essay against animal rights

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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.

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.

Copyright © 2022 by Martha Nussbaum. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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The Case Against Animal Rights

Kartik Chugh

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.

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3 responses to “the case against animal rights”.

Thank you for bringing balance to a difficult question, and proving that rational, critical thinking is far more effective than the assumed inherent “must agree” herd mentality – just because it comes from the conservationist/greenie/SJW left!!

There is no reason for animals to be less important than people. No reason at all Shame on anyone who doesn’t understand that.

Humans have rights because they are humans. Animals do not have rights – they are things, not persons. Humans have always used animals for food and clothing for as long as we have been human and using animals is therefore normal human behaviour – when in civilisation, humans are civilised – when in nature, humans are predators, too. Every legal system in the world treats animals as property. It follows that animal rights are about human feelings towards animals, not about animals themselves. In fact, the concept of animal rights is only found among well fed, well protected humans. It doesn’t exist among the poor and hungry. We are humans and there is no need to be cruel – but animal welfare is something we give to animals – it is not something they own as a right.

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• Animal Rights

Responses to Top Arguments Against Animal Rights

• University of Southern California

• University of Tennessee
• Endangered Species

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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• The Iditarod and Animal Cruelty
• Why Animal Rights Activists Are Against the AKC
• Historical Timeline of the Animal Rights Movement
• Animal Cruelty in Circuses
• Overview of Animal Cruelty
• Why Animal Rights Activists Oppose Foie Gras

What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly?

A few years ago, activists walked into a factory farm in Utah and walked out with two piglets. State prosecutors argued that this was a crime. That they were correct was obvious: The pigs were the property of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the country. The defendants had videoed themselves committing the crime; the F.B.I. later found the piglets in Colorado, in an animal sanctuary.

The activists said they had completed a “rescue,” but Smithfield had good reason to claim it hadn’t treated the pigs illegally. Unlike domestic favorites like dogs, which are protected from being eaten, Utah’s pigs are legally classified as “livestock”; they’re future products, and Smithfield could treat them accordingly. Namely, it could slaughter the pigs, but it could also treat a pig’s life—and its temporary desire for food, space, and medical help—as an inconvenience, to be handled in whatever conditions were deemed sufficient.

In their video, the activists surveyed those conditions . At the facility—a concentrated animal-feeding operation, or CAFO —pregnant pigs were confined to gestation crates, metal enclosures so small that the sows could barely lie down. (Smithfield had promised to stop using these crates, but evidently had not.) Other pigs were in farrowing crates, where they had enough room to lie down but not enough to turn their bodies around. When the activists approached one sow, they found dead piglets rotting beneath her. Nearby, they found two injured piglets, whom they decided to take. One couldn’t walk because of a foot infection; the other’s face was covered in blood. According to Smithfield, which denied mistreating animals, the piglets were each worth about forty-two dollars, but both had diarrhea and other signs of illness. This meant they were unlikely to survive, and that their bodies would be discarded, just as millions of farm animals are discarded each year.

During the trial, the activists reiterated that, yes, they entered Smithfield’s property and, yes, they took the pigs. And then, last October, the jury found them not guilty. In a column for the Times , one of the activists—Wayne Hsiung, the co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere—described talking to one of the jurors, who said that it was hard to convict the activists of theft, given that the sick piglets had no value for Smithfield. But another factor was the activists’ appeal to conscience. In his closing statement, Hsiung, a lawyer who represented himself, argued that an acquittal would model a new, more compassionate world. He had broken the law, yes—but the law, the jury seemed to agree, might be wrong.

A lot has changed in our relationship with animals since 1975, when the philosopher Peter Singer wrote “ Animal Liberation ,” the book that sparked the animal-rights movement. Gestation crates, like the ones in Utah, are restricted in the European Union, and California prohibits companies that use them from selling in stores, a case that the pork industry fought all the way to the Supreme Court—and lost. In a 2019 Johns Hopkins survey, more than forty per cent of respondents wanted to ban new CAFO s. In Iowa, which is the No. 1 pork-producing state, my local grocery store has a full Vegan section. “Vegan” is also a shopping filter on Sephora, and most of the cool-girl brands are vegan, anyway. Wearing fur is embarrassing.

