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Animal rights
Animal rights advocates propose that animals be viewed as persons, not property.[1]
Description	Animals are members of the moral community.[2]
Early proponents	Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) Henry Salt (1851–1939) Leonard Nelson (1882–1927)
Modern proponents	Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Gary Francione
Key texts	Salt's Animals' Rights (1894) Singer's Animal Liberation (1975)
Subject	Philosophy, ethics

Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, ranging from the protectionist side of the movement, presented by philosopher Peter Singer—with a utilitarian focus on suffering and consequences, rather than just on the concept of rights—to the abolitionist side, represented by law professor Gary Francione, who argues that animals need only one right: the right not to be property. Despite the different approaches, advocates broadly agree that animals should be viewed as non-human persons and members of the moral community, and should not be used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment.^[3]

The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School. Animal rights is routinely covered in universities in philosophy or applied ethics courses, and as of 2011 animal law was taught in 135 law schools in the United States and Canada. Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby argued in 2008 that the movement had reached the stage the gay rights movement was at 25 years earlier.^[4]

Critics of the idea argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and for that reason cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote in 2000 that only humans have duties and therefore only humans have rights. However, defenders of the position that animals have rights have pointed out that this represents a double standard, since humans are considered to have rights regardless of their mental competence. There has also been criticism, including from within the animal rights movement itself, of certain forms of animal rights activism, in particular the destruction of fur farms and animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front. A parallel argument is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources so long there is no unnecessary suffering, a view known as the animal welfare position.^[5]

Development of the idea[link]

Moral status of animals in the ancient world[link]

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. The Book of Genesis said God gave humankind "dominion" over non-humans.^[6]

The 21st-century debates about how humans should treat animals can be traced to the ancient world. The idea that the use of animals by humans—for food, clothing, entertainment, and as research subjects—is morally acceptable, springs mainly from two sources. First, there is the idea of a divine hierarchy based on the theological concept of "dominion," from Genesis (1:20–28), where Adam is given "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Although the concept of dominion need not entail property rights, it has been interpreted over the centuries to imply ownership. There is also the idea that animals are inferior because they lack rationality and language, and as such are worthy of less consideration than humans, or even none.^[6] Springing from this is the idea that individual animals have no separate moral identity: a pig is simply an example of the class of pigs, and it is to the class, not to the individual, that human stewardship should be applied. This leads to the argument that the use of individual animals is acceptable so long as the species is not threatened with extinction.^[7]

17th century: Animals as automata[link]

1641: Descartes[link]

Descartes remains influential regarding how the issue of animal consciousness—or as he saw it, lack thereof—should be approached.^[8]

The great influence of the 17th century was the French philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650), whose Meditations (1641) informed attitudes about animals well into the 20th century.^[8] Writing during the scientific revolution—of which he was one of the chief architects—Descartes proposed a mechanistic theory of the universe, the aim of which was to show that the world could be mapped out without allusion to subjective experience.^[10]

His mechanistic approach was extended to the issue of animal consciousness. Mind, for Descartes, was a thing apart from the physical universe, a separate substance, linking human beings to the mind of God. The non-human, on the other hand, are nothing but complex automata, with no souls, minds, or reason. They can see, hear, and touch, but they are not, in any sense, conscious, and are unable to suffer or even to feel pain.^[8]

In the Discourse, published in 1637, Descartes wrote that the ability to reason and use language involves being able to respond in complex ways to "all the contingencies of life," something that animals clearly cannot do. He argued from this that any sounds animals make do not constitute language, but are simply automatic responses to external stimuli.^[12]

First known laws protecting animals in the English-speaking world[link]

Richard Ryder writes that the first known legislation against animal cruelty in the English-speaking world was passed in Ireland in 1635. It prohibited pulling wool off sheep, and the attaching of ploughs to horses' tails, referring to "the cruelty used to beasts," which Ryder writes is probably the earliest reference to this concept in the English language.^[13] In 1641, the year Descartes' Meditations was published, the first legal code to protect domestic animals in North America was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.^[14] The colony's constitution was based on The Body of Liberties by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652), a lawyer, Puritan clergyman, and University of Cambridge graduate, originally from Suffolk, England.^[15] Ward listed the "rites" the Colony's general court later endorsed, including rite number 92: "No man shall exercise any Tirrany or Crueltie toward any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use." Historian Roderick Nash writes that, at the height of Descartes' influence in Europe, it is significant that the early New Englanders created a law that implied animals were not unfeeling automata.^[16]

The Puritans passed animal protection legislation in England too. Kathleen Kete writes that animal welfare laws were passed in 1654 as part of the ordinances of the Protectorate—the government under Oliver Cromwell, which lasted 1653–1659 following the English Civil War. Cromwell disliked blood sports, particularly cockfighting, cock throwing, dog fighting, as well as bull baiting and bull running, said to tenderize the meat. These could be seen in villages and fairgrounds, and became associated for the Puritans with idleness, drunkenness, and gambling. Kete writes that the Puritans interpreted the dominion of man over animals in the Book of Genesis to mean responsible stewardship, rather than ownership. The opposition to blood sports became part of what was seen as Puritan interference in people's lives, which became a leitmotif of resistance to them, Kete writes, and the animal protection laws were overturned during the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne in 1660.^[17] Bull baiting remained lawful in England for another 162 years, until it was outlawed in 1822.

