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A Ukrainian boy and his dog sit on a cot that has been set up in a makeshift refugee shelter at the Katowice train station in Poland. The family is resting here before continuing their journey.

Animal welfare groups like UAnimals, as well as activists around Ukraine who have stayed amid the chaos of war, are working around the clock to rescue stray animals and keep shelters running. That devotion can come with a cost: An animal shelter in Kharkiv was bombed, and three animal rescue volunteers were killed in fighting earlier this month while attempting to deliver dog food.

Chevganiuk says UAnimals is focused on providing feed and other supplies to animal shelters and street animals, as well as evacuating animals to safety in neighboring Poland.

“The most horrible part is when you’re not able to reach a place and you know animals are suffering there,” she said. “It’s not possible to reach all the areas, or it’s pretty difficult because of the danger, so you have to find real brave people who will agree to go near these areas in danger.” The organization is also operating a support hotline, fielding questions around animal rescue and connecting fellow Ukrainians to resources for animal care.

Zoos are also under threat. The Feldman Ecopark zoo in Kharkiv was damaged amid fighting and there are reports that animals at Park XII Months zoo, north of Kyiv, have begun to die from starvation and cold. Animals in zoos already suffer psychological stress from captivity; the disruption and chaos of war only exacerbates it.

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Elephants at the Mykolaiv zoo in southern Ukraine on March 22, 2022.

Farmed animals are victims of war too. According to the Netherlands-based trade publication Poultry World, Avangard — the largest egg producer in Ukraine — says several of its farms have been shut down and destroyed due to Russian aggression. One farm had to suspend production due to loss of power, and most of its flock had to be slaughtered due to lack of feed.

MHP, the country’s largest chicken meat producer, suffered losses of $8 million when Russian shelling hit a large frozen food warehouse in the Kyiv region. According to international humanitarian law, intentional attacks on civilian infrastructure in armed conflict zones, like farms, could be considered war crimes.

The situation for animals in Ukraine is disturbing, though sadly unsurprising. For most of human history, animals were not just indirectly harmed by war but were drafted into war efforts, whether as transport or to carry a knight or later a cavalry fighter onto the battlefield — where they were often targets themselves.

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Cats accompanying war refugees from Ukraine rest at the train station in Katowice.

Technological advances in warfare have largely rendered animal labor unnecessary. But with animals now woven into our economy and our daily lives — whether as beloved pets in the home, entertainment in circuses and zoos, or as food in industrial farms — they have become victims of war alongside the humans that keep them for companionship or profit.

The valiant efforts by Ukrainians who’ve stayed behind in a war zone to save animals is perhaps the best demonstration of humanity’s deep connection to other species, but it has also underscored the dearth of animal welfare protections, whether humans are at war or not. As the legal status of animals slowly improves, however, their legal status in armed conflict might too — that is, if animal welfare and environmental advocates can include them in international humanitarian law and national disaster planning.

A brief history of animals’ role in war

Before war became highly mechanized and technological, animals were enlisted to shoulder much of the burden of war alongside human soldiers. Larger mammals like horses, donkeys, oxen, and elephants were used to transport soldiers and supplies, fighters charged into battle on horseback, and carrier pigeons reliably delivered messages when telegraph and telephone lines were cut off.

Pigeons were so critical to Britain’s efforts in World War I that shooting them was criminalized under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 since any pigeon may have been carrying a critical message. Horses were still used by some armies during that war in the midst of machine guns and chemical weapons, as the play and 2011 film War Horse demonstrated. “Mercy dogs” were used to comfort dying British soldiers and donkeys were used to console soldiers suffering from PTSD.

Animals are still employed in war today, though in much smaller numbers. Dogs are trained to sniff out bombs and rats are trained to detect landmines, while dolphins and sea lions are trained to protect harbors from sea mines. Pigs, monkeys, mice, and guinea pigs, among other species, have been used in grisly weapons testing, such as biological and chemical agents and explosives tests.

As is the case with human beings, animals in wartime are now mostly harmed indirectly, as we’ve seen in Ukraine: Pets are abandoned by fleeing owners, zoos are put under siege, livestock are left to starve or are seemingly targeted to damage a country’s food supply, and wild animals are inadvertently killed from shelling.

A paper published in Nature found that from 1946 to 2010, “conflict frequency predicts the occurrence and severity of population declines among wild large herbivores in African protected areas” and that conflict frequency was the most important predictor of wildlife population trends among the variables researchers studied. This is caused, in part, by the poaching and wildlife trafficking that can increase during conflict.

In the midst of war, animal protection is often ignored by everyone involved, from policymakers to generals to civilians. But some organizations and conflict scholars have ideas, and even some plans in motion, to incorporate animal welfare into war and other emergency situations.

How to protect animals in war

According to research by Jerome de Hemptinne, an expert on international humanitarian law (IHL), animals are largely excluded from wartime treaties like the Geneva and Hague conventions. There are some exceptions, such as multilateral pacts that protect endangered species, but even as the legal status of animals has evolved in recent decades, incorporating animal protections into IHL remains challenging.

