Animal Rights: Topic Exploration and Analysis
Recent decades have seen numerous ad campaigns for the protection of animal rights within the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Some of the well-known issues that get television coverage would be animal abuse, criminal charges against animal abuse, torture within the fur industry, torture within the agricultural industry, the use of lab animals, and promotion of veganism. Animal rights activism is also seen as part of the environmental protection movement, since an issue would be the protection of wild animals from poaching and loss of habitat. The problem I will address in this study is the complexity of animal rights. Unlike environmental protection, which is supported by hard science, one of the ethical issues that plagues animal rights activism is the “discussion about animals as sentient beings,” (Gardiner, 2014, p. N6). When it comes to abuse, for example, should people identify animal suffering the same way as human suffering? How do lawmakers approach the subject of giving animals personhood status?
Animal rights activists fight for the general goal of supporting animal welfare. This is sometimes understood as “nonhuman animals have an interest in not suffering,” (McCausland, 2014, p. 649). The UK Farm Animal Council (FAWC) has established the “Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare,” a list that describes a basic framework of the needs of animals. This is listed as “(1) Freedom from hunger and thirst; (2) freedom from discomfort; (3) freedom from pain, injury or disease; (4) freedom to express normal behavior; (5) freedom from fear and distress,” (McCausland, 2014, p. 650). A framework like this essentially poses a moral obligation on humans to provide these freedoms for animals. But a model such as this invites plenty of criticism.
For some, it may make sense that there shouldn’t be a civilized society that would tolerate the abuse of animals, but the “most credible argument against the phenomenon of the animals rights movement in the West is that is trivializes human suffering,” (Whitehouse, 2016). An example of this would be how the United States federal government “donated 10 million in emergency aid to Nepal in the aftermath of an April 2015 earthquake that killed around 9,000 people and caused 5 billion in damages,” (Whitehouse, 2016). By a large contrast, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) received 225 million dollars in assets in that fiscal year. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also received about 52 millions dollars for the fiscal year of 2014.
Animal rights movements are based on a deviance model. Essentially, “by ascribing rights to animals parallel to human rights, they fundamentally question the dominant worldview as well as common behavioral codes,” (Lindblom & Jacobsson, 2014, p. 133). An extreme example of this is how an activist would accuse people who eat meat as murderers. But the same concept can be applied to challenging people’s perception of animal suffering – do animals truly suffer the same way that humans do? There are mixed results from the efforts put in by animal rights activists. There has been a push for regulation in slaughterhouses, and some states have allowed harsher sentences for people committing animal abuse. Florida just recently made it legal to break into a car to save a baby and a pet from being locked inside. At the same time, animal rights activism has been labeled as deviant behavior. Some of the more extreme behavior, as exemplified before, has only fueled the rampant spread of stereotyping, and “as some groups in society have more power to impose their definitions than others, it follows that such labeling is also a way of exerting social control,” (Lindblom & Jacobsson, 2014, p. 134). Activists face experiences such as “ostracism and scorn from family and friends alienation and disengagement from the mainstream culture,” (Lindblom & Jacobsson, 2014, p. 134).
This would be because “activists’ commitment to specific moral ideals concurrently compels them to transgress social norms as their visions come into conflict with the established rules and conventions in society,” (Lindblom & Jacobsson, 2014, p. 135). In other words, their moral ideals conflict with the moral norms of society. This would describe the “sheer omnipresence of the animals rights agenda in the Western media,” (Whitehouse, 2016). Marketing tactics for animal rights activism would have to work diligently in order to elicit sympathy for lab animals.
This would be because “societies have always practiced ‘speciesism,’ which describes the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individual animals based solely on their species,” (Gardiner, 2014, p. N6). This is seen as how people tend to relate better to dolphins, horses, and rabbits over rats. Essentially, what seems to be a preference for animal life over human life alienates critics of the animal rights movements, and the tendency to value the lives of certain animals over others will alienate more devoted animal rights activists.
This research will be approached in much of the same way as environmental protection and preservation should be approached, viewing the Five Freedoms as rights. In a country that has outlawed cruel and unusual punishment, under no circumstances should an animal have to endure abuse. Abusers should be seeing more severe sentences in court for their crimes, considering the severity of such behavior. Initiatives to seek out stray animals and giving them medication as well as spaying or neutering them would be beneficial to society as a whole. This essentially would see fewer animals in the streets without forever homes, and the lack of street animals also means that our pets would face less exposure to disease.
References
Gardiner, B. (2014). Animal welfare, animal rights. Australian Veterinary Journal, 92(3): N6.
Lindblom, J. & Jacobsson, K. (2014). A deviance perspective on social movements: The case of animal rights activism. Deviant Behavior, 35: 133-151.
McCausland, C. (2014). The five freedoms of animal welfare are rights. Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, 27: 649-662.
Whitehouse, R. (2016, January 10). The hypocrisy of the animal rights movement. International Policy Digest. Retrieved from http://intpolicydigest.org/2016/01/10/the-hypocrisy-of-the-animal-rights- movement/, via Walden University Library.
