essay against animal rights

Responses to Top Arguments Against Animal Rights

• University of Southern California

• University of Tennessee
• Animal Rights
• 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.

• What Are Animal Rights?
• Animal Cruelty in Circuses
• What's Wrong with Eating Pork?
• The Top 10 Animal Rights Issues
• The Argument for Animal Rights
• Basic Tenets of Animal Rights
• Meet the 'Social Omnivore'
• Rescuer Saves and Rehabs Hundreds of Wild Animals in Peru
• Arguments for and Against Hunting
• What's Wrong With Fish Farms?
• Is a Vegetarian Diet Safe for My Dog?
• 22 Things You Didn't Know About Cows
• What Will Happen to the Animals If Everyone Goes Vegan
• What's Wrong With Aquariums?
• Is Pet Ownership Ethical?
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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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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 .

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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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2 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.

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The Moral Status of Animals

Is there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea that humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an answer to this question has become increasingly important among philosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested in our treatment of non-human animals. For some, answering this question will enable us to better understand the nature of human beings and the proper scope of our moral obligations. Some argue that there is an answer that can distinguish humans from the rest of the natural world. Many of those who accept this answer are interested in justifying certain human practices towards non-humans—practices that cause pain, discomfort, suffering and death. This latter group expects that in answering the question in a particular way, humans will be justified in granting moral consideration to other humans that is neither required nor justified when considering non-human animals. In contrast to this view, an increasing number of philosophers have argued that while humans are different in a variety of ways from each other and other animals, these differences do not provide a philosophical defense for denying non-human animals moral consideration. What the basis of moral consideration is and what it amounts to has been the source of much disagreement.

1.1 Speciesism

1.2 human exceptionalism, 1.3.1 rational persons, 1.3.2 legal persons, 1.4 sentience, 2. the moral significance of animals’ moral claims, 3. alternative perspectives on human relations to other animals, references cited, further reading, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the moral considerability of animals.

To say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there is a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize such claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be wronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize moral claims, it is only humans who are morally considerable. However, when we ask why we think humans are the only types of beings that can be morally wronged, we begin to see that the class of beings able to recognize moral claims and the class of beings who can suffer moral wrongs are not co-extensive.

The view that only humans are morally considered is sometimes referred to as “speciesism”. In the 1970s, Richard Ryder coined this term while campaigning in Oxford to denote a ubiquitous type of human centered prejudice, which he thought was similar to racism. He objected to favoring one’s own species, while exploiting or harming members of other species. Peter Singer popularized the term and focused on the way speciesism, without moral justification, favors the interests of humans:

the racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case. (Singer 1974: 108)

Discrimination based on race, like discrimination based on species is thought to be prejudicial, because these are not characteristics that matter when it comes to making moral claims.

Speciesist actions and attitudes are prejudicial because there is no prima facie reason for preferring the interests of beings belonging to the species group to which one also belongs over the interests of those who don’t. That humans are members of the species Homo sapiens is certainly a distinguishing feature of humans—humans share a genetic make-up and a distinctive physiology, we all emerge from a human pregnancy, but this is unimportant from the moral point of view. Species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic, a bit of luck that is no more morally interesting than being born in Malaysia or Canada. As a morally irrelevant characteristic it cannot serve as the basis for a view that holds that our species deserves moral consideration that is not owed to members of other species.

One might respond that it is not membership in a biological category that matters morally, but rather the social meaning of those categories, meanings that structure not only the institutions we operate within, but how we conceptualize ourselves and our world. Humans have developed moral systems as well as a wide range of other valuable practices, and by creating these systems, we separate the human from the rest of the animal kingdom. But the category “human” itself is morally contested. Some argue, for example, that racism is not simply, or even primarily about discrimination and prejudice, but rather a mechanism of dehumanizing blackness so as to provide the conditions that makes humans white (see Fanon 1967; Kim 2015; Ko& Ko 2017). According to this line of thought, speciesism isn’t focused on discrimination or prejudice but is a central tool for creating human (and white) supremacy or exceptionalism.

Like speciesism, human exceptionalism can be understood in different ways. The most common way of understanding it is to suggest that there are distinctly human capacities and it is on the basis of these capacities that humans have moral status and other animals do not. But which capacities mark out all and only humans as the kinds of beings that can be wronged? A number of candidate capacities have been proposed—developing family ties, solving social problems, expressing emotions, starting wars, having sex for pleasure, using language, or thinking abstractly, are just a few. As it turns out, none of these activities is uncontroversially unique to human. Both scholarly and popular work on animal behavior suggests that many of the activities that are thought to be distinct to humans occurs in non-humans. For example, many species of non-humans develop long lasting kinship ties—orangutan mothers stay with their young for eight to ten years and while they eventually part company, they continue to maintain their relationships. Less solitary animals, such as chimpanzees, baboons, wolves, and elephants maintain extended family units built upon complex individual relationships, for long periods of time. Meerkats in the Kalahari desert are known to sacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family members so that the fatally ill will not die alone. All animals living in socially complex groups must solve various problems that inevitably arise in such groups. Canids and primates are particularly adept at it, yet even chickens and horses are known to recognize large numbers of individuals in their social hierarchies and to maneuver within them. One of the ways that non-human animals negotiate their social environments is by being particularly attentive to the emotional states of others around them. When a conspecific is angry, it is a good idea to get out of his way. Animals that develop life-long bonds are known to suffer from the death of their partners. Some are even said to die of sorrow. Darwin reported this in The Descent of Man : “So intense is the grief of female monkeys for the loss of their young, that it invariably caused the death of certain kinds” (1871: 40). Jane Goodall’s report of the death of the healthy 8 year old chimpanzee Flint just three weeks after the death of his mother Flo also suggests that sorrow can have a devastating effect on non-human animals (see Goodall 2000: 140–141 in Bekoff 2000). Coyotes, elephants and killer whales are also among the species for which profound effects of grief have been reported (Bekoff 2000) and many dog owners can provide similar accounts. While the lives of many, perhaps most, non-humans in the wild are consumed with struggle for survival, aggression and battle, there are some non-humans whose lives are characterized by expressions of joy, playfulness, and a great deal of sex (Woods 2010). Recent studies in cognitive ethology have suggested that some non-humans engage in manipulative and deceptive activity, can construct “cognitive maps” for navigation, and some non-humans appear to understand symbolic representation and are able to use language. [ 1 ]

It appears that most of the capacities that are thought to distinguish humans as morally considerable beings, have been observed, often in less elaborate form, in the non-human world. Because human behavior and cognition share deep roots with the behavior and cognition of other animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or cognitive boundaries between humans and other animals remain controversial. For this reason, attempts to establish human uniqueness by identifying certain capacities, are not the most promising when it comes to thinking hard about the moral status of animals.

1.3 Personhood

Nonetheless, there is something important that is thought to distinguish humans from non-humans that is not reducible to the observation of behavior best explained by possessing a certain capacity and that is our “personhood”. The notion of personhood identifies a category of morally considerable beings that is thought to be coextensive with humanity. Historically, Kant is the most noted defender of personhood as the quality that makes a being valuable and thus morally considerable (for a contemporary utilitarian discussion of personhood, see Varner 2012). Kant writes:

…every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will…Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves. (Kant [1785] 1998: [Ak 4: 428])

The fact that the human being can have the representation “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth. By this he is a person….that is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion. (Kant [1798] 2010: 239 [Ak 7: 127])

More recent work in a Kantian vein develops this idea. Christine Korsgaard, for example, argues that humans “uniquely” face a problem, the problem of normativity. This problem emerges because of the reflective structure of human consciousness. We can, and often do, think about our desires and ask ourselves “Are these desires reasons for action? Do these impulses represent the kind of things I want to act according to?” Our reflective capacities allow us and require us to step back from our mere impulses in order to determine when and whether to act on them. In stepping back we gain a certain distance from which we can answer these questions and solve the problem of normativity. We decide whether to treat our desires as reasons for action based on our conceptions of ourselves, on our “practical identities”. When we determine whether we should take a particular desire as a reason to act we are engaging in a further level of reflection, a level that requires an endorseable description of ourselves. This endorseable description of ourselves, this practical identity, is a necessary moral identity because without it we cannot view our lives as worth living or our actions as worth doing. Korsgaard suggests that humans face the problem of normativity in a way that non-humans apparently do not:

A lower animal’s attention is fixed on the world. Its perceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will. It is engaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious of them. That is, they are not the objects of its attention. But we human animals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires themselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious of them. That is why we can think about them…And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is the problem of the normative…. The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason. (Korsgaard 1996: 93)

Here, Korsgaard understands “reason” as “a kind of reflective success” and given that non-humans are thought to be unable to reflect in a way that would allow them this sort of success, it appears that they do not act on reasons, at least reasons of this kind. Since non-humans do not act on reasons they do not have a practical identity from which they reflect and for which they act. So humans can be distinguished from non-humans because humans, we might say, are sources of normativity and non-humans are not.

But arguably, Kant’s view of personhood does not distinguish all and only humans as morally considerable. Personhood is not, in fact, coextensive with humanity when understood as a general description of the group to which human beings belong. And the serious part of this problem is not that there may be some extra-terrestrials or deities who have rational capacities. The serious problem is that many humans are not persons. Some humans—i.e., infants, children, people in comas—do not have the rational, self-reflective capacities associated with personhood. This problem, unfortunately known in the literature as the problem of “marginal cases”, poses serious difficulties for “personhood” as the criterion of moral considerability. Many beings whose positive moral value we have deeply held intuitions about, and who we treat as morally considerable, will be excluded from consideration by this account.

There are three ways to respond to this counter-intuitive conclusion. One, which can be derived from one interpretation of Kant, is to suggest that non-persons are morally considerable indirectly. Though Kant believed that animals were mere things it appears he did not genuinely believe we could dispose of them any way we wanted. In the Lectures on Ethics he makes it clear that we have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not toward them, but in regard to them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to persons.

If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. ([1784–5] 1997: 212 [Ak 27: 459])

And one could argue the same would be true of those human beings who are not persons. We disrespect our humanity when we act in inhumane ways towards non-persons, whatever their species.

But this indirect view is unsatisfying—it fails to capture the independent wrong that is being done to the non-person. When someone rapes a woman in a coma, or whips a severely brain damaged child, or sets a cat on fire, they are not simply disrespecting humanity or themselves as representatives of it, they are wronging these non-persons. So, a second way to avoid the counter-intuitive conclusion is to argue that such non-persons stand in the proper relations to “rational nature” such that they should be thought of as morally considerable. Allen Wood (1998) argues in this way and suggests that all beings that potentially have a rational nature, or who virtually have it, or who have had it, or who have part of it, or who have the necessary conditions of it, what he calls “the infrastructure of rational nature”, should be directly morally considerable. Insofar as a being stands in this relation to rational nature, they are the kinds of beings that can be wronged.

This response is not unlike that of noted animal rights proponent, Tom Regan, who argues that what is important for moral consideration are not the differences between humans and non-humans but the similarities. Regan argues that because persons share with certain non-persons (which includes those humans and non-humans who have a certain level of organized cognitive function) the ability to be experiencing subject of a life and to have an individual welfare that matters to them regardless of what others might think, both deserve moral consideration. Regan argues that subjects of a life:

want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death—all make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals. As the same is true of … animals … they too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with inherent value of their own. (Regan 1985: 24)

A third way of addressing this problem has been taken up by Korsgaard who maintains that there is a big difference between those with normative, rational capacities and those without, but unlike Kant, believes both humans and non-humans are the proper objects of our moral concern. She argues that those without normative, rational capacities share certain “natural” capacities with persons, and these natural capacities are often the content of the moral demands that persons make on each other. She writes,

what we demand, when we demand … recognition, is that our natural concerns—the objects of our natural desires and interests and affections—be accorded the status of values, values that must be respected as far as possible by others. And many of those natural concerns—the desire to avoid pain is an obvious example—spring from our animal nature, not from our rational nature. (Korsgaard 2007: 7)

What moral agents construct as valuable and normatively binding is not only our rational or autonomous capacities, but the needs and desires we have as living, embodied beings. Insofar as these needs and desires are valuable for agents, the ability to experience similar needs and desires in patients should also be valued.

In the courts, all humans and some corporations are considered persons in the legal sense. But all animals, infants and adults, are not legal persons, but rather, under the law they are considered property. There have been a few attempts to change the legal status of some nonhuman animals from property to persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) founded by Steven Wise, has filed a series of cases in the New York courts seeking to establish legal personhood for particular chimpanzees being held in the state, with the goal of protecting their rights to bodily integrity and liberty, and allow them to seek remedy, through their proxies, when those rights are violated. Chimpanzees are a good test case for establishing nonhuman legal personhood as they are, according to the documents filed by NhRP, autonomous beings with sophisticated cognitive abilities including

episodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self agency, referential and intentional communication, mental time-travel, numerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective taking, understanding the experiences of others, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy, metacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred imitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic culture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making, cause-and-effect. (petition of NhRP v. Samuel Stanley, p. 12, see Other Internet Resources )

The legal arguments to extend personhood beyond the human parallel more general ethical arguments that extend ethical consideration outward from those who occupy the moral center. Turning to empirical work designed to show that other animals are really similar to those considered legal persons, primatologists submitted affidavits attesting to what they have learned working with chimpanzees. Mary Lee Jensvold suggests

there are numerous parallels in the way chimpanzee and human communication skills develop over time, suggesting a similar unfolding cognitive process across the two species and an underlying neurobiological continuity. (Jensvold affidavit, p. 4, in Other Internet Resources )

James King notes

chimpanzees and humans resemble each other in terms of their ability to experience happiness and the way in which it relates to individual personality. (King affidavit, p. 8, in Other Internet Resources )

And Mathias Osvath makes remarkable claims about chimpanzee personhood:

Autonoetic consciousness gives an individual of any species an autobiographical sense of it self with a future and a past. Chimps and other great apes clearly possess an autobiographical self, as they are able to prepare themselves for future actions… they likely can, just as humans, be in pain over an anticipated future event that has yet to occur. For instance, confining someone in a prison or cage for a set time, or for life, would lose much of its power as punishment if that individual had no self-concept. Every moment would be a new moment with no conscious relation to the next. But, chimpanzees. and other great apes have a concept of their personal past and future and therefore suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill one’s goals or move around as one wants; like humans they experience the pain of anticipating a never-ending situation. (Osvath affidavit, pp. 4–7, in Other Internet Resources )

These claims, as well as those of others experts, identify the relevantly similar capacities that chimpanzees and other great apes share with humans and it is in virtue of these capacities that legal personhood is sought.

Using rational nature or cognitive capacities as the touchstone of moral considerability misses an important fact about animals, human and nonhuman. Our lives can go better or worse for us. Utilitarians have traditionally argued that the truly morally important feature of beings is unappreciated when we focus on personhood or the rational, self-reflective nature of humans, or the relation a being stands in to such nature, or being the subject of a life, or being legal persons. What is really important, utilitarians maintain, is the promotion of happiness, or pleasure, or the satisfaction of interests, and the avoidance of pain, or suffering, or frustration of interests. Bentham, one of the more forceful defenders of this sentientist view of moral considerability, famously wrote:

Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things . [original emphasis] … The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated … upon the same footing as … animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the ossacrum , are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?…the question is not, Can they reason ? nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer ? (Bentham 1780/1789: chapter xvii, paragraph 6)

Contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer (1990, 1979 [1993]), suggest that there is no morally justifiable way to exclude from moral consideration non-humans or non-persons who can clearly suffer. Any being that has an interest in not suffering deserves to have that interest taken into account. And a non-human who acts to avoid pain can be thought to have just such an interest. Even contemporary Kantians have acknowledged the moral force of the experience of pain. Korsgaard, for example, writes “it is a pain to be in pain. And that is not a trivial fact” (1996: 154).

When you pity a suffering animal, it is because you are perceiving a reason. An animal’s cries express pain, and they mean that there is a reason, a reason to change its conditions. And you can no more hear the cries of an animal as mere noise than you can the words of a person. Another animal can obligate you in exactly the same way another person can. …So of course we have obligations to animals. (Korsgaard 1996: 153)

When we encounter an animal in pain we recognize their claim on us, and thus beings who can suffer are morally considerable.

That non-human animals can make moral claims on us does not in itself indicate how such claims are to be assessed and conflicting claims adjudicated. Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral radar screen—how strong the signal is or where it is located on the screen are separate questions. Of course, how one argues for the moral considerability of non-human animals will inform how we are to understand the force of an animal’s claims.

According to the view that an animal’s moral claim is equivalent to a moral right, any action that fails to treat the animal as a being with inherent worth would violate that animal’s right and is thus morally objectionable. According to the animal rights position, to treat an animal as a means to some human end, as many humans do when they eat animals or experiment on them, is to violate that animal’s right. As Tom Regan has written,

…animals are treated routinely, systematically as if their value were reducible to their usefulness to others, they are routinely, systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus are their rights routinely, systematically violated. (Regan 1985: 24).

The animal rights position is an absolutist position. Any being that is a subject of a life has inherent worth and the rights that protect such worth, and all subjects of a life have these rights equally. Thus any practice that fails to respect the rights of those animals who have them, e.g., eating animals, hunting animals, experimenting on animals, using animals for entertainment, is wrong, irrespective of human need, context, or culture.

The utilitarian position on animals, most commonly associated with Peter Singer and popularly, though erroneously, referred to as an animal rights position, is actually quite distinct. Here the moral significance of the claims of animals depends on what other morally significant competing claims might be in play in any given situation. While the equal interests of all morally considerable beings are considered equally, the practices in question may end up violating or frustrating some interests but would not be considered morally wrong if, when all equal interests are considered, more of these interests are satisfied than frustrated. For utilitarians like Singer, what matters are the strength and nature of interests, not whose interests these are. So, if the only options available in order to save the life of one morally considerable being is to cause harm, but not death, to another morally considerable being, then according to a utilitarian position, causing this harm may be morally justifiable. Similarly, if there are two courses of action, one which causes extreme amounts of suffering and ultimate death, and one which causes much less suffering and painless death, then the latter would be morally preferable to the former.

Consider factory farming, the most common method used to convert animal bodies into relatively inexpensive food in industrialized societies today. An estimated 8 billion animals in the United States are born, confined, biologically manipulated, transported and ultimately slaughtered each year so that humans can consume them. The conditions in which these animals are raised and the method of slaughter causes vast amounts of suffering (see, for example, Mason & Singer 1980 [1990]). Given that animals suffer under such conditions and assuming that suffering is not in their interests, then the practice of factory farming would only be morally justifiable if its abolition were to cause greater suffering or a greater amount of interest frustration. Certainly humans who take pleasure in eating animals will find it harder to satisfy these interests in the absence of factory farms; it may cost more and require more effort to obtain animal products. The factory farmers, and the industries that support factory farming, will also have certain interests frustrated if factory farming were to be abolished. How much interest frustration and interest satisfaction would be associated with the end to factory farming is largely an empirical question. But utilitarians are not making unreasonable predictions when they argue that on balance the suffering and interest frustration that animals experience in modern day meat production is greater than the suffering that humans would endure if they had to alter their current practices.

Importantly, the utilitarian argument for the moral significance of animal suffering in meat production is not an argument for vegetarianism. If an animal lived a happy life and was painlessly killed and then eaten by people who would otherwise suffer hunger or malnutrition by not eating the animal, then painlessly killing and eating the animal would be the morally justified thing to do. In many parts of the world where economic, cultural, or climate conditions make it virtually impossible for people to sustain themselves on plant based diets, killing and eating animals that previously led relatively unconstrained lives and are painlessly killed, would not be morally objectionable. The utilitarian position can thus avoid certain charges of cultural chauvinism and moralism, charges that the animal rights position apparently cannot avoid.

It might be objected that to suggest that it is morally acceptable to hunt and eat animals for those people living in arctic regions, or for nomadic cultures, or for poor rural peoples, for example, is to potentially condone painlessly killing other morally considerable beings, like humans, for food consumption in similar situations. If violating the rights of an animal can be morally tolerated, especially a right to life, then similar rights violations can be morally tolerated. In failing to recognize the inviolability of the moral claims of all morally considerable beings, utilitarianism cannot accommodate one of our most basic prima facie principles, namely that killing a morally considerable being is wrong.

There are at least two replies to this sort of objection. The first appeals to the negative side effects that killing may promote. If, to draw on an overused and sadly sophomoric counter-example, one person can be kidnapped and painlessly killed in order to provide body parts for four individuals who will die without them, there will inevitably be negative side-effects that all things considered would make the kidnapping wrong. Healthy people, knowing they could be used for spare parts, might make themselves unhealthy to avoid such a fate or they may have so much stress and fear that the overall state of affairs would be worse than that in which four people died. Appealing to side-effects when it comes to the wrong of killing is certainly plausible, but it fails to capture what is directly wrong with killing.

A more satisfying reply would have us adopt what might be called a multi-factor perspective, one that takes into account the kinds of interest that are possible for certain kinds of morally considerable beings, the content of interests of the beings in question, their relative weight, and the context of those who have them. Consider a seal who has spent his life freely roaming the oceans and ice flats and who is suddenly and painlessly killed to provide food for a human family struggling to survive a bitter winter in far northern climes. While it is probably true that the seal had an immediate interest in avoiding suffering, it is less clear that the seal has a future directed interest in continued existence. If the seal lacks this future directed interest, then painlessly killing him does not violate this interest. The same cannot be said for the human explorer who finds himself face to face with a hungry Inuit family. Persons generally have interests in continued existence, interests that, arguably, non-persons do not have. So one factor that can be appealed to is that non-persons may not have the range of interests that persons do.

An additional factor is the type of interest in question. We can think of interests as scalar; crucial interests are weightier than important interests, important interests are weightier than replaceable interests, and all are weightier than trivial interests or mere whims. When there is a conflict of interests, crucial interests will always override important interests, important interests will always override replaceable interests, etc. So if an animal has an interest in not suffering, which is arguably a crucial interest, or at least an important one, and a person has an interest in eating that animal when there are other things to eat, meaning that interest is replaceable, then the animal has the stronger interest and it would be wrong to violate that interest by killing the animal for food if there is another source of food available.

Often, however, conflicts of interests are within the same category. The Inuit’s interest in food is crucial and the explorer’s interest in life is crucial. If we assume that the explorer cannot otherwise provide food for the hunter, then it looks as if there is a conflict within the same category. If you take the interests of an indigenous hunter’s whole family into account, then their combined interest in their own survival appears to outweigh the hapless explorer’s interest in continued existence. Indeed, if painlessly killing and eating the explorer were the only way for the family to survive, then perhaps this action would be morally condoned. But this is a rather extreme sort of example, one in which even our deepest held convictions are strained. So it is quite hard to know what to make of the clash between what a utilitarian would condone and what our intuitions tell us we should believe here. Our most basic prima facie principles arise and are accepted under ordinary circumstances. Extraordinary circumstances are precisely those in which such principles or precepts give way. [ 2 ]

The multi-factor utilitarian perspective is particularly helpful when considering the use of animals in medical research. According to the animal rights position, the use of animals in experimental procedures is a clear violation of their rights—they are being used as a mere means to some possible end—and thus animal rights proponents are in favor of the abolition of all laboratory research. The utilitarian position, particularly one that incorporates some kind of multi-factor perspective, might allow some research on animals under very specific conditions. Before exploring what a utilitarian might condone in the way of animal experimentation, let us first quickly consider what would be morally prohibited. All research that involves invasive procedures, constant confinement, and ultimate death can be said to violate the animal’s crucial interests. Thus any experiments that are designed to enhance the important, replaceable, or trivial interests of humans or other animals would be prohibited. That would mean that experiments for cosmetics or household products are prohibited, as there are non-animal tested alternatives and many options already available for consumers. Certain psychological experiments, such as those in which infant primates are separated from their mothers and exposed to frightening stimuli in an effort to understand problems teenagers have when they enter high school, would also come into question. There are many examples of experiments that violate an animal’s crucial interests in the hopes of satisfying the lesser interests of some other morally considerable being, all of which would be objectionable from this perspective.

There are some laboratory experiments, however, that from a multi-factor utilitarian perspective may be permitted. These are experiments in which the probability of satisfying crucial or important interests for many who suffer from some debilitating or fatal disease is high, and the numbers of non-human animals whose crucial interests are violated is low. The psychological complexity of the non-humans may also be significant in determining whether the experiment is morally justified. In the case of experimenting in these limited number of cases, presumably a parallel argument could be made about experimenting on humans. If the chances are very high that experimenting on one human, who is a far superior experimental animal when it comes to human disease, can prevent great suffering or death in many humans, then the utilitarian may, if side effects are minimal, condone such an experiment. Of course, it is easier to imagine this sort of extreme case in the abstract, what a utilitarian would think actually morally justified, again depends on the specific empirical data.

In sum, the animal rights position takes the significance of morally considerable claims to be absolute. Thus, any use of animals that involves a disregard for their moral claims is problematic. The significance of an animal’s morally considerable interests according to a utilitarian is variable. Whether an action is morally justified or permissible will depend on a number of factors. The utilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of practices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals, but there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and perhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen 2011: ch. 4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray 2012).

Given the long-standing view that non-humans are mere things, there are still many who reject the arguments presented here for the moral considerability of non-humans and the significance of their interests. Nonetheless, most now realize that the task of arguing that humans have a unique and exclusive moral status is rather difficult. Yet even amongst those who do view animals as within the sphere of moral concern, there is disagreement about the nature and usefulness of the arguments presented on behalf of the moral status of animals.

Increasingly, philosophers are arguing that while our behavior towards animals is indeed subject to moral scrutiny, the kinds of ethical arguments that are usually presented frame the issues in the wrong way. Some philosophers suggest that rational argumentation fails to capture those features of moral experience that allow us to really see why treating animals badly is wrong. The point, according to commentators such as Stephen R.L. Clark and Cora Diamond, for example, is that members of our communities, however we conceive of them, pull on us and it is in virtue of this pull that we recognize what is wrong with cruelty. Animals are individuals with whom we share a common life and this recognition allows us to see them as they are. Eating animals is wrong not because it is a violation of the animal’s rights or because on balance such an act creates more suffering than other acts, but rather because in eating animals or using them in other harmful, violent ways, we do not display the traits of character that kind, sensitive, compassionate, mature, and thoughtful members of a moral community should display.

According to some in the virtue ethics tradition, carefully worked out arguments in which the moral considerability and moral significance of animals are laid out will have little if any grip on our thoughts and actions. Rather, by perceiving the attitudes that underlie the use and abuse of non-human animals as shallow or cruel, one interested in living a virtuous life will change their attitudes and come to reject treating animals as food or tools for research. As Rosalind Hursthouse recognized after having been exposed to alternative ways of seeing animals:

I began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of flesh-foods as unnecessary, greedy, self-indulgent, childish, my attitude to shopping and cooking in order to produce lavish dinner parties as parochial, gross, even dissolute. I saw my interest and delight in nature programmes about the lives of animals on television and my enjoyment of meat as side by side at odds with one another…Without thinking animals had rights, I began to see both the wild ones and the ones we usually eat as having lives of their own, which they should be left to enjoy. And so I changed. My perception of the moral landscape and where I and the other animals were situated in it shifted. (Hursthouse 2000: 165–166; see also Diamond 2001 [especially chs. 11 and 13], and Clarke 1977)

Alice Crary argues that shifting perceptions of our moral landscapes occur because these landscapes, and more precisely the rich worlds of those who inhabit them, are not morally neutral. The characteristics that philosophers tend to look for in other animals to determine whether or not they are morally considerable, according to Crary, are already infused with moral importance, “human beings and other animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics” (my emphasis, 2016: 85) that are, as she puts it “inside ethics”. These values often sneak in under a supposedly neutral gloss. By explicitly locating these characteristics inside ethics, the texture, quality, and purposes of our ethical reflection on moral considerability changes. Arriving at an adequate empirical understanding requires non-neutral methods, identifying historical and cultural perspectives as shaping how we consider other animals morally. What ethical questions we think are important and how we frame and answer them, will be different if we see our lives and the lives of other animals as already imbued with moral values.