And yet Singer’s latest book, “ Animal Liberation Now ,” a rewrite of his 1975 classic, is less a celebratory volume than a tragic one—tragic because it is very similar to the original in refrain, which is that, big-picture-wise, the state of animal life is terrible. “The core argument I was putting forward,” Singer writes, “seemed so irrefutable, so undeniably right, that I thought everyone who read it would surely be convinced by it.” Apparently not. By some estimates, scientists in the U.S. currently use roughly fifteen million animals for research, including mice, rats, cats, dogs, birds, and nonhuman primates. As in the seventies, much of this research tries to model psychological ailments, despite scientists’ having written for decades that more research is needed to figure out whether animals—and which kind of animals—provide a useful analogue for mental illness in humans. When Singer was first writing, a leading researcher created psychopathic monkeys by raising them in isolation, impregnating them with what he called a “rape rack,” and studying how the mothers bashed their infants’ heads into the ground. In 2019, researchers were still putting animals through “prolonged stress”—trapping them in deep water, restraining them for long periods while subjecting them to the odor of a predator—to see if their subsequent behavior evidenced P.T.S.D. (They wrote that more research was needed.) Meanwhile, factory farms, which were newish in 1975, have swept the globe. Just four per cent of Americans are vegetarian, and each year about eighty-three billion animals are killed for food.

It’s for these animals, Singer writes, “and for all the others who will, unless there is a sudden and radical change, suffer and die,” that he writes this new edition. But Singer’s hopes are by now tempered. One obvious problem is that, in the past fifty years, the legal standing of animals has barely changed. The Utah case was unusual not just because of the verdict but because referendums on farm-animal welfare seldom occur at all. In many states, lawmakers, often pressured by agribusiness, have tried to make it a serious crime to enter a factory farm’s property. The activists in Utah hoped they could win converts at trial; they gambled correctly, but, had they been wrong, they could have gone to prison. As in 1975, it remains impossible to simply petition the justice system to notice that pigs are suffering. All animals are property, and property can’t take its owner to court.

Philosophers have debated the standing of animals for centuries. Pythagoras supposedly didn’t eat them, perhaps because he believed they had souls. Their demotion to “things” owes partly to thinkers like Aristotle, who called animals “brute beasts” who exist “for the sake of man,” and to Christianity, which, like Stoicism before it, awarded unique dignity to humans. We had souls; animals did not. Since then, various secular thinkers have given this idea a new name—“inherent value,” “intrinsic dignity”—in order to explain why it is O.K. to eat a pig but not a baby. For Singer, these phrases are a “last resort,” a way to clumsily distinguish humans from nonhuman animals. Some argue that our ability to tell right from wrong, or to perceive ourselves, sets us apart—but not all humans can do these things, and some animals seem to do them better. Good law doesn’t withhold justice from humans who are elderly or infirm, or those who are cognitively disabled. As a utilitarian, Singer cites the founder of that tradition, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that justice and equality have nothing to do with a creature’s ability to reason, or with any of its abilities at all, but with the fact that it can suffer. Most animals suffer. Why, then, do we not give them moral consideration?

Singer’s answer is “speciesism,” or “bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species.” Like racism and sexism, speciesism denies equal consideration in order to maintain a status quo that is convenient for the oppressors. As Lawrence Wright has written in this magazine , courts, when considering the confinement of elephants and chimpanzees, have conceded that such animals evince many of the qualities that give humans legal standing, but have declined to follow through on the implications of this fact. The reason for that is obvious. If animals deserved the same consideration as humans, then we would find ourselves in a world in which billions of persons were living awful, almost unimaginably horrible lives. In which case, we might have to do something about it.

