Animal Rights

The animal rights movement, whichever side one is for, seems to run into some serious problems concerning other issues. Rachel’s argument dealing with why animals have a right to life fails to explain why the normal human has a right to life and therefore assumes that adult human beings have a fundamental right to life, but on what ground? Wellman talks about three fundamental properties dealing with who can possess a right to life and the one which seems to question animal’s rights is autonomy: being able to make rational decisions and moral choices. Non-human animals do in fact lack this attribute which “most” humans possess. But if this is the case then do infants and mentally disabled people have a right to life? That is when the situation gets a little stickier, because then people can claim on behalf of someone to be their right holder. Animal rights activists argue that they can claim on behalf of animals the same way adults do for infants. But then the claim turns into if one had potential to be a right holder themselves then it would be different and since animals cannot ever become rational beings they cannot possess this right to life. Then the question turns to whether this is a moral right or legal right. Under current law the animals (domestic or wild) are property by private or state/national parties. If the animal is mistreated they cannot claim against their owner because of mistreatment, they lack the rational to perform this action.

I think that the animal rights activists should be fighting more so for treatment of animals versus giving animals actual rights which they possess. Mistreatment of animals should be illegal because we should have a responsibility to treat them humane not because they have a right to be treated humanely. Giving animals rights seems to uproot some of our fundamental rights for being human and what that holds, for humans and humans alone. If animals are granted rights what rights would we lose as being rational beings? It seems ridiculous to grant a whole species rights in which they have no comprehension of the right and practice cannibalism.