Animal Rights?
Inside Liberty Watch Today - Oct. 17, 2005

While property rights continue to be trampled, the cause for animal rights marches on. Most readers can't imagine that the environmental kooks could be getting any traction for the cause of rats, guinea pigs and other critters, but even that bastion of capitalism and human action, the New York Stock Exchange, is cowering to the animal rights gang. 

In his commentary for weekly financial paper Barron's, Thomas Donlan reports that a company called Life Sciences Research was expecting to have its stock listed on the NYSE in early September. However, the listing was postponed because in Donlan's words the "New York Stock Exchange did not want to become Ground Zero for animal-rights protests." 

Life Science Research is in the business of product research. Firms contract with the company to test products like cosmetics, medical devices and new pharmaceuticals on a variety of animals, including guinea pigs and dogs. 

Animal rights activists complain that a subsidiary of Life Science Research, Huntingdon Life Sciences, kills 500 animals a day in its laboratories and are down right cruel to these rats, dogs and other furry creatures. 

The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) organization is well-funded, with an elaborate website that makes clear it is anti-research, anti-pharmaceutical, and anti-human. The organization "encourages destruction of property," writes Donlan, "and it tolerates violence against people." 

Win Animal Rights, or W.A.R. is a national non-profit organization allied with SHAC that according to its website is: "dedicated to eliminating the exploitation and suffering of animals, while promoting and defending, what we believe to be, their inherent rights. We believe that all animals, human and non-human have the intrinsic right to live free of abuse and exploitation. We also believe that non-human animals have just as much right to be themselves and live their own lives as human animals do. As such, we believe that any animal, whose rights are subjugated to human self interest and greed, is worthy of our fullest attention and efforts to restore that animal's freedom and self direction."

Restore animals' freedom and self direction? Good grief. Animals aren't self directed. They operate on instinct. Animals can't formulate concepts, plan for the future, or make discoveries that improve their lives and the lives of other animals. Humans do that. 

This growing idea that concern for human beings is the sin of "speciesism," is absurd. But the fine humans at W.A.R. "hold
that speciesism is just as evil and morally indefensible as racism, sexism or any of the other forms of discrimination." 

But are animal rights really what these people are arguing for? After all, when a shark attacks a child in the surf and is destroyed, or if a hiker is attacked by a wolf or bear and is hunted down and killed, rabid animal rights activists aren't petitioning the courts to have game wardens jailed for murder.

Philosophy professor Tibor Machan points out that the difference is: "When you attack the livelihood of people in order to try to save the wilds and its animals, that is perceived as merely opposing profit." Indeed the SHAC website condemns market makers in Huntingdon stock as "Money grabbing scum." 

But, as Machan points out, "economic development is actually the life support of millions of human beings, especially in underdeveloped countries, and that disregarding and attacking economic development do indeed have harmful impact on human life…" 

The fact is, animals don't have rights because, as Machan points out in his book Putting Humans First, "only human beings have the requisite moral nature for ascribing to them basic rights." Contrary to what the W.A.R. nuts believe, only humans have the capacity for free choice and are responsible enough to act ethically. Human beings are choosing, thinking, social animals. Rover, as loveable as he may be, is not. 

Animal rights activists make what's known as a "category mistake" when they tout animal rights, "the logical error of treating two different kinds of entities as equivalent in a way that they are not at all equivalent," explains Machan. 

Animals live in a wild kingdom, their instinct is to slaughter and consume. If animals have rights, then at the same time, virtually all animals would be brought up on murder charges because they aggress against other creatures. 

It's hard to imagine the Supreme Court ever agreeing to hear a case for animal rights, let alone grant these rights as valid. But, then again, who would have imagined the court would find in favor of the government's taking of one person's private property and handing it to another private party as in the Kelo decision. 

Doug French, Liberty Watch Columnist