   #copyright

Animal rights

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Animal & Human Rights

   A civet, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong People's Zoo, Sichuan,
   2001, by the Asian Animal Protection Network. The animal was kept
   hungry so that visitors could feed him live eels from a ladle.
   A civet, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong People's Zoo, Sichuan,
   2001, by the Asian Animal Protection Network. The animal was kept
   hungry so that visitors could feed him live eels from a ladle.

   Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the movement to
   protect non-human animals from being used or regarded as property by
   humans. It is a radical social movement insofar as it aims not only to
   attain more humane treatment for animals, but also to include species
   other than human beings within the moral community by giving their
   basic interests — for example, the interest in avoiding suffering — the
   same consideration as those of human beings. The claim is that animals
   should no longer be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated
   as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as
   legal persons.

   Animal law courses are now taught in 79 out of 180 United States law
   schools, and the idea of extending personhood to animals has the
   support of some senior legal scholars, including Alan Dershowitz and
   Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School. The Seattle-based Great Ape
   Project is campaigning for the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on
   Great Apes, which would see gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and
   bonobos included in a "community of equals" with human beings,
   extending to them the protection of three basic interests: the right to
   life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of
   torture. This is seen by an increasing number of animal rights lawyers
   as a first step toward granting rights to other animals.

   Critics of the concept of animal rights argue that animals do not have
   the capacity to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and
   therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of moral rights. The
   philosopher Roger Scruton argues that only human beings have duties and
   that "[t]he corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights." Critics
   holding this position argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with
   using animals for food, as entertainment, and in research, though human
   beings may nevertheless have an obligation to ensure they do not suffer
   unnecessarily. This position is generally called the animal welfare
   position, and it is held by some of the oldest of the animal protection
   agencies.

                                                       Theories of rights
                                                          Animal rights
                                                        Children's rights
                                                          Civil rights
                                                        Collective rights
                                                          Group rights
                                                          Human rights
                                                       Inalienable rights
                                                        Individual rights
                                                          Legal rights
                                                          Men's rights
                                                         Natural rights
                                                       Negative & positive
                                                          Social rights
                                                       "Three generations"
                                                         Women's rights
                                                         Workers' rights
                                                          Youth rights

History


   Animal rights

   Activists
   Greg Avery · David Barbarash
   Rod Coronado · Barry Horne
   Ronnie Lee · Keith Mann
   Ingrid Newkirk · Andrew Tyler
   Jerry Vlasak · Robin Webb

   Groups/campaigns
   Animal Aid
   Animal Liberation Front
   Animal liberation movement
   Animal Rights Militia
   BUAV · Great Ape Project
   Justice Department
   PETA
   PCRM · SPEAK
   Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
   Viva!

   Issues
   Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
   Animal rights
   Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986
   Animal testing · Bile bear
   Factory farming
   Great Ape research ban
   International trade in primates
   Nafovanny
   Non-human primate experiments
   Operation Backfire
   Speciesism

   Cases
   Britches
   Cambridge University primates
   Covance · Huntingdon Life Sciences
   Pit of despair · Silver Spring monkeys
   Unnecessary Fuss

   Writers/advocates
   Steven Best · Stephen R.L. Clark
   Gary Francione · Gill Langley
   Tom Regan · Richard D. Ryder
   Peter Singer · Steven M. Wise

   Categories
   Animal experimentation
   Animal Liberation Front
   Animal rights movement
   Animal rights

History of the concept

   The 20th-century debate about animal rights can be traced back to the
   earliest philosophers. In the 6th century BC, Pythagoras, the Greek
   philosopher and mathematician — who has been called the first animal
   rights philosopher — urged respect for animals because he believed in
   the transmigration of souls between human and non-human animals: in
   killing an animal, we might be killing an ancestor. He advocated
   vegetarianism, rejecting the use of animals as food or religious
   sacrifices.