Equal consideration does not mean equal treatment. As a utilitarian, Singer’s aim is to minimize the suffering in the world and maximize the pleasure in it, a principle that invites, and often demands, choices. This is why Singer does not object to killing mosquitos (if done quickly), or to using animals for scientific research that would dramatically relieve suffering, or to eating meat if doing so would save your life. What he would not agree with, though, is making those choices on the basis of perceived intelligence or emotion. In a decision about whether to eat chicken or pork, it is not better to choose chicken simply because pigs seem smarter. The fleeting pleasure of eating any chicken is trounced by its suffering in industrial farms, where it was likely force-fed, electrocuted, and perhaps even boiled alive.

Still, Singer’s emphasis on suffering is cause for concern to Martha Nussbaum , whose new book, “ Justice for Animals ,” is an attempt to settle on the ideal philosophical template for animal rights. Whereas Singer’s argument is emphatically emotion-free—empathy, in his view, is not just immaterial but often actively misleading—Nussbaum is interested in emotions, or at least in animals’ inner lives and desires. She considers several theories of animal rights, including Singer’s, before arguing that we should adopt her “capabilities approach,” which builds on a framework developed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, and holds that all creatures should be given the “opportunity to flourish.” For decades, Nussbaum has adjusted her list of what this entails for humans, which includes “being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length,” “being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves,” and having “bodily integrity”—namely, freedom from violence and “choice in matters of reproduction.” In “Justice for Animals,” she outlines some conditions for nonhuman flourishing: a natural life span, social relationships, freedom of movement, bodily integrity, and play and stimulation. Eventually, she writes, we would have a refined list for each species, so that we could insure flourishing “in the form of life characteristic to the creature.”

In imagining this better world, Nussbaum is guided by three emotions: wonder, anger, and compassion. She wants us to look anew at animals such as chickens or pigs, which don’t flatter us, as gorillas might, with their resemblance to us. What pigs do, and like to do, is root around in the dirt; lacquer themselves in mud to keep cool; build comfy nests in which to shelter their babies; and communicate with one another in social groups. They also seek out belly rubs from human caregivers. In a just world, Nussbaum writes, we would wonder at a pig’s mysterious life, show compassion for her desire to exist on her own terms, and get angry when corporations get in her way.

Some of Nussbaum’s positions are more actionable, policy-wise, than others. For example, she supports legal standing for animals, which raises an obvious question: How would a pig articulate her desires to a lawyer? Nussbaum notes that a solution already exists in fiduciary law: in the event that a person, like a toddler or disabled adult, cannot communicate their decisions or make sound ones, a representative is appointed to understand that person’s interests and advocate for them. Just as organizations exist to help certain people advance their interests, organizations could represent categories of animals. In Nussbaum’s future world, such a group could take Smithfield Foods to court.

Perhaps Nussbaum’s boldest position is that wild animals should also be represented by fiduciaries, and indeed be assured, by humans, the same flourishing as any other creature. If this seems like an overreach, a quixotic attempt to control a world that is better off without our meddling, Nussbaum says, first, to be realistic: there is no such thing as a truly wild animal, given the extent of human influence on Earth. (If a whale is found dead with a brick of plastic in its stomach, how “wild” was it?) Second, in Nussbaum’s view, if nature is thoughtless—and Nussbaum thinks it is—then perhaps what happens in “the wild” is not always for the best. No injustice can be ignored. If we aspire to a world in which no sentient creature can harm another’s “bodily integrity,” or impede one from exploring and fulfilling one’s capabilities, then it is not “the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators.”

Here, Nussbaum’s world is getting harder to imagine. Animal-rights writing tends to elide the issue of wild-animal suffering for obvious reasons—namely, the scarcity of solutions. Singer covers the issue only briefly, and mostly to say that it’s worth researching the merit of different interventions, such as vaccination campaigns. Nussbaum, for her part, is unclear about how we would protect wild antelopes without impeding the flourishing of their predators—or without impeding the flourishing of antelopes, by increasing their numbers and not their resources. In 2006, when she previously discussed the subject, she acknowledged that perhaps “part of what it is to flourish, for a creature, is to settle certain very important matters on its own.” In her new book, she has not entirely discarded that perspective: intervention, she writes, could result in “disaster on a large scale.” But the point is to “press this question all the time,” and to ask whether our hands-off approach is less noble than it is self-justifying—a way of protecting ourselves from following our ideals to their natural, messy, inconvenient ends.

