Rights of Animals, The | Introduction
In China, consumers ensure that the food they buy is fresh by buying live animals— chickens, ducks, fish, frogs, and turtles, among others—and having the animals butchered either in front of them in the market or at home. In the United States, many Chinese immigrants continue this practice, sometimes to the consternation of a segment of the American population that considers the housing of these animals and their subsequent slaughter to be inhumane. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese desire for fresh meat led to a lawsuit in 1998 by animal rights activists against Chinatown’s market owners.
The animal advocates sought a ban on the selling of live frogs and turtles in Chinese markets, and contended that the butchering of the animals violated health codes and anticruelty statues. According to the advocates’ charges, the animals were kept in cramped, unsanitary containers and were inhumanely butchered. Eric Mills, an animal rights activist with Action for Animals, argued that even animals destined to be killed for food have the right to be housed and killed in humane conditions. He maintains that he has seen frogs and turtles stacked so high atop one another that the ones on the bottom are crushed to death. Mills also claims the animals were routinely denied food and water, and he says frogs were skinned alive and the shells ripped off turtles that were also still alive, all practices that he asserts are cruel and inhumane.
The lawsuit brought by the animal rights activists was dismissed in July 1998 by Superior Court judge Carlos T. Bea, who ruled that people have the right to kill animals for food. He quoted verses from the Bible that said man has dominion over “every living thing that moveth upon the earth” to support his decision. Moreover, Bea doubted whether animals even feel pain. “Absent such evidence of [a pain-sensing constitution], to find pain in the animal would be to indulge in anthropomorphic speculation, which is hardly a sufficient basis for the application of criminal statutes,” he wrote. Following the dismissal of their lawsuit, animal rights activists reached a compromise with the Chinese markets. The Chinese market owners agreed to house the animals humanely; to kill the animals before they leave the market and before removing their feathers, skin, or shells.
The controversy over the killing of animals in the Chinese markets of San Francisco’s Chinatown illustrates how most Americans’ views toward animals have changed in the last two centuries. Until the early 1800s, animals were viewed mostly as unfeeling property whose sole purpose in life was to benefit humans by providing needed food, labor, and clothing. At the end of the twentieth century, many Americans have come to believe that animals are capable of experiencing pain and suffering and that humans should do all they can to protect them, whether that means not eating or hunting them, wearing their fur, using them in experiments, or exploiting them for their labor or companionship.
This change in thinking was a very gradual process that began in the eighteenth century when a few noted philosophers began writing treatises on the rights of animals. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) considered the question of animal rights and concluded, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” Bentham and others believed the answer was “yes,” and therefore, animals had the right to be treated humanely and to be free from pain and suffering. The idea of treating animals humanely spread until New York passed the first anticruelty statute in the United States in 1829. The law— which prohibited the malicious injuring or killing of farm animals such as horses, oxen, cattle, or sheep—followed an 1822 English law known as Martin’s Act that was the first law to prohibit cruelty toward animals. By 1907 every state had passed anticruelty legislation, and by 1923 the laws also prohibited animal neglect and abandonment, cockfighting, and certain hunting traps, among other restrictions.
In 1958, Congress passed the first federal law concerning the humane treatment of farm animals, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. The act required slaughterhouses to stun animals prior to killing them if their meat was to be sold to the federal government. This law eventually became the standard for all animals sent to slaughter for their meat. In 1966, Congress passed the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act, which regulated the care and treatment of animals other than rodents used in research experiments. Zoo and circus animals were added to the act’s provisions in 1970 and 1976. New rules concerning the treatment of research animals were passed in 1985 after an activist from the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who was working undercover at a research lab, released a videotape of monkeys being mistreated.
PETA soon became an important force in the animal rights movement. By going undercover and videotaping animal treatment at research facilities and by recruiting celebrities to promote its point of view, PETA was able to attract much media attention to its cause. PETA and its followers believe that animals are not put on the earth for humans “to eat, wear, perform experiments on, or use for entertainment.” This view has gained wider acceptance as more people make a conscious choice to demonstrate against the use of animals in circus acts, to forgo the wearing of fur, and to eat less meat or become vegetarian.
Not all Americans share the point of view of PETA and its supporters, however. As Bea makes clear in his decision supporting the Chinese markets, many people continue to view animals as creatures whose purpose is to provide food, clothing, labor, and companionship for humans. Furthermore, those who support the use of animals in medical research point out the hypocrisy of animal rights advocates who push scientists to find a cure for breast cancer, AIDS, or other diseases. Performing experiments on animals is vital to determine how cancerous cells are formed, the researchers argue, or discover how a drug will affect the disease or the body. Researchers and scientists have come to accept, along with most other people, that all animals, whether used in experiments or not, should be treated humanely. What they do not accept, however, are the views of animal rights activists who claim that animals have the same moral rights as humans, and therefore, denounce medical cures if they have been achieved through animal experimentation.
Furthermore, some contemporary philosophers support the argument against endowing animals with an intrinsic worth equal to that of humans. R.G. Frey, a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green University in Ohio and the author of several books and articles on animal rights, asserts, “One can perfectly consistently oppose cruelty to all sentient creatures without having to suppose that the lives of all such creatures are equally valuable.” Human life is more valuable than animal life, he argues, because it is richer and full of choices that add a dimension that animals are unable to experience.
During the past two centuries, the status of animals has changed from one of no rights, in which animals could be treated in whatever way the owner saw fit, to one in which animal rights activists and their opponents debate whether animals have the same moral rights as humans. The moral equivalency of animals and humans is at the heart of the issues considered in The Rights of Animals: Current Controversies. Throughout this anthology, the authors examine the rights of animals and whether humans have the right to experiment on them and use them for food, clothing, and entertainment.
