Aldous Huxley once wrote that animals might regard human beings as Satan, considering the standard conditions of farmed animals.
Every year we see animals being lowered down by the crane from the rooftop, scared animals running on the street, and endangered birds being hunted by the royals. Wild animal is kept as a pet or stuffed in the living room to feed our ego.
According to the United Nations, the number of industrial livestock sent to slaughter each year is equivalent to eight times the human population on planet Earth.
Animal rights are violated in thousands of ways. When we breed animals so we can take their babies and eat them, we deliberately impregnate them so we can take their baby’s milk, we force them into a circus ring or cage them in the zoo. We use them for experiments in laboratories.
Animal rights are violated when we shoot or hunt them for fun, trap them for fur, and pluck out their feathers to fill duvets or jackets; we put them in a tank in our living rooms as a display object.
There is growing evidence of scientific knowledge suggesting that animals likely do experience pain, possess inner worlds, including memories, and show emotional sophistication. The physical and psychological pain endured by animals in places like factory farms has reached a point many consider to be unacceptable. Animals are mutilated by humans in several different ways, including castrations, dehorning, and cutting off various body parts, usually without the use of an anesthetic.
PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has said, “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig, a dog is a boy. Each one values his or her life and fights the knife.
The movement for animal rights aims to increase understanding, compassion, and respect for the multitude of nonhuman animal species with whom we share this planet. The philosophy of animal rights aims to reverse this objectification of animals, elevating their formal status from something to someone and ultimately releasing them from human exploitation of any kind, whether in farms, laboratories, or any other venue where their autonomy is typically denied. Animal rights would theoretically extend to animals living in wild habitats, making activities such as whaling and deer hunting a violation of those animals’ rights.
Animal rights form part of a way of thinking about nonhuman animals as off-limits for human exploitation. Animal rights come into direct opposition with animal exploitation, which includes animals used by humans for a variety of reasons, be it for food, as experimental objects, or even as pets. Animal rights can also be violated when it comes to the human destruction of animal habitats.
Animal welfare, on the other hand, is a set of practices designed to govern the treatment of animals who are being dominated by humans, whether for food, research, or entertainment.
In his book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer states that the basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration.
Speciesism, like racism and sexism, is wrong because animals popular in the meat industry, like cows and chickens, suffer when confined, tortured, and slaughtered, and there is no reason to morally distinguish between humans and nonhuman animals.
Factory farming for animal products is a multi-billion-dollar industry. JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, posted $9 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2020 alone, so whenever people are talking about animal rights, there is resistance from the meat industry. The US market for lab rats, who are far less popular than mice for experiments, was valued at over $412 million in 2016.
Factory farms confine thousands of animals together in close quarters above their waste. Animals are dosed with antibiotics, hormones, and other drugs, like beta-agonists ractopamine and zilpaterol, to keep them from gaining weight and prevent them from succumbing to illness in their disease-ridden quarters.
In beef cattle, producers administer a variety of steroid hormones, both estrogen and testosterone, to make animals grow faster, convert their food into muscle more efficiently and make their meat leaner.
In dairy cows, the controversy centers around recombinant bovine growth hormone. Health advocacy groups have claimed that the use of rBGH may be indirectly harmful to humans by speeding the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and increasing the levels of a protein that’s been associated with cancer.
Chickens are arguably the most exploited species on the planet, accounting for 88% of farmed land animals. In the wild, chickens can live upwards of ten years, but broiler chickens, those who are raised for meat, are kept alive for roughly 47 days.
In egg-production factory farms, male chicks are considered useless to the industry and so are often ground up alive.
Fish farms force species such as salmon to live such impoverished lives that they become severely depressed, displaying the same neurochemical conditions occurring within humans who have given up on life.
Goats and sheep raised for meat are typically slaughtered very young three to five months for goat kids and six to eight months for lambs.
Dairy cows are impregnated once a year to force them to continue providing milk. Their calves are often taken away immediately after birth or shortly thereafter to prevent the calf from drinking any milk intended for human consumption.
Justifications for Animal Exploitation are that animals are not intelligent and cannot think or reason. Rights cannot be determined by the ability to think; otherwise, we will have to give intelligence tests to determine which humans deserve rights. This would mean that babies, the mentally disabled, and the mentally ill would have no rights.
In 1966, the United States passed the Animal Welfare Act. The law does establish some basic guidelines for the sale, transport, and handling of dogs, cats, rabbits, and nonhuman primates.
In 2021, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons introduced the Animal Sentience Bill. If passed, this bill would enshrine into law that animals are, in fact, sentient beings, and they deserve humane treatment at the hands of humans.
For animals, having rights is everything. With rights, they would not be trapped, beaten, caged, artificially inseminated, mutilated, drugged, traded, transported, harmed, and killed just because someone else profits from it. By granting animals rights, the sum of suffering in the world would reduce dramatically.
The American Dietetic Association recognizes that people can be perfectly healthy as vegans.
The question is, can one use animal products and eat meat as well as uphold the rights of an animal?
The answer is yes for some, but for vegetarians and vegans is a No!
We can eat meat and still be advocates for animal rights. Most meat eaters want animals to be treated as humanely as possible, and many of them take part in efforts to stop animal abuse, just as vegetarians.
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