thesis statement for animal rights

Animal Rights Essay: Topics, Outline, & Writing Tips

• 🐇 Animal Rights Essay: the Basics
• 💡 Animal Rights Essay Topics
• 📑 Outlining Your Essay
• ✍️ Sample Essay (200 Words)

🔗 References

🐇 animal rights essay: what is it about.

Animal rights supporters advocate for the idea that animals should have the same freedom to live as they wish, just as humans do. They should not be exploited or used in meat , fur, and other production. At long last, we should distinguish animals from inanimate objects and resources like coal, timber, or oil.

Interdisciplinary research has shown that animals are emotional and sensitive, just like we are.

Their array of emotions includes joy, happiness, embarrassment, resentment, jealousy, anger, love, compassion, respect, disgust, despair, and even grief.

However, animal rights legislation does not extend human rights to animals. It establishes their right to have their fundamental needs and interests respected while people decide how to treat them. This right changes the status of animals from being property to being legal entities.

The statement may sound strange until we recall that churches , banks, and universities are also legal entities. Their interests are legally protected by law. Then why do we disregard the feelings of animals , which are not inanimate institutions? Several federal laws protect them from human interference.

But the following statements are only some of the rules that could one day protect animal rights in full:

• Animals should not be killed by hunting.
• Animals’ habitats should allow them to live in freedom.
• Animals should not be bred for sale or any other purpose.
• Animals should not be used for food by industries or households.

Most arguments against the adoption of similar laws are linked to money concerns. Animal exploitation has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. The lives of many private farmers depend on meat production, and most people prefer not to change the comfortable status quo.

Animal Rights Argumentative Essay

An animal rights argumentative essay should tackle a problematic issue that people have widely discussed. While choosing ideas for the assignment, opt for the most debatable topics.

Here is a brief list of argumentative essay prompts on animal rights:

• The pros and cons of animal rights.
• Can humanity exist without meat production?
• Do animals have souls?
• Should society become vegan to protect animal rights?

As you see, these questions could raise controversy between interlocutors. Your purpose is to take a side and give several arguments in its support. Then you’ll have to state a counterargument to your opinion and explain why it is incorrect.

Animal Rights Persuasive Essay

An animal rights persuasive essay should clearly state your opinion on the topic without analyzing different points of view. Still, the purpose of your article is to persuade the reader that your position is not only reasonable but the only correct one. For this purpose, select topics relating to your opinion or formulated in questionary form.

For example:

• What is your idea about wearing fur?
• Do you think people would ever ban animal exploitation?
• Is having pets a harmful practice?
• Animal factories hinder the development of civilization .

💡 53 Animal Rights Essay Topics

• Animal rights have been suppressed for ages because people disregard their mental abilities .
• Cosmetic and medical animal testing .
• Laws preventing unnecessary suffering of animals mean that there is some necessary suffering.
• Red fluorescent protein transgenic dogs experiment.
• Do you believe animals should have legal rights?
• Genetically modified animals and implications.
• Why is animal welfare important?
• Neutering animals to prevent overpopulation: Pros and cons.
• Animal testing: Arguments for and against.
• What is our impact on marine life?
• Some animals cannot stay wild.
• Animal testing for medical purposes .
• We are not the ones to choose which species to preserve.
• Pavlov’s dog experiment .
• Keeping dogs chained outdoors is animal neglect.
• The use of animals for research .
• Animal dissection as a learning tool: Alternatives?
• More people beat their pets than we think.
• Duties to non-human animals.
• If we do not control the population of some animals, they will control ours.
• Animals in entertainment: Not entertaining at all.
• Animals in research, education, and teaching.
• Which non-animal production endangers the species?
• Is animal testing really needed?
• Why do some people think that buying a new pet is cheaper than paying for medical treatment of the old one?
• Animal experiments: benefits, ethics, and defenders.
• Can people still be carnivorous if they stop eating animals?
• Animal testing role.
• Marine aquariums and zoos are animal prisons.
• Animal experimentation: justification arguments .
• What would happen if we replace animals in circuses with people, keeping the same living conditions?
• The ethics of animal use in scientific research .
• Animal sports: Relics of the past.
• Animal testing ban: counterargument and rebuttal .
• Denial to purchase animal-tested cosmetics will not change anything.
• Animal research, its ineffectiveness and amorality.
• Animal rights protection based on their intellect level: It tells a lot about humanity.
• Debates of using animals in scientific analysis .
• How can we ban tests on rats and kill them in our homes at the same time?
• Animal testing in experiments .
• What is the level of tissue engineering development in leather and meat production?
• Equal consideration of interests to non-human animals .
• Animals should not have to be our servants.
• Zoos as an example of humans’ immorality.
• We should feed wild animals to help them survive.
• Animal testing in biomedical research.
• Abolitionism: The right not to be owned.
• Do you support the Prima facie rights theory?
• Psychologist perspective on research involving animal and human subjects.
• Ecofeminism: What is the link between animals’ and women’s rights?
• No philosophy could rationalize cruelty against animals.
• Qualities that humans and animals share.
• Ancient Buddhist societies and vegetarianism: A research paper.

Need more ideas? You are welcome to use our free research topic generator !

