ANIMAL RIGHTS: WHAT IS IT?

A Handy Print-Out Guide to Animal Rights

(From Chapter Five of Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror)

Animal rights is the development of respect for the interests of conscious beings in living on their terms rather than under human dominion.

Animal rights, like ethics, is understood most clearly not as a plural term, but in the singular. Animal rights is not a list of things we give, but an attitude of respect.

The arguments against animal rights are largely irrelevant to its essence. Conscious beings are not attempting to get into our social contracts, enjoy privileges without corresponding responsibilities, or impose complex rules of conduct upon us.

Animal rights, as distinguished from the extension of humane welfare provisions, is fundamentally an issue of justice. The more justice prevails, the less charity is needed. Thus, the guiding principle isn’t to help them, but to aspire not to interfere. At essence, it would mean their privacy from our intrusions.

The advent of animal rights philosophy in a truly radical, egalitarian form would defy millennia of social conditioning. It is, at essence, the repudiation of violence, of seeing others as instruments to our ends, of taking advantage.

The advent of animal rights philosophy would mean the most comprehensive peace movement ever known. Not only would it turn swords into ploughshares; it would dedicate those ploughshares to an agriculture of peace.

Animal rights is the cultivation of ethics without borders.

 

Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (July 2006), is written by Friends of Animals' legal Director Lee Hall, and is available through Nectar Bat Press, Darien, Connecticut, U.S.; Tel: 203.656.1522