essay against animal rights

Responses to Top Arguments Against Animal Rights

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While opponents of animal rights (AR) usually make weak arguments for their case, they are occasionally right. For instance, AR advocates really do believe it is morally wrong for humans to eat animals. But for the most part, their arguments have little or no basis in reality and are easily shown for the fallacies they are.

Lions Eat Animals

One of the most common arguments against animal rights is that there are many predators in the wild who hunt and eat meat-based prey. Why should humans, who are also animals, be exempt?

Animal rights advocates counter that a lion, being a feline, is what is considered an obligate carnivore . Taurine, an essential amino acid, is vital to the health of these big cats. Without it, they will die. And they can only get it from meat. Taurine, however, is made in the human body and can also be obtained from non-meat sources.

Besides, say AR advocates, there are a lot of things that lions do that humans would not. Lions play with their food before killing and consuming it. There have been no studies to suggest that lions feel sorry for their prey, whereas human beings are empathetic to others. Lion social structure is also different. Male lions have more than one partner, a practice humans frown on. Also, a male lion will kill the babies of another male lion in order to perpetuate its own bloodline.

Furthermore, the American Dietetic Association supports vegan diets :

"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets , including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases."

Animal Rights Is Extreme

Whether animals rights is "extreme" might depend on how one understands the term. Merriam Webster defines "extreme" in three ways:

Existing in a very high degree
Going to great or exaggerated lengths; radical
Exceeding the ordinary, usual, or expected

In the case of animal rights, say its adherents, there is nothing wrong with seeking solutions that are "extreme" and far from the ordinary. In the United States, the "ordinary" treatment of animals causes animals to suffer and die on factory farms , in laboratories, on fur farms, in leg-hold traps, in puppy mills, and in zoos and circuses. An extreme change is needed to save animals from these fates.

Pets Will Become Extinct

It's a common misconception that animal rights advocates want all domestic animals to go extinct. That means not only no more cows, chickens, and pigs raised for meat, but also no cats, dogs, horses, hamsters, etc. raised as animal companions.

Animal rights advocates realize just how strong the human/animal bond can be. The last thing they want is to allow people's pets to be wiped from the face of the earth. Neither does anyone want these animals released into the wild, even though many feral cat, dog, and pig colonies already exist. For those animals that are unfit to survive in the wild, extinction is not a bad thing. "Broiler" chickens grow so large, they develop joint problems and heart disease. Cows now produce more than twice as much milk as they did 50 years ago, and domestic turkeys are too large to mate naturally. There is no reason to continue breeding these animals. To animal rights advocates, these are fates worse than death.

They Want Eating Meat to Be Illegal

Eating meat infringes on the rights of animals to live and be free, so animal rights activists don't believe people have a moral right to eat animals, even though it's perfectly legal to do so. Some prominent AR advocates have called for making the slaughter and eating of meat illegal, while others rely on moral persuasion.

But AR activists will never remain silent in the face of what they believe is this injustice—and they have a legal right to free speech that is protected by law. To expect AR activists to remain silent is failing to respect their right to express themselves and advocate veganism .

Vegans Kill Animals, Too

It is nearly impossible for a person to live on this planet without causing some suffering and death to animals. Animals are killed and displaced on farms to grow crops; animal products show up in unexpected places like car tires; and pollution destroys wild habitats and the animals who depend on them. However, this has nothing to do with whether animals deserve rights, and being vegan is one way to minimize one's negative impact on animals and leave as small a carbon footprint as possible. One cannot be an environmentalist and a carnivore, say vegans. Which way of life leads to a better planet for the people, for the animals, and for the future of Earth?

Animals Don't Think

The ability to think like a human is an arbitrary criterion for rights. Why not base it on the ability to fly or use echolocation or walk up walls?

Furthermore, if rights come from the ability to think, then some humans—babies and the mentally incapacitated—are not deserving of rights, while some non-human animals with the ability to think like a human do deserve rights. No one is arguing for this twisted reality where only the most intellectually gifted individuals of various species in the animal kingdom deserve rights.

They Do Not Have Duties

This is a twisted argument. All animals absolutely have a purpose in life. Even a tick, a blood-sucking pest, is food for birds. Those white birds standing on cattle are not mistaking the cow for an Uber driver! They are eating the ticks, which help them do their job—to drop seeds on the ground, which will grow into plants. Hawks eat carrion; sharks rid the ocean of overpopulated species; bees are absolutely necessary to the health of our crops' and dogs help the blind. It goes on and on.

And, again, if "duty" were a criteria for rights, that would mean babies, the mentally ill, the mentally incapacitated, or the intellectually disabled would not have rights.

Furthermore, although animals do not have rights, they are still subject to human laws and punishments, including imprisonment and death. A dog that attacks a person may be required to remain confined and/or muzzled, or may be sentenced to die. A deer that eats crops may be shot and killed by a farmer under a depredation permit. If animals can be punished under our laws, say AR advocates, then they should also have rights under those laws.

Plants Have Feelings, Too

This argument is another one of those ridiculous things people say when they are out of ammo. As far as science is concerned, plants do not feel pain. Even if they did, that would put humans in the same position as lions, since we cannot live without consuming plants. Therefore, we would be morally justified in eating plants.

Also, if plants feel pain, that does not mean that eating plants and eating animals are morally equivalent because it takes many more plants to feed an omnivore compared to a vegan. Feeding grains, hay, and other plant foods to animals so that we can eat the animals is very inefficient and kills far more plants than being vegan.

United Sates Department of Agriculture. The Changing Landscape Of U.S. Milk Production . 2002.

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Introduction

Philosophical background

Animals and the law.

The modern animal rights movement

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Table Of Contents

animal rights , moral or legal entitlements attributed to nonhuman animals, usually because of the complexity of their cognitive , emotional, and social lives or their capacity to experience physical or emotional pain or pleasure. Historically, different views of the scope of animal rights have reflected philosophical and legal developments, scientific conceptions of animal and human nature , and religious and ethical conceptions of the proper relationship between animals and human beings. Since the beginning of the modern animal rights movement , which was initiated by philosophers in the 1970s, animal rights has been a popular topic of discussion within the academic study of applied ethics , or the application of normative ethical theories to practical problems.

The proper treatment of animals is a very old question in the West. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers debated the place of animals in human morality . The Pythagoreans (6th–4th century bce ) and the Neoplatonists (3rd–6th century ce ) urged respect for animals’ interests, primarily because they believed in the transmigration of souls between human and animal bodies. In his biological writings, Aristotle (384–322 bce ) repeatedly suggested that animals lived for their own sake, but his claim in the Politics that nature made all animals for the sake of humans was unfortunately destined to become his most influential statement on the subject.

Aristotle, and later the Stoics , believed the world was populated by an infinity of beings arranged hierarchically according to their complexity and perfection, from the barely living to the merely sentient , the rational, and the wholly spiritual. In this Great Chain of Being , as it came to be known, all forms of life were represented as existing for the sake of those forms higher in the chain. Among corporeal beings, humans, by dint of their rationality, occupied the highest position. The Great Chain of Being became one of the most persistent and powerful, if utterly erroneous , ways of conceiving the universe, dominating scientific, philosophical, and religious thinking until the middle of the 19th century.

The Stoics , insisting on the irrationality of all nonhuman animals, regarded them as slaves and accordingly treated them as contemptible and beneath notice. Aggressively advocated by St. Augustine (354–430), these Stoic ideas became embedded in Christian theology. They were absorbed wholesale into Roman law—as reflected in the treatises and codifications of Gaius (fl. 130–180) and Justinian (483–565)—taken up by the legal glossators of Europe in the 11th century, and eventually pressed into English (and, much later, American) common law . Meanwhile, arguments that urged respect for the interests of animals nearly disappeared, and animal welfare remained a relative backwater of philosophical inquiry and legal regulation until the final decades of the 20th century.

In the 3rd or 4th century ce , the Roman jurist Hermogenianus wrote, “Hominum causa omne jus constitum” (“All law was established for men’s sake”). Repeating the phrase, P.A. Fitzgerald’s 1966 treatise Salmond on Jurisprudence declared, “The law is made for men and allows no fellowship or bonds of obligation between them and the lower animals.” The most important consequence of this view is that animals have long been categorized as “legal things,” not as “legal persons.” Whereas legal persons have rights of their own, legal things do not. They exist in the law solely as the objects of the rights of legal persons—e.g., as things over which legal persons may exercise property rights . This status, however, often affords animals the indirect protection of laws intended to preserve social morality or the rights of animal owners, such as criminal anticruelty statutes or civil statutes that permit owners to obtain compensation for damages inflicted on their animals. Indeed, this sort of law presently defines the field of “animal law,” which is much broader than animal rights because it encompasses all law that addresses the interests of nonhuman animals—or, more commonly, the interests of the people who own them.

A legal thing can become a legal person; this happened whenever human slaves were freed. The former legal thing then possesses his own legal rights and remedies. Parallels have frequently been drawn between the legal status of animals and that of human slaves . “The truly striking fact about slavery,” the American historian David Brion Davis has written, is the

antiquity and almost universal acceptance of the concept of the slave as a human being who is legally owned, used, sold, or otherwise disposed of as if he or she were a domestic animal. This parallel persisted in the similarity of naming slaves, branding them, and even pricing them according to their equivalent in cows , camels , pigs , and chickens .

The American jurist Roscoe Pound wrote that in ancient Rome a slave “was a thing, and as such, like animals could be the object of rights of property,” and the British historian of Roman law Barry Nicholas has pointed out that in Rome “the slave was a thing…he himself had no rights: he was merely an object of rights, like an animal.”

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, humanitarian reformers in Britain and the United States campaigned on behalf of the weak and defenseless, protesting against child labour , debtor’s prisons, abusive punishment in public schools, and, inevitably, the cruel treatment of animals. In 1800 the most renowned abolitionist of the period, William Wilberforce , supported a bill to abolish bull- and bearbaiting, which was defeated in the House of Commons . In 1809 Baron Erskine , former lord chancellor of England, who had long been troubled by cruelty to animals , introduced a bill to prohibit cruelty to all domestic animals. Erskine declared that the bill was intended to “consecrate, perhaps, in all nations, and in all ages, that just and eternal principle which binds the whole living world in one harmonious chain, under the dominion of enlightened man, the lord and governor of all.” Although the bill passed the House of Lords , it failed in the House of Commons. Then, in 1821, a bill “to prevent cruel and improper treatment of Cattle” was introduced in the House of Commons, sponsored by Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton and championed by Irish member of Parliament Richard Martin. The version enacted in 1822, known as Martin’s Act, made it a crime to treat a handful of domesticated animals—cattle, oxen, horses, and sheep—cruelly or to inflict unnecessary suffering upon them. However, it did not protect the general welfare of even these animals, much less give them legal rights, and the worst punishment available for any breach was a modest fine. Similar statutes were enacted in all the states of the United States, where there now exists a patchwork of anticruelty and animal-welfare laws. Most states today make at least some abuses of animals a felony . Laws such as the federal Animal Welfare Act (1966), for example, regulate what humans may do to animals in agriculture, biomedical research, entertainment, and other areas. But neither Martin’s Act nor many subsequent animal-protection statutes altered the traditional legal status of animals as legal things.

This situation changed in 2008, when the Spanish national parliament adopted resolutions urging the government to grant orangutans , chimpanzees , and gorillas some statutory rights previously afforded only to humans. The resolutions also called for banning the use of apes in performances, harmful research, and trading as well as in other practices that involve profiting from the animals. Although zoos would still be allowed to hold apes, they would be required to provide them with “optimal” living conditions.

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Animal Rights: The Simple Idea That Sparked a Movement

Animal rights is a revolutionary idea and social movement that requires humans to reexamine their relationship with animals, especially animals used for food.

Explainer • Policy • Reflections

Words by Hemi Kim

There are many awkward conversations you might have at family or work meetings as the singular vegan . It’s possible to find yourself carefully describing your food choices, aware that you are on the edge of disassembling a joyous bulgogi dish into the painful experiences that were required to produce it. Talking about issues related to animal rights can be emotionally difficult especially when eating with and cooking for others is a love language; rejecting family and friends’ cooking can be hurtful.

Yet animal advocates have managed to tap into common, shared values, successfully encouraging more and more people to reexamine what living their values really looks like, especially values of respect, empathy, imagination, cooperation, adaptability, and compassion for all living beings.

Do Animals Have Rights?

In the United States, many animals are defined as property and do not have rights in the same sense that humans have rights. At least 13 nations have symbolically acknowledged the dignity and personhood of nonhuman animals or the need to show compassion towards them as something other than objects in their constitutions . (These are Brazil, Germany, India, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, the Iroquois Nations, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the People’s Republic of China, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia.) Yet such acknowledgments remain largely lip service—the animals in these thirteen nations are still treated similarly, both culturally and legally, to the animals in any other country.

Nevertheless, animal studies researchers such as Maneesha Deckha often see potential in the “shift in legal standing of nonhumans that constitutional recognition can precipitate.”

One advocacy approach seeks to translate the moral rights of animals into practical change by expanding how the law views animals: from property to personhood . Legal status as a person is something that U.S. courts have given to corporations, ships, and “entities of nature,” according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund , and it has been conferred on individual great apes outside the United States. Read more about the nuances of how advocates are trying to improve the status and legal protections of animals here .

What Are Animal Rights?

Animal rights form part of a way of thinking about nonhuman animals as off-limits for human exploitation. People that espouse this way of thinking try to direct their own and others’ behaviors away from eating, dressing, conducting scientific experiments, and being entertained in ways that involve harm to nonhuman animals.

Animal rights is also a broad term describing animal advocacy , and the social movement focused on improving the lives of nonhuman animals. Yet the term “animal rights activist” can be alienating , which may be why groups prefer to use the terms “animal protection” or “animal advocates.”

When Did the Animal Rights Movement Begin in the U.S.?

The modern animal rights movement in the United States saw a major milestone in the 1970s with the publication of Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” in which he argued that it was ethically important that nonhuman animals feel pain, and that this fact demanded far more equal treatment of nonhuman animals and humans. He also popularized the term “ speciesism ” to describe what happens when nonhuman animals are not given the same consideration as humans. Other thinkers, writers, and activist groups have also notably furthered and developed the fabric of the animal rights movement, both before and since Singer’s book, including Tom Regan and PETA.

Singer’s text itself reportedly sits on the shoulders of at least one British author who lived about a century prior. And for many centuries European travelers to India have learned about, and been attracted to, the concept of ahimsa and care for animals. Ahimsa , documented as early as the eighth century B.C. in Indian religious texts—Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist—affirms nonviolence and the alleviation of the suffering of all beings.

From the perspectives of scholars such as Cree writer Billy Ray Belcourt, and vegan theorists such as Aph and Syl Ko, the modern divide between animals and humans works in tandem with the imposition of white supremacy: on Indigenous people whose land was stolen by settler-colonists and who were targets of genocide, and on Black and Brown people who were and often continue to be treated as less than human.

Thus the animal protection movement in the United States is limited by the legacies and habits of thought of settler colonialism and other oppressions, and the history of the movement is whitewashed—something that people are now trying to undo. Belcourt, for example, argued in a 2020 article that people concerned with living ethically must challenge the white supremacy underpinning many efforts to expand the rights of nonhuman animals, and instead look to Indigenous traditions that see “animals as kin who co-produce a way of life that engenders care rather than and contra to suffering.”

What’s the Difference Between Animal Welfare and Animal Rights?

The terms “animal welfare” and “animal rights” are similar, but animal rights is a broader idea than animal welfare. Animal welfare refers to the responsibility of humans to treat nonhuman animals well and directly care for their health, but without challenging the overall circumstances that animals find themselves in or the ways they are used in society.

For example, an animal welfare advocate may be vigilant about how animals such as bears and apes are treated in the movie industry when they are working on a set. An animal rights proponent may instead call for an end to the use of animals in films altogether.

Another example of animal welfare is when people campaign for better treatment of young chickens before they are slaughtered. Though groups that campaign for animal welfare may also support goals that are compatible with animal rights, for example when promoting the consumption of plant-based foods.

What Are Some Examples of Animal Rights?

Animal rights supporters tend to be concerned that people use animals as a means to an end, typically without the animals’ assent to participate in an activity. In addition to the examples below, common areas of concern for animal rights include clothing, makeup, scientific experimentation, sports, and wildlife.

Animal Agriculture

Hogs are not just the source material for a good slow roast, crispy bacon, and pork belly. The pork industry also disassembles pigs for their parts to be used as ingredients in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and other scientific endeavors. People who support animal rights tend to oppose all farming of livestock and fish. The fictional film “Okja” is often cited as an animal rights story dealing with these issues—one that is sympathetic to animals sent to slaughter.

Entertainment

Circuses, zoos, and aquariums have been the subject of animal rights campaigns and popular documentaries, such as “Blackfish” , that have resulted in changes to how the entertainment industry markets animal-based entertainment.

Companionship and Working Animals

People concerned with animal rights might be more concerned with the potential for conscripting an animal into an unhealthy situation that exploits their labor than they would be about the benefits to humans of emotional support animals or land-mine-sniffing rats.

Animal Rights Arguments: Pros and Cons

The arguments of critics and supporters of animal protection can seem as diverse as the number of people who express an opinion. Below are some common reasons why people may feel pulled toward or away from animal rights causes.

Arguments in Favor of Animal Rights

In “Aphro-ism” , Syl and Aph Ko promote a view of animal rights within Black Veganism that sees animal rights as essential to ending racism. They write sensitively about the topic in a way that acknowledges how white supremacy has animalized Black people. They also draw a line from the oppression of nonhuman animals to white supremacy and convincingly argue that being antiracist is essential to animal liberation.

People allied with animal rights might also include Coast Salish activists in the Block Corporate Salmon campaign, who identify themselves as Salmon People and oppose the introduction of genetically modified fish to the local wildlife environment.

Arguments Against Animal Rights

People who oppose animal rights might see animals as property, and inferior to humans. They might argue that eating meat is a natural feature of the food chain, or that nonhuman animals exist for the benefit of humans .

Sometimes, deciding to disregard animal rights is a matter of practicality. For example, using life-saving products that were created with scientific research that relied on experimentation on nonhuman animals, as is the case with vaccines and pharmaceutical medicines.

As animal advocate, Christopher Soul Eubanks wrote in March 2021, “To Black people and non-vegans of all races, the animal rights movement can appear as an affluent far-left group who ignore the systemic oppression they have benefited from while using that affluence to advocate for nonhumans.” Indeed, roughly 9 out of 10 people working for farmed animal protection organizations are white. In a more racially equitable world, that number would be closer to 6 in the United States.

Colonialist harms brought about by animal rights and vegan activism can be investigated: it’s something people of the global majority and others have begun.

Why Are Animal Rights Important?

“Being labeled less-than-human” is a condition that most people experience, one that Black and other oppressed peoples live daily, according to Aph Ko in a chapter of “Aphro-Ism.” Ko also writes in a later chapter that “‘[a]nimal’ is a category that we shove certain bodies into when we want to justify violence against them, which is why animal liberation should concern all who are minoritized, because at any moment you can become an ‘animal’ and be considered disposable.”

For Ko, being a critical thinker is more important than believing popular, yet false, narratives about oneself and nonhuman animals. This desire to re-evaluate what one thinks is a launching point for Afrofuturist possibilities, or Black-centered creativity , a philosophical wellspring for Black veganism. You can read more about Black veganism here , here , and here .

Animal rights, then, is an opportunity to constantly ask tough questions. And asking questions creates spaces within which vulnerable communities can flourish. For antiracist humane educator Dana McPhall , the following questions guide her work:

“So what would it look like to imagine a world where I’m not defined by the racial and gender constructs imposed upon me? Where people racialized as white are no longer invested in whiteness? Where the lives of nonhuman animals are no longer circumscribed within the social construct “animal?” Where huge swaths of our planet are not considered disposable, along with the people and wildlife who inhabit them?”

What Are the Consequences of Animal Rights?

Results of animal rights activism include the increasing popularity of vegan food products, a ban on selling fur in California, and state bans on using most animals in circuses. Keeping up with Sentient Media is one way to see these types of stories as they proliferate.

Ending Suffering Wherever It Persists

Nonhuman animals’ rights are not so much a question of legality or illegality, especially as laws tend to treat them as property. They are rather a way of thinking about what is morally right in a given cultural context. Avoiding the suffering of animals and respecting their right to exist are basic tenets of animal protection. As a way of thinking and being in community with others, animal rights can be an invitation for learning and imagining. Animal advocates of all races can dismantle white supremacy and undo “isms” by re-centering the experiences of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and other previously “less-than-human” people.

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Hemi is a writer and educator.

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What Are Animal Rights & Why Should Animals Have Rights?

Estimated reading time: 9½ minutes

Around the world, the fight for human rights continues – for equality, justice and freedom. Alongside this important movement, compassionate people are working to ensure that non-human animals are not left behind. For centuries, animals have been exploited, abused, deliberately harmed and killed by people because they have been seen as different and inferior. So, while the rights that humans need and deserve are different from those that animals need and deserve, there is much in common between the two movements. Both seek justice and fairness for beings who have traditionally been treated – and are still being treated – appallingly.

What Are Animal Rights?

If human animals have rights, then why not non-human animals? After all, we are all just creatures living on this same planet, and sharing many biological, psychological and emotional traits. We’re not the same as a dog or a bird, and they are not the same as each other, but if we are worthy of dignity, autonomy and respect, then what reason could there be for denying the same to non-human animals?

Some people argue from a position of ignorance, or perhaps deliberate misunderstanding, and say but cows don’t need to vote! as if this is what is meant when we talk about the rights of animals. What we are saying is that animals deserve not just better treatment, but to be given dignity, have their interests recognised and respected, and – crucially – not to be exploited for human gain.

Why Are Animals’ Rights Important?

We may as well ask why human rights are important! Because animals are sentient beings here on this planet with us, not for us. Because who would we be if we abused those weaker than ourselves just because we could, or treated others with kindness only if we thought them attractive or intelligent?

For animals, having rights is everything. With rights, they would not be trapped, beaten, caged, artificially inseminated, mutilated, drugged, traded, transported, harmed and killed just because someone else profits by it. By granting animals rights, the sum of suffering in the world would reduce dramatically.

How Are Animal Rights Violated?

In thousands of ways. When we breed animals so we can take their babies and eat them; when we deliberately impregnate them so we can take their babies’ milk; when we force them into a circus ring or into a cage at a zoo; when we breed and sell them as ‘pets’ for profit; when we force them to race; when we beat them to make them do what we want; when we rub chemicals into their eyes in laboratories; when we shoot or hunt them for fun; when we trap them for fur; when we pluck out their feathers to fill duvets or jackets; when we put them in a tank or cage in our living rooms so we can watch them instead of the television for a few minutes.

Our relationship with animals is based entirely on their subjugation and our dominance. And this unequal relationship stems from the historical ideology that might is right, that it is acceptable for the stronger to bully and abuse the weaker simply because they can.

The Difference Between Animal Welfare And Animal Rights?

Often, the difference between these two has been described as the difference between giving animals bigger cages and abolishing cages altogether. Animal welfare asks that we reduce suffering while still exploiting, harming, governing every aspect of their lives, and ultimately killing them.

If you believe it is not OK for one being to exploit and subjugate another, then you believe in animal rights.

Do Animals Need Rights?

They do, just as human animals do. Without rights that are enshrined in law, there is nothing to stop up being harmed and exploited.

Animals can suffer, like us, they have personalities and preferences like us, and they do not wish to be harmed, like us. Their rights should not be based on a human perception of their intelligence or worth. Our own prejudices should not matter when it comes to the rights of animals, just as they should not matter when it comes to ensuring that the rights of marginalized people are conferred and upheld.

Arguments In Favor Of Animal Rights

Simply, it is the right thing to do. Animals are not ours to harm and abuse just because we can. They are not our playthings, but sentient beings in their own right.

But there is a wider impact of conferring rights on animals, one that benefits people, too. Human rights would be enhanced because the same forces that give rise to racism, sexism, and hatred of – or prejudice toward – marginalized groups also give rise to the systematic exploitation of animals. This prejudiced worldview stems from the notion of a biological hierarchy with European straight white males at the top, and below them, women, people of colour, those from the LGBTQ+ community, people with a disability, and animals. Conferring rights on animals helps demolish this hierarchy, dismantles this old, destructive way of categorizing and ranking individuals, and helps achieve justice for all.

Arguments Against Animal Rights

Those who profit from harming or exploiting animals are unsurprisingly the most resistant to a change in the status quo. Instead of being honest about their own vested interests, they put forward other arguments.

They might say: Animals are not intelligent, which of course is not true, but even if we were to confer rights based on intelligence, would we accept that babies should not have rights? They might say: You can’t have rights without responsibilities. Again, this makes no sense unless we accept that children and those with serious mental impairments do not have rights; and what about our own responsibilities to other sentient beings? Or they might say: God put animals here for our use. This belief stems from a certain reading of the Bible, one that many compassionate Christians do not support.

There are also people who argue that giving rights to animals would diminish human rights and undermine our ‘special’ role in the world. Our view is – as above – that it would only enhance it.

The Consequences Of Animal Rights

For so long, we have treated animals like property, not like beings, and much of our way of life is predicated on us doing whatever we want to them. While we are incrementally moving towards a few rights for some animals, it’s wonderful to imagine what the world would be like if animals were afforded full legal rights.

If that was the case, we wouldn’t eat them, breed them for milk or confine them for eggs. Factory farming would end, slaughterhouses would close and we would all be vegan. Without consuming animal fats and protein, some or our biggest killers – heart disease, diabetes and hypertension – would be dramatically reduced. With reduced sickness, there would be a boost to the economy .

Because we wouldn’t be wasting precious antibiotics trying to keep sick animals alive inside factory farms, we would limit the dangers of antibiotic resistance. And since three quarters of emerging infectious diseases come from animals, we would drastically reduce the risk of pandemics, too.

Without factory farming, our impact on the Earth would be much gentler. We’d reduce deforestation, pollution and climate change. With everyone vegan, we could feed many more people using less land, and that means people would not go hungry and nature would benefit, too. With 68 percent of animal populations having been wiped out in the past 50 years, a massive reduction in land use would redress that shocking annihilation.

No profit could be made from the lives and bodies of animals, so we would not wear their skins or keep them as ‘pets’. This is not to say we would have to throw away our old leather jacket or turn out our dogs to fend for themselves. Nothing can protect the cows whose skin that coat once was, and we have a duty of care to the animals already here, but we would not skin more cows or breed more dogs.

