Animal Rights
I see 4 consistent possibilities:
- Animals have no rights and are therefore to be considered things. Abolish all laws on zoophilia or animal abuse. Get a dog, have sex with it, slowly torture it, and then cook it.
- A coherent hierarchy. Remains to be constructed.
- Animals have the same rights as humans. Not sure would be applicable. Besides, as usual with any stance based on rights that only a certain category of people/things/plants/animals has, a usual question is, where to draw the limit? A difficult question to be sure. But then again, where to draw the limit about who/what is and isn't a human being with rights? Think endless debates about abortion.
- A coherent set of rules, such as some version of the Non Agression Principle.
Solution # 4 makes the most sense to me. The current legal or pseudo-moral solutions are obviously utterly inconsistent. There is no clear-cut definition of human in our societies. In China (at least...) killing babies used to be considered ok, I think. In French Law a baby might be aborted under some legal conditions as long as it's not born - that is, you kill it first, then give birth to a dead baby, but if you were to kill it right after it were born you'd be legally a criminal. Other countries have limits on the delay in which abortion is legal. Other countries ban it altogether.
The situation is even worse with animals. There are bans on zoophilia, or even zoophilia images (like in Switzerland), while at the same time artificial insemination of turkeys is fine, as well as for that matter castrating pigs, or even cats. (Of course, our societies in general have a problem with sex, so it's not that unsurprising that fucking animals can be considered worse than killing them. In France for instance, people get on average more jail time for rape than for murder. Yes, I'm using France examples because Marcela Iacub has studied that so well.)
2009-02-01