   Peter Singer, in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, writes that the
   first chapter of Genesis describes how God gave human beings dominion
   over animals, tempered in the Torah by injunctions to be kind; for
   example, by being required to rest one's oxen on the sabbath. The New
   Testament is, he writes, devoid of such injunctions, with Paul
   interpreting the sabbath requirement as intended to benefit the human
   owners, not the animals themselves. Augustine argued that Jesus allowed
   the Gadarene swine to drown in order to demonstrate that man has no
   duty of care toward animals, a position adopted by Thomas Aquinas, who
   argued that we should be charitable to animals only to make sure that
   cruel habits do not carry over into our treatment of human beings.

   Aristotle, writing in the 4th century BCE, argued that non-human
   animals ranked far below humans in the Great Chain of Being, or scala
   naturae, because of their alleged irrationality, and that they had no
   interests of their own. One of his pupils, Theophrastus, disagreed,
   arguing against eating meat on the grounds that it robbed animals of
   life and was therefore unjust. Non-human animals, he said, can reason,
   sense, and feel just as human beings do. This view did not prevail, and
   it was Aristotle's position — that human and non-human animals exist in
   different moral realms because one is rational and the other not — that
   largely persisted until challenged by philosophers in the 1970s.

   In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that
   animals have no souls or minds, and are nothing but complex automata.
   They therefore cannot think or even feel pain. They do have sensory
   equipment so they can see, hear and touch, and may even feel anger and
   fear, but they are not, in any sense, conscious. Against this,
   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the preface of his Discourse on Inequality
   (1754), argued that man starts as an animal, though not one "devoid of
   intellect and freedom." However, as animals are sensitive beings, "they
   too ought to participate in natural right, and ... man is subject to
   some sort of duties toward them," specifically "one [has] the right not
   to be uselessly mistreated by the other."

   Contemporaneous with Rousseau was the Scottish writer John Oswald, who
   died in 1793. In The Cry of Nature or an Appeal to Mercy and Justice on
   Behalf of the Persecuted Animals, Oswald argued that man is naturally
   equipped with feelings of mercy and compassion. If each man had to
   witness the death of the animals he ate, he argued, a vegetarian diet
   would be far more common. The division of labor, however, allows modern
   man to eat flesh without experiencing what Oswald called the prompting
   of man's natural sensitivities, while the brutalization of modern man
   made him inured to these sensitivities.

   Later in the 18th century, one of the founders of modern
   utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, argued that
   animal pain is as real and as morally relevant as human pain, and that
   "[t]he day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire
   those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the
   hand of tyranny." Bentham argued that the ability to suffer, not the
   ability to reason, must be the benchmark of how we treat other beings.
   If the ability to reason were the criterion, many human beings,
   including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as
   though they were things, famously writing that:

     It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs,
     the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum 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 of discourse? But
     a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as
     well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week
     or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it
     avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?
     but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to
     any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend
     its mantle over everything which breathes ...

   In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that non-human animals
   have the same essence as humans, despite lacking the faculty of reason.
   Although he considered vegetarianism to be only supererogatory, he
   argued for consideration to be given to animals in morality, and he
   opposed vivisection. His critique of Kantian ethics contains a lengthy
   and often furious polemic against the exclusion of animals in his moral
   system.

   The world's first animal welfare organization, the Society for the
   Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded in Britain in 1824, and
   similar groups soon sprang up elsewhere in Europe and then in North
   America. The first such group in the United States, the American
   Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was chartered in the
   state of New York in 1866. The concept of animal rights became the
   subject of an influential book in 1892, Animals' Rights: Considered in
   Relation to Social Progress, by English social reformer Henry Salt, who
   had formed the Humanitarian League a year earlier, with the objective
   of banning hunting as a sport.

   In Nazi Germany, one of the first acts of the new regime was to enact
   an animal protection law. The implemented law on animal protection was
   stringent and restricted research.