Circuses would showcase the very best human talent, as many already do, but there would be no tigers forced through hoops or other animals made to dance. Zoos would initially close to the public because animals are not put here for our entertainment. That industry would no longer breed, sell on and kill animals at their own convenience, and eventually, they would close altogether. Any claims they have as conservation bodies would be rendered obsolete because there would be a lot more land available for wildlife, and wild populations could flourish again.

We would not spend our time at horse or dog races. We would not attend rodeos or bullfights. We would not see animals in films or adverts, dressed up and exploited, their ‘cuteness’ or ‘strength’ being used to sell products and make rich people richer.

And instead of causing horrific suffering to animals in laboratories – testing chemicals, cosmetics, and drugs on them, as well as infecting them with human diseases – we would use cutting-edge, modern, scientifically excellent techniques that are quicker, more efficient and more effective.

Our whole attitude and way of life would change and it would benefit us in so many ways. Nature would thrive. People would thrive. The world would be kinder, more compassionate and safer.

Do Animals Have Legal Rights?

There are welfare laws that protect some animals in some circumstances against certain treatment but these are not universal, and are often not enforced. But do animals have meaningful legal rights? Not yet, but thanks to groups like The Non Human Rights Project, that is changing. They are securing court hearings in support of the legal personhood and right to bodily liberty of chimpanzees and elephants, the organization’s first clients.

In 2020, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Alison Y. Tuitt issued a decision in the case of Happy, an elephant held in isolation in a one-acre exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. She wrote that the Court “agrees [with the NhRP] that Happy is more than just a legal thing, or property. She is an intelligent, autonomous being who should be treated with respect and dignity, and who may be entitled to liberty … the arguments advanced by the NhRP are extremely persuasive for transferring Happy from her solitary, lonely one-acre exhibit at the Bronx Zoo to an elephant sanctuary.”

There is much work to do, but it is a fight that, when successful, will liberate us all.

stop factory farms : animal rights demonstration

Most people understand that our lives are as important to us as animals’ lives are to them. And yet we exist in a society that treats them as things, not beings, as something not someone. To achieve justice for all, we must unpick the hierarchy that keeps different groups of people and animals ‘in their place’. Conferring rights on animals is vital to them and long overdue, but the benefits for people would be momentous, too.

For those wishing to know more about the history of animal rights and the campaigns to confer meaningful rights on animals, we recommend reading:

Animal Liberation , Peter Singer
The Case for Animal Rights , Tom Regan
The Sexual Politics of Meat , Carol J Adams
Animals Matter , Marc Bekoff
Animals as Persons , Gary L Francione
Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters , Aph Ko and Syl Ko

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Causes & Effects of Deforestation: How Can We Stop It?

Natural & Human Causes of Climate Change and Its Effects

Taking Pandemics Off the Menu this Winter

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Animal Rights Movement: Understanding When and Why It Started

Introduction

The animal rights movement has progressed with time, reflecting our growing knowledge of animals’ needs and changing attitudes toward their treatment. What can animal advocates learn from looking back at how the animal rights movement came to be? In this article, we’ll explore the concept of animal rights and the history of the animal rights movement, delving into its early days, goals, challenges, and evolution in the modern era.

Do Animals Have Rights?

The belief that nonhuman animals have intrinsic value and the right to be treated with respect and compassion has existed in some form for millennia. For example, the Indian principle of ahiṃsā , which preaches nonviolence toward all living beings, dates back to the 9th century BCE and is observed in religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to this day. Throughout history, however, humans have generally regarded animals as commodities with no inherent rights. One of the first prominent figures to discuss animals’ moral value, 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, promoted a particularly callous view of animals. He argued that animals lacked a mind and could not feel pain, justifying cruel acts such as live vivisection. This sentiment fortunately lost favor as humans’ understanding of animal cognition, emotions, and sentience deepened.

Why Are Animal Rights Important?

Animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain, suffering, and joy. Respecting their rights to not be harmed, captured, taken away from their habitat, abused, confined, or killed for human purposes is in line with moral principles such as empathy, compassion, and ethical conduct. By securing animal rights, we can greatly minimize the amount of pain and suffering in the world. Acknowledging animal rights also benefits humans. For example, improving the living conditions of animals on farms decreases the likelihood of disease transmission to humans. Similarly, reducing meat consumption can help curb the impact of climate change and preserve ecosystems.

When Did the Animal Rights Movement Start?

The modern-day animal rights movement traces back to the Industrial Revolution, when rapid industrialization and urbanization spurred massive changes across Europe and North America. Along with other industries, traditional farming practices were replaced by large-scale, profit-driven factory farms and slaughterhouses. The dangerous, unsanitary, and traumatic working conditions in these meat industry facilities were famously depicted in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle . People began to question the treatment of workers and animals in this new industrial era, leading to the first organized animal advocacy efforts.

Who Started the First Animal Rights Movement?

Several people played a role in the development of the animal rights movement, although a few individuals are often credited with starting it. One of these individuals is Richard Martin, an Irish politician who passed one of the first farmed animal welfare laws (the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act) in 1822 and founded the first animal welfare charity (the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) in 1824. Another prominent figure of the early animal rights movement is Henry Stephens Salt, an English writer and social reformer who argued in favor of animal rights in his 1892 book Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.

What Are the Goals of the Animal Rights Movement?

The goals of the animal rights movement have evolved over time, with early efforts more focused on soliciting compassion for animals and modern efforts more focused on reducing animal consumption or securing legal protection. Today, the end goal of the animal rights movement is to abolish all human activities that cause animal suffering, including factory farming, animal experimentation, and habitat destruction. Animal rights advocates focus on various causes and use different approaches to achieve this goal. Our Menu of Interventions presents a range of these strategies and their potential positive outcomes for animals.

What Laws Protect Animal Rights?

Animal rights laws vary significantly among countries, states, and jurisdictions. Although most countries still do not recognize animal rights or sentience, several have implemented laws to protect certain species against cruelty and neglect. Laws range from basic anti-cruelty protections to more nuanced regulations designed to address animal treatment in specific contexts. Companion animals tend to receive greater protection than farmed and wild animals, as industries routinely challenge new and existing legislation.

A humpback whale’s tail protrudes from the ocean’s surface

Was the Animal Rights Movement Successful?

Although there have been considerable advancements in animal welfare, the animal rights movement still faces challenges. Legal and societal shifts have resulted in better protections against animal cruelty and exploitation, but enforcement remains weak, welfare considerations for farmed animals are lacking, and few countries officially recognize animal sentience in law. Nevertheless, the movement has made significant progress by banning certain cruel practices, improving living conditions for animals, and shifting public opinion.

What Did the Animal Rights Movement Accomplish?

The animal rights movement has accomplished several significant changes and advancements over the years, although the extent of these accomplishments varies by species and region. Some notable accomplishments of the animal rights movement include:

Raising public awareness about the treatment of animals in various industries, such as factory farming, entertainment, and research
Influencing the creation and enforcement of laws and regulations aimed at protecting animals, covering areas such as animal cruelty, animal testing, and wildlife conservation
Improving conditions for farmed animals in some regions, with some companies and farms adopting more humane practices, larger enclosures, and better living conditions for animals
Addressing issues like poaching, illegal wildlife trade, and the use of animals in entertainment
Pressuring companies to adopt more ethical and sustainable sources in their supply chains

The growth of the animal rights movement has also resulted in increased collaboration with other causes, such as environmental protection, social justice, labor rights, and human health. This approach addresses the broader context in which animal suffering occurs and builds alliances for more effective advocacy.

When Did Effective Animal Advocacy Emerge?

Effective animal advocacy (EAA) emerged during the early days of Effective Altruism (EA), a movement that uses evidence and reason to identify the most effecient and impactful ways to do good. EA gained prominence in the 21st century and quickly spread to philanthropic spaces, including the animal rights movement. The first group solely dedicated to effective animal advocacy, Effective Animal Activism, was founded in 2012 as an intern project of 80,000 Hours —a U.K.-based organization that guides individuals toward high-impact careers. Effective Animal Activism sought to improve animal welfare as much as possible, despite the lack of evidence-based guidance on the most effective ways to do so.

Growth of Effective Animal Advocacy

Effective Animal Activism’s earliest efforts consisted of evaluating animal charities, expanding the effective animal advocacy community, and providing career advice to aspiring animal advocates. In 2013, the group merged with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and revised its mission to finding and promoting highly effective opportunities to help animals, soon rebranding as Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE). Charity evaluations became ACE’s core, and we remained the most prominent organization in EAA for years. Through introspection and the growth of EAA, we realized the limitations of our approach in directing funds to smaller groups in underrepresented regions. To address this gap, we introduced the Movement Grants Program.

How Did Effective Animal Advocacy Impact the Animal Rights Movement?

Effective animal advocacy has influenced the animal rights movement by popularizing data-driven approaches with measurable impact, leading to more strategic and cost-effective advocacy efforts. Despite its positive impacts, EAA has also been criticized for its quantitative focus, lack of diversity, prioritization methods, and association with the EA movement. As a prominent figure in the EAA space, ACE carefully considers these critiques and continually reassesses our approach to ensure we support the entire animal rights movement as best we can.

From ancient principles of nonviolence to modern legal debates, the animal rights movement is larger and more relevant than ever before. While many challenges lie ahead, the movement’s forward progress is undeniable. Will you help us advance it even further?

ACE is dedicated to maximizing the impact of every donation we receive. By becoming an ACE monthly donor, you can make the most of your desire to help animals and provide us with a stable foundation to plan and execute long-term projects that drive meaningful change for animals. Together, we can work toward a world where animal rights are valued and respected.

HELP ANIMALS ALL YEAR LONG

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About Selena Darlim

Selena joined ACE in September 2021. She is a longtime animal advocate with several years’ experience writing for nonprofits and media organizations. She holds a self-designed bachelor’s degree in Wildlife Conservation and Animal Advocacy, and she strives to continually expand her knowledge of human and nonhuman advocacy movements.

At the risk of appearing to lack humility, the concept of Effective Animal Advocacy started earlier, with the launch of Faunalytics (then called the Humane Research Council) in 2000. We may have not used the same terminology, but we had a similar sense of cause prioritization and a clear focus on evaluation and effectiveness for both individual groups and the movement. This is a part of our movement’s history that I think is often overlooked by EAAs.

Hi Che. Thank you for reading this article and providing additional background around the movement. We update our pages periodically, and we’ll make sure to take this into account in our next revision.

Article Contents

1. introduction: the need for legal animal rights theory, 2. can animals have legal rights, 3. do animals have (simple) legal rights, 4. should animals have (fundamental) legal rights, 5. conclusion.

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Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

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Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 533–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa007

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With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Legal animal rights are on the horizon, and there is a need for a legal theory of animal rights—that is, a theory of animal rights as legal rights. While there is a diverse body of moral and political theories of animal rights, 1 the nature and conceptual foundations of legal animal rights remain remarkably underexplored. As yet, only few and fragmented legal analyses of isolated aspects of animal rights exist. 2 Other than that, most legal writing in this field operates with a hazily assumed, rudimentary and undifferentiated conception of animal rights—one largely informed by extralegal notions of moral animal rights—which tends to obscure rather than illuminate the distinctive nature and features of legal animal rights. 3 A more systematic and nuanced theorisation of legal animal rights is, however, necessary and overdue for two reasons: first, a gradual turn to legal rights in animal rights discourse; and, secondly, the incipient emergence of legal animal rights.

First, while animal rights have originally been framed as moral rights, they are increasingly articulated as potential legal rights. That is, animals’ moral rights are asserted in an ‘ought to be legal rights’-sense (or ‘manifesto sense’) 4 that demands legal institutionalisation and refers to the corresponding legal rights which animals should ideally have. 5 A salient reason for transforming moral into legal animal rights is that purely moral rights (which exist prior to and independently of legal validation) do not provide animals with sufficient practical protection, whereas legally recognised rights would be reinforced by the law’s more stringent protection and enforcement mechanisms. 6 With a view to their (potential) juridification, it seems advisable to rethink and reconstruct animal rights as specifically legal rights, rather than simply importing moral animal rights into the legal domain. 7

Secondly, and adding urgency to the need for theorisation, legal animal rights are beginning to emerge from existing law. Recently, a few pioneering courts have embarked on a path of judicial creation of animal rights, arriving at them either through a rights-based interpretation of animal welfare legislation or a dynamic interpretation of constitutional (human) rights. Most notably, the Supreme Court of India has extracted a range of animal rights from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and, by reading them in the light of the Constitution, elevated those statutory rights to the status of fundamental rights. 8 Furthermore, courts in Argentina 9 and Colombia 10 have extended the fundamental right of habeas corpus , along with the underlying right to liberty, to captive animals. 11 These (so far isolated) acts of judicial recognition of animal rights may be read as early manifestations of an incipient formation of legal animal rights. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing practical need for legal animal rights theory, in order to explain and guide the as yet still nascent—and somewhat haphazard—evolution of legal animal rights.

This article seeks to take the first steps towards building a more systematic and nuanced theory of legal animal rights. Navigating the existing theoretical patchwork, the article revisits and connects relevant themes that have so far been addressed only in a scattered or cursory manner, and consolidates them into an overarching framework for legal animal rights. Moreover, tackling the well-known problem of ambiguity and obscurity involved in the generally vague, inconsistent and undifferentiated use of the umbrella term ‘animal rights’, this article brings analytical clarity into the debate by disentangling and unveiling different meanings and facets of legal animal rights. 12 To this end, the analysis identifies and separates three relevant sets of issues: (i) conceptual issues concerning the nature and foundations of legal animal rights, and, more generally, whether animals are the kind of beings who can potentially hold legal rights; (ii) doctrinal issues pertaining to existing animal welfare law and whether it confers some legal rights on animals—and, if so, what kind of rights; and (iii) normative issues as to why and what kind of legal rights animals ought ideally to have as a matter of future law. These thematic clusters will be addressed through three simple yet key questions: can , do and should animals have legal rights?

Section 2 will show that it is conceptually possible for animals to hold legal rights, and will clarify the formal structure and normative grounds of legal animal rights. Moreover, as section 3 will demonstrate, unwritten animal rights could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though such ‘animal welfare rights’ are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. In order to distinguish between these weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law and the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have potentially or ideally, the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ will be introduced. Finally, section 4 will explore a range of functional reasons why animals need such strong, fundamental rights as a matter of future law.

As a preliminary matter, it seems necessary to first address the conceptual issue whether animals potentially can have legal rights, irrespective of doctrinal and normative issues as to whether animals do in fact have, or should have, legal rights. Whether animals are possible or potential right holders—that is, the kind of beings to whom legal rights can be ascribed ‘without conceptual absurdity’ 13 —must be determined based on the general nature of rights, which is typically characterised in terms of the structure (or form) and grounds (or ultimate purpose) of rights. 14 Looking at the idea of animal rights through the lens of general rights theories helps clarify the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights by identifying their possible forms and grounds. The first subsection (A) focusses on two particular forms of conceptually basic rights—claims and liberties—and examines their structural compatibility with animal rights. The second subsection (B) considers the two main competing theories of rights—the will theory and interest theory—and whether, and on what grounds, they can accommodate animals as potential right holders.

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

The formal structure of rights is generally explicated based on the Hohfeldian typology of rights. 15 Hohfeld famously noted that the generic term ‘right’ tends to be used indiscriminately to cover ‘any sort of legal advantage’, and distinguished four different types of conceptually basic rights: claims (rights stricto sensu ), liberties, powers and immunities. 16 In the following, I will show on the basis of first-order rights 17 —claims and liberties—that legal animal rights are structurally possible, and what such legal relations would consist of. 18

(i) Animal claim rights

To have a right in the strictest sense is ‘to have a claim to something and against someone’, the claim right necessarily corresponding with that person’s correlative duty towards the right holder to do or not to do something. 19 This type of right would take the form of animals holding a claim to something against, for example, humans or the state who bear correlative duties to refrain from or perform certain actions. Such legal animal rights could be either negative rights (correlative to negative duties) to non-interference or positive rights (correlative to positive duties) to the provision of some good or service. 20 The structure of claim rights seems especially suitable for animals, because these are passive rights that concern the conduct of others (the duty bearers) and are simply enjoyed rather than exercised by the right holder. 21 Claim rights would therefore assign to animals a purely passive position that is specified by the presence and performance of others’ duties towards animals, and would not require any actions by the animals themselves.

(ii) Animal liberties

Liberties, by contrast, are active rights that concern the right holder’s own conduct. A liberty to engage in or refrain from a certain action is one’s freedom of any contrary duty towards another to eschew or undertake that action, correlative to the no right of another. 22 On the face of it, the structure of liberties appears to lend itself to animal rights. A liberty right would indicate that an animal is free to engage in or avoid certain behaviours, in the sense of being free from a specific duty to do otherwise. Yet, an obvious objection is that animals are generally incapable of having any legal duties. 23 Given that animals are inevitably in a constant state of ‘no duty’ and thus ‘liberty’, 24 this seems to render the notion of liberty rights somewhat pointless and redundant in the case of animals, as it would do nothing more than affirm an already and invariably existing natural condition of dutylessness. However, this sort of ‘natural liberty’ is, in and of itself, only a naked liberty, one wholly unprotected against interferences by others. 25 That is, while animals may have the ‘natural liberty’ of, for example, freedom of movement in the sense of not having (and not being capable of having) a duty not to move around, others do not have a duty vis-à-vis the animals not to interfere with the exercise of this liberty by, for example, capturing and caging them.

The added value of turning the ‘natural liberties’ of animals into liberty rights thus lies in the act of transforming unprotected, naked liberties into protected, vested liberties that are shielded from certain modes of interference. Indeed, it seems sensible to think of ‘natural liberties’ as constituting legal rights only when embedded in a ‘protective perimeter’ of claim rights and correlative duties within which such liberties may meaningfully exist and be exercised. 26 This protective perimeter consists of some general duties (arising not from the liberty right itself, but from other claim rights, such as the right to life and physical integrity) not to engage in ‘at least the cruder forms of interference’, like physical assault or killing, which will preclude most forms of effective interference. 27 Moreover, liberties may be fortified by specific claim rights and correlative duties strictly designed to protect a particular liberty, such as if the state had a (negative) duty not to build highways that cut across wildlife habitat, or a (positive) duty to build wildlife corridors for such highways, in order to facilitate safe and effective freedom of movement for the animals who live in these fragmented habitats.

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

Lastly, some remarks on the relation between animal rights and duties seem in order. Some commentators hold that animals are unable to possess legal rights based on the influential idea that the capacity for holding rights is inextricably linked with the capacity for bearing duties. 28 Insofar as animals are not capable of bearing legal duties in any meaningful sense, it follows that animals cannot have legal (claim) rights against other animals, given that those other animals would be incapable of holding the correlative duties. But does this disqualify animals from having legal rights altogether, for instance, against legally competent humans or the state?

While duties are a key component of (first-order) rights—with claim rights necessarily implying the presence of a legal duty in others and liberties necessarily implying the absence of a legal duty in the right holder 29 —neither of them logically entails that the right holder bear duties herself . As Kramer aptly puts it:

Except in the very unusual circumstances where someone holds a right against himself, X’s possession of a legal right does not entail X’s bearing of a legal duty; rather, it entails the bearing of a legal duty by somebody else. 30

This underscores an important distinction between the conceptually axiomatic correlativity of rights and duties—the notion that every claim right necessarily implies a duty—and the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties—the notion that (the capacity for) right holding is conditioned on (the capacity for) duty bearing. While correlativity refers to an existential nexus between a right and a duty held by separate persons within one and the same legal relation , reciprocity posits a normative nexus between the right holding and duty bearing of one and the same person within separate, logically unrelated legal relations.

The claim that the capacity for right holding is somehow contingent on the right holder’s (logically unrelated) capacity for duty bearing is thus, as Kramer puts it, ‘straightforwardly false’ from a Hohfeldian point of view. 31 Nevertheless, there may be other, normative reasons (notably underpinned by social contract theory) for asserting that the class of appropriate right holders should be limited to those entities that, in addition to being structurally possible right holders, are also capable of reciprocating, that is, of being their duty bearers’ duty bearers. 32 However, such a narrow contractarian framing of right holding should be rejected, not least because it misses the current legal reality. 33 With a view to legally incompetent humans (eg infants and the mentally incapacitated), contemporary legal systems have manifestly cut the connection between right holding and the capacity for duty bearing. 34 As Wenar notes, the ‘class of potential right holders has expanded to include duty-less entities’. 35 Similarly, it would be neither conceptually nor legally apposite to infer from the mere fact that animals do not belong to the class of possible duty bearers that they cannot belong to the class of possible right holders. 36

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

While Hohfeld’s analytical framework is useful to outline the possible forms and composition of legal animal rights, Kelch rightly points out that it remains agnostic as to the normative grounds of potential animal rights. 37 In this respect, the two dominant theories of rights advance vastly differing accounts of the ultimate purpose of rights and who can potentially have them. 38 Whereas the idea of animal rights does not resonate well with the will theory, the interest theory quite readily provides a conceptual home for it.

(i) Will theory

According to the will theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is to promote and protect some aspect of an individual’s autonomy and self-realisation. A legal right is essentially a ‘legally respected choice’, and the right holder a ‘small scale sovereign’ whose exercise of choice is facilitated by giving her discretionary ‘legal powers of control’ over others’ duties. 39 The class of potential right holders thus includes only those entities that possess agency and legal competence, which effectively rules out the possibility of animals as right holders, insofar as they lack the sort or degree of agency necessary for the will-theory conception of rights. 40

However, the fact that animals are not potential right holders under the will theory does not necessarily mean that animals cannot have legal rights altogether. The will theory has attracted abundant criticism for its under-inclusiveness as regards both the class of possible right holders 41 and the types of rights it can plausibly account for, and thus seems to advance too narrow a conception of rights for it to provide a theoretical foundation for all rights. 42 In particular, it may be noted that the kinds of rights typically contemplated as animal rights are precisely of the sort that generally exceed the explanatory power of the will theory, namely inalienable, 43 passive, 44 public-law 45 rights that protect basic aspects of animals’ (partially historically and socially mediated) vulnerable corporeal existence. 46 Such rights, then, are best explained on an interest-theoretical basis.

(ii) Interest theory

Animal rights theories most commonly ground animal rights in animal interests, and thus naturally gravitate to the interest theory of rights. 47 According to the interest theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is the protection and advancement of some aspect(s) of an individual’s well-being and interests. 48 Legal rights are essentially ‘legally-protected interests’ that are of special importance and concern. 49 With its emphasis on well-being rather than on agency, the interest theory seems more open to the possibility of animal rights from the outset. Indeed, as regards the class of possible right holders, the interest theory does little conceptual filtering beyond requiring that right holders be capable of having interests. 50 Given that, depending on the underlying definition of ‘interest’, this may cover all animals, plants and, according to some, even inanimate objects, the fairly modest and potentially over-inclusive conceptual criterion of ‘having interests’ is typically complemented by the additional, more restrictive moral criterion of ‘having moral status’. 51 Pursuant to this limitation, not just any being capable of having interests can have rights, but only those whose well-being is not merely of instrumental, but of intrinsic or ‘ultimate value’. 52

Accordingly, under the interest theory, two conditions must be met for animals to qualify as potential right holders: (i) animals must have interests, (ii) the protection of which is required not merely for ulterior reasons, but for the animals’ own sake, because their well-being is intrinsically valuable. Now, whether animals are capable of having interests in the sense relevant to having rights and whether they have moral status in the sense of inherent or ultimate value is still subject to debate. For example, some have denied that animals possess interests based on an understanding of interests as wants and desires that require complex cognitive abilities such as having beliefs and language. 53 However, most interest theories opt for a broader understanding of interests in the sense of ‘being in someone’s interest’, meaning that an interest holder can be ‘made better or worse off’ and is able to benefit in some way from protective action. 54 Typically, though not invariably, the capacity for having interests in this broad sense is bound up with sentience—the capacity for conscious and subjective experiences of pain, suffering and pleasure. 55 Thus, most interest theorists quite readily accept (sentient) animals as potential right holders, that is, as the kind of beings that are capable of holding legal rights. 56

More importantly yet for legal purposes, the law already firmly rests on the recognition of (some) animals as beings who possess intrinsically valuable interests. Modern animal welfare legislation cannot be intelligibly explained other than as acknowledging that the animals it protects (i) have morally and legally relevant goods and interests, notably in their welfare, life and physical or mental integrity. 57 Moreover, it rests on an (implicit or explicit) recognition of those animals as (ii) having moral status in the sense of having intrinsic value. The underlying rationale of modern, non-anthropocentric, ethically motivated animal protection laws is the protection of animals qua animals, for their own sake, rather than for instrumental reasons. 58 Some laws go even further by directly referencing the ‘dignity’ or ‘intrinsic value’ of animals. 59

It follows that existing animal welfare laws already treat animals as intrinsically valuable holders of some legally relevant interests—and thus as precisely the sorts of beings who possess the qualities that are, under an interest theory of rights, necessary and sufficient for having rights. This, then, prompts the question whether those very laws do not only conceptually allow for potential animal rights, but might also give rise to actual legal rights for animals.

Notwithstanding that animals could have legal rights conceptually, the predominant doctrinal opinion is that, as a matter of positive law, animals do not have any, at least not in the sense of proper, legally recognised and claimable rights. 60 Yet, there is a certain inclination, especially in Anglo-American parlance, to speak—in a rather vague manner—of ‘animal rights’ as if they already exist under current animal welfare legislation. Such talk of existing animal rights is, however, rarely backed up with further substantiations of the underlying claim that animal welfare laws do in fact confer legal rights on animals. In the following, I will examine whether animals’ existing legal protections may be classified as legal rights and, if so, what kind of rights these constitute. The analysis will show (A) that implicit animal rights (hereinafter referred to as ‘animal welfare rights’) 61 can be extracted from animal welfare laws as correlatives of explicit animal welfare duties, but that this reading remains largely theoretical so far, given that such unwritten animal rights are hardly legally recognised in practice. Moreover, (B) the kind of rights derivable from animal welfare laws are currently at best imperfect and weak rights that do not provide animals with the sort of robust normative protection that is generally associated with legal rights, and typically also expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. Finally, (C) the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ are introduced in order to distinguish, and account for the qualitative differences, between such current, imperfect, weak animal rights and potential, ideal, strong animal rights.

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws

(i) the simple argument from correlativity.

Existing animal welfare laws are not framed in the language of rights and do not codify any explicit animal rights. They do, however, impose on people legal duties designed to protect animals—duties that demand some behaviour that is beneficial to the welfare of animals. Some commentators contend that correlative (claim) rights are thereby conferred upon animals as the beneficiaries of such duties. 62 This view is consistent with, and, indeed, the logical conclusion of, an interest-theoretical analysis. 63 Recall that rights are essentially legally protected interests of intrinsically valuable individuals, and that a claim right is the ‘position of normative protectedness that consists in being owed a … legal duty’. 64 Under existing animal welfare laws, some goods of animals are legally protected interests in exactly this sense of ultimately valuable interests that are protected through the imposition of duties on others. However, the inference from existing animal welfare duties to the existence of correlative ‘animal welfare rights’ appears to rely on a somewhat simplistic notion of correlativity, along the lines of ‘where there is a duty there is a right’. 65 Two objections in particular may be raised against the view that beneficial duties imposed by animal welfare laws are sufficient for creating corresponding legal rights in animals.

