Dhozinta Z. Mphuka is a member of the Zambian Bar and a legal practitioner whose practice spans corporate law, litigation & arbitration, covering a wide range of disputes, from environmental to commercial matters. She also guest-lectures on trust law the Zambia College of Pensions and Insurance Trust.
Animal welfare has always mattered to Dhozinta personally, but she never imagined it as something one could practice in Zambia, until she needed a topic for her LLB dissertation and chose it anyway. Her research, Animal Welfare Law in Zambia: A Critical Analysis, examined the country’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, a colonial-era statute last substantively amended in 1994, against international and comparative frameworks. Drawing on primary sources and an interview with the Lusaka Animal Welfare Society, she concluded that the Act fails to recognize animal sentience or impose a duty of care on owners and recommended its repeal in favour of a comprehensive Animal Welfare Act.
That research opened her eyes to how far the law had moved elsewhere (animal sentience and the Five Freedoms are now written into statute across dozens of jurisdictions) and how little of that progress has reached the African continent, where few lawyers are trained to carry it forward.
Dhozinta is pursuing the Animal Law LLM to build that expertise, with particular interests in wildlife law. She plans to return to Lusaka to lecture, publish, and advocate for reform and to help train the first generation of Zambian lawyers working in this field.