The True Meaning of Animal Rights

[Brandon Becker]

Learn about the true meaning of animal rights, including what is and is not rights advocacy and examples of rights advocacy compared to other advocacy: http://www.rpaforall.org/rights.html

From the introduction:
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"Animal rights" is almost always used incorrectly by the news industry and most animal organizations and advocates. This hampers animal-rights advocacy by creating confusion about its goal, divergence from rights-promoting strategies, and delusion about what constitutes progress toward animal rights. People have helped animals in countless ways for thousands of years without promoting rights for them. Promoting rights means describing the rights other animals need to lead fulfilling lives, why meaningful protection is impossible without rights, and why human beings as well as other animals will benefit when all have the rights they need.
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[Norm]

"The idea of rights is a moral construct that only we (as humans) can recognize and act upon. Therefore our only obligation is how we (as humans) govern our relationship with others (both with other humans and nonhumans). As we have the cognitive ability and technical skills to survive without relying on the use and killing of animals, then it is our moral imperative that we do so."

The moral prescription against humans killing humans/non-humans is speciesist, because it presumes without any evidence or coherent reasoning that humans have a 'capacity' for free will, and that humans have - as a result of divine revelation to them, or super-animal access to the true normative order of the world - and that animals do not. It presumes that, because of Free Will and super-animal access to Truth and Good/Evil, that humans can choose not to do bad things and animals cannot. This presumes to know the minds of other animals (as well as the mind of other humans), and to judge them inferior with no evidence or reason. 

This speciesism can be resolved in two different ways:
1. By dismantling the moral framework of rights (human and non-human) and replacing it with a political one of liberation (human and non-human).
2. By eliminating the 'human' constraint and applying the moral prescription to all life forms.

Respuestas does the latter and becomes a conqueror and tame-r of other life forms. I do the former and become a liberator. Many just retain the speciesism of moralism and try to do their best.

 

[Norm]

"herbivorous lions which still retained their essential "lion" character"

Is C.S Lewis entitled to determine what constitutes the 'essential' lion 'character' of a real, free Lion? 

From where does he draw this entitlement to dictate the normative order of reality?

"They must be made to desire vegetation instinctively"

They must be *made* to.... Can you hear yourself? Does this not sound exactly like the person who claims pigs must be *made* to not bite the hands of humans that feed them? That dogs muse be *made* to heel? 

[Norm]

"Neolithic agrarianism did exist without the exploitation of animals"

Neolithic agrarianism wiped countless millions of animals off the planet through destroying the climax ecosystems that were their homes and then obliterated soil underneath them. It then exterminated animals to extinction to keep them from the crops and from the grain stores, and from the filth and exretia that followed centralised human populations. Your perception of neolithic society is romantic indeed. Cats were not domesticated (through abuse) to keep mice and rats away from the goats the domesticating societies abused for their milk and wool, they were domesticated through abuse to keep mice and rats away from grains and the swelling centres of human population. The agrarian cultures you respect as the foundation of the human project of control and domination - beginning with the 'Ideal' of a Static, Innocent, Ordered 'Garden' - initiated the project of control through abuse that has resulted not only in factory farms but mass monoculture and mass extinction.

[Norm]

"All the arguments you make against intervention to help members of other species could be used -  and have been used - to justify a non-interventionist approach to famine and genocide suffered by members for other ethnic groups."

The people making those arguments mistake the famine and genocide to be 'happy little accidents' of nature rather than part of a sustained, methodical program of abuse, domination, control, forced impoverishment and systematic cultural assimilation.

The non-interventionist approach would work *remarkably well* at eliminating famine and genocide if it were followed literally and globalisation of neoliberalism, political hegemony of western industrial civilisation and the forcible assimilation of slaves/wageslaves/sexslaves were stopped instantly.

Stopping the sustained application of violence by those seeking to control life and living creatures will end the most horrific, the most numerous abuses instantaneously. The 'little accidents' of nature are not even worth considering compared to the horrors that this culture intentionally unleashes in its project to make the world conform to its normative ideal. Does that sound familar?

[Lisa V]

Your legal obligation to act depends on the circumstance.

http://theemtspot.com/2009/06/23/what-is-the-duty-to-act/

"Some untrained citizens fall under “duty to act” or “duty to rescue” laws. For instance, in most industrialized nations, spouses have a duty to attempt to rescue each other – including all fifty states of the U.S. Travel industry personnel have a duty to assist their patrons in emergencies. Parents also have a duty to rescue and assist minor children including “in loco parentis” caregivers like school teachers and babysitters.