First, not every kind of duty entails a correlative right. 66 While some duties are of an unspecific and general nature, only relational, directed duties which are owed to rather than merely regarding someone are the correlatives of (claim) rights. Closely related, not everyone who stands to benefit from the performance of another’s duty has a correlative right. According to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties designed to protect their interests. 67 Yet, animal welfare duties, in a contemporary reading, are predominantly understood not as indirect duties regarding animals—duties imposed to protect, for example, an owner’s interest in her animal, public sensibilities or the moral character of humans—but as direct duties owed to the protected animals themselves. 68 Moreover, the constitutive purpose of modern animal welfare laws is to protect animals for their own sake. Animals are therefore clearly beneficiaries in a qualified sense, that is, they are not merely accidental or incidental, but the direct and intended primary beneficiaries of animal welfare duties. 69

Secondly, one may object that an analysis of animal rights as originating from intentionally beneficial duties rests on a conception of rights precisely of the sort which has the stigma of redundancy attached to it. Drawing on Hart, this would appear to cast rights as mere ‘alternative formulation of duties’ and thus ‘no more than a redundant translation of duties … into a terminology of rights’. 70 Admittedly, as MacCormick aptly puts it:

[To] rest an account of claim rights solely on the notion that they exist whenever a legal duty is imposed by a law intended to benefit assignable individuals … is to treat rights as being simply the ‘reflex’ of logically prior duties. 71

One way of responding to this redundancy problem is to reverse the logical order of rights and duties. On this account, rights are not simply created by (and thus logically posterior to) beneficial duties, but rather the converse: such duties are derived from and generated by (logically antecedent) rights. For example, according to Raz, ‘Rights are grounds of duties in others’ and thus justificationally prior to duties. 72 However, if rights are understood not just as existentially correlative, but as justificationally prior to duties, identifying intentionally beneficial animal welfare duties as the source of (logically posterior) animal rights will not suffice. In order to accommodate the view that rights are grounds of duties, the aforementioned argument from correlativity needs to be reconsidered and refined.

(ii) A qualified argument from correlativity

A refined, and reversed, argument from correlativity must show that animal rights are not merely reflexes created by animal welfare duties, but rather the grounds for such duties. In other words, positive animal welfare duties must be plausibly explained as some kind of codified reflection, or visible manifestation, of ‘invisible’ background animal rights that give rise to those duties.

This requires further clarification of the notion of a justificational priority of rights over duties. On the face of it, the idea that rights are somehow antecedent to duties appears to be at odds with the Hohfeldian correlativity axiom, which stipulates an existential nexus of mutual entailment between rights and duties—one cannot exist without the other. 73 Viewed in this light, it seems paradoxical to suggest that rights are causal for the very duties that are simultaneously constitutive of those rights—cause and effect seem to be mutually dependent. Gewirth offers a plausible explanation for this seemingly circular understanding of the relation between rights and duties. He illustrates that the ‘priority of claim rights over duties in the order of justifying purpose or final causality is not antithetical to their being correlative to each other’ by means of an analogy:

Parents are prior to their children in the order of efficient causality, yet the (past or present) existence of parents can be inferred from the existence of children, as well as conversely. Hence, the causal priority of parents to children is compatible with the two groups’ being causally as well as conceptually correlative. The case is similar with rights and duties, except that the ordering relation between them is one of final rather than efficient causality, of justifying purpose rather than bringing-into-existence. 74

Upon closer examination, this point may be specified even further. To stay with the analogy of (biological) 75 parents and their children: it is actually the content of ‘parents’—a male and a female (who at some point procreate together)—that exists prior to and independently of possibly ensuing ‘children’, whereas this content turns into ‘parents’ only in conjunction with ‘children’. That is, the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are mutually entailing, whilst, strictly speaking, it is not ‘parents’, but rather that which will later be called ‘parents’ only once the ‘child’ comes into existence—the pre-existing content—which is antecedent to and causal for ‘children’.

Applied to the issue of rights and duties, this means that it is actually the content of a ‘right’—an interest—that exists prior to and independently of, and is (justificationally) causal for the creation of, a ‘duty’, which, in turn, is constitutive of a ‘right’. The distinction between ‘right’ and its content—an interest—allows the pinpointing of the latter as the reason for, and the former as the concomitant correlative of, a duty imposed to protect the pre-existing interest. It may thus be restated, more precisely, that it is not rights, but the protected interests which are grounds of duties. Incidentally, this specification is consistent with Raz’s definition of rights, according to which ‘having a right’ means that an aspect of the right holder’s well-being (her interest) ‘is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty’. 76 Now, the enactment of modern animal welfare laws is in and of itself evidence of the fact that some aspects of animals’ well-being (their interests) are—both temporally and justificationally—causal and a sufficient reason for imposing duties on others. Put differently: animal interests are grounds of animal welfare duties , and this, in turn, is conceptually constitutive of animal rights .

In conclusion, existing animal welfare laws could indeed be analysed as comprising unwritten ‘animal welfare rights’ as implicit correlatives of the explicit animal welfare duties imposed on others. The essential feature of legal rules conferring rights is that they specifically aim at protecting individual interests or goods—whether they do so expressis verbis or not is irrelevant. 77 Even so, in order for a right to be an actual (rather than a potential or merely postulated) legal right, it should at least be legally recognised (if not claimable and enforceable), 78 which is determined by the applicable legal rules. In the absence of unequivocal wording, whether a legal norm confers unwritten rights on animals becomes a matter of legal interpretation. While theorists can show that a rights-based approach lies within the bounds of a justifiable interpretation of the law, an actual, valid legal right hardly comes to exist by the mere fact that some theorists claim it exists. For that to happen, it seems instrumental that some public authoritative body, notably a court, recognises it as such. That is, while animals’ existing legal protections may already provide for all the ingredients constitutive of rights, it takes a court to actualise this potential , by authoritatively interpreting those legal rules as constituting rights of animals. However, because courts, with a few exceptions, have not done so thus far, it seems fair to say that unwritten animal rights are not (yet) legally recognised in practice and remain a mostly theoretical possibility for now. 79

B. The Weakness of Current ‘Animal Welfare Rights’

Besides the formal issue of legal recognition, there are substantive reasons for questioning whether the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare laws are really rights at all. This is because current ‘animal welfare rights’ are unusually weak rights that do not afford the sort of strong normative protection that is ordinarily associated with legal rights. 80 Classifying animals’ existing legal protections as ‘rights’ may thus conflict with the deeply held view that, because they protect interests of special importance, legal rights carry special normative force . 81 This quality is expressed in metaphors of rights as ‘trumps’, 82 ‘protective fences’, 83 protective shields or ‘No Trespassing’ signs, 84 or ‘suits of armor’. 85 Rights bestow upon individuals and their important interests a particularly robust kind of legal protection against conflicting individual or collective interests, by singling out ‘those interests that are not to be sacrificed to the utilitarian calculus ’ and ‘whose promotion or protection is to be given qualitative precedence over the social calculus of interests generally’. 86 Current ‘animal welfare rights’, by contrast, provide an atypically weak form of legal protection, notably for two reasons: because they protect interests of secondary importance or because they are easily overridden.

In order to illustrate this, consider the kind of rights that can be extracted from current animal welfare laws. Given that these are the correlatives of existing animal welfare duties, the substance of these rights must mirror the content laid down in the respective legal norms. This extraction method produces, first, a rather odd subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’ that have a narrow substantive scope protecting highly specific, secondary interests, such as a (relative) right to be slaughtered with prior stunning, 87 an (absolute) right that experiments involving ‘serious injuries that may cause severe pain shall not be carried out without anaesthesia’ 88 or a right of chicks to be killed by fast-acting methods, such as homogenisation or gassing, and to not be stacked on top of each other. 89 The weak and subsidiary character of such rights becomes clearer when placed within the permissive institutional context in which they operate, and when taking into account the more basic interests that are left unprotected. 90 While these rights may protect certain secondary, derivative interests (such as the interest in being killed in a painless manner ), they are simultaneously premised on the permissibility of harming the more primary interests at stake (such as the interest in not being killed at all). Juxtaposed with the preponderance of suffering and killing that is legally allowed in the first place, phrasing the residual legal protections that animals do receive as ‘rights’ may strike us as misleading. 91

But then there is a second subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’, extractable from general animal welfare provisions, that have a broader scope, protecting more basic, primary interests, such as a right to well-being, life, 92 dignity, 93 to not suffer unnecessarily, 94 or against torture and cruel treatment. 95 Although the object of such rights is of a more fundamental nature, the substantive guarantee of these facially fundamental rights is, to a great extent, eroded by a conspicuously low threshold for permissible infringements. 96 That is, these rights suffer from a lack of normative force, which manifests in their characteristically high infringeability (ie their low resistance to being overridden). Certainly, most rights (whether human or animal) are relative prima facie rights that allow for being balanced against conflicting interests and whose infringement constitutes a violation only when it is not justified, notably in terms of necessity and proportionality. 97 Taking rights seriously does, however, require certain safeguards ensuring that rights are only overridden by sufficiently important considerations whose weight is proportionate to the interests at stake. As pointed out by Waldron, the idea of rights is seized on as a way of resisting, or at least restricting, the sorts of trade-offs that would be acceptable in an unqualified utilitarian calculus, where ‘important individual interests may end up being traded off against considerations which are intrinsically less important’. 98 Yet, this is precisely what happens to animals’ prima facie protected interests, any of which—irrespective of how important or fundamental they are—may enter the utilitarian calculus, where they typically end up being outweighed by human interests that are comparatively less important or even trivial, notably dietary and fashion preferences, economic profitability, recreation or virtually any other conceivable human interest. 99

Any ‘animal welfare rights’ that animals may presently be said to have are thus either of the substantively oddly specific, yet rather secondary, kind or, in the case of more fundamental prima facie rights, such that are highly infringeable and ‘evaporate in the face of consequential considerations’. 100 The remaining question is whether these features render animals’ existing legal protections non-rights or just particularly unfit or weak rights , but rights nonetheless. The answer will depend on whether the quality of special strength, weight or force is considered a conceptually constitutive or merely typical but not essential feature of rights. On the first view, a certain normative force would function as a threshold criterion for determining what counts as a right and for disqualifying those legal protections that may structurally resemble rights but do not meet a minimum weight. 101 On the second view, the normative force of rights would serve as a variable that defines the particular weight of different types of rights on a spectrum from weak to strong. 102 To illustrate the intricacies of drawing a clear line between paradigmatically strong rights, weak rights or non-rights based on this criterion, let us return to the analogy with (biological) ‘parents’. In a minimal sense, the concept of ‘parents’ may be essentially defined as ‘biological creators of a child’. Typically, however, a special role as nurturer and caregiver is associated with the concept of ‘parent’. Now, is someone who merely meets the minimal conceptual criterion (by being the biological creator), but not the basic functions attached to the concept (by not giving care), still a ‘parent’? And, if so, to what extent? Are they a full and proper ‘parent’, or merely an imperfect, dysfunctional form of ‘parent’, a bad ‘parent’, but a ‘parent’ nonetheless? Maybe current animal rights are ‘rights’ in a similar sense as an absent, negligent, indifferent biological mother or father who does not assume the role and responsibilities that go along with parenthood is still a ‘parent’. That is, animals’ current legal protections may meet the minimal conceptual criteria for rights, but they do not perform the characteristic normative function of rights. They are, therefore, at best atypically weak and imperfect rights.

C. The Distinction between Simple and Fundamental Animal Rights

In the light of the aforesaid, if one adopts the view that animals’ existing legal protections constitute legal rights—that is, if one concludes that existing animal welfare laws confer legal rights on animals despite a lack of explicit legal enactment or of any coherent judicial recognition of unwritten animal rights, and that the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare law retain their rights character regardless of how weak they are—then an important qualification needs to be made regarding the nature and limits of such ‘animal welfare rights’. In particular, it must be emphasised that this type of legal animal rights falls short of (i) our ordinary understanding of legal rights as particularly robust protections of important interests and (ii) institutionalising the sort of inviolable, basic moral animal rights (along the lines of human rights) that animal rights theorists typically envisage. 103 It thus seems warranted to separate the kind of imperfect and weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of ideal, 104 proper, strong fundamental rights that animals potentially ought to have as a matter of future law.

In order to denote and account for the qualitative difference between these two types of legal animal rights, and drawing on similar distinctions as regards the rights of individuals under public and international law, 105 I propose to use the conceptual categories of fundamental animal rights and other, simple animal rights. As to the demarcating criteria, we can distinguish between simple and fundamental animal rights based on a combination of two factors: (i) substance (fundamentality or non-fundamentality of the protected interests) and (ii) normative force (degree of infringeability). Accordingly, simple animal rights can be defined as weak legal rights whose substantive content is of a non-fundamental, ancillary character and/or that lack normative force due to their high infringeability. In contradistinction, fundamental animal rights are strong legal rights along the lines of human rights that are characterised by the cumulative features of substantive fundamentality and normative robustness due to their reduced infringeability.

The ‘animal welfare rights’ derivable from current animal welfare laws are simple animal rights. However, it is worth noting that while the first subtype of substantively non-fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ belongs to this category irrespective of their infringeability, 106 the second subtype of substantively fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ presently falls in this category purely in respect of their characteristically high infringeability. Yet, the latter is a dynamic and changeable feature, insofar as these rights could be dealt with, in case of conflict, in a manner whereby they would prove to be more robust. In other words, while the simple animal rights of the second subtype currently lack the normative force of legal rights, they do have the potential to become fundamental animal rights. Why animals need such fundamental rights will be explored in the final section.

Beyond the imperfect, weak, simple rights that animals may be said to have based on existing animal welfare laws, a final normative question remains with a view to the future law: whether animals ought to have strong legal rights proper. I will focus on fundamental animal rights—such as the right to life, bodily integrity, liberty and freedom from torture—as these correspond best with the kind of ‘ought to be legal rights’ typically alluded to in animal rights discourse. Given the general appeal of rights language, it is not surprising that among animal advocates there is an overall presumption in favour of basic human rights-like animal rights. 107 However, it is often simply assumed that, rather than elucidated why, legal rights would benefit animals and how this would strengthen their protection. In order to undergird the normative claim that animals should have strong legal rights, the following subsections will look at functional reasons why animals need such rights. 108 I will do so through a non-exhaustive exploration of the potential legal advantages and political utility of fundamental animal rights over animals’ current legal protections (be they animal welfare laws or ‘animal welfare rights’).

A. Procedural Aspect: Standing and Enforceability

Against the backdrop of today’s well-established ‘enforcement gap’ and ‘standing dilemma’, 109 one of the most practical benefits typically associated with, or expected from, legal animal rights is the facilitation of standing for animals in their own right and, closely related, the availability of more efficient mechanisms for the judicial enforcement of animals’ legal protections. 110 This is because legal rights usually include the procedural element of having standing to sue, the right to seek redress and powers of enforcement—which would enable animals (represented by legal guardians) to institute legal proceedings in their own right and to assert injuries of their own. 111 This would also ‘decentralise’ enforcement, that is, it would not be concentrated in the hands (and at the sole discretion) of public authorities, but supplemented by private standing of animals to demand enforcement. Ultimately, such an expanded enforceability could also facilitate incremental legal change by feeding animal rights questions into courts as fora for public deliberation.

However, while standing and enforceability constitute crucial procedural components of any effective legal protection of animals, for present purposes, it should be noted that fundamental animal rights (or any legal animal rights) are—albeit maybe conducive—neither necessary nor sufficient to this end. On the one hand, not all legal rights (eg some socio-economic human rights) are necessarily enforceable. Merely conferring legal rights on animals will therefore, in itself, not guarantee sufficient legal protection from a procedural point of view. Rather, fundamental animal rights must encompass certain procedural rights, such as the right to access to justice, in order to make them effectively enforceable. On the other hand, animals or designated animal advocates could simply be granted standing auxiliary to today’s animal welfare laws, which would certainly contribute towards narrowing the enforcement gap. 112 Yet, standing as such merely offers the purely procedural benefit of being able to legally assert and effectively enforce any given legal protections that animals may have, but has no bearing on the substantive content of those enforceable protections. Given that the issue is not just one of improving the enforcement of animals’ existing legal protections, but also of substantially improving them, standing alone cannot substitute for strong substantive animal rights. Therefore, animals will ultimately need both strong substantive and enforceable rights, which may be best achieved through an interplay of fundamental rights and accompanying procedural guarantees.

B. Substantive Aspect: Stronger Legal Protection for Important Interests

The aforesaid suggests that the critical function of fundamental animal rights is not procedural in nature; rather, it is to substantively improve and fortify the protection of important animal interests. In particular, fundamental animal rights would strengthen the legal protection of animals on three levels: by establishing an abstract equality of arms, by broadening the scope of protection to include more fundamental substantive guarantees and by raising the burden of justification for infringements.

First of all, fundamental animal rights would create the structural preconditions for a level playing field where human and animal interests are both reinforced by equivalent rights, and can thus collide on equal terms. Generally speaking, not all legally recognised interests count equally when balanced against each other, and rights-empowered interests typically take precedence over or are accorded more weight than unqualified competing interests. 113 At present, the structural makeup of the balancing process governing human–animal conflicts is predisposed towards a prioritisation of human over animal interests. Whereas human interests are buttressed by strong, often fundamental rights (such as economic, religious or property rights), the interests at stake on the animal side, if legally protected at all, enter the utilitarian calculus as unqualified interests that are merely shielded by simple animal welfare laws, or simple rights that evaporate quickly in situations of conflict and do not compare to the sorts of strong rights that reinforce contrary human interests. 114 In order to achieve some form of abstract equality of arms, animals’ interests need to be shielded by strong legal rights that are a match to humans’ rights. Fundamental animal rights would correct this structural imbalance and set the stage for an equal consideration of interests that is not a priori biased in favour of humans’ rights.

Furthermore, as defined above, fundamental animal rights are characterised by both their substantive fundamentality and normative force, and would thus strengthen animals’ legal protection in two crucial respects. On a substantive level , fundamental animal rights are grounded in especially important, fundamental interests. Compared to substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights, which provide for narrow substantive guarantees that protect secondary interests, fundamental animal rights would expand the scope of protection to cover a wider array of basic and primary interests. As a result, harming fundamentally important interests of animals—while readily permissible today insofar as such interests are often not legally protected in the first place 115 —would trigger a justification requirement that initially allows those animal interests to enter into a balancing process. For even with fundamental animal rights in play, conflicts between human and animal interests will inevitably continue to exist—albeit at the elevated and abstractly equal level of conflicts of rights—and therefore require some sort of balancing mechanism. 116

On this justificatory level , fundamental animal rights would then demand a special kind and higher burden of justification for infringements. 117 As demonstrated above, substantively fundamental yet highly infringeable simple animal rights are marked by a conspicuously low threshold for justifiable infringements, and are regularly outweighed by inferior or even trivial human interests. By contrast, the normative force of fundamental animal rights rests on their ability to raise the ‘level of the minimally sufficient justification’. 118 Modelling these more stringent justification requirements on established principles of fundamental (human) rights adjudication, this would, first, limit the sorts of considerations that constitute a ‘legitimate aim’ which can be balanced against fundamental animal rights. Furthermore, the balancing process must encompass a strict proportionality analysis, comprised of the elements of suitability, necessity and proportionality stricto sensu , which would preclude the bulk of the sorts of low-level justifications that are currently sufficient. 119 This heightened threshold for justifiable infringements, in turn, translates into a decreased infringeability of fundamental animal rights and an increased immunisation of animals’ prima facie protected interests against being overridden by conflicting considerations and interests of lesser importance.

Overall, considering this three-layered strengthening of the legal protection of animals’ important interests, fundamental animal rights are likely to set robust limits to the violability and disposability of animals as means to human ends, and to insulate animals from many of the unnecessary and disproportionate inflictions of harm that are presently allowed by law.

C. Fallback Function: The Role of Rights in Non-ideal Societies

Because contemporary human–animal interactions are, for the most part, detrimental to animals, the latter appear to be in particular need of robust legal protections against humans and society. 120 Legal rights, as strong (but not impenetrable) shields, provide an instrument well suited for this task, as they operate in a way that singles out and protects important individual goods against others and the political community as a whole. For this reason, rights are generally considered an important counter-majoritarian institution, but have also been criticised for their overly individualistic, antagonistic and anti-communitarian framing. 121 Certainly, it may be debated whether there is a place for the institution of rights in an ideal society—after all, rights are not decrees of nature, but human inventions that are historically and socially contingent. 122 However, rights are often born from imperfect social conditions, as a ‘response to a failure of social responsibility’ 123 and as corrections of experiences of injustice, or, as Dershowitz puts it: ‘ rights come from wrongs ’. 124 Historical experience suggests that, at least in non-ideal societies, there is a practical need for rights as a safety net—a ‘position of fall-back and security’ 125 —that guarantees individuals a minimum degree of protection, in case or because other, less coercive social or moral mechanisms fail to do so.

Yet, as Edmundson rightly points out, this view of rights as backup guarantees does not quite capture the particular need for rights in the case of animals. 126 It is premised on the existence of a functioning overall social structure that can in some cases, and maybe in the ideal case, substitute for rights. However, unlike many humans, most animals are not embedded in a web of caring, affectionate, benevolent relations with humans to begin with, but rather are caught up in a system of exploitative, instrumental and harmful relations. For the vast majority of animals, it is not enough to say that rights would serve them as fallbacks, because there is nowhere to fall from—by default, animals are already at (or near) the bottom. Accordingly, the concrete need for rights may be more acute in the case of animals, as their function is not merely to complement, but rather to compensate for social and moral responsibility, which is lacking in the first place. 127 To give a (somewhat exaggerated) example: from the perspective of a critical legal scholar, meta-theorising from his office in the ivory tower, it may seem easier, and even desirable, to intellectually dispense with the abstract notion of rights, whereas for an elephant who is actually hunted down for his ivory tusks, concrete rights may make a very real difference, literally between life and death. Therefore, under the prevailing social conditions, animals need a set of basic rights as a primary ‘pull-up’ rather than as a subsidiary backup—that is, as compensatory baseline guarantees rather than as complementary background guarantees.

D. Transformative Function: Rights as ‘Bridges’ between Non-ideal Realities and Normative Ideals

Notwithstanding that animals need fundamental rights, we should not fail to recognise that even the minimum standards such rights are designed to establish and safeguard seem highly ambitious and hardly politically feasible at present. Even a rudimentary protection of fundamental animal rights would require far-ranging changes in our treatment of animals, and may ultimately rule out ‘virtually all existing practices of the animal-use industries’. 128 Considering how deeply the instrumental and inherently harmful use of animals is woven into the economic and cultural fabric of contemporary societies, and how pervasive animal cruelty is on both an individual and a collective level, the implications of fundamental animal rights indeed seem far removed from present social practices. 129 This chasm between normative aspirations and the deeply imperfect empirical realities they collide with is not, however, a problem unique to fundamental animal rights; rather, it is generally in the nature of fundamental rights—human or animal—to postulate normative goals that remain, to some extent, aspirational and unattainable. 130 Aspirational rights express commitments to ideals that, even if they may not be fully realisable at the time of their formal recognition, act as a continuous reminder and impulse that stimulates social and legal change towards a more expansive implementation. 131 In a similar vein, Bilchitz understands fundamental rights as moral ideals that create the pressure for legal institutionalisation and as ‘bridging concepts’ that facilitate the transition from past and present imperfect social realities towards more just societies. 132

This, then, provides a useful lens for thinking about the aspirational nature and transformative function of fundamental animal rights. Surely, the mere formal recognition of fundamental animal rights will not, by any realistic measure, bring about an instant practical achievement of the ultimate goal of ‘abolishing exploitation and liberating animals from enslavement’. 133 They do, however, create the legal infrastructure for moving from a non-ideal reality towards more ideal social conditions in which animal rights can be respected. For example, a strong animal right to life would (at least in industrialised societies) preclude most forms of killing animals for food, and would thus certainly conflict with the entrenched practice of eating meat. Yet, while the current social normality of eating animals may make an immediate prohibition of meat production and consumption unrealistic, it is also precisely the reason why animals need a right to life (ie a right not to be eaten), as fundamental rights help to denormalise (formerly) accepted social practices and to establish, internalise and habituate normative boundaries. 134 Moreover, due to their dynamic nature, fundamental rights can generate successive waves of more stringent and expansive duties over time. 135 Drawing on Bilchitz, the established concept of ‘progressive realisation’ (originally developed in the context of socio-economic human rights) may offer a helpful legal framework for the gradual practical implementation of animal rights. Accordingly, each fundamental animal right could be seen as comprising a minimum core that has to be ensured immediately, coupled with a general prohibition of retrogressive measures , and an obligation to progressively move towards a fuller realisation . 136 Therefore, even if fundamental animal rights may currently not be fully realisable, the very act of introducing them into law and committing to them as normative ideals places animals on the ‘legal map’ 137 and will provide a powerful generative basis—a starting point rather than an endpoint 138 —from which a dynamic process towards their more expansive realisation can unfold.

The question of animal rights has been of long-standing moral concern. More recently, the matter of institutionalising moral animal rights has come to the fore, and attaining legal rights for animals has become an important practical goal of animal advocates. This article started out from the prefatory observation that the process of juridification may already be in its early stages, as judicially recognised animal rights are beginning to emerge from both animal welfare law and human rights law. With legal animal rights on the horizon, the analysis set out to systematically address the arising conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues, in order to provide a theoretical underpinning for this legal development. The article showed that the idea of legal animal rights has a sound basis in both legal theory as well as in existing law. That is, legal animal rights are both conceptually possible and already derivable from current animal welfare laws. However, the analysis has also revealed that the ‘animal welfare rights’ which animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law fall short of providing the sort of strong normative protection that is typically associated with legal rights and that is furthermore expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. This discrepancy gave rise to a new conceptual distinction between two types of legal animal rights: simple and fundamental animal rights.

