Animal Rights

Animals, wild and domestic, have long been used by people for food, clothing and kept as pets. More recently, they have been used for research purposes to develop and test new medication and medical treatments, cosmetics and other commercial products. Non-human animals are given rights only because of their interactions with human beings. Without involvement with humans, animals do not deserve rights. It is through this interaction with humans that animals are even given moral consideration. We do not give rights to a rock simply because it is a creation of Mother Nature, similarly non-human animals do not have rights unless it is in regards to humans. As pointed out by Jan Narveson "morality is a sort of agreement among rational, independent, self-interested persons who have something to gain from entering into such an agreement" (Oliver, 2008). In order to have the ability to obtain rights one must be consciously able to enter into an agreement, non-human animals are unable to do so. Entering into an agreement is done so because both parties have something to gain from this understanding.

I do not believe that animals should be denied of moral consideration because of their limited ability to harm humans. First of all, this statement is false animals clearly have the ability to attack if so desired not by the human, but by the decision of the animal. In our sculpted urban environments animals are exiled and in relatively minimal human contact. Such predacious animals, that have historically attacked humans, have been kept out of our society by enormous architectural fences. These animals that attack usually need vast open spaces to hunt game, these environments hardly exist any more, and these animals are rarely in contact with humans. These urban areas do not attract animals with the capacity to attack humans but that is not to say that these animals do not have the ability to harm us, we have just manipulated our environment so that they are on the outside. One thousand years ago, humans would have been more likely to have been attacked by an animal. Our modern buildings and infrastructure isolate us from these creatures and has also reduced their population making it less dangerous for a human to worry about being struck by a beast on their way to work (March, 1984).

The concept of suffering has often been applied to understand whether an animal deserves rights. ...