by Jerry Curtis

Created on: June 26, 2007

Yes, the concept of "animal rights" as advocated by none other than Animal Rights.com, goes too far. Conceptually, the Animal Rights folks would force everyone to become vegans, unless we could convince them that cows milk and chicken eggs were extracted humanely. There would be no more medical research using animals, and motorcycle gangs would have to give up leather. Next, animal rights advocates believe that, since there is no food chain among living creatures, animals should be treated like humans and given "rights."

Here is a first hand statement from Animal Rights.com:

"The fundamental principle of the AR movement is that nonhuman animals deserve to live according to their own natures, free from harm, abuse, and exploitation. This goes further than just saying that we should treat animals well while we exploit them, or before we kill and eat them. It says animals have the RIGHT to be free from human cruelty and exploitation, just as humans possess this right. The withholding of this right from the nonhuman animals based on their species membership is referred to as "speciesism"."

That kindly manifesto is illustrative of the uncompromising attitude of advocates of this movement. They purport that animals have the RIGHT to be free from being exploited as products of our food industry, because, well, they just do.

How should this treatment be manifested, and what changes should we make in our attitudes towards animals? Read on:

(Again, from Animal Rights.com)"Animal rights activists try to extend the human circle of respect and compassion beyond our species to include other animals, who are also capable of feeling pain, fear, hunger, thirst, loneliness, and kinship. When we try to do this, many of us come to the conclusion that we can no longer support factory farming, vivisection, and the exploitation of animals for entertainment..."

Excluding from our discussion the extreme activities of an organization known as "The Animal Liberation Front," and the fact that we now have a federal law on the books that equates violence on behalf of animal liberation as terrorism, let's look at the fundamental views of animal rights activists.

Do animals have "rights"? What is a right, anyway? Black's Law Dictionary says that a "right" as "taken in an abstract sense, means justice, ethical correctness, or consonance with the rules of law or the principles of morals." So, in the ethical sense and in the abstract, animals could be considered to have some basic rights because they

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