While the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of legal protections that the law may grant to animals, distinguishing between simple and fundamental animal rights helps to unveil important differences between what we may currently call ‘legal animal rights’ based on existing animal welfare laws, which are weak legal rights at best, and the kind of strong, fundamental legal rights that animals should have as a matter of future law. This distinction is further conducive to curbing the trivialisation of the language of animal rights, as it allows us to preserve the normative force of fundamental animal rights by separating out weaker rights and classifying them as other, simple animal rights. Lastly, it is interesting to note that, with courts deriving legal animal rights from both animal welfare law and from constitutional, fundamental or human rights law, first prototypes of simple and fundamental animal rights are already discernible in emerging case law. Whereas Christopher Stone once noted that ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been … a bit unthinkable’ throughout legal history, 139 the findings of this article suggest that we may presently be witnessing a new generation of legal rights in the making—legal animal rights, simple and fundamental.

This article is the first part of my postdoctoral research project ‘Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I am indebted to William Edmundson, Raffael Fasel, Chris Green, Christoph Krenn, Visa Kurki, Will Kymlicka, Nico Müller, Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, MH Tse, Steven White, Derek Williams and the anonymous reviewers for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Seminally, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 1983); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP 2011).

See, notably, Matthew H Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (2001) 14 CJLJ 29; Tom L Beauchamp, ‘Rights Theory and Animal Rights’ in Tom L Beauchamp and RG Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (OUP 2011); William A Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (2015) 23 Journal of Political Philosophy 345; Gary L Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (first printed 1995, Temple UP 2007) 91ff; Steven M Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution—The Eligibility of Nonhuman Animals for Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democracy’ (1998) 22 Vt L Rev 793; Anne Peters, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Animalité: Human-Animal Comparisons in Law’ (2016) 5 TEL 25; Thomas G Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights’ (1999) 27 BC Envtl Aff L Rev 1.

Much legal scholarship deals with animal rights in a rather cursory and incidental manner, because it typically focusses on parallel debates that are closely related to, but seen as preceding, the issue of rights. For example, much has been written about the systemic shortcomings of animal welfare legislation, which—within the entrenched animal welfare/rights-dualism—has served to undergird calls for shifting towards a rights -paradigm for legal protection of animals. Another focal point of legal scholars has been to change the legal status of animals from property to person , which is taken to be a prerequisite for right holding. Yet, even though legal rights for animals may be the ultimate goal informing these debates, surprisingly little detailed attention has been given to such envisaged legal animal rights per se.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Prentice-Hall 1973) 67.

See eg Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia UP 2012) 14–15, 207 (whose ‘account of the moral rights of animals … proposes what the legal rights of animals ought to be ’); cf Joel Feinberg, ‘In Defence of Moral Rights’ (1992) 12 OJLS 149 (describing this indirect way of referencing legal rights as the ‘“There ought to be a law” theory of moral rights’, 156).

As noted by Favre, what is required is ‘that the legal system intervene when personal morals or ethics do not adequately protect animals from human abuse’. David Favre, ‘Integrating Animal Interests into Our Legal System’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 87, 88.

Even though moral and legal rights are intimately connected (see HLA Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 175, 177), a somewhat distinct (or at least modified and refined) theorisation is warranted because, unlike moral animal rights, legal animal rights are constituted by legal systems, and their existence and scope have to be determined based on the applicable legal rules. As Wise puts it: ‘philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights’. Steven M Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus 2002) 34.

Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] [56] [62ff]; see further Kerala High Court 6 June 2000, AIR 2000 KER 340 (expressing the opinion that ‘legal rights shall not be the exclusive preserve of the humans’, [13]); Delhi High Court 15 May 2015, CRL MC no 2051/2015 [3] [5] (recognizing birds’ ‘fundamental rights to fly in the sky’).

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15; this landmark decision was preceded by an obiter dictum in Cámara Federal de Casación Penal Buenos Aires, 18 December 2014, SAIJ NV9953 [2] (expressing the view that animals are right holders and should be recognized as legal subjects).

Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona). This ruling was later reversed in Corte Suprema de Justicia 16 August 2017, STL12651-2017 (MP: Fernando Castillo Cadena). In January 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided against granting habeas corpus to the animal in question.

Similar habeas corpus claims on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants, brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project, have not been accepted by US courts. See, notably, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336.

On the ambiguity of the term ‘animal rights’, see eg Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Rights’ in Lori Gruen (ed), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago Press 2018) 320; in using the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ without further specifications, it is often left unclear what exactly is meant by ‘rights’. For example, the term may refer to either moral or legal animal rights—or both. Furthermore, in a broad sense, ‘animal rights’ sometimes refers to any kind of normative protection for animals, whereas in a narrow sense, it is often reserved for particularly important and inviolable, human rights-like animal rights. Moreover, some speak of ‘animal rights’ as if they already existed as a matter of positive law, while others use the same term in a ‘manifesto sense’, to refer to potential, ideal rights.

Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Clare Palmer (ed), Animal Rights (Routledge 2008) 409; the class of potential right holders comprises ‘any being that is capable of holding legal rights, whether or not he/she/it actually holds such rights’. Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29.

See generally Alon Harel, ‘Theories of Rights’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 191ff.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16; Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1917) 26 Yale LJ 710.

See Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 717; these Hohfeldian incidents of rights are merely ‘atomic’ units, whereas many common rights are complex aggregates, clusters or ‘molecular rights’ consisting of combinations thereof. ibid 746; Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (2005) 33 Philosophy & Public Affairs 223, 225, 234.

First-order rights (claims and liberties) directly concern someone’s actual rather than normative conduct, whereas powers and immunities are second-order rights (‘meta-rights’) that concern other legal relations; by prioritising, for the sake of this analysis, first-order rights regarding (in)actions of and towards animals, this is not to say that second-order rights are not important to accompany and bolster the first-order rights of animals. For instance, just as many complex (eg fundamental) rights contain immunities, that is, the freedom from the legal power of another (the disability bearer) to change the immunity holder’s rights, animals’ claims and liberties may be bolstered by immunity rights that protect those first-order rights from being altered, notably voided, by others. For example, one of the most basic rights frequently discussed for animals, the ‘right not to be property’ (Gary L Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (first printed 2000, Temple UP 2007) 93ff), may be explained as an immunity that would strip away the legal powers that currently go along with the state of legal disposability entailed by animals’ property status, and would thus disable human ‘owners’ to decide over animals’ rights. As passive rights, immunities are quite easily conceivable as animal rights, because they are specified by reference to the correlative position, that is, by what the person disabled by the animal’s immunity right cannot legally do (see generally Matthew H Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ in Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998) 22). By contrast, a power refers to one’s control over a given legal relation and entails one’s normative ability to alter another’s legal position (see Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55). Prima facie , powers may thus seem ill-suited for animals. This is because, unlike passive second-order rights (immunities), powers are active rights that have to be exercised rather than merely enjoyed and, unlike first-order active rights (liberties), powers concern the exercise of legal rather than factual actions and thus require legal rather than mere practical or behavioural agency. Notwithstanding, it may be argued that animals, not unlike children, could hold legal powers (eg powers of enforcement) that are exercisable through human proxies (cf Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Legal Competence and Legal Power’ in Mark McBride (ed), New Essays on the Nature of Rights (Hart Publishing 2017) 46).

For a discussion of Hohfeldian theory in the context of animal rights, see also Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 799ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 96–7; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 6ff.

Joel Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ in Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton UP 1980) 159; Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55.

So far, animal rights theory has largely focussed on negative rights. See critically Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 5ff, 49ff.

cf Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (n 16) 233.

See Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 10.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 162; but see Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 41–2 (arguing that it would not be impossible, though ‘cruel and perhaps silly’, to impose legal duties on animals).

A ‘liberty’ is the negation of ‘duty’ and may thus be redescribed as ‘no-duty’.

On the distinction between naked and vested liberties, see HLA Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ in HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (OUP 1982) 172.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171, 173.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171.

eg Richard L Cupp, ‘Children, Chimps, and Rights: Arguments from “Marginal” Cases’ (2013) 45 Ariz St LJ 1; see also Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (OUP 2018) 116ff.

See David Lyons, ‘Rights, Claimants, and Beneficiaries’ (1969) 6 American Philosophical Quarterly 173, 173–4.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

In this vein, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, p 4, 6; but see critically New York Court of Appeals, Tommy v Lavery and Kiko v Presti decision of 8 May 2018, motion no 2018-268, concurring opinion Judge Fahey.

For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia explicitly departed from this reciprocity paradigm and held that animals are right holders but not duty bearers. Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona), 14ff; for a refutation of the contractarian reciprocity argument, see also Brief for Philosophers as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner-Appellant, Nonhuman Rights Project v Lavery 2018 NY Slip Op 03309 (2018) (Nos 162358/15 and 150149/16), 14ff.

See Peters (n 2) 45–6; David Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Personhood and Dignity of Non-Human Animals’ (2009) 25 SAJHR 38, 42–3; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 163; but see Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, 5.

Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (2013) 123 Ethics 202, 207.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 43.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 9.

For an overview, see generally Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998).

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 183, 188–9.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 30; Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 185.

A problematic corollary of the will theory is its conceptual awkwardness, or inability, to accommodate as right holders not just non-human but also human non-agents, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated. As noted by Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (n 7) 181, the will conception of rights ‘should incline us not to extend to animals and babies … the notion of a right’; see also Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 69.

As pointed out by van Duffel, neither the will theory nor the interest theory may be a ‘plausible candidate for a comprehensive theory of rights’, and it may be best to assume that both theories simply attempt to capture the essence of different kinds of rights. See Siegfried van Duffel, ‘The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake’ (2012) 93 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104, 105, 117 et passim .

Under the will theory, inalienable rights are not ‘rights’ by definition, as they precisely preclude the right holder’s power to waive the correlative duties. See DN MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ in PMS Hacker and J Raz (eds), Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of HLA Hart (OUP 1977) 198f; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 73.

The will theory is primarily modelled on active rights (liberties and powers) that directly facilitate individual autonomy and choice, but is less conclusive with regard to passive rights (claims and immunities) which do not involve any action or exercise of choice by the right holder herself. cf Harel (n 14) 194–5.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 190, conceded that the will theory does not provide a sufficient analysis of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights; legal animal rights, by contrast, are most intelligibly explained as public-law rights held primarily against the state which has correlative duties to respect and protect.

The will theory appears to limit the purpose of rights protection to a narrow aspect of human nature—the active, engaging and self-determining side—while ignoring the passive, vulnerable and needy side. Autonomy is certainly an important good deserving of normative protection, but it is hardly the only such good. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Introduction’ in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (OUP 1984) 11; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 197, 208.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 10ff; for an interest-based approach to animal rights, see eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19); Cochrane (n 5) 19ff.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 192.

J Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (1984) 4 OJLS 1, 12; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 12, 14.

See William A Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (2nd edn, CUP 2012) 97; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 176; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 167.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33ff, 39.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 177ff; see also Neil MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights: A Test-Case for Theories of Right’ in Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (OUP 1982) 159–60.

See RG Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (OUP 1980) 78ff; HJ McCloskey, ‘Rights’ (1965) 15 The Philosophical Quarterly 115, 126; but see Tom Regan, ‘McCloskey on Why Animals Cannot Have Rights’ (1976) 26 The Philosophical Quarterly 251.

Harel (n 14) 195; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 39–40; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person’ in Visa AJ Kurki and Tomasz Pietrzykowski (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn (Springer 2017) 79–80.

See eg Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 207, 227; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166.

See also Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 80.

See Thomas G Kelch, ‘A Short History of (Mostly) Western Animal Law: Part II’ (2013) 19 Animal Law Review 347, 348ff; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 44ff; in this vein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 [57]) noted that ‘the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals ’ (emphasis added); the well-established German concept of ‘ethischer Tierschutz’ expresses this non-anthropocentric, ethical thrust of animal welfare law. See Margot Michel, ‘Law and Animals: An Introduction to Current European Animal Protection Legislation’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 91–2.

1999 Federal Constitution (Bundesverfassung) (CH), Article 120(2) and 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 3(a); 2010 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (LI), Article 1; 2018 Animal Welfare Act (Loi sur la protection des animaux) (LU), Article 1; 1977 Experiments on Animals Act (Wet op de dierproeven) (NL), Article 1a; European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Recital 12.

See eg Steven M Wise, ‘Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The Case for Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ (1996) 2 Animal Law Review 179, 179; Richard A Epstein, ‘Animals as Objects, or Subjects, of Rights’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005) 144ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 18; Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238 [6]; Herrmann v Germany App no 9300/07 (ECtHR, 26 June 2012), separate opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, 38; Noah v Attorney General HCJ 9232/01 [2002–2003] IsrLR 215, 225, 232, 253.

This type of current legal animal rights will be called ‘animal welfare rights’ in order to indicate their origin in current animal welfare laws.

See eg Cass R Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights)’ (2000) 47 UCLA Law Review 1333 (claiming that current animal welfare law creates ‘a robust set of animal rights’ or even ‘an incipient bill of rights for animals’. ibid 1334, 1336); Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 43ff, 48–9 (concluding that ‘the existing statutory framework can already be seen to confer certain legal rights upon animals’: 50 fn 61); Jerrold Tannenbaum, ‘Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights’ (1995) 62 Social Research 539, 581; Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 910ff; this view was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] (stating that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ‘deals with duties of persons having charge of animals, which is mandatory in nature and hence confer corresponding rights on animals’).

See eg Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (n 19) 193–4 et passim ; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 218, 220; Visa AJ Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (OUP 2019) 62–5.

Matthew H Kramer, ‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 188.

eg, for Sunstein correlativity seems to run both ways: ‘Not only do rights create duties, but the imposition of a duty also serves to create a right.’ Cass R Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (1995) 70 Notre Dame L Rev 727, 746.

On this objection, see also Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 8–9.

See Lyons (n 29) 176; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 10; critically Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 85ff; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory’ (2018) 38 OJLS 430, 436ff.

See eg Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 161–2, 166; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 45–6; in this vein, a German high court held that, based on the criminal law justification of necessity (‘rechtfertigender Notstand’), private persons may be authorised to defend the legally protected goods of animals on behalf of the animals, independently of or even against the interests of their owners. OLG Naumburg, judgment of 22 February 2018, case no 2 Rv 157/17, recital II; on why animals need directed rather than indirect duties, see Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 350ff.

See also Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 100.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 181–2, 190.

MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 199.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 167, 170f; see also Alan Gewirth, ‘Introduction’ in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (University of Chicago Press 1982) 14.

See Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 40.

Gewirth (n 72) 14.

For the sake of the argument, I am only referring to biological parents.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 180–1.

See MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 191–2; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 13–14.

According to some scholars, legal rights exist only when they are enforceable. See eg Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard UP 2011) 405–6 (stating that legal rights are only those that the right holder is entitled to enforce on demand in directly available adjudicative processes).

A significant practical hurdle to the legal recognition of animal rights is that in virtually any legal order, animals are legal objects rather than legal persons. Because legal personhood and right holding are generally thought to be inextricably linked, many jurists refrain from calling the existing legal protections of animals ‘rights’. See critically Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 71, 85–6.

See generally Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff.

On this, see Kai Möller, ‘Proportionality and Rights Inflation’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 166; Harel (n 14) 197ff; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 14ff.

Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’ in Waldron, Theories of Rights (n 46) 153.

Bernard E Rollin, ‘The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights’ in HB Miller and WH Willliams (eds), Ethics and Animals (Humana Press 1983) 106.

Tom Regan, ‘The Day May Come: Legal Rights for Animals’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 11, 15–16.

Frederick Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (1993) 27 Ga L Rev 415, 429 et passim .

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (CUP 1993) 209, 215–16 (emphasis added); see also Frederick Schauer, ‘Rights, Constitutions and the Perils of Panglossianism’ (2018) 38 OJLS 635, 637.

Correlative to Council Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 of 24 September 2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing [2009] OJ L303/1, Article 4 and Annex I.

Correlative to European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Article 14(1)(2).

Correlative to 2008 Animal Welfare Ordinance (Tierschutzverordnung) (CH), Article 178a(3).

The permissive character of animal welfare law was highlighted by the Israeli High Court of Justice in a case concerning the force-feeding of geese. Commenting on the ‘problematic’ regulatory language, it noted that the stated ‘purpose of the Regulations is “to prevent the geese’s suffering.” Clearly these regulations do not prevent suffering; at best they minimize, to some extent, the suffering caused’. Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 234–5. See also Shai Lavi, ‘Humane Killing and the Ethics of the Secular: Regulating the Death Penalty, Euthanasia, and Animal Slaughter’ (2014) 4 UC Irvine Law Review 297, 321 (noting the disparity between ‘the resolution to overcome pain and suffering, which exists side-by-side with inhumane conditions that remain unchallenged and are often taken for granted’).

As MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights’ (n 52) 159, has succinctly put it: ‘Consider the oddity of saying that turkeys have a right to be well fed in order to be fat for the Christmas table’; this is not to minimise the importance of existing animal welfare protections. Even though they are insufficient and weak compared to proper legal rights, that does not mean that they are insignificant. See, on this point, Regina Binder, ‘Animal Welfare Regulation: Shortcomings, Requirements, Perspectives’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 83.

eg correlative to 1972 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (DE), § 1 and 17(1).

eg correlative to 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 26(1)(a).

eg derived from Animal Welfare Act 2006 (UK), s 4.

See eg Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [62] (extracting from animal welfare law, inter alia , the right to life, to food and shelter, to dignity and fair treatment, and against torture); similarly, Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238, dissenting opinion Justice Fraser [43].

For example, the prima facie right to be free from unnecessary pain and suffering is, in effect, rendered void if virtually any kind of instrumental interest in using animals is deemed necessary and a sufficient justification for its infringement.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Harel (n 14) 198; Laurence H Tribe, ‘Ten Lessons Our Constitutional Experience Can Teach Us About the Puzzle of Animal Rights: The Work of Steven M Wise’ (2001) 7 Animal Law Review 1, 2.

See Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 209–11.

See Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 17ff, 109.

Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 114.

For Schauer, a certain normative force seems to be constitutive of the concept of rights. He argues that a right exists only insofar as an interest is protected against the sorts of low-level justifications that would otherwise be sufficient to restrict the interest if it were not protected by the right. See Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430 et passim .

In this vein, Sunstein holds that animal welfare laws ‘protect a form of animal rights, and there is nothing in the notion of rights or welfare that calls for much, or little, protection of the relevant interests’. Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1335.

On the universal basic rights of animals, see eg Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 19ff.

‘Ideal right’ in the sense of ‘what ought to be a positive … right, and would be so in a better or ideal legal system’. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (n 4) 84.

In domestic public law, fundamental or constitutional rights are distinguished from other, simple public (eg administrative) law rights. Likewise, in international law, human rights can be distinguished from other, simple or ordinary international individual rights. See Anne Peters, Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (CUP 2016) 436ff.

Indeed, substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights may be quite resistant to being overridden, and may sometimes even be absolute (non-infringeable) rights.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of legal rights is not undisputed within the animal advocacy movement. For an overview of some pragmatic and principled objections against animal rights , see Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 325ff.

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2); Peters (n 2) 46ff.

Today, animals’ legal protections remain pervasively under-enforced by the competent public authorities as well as practically unenforceable by the affected animals or their human representatives for lack of standing. See eg Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1334ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

The link between rights and the legal-operational advantage of standing was famously highlighted by Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 S Cal L Rev 450; see further Cass R Sunstein, ‘Can Animals Sue?’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005); Peters (n 2) 47–8.

See Stone (n 110) 458ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

See eg Constitutional Court of South Africa 8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 (affirming the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ statutory power of private prosecution and to institute legal proceedings in case of animal cruelty offences).

See Frederick Schauer, ‘Proportionality and the Question of Weight’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber (eds), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 177–8.

See generally Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016) 151ff.

For example, under the Swiss 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz), life itself is not a legally protected good, and the (painless, non-arbitrary) killing of an animal does not therefore require any justification.

See also Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 253–4 (pointing out that balancing different interests is ‘part and parcel of our legal system’).

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 736–7.

On this threshold-raising conception of rights, see generally Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Harvard UP 1978) 191–2 (noting that a right cannot justifiably be overridden ‘on the minimal grounds that would be sufficient if no such right existed’).

At present, the overwhelming portion of permissible interferences with animals’ interests can hardly be said to be necessary or proportionate in any real sense of the word. See Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights (n 17) 9, 55.

As noted by Teubner, animal rights ‘create basically defensive institutions. Paradoxically, they incorporate animals into human society in order to create defences against the destructive tendencies of human society against animals’. Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law’ (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 497, 521.

See eg Mark Tushnet, ‘An Essay on Rights’ (1984) 62 Tex L Rev 1363; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991); for a modern reformulation of the rights critique, see eg Robin L West, ‘Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama’ (2011) 53 Wm & Mary L Rev 713.

See generally Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (Basic Books 2004) 59ff.

See Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 754.

Dershowitz (n 122) 9.

Jeremy Waldron, ‘When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights’ (1988) 11 Harv JL & Pub Pol’y 625, 629.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 358.

More generally, the practical need for rights as complementary or compensatory guarantees will vary depending on social context, and may be more immediate and pressing for the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalised, victimised, vulnerable, disadvantaged or even oppressed portions of society. See generally Patricia J Williams, ‘Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights’ (1987) 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 401.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 40, 49; see further Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 2004) 330ff, 348–9; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

See Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

On the aspirational dimension of human rights, see generally Philip Harvey, ‘Aspirational Law’ (2004) 52 Buff L Rev 701.

ibid 717–18; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 14–15, 19; ‘rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche’. Williams (n 127) 424.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Fundamental Rights as Bridging Concepts: Straddling the Boundary Between Ideal Justice and an Imperfect Reality’ (2018) 40 Hum Rts Q 119, 121ff.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 49; see also Gary L Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple UP 2007) 2.

cf Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 331–2.

On the dynamic nature of rights and their generative power, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 171; Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 212, 214.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?’ (2010) 25 Southern African Public Law 267, 291ff.

Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 71.

cf Harvey (n 130) 723 (noting that human rights will always remain a ‘work in progress rather than a finished project’); similarly, Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 333.

Stone (n 110) 453.

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September 2020	1,236
October 2020	810
November 2020	757
December 2020	696
January 2021	765
February 2021	808
March 2021	926
April 2021	881
May 2021	784
June 2021	607
July 2021	737
August 2021	654
September 2021	995
October 2021	1,253
November 2021	1,297
December 2021	1,036
January 2022	875
February 2022	1,323
March 2022	1,533
April 2022	1,477
May 2022	1,204
June 2022	854
July 2022	712
August 2022	868
September 2022	915
October 2022	975
November 2022	922
December 2022	715
January 2023	833
February 2023	730
March 2023	1,113
April 2023	1,085
May 2023	884
June 2023	533
July 2023	660
August 2023	589
September 2023	687
October 2023	934
November 2023	1,041
December 2023	1,010
January 2024	894
February 2024	863
March 2024	1,104
April 2024	1,188
May 2024	930
June 2024	546
July 2024	529
August 2024	460

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The case against pets

A morally just world would have no pets, no aquaria, no zoos. no fields of sheep, no barns of cows. that’s true animal rights.

by Gary L Francione & Anna E Charlton + BIO

We live with six rescued dogs. With the exception of one, who was born in a rescue for pregnant dogs, they all came from very sad situations, including circumstances of severe abuse. These dogs are non-human refugees with whom we share our home. Although we love them very much, we strongly believe that they should not have existed in the first place.

We oppose domestication and pet ownership because these violate the fundamental rights of animals.

The term ‘animal rights’ has become largely meaningless. Anyone who thinks that we should give battery hens a small increase in cage space, or that veal calves should be housed in social units rather than in isolation before they are dragged off and slaughtered, is articulating what is generally regarded as an ‘animal rights’ position. This is attributable in large part to Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975), who is widely considered the ‘father of the animal rights movement’.

The problem with this attribution of paternity is that Singer is a utilitarian who rejects moral rights altogether, and supports any measure that he thinks will reduce suffering. In other words, the ‘father of the animal rights movement’ rejects animal rights altogether and has given his blessing to cage-free eggs, crate-free pork, and just about every ‘happy exploitation’ measure promoted by almost every large animal welfare charity. Singer does not promote animal rights ; he promotes animal welfare . He does not reject the use of animals by humans per se . He focuses only on their suffering. In an interview with The Vegan magazine in 2006, he said, for example, that he could ‘imagine a world in which people mostly eat plant foods, but occasionally treat themselves to the luxury of free-range eggs, or possibly even meat from animals who live good lives under conditions natural for their species, and are then humanely killed on the farm’.

We use the term ‘animal rights’ in a different way, similar to the way that ‘human rights’ is used when the fundamental interests of our own species are concerned. For example, if we say that a human has a right to her life, we mean that her fundamental interest in continuing to live will be protected even if using her as a non-consenting organ donor would result in saving the lives of 10 other humans. A right is a way of protecting an interest; it protects interests irrespective of consequences. The protection is not absolute; it may be forfeited under certain circumstances. But the protection cannot be abrogated for consequential reasons alone.

Non-human animals have a moral right not to be used exclusively as human resources, irrespective of whether the treatment is ‘humane’, and even if humans would enjoy desirable consequences if they treated non-humans exclusively as replaceable resources.

W hen we talk about animal rights, we are talking primarily about one right: the right not to be property. The reason for this is that if animals matter morally – if animals are not just things – they cannot be property. If they are property, they can only be things. Think about this matter in the human context. We are all generally agreed that all humans, irrespective of their particular characteristics, have the fundamental, pre-legal right not to be treated as chattel property. We all reject human chattel slavery. That is not to say that it doesn’t still exist. It does. But no one defends it.

The reason we reject chattel slavery is because a human who is a chattel slave is no longer treated as a person, by which we mean that the slave is no longer a being who matters morally. A human slave is a thing that exists completely outside the moral community. All the interests that the human slave has can be valued by someone else – the owner – who might choose to value the slave as a member of the family, or could provide the slave with minimal sustenance but otherwise treat the slave horribly. The slave’s fundamental interests might be valued at zero.

There were many laws that purported to regulate race-based human slavery in the United States and Britain. These laws did not work because the only times regulatory laws are relevant is when there is a conflict between slave and slave owner. And, if the slave owner does not prevail substantially all of the time, then there is no longer an institution of slavery. There can be no meaningful challenge to the exercise of the owner’s property rights.

The same problem exists where non-humans are concerned. If animals are property, they can have no inherent or intrinsic value. They have only extrinsic or external value. They are things that we value. They have no rights; we have rights, as property owners, to value them . And we might choose to value them at zero.

There are many laws that supposedly regulate our use of non-human animals. In fact, there are more such laws than there were laws that regulated human slavery. And, like the laws that regulated human slavery, they don’t work. These laws are relevant only when human interests and animal interests conflict. But humans have rights, including the right to own and use property. Animals are property. When the law attempts to balance human and non-human interests, the result is preordained.

however ‘humanely’ we treat animals, they are still subjected to treatment that, were humans involved, would be torture

Moreover, because animals are chattel property, the standard of animal welfare will always be very low. It costs money to protect animal interests, which means that those interests will, for the most part, be protected only in those situations in which there is an economic benefit in doing so. It is difficult to find a welfare measure that does not make animal exploitation more efficient. Laws requiring the stunning of large animals before slaughter reduce carcass damage and worker injuries. Housing calves in smaller social units rather than in solitary crates reduces stress and resulting illness, which reduces veterinary costs.

