Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
AT: “Can Achieve Justice Short of Recognition of Rights”
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- AT: “Focus on Animal Welfare Enough—Don’t Need Rights”
AT: “Can Achieve Justice Short of Recognition of Rights”PERSONHOOD STATUS ALONE INSUFFICIENT—MUST HAVE RIGHTS AS WELL Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 141 Nonhumans need a number of rights that constitutional personhood confers on humans, such as a right to life. Eventually after emancipation, virtually all nonhumans would be free-living and non “domesticated.” Free-living nonhumans can’t be completely isolated from humans. Geese visit “our” ponds; squirrels enter our backyards; pigeons roost on our buildings. We encounter bears in the forest and crabs on the seashore. Wherever they may be, nonhumans need protection against humans. They need legal rights that prevent human interference. Unless buzzards and coyotes have a legal right to life, humans can shoot or poison them without impunity. Following emancipation, humans couldn’t legally hunt, Francione says, because hunting is “a form of institutionalized exploitation.” In its current form, yes. However, individual humans could hunt unless emancipated nonhumans had a right to life. Francione sometimes refers to the “one right” that he advocates for nonhumans as a right “not to be treated as a resource.” If I murder a human out of anger, I haven’t treated them as a resource. Nevertheless, I’ve violated their right to life. Nonhuman rights, too, can be violated whether or not nonhumans are regarded as resources. When an exterminator murders all of the wasps who live in a nest attached to a house, the wasps are viewed as pests, not resources. Their murder doesn’t involve any exploitation. Wasps need a legal right to life. Similarly, when humans kill a nonpoisonous snake out of irrational fear and dislike, they aren’t treating the snake as a resource. Snakes need a legal right to life. According to Francione, abolishing institutionalized speciesist exploitation would eliminate the vast majority of human-nonhuman conflicts. I agree that emancipation would eliminate a massive amount of nonhuman suffering and death. However, it wouldn’t eliminate human-nonhuman conflicts over land or other natural resources such as water. These conflicts are ongoing and worldwide. END OF PROPERTY STATUS ALONE INSUFFICIENT—MUST HAVE RIGHTS AS WELL Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 147 Cavalieri’s book The Animal Question is subtitled Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights. Nonhumans should have every relevant legal right currently reserved for humans, such as a right not be kidnapped, maimed, or murdered. Emancipated nonhumans wouldn’t be integrated into human society; nonhumans’ forced “participation” in human society would end. However, free and independent nonhumans would need legal protection from humans. Racism toward African-Americans didn’t end when they ceased to be property. Nor will speciesism end when nonhumans cease to be property. Free humans have legal rights. Free nonhumans must have them as well.
Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 50* A defender of animal welfare may agree that the current standards of animal welfare are inadequate, but may argue that the solution is to improve animal welfare and not reject it in favor of animal rights. The problem with this approach, however, is that all forms of animal welfare, including the theory articulated by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1990) are linked by the notion that it is morally justifiable to support the institutionalized exploitation of animals under some circumstances. All versions of animal welfare necessarily involve the use of a balancing construct; because animals are regarded as property, it is difficult to understand how this balancing construct could be adjusted to ensure greater animal protection. It is, of course, possible to conceive of a situation in which animals were not regarded as property but were also not regarded as rightholders. Presumably, animal interests would be taken more seriously were animals not regarded, as a matter of law, as solely means to human ends. The problem is that if humans are still rightholders and animals are not (although they would no longer be regarded as property), then any welfarist balancing of human and animal interests would still weigh interests protected by right against interest unprotected by right. AT: “Focus on Animal Welfare Enough—Don’t Need Rights”TURN - HUMANE TREATMENT PERCEPTION MASKS UNDERLYING ABUSE Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 60 “Welfarist” campaigns suggest that the problem lies in specific abuses (such as excruciatingly small cages) rather than the whole, needless, unjust enterprise of exploiting nonhumans for food. They keep the focus off genuine freedom. The goal becomes slightly less horrendous prison conditions—room to flap one’s wings, space to turn around, 67 square inches of space instead of 48 – rather than release from false imprisonment. Until nonhuman advocates demand emancipation and stop sending mixed messages, emancipation will be endlessly deferred.
In a 2000 Zogby America poll of 1,204 US adults, 81 percent of respondents indicated that they’d willingly pay more for eggs from hens kept under better conditions. Many people feel better about eating animal-derived food if they believe that the victims were treated humanely. A façade of humaneness helps companies to sell eggs, flesh and milk. The press fosters the illusion that McDonald’s and other corporations have “set tough standards for animal welfare.” About 8 by 8.5 inches of space for each hen? That’s tough only on the hens. “The United States is dramatically improving the quality of lives—and the humaneness of the deaths—of the cows, pigs, and chickens that we eat.” That’s how a 2003 USA Today article begins. And that’s an utterly false statement. It sanitizes food-industry enslavement and slaughter and comforts consumers of animal-derived food.
Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 131-2 We could, of course, treat animals better than we do; there are, however, powerful economic forces that militate against better treatment in light of the status of animals as property. But simply according better treatment to animals would not mean that they are no longer things. It may have been better to beat slaves three rather than five times a week, but this better treatment would not have removed slaves from the category of things. The similar interests of slave owners and slaves were not accorded similar treatment because the former had a right not to suffer at all from being used exclusively as a resource, and the latter did not possess such a right. Animals, like humans, have an interest in not suffering at all from the ways in which we use them, however “humane” that use may be. To the extent that we protect humans from suffering from these uses and we do not extend the same protections to animals, we fail to accord equal consideration to animal interests in not suffering. TURN - MORAL OBLIGATION TO SUPPORT ABOLITIONIST NOT WELFARE GOALS Tom Regan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, 2001, Defending Animal Rights, p. 43 It is on this basis that I reach conclusions that, in Jan Naverson’s cheerful words, qualify me as “a starry eyed radical” (Narveson 1987:38). In my view, since the utiliazation of nonhuman animals for purposes of, among other things, fashion, research, entertainment, or gustatory delight harms them and treats them as (our) resources, and since such treatment violates the right to be treated with respect, it follows that such utilization is morally wrong and ought to end. Merely to reform such institutional injustice (by resolving to eat only “happy” cows or to insist on larger cages, for example) is not enough. Morally considered, abolition is required.
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