Piers Beirne

Piers Beirne is an Anglo-Irish emeritus professor of sociology and legal studies at the University of Southern Maine. Having been based in the United States since 1976, he continues to research and write about our relationships with the more than human world. A leading scholar in green criminology and animal abuse studies, he is the founder of nonspeciesist criminology.

Beirne is one of the first criminologists to challenge his own field for its anthropocentrism and speciesism in focusing on exclusively human criminality and crime victims who are invariably humans. Beirne considers speciesism as the ideological anchor of the intersecting networks of the animal–industrial complex, such as factory farms, vivisection, hunting and fishing, zoos and aquaria, wildlife trade, and so forth.