BELIEVE: How the world might look if animals had legal rights
Once, people probably couldn’t imagine a future where slavery was made illegal, or laughed at giving every adult in society a vote. One day we will look back on the way we have treated nonhuman animals with a similar sense of disbelief. When we try to imagine a world with animal rights, it turns out not to be so difficult after all. The concepts, technologies, and mechanisms needed are already in place, we just need to be brave enough to use them.
STEVE COOKE: Let’s picture what our societies might look like if animals were granted rights against being killed, made to suffer or exploited for human gain. When activists argue for animal rights, they ask us to imagine a different world. First, we need to understand how our lives are shaped by animals’ lack of rights.
The range of uses we put animals to is enormous – going far beyond food, labour and clothing. We use gelatin to treat paper, from loo-roll to watercolour paper. Tallow finds its way into our banknotes, animal hair gives structure to suits and milk protein is found in condoms and any number of tablets. Beeswax and shellac (manufactured by crushing countless lac beetles) are used to make sweets shiny and treat wood. We even use waste from animal carcasses as biofuel. Many religious and national festivals involve consuming meat or wearing costumes made from animal parts. Animal products are everywhere. We kill billions of animals to make them every year.
A call for animal rights is a call to forbid most of these uses in law. It is also a call to reconfigure our relationships with animals. Imagining such possibilities can be difficult. What’s the point, we may wonder, of even considering the ethics of a future we can barely imagine?…
Although granting animals rights would dramatically change how we manufacture products, many of us may not even notice. Not only are vegan alternatives available for most animal products, but advances in technology make the use of animals possible without killing them or making them suffer. It is already possible to grow meat, eggs, milk, and leather in a lab without harming animals. In the future, scientific advances will probably make widescale production possible.
One change we might notice though, would be an improvement to our environment. Animal agriculture uses vast amounts of land, water and energy, both to house and feed animals, and pollutes our air, rivers and oceans…
A core purpose of a right is to protect the rights-bearer from being used as a means to benefit someone else. We can probably think of a great many deeply unethical practices that could benefit lots of people, but we rule them out because they would violate moral principles. In any case, if future advances are possible without harming nonhuman animals, then we ought to opt for alternative methods of research.
What about the uses we find for live animals, for example as workers, entertainers and companions? Even though many people love their pets as if they were family, there are some people who ask vets to have their pets killed because they no longer want them. Indeed, such cases are common enough that the veterinary profession has coined the term “convenience euthanasia”. In these cases, vets do have the right to refuse to euthanise an animal. But there is ultimately no law to prevent vets from carrying out these instructions and many struggle with the ethics of doing so…
If companion animals had rights, then they would have to be treated differently. One possibility is that pets would become something much closer to a fostered family member. We might even start to think of nonhuman animals as fellow citizens…
Once, people probably couldn’t imagine a future where slavery was made illegal, or laughed at giving every adult in society a vote. I suspect that one day we will look back on the way we have treated nonhuman animals with a similar sense of disbelief. When we try to imagine a world with animal rights, it turns out not to be so difficult after all. The concepts, technologies, and mechanisms needed are already in place, we just need to be brave enough to use them. SOURCE…
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