Do Animails Have Rights? | Do Animails Have Rights - Introduction
For decades, the question “Do animals have rights?” has been examined from many different angles. People contend that animals do or do not have rights based on several factors, including whether animals can learn, can use language, are conscious, are able to suffer, and are ethical beings. Whether and which animals have rights depends on which characteristics are considered.
Some say that the only animals with rights are those that can learn and rationalize. In this light, many species are denied rights, including bugs, birds, and reptiles. Under this premise, however, great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, and gorillas) would be granted rights. Proof of their intelligence lies in documentation that they use and make tools, live in complex societies, treat illnesses with medicinal plants, and can add fractions. Indeed, the international Great Ape Project contends that due to their humanlike abilities, great apes deserve the same rights to life and liberty that humans enjoy. Rats and mice, too, as seen in experiments that offer rewards for efficiently completing a maze, can learn. However, many analysts contend that deciding whether or not a particular animal has rights goes beyond determining its intelligence; for these commentators, an animal’s ability to communicate should be considered in deciding whether to grant it rights.
Many rights advocates say animals that are competent in human language ought to have rights. For more than thirty years, researchers have studied the ability of great apes to use sign language. A gorilla named Koko is said to have a vocabulary of over one thousand signs. She understands two thousand spoken words and often invents signs for words she has not been taught. However, in “The Soul of the Ape,” Clive D.L. Wynne summarizes the results of one chimpanzee study, which he says are not uncommon:
Moreover, he claims, instances in which a great ape forms a new combination of signs for a word it has not been taught, such as signing “water” and “bird” for swan, are rare and do not necessarily indicate a capacity for language. Instead, the animal may be signing for two things it sees, water and bird. In this view, advanced animals can imitate signs but cannot truly understand communication like humans do.The animal’s vocabulary developed painfully slowly, and it never exceeded a couple of hundred signs (about two weeks’ work for a healthy two-year-old child). Often the chimp involved could only repeat gestures, and in any case, chimpanzee “sentences” rarely extend beyond one or two signs.
Philosopher René Descartes deduced that no animals have rights because they do not use language, and because, he asserted, they are not conscious. Loosely defined, consciousness is a state of being aware, especially of oneself, that may be characterized by emotion and thought. Sometimes referred to as sentience, it is important in the animal rights debate, says animal rights lawyer Steven M. Wise, “because species with no capacity for it lack that quality of mind that matters for legal rights. They’re not aware that they, or anyone else, exist. . . . Entitlement to legal rights rests upon the existence of conscious states.” He notes that some animals, like great apes, behave in a way that suggests similar mental processes to ours. For instance, he contends that apes understand cause and effect, they deceive and empathize with others, and they recognize themselves in mirrors (by noticing a splash of dye on their faces, for example).
Wynne disagrees. Simply because great apes can recognize themselves in mirrors does not prove self-awareness, he points out. He cites blind people who cannot see themselves but are clearly self-aware, and autistic children whose self-awareness is clearly impaired but who can still recognize their reflections.
This raises the question of whether animals can have conscious minds without sharing all the attributes, such as self-awareness or emotion, of human consciousness. Animal behaviorist Marian Stamp Dawkins says, “Different animals might possess some or all of these attributes to different extents, so that it may not be possible to say that an animal is either conscious (possessing all elements) or not (possessing none).” With consciousness seen as a spectrum, less complicated animals might experience dreamy, incoherent consciousness, while deeply conscious creatures think complex thoughts and experience highly sophisticated feelings.
Still, some argue that consciousness is not a strong enough attribute upon which to base animal rights. Philosopher David S. Oderberg states that even if animals are sentient,
Descartes saw both plants and animals as lacking consciousness, so, he surmised, they are aware of neither pleasure nor pain. Therefore, he writes, animals are mere “automatons or moving machines.” In fact, when Descartes and his followers performed experiments in which they burned and mutilated animals, he claimed the animals’ whines were no different from the sounds of a machine that was malfunctioning or a gear that needed oil. Unable to feel pain, these creatures need not be shielded by humans, he reasoned.The truth is that there is no straight entailment between consciousness . . . and the possession of rights. What is the logical connection between sentience and rights? Feeling pain/ pleasure is just another way that a creature’s life can go badly/ well for it. . . . So why don’t plants have rights? They aren’t sentient, but their lives can go well or badly in other ways.