1693: Locke[link]

John Locke argued against animal cruelty, but only because of its effect on human beings.

Against Descartes, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693, that animals do have feelings, and that unnecessary cruelty toward them is morally wrong, but—echoing Thomas Aquinas—the right not to be so harmed adhered either to the animal's owner, or to the person who was being harmed by being cruel, not to the animal itself. Discussing the importance of preventing children from tormenting animals, he wrote: "For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men."^[18]

18th century: The centrality of sentience, not reason[link]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in 1754 that animals are part of natural law, and have natural rights, because they are sentient.

1754, 1785: Rousseau, Kant[link]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued in Discourse on Inequality in 1754 that animals should be part of natural law, not because they are rational, but because they are sentient: "[Here] we put an end to the time-honoured disputes concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes."^[19]

Furthermore, in his treatise on education Emile, he encourages parents to raise their children on a vegetarian diet: "The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service."

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), following Locke, opposed the idea that humans have duties toward non-humans. For Kant, cruelty to animals was wrong solely on the grounds that it was bad for humankind. He argued in 1785 that humans have duties only toward other humans, and that "cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other humans is weakened."^[20] "Animals," he wrote, "... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man."^[21]

1789: Bentham[link]

Jeremy Bentham: "The time will come, when humanity will extend its mantle over every thing which breathes" (1781).^[22]

Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although deeply opposed to the concept of natural rights, argued, following Rousseau, that it was the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, that should be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If rationality were the criterion, many humans, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things.^[23] He wrote in 1789, just as slaves were being freed by the French, but were still held captive in the British dominions:

The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. 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 a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? ^[24]

1792: Thomas Taylor[link]

Despite Rousseau and Bentham, the idea that animals did or ought to have rights remained ridiculous. When the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), a Cambridge philosopher, responded with an anonymous tract called Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, intended as a reductio ad absurdum. Taylor took Wollstonecraft's arguments, and those of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790), and showed that they applied equally to animals, leading to the conclusion that animals have "intrinsic and real dignity and worth," a conclusion absurd enough, in his view, to discredit Wollstonecraft's and Paine's positions entirely.^[25]

[edit] 19th century: Emergence of jus animalium

The 19th century saw an explosion of interest in animal protection, particularly in England. Debbie Legge and Simon Brooman write that the educated classes became concerned about attitudes toward the old, the needy, children, and the insane, and that this concern was extended to non-humans. Before the 19th century, there had been prosecutions for poor treatment of animals, but only because of the damage to the animal as property. In 1793, for example, John Cornish was found not guilty of maiming a horse after pulling its tongue out, the judge ruling that he could be found guilty only if there was evidence of malice toward the owner.^[27] From 1800 onwards, there were several attempts in England to introduce animal welfare or rights legislation. The first was a bill in 1800 against bull baiting, introduced by Sir William Pulteney, and opposed by the Secretary at War, William Windham, on the grounds that it was anti-working class. Another attempt was made in 1802 by William Wilberforce, again opposed by Windham, who said that the Bill was supported by Methodists and Jacobins who wished, for different reasons, to "destroy the Old English character, by the abolition of all rural sports" and that bulls, when they were in the ascendant in the contest, did not dislike the situation.^[28] In 1809, Lord Erskine introduced a bill to protect cattle and horses from malicious wounding, wanton cruelty, and beating, this one opposed by Windham because it would be used against the "lower orders" when the real culprits would be property owners.^[29] Judge Edward Abbott Parry writes that the House of Lords drowned Erskine out with cat calls and cock crowing.^[30]

1822: Martin's Act[link]

The Trial of Bill Burns, showing Richard Martin with the donkey in an astonished courtroom.

In 1821, the Treatment of Horses bill was introduced by Colonel Richard Martin, MP for Galway in Ireland, but it was lost among laughter in the House of Commons that the next thing would be rights for asses, dogs, and cats.^[31] Nicknamed "Humanity Dick" by George IV, Martin finally succeeded in 1822 with his "Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill," or "Martin's Act", as it became known, the world's first major piece of animal protection legislation. It was given royal assent on June 22 that year as An Act to prevent the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle, and made it an offence, punishable by fines up to five pounds or two months imprisonment, to "beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle."^[32]

