Wikipedia is telling me that “animal rights” and “animal liberation” can be interchanged. I think I may be making up definitions again, but they sound different to me.
The animal rights philosophy is flawed.
Animals don’t have rights. I know this is obvious, but there are some who don’t accept this. Animals do not have rights. It’s not that they have natural rights that we don’t respect, it’s that they don’t have rights. Rights are given. No one is born with rights.
So, if they don’t have rights, what is there to argue for? That they should have rights? Rights to do what? Rights are based on interests, right? How do you know what a cow wants? You don’t. She (the cow) knows.
I was in argument once about animal rights. I made the mistake of assuming I knew what made animals happy. My friend told me that his cat loved being inside. His cat loved being cuddled and fed and given toys.
What rights do we award based on that? You could go in the direction I was heading. “Every animal has the right to provide for himself.” But then, what about cats like my friend’s? The point is, we can’t know what makes animals happy, so we can’t know their interests, so we can’t award them rights.
Then there’s the argument that animals should not be considered part of our society in the way that they deserve rights because animals are not moral agents. They don’t know right from wrong. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that goes against this. However, it’s a damn good argument. Why should we give rights to a group that would never respect rights?
Why should we give rights to someone who doesn’t care if he has rights? I could never guess what a lion wants. Yeah, he wants to go “boo” at animals, but when? With whom? Where? What animal? I could try my hardest to create a simulation of his environment (hello zoos), but my guess is that it would never match his natural surroundings.
Again, animals don’t care if they have rights. They just want to do what they do. Hens like to take dust baths. Should every hen have a protected right to take dust baths?
And haven’t I been fighting our dependence on animals this whole time? (I have been.) If we give animals rights, isn’t that ingraining them into our society? Do they want to be part of our society? (Do they care, as long as they can do what they want?)
Also, awarding farm animals rights would mean no more farm animals. If no one is demanding beef, no one is breeding cows. Then what? I understand that not all animals are farm animals (I think Spain gave gorillas legal rights), but they are a huge part of the AR movement, yes?
Okay. What I’m trying to say is animal rights, I don’t agree with. I like “animal liberation.” It sounds like, “Just leave them the hell alone. We don’t need them and they don’t need us. Let them be.” And yeah, we can make laws against not letting them be, but awarding rights willy-nilly is not rational.
This will also spell out the end of domesticated animals. Yay.