The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical. The problem is particularly acute in animal-rights activism. Ending wild-animal suffering is laughably hard (our efforts at ending human suffering don’t exactly recommend us to the task); obviously, so is changing the landscape of factory farms, or Singer wouldn’t be reissuing his book. In 2014, the British sociologist Richard Twine suggested that the vegan isn’t unlike the feminist of yore, in that both come across as killjoys whose “resistance against routinized norms of commodification and violence” repels those who prefer the comforts of the status quo. Wayne Hsiung, the Direct Action Everywhere activist, was only recently released from jail, after being sentenced for duck and chicken rescues in California. On his blog, he wrote that one reason the prosecution succeeded was that, unlike in Utah, he and his colleagues were cast as “weird extremists.”

It’s easy to construct a straw-man vegan, one oblivious to his own stridency, privilege, or hypocrisy. Isn’t he driving deforestation with all his vegetables? (No, Singer replies, as the vast majority of soybeans are fed to farm animals.) Isn’t he ignoring food deserts or the price tag on vegan substitutes, which puts them out of the reach of poor families? (Nussbaum acknowledges that cost can be an issue, but argues that it only emphasizes the need for resourced people to eat as humanely as they can, given that the costs of a more ethical diet “will not come down until it is chosen by many.”) Anyone pointing out moral culpability will provoke, in both others and themselves, a certain defensiveness. Nussbaum spends a lot of time discussing her uneasiness with her choice to eat fish for nutritional reasons. (She argues that fish likely have no sense of the future, a claim that even she seems unsure about.) Singer is eager to intervene here, emphasizing that animal-rights activism should pursue the diminishment of suffering, not the achievement of sainthood. “We are more likely to persuade others to share our attitude if we temper our ideals with common sense than if we strive for the kind of purity that is more appropriate to a religious dietary law than to an ethical and political movement,” he writes. Veganism is a boycott, and, while boycotts are more effective the more you commit to them, what makes them truly effective is persuading others to join them.

Strangely, where Singer and Nussbaum might agree is that defining the proper basis for the rights of animals is less important, at least in the short term, than getting people not to harm them, for any reason at all. Those reasons might have nothing to do with the animals themselves. Perhaps you decide not to eat animals because you care about people: because you care that the water where you live, if it’s anything like where I live, is too full of CAFO by-products to confidently drink. Perhaps you care about the workers in enormous slaughterhouses, where the pay is low and the costs to the laborer high. Perhaps you believe in a God, and believe that this God would expect better of people than to eat animals raised and killed in darkness. Or perhaps someone you love happens to love pigs, or to love the idea that the world could be gentler or more just, and you love the way they see the future enough to help them realize it. Nussbaum, after all, became interested in animal rights because she loved a person, her late daughter, an attorney who championed legislation to protect whales and other wild animals until her death, in 2019. Nussbaum’s book is dedicated to her—and also, now, to the whales. ♦

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Animal Rights: Definition, Issues, and Examples

Animal rights advocates believe that non-human animals should be free to live as they wish, without being used, exploited, or otherwise interfered with by humans.

T he idea of giving rights to animals has long been contentious, but a deeper look into the reasoning behind the philosophy reveals ideas that aren’t all that radical. Animal rights advocates want to distinguish animals from inanimate objects, as they are so often considered by exploitative industries and the law.

The animal rights movement strives to make the public aware of the fact that animals are sensitive, emotional , and intelligent beings who deserve dignity and respect. But first, it’s important to understand what the term "animal rights" really means.

What are animal rights?

Animal rights are moral principles grounded in the belief that non-human animals deserve the ability to live as they wish, without being subjected to the desires of human beings. At the core of animal rights is autonomy, which is another way of saying choice . In many countries, human rights are enshrined to protect certain freedoms, such as the right to expression, freedom from torture, and access to democracy. Of course, these choices are constrained depending on social locations like race, class, and gender, but generally speaking, human rights safeguard the basic tenets of what makes human lives worth living. Animal rights aim to do something similar, only for non-human animals.