📑 Animal Rights Essay Outline

An animal rights essay should be constructed as a standard 5-paragraph essay (if not required otherwise in the assignment). The three following sections provide a comprehensive outline.

Animal Rights Essay: Introduction

An introduction consists of:

• Background information,
• A thesis statement .

In other words, here you need to explain why you decided to write about the given topic and which position you will take. The background part should comprise a couple of sentences highlighting the topicality of the issue. The thesis statement expresses your plans in the essay.

For example: In this essay, I will explain why animal-based production harms the ecology.

Animal Rights Essay: Main Body

The main body is a place for you to argue your position . One paragraph equals one argument. In informative essays, replace argumentation with facts.

Start each section with a topical sentence consisting of a general truth. Then give some explanation and more specific points. By the way, at the end of this article, you’ll find a bonus! It is a priceless selection of statistics and facts about animal rights.

Animal Rights Essay: Conclusion

A conclusion restates your central ideas and thesis statement. Approach it as a summary of your essay, avoid providing new facts or arguments.

✍️ Animal Rights Essay Example (200 Words)

Why is animal welfare important? The term “animal welfare” evokes the pictures of happy cows from a milk advertisement. But the reality has nothing to do with these bright videos. Humane treatment of animals is a relative concept. This essay explains why animal welfare is important, despite that it does not prevent farms from killing or confining animals.

The best way to approach animal welfare is by thinking of it as a temporary measure. We all agree that the current state of the economy does not allow humanity to abandon animal-based production. Moreover, such quick decisions could make farm animals suffer even more. But ensuring the minimum possible pain is the best solution as of the moment.

The current legislation on animal welfare is far from perfect. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 prevents cruelty against animals in labs and zoos. Meanwhile, the majority of suffering animals do not fall under its purview. For example, it says nothing about the vivisection of rats and mice for educational and research purposes, although the procedure is extremely painful for the creature. Neither does it protect farm animals.

Unfortunately, the principles of animal welfare leave too much room for interpretation. Animals should be free from fear and stress, but how can we measure that? They should be allowed to engage in natural behaviors, but no confined space would let them do so. Thus, the legislation is imprecise.

The problem of animal welfare is almost unresolvable because it is a temporary measure to prevent any suffering of domesticated animals. It has its drawbacks but allows us to ensure at least some comfort for those we unjustifiably use for food. They have the same right to live on this planet as we do, and animal farming will be stopped one day.

📊 Bonus: Statistics & Facts for Your Animal Rights Essay Introduction

Improve the quality of your essay on animal rights by working in the following statistics and facts about animals.

• According to USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service , about 4.6 billion animals — including hogs, sheep, cattle, chickens, ducks, lambs, and turkey — were killed and used for food in the United States last year (2015).
• People in the U.S. kill over 100 million animals for laboratory experiments every year, according to PETA .
• More than 40 million animals are killed for fur worldwide every year. About 30 million animals are raised and killed on fur farms, and nearly 10 million wild animals are hunted and killed for the same reasons — for their valuable fur.
• According to a report by In Defense of Animals , hunters kill more than 200 million animals in the United States yearly.
• The Humane Society of the United States notes that a huge number of cats and dogs — between 3 and 4 million each year — are killed in the country’s animal shelters. Sadly, this number does not include dogs or cats killed in animal cruelty cases.
• According to the ASPCA , about 7.6 million companion animals enter animal shelters in the United States yearly. Of this number, 3.9 Mil of dogs, and 3.4 Mil of cats.
• About 2.7 million animals are euthanized in shelters every year (1.4 million cats and 1.2 million dogs).
• About 2.7 million shelter animals are adopted every year (1.3 million cats and 1.4 million dogs).
• In total, there are approximately 70-80 million dogs and 74-96 million cats living as pets in the United States.
• It’s impossible to determine the exact number of stray cats and dogs living in the United States, but the number of cats is estimated to be up to 70 million.
• Many stray cats and dogs were once family pets — but they were not kept securely indoors or provided with proper identification.

Each essay on animals rights makes humanity closer to a better and more civilized world. Please share any thoughts and experience in creating such texts in the comments below. And if you would like to hear how your essay would sound in someone’s mind, use our Text-To-Speech tool .

• Why Animal Rights? | PETA
• Animal Rights – Encyclopedia Britannica
• Animal ethics: Animal rights – BBC
• Animal Health and Welfare – National Agricultural Library
• The Top 10 Animal Rights Issues – Treehugger
• Animal welfare – European Commission

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How to Deal with Animal Right Essays: Quick & Simple Prompts

Table of Contents

Whether you’re a student at the Ethics, Biology, or Medicine department, you can receive an assignment to write animal right essays from time to time.

On the one hand, the task may seem simple and manageable at first glance. On the other hand, such essays (as any other type of academic work) require careful research, outlining, structuring, and writing in line with top academic standards. Thus, if you’re stuck on this task with no ideas in mind, read on to find valuable tips for this kind of essay.

Here we compiled valuable recommendations from our writing experts about:

• Finding an interesting, relevant topic.
• Composing an animal rights outline.
• Developing an effective animal rights thesis statement.
• Researching credible sources for animal right essays.
• Structuring your arguments.
• Effective editing and proofreading of the assignment.