   By the late 20th century, animal welfare societies and laws against
   cruelty to animals existed in almost every country in the world.
   Specialized animal advocacy groups also proliferated, including those
   dedicated to the preservation of endangered species, and others, such
   as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), that protested
   against painful or brutal methods of hunting animals, the mistreatment
   of animals raised for food in factory farms, and the use of animals in
   experiments and as entertainment.

History of the modern movement

   The modern animal rights movement can be traced to the 1970s, and is
   one of the few examples of social movements that were created by
   philosophers, and in which they remain in the forefront.

   In the early 1970s, a group of Oxford philosophers began to question
   whether the moral status of non-human animals was necessarily inferior
   to that of human beings. The group included the psychologist Richard D.
   Ryder, who coined the phrase " speciesism" in 1970, first using it in a
   privately printed pamphlet to describe the assignment of value to the
   interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular
   species.

   Ryder became a contributor to the influential book Animals, Men and
   Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans. It was in a
   review of this book for the New York Review of Books that Peter Singer
   put forward the basic arguments, based on utilitarianism and drawing an
   explicit comparison between women's liberation and animal liberation,
   that in 1975 became Animal Liberation, the book often referred to as
   the "bible" of the animal rights movement.

   In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement was joined by a wide variety of
   academic and professional groups, including theologians, lawyers,
   physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, veterinarians, pathologists
   and former vivisectionists.

   Other books regarded as ground-breaking include Tom Regan's The Case
   for Animal Rights (1983); James Rachels's Created from Animals: The
   Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990); Steven M. Wise's Rattling the
   Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000); and Julian H. Franklin's
   Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy (2005).

Philosophy

   Animal rights is the concept that all or some animals are entitled to
   possess their own lives; that they are deserving of, or already
   possess, certain moral rights; and that some basic rights for animals
   ought to be enshrined in law. The animal-rights view rejects the
   concept that animals are merely capital goods or property intended for
   the benefit of humans. The concept is often confused with animal
   welfare, which is the philosophy that takes cruelty towards animals and
   animal suffering into account, but that does not assign specific moral
   rights to them.

   The animal-rights philosophy does not necessarily maintain that human
   and non-human animals are equal. For example, animal-rights advocates
   do not call for voting rights for chickens. Some activists also make a
   distinction between sentient or self-aware animals and other life
   forms, with the belief that only sentient animals, or perhaps only
   animals who have a significant degree of self-awareness, should be
   afforded the right to possess their own lives and bodies, without
   regard to how they are valued by humans. Activists maintain that any
   human being or institution that commodifies animals for food,
   entertainment, cosmetics, clothing, animal testing, or for any other
   reason, infringes upon the animals' right to possess themselves and to
   pursue their own ends.

   Few people would deny that non-human great apes, such as chimpanzees,
   bonobos, and gorillas, are intelligent, are aware of their own
   condition, have goals, and may become frustrated when their freedoms
   are curtailed.

   In the late 1960s and early '70s, Martin E. P. Seligman demonstrated
   that dogs repeatedly exposed to inescapable electroshocks are very
   similar to severely depressed humans. He wrote:

     So there are considerable parallels between the behaviors which
     define learned helplessness and major symptoms of depression.
     Helpless animals become passive in the face of later trauma; they do
     not initiate responses to control trauma and the amplitude of
     responding is lowered. Depressed patients are characterized by
     diminished response initiation; their behavioural repertoire is
     impoverished and in severe cases, almost stuporous. Helpless animals
     do not benefit from exposure to experiences in which responding now
     produces relief; rather they often revert to passively accepting
     shock. Depressed patients have strong negative expectations about
     the effectiveness of their own responding. They construe even
     actions that succeed as having failed and underestimate and devalue
     their own performance. In addition, evidence exists which suggests
     that both learned helplessness and depression dissipate in time, are
     associated with weight loss and anorexia, or loss of libido, and
     norepinephrine depletion.
     Finally, it is not an accident that we have used the word
     “helplessness” to describe the behaviour of dogs in our laboratory.
     Animals that lie down in traumatic shock that could be removed
     simply by jumping to the other side, and who fail even to make
     escape movements are readily seen as helpless. Moreover we should
     not forget that depressed patients commonly describe themselves
     helpless, hopeless, and powerless.

