ANIMALS AND LAW: QUEST FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS

Abstract

People are not going to think about Animal Conservation until they think that animals are worthwhile.

- David Attenborough

Being alive is a sufficient condition for an individual having inherent value. Animals in this way are to be considered as individuals who have inherent value. We are to treat these individuals in ways that respect their inherent value, i.e., it requires a respectful treatment of all who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criteria. It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of Justice. It is respect for their inherent value. Animals have certain basic moral rights, including in particular the fundamental right to be treated with respect they are due, as a matter of strict justice. Animals shall be treated at par with humans, as their life has the same philosophical value as the Human Life. Ethics view that while rejecting Racism and Sexism, accept Speciesism, with a Neologism that elopes to the parallel intra-human prejudices, the view that grants to the members of our own species, a privileged status with respect to all other creatures- are internally inconsistent, for Speciesism and Racism are twin doctrines. Humans generally argue that Animals are not mentally developed the same way as themselves and thus have no or low consciousness. Animals do possess the power to understand and respond, maybe not as powerful as Humans but the concept of ‘Animal Consciousness’ does exist. Routine use of animals in research assumes that their value is reducible to their possible utility relative to the interests of others. They, like us, have a value of their own, logically independent of their utility for others and of their being object of anyone else’s interests. To treat them in ways that respect their value, requires that we do not sanction practices that institutionalize treating them as if their value was reducible to their possible utility relative to our interests. Today’s vocal defenders of animal rights are branded as species-ists of the Animal Rights Movement. Sometimes the classical view treated animals as a distinctive form of property; at other times, animals became the object of public regulation. In both settings, the legal rules were imposed largely for the benefit of human beings in their role as owners of animals. None of our laws dealing with animals put the animals’ front, they center the holder of the animal as the owner of property and its rights respectively. The challenge for anyone trying to describe a process through which one learns about animals and with animals as ‘Humane Education’, then, it is to focus not only on the final rules for behaviors toward animals, but also to examine the path way to those roles. The authors focus on the rights and respect that animals deserve but are not given any, and how one can take the initiative to make a difference and bring Animal Rights at par with Human Rights.