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Animal Rights

Basically, Linzey?s is the animal right?s perspective. The animal rights perspective holds that animals have a right, just as human beings do, to be free from pain and suffering. Back in the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, the father of the Utilitarian Movement, stated that if we?re talking about a being?s right to be free from pain and suffering, the morally relevant variable is not whether that being can think or talk or how we relate to that being?s life, but his or her capacity to feel pain, to suffer. Of course, any introductory physiology course will teach you that birds, mammals, and fish, have basically the same capacity to suffer. We share this capacity with all animals.

Alice Walker, the civil rights activist and humanitarian who wrote The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, wrote the introduction to a book entitled, The Dreaded Comparison, by Marjorie Spiegel. In this book, Spiegel compares the treatment of human slaves in the 16th through 19th centuries to the way animals are treated today. Alice Walker agrees, saying,

?The animals of the world ? were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women were created for men.?

The animal rights movement is a movement for justice, just like abolition, suffrage, civil rights, and women?s rights. Most people today understand that bias on the basis of race or gender or religion or nationality?any bias against other human beings?is wrong. The neglected link, for many, is species bias?having the idea that just because certain beings are not human, we can do whatever we wish with them. Dr. Albert Schweitzer put it well when he stated that ?[c]ompassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to [hu]mankind.?

Prejudice is prejudice, whether it is based on race or gender or religion?or on species. In each case, a line is drawn, separating those in the group above the line from those in the group below the line. Nobel laureate Dr. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland, called species bias the ?purest form of racism? and animal rights the purest form of justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals is the epitome of the ?might makes right? moral paradigm?a moral paradigm that is ethically bankrupt.

Interestingly, the animal rights perspective has been embraced by a range of brilliant thinkers and humanitarians that includes, in addition to those I?ve mentioned: Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, C.S. Lewis, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, d**k Gregory and Mahatma Gandhi.

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I was going to watch that but I would probably throw up for a week and tell my parents and get grounded. If I ever start to crave meat I will watch it though. But I agree that animals can feel pain I mean I have told people to knock it out because they have been hitting dogs and the dogs havbe wimpered or screamed.

All that is not 100% true. About the diary products:
Not all countries allow that. And the animals are not always in those conditions.
IF you buy organic milk products, it's no harm to the animal, and the baby will stay by it's mother until the naturally leave each other.

Maybe it's that way in the US. I haven't actually checked. But in many countries, in Europe that is, it's nothing near that.

I've been to many organic farms and they look great. Milking farms.

Besides if we stop the production of milk then the cows will have no places to live, because farmers can't use them for anything. Then they'll die.

And that's not in my opinion supporting.

For more insight on the rights and future rights of nonhuman animals check out Steven M. Wise's books, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights and Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.