Animal rights is a topic that very often gets forgotten about. My hope is that anyone who visits this page will learn something, or be touched by one of the issues or stories within these pages. The welfare of the animals depends on our understanding, caring and taking action. They deserve our he 10310l1110k lp.
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
- Thomas Edison (inventor)
I believe that animals deserve to live according to their own natures, without harm, abuse, or exploitation. It has been shown that animals are capable of feeling pain, fear, hunger, thirst, loneliness, and kinship.
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of animals, such as the interest in avoiding suffering, should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Although animal rights advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, they argue, broadly speaking, that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment, but should instead be regarded as legal persons and members of the moral community.
The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School. Steven Wise, also of Harvard Law School, argues that the first serious judicial challenges to what he calls the "legal thinghood" of animals may only be a few years away, while Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby believes that the idea of animal rights has reached the stage the gay rights movement was at 25 years ago. Animal law is now taught in 100 out of 180 law schools in the United States, and in eight law schools in Canada. The concept of animal rights is routinely covered in universities as part of applied ethics or philosophy courses; Robert Garner of the University of Leicester calls it the "new morality. In June 2008, Spain became the first country to introduce animal rights, when a cross-party parliamentary committee recommended that rights be extended to the great apes in accordance with the Great Ape Project.
Critics argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only human beings have duties and that the corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights. An argument that often runs parallel to this is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources for human purposes, though there is an obligation to ensure they do not suffer unnecessarily, a view known as the animal welfare position. There has also been criticism, including from within the animal rights movement, of certain forms of animal rights activism, in particular the destruction of fur farms and animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front. The idea that the use of animals by human beings - for food, clothing, entertainment, and as research subjects - is morally acceptable springs mainly from two sources. First, there is the idea of a divine hierarchy based on the theological concept of "dominion," from Genesis (where Adam is given "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Although the concept of dominion need not entail property rights, it has, over the centuries, been interpreted to imply some form of ownership.
Second, is the idea that animals are inferior, because they lack rationality or language, and as such are worthy of less consideration than human beings, or even none. Springing from this is the idea that individual animals have no separate moral identity. A pig is simply an example of the class of pigs, and it is to the class, not to the individual, that human responsibility or stewardship applies. This leads to the argument that the use of individual animals is acceptable so long as, for example, the species is not threatened with extinction.
The 21st-century debate about these ideas can be traced back to the earliest philosophers and theologians.
|
