Fido won’t have the right to legal counsel if he can’t afford it next time he chews up your shoes. At least not in Switzerland. On Sunday Swiss voters rejected a referendum that would have appointed state-funded lawyers to represent animals in court, with 70.5 percent of Swiss voting against the measure.

There is already one state-subsidized animal lawyer in Switzerland. Antoine Goetschel, animal lawyer for the canton of Zurich, numbers dogs, cats, guinea pigs, cows, horses and sheep among his clients. One recent client was a large pike, pulled by an angler from the depths of Lake Zurich.

“It took 10 minutes of struggle to reel the pike in before killing it,” Goetschel noted.

The Swiss Animal Protection Ordinance, updated in 2008, also mandates that fishermen get sensitivity training. Nevertheless the court found the fisherman, Patrick Giger, not guilty.

Switzerland already has some of the strictest laws against animal cruelty in the world. The country’s 160 page animal protection codes detail such minutiae as the proper water temperature for an African clawed frogs (between 64 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit) and the exact amount of space required by a Mongolian gerbil (233 square inches.) But Antoine Goetschel, a vegetarian who owns no pets himself, wonders if it goes far enough. “The 2008 law only protects vertebrates,” he notes.