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Last year Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her dog, Trouble, setting off a heated courtroom battle. California just passed a proposition that says farm animals must be humanely caged. The legal line between humans and animals is blurring further everyday. When it comes to "animal rights," should your cocker spaniel be entitled to the same freedoms and protections as your kid?
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Why Might Animals Have Rights?
- From Tibor Machan
By Tibor Machan - Author/Journalist/Professor
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Your childhood
You said: "Hardly anyone can have escaped one or another moral lecture from parents or neighbors concerning the treatment of cats, dogs, or birds." And you told of torturing insects and shooting at pigeons purely for "fun."
I find this assumption telling. In fact, not everyone has received such a lecture. Only those who ABUSED animals received that lecture.
“One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it. - Margaret Mead
- ElaineVigneault
November 18, 2008 7:45PM
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Side: Yes
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Sacrificing is wrong
"Thus an animal that is capable of experiencing pleasure or happiness may be sacrificed to further some human purpose only if that demonstrably contributes to the overall pleasure or happiness on earth"
This is awful. Why should we have to sacrifice at all? We are not barbarians. We have come farther in humanity and should be above this. Animals and humans both, have the right to choose whether they want to be sacrificed or not.
- pioneerlinh
February 3, 2009 9:11PM
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Side: Uncommitted
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We have discovered that animals have free will
Surely, we must agree that all beings who exist and have an identity also have free will (positive freedom). I know some believe that single cell organisms have no free will and even that higher vertabrates have no free will, since they are entirely like machines executing the commands of instinct. Science has shown this not to be the case- even individual cells have free will as to single cell organisms. They may not have moral agency- but this means only they have no sense of good and evil. Since we have scientfically come to this realisation now and since we as humans have moral agency, we must on the basis of this new evidence completely change our attitude towards animals . We can no longer regard them as automatons controlled by instinct- we must bestow on the them the right to freedom.
- sor666
May 6, 2009 6:10AM
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Side: Yes
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