   In contrast, animals like jellyfish have simple nervous systems, and
   may be little more than automata, capable of basic reflexes but
   incapable of formulating any ends to their actions or plans to pursue
   them, and equally unable to notice whether they are in captivity. But
   the biology of mind is largely a black box and claims regarding the
   existence or absence of mind in other animals, based on their
   physiology, are speculative. Neuroscientist Sam Harris argues:

     Inevitably, scientists treat consciousness as a mere attribute of
     certain large-brained animals. The problem, however, is that nothing
     about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, delares it to be
     a bearer of that peculiar, inner dimension that each of us
     experiences as consciousness in his own case.... The operational
     definition of consciousness ... is reportability. But consciousness
     and reportabiltiy are not the same thing. Is a starfish conscious?
     No science that conflates consciousness with reportabilty will
     deliver an answer to this question. To look for consciousness in the
     world on the basis of its outward signs is the only thing we can do.
     And so, while we know many things about ourselves [and other
     animals] in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we
     currently have no idea why it is "like something" to be what we are.
     The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand, the fact
     that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative
     character, is an absolute mystery.

   The animal-rights debate, much like the abortion debate, is complicated
   by the difficulty of establishing clear-cut distinctions on which to
   base moral and political judgements. The default human/non-human animal
   relationship is deeply rooted in prehistory and tradition but arguments
   for animal rights are questionable due to the basic human inability to
   understand the subjective state of animals in question.

   Opponents of animal rights have attempted to identify morally relevant
   differences between humans and animals that might justify the
   attribution of rights and interests to the former but not to the
   latter. Various distinguishing features of humans have been proposed,
   including the possession of a soul, the ability to use language,
   self-consciousness, a high level of intelligence, and the ability to
   recognize the rights and interests of others. However, such criteria
   face the difficulty that they do not seem to apply to all and only
   humans: each may apply either to some but not to all humans, or to all
   humans but also to some animals.

   Peter Singer and Tom Regan are the best-known proponents of animal
   liberation, though they differ in their philosophical approaches.
   Another influential thinker is Gary L. Francione, who presents an
   abolitionist view that non-human animals should have the basic right
   not to be treated as the property of humans.

Utilitarian approach

   Although Singer is said to be the ideological founder of today's
   animal-liberation movement, his approach to an animal's moral status is
   not based on the concept of rights, but on the utilitarian principle of
   equal consideration of interests. His 1975 book Animal Liberation
   argues that humans grant moral consideration to other humans not on the
   basis of intelligence (in the instance of children, or the mentally
   disabled), on the ability to moralize (criminals and the insane), or on
   any other attribute that is inherently human, but rather on their
   ability to experience suffering. As animals also experience suffering,
   he argues, excluding animals from such consideration is a form of
   discrimination known as " speciesism."

   Singer uses a particularly compelling argument called the Argument from
   Marginal Cases. If we give rights to humans based on some quality they
   possess, then we cannot argue that humans that lack that quality should
   have rights. Such a quality may be sentience or ability to enter a
   social contract or rationality. But an infant born with a defect so
   that it will never have those qualities can not be granted rights
   without invoking speciesism. Singer argues that the way in which humans
   use animals is not justified, because the benefits to humans are
   negligible compared to the amount of animal suffering they necessarily
   entail, and because he feels the same benefits can be obtained in ways
   that do not involve the same degree of suffering.

