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ANIMAL RIGHTS

use are practical: they are often healthier, safer, and more informative for human beings.

Regardless of the type of abuse an animal is subjected to, from a moral perspective it is all the same. Animals great and small share basic characteristics with man. We all possess a varying degree of intelligence. We all care for and teach our young. We all have a sense of home and what constitutes a suitable habitat. We know and experience contentment and joy, pain and suffering. All animals possess a claim on life and a right to exist. Opponents of animal rights suggest that because animals do not possess the same faculties for reason, intelligence, and contemplation that humans do, that therefore we are justified in destroying them at will(Singer 18-19).

However, the argument for animal rights shows the fallacy in this idea. Human beings all individually possess very different capacities for reason, intelligence, and contemplation. Some of us are brilliant, and some of us are mentally handicapped. And yet we do not say that those people who cannot understand molecular biology, or cannot read, have less inherent value than those who can. We are all conscious, feeling beings with similar core dimensions of life; we all know satisfaction and frustration, elation and misery, and therefore we are all equal. Animals too know satisfaction and frustration, elation and misery; we must, by the dictates of our own system, afford them with the same inherent value that we afford ourselves(Regan, 35-37).

And ultimately, the capacity to reason and contemplate is introduced by anti-animal rights activists as a proof that animals do not understand their own interests, that they are incapable of making rational choices as humans do. Kathleen Marquardt, founder of Putting People First, a group designed to combat animal-rights activists, asserts "Animals can't choose, so they can't have rights"(Monagie 20). But consider: if a being is...

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ANIMAL RIGHTS. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:35, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705906.html