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 an

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..