Animal Rights

What is Animal Rights about

• the total abolition of the use of animals in science;
• the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture;
• the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping.

Recognizing that non-human animals are living sentient beings/creatures with interest of their own and not objects of human expoitation.
Animal Rights means that non-human animals interests should be respected (what means that the enslaving, eating, wearing and torturing of non-human animals by humans should stop).

Animals are NOT property

As long as animals are seen as property they can not have rights. Thus we first need to remove the property status of non-human animals before we can start talking about animal rights.

Animal Rights FAQ

"Surely it is agreeable that animals must apply to a code of morality just like the rest of us"

Unlike humans, animals lack an understanding of morality (that is, to the same degree; dogs and cats can clearly love, elephants have been filmed digging other drowning elephants out of swamps, even on big cat diary you could see a leapord carefully pulling a painful thorne out of a siblings nose; Do not assume they are totally void of empathy). Along with this they also lack a capacity for malice which humans have. In these ways they are very comparable to children and many mentally disabled humans. They are simply innocent but what they dont lack is an ability to experience extreme fear and horendous pain, or the very strong will to live. We have no reason to believe they experience any of these features to any less extent than humans do. It is wrong to hurt children. is this really because they have the capacity to develop into a caring being or simply because causing an innocent child to suffer is hideous? and what about many mentally disabled people...

"Why is it deemed unnatural and wrong to eat meat in lieu of this fact"

I do not think there is a general animal rights declaration that eating meat is unnatural. Having said that, farming animals and cooking meat is clearly unnatural. The fact that eating meat is natural, is often offered as justification. But driving a car is not natural whilst rape and murder are perfectly natural. It is not fair to suddenly claim that something is natural when it suits you, and that is why it is still wrong. People, what with their morality, have a choice. You can eat a vegetarian meal, or you can take the existence away from an animal that wants to live as desperately as you do. Meat becomes a selfish choice which we should evolve past. If you are talking about a need for people to be omniverous in order to gain the neccessary sustinance then think twice. Vegetarians live longer on average, Vegans longer still, and medical doctors fully accept that all required and reccomended sustinance can be gained through a veg*n diet.

"Research on animals which may lead to millions of lives being saved"

A major part of the animal rights argument is that animal research is ineffective. But i will focus solely on the moral argument. It is wrong to conduct painful and or fatal research on an innocent animal which does not even understand why it is being harmed for the benefit of many human lives. Even if we do not dispute that a human life is more important than an animal's then this point remains strong. It is indisputable that the same testing on human subjects would yield far more reliable and effective results than tests on animals. So what is more important; 50 children or 10,000 children? - 10,000 children must be more important. then would you justify the abduction of 50 children - healthy? dissabled? orphan? foreign? anything - and then for meerly fatal, let alone horifically painful and traumatic research to be carried out upon those children against their will, in order to gain, from those 50 children, new cures which could treat thousands or millions of people? Right and wrong is hard to define. But you know the difference.

Animal Rights, Animal Welfare and New Welfarism

The big difference between the animal rights and animal welfare position is seeing the usage of animals as moraly wrong (resp. right). A welfarist will use an animal if it benefits him. Even if the animal undergoes cruelty and abuse for his needs, this will not be a problem as long as the animal live and dead happens under "humane" conditions. Where the humane part is only questioned as long as it is not a inconvenience for us.

The welfarist wishes to improve the conditions of animals exploited for our needs while the animal rights activist wishes to end the exploitation itself.

New welfarism is a new term introduced by Gary Francione that places it between animal welfare and animal rights.

Although new welfarists share the views of rightists (the cause of suffering needs to be abolished), they argue that this could take long so meanwhile we should reduce animal cruelty and suffering by way of animal welfare messures.

Someone who follows the abolitionist approach to animal rights does not wish to take part in animal explotation and usage in any way. Only by going vegan one can accomplish this. Thus veganism is the moral baseline for every animal rights activist.

Human Rights and Animal Rights

Although human rights and animal rights can go easily hand in hand still a lot of people refuse to exept that. It's not a question who comes first, both are important. Just as stopping racism, sexism and discrimination is important we should also try to eradicate specism.
It's not because you put the attention to one thing that you are against another. If you are against slavery and racism no sensible person will blaim you of not helping your own race.

Where human rights are abused, animal rights will also be abused and vice-versa. Let's take war and poverty as an example. In war, no one is spared. The same goes with povery, where starvation effects both humans and non-human animals. So if one works to stop either or both afflictions, one would be helping both humans and other animals. Many believe that cruelty to non-human animals can lead to cruelty to human beings. Also, if one is cruel to human beings, one most probably would not care about other animals either.

You do not have to choose between animal and human rights. You can respect and be active in both movements. Both strive for a better world.