To the extent that animal welfare measures increase production costs, the increase is usually very small (eg, going from the conventional battery cage to ‘enriched cages’ in the EU) and rarely affects overall demand for the product given elasticities of demand. In any event, however ‘humanely’ treated animals used for food are, they are still subjected to treatment that, were humans involved, would be torture. There is no such thing as ‘happy’ exploitation.

Although the right not to be property is a negative right and does not address any positive rights that non-humans might have, recognition of that one negative right would have the effect of requiring us, as a matter of moral obligation, to reject all institutionalised exploitation, which necessarily assumes that animals are just things that we can use and kill for our purposes.

W e want to take a short detour here and point out that, although what we are saying might sound radical, it’s really not. Indeed, our conventional wisdom about animals is such that we come to almost the same conclusion without any consideration of rights at all.

Conventional wisdom about animals is that it is morally acceptable for humans to use and kill them but that we should not impose unnecessary suffering and death on animals. However we might understand the concept of necessity in this context, it cannot be understood as allowing any suffering or death for frivolous purposes. We recognise this clearly in particular contexts. For example, many people still have a strong negative reaction to the American football player Michael Vick, who was found to be involved in a dog-fighting operation in 2007. Why do we still resent Vick almost a decade later? The answer is clear: we recognise that what Vick did was wrong because his only justification was that he derived pleasure or amusement from harming those dogs, and pleasure and amusement cannot suffice as justifications.

Many – perhaps most – people object to bullfighting, and even most Tories in the UK oppose fox hunting. Why? Because those bloodsports, by definition, involve no necessity or compulsion that would justify imposing suffering and death on non-human animals. No one proposed that Vick would be less culpable if he were a more ‘humane’ dog fighter. No one who opposes bloodsports proposes that they be made more humane because they involve unnecessary suffering. They oppose the activities altogether, and advocate their abolition, because these activities are immoral, however they are conducted.

The problem is that 99.999 per cent of our uses of non-human animals are morally indistinguishable from the activities to which the overwhelming number of us object.

The only use of animals that we make that is not transparently frivolous is the use of animals in research to find cures for serious illnesses

Our most numerically significant use of animals is for food. We kill more than 60 billion animals for food annually, and this does not count the even larger number – estimated conservatively to be about a trillion – of sea animals. We don’t need to eat animals for optimal health. Indeed, an increasing number of mainstream healthcare authorities, including the National Institutes of Health in the US, the American Heart Association, the British National Health Service, and the British Dietetic Association, have stated that a sensible vegan diet can be just as nutritious as a diet that includes animal foods. Some authorities have gone further to say that a vegan diet can be healthier than an omnivorous diet. In any event, it cannot be credibly claimed that we need animal products for health reasons. And animal agriculture is an ecological disaster.

We consume animal products because we enjoy the taste. In other words, we are no different from Vick, except that most of us pay others to inflict the harm rather than inflicting it ourselves. And our uses of animals for entertainment or sport are, by definition, also unnecessary. The only use of animals that we make that is not transparently frivolous is the use of animals in research to find cures for serious illnesses. We reject vivisection as morally unjustifiable even if it involves necessity (a claim we also believe is problematic as an empirical matter), but the morality of vivisection requires a more nuanced analysis than the use of animals for food, clothing, entertainment and other purposes. Just about all of our other uses of animals can easily be seen to be immoral given our conventional wisdom.

The bottom line: whether you adopt an animal-rights position and recognise that animals must have a basic, pre-legal right not to be property, or you stay with conventional wisdom, the result is the same: substantially all of our uses of animals must be abolished.

T o say that an animal has a right not to be used as property is simply to say that we have a moral obligation to not use animals as things, even if it would benefit us to do so. With respect to domesticated animals, that means that we stop bringing them into existence altogether. We have a moral obligation to care for those right-holders we have here presently. But we have an obligation not to bring any more into existence.

And this includes dogs, cats and other non-humans who serve as our ‘companions’.

We treat our six dogs as valued members of our family. The law will protect that decision because we may choose to value our property as we like. We could, however, choose instead to use them as guard dogs and have them live outside with virtually no affectionate contact from us. We could put them in a car right now and take them to a shelter where they will be killed if they are not adopted, or we could have them killed by a veterinarian. The law will protect those decisions as well. We are property owners. They are property. We own them.

The reality is that in the US, most dogs and cats do not end up dying of old age in loving homes. They have homes for a relatively short period of time before they are transferred to another owner, taken to a shelter, dumped or killed.

And it does not matter whether we characterise an owner as a ‘guardian’, as some advocates urge. Such a characterisation is meaningless. If you have the legal right to take your dog to a kill shelter, or to ‘humanely’ kill your dog yourself, it does not matter what you call yourself or your dog. Your dog is your property. Those of us who live with companion animals are owners as far as the law is concerned, and we have the legal right to treat our animals as we see fit as long as we provide for minimal food, water and shelter. Yes, there are limitations on the exercise of our ownership rights. But those limitations are consistent with according a very low value to the interests of our animal companions.

But, as you recoil in horror thinking of what life would be like without your beloved dog, cat or other non-human companion, whom you love and cherish as a member of your family, you are probably thinking: ‘But wait. What if we required everyone to treat their animals the way I treat mine?’

The problem with this reply is that, even if we could come up with a workable and enforceable scheme that required animal owners to provide a higher level of welfare to their animals, those animals would still be property. We would still be able to value their lives at zero and either kill them, or take them to a shelter where they would be killed if not adopted.

You might respond that you disagree with all that as well, and that we ought to prohibit people from killing animals except in situations in which we might be tempted to allow assisted suicide (terminal illness, unrelenting pain, etc) and that we should prohibit shelters from killing animals except when it is in the best interests of the animal.

domestication itself raises serious moral issues irrespective of how the non-humans involved are treated

What you’re suggesting starts coming close to abolishing the status of animals as chattel property and requiring that we treat them in a way that is similar to the way we treat human children. Would it be acceptable to continue to breed non-humans to be our companions then?

Our answer is still a firm ‘no’.

Putting aside that the development of general standards of what constitutes treating non-humans as ‘family members’ and resolution of all the related issues is close to impossible as a practical matter, this position neglects to recognise that domestication itself raises serious moral issues irrespective of how the non-humans involved are treated.

Domesticated animals are completely dependent on humans, who control every aspect of their lives. Unlike human children, who will one day become autonomous, non-humans never will. That is the entire point of domestication – we want domesticated animals to depend on us. They remain perpetually in a netherworld of vulnerability, dependent on us for everything that is of relevance to them. We have bred them to be compliant and servile, and to have characteristics that are pleasing to us, even though many of those characteristics are harmful to the animals involved. We might make them happy in one sense, but the relationship can never be ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. They do not belong in our world, irrespective of how well we treat them. This is more or less true of all domesticated non-humans. They are perpetually dependent on us. We control their lives forever. They truly are ‘animal slaves’. Some of us might be benevolent masters, but we really can’t be anything more than that.

There are some, such as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, who in their book Zoopolis (2011) say that humans are dependent on each other, and ask what’s wrong with animals being dependent on us? Human relationships might involve mutual dependence or interdependence, but such dependence either operates on the basis of choice, or it reflects social decisions to care for more vulnerable members of society who are bound together and protected by the complex aspects of a social contract. Besides, the nature of human dependence does not strip the dependant of core rights that can be vindicated if the dependence becomes harmful.

There are those who respond to our position by saying that dogs, cats and other ‘pet’ animals have a right to reproduce. Such a position would commit us to continue to reproduce without limit and indefinitely, as we could not limit any reproductive right to ‘pet’ animals. As for those who are concerned that the end of domestication would mean a loss of species diversity, domesticated animals are beings we have created through selective breeding and confinement.

Some critics have claimed that our position concerns only the negative right not to be used as property, and does not address what positive rights animals might have. This observation is correct, but all domestication would end if we recognised this one right – the right not to be property. We would be obliged to care for those domesticated animals who presently exist, but we would bring no more into existence.

If we all embraced the personhood of non-humans, we would still need to think about the rights of non-domesticated animals who live among us and in undeveloped areas. But if we cared enough not to eat, wear or otherwise use domesticated non-humans, we would undoubtedly be able to determine what those positive rights should be. The most important thing is that we recognise the negative right of animals not to be used as property. That would commit us to the abolition of all institutionalised exploitation that results in the commodification and control of them by humans.

We love our dogs, but recognise that, if the world were more just and fair, there would be no pets at all, no fields full of sheep, and no barns full of pigs, cows and egg-laying hens. There would be no aquaria and no zoos.

If animals matter morally, we must recalibrate all aspects of our relationship with them. The issue we must confront is not whether our exploitation of them is ‘humane’ – with all of the concomitant tinkering with the practices of animal-use industries – but rather whether we can justify using them at all.

Black-and-white photo of a man in a suit and hat grabbing another man by his collar in front of a bar with bottles.

Political philosophy

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

A suburban street with mountains in the background, featuring a girl on a bike, parked cars, and old furniture on the sidewalk in front of a house.

Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

Daniel Waldenström

Silhouette of a person walking through a spray of water at sunset with cars and buildings in the background.

Neuroscience

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures

Clayton Page Aldern

A brick house with a tiled roof, surrounded by a well-maintained garden with bushes and colourful flowers.

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

An old photograph of a man pulling a small cart with a child and belongings, followed by a woman and three children; one child is pushing a stroller.

Thinkers and theories

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

Close-up of a person’s hand using a smartphone in a dimly lit room with blurred lights in the background. The phone screen shows the text ‘How can I help you today?’ and a text input field.

Computing and artificial intelligence

Mere imitation

Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI?

Rights of Nature, Rights of Animals

Kristen Stilt
See full issue

The fields of animal law and environmental law have an uneasy relationship. At a basic level, they are intertwined by the fundamental observation that animals, human and nonhuman, exist in the environment. Environmental law is generally concerned with animals at the level of species (and specifically endangered or threatened species), whereas animal law is concerned with all animals, regardless of particular characteristics. The issue of wild horses in the western United States illustrates this tension. Some environmentalists view the horses as “feral pests” that damage the fragile ecosystem and compete with wildlife — and privately owned cattle — for resources. 1 They argue that the horses should be gathered through helicopter-led “roundups” and euthanized or sold. 2 Animal protection advocates argue that these roundups are cruel and note that the millions of cattle also grazing on these lands are far more damaging to the environment than the horses. 3 They insist that these wild horses should not be killed — the life of each individual animal matters and should be protected. 4

Environmental law is the older and more established field of law. There are many ways to measure this, such as at the constitutional level, which shows environmental law’s seniority and success. Most constitutions address the environment, and the typical phrasing is anthropocentric: a human right to a healthy environment as seen, for example, in article 42 of the Constitution of Kenya: “Every person has the right to a clean and healthy environment . . . .” 5 Newer trends adopt ecocentric or biocentric approaches and grant rights to nature (or its component parts, such as a river) at the constitutional or legislative level or through judicial decisions. 6

In contrast to environmental rights, it is only a fairly recent phenomenon that assigns “constitutional significance to the experiences of individual nonhuman animals.” 7 Animals are protected in just a handful of constitutions with no clear adoption trend: Switzerland (1973), 8 India (1976), 9 Brazil (1988), 10 Slovenia (1991), 11 Germany (2002), 12 Luxembourg (2007), 13 Austria (2013), 14 Egypt (2014), 15 and Russia (2020). 16 ) (Russ.), translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, 2020) . The year accompanying each country listed above indicates when the provision was added to an existing constitution or when a new constitution with the provision was adopted. These provisions use terms such as the “welfare” of animals, 17 the “dignity” of animals, 18 animal “protection,” 19 “compassion” toward animals, 20 and animal “cruelty” 21 — all of which follow a general animal welfare approach. In contrast to the environmental context, none of the provisions uses the term “rights.” 22

In this Essay, I show how developments and achievements in the field of environmental rights and specifically rights of nature can be instructive, intellectually and practically, to the cause of animal protection and animal rights. 23 That instruction includes not only positive examples but also notes of caution, where animal law may face different and more formidable challenges. The Essay first assesses the role that a human right to a healthy environment has played in the development of environmental rights and rights of nature, and then it discusses the relevance of this experience for animal rights. In Part II, it turns to how rights of nature have been interpreted and applied in several prominent court decisions and suggests insights that animal rights can take from this jurisprudence. Given the brevity of Forum essays, I cannot be comprehensive. Rather, I chart out the range of my arguments and support them with some notable examples, with the intention to treat this topic more fully in a future work.

I. A Human Right to a Healthy Environment, A Human Right to Animal Protection

The anthropocentric formulation of a human right to a healthy environment initially may not seem like a helpful framing for the cause of animal rights, but it is actually very instructive. “Rights of Nature” have roots in two sources. First, these rights emerged from a recent recognition that current environmental law, including the human right to a healthy environment, has failed to address the global ecological crisis and notably climate change. 24 Second, indigenous traditions and jurisprudence “that have always treated humans as part of nature, rather than distinct from it,” have long provided a rights of nature framework and approach. 25 The widespread acceptance of a human right to a healthy environment served as part of the foundation for the development of a stronger rights of nature approach, which synergistically connected with indigenous approaches to nature.

In an animal context, an analogous formulation would be a human right to animal protection, a right of humans to have all animals adequately protected. This may sound like awkward phrasing, but such an approach does closely match how, in general, legal systems currently treat animals. 26 That is, animal interests are protected to the extent that humans want them to be and benefit from those protections and limitations.

An anthropocentric approach to animal protection along these lines is likely politically more acceptable than an animal rights–based approach. If it were widely adopted, however, it could serve merely to entrench the status quo in animal law. Alternatively, a human right to animal protection could offer the possibility of far more robust protection than currently exists under animal welfare laws. Because different humans will have different ideas about what the protection of animals should involve, a human right could allow more protective views to be recognized. It could also provide an intermediate step to animal rights, laying a foundation for future expansion. More needs to be known about the evolution from the right to a healthy environment to rights of nature, and how animal rights might be able to follow a similar path.

II. Rights of Nature, Rights of Animals

Ecocentric or biocentric approaches that lodge a right in nature or its component parts also may be promising for the development of legally recognized animal rights. Rights of nature are not widespread, but they have potential for growth and impact. At the constitutional level, Ecuador was the first to recognize the rights of nature. Article 71 begins: “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” 27 Bolivia adopted this approach through the Law on the Rights of Mother Earth (2010); 28 the enumerated rights are the rights to life, diversity of life, water, clean air, equilibrium, restoration, and pollution-free living. 29 Other countries have recognized the right in judicial opinions. 30

A. Animals as Part of Nature

At the most fundamental level, if nature has rights, and if nature includes animals, then rights-based claims could be made on behalf of animals using existing rights of nature doctrine and strategy. A 2008 case from the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil, known as the Wild Parrot case, illustrates this possibility. 31 The case involved an individual who had kept a single wild animal, a blue-fronted parrot, in custody for more than two decades and in inadequate living conditions. 32 This parrot was considered a wild species; this no doubt facilitated the connection to nature, but the court engaged in language that stretched beyond concern for a wild species. The court cited article 225 of the constitution as evidence for Brazil’s “ecological approach.” 33 Article 225 is an anthropocentric human right to an “ecologically balanced environment,” not a rights of nature provision, and the constitutional framing of animal protection comes through an environmental, “fauna and . . . flora” framework. 34 What is remarkable is that the court took this limited language as a starting point to reach a discussion of rights of nature and recognition of sentient beings in general.

The court called for a rethinking of the “Kantian, anthropocentric and individualistic concept of human dignity.” 35 Dignity should be reformulated to recognize “an intrinsic value conferred to non-human sensitive beings, whose moral status would be recognized and would share with the human beings the same moral community.” 36 The treatment of animals “must be based no longer on human dignity or human compassion, but on the very dignity inherent in the existence of nonhuman animals.” 37 The court brought together two strands of jurisprudence: the protection of animals in the German and Swiss Constitutions 38 and the rights of nature language in the Ecuadorean Constitution and Bolivian Law on the Rights of Mother Earth. By doing so, it reached a language of rights: “This view of nature as an expression of life in its entirety enables the Constitutional Law and other areas of law to recognize the environment and non-human animals as beings of their own value, therefore deserving respect and care, so that the legal system grants them the ownership of rights and dignity.” 39 The court conceptually moved nonhuman animals out of the environmental constraints of article 225 to attain their own independent status, for which the court advocated both rights and dignity.

B. Nonhuman Rights

Even if the concept of nature is not currently understood to include individual animals, provisions recognizing the rights of nature still implicitly acknowledge that a nonhuman can have rights. This may seem obvious since corporations and other nonhuman entities are legal persons and have rights, but entities such as rivers or ecosystems traditionally have not been extended the same recognition by legal systems worldwide. Rivers have been treated as legal persons in some jurisdictions, notably in Bangladesh, 40 Colombia, 41 Ecuador, 42 India, 43 New Zealand, 44 and the United States. 45

One of the most significant cases involving river rights was decided by the Constitutional Court of Colombia in 2016 (the Atrato River Case). 46 The plaintiffs challenged the pollution and degradation that industrial and illegal mining and logging had caused to the Atrato River basin, the tributaries, and surrounding territories. 47 They showed that the Atrato banks were the ancestral home to Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities such as themselves. 48 The river provided a subsistence means of living based on agriculture, hunting, fishing, and artisanal mining. 49 The plaintiffs asked the court to protect their fundamental rights to life, health, water, food security, a healthy environment, and the culture and territory of their ethnic communities. 50 They also asked the court to impose measures to address the crisis in the Atrato River basin resulting from the environmental pollution and degradation. 51

While the plaintiffs framed their claims as rights of the individuals living in the Atrato River basin, the court did not limit itself to a consideration of anthropocentric rights. For the court, the importance of nature “[was] established, of course, in reference to the humans that inhabit it and the need to count on a healthy environment to live a dignified life in conditions of well-being; but [nature’s importance was founded] also in connection with the other living organisms with whom the planet is shared, understood as entities deserving of protection in and of themselves .” 52 Nature was a subject of rights. 53

Thus, theoretically, the rights of nature may be violated even in the absence of any injury to humans. A decision from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights made this point clearly: “The Court consider[ed] it important to stress that, as an autonomous right, the right to a healthy environment, unlike other rights, protects the components of the environment, such as forests, rivers, and seas, as legal interests in themselves, even in the absence of the certainty or evidence of a risk to individuals.” 54

An excellent example of an approach that leads with the rights of nature is the Turag River case, decided by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2019. 55 Through time-sequenced photographs, a news article that the court relied on in its decision showed the encroachment on the Turag River due to “river-grabbers,” pollutants, and the failure to keep the river navigable through dredging. 56 Despite laws and many judicial decisions, encroachers walled off land in the river and deployed bulldozers and excavators to fill their newly claimed territory, expanding the reach of dry land at the river’s expense. 57 The same actions were taking place in other rivers in the capital of this “riverine country.” 58 The NGO Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh brought the case to eject all the illegal occupiers and stop landfilling and construction activities on the river’s territory. 59

The Turag River itself was at the center of the case from the outset. But the river for its own sake? The court echoed the language of the Daily Star article, speaking in terms of the Turag becoming a “dead river” 60 or facing “extinction” if the activity was not stopped. 61 The court also acknowledged that the occupation and pollution had caused a “major shortage of potable water, for which people are constantly facing health risks.” 62 And given the centrality of waterways to Bangladesh, “[d]estroying the rivers is . . . the same as our collective suicide.” 63 As a last resort to save the river, the court declared the Turag and indeed all rivers in the country legal persons. 64 It also ordered the removal of all unlawful pollution and construction and issued seventeen other wide-ranging orders. 65 The Turag River case and others show that rights can be lodged in a nonhuman, but in practice the human rights are also significant components.

C. Nonhuman Remedies and Enforcement

Finally, the remedies discussion in rights of nature cases demonstrates that there are adequate ways for humans to assess and implement the desires and needs of nonhuman entities. In what is known as the Deforestation Case, the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil held that in addition to the requirement to restore the damage caused to the environment, a defendant may also be required to pay monetary damages, or “pure ecological damage,” for “degrading nature in itself, an asset that is not and cannot be owned.” 66 Applied to the animal context, it could stand for the principle that wrongful treatment of an animal, for example, could require the payment of compensation without any particular showing of physical harm. The payment would presumably go into a trust established to support the needs of the animal or her ecosystem.

In the animal context, the idea that humans are capable of making such an assessment has been questioned. In Naruto v. Slater , 67 the Ninth Circuit took a generally irritated tone toward the organization that brought the case on behalf of Naruto, a crested macaque. 68 Concurring in part, Judge Smith stated: “But the interests of animals? We are really asking what another species desires. . . . We have millennia of experience understanding the interests and desires of humankind. That is not necessarily true of animals.” 69 If so — and without conceding the point — that is also not necessarily true of rivers, forests, or ecosystems, but courts that grant rights to nature routinely appoint guardianship bodies to make these determinations. 70

There is a limit to the analogy between nature and nonhuman animals that appears at the stage of remedies in some cases and goes to the heart of the comparison. For a river, the component of nature for which there is the most extensive case law, courts typically speak in terms of “rights that imply its protection, conservation, maintenance” and “restoration,” as in the Atrato River Case. 71 That court sought to have the conditions of the river improved so that the human communities could again make full use of the river for agriculture, hunting, fishing, and artisanal mining. The remedy raises a deeper question, one that the court did not ask: What is the intrinsic purpose of a river? The implication of rights of river judgments is not that a river simply seeks to be left alone. The purpose of a river in these decisions is to serve humans, through access to water, transportation, and the animals who live in them.

The rights that advocates seek for animals are far more robust and categorically reject that the inherent purpose of an animal is to serve human interests and uses. In the habeas corpus cases, the animals are in captivity, such as in a zoo or research facility. 72 The plaintiffs seek release of these animals to a setting in which they can live more natural lives, such as a sanctuary, given that these animals generally cannot be placed in a fully natural, wild environment. 73 While the presumption is that the transfer to better environments would aid in the protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration of these animals, the point was not that the animals will look and feel better for any kind of human benefit. The remedy of habeas corpus seeks to release the animals from a human environment so that they could be, to the extent possible, left alone to be animals.

This difference in the issue of remedies and their enforcement may be significant and may project back onto the fundamental question of whether humans will recognize animal rights at all. Rights of nature call for some major changes in the way that humans live in the world, as seen in the above cases. Viewed from the remedy angle, the rights of animals are an even greater challenge to the behavior of humans. Rights of animals impact fundamental questions such as what humans eat and drink, what they wear, and what kinds of entertainment they engage in, to name just a few. A judge may seek to avoid remedies that would alter human behavior in dramatic ways, and the mere possibility of these remedies may also work to undermine the cause of action itself. 74

Rights of nature approaches are instructive to the cause of animal rights, intellectually and practically. They do not offer a model to be copied wholesale, but instead call for careful study of the parallels and points of disconnection, of the commonalities and the conflicts, with the potential for significant results.

* Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Director, Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program. I thank Sam Bookman, Doug Kysar, Justin Marceau, Kathy Meyer, and Steve Wise for insightful comments on this Essay. I thank the editors of the Harvard Law Review for their thoughtful engagement and editorial assistance. Andy Stawasz, J.D. ’21, provided outstanding research assistance. I also thank the translators who assisted with translations of the cases cited in the Essay: Cibele Maria Melendez Texeira Bandeira and Harvard Law School S.J.D. candidates Beatriz Botero Arcila, Sannoy Das, and Nicolás Parra-Herrera.

^ Karin Brulliard, The Battle over Wild Horses , WASH. POST (Sept. 18, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/18/wild-horses-have-long-kicked-up-controversy-now-foes-say-they-have-solution [ https://perma.cc/L9BW-GJP7 ].

^ The constitution of Kenya , 2010, art. 42, in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline , 2010) .

^ James R. May & Erin Daly, Global Environmental Constitutionalism 255–56 (2015). A biocentric approach places humans on the same level as all living beings, whereas an ecocentric approach considers all that is in the natural world — living beings and nonliving entities — to all be equally valued. Int’l Rivers et al., Rights of Rivers 10 (2020), https://3waryu2g9363hdvii1ci666p-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2020/09/Right-of-Rivers-Report-V3-Digital-compressed.pdf [ https://perma.cc/JLG7-4QD5 ].

^ Jessica Eisen & Kristen Stilt, Protection and Status of Animals , in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law ¶ 1 (Rainer Grote, Frauke Lachenmann & Rüdiger Wolfrum eds., 2016), Oxford Constitutional Law (article updated Dec. 2016).

^ Id . ¶¶ 26–35.

^ Id . ¶¶ 11–17.

^ Id . ¶¶ 36–38.

^ Id . ¶¶ 39–41.

^ Id . ¶¶ 18–25.

^ Id . ¶¶ 47–56.

^ Id . ¶¶ 42–46.

^ Id . ¶¶ 63–65.

^ See Konstitutsiia Rossiĭskoĭ Federatsii [Konst. RF] [Constitution] art. 114(1)(e 5

^ Eisen & Stilt, supra note 7, ¶ 45.

^ Id . ¶ 31.

^ Id . ¶ 23.

^ Id . ¶ 12.

^ Id . ¶ 36.

^ Id . ¶ 69.

^ The desire for more rights is not an unqualified positive, as some have argued. While an important question, this Essay does not engage in that debate.

^ Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 6.

^ Id . In the animal law context, more research is needed on the alignment of beliefs in indigenous communities with animal rights approaches — a partnership that has been important in the contemporary rights of nature movement. Due to issues such as whaling and seal hunting, this alignment has proven difficult, but with thoughtful engagement, it is within reach. See generally Maneesha Deckha, Unsettling Anthropocentric Legal Systems: Reconciliation, Indigenous Laws, and Animal Personhood , 41 J. Intercultural Stud . 77 (2020).

^ There is a long line of thinking in animal protection that preventing cruelty to animals is also beneficial for humans. One strand of this thinking focuses on a connection between violence against animals and violence against humans, referred to as the “link” theory. For a discussion and critique of this theory, see Justin Marceau , Beyond Cages 193–250 (2019).

^ Constitución de la República del Ecuador [Constitution] 2008 , art. 71, translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, Jefri Jay Ruchti, ed., Maria Del Carmen Gress & J.J. Ruchti, trans., 2018 ) .

^ Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra [Law of the Rights of Mother Earth], Ley 071 (2010) ( Bol .) .

^ See Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 15–49.