   A substantial multiple part debate between Singer and senior US Judge
   Richard Posner on Animal Liberation is listed online. In it, Posner
   first argues that instead of starting his philosophy on the idea that
   consideration of pain for all animals is equal, his moral intuition
   tells him that humans prefer their own. If a dog threatened an infant,
   and it required causing more pain to the dog to get it to stop than the
   dog would have caused to the infant, then we, as humans, spare the
   infant. It would be "monstrous to spare the dog." Singer challenged
   Posner's moral intuition with ethical arguments that formerly unequal
   rights for homosexuals, women, and those of different races also were
   justified using moral intuition. Posner replies that equality in civil
   rights did not occur because of ethical arguments, but because facts
   mounted that there were not significant differences between humans
   based on race, sex, or sexual orientation that would support that
   inequality. If and when similar facts mount on the differences between
   humans and animals, those differences in rights too will erode. But
   facts will drive equality, and not ethical arguments that run contrary
   to moral instinct. Posner calls his approach soft utilitarian in
   contrast to Singer's hard utilitarian, in which the terms hard and soft
   refer to the power of the logic of the ethical arguments to overpower
   moral intuition. Posner concludes his philosophical arguments

     The "soft" utilitarian position on animal rights is a moral
     intuition of many, probably most, Americans. We realize that animals
     feel pain, and we think that to inflict pain without a reason is
     bad. Nothing of practical value is added by dressing up this
     intuition in the language of philosophy; much is lost when the
     intuition is made a stage in a logical argument. When kindness
     toward animals is levered into a duty of weighting the pains of
     animals and of people equally, bizarre vistas of social engineering
     are opened up.

Rights-based approach

   Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights and Empty Cages) argues that
   non-human animals, as "subjects-of-a-life," are bearers of rights like
   humans. He argues that, because the moral rights of humans are based on
   their possession of certain cognitive abilities, and because these
   abilities are also possessed by at least some non-human animals, such
   animals must have the same moral rights as humans. Although only humans
   act as moral agents, both marginal case humans and at least some
   non-humans must have the status of moral patients.

   Animals in this class have "inherent value" as individuals, and cannot
   be regarded as means to an end. This is also called the "direct duty"
   view. According to Regan, we should abolish the breeding of animals for
   food, animal experimentation, and commercial hunting. Regan's theory
   does not extend to all sentient animals but only to those that can be
   regarded as "subjects-of-a-life." He argues that all normal mammals of
   at least one year of age would qualify in this regard.

   The predation reductio argument is often applied to Regan's
   rights-based approach. If we are to protect animals with rights from
   moral patient humans, must we also protect them from other animals?
   This raises the issue of whether giving animals 'moral patient' status
   condemns to extermination certain classes of predation.

   While Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of
   animals and accepts that, at least in some hypothetical scenarios,
   animals could be legitimately used for further (human or non-human)
   ends, Regan believes we ought to treat animals as we would persons, and
   he applies the strict Kantian idea that they ought never to be
   sacrificed as mere means to ends, and must be treated as ends unto
   themselves. Notably, Kant himself did not believe animals were subject
   to what he called the moral law; he believed we ought to show
   compassion, but primarily because not to do so brutalizes human beings,
   and not for the sake of animals themselves.

   Despite these theoretical differences, both Singer and Regan largely
   agree about what to do in practise. For example, they agree that the
   adoption of a vegan diet and the abolition of nearly all forms of
   animal testing are ethically mandatory.

Rights require obligations

   Critics such as Carl Cohen, professor of philosophy at the University
   of Michigan and the University of Michigan Medical School, oppose the
   granting of personhood to animals. Cohen wrote in the New England
   Journal of Medicine in October 1986: that "[t]he holders of rights must
   have the capacity to comprehend rules of duty governing all, including
   themselves. In applying such rules, the holders of rights must
   recognize possible conflicts between what is in their own interest and
   what is just. Only in a community of beings capable of self-restricting
   moral judgments can the concept of a right be correctly invoked."

   Cohen rejects Peter Singer's argument that since a brain-damaged human
   could not exhibit the ability to make moral judgments, that moral
   judgments cannot be used as the distinguishing characteristic for
   determining who is awarded rights. Cohen states that the test for moral
   judgment "is not a test to be administered to humans one by one." This
   is also known as the Argument from Species Normality.

