Animal Rights Issues

In a world increasingly filled with abuse, violence, neglect, and lack of regard for the lives of human beings, it becomes ever more difficult to uphold the rights and ethical treatment of other species as well. Babies both at the embryonic stage of development and full-term deliveries are discarded without a second thought. Children are tied to bedposts and starved, beaten to death, or sexually molested. In a society where such horrific acts proliferate daily, ethics, conscience, and humanity are lost. Unfortunately, people who cannot even support ethical treatment of people are completely immune to the need for ethical treatment of animals. Yet animals have rights just as people do, endowed by their Creator. As sensate beings with distinct personalities, many with impulses to help and serve others, and the same sensitivity to suffering as humans have, animals deserve to be treated with dignity, maintained without suffering, and provided a life that is not assaulted with treacheries devised by humans. The animal rights movement has many supporters who are "specifically concerned with the use of animals for medical and cosmetics testing, the killing of animals for furs, hunting for pleasure, and the raising of livestock in restrictive or inhumane quarters, so-called factory farming" (The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2107). This paper will examine the issues surrounding animal rights and discuss the reasons that animals should be treated humanely.

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Category: Psychology - A