^ S.T.J., No. 1.797.175/SP, Relator: Ministro OG Fernandes, 21.03.2019, Revista Eletrônica da Jurisprudência [R.S.T.J.], 13.05.2019 (Braz.), https://processo.stj.jus.br/processo/revista/documento/mediado/?componente=ITA&sequencial=1806039&num_registro=201800312300&data=20190513&peticao_numero=-1&formato=PDF [ https://perma.cc/TZ76-P4E3 ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library) [hereinafter Wild Parrot Case].

^ Id . at 2–3.

^ Id . at 9.

^ Constitução Federal [C.F.] [Constitution] art. 225 (Braz.), translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, Jefri Jay Ruchi, ed., Keith S. Rosenn, trans., 2020) .

^ Wild Parrot Case, supra note 31, at 10.

^ Id . at 12.

^ See Eisen & Stilt, supra note 7, ¶¶ 22–24, 28–29.

^ Wild Parrot Case, supra note 31, at 14.

^ See Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 47.

^ See id . at 23.

^ See id . at 33.

^ See id . at 44.

^ See id . at 17.

^ See id . at 39. In India, the decisions have been stayed by the Supreme Court. Id . at 46. In the U.S. context, Native American tribal jurisdictions have led the way in recognizing rights of nature. The Navajo Nation Code Annotated, tit. I, § 205 (2014), states that “[a]ll creation, from Mother Earth and Father Sky to the animals, those who live in water, those who fly and plant life have their own laws and have rights and freedoms to exist.” The publication of Christopher D. Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects , 45 S. Cal. L. Rev . 450 (1972), was influential for Justice Douglas, dissenting in Sierra Club v. Morton , 405 U.S. 727, 741–42 (1972) (“Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”). Recently, some local governments in the United States have attempted to declare that natural communities and ecosystems have rights. For a discussion of these efforts, see David R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature 109–30 (2017).

^ Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], noviembre 10, 2016, Sentencia T-622/16 (Colom.), https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/relatoria/2016/t-622-16.htm [ https://perma.cc/CP7X-3NCJ ], translated in Center for Social Justice Studies v. Presidency of the Republic, Judgment T-622/16, Constitutional Court of Colombia (Nov. 10, 2016), The Atrato River Case , Dignity Rts. Project , http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload838.pdf [ https://perma.cc/SF8R-W8EC ] [hereinafter Atrato River Case].

^ Id . § I.2.1.

^ Id . § I.1.

^ Id . § I.2.10.

^ Id . § IV.9.27.

^ Id . § IV.9.31.

^ The Environment and Human Rights (Arts. 4(1) and 5(1) in Relation to Arts. 1(1) and 2 American Convention on Human Rights), Advisory Opinion OC-23/17, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) No. 23, ¶ 62 (Nov. 15, 2017), https://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/opiniones/seriea_23_ing.pdf [ https://perma.cc/W3HZ-LPX9 ].

^ Bangladesh Supreme Court, High Court Division, Writ Petition No. 13898/2016 (2019) (official translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library) [hereinafter Turag River Case].

^ See id . at 3; Tawfique Ali, Time to Declare Turag Dead , Daily Star (Nov. 6, 2016), https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/time-declare-turag-dead-1310182 [ https://perma.cc/R5NL-WA6M ].

^ See Ali, supra note 56.

^ See Turag River Case, supra note 55, at 3.

^ Id . at 4.

^ Id . at 54.

^ Id . at 449.

^ Id . at 449–50.

^ S.T.J., No. 1.145.083/MG, Relator: Ministro Heman Benjamin, 27.09.2011, Revista Eletrônica da Jurisprudência [R.S.T.J.], 04.09.2012, 10 (Braz.), https://processo.stj.jus.br/processo/revista/documento/mediado/?componente=ITA&sequencial=975073&num_registro=200901152629&data=20120904&formato=PDF [ https://perma.cc/FW7S-C6Q8 ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library).

^ 888 F.3d 418 (9th Cir. 2018).

^ Id . at 420.

^ Id . at 432 (Smith, J., concurring in part).

^ Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 8.

^ Atrato River Case, supra note 46, § IV.9.32.

^ See, e.g ., Cámara del Fuero Contencioso Administrativo y Tributario [CABA] [Chamber of Appeals in Contentious Administrative and Tax Matters], Buenos Aires, sala 1, 14/06/2016, “Asociación de Funcionarios y Abogados por los Derechos de los Animales y Otros c. GCBA s/ Amparo,” (Arg.), 3, https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/1%20%E2%80%9CASOCIACIO%CC%81N%20DE%20FUNCIONARIOS%20Y%20ABOGADOS%20POR%20LOS%20DERECHOS%20DE%20LOS%20ANIMALES%20Y%20OTROS%20C%3A%20GCBA%20S%3A%20AMPARO%E2%80%9D%20.pdf [ https://perma.cc/7LD3-XCDG ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library); Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], enero 23, 2020, Sentencia SU-016/20 (§§ I.1 to .3) (Colom.), https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/comunicados/Comunicado%20No.%2003%20del%2023%20de%20enero%20de%202020.pdf [ https://perma.cc/9EX8-UCYL ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library). For an overview of habeas corpus cases brought in the United States on behalf of nonhuman animals, see Challenging the Legal Thinghood of Autonomous Nonhuman Animals , Nonhuman Rts. Project , https://www.nonhumanrights.org/litigation [ https://perma.cc/69P9-UU7M ].

^ CABA, 14/06/2016, “Asociación de Funcionarios y Abogados por los Derechos de los Animales y Otros c. GCBA s/ Amparo,” 2, 14; C.C., enero 23, 2020, Sentencia SU-016/20 (§§ I.1 to .3).

^ I thank Doug Kysar for the point that this also works in reverse; a judge in a jurisdiction with weak enforcement might be willing to go further with a finding of animal rights, knowing that the implications are unlikely to be seen as a practical matter.

Environmental Law

March 20, 2021

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The Case Against Animal Rights

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The coronavirus might have been invisible but that there would be a pandemic was not unforeseen. The simple narrative that the virus emerged in animals and jumped the species barrier to reach humans, helps sidestep the realm of human responsibility. At the center of this outbreak is not just the animal, but the human-animal relationship. The pandemic has revealed that there is surely something unhealthy in our relationship with the animals, especially those that we eat. Zoonotic spillover is the result of animal abuse in industrial animal farming and wet markets, the cramped conditions of which provide the perfect breeding grounds for zoonoses. While experts have warned that these spaces, conditions and practices risk more pandemics, animal right activists have taken to the fore and made a compelling case for denouncing meat products and extending rights to animals.

There is no denying that there is a nexus between animal cruelty and infectious diseases in our food supply; and that there is something unhealthy, both literally and morally, in our ‘normal’ relations with these animals. The way we treat animals and the broader domain of animal welfare have to be taken up seriously as a part of global conversation about the pandemic. My point of departure, however, is the way animal right activists think about animal welfare. I believe that the flaming passion of animal rights activists towards animal matters is compelling, but their philosophical formulations much less so. We have an ethical obligation to avoid making others suffer but in case of suffering, laws and rights are never enough. In this article, I will present the problems associated with the animal rights discourse. But before that, it is important that we understand the foundations of animal rights.

The Equality Argument

Animal Rights arguments are largely based on the similarities between humans and animals. For instance, Peter Singer, one of the proponents of Animal Liberation, argues that all animals are equal. And because animals have pain, pleasure and interests like humans, “the ethical principle on which human equality rests requires us to extend equal considerations to animals”(Singer, 1975). His animal liberation arguments use analogies of women’s liberation and civil rights movement. Just like African-American women were discriminated based on their sex and colour, animals are discriminated based on their species. If we are not using the humanist list of capacities (like reason, language etc.) to decide the matters of ethical consideration, we are indulging in ‘speciesism’, which like its associates – racism and sexism- discriminates solely on the basis of species and not on the basis of their capacities and qualities. For Singer, beings who have a ‘capacity to suffer’ (which includes not just physical pain but also psychological pain and anticipatory duress) have a demonstrable interest in avoiding suffering. Those beings, he argues, have a right to have their interests protected, to be regarded morally as ends in themselves. In this light, it’s easy to see how Singer imagines animals as a marginalised group within the human society.

Tom Regan, the proponent of Animal Rights discourse, insists that we look at the “really crucial, basic similarity” between humans and animals, which is delineated in terms of experiences, subjectivity, beliefs, consciousness, memory and feelings. By doing that, he broadens the concept of what he calls “inherent value” beyond the emphasis on suffering alone. He argues that all animals which have ‘inherent value’ – and which might not be all creatures – are a “subject of a life” and insofar they have those qualities and interests, they are like us and hence deserve protection, respect and rights like us.

One might ask, which animals are more like us? Which animals have interests and thus inherent value and which do not? Which animals should we consider subjects and which animals non-subjects? Although Regan has provided some suggestions, but where do we draw the line is ultimately unclear. This kind of line drawing is also where the problems with animal rights discourse begin to emerge as I’ll demonstrate in the following section.

What’s Wrong with Animal Rights?

Drawing lines between subjects and non-subjects creates two sides: those who have what it takes to be inherently valuable and those who do not. Conceptually, this is the same kind of exclusionary thinking inherent in human-animal dichotomy. If human-animal dichotomy is part and parcel of the animal rights discourse, then how can we use the same discourse to overcome that binary? (Oliver, 2008)

If we start from the presumption that it is only our similarities that matter and not our differences – differences that are essential in considering the specific interests of individual animals or species – how can we think of any ethics that looks at animals in terms of their own interest as they experience them? By discounting differences, rights discourse ascertains that animals which are less similar to us receive lesser consideration. This is particularly true in case of vermins, insects and viruses, which not only may have different interests/value but which may also be killable. In other words, it is only in their ‘humanity’ that animals can be liberated, in their ‘animality’ they are still subordinated.

Another problem with Singer’s and Regan’s argument is that “it holds an ‘essentialist’ view of the moral worths of both humans and animals”. That is, it proposes a single capacity as the foundation for ethical consideration. This single capacity, namely ‘possession of interests’ (or Singer’s ‘suffering’/ Regan’s ‘inherent value’) is also something humans possess in large degrees. In this light, as Wolfe (1997) argues, “the problem with animal rights philosophy is not that it is anti-humanist but rather that it is too humanist.” Just like feminists have critiqued that women don’t have to be like men in order to be equal, one can critique that animals don’t have to be like humans in order to be inherently valuable.

“The problem with animal rights philosophy is not that it is anti-humanist but rather that it is too humanist.” – Wolfe (1997)

The exclusionary nature of single capacity criteria for ethical consideration creates a paradox. Either the working definition of animals is so ambiguous that it includes everything from viruses to giraffes, without accounting for the differences between them, or it uses the differences between them to continue excluding and exploiting most (Oliver, 2008). In this regard, the premise of animal rights discourse that all animals are equal is flawed. The exclusionary nature of identity claims , creates a power structure where rights and equality become entitlements of an elite group while interests of others are excluded.

Feminist Critiques of Animal Rights Discourse

Feminist studies have problematized the ‘meaning of consent’ and ‘speaking for others’, issues which become even more apparent in case of animals. The meaning of consent is a vexed issue in case of animals especially because, given a lack of common language, we can never be sure what the animal wants. For instance, how do we know that the animals we call pets freely consent to our love and attention?

Feminists have also argued that speaking for others can be a way of silencing them. Moreover, the powerful speaking for the powerless only replicates the power structure instead of changing it.

Calculating the Incalculable

Derrida’s take on this matter is rather interesting. In his book “The Animal That Therefore I Am” , he argues that calculating rights and interests risks replacing ethical responsibility with equations and legalism. Delineating rights, weighing the value of one life against another are the antithesis of ethics. For him the problem is imagining that we can calculate the incalculable, that we can know for sure what’s equal, fair and right. Laws, Derrida says “make man the measure of all things – he is the measurer and the yardstick”. Haraway (2008) portrays this excessive humanism in rights discourse brilliantly. For her, the categories for subject are a part of the problem. She argues that the categories used by animal rights discourse end up making the animals “permanent dependents (lesser humans), utterly natural (nonhumans) or entirely the same (humans in fur suits).”

Laws and rights might be important in our civil society, but they are never enough when it comes to suffering. The case of animal welfare is a matter of infinite responsibility. It is time we move away from the rights discourse and think about animal welfare in terms of response and relationship rather than capacity and identity. The question then is not whether Animals can suffer but “How do we respond to the suffering of others?” Like Haraway, I’m convinced that “multispecies coflourishing requires simultaneous, contradictory truths… that we should face nurturing and killing as an inescapable part of mortal companion species entanglements.” This isn’t to say that the category of killing is innocent; killing animals is killing someone and knowing this is not the end but the beginning of serious accountability inside multispecies worldings.

Derrida A, J., & Wills, D. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am (Mallet M., Ed.). New York: Fordham University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt13x09fn

Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Oliver, K. (2008). What Is Wrong with (Animal) Rights? The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 22 (3), new series, 214-224. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/25670714

Wolfe, C. (1998). Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal rights, and the Poverty of Humanism. Diacritics 28 (2):21-40.

The Moral Rights of Animals

Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock (eds.), The Moral Rights of Animals , Lexington, 2016, 296pp., $100.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781498531900.

Reviewed by Dan Hooley, University of Toronto

The attitudes of philosophers on our obligations to other animals and the view that other animals possess certain moral rights have shifted considerably in the last 40 years and a great deal of credit for this shift is owed to Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights and subsequent work. This excellent anthology grew out of a 2011 workshop held in Regan's honor and is dedicated to him. It features fourteen essays all of which intersect with Regan's views in some way. The authors largely defend the view that other animals have moral rights and those who don't hold that we have significant obligations to other animals. The essays succeed at exploring, critiquing, and expanding upon Regan's work in a way that is both rigorous and detailed, while accessible to those new to Regan or the animal rights literature.

The book has three parts. Part 1 focuses on the theoretical basis of animal rights, and responses to objections to animal rights. Part 2 looks at questions relating to the comparative value of human and nonhuman lives, with a focus on the comparative harm of death for humans and animals and the question of whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life. Part 3 turns to the practical import of animal rights.

Part 1 begins with an essay by Regan, which succinctly summarizes the argument he made in The Case for Animal Rights that all individuals who are "subjects of a life" -- conscious, sentient individuals with an experiential welfare who have beliefs and desires and some awareness of the past and future -- have certain basic moral rights. This essay, combined with the relevant summaries in subsequent chapters, provide a sufficient overview of Regan's views, so those who have not read Regan before will not be lost.

In Chapter 2, Jeremy Garrett argues that deontological libertarians should accept animal rights. Garrett argues that libertarian views harmonize quite nicely with Regan's defense of animal rights and defends this view against objections from Nozick. In Chapter 3, Mylan Engel Jr. makes a straightforward and compelling case that if all humans have moral rights, then many other animals do as well since these animals have the properties that confer rights on humans. Engel also argues that most of the harmful uses of animals are wrong even if animals do not possess rights. In Chapter 4, Nathan Nobis considers some of the limitations of Regan's response to Carl Cohen's well-known "kind" argument, which holds that since animals are not of the kind of beings who are moral agents, they do not possess rights, and develops stronger objections to Cohen's position. In Chapter 5, Anne Baril argues that the equal inherent value of all animals does not demand intervention to prevent predation among wild animals. She argues that respect for wild animals, as the kinds of beings they are, does not require intervention to prevent predation.

Central or important to many of the essays in Part 1 is the much discussed (and poorly named) "Argument from Marginal Cases." [1] Versions and variations on this argument are put forward here by Regan, Garrett, Engel, and Nobis. Engel and Nobis, in particular, do a superb job challenging many of the common attempts to defend the view that all humans possess certain basic rights but all nonhumans do not. These essays present important challenges to those who think some form of human exceptionalism is defensible.

One important point made by Engel is that defenders of human exceptionalism must provide a plausible rationale for why any specific capacity, claimed to be both necessary and sufficient for the possession of a given right, is connected to that specific right in question. Many attempts to do this fail the test of having a plausible rationale. Moral autonomy is relevant to whether or not beings can be held morally accountable for their behavior, but it is far from clear why being morally autonomous is a necessary condition for possessing a right not to be harmed. This is because being morally autonomous is not necessary to have a morally relevant interest in not being harmed. As Engel notes, it is a much more plausible rationale to think that sentience is the morally relevant rights-conferring property for the right not to be harmed. This capacity has a much more plausible connection to the specific right in question.

A similar point is made by Nobis in response to Cohen's "kind" argument. Cohen claims all humans (regardless of cognitive capacities) have moral rights because they are members of a kind of being that possess moral agency. But this lacks a plausible rationale when it comes to the specific rights of non-rational humans (such as babies or individuals with severe cognitive disabilities). Cohen claims these individuals have rights related to autonomy because they are members of a kind that is morally autonomous. But even if we concede this, it would be wrong to let them make all the decisions about their lives that we allow paradigmatic adults to make (75). They seem to lack these rights because they do not possess the relevant interests. Once we recognize this, however, it is not clear why membership in a kind is morally relevant: we can be classified in different groups, but we don't always have the rights typical members of those groups possess.

Part 2 focuses primarily on the comparative harm of death for humans and animals and the question of whether or not humans and other animals have an equal right to life. In Chapter 6, Aaron Simmons argues that while life has less value for animals than for humans, they nevertheless possess an equal right to life, such that the negative rights they possess are just as stringent as those possessed by humans. In Chapter 7, Molly Gardner argues that Regan's rights view does not, as he claims, actually prohibit animal research in all cases. She develops an alternative position, what she calls the "attenuated rights view," that balances rights with a somewhat complex but interesting weighing principle. This view generates a strong presumption against animal research, but would not justify a categorical opposition to all harmful research involving animals. In Chapter 8, Evelyn Pluhar draws on ethological research to argue that all vertebrates and some cephalopod invertebrates should be seen as subjects of a life. She defends the view that all subjects of a life, who have satisfying lives and opportunities for future satisfaction, are harmed equally by death. In Chapter 9, Alastair Norcross argues that Singer's account of moral considerability -- where all sentient creatures deserve equal consideration -- can be combined with Regan's account of subjects of a life. Norcross argues that all sentient creatures deserve equal consideration, but that subjects of a life have a lot more to lose by dying than "merely" sentient beings. And in Chapter 10, Gary Comstock gives empirical evidence that suggests much of the time human behavior is controlled by non-conscious mechanisms. Comstock uses this to argue against the view that the ability of humans to control their behavior is a morally relevant difference separating humans from other animals: if animals act "on instinct" much of the time, so do we.

The question of whether or not humans are harmed more by death than animals and the related question of whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life are some of the most difficult and perplexing questions in animal ethics. One notable feature of the essays in Part 2 is the diversity of views presented on these issues, despite the (mostly) shared belief that nonhuman animals possess basic moral rights.

Both Simmons and Gardner, for example, defend the common position that life has more value for (most) humans compared to most other animals because of our more sophisticated cognitive abilities. Simmons defends this by arguing that our more sophisticated cognitive capacities allow us to experience more creative and intellectual pleasures that are quantitatively and qualitatively superior to other pleasures (110).

One important objection not considered by either author concerns the ways in which the more sophisticated capacities of humans might allow for qualitatively and quantitatively worse forms of displeasure or negative experiences. If human life has more value because of the quantity and types of pleasures and valuable experiences we can enjoy, why are the distinct types of suffering, anxiety, and agony we can experience not relevant? If the claim is that humans have more valuable lives because of the net quantity and quality of pleasure and valuable experiences we can enjoy, then it isn't obviously true that humans have more valuable lives compared to animals, once we take the distinct types of displeasure we can experience into account. Further, even if it is true that some human lives contain more net value than other animals, this is likely not true for all of us.

More interesting, I think, is Simmons' suggestion that even if most humans are harmed more by death than most animals, this does not undermine an equal right to life. The assumption needed to ground this claim holds that two beings have an equal right to life only if the value of life for them is equal (112). But Simmons thinks we ought to reject this assumption because it entails that all humans do not have an equal right to life. Not only would this be the case for humans with severe cognitive disabilities but, Simmons rightly notes, there are reasons to think that among paradigmatic adult humans some are harmed more by death, as "some normal, adult humans seem to have greater capacities for reflective, creative, and intellectual activity than others" (112). This is an important point often ignored in this debate. Instead, Simmons suggests that to have an equal right to life only requires that the value of life for a being meets a certain threshold of value. And this threshold, he argues, should be set to include all individuals who are subjects of a life.

Norcross takes a different approach to these questions. He draws attention to an important element related to the harm of death not addressed in the other essays: the psychological relationship between an individual and her self in the future. Norcross argues that death is worse for animals who are subjects of a life (and who have some degree of self-consciousness) because of our psychological connection to our future selves: a fact we see when you must decide between a procedure that would extend your life for two years, or one that would extend "your" life by twenty years but sever all psychological connections between your present self and the future individual. Since it is rational to prefer the first procedure, Norcross argues that what is significant about death to individuals with a personal identity over time is the effect on their well-being (as opposed to the well-being of the organism) (171).

Subjects of a life, as beings with some degree of self-consciousness, have lives that matter to them . In this respect, their death is quite different from beings who are merely sentient and lack any psychological connection to their future selves. Their death may affect the net amount of well-being in the world, but it lacks personal significance to that being, in the same way that opting for the second procedure in the example above lacks any personal significance for me. This fact, Norcross argues, can ground a preference for subjects of a life over the merely sentient when it comes to issues of life and death (174).

Part 3 turns to more practical implications of animal rights and contains a variety of interesting and unique essays. In Chapter 11, Ramona Ilea argues that the capabilities approach to animals, articulated by Nussbaum, provides a useful and rigorous way to practically apply Regan's account of animal rights to questions of public policy and the law. In Chapter 13, Robert Bass develops an argument for veganism centered on moral caution. Bass argues that if there is a reasonable chance that an action is seriously wrong and no chance that it is morally required, then we ought to avoid that action. Bass thinks meat eating meets these criteria, and presents an array of arguments that attempt to show that the more modest conclusion is that there is a substantial chance meat-eating is wrong. In Chapter 14, Jason Hanna responds to arguments that animal rights views are consistent with "therapeutic hunting" aimed at reducing the suffering and future death of overabundant species. Hanna contends that hunters and wildlife managers are not in a situation where they must override an individual's rights, and that this blunts attempts to defend therapeutic hunting.

In Chapter 12, Scott Wilson argues that many who have made moral arguments for vegetarianism have failed to appreciate the significant interest meat-eaters have in consuming meat. He makes a strong case that the interest in consuming meat cannot be reduced to an interest simply in taste or nutrition, but instead reflects and involve a much wider variety of interests, including our self-conceptions of who we are, relationships with family and friends, convenience, and a variety of symbolic meanings. Wilson contends that this ultimately undermines utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism, and shows that rights-based approaches to animals are superior.

While I think Wilson is right to highlight some of the ways in which the consumption of meat reflects more than a simple interest in taste or pleasure, it is not clear his argument actually undermines a utilitarian argument for vegetarianism. Two points can be made in response to his argument. The first concerns the plasticity of our desires. We might think, against Wilson, that many meat-eaters overestimate the effect that switching to a vegetarian lifestyle will have on their welfare. If this is the case, it is not clear that any loss they might experience is as significant as they might initially be inclined to think (many vegetarians and vegans, for example, report enjoying food just as much or nearly as much as during their omnivorous days). Second, and related to this, there is a considerable body of evidence that suggests eating a plant-based diet makes it much more likely an individual will be healthier, avoid chronic diseases, and live longer. If this is the case, individuals who adopt a vegetarian diet may experience welfare gains (even if they miss eating meat), and even if they don't appreciate this fact.

This book offers an interesting and expansive exploration of current thought on animal rights. One downside it has, however, is that none of the essays engage with more recent work on the political status of non-human animals and their place in our legal and political institutions (Ilea's essay is in this ballpark, but it doesn't address any of the recent work on the topic). This omission is understandable: the anthology grew out of a 2011 conference, and much of the emerging literature on the political status of nonhuman animals was sparked by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's (2011) Zoopolis . However, one of the volume's stated goals is to "reflect the current state of philosophical thought on the moral rights of animals" (x). The political turn that is happening in animal ethics (and among animal rights theorists) can be understood as a potential implication of the moral rights of animals (and would thus fit in Part 3). This omission leaves out a rather exciting current development in the field that is particularly relevant to advocates of the moral rights of animals.

Some of this new work, moreover, would connect the topics in Parts 2 and 3 in an interesting way. One question we might have concerns whether much hangs on questions about the comparative harm of death or claims to an equal right to life. If other animals are significantly harmed by death and have a right to life, then we might think this is all we need to see that harmful animal-use industries, like animal agriculture, must be stopped, even if humans are harmed more by death or possess a more stringent right to life.

However, if we frame our relationship to other animals in political terms, the question of the comparative harm of death may take on a new importance. If, to give just one example, we begin to look at other domesticated animals as fellow members of our political communities, then there might be additional reasons why it matters how much death harms these beings. Domesticated animals could have positive rights to things like health care, emergency services, research and development into present diseases, and the policing and investigation of crimes. How we think about these claims and their comparative strength may depend, in part, on how we think about the comparative harm of death, and whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life. I highlight this not to fault the book for this omission, but to note how some of the more recent developments in animal ethics connect with some of the topics explored in the essays, and potentially make these questions more urgent and intriguing.

Overall, this anthology makes an excellent companion to the work of Regan, and contains a great collection of readings on current debates in the area of animal rights. It would work quite well in a class on animal ethics, and the material is suitable and accessible for undergraduates of all levels.

[1] One problem with this name is that it is misleading. The cognitive diversity that is characteristic of humans is not something that just affects those with cognitive disabilities or dementia, but all of us across our lives (when we are young, during periods of severe illness, and for many of us, as we age).

Against Animal Rights

How it works

As society expands the increase of animal interactions between human and wild animal are drastically rising. As society has migrated from our agricultural roots to a more urban existence, the importance of distinguishing between animal rights and animal welfare becomes eminent. The public debate about animal products (fur, meat, leather etc.) is often distorted with confusion between two important concepts: animal welfare and animal rights. These terms sound similar and are often used interchangeably, but they describe two profoundly different ideas.

The issues surrounding the views of animal rights and animal welfare are very familiar to those who utilize animals in industry, entertainment, sport or recreation.