Other feminist philosophers have taken issue with the supposedly morally neutral methods of argumentation used to establish the moral status of animals. For many feminists the traditional methods of rational argumentation fail to take into account the feelings of sympathy or empathy that humans have towards non-humans, feelings they believe are central to a full account of what we owe non-humans and why (see Adams & Donovan 1995; Donovan & Adams 2007; Adams & Gruen 2014).

Feminist philosophers have also challenged the individualism that is central in the arguments for the moral status of animals. Rather than identifying intrinsic or innate properties that non-humans share with humans, some feminists have argued instead that we ought to understand moral status in relational terms given that moral recognition is invariably a social practice. As Elizabeth Anderson has written:

Moral considerability is not an intrinsic property of any creature, nor is it supervenient on only its intrinsic properties, such as its capacities. It depends, deeply, on the kind of relations they can have with us. (Anderson 2004: 289).

And these relationships needn’t be direct. The reach of human activity has expanded across the entire globe and humans are entangled with each other and other animals in myriad ways. We participate in activities and institutions that directly or indirectly harm others by creating negative experiences, depriving them of their well-being, or denying them opportunities to be who they are and pursue what they care about. Philosophers Elisa Aaltola and Lori Gruen have argued for refining our empathetic imagination in order to improve our relationships with each other and other animals.

Even though it is challenging to understand what it is like to be another, and even though we are limited by our inevitable anthropocentric perspectives, being in respectful ethical relation involves attempting to understand and respond to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and perspectives. What Gruen calls, “entangled empathy” is a process that involves both affect and cognition (Gruen 2015). Individuals who are empathizing with others respond to the other’s condition and reflectively imagine themselves in the distinct position of the other while staying attentive to both similarities and differences between herself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom she is empathizing. Entangled empathy involves paying critical attention to the broader conditions that may negatively affect the experiences and flourishing of those with whom one is empathizing, and this requires those of us empathizing to attend to things we might not have otherwise. It therefore also enhances our own experiences, develops our moral imagination, and helps us to become more sensitive perceivers.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Moral Status of Animals , webpage at Ethics Updates (Larry Hinman, University of San Diego), now only available at the Internet Archive.
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• AnimalLaw.com: International Institute for Animal Law (National Anti-Vivisection Society)
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animal: consciousness | Bentham, Jeremy | consequentialism | emotion | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | Kant, Immanuel | rights

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The big idea: should animals have the same rights as humans?

Debates about the human-like attributes of animals miss the point. Can we respect them regardless?

T he government has finally caught up with what most animal behavioural scientists have been saying for years by formally recognising animals as sentient beings in its animal welfare (sentience) bill . In November it was confirmed that the scope of the bill would be extended to include in the “sentient” category all decapod crustaceans (such as crabs and lobsters) and cephalopods (including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish). This ruling heeds a review led by Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics, who points out: “Octopuses and other cephalopods have been protected in science for years, but have not received any protection outside science until now.”

Although these rulings are welcome, their tardiness is sobering. People have been arguing fiercely, dogmatically and even violently about animal welfare for a very long time – yet framing the issue in terms of legally enforced rights comes with baggage about the socially constructed (and therefore exclusively human) nature of moral status and rights-based reasoning. The starting point should rather have been the nature of animal cognition: how we and other beings are situated in a broad panorama of minds. While there is still plenty to learn about that mindscape, Birch is right to imply that, given what science has already told us, it borders on the absurd that UK law took so long to formally acknowledge animal sentience.

There was, however, a long historical tradition of human prejudice and exceptionalism to overcome. Aristotle distinguished humans from other animals by asserting that only we have a “rational soul”, in addition to the “sensitive soul” of animals. In the 17th century René Descartes notoriously asserted that animals are mindless mechanisms, so that we shouldn’t mistake signs of apparent pain or distress as an indication that brute beasts truly feel anything at all. His supporters were accused of the most heartless acts of vivisection (although Descartes himself was said to be devoted to his dog, Monsieur Grat).

Charles Darwin’s claim that there are “no fundamental differences between man and the higher mammals in terms of mental faculties” didn’t deter the radical behaviourist psychologists of the 1950-70s, such as BF Skinner, from returning to something like the Cartesian view of animals as automata. (Skinner saw no ethical problem in training pigeons to be living guidance systems inside bombs.) Not until the modern age of neuroscience have we truly begun to recognise a continuity of neural hardware and cognitive ability between us and other animals.

Still the question lingers of whether there is some fundamental difference of mind that makes humans special. Certainly, the sophistication of our language, and perhaps in consequence of our culture, seems unique. But there’s no reason to suppose that the capacity to experience pain, curiosity, empathy and other felt aspects of existence belongs to humans alone.

Some biologists now argue that sentience may be a property of all living things, even bacteria and single cells. They assert that plants, despite lacking a nervous system, show signs of genuine cognition, even feeling. But if it is still disputed at what point in the living world sentience begins, the view expressed by philosopher Daniel Dennett is now common: “Sentience comes in every imaginable grade and intensity, from the simplest and most ‘robotic’, to the most exquisitely sensitive, ‘hyper-reactive’ human.”

The concept of sentience liberates the debate from the more contentious matter of whether other animals are conscious: a question in which the obsolete Enlightenment view that “human reason” is like a divine spark activated within us is still discernible. A ghost of Aristotelian exceptionalism remains in the suspicion that, while other animals may be sentient, only humans have that special form of it we call consciousness. The problem is that it’s hard to assign clear, quantifiable meanings to these words – even in humans, where, for example, arguments rage over the cognitive status of people in a permanent vegetative state after brain trauma (that very term harking back to Aristotle’s view of plants as possessing a mere “vegetative soul”). Although we might not know or agree on what consciousness is, it looks increasingly peculiar to imagine it as a single and absolute cognitive attribute.

The question for animal welfare is how the evident differences in “qualities of mind” between species colour our attitudes and obligations. One commonly cited criterion is whether other animals experience pain. American neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux argues that emotions such as pain are human-specific responses to physiological reactions: narratives we alone can create because of our linguistic capacity (for example, “I’m hurting”). Others counter that, since all observable indicators of and responses to “pain” in, say, dogs or chimps, look like those in us, it makes no sense to imagine some fundamental difference. At any rate, the humane position is surely to assume an equivalence unless we have clear reason not to.

And it’s not just about physical pain. Experiments have shown, for example, that farmed pigs respond as if “depressed” when kept in barren conditions devoid of mental stimulation, responding to signals (about food, say) as if they have acquired a pessimistic lack of interest in things that might benefit them. Again, we don’t know what that situation feels like to a pig – but they do seem to have a response to their experience that displays a sensitivity to the richness (or not) of their surroundings.

One challenge is how to avoid framing this debate in anthropomorphic terms, to assess rights on the basis of how closely an animal seems to approach human-like cognition. Cephalopods in particular have suffered from that tendency. The common ancestor we share with them probably lived about 600m years ago – far more distant than that of all vertebrates, such as fish – and their nervous systems are very different: most of an octopus’s neurons are in the arms, not the central brain. Some researchers think they might have a kind of dual or even multiple consciousness – a bizarre situation we struggle to imagine. Octopuses are “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien” , says philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. For octopuses do show signs of considerable intelligence, even if their motives can be hard to deduce. For this reason, in 2019 more than 100 experts in cephalopod cognition called for a ban on octopus farming in “sterile, monotonous” environments.

In the end, the notion of “rights” is hugely anthropocentric. Even the rights of, say, human embryos or people in untreatable comas (which might be argued to have less sentience than a chimp) are framed in terms of the potential for human experience. The Great Ape Project makes a compelling case for rights among our closest primate relatives: to not be killed (except in self-defence), to be allowed freedom and dignity, habitat protection and freedom from intentionally inflicted physical and psychological pain. But while the often blunt instruments of law can be needed to prevent obvious abuses, the better question is not what animals “deserve” or should be granted, but what kinds of mind they have, and what obligations we humans incur towards them as a result.

The Book of Minds by Philip Ball will be published by Pan Macmillan in June.

Further reading

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (Granta, £10.99)

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith (William Collins, £9.99)

Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses by Jackie Higgins (Picador, £20)

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Article Contents

1. introduction: the need for legal animal rights theory, 2. can animals have legal rights, 3. do animals have (simple) legal rights, 4. should animals have (fundamental) legal rights, 5. conclusion.

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Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

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Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 533–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa007

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With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Legal animal rights are on the horizon, and there is a need for a legal theory of animal rights—that is, a theory of animal rights as legal rights. While there is a diverse body of moral and political theories of animal rights, 1 the nature and conceptual foundations of legal animal rights remain remarkably underexplored. As yet, only few and fragmented legal analyses of isolated aspects of animal rights exist. 2 Other than that, most legal writing in this field operates with a hazily assumed, rudimentary and undifferentiated conception of animal rights—one largely informed by extralegal notions of moral animal rights—which tends to obscure rather than illuminate the distinctive nature and features of legal animal rights. 3 A more systematic and nuanced theorisation of legal animal rights is, however, necessary and overdue for two reasons: first, a gradual turn to legal rights in animal rights discourse; and, secondly, the incipient emergence of legal animal rights.

First, while animal rights have originally been framed as moral rights, they are increasingly articulated as potential legal rights. That is, animals’ moral rights are asserted in an ‘ought to be legal rights’-sense (or ‘manifesto sense’) 4 that demands legal institutionalisation and refers to the corresponding legal rights which animals should ideally have. 5 A salient reason for transforming moral into legal animal rights is that purely moral rights (which exist prior to and independently of legal validation) do not provide animals with sufficient practical protection, whereas legally recognised rights would be reinforced by the law’s more stringent protection and enforcement mechanisms. 6 With a view to their (potential) juridification, it seems advisable to rethink and reconstruct animal rights as specifically legal rights, rather than simply importing moral animal rights into the legal domain. 7

Secondly, and adding urgency to the need for theorisation, legal animal rights are beginning to emerge from existing law. Recently, a few pioneering courts have embarked on a path of judicial creation of animal rights, arriving at them either through a rights-based interpretation of animal welfare legislation or a dynamic interpretation of constitutional (human) rights. Most notably, the Supreme Court of India has extracted a range of animal rights from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and, by reading them in the light of the Constitution, elevated those statutory rights to the status of fundamental rights. 8 Furthermore, courts in Argentina 9 and Colombia 10 have extended the fundamental right of habeas corpus , along with the underlying right to liberty, to captive animals. 11 These (so far isolated) acts of judicial recognition of animal rights may be read as early manifestations of an incipient formation of legal animal rights. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing practical need for legal animal rights theory, in order to explain and guide the as yet still nascent—and somewhat haphazard—evolution of legal animal rights.

This article seeks to take the first steps towards building a more systematic and nuanced theory of legal animal rights. Navigating the existing theoretical patchwork, the article revisits and connects relevant themes that have so far been addressed only in a scattered or cursory manner, and consolidates them into an overarching framework for legal animal rights. Moreover, tackling the well-known problem of ambiguity and obscurity involved in the generally vague, inconsistent and undifferentiated use of the umbrella term ‘animal rights’, this article brings analytical clarity into the debate by disentangling and unveiling different meanings and facets of legal animal rights. 12 To this end, the analysis identifies and separates three relevant sets of issues: (i) conceptual issues concerning the nature and foundations of legal animal rights, and, more generally, whether animals are the kind of beings who can potentially hold legal rights; (ii) doctrinal issues pertaining to existing animal welfare law and whether it confers some legal rights on animals—and, if so, what kind of rights; and (iii) normative issues as to why and what kind of legal rights animals ought ideally to have as a matter of future law. These thematic clusters will be addressed through three simple yet key questions: can , do and should animals have legal rights?

Section 2 will show that it is conceptually possible for animals to hold legal rights, and will clarify the formal structure and normative grounds of legal animal rights. Moreover, as section 3 will demonstrate, unwritten animal rights could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though such ‘animal welfare rights’ are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. In order to distinguish between these weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law and the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have potentially or ideally, the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ will be introduced. Finally, section 4 will explore a range of functional reasons why animals need such strong, fundamental rights as a matter of future law.

As a preliminary matter, it seems necessary to first address the conceptual issue whether animals potentially can have legal rights, irrespective of doctrinal and normative issues as to whether animals do in fact have, or should have, legal rights. Whether animals are possible or potential right holders—that is, the kind of beings to whom legal rights can be ascribed ‘without conceptual absurdity’ 13 —must be determined based on the general nature of rights, which is typically characterised in terms of the structure (or form) and grounds (or ultimate purpose) of rights. 14 Looking at the idea of animal rights through the lens of general rights theories helps clarify the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights by identifying their possible forms and grounds. The first subsection (A) focusses on two particular forms of conceptually basic rights—claims and liberties—and examines their structural compatibility with animal rights. The second subsection (B) considers the two main competing theories of rights—the will theory and interest theory—and whether, and on what grounds, they can accommodate animals as potential right holders.

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

The formal structure of rights is generally explicated based on the Hohfeldian typology of rights. 15 Hohfeld famously noted that the generic term ‘right’ tends to be used indiscriminately to cover ‘any sort of legal advantage’, and distinguished four different types of conceptually basic rights: claims (rights stricto sensu ), liberties, powers and immunities. 16 In the following, I will show on the basis of first-order rights 17 —claims and liberties—that legal animal rights are structurally possible, and what such legal relations would consist of. 18

(i) Animal claim rights

To have a right in the strictest sense is ‘to have a claim to something and against someone’, the claim right necessarily corresponding with that person’s correlative duty towards the right holder to do or not to do something. 19 This type of right would take the form of animals holding a claim to something against, for example, humans or the state who bear correlative duties to refrain from or perform certain actions. Such legal animal rights could be either negative rights (correlative to negative duties) to non-interference or positive rights (correlative to positive duties) to the provision of some good or service. 20 The structure of claim rights seems especially suitable for animals, because these are passive rights that concern the conduct of others (the duty bearers) and are simply enjoyed rather than exercised by the right holder. 21 Claim rights would therefore assign to animals a purely passive position that is specified by the presence and performance of others’ duties towards animals, and would not require any actions by the animals themselves.

(ii) Animal liberties

Liberties, by contrast, are active rights that concern the right holder’s own conduct. A liberty to engage in or refrain from a certain action is one’s freedom of any contrary duty towards another to eschew or undertake that action, correlative to the no right of another. 22 On the face of it, the structure of liberties appears to lend itself to animal rights. A liberty right would indicate that an animal is free to engage in or avoid certain behaviours, in the sense of being free from a specific duty to do otherwise. Yet, an obvious objection is that animals are generally incapable of having any legal duties. 23 Given that animals are inevitably in a constant state of ‘no duty’ and thus ‘liberty’, 24 this seems to render the notion of liberty rights somewhat pointless and redundant in the case of animals, as it would do nothing more than affirm an already and invariably existing natural condition of dutylessness. However, this sort of ‘natural liberty’ is, in and of itself, only a naked liberty, one wholly unprotected against interferences by others. 25 That is, while animals may have the ‘natural liberty’ of, for example, freedom of movement in the sense of not having (and not being capable of having) a duty not to move around, others do not have a duty vis-à-vis the animals not to interfere with the exercise of this liberty by, for example, capturing and caging them.

The added value of turning the ‘natural liberties’ of animals into liberty rights thus lies in the act of transforming unprotected, naked liberties into protected, vested liberties that are shielded from certain modes of interference. Indeed, it seems sensible to think of ‘natural liberties’ as constituting legal rights only when embedded in a ‘protective perimeter’ of claim rights and correlative duties within which such liberties may meaningfully exist and be exercised. 26 This protective perimeter consists of some general duties (arising not from the liberty right itself, but from other claim rights, such as the right to life and physical integrity) not to engage in ‘at least the cruder forms of interference’, like physical assault or killing, which will preclude most forms of effective interference. 27 Moreover, liberties may be fortified by specific claim rights and correlative duties strictly designed to protect a particular liberty, such as if the state had a (negative) duty not to build highways that cut across wildlife habitat, or a (positive) duty to build wildlife corridors for such highways, in order to facilitate safe and effective freedom of movement for the animals who live in these fragmented habitats.

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

Lastly, some remarks on the relation between animal rights and duties seem in order. Some commentators hold that animals are unable to possess legal rights based on the influential idea that the capacity for holding rights is inextricably linked with the capacity for bearing duties. 28 Insofar as animals are not capable of bearing legal duties in any meaningful sense, it follows that animals cannot have legal (claim) rights against other animals, given that those other animals would be incapable of holding the correlative duties. But does this disqualify animals from having legal rights altogether, for instance, against legally competent humans or the state?

While duties are a key component of (first-order) rights—with claim rights necessarily implying the presence of a legal duty in others and liberties necessarily implying the absence of a legal duty in the right holder 29 —neither of them logically entails that the right holder bear duties herself . As Kramer aptly puts it:

Except in the very unusual circumstances where someone holds a right against himself, X’s possession of a legal right does not entail X’s bearing of a legal duty; rather, it entails the bearing of a legal duty by somebody else. 30

This underscores an important distinction between the conceptually axiomatic correlativity of rights and duties—the notion that every claim right necessarily implies a duty—and the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties—the notion that (the capacity for) right holding is conditioned on (the capacity for) duty bearing. While correlativity refers to an existential nexus between a right and a duty held by separate persons within one and the same legal relation , reciprocity posits a normative nexus between the right holding and duty bearing of one and the same person within separate, logically unrelated legal relations.

The claim that the capacity for right holding is somehow contingent on the right holder’s (logically unrelated) capacity for duty bearing is thus, as Kramer puts it, ‘straightforwardly false’ from a Hohfeldian point of view. 31 Nevertheless, there may be other, normative reasons (notably underpinned by social contract theory) for asserting that the class of appropriate right holders should be limited to those entities that, in addition to being structurally possible right holders, are also capable of reciprocating, that is, of being their duty bearers’ duty bearers. 32 However, such a narrow contractarian framing of right holding should be rejected, not least because it misses the current legal reality. 33 With a view to legally incompetent humans (eg infants and the mentally incapacitated), contemporary legal systems have manifestly cut the connection between right holding and the capacity for duty bearing. 34 As Wenar notes, the ‘class of potential right holders has expanded to include duty-less entities’. 35 Similarly, it would be neither conceptually nor legally apposite to infer from the mere fact that animals do not belong to the class of possible duty bearers that they cannot belong to the class of possible right holders. 36

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

While Hohfeld’s analytical framework is useful to outline the possible forms and composition of legal animal rights, Kelch rightly points out that it remains agnostic as to the normative grounds of potential animal rights. 37 In this respect, the two dominant theories of rights advance vastly differing accounts of the ultimate purpose of rights and who can potentially have them. 38 Whereas the idea of animal rights does not resonate well with the will theory, the interest theory quite readily provides a conceptual home for it.

(i) Will theory

According to the will theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is to promote and protect some aspect of an individual’s autonomy and self-realisation. A legal right is essentially a ‘legally respected choice’, and the right holder a ‘small scale sovereign’ whose exercise of choice is facilitated by giving her discretionary ‘legal powers of control’ over others’ duties. 39 The class of potential right holders thus includes only those entities that possess agency and legal competence, which effectively rules out the possibility of animals as right holders, insofar as they lack the sort or degree of agency necessary for the will-theory conception of rights. 40

However, the fact that animals are not potential right holders under the will theory does not necessarily mean that animals cannot have legal rights altogether. The will theory has attracted abundant criticism for its under-inclusiveness as regards both the class of possible right holders 41 and the types of rights it can plausibly account for, and thus seems to advance too narrow a conception of rights for it to provide a theoretical foundation for all rights. 42 In particular, it may be noted that the kinds of rights typically contemplated as animal rights are precisely of the sort that generally exceed the explanatory power of the will theory, namely inalienable, 43 passive, 44 public-law 45 rights that protect basic aspects of animals’ (partially historically and socially mediated) vulnerable corporeal existence. 46 Such rights, then, are best explained on an interest-theoretical basis.

(ii) Interest theory

Animal rights theories most commonly ground animal rights in animal interests, and thus naturally gravitate to the interest theory of rights. 47 According to the interest theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is the protection and advancement of some aspect(s) of an individual’s well-being and interests. 48 Legal rights are essentially ‘legally-protected interests’ that are of special importance and concern. 49 With its emphasis on well-being rather than on agency, the interest theory seems more open to the possibility of animal rights from the outset. Indeed, as regards the class of possible right holders, the interest theory does little conceptual filtering beyond requiring that right holders be capable of having interests. 50 Given that, depending on the underlying definition of ‘interest’, this may cover all animals, plants and, according to some, even inanimate objects, the fairly modest and potentially over-inclusive conceptual criterion of ‘having interests’ is typically complemented by the additional, more restrictive moral criterion of ‘having moral status’. 51 Pursuant to this limitation, not just any being capable of having interests can have rights, but only those whose well-being is not merely of instrumental, but of intrinsic or ‘ultimate value’. 52

Accordingly, under the interest theory, two conditions must be met for animals to qualify as potential right holders: (i) animals must have interests, (ii) the protection of which is required not merely for ulterior reasons, but for the animals’ own sake, because their well-being is intrinsically valuable. Now, whether animals are capable of having interests in the sense relevant to having rights and whether they have moral status in the sense of inherent or ultimate value is still subject to debate. For example, some have denied that animals possess interests based on an understanding of interests as wants and desires that require complex cognitive abilities such as having beliefs and language. 53 However, most interest theories opt for a broader understanding of interests in the sense of ‘being in someone’s interest’, meaning that an interest holder can be ‘made better or worse off’ and is able to benefit in some way from protective action. 54 Typically, though not invariably, the capacity for having interests in this broad sense is bound up with sentience—the capacity for conscious and subjective experiences of pain, suffering and pleasure. 55 Thus, most interest theorists quite readily accept (sentient) animals as potential right holders, that is, as the kind of beings that are capable of holding legal rights. 56

More importantly yet for legal purposes, the law already firmly rests on the recognition of (some) animals as beings who possess intrinsically valuable interests. Modern animal welfare legislation cannot be intelligibly explained other than as acknowledging that the animals it protects (i) have morally and legally relevant goods and interests, notably in their welfare, life and physical or mental integrity. 57 Moreover, it rests on an (implicit or explicit) recognition of those animals as (ii) having moral status in the sense of having intrinsic value. The underlying rationale of modern, non-anthropocentric, ethically motivated animal protection laws is the protection of animals qua animals, for their own sake, rather than for instrumental reasons. 58 Some laws go even further by directly referencing the ‘dignity’ or ‘intrinsic value’ of animals. 59

It follows that existing animal welfare laws already treat animals as intrinsically valuable holders of some legally relevant interests—and thus as precisely the sorts of beings who possess the qualities that are, under an interest theory of rights, necessary and sufficient for having rights. This, then, prompts the question whether those very laws do not only conceptually allow for potential animal rights, but might also give rise to actual legal rights for animals.

Notwithstanding that animals could have legal rights conceptually, the predominant doctrinal opinion is that, as a matter of positive law, animals do not have any, at least not in the sense of proper, legally recognised and claimable rights. 60 Yet, there is a certain inclination, especially in Anglo-American parlance, to speak—in a rather vague manner—of ‘animal rights’ as if they already exist under current animal welfare legislation. Such talk of existing animal rights is, however, rarely backed up with further substantiations of the underlying claim that animal welfare laws do in fact confer legal rights on animals. In the following, I will examine whether animals’ existing legal protections may be classified as legal rights and, if so, what kind of rights these constitute. The analysis will show (A) that implicit animal rights (hereinafter referred to as ‘animal welfare rights’) 61 can be extracted from animal welfare laws as correlatives of explicit animal welfare duties, but that this reading remains largely theoretical so far, given that such unwritten animal rights are hardly legally recognised in practice. Moreover, (B) the kind of rights derivable from animal welfare laws are currently at best imperfect and weak rights that do not provide animals with the sort of robust normative protection that is generally associated with legal rights, and typically also expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. Finally, (C) the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ are introduced in order to distinguish, and account for the qualitative differences, between such current, imperfect, weak animal rights and potential, ideal, strong animal rights.

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws

(i) the simple argument from correlativity.

Existing animal welfare laws are not framed in the language of rights and do not codify any explicit animal rights. They do, however, impose on people legal duties designed to protect animals—duties that demand some behaviour that is beneficial to the welfare of animals. Some commentators contend that correlative (claim) rights are thereby conferred upon animals as the beneficiaries of such duties. 62 This view is consistent with, and, indeed, the logical conclusion of, an interest-theoretical analysis. 63 Recall that rights are essentially legally protected interests of intrinsically valuable individuals, and that a claim right is the ‘position of normative protectedness that consists in being owed a … legal duty’. 64 Under existing animal welfare laws, some goods of animals are legally protected interests in exactly this sense of ultimately valuable interests that are protected through the imposition of duties on others. However, the inference from existing animal welfare duties to the existence of correlative ‘animal welfare rights’ appears to rely on a somewhat simplistic notion of correlativity, along the lines of ‘where there is a duty there is a right’. 65 Two objections in particular may be raised against the view that beneficial duties imposed by animal welfare laws are sufficient for creating corresponding legal rights in animals.

First, not every kind of duty entails a correlative right. 66 While some duties are of an unspecific and general nature, only relational, directed duties which are owed to rather than merely regarding someone are the correlatives of (claim) rights. Closely related, not everyone who stands to benefit from the performance of another’s duty has a correlative right. According to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties designed to protect their interests. 67 Yet, animal welfare duties, in a contemporary reading, are predominantly understood not as indirect duties regarding animals—duties imposed to protect, for example, an owner’s interest in her animal, public sensibilities or the moral character of humans—but as direct duties owed to the protected animals themselves. 68 Moreover, the constitutive purpose of modern animal welfare laws is to protect animals for their own sake. Animals are therefore clearly beneficiaries in a qualified sense, that is, they are not merely accidental or incidental, but the direct and intended primary beneficiaries of animal welfare duties. 69

Secondly, one may object that an analysis of animal rights as originating from intentionally beneficial duties rests on a conception of rights precisely of the sort which has the stigma of redundancy attached to it. Drawing on Hart, this would appear to cast rights as mere ‘alternative formulation of duties’ and thus ‘no more than a redundant translation of duties … into a terminology of rights’. 70 Admittedly, as MacCormick aptly puts it:

[To] rest an account of claim rights solely on the notion that they exist whenever a legal duty is imposed by a law intended to benefit assignable individuals … is to treat rights as being simply the ‘reflex’ of logically prior duties. 71

One way of responding to this redundancy problem is to reverse the logical order of rights and duties. On this account, rights are not simply created by (and thus logically posterior to) beneficial duties, but rather the converse: such duties are derived from and generated by (logically antecedent) rights. For example, according to Raz, ‘Rights are grounds of duties in others’ and thus justificationally prior to duties. 72 However, if rights are understood not just as existentially correlative, but as justificationally prior to duties, identifying intentionally beneficial animal welfare duties as the source of (logically posterior) animal rights will not suffice. In order to accommodate the view that rights are grounds of duties, the aforementioned argument from correlativity needs to be reconsidered and refined.

(ii) A qualified argument from correlativity

A refined, and reversed, argument from correlativity must show that animal rights are not merely reflexes created by animal welfare duties, but rather the grounds for such duties. In other words, positive animal welfare duties must be plausibly explained as some kind of codified reflection, or visible manifestation, of ‘invisible’ background animal rights that give rise to those duties.