Why It Is Important to Discuss Animal Rights

Whenever you approach writing about animal rights, this topic’s relevance always surfaces as a critical vantage point of your animal rights essays. It’s a commonly recognized fact that throughout history, humans have been too cruel toward animals, and they have ruined much of the authentic wildlife ecosystems in the process of industrialization and urbanization. As a result, numerous species lost their habitats and were urged to seek shelter elsewhere, thus altering other natural habitats by residing in places where they shouldn’t be.

Even in cities, where people and animals seem to have different lives, cruel treatment and abuse of human authority are evident.

First, pets are not always treated ethically and respectfully, mainly because of their legal status as human property.

Second, many pets are abandoned and flood the streets, where they are either killed by other street animals or are doomed to wandering the streets and surviving by eating trash and food remnants.

Third, corporate breeding animals for food (e.g., children farms and daily factories) is highly inhumane, involving cruel treatment of animals and their stay in awful conditions.

The situation with wildlife is not much better, with hunters and poachers killing wild animals for fun and entertainment. Fires and floods caused by human-made climate change also urge wild animals to seek shelter and food in human residences, which often ends in their killing or captivation.

Thus, as one can see, the problem of animal rights and human oppression of the planet’s fauna is pressing, with so many manifestations of unethical, inconsiderate, and cruel attitudes to all creatures, great and small.

Main Points to Elaborate on

Given the problems surrounding animal protection and rights today, you can approach the subject from numerous perspectives in your academic assignment:

• Legal rights of animals in your country or abroad. Comparison of legal policies towards wildlife and pet protection.
• Pet protection and a new legal status for pets.
• Legal and ethical standards for corporate farming.
• Legal and ethical standards for animal use with medical/experimental purposes.
• Wildlife protection and conservation.
• Protection of marine life from exploitative industrial practices.

How to Write Animal Rights Essay Introduction

All animal right essays should start with an impactful introduction so that your audience understands what you’re talking about, what you’re driving at, and what your key arguments are.

To achieve this goal, we recommend structuring an introduction as follows:

• First, discuss the broad context of the paper – animal rights in general, what kinds of rights they possess, and what abuses of those rights are observed globally.
• You may also boost the interest of your readers by citing some shocking stats or providing some anecdotal evidence. Anyway, this information should be relevant, pointing to the serious, pressing problem in the field of animal rights you have identified.
• Next, it’s vital to formulate the problem clearly and indicate how you will resolve/discuss it. It will be your thesis statement.

Following this structure, you’re sure to make a captivating intro that will urge your audience to read the paper until its end.

Animal Rights Essay Outline

To complete animal right essays quickly and effectively, you need to perform some pre-writing work. Composing an outline is always a helpful approach to organizing the basis for your writing process as you receive a roadmap for the further composition of your essay’s vital parts.

Here is a sample outline for a paper about pet rights and legal status. Still, you can successfully appropriate this outline for any other topic by following the instructions about each part’s content.

INTRODUCTION

Introduce your subject and give some background information. Underline the problem’s significance. State your key idea of the paper.

Pets are typically a part of the family in which they live, causing warm feelings and enjoying commitment from the people who invited them to their homes. Still, sadly, pets are considered property by law in 90% of countries, limiting the protection of cruelly treated and abandoned animals. Thus, a legal change is required to improve pet coverage by law and enable animal rights advocates to take measures against pet maltreatment.

BODY OF THE PAPER

Paragraph #1-3 – Indicate a topic sentence with each paragraph’s key idea. Support that key idea with some supporting data from credible sources. Offer your interpretation of the information in those external sources. Make a transition to the next paragraph and then to the conclusion.

Paragraph #1 – statistics on pet maltreatment. Animal abandonment and abuse.

Paragraph #2 – protective legislation. E.g., the UK Animal Welfare Act (2007), felony animal cruelty laws in the USA.

Paragraph #3 – animal rights advocacy organizations (e.g., ALDF). Actions they take to prevent and minimize pet maltreatment.

Summarize your arguments concisely and refer them back to the general argument. Clarify the arguments’ significance for the broader subject of your research. Again, stress the importance of dwelling on this subject theoretically and with practical steps.

Pet abuse is still commonplace because of the legal status of home animals as human property. Still, numerous laws and activist organizations work to change the situation. A broader legal change is required to change pets’ status and enhance their protection.

How to Write Animal Rights Thesis Statement

The thesis statement for animal right essays should be clear and concise, communicating your central message and purpose of the paper. The thesis should not be too long or too short. It should also incorporate the central arguments you’ll expand in the following sections of your text.

In this way, this statement will function as your readers’ roadmap leading them from one argument to another one and helping them follow your logic.

20 Animal Topics for Research Papers – Choose the Best Idea

Looking for some bulletproof animal topics for research papers? Here is a list you can use on all occasions to compose various academic works with ease.