SPCA and PETA are two of the most recognizable organizations we all find familiar, but how can we distinguish which side of this topic they are on? Animal Welfare, as defined by the American Veterinary Medical Association as, a human responsibility that encompasses all aspects of animal well-being including; proper housing, management, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling, and, when necessary, humane euthanasia. While animal welfare is the view that animals have rights similar or the same as humans. True animal rights proponents believe that humans do not have the right to use animals at all. Animal rights proponents wish to ban all use of animals by humans. As PETA’S mantra in rally is “Not better cages but, No cages” we easily tell they are supporters of the rights group. SPCA is focused on the care of abandoned and ill animals we see they are the general welfare group. Through the upcoming research paper, we will explore both sides of this radical debate and gain a new outlook on each side. Are animal rights activist extremist while welfare groups and associations are the ones with the obligation of taking care of the animals who are left behind while society over runs?

As we dive into Animal Welfare, we need to address the Animal Welfare Act which requires standards to govern the treatment of animals by dealers, exhibitors, and research facilities. The AWA protects animals that are sold or transported in commerce. The AWA is a federal statute that directs the secretary of the USDA to “promulgate standards to govern the humane handling, care, treatment and transportation of animals by dealers, research facilities, and exhibitors.” Why is animal welfare important to Animal Science as a whole? Animal welfare requirements are important for regulatory, scientific, and ethical reasons. Scientific research and standards set for animals is supported by many people due to this being the only reliable mechanism for testing the safety of compounds before exposure to humans. Without the Animal Welfare Act in place the treatment of animals would not be of importance and there would not be expectations set around the ethical treatment of such animals. “As an extension of this animal rights philosophy, a number of people are embracing veganism, relying exclusively on plant-based food, and plant-based and synthetic clothing. However, with less than 3 percent of the Earth’s surface being suitable for crop production, animal protein and fiber will continue to be indispensable to the survival of the planet’s 6 billion people, and to the conservation of natural habitat. It is for these reasons that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) promotes the use by humans of both plants and animals, domestic and wild.” (6)

Animal rights is the philosophy, sociology, and public policy of animals in society and how they are treated, with the view that no animal has the right to be used by any human for any purpose. Activists try to end animal cruelty and suffering around the world. Whether or not animals have “rights” depends on how the term is defined. If living things are ascribed a “right” to remain living, then animals would have rights. Most ethicists do not use the term so broadly. They generally ascribe rights only to members of societies that are capable of applying mutually accepted ethical principles to specific situations. The animal rights viewpoint also leads to some philosophically untenable conclusions. For instance, in its strongest form it implies that the lives of all animals, including humans, are equal. But, the death of a human is not equivalent to the death of a mouse. Animal rights advocates do not distinguish between human beings and animals.

Human overpopulation is the number one threat to wild and domestic animals worldwide. Whatever humans do to use, abuse, kill, or displace animals is magnified by the number of people on the planet; but do animals need rights? Animals don’t need rights to deserve protection. Animal-welfare advocates have worked for the past 100 years to ensure that the animals that provide us with meat, dairy products and eggs receive good nutrition and care. Thanks to their efforts we have humane-slaughter regulations, codes of practice and other provisions to minimize stress and suffering. This is an on-going process. Animal rights groups have attempted to distort the facts about animal research. As well as fabricate videos and articles accusing the FDA of non-adequate treatment of animals in feed yards and other animal productions. Animal rights groups grossly exaggerate the numbers they use within their campaigns and marketing.

The biggest topic for animal rights vs. animal welfare is animals within research. Rights groups have tendencies to contrive false numbers regarding the facts of animal research. They claim the majority of research animals are primates and stolen pets but yet, “90 percent or more of the animals in research each year are mice, rats and other rodents.; cats, dogs, and other animals such as hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, primates, and farm animals collectively make up the small remaining percentage of animals.” (4) Stringent controls are in place by the federal government through the Animal Welfare Act and its amendments, in place since 1966 in order to keep animals welfare in mind and under supervision.

Both parties are for the overall care and well being of animals but the fine line which is crossed is the radical acts and extremist ideas of the Animal rights organizations. This argument can be met with understanding on each side; also met with haste and belligerence. The welfare of animals is the most important beyond each argument.

There is evidence that humans were thinking about the cognition of animals in the 17th century when Rene Descartes philosophized that animals had no thought (Regan, 2004). Since then more theories have been made about the cognition of animals. Many people now believe that animals possess “conscious awareness” (Regan, 2004, pg. 2). This in return suggests that animals can feel pain, think, plan, and possibly have feelings. With modern research we can observe deeper into the consciousness of animals. With the field of consciousness research rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for non-human animal research have been developed. Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals. The University of Cambridge has exceeded in cognition quoting “ Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots.” (Phillips, 2012) Thus, also showing signs of emotional networks just as humans. The ability to self-recognize is the presence of consciousness and cognition working together as the University of Cambridge has been able to see that “Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.”(Phillips 2012)

To measure awareness is similar to human research basic tasks are evaluated by how well you are able to complete. “Include an examination of perception, learning, categorization, memory, spatial cognition, numerosity, communication, language, social cognition, theory of mind or mindreading, causal reasoning, and metacognition.” (Andrews, 2016)

So, the question poses; if animals are self-aware should we give them more rights? The idea of animal rights vs. animal welfare is a larger portion of the problem. The idea that there are two sides to consider when all in all they are fighting for animals lives in general. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration.

The thing is different people have different concepts of what being an animal lover is. The idea that there are two sides to consider when all in all they are fighting for animals lives in general. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration. The thing is different people have different concept so what being an animal lover is often confronted with whether they are on the animal rights spectrum of just for general welfare of the animal. Emphasizing that animal rights is not proponent in the use of animals at all; including pet ownership. For a example a zoo had a polar bear die unexpectedly after giving birth. Animal welfare groups were to interfere and take on the cub to ensure its life was safe and to attend to its needs; Animal rights had the input to leave the cub as is and not interfere. Animal rights would rather see animals die in “freedom” rather than in captivity in any means.

This grey area is often construed with interchanging terminology. Where is the line drawn between the ideas of animals rights and animal welfare in real life situations rather than idealistic fantasies of the rights groups.

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Sample Essays

Animal Rights Essay

This IELTS animal rights essay discusses the exploitation of animals by humans.

People who believe in animal rights think that they should not be treated cruelly, for example in experiments or for sport.

'To exploit' means to benefit from something in an unfair way. Take a look at the question:

A growing number of people feel that animals should not be exploited by people and that they should have the same rights as humans, while others argue that humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Discussing 'Two Opinions'

Animals should not be exploited by people and they should have the same rights as humans. Humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

In this essay you are being given two opposing opinions to discuss.

This is the first opinion:

Animals should not be exploited by people and they should have the same rights as humans.

This is the second opinion:

Humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

In this type of essay, you must look at both sides. In other words you need to discuss the arguments FOR animal rights and AGAINST .

You must also ensure you give YOUR opinion.

Organising the Essay

One way to organize an essay like this is to consider both opinions, then give your opinion in a final paragraph ( see this example ) or dedicate a whole final paragraph to your opinion ( see this example ).

Another way to write an essay like this is to also make one of the 'for' or 'against' opinions your opinion as well.

Look at the model animal rights essay below. The second body paragraph discusses the first opinion, but the topic sentence makes it clear that this paragraph is also representing the writers opinion as well:

However, I do not believe these arguments stand up to scrutiny.

This now means that in two body paragraphs you have covered all three parts of the question from the animal rights essay:

1. First opinion 2. Second opinion 3. Your opinion

The advantage of doing it this way rather than having a separate paragraph is that you do not need to come up with new ideas for a new paragraph.

If you have a separate paragraph with your opinion you may find you cannot think of any new ideas or you may end up repeating the same things as in your previous paragraphs.

IELTS Writing Example

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

Animal Rights Essay - Model Answer

Animals have always been used by humans in some form to satisfy their needs. However, while some people believe that animals should be treated in the same way humans are and have similar rights, others think that it is more important to use them as we desire for food and medical research.

With regard to the exploitation of animals, people believe it is acceptable for several reasons. Firstly, they think that humans are the most important beings on the planet, and everything must be done to ensure human survival. If this means experimenting on animals so that we can fight and find cures for diseases, then this takes priority over animal suffering. Furthermore, it is believed by some that animals do not feel pain or loss as humans do, so if we have to kill animals for food or other uses, then this is morally acceptable.

However, I do not believe these arguments stand up to scrutiny. To begin, it has been shown on numerous occasions by secret filming in laboratories via animal rights groups that animals feel as much pain as humans do, and they suffer when they are kept in cages for long periods. In addition, a substantial amount of animal research is done for cosmetics, not to find cures for diseases, so this is unnecessary. Finally, it has also been proven that humans can get all the nutrients and vitamins that they need from green vegetables and fruit. Therefore, again, having to kill animals for food is not an adequate argument.

To sum up, although some people argue killing animals for research and food is ethical, I would argue there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this is not the case, and, therefore, steps must be taken to improve the rights of animals.

(Words 290)

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11 Pros and Cons of Animal Rights

According to the laws of most nations, animals are covered under property rights. That means the value of their life is dependent upon market forces and demand. If something happens to a pet, unless there is cruelty in the actions taken, the responsibility involves replacing the “property” of that pet instead of addressing a fundamental right of life.

For that reason, some nations and jurisdictions have begun to protect the rights of animals as living beings instead of as property. Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom have overhauled many of their laws to provide better protections for animals so that their welfare can be guaranteed.

The primary benefit of giving animals rights is to protect the general welfare of society. Not only are animals living creatures, but people who take their fury out on an animal are just a few steps away from doing so to humans. By identifying people who take these actions early, the rest of society can be protected while the individual in question can be entered into a rehabilitation program.

The disadvantage with animal rights is that it equates animal life with human life. With much of our diet coming from animal muscle protein, such a legal structure would change the entire agricultural community and potentially create many more food deserts throughout the world.

Here are some additional facts to consider when looking at the pros and cons of animal rights.

What Are the Pros of Animal Rights?

1. The death of an animal doesn’t really benefit a human. Humans may eat animals, but animal protein isn’t necessary for human survival. Vegetarians and vegans prove this every day. If we kill animals, then we create a gap in nature’s evolutionary process that can affect the rest of the world. Sustainable food approaches, when combined with a greater respect for human life, could create a healthier society.

2. Saving animal lives would save our water supply. Animals have a large water footprint. It is one of the most resource-intensive items in our current food supply. To produce just 1 pound of beef requires almost 1,800 gallons of water. One pound of pork requires nearly 600 gallons of water. In comparison, producing an equivalent number of soybeans or corn would cost 216 gallons and 108 gallons respectively.

3. Animal testing is not a guarantee of safety. The number of medications that are safe for animals to take, but unsafe for humans, could fill a list the length of your arm. There are also a handful of medications that are safe for humans to take, but are quite harmful to animals. Although there is a similarity between humans and certain animals, there are enough differences that make the data gathered become unreliable.

4. Preventing animal rights is a costly venture. Many of the animal testing procedures that are initiated never result in a product and the figures continue to rise. In the 1990s, up to 92% of products that were tested on animals never made it to market. By the 2010s, the figure rose to over 98%. These tests all come at a cost and that money needs to come from somewhere.

5. Animals have a certain intelligence to them. Chimpanzees have the same ability as humans to manipulate their environment, use tools, and finish specific tasks. An adult pig has a comparative intelligence to a 3-year-old human child. Dolphins have a complex language and can recognize themselves in the mirror, which proves self-awareness. Elephants have complex social groups, display empathy and grief, and have an outstanding memory. If we saw many of these traits in humans, we’d expect that person to have rights. Why should an animal be any different?

6. Allotted funds could be used elsewhere. Money that is being spent on animal testing right now could be dedicated to food programs that feed the hungry. Most food programs around the world can average $0.20 per meal provided. In the United States, about $16 billion is spent every year on animal testing. If just half of those funds were sent to food programs, that would create 40 billion extra meals to feed the hungry.

What Are the Cons of Animal Rights?

1. It would change medication testing processes. Many of the research projects which involve new medications test the products on animals before testing them on humans. The goal of doing so is to protect human lives by seeing how a medication would react. Some animals, such as rats and chimpanzees, have a DNA profile that is very similar to humans. The data gathered can help researchers understand more about the medication they’re working on to benefit human societies.

2. We need to test new items on something. It is unethical to try experimental products of humans. Some could argue that it is immoral. Even with informed consent, research that causes harm to a person may not be classified as being beneficial to society. By using animals as a last line of defense to measure the effectiveness of various products, the harm that an untested and dangerous item can cause to humans is naturally limited.

3. Not having animal rights reduces human risks. Although there are honest questions about the effectiveness of animal testing, it boils down to an us vs. them debate. Having an animal die because there are unforeseen consequences of a drug or product means a human being doesn’t need to die. In the chain of life, human life is superior to animal life, which some argue makes the sacrifice worthwhile.

4. There would be added enforcement costs. By offering animals rights that are equivalent to the rights of humans, an extra layer of law enforcement would need to be added to our criminal justice systems. People would be spending more time in prison because of charges related to the new rights afforded to animals. Added officers and officials would be needed for enforcement. Since existing laws often afford many rights to animals already in terms of proper treatment, spending this extra cost to provide equivalence may not be the right choice to make.

5. Animals would require a human representative. Our current legal system recognizes the advancements of humanity. To represent animal rights, a human being would be forced to represent an animal who may have had their rights violated. Although some cases show clear-cut evidence of abuse or neglect, there would be an added level of interpretation to some cases that could make animal rights be more about “getting even” with others rather than be a true case of seeking justice.

The pros and cons of animal rights should cause us to question our belief structures. How we treat animals is a reflection of how we treat others. Giving animals more protections under the laws that govern property may make sense, but giving animals an equivalency may not. There is no easy answer or compromise to this debate.

Essay on Animal Rights

Students are often asked to write an essay on Animal Rights in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Animal Rights

Understanding animal rights.

Animal rights mean animals should be free from human harm, abuse, or use for personal gains. It’s the belief that animals deserve to live their lives free from suffering and exploitation. This concept is based on the idea that animals have feelings and interests just like humans.

Importance of Animal Rights

Animal rights are important because animals are living beings. They feel pain, experience emotions, and want to live a life free from harm. By respecting animal rights, we show our respect for all life forms. We also help maintain balance in nature.

Threats to Animal Rights

Animals face many threats. These include hunting, habitat loss, and cruel treatment in farms or circuses. Many animals are also used for scientific experiments. These practices cause pain and suffering to animals. They are clear violations of animal rights.

Steps to Protect Animal Rights

We can protect animal rights in many ways. We can adopt pets instead of buying them. We can avoid products tested on animals. We can also support organizations that work for animal rights. Teaching others about animal rights is another effective way to help.

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250 Words Essay on Animal Rights

What are animal rights.

Animal rights mean that animals deserve to live free from suffering, pain, and exploitation. This idea is based on the belief that animals have feelings too. They can feel joy, sadness, and pain just like us humans. So, they should be treated with kindness and respect.

Why are Animal Rights Important?

Animal rights are important for many reasons. Firstly, animals are living beings, not objects. They should not be used for our selfish needs like food, clothing, or entertainment. Secondly, respecting animal rights helps us become better humans. It teaches us values like compassion, empathy, and respect for all life. Lastly, animals play a crucial role in our ecosystem. If we harm them, it can disturb the balance of nature.

How can we Protect Animal Rights?

Protecting animal rights is not hard. We can start by being kind to animals. We should not hurt them or make them suffer. We can also stop using products that are tested on animals. Many companies test their products on animals, causing them pain and suffering. By refusing to buy such products, we can stand up for animal rights.

Role of Laws in Protecting Animal Rights

Many countries have laws to protect animal rights. These laws make it illegal to harm animals or use them in cruel ways. But, these laws are not always followed. So, it’s important for us to raise our voice against animal cruelty. We can report cases of animal abuse to the authorities and demand strict action.

500 Words Essay on Animal Rights

Animal rights mean that animals deserve certain kinds of consideration—what’s best for them. Regardless of how useful they are to humans, or how cute they are, they should be treated with respect. They should not be hurt or treated badly. Some people think animals should have the same rights as humans, while others believe they should have different rights.

Animal rights are important because animals are living beings. They can feel pain, they can suffer, and they have a will to live. Just like humans, they have feelings and emotions. They deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. Animal rights also help people. When we treat animals well, we also learn to treat people well.

Types of Animal Rights

There are two main types of animal rights. The first type is called ‘animal welfare’. This means that people should make sure animals are treated well. They should have good food, a nice place to live, and should not be hurt or made to suffer.

The second type is ‘animal liberation’. This means that animals should be free and not used by humans at all. People who believe in animal liberation think that animals should not be kept in zoos or farms, used for testing, or used for entertainment.

Animal Rights and Laws

Many countries have laws to protect animals. These laws say that people cannot hurt animals or make them suffer. They also say that animals should be treated with respect. But, not all countries have these laws, and in many places, these laws are not followed.

Animal Rights Movements

What can we do.

There are many ways we can help animals and support animal rights. We can adopt pets instead of buying them. We can choose not to go to places that use animals for entertainment, like circuses and zoos. We can eat less meat or no meat at all. And, we can tell others about why animal rights are important.

In conclusion, animal rights are about respecting and caring for animals. They are about understanding that animals have feelings and deserve to be treated well. By supporting animal rights, we are not just helping animals, we are also making the world a better place for all living beings.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Arguments for Animal Rights Research Paper

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Introduction

Arguments for animal rights, conclusion and recommendations, works cited.

For a long time, many human societies have viewed animals as sources of food, labor, and clothing. This view (partly) stems from religious influences, which define people’s perceptions of animal rights. For example, Christian teachings show that God gave man the power to control all animals (on land and in the sea). Therefore, many Christian societies know that human beings are superior to animals.

Philosophers, such as Aristotle, also supported the above-mentioned religious arguments by ranking animals in the lowest cadre of living things (Taylor 36). Although the Greek philosopher explored the differences and similarities between both species, he said animals were a “lower-stature” species (compared to human beings) because they could not reason, think, or have beliefs, as people do (Taylor 36). These ancient perceptions of animals largely explain the background of animal rights debates. They also explain how different societies treat animals today.

Relative to how people treat animals, Singera (13) says, in 2001, North American farmers raised and killed about 17 billion land animals for human consumption. Scientists in America and Europe killed another 100 million animals for experimental purposes (Singera 13). People killed about 30 million more land animals for their fur (Singera 13).

Most of these animals lived and died in morally repugnant circumstances. Such “inhuman” treatments continue unabated because many societies believe animals do not have any rights. This paper seeks to change this narrative by focusing on pets and arguing for their rights. Although it explores critics’ arguments too, it shows that, like human beings, pets are emotional creatures and not property items, as many people would like to believe. Therefore, it is immoral to mistreat them.

Pets can feel Emotion and Pain as People do

Singera (1) is widely considered as the greatest pioneer of animal rights. He said human beings do not have a special status above other animals. For him, the degree that both species experience when feeling pleasure or pain is the only difference between animals and human beings. Since both groups have a threshold of pain, Singera (1) does not understand why people do not protect animals the same way they protect their offspring. Here, Singera (1) strives to eliminate the differences between animals and human beings to advance animal rights.

Linker (9) supports this view by saying, “Once the dividing line between humans and animals disappears, it is hard to uphold any fundamental ethical distinction between them.” Steve Wise, an American Law Professor (cited in Linker 9), similarly advances the above argument by using a different justification for supporting animal rights. Instead of using shared pain and pleasure to show the similarities between people and animals, he strives to elevate animals to human status. For example, he criticizes people who view animals as property because he believes animals could reason as human beings do.

For example, he says Chimpanzees have this ability (Linker 9). He uses this argument to say their reasoning ability makes them more valuable than other types of property. Therefore, he believes animals share the same dignity as people do. Referring to Wise’s argument, Linker (12) says, “if he can demonstrate that certain higher animals possess the same intrinsic dignity that human beings do, the law within liberal democracies will be obliged to recognize that such animals are persons possessing at least some fundamental, inviolable rights.”

The above arguments show no significant differences between people and animals. In terms of shared emotion and pain, Singerb (11) says scientists infer almost all human physiological pain manifestations on other species. He particularly draws our attention to animals that are close to us – mammals and birds. He says, “Their behavioral signs include writhing, facial contortions, moaning, yelping, or other forms of calling, attempts to avoid the source of pain, appearance of fear at the prospect of its repetition, and so on” (Singerb 11).

Indeed, like how human beings behave (when they feel pain) animals show the same physiological symptoms of pain, such as dilated pupils, increased pulse rates, and increased blood pressure. To explain this commonality, Grandin (141) says both species have similar nervous systems. In line with this argument, Singerb (11) emphasizes that the nervous systems of animals evolved the same way the nervous systems of human beings did. Their ability to feel pain is part of their survival tactics because they use it to avoid injury and death.

Grandin (141) says animals also experience fear, the same way human beings do. Certainly, although fear is subjective, it causes significant stress to animals. This is why advocates of animal rights say they need environmental enrichments to prevent them from developing irregular developmental patterns, such as EEG patterns (Grandin 141). Relative to this argument, Grandin (141) says people’s nervous systems do not differ with that of higher animals. For example, scientific evidence shows that the nervous systems of chimpanzees, dogs, and cows are like that of human beings (Grandin 141).

The genome project also supports the same finding by showing that people’s gene make-up is like a mouse’s gene makeup (Grandin 141). Relative to this fact, Grandin (141) says mammals have more than 30% of their genes designed to serve nervous system functions. These similarities explain why some animals adopt human-like behaviors, such as self-medication. For example, studies have shown that rats self-medicate when they suffer from arthritis (Grandin 141). Besides these behavioral similarities, animals are as social as human beings are (Grandin 142).

Although some people may not support these facts, scientific evidence suggests that most animals perceive pain the same way human beings do. Governments have used this evidence to protect animal rights in many parts of the world. For example, three separate government committees (on animal welfare), in the UK, affirm that most animals feel pain (Singerb 13). However, Grandin (140) says we need more research to explain the extent that these animals experience the pain.

Animals are not Property

Taylor (36) says until the early 1900s, many people saw animals as worthless creatures. In fact, many societies could not accord a “property status” to them because of spite (Taylor 36). Therefore, the law permitted people to steal and kill animals without any consequences. The abolition approach has strived to change people’s perception of animals (as property).

It says that focusing on animal welfare distracts people from eliminating property rights on animal ownership (Grandin 140). Instead, the theory proposes a moral and legal paradigm shift, which strives to differentiate animals from other types of property (Grandin 140). To do so, the abolitionist approach encourages people to perceive animals as sentient creatures (having subjective awareness).

Proponents of this view say they do not need human-like rationalities to receive better treatment from people (Grandin 140). Therefore, since they are creatures that experience pain, they should belong to the moral community. This view differs with the animal rights view, which (only) supports the better treatment of human-like animals, such as apes, because their DNA make-up is more like human beings than other animals. As such, they say all animals are the same (Grandin 140). They also oppose treating animals as human property (merely) because they do not fit our conventional perceptions of property (Taylor 36).

Grandin (140) takes a more practical approach in elaborating the above point by comparing an animal and a screwdriver. He says that although many societies perceive them as property, they are different. To elaborate this point, he uses the US legal system and culture by highlighting how the law allows American citizens to sell, profit, and “eat” their property (among other utilities) (Grandin 140). Although property holders could do the above things, the law restricts them from committing the same acts on animals (the same restrictions do not apply to other properties).

For example, law enforcement officials could arrest a person for using a screwdriver to puncture a cow’s eye. However, they would not penalize the offender for using a hammer to deform a screwdriver. Based on this understanding, the status of animals has slowly changed, in America, because the law now recognizes animal rights. For example, all 50 states have introduced anti-cruelty laws that protect animals from mistreatment (Grimm 3). These laws allow judges to impose fines of up to $125,000, or a jail term of ten years on offenders (Grimm 4).

Similarly, many existing legislations support animal rights (such as the Federal Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, which requires rescue services to save animals, as they would rescue a human being) (Grimm 3). This trend has equally seen many judges treat dogs as people (some judges even allow dogs to have lawyers).

Consequently, some animals have received damages from the judges (Grimm 3). Other types of “property” do not receive the same status. Using the above examples, Grandin (140) supports the views of animal rights advocates who say animals need rights because they feel pain (a goat can feel pain, but a screwdriver cannot).

It is Immoral to Mistreat Animals

Although many researchers have used different criteria to explain the differences between man and animals, few have bothered to explain man’s higher reasoning that allows them to act ethically. Indeed, unlike many animals, human beings can understand the differences between right and wrong. Based on this higher level of reasoning, people can understand that it is wrong to mistreat animals because they do not have rights.

This argument stems from the immoral and heinous acts that some people do to animals and people alike. Here, it is irrelevant to distinguish between animals and human beings because inflicting pain on another animal is wrong (human beings are animals too). People who do so diminish the moral authority that human beings have on other species.

The utilitarian view condemns how people treat and use animals. This theory says people should evaluate the net use of animals (to human beings) and adopt strategies that lead to the overall net satisfaction of animal and human interests (Singerb 14). Relative to this view, the utilitarian view urges people to “act in such a way as to maximize the expected satisfaction of interests in the world, equally considered” (Singerb 14).

When we apply this theory to animal treatment, it encourages people to imagine themselves in conditions that the animals live and, afterwards, take the best course of action. Using a welfare approach, the theory argues that all people should treat animals in a “humane” way and avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on them. In line with this argument, Singera (1) says it is important for people to take animal rights seriously because species-bias (the justification that most people use to mistreat animals) is like racism and other social practices that many societies dislike.

He also believes that most people who oppose animal rights do so because they rely on invariable animal defects, like their lack of language skills, or advanced cognitive skills, to mistreat animals (Singerb 14). On the other side, the same people do not perceive mentally incapacitated human beings (who cannot talk or profess the same advanced cognitive skills as other people do) as animals. Based on this analysis, Francione (3) says species-bias is the only justification that most people use to exploit animals. However, this reasoning is unjust.

Arguments Against

Many people have used the utilitarian view to support animal rights. However, this view has significant weaknesses that undermine its applicability to animal rights. For example, proponents of these rights say animals have feelings, the way human beings do (Singerb 14). However, Nordin (2) questions the criterion that such people use to measure these feelings (no one has ever been a dog or a cat).

Stated differently, people have used physiological variations in a dog’s behavior to advance the view that they experience pain or emotion, but how do people know how much pain it is feeling? For example, is it correct to assume that a whimpering dog experiences the same pain as a human baby crying? Similarly, it is difficult to draw the same inferences about a dog’s pain to a whale, frog, or another animal. Therefore, many critics question whether animals could express the same emotions as grief, melancholy, and a deep interest in life, as human beings do.

Machan (1) is among groups of researchers who do not understand why animals should have the same rights as people do. Particularly, they say it is a mistake for the government to entrench animal rights in law. For example, they believe that those people who support animal rights should persuade other people to join their cause, as opposed to forcing them to do so, legally (Machan 1).

