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Animal Rights

Businesses use animals in numerous ways. The fish and meat on the table for dinner come from farms, fish markets, and butchers. Many items of clothing are from the leather industry, the animal dye industry, and the fur trade. Circuses, zoos, and trained-animal fights (such as cockfights) are parts of the entertainment industry. Many cosmetics have been safety tested on animals, and the pharmaceutical and chemical industries each year expend millions of research dollars on millions of animals used in toxicological studies.

Many businesses have internal review committees established, at least in part, to protect the interests of research animals. Their charge is to see that prevailing policies intended to protect animals are properly implemented and that pain and suffering are minimized. Many corporations in the pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetics industries have such committees, often with veterinarians and other experts on animals involved in deliberations. However, committees in these industries may intentionally allow a high level of harmful activity, such as the acute toxicity test (increasing doses until animal welfare is seriously compromised). Other industries—such as circuses, slaughter houses, and farms—generally do not use ethics committees for purposes of reviewing their practices (though these industries are regulated by governments in some uses of animals). Concerns in these industries center more on having healthy animals, a pragmatic rather than moral concern.

Differences in the review of uses of animals derives in part from tradition and in part from diverse conceptions of when animals have interests that must, from a moral point of view, be protected.

Do Animals have Rights?

Animal rights is a generic term that refers to a wide range of accounts of how animals should be protected against human misuse. The language of rights derives historically from the need for strong and meaningful protections of citizens in political states against oppression, unequal treatment, intolerance, and the like. Given this history, many framers of declarations about protections for animals chose rights language as the basic terminology. Others interested in animal welfare intentionally do not use the language of rights.

Although the term animal rights movement is broadly used, social movements to protect animal interests divide roughly into two (or, when the two are combined, three) different types or approaches: (1) those who believe that animals have rights (animal rightists) and (2) those who believe that animals do not have rights but that humans have obligations to protect the welfare interests of animals (animal welfarists). A third position situated between these two approaches holds that rights and obligations are correlative, and therefore, whenever an animal has a right some human has an obligation and whenever a human has an obligation to an animal, the animal has a right. Thus, if a farmer has obligations to feed his cattle and abstain from using painful electrical prods, then the cattle have rights to be fed and not to have the pain inflicted.

Animal rightists generally endorse strong positions on rights, for example, declaring that certain animals have a right to life, a right to an uncontaminated habitat, a right not to be constrained in tight cages or pens, and comparable rights. “Rights” are here understood as justified claims that individual animals or groups of animals have and that are binding on human agents and societies. If an individual or group possesses a right, others are validly constrained from interfering with the exercise of that right. A right, then, is a justified claim or entitlement. The position that animals have such rights has been regarded by many critics as an inappropriate and innovative doctrine, and some even view it as a radical, revolutionary doctrine. Nonetheless, the view that animals have rights has come to be one of the most important ideas in the literature on animals and human responsibilities for them.

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