Animal rights come into direct opposition with animal exploitation, which includes animals used by humans for a variety of reasons, be it for food , as experimental objects, or even pets. Animal rights can also be violated when it comes to human destruction of animal habitats . This negatively impacts the ability of animals to lead full lives of their choosing.

Do animals have rights?

Very few countries have enshrined animal rights into law. However, the US and the UK do have some basic protections and guidelines for how animals can be treated.

The UK Sentience Bill

In 2021, the United Kingdom's House of Commons introduced the Animal Sentience Bill . If passed, this bill would enshrine into law that animals are, in fact, sentient beings, and they deserve humane treatment at the hands of humans. While this law would not afford animals full autonomy, it would be a watershed in the movement to protect animals—officially recognizing their capacity to feel and to suffer, and distinguishing them from inanimate objects.

The US Animal Welfare Act

In 1966, the United States passed the Animal Welfare Act . While it is the biggest federal legislation addressing the treatment of animals to date, its scope is fairly narrow—the law excludes many species, including farmed animals , from its protections. The law does establish some basic guidelines for the sale, transport, and handling of dogs, cats, rabbits, nonhuman primates, guinea pigs, and hamsters. It also protects the psychological welfare of animals who are used in lab experiments, and prohibits the violent practices of dogfighting and cockfighting. Again, this law does not recognize the rights and autonomy of animals—or even their ability to feel pain and suffer—but it does afford non-human animals some basic welfare protections .

What are some examples of animal rights?

While few laws currently exist in the UK or US that recognize or protect animals' rights to enjoy lives free from human interference, the following is a list of examples of animal rights that could one day be enacted:

• Animals may not be used for food.
• Animals may not be hunted.
• The habitats of animals must be protected to allow them to live according to their choosing.
• Animals may not be bred.

What's the difference between animal welfare and animal rights?

Animal rights philosophy is based on the idea that animals should not be used by people for any reason, and that animal rights should protect their interests the way human rights protect people. Animal welfare , on the other hand, is a set of practices designed to govern the treatment of animals who are being dominated by humans, whether for food, research, or entertainment.

Do animals need rights? Pros and cons

The idea of giving animals rights tends to be contentious, given how embedded animal products are within societies such as the United States. Some people, including animal activists, believe in an all-or-nothing approach, where animal rights must be legally enshrined and animals totally liberated from all exploitation. On the other end of the spectrum are people whose livelihoods depend upon animal-based industries. Below are some arguments both in favor of and opposing animal rights.

Arguments in favor of animal rights

Should the rights of animals be recognized, animal exploitative industries would disappear, as would the host of environmental problems they cause, including water pollution, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation.

Halting the widespread use of animals would also eliminate the systematic cruelty and denial of choice that animal industries perpetuate. The physical and psychological pain endured by animals in places like factory farms has reached a point many consider to be unacceptable , to say the least. Animals are mutilated by humans in several different ways, including castrations, dehorning, and cutting off various body parts, usually without the use of anesthetic.

“ Many species never see the outdoors except on their way to the slaughterhouse.

As their name suggests, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) pack vast numbers of animals in cramped conditions, often forcing animals to perpetually stand in their own waste. Many species—including chickens, cows, and pigs—never see the outdoors except on their way to the slaughterhouse. Recognizing animal rights would necessitate stopping this mistreatment for good.

Arguments against animal rights

Most arguments against animal rights can be traced back to money, because animal exploitation is big business. Factory farming for animal products is a multi-billion-dollar industry. JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, posted $9 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2020 alone.

A lesser-known, yet also massive, industry is that which supplies animals for laboratories. The US market for lab rats (who are far less popular than mice for experiments) was valued at over $412 million in 2016. Big industrial producers of animals and animal products have enough political clout to influence legislation—including passing laws making it illegal to document farm conditions—and to benefit from government subsidies.

