by Aran M

Created on: August 04, 2009   Last Updated: September 10, 2009

Do animals have rights? Under the law the answer is clearly no. Many people misunderstand the idea of rights, believing animal welfare laws equate to rights, this is not the case. Non-human animals can be treated in virtually any way humans want to as long as a benefit to humans can be shown. Killed for people's taste buds, kept in cages for our entertainment or electrocuted for fur trim on our clothes - animals clearly don't have rights under the law, the law simply limits the amount of cruelty that can be used.

But logically should animals have rights recognised in law? Is it acceptable to use animals for our own ends or do animals have basic rights that should not be violated? Well, animals feel pain and suffer and thus have interests, the question we must ask is what right to we have to violate those interests?

It is often argued that as animals are not believed to be as aware as most adult humans they cannot have rights, our interests as 'higher' beings always take priority. It is also argued that rights are something that must be reciprocated and the fact that other animals don't understand our system of rights excludes them from their protection.

However there are many humans that would fall outside our circles of protection if these tests were objectively applied. Young children and some severely mentally disabled human beings have a similarly low level of awareness and cannot be expected to reciprocate rights. We wouldn't dream of saying these people shouldn't have rights though.

The fact that animals can be negatively and positively affected by our actions, feel pain and suffer, means that there is no reason we should have the right to mistreat them for our own ends. It is simply not a relevant fact that they are not human beings. It is an inconvenient truth that animals are deserving of rights and it is simply discrimination to deny them.

This is not to say non-human animals should have the same rights as humans, animals do not need the right to education, for example. Animals should however be afforded relevant rights - to not have their lives taken by a human, the right not to be tortured and the right not to be unnecessarily imprisoned. Of course, rights are not absolute - everyone has the right to self-defense for example so the right to life is not absolute. But in a general sense humans as beings with the ability to consider morality should grant this form of protection to all those that feel regardless of the species barrier.

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