• Is it realistic to protect all animal rights today?
• Is the animals’ right to no selective breeding compatible with the human needs?
• What is the best way to protect animals from the harmful impact of humans?
• Is hunting ethical on any grounds?
• Hunting and animal species extinction – a need for a more effective protective policy.
• Is experimentation on animals generally avoidable?
• How does the human-made climate change affect the well-being of fauna?
• Is pet euthanasia a reality?
• The impact of massive fishing on biodiversity and fish species survival.
• Increasing peopling of suburbs and the loss of animal habitat – a reverse side of people’s flight from the vices of urbanization.
• What is the impact of invasive species on the local wildlife? Discuss with examples.
• Cruel handling of corporately farmed animals.
• Is overbreeding of pets a pressing problem? What are the far-reaching consequences of overbreeding?
• Destroying predators – a step towards human safety or an ecological crime? Discuss the fundamental role of predators in local wildlife and the adverse effects of these species’ minimization.
• Are police and military dogs given similar rights upon retirement as people who served their motherland? Discuss more extensive coverage of police/military dog health and care services.
• What kinds of experiments on animals are unavoidable to save people’s lives? And what are senseless and cruel?
• Animal abuse in zoos – the reverse side of human entertainment and endangered species conservation.
• Is it ethical to use animals in hard manual/agricultural labor?
• What can people do to enhance animal rights protection?
• Is it ethical to consider animals human property? The need for a legal change of pet status as a vital contribution to the more humane treatment of home pets.

With these topics, you’re sure to beat all professors’ expectations and develop an attention-grabbing, exciting argument.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Animal Rights

Essays on Animal Rights

As a college student, choosing the right essay topic is crucial to the success of your assignment. It's important to select a topic that not only interests you, but also allows for critical analysis and creative exploration. This webpage is designed to provide you with a variety of Animal Rights essay topics to consider, along with examples of and paragraphs for each topic.

Types of Animal Rights Essays and Topic Examples

Argumentative essays.

• The Ethics of Animal Testing
• Should Animals be Used for Entertainment?
• Animal Rights vs. Human Needs

Example Paragraph: The use of animals in scientific research has long been a controversial issue. While some argue that it is necessary for medical advancements, others believe it is unethical to subject animals to testing. In this essay, we will explore the ethical implications of animal testing and the potential alternatives.

Example Paragraph: The ethical implications of animal testing are complex and multifaceted. While there is no easy solution, it is crucial for society to continue exploring alternative methods that do not involve the use of animals.

Compare and Contrast Essays

• Differences in Animal Rights Laws Across Countries
• The Treatment of Domestic Animals vs. Wild Animals
• The Ethical Considerations of Eating Meat vs. Being Vegetarian

Example Paragraph: The treatment of animals varies significantly around the world, with different countries having their own laws and regulations. In this essay, we will compare and contrast the differences in animal rights laws across various countries, and explore the ethical implications of these differences.

Example Paragraph: It is clear that the treatment of animals is a complex issue that varies greatly depending on cultural, legal, and ethical considerations. By understanding these differences, we can work towards creating a more unified and compassionate approach to animal rights.

Descriptive Essays

• A Day in the Life of a Shelter Animal
• The Beauty of Wildlife Conservation
• The Emotional Lives of Farm Animals

Example Paragraph: The emotional lives of animals are often overlooked in discussions of animal rights. In this essay, we will delve into the emotional experiences of farm animals and the implications for their treatment and rights.

Example Paragraph: By acknowledging the emotional lives of farm animals, we can begin to reshape our perspective on their treatment and rights. It is crucial for society to recognize the emotional complexity of animals and work towards a more compassionate approach.

Persuasive Essays

• The Importance of Animal Rights Education
• Why We Should Ban Circuses that Use Animals
• The Moral Imperative to Protect Endangered Species

Example Paragraph: The use of animals in circuses has long been a topic of controversy. In this essay, we will explore the ethical implications of using animals for entertainment and argue for the banning of circuses that use animals.

Example Paragraph: It is clear that the use of animals in circuses raises significant ethical concerns. By advocating for the banning of these practices, we can work towards a more compassionate and ethical treatment of animals in entertainment.

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Animal rights are moral or legal entitlements attributed to nonhuman animals, usually because of the complexity of their cognitive, emotional, and social lives or their capacity to experience physical or emotional pain or pleasure.

Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their utility for humans, and that their most basic interests — such as in avoiding suffering — should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.

Earliest examples of animal rights being acknowledged date to Ancient Greece and India, where figures like Pythagoras and Buddha advocated for a vegetarian diet. In 2014 Sandra, an orangutan at Buenos Aires Zoo was granted basic human rights in an unprecedented ruling. The Great Ape Project advocates for basic human rights to be extended to our closest primate relatives.

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Article Contents

1. introduction: the need for legal animal rights theory, 2. can animals have legal rights, 3. do animals have (simple) legal rights, 4. should animals have (fundamental) legal rights, 5. conclusion.

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Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

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Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 533–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa007

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With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Legal animal rights are on the horizon, and there is a need for a legal theory of animal rights—that is, a theory of animal rights as legal rights. While there is a diverse body of moral and political theories of animal rights, 1 the nature and conceptual foundations of legal animal rights remain remarkably underexplored. As yet, only few and fragmented legal analyses of isolated aspects of animal rights exist. 2 Other than that, most legal writing in this field operates with a hazily assumed, rudimentary and undifferentiated conception of animal rights—one largely informed by extralegal notions of moral animal rights—which tends to obscure rather than illuminate the distinctive nature and features of legal animal rights. 3 A more systematic and nuanced theorisation of legal animal rights is, however, necessary and overdue for two reasons: first, a gradual turn to legal rights in animal rights discourse; and, secondly, the incipient emergence of legal animal rights.

