Associate Professor Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere says animal welfare legislation needs better enforcement and resourcing to give it teeth.
Some people are cat people while others prefer dogs. Animal law expert Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere, however, is a goat person.
The associate law professor is an animal welfare and administrative law expert, a popular lecturer, keen tramper, film buff and vinyl collector. He’s also president of the New Zealand Animal Law Association.
Marcelo says his love of goats evolved while living on a Dunedin property where, in lieu of a lawnmower, the neighbours’ goats and sheep kept the grass under control.
“I did some general TLC for them, fixing a bit of footrot,” he says. “That was an education.”
He ended up far more attached to the goats than anticipated.
“They’re the best companion animals. They have the personality of a dog combined with the independence and self-sufficiency of a cat.”
Marcelo grew up on the K?piti Coast and was drawn to debate, articulating big ideas and “really thrashing them through”. His family would agree he is “pretty adept at arguing”, he says.
He studied law and arts, majoring in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Otago, where he later taught. In LAWS101, his teacher was Professor Mark Henaghan, now a close colleague at Auckland Law School.
“I was inspired immediately,” he says. “That’s a pretty common story for people who have Mark as a lecturer.”
Marcelo’s interest in animal welfare grew gradually: first, from a desire to reduce his environmental impact; then, living in what was “basically a vegan commune” during his masters studies in Canada; and, finally, attending a talk at Otago University by retired Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, a staunch animal advocate, who encouraged Otago to introduce an animal law paper.
Marcelo took up the challenge in 2013.
Today, his research and teaching at Auckland Law School straddle public, administrative and animal law – the latter, a topic he helped revive after a hiatus of around 15 years.
His doctoral research argues that enforcement of our animal welfare legislation is failing to meet animals’ needs; it compares New Zealand and Alberta’s animal welfare systems and shows the worst-case scenario of under enforcement: systemic failure.
https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2025/06/03/Marcelo-Rodriguez-Ferrere-profile.html
