Animal Rights...The Pros and Cons

Joshua Rosen
About 1900 words
Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty

Do animals have moral rights? What kind of legal status should we afford them? This debate has become hugely confused. Some animal rights campaigners maintain that we should allow animals the same rights enjoyed by humans. That is, of course, absurd. There are many human rights that simply have no application to non-humans(Driscoll, 1995). I would like to propose something a little different: that a sensible and coherent theory of animal rights should focus on just one right for animals. That is the right not to be treated as the property of humans.Let me explain why this makes sense. At present, animals are commodities that we own in the same way that we own automobiles or furniture. Like these inanimate forms of property, animals have only the value that we choose to give them. This is in part because researchers have relied on animal studies, though our metabolism, biochemistry, physiology, genetic makeup and expression are all different(Gluck & Kubacki, 1991) . Any moral or other interest an animal has represents an economic cost that we can choose to ignore. The economic cost is what we would give up for a better alternative. However, we so often ignore that alternative because animals have no claim to an economic alternative.

We have laws that supposedly regulate our treatment of our animal property, and prohibit the infliction of "unnecessary" suffering. These laws require that we balance the interests of humans and animals in order to ensure that animals are treated "humanely"(Matthews & Herzog, 1999). It is, however, a fallacy to suppose that we can balance human interests, which are protected by claims of right in general and of a right to own property in particular, against the interests of animals which, as property, exist only as a means to the ends of humans. According to European legislation, animal tests are in principle only to be performed as a last resort. Alternative methods to animal tests are to be applied as soon as they are available. The promotion of alternative methods has become particularly important, since European legislation was reinforced in 2003 by banning cosmetics and cosmetic ingredients tested on animals if valid alternatives were available. Similarly, the Proposal for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) includes specific provisions aiming at promoting alternative approaches to reduce the number of animal tests as much as possible(Pifer & Pifer, 1994) . The animal in question is always a "pet" or a "laboratory animal" or a "game animal" or a "food animal" or a "circus animal" or some other form of animal property that exists solely for our use. We prohibit animal suffering only when it has no economic benefit. The balance is unbalanced from the outset.There are parallels here with the institution of human slavery. While we tolerate varying degrees of human exploitation, we no longer regard it as legitimate to treat anyone, irrespective of their particular characteristics, as the property of others. In a world deeply divided on many moral issues, one of the few norms steadfastly endorsed by the international community is the prohibition of human slavery. Some forms of slavery are worse than others, yet we prohibit all of them — however "humane" — because they more or less allow the fundamental interests of slaves to be ignored if it provides a benefit to slave owners. We recognize all humans as having a basic right not to be treated as the property of others.

Is there a morally sound reason not to extend this single right — the right not to be treated as property — to animals? Or to ask the question another way, why do we deem it acceptable to eat animals, hunt them, confine and display them in circuses and zoos, use them in experiments or rodeos, or otherwise treat them in ways in which we would never think it appropriate to treat any human irrespective of how "humane" we were being?The response that animals lack some special characteristic that is possessed solely by humans not only flies in the face of the theory of evolution, but is completely irrelevant to whether it is morally permissible to treat non-humans as commodities — just as differences among humans would not serve to justify treating some as slaves(Furnham & Scott, 2003). Also of no use is the response that it is acceptable for humans to exploit non-humans because it is "traditional" or "natural" to do so. This merely states a conclusion and does not constitute an argument.

The bottom line is that we cannot justify human domination of non-humans except by appeal to religious superstition focused on the supposed spiritual superiority of humans. High-tech, effective non-animal testing methods exist, and more are waiting to be developed, limited only by the shortsightedness of funding agencies entrenched in old methodologies(Hovey, 2004). We have found ways to grow human cells, we have also found ways to test on human organs, though the thought of donor ship seems to be more important. Our "conflicts" with animals are mostly of our own doing. We bring billions of sentient animals into the world in order to kill them for reasons that are often trivial. We then seek to understand the nature of our moral obligations to these animals. But by bringing these animals into existence for reasons that we would never consider appropriate for humans, we have already decided that animals are outside the scope of our moral community altogether.