Many people depend upon animal exploitation for work. On factory farms, relatively small numbers of people can manage vast herds or flocks of animals, thanks to mechanization and other industrial farming techniques. Unfortunately, jobs in industrial meatpacking facilities are also known to be some of the most dangerous in the US. Smaller farmers coming from multi-generational farming families more directly depend upon using animals to make a living and tend to follow welfare standards more judiciously. However, smaller farms have been decreasing in number, due to the proliferation of factory farms against which they often cannot compete.

Although people may lose money or jobs in the transition to animal alternatives, new jobs can be created in the alternative protein sector and other plant-based industries.

When did the animal rights movement begin in the US?

The modern day animal rights movement in the United States includes thousands of individuals and a multitude of groups who advocate for animals in a variety of ways—from lobbying legislators to support animal rights laws, to rescuing animals from situations of abuse and neglect. While individuals throughout history have believed in and fought for animal rights, we can trace back the modern, US-based animal rights movement to the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866. The group's founder, Henry Burgh , believed that animals are "entitled to kind and respectful treatment at the hands of humans and must be protected under the law." The organization worked with the New York City government to pass and enforce anti-cruelty laws that prevented the abuse of carthorses and provided care for injured horses. Since then, the ASPCA has expanded its advocacy across different non-human animal species—including farmed animals—and many more animal protection groups have sprung up, both locally and nationwide. Currently, there are over 40,000 non-profit organizations identified as animal groups in the US.

Why are animal rights important?

Animal rights are important because they represent a set of beliefs that counteract inaccurate yet long-held assumptions that animals are nothing more than mindless machines—beliefs popularized by western philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century. The perception of animals as being unthinking, unfeeling beings justified using them for human desires, resulting in today’s world where farmed mammals outnumber those in the wild, and the majority of these farmed animals are forced to endure harsh conditions on factory farms.

“ Farmed mammals outnumber those in the wild.

But the science is increasingly clear: The animals we eat ( pigs, chickens, cows ), the animals we use in laboratories ( mice and rats ), the animals who provide us with clothing , and those whose backs we ride upon have all been found to possess more cognitive complexity, emotions, and overall sophistication than has long been believed. This sophistication renders animals more susceptible not only to physical pain but also to the psychological impacts caused by the habitual denial of choice. Awareness of their own subjugation forms sufficient reasoning to rethink the ways animals are treated in western societies.

The consequences of animal rights

Currently, laws in the US and UK are geared toward shielding animals from cruelty, not giving them the same freedom of choice that humans have. (Even these laws are sorely lacking, as they fail to protect livestock and laboratory animals.) However, the animal rights movement can still have real-world consequences. Calls for animal liberation from places like factory farms can raise public awareness of the poor living conditions and welfare violations these facilities perpetuate, sometimes resulting in stronger protections, higher welfare standards , and decreasing consumer demand. Each of these outcomes carries economic consequences for producers, as typically it is more expensive for factory farms to provide better living conditions such as more space, or using fewer growth hormones which can result in lower production yields.

Of course, should the animal rights movement achieve its goals , society would look much different than it does today. If people consume more alternative sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown meat, the global environment would be far less impacted. Clothing would be made without leather or other animal products; alternative sources, such as pineapple leather created from waste products from the pineapple industry, could replace toxic tanneries. The fur industry is being increasingly shunned, with fashion labels rejecting fur in favor of faux materials. Ocean ecosystems would be able to recover, replenishing fish populations and seafloor habitats. Today these are razed by bottom trawling fishing, resulting in the clear-cutting of corals that can be thousands of years old .

How you can advocate for animals

A world in which animals are free from human exploitation still seems far off, but we can make choices that create a kinder world for animals, every day. We can start by leaving animals off our plate in favor of plant-based alternatives—a choice that recognizes animals as the sentient beings that they are, and not products for consumption.

