The Principle of Proportionality: The Concept and its Application to Animal Protection Issues such as the “Three Rs” and the “Harm-Benefit Analysis”

16 proportionality” which the German Constitutional Court developed in the 1950s and which since then has been treated as unwritten constitutional law in Germany. In the decades that followed the 1950s the German Constitutional Court realized that the principle of proportionality (commensurability) works like a representation of people’s moral sense and sense of justice. Therefore, the German Constitutional Court concluded that, generally, it should be considered when laws are made, applied, or interpreted (Hirschberg, 1981). This is the spirit that shaped the Animal Protection Act of 1972 in West Germany (Maisack, 2007). Today, the animal welfare legislation of the European Union (EU) follows the principle of proportionality too.