Accepting that animals have this one right does not entail letting cows, chickens, pigs and dogs run free in the streets. We have brought these animals into existence and they depend on us for their survival. We should care for those currently in existence, but we should stop causing more to come into being to serve as our resources. We would thereby eliminate any supposed conflicts we have with animals. We may still have conflicts with wild animals, and we would have to address hard questions about how to apply equal consideration to humans and animals in those circumstances. Recognizing animal rights really means accepting that we have a duty not to treat sentient non-humans as resources. The interesting question is not whether the cow should be able to sue the farmer for cruel treatment, but why the cow is there in the first place.We cannot justify our domination of animals except by appeal to religious superstition.


On the other hand, many people now take the view that the human species is not entitled to the dominion that it has so far asserted over all other species. They express this by saying that animals, like us, have rights. Hence many of the things that we do to animals are morally indefensible. I find myself agreeing with the conclusion, but not with premise. The attribution of rights to animals seems to me to be a radical departure from the norms of moral argument; if taken seriously it would undermine our ability to make the important decisions that we now must make if animals in general, and wild animals in particular, are to enjoy a sustainable future.

The debate is not a trivial one. Advocates of animal rights are currently attempting to bankrupt a firm (Huntingdon Life Sciences) which uses animals for medical research; they have succeeded in banning fur farming in Britain, and are now hopeful that they can ban hunting with hounds( Barnard, 2007). They intend, if successful, to ban shooting and angling, and no doubt there are those among them who would like to impose a strict regime of non-interference in the entire animal kingdom, whether the rest of us want it or not.

This intransigence is an inevitable result of the belief in rights. If I believe that you are denying someone his rights-to life, property or freedom- then I am absolutely entitled to interfere on the victim’s behalf. Rights may be relinquished but only by the person who possesses them, and only if his action is entirely voluntary. The purpose of the concept of a right is to establish, around each individual, a sphere where that individual alone is sovereign. Hence your right is my duty, and if I disregard your rights I both wrong you and also do what is wrong.

Why should we have such a concept? Surely, because we will to live in a condition of mutual freedom and mutual respect. The concept of a right derives from legal ways of thinking, and serves as the individual’s shield against oppression. All calculation stops at the threshold where you are sovereign, and it is to mark out this threshold that we deploy the concept of a right. Some philosophers believe that there are both positive rights-which are laid down by a legal code- and natural rights- which are inherent in our condition as rational agents. And it is this idea of a natural right that is invoked by those who argue for the rights of animals. Natural rights are those like the rights to like and freedom, the violation of which is declaration of war.

Let us suppose that animals do have rights; what follows? Surely, the very least that follows is that it wrong to kill them, to eat them, to keep them as pets, to make them suffer in any way that is not to their individual benefit-and wrong in just the way that it is wrong to do any of this to a human being. That is what the activists say they believe. But do they really believe it? Are they prepared to say that my attempts to rid my barn of rats are tantamount to mass murder? That people who keep cats are contemplating in a serial killing? That my keeping a horse in his stable is a case of false imprisonment? That my digging the garden involves the negligent slaughter of innocent worms, beetles and moles? Which activities involving animals would be permitted and on what grounds?

But there is a more important consequence of rights-talk from the environmental point of view. To invoke rights is to accord absolute respect to the individual, and to give him precedence over collective calculations whenever his vital interests are at stake. Hence the sick, the deformed, and the genetically impaired have just the same rights as the healthy and the strong. If animals have rights you have no more right to kill a sick, wounded or genetically impaired individual than you have to kill its healthy companion. All attempts at managing wildlife populations by encouraging healthy breeding and eliminating the carriers of diseases would be ruled out on moral grounds. It would also be morally impossible to intervene in nature to re-establish the ecological balance- say by culling an over-abundant predator population, by controlling parasites and pests, or by capturing animals and moving them to favorable breeding grounds.

Of course, if we lived in virgin forests as hunter-gatherers (itself morally impossible for the animal rights activist), we could reasonably assume that the ecological balance would restore itself over our footsteps. But we do not live like that. The environment is now our concern, something to be managed and restored by human ingenuity, and no longer able to restore itself unaided. To believe in the rights of animals we should have to relinquish that task, and allow animal populations to find what niche they can in the human sprawl. Good for rats and crows perhaps; but not for apes or fish or songbirds.