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I'm curious where animals get rights from in the first place? Serious question.

• salmanapk 14y ago
  From having feelings? WTF is wrong with you people.
  • hkmurakami 14y ago
    crap sorry I meant to upvote you but misclicked and downvoted you. I'll go upvote a random different post of yours to compensate. I'll also add that animals can feel 'pain'. The world is a better place with less overall pain.
  • Volpe 14y ago
    There are lots of ways to express how we should treat eachother (and animals), other than "Rights". Being able to think outside of the existing paradigm of rights based thinking is not something that is "wrong" it is actually more 'considered' than knee jerk assertions.
• glesica 14y ago
  That's a tricky question. Start with a different, and probably easier (for many people) question: where do humans get rights? There are many possible answers. Some people think our rights come from God (or gods), others take different approaches. Ultimately it's just a matter of deciding what is important and "true". You have to invent your own axioms in some sense, I think. So, once you've done that, you can use those axioms to decide whether or not animals have rights.
• smtddr 14y ago
  To answer your question, first you'll have to tell us where you think humans get their rights from. For me, I'd say that animals, humans and the general respect for all life comes from (not so)common decency and/or religion.
  • lostlogin 14y ago
    Religion is a great hinderence to human and animal rights in my view - too much personal responsibility is passed off.
• davekinkead 14y ago
  Rights are the correlative of duties and obligations. If people have a duty not to X, then who ever that duty is owed to now has a right to X. As a being capable of moral reflection, I think I have a duty not to inflict, or support the infliction upon, other beings capable of feeling pain and suffering. Thus, other beings have a right not to be inflicted with pain and suffering, from me at least.
  • tantalor 14y ago
    > pain and suffering As far as you know.
    • a_bonobo 14y ago
      Depends on your definition of "suffering" - if it's >Physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury it has to be communicated to you, which in the case of animals is quite hard. On the other hand, if you define "suffering" as >an unpleasant situation causing signs of distress that is avoided by the sufferer, then you can make better predictions, because "avoidance" or "distress" are easier to measure.
    • colanderman 14y ago
      Ignorance is a poor excuse for moral blindness. If I am about to demolish a house, it is my moral duty to ensure that the house contains no occupants. It is not sufficient to claim "as far as I know the house is empty, therefore I needn't check". Similarly, if you make any moral claim predicated on the assumption that animals do not experience pain (or experience it to a lesser degree than humans), the burden is on you to demonstrate as much. If you do not take religion or the supernatural as an axiom, you face a very difficult proof due to the physiological and evolutionary similarities between humans and other animals.
      • icebraining 14y ago
        How does that work if we could (can?) not prove that plants and the other sources of food can feel pain? Does eating at all become immoral?
• jonmrodriguez 14y ago
  From a utilitarian standpoint, lets suppose that a human can feel +/- 100 utils, a pig can feel +/- 50 utils, and a chicken can feel +/- 20 utils. Even with these anthropocentric weightings, factory farming might be causing enough suffering to switch life on earth from net positive happiness to net negative.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    How says pigs get points?
    • lilsunnybee 14y ago
      Because they have a nervous system and the same brain as you as far as registering nerve impulses. If you've ever had a pet, they give all indications that they are suffering when they're in pain. If they give all indications of experiencing pain and suffering, though they cannot communicate this to us, the simplest explanation is that they feel pain and suffering.
• telesphore 14y ago
  Your question misses the point. Animals may not have the rights we grant a human, some would argue that they have no rights. But that does not mean that we then have the right to treat that creature with arbitrary cruelty. In fact, we don't allow arbitrary violence to be performed on inanimate objects, for instance you might get in trouble for damaging the Statue of Liberty. We decide what we will allow based on our own convictions, morals, customs, religion, etc. Many, likely most, people would agree that torturing animals,even those destined for slaughter, is wrong.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    In fact, we don't allow arbitrary violence to be performed on inanimate objects, for instance you might get in trouble for damaging the Statue of Liberty. That's not a right of the object, it's a right of the people who own the object. If I make a replica of the Statue, I can do whatever I please with it, including burning it to the ground.
• twentysix 14y ago
  We endowed it upon them. These rights apply only in human - animal relations and not animal - animal relations. Carnivorous animals and other plants are free to do as they like to their fellow beings. But, from what I know animals rarely abuse other animals for no reason. Usually there is a good reason for them to attack another animal like food, territory, self defense or if they are ill( elephants in musth, rabid dogs and wolves). What am trying to say is that animals get rights from the same place that we get rights, laws and social norms. Animals are farmed and killed for us to eat, the least we can do is to treat them with respect while they are alive. I am sleepy.
