Some principles enshrined in particular in Geneva Conventions I and IV and in Additional Protocol I regarding the protection of medical transports, equipment and personnel could potentially provide minimum safeguards for animals when these are used as a means of medical transportation or in search and rescue operations. However, this regime is in many respects inappropriate for the protection of animals. It does not take into account the fact that animals are sentient beings experiencing emotion, pain and distress. Therefore, the application of sui generis principles, tailored to the specific needs of living creatures – such as the principles of animal dignity, no military involvement and return to homeland – should be conceived in light of recent legal trends on the welfare and rights of animals in peacetime.

New approaches in historiography combine the study of war and violence with human#x2013;animal studies. This type of ‘animate history’ is pursued here. The postulate is that the fabric of history is made up of the interaction of diverse and multiple living creatures possessing different types and degrees of (factual) agency. This perspective changes the historiography of warfare by including animals in the tableau of historically meaningful actors and actions. In its history of humans and animals in wartime, the chapter discusses inter-species relationships during and after periods of war, inter alia by suggesting a specific reading of the role ascribed to animals in war memorials.

This chapter analyses the international humanitarian rules on veterinary personnel. It distinguishes between international armed conflicts and non-international armed conflicts and examines the legal consequences of violations. The chapter also reflects on the anthropocentric nature of international humanitarian law and discusses how this body of law might take better account of the interdependency of the fate of the human race with the fate of the other animal and plant species with which it shares the planet. It finally recommends lines of investigations on the legal protection of veterinary personnel.

International humanitarian law provides special protection in armed conflict to particular categories of objects, granting them additional layers of protection and providing for some restriction on their use for military purposes. This chapter explores how animals could benefit from such special protection under two headings. First, it analyses whether and with which consequences animals could be safeguarded as cultural property. Second, the chapter addresses the protection of animals as objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. It concludes with some recommendations on how the category of specially protected objects could be dynamically used to enhance the protection of animals against the effects of warfare.

An inquiry into the rationale for the protection of animals in wartime confronts a key challenge: tThe progressive philosophical reflection on the improvement of the position of animals in (human) societies is at odds with the human-centred nature of international humanitarian law. Against this background, the chapter critically engages with possible reasons for animal protection in wartime: anthropocentric approaches, speciesism, anthropomorphism and a rights-based approach. It analyses to what extent these paradigms are reflected both in lex lata and in claims de lege ferenda. The chapter also examines to what extent these approaches can be brought in line with the overall objectives of international humanitarian law and reflects upon the challenges that arise from such an alignment. It favours a straightforward reform approach which aims at a specific convention for the protection of animal rights in wartimes.

Thirty galloping horses at Astley’s Circus in 1824 underpinned the presentation of the Battle of Waterloo, which subsequently became a staple circus act during the first half of the nineteenth century. Military action was imbedded in the early circus, indicative of both an increased number of soldiers in nineteenth-century society and its ensuing militarisation. This chapter explores the use of horses and other animals in the re-enactment of war in the nineteenth-century circus. War re-enactments expanded to encompass colonial conflicts, so circus became complicit in colonising practices and attitudes to colonised peoples in the British colonies and towards exotic animals that were shipped in increasing numbers. In the 1880s a distinctive war-re-enactment genre emerged, exemplified by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which toured internationally and was integrated back into circus. This chapter argues that it was the action of horses and other nonhuman animals that instigated and made battle re-enactment seem authentic but that circus war action replicated the pattern of actual war in which animals went unnoticed. This pattern was reversed with the Boer War re-enactment. Directed by circus entrepreneur Frank Fillis for the 1904 St Louis Exposition, it sought authenticity by featuring the death of fifty horses on the battlefield.