Legge and Brooman argue that the success of the Bill lay in the personality of "Humanity Dick," who was able to shrug off the ridicule from the House of Commons, and whose own sense of humour managed to capture its attention. It was Martin himself who brought the first prosecution under the Act, when he had Bill Burns, a costermonger—a street seller of fruit—arrested for beating a donkey. Seeing in court that the magistrates seemed bored and didn't much care about the donkey, he sent for it, parading its injuries before a reportedly astonished court. Burns was fined, becoming the first person in the world known to have been convicted of animal cruelty. Newspapers and music halls were full of jokes about the "Trial of Bill Burns," as it became known, and how Martin had relied on the testimony of a donkey, giving Martin's Act some welcome publicity.^[33][34] The trial became the subject of a painting (left), which hangs in the headquarters of the RSPCA in London.^[35]

Other countries followed suit in passing legislation or making decisions that favoured animals. In 1822, the courts in New York ruled that wanton cruelty to animals was a misdemeanor at common law.^[14] In France in 1850, Jacques Philippe Delmas de Grammont succeeded in having the Loi Grammont passed, outlawing cruelty against domestic animals, and leading to years of arguments about whether bulls could be classed as domestic in order to ban bullfighting.^[36] The state of Washington followed in 1859, New York in 1866, California in 1868, Florida in 1889.^[37] In England, a series of amendments extended the reach of the 1822 Act, which became the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, outlawing cockfighting, baiting, and dog fighting, followed by another amendment in 1849, and again in 1876.

1824: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals[link]

Richard Martin soon realized that magistrates did not take the Martin Act seriously, and that it was not being reliably enforced. Several members of parliament decided to form a society to bring prosecutions under the Act. The Reverend Arthur Broome, a Balliol man who had recently become the vicar of Bromley-by-Bow, arranged a meeting in Old Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane, a London café frequented by artists and actors. The group met on June 16, 1824, and included a number of MPs: Richard Martin, Sir James Mackintosh, Sir Thomas Buxton, William Wilberforce, and Sir James Graham, who had been an MP, and who became one again in 1826. They decided to form a "Society instituted for the purpose of preventing cruelty to animals," or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as it became known. It determined to send men to inspect Smithfield Market, where livestock had been sold since the 10th century, as well as slaughterhouses, and the practices of coachmen toward their horses.^[33] The Society became the Royal Society in 1840, when it was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria, herself strongly opposed to vivisection.^[38]

Noel Molland writes that, in 1824, Catherine Smithies, an anti-slavery activist, set up an SPCA youth wing called the Bands of Mercy. It was a children's club modeled on the Temperance Society's Bands of Hope, which were intended to encourage children to campaign against drinking and gambling. The Bands of Mercy were similarly meant to encourage a love of animals.^[39] Molland writes that some of its members responded with more enthusiasm than Smithies intended, and became known for engaging in direct action against hunters by sabotaging their rifles, although Kim Stallwood writes that he has never been able to find solid evidence to support this.^[40] Whether the story is true or apocryphal, the idea of the youth group was revived by Ronnie Lee in 1972, when he and Cliff Goodman set up the Band of Mercy as a militant, anti-hunting guerrilla group, which slashed hunters' vehicles' tires and smashed their windows. In 1976, some of the same activists, sensing that the Band of Mercy name sounded too accommodating, founded the Animal Liberation Front.^[39]

1866, 1985: American SPCA, Frances Power Cobbe[link]

The first animal protection group in the United States was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded by Henry Bergh in April 1866. Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post in Russia, and had been disturbed by the treatment of animals there. He consulted with the president of the RSPCA in London and returned to the U.S. to speak out against bullfights, cockfights, and the beating of horses. He created a "Declaration of the Rights of Animals," and in 1866 persuaded the New York state legislature to pass anti-cruelty legislation and to grant the ASPCA the authority to enforce it.^[41] The remainder of the century saw the creation of many animal protection groups. In 1875, the Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, the world's first organization opposed to animal research, which became the National Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1898, she set up the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, with which she campaigned against the use of dogs in research, coming close to success with the 1919 Dogs (Protection) Bill, which almost became law.

1824: Development of the concept of animal rights[link]

The period saw the first extended interest in the idea that non-humans might have natural rights, or ought to have legal ones. In 1824, Lewis Gompertz, one of the men who attended the first meeting of the SPCA in June that year, published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, in which he argued that every living creature, human and non-human, has more right to the use of its own body than anyone else has to use it, and that our duty to promote happiness applies equally to all beings.^[42] In 1879, Edward Nicholson argued in Rights of an Animal that animals have the same natural right to life and liberty that human beings do, arguing strongly against Descartes' mechanistic view, or what he called the "Neo-Cartesian snake," that they lack consciousness.^[42] Other writers of the time who explored whether animals might have natural rights were John Lewis, Edward Evans, and J. Howard Moore.^[43]

1839: Schopenhauer[link]

For Schopenhauer, the view that cruelty is wrong only because it hardens human beings was "revolting and abominable."^[44]