  • intended 14y ago
    From what I recall there are definitely cases of animal animal abuse - as in one animal torturing another for amusement. For the life of me I can't remember the exact incident. I do know of 1 monkey which decided to tease the ever living daylights out of a tiger/lion though.
    • sxp 14y ago
      Cats have a habit of playing with their food while their prey is still alive. If that cat was a human, then what they do would probably be classified as animal abuse.
    • boon 14y ago
      Is that really abuse? Play is one of those behaviors that animals exhibit to prepare for dangerous encounters. Arguably, that is just as important to their species survival.
    • tomjen3 14y ago
      Dolphins are rapist and attack their fellow dolphins for fun.
  • zizee 14y ago
    > But, from what I know animals rarely abuse other animals for no reason. Not trying to undermine your point, but wanted to point out that animals aren't always as noble as you suggest. Ever seen a cat playing with a mouse? http://youtu.be/O0qMT2YBIcg?t=27s http://youtu.be/O0qMT2YBIcg?t=27s
• fleitz 14y ago
  The same place we do, natural law, note that under natural law we can do whatever we please. The underpinnings of non-fiat social contract is the idea that we give up certain rights to the state, namely the right to commit violence against others, in exchange for protection of the remaining rights. In all honesty though we get our rights from wherever we can convince others that we have those rights, for example in the UK if you're born to the right parents you have the right to live in buckingham palace. They claim those people get those rights from God.
• n3rdy 14y ago
  Nobody and nothing gives you rights. You are born with them, and its up to you to assert them for yourself. Nobody is obligated to protect your rights for you (and vice versa), but they can do so voluntarily. Looking at it like this, it makes animal rights a matter of morality. An animal cannot defend its own rights, so they depend on humans to voluntarily defend their rights for them. Nobody is obligated to do so, but its reasonable to believe the world would be a better place if we treated animals better.
  • 1123581321 14y ago
    How do you know animals are born with such rights (or if humans are, for that matter), and if they want to exercise them the way you exercise what you believe to be yours? A somewhat facetious take on it from Chesterton: But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle -- that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism. Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant. Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.
• captain_mars 14y ago
  Let's assume that animals don't have any rights. Still, they do feel emotions such as joy and fear, and physical sensations such as pleasure and pain. And how we treat them does have an effect on which of these they are going to feel. Would I go out of my way to cause pain to an animal? Would I go out of my way to prevent pain to it? On what basis should I decide? I think everything we do says, "this is who I am". That is, through every action (or inaction), we make a statement about how we perceive of ourselves. If I perceive of myself as a kind person, I would be conflicted about doing anything that I know will cause pain to another sentient being. If I have low self-esteem and don't think of myself as a particularly nice person, I might not make much of an effort to regulate my behavior to account for the effect it might have on others. So, I would say that we forget about "animal rights", and think only about whether our actions truly reflect the kind of people and the kind of society we wish to be.
• jtheory 14y ago
  Oh man, I love this discussion but I'm late to the party. Before the animal question -- where do people get rights? "Rights" are absolutely not inherent to anyone or anything... though it serves our society if people believe that rights are natural and inherent. The language of rights reinforces that view, but it's obviously false if you think it through; they're a language construct around a behavioral guide. In reality, a single entity (person/animal/etc.) has no rights whatsoever. What "rights" do you have when you're alone? They only serve any purpose when you're interacting with others. Rights are something a thinking entity recognizes (acts as if they exist) in others. If you "recognize" a right in another entity, you guide your behavior to avoid violating that right. So generally non-humans aren't capable of respecting human rights -- your dog can't personally understand that the mailman has a right to unhampered movement in public walkways. But that's irrelevant to whether "animal rights" can exist -- if a thinking person recognizes that an animal has a right (to no undue suffering, whatever), that animal now has that right. In the eyes of that one person, anyway. The animal rights struggle is generally about getting more people generally to respect rights in animals, and then enshrining those rights in law (to force recognition of those rights even in people who don't intellectually agree the right is merited). I love thinking about this stuff because the language is so misleading -- I was confused about rights for many years, before I finally sat down and mapped out what actually happens IRL when various rights were respected, violated, etc..