Animal Rights Concerns

Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

Author: Gary Francione
ISBN-nr: 1566396921
Category: Animal Rights Issues
added by terri

Two-thirds of Americans polled by the Associated Press agree with the following statement: "An animal's right to live free of suffering should be just as important as a person's right to live free of suffering." More than 50 percent of Americans believe that it is wrong to kill animals to make fur coats or to hunt them for sport. But these same Americans eat hamburgers, take their children to circuses and rodeos, and use products developed with animal testing. How do we justify our inconsistency?

In this easy-to-read introduction, animal rights advocate Gary Francione looks at our conventional moral thinking about animals. Using examples, analogies, and thought-experiments, he reveals the dramatic inconsistency between what we say we believe about animals and how we actually treat them.

Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? provides a guidebook to examining our social and personal ethical beliefs. It takes us through concepts of property and equal consideration to arrive at the basic contention of animal rights: that everyone—human and non-human—has the right not to be treated as a means to an end. Along the way, it illuminates concepts and theories that all of us use but few of us understand—the nature of "rights" and "interests," for example, and the theories of Locke, Descartes, and Bentham.

Filled with fascinating information and cogent arguments, this is a book that you may love or hate, but that will never fail to inform, enlighten, and educate.

Your Child or the Dog?
By Gary Lawrence Francione
Published by Temple University Press, 2000
ISBN 1566396921, 978-1566396929
280 pages

Parts out of the Introduction:

There is a profound disparity between what we say we believe about animals, and how we actually treat them. On one hand, we claim to take animal interests seriously.
...
On the other hand, our actual treatment of animals stands in stark contrast to our porclamations about our regard for their moral status.

Content

Foreword – Alan Watson
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Diagnosis: Our Moral Schizophrenia about Animals
2. Vivisection: A Trickier Question
3. The Cause of Our Moral Schizophrenia: Animals as Property
4. The Cure for Our Moral Schizophrenia: The Principle of Equal Consideration
5. Robots, Religion, and Rationality
6. Having Our Cow and Eating Her Too: Bentham's Mistake
7. Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?
Appendix: Twenty Questions (and Answers)
Notes
Index
Photographs

Reviews

"Gary Francione, the legal community’s leading proponent of animal rights theory, has written a book whose time has come…. [Francione's book] brings us to the very essence of rights: the right not to be the instrument of another being is the one right that serves as a baseline and a moral imperative for any effective concept of animal rights…. Introduction to Animal Rights is brimming with insights…. Francione demands a revolutionary change in our thought process. To achieve this paradigm shift, one must first conceive it, which is what Francione accomplishes with [this book]…. [Francione gives us] two choices. We can continue to inflict suffering on nonhuman animals for virtually any purpose that provides satisfaction or a perceived benefit to humans. If we decide to do so, we should admit that our claim to include nonhumans in our scope of moral consideration is a sham. Alternatively, we can abolish the institutionalized exploitation of animals." -Lee Hall, Legal Director, Friends of Animals (book review in Suffolk University Law Review, Volume 34, Pages 83-95 (2000))

"A clearly written, passionately argued, and compelling and convincing call for the widening of our circle of moral sympathy and concern. Anyone who cares about animals must read this book, with care. Anyone who loves animals will read this book, with gratitude." -Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, co-author of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals and author of The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals

"In this splendidly clear and original book, Gary Francione demonstrates the profound flaw in our thinking about animals and their moral status. He brings to light the clash between the principles to which we take ourselves to be committed, and the reality we live, a reality shaped by the conception of animals as property." —Cora Diamond, University of Virginia

Gary Francione is Professor of Law and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University Law School. He is the Co-Director of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Centre.