Animals

A while back I had a brief conversation with someone who thought it necessary to refer to animal rights in quotation marks, as in “the underlying justification offered by PETA in terms of ‘rights’ of animals is wholly unpersuasive.” I was a little surprised.

Don’t animals have rights? (What rights? Well, you know, just the same basic rights - to live, mainly - that we want for ourselves.) I think they must.

I realize this is something most of us would rather not think about. But if you agree that humans have rights, it’s difficult not to accord similar rights to animals. Because it’s impossible to draw a really fundamental distinction between humans and animals. The most you can say is that, generally speaking, we have evolved relatively larger brains, as a result of which we are more intelligent, have developed better languages, and have a level of consciousness that may or may not be unique to us.

But brain size is not a criterion on which basic rights can be granted or denied. (If it were, it would be open season on lots of people - hunters, for example, or Republicans.) On what basis, then, do we deny the rights of animals?

There is no principled basis. Nor is there a practical one. I don’t dispute that full implementation of animal rights would wreak havoc with our present arrangements. But let’s not worry right now about implementation. Let’s just start by acknowledging that animals have rights. Implementation, like evolution, may take a while. In the meantime, every step toward it will help stem the most damaging consequence of the way we treat animals now: the erosion of our own capacity for empathy.