Animal Rights": What Rights"

Anyone who's ever acted to promote animal rights has heard phrases such as:



The luckier ones get to hear a more amusing version:



These phrases often reflect a complete disregard of the needs and suffering of those who were not lucky enough to be born human beings. They attempt to show us that animal rights is an absurdity because nonhuman animals don't deserve serious consideration. This kind of approach cannot prompt a serious response. Still, sometimes the phrases reflect an honest philosophical question:

What's bothering us?

Granted, if we try to determine to what extent we can project the rights that concern us as human beings to chickens, dogs or carp, we will not get very far. We are used to thinking of certain rights, the violation of which disturbs us: the right to practice my own lifestyle, to think and express myself freely, etc. Some of these rights are also codified in the law, allowing me to vote for government, express my opinions freely, and receive fair value for money paid. But all this is subject to conditions of relative freedom. If we feel more threatened, we demand that our rights to property and perhaps the rights over our body be respected. Protecting ourselves from beating, injury or imprisonment already places us much closer to animals with fur, feathers or scales. Even then, the use of the term 'rights' seems out of place: most of the rights that humans are concerned about do not seem to be shared by the other biological species.

Different rights for different people

We should make clear, when we discuss human rights, whether we accept that these are rights we all share. The answer is "yes", but also "no". Most of us, for example, are not concerned about the threat of torture, hunger or institutionalized robbery - but there are places where entire populations seek protection from such basic harms. Had we been in their situation, we certainly would have discovered similar needs. Still, we are not in their situation, and in many cases, we never can be. Men, for example, cannot be in the situations in which women often find themselves: there is no parallel among men to the needs of pregnant women. Regarding children, the gap is even wider: we assume that it is the child's right to be provided for (a right which the adults among us have, regrettably, lost), and yet it seems absurd to give a child the right to vote (a right which adults take for granted). Some rights are obviously common to us all, but not all rights.

Common rights?!

To some extent it may seem that the rights common to all humans are related to our basic needs. Some of these needs are shared by nonhuman animals as well. We are all susceptible to harm from beating, injury or coercion to perform in a way that goes against our nature. In this sense, animals of many different species are similar to us. We believe it is our right to act according to our nature, and there is no reason to assume that this right is not shared by all those who have a will and the capacity to feel pleasure or pain in what happens to them. Here we should bear in mind that the nature of one is not the nature of the other. If we deprive an adult of the right to control his own life, we would be harming him, but if we deprive a baby of this right, and instead offer him full supervision and care, we would be acting in his best interest. Similarly, a human being requires air to breathe, and so does the carp - a basic need! Still, if we provide the carp with fresh air, like the air we wish to provide to all people, we would be killing him; similarly, the environment in which the carp breathes easily would kill a human.

Equal consideration, different treatment.

The simple conclusion from this discussion is that different creatures are not entitled to similar treatment. Quite the opposite - they have the right to be treated differently. Should we behave exactly the same with creatures of different species, and even with different individuals, we may cause them harm. Even when we speak of a seemingly common right, such as the right to breathe or the right to eat well - even then different individuals may require different treatment. If these individuals belong to different biological species, the treatment could even be completely opposite - although the amount of consideration for each individual remains the same. The practical demand for different treatment follows the recognition that different creatures deserve equal consideration for their needs, wishes, and distress. This is why giving chickens the right to vote is absurd, but no more so than the claim that I deserve the right to a sand bath - a practice that chickens enjoy very much, and when denied to them, causes them great distress.

What rights?

A serious question! Animal rights is indeed a very complicated issue. It is not enough that we look for the most basic common denominator between us and the other, significantly different, creatures. This common denominator could be, perhaps, the ability to feel pleasure and pain, but by saying that we have said nothing. We merely determined that these animals deserve consideration, but we haven't defined what should be done in order to satisfy this demand. Animal rights means that we should learn and understand exactly what others require - whether they walk on two or four legs, fly, swim or crawl - and what harms them. We cannot have a predefined answer to these questions. They demand knowledge of the individual animals.

Originally published in "Animal Rights This Week",
Anonymous for Animal Rights' Weekly Online Magazine