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 We May Use Animals
- From Tibor Machan
By Tibor Machan - Author/Journalist/Professor
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Get your priorities straight
It matters not their "importance." It matters not your perception of their "value."
What matters are simply these two things:
1) Do they suffer?
2) Can we prevent that suffering?
- ElaineVigneault
November 18, 2008 7:33PM
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same old ignorance.
When it comes down to it, the argument is that difference equals superiority or inferiority, measuring everything on a hierarchical scale. Nevermind the fundamental cores of human and nonhuman animals are the same, nevermind this is an excuse to treat living beings as property. This same argument is used by racists, sexists.....speciest are no different.
- progressisdead
April 4, 2009 6:19PM
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Is there a universal measure of importance?
Evaluation or ranking of any kind implies that there is an agent who is doing the evaluating! Can such evaluation be impartial? In this case the agent is us- which makes the evaluation kind of biased?! How can such evaluation possibly be 'natural' or 'neutral'? Also the word 'important' requires us to establish-important for whom and for what? Again, the answer is 'important' to us. We are more important to us. After all we are not more important to animals than animals are to themselves? Indeed, this is almost a theistic argument implying that there is a universal criterion for the ranking of 'importance' or value and furthermore, we have been let in on the secret scale used, while animals have not, hence they have no idea they are not important! But we know better.
- sor666
May 6, 2009 6:20AM
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