First, while animal rights have originally been framed as moral rights, they are increasingly articulated as potential legal rights. That is, animals’ moral rights are asserted in an ‘ought to be legal rights’-sense (or ‘manifesto sense’) 4 that demands legal institutionalisation and refers to the corresponding legal rights which animals should ideally have. 5 A salient reason for transforming moral into legal animal rights is that purely moral rights (which exist prior to and independently of legal validation) do not provide animals with sufficient practical protection, whereas legally recognised rights would be reinforced by the law’s more stringent protection and enforcement mechanisms. 6 With a view to their (potential) juridification, it seems advisable to rethink and reconstruct animal rights as specifically legal rights, rather than simply importing moral animal rights into the legal domain. 7

Secondly, and adding urgency to the need for theorisation, legal animal rights are beginning to emerge from existing law. Recently, a few pioneering courts have embarked on a path of judicial creation of animal rights, arriving at them either through a rights-based interpretation of animal welfare legislation or a dynamic interpretation of constitutional (human) rights. Most notably, the Supreme Court of India has extracted a range of animal rights from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and, by reading them in the light of the Constitution, elevated those statutory rights to the status of fundamental rights. 8 Furthermore, courts in Argentina 9 and Colombia 10 have extended the fundamental right of habeas corpus , along with the underlying right to liberty, to captive animals. 11 These (so far isolated) acts of judicial recognition of animal rights may be read as early manifestations of an incipient formation of legal animal rights. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing practical need for legal animal rights theory, in order to explain and guide the as yet still nascent—and somewhat haphazard—evolution of legal animal rights.

This article seeks to take the first steps towards building a more systematic and nuanced theory of legal animal rights. Navigating the existing theoretical patchwork, the article revisits and connects relevant themes that have so far been addressed only in a scattered or cursory manner, and consolidates them into an overarching framework for legal animal rights. Moreover, tackling the well-known problem of ambiguity and obscurity involved in the generally vague, inconsistent and undifferentiated use of the umbrella term ‘animal rights’, this article brings analytical clarity into the debate by disentangling and unveiling different meanings and facets of legal animal rights. 12 To this end, the analysis identifies and separates three relevant sets of issues: (i) conceptual issues concerning the nature and foundations of legal animal rights, and, more generally, whether animals are the kind of beings who can potentially hold legal rights; (ii) doctrinal issues pertaining to existing animal welfare law and whether it confers some legal rights on animals—and, if so, what kind of rights; and (iii) normative issues as to why and what kind of legal rights animals ought ideally to have as a matter of future law. These thematic clusters will be addressed through three simple yet key questions: can , do and should animals have legal rights?

Section 2 will show that it is conceptually possible for animals to hold legal rights, and will clarify the formal structure and normative grounds of legal animal rights. Moreover, as section 3 will demonstrate, unwritten animal rights could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though such ‘animal welfare rights’ are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. In order to distinguish between these weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law and the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have potentially or ideally, the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ will be introduced. Finally, section 4 will explore a range of functional reasons why animals need such strong, fundamental rights as a matter of future law.

As a preliminary matter, it seems necessary to first address the conceptual issue whether animals potentially can have legal rights, irrespective of doctrinal and normative issues as to whether animals do in fact have, or should have, legal rights. Whether animals are possible or potential right holders—that is, the kind of beings to whom legal rights can be ascribed ‘without conceptual absurdity’ 13 —must be determined based on the general nature of rights, which is typically characterised in terms of the structure (or form) and grounds (or ultimate purpose) of rights. 14 Looking at the idea of animal rights through the lens of general rights theories helps clarify the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights by identifying their possible forms and grounds. The first subsection (A) focusses on two particular forms of conceptually basic rights—claims and liberties—and examines their structural compatibility with animal rights. The second subsection (B) considers the two main competing theories of rights—the will theory and interest theory—and whether, and on what grounds, they can accommodate animals as potential right holders.

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

The formal structure of rights is generally explicated based on the Hohfeldian typology of rights. 15 Hohfeld famously noted that the generic term ‘right’ tends to be used indiscriminately to cover ‘any sort of legal advantage’, and distinguished four different types of conceptually basic rights: claims (rights stricto sensu ), liberties, powers and immunities. 16 In the following, I will show on the basis of first-order rights 17 —claims and liberties—that legal animal rights are structurally possible, and what such legal relations would consist of. 18

(i) Animal claim rights

To have a right in the strictest sense is ‘to have a claim to something and against someone’, the claim right necessarily corresponding with that person’s correlative duty towards the right holder to do or not to do something. 19 This type of right would take the form of animals holding a claim to something against, for example, humans or the state who bear correlative duties to refrain from or perform certain actions. Such legal animal rights could be either negative rights (correlative to negative duties) to non-interference or positive rights (correlative to positive duties) to the provision of some good or service. 20 The structure of claim rights seems especially suitable for animals, because these are passive rights that concern the conduct of others (the duty bearers) and are simply enjoyed rather than exercised by the right holder. 21 Claim rights would therefore assign to animals a purely passive position that is specified by the presence and performance of others’ duties towards animals, and would not require any actions by the animals themselves.

