ysvlek: animal cruelty quotes

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The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School. Animal rights is routinely covered in universities in philosophy or applied ethics courses, and as of 2011 animal law was taught in 135 law schools in the United States and Canada. Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby argued in 2008 that the movement had reached the stage the gay rights movement was at 25 years earlier.

stop animal abuse quotes

Critics of the idea argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and for that reason cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote in 2000 that only humans have duties and therefore only humans have rights. There has also been criticism, including from within the animal rights movement itself, of certain forms of animal rights activism, in particular the destruction of fur farms and animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front. A parallel argument is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources so long there is no unnecessary suffering, a view known as the animal welfare position.

Stop animal abuse

The 21st-century debates about how humans should treat animals can be traced to the ancient world. The idea that the use of animals by humans—for food, clothing, entertainment, and as research subjects—is morally acceptable, springs mainly from two sources. First, there is the idea of a divine hierarchy based on the theological concept of "dominion," from Genesis (1:20–28), where Adam is given "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Although the concept of dominion need not entail property rights, it has been interpreted over the centuries to imply ownership. There is also the idea that animals are inferior because they lack rationality and language, and as such are worthy of less consideration than humans, or even none. Springing from this is the idea that individual animals have no separate moral identity: a pig is simply an example of the class of pigs, and it is to the class, not to the individual, that human stewardship should be applied. This leads to the argument that the use of individual animals is acceptable so long as the species is not threatened with extinction.