Many disagree with this conclusion. Animals’ ability to feel pain, says philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is the only factor that should be considered in weighing whether animals matter morally. He writes, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Similarly, civil rights attorney William Kunstler contends, “Pain is pain, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the victim.” Rights advocates point out that many animals are used in research into human pain and pain relieving drugs. In experiments in which animals self-administer analgesics after surgery, mice and rats are chosen as test subjects because they perceive physical pain that is comparable to that of humans. Birds also feel pain, as evidenced in studies that measure how fast birds jump as their feet touch a hot plate.
Gary L. Francione takes Bentham’s argument one step further, claiming that animals have interests in not experiencing pain. Animal welfare laws were designed to prohibit humans from inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals, but fall short of the mark, he says. In Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?, he speaks of the importance of balancing animal interests and human interests:
Perhaps the most important discussion in the animal rights debate revolves around whether animals are ethical creatures. In the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Stanley M. Giannet writes, “Scientists claim that the cardinal difference between animals and humans is that humans have a capacity for moral judgments and thought. We are ethical sentient beings whereas animals are only sentient beings.” By this he refers to assertions that humans can weigh moral aspects in making decisions while animals cannot. For example, in determining whether to shoot a bear that is pregnant or has young cubs in tow, a hunter can consider ethical reasons not to kill it, such as the bear’s responsibility to its cubs. Animals, on the other hand, have no regard to the lives, responsibilities, or feelings of other living things, as is the case when a bear attacks and kills a person whose family is nearby.If the balance tips in favor of humans—if human interests in inflicting harm on an animal are stronger than the animals’ interests in not being made to suffer—we consider that the use or treatment is morally justified because it is necessary. . . . We must agree that if the prohibition against animal suffering is to have any meaning at all, it is morally and legally wrong to inflict suffering on animals merely for our amusement.
Writer and philosopher Roger Scruton frames the issue this way: “American jurisprudence has always been clear that rights cannot be had for free. . . . Rights cannot be invented without also inventing the social and legal relations that enable us to uphold them. . . . Rights ought not to be given but purchased, and the price is duty.”
Charles R. Pulver, who writes for the Catholic weekly Wanderer, offers an illustration. If an eagle has a legal right to life, it would be bound to respect the same rights granted to a mouse. Once the eagle eats a mouse, the eagle would have to be convicted and punished for committing murder. Pulver writes,
Illustrating “the utter foolishness of so-called animal rights,” Pulver concludes that animals can never hold duties because they cannot distin- guish right from wrong and have no moral sense as humans do. Therefore, granting any animal rights would be absurd.The majestic bird must be read his Miranda rights, be given counsel, and be tried by a jury of his peers. We may assume that his “peers” should be members of his own species, i.e., fellow eagles. Or perhaps mice should be included on the jury, since eagles would be strongly biased to favor the defendant. . . . Would the convicted killer get life without parole or the death penalty?
One major flaw with this argument, says Peter Singer, father of the animal liberation movement, is that humans who cannot make moral decisions are granted legal rights. The severely mentally disabled and the unborn fetus, for example, enjoy protection under the law, even if they are unable to understand or make ethical choices. Singer asserts, “On any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, selfconsciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure, pain, and so on, the calf, the pig, and the much-derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy.” Singer believes that any of those animals deserve more rights than an unborn child.
As can be clearly seen when examining the arguments of animal rights advocates and opponents, determining whether and which animals should be granted rights is exceedingly complex. The authors in At Issue: Do Animals Have Rights? debate many of the issues surrounding this question, such as whether animal experimentation and cloning violate animals’ rights.
