Animal Rights

The philosophy of animal rights maintains that non-human animals are "subjects of life", and as such have an intrinsic right to live free from human exploitation. Animals are conscience-living entities, with feelings, inherent dignity, right to life and happiness with virtually no interference or persecution from human animals. This means that all forms of institutionalised exploitation of animals for human use such as food, clothing, experimentation or recreation, should be abolished.

In the early 1980's American thinker Dr Tom Regan developed the notion of animal rights. The following is an overview of the animal rights philosophy:

The other animals humans eat, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.

That life includes a variety of biological, individual, and social needs. The satisfaction of these needs a source of pleasure, their frustration or abuse, a source of pain. In these fundamental ways, the non-human animals in labs and on farms, for example are the same as human beings. And so it is that the ethics of our dealings with them one another, must acknowledge the same fundamental moral principles.

At its deepest level, humans ethics is based on the independent value of the individual: the moral worth of any one human being is not be measured by how useful that person is in advancing the interest of other human beings. To treat human beings in ways that do not honor their independent value is to be treated with respect.

The philosophy of animal rights demands only that logic be respected. For any argument that plausibly explains the right of humans to be treated with respect, also implies that other animals have this same value, and have it equally, too.

It is true, therefore, that women do not exist to serve men, blacks to serve whites, the poor to serve the rich or the weak to serve the strong. But the philosophy goes even further. By insisting upon and justifying the independent value and rights of other animals, it gives scientifically informed and morally impartial reasons for denying that these animals exist to serve us.

Once this truth is acknowledged, it is easy to understand why the philosophy of animal Rights is uncompromising in its response to each and every injustice other animals are made to suffer.

It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands in the case of animals used in science, for example, but empty cages: not "traditional" animal agriculture, but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not "more humane" hunting and trapping but the total eradication of the barbarous practices.

For when an injustice is absolute, one must oppose it absolutely. It was not "reformed" slavery that justice demanded, not "reformed" child labor, not "reformed" subjugation of women. In each of these cases, abolition was the only moral answer. Merely to reform injustice is to prolong injustice.

The philosophy of animal rights demands this same answer-abolition-in response to the unjust exploitation of other animals. It is not the details of unjust exploitation that must be changed. It is the unjust exploitation that must be changed. It is the unjust exploitation itself that must be ended, whether on the farm, in the lab, or among the wild, the example, The philosophy of animal rights asks for nothing more, but neither will it be satisfied with anything less .of other animals. It is the unjust exploitation that must be changed. It is the exploitation of other animals. It is not the details of other animals. It is not the details of unjust exploitation less.