(ii) Animal liberties

Liberties, by contrast, are active rights that concern the right holder’s own conduct. A liberty to engage in or refrain from a certain action is one’s freedom of any contrary duty towards another to eschew or undertake that action, correlative to the no right of another. 22 On the face of it, the structure of liberties appears to lend itself to animal rights. A liberty right would indicate that an animal is free to engage in or avoid certain behaviours, in the sense of being free from a specific duty to do otherwise. Yet, an obvious objection is that animals are generally incapable of having any legal duties. 23 Given that animals are inevitably in a constant state of ‘no duty’ and thus ‘liberty’, 24 this seems to render the notion of liberty rights somewhat pointless and redundant in the case of animals, as it would do nothing more than affirm an already and invariably existing natural condition of dutylessness. However, this sort of ‘natural liberty’ is, in and of itself, only a naked liberty, one wholly unprotected against interferences by others. 25 That is, while animals may have the ‘natural liberty’ of, for example, freedom of movement in the sense of not having (and not being capable of having) a duty not to move around, others do not have a duty vis-à-vis the animals not to interfere with the exercise of this liberty by, for example, capturing and caging them.

The added value of turning the ‘natural liberties’ of animals into liberty rights thus lies in the act of transforming unprotected, naked liberties into protected, vested liberties that are shielded from certain modes of interference. Indeed, it seems sensible to think of ‘natural liberties’ as constituting legal rights only when embedded in a ‘protective perimeter’ of claim rights and correlative duties within which such liberties may meaningfully exist and be exercised. 26 This protective perimeter consists of some general duties (arising not from the liberty right itself, but from other claim rights, such as the right to life and physical integrity) not to engage in ‘at least the cruder forms of interference’, like physical assault or killing, which will preclude most forms of effective interference. 27 Moreover, liberties may be fortified by specific claim rights and correlative duties strictly designed to protect a particular liberty, such as if the state had a (negative) duty not to build highways that cut across wildlife habitat, or a (positive) duty to build wildlife corridors for such highways, in order to facilitate safe and effective freedom of movement for the animals who live in these fragmented habitats.

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

Lastly, some remarks on the relation between animal rights and duties seem in order. Some commentators hold that animals are unable to possess legal rights based on the influential idea that the capacity for holding rights is inextricably linked with the capacity for bearing duties. 28 Insofar as animals are not capable of bearing legal duties in any meaningful sense, it follows that animals cannot have legal (claim) rights against other animals, given that those other animals would be incapable of holding the correlative duties. But does this disqualify animals from having legal rights altogether, for instance, against legally competent humans or the state?

While duties are a key component of (first-order) rights—with claim rights necessarily implying the presence of a legal duty in others and liberties necessarily implying the absence of a legal duty in the right holder 29 —neither of them logically entails that the right holder bear duties herself . As Kramer aptly puts it:

Except in the very unusual circumstances where someone holds a right against himself, X’s possession of a legal right does not entail X’s bearing of a legal duty; rather, it entails the bearing of a legal duty by somebody else. 30

This underscores an important distinction between the conceptually axiomatic correlativity of rights and duties—the notion that every claim right necessarily implies a duty—and the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties—the notion that (the capacity for) right holding is conditioned on (the capacity for) duty bearing. While correlativity refers to an existential nexus between a right and a duty held by separate persons within one and the same legal relation , reciprocity posits a normative nexus between the right holding and duty bearing of one and the same person within separate, logically unrelated legal relations.

The claim that the capacity for right holding is somehow contingent on the right holder’s (logically unrelated) capacity for duty bearing is thus, as Kramer puts it, ‘straightforwardly false’ from a Hohfeldian point of view. 31 Nevertheless, there may be other, normative reasons (notably underpinned by social contract theory) for asserting that the class of appropriate right holders should be limited to those entities that, in addition to being structurally possible right holders, are also capable of reciprocating, that is, of being their duty bearers’ duty bearers. 32 However, such a narrow contractarian framing of right holding should be rejected, not least because it misses the current legal reality. 33 With a view to legally incompetent humans (eg infants and the mentally incapacitated), contemporary legal systems have manifestly cut the connection between right holding and the capacity for duty bearing. 34 As Wenar notes, the ‘class of potential right holders has expanded to include duty-less entities’. 35 Similarly, it would be neither conceptually nor legally apposite to infer from the mere fact that animals do not belong to the class of possible duty bearers that they cannot belong to the class of possible right holders. 36

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

While Hohfeld’s analytical framework is useful to outline the possible forms and composition of legal animal rights, Kelch rightly points out that it remains agnostic as to the normative grounds of potential animal rights. 37 In this respect, the two dominant theories of rights advance vastly differing accounts of the ultimate purpose of rights and who can potentially have them. 38 Whereas the idea of animal rights does not resonate well with the will theory, the interest theory quite readily provides a conceptual home for it.

