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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No ... the source of right or rights
Why worry about rights when instead we can just do what is right?
Naumadd, you are a skilled writer, a profound thinker who does not fall for the trap of some of some of these other writers in that you do not think without first filtering your thoughts through that part of your mind which I call heart. What point thinking and reasoning without compassion?
I am grateful to you for your contribution and believe it is people like you who give humanity and this planet hope.
I would only point out, that I believe there is a misconception with the word "rights". It is bantied around as if "rights" exist, somewhere. You wrote "It's likely they have similar rights, but cannot have the same rights".
This begs the question: from where do these so called rights originate? What or who is the source of these "rights"? This very question reveals that rights are something which people arbitrarily declare. We might justify the ascribing of a particular set of protections, in law or in ethics, to one or another group of beings by reference to some other body of edicts or rules... which it will turn out also issue from the minds and writings of other people. At the end of the day though, we make them up.
So if compassion is a fundamental higher ethic, and if we make rights up, then why not just ascribe rights to animals to be free from cruelty at the hands of humans, whether for sport, medical research or food? Given that we don't need to kill animals in order to be happy, why should we continue to degrade the essence of humanity, damage the environment and bring such misery into the world by continuing to deprive animals of such rights.
Plutarch foreshadowed such a day when animals too would be recognised for their interests in freedom from suffering. Thomas Edison, Einstein and Jeremy Bentham all recognised that our exploitation of animals was cruel and would see our ruin.
Time to stop bickering about whether or not animals have rights, and to start doing what is right.
- sean joshua
November 12, 2008 11:39PM
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Necessity and Misery ...
Well, as I indicated, assuming one wishes to continue living, there is no escaping the clear necessity to take the life of another in order to continue one's own - plant, animal or otherwise. As I also indicated, ownership of one's own life is not something that can be given or taken away. Each life belongs to itself and no factual or consistently reasonable argument can be made to the contrary. Nevertheless, in the end, rule number one always confronts us - consume or be consumed. For continued living, killing is a necessity regardless of the form of life and that necessity precedes any considerations of the fact every life owns itself.
Still, although to take life in order to keep it is an inescapable necessity, our own misery and the misery we inflict on other life is NOT a necessity. To inflict misery simply because one is too ignorant or lazy to do otherwise or because one loves the misery of another has nothing at all to do with inescapable necessity. To inflict misery on another or to remain complacent regarding one's own misery is choice. It is at those times necessity no longer precedes the fact of an individual life's ownership of itself. It is at those times one has an alternate choice to be compassionate or not regarding another life and to be happy or not regarding one's own. One's survival is not at issue.
It isn't madness to want to survive, however, to want to survive while experiencing as much misery as one can endure and while inflicting as much misery as one is capable is surely madness.
In the end, this question "Do animals have the same rights as people?" is a disguise for the real question - "Ought human beings grant liberty to other forms of life to exercise the right of their own lives?" I happen to take animal rights as a given because, if I hold as true I own all rights to my own life, I must maintain that every life owns itself for the same reasons I use to support my own claim. What is truly at issue is whether I'm willing to grant other life the liberty to live as it chooses because I too value that liberty. I love my life. If I assume other life values itself, I must grant that life the liberty to live it, otherwise my love of my own life and my value of its liberty is a sham should I attempt to use one argument for myself and a different argument for the value of other life.
A life's ownership of itself is a given. I grant other life liberty of self-determination because I too value such liberty. Nevertheless, if I am to survive, no matter how much I value my own liberty or the liberty of other life, rule number one is the final arbiter - consume or be consumed. What I will not do is impose myself on other life beyond my own necessity. I will not inflict misery on another out of laziness or love of misery.
That is not necessity, it is madness.
- Naumadd
November 13, 2008 7:07PM
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Rights are....
are simply abstract expressions of what all living creatures bestow upon one another.
- CitizenZebra
October 25, 2009 3:02AM
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