How far animal rights?

[rasputin]

I'm just the bearer, not opining.

This morning I caught a broadcast on the BBC (was it The World Today?) in which a Lord Brennan (?), evidently a UK scholar of some importance in the area of rights/responsibility/etc, delineated human rights as opposed to rights of non-humans.

Basically, and perhaps not giving the best summary of the broadcast, Lord B (apologies for not catching his name on my staticky radio) argues that human rights (life, freedom from torture, etc) are rights that we accord humans because they are the life that we hold most sacred. He goes on to argue that while it is debatable whether animals, etc. are to be subjected to this/that experiment/procedure or whether any sort of thing should be done at all on them, that is not a matter of intrinsic rights but rather a matter for public discussion/debate. The gist is that the family pet does not have the same inherent rights or status as the family, regardless of the quality of treatment that society mandates or that is given.

[cognac]

Put him up against a wall and shoot him. Anyone tortured any of my animals they better hope I never found them, I would be going to jail for murder.
Cognac

[Die Fledermaus]

>> The gist is that the family pet does not have the same inherent rights or status as the family, regardless of the quality of treatment that society mandates or that is given <<

So what rights does it have?

This fellow sounds like an unctious Philosophy professor skilled at hair-splitting (as opposed to hare-splitting).

[Hamsters82]

I think animals have rights. They have feelings too don't they? They can feel when their hurt; people who harm animals are stupid & people who think its okay to do it is stupid too.

[Die Fledermaus]

Of course animals have rights.

The question is what that guy was saying and implying - that they have no rights at all?

[rasputin]

It's been over a year, I know, since I first posted this, but I was offline during y'all's discussion and missed my chance to clarify my line of inquiry.

The radio article seems to say:

You can/must mandate humane treatment for all animals, and you can/must say that it is morally wrong to subject them to undue pain, inhumane experiments, torture, or any other procedure you deem wrong. This would be an expression of your -- our your society's -- morality.

However, if the only rights you can ascribe to animals are negative rights (right to be free from X), it would be incorrect to call those rights -- what you are giving the animals are restraints upon humans. Animals cannot take advantage of positive rights (right to do X). They cannot understand what it is to have rights. They simply do, or do not do, according to training, not philosophy or legality. You can train an animal to "speak", but you cannot instill in an animal an understanding of freedom of speech, or what it means to exercise only appropriate speech. All you can do in freeing animals is to remove restraints placed upon them from external sources (people, environment, or other animals).

I understand this argument, and I'm starting to agree with it.

I can not grant my pets freedom of movement. I do let them move as they desire in the space I prepare for them, which includes their cages and/or play spaces.

However, if I let them move freely throughout my apartment and outside environs, as I would let people do, I must essentially let them live in a wild state, and persuade them to stay with bribes and subsidies. They cease to be domestic and become pests, to a degree determined by their instinctive need to urinate, defecate, and masticate. They are no longer under my protection but instead can go where they are in danger from cats, cars, cold, starvation, and any other situation they encounter.

If I determine that they have rights, they are not my pets.

[Die Fledermaus]

I always considered myself a caregiver, not a pet owner - a term I felt uncomfortable with.

Anyway, I know what humane treatment is, and no one in their right mind is ascribing such as the protecton of the Bill of Rights to a horse. But they (domestic critters) no more have the right to do anything they wish than a two year old child would.

Now go see "King Kong", which was excellent, and sad, and consider his rights, if applicable. Actually, I always wondered, even in 1933, if any of that was even possible with the ASPCA fully active. I seriously doubt it.

[rasputin]

Anything is possible -- it is only in recent decades that animal protection efforts seem to have had any power stopping people with weapons from doing what they wanted or declared necessary.

Certainly, even if the Amer. Society had any preventative power, no one in a movie theater would have expected them to be able to do anything about it until the 70s or 80s, at the very earliest.