Stated differently, Machan (2) says if advocates of animal rights do not support killing animals for their fur, they should persuade people to stop buying coats, or other animal products, and not ban the use of the animal product. Again, this argument stems from the belief that no animal enjoys the same basic rights as people do. As shown above, Machan (3) believes that all people should start perceiving this matter as an ethical issue, as opposed to a legal issue. He says people can empathize with the pain that other people feel, but animals cannot.

Therefore, he opposes the views of animal rights advocates, such as Singerb (14). He argues that if animals could empathize with the pain of other animals, people should hold them to the same accountability standards as human beings do (Machan 3). For example, animals should punish other animals for killing and maiming their kind.

Since this suggestion is impractical, Machan (3) says animal advocates have misguided views. However, he defines this issue as a philosophical one (category mistake) because advocates of animal rights strive to impose their hopes and dreams on animals, using human perceptions about life. Overall, although these arguments largely describe the views of many animal right critics, they do not legitimize the inhumane treatment of animals.

The abolitionist and utilitarian views are sympathetic to animal causes. They differ from classical animal welfare views, which do not have a high regard for the creatures, or their rights. Nonetheless, this paper shows that all animals should have the same rights as human beings do because they experience, pain, fear, and emotions. Similarly, animals are not like other types of property because they are human-like. Based on these arguments alone, it is immoral to mistreat animals and cause unnecessary pain to them.

Proponents of animal rights advance the above views. However, their thoughts are not theories of animal rights; instead, they are moral judgments of human actions on animals. Such ideas come from the consequences of what we perceive as right or wrong. For example, if a person violated the right of a person, or an animal, because it produced more good than bad, the law should not punish him. Based on the findings of this research, the “good” includes giving animals the same rights as people do.

Francione, Gary. Animal Rights Theory and Utilitarianism: Relative Normative Guidance. September. 2003. PDF file.

Grandin, Temple. Animals Are Not Things: A View on Animal Welfare Based on Neurological, Complexity . 2014. PDF file.

Grimm, David. Should Pets Have the Same Legal Rights as People? 2014.

Linker, Damon. No, Animals Don’t Have Rights . 2014.

Machan, Tibor. Animals Do Not Have Rights . 2014.

Nordin, Ingemar. Animals Don’t Have Rights: A Philosophical Study . 2001. PDF file.

Singera, Peter. In Defense of Animals , Malded, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Print.

Singerb, Peter. Animal Liberation , New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002. Print.

Taylor, Angus. Animals and Ethics , New York, NY: Broadview Press, 2009. Print.

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Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago

Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact

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Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-warnings-from-democrats-about-project-2025-and-donald-trump

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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Trump’s Latest Abortion Comments Expose the Bind He’s In

This week, Donald Trump gave his clearest answer to date about whether he would enforce the Comstock Act, a 19 th -century obscenity law, as an abortion ban. In truth, Trump’s answer was anything but clear: He suggested that “specifics” remained to be determined, but that he “generally” wouldn’t enforce the Comstock Act against abortion pills, whatever that means. This was played up in mainstream media as Trump rejecting the use of Comstock Act as a de facto national abortion ban. They should not have gone so far.

Trump’s statement wasn’t actually all that new: Trump has spent the election season giving muddy answers in the hope of keeping antiabortion voters close without alienating everyone else. But Trump’s latest interview has infuriated key anti-abortion supporters , in the process revealing a major mistake made by conservatives in the aftermath of Dobbs . Abortion opponents were so sure of their chances of continuing to win before a conservative Supreme Court that they unveiled a disastrously unpopular Comstock strategy before an election year. As reaction to the CBS interview suggests, conservatives’ overconfidence might have created a trap that Trump will have trouble getting out of.

The idea for Comstock revival came from Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general, and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, the team behind Texas’s S.B. 8 bounty law, which allows anyone to sue an abortion provider or someone aiding them for at least $10,000 . Mitchell and Dickson’s objective was to find a way to bring about an abortion ban that could succeed before the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, not to win an election.

That’s where the Comstock Act came in. It was clear that Americans didn’t want a sweeping national ban on abortion. It seemed improbable that Congress would have a large enough Republican majority to pass one in the near term, or that Republicans would prioritize such a move given how unpopular such bans had become.

Mitchell and Dickson argued that there was no need for new legislation because the Comstock Act already was a national ban . The two pointed to language in the statute referring to items or information related to items designed, intended, or adapted for abortion, arguing that the Comstock Act made it a crime to mail or receive abortion drugs or paraphernalia. They contended that the law operated as a de facto ban on all abortions because no procedure in the United States takes place without items shipped across state lines by drug or medical supply companies.

From the beginning, this strategy didn’t seem likely to be a political winner. Americans have become more supportive of abortion rights since Dobbs , with support at near-record highs . And as conservatives interpreted Comstock, it was even more extreme than state bans: lacking exceptions for rape, incest, or even the life of the patient, and applying to women and other abortion seekers. Nevertheless, prominent anti-abortion groups embraced it . So did J.D. Vance and a who’s who of congressional conservatives . Comstock became a cornerstone of Project 2025. A Comstock claim even figured centrally in the Supreme Court’s recent mifepristone case, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

All of that speaks to the overconfidence of abortion opponents in the wake of Dobbs. The movement recognized that its best path to victory was to rely on the federal courts and the executive branch because voters seemed irrevocably opposed to anti-abortion leaders’ priorities. And with Trump long leading Joe Biden in the polls, anti-abortion leaders were convinced their candidate would come out ahead. But publicly embracing Comstock because it didn’t require voter support might have been a step too far, especially now that Kamala Harris has replaced the unpopular Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Trump’s campaign was well aware that it wouldn’t do him any favors to embrace Comstock. At the same time, clearly rejecting a Comstock strategy seemed likely to alienate anti-abortion voters already unsure of Trump’s commitment to their cause. Trump tried to thread the needle by avoiding the subject. He went months without saying anything, then promised Time magazine a policy statement on Comstock that never appeared. Most recently, in speaking to CBS, Trump tried the same tactic again. He answered the question but hardly offered any clarity. What does it mean to “generally” avoid Comstock enforcement? That only some doctors or drug companies or patients would be prosecuted? Which specifics remain to be worked out?

With Biden at the top of the ticket, Trump’s efforts to confuse the electorate seemed to benefit him. But now, it looks like Trump might end up with the worst of all possible outcomes. His latest comments were roundly criticized by anti-abortion leaders—including some who had defended Trump in the past.

It would be one thing if Trump were winning over swing voters, especially women, by angering anti-abortion conservatives, but it’s not clear that’s what’s happening. The gender gap—the difference in the stated voting intentions of male and female voters—seems to be at an all-time high. Whatever Trump’s potential appeal to swing voters, it’s likely not his honesty. Given his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, voters may simply not believe his faint-hearted denials about Comstock. At the same time, anti-abortion leaders have grown fed up with what they feel is Trump’s cowardice.

For the moment, abortion opponents’ overconfidence seems to be helping Kamala Harris. But in the longer term, the effects of Trump’s possible backpedaling on Comstock won’t be as straightforward. Jonathan Mitchell famously told Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times that he hoped that anti-abortion groups would “keep their mouths shut as much as possible until after the election .” In some ways, that was the opposite of what happened.

If Trump doesn’t win—or even if he prevails and doesn’t enforce Comstock as strictly as abortion opponents hope—the lesson may well be that Mitchell was right. Publicly detailing plans for Comstock enforcement, like making Project 2025 broadly available, has created an opening for public exposure and criticism.

Since Dobbs , abortion opponents have looked for ways to win without the support of voters. Now, they may be incentivized to hide their plans altogether until well after the election ends.

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They can think, feel pain, love. isn’t it time animals had rights.

Martha Nussbaum lays out ethical, legal case in new book

Martha Nussbaum

Excerpted from “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility” by Martha C. Nussbaum, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’75

Animals are in trouble all over the world. Our world is dominated by humans everywhere: on land, in the seas, and in the air. No non-human animal escapes human domination. Much of the time, that domination inflicts wrongful injury on animals: whether through the barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry, through poaching and game hunting, through habitat destruction, through pollution of the air and the seas, or through neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love.

In a way, this problem is age-old. Both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions have deplored human cruelty to animals for around two millennia. The Hindu emperor Ashoka (c. 304–232 bce), a convert to Buddhism, wrote about his efforts to give up meat and to forgo all practices that harmed animals. In Greece the Platonist philosophers Plutarch (46–119 ce) and Porphyry (c. 234–305 ce) wrote detailed treatises deploring human cruelty to animals, describing their keen intelligence and their capacity for social life, and urging humans to change their diet and their way of life. But by and large these voices have fallen on deaf ears, even in the supposedly moral realm of the philosophers, and most humans have continued to treat most animals like objects, whose suffering does not matter — although they sometimes make an exception for companion animals. Meanwhile, countless animals have suffered cruelty, deprivation, and neglect.

Cover of For Animals by Martha Nussbaum.

Because the reach of human cruelty has expanded, so too has the involvement of virtually all people in it. Even people who do not consume meat produced by the factory farming industry are likely to have used single-use plastic items, to use fossil fuels mined beneath the ocean and polluting the air, to dwell in areas in which elephants and bears once roamed, or to live in high-rise buildings that spell death for migratory birds. The extent of our own implication in practices that harm animals should make every person with a conscience consider what we can all do to change this situation. Pinning guilt is less important than accepting the fact that humanity as a whole has a collective duty to face and solve these problems.

So far, I have not spoken of the extinction of animal species, because this is a book about loss and deprivation suffered by individual creatures, each of whom matters. Species as such do not suffer loss. However, extinction never takes place without massive suffering of individual creatures: the hunger of a polar bear, starving on an ice floe, unable to cross the sea to hunt; the sadness of an orphan elephant, deprived of care and community as the species dwindles rapidly; the mass extinctions of song-bird species as a result of unbreathable air, a horrible death. When human practices hound species toward extinction, member animals always suffer greatly and live squashed and thwarted lives. Besides, the species themselves matter for creating diverse ecosystems in which animals can live well.

Extinctions would take place even without human intervention. Even in such cases we might have reasons to intervene to stop them, because of the importance of biodiversity. But scientists agree that today’s extinctions are between one thousand and ten thousand times higher than the natural extinction rate. (Our uncertainty is huge, because we are very ignorant of how many species there actually are, particularly where fish and insects are concerned.) Worldwide, approximately one-quarter of the world’s mammals and over 40 percent of amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. These include several species of bear, the Asian elephant (endangered), the African elephant (threatened), the tiger, six species of whale, the gray wolf, and so many more. All in all, more than 370 animal species are either endangered or threatened, using the criteria of the US Endangered Species Act, not including birds, and a separate list of similar length for birds. Asian songbirds are virtually extinct in the wild, on account of the lucrative trade in these luxury items. And many other species of birds have recently become extinct. Meanwhile, the international treaty called CITES that is supposed to protect birds (and many other creatures) is toothless and unenforced. The story of this book is not that story of mass extinction, but the sufferings of individual creatures that take place against this background of human indifference to biodiversity.

“The extent of our own implication in practices that harm animals should make every person with a conscience consider what we can all do to change this situation.”

There is a further reason why the ethical evasion of the past must end now. Today we know far more about animal lives than we did even 50 years ago. We know much too much for the glib excuses of the past to be offered without shame. Porphyry and Plutarch (and Aristotle before them) knew a lot about animal intelligence and sensitivity. But somehow humans find ways of “forgetting” what the science of the past has plainly revealed, and for many centuries most people, including most philosophers, thought animals were “brute beasts,” automata without a subjective sense of the world, without emotions, without society, and perhaps even without the feeling of pain.

Recent decades, however, have seen an explosion of high-level research covering all areas of the animal world. We now know more not only about animals long closely studied — primates and companion animals — but also about animals who are difficult to study — marine mammals, whales, fish, birds, reptiles, and cephalopods.

We know — not just by observation, but by carefully designed experimental work — that all vertebrates and many invertebrates feel pain subjectively, and have, more generally, a subjectively felt view of the world: the world looks like something to them. We know that all of these animals experience at least some emotions (fear being the most ubiquitous), and that many experience emotions like compassion and grief that involve more complex “takes” on a situation. We know that animals as different as dolphins and crows can solve complicated problems and learn to use tools to solve them. We know that animals have complex forms of social organization and social behavior. More recently, we have been learning that these social groups are not simply places where a rote inherited repertory is acted out, but places of complicated social learning. Species as different as whales, dogs, and many types of birds clearly transmit key parts of the species’ repertoire to their young socially, not just genetically.

What are the implications of this research for ethics? Huge, clearly. We can no longer draw the usual line between our own species and “the beasts,” a line meant to distinguish intelligence, emotion, and sentience from the dense life of a “brute beast.” Nor can we even draw a line between a group of animals we already recognize as sort of “like us” — apes, elephants, whales, dogs — and others who are supposed to be unintelligent. Intelligence takes multiple and fascinating forms in the real world, and birds, evolving by a very different path from humans, have converged on many similar abilities. Even an invertebrate such as the octopus has surprising capacities for intelligent perception: an octopus can recognize individual humans, and can solve complex problems, guiding one of its arms through a maze to obtain food using only its eyes. Once we recognize all this we can hardly be unchanged in our ethical thinking. To put a “brute beast” in a cage seems no more wrong than putting a rock in a terrarium. But that is not what we are doing. We are deforming the existence of intelligent and complexly sentient forms of life. Each of these animals strives for a flourishing life, and each has abilities, social and individual, that equip it to negotiate a decent life in a world that gives animals difficult challenges. What humans are doing is to thwart this striving — and this seems wrong.

But even though the time has come to recognize our ethical responsibility to the other animals, we have few intellectual tools to effect meaningful change. The third reason why we must confront what we are doing to animals now, today, is that we have built a world in which two of humanity’s best tools for progress, law and political theory, have, so far, no or little help to offer us. Law — both domestic and international — has quite a lot to say about the lives of companion animals, but very little to say about any other animals. Nor do animals in most nations have what lawyers call “standing”: that is, the status to bring a legal claim if they are wronged. Of course, animals cannot themselves bring a legal claim, but neither can most humans, including children, people with cognitive disabilities — and, to tell the truth, almost everybody, since people have little knowledge of the law. All of us need a lawyer to press our claims. But all the humans I have mentioned — including people with lifelong cognitive disabilities — count, and can bring a legal claim, assisted by an able advocate. The way we have designed the world’s legal systems, animals do not have this simple privilege. They do not count.

Law is built by humans using the theories they have. When those theories were racist, laws were racist. When theories of sex and gender excluded women, so too did law. And there is no denying that most political thought by humans the world over has been human-centered, excluding animals. Even the theories that purport to offer help in the struggle against abuse are deeply defective, built on an inadequate picture of animal lives and animal striving. As a philosopher and political theorist who is also deeply immersed in law and law teaching, I hope to change things with this book.

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Good genes are nice, but joy is better

Harvard study, almost 80 years old, has proved that embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier

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Researchers outline path to lower risk of depression

Harris Promises to Chart ‘New Way Forward’ as She Accepts Nomination

Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a searing rebuke of former President Donald J. Trump, casting him as a threat to democracy, global stability and women’s rights.

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Harris Accepts Democratic Nomination

Vice president kamala harris ceremonially accepted the democratic party’s nomination for president on thursday..

[playing “Freedom.”] Thank you all. Crowd chanting: “U.S.A.” My entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people. On behalf of everyone who’s story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth. I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America. Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward. Let’s get out there. Let’s vote for it. And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told. [playing “Freedom.”]

By Katie Rogers and Reid J. Epstein

Reporting from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago

Aug. 22, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris used her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday to present herself as a pragmatic leader who could unite all Americans behind a “new way forward,” painting her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, as a dangerous and “unserious man” whose election would alter the foundation of American democracy.

With a steady voice and a straightforward gaze, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, presented the lengthiest and most serious case she has made against Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate.

At each turn of the nearly 40-minute address, Ms. Harris warned that the former president’s truculent behavior belied a serious and substantive threat to Americans, whether they are seeking access to reproductive health care, concerned about the safety and stability of diplomatic relationships or worried about the flow of immigrants across the nation’s southern border.

“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” she said. “A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

Speaking to thousands of supporters at the United Center in Chicago, Ms. Harris acknowledged that her candidacy was not the one her party was expecting as little as a few weeks ago. But she told the crowd that she was “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” describing herself as the daughter of an Indian scientist whose dreams of a new life in the United States became the catalyst for Ms. Harris’s legal and political career. Her mother, she said wryly, taught her to “never do anything half-assed.”

Although she didn’t mention it, Ms. Harris’s nomination is barrier-breaking: She is the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to accept a major party’s nomination. If elected, she would be the first female president in the nation’s history.

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Republicans’ New, Dangerous Attempt to Break the Election

Even if the Supreme Court rejects this plea, the GOP will advance its cause of sowing doubt in the electoral process all the same.

Ballot about to be smashed by elephant foot

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 11:27 a.m. ET on August 26, 2024

Only months before November’s elections, the Republican National Committee has launched a new legal attack on the rules that govern federal elections. Supported by 24 states, the RNC is seeking, on an emergency basis, a Supreme Court ruling that the United States Congress lacks the constitutional authority to regulate presidential elections—congressional elections, yes, but not elections held to select presidents. The petitioners’ immediate goal is to allow the state of Arizona to impose a “proof of citizenship” requirement as a condition of a person’s right to vote for president.

If they are to succeed, the Court will have to suddenly, with mere weeks left before people start voting, abandon or explain away a decision it rendered in 2013—that Congress has the power to establish rules for voter registration in presidential elections. But even if the suit fails, it risks achieving some success in sowing doubt about the integrity of elections, highlighting claims of illegal voting by immigrants, and laying a foundation for post-election allegations of fraud and related legal challenges. (I have advised the national Democratic Party on this suit and have been further monitoring it as part of nonpartisan work to support election administrators in their preparation for the fall elections.)

The RNC target in this suit is a federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), enacted in 1993 to establish uniform, simplified, and nondiscriminatory rules for the registration of voters in federal elections. NVRA requires states to provide registration opportunities at their motor-vehicle departments and public-assistance agencies, and directed the adoption of procedures to keep voter rolls accurate and current. The law also mandated a federal voter-registration form that states must “accept and use.” The form requires an attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury and no further documentation.

Read: Should voter registration be automatic?

But in 2022, Arizona passed a law requiring its voters to submit , along with the federal form, documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC), such as a passport or a birth certificate. Under that law, Arizonans who register to vote with this form but do not provide DPOC would be barred from voting at all for president, and from voting by mail in any other election in the state. The state has never enforced the law, for one reason: In 2013, the Supreme Court had held that the NVRA preempted an earlier version of this requirement—constitutional-law-speak for not permitting the state to add its own DPOC mandate to the attestation called for by the federal form. This meant that the state could impose its own requirement only for state elections. Ever since then, only those Arizona voters who did not use the federal form to register were required by law to supply DPOC, but even this was not enforced.

With more than half the states in its corner, Arizona now argues in effect that the Supreme Court got it wrong, because, in its view, the Constitution confers on the states exclusive authority to regulate presidential elections. Congress can force the form without DPOC on the states for congressional elections only. The RNC and its allies claim as one source of authority the Constitution’s electors clause, which empowers states to establish the process for the appointment of presidential electors and, the petitioners argue, provides them with the broad authority they are seeking over the rules for registering in presidential elections. This reliance on the electors clause will be familiar to readers who followed the controversy over the so-called independent legislature doctrine, which in its most extreme articulation would somehow allow legislatures alleging “fraud” to disregard the popular vote for president and appoint their own preferred electors. In a 2022 case testing the boundaries of the clause, the Supreme Court did not move down that path .

The petitioners in the current case urge the Court to share their worry about undocumented immigrants voting illegally, and to recognize the urgency of giving states the constitutional latitude to deal with it. In their amicus brief, the 24 states allege that such voting is widespread: “The problem of non-citizen voting has gotten worse, as the number of aliens in the United States has undeniably grown.” These votes have been numerous enough, they assert, to have delivered victories to Democrats in states such as Minnesota and North Carolina, in both Senate and presidential elections. In the view of these petitioners, the states should be able to do something about it, and the Constitution does not allow the federal government to get in the way of laws like Arizona’s, specifically in presidential elections. (There is, in fact, no evidence of any such pervasive undocumented-immigrant voting, much less any kind of systematic voter fraud.)

The earlier 2013 decision is one hurdle that the RNC and its allies confront, but not the only one. The Court has made clear in other cases, as in those involving presidential campaign finance, that Congress does indeed have the power to regulate presidential elections: “Congress has the power to regulate Presidential elections and primaries,” the Court said in Buckley v. Valeo , affirming its position in the earlier case of Burroughs v. United States , that Congress can use that power to safeguard those elections from corruption.

The Court has also upheld Congress’s authority to lower the voting age in presidential elections, to prohibit disqualification of voters in presidential and vice-presidential elections for failure to meet state residency requirements, and to provide uniform national rules in those elections for absentee voting. Additional federal laws on the books for years protect against the coercion of voters in presidential elections and ensure that members of the armed forces and other overseas voters have access to the ballot.

NVRA rests on additional constitutional foundations. Congress’s power to regulate federal voter registration also derives from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments’ protections against racial discrimination. NVRA contains “findings” in support of its provisions, one of which is that “discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.”

And the RNC has a significant timing problem. Under the Purcell principle—the name of a relevant case decided in yet another Arizona election-law controversy—11th-hour legal maneuvers for changes in election laws are disfavored, in an effort to reduce the risk of “voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” Yet the RNC has shown up at the Supreme Court, less than three months prior to the next presidential election, to make a bold constitutional claim and to seek “emergency” action to enable it to enforce a law it passed two years ago.

In the meantime, thousands of Arizona voters have registered with the federal form without providing DPOC—because federal law does not require them to do so. A last-minute decision by the Court to allow Arizona to enforce its DPOC law could throw all of these registrations into question—the sort of chaos and confusion, seriously undermining the orderly administration of the election within months of the election, that the Court has counseled the judiciary to strive to avoid.

Read: The decision that could end voting rights

Faced with the unfavorable Court ruling in 2013, the RNC and its state supporters are well aware of the aggressive nature of their move. The states are calling for the Court to “overrule” or “cabin”—a legal term for “narrow”—that decision, from which Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. The RNC and its allies likely see them as candidates to revisit it. Justice Neil Gorsuch, too, has joined Thomas in stating concern over the “federalization” of state-court rulings in election-law cases. Here, then, are three possible votes. The petitioners might believe more are persuadable.

But winning in Court may not be all that the RNC hopes to gain. Even if they lose, the RNC and its co-litigants will be building a case for post-election claims of illegal voting—illegal noncitizen voting in particular. They’ll charge that the federal government under Democratic control will let it happen, because, as petitioners allege in their cited examples of Minnesota and North Carolina, Democrats will benefit. The RNC and its supporters will say that they did what they could, warning of the threat and appealing to the Court, and that they were defeated only by process—fealty to the Purcell principle. As a political calculation, perhaps it works either way: The courts can be their vehicle for messaging about illegal voting, win or lose.

A strategy to pursue political gamesmanship in the courts is also not incompatible with a longer-term legal strategy. The Court may reject the “emergency relief” in this new Arizona case, but the Justices may still take up this issue in due course. The RNC under Donald Trump’s leadership is seeding the election-law landscape with other claims that may have poor prospects of yielding immediate gain, and yet remain available for development and better success later. In two states, the RNC is bringing claims that states cannot process any mail-in ballots after midnight of Election Day, even if cast and received within the period specified by state law. It is apparently setting up these cases for Supreme Court review. And the “independent-state-legislature doctrine” is by no means gone for good.

The “ voting wars ,” as the legal scholar Richard L. Hasen has termed the legal battles over elections, appear certain to rage on. They have intensified under the pressures of election denialism and the grievances of a former president over an election he will not concede he lost. Now the Supreme Court will have to decide, whatever course this conflict takes in the years ahead, whether it will entertain novel and potentially destabilizing legal claims as election administrators complete their preparations for the fall, and the voting begins.

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100 Words Essay on Animal Rights Understanding Animal Rights. Animal rights mean animals should be free from human harm, abuse, or use for personal gains. ... So, it's important for us to raise our voice against animal cruelty. We can report cases of animal abuse to the authorities and demand strict action. In conclusion, animals have a right ...
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Singera (1) is widely considered as the greatest pioneer of animal rights. He said human beings do not have a special status above other animals. For him, the degree that both species experience when feeling pleasure or pain is the only difference between animals and human beings.
Essay competition
Essay Competition. The Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law organises an annual essay competition in the field of animal rights law. The aim of this competition is to encourage students to explore the fascinating questions that animals rights raise, and to discuss these questions in an original piece of writing that may inspire them to engage further with the topic in the future.
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Responses to Top Arguments Against Animal Rights

Lions Eat Animals

Animal Rights Is Extreme

Pets Will Become Extinct

They Want Eating Meat to Be Illegal

Vegans Kill Animals, Too

Animals Don't Think

They Do Not Have Duties

Plants Have Feelings, Too

Philosophical background

animal rights

Resources for Journalists

Sentient Media

Animal Rights: The Simple Idea That Sparked a Movement

Do Animals Have Rights?

What Are Animal Rights?

When Did the Animal Rights Movement Begin in the U.S.?

What’s the Difference Between Animal Welfare and Animal Rights?

What Are Some Examples of Animal Rights?

Animal Agriculture

Entertainment

Companionship and Working Animals

Animal Rights Arguments: Pros and Cons

Arguments in Favor of Animal Rights

Arguments Against Animal Rights

Why Are Animal Rights Important?

What Are the Consequences of Animal Rights?

Ending Suffering Wherever It Persists

VP Candidate Tim Walz Has Deep Connections to Agriculture and Conservation

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FBI Records Reveal Ironic Accusations Against Animal Activists

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The Best & Worst Countries for Animal Welfare Are Difficult to Measure

Why Eating Organic Isn’t a Climate Solution

On Organic Caviar Farms, Fish Still Suffer

How Bacon for Breakfast Became an American Staple

How the Amy’s Kitchen Boycott Worked, and What It Might Mean for Other Labor Organizers

Book Review: ‘Meet the Neighbors’ by Brandon Keim Compassionately Complicates the Narrative about Animals

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What Are Animal Rights & Why Should Animals Have Rights?

What Are Animal Rights?

Why Are Animals’ Rights Important?

How Are Animal Rights Violated?

The Difference Between Animal Welfare And Animal Rights?

Do Animals Need Rights?

Arguments In Favor Of Animal Rights

Arguments Against Animal Rights

The Consequences Of Animal Rights

Do Animals Have Legal Rights?

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Article Contents

Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

(i) Animal claim rights

(ii) Animal liberties

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

(i) Will theory

(ii) Interest theory

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws