Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

It is simply projustice, insisting only that the scope of justice be seen to include respect for the rights of animals. The animal rights movement is not for the faint of heart. How we change the dominant misconception of animals—indeed, whether we change it—is to a large extent a political question.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 28, 2012

This is human chauvinism. The anthropomorphic side reads: "It is anthropomorphic to attribute characteristics to nonhumans that belong only to humans." The human chauvinism side reads: "It is chauvinistic not to attribute characteristics to those nonhumans who have them and to persist in the conceit that only humans do."

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Animal Person

JULY 25, 2010

Thanks, once again, to James LaVeck and Jenny Stein of Tribe of Heart for kindly and carefully bringing attention to what should be a stunningly-obvious moment of hypocrisy by groups that exist to advocate for and save animals. Tags: Activism Current Affairs Ethics Film animal rights Tribe of Heart.

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Critter News

AUGUST 17, 2011

Animal-rights activists are urging Air Canada to stop shipping live monkeys and other animals destined for experimentation, saying the airline can change its tariff rules if it wants. According to a legal opinion solicited by the Humane Society International Canada, Air Canada can set and amend the terms of its tariffs.

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Critter News

OCTOBER 26, 2008

I came across this 2005 book from the Society & Animals Journal titled Confronting Cruelty Moral Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement. Readership: This book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the animal rights movement in England, the United States and Australia.

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Critter News

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I don't support animal research and I have no sympathy for animal researchers. I don't believe they are working for human welfare. I don't believe they want an honest dialogue about what they are doing to animals. I do believe they want prestige, tenure, royalties and patent rights. The other women wouldn't.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

is clearly someone who advocates for animal rights. Ernst believes we don't have a right to use sentient nonhumans and all of her posts (and those of Alex Melonas, who also posts at animalrights.change.org) are unequivocal about animal use.

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Animal Person

MAY 11, 2009

Yesterday's " Do Small Victories Affect Big Picture in Animal Rights Debate? Both, of course, were seen as victories, but the article's author, Richard Foot, asks: Do such successes mean the animal rights movement is winning its long, controversial campaigns to gain the same legal protections for animals as those ascribed to humans?

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 30, 2012

In 2002 the German Parliament amended Article 26 of the Basic Law to give nonhuman animals the right to be “respected as fellow creatures” and to be protected from “avoidable pain.” Half of the sixteen German states already have some sort of animal rights provisions in their constitutions. Salem and Andrew N.

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Animal Person

APRIL 4, 2009

Responsible Policies for Animals Members and Friends! Getting people to understand animal rights is much more difficult than was establishing that Earth travels around the sun. From David Cantor. This past Monday's botched radio interview is rescheduled for next Monday, April 6th -- again at 3:00 P.M. East Coast time.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 10, 2008

Why is it surprising that I have little to say about the nature of rights? It would only be surprising to one who assumes that my case for animal liberation is based upon rights and, in particular, upon the idea of extending rights to animals. But this is not my position at all.

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Animal Person

APRIL 6, 2010

Riddle me this: Why would any human animal use as a default position that nonhuman animals do not have personalities as rich, distinct, obnoxious, obsequious and varied as human animals? Have they not ever observed nonhuman animals? We're all animals, aren't we? We're sentient. Or "even" obnoxious?

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Animal Ethics

JULY 24, 2012

Because animals are sentient (i.e., can experience pleasure and pain) and because they not only have but can act on their preferences, any view that holds that pleasures or pains, or preference-satisfactions or frustrations matter morally is bound to seem attractive to those in search of the moral basis for the animal rights movement.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 24, 2012

Since this will require increased human intervention in human practices that threaten rare or endangered species (e.g., Since this will require increased human intervention in human practices that threaten rare or endangered species (e.g., Too little is not enough. (

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Animal Person

MAY 23, 2009

I notice that if I use "animal rights activist" or anything with the word "rights" in it, because it's loaded and misunderstood, my listener often has an immediate bias of some kind. People have a relationship, whether or not they are aware, to the term "animal rights." And not necessarily for animals.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

There are also some things we cannot learn by using humans, if we respect their rights. The rights view merely requires moral consistency in this regard. ( If that means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 28, 2008

From this perspective, the animal-rights debate seems considerably less urgent and a relatively "safe" area of controversy. One wonders why here (as elsewhere) there is so much concern for the plight of animals and evidently so little for that of humans.