The development in England of the concept of animal rights was strongly supported by the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). He wrote that Europeans were "awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man."^[45] He applauded the animal protection movement in England—"To the honor, then, of the English be it said that they are the first people who have, in downright earnest, extended the protecting arm of the law to animals."^[45]—and argued against the dominant Kantian idea that animal cruelty is wrong only insofar as it brutalizes humans: "Thus, because Christian morality leaves animals out of account ... they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere "things," mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, chandalas, and mlechchhas, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing ...^[44] His views stopped short of advocating vegetarianism; he argued that, so long as an animal's death was quick, men would suffer more by not eating meat than animals would suffer by being eaten.^[46]

1894: Henry Salt and an "epistemological breakthrough"[link]

In 1894, Henry Salt, a former master at Eton, who had set up the Humanitarian League to lobby for a ban on hunting the year before, created what Keith Tester of the University of Portsmouth has called an "epistemological break," in Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.^[47] Salt wrote that the object of his essay was to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing, [and] to show that this principle underlies the various efforts of humanitarian reformers ..." Concessions to the demands for jus animalium have been made grudgingly to date, he writes, with an eye on the interests of animals qua property, rather than as rights bearers:

Even the leading advocates of animal rights seem to have shrunk from basing their claim on the only argument which can ultimately be held to be a really sufficient one—the assertion that animals, as well as men, though, of course, to a far less extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive individuality, and, therefore, are in justice entitled to live their lives with a due measure of that "restricted freedom" to which Herbert Spencer alludes.^[48]

He argued that there is no point in claiming rights for animals if we subordinate those rights to human desire, and took issue with the idea that the life of a human might have more moral worth or purpose. "[The] notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day—it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a "great gulf" fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood."^[48]

Late 1890s: Opposition to anthropomorphism[link]

Richard Ryder writes that attitudes toward animals began to harden in the late 1890s, when scientists embraced the idea that what they saw as anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities to non-humans—was unscientific. Animals had to be approached as physiological entities only, as Ivan Pavlov wrote in 1927, "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states." It was a position that hearkened back to Descartes in the 17th century, that non-humans were purely mechanical, like clocks, with no rationality and perhaps even with no consciousness.^[49]

20th century: Animal rights movement[link]

[edit] 1933: Tierschutzgesetz

On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party passed the most comprehensive set of animal protection laws in Europe.^[50] Kathleen Kete writes that it was the first known attempt by a government to break the species barrier, the traditional binary of humans and animals. Humans as a species lost their sacrosanct status, with Aryans at the top of the hierarchy, followed by wolves, eagles, and pigs, and Jews languishing with rats at the bottom. Kete writes that it was the worst possible answer to the question of what our relationship with other species ought to be.^[51]

On November 24, 1933, the Tierschutzgesetz, or animal protection law, was introduced, with Adolf Hitler announcing an end to animal cruelty: "Im neuen Reich darf es keine Tierquälerei mehr geben." ("In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.") It was followed on July 3, 1934 by the Reichsjagdgesetz, prohibiting hunting; on July 1, 1935 by the Naturschutzgesetz, a comprehensive piece of environmental legislation; on November 13, 1937 by a law regulating animal transport by car; and on September 8, 1938 by a similar one dealing with animals on trains.^[52] The least painful way to shoe a horse was prescribed, as was the correct way to cook a lobster to prevent them from being boiled alive.^[51] Several senior Nazis, including Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, adopted some form of vegetarianism, though by most accounts not strictly, with Hitler allowing himself the occasional dish of meat. Himmler also mandated vegetarianism for senior SS officers, although this was due mainly to health concerns rather than for animal welfare.^[53]

Shortly before the Tierschutzgesetz was introduced, vivisection was first banned, then restricted. Animal research was viewed as part of "Jewish science," and "internationalist" medicine, indicating a mechanistic mind that saw nature as something to be dominated, rather than respected. Hermann Göring first announced a ban on August 16, 1933, following Hitler's wishes, but Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Morrel, reportedly persuaded him that this was not in the interests of German research, and in particular defence research.^[54] The ban was therefore revised three weeks later, on September 5, 1933, when eight conditions were announced under which animal tests could be conducted, with a view to reducing pain and unnecessary experiments.^[55] Primates, horses, dogs, and cats were given special protection, and licenses to conduct vivisection were to be given to institutions, not to individuals.^[56] The removal of the ban was justified with the announcement: "It is a law of every community that, when necessary, single individuals are sacrificed in the interests of the entire body."^[57] Medical experiments were later conducted on Jews and Romani children in camps, particularly in Auschwitz by Dr. Josef Mengele, and on others regarded as inferior, including prisoners-of-war. Because the human subjects were often in such poor health, researchers feared that the results of the experiments were unreliable, and so human experiments were repeated on animals. Dr Hans Nachtheim, for example, induced epilepsy on human adults and children without their consent by injecting them with cardiazol, then repeated the experiments on rabbits to check the results.^[58]