This requires further clarification of the notion of a justificational priority of rights over duties. On the face of it, the idea that rights are somehow antecedent to duties appears to be at odds with the Hohfeldian correlativity axiom, which stipulates an existential nexus of mutual entailment between rights and duties—one cannot exist without the other. 73 Viewed in this light, it seems paradoxical to suggest that rights are causal for the very duties that are simultaneously constitutive of those rights—cause and effect seem to be mutually dependent. Gewirth offers a plausible explanation for this seemingly circular understanding of the relation between rights and duties. He illustrates that the ‘priority of claim rights over duties in the order of justifying purpose or final causality is not antithetical to their being correlative to each other’ by means of an analogy:

Parents are prior to their children in the order of efficient causality, yet the (past or present) existence of parents can be inferred from the existence of children, as well as conversely. Hence, the causal priority of parents to children is compatible with the two groups’ being causally as well as conceptually correlative. The case is similar with rights and duties, except that the ordering relation between them is one of final rather than efficient causality, of justifying purpose rather than bringing-into-existence. 74

Upon closer examination, this point may be specified even further. To stay with the analogy of (biological) 75 parents and their children: it is actually the content of ‘parents’—a male and a female (who at some point procreate together)—that exists prior to and independently of possibly ensuing ‘children’, whereas this content turns into ‘parents’ only in conjunction with ‘children’. That is, the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are mutually entailing, whilst, strictly speaking, it is not ‘parents’, but rather that which will later be called ‘parents’ only once the ‘child’ comes into existence—the pre-existing content—which is antecedent to and causal for ‘children’.

Applied to the issue of rights and duties, this means that it is actually the content of a ‘right’—an interest—that exists prior to and independently of, and is (justificationally) causal for the creation of, a ‘duty’, which, in turn, is constitutive of a ‘right’. The distinction between ‘right’ and its content—an interest—allows the pinpointing of the latter as the reason for, and the former as the concomitant correlative of, a duty imposed to protect the pre-existing interest. It may thus be restated, more precisely, that it is not rights, but the protected interests which are grounds of duties. Incidentally, this specification is consistent with Raz’s definition of rights, according to which ‘having a right’ means that an aspect of the right holder’s well-being (her interest) ‘is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty’. 76 Now, the enactment of modern animal welfare laws is in and of itself evidence of the fact that some aspects of animals’ well-being (their interests) are—both temporally and justificationally—causal and a sufficient reason for imposing duties on others. Put differently: animal interests are grounds of animal welfare duties , and this, in turn, is conceptually constitutive of animal rights .

In conclusion, existing animal welfare laws could indeed be analysed as comprising unwritten ‘animal welfare rights’ as implicit correlatives of the explicit animal welfare duties imposed on others. The essential feature of legal rules conferring rights is that they specifically aim at protecting individual interests or goods—whether they do so expressis verbis or not is irrelevant. 77 Even so, in order for a right to be an actual (rather than a potential or merely postulated) legal right, it should at least be legally recognised (if not claimable and enforceable), 78 which is determined by the applicable legal rules. In the absence of unequivocal wording, whether a legal norm confers unwritten rights on animals becomes a matter of legal interpretation. While theorists can show that a rights-based approach lies within the bounds of a justifiable interpretation of the law, an actual, valid legal right hardly comes to exist by the mere fact that some theorists claim it exists. For that to happen, it seems instrumental that some public authoritative body, notably a court, recognises it as such. That is, while animals’ existing legal protections may already provide for all the ingredients constitutive of rights, it takes a court to actualise this potential , by authoritatively interpreting those legal rules as constituting rights of animals. However, because courts, with a few exceptions, have not done so thus far, it seems fair to say that unwritten animal rights are not (yet) legally recognised in practice and remain a mostly theoretical possibility for now. 79

B. The Weakness of Current ‘Animal Welfare Rights’

Besides the formal issue of legal recognition, there are substantive reasons for questioning whether the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare laws are really rights at all. This is because current ‘animal welfare rights’ are unusually weak rights that do not afford the sort of strong normative protection that is ordinarily associated with legal rights. 80 Classifying animals’ existing legal protections as ‘rights’ may thus conflict with the deeply held view that, because they protect interests of special importance, legal rights carry special normative force . 81 This quality is expressed in metaphors of rights as ‘trumps’, 82 ‘protective fences’, 83 protective shields or ‘No Trespassing’ signs, 84 or ‘suits of armor’. 85 Rights bestow upon individuals and their important interests a particularly robust kind of legal protection against conflicting individual or collective interests, by singling out ‘those interests that are not to be sacrificed to the utilitarian calculus ’ and ‘whose promotion or protection is to be given qualitative precedence over the social calculus of interests generally’. 86 Current ‘animal welfare rights’, by contrast, provide an atypically weak form of legal protection, notably for two reasons: because they protect interests of secondary importance or because they are easily overridden.

In order to illustrate this, consider the kind of rights that can be extracted from current animal welfare laws. Given that these are the correlatives of existing animal welfare duties, the substance of these rights must mirror the content laid down in the respective legal norms. This extraction method produces, first, a rather odd subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’ that have a narrow substantive scope protecting highly specific, secondary interests, such as a (relative) right to be slaughtered with prior stunning, 87 an (absolute) right that experiments involving ‘serious injuries that may cause severe pain shall not be carried out without anaesthesia’ 88 or a right of chicks to be killed by fast-acting methods, such as homogenisation or gassing, and to not be stacked on top of each other. 89 The weak and subsidiary character of such rights becomes clearer when placed within the permissive institutional context in which they operate, and when taking into account the more basic interests that are left unprotected. 90 While these rights may protect certain secondary, derivative interests (such as the interest in being killed in a painless manner ), they are simultaneously premised on the permissibility of harming the more primary interests at stake (such as the interest in not being killed at all). Juxtaposed with the preponderance of suffering and killing that is legally allowed in the first place, phrasing the residual legal protections that animals do receive as ‘rights’ may strike us as misleading. 91

But then there is a second subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’, extractable from general animal welfare provisions, that have a broader scope, protecting more basic, primary interests, such as a right to well-being, life, 92 dignity, 93 to not suffer unnecessarily, 94 or against torture and cruel treatment. 95 Although the object of such rights is of a more fundamental nature, the substantive guarantee of these facially fundamental rights is, to a great extent, eroded by a conspicuously low threshold for permissible infringements. 96 That is, these rights suffer from a lack of normative force, which manifests in their characteristically high infringeability (ie their low resistance to being overridden). Certainly, most rights (whether human or animal) are relative prima facie rights that allow for being balanced against conflicting interests and whose infringement constitutes a violation only when it is not justified, notably in terms of necessity and proportionality. 97 Taking rights seriously does, however, require certain safeguards ensuring that rights are only overridden by sufficiently important considerations whose weight is proportionate to the interests at stake. As pointed out by Waldron, the idea of rights is seized on as a way of resisting, or at least restricting, the sorts of trade-offs that would be acceptable in an unqualified utilitarian calculus, where ‘important individual interests may end up being traded off against considerations which are intrinsically less important’. 98 Yet, this is precisely what happens to animals’ prima facie protected interests, any of which—irrespective of how important or fundamental they are—may enter the utilitarian calculus, where they typically end up being outweighed by human interests that are comparatively less important or even trivial, notably dietary and fashion preferences, economic profitability, recreation or virtually any other conceivable human interest. 99

Any ‘animal welfare rights’ that animals may presently be said to have are thus either of the substantively oddly specific, yet rather secondary, kind or, in the case of more fundamental prima facie rights, such that are highly infringeable and ‘evaporate in the face of consequential considerations’. 100 The remaining question is whether these features render animals’ existing legal protections non-rights or just particularly unfit or weak rights , but rights nonetheless. The answer will depend on whether the quality of special strength, weight or force is considered a conceptually constitutive or merely typical but not essential feature of rights. On the first view, a certain normative force would function as a threshold criterion for determining what counts as a right and for disqualifying those legal protections that may structurally resemble rights but do not meet a minimum weight. 101 On the second view, the normative force of rights would serve as a variable that defines the particular weight of different types of rights on a spectrum from weak to strong. 102 To illustrate the intricacies of drawing a clear line between paradigmatically strong rights, weak rights or non-rights based on this criterion, let us return to the analogy with (biological) ‘parents’. In a minimal sense, the concept of ‘parents’ may be essentially defined as ‘biological creators of a child’. Typically, however, a special role as nurturer and caregiver is associated with the concept of ‘parent’. Now, is someone who merely meets the minimal conceptual criterion (by being the biological creator), but not the basic functions attached to the concept (by not giving care), still a ‘parent’? And, if so, to what extent? Are they a full and proper ‘parent’, or merely an imperfect, dysfunctional form of ‘parent’, a bad ‘parent’, but a ‘parent’ nonetheless? Maybe current animal rights are ‘rights’ in a similar sense as an absent, negligent, indifferent biological mother or father who does not assume the role and responsibilities that go along with parenthood is still a ‘parent’. That is, animals’ current legal protections may meet the minimal conceptual criteria for rights, but they do not perform the characteristic normative function of rights. They are, therefore, at best atypically weak and imperfect rights.

C. The Distinction between Simple and Fundamental Animal Rights

In the light of the aforesaid, if one adopts the view that animals’ existing legal protections constitute legal rights—that is, if one concludes that existing animal welfare laws confer legal rights on animals despite a lack of explicit legal enactment or of any coherent judicial recognition of unwritten animal rights, and that the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare law retain their rights character regardless of how weak they are—then an important qualification needs to be made regarding the nature and limits of such ‘animal welfare rights’. In particular, it must be emphasised that this type of legal animal rights falls short of (i) our ordinary understanding of legal rights as particularly robust protections of important interests and (ii) institutionalising the sort of inviolable, basic moral animal rights (along the lines of human rights) that animal rights theorists typically envisage. 103 It thus seems warranted to separate the kind of imperfect and weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of ideal, 104 proper, strong fundamental rights that animals potentially ought to have as a matter of future law.

In order to denote and account for the qualitative difference between these two types of legal animal rights, and drawing on similar distinctions as regards the rights of individuals under public and international law, 105 I propose to use the conceptual categories of fundamental animal rights and other, simple animal rights. As to the demarcating criteria, we can distinguish between simple and fundamental animal rights based on a combination of two factors: (i) substance (fundamentality or non-fundamentality of the protected interests) and (ii) normative force (degree of infringeability). Accordingly, simple animal rights can be defined as weak legal rights whose substantive content is of a non-fundamental, ancillary character and/or that lack normative force due to their high infringeability. In contradistinction, fundamental animal rights are strong legal rights along the lines of human rights that are characterised by the cumulative features of substantive fundamentality and normative robustness due to their reduced infringeability.

The ‘animal welfare rights’ derivable from current animal welfare laws are simple animal rights. However, it is worth noting that while the first subtype of substantively non-fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ belongs to this category irrespective of their infringeability, 106 the second subtype of substantively fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ presently falls in this category purely in respect of their characteristically high infringeability. Yet, the latter is a dynamic and changeable feature, insofar as these rights could be dealt with, in case of conflict, in a manner whereby they would prove to be more robust. In other words, while the simple animal rights of the second subtype currently lack the normative force of legal rights, they do have the potential to become fundamental animal rights. Why animals need such fundamental rights will be explored in the final section.

Beyond the imperfect, weak, simple rights that animals may be said to have based on existing animal welfare laws, a final normative question remains with a view to the future law: whether animals ought to have strong legal rights proper. I will focus on fundamental animal rights—such as the right to life, bodily integrity, liberty and freedom from torture—as these correspond best with the kind of ‘ought to be legal rights’ typically alluded to in animal rights discourse. Given the general appeal of rights language, it is not surprising that among animal advocates there is an overall presumption in favour of basic human rights-like animal rights. 107 However, it is often simply assumed that, rather than elucidated why, legal rights would benefit animals and how this would strengthen their protection. In order to undergird the normative claim that animals should have strong legal rights, the following subsections will look at functional reasons why animals need such rights. 108 I will do so through a non-exhaustive exploration of the potential legal advantages and political utility of fundamental animal rights over animals’ current legal protections (be they animal welfare laws or ‘animal welfare rights’).

A. Procedural Aspect: Standing and Enforceability

Against the backdrop of today’s well-established ‘enforcement gap’ and ‘standing dilemma’, 109 one of the most practical benefits typically associated with, or expected from, legal animal rights is the facilitation of standing for animals in their own right and, closely related, the availability of more efficient mechanisms for the judicial enforcement of animals’ legal protections. 110 This is because legal rights usually include the procedural element of having standing to sue, the right to seek redress and powers of enforcement—which would enable animals (represented by legal guardians) to institute legal proceedings in their own right and to assert injuries of their own. 111 This would also ‘decentralise’ enforcement, that is, it would not be concentrated in the hands (and at the sole discretion) of public authorities, but supplemented by private standing of animals to demand enforcement. Ultimately, such an expanded enforceability could also facilitate incremental legal change by feeding animal rights questions into courts as fora for public deliberation.

However, while standing and enforceability constitute crucial procedural components of any effective legal protection of animals, for present purposes, it should be noted that fundamental animal rights (or any legal animal rights) are—albeit maybe conducive—neither necessary nor sufficient to this end. On the one hand, not all legal rights (eg some socio-economic human rights) are necessarily enforceable. Merely conferring legal rights on animals will therefore, in itself, not guarantee sufficient legal protection from a procedural point of view. Rather, fundamental animal rights must encompass certain procedural rights, such as the right to access to justice, in order to make them effectively enforceable. On the other hand, animals or designated animal advocates could simply be granted standing auxiliary to today’s animal welfare laws, which would certainly contribute towards narrowing the enforcement gap. 112 Yet, standing as such merely offers the purely procedural benefit of being able to legally assert and effectively enforce any given legal protections that animals may have, but has no bearing on the substantive content of those enforceable protections. Given that the issue is not just one of improving the enforcement of animals’ existing legal protections, but also of substantially improving them, standing alone cannot substitute for strong substantive animal rights. Therefore, animals will ultimately need both strong substantive and enforceable rights, which may be best achieved through an interplay of fundamental rights and accompanying procedural guarantees.

B. Substantive Aspect: Stronger Legal Protection for Important Interests

The aforesaid suggests that the critical function of fundamental animal rights is not procedural in nature; rather, it is to substantively improve and fortify the protection of important animal interests. In particular, fundamental animal rights would strengthen the legal protection of animals on three levels: by establishing an abstract equality of arms, by broadening the scope of protection to include more fundamental substantive guarantees and by raising the burden of justification for infringements.

First of all, fundamental animal rights would create the structural preconditions for a level playing field where human and animal interests are both reinforced by equivalent rights, and can thus collide on equal terms. Generally speaking, not all legally recognised interests count equally when balanced against each other, and rights-empowered interests typically take precedence over or are accorded more weight than unqualified competing interests. 113 At present, the structural makeup of the balancing process governing human–animal conflicts is predisposed towards a prioritisation of human over animal interests. Whereas human interests are buttressed by strong, often fundamental rights (such as economic, religious or property rights), the interests at stake on the animal side, if legally protected at all, enter the utilitarian calculus as unqualified interests that are merely shielded by simple animal welfare laws, or simple rights that evaporate quickly in situations of conflict and do not compare to the sorts of strong rights that reinforce contrary human interests. 114 In order to achieve some form of abstract equality of arms, animals’ interests need to be shielded by strong legal rights that are a match to humans’ rights. Fundamental animal rights would correct this structural imbalance and set the stage for an equal consideration of interests that is not a priori biased in favour of humans’ rights.

Furthermore, as defined above, fundamental animal rights are characterised by both their substantive fundamentality and normative force, and would thus strengthen animals’ legal protection in two crucial respects. On a substantive level , fundamental animal rights are grounded in especially important, fundamental interests. Compared to substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights, which provide for narrow substantive guarantees that protect secondary interests, fundamental animal rights would expand the scope of protection to cover a wider array of basic and primary interests. As a result, harming fundamentally important interests of animals—while readily permissible today insofar as such interests are often not legally protected in the first place 115 —would trigger a justification requirement that initially allows those animal interests to enter into a balancing process. For even with fundamental animal rights in play, conflicts between human and animal interests will inevitably continue to exist—albeit at the elevated and abstractly equal level of conflicts of rights—and therefore require some sort of balancing mechanism. 116

On this justificatory level , fundamental animal rights would then demand a special kind and higher burden of justification for infringements. 117 As demonstrated above, substantively fundamental yet highly infringeable simple animal rights are marked by a conspicuously low threshold for justifiable infringements, and are regularly outweighed by inferior or even trivial human interests. By contrast, the normative force of fundamental animal rights rests on their ability to raise the ‘level of the minimally sufficient justification’. 118 Modelling these more stringent justification requirements on established principles of fundamental (human) rights adjudication, this would, first, limit the sorts of considerations that constitute a ‘legitimate aim’ which can be balanced against fundamental animal rights. Furthermore, the balancing process must encompass a strict proportionality analysis, comprised of the elements of suitability, necessity and proportionality stricto sensu , which would preclude the bulk of the sorts of low-level justifications that are currently sufficient. 119 This heightened threshold for justifiable infringements, in turn, translates into a decreased infringeability of fundamental animal rights and an increased immunisation of animals’ prima facie protected interests against being overridden by conflicting considerations and interests of lesser importance.

Overall, considering this three-layered strengthening of the legal protection of animals’ important interests, fundamental animal rights are likely to set robust limits to the violability and disposability of animals as means to human ends, and to insulate animals from many of the unnecessary and disproportionate inflictions of harm that are presently allowed by law.

C. Fallback Function: The Role of Rights in Non-ideal Societies

Because contemporary human–animal interactions are, for the most part, detrimental to animals, the latter appear to be in particular need of robust legal protections against humans and society. 120 Legal rights, as strong (but not impenetrable) shields, provide an instrument well suited for this task, as they operate in a way that singles out and protects important individual goods against others and the political community as a whole. For this reason, rights are generally considered an important counter-majoritarian institution, but have also been criticised for their overly individualistic, antagonistic and anti-communitarian framing. 121 Certainly, it may be debated whether there is a place for the institution of rights in an ideal society—after all, rights are not decrees of nature, but human inventions that are historically and socially contingent. 122 However, rights are often born from imperfect social conditions, as a ‘response to a failure of social responsibility’ 123 and as corrections of experiences of injustice, or, as Dershowitz puts it: ‘ rights come from wrongs ’. 124 Historical experience suggests that, at least in non-ideal societies, there is a practical need for rights as a safety net—a ‘position of fall-back and security’ 125 —that guarantees individuals a minimum degree of protection, in case or because other, less coercive social or moral mechanisms fail to do so.

Yet, as Edmundson rightly points out, this view of rights as backup guarantees does not quite capture the particular need for rights in the case of animals. 126 It is premised on the existence of a functioning overall social structure that can in some cases, and maybe in the ideal case, substitute for rights. However, unlike many humans, most animals are not embedded in a web of caring, affectionate, benevolent relations with humans to begin with, but rather are caught up in a system of exploitative, instrumental and harmful relations. For the vast majority of animals, it is not enough to say that rights would serve them as fallbacks, because there is nowhere to fall from—by default, animals are already at (or near) the bottom. Accordingly, the concrete need for rights may be more acute in the case of animals, as their function is not merely to complement, but rather to compensate for social and moral responsibility, which is lacking in the first place. 127 To give a (somewhat exaggerated) example: from the perspective of a critical legal scholar, meta-theorising from his office in the ivory tower, it may seem easier, and even desirable, to intellectually dispense with the abstract notion of rights, whereas for an elephant who is actually hunted down for his ivory tusks, concrete rights may make a very real difference, literally between life and death. Therefore, under the prevailing social conditions, animals need a set of basic rights as a primary ‘pull-up’ rather than as a subsidiary backup—that is, as compensatory baseline guarantees rather than as complementary background guarantees.

D. Transformative Function: Rights as ‘Bridges’ between Non-ideal Realities and Normative Ideals

Notwithstanding that animals need fundamental rights, we should not fail to recognise that even the minimum standards such rights are designed to establish and safeguard seem highly ambitious and hardly politically feasible at present. Even a rudimentary protection of fundamental animal rights would require far-ranging changes in our treatment of animals, and may ultimately rule out ‘virtually all existing practices of the animal-use industries’. 128 Considering how deeply the instrumental and inherently harmful use of animals is woven into the economic and cultural fabric of contemporary societies, and how pervasive animal cruelty is on both an individual and a collective level, the implications of fundamental animal rights indeed seem far removed from present social practices. 129 This chasm between normative aspirations and the deeply imperfect empirical realities they collide with is not, however, a problem unique to fundamental animal rights; rather, it is generally in the nature of fundamental rights—human or animal—to postulate normative goals that remain, to some extent, aspirational and unattainable. 130 Aspirational rights express commitments to ideals that, even if they may not be fully realisable at the time of their formal recognition, act as a continuous reminder and impulse that stimulates social and legal change towards a more expansive implementation. 131 In a similar vein, Bilchitz understands fundamental rights as moral ideals that create the pressure for legal institutionalisation and as ‘bridging concepts’ that facilitate the transition from past and present imperfect social realities towards more just societies. 132

This, then, provides a useful lens for thinking about the aspirational nature and transformative function of fundamental animal rights. Surely, the mere formal recognition of fundamental animal rights will not, by any realistic measure, bring about an instant practical achievement of the ultimate goal of ‘abolishing exploitation and liberating animals from enslavement’. 133 They do, however, create the legal infrastructure for moving from a non-ideal reality towards more ideal social conditions in which animal rights can be respected. For example, a strong animal right to life would (at least in industrialised societies) preclude most forms of killing animals for food, and would thus certainly conflict with the entrenched practice of eating meat. Yet, while the current social normality of eating animals may make an immediate prohibition of meat production and consumption unrealistic, it is also precisely the reason why animals need a right to life (ie a right not to be eaten), as fundamental rights help to denormalise (formerly) accepted social practices and to establish, internalise and habituate normative boundaries. 134 Moreover, due to their dynamic nature, fundamental rights can generate successive waves of more stringent and expansive duties over time. 135 Drawing on Bilchitz, the established concept of ‘progressive realisation’ (originally developed in the context of socio-economic human rights) may offer a helpful legal framework for the gradual practical implementation of animal rights. Accordingly, each fundamental animal right could be seen as comprising a minimum core that has to be ensured immediately, coupled with a general prohibition of retrogressive measures , and an obligation to progressively move towards a fuller realisation . 136 Therefore, even if fundamental animal rights may currently not be fully realisable, the very act of introducing them into law and committing to them as normative ideals places animals on the ‘legal map’ 137 and will provide a powerful generative basis—a starting point rather than an endpoint 138 —from which a dynamic process towards their more expansive realisation can unfold.

The question of animal rights has been of long-standing moral concern. More recently, the matter of institutionalising moral animal rights has come to the fore, and attaining legal rights for animals has become an important practical goal of animal advocates. This article started out from the prefatory observation that the process of juridification may already be in its early stages, as judicially recognised animal rights are beginning to emerge from both animal welfare law and human rights law. With legal animal rights on the horizon, the analysis set out to systematically address the arising conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues, in order to provide a theoretical underpinning for this legal development. The article showed that the idea of legal animal rights has a sound basis in both legal theory as well as in existing law. That is, legal animal rights are both conceptually possible and already derivable from current animal welfare laws. However, the analysis has also revealed that the ‘animal welfare rights’ which animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law fall short of providing the sort of strong normative protection that is typically associated with legal rights and that is furthermore expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. This discrepancy gave rise to a new conceptual distinction between two types of legal animal rights: simple and fundamental animal rights.

While the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of legal protections that the law may grant to animals, distinguishing between simple and fundamental animal rights helps to unveil important differences between what we may currently call ‘legal animal rights’ based on existing animal welfare laws, which are weak legal rights at best, and the kind of strong, fundamental legal rights that animals should have as a matter of future law. This distinction is further conducive to curbing the trivialisation of the language of animal rights, as it allows us to preserve the normative force of fundamental animal rights by separating out weaker rights and classifying them as other, simple animal rights. Lastly, it is interesting to note that, with courts deriving legal animal rights from both animal welfare law and from constitutional, fundamental or human rights law, first prototypes of simple and fundamental animal rights are already discernible in emerging case law. Whereas Christopher Stone once noted that ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been … a bit unthinkable’ throughout legal history, 139 the findings of this article suggest that we may presently be witnessing a new generation of legal rights in the making—legal animal rights, simple and fundamental.

This article is the first part of my postdoctoral research project ‘Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I am indebted to William Edmundson, Raffael Fasel, Chris Green, Christoph Krenn, Visa Kurki, Will Kymlicka, Nico Müller, Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, MH Tse, Steven White, Derek Williams and the anonymous reviewers for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Seminally, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 1983); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP 2011).

See, notably, Matthew H Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (2001) 14 CJLJ 29; Tom L Beauchamp, ‘Rights Theory and Animal Rights’ in Tom L Beauchamp and RG Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (OUP 2011); William A Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (2015) 23 Journal of Political Philosophy 345; Gary L Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (first printed 1995, Temple UP 2007) 91ff; Steven M Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution—The Eligibility of Nonhuman Animals for Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democracy’ (1998) 22 Vt L Rev 793; Anne Peters, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Animalité: Human-Animal Comparisons in Law’ (2016) 5 TEL 25; Thomas G Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights’ (1999) 27 BC Envtl Aff L Rev 1.

Much legal scholarship deals with animal rights in a rather cursory and incidental manner, because it typically focusses on parallel debates that are closely related to, but seen as preceding, the issue of rights. For example, much has been written about the systemic shortcomings of animal welfare legislation, which—within the entrenched animal welfare/rights-dualism—has served to undergird calls for shifting towards a rights -paradigm for legal protection of animals. Another focal point of legal scholars has been to change the legal status of animals from property to person , which is taken to be a prerequisite for right holding. Yet, even though legal rights for animals may be the ultimate goal informing these debates, surprisingly little detailed attention has been given to such envisaged legal animal rights per se.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Prentice-Hall 1973) 67.

See eg Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia UP 2012) 14–15, 207 (whose ‘account of the moral rights of animals … proposes what the legal rights of animals ought to be ’); cf Joel Feinberg, ‘In Defence of Moral Rights’ (1992) 12 OJLS 149 (describing this indirect way of referencing legal rights as the ‘“There ought to be a law” theory of moral rights’, 156).

As noted by Favre, what is required is ‘that the legal system intervene when personal morals or ethics do not adequately protect animals from human abuse’. David Favre, ‘Integrating Animal Interests into Our Legal System’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 87, 88.

Even though moral and legal rights are intimately connected (see HLA Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 175, 177), a somewhat distinct (or at least modified and refined) theorisation is warranted because, unlike moral animal rights, legal animal rights are constituted by legal systems, and their existence and scope have to be determined based on the applicable legal rules. As Wise puts it: ‘philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights’. Steven M Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus 2002) 34.

Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] [56] [62ff]; see further Kerala High Court 6 June 2000, AIR 2000 KER 340 (expressing the opinion that ‘legal rights shall not be the exclusive preserve of the humans’, [13]); Delhi High Court 15 May 2015, CRL MC no 2051/2015 [3] [5] (recognizing birds’ ‘fundamental rights to fly in the sky’).

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15; this landmark decision was preceded by an obiter dictum in Cámara Federal de Casación Penal Buenos Aires, 18 December 2014, SAIJ NV9953 [2] (expressing the view that animals are right holders and should be recognized as legal subjects).

Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona). This ruling was later reversed in Corte Suprema de Justicia 16 August 2017, STL12651-2017 (MP: Fernando Castillo Cadena). In January 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided against granting habeas corpus to the animal in question.

Similar habeas corpus claims on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants, brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project, have not been accepted by US courts. See, notably, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336.