(i) Will theory

According to the will theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is to promote and protect some aspect of an individual’s autonomy and self-realisation. A legal right is essentially a ‘legally respected choice’, and the right holder a ‘small scale sovereign’ whose exercise of choice is facilitated by giving her discretionary ‘legal powers of control’ over others’ duties. 39 The class of potential right holders thus includes only those entities that possess agency and legal competence, which effectively rules out the possibility of animals as right holders, insofar as they lack the sort or degree of agency necessary for the will-theory conception of rights. 40

However, the fact that animals are not potential right holders under the will theory does not necessarily mean that animals cannot have legal rights altogether. The will theory has attracted abundant criticism for its under-inclusiveness as regards both the class of possible right holders 41 and the types of rights it can plausibly account for, and thus seems to advance too narrow a conception of rights for it to provide a theoretical foundation for all rights. 42 In particular, it may be noted that the kinds of rights typically contemplated as animal rights are precisely of the sort that generally exceed the explanatory power of the will theory, namely inalienable, 43 passive, 44 public-law 45 rights that protect basic aspects of animals’ (partially historically and socially mediated) vulnerable corporeal existence. 46 Such rights, then, are best explained on an interest-theoretical basis.

(ii) Interest theory

Animal rights theories most commonly ground animal rights in animal interests, and thus naturally gravitate to the interest theory of rights. 47 According to the interest theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is the protection and advancement of some aspect(s) of an individual’s well-being and interests. 48 Legal rights are essentially ‘legally-protected interests’ that are of special importance and concern. 49 With its emphasis on well-being rather than on agency, the interest theory seems more open to the possibility of animal rights from the outset. Indeed, as regards the class of possible right holders, the interest theory does little conceptual filtering beyond requiring that right holders be capable of having interests. 50 Given that, depending on the underlying definition of ‘interest’, this may cover all animals, plants and, according to some, even inanimate objects, the fairly modest and potentially over-inclusive conceptual criterion of ‘having interests’ is typically complemented by the additional, more restrictive moral criterion of ‘having moral status’. 51 Pursuant to this limitation, not just any being capable of having interests can have rights, but only those whose well-being is not merely of instrumental, but of intrinsic or ‘ultimate value’. 52

Accordingly, under the interest theory, two conditions must be met for animals to qualify as potential right holders: (i) animals must have interests, (ii) the protection of which is required not merely for ulterior reasons, but for the animals’ own sake, because their well-being is intrinsically valuable. Now, whether animals are capable of having interests in the sense relevant to having rights and whether they have moral status in the sense of inherent or ultimate value is still subject to debate. For example, some have denied that animals possess interests based on an understanding of interests as wants and desires that require complex cognitive abilities such as having beliefs and language. 53 However, most interest theories opt for a broader understanding of interests in the sense of ‘being in someone’s interest’, meaning that an interest holder can be ‘made better or worse off’ and is able to benefit in some way from protective action. 54 Typically, though not invariably, the capacity for having interests in this broad sense is bound up with sentience—the capacity for conscious and subjective experiences of pain, suffering and pleasure. 55 Thus, most interest theorists quite readily accept (sentient) animals as potential right holders, that is, as the kind of beings that are capable of holding legal rights. 56

More importantly yet for legal purposes, the law already firmly rests on the recognition of (some) animals as beings who possess intrinsically valuable interests. Modern animal welfare legislation cannot be intelligibly explained other than as acknowledging that the animals it protects (i) have morally and legally relevant goods and interests, notably in their welfare, life and physical or mental integrity. 57 Moreover, it rests on an (implicit or explicit) recognition of those animals as (ii) having moral status in the sense of having intrinsic value. The underlying rationale of modern, non-anthropocentric, ethically motivated animal protection laws is the protection of animals qua animals, for their own sake, rather than for instrumental reasons. 58 Some laws go even further by directly referencing the ‘dignity’ or ‘intrinsic value’ of animals. 59

It follows that existing animal welfare laws already treat animals as intrinsically valuable holders of some legally relevant interests—and thus as precisely the sorts of beings who possess the qualities that are, under an interest theory of rights, necessary and sufficient for having rights. This, then, prompts the question whether those very laws do not only conceptually allow for potential animal rights, but might also give rise to actual legal rights for animals.

Notwithstanding that animals could have legal rights conceptually, the predominant doctrinal opinion is that, as a matter of positive law, animals do not have any, at least not in the sense of proper, legally recognised and claimable rights. 60 Yet, there is a certain inclination, especially in Anglo-American parlance, to speak—in a rather vague manner—of ‘animal rights’ as if they already exist under current animal welfare legislation. Such talk of existing animal rights is, however, rarely backed up with further substantiations of the underlying claim that animal welfare laws do in fact confer legal rights on animals. In the following, I will examine whether animals’ existing legal protections may be classified as legal rights and, if so, what kind of rights these constitute. The analysis will show (A) that implicit animal rights (hereinafter referred to as ‘animal welfare rights’) 61 can be extracted from animal welfare laws as correlatives of explicit animal welfare duties, but that this reading remains largely theoretical so far, given that such unwritten animal rights are hardly legally recognised in practice. Moreover, (B) the kind of rights derivable from animal welfare laws are currently at best imperfect and weak rights that do not provide animals with the sort of robust normative protection that is generally associated with legal rights, and typically also expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. Finally, (C) the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ are introduced in order to distinguish, and account for the qualitative differences, between such current, imperfect, weak animal rights and potential, ideal, strong animal rights.

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws

(i) the simple argument from correlativity.