Post 1945: Increase in animal use[link]

Despite the proliferation of animal protection legislation, animals still had no legal rights. Debbie Legge writes that existing legislation was very much tied to the idea of human interests, whether protecting human sensibilities by outlawing cruelty, or protecting property rights by making sure animals were not damaged. The over-exploitation of fishing stocks, for example, is viewed as harming the environment for people; the hunting of animals to extinction means that humans in the future will derive no enjoyment from them; poaching results in financial loss to the owner, and so on.^[37] Notwithstanding the interest in animal welfare of the previous century, the situation for animals arguably deteriorated in the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War. This was in part because of the increase in the numbers used in animal research—300 in the UK in 1875, 19,084 in 1903, and 2.8 million in 2005 (50–100 million worldwide),^[59] and a modern annual estimated range of 10 million to upwards of 100 million in the U.S.^[60]—but mostly because of the industrialization of farming, which saw billions of animals raised and killed for food on a scale not possible before the war.^[61]

1960s: Formation of the Oxford group[link]

In the late 1960s, a small group of intellectuals, particularly at the University of Oxford—now known as the Oxford Group—began to view the use of animals as unacceptable exploitation.^[62] In 1964, Ruth Harrison published Animal Machines, a devastating critique of factory farming. Both the Godlovitches and Oxford clinical psychologist Richard D. Ryder (who later became a member of the Oxford Group) were also independently impressed by a 1965 Sunday Times article by novelist Brigid Brophy, called "The Rights of Animals"—following Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791). It was the first time a major newspaper had devoted so much space to the issue.^[49] Brophy wrote:

The relationship of homo sapiens to the other animals is one of unremitting exploitation. We employ their work; we eat and wear them. We exploit them to serve our superstitions: whereas we used to sacrifice them to our gods and tear out their entrails in order to foresee the future, we now sacrifice them to science, and experiment on their entrail in the hope—or on the mere offchance—that we might thereby see a little more clearly into the present ... To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.^[63]

Robert Garner writes that Harrison's and Brophy's articles led to an explosion of interest in the relationship between humans and non-humans, or what Garner calls the "new morality."^[64] Ryder had also been disturbed by incidents he had seen as a researcher in animal laboratories in the UK and U.S., and in what he calls a spontaneous eruption of indignation he wrote several letters to The Daily Telegraph, which were published on April 7, May 3, and May 20, 1969. Brophy read them, and put Ryder in touch with Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, who were working on a book about the treatment of animals.^[49] Ryder subsequently became a contributor to their highly influential Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971), as did Harrison and Brophy.^[65] Rosalind Godlovitch's essay "Animal and Morals" was published in the same year. In 1970 Ryder coined the phrase "speciesism" in a privately printed pamphlet—having first thought of it in the bath—to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of species membership alone.^[66] Singer used the term in Animal Liberation in 1975, and it stuck, becoming an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989.^[67]

[edit] 1975: Publication of Animal Liberation

In 1970, over lunch in Oxford with fellow student Richard Keshen, who was a vegetarian, Australian philosopher Peter Singer came to believe that, by eating animals, he was engaging in the oppression of other species. Keshen introduced Singer to the Godlovitches, and Singer and Roslind Godlovitch spent hours together refining their views. Ironically, Singer at first refused to contemplate actually becoming a vegetarian, though his wife Renata did so almost immediately after meeting the Godlovitches. However the logic of the position eventually persuaded him, and it was Singer's review of the Godlovitches' book in The New York Review of Books (April 5, 1973) that evolved into his Animal Liberation (1975), one of the animal rights movement's canonical texts. Singer based his arguments on the principle of utilitarianism, the view, broadly speaking, that an act is right if it leads to the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," a phrase first used in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham. He drew an explicit comparison between the liberation of women and the liberation of animals.^[68]

Although he regards himself as an animal rights advocate, Singer uses the term "right" as "shorthand for the kind of protection that we give to all members of our species."^[69] There is no rights theory in his work. He rejects the idea that humans or non-humans have natural or moral rights, and proposes instead the equal consideration of interests, arguing that there are no logical, moral, or biological grounds to suppose that a violation of the basic interests of a human—for example, the interest in not suffering—is different in any morally significant way from a violation of the basic interests of a non-human. Singer's position is that of the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), who wrote: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other."^[70]

The publication of Animal Liberation triggered a groundswell of scholarly interest in animal rights. Tom Regan wrote in 2001 that philosophers had written more about animal rights in the previous 20 years than in the 2,000 years before that.^[71] Robert Garner writes that Charles Magel's extensive bibliography of the literature, Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights (1989), contains 10 pages of philosophical material on animals up to 1970, but 13 pages between 1970 and 1989 alone.^[72]

1976: Founding of the Animal Liberation Front[link]

In parallel with the development of the Oxford Group, grassroots activists set up the Animal Liberation Front in 1976.

