The Emergence of Sustainable Animal Protection in European Law – Conceptual Foundations, Doctrinal Limits, and Comparative Governance Patterns

This article examines Sustainable Animal Protection (SAP) as an emerging analytical and governance framework in European law: a shift from sectoral welfare standards and conversation-oriented fauna protection toward an integrated legal architecture that linkt Treaty-based sustainability commitments to animal-welfare requirements and operationalizes tchem through blended instruments. It argues that EU law is progressively linking animal welfare with environmental integration, official controls, traceability requirements, and institutional capacity, while maintaining important doctrinal distinctions between the protection of animals as sentient individual beings and conservation regimes concerned with species, habitats, and biodiversity. Methodologically, the article combines doctrinal analysis of EU primary and secondary law with a focused comparative governance typology and a Hungarian case study. The comparative dimension identifies several regulatory patterns among Member States, including market-based approaches, civil-society certification schemes, statutory labeling models, mixed forms of informational governance, and coordinated public-funding frameworks. The article concludes that sustainable animal protection should be understood primarily as a governance-design challenge. Its durability depends not only on the articulation of substantive welfare standards, but also on enforceable control mechanisms, stable financing structures, periodic review, and transparent coordination among public authorities, expert institutions, and civil-society actors.