On the ambiguity of the term ‘animal rights’, see eg Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Rights’ in Lori Gruen (ed), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago Press 2018) 320; in using the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ without further specifications, it is often left unclear what exactly is meant by ‘rights’. For example, the term may refer to either moral or legal animal rights—or both. Furthermore, in a broad sense, ‘animal rights’ sometimes refers to any kind of normative protection for animals, whereas in a narrow sense, it is often reserved for particularly important and inviolable, human rights-like animal rights. Moreover, some speak of ‘animal rights’ as if they already existed as a matter of positive law, while others use the same term in a ‘manifesto sense’, to refer to potential, ideal rights.

Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Clare Palmer (ed), Animal Rights (Routledge 2008) 409; the class of potential right holders comprises ‘any being that is capable of holding legal rights, whether or not he/she/it actually holds such rights’. Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29.

See generally Alon Harel, ‘Theories of Rights’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 191ff.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16; Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1917) 26 Yale LJ 710.

See Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 717; these Hohfeldian incidents of rights are merely ‘atomic’ units, whereas many common rights are complex aggregates, clusters or ‘molecular rights’ consisting of combinations thereof. ibid 746; Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (2005) 33 Philosophy & Public Affairs 223, 225, 234.

First-order rights (claims and liberties) directly concern someone’s actual rather than normative conduct, whereas powers and immunities are second-order rights (‘meta-rights’) that concern other legal relations; by prioritising, for the sake of this analysis, first-order rights regarding (in)actions of and towards animals, this is not to say that second-order rights are not important to accompany and bolster the first-order rights of animals. For instance, just as many complex (eg fundamental) rights contain immunities, that is, the freedom from the legal power of another (the disability bearer) to change the immunity holder’s rights, animals’ claims and liberties may be bolstered by immunity rights that protect those first-order rights from being altered, notably voided, by others. For example, one of the most basic rights frequently discussed for animals, the ‘right not to be property’ (Gary L Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (first printed 2000, Temple UP 2007) 93ff), may be explained as an immunity that would strip away the legal powers that currently go along with the state of legal disposability entailed by animals’ property status, and would thus disable human ‘owners’ to decide over animals’ rights. As passive rights, immunities are quite easily conceivable as animal rights, because they are specified by reference to the correlative position, that is, by what the person disabled by the animal’s immunity right cannot legally do (see generally Matthew H Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ in Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998) 22). By contrast, a power refers to one’s control over a given legal relation and entails one’s normative ability to alter another’s legal position (see Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55). Prima facie , powers may thus seem ill-suited for animals. This is because, unlike passive second-order rights (immunities), powers are active rights that have to be exercised rather than merely enjoyed and, unlike first-order active rights (liberties), powers concern the exercise of legal rather than factual actions and thus require legal rather than mere practical or behavioural agency. Notwithstanding, it may be argued that animals, not unlike children, could hold legal powers (eg powers of enforcement) that are exercisable through human proxies (cf Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Legal Competence and Legal Power’ in Mark McBride (ed), New Essays on the Nature of Rights (Hart Publishing 2017) 46).

For a discussion of Hohfeldian theory in the context of animal rights, see also Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 799ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 96–7; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 6ff.

Joel Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ in Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton UP 1980) 159; Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55.

So far, animal rights theory has largely focussed on negative rights. See critically Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 5ff, 49ff.

cf Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (n 16) 233.

See Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 10.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 162; but see Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 41–2 (arguing that it would not be impossible, though ‘cruel and perhaps silly’, to impose legal duties on animals).

A ‘liberty’ is the negation of ‘duty’ and may thus be redescribed as ‘no-duty’.

On the distinction between naked and vested liberties, see HLA Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ in HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (OUP 1982) 172.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171, 173.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171.

eg Richard L Cupp, ‘Children, Chimps, and Rights: Arguments from “Marginal” Cases’ (2013) 45 Ariz St LJ 1; see also Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (OUP 2018) 116ff.

See David Lyons, ‘Rights, Claimants, and Beneficiaries’ (1969) 6 American Philosophical Quarterly 173, 173–4.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

In this vein, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, p 4, 6; but see critically New York Court of Appeals, Tommy v Lavery and Kiko v Presti decision of 8 May 2018, motion no 2018-268, concurring opinion Judge Fahey.

For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia explicitly departed from this reciprocity paradigm and held that animals are right holders but not duty bearers. Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona), 14ff; for a refutation of the contractarian reciprocity argument, see also Brief for Philosophers as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner-Appellant, Nonhuman Rights Project v Lavery 2018 NY Slip Op 03309 (2018) (Nos 162358/15 and 150149/16), 14ff.

See Peters (n 2) 45–6; David Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Personhood and Dignity of Non-Human Animals’ (2009) 25 SAJHR 38, 42–3; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 163; but see Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, 5.

Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (2013) 123 Ethics 202, 207.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 43.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 9.

For an overview, see generally Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998).

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 183, 188–9.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 30; Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 185.

A problematic corollary of the will theory is its conceptual awkwardness, or inability, to accommodate as right holders not just non-human but also human non-agents, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated. As noted by Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (n 7) 181, the will conception of rights ‘should incline us not to extend to animals and babies … the notion of a right’; see also Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 69.

As pointed out by van Duffel, neither the will theory nor the interest theory may be a ‘plausible candidate for a comprehensive theory of rights’, and it may be best to assume that both theories simply attempt to capture the essence of different kinds of rights. See Siegfried van Duffel, ‘The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake’ (2012) 93 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104, 105, 117 et passim .

Under the will theory, inalienable rights are not ‘rights’ by definition, as they precisely preclude the right holder’s power to waive the correlative duties. See DN MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ in PMS Hacker and J Raz (eds), Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of HLA Hart (OUP 1977) 198f; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 73.

The will theory is primarily modelled on active rights (liberties and powers) that directly facilitate individual autonomy and choice, but is less conclusive with regard to passive rights (claims and immunities) which do not involve any action or exercise of choice by the right holder herself. cf Harel (n 14) 194–5.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 190, conceded that the will theory does not provide a sufficient analysis of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights; legal animal rights, by contrast, are most intelligibly explained as public-law rights held primarily against the state which has correlative duties to respect and protect.

The will theory appears to limit the purpose of rights protection to a narrow aspect of human nature—the active, engaging and self-determining side—while ignoring the passive, vulnerable and needy side. Autonomy is certainly an important good deserving of normative protection, but it is hardly the only such good. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Introduction’ in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (OUP 1984) 11; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 197, 208.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 10ff; for an interest-based approach to animal rights, see eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19); Cochrane (n 5) 19ff.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 192.

J Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (1984) 4 OJLS 1, 12; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 12, 14.

See William A Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (2nd edn, CUP 2012) 97; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 176; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 167.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33ff, 39.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 177ff; see also Neil MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights: A Test-Case for Theories of Right’ in Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (OUP 1982) 159–60.

See RG Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (OUP 1980) 78ff; HJ McCloskey, ‘Rights’ (1965) 15 The Philosophical Quarterly 115, 126; but see Tom Regan, ‘McCloskey on Why Animals Cannot Have Rights’ (1976) 26 The Philosophical Quarterly 251.

Harel (n 14) 195; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 39–40; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person’ in Visa AJ Kurki and Tomasz Pietrzykowski (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn (Springer 2017) 79–80.

See eg Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 207, 227; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166.

See also Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 80.

See Thomas G Kelch, ‘A Short History of (Mostly) Western Animal Law: Part II’ (2013) 19 Animal Law Review 347, 348ff; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 44ff; in this vein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 [57]) noted that ‘the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals ’ (emphasis added); the well-established German concept of ‘ethischer Tierschutz’ expresses this non-anthropocentric, ethical thrust of animal welfare law. See Margot Michel, ‘Law and Animals: An Introduction to Current European Animal Protection Legislation’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 91–2.

1999 Federal Constitution (Bundesverfassung) (CH), Article 120(2) and 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 3(a); 2010 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (LI), Article 1; 2018 Animal Welfare Act (Loi sur la protection des animaux) (LU), Article 1; 1977 Experiments on Animals Act (Wet op de dierproeven) (NL), Article 1a; European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Recital 12.

See eg Steven M Wise, ‘Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The Case for Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ (1996) 2 Animal Law Review 179, 179; Richard A Epstein, ‘Animals as Objects, or Subjects, of Rights’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005) 144ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 18; Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238 [6]; Herrmann v Germany App no 9300/07 (ECtHR, 26 June 2012), separate opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, 38; Noah v Attorney General HCJ 9232/01 [2002–2003] IsrLR 215, 225, 232, 253.

This type of current legal animal rights will be called ‘animal welfare rights’ in order to indicate their origin in current animal welfare laws.

See eg Cass R Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights)’ (2000) 47 UCLA Law Review 1333 (claiming that current animal welfare law creates ‘a robust set of animal rights’ or even ‘an incipient bill of rights for animals’. ibid 1334, 1336); Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 43ff, 48–9 (concluding that ‘the existing statutory framework can already be seen to confer certain legal rights upon animals’: 50 fn 61); Jerrold Tannenbaum, ‘Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights’ (1995) 62 Social Research 539, 581; Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 910ff; this view was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] (stating that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ‘deals with duties of persons having charge of animals, which is mandatory in nature and hence confer corresponding rights on animals’).

See eg Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (n 19) 193–4 et passim ; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 218, 220; Visa AJ Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (OUP 2019) 62–5.

Matthew H Kramer, ‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 188.

eg, for Sunstein correlativity seems to run both ways: ‘Not only do rights create duties, but the imposition of a duty also serves to create a right.’ Cass R Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (1995) 70 Notre Dame L Rev 727, 746.

On this objection, see also Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 8–9.

See Lyons (n 29) 176; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 10; critically Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 85ff; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory’ (2018) 38 OJLS 430, 436ff.

See eg Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 161–2, 166; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 45–6; in this vein, a German high court held that, based on the criminal law justification of necessity (‘rechtfertigender Notstand’), private persons may be authorised to defend the legally protected goods of animals on behalf of the animals, independently of or even against the interests of their owners. OLG Naumburg, judgment of 22 February 2018, case no 2 Rv 157/17, recital II; on why animals need directed rather than indirect duties, see Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 350ff.

See also Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 100.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 181–2, 190.

MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 199.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 167, 170f; see also Alan Gewirth, ‘Introduction’ in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (University of Chicago Press 1982) 14.

See Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 40.

Gewirth (n 72) 14.

For the sake of the argument, I am only referring to biological parents.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 180–1.

See MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 191–2; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 13–14.

According to some scholars, legal rights exist only when they are enforceable. See eg Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard UP 2011) 405–6 (stating that legal rights are only those that the right holder is entitled to enforce on demand in directly available adjudicative processes).

A significant practical hurdle to the legal recognition of animal rights is that in virtually any legal order, animals are legal objects rather than legal persons. Because legal personhood and right holding are generally thought to be inextricably linked, many jurists refrain from calling the existing legal protections of animals ‘rights’. See critically Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 71, 85–6.

See generally Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff.

On this, see Kai Möller, ‘Proportionality and Rights Inflation’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 166; Harel (n 14) 197ff; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 14ff.

Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’ in Waldron, Theories of Rights (n 46) 153.

Bernard E Rollin, ‘The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights’ in HB Miller and WH Willliams (eds), Ethics and Animals (Humana Press 1983) 106.

Tom Regan, ‘The Day May Come: Legal Rights for Animals’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 11, 15–16.

Frederick Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (1993) 27 Ga L Rev 415, 429 et passim .

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (CUP 1993) 209, 215–16 (emphasis added); see also Frederick Schauer, ‘Rights, Constitutions and the Perils of Panglossianism’ (2018) 38 OJLS 635, 637.

Correlative to Council Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 of 24 September 2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing [2009] OJ L303/1, Article 4 and Annex I.

Correlative to European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Article 14(1)(2).

Correlative to 2008 Animal Welfare Ordinance (Tierschutzverordnung) (CH), Article 178a(3).

The permissive character of animal welfare law was highlighted by the Israeli High Court of Justice in a case concerning the force-feeding of geese. Commenting on the ‘problematic’ regulatory language, it noted that the stated ‘purpose of the Regulations is “to prevent the geese’s suffering.” Clearly these regulations do not prevent suffering; at best they minimize, to some extent, the suffering caused’. Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 234–5. See also Shai Lavi, ‘Humane Killing and the Ethics of the Secular: Regulating the Death Penalty, Euthanasia, and Animal Slaughter’ (2014) 4 UC Irvine Law Review 297, 321 (noting the disparity between ‘the resolution to overcome pain and suffering, which exists side-by-side with inhumane conditions that remain unchallenged and are often taken for granted’).

As MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights’ (n 52) 159, has succinctly put it: ‘Consider the oddity of saying that turkeys have a right to be well fed in order to be fat for the Christmas table’; this is not to minimise the importance of existing animal welfare protections. Even though they are insufficient and weak compared to proper legal rights, that does not mean that they are insignificant. See, on this point, Regina Binder, ‘Animal Welfare Regulation: Shortcomings, Requirements, Perspectives’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 83.

eg correlative to 1972 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (DE), § 1 and 17(1).

eg correlative to 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 26(1)(a).

eg derived from Animal Welfare Act 2006 (UK), s 4.

See eg Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [62] (extracting from animal welfare law, inter alia , the right to life, to food and shelter, to dignity and fair treatment, and against torture); similarly, Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238, dissenting opinion Justice Fraser [43].

For example, the prima facie right to be free from unnecessary pain and suffering is, in effect, rendered void if virtually any kind of instrumental interest in using animals is deemed necessary and a sufficient justification for its infringement.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Harel (n 14) 198; Laurence H Tribe, ‘Ten Lessons Our Constitutional Experience Can Teach Us About the Puzzle of Animal Rights: The Work of Steven M Wise’ (2001) 7 Animal Law Review 1, 2.

See Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 209–11.

See Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 17ff, 109.

Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 114.

For Schauer, a certain normative force seems to be constitutive of the concept of rights. He argues that a right exists only insofar as an interest is protected against the sorts of low-level justifications that would otherwise be sufficient to restrict the interest if it were not protected by the right. See Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430 et passim .

In this vein, Sunstein holds that animal welfare laws ‘protect a form of animal rights, and there is nothing in the notion of rights or welfare that calls for much, or little, protection of the relevant interests’. Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1335.

On the universal basic rights of animals, see eg Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 19ff.

‘Ideal right’ in the sense of ‘what ought to be a positive … right, and would be so in a better or ideal legal system’. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (n 4) 84.

In domestic public law, fundamental or constitutional rights are distinguished from other, simple public (eg administrative) law rights. Likewise, in international law, human rights can be distinguished from other, simple or ordinary international individual rights. See Anne Peters, Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (CUP 2016) 436ff.

Indeed, substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights may be quite resistant to being overridden, and may sometimes even be absolute (non-infringeable) rights.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of legal rights is not undisputed within the animal advocacy movement. For an overview of some pragmatic and principled objections against animal rights , see Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 325ff.

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2); Peters (n 2) 46ff.

Today, animals’ legal protections remain pervasively under-enforced by the competent public authorities as well as practically unenforceable by the affected animals or their human representatives for lack of standing. See eg Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1334ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

The link between rights and the legal-operational advantage of standing was famously highlighted by Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 S Cal L Rev 450; see further Cass R Sunstein, ‘Can Animals Sue?’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005); Peters (n 2) 47–8.

See Stone (n 110) 458ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

See eg Constitutional Court of South Africa 8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 (affirming the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ statutory power of private prosecution and to institute legal proceedings in case of animal cruelty offences).

See Frederick Schauer, ‘Proportionality and the Question of Weight’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber (eds), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 177–8.

See generally Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016) 151ff.

For example, under the Swiss 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz), life itself is not a legally protected good, and the (painless, non-arbitrary) killing of an animal does not therefore require any justification.

See also Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 253–4 (pointing out that balancing different interests is ‘part and parcel of our legal system’).

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 736–7.

On this threshold-raising conception of rights, see generally Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Harvard UP 1978) 191–2 (noting that a right cannot justifiably be overridden ‘on the minimal grounds that would be sufficient if no such right existed’).

At present, the overwhelming portion of permissible interferences with animals’ interests can hardly be said to be necessary or proportionate in any real sense of the word. See Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights (n 17) 9, 55.

As noted by Teubner, animal rights ‘create basically defensive institutions. Paradoxically, they incorporate animals into human society in order to create defences against the destructive tendencies of human society against animals’. Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law’ (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 497, 521.

See eg Mark Tushnet, ‘An Essay on Rights’ (1984) 62 Tex L Rev 1363; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991); for a modern reformulation of the rights critique, see eg Robin L West, ‘Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama’ (2011) 53 Wm & Mary L Rev 713.

See generally Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (Basic Books 2004) 59ff.

See Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 754.

Dershowitz (n 122) 9.

Jeremy Waldron, ‘When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights’ (1988) 11 Harv JL & Pub Pol’y 625, 629.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 358.

More generally, the practical need for rights as complementary or compensatory guarantees will vary depending on social context, and may be more immediate and pressing for the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalised, victimised, vulnerable, disadvantaged or even oppressed portions of society. See generally Patricia J Williams, ‘Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights’ (1987) 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 401.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 40, 49; see further Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 2004) 330ff, 348–9; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

See Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

On the aspirational dimension of human rights, see generally Philip Harvey, ‘Aspirational Law’ (2004) 52 Buff L Rev 701.

ibid 717–18; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 14–15, 19; ‘rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche’. Williams (n 127) 424.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Fundamental Rights as Bridging Concepts: Straddling the Boundary Between Ideal Justice and an Imperfect Reality’ (2018) 40 Hum Rts Q 119, 121ff.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 49; see also Gary L Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple UP 2007) 2.

cf Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 331–2.

On the dynamic nature of rights and their generative power, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 171; Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 212, 214.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?’ (2010) 25 Southern African Public Law 267, 291ff.

Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 71.

cf Harvey (n 130) 723 (noting that human rights will always remain a ‘work in progress rather than a finished project’); similarly, Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 333.

Stone (n 110) 453.

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The Moral Rights of Animals

Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock (eds.), The Moral Rights of Animals , Lexington, 2016, 296pp., $100.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781498531900.

Reviewed by Dan Hooley, University of Toronto

The attitudes of philosophers on our obligations to other animals and the view that other animals possess certain moral rights have shifted considerably in the last 40 years and a great deal of credit for this shift is owed to Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights and subsequent work. This excellent anthology grew out of a 2011 workshop held in Regan's honor and is dedicated to him. It features fourteen essays all of which intersect with Regan's views in some way. The authors largely defend the view that other animals have moral rights and those who don't hold that we have significant obligations to other animals. The essays succeed at exploring, critiquing, and expanding upon Regan's work in a way that is both rigorous and detailed, while accessible to those new to Regan or the animal rights literature.

The book has three parts. Part 1 focuses on the theoretical basis of animal rights, and responses to objections to animal rights. Part 2 looks at questions relating to the comparative value of human and nonhuman lives, with a focus on the comparative harm of death for humans and animals and the question of whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life. Part 3 turns to the practical import of animal rights.

Part 1 begins with an essay by Regan, which succinctly summarizes the argument he made in The Case for Animal Rights that all individuals who are "subjects of a life" -- conscious, sentient individuals with an experiential welfare who have beliefs and desires and some awareness of the past and future -- have certain basic moral rights. This essay, combined with the relevant summaries in subsequent chapters, provide a sufficient overview of Regan's views, so those who have not read Regan before will not be lost.

In Chapter 2, Jeremy Garrett argues that deontological libertarians should accept animal rights. Garrett argues that libertarian views harmonize quite nicely with Regan's defense of animal rights and defends this view against objections from Nozick. In Chapter 3, Mylan Engel Jr. makes a straightforward and compelling case that if all humans have moral rights, then many other animals do as well since these animals have the properties that confer rights on humans. Engel also argues that most of the harmful uses of animals are wrong even if animals do not possess rights. In Chapter 4, Nathan Nobis considers some of the limitations of Regan's response to Carl Cohen's well-known "kind" argument, which holds that since animals are not of the kind of beings who are moral agents, they do not possess rights, and develops stronger objections to Cohen's position. In Chapter 5, Anne Baril argues that the equal inherent value of all animals does not demand intervention to prevent predation among wild animals. She argues that respect for wild animals, as the kinds of beings they are, does not require intervention to prevent predation.

Central or important to many of the essays in Part 1 is the much discussed (and poorly named) "Argument from Marginal Cases." [1] Versions and variations on this argument are put forward here by Regan, Garrett, Engel, and Nobis. Engel and Nobis, in particular, do a superb job challenging many of the common attempts to defend the view that all humans possess certain basic rights but all nonhumans do not. These essays present important challenges to those who think some form of human exceptionalism is defensible.

One important point made by Engel is that defenders of human exceptionalism must provide a plausible rationale for why any specific capacity, claimed to be both necessary and sufficient for the possession of a given right, is connected to that specific right in question. Many attempts to do this fail the test of having a plausible rationale. Moral autonomy is relevant to whether or not beings can be held morally accountable for their behavior, but it is far from clear why being morally autonomous is a necessary condition for possessing a right not to be harmed. This is because being morally autonomous is not necessary to have a morally relevant interest in not being harmed. As Engel notes, it is a much more plausible rationale to think that sentience is the morally relevant rights-conferring property for the right not to be harmed. This capacity has a much more plausible connection to the specific right in question.

A similar point is made by Nobis in response to Cohen's "kind" argument. Cohen claims all humans (regardless of cognitive capacities) have moral rights because they are members of a kind of being that possess moral agency. But this lacks a plausible rationale when it comes to the specific rights of non-rational humans (such as babies or individuals with severe cognitive disabilities). Cohen claims these individuals have rights related to autonomy because they are members of a kind that is morally autonomous. But even if we concede this, it would be wrong to let them make all the decisions about their lives that we allow paradigmatic adults to make (75). They seem to lack these rights because they do not possess the relevant interests. Once we recognize this, however, it is not clear why membership in a kind is morally relevant: we can be classified in different groups, but we don't always have the rights typical members of those groups possess.

Part 2 focuses primarily on the comparative harm of death for humans and animals and the question of whether or not humans and other animals have an equal right to life. In Chapter 6, Aaron Simmons argues that while life has less value for animals than for humans, they nevertheless possess an equal right to life, such that the negative rights they possess are just as stringent as those possessed by humans. In Chapter 7, Molly Gardner argues that Regan's rights view does not, as he claims, actually prohibit animal research in all cases. She develops an alternative position, what she calls the "attenuated rights view," that balances rights with a somewhat complex but interesting weighing principle. This view generates a strong presumption against animal research, but would not justify a categorical opposition to all harmful research involving animals. In Chapter 8, Evelyn Pluhar draws on ethological research to argue that all vertebrates and some cephalopod invertebrates should be seen as subjects of a life. She defends the view that all subjects of a life, who have satisfying lives and opportunities for future satisfaction, are harmed equally by death. In Chapter 9, Alastair Norcross argues that Singer's account of moral considerability -- where all sentient creatures deserve equal consideration -- can be combined with Regan's account of subjects of a life. Norcross argues that all sentient creatures deserve equal consideration, but that subjects of a life have a lot more to lose by dying than "merely" sentient beings. And in Chapter 10, Gary Comstock gives empirical evidence that suggests much of the time human behavior is controlled by non-conscious mechanisms. Comstock uses this to argue against the view that the ability of humans to control their behavior is a morally relevant difference separating humans from other animals: if animals act "on instinct" much of the time, so do we.

The question of whether or not humans are harmed more by death than animals and the related question of whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life are some of the most difficult and perplexing questions in animal ethics. One notable feature of the essays in Part 2 is the diversity of views presented on these issues, despite the (mostly) shared belief that nonhuman animals possess basic moral rights.

Both Simmons and Gardner, for example, defend the common position that life has more value for (most) humans compared to most other animals because of our more sophisticated cognitive abilities. Simmons defends this by arguing that our more sophisticated cognitive capacities allow us to experience more creative and intellectual pleasures that are quantitatively and qualitatively superior to other pleasures (110).

One important objection not considered by either author concerns the ways in which the more sophisticated capacities of humans might allow for qualitatively and quantitatively worse forms of displeasure or negative experiences. If human life has more value because of the quantity and types of pleasures and valuable experiences we can enjoy, why are the distinct types of suffering, anxiety, and agony we can experience not relevant? If the claim is that humans have more valuable lives because of the net quantity and quality of pleasure and valuable experiences we can enjoy, then it isn't obviously true that humans have more valuable lives compared to animals, once we take the distinct types of displeasure we can experience into account. Further, even if it is true that some human lives contain more net value than other animals, this is likely not true for all of us.

More interesting, I think, is Simmons' suggestion that even if most humans are harmed more by death than most animals, this does not undermine an equal right to life. The assumption needed to ground this claim holds that two beings have an equal right to life only if the value of life for them is equal (112). But Simmons thinks we ought to reject this assumption because it entails that all humans do not have an equal right to life. Not only would this be the case for humans with severe cognitive disabilities but, Simmons rightly notes, there are reasons to think that among paradigmatic adult humans some are harmed more by death, as "some normal, adult humans seem to have greater capacities for reflective, creative, and intellectual activity than others" (112). This is an important point often ignored in this debate. Instead, Simmons suggests that to have an equal right to life only requires that the value of life for a being meets a certain threshold of value. And this threshold, he argues, should be set to include all individuals who are subjects of a life.

Norcross takes a different approach to these questions. He draws attention to an important element related to the harm of death not addressed in the other essays: the psychological relationship between an individual and her self in the future. Norcross argues that death is worse for animals who are subjects of a life (and who have some degree of self-consciousness) because of our psychological connection to our future selves: a fact we see when you must decide between a procedure that would extend your life for two years, or one that would extend "your" life by twenty years but sever all psychological connections between your present self and the future individual. Since it is rational to prefer the first procedure, Norcross argues that what is significant about death to individuals with a personal identity over time is the effect on their well-being (as opposed to the well-being of the organism) (171).

Subjects of a life, as beings with some degree of self-consciousness, have lives that matter to them . In this respect, their death is quite different from beings who are merely sentient and lack any psychological connection to their future selves. Their death may affect the net amount of well-being in the world, but it lacks personal significance to that being, in the same way that opting for the second procedure in the example above lacks any personal significance for me. This fact, Norcross argues, can ground a preference for subjects of a life over the merely sentient when it comes to issues of life and death (174).

Part 3 turns to more practical implications of animal rights and contains a variety of interesting and unique essays. In Chapter 11, Ramona Ilea argues that the capabilities approach to animals, articulated by Nussbaum, provides a useful and rigorous way to practically apply Regan's account of animal rights to questions of public policy and the law. In Chapter 13, Robert Bass develops an argument for veganism centered on moral caution. Bass argues that if there is a reasonable chance that an action is seriously wrong and no chance that it is morally required, then we ought to avoid that action. Bass thinks meat eating meets these criteria, and presents an array of arguments that attempt to show that the more modest conclusion is that there is a substantial chance meat-eating is wrong. In Chapter 14, Jason Hanna responds to arguments that animal rights views are consistent with "therapeutic hunting" aimed at reducing the suffering and future death of overabundant species. Hanna contends that hunters and wildlife managers are not in a situation where they must override an individual's rights, and that this blunts attempts to defend therapeutic hunting.

In Chapter 12, Scott Wilson argues that many who have made moral arguments for vegetarianism have failed to appreciate the significant interest meat-eaters have in consuming meat. He makes a strong case that the interest in consuming meat cannot be reduced to an interest simply in taste or nutrition, but instead reflects and involve a much wider variety of interests, including our self-conceptions of who we are, relationships with family and friends, convenience, and a variety of symbolic meanings. Wilson contends that this ultimately undermines utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism, and shows that rights-based approaches to animals are superior.