In parallel with the Oxford Group, grassroots activists in England were also developing ideas about animal rights. A British law student, Ronnie Lee, formed an anti-hunting activist group in Luton in 1971, later calling it the Band of Mercy after a 19th-century RSPCA youth group. The Band attacked hunters' vehicles by slashing tires and breaking windows, calling it "active compassion." In November 1973 they engaged in their first act of arson when they set fire to a Hoechst Pharamaceuticals research laboratory near Milton Keynes; the Band claimed responsibility, identifying itself to the press as a "nonviolent guerilla organization dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of cruelty and persecution at the hands of mankind."^[73]

Lee and another activist were sentenced to three years in prison in August 1974. They were paroled after 12 months, with Lee emerging more militant than ever. In 1976 he brought together the remaining Band of Mercy activists along with some fresh faces, 30 activists in all, to start a new movement. He called it the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a name he hoped would come to "haunt" those who used animals.^[73] The ALF is now active in 38 countries, operating as a leaderless resistance. Activists see themselves as a modern Underground Railroad, the network that helped slaves escape from the U.S. to Canada, passing animals from ALF cells, who have removed them from farms and laboratories, to sympathetic veterinarians to safe houses and finally to sanctuaries. Some activists also engage in threats, intimidation, and arson, acts that have lost the movement sympathy in mainstream public opinion.

The decentralized model of activism is intensely frustrating for law enforcement organizations, who find the cells and networks difficult to infiltrate, because they tend to be organized around known friends.^[76] In 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security indicated how seriously it takes the ALF when it included them in a list of domestic terrorist threats.^[77] The tactics of some of the more determined ALF activists are anathema to many animal rights advocates, such as Singer, who regard the animal rights movement as something that should occupy the moral high ground, an impossible claim to sustain when others are bombing buildings and risking lives in the name of the same idea. ALF activists respond to the criticism with the argument that, as Ingrid Newkirk puts it, "Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out."^[78]

1980: Henry Spira and "reintegrative shaming"[link]

Henry Spira, a former seaman and civil rights activist, became the most notable of the new animal advocates in the United States. A proponent of gradual change, he introduced the idea of "reintegrative shaming," whereby a relationship is formed between a group of animal rights advocates and a corporation they see as misusing animals, with a view to obtaining concessions or halting a particular practice. His first campaign was in opposition to the American Museum of Natural History in 1976, where cats were being experimented on, research that he persuaded them to halt. His most notable achievement was in 1980, when he convinced the cosmetics company Revlon to stop using the Draize test, whereby ingredients are dripped into the eyes of rabbits to test for toxicity. He famously took out a full-page ad in several newspapers, featuring a rabbit with sticking plaster over the eyes, which asked, "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" Revlon stopped using animals for cosmetics testing, donated money to help set up Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, and was swiftly followed by other leading cosmetics companies.^[79] Spira's approach has been widely adopted by animal rights groups, most notably by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It has its critics on the abolitionist side of the movement, such as Gary Francione, who argue that it aligns the movement with 19th-century animal welfare societies, making them "new welfarists," or animal protectionists, rather than animal rights groups. These critics say the approach takes the movement back to its roots in animal welfare, rather than moving toward the paradigm shift the abolitionists want to see, whereby humans stop seeing animals as property, rather than as property to be treated kindly.^[80]

21st century: Developments[link]

In January 2008, Austria's Supreme Court ruled that Matthew Hiasl Pan, a chimpanzee, was not a person, after the Association Against Animal Factories sought personhood status for him because his custodians went bankrupt. Matthew was captured as a baby in Sierra Leone in 1982, then smuggled to Austria to be used in pharmaceutical experiments, but was discovered by customs officials when he arrived in the country and taken to the shelter instead. He was kept there for 25 years, but the group that ran the shelter went bankrupt in 2007. Donors offered to help him, but under Austrian law only a person can receive personal gifts, so any money sent to Matthew would be lost to the shelter's bankruptcy. The Association has appealed the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer proposing Matthew's personhood, Eberhart Theuer, has asked the court to appoint a legal guardian for him and to grant him four rights: the right to life, limited freedom of movement, personal safety, and the right to claim property.^[81] In June 2008, a committee of Spain's national legislature became the first to vote for a resolution to extend limited rights to non-human primates. The parliamentary Environment Committee recommended giving chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans the right not to be used in medical experiments or in circuses, and recommended making it illegal to kill apes, except in self-defense, based upon Peter Singer's Great Ape Project (GAP).^[82] The committee's proposal has not yet been enacted into law.^[83] In January 2010, a team of scientists announced research results suggesting that dolphins are second in intelligence only to human beings, and should be regarded as "non-human persons."^[84] In January 2011, China banned use of animals in circuses. In 2011, the government in Catalonia, a region in Spain, passed a motion to outlaw bull fighting which came into effect on January 1, 2012.^[85] In February 2012 Greece became the first European country to ban any animal from performing in any circus in its territory, following a campaign by Animal Defenders International and the Greek Animal Welfare Fund (GAWF).^[86]