Beyond protecting civilians themselves, IHL in general protects “civilian objects,” such as schools, homes, and places of worship, but it’s unclear whether a civilian object must be an inanimate object to merit protection, Hemptinne writes. If so, it would by definition exclude animals. But IHL conventions wouldn’t place animals in the protected category of “civilian,” either. As they do so often in peacetime, animals in wartime exist in a legal gray zone.

But in his 2017 paper “The Protection of Animals During Warfare,” Hemptinne details some paths forward for animal protection in warfare.

First, in 1977, additional protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions that grant protection to demilitarized zones between belligerents. “The protection of areas of high global species diversity could be enhanced if belligerents were to agree to formally classifying them as ‘demilitarized zones,’” Hemptinne wrote.

Second, Article 53 of Geneva Convention IV prohibits the occupying power from destroying private and public property unless it’s absolutely necessary for military operations. “This provision could provide minimum protection to certain animals when considered to be items of private or public property,” Hemptinne added.

There are also broader efforts underway to protect animals in emergency situations, like wars, as well as natural disasters. “Animals need to be included in the consideration when we speak about humanitarian aid,” Jackson Zee, director of global affairs and disaster resilience for the animal welfare organization Four Paws, told me.

To that aim, Four Paws collaborated with European Union member states to include animal welfare in the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, a framework created to improve disaster preparedness and response in the region. The animal welfare language is largely symbolic, but Zee said it’s a first step. His organization is now using it to lobby EU member states to include animals in their national disaster planning and set aside resources to operationalize animal protection in disaster response.

Four Paws has taken a similar approach with the United Nations. In 2018, the organization helped to secure animal welfare language at an EU/UN summit on disaster risk reduction.
“It was mostly in spirit because there was no monetary tag to it,” Zee says. “We will be pushing that forward so that it’s adopted on a national basis across every country [in the EU]. Currently, Italy is the only country that’s adopted that fully.”

These policy efforts are only at the beginning of a long, uncertain slog, and even if animal protections were adopted into the laws of war, enforcing those rules in conflict would be as difficult, if not more so, than enforcing the laws meant to protect the tens of thousands of humans who die in war each year. For now, Zee and many of his colleagues are focused on Ukraine, as Four Paws has staff on the ground aiding in rescue efforts and watching over animals at the organization’s bear sanctuary in Domazhyr.

Thomas Machowicz/We Animals Media

A brown bear at the White Rock Bear Shelter in the Kyiv region of Ukraine.

Zee also has his eye on the future. “The effort will last a long time,” he told me. “This is only the beginning … so the efforts that we do now need to continue to be facilitated months from now, and eventually, hopefully for the recovery.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has exposed, as have so many past wars, the critical roles animals play in human life. When we’re separated from our pets, we’ll go to great lengths to find them because the companionship they provide can be just as meaningful, and sometimes more so, than that provided by fellow humans. When conflict kills wildlife, it also harms ecosystems that humans rely on. When farms are destroyed, so too are sources of food and people’s livelihoods.

Animal welfare and human prosperity are often pitted against one another, as though well-being were a zero-sum game. But human health and animal health, in wartime and peacetime, are inextricably linked.

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But as Kavanaugh correctly notes in his concurring opinion, there is a long line of Supreme Court precedents establishing that courts should be exceedingly reluctant to interfere with military affairs.

In Gilligan v. Morgan (1973), for example, the Court held that “the complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force are essentially professional military judgments,” and that “it is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence.”

Nevertheless, Judge Reed O’Connor, a notoriously partisan judge in Texas who is best known for a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ruled in favor of the service members who refused to follow a direct order. And the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused the Navy’s request to stay key parts of O’Connor’s order.

That left the responsibility of restoring the military’s proper chain of command to the Supreme Court. Though the Court’s order does not wipe out O’Connor’s decision in its entirety, it temporarily blocks that decision “insofar as it precludes the Navy from considering respondents’ vaccination status in making deployment, assignment, and other operational decisions.”

But the astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that the Supreme Court needed to intervene in this case at all.

Order prevailed, but several justices wanted to upend things

The most astonishing thing about the SEALs order is that at least three justices dissented. (While it is likely that six justices sided with the Navy here, only four justices — the three dissenters plus Kavanaugh — chose to reveal how they voted. So it is possible that one other justice silently dissented.)

Thomas did not explain why he dissented, but Alito published a brief opinion, joined by Gorsuch, which lays out why he thinks that judges should be allowed to countermand orders handed down to military personnel by their commanders. Among other things, Alito complains that the Navy did not provide service members with a meaningful process they could use to request a religious exemption from the vaccination requirement.

The Navy provided the Court with several statements from high-ranking officers explaining why it requires nearly every sailor to be vaccinated, and why it generally considers unvaccinated special warfare personnel undeployable.

According to Adm. William Lescher, the Navy’s second-highest-ranking officer, Navy vessels have only limited medical facilities. So, if one of the ship’s crew becomes seriously ill, that “would require a return to port or an emergency medical evacuation by helicopter” — potentially forcing the whole ship to abandon its mission to accommodate one unvaccinated service member.