While I think Wilson is right to highlight some of the ways in which the consumption of meat reflects more than a simple interest in taste or pleasure, it is not clear his argument actually undermines a utilitarian argument for vegetarianism. Two points can be made in response to his argument. The first concerns the plasticity of our desires. We might think, against Wilson, that many meat-eaters overestimate the effect that switching to a vegetarian lifestyle will have on their welfare. If this is the case, it is not clear that any loss they might experience is as significant as they might initially be inclined to think (many vegetarians and vegans, for example, report enjoying food just as much or nearly as much as during their omnivorous days). Second, and related to this, there is a considerable body of evidence that suggests eating a plant-based diet makes it much more likely an individual will be healthier, avoid chronic diseases, and live longer. If this is the case, individuals who adopt a vegetarian diet may experience welfare gains (even if they miss eating meat), and even if they don't appreciate this fact.

This book offers an interesting and expansive exploration of current thought on animal rights. One downside it has, however, is that none of the essays engage with more recent work on the political status of non-human animals and their place in our legal and political institutions (Ilea's essay is in this ballpark, but it doesn't address any of the recent work on the topic). This omission is understandable: the anthology grew out of a 2011 conference, and much of the emerging literature on the political status of nonhuman animals was sparked by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's (2011) Zoopolis . However, one of the volume's stated goals is to "reflect the current state of philosophical thought on the moral rights of animals" (x). The political turn that is happening in animal ethics (and among animal rights theorists) can be understood as a potential implication of the moral rights of animals (and would thus fit in Part 3). This omission leaves out a rather exciting current development in the field that is particularly relevant to advocates of the moral rights of animals.

Some of this new work, moreover, would connect the topics in Parts 2 and 3 in an interesting way. One question we might have concerns whether much hangs on questions about the comparative harm of death or claims to an equal right to life. If other animals are significantly harmed by death and have a right to life, then we might think this is all we need to see that harmful animal-use industries, like animal agriculture, must be stopped, even if humans are harmed more by death or possess a more stringent right to life.

However, if we frame our relationship to other animals in political terms, the question of the comparative harm of death may take on a new importance. If, to give just one example, we begin to look at other domesticated animals as fellow members of our political communities, then there might be additional reasons why it matters how much death harms these beings. Domesticated animals could have positive rights to things like health care, emergency services, research and development into present diseases, and the policing and investigation of crimes. How we think about these claims and their comparative strength may depend, in part, on how we think about the comparative harm of death, and whether or not humans and animals have an equal right to life. I highlight this not to fault the book for this omission, but to note how some of the more recent developments in animal ethics connect with some of the topics explored in the essays, and potentially make these questions more urgent and intriguing.

Overall, this anthology makes an excellent companion to the work of Regan, and contains a great collection of readings on current debates in the area of animal rights. It would work quite well in a class on animal ethics, and the material is suitable and accessible for undergraduates of all levels.

[1] One problem with this name is that it is misleading. The cognitive diversity that is characteristic of humans is not something that just affects those with cognitive disabilities or dementia, but all of us across our lives (when we are young, during periods of severe illness, and for many of us, as we age).

Arguments for Animal Rights Research Paper

Introduction, arguments for animal rights, conclusion and recommendations, works cited.

For a long time, many human societies have viewed animals as sources of food, labor, and clothing. This view (partly) stems from religious influences, which define people’s perceptions of animal rights. For example, Christian teachings show that God gave man the power to control all animals (on land and in the sea). Therefore, many Christian societies know that human beings are superior to animals.

Philosophers, such as Aristotle, also supported the above-mentioned religious arguments by ranking animals in the lowest cadre of living things (Taylor 36). Although the Greek philosopher explored the differences and similarities between both species, he said animals were a “lower-stature” species (compared to human beings) because they could not reason, think, or have beliefs, as people do (Taylor 36). These ancient perceptions of animals largely explain the background of animal rights debates. They also explain how different societies treat animals today.

Relative to how people treat animals, Singera (13) says, in 2001, North American farmers raised and killed about 17 billion land animals for human consumption. Scientists in America and Europe killed another 100 million animals for experimental purposes (Singera 13). People killed about 30 million more land animals for their fur (Singera 13).

Most of these animals lived and died in morally repugnant circumstances. Such “inhuman” treatments continue unabated because many societies believe animals do not have any rights. This paper seeks to change this narrative by focusing on pets and arguing for their rights. Although it explores critics’ arguments too, it shows that, like human beings, pets are emotional creatures and not property items, as many people would like to believe. Therefore, it is immoral to mistreat them.

Pets can feel Emotion and Pain as People do

Singera (1) is widely considered as the greatest pioneer of animal rights. He said human beings do not have a special status above other animals. For him, the degree that both species experience when feeling pleasure or pain is the only difference between animals and human beings. Since both groups have a threshold of pain, Singera (1) does not understand why people do not protect animals the same way they protect their offspring. Here, Singera (1) strives to eliminate the differences between animals and human beings to advance animal rights.

Linker (9) supports this view by saying, “Once the dividing line between humans and animals disappears, it is hard to uphold any fundamental ethical distinction between them.” Steve Wise, an American Law Professor (cited in Linker 9), similarly advances the above argument by using a different justification for supporting animal rights. Instead of using shared pain and pleasure to show the similarities between people and animals, he strives to elevate animals to human status. For example, he criticizes people who view animals as property because he believes animals could reason as human beings do.

For example, he says Chimpanzees have this ability (Linker 9). He uses this argument to say their reasoning ability makes them more valuable than other types of property. Therefore, he believes animals share the same dignity as people do. Referring to Wise’s argument, Linker (12) says, “if he can demonstrate that certain higher animals possess the same intrinsic dignity that human beings do, the law within liberal democracies will be obliged to recognize that such animals are persons possessing at least some fundamental, inviolable rights.”

The above arguments show no significant differences between people and animals. In terms of shared emotion and pain, Singerb (11) says scientists infer almost all human physiological pain manifestations on other species. He particularly draws our attention to animals that are close to us – mammals and birds. He says, “Their behavioral signs include writhing, facial contortions, moaning, yelping, or other forms of calling, attempts to avoid the source of pain, appearance of fear at the prospect of its repetition, and so on” (Singerb 11).

Indeed, like how human beings behave (when they feel pain) animals show the same physiological symptoms of pain, such as dilated pupils, increased pulse rates, and increased blood pressure. To explain this commonality, Grandin (141) says both species have similar nervous systems. In line with this argument, Singerb (11) emphasizes that the nervous systems of animals evolved the same way the nervous systems of human beings did. Their ability to feel pain is part of their survival tactics because they use it to avoid injury and death.

Grandin (141) says animals also experience fear, the same way human beings do. Certainly, although fear is subjective, it causes significant stress to animals. This is why advocates of animal rights say they need environmental enrichments to prevent them from developing irregular developmental patterns, such as EEG patterns (Grandin 141). Relative to this argument, Grandin (141) says people’s nervous systems do not differ with that of higher animals. For example, scientific evidence shows that the nervous systems of chimpanzees, dogs, and cows are like that of human beings (Grandin 141).

The genome project also supports the same finding by showing that people’s gene make-up is like a mouse’s gene makeup (Grandin 141). Relative to this fact, Grandin (141) says mammals have more than 30% of their genes designed to serve nervous system functions. These similarities explain why some animals adopt human-like behaviors, such as self-medication. For example, studies have shown that rats self-medicate when they suffer from arthritis (Grandin 141). Besides these behavioral similarities, animals are as social as human beings are (Grandin 142).

Although some people may not support these facts, scientific evidence suggests that most animals perceive pain the same way human beings do. Governments have used this evidence to protect animal rights in many parts of the world. For example, three separate government committees (on animal welfare), in the UK, affirm that most animals feel pain (Singerb 13). However, Grandin (140) says we need more research to explain the extent that these animals experience the pain.

Animals are not Property

Taylor (36) says until the early 1900s, many people saw animals as worthless creatures. In fact, many societies could not accord a “property status” to them because of spite (Taylor 36). Therefore, the law permitted people to steal and kill animals without any consequences. The abolition approach has strived to change people’s perception of animals (as property).

It says that focusing on animal welfare distracts people from eliminating property rights on animal ownership (Grandin 140). Instead, the theory proposes a moral and legal paradigm shift, which strives to differentiate animals from other types of property (Grandin 140). To do so, the abolitionist approach encourages people to perceive animals as sentient creatures (having subjective awareness).

Proponents of this view say they do not need human-like rationalities to receive better treatment from people (Grandin 140). Therefore, since they are creatures that experience pain, they should belong to the moral community. This view differs with the animal rights view, which (only) supports the better treatment of human-like animals, such as apes, because their DNA make-up is more like human beings than other animals. As such, they say all animals are the same (Grandin 140). They also oppose treating animals as human property (merely) because they do not fit our conventional perceptions of property (Taylor 36).

Grandin (140) takes a more practical approach in elaborating the above point by comparing an animal and a screwdriver. He says that although many societies perceive them as property, they are different. To elaborate this point, he uses the US legal system and culture by highlighting how the law allows American citizens to sell, profit, and “eat” their property (among other utilities) (Grandin 140). Although property holders could do the above things, the law restricts them from committing the same acts on animals (the same restrictions do not apply to other properties).

For example, law enforcement officials could arrest a person for using a screwdriver to puncture a cow’s eye. However, they would not penalize the offender for using a hammer to deform a screwdriver. Based on this understanding, the status of animals has slowly changed, in America, because the law now recognizes animal rights. For example, all 50 states have introduced anti-cruelty laws that protect animals from mistreatment (Grimm 3). These laws allow judges to impose fines of up to $125,000, or a jail term of ten years on offenders (Grimm 4).

Similarly, many existing legislations support animal rights (such as the Federal Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, which requires rescue services to save animals, as they would rescue a human being) (Grimm 3). This trend has equally seen many judges treat dogs as people (some judges even allow dogs to have lawyers).

Consequently, some animals have received damages from the judges (Grimm 3). Other types of “property” do not receive the same status. Using the above examples, Grandin (140) supports the views of animal rights advocates who say animals need rights because they feel pain (a goat can feel pain, but a screwdriver cannot).

It is Immoral to Mistreat Animals

Although many researchers have used different criteria to explain the differences between man and animals, few have bothered to explain man’s higher reasoning that allows them to act ethically. Indeed, unlike many animals, human beings can understand the differences between right and wrong. Based on this higher level of reasoning, people can understand that it is wrong to mistreat animals because they do not have rights.

This argument stems from the immoral and heinous acts that some people do to animals and people alike. Here, it is irrelevant to distinguish between animals and human beings because inflicting pain on another animal is wrong (human beings are animals too). People who do so diminish the moral authority that human beings have on other species.

The utilitarian view condemns how people treat and use animals. This theory says people should evaluate the net use of animals (to human beings) and adopt strategies that lead to the overall net satisfaction of animal and human interests (Singerb 14). Relative to this view, the utilitarian view urges people to “act in such a way as to maximize the expected satisfaction of interests in the world, equally considered” (Singerb 14).

When we apply this theory to animal treatment, it encourages people to imagine themselves in conditions that the animals live and, afterwards, take the best course of action. Using a welfare approach, the theory argues that all people should treat animals in a “humane” way and avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on them. In line with this argument, Singera (1) says it is important for people to take animal rights seriously because species-bias (the justification that most people use to mistreat animals) is like racism and other social practices that many societies dislike.

He also believes that most people who oppose animal rights do so because they rely on invariable animal defects, like their lack of language skills, or advanced cognitive skills, to mistreat animals (Singerb 14). On the other side, the same people do not perceive mentally incapacitated human beings (who cannot talk or profess the same advanced cognitive skills as other people do) as animals. Based on this analysis, Francione (3) says species-bias is the only justification that most people use to exploit animals. However, this reasoning is unjust.

Arguments Against

Many people have used the utilitarian view to support animal rights. However, this view has significant weaknesses that undermine its applicability to animal rights. For example, proponents of these rights say animals have feelings, the way human beings do (Singerb 14). However, Nordin (2) questions the criterion that such people use to measure these feelings (no one has ever been a dog or a cat).

Stated differently, people have used physiological variations in a dog’s behavior to advance the view that they experience pain or emotion, but how do people know how much pain it is feeling? For example, is it correct to assume that a whimpering dog experiences the same pain as a human baby crying? Similarly, it is difficult to draw the same inferences about a dog’s pain to a whale, frog, or another animal. Therefore, many critics question whether animals could express the same emotions as grief, melancholy, and a deep interest in life, as human beings do.

Machan (1) is among groups of researchers who do not understand why animals should have the same rights as people do. Particularly, they say it is a mistake for the government to entrench animal rights in law. For example, they believe that those people who support animal rights should persuade other people to join their cause, as opposed to forcing them to do so, legally (Machan 1).

Stated differently, Machan (2) says if advocates of animal rights do not support killing animals for their fur, they should persuade people to stop buying coats, or other animal products, and not ban the use of the animal product. Again, this argument stems from the belief that no animal enjoys the same basic rights as people do. As shown above, Machan (3) believes that all people should start perceiving this matter as an ethical issue, as opposed to a legal issue. He says people can empathize with the pain that other people feel, but animals cannot.

Therefore, he opposes the views of animal rights advocates, such as Singerb (14). He argues that if animals could empathize with the pain of other animals, people should hold them to the same accountability standards as human beings do (Machan 3). For example, animals should punish other animals for killing and maiming their kind.

Since this suggestion is impractical, Machan (3) says animal advocates have misguided views. However, he defines this issue as a philosophical one (category mistake) because advocates of animal rights strive to impose their hopes and dreams on animals, using human perceptions about life. Overall, although these arguments largely describe the views of many animal right critics, they do not legitimize the inhumane treatment of animals.

The abolitionist and utilitarian views are sympathetic to animal causes. They differ from classical animal welfare views, which do not have a high regard for the creatures, or their rights. Nonetheless, this paper shows that all animals should have the same rights as human beings do because they experience, pain, fear, and emotions. Similarly, animals are not like other types of property because they are human-like. Based on these arguments alone, it is immoral to mistreat animals and cause unnecessary pain to them.

Proponents of animal rights advance the above views. However, their thoughts are not theories of animal rights; instead, they are moral judgments of human actions on animals. Such ideas come from the consequences of what we perceive as right or wrong. For example, if a person violated the right of a person, or an animal, because it produced more good than bad, the law should not punish him. Based on the findings of this research, the “good” includes giving animals the same rights as people do.

Francione, Gary. Animal Rights Theory and Utilitarianism: Relative Normative Guidance. September. 2003. PDF file.

Grandin, Temple. Animals Are Not Things: A View on Animal Welfare Based on Neurological, Complexity . 2014. PDF file.

Grimm, David. Should Pets Have the Same Legal Rights as People? 2014.

Linker, Damon. No, Animals Don’t Have Rights . 2014.

Machan, Tibor. Animals Do Not Have Rights . 2014.

Nordin, Ingemar. Animals Don’t Have Rights: A Philosophical Study . 2001. PDF file.

Singera, Peter. In Defense of Animals , Malded, Ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Print.

Singerb, Peter. Animal Liberation , New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002. Print.

Taylor, Angus. Animals and Ethics , New York, NY: Broadview Press, 2009. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Arguments for Animal Rights." April 14, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/animal-rights-arguments/.

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Ethics guide

Animal rights

This article discusses whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.

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The case for animal rights, the case against animal rights, animals aren't 'moral', moral community, fundamental rights, the problem of 'marginal people', page options.

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There is much disagreement as to whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.

There is much less disagreement about the consequences of accepting that animals have rights.

The consequences of animal rights

Animal rights teach us that certain things are wrong as a matter of principle, that there are some things that it is morally wrong to do to animals.

Human beings must not do those things, no matter what the cost to humanity of not doing them.

Human beings must not do those things, even if they do them in a humane way.

For example: if animals have a right not to be bred and killed for food then animals must not be bred and killed for food.

It makes no difference if the animals are given 5-star treatment throughout their lives and then killed humanely without any fear or pain - it's just plain wrong in principle, and nothing can make it right.

Accepting the doctrine of animal rights means:

• No experiments on animals
• No breeding and killing animals for food or clothes or medicine
• No use of animals for hard labour
• No selective breeding for any reason other than the benefit of the animal
• No zoos or use of animals in entertainment

Philosophers have usually avoided arguing that all non-human animals have rights because:

• the consequences are so limiting for humanity
• it would give rights to creatures that are so simple that the idea of them having rights seems to defy common sense

The second problem is dealt with by not arguing that all animals have rights, but only that 'higher' animals have rights.

One leading author restricts right to mentally normal mammals at least one year old (called 'adult mammals' from now on).

The case for animal rights is usually derived from the case for human rights.

The argument (grossly oversimplified) goes like this:

• Human animals have rights
• There is no morally relevant difference between human animals and adult mammals
• Therefore adult mammals must have rights too

Human beings and adult mammals have rights because they are both 'subjects-of-a-life'.

This means that:

• They have similar levels of biological complexity
• They are conscious and aware that they exist
• They know what is happening to them
• They prefer some things and dislike others
• They make conscious choices
• They live in such a way as to give themselves the best quality of life
• They plan their lives to some extent
• The quality and length of their life matters to them

If a being is the subject-of-a-life then it can be said to have 'inherent value'.

All beings with inherent value are equally valuable and entitled to the same rights.

Their inherent value doesn't depend on how useful they are to the world, and it doesn't diminish if they are a burden to others.

Thus adult mammals have rights in just the same way, for the same reasons, and to the same extent that human beings have rights.

A number of arguments are put forward against the idea that animals have rights.

• Animals don't think

Animals are not really conscious

Animals were put on earth to serve human beings, animals don't have souls, animals don't behave morally.

• Animals are not members of the 'moral community'
• Animals lack the capacity for free moral judgment

St Thomas Aquinas taught that animals acted purely on instinct while human beings engaged in rational thought.

This distinction provided the frontier between human beings and animals, and was regarded as a suitable criterion for assessing a being's moral status.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes, and many others, taught that animals were no more than complicated biological robots.

This meant that animals were not the sort of thing that was entitled to have any rights - or indeed any moral consideration at all.

This view comes originally from the Bible, but probably reflects a basic human attitude towards other species.

Christian theologians developed this idea - St Augustine taught that "by a most just ordinance of the Creator, both their [animals'] life and their death are subject to our use."

St Thomas Aquinas taught that the universe was constructed as a hierarchy in which beings at a lower level were there to serve those above them.

As human beings were above animals in this hierarchy they were entitled to use animals in any way they wanted.

However, as C.S. Lewis pointed out:

We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. C.S. Lewis, Vivisection

Christian theologians used to teach that only beings with souls deserved ethical consideration.

Animals did not have souls and therefore did not have any moral rights.

This argument is no longer regarded as useful, because the idea of the soul is very controversial and unclear, even among religious people. Furthermore it is not possible to establish the existence of the soul (human or animal) in a valid experimental way.

This also makes it difficult to argue, as some theologians have done, that animals should have rights because they do have souls.

Some of the arguments against animal rights centre on whether animals behave morally.

Rights are unique to human beings

• rights only have meaning within a moral community
• only human beings live in a moral community
• adult mammals don't understand or practice living according to a moral code
• the differences in the way human beings and adult mammals experience the world are morally relevant
• therefore rights is a uniquely human concept and only applies to human beings

Some argue that since animals don't behave in a moral way they don't deserve moral treatment from other beings.

Animals, it's argued, usually behave selfishly, and look after their own interests, while human beings will often help other people, even if doing so is to their own disadvantage.

Not all scientists agree: Jane Goodall, an expert on chimpanzees has reported that they sometimes show truly altruistic behaviour.

Animals don't have rights against other animals

Another reason for thinking that animals don't behave morally is that even the most enthusiastic supporters of animal rights only argue that animals have rights against human beings, not against other animals.

For example, as Mary Warnock put it:

May they [animals] be hunted? To this the answer is no, not by humans; but presumably their rights are not infringed if they are hunted by animals other than human beings. And here the real difficulties start. If all animals had a right to freedom to live their lives without molestation, then someone would have to protect them from one another. But this is absurd... M Warnock, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics, 1998

Why this might be relevant to the question of whether animals should have rights becomes clearer if you rephrase it in terms of duties or obligations instead of rights and ask - why should human beings have obligations towards animals, if animals don't have obligations to other animals or to human beings?

This argument states that animals are not members of the 'moral community'.

• a group of beings who live in relationship with each other and use and understand moral concepts and rules
• the members of this community can respect each other as moral persons
• the members of this community respect each other's autonomy
• human beings do display these characteristics and are therefore members of the 'moral community'
• most people would agree with this: after all we don't regard a dog as having done something morally wrong when it bites someone - if the dog is put to death because of the bite, that is to protect people, not to punish the dog
• only members of a 'moral community' can have rights, therefore animals don't have rights
• members of the 'moral community' are more 'valuable' than beings that are not members of the moral community
• it is not wrong for valuable beings to 'use' less valuable beings
• therefore it is not wrong for human beings to use animals

Animals lack the capacity for free moral judgements

• If an individual lacks the capacity for free moral judgment, then they do not have moral rights.
• All non-human animals lack the capacity for free moral judgment.
• Therefore, non-human animals do not have moral rights.

Animal and human rights boil down to one fundamental right: the right to be treated with respect as an individual with inherent value.

Philosophers have a traditional way of expressing this:

Animals with rights must be treated as ends in themselves; they should not be treated by others as means to achieve their ends.

From this fundamental right come other rights.

Particular species only get relevant and useful rights - so animals don't get all the rights that human beings get. For example: animals don't want or get the right to vote.

When rights conflict

Sometimes a particular situation results in a conflict of rights.

Two methods can be used to determine the best course of action when there is no alternative to violating the rights of some individual or group:

• The Miniride Principle: Where similar harms are involved, override the fewest individuals' rights.
• The Worse-off Principle: Where dissimilar harms are involved, avoid harming the worse-off individual.

Harm is defined as the reduction of the capacity to have and fulfil desires.

This definition of harm benefits people over animals because human beings have far more desires that they want to satisfy than do non-human animals.

This resolves many of the traditional problems of humans versus animals in favour of humanity, because the human being under consideration would suffer far more harm than the non-human animal.

But be careful: this method of choosing alternative courses of action is not utilitarian, it doesn't necessarily lead to choosing the course of action that produces the greatest overall happiness.

The phrase 'marginal people' or 'marginal human beings' is unpleasant. We use it here only because if you read the literature of animal rights you will encounter it often, and it's important to know what it means. We do not intend to denigrate the status or worth of any human being by using it here...

The problem with the line of thought in the section above that it takes rights away from many human beings as well as from non-human animals.

This is because some human beings (babies, senile people, people with some severe mental defects and people in a coma) don't have the capacity for free moral judgement either, and by this argument they wouldn't have any rights.

Some philosophers are prepared to argue that in fact such 'marginal human beings' don't have rights, but most people find that conclusion repellent.

The argument can be rescued by rewriting it like this:

• If an individual is a member of a species that lacks the capacity for free moral judgment, then he or she does not have moral rights.
• All non-human animal species lack the capacity for free moral judgment.

But this is not an argument; it's a statement that human beings have rights and non-human animals don't, which is pure speciesism , and hardly persuasive.

It's also vulnerable to the (probably unlikely) arrival of a species of extra-terrestrial creatures who demonstrate the capacity for free moral judgement.

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How Far Should We Carry the Logic of the Animal-Rights Movement?

By Kelefa Sanneh

One morning, in February of this year, Zahid Badroodien, who oversees the Committee on Water and Sanitation in Cape Town, South Africa, posted on X that he had been alerted to “a sewage smell blanketing parts of the city.” He assured residents that inspectors had been dispatched to wastewater-treatment facilities, but half an hour later he announced that a different culprit had been identified: a ship in the harbor that was transporting cattle—nineteen thousand in all—from Brazil to Iraq, with a brief layover in town to replenish their feed. On board, conditions were “awful,” according to a veterinary consultant who conducted an inspection. A single cow discovered in such a state might have become a cause célèbre, but it was harder to rally around nineteen thousand of them. Within a day, the cows were back at sea, where virtually no one could know, or smell, their plight.

There is a name for the cruel, and correspondingly clandestine, process by which many animals become meat: “factory farming,” a term that is usually wielded as an insult, especially since the publication, in 1975, of “Animal Liberation,” an incendiary book by the philosopher Peter Singer. “In general, we are ignorant of the abuse of living creatures that lies behind the food we eat,” Singer wrote, and he wanted to destroy both this ignorance and the industry behind the abuse. He halfway succeeded. “Animal Liberation” helped bring new militancy to a cause formerly associated with decorous humane societies and peaceable hippies. The book also helped inspire the Animal Liberation Front, a group devoted to direct action against farms and labs that abused animals. And it turned Singer into one of the most prominent philosophers in the world, especially among non-philosophers.

The movement against cruelty to animals is broadly popular, at least in theory—lots of people are bothered by the way livestock live and die, although not bothered enough to stop eating them. But Singer is a polarizing figure, known for his willingness to follow his logic to conclusions that some might find bizarre, or evil. Rejecting what he calls “speciesism,” Singer has argued that we ought to treat creatures according to their cognitive capacities; by this logic, he concedes, a “chimpanzee, dog, or pig” might demonstrate “a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility.” Directly and indirectly, “Animal Liberation” has inspired generations of people who would never endorse many of the claims made by the person who wrote it, and it sometimes seems that Singer’s support for animal liberation is viewed today as the least objectionable thing about him.

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In “ Animal Liberation Now ” (HarperCollins), a revised version of his book, Singer considers all that has and hasn’t changed since 1975. “The media no longer ridicules animal rights activists; mostly, it takes them seriously,” he writes. He is curious about the prospect of lab-grown meat, and attentive to research indicating that a scallop is more sentient than an oyster, and therefore less edible, at least for someone with his commitments. He also seems slightly astonished that more people have not joined him in opposing the “tyranny” of speciesism. “There are now more animals suffering in laboratories and factory farms than ever before,” he writes, but he remains hopeful that one day people will attend to this suffering.

Martha Nussbaum, a fellow-philosopher, is one of many who admire Singer’s animal advocacy without fully endorsing his program. In “ Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility ” (Simon & Schuster), Nussbaum praises Singer as a “sophisticated” thinker while suggesting that it is wise to consider not just the suffering of animals but how best to help them live the kinds of lives they seem to want to live. Most of her proposals reflect a left-liberal world view: she has great faith in the ability of experts and government officials, working together, to better regulate our treatment of animals. And yet the movement to protect animals need not be a partisan cause. This, anyway, is the position of Matthew Scully, a Republican speechwriter who has spent decades arguing that conservatives ought to care more about the lives and deaths of animals. He made his case in “ Dominion ,” from 2002, which is one of the most bracing books on the topic since “Animal Liberation,” partly because it pushes so hard against Singer’s approach. Scully refines his argument in “ Fear Factories ” (Arezzo), a new collection of essays that urges both right- and left-leaning readers to reconsider their assumptions. One of them, from 2013, excoriates the “cheap nature worship” of contemporary environmentalists, who have, Scully says, been too distracted by climate concerns to pay attention to the slaughter of elephants. “It’s all carbon, all the time,” he writes, “and for all of the movement’s alarmism on other fronts, somehow the end days of the earth’s largest land animal have gone practically unremarked.”

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Debates about animals tend to be less about how to treat them and more about how much we should care when they are mistreated. (Nearly everyone can probably agree that, in an ideal world, nineteen thousand cattle would not be crowded onto a ship so fetid that it can’t come near land without alarming the authorities.) Historically, advocacy for animals often failed because the cause was judged unserious. This perception began to change in the late nineteenth century, thanks to a handful of activists, many of whom were also involved in other causes: abolition, child protection, temperance. A century later, animal welfare and temperance were joined again in the punk offshoot known as hardcore, in which a number of leading musicians embraced a “straight edge” ethos that was anti-drug and, relatedly, anti-meat. (Ian MacKaye, the musician credited with coining the term, has said that he viewed eschewing meat as a “logical extension” of straight edge.) It was through hardcore that I encountered and, for a few years, adopted the vegan diet, equally inspired by both the cause and the culture that surrounded it, or maybe unequally inspired. We are a self-obsessed species, and indeed self-obsession is part of what distinguishes us from other species; we are more different from, say, chimpanzees than chimpanzees are from orangutans. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that so many animal-centric movements spend so much time thinking and talking about humans instead.