When we come together, we can also fight for better protections for animals in the US and around the world. There's a robust movement to hold corporations accountability and end the cruelty of factory farming—an industry which causes immense amount of suffering for billions of animals. If you want to help end this suffering and spread compassion for animals, join our community of online animal activists and take action .

More like this

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The Ethical Case for Welfare Reform

Industry welfare commitments are good for animals. Here’s why.

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The Case Against Animal Rights

1986, The Southern Journal of Philosophy

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Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , 2005

I argue that animals have rights in the sense of having valid claims, which might turn out to be actual rights as society advances and new scientific-technological developments facilitate finding alternative ways of satisfying our vital interests without using animals. Animals have a right to life, to liberty in the sense of freedom of movement and communication, to subsistence, to relief from suffering , and to security against attacks on their physical existence. Animals' interest in living, freedom, subsistence, and security are of vital importance to them, and they do not belong to us; they are not the things we have already possessed by virtue of our own nature.

Theories of rights are many and engaging in a detailed discussion of those theories is beyond the scope of this essay. However, here we shall start with the views of the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, which informed attitudes towards animals well into the 20th century. Descartes based his rights arguments on cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am 1. Therefore consciousness and thought were central to his views on humans and animals. In part five of Discourse on Method published in 1637, he examined the nature of animals and how they were distinguished from humans. Mind, for Descartes, was not part of the physical universe; it was a separate substance and a link between humans and the mind of God. This link to God i.e. mind was unique to humans and non-humans had no mind and therefore no link to the mind of God. 2 His views suggest that the use of language is a sign of rationality and only beings that possess minds and souls are rational and argues that animals do not have immaterial minds or souls and are therefore not rational. It therefore follows that animals do not have sensations like pain, thirst or hunger. Animals for Descartes, were therefore nothing more than a "complex automata" and the squeals of pain, were mechanical reactions of the animal to external stimuli and not evidence of any sensation of pain. Humans on the other hand have minds or rational souls hence their capacity to use language and feel sensations like hunger, thirst and pain and this justifies their entitlement to holding rights. Furthermore, philosophers such as Locke and Grotius attached great emphasis on the ability of humans to reason, which for them justified their equal access to rights. However, the basis proposed by Descartes, Locke, and Grotius and defended by modern philosophers such as Georodie Duckler is being increasingly questioned. Questions are being asked about the moral standing of animals and whether their interests should also be considered. Amongst the commentators who have increasingly questioned the justification for focusing exclusively on human interests to the exclusion of all other species is Peter Singer who has attacked the basis of the theories of natural law. Singer is an advocate of utilitarianism and in Animal Liberation Movement, he refers to the proposals of equality of consideration by many philosophers, but points to their failure to recognize that this principle also applies to members of other species and not only humans. 3

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2005

Ethics in Progress, 2014

Review of: Dorota Probucka (2013). Filozoficzne podstawy idei praw zwierząt [Philosophical foundations of the animal rights concept], pp. 352, Cracow: Universitas

Modern animal rights debates began in the 1970s, mainly as part of the budding field of applied ethics in Anglo-American philosophy. In just a short time, these animal rights discourses received international academic respect, especially through analytically trained philosophers. Central for this development was the analysis that rights language can be principally used species neutrally. This paper’s contribution is to examine the central terms of Tom Regan’s still widely discussed theory for their actuality and usefulness. Hence strengthening these arguments for modern animal rights theory as a serious approach in (inter)national ethical and legal disputes. Translated from German by Gary Steiner, Bucknell University

Broadview Press, 2009

Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.

Essays in Philosophy, 2004

Tài liệu tổng hợp môn cơ sở văn hóa Việt Nam, 2022

Bulletin de la Société tournaisienne de Géologie, Préhistoire et Archéologie, 2024