Special warfare personnel, moreover, often deploy in very small units. So one member becoming sick is a big blow to the team. And, the Navy argued, special operations “are often conducted in hostile, austere or diplomatically sensitive environments” where a severely ill service member might not be able to obtain local medical care and may need to be evacuated by the Navy — an operation that is itself dangerous and that could force the sick service member’s fellow sailors to risk their lives on his or her behalf.

To these concerns, Alito essentially said, “Prove it.”

“In order to win at trial,” Alito wrote in response to the Navy’s warnings, “it would not be enough for the Government to posit that sending an unvaccinated Seal on such a mission might produce such consequences.” Rather, the Navy would have to prove that requiring vaccination “is the least restrictive means of furthering the interest it asserts in light of the present nature of the pandemic, what is known about the spread of the virus and the effectiveness of the vaccines, prevalent practices, and the physical characteristics of Navy Seals and others in the Special Warfare community.”

I want to emphasize the sheer enormity of what Alito is suggesting here. Once the Supreme Court permits a single servicemember to defy a direct order, that opens the door to any member of the armed services who disagrees with an order running to court to seek an exemption.

Think of the kinds of orders that military personnel have to obey — “take that hill,” “guard this prisoner,” “cease fire.” And even if Alito did not intend for his dissent to apply to such battlefield orders, his dissent could effectively neutralize major military assets while religious liberty cases brought by service members are being litigated. Imagine, for example, if the captain of an aircraft carrier is ordered to deploy his ship close to Ukraine — but the captain refuses because, for religious reasons, that captain believes that Vladimir Putin should prevail in his war against Ukraine.

The Court has understood for many decades that the military simply cannot function if its members think orders may be optional. As the Supreme Court held in Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), “the essence of military service ‘is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service.’”

Permitting service members to seek exemptions from the courts, Goldman explains, would undermine service members’ “habit of immediate compliance with military procedures and orders” — a habit that “must be virtually reflex with no time for debate or reflection.”

At the end of the day, every service member must know who their commander is, and everyone must respect the chain of command. There can only be one person at the apex of that chain, and it can either be Joe Biden or Samuel Alito.

And, as Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, the Constitution is very clear about who is at the top of that chain. It says, in unambiguous terms, that “the President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

Her texts prove some elite Republicans really do believe Trump’s lies.

Newly revealed text messages show that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas — conservative activist and spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — wanted President Trump to take extreme measures to stay in office in the days following the 2020 election. The messages between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were provided to the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attacks and obtained by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

One major takeaway from them is that her alarm was apparently sincere: These seem to be Thomas’s genuine beliefs, expressed in private to Trump’s top aide, when no one was looking.

Thomas shared with Meadows conspiracy theories that Trump had a secret plan to expose election fraud (“I hope this is true”) and to send its perpetrators to Guantanamo Bay, urged that Trump should “not concede” because “it takes time for the army who is gathering for his back,” said the “Left” was “attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” championed the ludicrous claims of Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell (“Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud”), complained about being “disgusted” with Vice President Mike Pence for approving the results, and declared Biden’s win meant “the end of Liberty.”

Ginni Thomas is not a government official and has no formal power. But she is an influential and well-connected activist at the top of elite conservative circles who, yes, is married to a Supreme Court justice. And her messages show precisely where she falls in the two broad groups of elite conservatives who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the election results: She’s among the conspiracy-addled true believers, rather than the cynical opportunists pandering to the base for political advantage.

In contrast, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) seems to be more in the opportunist category. Rather than full-throatedly endorsing goofy conspiracy theories, Hawley has nodded to a vaguer “concern” about the election’s integrity and calls for “investigation.” His specific justification for objecting to the results in Congress relied on a legalistic-sounding rationale: “Some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.” (This was a complaint that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to count mail ballots arriving a few days after election day, but that ended up being a small number of ballots that didn’t affect the outcome.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) voiced a similar line.

In the other camp, along with Thomas, you have people like Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Mike Flynn, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who embraced bizarre theories about foreign interference in the vote and pushed Trump to use ever more extreme tactics in fighting back.

The presence of both camps in the GOP is a problem for election integrity in the United States, but the latter might be the bigger problem. Cynical opportunists will go whichever way the wind is blowing. But if true- believing conspiracy theorists get elected to important offices with some role in certifying election results, they might stand by their beliefs no matter the situation.

There has long been speculation about which camp the former president falls into. Was Trump just lying? Or does he actually believe his claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election? Or is that question irrelevant?

By all accounts of Trump’s private behavior, he acts, all the time, as though he believes it. No close aide has told the press or revealed any story of him acknowledging that lots of his claims were false. Texts from Fox host Sean Hannity provided to the committee indicate that Hannity was rather disturbed by how committed Trump was to an extreme course in private. “I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood,” he wrote to Meadows on January 10, 2021.

This is a potential problem regarding investigative efforts to prove Trump’s intent to commit crimes related to January 6 — if he believes he is the rightful winner, it can be trickier (though not necessarily impossible) to demonstrate he acted with corrupt intent. But it’s also worrying regarding just how closely Trump was tethered to factual reality. And because Trump is gearing up for a possible repeat presidential campaign in 2024, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. If he wins, who will he staff his administration with next time around?

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