Why Do Animal Rights Matter

Let us use our imagination to start. Place yourself in the backyard. It is evening time, but during the warmer months of the year. Your family is gathered around. Parents on the deck. A sibling and yourself are playing catch with an implement of your choosing. Soon, your sibling throws the implement in a way that you can not handle. It goes past your hand, and smacks the family pet square in the snout. You drop to a knee, and plead with the pet for forgiveness.

What made you react in that way? The pet may not be hurt, but you still reacted like it had been drop kicked 14 yards. You care immensely for your pet. We care to the point of which we believe animals have rights. Animal Rights are believed to belong to animals to live free from use in medical research, hunting, and other services to humans.

In a way, one of those services animals perform is being food. The food industry could care less about the way they treats animals. According to Karen Emmerman, a part-time philosophy professor at the University of Washington, 10 billion animals are killed for food. Nine billion of which are chickens. Both numbers are truly astonishing.

There are some legal implications in place in the form of laws that are built to help animals. State laws do not protect animals raised for food. Even federal laws such as the Animal Welfare Act does not apply to farmed animals. The Animal Welfare Act is a federal law that addresses the standard of care animals receive at research facilities. Yet it excludes roughly 95% of the animals tested upon. Those animals include rates, mice, birds, fish and reptiles.  It also provides only minimal protection for the rest. Labs are not required to report non-AWA protected animals.

The 28-hour law revolves around a rather disgusting situation. Animals are transported on multi-leveled trailers. While in the trailer, animals are left without food and scared. They have nowhere to excrete, except for on top of and amongst each other. By law, animals are only supposed to be transported for 28 hours in these conditions before earning a break. In most cases, that deadline can be extended to 36 hours. Even then, these laws are rarely enforced.

In the end, the animals who face these conditions are on their way to die. It becomes horrible to think about. That’s why most people do not. The question I want to explore, is why do animal rights matter?

Trying to sympathize with the animals, knowing that their fate awaits is a complex matter. According to the USDA, as of 2014 The food marketing system, including food service and food retailing, supplied about $1.46 trillion worth of food. It is an unfathumable number that becomes humbeling.

It’s really hard to try and reshape the impact that the food industry has on our society. Full-service and fast food restaurants, the two largest segments of the commercial foodservice market, account for about 79 percent of all food away from home sales. According to the National Restaurant Association, restaurants are the Nation’s second-largest private-sector employer, providing jobs for one in 10 Americans. The production of different type of meats would cause restaurants to shut down, taking jobs away from humans. Kind of baffling to think about.  

We become concerned about animal rights because we can acknowledge that the animals have characteristics that we can recognize. People can tell when dogs are threatened. People can tell that cats are happy. Animal rights teach us that certain things are wrong as a matter of principle, that there are some things that it is morally wrong to do to animals.

The argument against animal rights stem tend to discredit the abilities animals have. St Thomas Aquinas taught that animals acted purely on instinct while human beings engaged in rational thought. He also taught that the universe was constructed as a hierarchy in which beings at a lower level were there to serve those above them.The French philosopher Rene Descartes, and many others, taught that animals were no more than complicated biological robots.

Unfortunately, those arguments discredit the abilities of humans. Biologically, humans and animals have similar levels of complexity. Both know what’s happening around them. Both choose what they like and dislike. Among other things, they live in a way that gives themselves the best quality lives.

That’s why humans consume so much meat. It tastes good. It is satisfying. They disregard another living being in order to enhance their own life. If people have problems with the roles being reversed, then the argument is settled. Farming animals shouldn’t be a practice, but it is.

A great example of humans trying to seperate themselves from animals is the language humans use when referring to food. Cow is called beef. Pig is called pork. In a book titled The Rape of Animals, The Butchering of Women, Carol J. Adams talks about an idea called the absent referent. The Absent Referent, is made to refer to something that disappears from the picture. The most obvious example of the absent referent deals with food, but it is used to blend into other problems as well.

Humans struggle to sympathize with animals and their rights, but believe in the rights of their fellow human. There are plenty of entertaining jokes on the internet having to do with Sarah McLaughlin. McLaughlin serves as a spokesperson that supports the BC SPCA End Animal Cruelty campaign. An example of the commercial is below.

The images from the video’s are brutal. For those animals, it is the reality of the life they are forced to live. The discomfort is obvious from they way they look and the way they behave. This meme shows how people react to those commercial. Selfishly valuing their own life, and the life of other humans as more valuable than those of animals. All this, despite being biologically similar to our furry friends.

Animal Rights are a complicated matter. People have manipulated nature and all things in it give themselves the most comfortable life possible. Realistically, we’ve all been beneficiary of this way of thinking. According to the USDA, as of 2014 The food marketing system, including food service and food retailing, supplied about $1.46 trillion worth of food. That type of industry is almost too powerful to reshape.

It’s obvious that animals show characteristics that help us realize their emotions. Animal rights teach us that certain things are wrong as a matter of principle, that there are some things that it is morally wrong to do to animals. If we can find a way to sympathize with these living beings, we can strive to make a difference in the lives of those animals and others. As humans, our goal in our time on this earth is leave it better than we found it. If we make an effort to treat animals better than they are being treated now, that goal can be achieved. Animal rights are important because animals are living beings we share the planet with and we are morally obligated to treat them with respect.

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