   The British philosopher Roger Scruton has argued that rights can only
   be assigned to beings who are able to understand them and to
   reciprocate by observing their own obligations to other beings. Scruton
   also argues against animal rights on practical grounds. For example, in
   Animal Rights and Wrongs, he supports foxhunting because it encourages
   humans to protect the habitat in which foxes live. However, he condemns
   factory farming because, he says, the animals are not provided with
   even a minimally acceptable life.

   The Foundation for Animal Use and Education states that "[o]ur
   recognition of the rights of others stems from our unique human
   character as moral agents — that is, beings capable of making moral
   judgments and comprehending moral duty. Only human beings are capable
   of exercising moral judgment and recognizing the rights of one another.
   Animals do not exercise responsibility as moral agents. They do not
   recognize the rights of other animals. They kill and eat one another
   instinctively, as a matter of survival. They act from a combination of
   conditioning, fear, instinct and intelligence, but they do not exercise
   moral judgment in the process."

   In The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice, the British philosopher
   Peter Carruthers argues that humans have obligations only to other
   beings who can take part in a hypothetical social contract. thus
   animals are excluded from the group of beings to whom humans have moral
   obligations.

   Social contract arguments do not address the problem of animals acting
   as if they they have entered into such contracts with others of their
   species. Cooperation and relatively peaceful coexistence in group
   situations are characterisics of many species. Jules Masserman
   (1905-1989), past president of the American Psychiatric Association,
   concluded in 1964 that: "A majority of rhesus monkeys will consistently
   suffer hunger rather than secure food at the expense of electroshock to
   a conspecific." In the Masserman study, it appears that rhesus monkeys
   might act in accordance with the Golden Rule.

   These arguments fail to address the human rights model. The Universal
   Declaration of Human Rights makes no similar demands.

   These arguments also fail to address the Argument from Marginal Cases,
   or Singer's example of a mentally retarded orphan.

Abolitionist view

   Gary Francione's work (Introduction to Animal Rights, et.al.) is based
   on the premise that if non-human animals are considered to be property
   then any rights that they may be granted would be directly undermined
   by that property status. He points out that a call to equally consider
   the interests of your property against your own interests is absurd.
   Without the basic right not to be treated as the property of humans,
   non-human animals have no rights whatsoever, he says. Francione posits
   that sentience is the only valid determinant for moral standing, unlike
   Regan who sees qualitative degrees in the subjective experiences of his
   "subjects-of-a-life" based upon a loose determination of who falls
   within that category. Francione claims that there is no actual
   animal-rights movement in the United States, but only an
   animal-welfarist movement. In line with his philosophical position and
   his work in animal-rights law for the Animal Rights Law Project at
   Rutgers University, he points out that any effort that does not
   advocate the abolition of the property status of animals is misguided,
   in that it inevitably results in the institutionalization of animal
   exploitation. It is logically inconsistent and doomed never to achieve
   its stated goal of improving the condition of animals, he argues.
   Francione holds that a society which regards dogs and cats as family
   members yet kills cows, chickens, and pigs for food exhibits what he
   calls "moral schizophrenia".

Analogies to human rights

   Writer Robert Bidinotto said in a 1992 speech to the Northeastern
   Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies: "Strict observance of animal
   rights forbids even direct protection of people and their values
   against nature's many predators. Losses to people are acceptable ...
   losses to animals are not. Logically then, beavers may change the flow
   of streams, but Man must not. Locusts may denude hundreds of miles of
   plant life ... but Man must not. Cougars may eat sheep and chickens,
   but Man must not."

   However, many other animal rights activists believe that human rights
   and animal rights are closely connected. Ronnie Lee, the founder of the
   Animal Liberation Front, talked of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as
   inspiration. Robin Webb, the press officer for the A.L.F. in Britain,
   has referred to animal rights as "the ultimate liberation movement",
   and an extension of the human rights struggle. Steven Best, who was a
   human rights activist before becoming involved in animal rights, has
   written several essays on the links between the two movements.

