Animal Rights Quiz
Have you ever seen a young kid torturing a small animal and thought, number one, there’s a future serial killer, and number two, why does that animal not have the same rights as me? There are lots of animal rights questions that need answering. So let’s look at it another way. Are there animals that experience life in a similar way to humans? If so, do they deserve the same protection and rights as humans?
When you look at it a little more deeply it’s not a simple question. With a growing number of people fighting to protect animals in this way right now. The problem is you can’t just say ok animal or human we all deserve the same rights, let’s just treat all animals as humans from now on. It’s not that easy because there’s a lot of legal stuff to consider.
Let's start with the definition of a person
Philosophers have been grappling with this for millennia, but we’ll keep our definition simple. We’ll say that a human is an individual with free will and a sound mind. This definition extends to all human beings regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. But you’ll notice this definition only focuses on mental attributes. It doesn’t mention anything about the physical attributes of humans, like having two legs and walking upright. But you can’t just say ok animals or humans, let’s all have the same rights and move forward because there’s another definition of person.
The legal personhood
This allows a person’s rights, responsibilities, and legal attributes to be given to something that is most definitely not a person. You see this all the time with corporations who are able to enter into legally binding contracts and be sued. They are considered under law, to be a person. So the law obviously works for things that are not human, why not just extend this to animals. The basis of that concept is that some animals are intelligent enough and emotional enough that they experience life similar to that of a human child. And as a result, they deserve the same protections that human children received. Like not being abused or tortured the right to life and the right to freedom, things like that.
This idea has been picking up steam in the last couple of decades. In 1992 Switzerland amended its constitution to change animals from things to beings. Ten years later in 2002, Germany did the same. Another five years in 2007 and Spain’s Balearic Islands, gave legal rights to great apes. in the USA there was a case where the director of the nonhuman Rights Project sued a university in New York over the freedom of two chimpanzees. And the case was going pretty well for him. The judge ruled that the university needed to show proof why it was holding these two chimpanzees and actually use the term habeas corpus which to that point had only been applied to human beings. Although the ruling was quickly reversed the next day. This case is still considered a watershed moment in the animal rights movement.
animal rights has its critics too
Some people say okay if we did extend these same legal protections that humans have to animals like apes or dolphins, or elephants, then how do you assess the same responsibilities that humans have, for example, if one monkey killed and ate another monkey do you charge that monkey with murder. And even if you do, and you try him, who makes up his jury. There’s a lot of prickly legal questions that will be opened up, but this does seem to be the way that the animal rights movement is moving.
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