Kur'ân Meâlleri: Sorunlar, Çözüm Önerileri, 2023

Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 2007

Investigaciones Geográficas, 2019

Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, 2012

Journal of Cell Biology

Southern Economic Journal, 1985

Journal of innovation nanagement, 2016

Revista del Museo de Antropología, 2023

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Animal Rights - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Animal rights refer to the belief that animals have an intrinsic value separate from any value they have to humans, and are worthy of moral consideration. They have the right to be free of oppression, confinement, use and abuse by humans. Essays could delve into the various arguments for and against animal rights, the legal frameworks surrounding animal rights, and the implications of animal rights on various industries and practices. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Animal Rights you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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The "In the Arms of an Angel" commercial has become one of the most iconic and heart-wrenching advertisements in recent memory. This ad featuring Sarah McLachlan's hauntingly beautiful song "Angel" was created to raise awareness and funds for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The emotional power of this commercial lies in its ability to connect with viewers on a deep empathetic level making it a significant case study in the world of advertising and […]

The Ethical and Practical Drawbacks of Animal Testing

Animal experimentation has remained a contentious subject, evoking substantial moral, scientific, and pragmatic considerations. Despite its historical contributions to medical and scientific progress, the deficiencies inherent in employing animals for investigative purposes are significant and warrant careful scrutiny. The ethical quandaries, compounded by uncertainties regarding the reliability and indispensability of such assessments, necessitate meticulous evaluation. Foremost among the concerns surrounding animal testing is the ethical conundrum it engenders. Numerous experiments entail procedures that inflict anguish, torment, and enduring detriment upon […]

PETA: the Principles and Impact of Ethical Animal Treatment

PETA, an acronym for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, embodies a paradigm of animal rights advocacy. Conceived in 1980 by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, PETA has burgeoned into an eminent and formidable force in the global sphere of animal rights activism. Its overarching objective is to delineate and safeguard the rights of all sentient beings, operating under the cardinal tenet that animals are not chattels to be consumed, donned, experimented upon, exploited for amusement, or subjected to […]

The Legal Status of Animal Testing: Ethical Considerations and Global Perspectives

In the intricate interplay between ethical responsibilities and scientific advancement, few topics evoke as much deliberation and introspection as the legal framework surrounding animal testing. This contentious issue serves as an arena where the noble endeavor of promoting human health clashes with the moral obligation to safeguard animal well-being. Exploring the legal frameworks, ethical considerations, and global viewpoints enveloping this intricate subject unveils a diverse tapestry of conflicting perspectives and evolving attitudes. At the heart of the debate lies the […]

Guardians of the Voiceless: Ethical Considerations in Animal Rights Advocacy

In the intricate web of ethical considerations, the cause of animal rights advocacy stands out as a vibrant thread, woven into the fabric of our shared human consciousness. "Guardians of the Voiceless" encapsulates the spirit of a movement dedicated to amplifying the silent pleas of creatures who inhabit our planet, yet lack the articulate voice to convey their needs, desires, and pains. At its essence, animal rights advocacy strives to dismantle the walls of speciesism, acknowledging the inherent value and […]

Animal Sentience: Acknowledging Consciousness in the Fight for Rights

In the vast tapestry of life that adorns our planet, one thread stands out in its intricacy and depth - the question of animal sentience. As humans, we have long prided ourselves on our intelligence and self-awareness, but in the quest for understanding the minds of other creatures, we unearth a profound ethical dilemma. It is a journey that beckons us to acknowledge the consciousness that resides within the eyes of the myriad beings we share our world with. The […]

Animal Rights: a Call for Compassion and Ethical Consideration

In the intricate tapestry of our world, one often-overlooked thread weaves through the lives of countless beings: the question of animal rights. Beyond the utilitarian perspective that has long viewed animals as mere resources for human consumption or experimentation, a growing movement advocates for a paradigm shift, recognizing the intrinsic value and rights of animals. At its core, the call for animal rights stems from a fundamental recognition of sentience and the capacity for suffering in non-human animals. The traditional […]

Zoos are Bad for Animals

Introduction "How would you feel if you had bars surrounding you, faces peering in every minute of the day, and being taken out of your natural habitat? Having animals in a zoo is simply cruel to the animal." These words highlight the controversial nature of zoos and their role in society. While many people view zoos as a source of entertainment and education, others see them as unethical institutions that compromise the well-being of animals. Zoos are bad for animals […]

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