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10,000 Birds

JULY 24, 2012

Today I’m exploring a couple questions that have been bouncing in my head for a while…I’d love to hear your thoughts…I’m not calling into question animal rights, just the focus of the movement. – The Great Ornithologist Felonious Jive Animal rights. This makes perfect sense.

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Animal Person

OCTOBER 30, 2010

I understand this is a children's book, but particularly if you're trying to be a voice for animals, it would behoove you to make connections that might be missed otherwise. For instance, the animals are enslaved. And when you read the reviews on various sites that sell the book, there is no mention of how we enslave animals.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 6, 2008

Here is a common argument in favor of animal rights: 1. If babies have rights, then animals have rights. Babies have rights. Animals have rights. Frey, "Animal Rights," Analysis 37 [June 1977]: 186-9.) Therefore, 3. In 1977, philosopher R. What is Frey's argument? Similarity.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 18, 2009

While spending hours in the car I've been thinking about various issues related to sentient nonhumans, animal rights and veganism. If you want to teach kids to respect animals, you can't teach them that it's okay to use and kill them if you like the taste of their flesh. Those messages aren't aligned. I am an abolitionist.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 12, 2012

Quite the contrary, just as would be true in the case of my son, what we should say is that part of the harm done to these animals by factory farming is that they do not know this. ( The unspoken assumption is not that what you don't know can't hurt you; it is that what you don't know can't harm you. This assumption is false.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 8, 2012

Indeed, precisely because one expects indifference from animals but pity or mercy from human beings, people who are cruel by being insensitive to the suffering they cause often are called "animals" or "brutes," and their character or behavior, "brutal" or "inhuman."

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 19, 2009

It is a merit of utilitarianism, with its stress on happiness and unhappiness, that lower animals must be considered along with human beings, so that they are not debarred from full or direct consideration because they are not "rational." I now think that the "perhaps of all sentient beings" should be much more uncompromising.

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Animal Person

JUNE 8, 2009

(You can buy some extra time by presoaking the animal in a basin of ice water.)" For Engber, who dispassionately describes procedures most of the time, the "advances" in the medical care of humans are all well worth what he and other vivisectionists do to dogs and other sentient nonhumans. It "guarantees humane treatment?"

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2007

By abusing evolutionary biology in this way, we are able to read back the sophisticated conduct of people into the animal behavior that prefigures it. But this means that the apes appeal to animal-rights activists for precisely the wrong reason—namely, that they look like people and behave like people, while making no moral demands.

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Animal Person

MAY 26, 2010

Big fail here for Animal Person. I didn't do the right thing for Animal Person. Films, blogs, books, e-zines, sanctuaries, protests, promotion of adoption (of humans and nonhumans!). Tags: Activism Current Affairs Ethics Language animal rights Blogging veganism writing. But I didn't.

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Critter News

MAY 28, 2009

So why is one type of animal cruelty (dogfighting) more reprehensible than another (lobster-boiling)? If you are a non-meat-eating, non-leather-wearing, non-shampoo-using, animal-rights activist for PETA, then it is not hypocritical to judge Vick for animal abuse. I think we have it backward.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 14, 2012

When it comes to legal rights, not all individuals are equal. The legal rights individuals have arise as the result of the creative activity of human beings. If there are moral rights, they do not "come to be" in the way legal rights do. ( This should not be surprising.

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10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

The interests of those working for conservation and those working for animal rights and animal welfare don’t always perfectly align like you might think they do. With no permanent habitation inside its boundaries, human disturbance is low. Conservation Animal Rights hunting' Shoot something!

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