Three friends walk into a motorbike competition and spot a distinctive-looking rider.
A man standing next to them says the rider is a lawyer and they nod with mild surprise. “He’s a vet as well,” the man says, and the trio walk away, thinking they’re being wound up.
In fact, the motorbike rider – Dr Ian Robertson – is both a lawyer and a veterinarian. And the man relating this to the trio was a friend, who was attending the competition with him.
More than pets
Robertson says he knew he wanted to be a veterinarian before he could even spell the word.
An only child, he was at primary school in rural Northland when his parents asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. Without skipping a beat, he told them he wanted to work with animals.
Growing up on a farm with his own horse, several cats and a calf club, Robertson says animals weren’t just pets – they were a passion.
“It wasn’t simply about, ‘oh I like animals’. It was, ‘how do they work? what affects them? what’s good for them?’ It was the bigger picture right from age seven.”
He chose high school subjects that would give him the best shot at getting into the highly competitive veterinary stream at Massey University. After graduating in the 1980s, he practised as a clinical vet for nearly 20 years and ran hospitals across the country.
By the late 1990s Robertson had become a celebrity vet – “the media face of veterinary medicine”, he says.
“I was on television with New Zealand Today. I was the presenter for Animals and Us. I wrote for magazines like the Woman’s Weekly. I wrote a couple of books.”
And that’s when Fox Television came knocking with an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was asked to be one of a handful of presenters to work on pieces about endangered species around the world.
It turned out to be a great gig. “I’ve played with the Tasmanian devil, swam with the whales, played with the pandas, run from the Komodo dragon.”
Then came the tipping point that propelled him towards a career in the law – an assignment in the South China Sea.
At a local market, Robertson saw a huge number of baskets of endangered green turtle eggs being sold illegally, after being collected from a local beach just hours earlier.
“Customary law says you can gather as many eggs as you can uplift in the morning. Back when that law was developed and people were rowing out around the islands… it kept things a little bit in balance. These days, with powerboats, people can [get there more quickly] and strip a whole beach [of eggs]”.
It was the law, not the turtles, that intrigued him the most.
“This clash between existing law, customary law and the animal caught in the middle of it and people’s livelihoods… it just became fascinating,” he says.
When Robertson returned to New Zealand in 2000, he sold all five of his veterinary practices and enrolled at the University of Canterbury’s law school as a mature student.
He was admitted to the bar in 2004.
“Veterinary medicine taught me about animals and how to look after animals. Television… showed me their place in the world and introduced me to this rulebook,” he says.
‘Just dog bites and animal rights?’
After finishing his degree, Robertson offered to teach animal law, but the idea was not well-received.
“One head of school said to me, ‘that’s very nice, Ian, but we teach real law here’.”
Another academic was similarly dismissive.
“He said, ‘it’s just dog bites and animal rights, isn’t it?’.”
The exception was Professor Scott Davidson, then head of the law department at the University of Canterbury.
“I went to him and said, ‘I want to promote animal law as a specialist area, a legal discipline in and of its own right’. And he didn’t hesitate. He said ‘that would be fantastic… when can you start?’.”
An environmental lawyer himself, Davidson knew what it was like to work in a developing legal area of interest.
“He said this cliffhanger… ‘Animal law is the younger cousin of environmental law’.”
Twenty-five years on, Robertson now runs Guardianz Animal Law – the only practice in the country specialising in animal law.
“I went back to law school with the specific intent to develop what I’m doing today, which is working as an animal law specialist.”
Established in 2014 – after Robertson had spent nearly eight years working in prosecution and animal law enforcement – the firm operates in New Zealand and internationally, including Australia, the UK and the European Union.
He likes his work as defence counsel because he believes everyone deserves a fair hearing.
“[People are] more likely to get that with someone who knows how prosecution works, how it’s supposed to work,” he says. Sometimes, those who fall short on their responsibilities need help rather than a hammer.
Being a registered vet makes the difference, he says. He reads the blood tests, the samples and the chain of evidence himself rather than having to ask someone else what they mean.
He recalls a veterinary witness telling him that lawyers would never understand the language.
“Little did he know, I am a veterinarian… and he ended up saying to me ‘that was so easy talking with you because you understood what I was talking about’, and that made all the difference to the outcome of the case.”
Not a ‘fringe specialty’
“Where there’s an animal involved, there’s usually a law involved,” Robertson says. “And that’s what we do. And it’s not just one of the things we do. It’s the focus of what we do.”
The more unusual aspect of his work is bioterrorism – where animals can be used as vectors for spreading disease. As an example, he was involved in assessing the illegal introduction of calicivirus to South Island rabbits.
“If somebody introduced foot-and-mouth into this country, the impacts would be enormous.”
Robertson knows what that looks like.
As a vet in England, he saw entire farms being destroyed and remembers watching grown men weep as generations of work went onto a funeral pyre.
The rest of the practice runs across border control, biosecurity, food safety, law reform and policy development. He has sat down with companies to review their policies, practices and contracts, he says. Zoos approach him when they are designing housing for specific species. He has worked on cases involving domestic violence and related animal abuse. Ownership disputes come in constantly – “the question of who gets the dog”.
That, he says, is why the field is not what people assume.
“Animal law isn’t some fringe specialty… For some people [it’s] almost surprisingly close to the very centre of things.”
Re-thinking animal law
Most people, he says, still think the field is about being nice to animals.
“Animals are classified as property, but quite distinctly, which makes it unique, they’re sentient property. Animal law is the only legal discipline that creates responsibilities about what another species feels.”
The legal standard for dealing with animals is the bare minimum, he says.
“[The law says] don’t cause pain or distress that’s unreasonable or unnecessary.”
But the Sentient Animal Law Foundation, which Robertson founded in 2015, argues for something above it – comfort, pleasure, choice and giving animals the chance to experience positive states.
“It’s not just what you can get away with in terms of minimum standards. It’s what also facilitates life.”
The Australian Capital Territory was the first to write it into law, in 2019, with input from the foundation.
“It’s not about animal rights. It’s about the responsibilities, in my view, to balance the relationship between those three entities – of animals and people and our shared environment.”
The prosecutor
Robertson was a prosecutor for the Ministry for Primary Industries from 2007 to 2014, and then a statewide specialist in compliance and enforcement for livestock at Victoria’s Department of Environment and Primary Industries.
Among the matters he prosecuted were animal transport, biosecurity breaches and corporate farming operations, including the Crafar Farms case – where the country’s largest family-owned dairy business collapsed in 2009, owing about $200 million, after a run of animal welfare and pollution prosecutions and a fight over its sale to foreign buyers.
He also acted in the Milk Pride case in 2013 where the sharemilking company was fined in the Rotorua District Court after pleading guilty to animal neglect for failing to provide proper and sufficient food to hundreds of cows.
When he wants to wind down from work, Robertson escapes to a couple of acres with a Bernese Mountain Dog that takes up all the room, and a flock of Wiltshire sheep.
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