[FlamingLonghorn]

Originally Posted by jammies

Assigning animals rights is self-contradictory no matter what process you arrive at the philosophy of rights by; rights are abstract concepts and have no meaning outside the understanding of a conscious being.

To illustrate, imagine life before humans arrived - does it make sense to claim that, for example, a tyrannosaurus had "rights"? Rights in comparison to what? Applied by whom? With what legal force? Rights are an artifact of human society and it makes no more sense to apply them to animals as if they are inherent characteristics than it does to claim that the scientific naming convention felis domesticus is an inherent characteristic of a cat.

As far as mentally handicapped people go, they have legally diminished rights compared to the bulk of humanity, for precisely the reason that they have diminished responsibility. The same is true of children, infants, and the insane.

Rights are a human concept to that I'll agree. However, many human concepts can be applied to animals. Pain, loyalty, fun, etc... You yourself apply rights to animals later on to animals when you say they have a right to not suffer unduly.

No, the death of animals for food (hamburger) is necessary, if you want meat (hamburgers), and there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to eat meat. Nor is there anything wrong with wanting to save human life by creating vaccines, and if animal testing is what is necessary to do so, then animal testing is what should happen.

Wanting something does not dictate necessity. I want a porsche, does that make it necessary? Meat is not necessary for survival as millions of Vegans all over the world dictate.

As far as animal lives being worth less than human, that isn't a belief, that is a pragmatic assessment. Every pound of vegetables YOU eat is a pound of vegetables some animal could have eaten to sustain its life; every slice of bread depends on the slaughter of insects who want to consume the same grain you want to consume, and every fruit you taste has been grown using water that otherwise would go to nurture an ecosystem of animals instead of humans. We bend the world to our purposes, and so does every other animal. There is no zero-sum game you can play where live and let live with the rest of the ecosystem is available - by choosing to live, you put your life ahead of all the organisms who are killed so that you can extract their energy, and you also prevent other potential creatures from existing who would otherwise use that energy you have sequestered to your selfish purposes.

You assume that switching to an all plant would take away food from other animals. That logic is flawed. In fact the factory farm industry, where we breed unnaturally too many animals consumes more of the planets food than is enough to sustain it. I don't believe in a live and let live scenario. Instead I believe in humans, the most advanced species on the planet, doing the most to make sure suffering for the rest of the planet is at a minimum.

Personally, if I had a choice between killing a (supposedly equally valuable) cow and killing a human being, I'd take the cow every time. Anyone who would think that is some kind of difficult moral decision has blurred the distinction between animals and people, as you can't have it both ways: either humans are just another kind of animal, in which case animal morality (ie - none) is acceptable, else humans are morally different than animals and thus morally distinct from them.

You are confusing having morals with what is moral. Under your definition throwing a cat in a microwave would not be immoral because it is an animal.

The latter definition - that humans and animals are morally distinct - is what I think to be correct, and I will illustrate with an example. If a tiger kills a man, that is NOT morally wrong, as the tiger cannot comprehend morality (and if it did, tiger morality would undoubtedly classify all but tigers as prey or enemy). If a man kills a tiger, whether it is morally wrong or not depends upon whether the man had sufficient reason to kill the tiger. The tiger and the man are fundamentally different - one understands the difference between right and wrong, and one does not.

I agree, but this doesn't automatically infer lack of rights. At best your argument so far illustrates that animals have less rights than humans maybe comparable to the insane and/or mentally handicap.

That is why it only makes sense to talk about rights - such as the right to life - in terms of humanity. If rabbits, for example, had a "right to life", then we would be obligated to protect all rabbits from foxes, and prosecute the latter when the rabbit's "rights" were violated by being killed and eaten. Obviously this is absurd, and worse, impossible to implement. Only HUMANS can be limited by the concept of rights and the consequent obligations, due to their moral grasp of what these mean - and if animals cannot take on the obligations, they cannot have the rights.

This is logic is flawed. Foxes consume rabbits to survive their right to life is = to that of the rabbit. Humans are distinct from foxes because they can survive without the death of another animal.

If we go back to the tiger example to show why this is so, according to the theory of animal rights, tigers could kill and eat people with impunity, but people could not fight back and kill the tigers, for the tigers are not bound by the obligation of not killing people, but the people must respect the rights of the tigers. I know there are people that think this way, and frankly, I wish they'd take themselves off into the woods to feed a bear to prove their sincerity and spare the rest of us. For taken to its logical extreme, this philosophy would mean we would eventually die out from starvation brought on by the inability to destroy pests and competitors for food.

Again flawed as their right to life doesn't supercede ours or any other species.

Unduly compared to what? I'm all for stringent regulations which treat cows as humanely as possible, but in the end, if they are being killed for meat there's no way to dress that up and make it happy fun times.

Obviously you have no insight to the factory farms. Also funny that you use the word "humane" to describe treatment of an animal.

Cows, like all other organisms, exist to pass on their genes. We supply the certainty of that. What would you define security as, if not this? Certainly the cows are much better off than, say, passenger pigeons.

So this logic is also flawed. My dog who cannot pass on genes is much more secure than a cow. Not really aware of the plight of the passenger pigeon. However, there lives would have to be pretty terrible to compare to that of a cow that lives on a factory farm.

As far as the child argument goes, it's a flawed analogy, and in any case, I never said we could do whatever we want with cows. For one, I think bullfighting is cruel and should be outlawed everywhere.

Here you are affording cows some rights which contradicts your entire argument. Bullfighting also illustrates cows ability to survive and protect itself.