Many religious traditions take killing an animal to be a grave act, though not necessarily a gravely wrong one. One of the first verses in the Bible is a vegan commandment: “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” But, after the flood, God told Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you,” balancing this permissive standard with a stern caveat: “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.”

The idea of principled and thoroughgoing veganism seems to have arrived more recently, at least in the West. In England, in 1714, a Dutch-born writer named Bernard Mandeville published an odd and excellent book called “The Fable of the Bees,” which opened with an apian allegory in verse form about laissez-faire government, but also contained several essays, including one that framed meat eating as a moral evil. “I have often thought, if it was not for this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us, that Men of any tolerable Good-nature could never be reconcil’d to the killing of so many Animals for their daily Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with Varieties of vegetable Dainties,” Mandeville wrote. “I question whether ever any body so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time.” When Jeremy Bentham’s “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals of Legislation” was first printed, in 1780, he included an extraordinary footnote that proposed a kind of beastly revolution. “The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny,” Bentham wrote. “The question is not, Can they reason ? nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer ?” By the nineteenth century, animal-welfare groups were growing in England, and in 1848 the satirical magazine Punch noted the emergence of a “great Vegetarian movement,” imagining a kind of meatless mania. “There are vegetarian missionaries going about the country inculcating the doctrine of peas and potatoes,” the magazine reported, adding that “a silver medal will be awarded to the vegetarian who will dispose of one hundred heads of celery with the utmost celerity.”

In a new history titled “ Our Kindred Creatures ” (Knopf), Bill Wasik, a journalist, and Monica Murphy, a veterinarian and a writer, show how this movement took root in America. They compare the “rise of animal-welfare consciousness,” in the late nineteenth century, to the rapid growth in support of same-sex marriage, during the twenty-tens, but they decline to simplify what turns out to be a sprawling and rather diffuse story of complicated advocates and mixed messages. An astonishingly confident and well-connected activist named Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866, and during the next year he pushed New York City to make it illegal to “neglect, maliciously kill, maim, wound, injure, torture or cruelly beat” any animal. (Bergh also bemoaned the influence of immigrants with a taste for bullfighting and other “barbarous” practices; formed a complicated alliance with P. T. Barnum , the circus master; and emerged as a leading critic of vaccination, which he viewed as an affront to humans and animals alike.) In Massachusetts, a local chapter of the A.S.P.C.A. launched a publication with a name that was meant as a tribute, though it now sounds like an insult: Our Dumb Animals. They were, of course, “dumb” in the original sense of the word; the magazine pledged to “speak for those that cannot speak for themselves.” An activist named Caroline Earle White, who came from a family of abolitionists, called in 1887 for a total ban on medical experiments involving animals—an unpopular cause, but one that was, she maintained, no more far-fetched than “the abolition of Negro slavery” had recently been.

Despite these decades of foment, the publication of “Animal Liberation,” roughly a century later, came as a shock. In fearsomely logical prose, Singer argued not just that we ought to treat animals better but that we had no right to treat them any differently than we treat one another. His radical repudiation of speciesism, defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” forced readers to reconsider a range of practices that they had learned to regard as normal. The power of the idea lay in its simplicity, which left Singer free to devote much of the book to considering the practical implications: the intentional horrors of animal-research laboratories, and the unintentional—or perhaps just unnecessary—horrors of factory farming, in which animals are often crammed together in miserable conditions and subjected to painful operations such as “de-beaking,” to prevent chickens from pecking one another to death, and “tail-docking,” to prevent overstressed and understimulated pigs from gnawing one another’s tails into bloody stumps.

Singer followed the chapter on factory farming with one about how to become a vegetarian, and he included, at the end, a list of recipes, which probably introduced more than a few Western readers to a form of “bean curd, sometimes called bean cake, or tofu .” In “Animal Liberation Now,” the recipes have been updated, with more variety and no more cheese. Singer has become what he calls a “flexible vegan” (he has said that he sometimes eats eggs, provided they have been taken from free-range hens), but he doesn’t seem inclined to worry much about either the purity or the deliciousness of his diet. “Frying the tofu is optional,” he tells readers, in the new recipe section, adding that “it tastes better, but I don’t like to consume too much oil, so sometimes I do it, and sometimes not.” Generations of readers probably learned to loathe McDonald’s from reading Singer, but he himself is too practical-minded to hold a grudge, and so in February he startled some of his fans by praising the company, on X. “Let’s give credit where it is due: @McDonald’s have reached their goal of sourcing 100% their U.S. egg supply from cage-free hens, as they pledged they would,” he wrote. “It’s not nearly enough, but it’s a step forward on a long march.”

Singer acknowledges his debt to Bentham, whose question is at the heart of much of Singer’s work: “Can they suffer ?” But, as a consequentialist, he realizes that his book will likely do more good if it offends fewer people, and so he deëmphasizes his suggestion that infanticide might sometimes be justified, though he doesn’t retract it. He has excised his claim that there “seem to be certain measurable differences between both races and sexes,” and that “we do not yet know how much of these differences is really due to the genetic endowments of the different races and sexes.” Singer’s point, in 1975, was that these differences, whether between sexes or races or species, do not justify discrimination. Still, he believes that some differences do matter, especially differences in sentience, because sentience is what enables suffering, and suffering is what we ought to want to prevent.

In many ways, this is a generous approach, one that asks us to search everywhere for mistreatment, and redress any that we find. Bentham and Singer’s alertness to cruelty, when their contemporaries were happy to ignore it, is part of what can make them seem like visionaries today. But the focus on sentience and suffering can also seem pitiless. Singer’s approach leaves no room for speciesism, which means it leaves no room for the idea that every human is valuable because of his humanity—no room for what Christians call grace, the sense that all people have something precious and perhaps sacred in common. Singer puts every living creature on the same scale, each with its own chance to earn, through sentience, the right not to be mistreated. This means that humanity is on the scale, too, and so perhaps are individual humans, all of us liable to be judged on precisely how sentient we are.

Singer, to his credit, is motivated by a desire to solve big problems, but this means that the small lives of animals don’t figure much in his book. Nussbaum, by contrast, views a wide spectrum of creatures with both affection and awe; they seem “wonderful” to her, as to so many of us, and she thinks we should pay more attention to that intuition. (The book is dedicated to her daughter, Rachel, who worked as an attorney for an animal-welfare group, and died in 2019.) “Wonder suggests to us that animals matter directly, for their own sake—not because of some similarity they have to ourselves,” she writes. What she opposes is not speciesism but its cousin, anthropocentrism, a world view that puts humans at the center, and values animals only to the extent that we decide that “they are (almost) like us.” To her, Singer’s view, with its focus on suffering, misses much of what makes animal life meaningful—meaningful, that is, to the animals themselves. Nussbaum is known for developing, with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, a framework called the capabilities approach, which focusses on insuring that all people have the ability to thrive. Now she wants to adapt that approach to account for the different ways that nonhuman animals, too, “strive for flourishing,” and are frequently blocked. “We are all animals,” she writes, “thrown into this world together, striving to get the things we need, and often thwarted in the attempt.” Nussbaum is horrified by factory farming, deeply moved by the plight of whales, and cautiously optimistic about the future prospects of pets, which she refers to as “companion animals,” to remind us that they exist not merely to please their so-called owners but to flourish in their own ways.

What does flourishing entail? For humans, Nussbaum has developed a list of entitlements, which may seem suspiciously well matched to the interests of a humanities professor. (The list includes the ability to experience and produce “literary” and other works but not, explicitly, the ability to trade goods.) As for animals, the entitlements will depend on both the species and the individual. She suggests that we heed “experts who have lived closely with a certain type of animal and studied those animals over long periods of time”; working across national borders, those experts could help us draft “a legally enforceable constitution” for every kind of animal. Dolphins, for instance, would be granted the right to roam, to socialize, and to have as much or as little contact with humans as they choose. She holds that, because animals generally “seek maturity as a central goal,” killing the young is probably harder to justify than killing the old. And she writes that virtually all creatures under human control should be guaranteed “at least one or two chances at sex and reproduction.” This means that companion animals might permissibly be spayed or neutered, but only after they have had a chance to find some companionship for themselves.

But why care about the flourishing only of animals, and not of a coral reef, or an ocean, or a forest? Singer’s suffering test provides one answer. Nussbaum’s answer is complicated, and the more she explains it the closer she draws to the anthropocentrism she says she opposes. In one passage, she points out that a cat can be said to engage in the “active pursuit of ends.” Elsewhere, she notes that a plant “lacks the sort of situational flexibility that makes us conclude that fish are sentient creatures,” adding that “a plant is basically a cluster entity, a they , rather than an it .” It is not that the distinctions she makes are indefensible. On the contrary, they are eminently defensible, because they reflect the things (activity, flexibility, sentience, individuality) that we humans tend to value in one another, and therefore in the world around us. It is hard to imagine a more anthropocentric view than one that surveys the natural landscape and sees creditable strivers, surrounded by less consequential organisms and entities that don’t measure up in the striving department.

Speciesism is easier to renounce than it is to abandon, because most of us share a sense that human beings have rights and responsibilities that set us apart. “To speak of ‘animal rights’ is, in the end, as absurd as to speak of ‘animal duties,’ ” Matthew Scully wrote in National Review in 1993. He wanted to assure his readers that they could object to cruelty without endorsing any weird metaphysical claims. By the time he published “Dominion,” he was working as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush , for whom he helped coin the phrase “axis of evil,” and he was already rethinking his skepticism of “animal rights.” Observing that people seemed to have little trouble extending compassion for the weakest in their midst, at least in theory, Scully wondered why animals should be offered less. He defended pets, both the concept and the term. He remembered reading Singer’s book as a teen-ager and then scrutinizing his own beloved dog. “Try as I might, I could not discern in his furry face any desire at all for liberation,” Scully wrote. Indeed, he encouraged his readers to visit a factory farm, if they could, and consider the idea that the cattle confined there were “morally indistinguishable” from the animals they loved at home.

Scully took his title from the Book of Genesis , in which, shortly before His vegan commandment, God grants man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Scully wrote not necessarily as a Christian (in one early interview, he mentioned that he had never been a regular churchgoer) but as a thinker who took the Bible seriously, and who was sure that Biblical “dominion” meant taking gentle care of the natural world, rather than simply dominating it or, worse, emulating its cruellest attributes. Unlike Nussbaum, who endeavors to figure out what we are each striving for, Scully accepted the mysteriousness of life, suggesting that God made all creatures to “serve some purpose beyond our full knowing.” What he wanted for animals was not justice but mercy—a kind of gift, freely given by humans to animals. “There is no such thing as a right to mercy, not for the animals and not even for us,” he wrote.

This is a poignant formulation, but one that does not easily lend itself to a program of social reform. And so “Fear Factories” chronicles how, in the years since “Dominion,” Scully has grown increasingly comfortable advocating for the “rights” of animals, as a way of insisting that how they are often treated is wrong, in ways that demand government intervention. In 1868, the editors of Our Dumb Animals boasted that their board included “Roman Catholics and Protestants, Democrats and Republicans, License men and Prohibitory men.” Scully, by contrast, has found allies virtually nowhere: few politicians in either party seem eager to crack down on so-called “canned” hunting—in which the quarry has essentially no chance to escape—or to tighten regulations on hog farming. When, in 2000, he told the strategist Karl Rove that the Republican Party’s platform might add a line about animal cruelty, Rove’s response did not rise even to the level of noncommittal. “Hey, man, at least you’re thinking outside the box,” Rove apparently said. “I like that!” And though Scully defends his having worked with Governor Sarah Palin , who backed a government-supported program of aerial wolf hunting, he admits, “The pile of moose and deer antlers on the campaign plane, gifts bestowed on the candidate at every rural stop, did get to be a little much.”

Scully, in fact, has something important in common with Palin: like many of his fellow-Republicans, and vanishingly few animal-rights activists, he is firmly opposed to abortion. This sets him apart from Nussbaum, who has argued that “access to abortion” is an essential component of “human dignity.” And it sets him farther apart still from Singer, who has questioned whether even newborn infants have “an inherent right to life.” Scully can’t help but see parallels between factory farming and abortion. “Both industries are blunt, practical solutions to hard moral problems that the people who advocate them have despaired of dealing with in some gentler way,” he writes. “I have never heard a single compelling argument for why the unborn must die or why the animals must suffer.” Of course, there is a powerful movement in America to ban abortion, and no similarly robust effort to ban meat. When the pro-life and the animal-rights causes seem to be, in many ways, natural allies, why do they continue to belong to such separate worlds? It is certainly possible to oppose abortion while also opposing, on feminist or prudential grounds, efforts to force all pregnant women to give birth. But it’s strange that the people most concerned about the fate of human blastocysts take little interest in the fate of cattle or chimpanzees, and that the people who think carefully about the nervous systems of crabs take little interest in the nervous system of a human fetus. Often, the overlap occurs strictly at the level of rhetoric. “Voice of the Voiceless,” the title of a 1992 compilation of mainly vegan straight-edge bands which raised money for the Animal Liberation Front, is also a phrase used by pro-life advocates, who are equally convinced that they are expanding the circle of human compassion.

There is something unsettling about the animal-rights argument, which is partly a matter of scale: the dizzying numbers involved can make it hard to know where to start, or stop. The use and abuse of animals is tightly woven into our world, which is why people who think seriously about it so often end up calling for broad changes that might seem unwise or even indefensible—at least, at first. My own years of veganism ended gradually, as my social surroundings changed, and I found myself wanting to be less of an outlier. I returned to cheese, and then fish, and then meat, having convinced myself that killing an animal is not necessarily an act of cruelty. I’m not eager to be at the leading edge of the vegan revolution, which may yet succeed, but neither would I wish to be at the tail end of the meat-eating resistance. And I am sympathetic to the frustration of advocates who can’t figure out why, nearly half a century after “Animal Liberation,” cattle are still sailing the world knee-deep in shit. A weekend with the work of Singer, Nussbaum, or Scully will likely make your next trip to the supermarket significantly more uncomfortable, and probably that’s as it should be. But these advocates also, in different ways, remind us that important causes have a way of redrawing ideological lines, turning some of our opponents into allies, and some allies into opponents. It is not easy to think carefully and consistently about what we do to animals. If the people who try often end up endorsing proposals that make us recoil, this may say as much about us as about them. ♦

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By Manvir Singh

By Louis Menand

By Jay Caspian Kang

Rights of Nature, Rights of Animals

• Kristen Stilt
• See full issue

The fields of animal law and environmental law have an uneasy relationship. At a basic level, they are intertwined by the fundamental observation that animals, human and nonhuman, exist in the environment. Environmental law is generally concerned with animals at the level of species (and specifically endangered or threatened species), whereas animal law is concerned with all animals, regardless of particular characteristics. The issue of wild horses in the western United States illustrates this tension. Some environmentalists view the horses as “feral pests” that damage the fragile ecosystem and compete with wildlife — and privately owned cattle — for resources. 1 They argue that the horses should be gathered through helicopter-led “roundups” and euthanized or sold. 2 Animal protection advocates argue that these roundups are cruel and note that the millions of cattle also grazing on these lands are far more damaging to the environment than the horses. 3 They insist that these wild horses should not be killed — the life of each individual animal matters and should be protected. 4

Environmental law is the older and more established field of law. There are many ways to measure this, such as at the constitutional level, which shows environmental law’s seniority and success. Most constitutions address the environment, and the typical phrasing is anthropocentric: a human right to a healthy environment as seen, for example, in article 42 of the Constitution of Kenya: “Every person has the right to a clean and healthy environment . . . .” 5 Newer trends adopt ecocentric or biocentric approaches and grant rights to nature (or its component parts, such as a river) at the constitutional or legislative level or through judicial decisions. 6

In contrast to environmental rights, it is only a fairly recent phenomenon that assigns “constitutional significance to the experiences of individual nonhuman animals.” 7 Animals are protected in just a handful of constitutions with no clear adoption trend: Switzerland (1973), 8 India (1976), 9 Brazil (1988), 10 Slovenia (1991), 11 Germany (2002), 12 Luxembourg (2007), 13 Austria (2013), 14 Egypt (2014), 15 and Russia (2020). 16 ) (Russ.), translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, 2020) . The year accompanying each country listed above indicates when the provision was added to an existing constitution or when a new constitution with the provision was adopted. These provisions use terms such as the “welfare” of animals, 17 the “dignity” of animals, 18 animal “protection,” 19 “compassion” toward animals, 20 and animal “cruelty” 21 — all of which follow a general animal welfare approach. In contrast to the environmental context, none of the provisions uses the term “rights.” 22

In this Essay, I show how developments and achievements in the field of environmental rights and specifically rights of nature can be instructive, intellectually and practically, to the cause of animal protection and animal rights. 23 That instruction includes not only positive examples but also notes of caution, where animal law may face different and more formidable challenges. The Essay first assesses the role that a human right to a healthy environment has played in the development of environmental rights and rights of nature, and then it discusses the relevance of this experience for animal rights. In Part II, it turns to how rights of nature have been interpreted and applied in several prominent court decisions and suggests insights that animal rights can take from this jurisprudence. Given the brevity of Forum essays, I cannot be comprehensive. Rather, I chart out the range of my arguments and support them with some notable examples, with the intention to treat this topic more fully in a future work.

I. A Human Right to a Healthy Environment, A Human Right to Animal Protection

The anthropocentric formulation of a human right to a healthy environment initially may not seem like a helpful framing for the cause of animal rights, but it is actually very instructive. “Rights of Nature” have roots in two sources. First, these rights emerged from a recent recognition that current environmental law, including the human right to a healthy environment, has failed to address the global ecological crisis and notably climate change. 24 Second, indigenous traditions and jurisprudence “that have always treated humans as part of nature, rather than distinct from it,” have long provided a rights of nature framework and approach. 25 The widespread acceptance of a human right to a healthy environment served as part of the foundation for the development of a stronger rights of nature approach, which synergistically connected with indigenous approaches to nature.

In an animal context, an analogous formulation would be a human right to animal protection, a right of humans to have all animals adequately protected. This may sound like awkward phrasing, but such an approach does closely match how, in general, legal systems currently treat animals. 26 That is, animal interests are protected to the extent that humans want them to be and benefit from those protections and limitations.

An anthropocentric approach to animal protection along these lines is likely politically more acceptable than an animal rights–based approach. If it were widely adopted, however, it could serve merely to entrench the status quo in animal law. Alternatively, a human right to animal protection could offer the possibility of far more robust protection than currently exists under animal welfare laws. Because different humans will have different ideas about what the protection of animals should involve, a human right could allow more protective views to be recognized. It could also provide an intermediate step to animal rights, laying a foundation for future expansion. More needs to be known about the evolution from the right to a healthy environment to rights of nature, and how animal rights might be able to follow a similar path.

II. Rights of Nature, Rights of Animals

Ecocentric or biocentric approaches that lodge a right in nature or its component parts also may be promising for the development of legally recognized animal rights. Rights of nature are not widespread, but they have potential for growth and impact. At the constitutional level, Ecuador was the first to recognize the rights of nature. Article 71 begins: “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” 27 Bolivia adopted this approach through the Law on the Rights of Mother Earth (2010); 28 the enumerated rights are the rights to life, diversity of life, water, clean air, equilibrium, restoration, and pollution-free living. 29 Other countries have recognized the right in judicial opinions. 30

A. Animals as Part of Nature

At the most fundamental level, if nature has rights, and if nature includes animals, then rights-based claims could be made on behalf of animals using existing rights of nature doctrine and strategy. A 2008 case from the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil, known as the Wild Parrot case, illustrates this possibility. 31 The case involved an individual who had kept a single wild animal, a blue-fronted parrot, in custody for more than two decades and in inadequate living conditions. 32 This parrot was considered a wild species; this no doubt facilitated the connection to nature, but the court engaged in language that stretched beyond concern for a wild species. The court cited article 225 of the constitution as evidence for Brazil’s “ecological approach.” 33 Article 225 is an anthropocentric human right to an “ecologically balanced environment,” not a rights of nature provision, and the constitutional framing of animal protection comes through an environmental, “fauna and . . . flora” framework. 34 What is remarkable is that the court took this limited language as a starting point to reach a discussion of rights of nature and recognition of sentient beings in general.

The court called for a rethinking of the “Kantian, anthropocentric and individualistic concept of human dignity.” 35 Dignity should be reformulated to recognize “an intrinsic value conferred to non-human sensitive beings, whose moral status would be recognized and would share with the human beings the same moral community.” 36 The treatment of animals “must be based no longer on human dignity or human compassion, but on the very dignity inherent in the existence of nonhuman animals.” 37 The court brought together two strands of jurisprudence: the protection of animals in the German and Swiss Constitutions 38 and the rights of nature language in the Ecuadorean Constitution and Bolivian Law on the Rights of Mother Earth. By doing so, it reached a language of rights: “This view of nature as an expression of life in its entirety enables the Constitutional Law and other areas of law to recognize the environment and non-human animals as beings of their own value, therefore deserving respect and care, so that the legal system grants them the ownership of rights and dignity.” 39 The court conceptually moved nonhuman animals out of the environmental constraints of article 225 to attain their own independent status, for which the court advocated both rights and dignity.

B. Nonhuman Rights

Even if the concept of nature is not currently understood to include individual animals, provisions recognizing the rights of nature still implicitly acknowledge that a nonhuman can have rights. This may seem obvious since corporations and other nonhuman entities are legal persons and have rights, but entities such as rivers or ecosystems traditionally have not been extended the same recognition by legal systems worldwide. Rivers have been treated as legal persons in some jurisdictions, notably in Bangladesh, 40 Colombia, 41 Ecuador, 42 India, 43 New Zealand, 44 and the United States. 45

One of the most significant cases involving river rights was decided by the Constitutional Court of Colombia in 2016 (the Atrato River Case). 46 The plaintiffs challenged the pollution and degradation that industrial and illegal mining and logging had caused to the Atrato River basin, the tributaries, and surrounding territories. 47 They showed that the Atrato banks were the ancestral home to Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities such as themselves. 48 The river provided a subsistence means of living based on agriculture, hunting, fishing, and artisanal mining. 49 The plaintiffs asked the court to protect their fundamental rights to life, health, water, food security, a healthy environment, and the culture and territory of their ethnic communities. 50 They also asked the court to impose measures to address the crisis in the Atrato River basin resulting from the environmental pollution and degradation. 51

While the plaintiffs framed their claims as rights of the individuals living in the Atrato River basin, the court did not limit itself to a consideration of anthropocentric rights. For the court, the importance of nature “[was] established, of course, in reference to the humans that inhabit it and the need to count on a healthy environment to live a dignified life in conditions of well-being; but [nature’s importance was founded] also in connection with the other living organisms with whom the planet is shared, understood as entities deserving of protection in and of themselves .” 52 Nature was a subject of rights. 53

Thus, theoretically, the rights of nature may be violated even in the absence of any injury to humans. A decision from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights made this point clearly: “The Court consider[ed] it important to stress that, as an autonomous right, the right to a healthy environment, unlike other rights, protects the components of the environment, such as forests, rivers, and seas, as legal interests in themselves, even in the absence of the certainty or evidence of a risk to individuals.” 54

An excellent example of an approach that leads with the rights of nature is the Turag River case, decided by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2019. 55 Through time-sequenced photographs, a news article that the court relied on in its decision showed the encroachment on the Turag River due to “river-grabbers,” pollutants, and the failure to keep the river navigable through dredging. 56 Despite laws and many judicial decisions, encroachers walled off land in the river and deployed bulldozers and excavators to fill their newly claimed territory, expanding the reach of dry land at the river’s expense. 57 The same actions were taking place in other rivers in the capital of this “riverine country.” 58 The NGO Human Rights and Peace for Bangladesh brought the case to eject all the illegal occupiers and stop landfilling and construction activities on the river’s territory. 59

The Turag River itself was at the center of the case from the outset. But the river for its own sake? The court echoed the language of the Daily Star article, speaking in terms of the Turag becoming a “dead river” 60 or facing “extinction” if the activity was not stopped. 61 The court also acknowledged that the occupation and pollution had caused a “major shortage of potable water, for which people are constantly facing health risks.” 62 And given the centrality of waterways to Bangladesh, “[d]estroying the rivers is . . . the same as our collective suicide.” 63 As a last resort to save the river, the court declared the Turag and indeed all rivers in the country legal persons. 64 It also ordered the removal of all unlawful pollution and construction and issued seventeen other wide-ranging orders. 65 The Turag River case and others show that rights can be lodged in a nonhuman, but in practice the human rights are also significant components.

C. Nonhuman Remedies and Enforcement

Finally, the remedies discussion in rights of nature cases demonstrates that there are adequate ways for humans to assess and implement the desires and needs of nonhuman entities. In what is known as the Deforestation Case, the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil held that in addition to the requirement to restore the damage caused to the environment, a defendant may also be required to pay monetary damages, or “pure ecological damage,” for “degrading nature in itself, an asset that is not and cannot be owned.” 66 Applied to the animal context, it could stand for the principle that wrongful treatment of an animal, for example, could require the payment of compensation without any particular showing of physical harm. The payment would presumably go into a trust established to support the needs of the animal or her ecosystem.

In the animal context, the idea that humans are capable of making such an assessment has been questioned. In Naruto v. Slater , 67 the Ninth Circuit took a generally irritated tone toward the organization that brought the case on behalf of Naruto, a crested macaque. 68 Concurring in part, Judge Smith stated: “But the interests of animals? We are really asking what another species desires. . . . We have millennia of experience understanding the interests and desires of humankind. That is not necessarily true of animals.” 69 If so — and without conceding the point — that is also not necessarily true of rivers, forests, or ecosystems, but courts that grant rights to nature routinely appoint guardianship bodies to make these determinations. 70

There is a limit to the analogy between nature and nonhuman animals that appears at the stage of remedies in some cases and goes to the heart of the comparison. For a river, the component of nature for which there is the most extensive case law, courts typically speak in terms of “rights that imply its protection, conservation, maintenance” and “restoration,” as in the Atrato River Case. 71 That court sought to have the conditions of the river improved so that the human communities could again make full use of the river for agriculture, hunting, fishing, and artisanal mining. The remedy raises a deeper question, one that the court did not ask: What is the intrinsic purpose of a river? The implication of rights of river judgments is not that a river simply seeks to be left alone. The purpose of a river in these decisions is to serve humans, through access to water, transportation, and the animals who live in them.

The rights that advocates seek for animals are far more robust and categorically reject that the inherent purpose of an animal is to serve human interests and uses. In the habeas corpus cases, the animals are in captivity, such as in a zoo or research facility. 72 The plaintiffs seek release of these animals to a setting in which they can live more natural lives, such as a sanctuary, given that these animals generally cannot be placed in a fully natural, wild environment. 73 While the presumption is that the transfer to better environments would aid in the protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration of these animals, the point was not that the animals will look and feel better for any kind of human benefit. The remedy of habeas corpus seeks to release the animals from a human environment so that they could be, to the extent possible, left alone to be animals.

This difference in the issue of remedies and their enforcement may be significant and may project back onto the fundamental question of whether humans will recognize animal rights at all. Rights of nature call for some major changes in the way that humans live in the world, as seen in the above cases. Viewed from the remedy angle, the rights of animals are an even greater challenge to the behavior of humans. Rights of animals impact fundamental questions such as what humans eat and drink, what they wear, and what kinds of entertainment they engage in, to name just a few. A judge may seek to avoid remedies that would alter human behavior in dramatic ways, and the mere possibility of these remedies may also work to undermine the cause of action itself. 74

Rights of nature approaches are instructive to the cause of animal rights, intellectually and practically. They do not offer a model to be copied wholesale, but instead call for careful study of the parallels and points of disconnection, of the commonalities and the conflicts, with the potential for significant results.

* Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Director, Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program. I thank Sam Bookman, Doug Kysar, Justin Marceau, Kathy Meyer, and Steve Wise for insightful comments on this Essay. I thank the editors of the Harvard Law Review for their thoughtful engagement and editorial assistance. Andy Stawasz, J.D. ’21, provided outstanding research assistance. I also thank the translators who assisted with translations of the cases cited in the Essay: Cibele Maria Melendez Texeira Bandeira and Harvard Law School S.J.D. candidates Beatriz Botero Arcila, Sannoy Das, and Nicolás Parra-Herrera.

^ Karin Brulliard, The Battle over Wild Horses , WASH. POST (Sept. 18, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/18/wild-horses-have-long-kicked-up-controversy-now-foes-say-they-have-solution [ https://perma.cc/L9BW-GJP7 ].

^ The constitution of Kenya , 2010, art. 42, in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline , 2010) .

^ James R. May & Erin Daly, Global Environmental Constitutionalism 255–56 (2015). A biocentric approach places humans on the same level as all living beings, whereas an ecocentric approach considers all that is in the natural world — living beings and nonliving entities — to all be equally valued. Int’l Rivers et al., Rights of Rivers 10 (2020), https://3waryu2g9363hdvii1ci666p-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2020/09/Right-of-Rivers-Report-V3-Digital-compressed.pdf [ https://perma.cc/JLG7-4QD5 ].

^ Jessica Eisen & Kristen Stilt, Protection and Status of Animals , in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law ¶ 1 (Rainer Grote, Frauke Lachenmann & Rüdiger Wolfrum eds., 2016), Oxford Constitutional Law (article updated Dec. 2016).

^ Id . ¶¶ 26–35.

^ Id . ¶¶ 11–17.

^ Id . ¶¶ 36–38.

^ Id . ¶¶ 39–41.

^ Id . ¶¶ 18–25.

^ Id . ¶¶ 47–56.

^ Id . ¶¶ 42–46.

^ Id . ¶¶ 63–65.

^ See Konstitutsiia Rossiĭskoĭ Federatsii [Konst. RF] [Constitution] art. 114(1)(e 5

^ Eisen & Stilt, supra note 7, ¶ 45.

^ Id . ¶ 31.

^ Id . ¶ 23.

^ Id . ¶ 12.

^ Id . ¶ 36.

^ Id . ¶ 69.

^ The desire for more rights is not an unqualified positive, as some have argued. While an important question, this Essay does not engage in that debate.

^ Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 6.

^ Id . In the animal law context, more research is needed on the alignment of beliefs in indigenous communities with animal rights approaches — a partnership that has been important in the contemporary rights of nature movement. Due to issues such as whaling and seal hunting, this alignment has proven difficult, but with thoughtful engagement, it is within reach. See generally Maneesha Deckha, Unsettling Anthropocentric Legal Systems: Reconciliation, Indigenous Laws, and Animal Personhood , 41 J. Intercultural Stud . 77 (2020).

^ There is a long line of thinking in animal protection that preventing cruelty to animals is also beneficial for humans. One strand of this thinking focuses on a connection between violence against animals and violence against humans, referred to as the “link” theory. For a discussion and critique of this theory, see Justin Marceau , Beyond Cages 193–250 (2019).

^ Constitución de la República del Ecuador [Constitution] 2008 , art. 71, translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, Jefri Jay Ruchti, ed., Maria Del Carmen Gress & J.J. Ruchti, trans., 2018 ) .

^ Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra [Law of the Rights of Mother Earth], Ley 071 (2010) ( Bol .) .

^ See Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 15–49.

^ S.T.J., No. 1.797.175/SP, Relator: Ministro OG Fernandes, 21.03.2019, Revista Eletrônica da Jurisprudência [R.S.T.J.], 13.05.2019 (Braz.), https://processo.stj.jus.br/processo/revista/documento/mediado/?componente=ITA&sequencial=1806039&num_registro=201800312300&data=20190513&peticao_numero=-1&formato=PDF [ https://perma.cc/TZ76-P4E3 ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library) [hereinafter Wild Parrot Case].

^ Id . at 2–3.

^ Id . at 9.

^ Constitução Federal [C.F.] [Constitution] art. 225 (Braz.), translated in World Constitutions Illustrated ( HeinOnline, Jefri Jay Ruchi, ed., Keith S. Rosenn, trans., 2020) .

^ Wild Parrot Case, supra note 31, at 10.

^ Id . at 12.

^ See Eisen & Stilt, supra note 7, ¶¶ 22–24, 28–29.

^ Wild Parrot Case, supra note 31, at 14.

^ See Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 47.

^ See id . at 23.

^ See id . at 33.

^ See id . at 44.

^ See id . at 17.

^ See id . at 39. In India, the decisions have been stayed by the Supreme Court. Id . at 46. In the U.S. context, Native American tribal jurisdictions have led the way in recognizing rights of nature. The Navajo Nation Code Annotated, tit. I, § 205 (2014), states that “[a]ll creation, from Mother Earth and Father Sky to the animals, those who live in water, those who fly and plant life have their own laws and have rights and freedoms to exist.” The publication of Christopher D. Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects , 45 S. Cal. L. Rev . 450 (1972), was influential for Justice Douglas, dissenting in Sierra Club v. Morton , 405 U.S. 727, 741–42 (1972) (“Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”). Recently, some local governments in the United States have attempted to declare that natural communities and ecosystems have rights. For a discussion of these efforts, see David R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature 109–30 (2017).

^ Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], noviembre 10, 2016, Sentencia T-622/16 (Colom.), https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/relatoria/2016/t-622-16.htm [ https://perma.cc/CP7X-3NCJ ], translated in Center for Social Justice Studies v. Presidency of the Republic, Judgment T-622/16, Constitutional Court of Colombia (Nov. 10, 2016), The Atrato River Case , Dignity Rts. Project , http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload838.pdf [ https://perma.cc/SF8R-W8EC ] [hereinafter Atrato River Case].

^ Id . § I.2.1.

^ Id . § I.1.

^ Id . § I.2.10.

^ Id . § IV.9.27.

^ Id . § IV.9.31.

^ The Environment and Human Rights (Arts. 4(1) and 5(1) in Relation to Arts. 1(1) and 2 American Convention on Human Rights), Advisory Opinion OC-23/17, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) No. 23, ¶ 62 (Nov. 15, 2017), https://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/opiniones/seriea_23_ing.pdf [ https://perma.cc/W3HZ-LPX9 ].

^ Bangladesh Supreme Court, High Court Division, Writ Petition No. 13898/2016 (2019) (official translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library) [hereinafter Turag River Case].

^ See id . at 3; Tawfique Ali, Time to Declare Turag Dead , Daily Star (Nov. 6, 2016), https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/time-declare-turag-dead-1310182 [ https://perma.cc/R5NL-WA6M ].

^ See Ali, supra note 56.

^ See Turag River Case, supra note 55, at 3.

^ Id . at 4.

^ Id . at 54.

^ Id . at 449.

^ Id . at 449–50.

^ S.T.J., No. 1.145.083/MG, Relator: Ministro Heman Benjamin, 27.09.2011, Revista Eletrônica da Jurisprudência [R.S.T.J.], 04.09.2012, 10 (Braz.), https://processo.stj.jus.br/processo/revista/documento/mediado/?componente=ITA&sequencial=975073&num_registro=200901152629&data=20120904&formato=PDF [ https://perma.cc/FW7S-C6Q8 ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library).

^ 888 F.3d 418 (9th Cir. 2018).

^ Id . at 420.

^ Id . at 432 (Smith, J., concurring in part).

^ Int’l Rivers et al ., supra note 6, at 8.

^ Atrato River Case, supra note 46, § IV.9.32.

^ See, e.g ., Cámara del Fuero Contencioso Administrativo y Tributario [CABA] [Chamber of Appeals in Contentious Administrative and Tax Matters], Buenos Aires, sala 1, 14/06/2016, “Asociación de Funcionarios y Abogados por los Derechos de los Animales y Otros c. GCBA s/ Amparo,” (Arg.), 3, https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/1%20%E2%80%9CASOCIACIO%CC%81N%20DE%20FUNCIONARIOS%20Y%20ABOGADOS%20POR%20LOS%20DERECHOS%20DE%20LOS%20ANIMALES%20Y%20OTROS%20C%3A%20GCBA%20S%3A%20AMPARO%E2%80%9D%20.pdf [ https://perma.cc/7LD3-XCDG ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library); Corte Constitucional [C.C.] [Constitutional Court], enero 23, 2020, Sentencia SU-016/20 (§§ I.1 to .3) (Colom.), https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/comunicados/Comunicado%20No.%2003%20del%2023%20de%20enero%20de%202020.pdf [ https://perma.cc/9EX8-UCYL ] (translation on file with the Harvard Law School Library). For an overview of habeas corpus cases brought in the United States on behalf of nonhuman animals, see Challenging the Legal Thinghood of Autonomous Nonhuman Animals , Nonhuman Rts. Project , https://www.nonhumanrights.org/litigation [ https://perma.cc/69P9-UU7M ].

^ CABA, 14/06/2016, “Asociación de Funcionarios y Abogados por los Derechos de los Animales y Otros c. GCBA s/ Amparo,” 2, 14; C.C., enero 23, 2020, Sentencia SU-016/20 (§§ I.1 to .3).

^ I thank Doug Kysar for the point that this also works in reverse; a judge in a jurisdiction with weak enforcement might be willing to go further with a finding of animal rights, knowing that the implications are unlikely to be seen as a practical matter.

• Environmental Law

March 20, 2021

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• Molly Rockett

Against Animal Rights

How it works

As society expands the increase of animal interactions between human and wild animal are drastically rising. As society has migrated from our agricultural roots to a more urban existence, the importance of distinguishing between animal rights and animal welfare becomes eminent. The public debate about animal products (fur, meat, leather etc.) is often distorted with confusion between two important concepts: animal welfare and animal rights. These terms sound similar and are often used interchangeably, but they describe two profoundly different ideas.

The issues surrounding the views of animal rights and animal welfare are very familiar to those who utilize animals in industry, entertainment, sport or recreation.

SPCA and PETA are two of the most recognizable organizations we all find familiar, but how can we distinguish which side of this topic they are on? Animal Welfare, as defined by the American Veterinary Medical Association as, a human responsibility that encompasses all aspects of animal well-being including; proper housing, management, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling, and, when necessary, humane euthanasia. While animal welfare is the view that animals have rights similar or the same as humans. True animal rights proponents believe that humans do not have the right to use animals at all. Animal rights proponents wish to ban all use of animals by humans. As PETA’S mantra in rally is “Not better cages but, No cages” we easily tell they are supporters of the rights group. SPCA is focused on the care of abandoned and ill animals we see they are the general welfare group. Through the upcoming research paper, we will explore both sides of this radical debate and gain a new outlook on each side. Are animal rights activist extremist while welfare groups and associations are the ones with the obligation of taking care of the animals who are left behind while society over runs?

As we dive into Animal Welfare, we need to address the Animal Welfare Act which requires standards to govern the treatment of animals by dealers, exhibitors, and research facilities. The AWA protects animals that are sold or transported in commerce. The AWA is a federal statute that directs the secretary of the USDA to “promulgate standards to govern the humane handling, care, treatment and transportation of animals by dealers, research facilities, and exhibitors.” Why is animal welfare important to Animal Science as a whole? Animal welfare requirements are important for regulatory, scientific, and ethical reasons. Scientific research and standards set for animals is supported by many people due to this being the only reliable mechanism for testing the safety of compounds before exposure to humans. Without the Animal Welfare Act in place the treatment of animals would not be of importance and there would not be expectations set around the ethical treatment of such animals. “As an extension of this animal rights philosophy, a number of people are embracing veganism, relying exclusively on plant-based food, and plant-based and synthetic clothing. However, with less than 3 percent of the Earth’s surface being suitable for crop production, animal protein and fiber will continue to be indispensable to the survival of the planet’s 6 billion people, and to the conservation of natural habitat. It is for these reasons that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) promotes the use by humans of both plants and animals, domestic and wild.” (6)

Animal rights is the philosophy, sociology, and public policy of animals in society and how they are treated, with the view that no animal has the right to be used by any human for any purpose. Activists try to end animal cruelty and suffering around the world. Whether or not animals have “rights” depends on how the term is defined. If living things are ascribed a “right” to remain living, then animals would have rights. Most ethicists do not use the term so broadly. They generally ascribe rights only to members of societies that are capable of applying mutually accepted ethical principles to specific situations. The animal rights viewpoint also leads to some philosophically untenable conclusions. For instance, in its strongest form it implies that the lives of all animals, including humans, are equal. But, the death of a human is not equivalent to the death of a mouse. Animal rights advocates do not distinguish between human beings and animals.

Human overpopulation is the number one threat to wild and domestic animals worldwide. Whatever humans do to use, abuse, kill, or displace animals is magnified by the number of people on the planet; but do animals need rights? Animals don’t need rights to deserve protection. Animal-welfare advocates have worked for the past 100 years to ensure that the animals that provide us with meat, dairy products and eggs receive good nutrition and care. Thanks to their efforts we have humane-slaughter regulations, codes of practice and other provisions to minimize stress and suffering. This is an on-going process. Animal rights groups have attempted to distort the facts about animal research. As well as fabricate videos and articles accusing the FDA of non-adequate treatment of animals in feed yards and other animal productions. Animal rights groups grossly exaggerate the numbers they use within their campaigns and marketing.

The biggest topic for animal rights vs. animal welfare is animals within research. Rights groups have tendencies to contrive false numbers regarding the facts of animal research. They claim the majority of research animals are primates and stolen pets but yet, “90 percent or more of the animals in research each year are mice, rats and other rodents.; cats, dogs, and other animals such as hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, primates, and farm animals collectively make up the small remaining percentage of animals.” (4) Stringent controls are in place by the federal government through the Animal Welfare Act and its amendments, in place since 1966 in order to keep animals welfare in mind and under supervision.

Both parties are for the overall care and well being of animals but the fine line which is crossed is the radical acts and extremist ideas of the Animal rights organizations. This argument can be met with understanding on each side; also met with haste and belligerence. The welfare of animals is the most important beyond each argument.

There is evidence that humans were thinking about the cognition of animals in the 17th century when Rene Descartes philosophized that animals had no thought (Regan, 2004). Since then more theories have been made about the cognition of animals. Many people now believe that animals possess “conscious awareness” (Regan, 2004, pg. 2). This in return suggests that animals can feel pain, think, plan, and possibly have feelings. With modern research we can observe deeper into the consciousness of animals. With the field of consciousness research rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for non-human animal research have been developed. Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals. The University of Cambridge has exceeded in cognition quoting “ Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots.” (Phillips, 2012) Thus, also showing signs of emotional networks just as humans. The ability to self-recognize is the presence of consciousness and cognition working together as the University of Cambridge has been able to see that “Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.”(Phillips 2012)

To measure awareness is similar to human research basic tasks are evaluated by how well you are able to complete. “Include an examination of perception, learning, categorization, memory, spatial cognition, numerosity, communication, language, social cognition, theory of mind or mindreading, causal reasoning, and metacognition.” (Andrews, 2016)

So, the question poses; if animals are self-aware should we give them more rights? The idea of animal rights vs. animal welfare is a larger portion of the problem. The idea that there are two sides to consider when all in all they are fighting for animals lives in general. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration.

The thing is different people have different concepts of what being an animal lover is. The idea that there are two sides to consider when all in all they are fighting for animals lives in general. The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration. The thing is different people have different concept so what being an animal lover is often confronted with whether they are on the animal rights spectrum of just for general welfare of the animal. Emphasizing that animal rights is not proponent in the use of animals at all; including pet ownership. For a example a zoo had a polar bear die unexpectedly after giving birth. Animal welfare groups were to interfere and take on the cub to ensure its life was safe and to attend to its needs; Animal rights had the input to leave the cub as is and not interfere. Animal rights would rather see animals die in “freedom” rather than in captivity in any means.

This grey area is often construed with interchanging terminology. Where is the line drawn between the ideas of animals rights and animal welfare in real life situations rather than idealistic fantasies of the rights groups.  

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No, animals don’t have rights

Once the dividing line between humans and animals has been erased, it's hard to uphold any fundamental ethical distinction between them

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Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni declared that "an era of what might be called animal dignity is upon us." If he merely meant to draw attention to the fact that we're more attached than ever to our pets — spending billions of dollars a year on veterinary care and paraphernalia, even making places for them in our wills — then the point would be undeniable.

But that was not Bruni's aim. Beyond these sociological observations, Bruni was writing to endorse the movement that's working to establish the legal personhood of animals and grant them legal rights.

I agree that this movement is important and in the long run may very well succeed in its efforts. But I don't at all think we should be cheering it on. On the contrary, it's something that all humanists should find deeply troubling.

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Let me be clear: I'm all in favor of treating animals decently, with special sensitivity to their pain and suffering. By all means, let's pass stricter regulation of factory farming and laboratory experimentation.

But the basis of these reforms should not be any quality we presume the animals themselves possess. It should grow out of an expansion of the sphere of human concern and sympathy, along the lines of the old aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige — the notion that one's superiority obliges one to act nobly toward commoners. In other words, we should treat animals decently not because they're just like human beings, but rather because they're not.

The animal rights movement, by contrast, invariably takes the opposite tack — either reducing us to the level of animals or attempting to raise them up to ours. Both should be resisted.

The founding father of the animal rights movement, Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer, takes the first approach. In a series of writings going back to his seminal book Animal Liberation (1975), Singer has developed a version of utilitarianism that denies any special status to human beings, and claims that the only significant moral consideration is the degree of pleasure or pain experienced by a sentient being. Since both humans and (other) animals are sufficiently sentient to endure pain, we have as much of an ethical obligation to avoid inflicting it on animals as we do on humans.

Provided that specific humans and animals are equally sentient, that is. In cases where that equality is unclear, Singer is notoriously willing, for consistency's sake, to endorse infanticide for (ostensibly pre-sentient) human newborns — and to say that we have fewer moral obligations toward severely disabled human beings than we do toward certain highly evolved animals.

Once the dividing line between humans and animals has been erased, it's hard to uphold any fundamental ethical distinction between them.

Steven Wise, a law professor and founder of an organization — the Nonhuman Rights Project — that fights to establish the legal personhood and rights of animals, takes the opposite approach. (The group's most recent lawsuits along these lines were dismissed by a judge in mid-December.) Rather than trying to establish human and animal equality on the low basis of commonly experienced pleasure and pain, Wise works to elevate animals to the human level. Chimps and bonobos can reason, they exhibit emotions, and they live in and contribute to primitive cultures. That makes them more than things; it means they possess the same degree of dignity as fully functional humans.

That claim is crucial. Philosophers and lawyers bicker about what grounds human rights. Do we acknowledge them and use government power to protect against their violation simply because we have a history of doing it? Does a right just pop into existence as soon as a certain number of human beings clamors for getting a law passed in its name?

In the end, though, the only way to make sense of the spiritually wounding experience of having a fundamental human right violated — even in places with no history of codified legal rights — is to presume that rights protect the violation of intrinsic dignity. To kill an individual is wrong, in this view, whether or not a particular political community publicly recognizes a legal right to life — because to kill an individual is to violate the intrinsic dignity that he or she possesses simply by virtue of being human.

Wise (like Frank Bruni) understands that if he can demonstrate that certain higher animals possess the same intrinsic dignity that human beings do, the law within liberal democracies will be obliged to recognize that such animals are persons possessing at least some fundamental, inviolable rights.

So why not do it? Because there's too much at stake with regard to human self-knowledge. We should do more to protect animals from needless pain and suffering, but not at the cost of denying so much of what makes human beings distinctive.

As I pointed out several years ago in an essay for Commentary magazine (currently trapped behind a paywall ), animal rights advocates are right to note that humans and animals can each be motivated by hunger, but they can't explain "a person's choice to starve himself for a cause." They recognize that humans and animals both crave sex, but they can't explain how or why "some choose to embrace celibacy for the sake of its noble purity." They convincingly highlight the tendency of humans and animals to avoid pain and bodily harm, but they can't explain a man's "willingness to face certain death on the battlefield when called upon to do so by his country. Still less can [they] explain why stories of such sacrifice sometimes move us to tears."

Human dignity is inextricably linked to these moral qualities, which grow out of and reside in a shared public world defined by distinctively human ideas of virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. That's why I concluded my essay by insisting that to demonstrate that it possesses inviolable rights, a chimp or bonobo would need to do nothing less than "stand up and, led by a love of justice and a sense of self-worth, insist that the world recognize and respect its dignity." That's what it would take to prove that the members of an animal species possess the same intrinsic moral worth as human beings.

Anything short of that is an expression of human self-deception. And blindness about all that we are. Losing sight of that reality and truth in an act of advocacy-driven conceptual obfuscation is simply too high a price to pay, even for the promise of alleviating the suffering of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.

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11 Pros and Cons of Animal Rights

According to the laws of most nations, animals are covered under property rights. That means the value of their life is dependent upon market forces and demand. If something happens to a pet, unless there is cruelty in the actions taken, the responsibility involves replacing the “property” of that pet instead of addressing a fundamental right of life.

For that reason, some nations and jurisdictions have begun to protect the rights of animals as living beings instead of as property. Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom have overhauled many of their laws to provide better protections for animals so that their welfare can be guaranteed.

The primary benefit of giving animals rights is to protect the general welfare of society. Not only are animals living creatures, but people who take their fury out on an animal are just a few steps away from doing so to humans. By identifying people who take these actions early, the rest of society can be protected while the individual in question can be entered into a rehabilitation program.

The disadvantage with animal rights is that it equates animal life with human life. With much of our diet coming from animal muscle protein, such a legal structure would change the entire agricultural community and potentially create many more food deserts throughout the world.

Here are some additional facts to consider when looking at the pros and cons of animal rights.

What Are the Pros of Animal Rights?

1. The death of an animal doesn’t really benefit a human. Humans may eat animals, but animal protein isn’t necessary for human survival. Vegetarians and vegans prove this every day. If we kill animals, then we create a gap in nature’s evolutionary process that can affect the rest of the world. Sustainable food approaches, when combined with a greater respect for human life, could create a healthier society.

2. Saving animal lives would save our water supply. Animals have a large water footprint. It is one of the most resource-intensive items in our current food supply. To produce just 1 pound of beef requires almost 1,800 gallons of water. One pound of pork requires nearly 600 gallons of water. In comparison, producing an equivalent number of soybeans or corn would cost 216 gallons and 108 gallons respectively.

3. Animal testing is not a guarantee of safety. The number of medications that are safe for animals to take, but unsafe for humans, could fill a list the length of your arm. There are also a handful of medications that are safe for humans to take, but are quite harmful to animals. Although there is a similarity between humans and certain animals, there are enough differences that make the data gathered become unreliable.

4. Preventing animal rights is a costly venture. Many of the animal testing procedures that are initiated never result in a product and the figures continue to rise. In the 1990s, up to 92% of products that were tested on animals never made it to market. By the 2010s, the figure rose to over 98%. These tests all come at a cost and that money needs to come from somewhere.

5. Animals have a certain intelligence to them. Chimpanzees have the same ability as humans to manipulate their environment, use tools, and finish specific tasks. An adult pig has a comparative intelligence to a 3-year-old human child. Dolphins have a complex language and can recognize themselves in the mirror, which proves self-awareness. Elephants have complex social groups, display empathy and grief, and have an outstanding memory. If we saw many of these traits in humans, we’d expect that person to have rights. Why should an animal be any different?

6. Allotted funds could be used elsewhere. Money that is being spent on animal testing right now could be dedicated to food programs that feed the hungry. Most food programs around the world can average $0.20 per meal provided. In the United States, about $16 billion is spent every year on animal testing. If just half of those funds were sent to food programs, that would create 40 billion extra meals to feed the hungry.

What Are the Cons of Animal Rights?

1. It would change medication testing processes. Many of the research projects which involve new medications test the products on animals before testing them on humans. The goal of doing so is to protect human lives by seeing how a medication would react. Some animals, such as rats and chimpanzees, have a DNA profile that is very similar to humans. The data gathered can help researchers understand more about the medication they’re working on to benefit human societies.

2. We need to test new items on something. It is unethical to try experimental products of humans. Some could argue that it is immoral. Even with informed consent, research that causes harm to a person may not be classified as being beneficial to society. By using animals as a last line of defense to measure the effectiveness of various products, the harm that an untested and dangerous item can cause to humans is naturally limited.

3. Not having animal rights reduces human risks. Although there are honest questions about the effectiveness of animal testing, it boils down to an us vs. them debate. Having an animal die because there are unforeseen consequences of a drug or product means a human being doesn’t need to die. In the chain of life, human life is superior to animal life, which some argue makes the sacrifice worthwhile.

4. There would be added enforcement costs. By offering animals rights that are equivalent to the rights of humans, an extra layer of law enforcement would need to be added to our criminal justice systems. People would be spending more time in prison because of charges related to the new rights afforded to animals. Added officers and officials would be needed for enforcement. Since existing laws often afford many rights to animals already in terms of proper treatment, spending this extra cost to provide equivalence may not be the right choice to make.

5. Animals would require a human representative. Our current legal system recognizes the advancements of humanity. To represent animal rights, a human being would be forced to represent an animal who may have had their rights violated. Although some cases show clear-cut evidence of abuse or neglect, there would be an added level of interpretation to some cases that could make animal rights be more about “getting even” with others rather than be a true case of seeking justice.

The pros and cons of animal rights should cause us to question our belief structures. How we treat animals is a reflection of how we treat others. Giving animals more protections under the laws that govern property may make sense, but giving animals an equivalency may not. There is no easy answer or compromise to this debate.

• Animal Rights Essays

Animal Rights Argumentative Essay

Animal rights have been a consistent subject of debate, with animal activists emphasizing the need to differentiate between animal rights and welfare. The government’s failure to lay down sufficient legislation to help in the protection of animals from human predation has made it difficult for several people to believe in animal rights. It is essential to note that animal rights do not concern putting animals over and above humans but instead on the rejection of speciesism and sentience. Humans utilize several ways to exploit animals, including hunting, fur, circuses, and animal products like eggs and meat. There is an urgent need to help in securing strategies that will free animals from human exploitation. Therefore, this paper seeks to analyze the reasons against animal exploitation and reinforce the probable methods to uphold animal rights.

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There is a general feeling that the use of animals for both scientific and medical research results yields significant improvement in living standards and medical advancements. Thus, it is sensible for many to agree over the use of animals to test how healthy or harmful a newly discovered medicine is before giving it to the human species for consumption (Lin n.p). However, such tests and exposure to chemicals often result in the killing of thousands of animals for courses that in some instances turn unhelpful (Garner 21). Therefore, animals’ mere use for sciences’ sake is unacceptable since the animals’ suffering vastly outweighs the satisfaction of human curiosity (Lin n.p). It is thus unnecessary to justify animal exploitation on immoral grounds.

Animals cannot think and make rational decisions concerning what should take place in their lives. However, the determination of rights should not be based on intelligence grounds. Otherwise, conducting intelligence tests would be necessary for all humans for them to enjoy certain fundamental rights. Exploiting animals based on their inability to think and reason is unreasonable (Lin n.p). This form of reasoning would mean that babies with no intelligence and mentally challenged humans would have no rights.

Preservation of animal rights and dignity is an appreciation for their life since it develops significant status. Individuals who hold contrary arguments on animal rights protection tend to believe that human life is more critical than animal life (Lin n.p). Therefore, destroying animal life to preserve human life is justifiable. This is an ineffective criterion to determine the importance of having rights since such are usually subjective, and individuals often have selfish personal interests (Garner 9). Interestingly, an individual may find their home-bred animals more important than a stranger in the neighborhood with this scope. It should not allow the individual to kill or misuse animals just for the sake of prioritizing and ranking the importance.

