16 Facts About Animal rights

Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as in avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings.

Advocates for animal rights oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone—an idea known as speciesism since 1970, when Richard D Ryder adopted the term—arguing that it is a prejudice as irrational as any other.

Critics of animal rights argue that nonhuman animals are unable to enter into a social contract, and thus cannot be possessors of rights, a view summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only humans have duties, and therefore only humans have rights.

Some the basis of animal rights is in religion or animal worship, with some religions banning killing of any animal, and in other religions animals can be considered unclean.

The utilitarian philosopher most associated with animal rights is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University.

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Animal rights is a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected.

Animal rights's position is that there is no reason not to give equal consideration to the interests of human and nonhumans, though his principle of equality does not require identical treatment.

Animal rights argues that there is no reason to suppose that the pain behavior of nonhumans would have a different meaning from the pain behavior of humans.

Animal rights writes that, because the moral rights of humans are based on their possession of certain cognitive abilities, and because these abilities are possessed by at least some nonhuman animals, such animals must have the same moral rights as humans.

Animal rights argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify:.

Animal rights applies the strict Kantian ideal that they ought never to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in themselves.

Animal rights offers as an example the United States Animal Welfare Act, which he describes as an example of symbolic legislation, intended to assuage public concern about the treatment of animals, but difficult to implement.

The idea that nonhuman animals are worthy of prima facie rights is to say that, in a sense, animals have rights that can be overridden by many other considerations, especially those conflicting a human's right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

My point is that like laws govern all who interact within a society, Animal rights are to be applied to all beings who interact within that society.

But, in his early work, Interests and Rights, Frey disagreed with Singer—who in his Animal Liberation wrote that the interests of nonhuman animals must be included when judging the consequences of an act—on the grounds that animals have no interests.

Common misconception on the concept of animal rights is that its proponents want to grant non-human animals the exact same legal rights as humans, such as the right to vote.