In 2011, PETA sued SeaWorld over enslavement of killer whales. It was the first case in which the Thirteenth Amendment was used to protect non-human rights in court.^[87] A federal judge dismissed the case in February 2012.^[88]

Evolutionary view[link]

Scientific methods have been created for quantifying attitudes about animal rights.^[89] These studies suggest that human concern for animal rights may be an evolutionary trait, and that compassion for animals is correlated with compassion for other humans.^[90][91] Earlier studies have established links between interpersonal violence and animal cruelty.^[92][93] Also in terms of moral values, under an evolutionary view of the world, humans are just another species, therefore the way we evaluate member of our species compared to the way we evaluate members of other species is unjust.^[94]

Main philosophical approaches[link]

Overview[link]

There are several philosophical approaches to the issue of animal ethics. The utilitarian approach is exemplified by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. The deontological approach is represented by theorists such as Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, Mark Rowlands and Gary Francione, professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. The capabilities approach is represented by Martha Nussbaum. The egalitarian approach has been examined by Ingmar Persson and Peter Vallentyne. The virtue ethics approach has been studied by Rosalind Hursthouse. Finally, a pluralistic approach has been considered by Stephen R. L. Clark, Alice Crary, and Cora Diamond.
Their differences reflect several distinctions philosophers draw. One of them is the one between ethical theories that focus upon the consequences of actions, including in them the actions themselves (called consequentialism, or teleological ethics, of which utilitarianism is an instance, which is Singer's position), and those that focus upon the ethical standing of actions irrespective of their consequences (called deontological ethics, of which Regan and Francione are adherents). A consequentialist might argue, for example, that lying is wrong if the lie will make someone unhappy. A deontologist would argue that lying is wrong in principle. Consequentialists maintain that in order to know how to act we need to know what is good, and then try to bring about the better outcome. Deontologists claim there are actions we should never carry out, even if this entails a worse outcome.^[95] The egalitarian and the capabilities approach can be either defended from a consequentialist or a deontologist perspective. The point of the former is to claim that we should promote that all individuals have the possibility to develop their own capacities. Egalitarianism, in turn, favors an equal distribution of happiness among all individuals, which makes the interests of the worse off more important than those of the better off.^[96] Suppose one defends that a situation in which everyone is equally well is better, other things being equal, than another one in which some are better off and some are worse off. Then, one would be a consequentialist egalitarian. If, instead, one does not think so, but believes that, still, we should bring about more egalitarian outcomes, then one is a deontological egalitarian. Then virtue ethics is a separate approach which holds that in considering how to act we should not consider what acts to perform, but what kind of moral agents we should be. Finally, the pluralist approach tries to combine contributions from different viewpoints.

Within the animal rights debate, Singer does not believe there are such things as natural rights and that animals have them, although he uses the language of rights as shorthand for how we ought to treat individuals. Instead, he argues that, when we weigh the consequences of an act in order to judge whether it is right or wrong, the interests of animals—primarily their interest in avoiding suffering—ought to be given equal consideration to the similar interests of humans. That is, where the suffering of one individual, human or non-human, is equivalent to that of any other, there is no moral reason to award more weight to either one of them.^[97] Regan's and Francione's approaches are not driven by the weighing of consequences. Regan believes that animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," who have moral rights for that reason, and that moral rights ought not to be ignored. Francione argues that animals have one moral right, and need one legal one: the right not to be regarded as property. All else will follow from that one paradigm shift, he argues.^[98]

Utilitarian approach[link]

Peter Singer: Equal consideration of interests[link]

Peter Singer is a utilitarian, not a rights theorist.

Singer is an act utilitarian, or more specifically a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by its consequences, and specifically by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, which judges the rightness of an act according to the usual consequences of whichever moral rule the act is an instance of.)

Singer's position is that there are no moral grounds for failing to give equal consideration to the interests of human and non-humans. His principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment, but equal consideration of interests. A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked, because both would suffer, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight.^[97] He quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other."^[70] This reflects Jeremy Bentham's position: "[E]ach to count for one, and none for more than one."^[99] Unlike a man or mouse, a stone does not suffer when kicked, and therefore has no interest in avoiding it. Interests, Singer argues, are predicated on the ability to suffer, and nothing more, and once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must be given equal consideration. The extent to which animals can suffer is therefore a key issue.