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In conclusion, the concept that animals should have the ability to move freely without human interference and exploitation affirms the need for animal protection. With the ability to experience emotions, fear, pain, and happiness, the argument that the absence of cognitive abilities makes animals lesser than humans is baseless. Besides, arguments in favor of the protection of animals and giving more rights to animals does not mean putting them at the same level as humans, but attempts to show the value that animals have as a human source of food and labor objects. Therefore, upholding animals’ inherent value is critical for maintaining animals’ rights and ensuring the maintenance of a balanced and organized ecosystem where there is a significant minimization of human predation on animals.

Works Cited

• Garner, Robert, ed. Animal rights: The changing debate . Springer, 2016.
• Lin, Doris. What Are Animals Rights? 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-are-animal-rights-127600

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Animal Rights Essay

This IELTS  animal rights essay  discusses the exploitation of animals by humans.

People who believe in animal rights think that they should not be treated cruelly, for example in experiments or for sport.

'To exploit' means to benefit from something in an unfair way. Take a look at the question:

A growing number of people feel that animals should not be exploited by people and that they should have the same rights as humans, while others argue that humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Discussing 'Two Opinions'

Animals should not be exploited by people and they should have the same rights as humans. Humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

In this essay you are being given two opposing opinions to discuss.

This is the first opinion:

• Animals should not be exploited by people and they should have the same rights as humans.

This is the second opinion:

• Humans must employ animals to satisfy their various needs, including uses for food and research.

In this type of essay, you must look at both sides. In other words you need to discuss the arguments FOR animal rights and AGAINST .

You must also ensure you give YOUR opinion.

Organising the Essay

One way to organize an essay like this is to consider both opinions, then give your opinion in a final paragraph ( see this example ) or dedicate a whole final paragraph to your opinion ( see this example ).

Another way to write an essay like this is to also make one of the 'for' or 'against' opinions your opinion as well.

Look at the model animal rights essay below. The second body paragraph discusses the first opinion, but the topic sentence makes it clear that this paragraph is also representing the writers opinion as well:

However, I do not believe these arguments stand up to scrutiny.

This now means that in two body paragraphs you have covered all three parts of the question from the animal rights essay:

1. First opinion 2. Second opinion 3. Your opinion

The advantage of doing it this way rather than having a separate paragraph is that you do not need to come up with new ideas for a new paragraph.

If you have a separate paragraph with your opinion you may find you cannot think of any new ideas or you may end up repeating the same things as in your previous paragraphs.

IELTS Writing Example

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

Animal Rights Essay - Model Answer

Animals have always been used by humans in some form to satisfy their needs. However, while some people believe that animals should be treated in the same way humans are and have similar rights, others think that it is more important to use them as we desire for food and medical research. 

With regard to the exploitation of animals, people believe it is acceptable for several reasons. Firstly, they think that humans are the most important beings on the planet, and everything must be done to ensure human survival. If this means experimenting on animals so that we can fight and find cures for diseases, then this takes priority over animal suffering. Furthermore, it is believed by some that animals do not feel pain or loss as humans do, so if we have to kill animals for food or other uses, then this is morally acceptable.

However, I do not believe these arguments stand up to scrutiny. To begin, it has been shown on numerous occasions by secret filming in laboratories via animal rights groups that animals feel as much pain as humans do, and they suffer when they are kept in cages for long periods. In addition, a substantial amount of animal research is done for cosmetics, not to find cures for diseases, so this is unnecessary. Finally, it has also been proven that humans can get all the nutrients and vitamins that they need from green vegetables and fruit. Therefore, again, having to kill animals for food is not an adequate argument.

To sum up, although some people argue killing animals for research and food is ethical, I would argue there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this is not the case, and, therefore, steps must be taken to improve the rights of animals.

(Words 290) 

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Animal Rights — Thesis Statement For Animals Deserve Rights, And Their Rights

Thesis Statement for Animals Deserve Rights, and Their Rights

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

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Essay on Animal Rights

Students are often asked to write an essay on Animal Rights in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Animal Rights

Understanding animal rights.

Animal rights mean animals should be free from human harm, abuse, or use for personal gains. It’s the belief that animals deserve to live their lives free from suffering and exploitation. This concept is based on the idea that animals have feelings and interests just like humans.

Importance of Animal Rights

Animal rights are important because animals are living beings. They feel pain, experience emotions, and want to live a life free from harm. By respecting animal rights, we show our respect for all life forms. We also help maintain balance in nature.

Threats to Animal Rights

Animals face many threats. These include hunting, habitat loss, and cruel treatment in farms or circuses. Many animals are also used for scientific experiments. These practices cause pain and suffering to animals. They are clear violations of animal rights.

Steps to Protect Animal Rights

We can protect animal rights in many ways. We can adopt pets instead of buying them. We can avoid products tested on animals. We can also support organizations that work for animal rights. Teaching others about animal rights is another effective way to help.

Animal rights are a crucial part of a just society. By protecting animal rights, we also protect our environment and ourselves. It’s our duty to ensure that animals live free from harm and exploitation. We must respect all life forms and their rights.

Also check:

• Speech on Animal Rights

250 Words Essay on Animal Rights

What are animal rights.

Animal rights mean that animals deserve to live free from suffering, pain, and exploitation. This idea is based on the belief that animals have feelings too. They can feel joy, sadness, and pain just like us humans. So, they should be treated with kindness and respect.

Why are Animal Rights Important?

Animal rights are important for many reasons. Firstly, animals are living beings, not objects. They should not be used for our selfish needs like food, clothing, or entertainment. Secondly, respecting animal rights helps us become better humans. It teaches us values like compassion, empathy, and respect for all life. Lastly, animals play a crucial role in our ecosystem. If we harm them, it can disturb the balance of nature.

How can we Protect Animal Rights?

Protecting animal rights is not hard. We can start by being kind to animals. We should not hurt them or make them suffer. We can also stop using products that are tested on animals. Many companies test their products on animals, causing them pain and suffering. By refusing to buy such products, we can stand up for animal rights.

Role of Laws in Protecting Animal Rights

Many countries have laws to protect animal rights. These laws make it illegal to harm animals or use them in cruel ways. But, these laws are not always followed. So, it’s important for us to raise our voice against animal cruelty. We can report cases of animal abuse to the authorities and demand strict action.

In conclusion, animals have a right to live free from pain and suffering. It’s our duty to respect these rights and protect animals. After all, a world where all living beings are treated with kindness and respect is a better world for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Animal Rights

Animal rights mean that animals deserve certain kinds of consideration—what’s best for them. Regardless of how useful they are to humans, or how cute they are, they should be treated with respect. They should not be hurt or treated badly. Some people think animals should have the same rights as humans, while others believe they should have different rights.

Animal rights are important because animals are living beings. They can feel pain, they can suffer, and they have a will to live. Just like humans, they have feelings and emotions. They deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. Animal rights also help people. When we treat animals well, we also learn to treat people well.

Types of Animal Rights

There are two main types of animal rights. The first type is called ‘animal welfare’. This means that people should make sure animals are treated well. They should have good food, a nice place to live, and should not be hurt or made to suffer.

The second type is ‘animal liberation’. This means that animals should be free and not used by humans at all. People who believe in animal liberation think that animals should not be kept in zoos or farms, used for testing, or used for entertainment.

Animal Rights and Laws

Many countries have laws to protect animals. These laws say that people cannot hurt animals or make them suffer. They also say that animals should be treated with respect. But, not all countries have these laws, and in many places, these laws are not followed.

Animal Rights Movements

There are many groups that fight for animal rights. These groups work to change laws, to stop people from hurting animals, and to educate people about how to treat animals better. Some of these groups are big and well-known, like PETA and the Humane Society. Others are smaller and work in just one area or on one issue.

What Can We Do?

There are many ways we can help animals and support animal rights. We can adopt pets instead of buying them. We can choose not to go to places that use animals for entertainment, like circuses and zoos. We can eat less meat or no meat at all. And, we can tell others about why animal rights are important.

In conclusion, animal rights are about respecting and caring for animals. They are about understanding that animals have feelings and deserve to be treated well. By supporting animal rights, we are not just helping animals, we are also making the world a better place for all living beings.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Animal Exploitation
• Essay on Animals Also Have Feelings
• Essay on Animals Used For Entertainment

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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem defends her account of killing own dog in new book

South Dakota governor and Republican vice presidential contender Kristi Noem on Friday responded to a news report about a section of her forthcoming book where she describes killing her 14-month-old dog.

“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said in a post to X above a headline from The Guardian , which obtained a copy of Noem's upcoming book, “No Going Back.”

The Guardian's article describes a section of Noem's book, set for release next month, in which she recounted shooting her dog after deciding it was “less than worthless” and “untrainable.”

In her account, Noem grabbed her gun and led the dog, named Cricket, to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done,” Noem wrote.

She then went on to kill a family goat, which she called “nasty and mean.” Noem also led the goat to a gravel pit, where she said her first shot wounded but did not kill the animal. She got another shell for her gun and killed the goat, according to the book.

Noem wrote that her daughter seemed confused when she came home from school, asking, “Hey, where's Cricket?”

NBC News has not obtained Noem's book or independently verified the section reported by The Guardian.

Noem was lambasted Friday on social media; some said they were “ horrified ,” while others posted pictures of their dogs .

The Biden campaign p osted p hotos of the president walking with the family dog Commander, who has had numerous biting incidents , and Vice President Kamala Harris cuddling a dog.

Noem is widely viewed as a top contender to be Trump's running mate. She is in her second term as South Dakota governor, and she previously served as the state's lone representative in the U.S. House.

Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Trump says it’s up to states whether to punish, monitor women for abortions

Former president Donald Trump said in an interview published Tuesday that he would not intervene in state decisions on abortion policy, including in situations where states seek to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.

Trump also declined during the interview with Time magazine to commit to veto any additional federal restrictions if they were to come to his desk upon a possible return to the White House.

Asked by Time if he would be comfortable with states prosecuting women for having abortions outside limited periods permitted by state laws, Trump suggested the federal government should have no role.

“It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not,” Trump said. “It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.”

Trump’s comments highlight the fraught politics of the stance on abortion that he outlined earlier this month.

Trump announced on social media that policy should be left to the states, after months of mixed signals about his position. Trump has consistently taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade — three of the justices who ruled on the case were appointed by him — yet has distanced himself from the political repercussions of the decision.

Shortly after Trump articulated his states-rights stance this month, Arizona’s Supreme Court revived an 1864 law passed before it was granted statehood that forbids abortions except to save a mother’s life and punishes providers with prison time. In that case, Trump said the state had gone too far.

During the Time interview, however, Trump repeatedly emphasized his support for state autonomy, at least in concept.

When asked, for instance, about the federal Republican-sponsored Life at Conception Act, which would grant “full legal rights to embryos,” Trump said: “I’m leaving everything up to the states.”

He declined to say whether he would veto such a bill, suggesting he wouldn’t be presented with that decision.

“I don’t have to do anything about vetoes,” Trump said, “because we now have it back in the states.”

Asked by Time if states should monitor women’s pregnancies to detect whether they get abortions after a ban takes effect, Trump said: “I think they might do that.”

“Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states,” he said. “Look, Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states.”

Democrats have sought to make abortion the dominant issue in the 2024 elections, highlighting Trump’s role in appointing the three conservative Supreme Court justices who helped overturn a constitutional right to abortion in 2022, and legislation pushed by Republican lawmakers to ban or severely restrict access to the procedure.

President Biden’s campaign seized on the Time interview after it was published Tuesday.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Trump’s latest remarks are proof that reproductive health care is at stake in the election.

“Donald Trump’s latest comments leave little doubt: if elected he’ll sign a national abortion ban, allow women who have an abortion to be prosecuted and punished, allow the government to invade women’s privacy to monitor their pregnancies, and put IVF and contraception in jeopardy nationwide,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “Simply put: November’s election will determine whether women in the United States have reproductive freedom, or whether Trump’s new government will continue its assault to control women’s health care decisions.”

Trump declined to answer directly when asked by Time if he thinks women should be able to obtain the abortion pill mifepristone .

“Well, I have an opinion on that, but I’m not going to explain. I’m not gonna say it yet.” He said he would announce his position “probably over the next week.” When pressed for an answer, Trump sought more time. “I will be making a statement on that over the next 14 days.”

Trump spoke with writer Eric Cortellessa at his home in Florida on April 12 and had a follow-up phone interview April 27, the magazine reported. On Tuesday it published a story about the interview along with a transcript .

The interview comes as Republicans brace for fallout from their newly pushed restrictions.

Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy takes effect this week, one of the strictest in the nation.

The Republican-led Arizona Senate is expected to vote on a repeal of the state’s near total abortion ban after the state Supreme Court ruled a Civil War-era bill can take effect following the overturning of Roe v. Wade . Arizona’s House last week voted to repeal the law, after prominent antiabortion Republicans such as Senate candidate Kari Lake reversed course on the issue .

Trump, who once described himself as “very pro-choice,” said in 2000 that he would “indeed support a ban.” As a candidate, Trump struggled to adopt a position to fully satisfy leading members of the antiabortion movement while shielding himself and Republicans from blowback at the ballot box.

During the GOP nominating contests, Trump declined to take a firm stance on federal legislation and criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban as a “terrible mistake.” In a CNN town hall last year, Trump would not say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban. Instead he said the antiabortion movement was in a “very good negotiating position” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

As president, Trump backed a 20-week abortion ban that did not have the votes to pass Congress and at the time conflicted with Roe, which gave Americans nationwide a right to abortion until a fetus was viable outside the womb, often pegged at roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy.

After publication of the Time interview Tuesday, Trump celebrated the piece while speaking to reporters outside the courtroom in New York, where he is on trial.

“I want to thank the Time magazine,” he said. “They did a cover story, which is very nice.”

“It’s at least 60 percent correct, which is all I could ask for,” Trump said, without identifying anything that he might say were inaccuracies. Trump walked away and ignored questions shouted by reporters.

Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.

U.S. abortion access, reproductive rights

Tracking abortion access in the United States: Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade , the legality of abortion has been left to individual states. The Washington Post is tracking states where abortion is legal, banned or under threat.

Abortion and the election: Voters in about a dozen states could decide the fate of abortion rights with constitutional amendments on the ballot in a pivotal election year. Biden supports legal access to abortion , and he has encouraged Congress to pass a law that would codify abortion rights nationwide. After months of mixed signals about his position, Trump said the issue should be left to states . Here’s how Biden and Trump’s abortion stances have shifted over the years.

New study: The number of women using abortion pills to end their pregnancies on their own without the direct involvement of a U.S.-based medical provider rose sharply in the months after the Supreme Court eliminated a constitutional right to abortion , according to new research.

Abortion pills: The Supreme Court seemed unlikely to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone . Here’s what’s at stake in the case and some key moments from oral arguments . For now, full access to mifepristone will remain in place . Here’s how mifepristone is used and where you can legally access the abortion pill .

• States where abortion is on the ballot in the 2024 election April 15, 2024 States where abortion is on the ballot in the 2024 election April 15, 2024
• States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat May 1, 2024 States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat May 1, 2024
• Tears and despair at Florida abortion clinic in final hours before ban May 1, 2024 Tears and despair at Florida abortion clinic in final hours before ban May 1, 2024

Dan Schneider Sues ‘Quiet on Set’ Producers for Defamation, Calls Nickelodeon Abuse Docuseries a ‘Hit Job’

By Ethan Shanfeld

Ethan Shanfeld

• Anitta Reflects on Dreaming Big in Brazil and Breaking the ‘Rules’ of Being a Woman: ‘I Wanted to Shake My Ass. I Wanted to Be Free’ 13 hours ago
• Dan Schneider Sues ‘Quiet on Set’ Producers for Defamation, Calls Nickelodeon Abuse Docuseries a ‘Hit Job’ 1 day ago
• Death Threats, Divorce and Plastic Surgery: Gypsy Rose Blanchard Says ‘I Am in a Different Form of Prison’ in Lifetime Series Trailer 2 days ago

Dan Schneider has filed a defamation lawsuit against the producers of the Investigation Discovery docuseries “ Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV ,” which uncovered alleged abuse and misconduct at Nickelodeon and became Max’s biggest streaming title ever .

Popular on Variety

Schneider himself said in a video posted after the launch of “Quiet on Set,” “Watching over the past two nights was very difficult. Facing my past behaviors, some of which are embarrassing and that I regret. I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology.”

In a separate statement sent to Variety alongside the legal complaint, Schneider wrote: “Recently the docuseries ‘Quiet on Set’ highlighted mistakes I made and poor judgment I exhibited during my time at Nickelodeon, most of which happened decades ago during my early career as a producer, working on shows for Tollin/Robbins Productions. There is no doubt that I was sometimes a bad leader. I am sincerely apologetic and regretful for that behavior, and I will continue to take accountability for it. However, after seeing ‘Quiet on Set’ and its trailer, and the reactions to them, I sadly have no choice but to take legal action against the people behind it. In their successful attempt to mislead viewers and increase ratings, they went beyond reporting the truth and falsely implied that I was involved in or facilitated horrific crimes for which actual child predators have been prosecuted and convicted.”

Schneider continued: “I have no objection to anyone highlighting my failures as a boss, but it is wrong to mislead millions of people to the false conclusion that I was in any way involved in heinous acts like those committed by child predators. I owe it to myself, my family, and the many wonderful people involved in making these shows to set the record straight.”

Variety has reached out to ID for comment.

In addition to Dan Schneider, “Quiet on Set” also investigates other people working at Nickelodeon at the time, including dialogue and acting coach Brian Peck. Interviewed in “Quiet on Set” is “Drake & Josh” star Drake Bell, who alleges he was a victim of Peck’s sexual abuse. In 2003, Peck, 43 at the time, was arrested on 11 charges  — including sodomy, lewd act upon a child 14 or 15 by a person 10 years older, and oral copulation by anesthesia or controlled substance — but the victim was not previously named.

“Quiet on Set” also mentions Jason Michael Handy, a production assistant who was arrested and charged with a lewd act with a child under 14. The mother of a former child actor who appeared on “The Amanda Show” claimed on “Quiet on Set” that Handy sent her daughter a photograph of him naked, masturbating. Another Nickelodeon staffer, animator Ezel Channel, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for committing lewd acts on a 14-year-old boy and showing him pornography.

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Reproductive rights in America

What abortion politics has to do with new rights for pregnant workers.

Selena Simmons-Duffin

Employers are required to make accommodations for pregnant women and new moms like time off for doctor's appointments. Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images hide caption

Employers are required to make accommodations for pregnant women and new moms like time off for doctor's appointments.

This week, attorneys general from 17 Republican-led states sued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over something they say is an "abortion accommodation mandate."

Here are four things to know about the latest battle in the war over abortion between Republican-led states and the Biden administration.

1. The law in question is about protections for pregnant workers.

First, a little background: In 2015, a survey found that nearly 1 in 4 women went back to work just two weeks after giving birth.

It took about ten years for a bill protecting pregnant workers to get through Congress, and in 2022, not long after Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act passed with bipartisan support. The law requires employers with at least 15 employees to accommodate workers who are pregnant with things like extra bathroom breaks, time off for prenatal appointments, a chair for sitting during a shift. It also says employers have to accommodate workers after they give birth.

Even though lawmakers from both parties think pregnancy protections are a good thing, abortion politics have overshadowed the news of those new rights. It all comes down to one line in the law and the word "abortion" in the regulation.

The law says employers should make "reasonable accommodations" for pregnant workers during and after "pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions." The new rule EEOC put out to implement the law includes abortion in a lengthy list of "related medical conditions," along with everything from ectopic pregnancy to anxiety to varicose veins.

2. Abortion entered the chat and about 100,000 people chimed in on the regulations.

Political and religious groups that oppose abortion rights took notice of the inclusion of "abortion" in the list of related medical conditions, as did the lead Republican co-sponsor of the law , Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Some 54,000 people commented on the proposed rule objecting to the inclusion of abortion, according to the EEOC's analysis in the final rule, while 40,000 people commented in support of abortion's inclusion. (The agency noted that most of these were nearly identical "form comments" driven by advocacy groups).

In the end, "abortion" remained on the list. In its analysis, the agency explained that abortion's inclusion is consistent with longstanding interpretation of civil rights laws and courts' rulings. In the final rule, the EEOC says the law "does not require any employee to have – or not to have – an abortion, does not require taxpayers to pay for any abortions, and does not compel health care providers to provide any abortions." The rule also notes that unpaid time off for appointments is the most likely accommodation that would be sought by workers having abortions.

3. The lawsuit + the politics of the lawsuit

Within days of the rule being published in the Federal Register , a coalition of 17 Republican-led states filed suit. "The implications of mandating abortion accommodations are immense: covered employers would be required to support and devote resources, including by providing extra leave time, to assist employees' decision to terminate fetal life," the lawsuit reads .

The lawsuit was filed on Thursday in federal court in Eastern Arkansas. The plaintiffs ask the court to put a hold on the effective date of the final rule pending judicial review, and to temporarily block the enforcement of – and ultimately vacate – the rule's "abortion-accommodation mandate."

Arkansas and Tennessee are the two states leading the lawsuit. In a statement , Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said: "This is yet another attempt by the Biden administration to force through administrative fiat what it cannot get passed through Congress."

Griffin said the rule is a "radical interpretation" of the new pregnancy protection law that would leave employers subject to federal lawsuits if they don't give employees time off for abortions, even if abortions are illegal in those states. "The PWFA was meant to protect pregnancies, not end them," he said.

Women's advocates see the politics of the lawsuit as well. "It's no coincidence that this organized, partisan effort is occurring in states that have some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country," Jocelyn Frye of the National Partnership for Women & Families wrote in a statement . "Any attempt to dismantle these protections will have serious consequences for women's health, working families, and the ability for women to thrive in the workplace."

Greer Donley is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who submitted a comment on the proposed regulation defending the inclusion of abortion. She points out that this is the latest in a string of legal challenges from anti-abortion groups fighting the Biden administration's efforts to protect abortion using federal agencies.

"You can really see this in a suite of [abortion] lawsuits – including the two that were heard in the Supreme Court this term, one involving the FDA's regulation of mifepristone and one involving the Biden administration's interpretation of EMTALA ," she observes, and guesses a legal challenge will also come in response to the newly announced privacy protections for patients who've had abortions. "You have a Supreme Court that is overwhelmingly anti-abortion and overwhelmingly anti-administrative state – those two things in tandem are not a good thing for the Biden administration."

4. In the meantime, pregnant workers have new rights.

At the moment, until a judge says otherwise, the new protections for pregnant workers are already in effect. The EEOC has a guide for pregnant workers about their new rights under the law and how to file charges against their employers. It's also holding trainings for human resource professionals on how to comply with the law.

Complaints have already started to roll in. In a statement to NPR, EEOC spokesperson Victor Chen wrote that in the first three months that the law was in effect, the agency received nearly 200 charges alleging a violation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which works out to nearly two a day.

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Critics of Narendra Modi barred from entering India after speaking out against government

British academic Nitasha Kaul has long researched the changing social and political landscape in India.

It's led her to a dire conclusion about the world's most populous democracy.

"What we're witnessing post-2014 is a democratic erosion in India — that is undeniable," Professor Kaul told the ABC.

More than 950 million Indians are eligible to vote in this year's general election which began last week , and is held in seven phases until June 1.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to easily win a third term in office after first coming to power in 2014.

But ahead of the critical poll, Professor Kaul was shocked when she was barred from entering the country.

In February, she was detained and then deported after being invited to speak at a conference on the country's constitution, despite holding a valid lifelong visa.

She said no reason had ever been given for the decision.

"If you are critical of a political project, or a political party or their policies, it should be very straightforward that you're not against the country," she said.

"What … these kinds of actions do is label people as anti-national for being critical of a party or of its policies or a leader."

Professor Kaul held an Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) card.

Indian citizens can only hold one passport, but the OCI card acts as a lifelong visa, allowing foreign nationals of Indian origin to reside and work in India.

Professor Kaul's experience isn't an isolated one.

Research by the pro-democracy group Article 14 found at least 102 people have had their OCI cards revoked since 2014 under a clause of the country's citizenship laws.

The clause allows the government to cancel an OCI for several reasons, including if they have "shown disaffection towards the Constitution of India".

A Human Rights Watch report found several high-profile academics — who had published research critical of Indian government policy, Mr Modi or had commented on big issues affecting the country — were among those barred from entering India.

The report noted that in addition to cancelling OCI cards, the Indian government downgraded the privileges of 4.5 million OCI cardholders in 2021.

That move meant they needed to seek special permission to carry out tasks like research and journalism or visit areas in India listed as "protected".

Reducing public debate in India

Professor Kaul is the chair of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and has written extensively on how India's political landscape has changed since Mr Modi came to power.

She has also written about rising authoritarianism in the country.

After going public about her experience, she said other academics expressed concern their work would be a barrier to them getting home to see family.

She said the government's aim was to ultimately reduce the size of the public sphere in which to debate policy and publish academic work.

"This is a classic kind of authoritarian thing to be doing," she said.

Professor Kaul also received "violent, vicious, extremist, misogynistic, graphic sexual trolling" and death threats online.

"The idea for people who do that to people who are in the public domain is to try and intimidate and silence them," she said.

At the time Professor Kaul was denied entry, India's Ministry of External Affairs said "entry of foreign nationals into our country is a sovereign decision".

'Grossly unfair' 

London-based writer and activist Amrit Wilson's OCI card was cancelled two years ago.

She was born in India but moved to the United Kingdom when she was in her 20s, keeping close ties to her home nation.

Ms Wilson said the government attributed the cancellation to an article she wrote about protesting Indian farmers  and a social media post about the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.

She's challenging the cancellation.

"It seemed grossly unfair," Ms Wilson told the ABC.

"The government can't handle dissent of any type. It locks dissenters up and if they're abroad it tries to target them in other ways."

The Indian government was contacted for comment on why it was cancelling OCIs. 

Opposition MPs have been arrested , protesters have been detained and internet shutdowns have targeted anti-government commentary in the lead-up to the national election. 

Reporters Without Borders ranked India 161st of 180 countries and territories in its latest World Press Freedom Index.

Human Rights Watch's Asia director Elaine Pearson said other countries should hold India to account.

"These governments should press the Modi administration to interact with its critics to bring about reform, instead of intimidating them into silence," Ms Pearson said.

Rising Hindu nationalism

Mr Modi's grip on political power is intricately connected with religion and a rising anti-Muslim sentiment in India.

India is still officially a secular nation, and while Hinduism is the biggest religion, the country is home to 200 million Muslims.

Despite that, Mr Modi hasn't hidden his Hindu nationalist ideals.

In January, he inaugurated a Hindu temple built on the site of a demolished mosque, delivering on one of his earlier poll promises.

His government has also moved to enact a law that fast-tracks naturalisation for people who have fled from religious persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan but excludes Muslims from those countries.

In 2019, he stripped the Muslim-majority region Kashmir of its special status, bringing it under Delhi's control.

Ms Wilson said there was a concerted attack on Muslims, aiding the government and Mr Modi's political agenda.

"Modi plays to the Hindu majority by creating a fear of Muslims," she said.

"He concocts all kinds of lies about the Muslim population, and people do fall for it."

Last week, India's main opposition party accused Mr Modi of using hate speech after he called Muslims "infiltrators" at an election rally .

Mr Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party denies accusations of fostering religious intolerance and says its policies benefit all Indians.

India Hate Lab, a website tracking hate speech in India, found a steep rise in hate speech targeting Muslims in the second half of 2023. 

It documented 413 incidents, a 62 per cent rise compared to the first six months of the year.

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