"U.S. common law dictates that there is no general duty to act in an emergency, however, at least eight states have enacted laws requiring citizens to assist strangers in peril. These states include Florida, Ohio, Massachusetts, Rode Island and Vermont. You can be charged with a misdemeanor for not responding to someone in danger. Citizens are never required to place themselves in peril. This allows for so much subjectivity that the laws are generally ignored by law makers and citizens."

[Lisa V]

Cats are obligate carnivores because they require the amino acid taurine, which is found naturally only in flesh. If we were to breed a plant that produces taurine (and even now, we can synthesize taurine without using animals) would their predation still be "necessary?"

What's your definition of necessary?

[Peter Keller]

No doubt our meat-eating circle of acquaintance would say the same.

But we are urging our meat-eating acquaintances to make the choice to join in a pattern of global veganism of their own free will and accord, not through genetic manipulation or sterilization. You're consistently comparing apples to oranges.

The animals which you are proposing to save "for their own good" have not been asked if they want to be altered or sterilized.

I think what I see is the welfarist/suffering argument carried out to its conclusion. Animal rights contends that animals have an inherent right to their own self-determination. I agree with the others that say that the vast overwhelming majority of animals suffer and die at the hands of humans, rather than from each other. If we don't stop destroying destroying habitats that animals rely on, and stop breeding, using, and killing animals, then the kind of cataclysmic climate change that cause sure havoc on the earth will make the dreams of technological applications of "compassion" a distant wistful blip in the short history of mankind.

[Lisa V]

Peter, so then you would be opposed to laws against killing or exploiting animals in our vegan future?

[Kerry Baker]

My understanding of animal rights is to respect that we are one species of animal and that we should not impose our notions of what's right or wrong on those other species. That is, the kangaroo or the whale or the wolf and so on, have the right to live their lives as they would if human animals did not exist. Having said that, yes we as animals are part of the jigsaw, and so we have a role as well. If one considers the Gaia theory then it seems to me that humans have unnaturally proliferated through development of drugs such as penicillin and antibiotics which has caused an explosion in the human animal species. I suspect the Earth will do what is necessary to save itself. I can't see that turning natural carnivores like cats into vegans achieves anything. I suspect that cats fed vegan food will take the first opportunity they can to kill a bird or mouse to eat if they were able to. I note that returning wolves to national parks in the USA (Yellowstone?) has seen the ecosystem returning to what it should have been as wolves kill the herbivores that eat the natural vegetation that beavers use to build dams, and so on. The water came back and the ecosystem flourished when wolves were reintroduced. I think it worth noting, regarding the elephants stuck in the mud story, that humans are not the only species to go to the aid of another species. There have been witnessed examples shown on Facebook of a hippo charging a crocodile to try and prevent it capturing a young gazelle. So the notion of ethics and morals to me becomes even more complex to think a non-human animal can experience similar feelings.

[RespuestasVeganas.Org]

Say: "My understanding of animal rights is to respect that we are one species of animal and that we should not impose our notions of what's right or wrong on those other species."

All sentient animals know it's wrong that violate their fundamental interests, without a human to tell them.

[Brandon Becker]

I think it's a good idea to feed a rescued cat nutritionally-adequate vegan food if the cat will stay healthy eating such foods. In terms of wild cats living freely in their natural habitats, I oppose any intervention for humans to feed them, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier (creation of dependency, health problems, attacks on empty-handed humans, etc).

Genetic modification of plants has been an ecological disaster so I also oppose attempting to breed plants for taurine, planting them in the wild, and trying to persuade wild cats to eat them. It's fantasy, not reality, and a dystopian fantasy that I hope never becomes reality.

My definition of "necessary" certainly means survival and some animals eat other animals to survive. Even if we were so oppressive as to force other animals to follow human dictates, how would you communicate our rules and laws to them? And how would this be enforced across the animal kingdom, such as with reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, or with invertebrates? It's really delusional to think that humans have the capacity or ever will have the capacity to police all life on Earth.

[Peter Keller]

No, because we allow ourselves to live within the constraints of law to maintain society. If we don't then we would as a mass not allow those laws to apply to us and act as we please.

So are you on the side of using laws to force animals to be genetically altered and sterilized (Presuming that laws are what would be necessary in order to enact such a broad program)?