Animal suffering[link]

Singer writes that commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin, a philosopher and professor of animal sciences, writes that Descartes' influence continued to be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.^[100]

According to Singer, scientific publications have made it clear over the last two decades that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as humans, or to remember the suffering as vividly.^[101] In the most recent edition of Animal Liberation, Singer cites research indicating that animal impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon, a region well developed in mammals and birds.^[102] He also relies on the work of Richard Sarjeant. Sarjeant pointed out that non-human animals possess anatomical complexity of the cerebral cortex and neuroanatomy that is nearly identical to that of the human nervous system, arguing that, "[e]very particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours."^[103]

The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arises primarily because animals have no language, leading scientists to argue that it is impossible to know when an animal is suffering. This situation may change as increasing numbers of chimps are taught sign language, although skeptics question whether their use of it portrays real understanding. Singer writes that, following the argument that language is needed to communicate pain, it would often be impossible to know when humans are in pain. All we can do is observe pain behavior, he writes, and make a calculated guess based on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, if someone is screaming, clutching a part of their body, moaning quietly, or apparently unable to function, especially when followed by an event we believe would cause pain in ourselves, that is in large measure what it means to be in pain.^[104] Singer argues that there is no reason to suppose animal pain behavior would have a different meaning.

Rights-based approach[link]

Tom Regan: Subjects-of-a-life[link]

Tom Regan: animals are subjects-of-a-life.

Tom Regan argues in The Case for Animal Rights and Empty Cages that non-human animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," and as such are bearers of rights. 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, such as infants, and at least some non-humans must have the status of "moral patients." Moral patients are unable to formulate moral principles, and as such are unable to do right or wrong, even though what they do may be beneficial or harmful. Only moral agents are able to engage in moral action. He has adopted the concept of speciesism,^[105] a term first coined by Richard D. Ryder.

Animals for Regan have "inherent value" as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end. This is also called the "direct duty" view. His 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. Whereas Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of animals and accepts that, in some hypothetical scenarios, individual animals might be used legitimately to further human or non-human ends, Regan believes we ought to treat non-human animals as we would humans. He applies the strict Kantian ideal (which Kant himself applied only to humans) that they ought never to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in themselves.

Gary Francione: Abolitionism[link]

Gary Francione: animals need only one right, the right not to be owned.

Abolitionism falls within the framework of the rights-based approach, though it regards only one right as necessary: the right not to be owned. Abolitionists argue that the key to reducing animal suffering is to recognize that legal ownership of sentient beings is unjust and must be abolished. The most prominent of the abolitionists is Gary Francione, professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. He argues that focusing on animal welfare may actually worsen the position of animals, because it entrenches the view of them as property, and makes the public more comfortable about using them. Francione calls animal rights group who pursue animal welfare issues, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the "new welfarists," arguing that they have more in common with 19th-century animal protectionists than with the animal rights movement. His position is that there is no animal rights movement in the United States.^[106]

Critics[link]

Carl Cohen[link]

Carl Cohen: animals cannot distinguish their interests from what is right.^[107]

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, arguing that rights holders must be able to distinguish between their own interests and what is right. "The holders of rights must have the capacity to comprehend rules of duty governing all, including themselves. In applying such rules, [they] ... 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 Singer's argument that, since a brain-damaged human could not make moral judgments, moral judgments cannot be used as the distinguishing characteristic for determining who is awarded rights. Cohen writes that the test for moral judgment "is not a test to be administered to humans one by one," but should be applied to the capacity of members of the species in general.^[108]

Posner–Singer debate[link]

Judge Richard Posner: "facts will drive equality."^[109]

Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit debated the issue of animal rights with Peter Singer on Slate.^[109] Posner argues that his moral intuition tells him "that human beings prefer their own. If a dog threatens a human infant, even if it requires causing more pain to the dog to stop it, than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we favour the child. It would be monstrous to spare the dog."^[109]

Singer challenges Posner's moral intuition by arguing that formerly unequal rights for gays, women, and certain races were justified using the same set of intuitions. Posner replies that equality in civil rights did not occur because of ethical arguments, but because facts mounted that there were no morally significant differences between humans based on race, sex, or sexual orientation that would support inequality. If and when similar facts emerge about the difference, or lack thereof, between humans and animals, the differences in rights will erode too. But facts will drive equality, not ethical arguments that run contrary to instinct, he argues.^[109]

Posner calls his approach "soft utilitarianism," in contrast to Singer's "hard utilitarianism." He argues: "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."^[109]

Roger Scruton[link]

The British philosopher Roger Scruton argues that rights imply obligations. Every legal privilege, he writes, imposes a burden on the one who does not possess that privilege: that is, "your right may be my duty." Scruton therefore regards the emergence of the animal rights movement as "the strangest cultural shift within the liberal worldview," because the idea of rights and responsibilities is, he argues, distinctive to the human condition, and it makes no sense to spread them beyond our own species He accuses animal rights advocates of "pre-scientific" anthropomorphism, attributing traits to animals that are, he says, Beatrix Potter-like, where "only man is vile." It is within this fiction that the appeal of animal rights lies, he argues. The world of animals is non-judgmental, filled with dogs who return our affection almost no matter what we do to them, and cats who pretend to be affectionate when, in fact, they care only about themselves. It is, he argues, a fantasy, a world of escape.^[7]

See also[link]

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Animal rights

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