Animal rights and the Holocaust

   Some writers and animal rights groups have drawn a comparison between
   the treatment of animals and the Holocaust.

   Charles Patterson in Eternal Treblinka argues that "Nazi genocide and
   modern society's enslavement and slaughter of non-human animals" share
   "common roots." In a campaign largely based on Patterson's book, PETA
   organized a touring exhibition in 2003 entitled " Holocaust on your
   Plate," which mixed imagery of Jews in concentration camps with animals
   being killed and abused.

   The National Primate Research Exhibition Hall, a project of animal
   rights activists in Wisconsin, compares itself to the Holocaust
   Memorial at Auschwitz and plans extensive use of such imagery in its
   exhibits.

   The comparison between the modern treatment of animals by human beings
   and the treatment of Jews by the Nazis is regarded as controversial,
   and has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the
   United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews
   for Animal Rights argues that, although there is "connective tissue"
   between animal suffering and the Holocaust, they "fall into different
   historical frameworks, and comparison between them aborts the ... force
   of anti-Semitism.

Animal rights in law

   A monkey in a restraint tube filmed by PETA in a Covance branch,
   Vienna, Virginia, 2004-5
   A monkey in a restraint tube filmed by PETA in a Covance branch,
   Vienna, Virginia, 2004-5

   The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites the Roman jurist Hermogenianus
   writing in the 3rd or 4th century CE that: "Hominum causa omne jus
   constitum" — "All law was established for men's sake" — a position
   repeated in P.A. Fitzgerald's Salmond on Jurisprudence (1966), in which
   he wrote: "The law is made for men and allows no fellowship or bonds of
   obligation between them and the lower animals."

   This view categorizes animals as property; not as legal persons with
   rights, but as things that other legal persons exercise their rights in
   relation to. Current animal law therefore addresses the rights of the
   people who own animals, not the rights of the animals themselves. There
   are criminal laws against cruelty to animals; laws that regulate the
   keeping of animals in cities and on farms; laws regulating the transit
   of animals internationally, and governing quarantine and inspection
   provisions. These are designed to offer animals some protection from
   unnecessary physical harm and to regulate the use of animals as food,
   but they offer no civil rights to animals, who have a status similar to
   that of human slaves before abolition. American legal scholar Steven
   Wise writes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the failure to
   recognize individual rights makes animals "invisible to civil law."

   There is increasing interest in the concept of animal rights in law.
   The idea of extending personhood to animals is gaining the support of
   mainstream legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe.
   Animal law courses are taught in 69 out of 180 U.S. law schools, and 47
   U.S. law schools have student animal legal defense funds, with more
   being set up in Australia and Europe. Three specialist legal journals
   have been established — Animal Law, the Journal of Animal Law, and the
   Journal of Animal Law and Ethics.

   In 2006, Brazilians founded the Brazilian Animal Rights Review, the
   first legal journal about animal law in a developing countries. Brazil
   has advanced legislation: since 1988, their Constitution recognizes the
   protection of animals against cruelty.

   Switzerland passed legislation in 1992 to recognize animals as beings,
   rather than things, and the protection of animals was enshrined in the
   German constitution in 2002, when its upper house of parliament voted
   to add the words "and animals" to the clause in the constitution
   obliging the state to protect the "natural foundations of life ... in
   the interests of future generations."

   Steven Wise writes that the legal arguments in favour of animal rights
   are "powerfully assisted by increasingly sophisticated scientific
   investigations into the cognitive, emotional, and social capacities of
   animals and by advances in genetics, neuroscience, physiology,
   linguistics, psychology, evolution, and ethology, many of which have
   demonstrated that humans and animals share a broad range of behaviours,
   capacities, and genetic material." Wise argues that the first serious
   judicial challenges to the "legal thinghood of nonhuman animals" may
   only be a few years away.

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