Existing animal welfare laws are not framed in the language of rights and do not codify any explicit animal rights. They do, however, impose on people legal duties designed to protect animals—duties that demand some behaviour that is beneficial to the welfare of animals. Some commentators contend that correlative (claim) rights are thereby conferred upon animals as the beneficiaries of such duties. 62 This view is consistent with, and, indeed, the logical conclusion of, an interest-theoretical analysis. 63 Recall that rights are essentially legally protected interests of intrinsically valuable individuals, and that a claim right is the ‘position of normative protectedness that consists in being owed a … legal duty’. 64 Under existing animal welfare laws, some goods of animals are legally protected interests in exactly this sense of ultimately valuable interests that are protected through the imposition of duties on others. However, the inference from existing animal welfare duties to the existence of correlative ‘animal welfare rights’ appears to rely on a somewhat simplistic notion of correlativity, along the lines of ‘where there is a duty there is a right’. 65 Two objections in particular may be raised against the view that beneficial duties imposed by animal welfare laws are sufficient for creating corresponding legal rights in animals.

First, not every kind of duty entails a correlative right. 66 While some duties are of an unspecific and general nature, only relational, directed duties which are owed to rather than merely regarding someone are the correlatives of (claim) rights. Closely related, not everyone who stands to benefit from the performance of another’s duty has a correlative right. According to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties designed to protect their interests. 67 Yet, animal welfare duties, in a contemporary reading, are predominantly understood not as indirect duties regarding animals—duties imposed to protect, for example, an owner’s interest in her animal, public sensibilities or the moral character of humans—but as direct duties owed to the protected animals themselves. 68 Moreover, the constitutive purpose of modern animal welfare laws is to protect animals for their own sake. Animals are therefore clearly beneficiaries in a qualified sense, that is, they are not merely accidental or incidental, but the direct and intended primary beneficiaries of animal welfare duties. 69

Secondly, one may object that an analysis of animal rights as originating from intentionally beneficial duties rests on a conception of rights precisely of the sort which has the stigma of redundancy attached to it. Drawing on Hart, this would appear to cast rights as mere ‘alternative formulation of duties’ and thus ‘no more than a redundant translation of duties … into a terminology of rights’. 70 Admittedly, as MacCormick aptly puts it:

[To] rest an account of claim rights solely on the notion that they exist whenever a legal duty is imposed by a law intended to benefit assignable individuals … is to treat rights as being simply the ‘reflex’ of logically prior duties. 71

One way of responding to this redundancy problem is to reverse the logical order of rights and duties. On this account, rights are not simply created by (and thus logically posterior to) beneficial duties, but rather the converse: such duties are derived from and generated by (logically antecedent) rights. For example, according to Raz, ‘Rights are grounds of duties in others’ and thus justificationally prior to duties. 72 However, if rights are understood not just as existentially correlative, but as justificationally prior to duties, identifying intentionally beneficial animal welfare duties as the source of (logically posterior) animal rights will not suffice. In order to accommodate the view that rights are grounds of duties, the aforementioned argument from correlativity needs to be reconsidered and refined.

(ii) A qualified argument from correlativity

A refined, and reversed, argument from correlativity must show that animal rights are not merely reflexes created by animal welfare duties, but rather the grounds for such duties. In other words, positive animal welfare duties must be plausibly explained as some kind of codified reflection, or visible manifestation, of ‘invisible’ background animal rights that give rise to those duties.

This requires further clarification of the notion of a justificational priority of rights over duties. On the face of it, the idea that rights are somehow antecedent to duties appears to be at odds with the Hohfeldian correlativity axiom, which stipulates an existential nexus of mutual entailment between rights and duties—one cannot exist without the other. 73 Viewed in this light, it seems paradoxical to suggest that rights are causal for the very duties that are simultaneously constitutive of those rights—cause and effect seem to be mutually dependent. Gewirth offers a plausible explanation for this seemingly circular understanding of the relation between rights and duties. He illustrates that the ‘priority of claim rights over duties in the order of justifying purpose or final causality is not antithetical to their being correlative to each other’ by means of an analogy:

Parents are prior to their children in the order of efficient causality, yet the (past or present) existence of parents can be inferred from the existence of children, as well as conversely. Hence, the causal priority of parents to children is compatible with the two groups’ being causally as well as conceptually correlative. The case is similar with rights and duties, except that the ordering relation between them is one of final rather than efficient causality, of justifying purpose rather than bringing-into-existence. 74

Upon closer examination, this point may be specified even further. To stay with the analogy of (biological) 75 parents and their children: it is actually the content of ‘parents’—a male and a female (who at some point procreate together)—that exists prior to and independently of possibly ensuing ‘children’, whereas this content turns into ‘parents’ only in conjunction with ‘children’. That is, the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are mutually entailing, whilst, strictly speaking, it is not ‘parents’, but rather that which will later be called ‘parents’ only once the ‘child’ comes into existence—the pre-existing content—which is antecedent to and causal for ‘children’.

Applied to the issue of rights and duties, this means that it is actually the content of a ‘right’—an interest—that exists prior to and independently of, and is (justificationally) causal for the creation of, a ‘duty’, which, in turn, is constitutive of a ‘right’. The distinction between ‘right’ and its content—an interest—allows the pinpointing of the latter as the reason for, and the former as the concomitant correlative of, a duty imposed to protect the pre-existing interest. It may thus be restated, more precisely, that it is not rights, but the protected interests which are grounds of duties. Incidentally, this specification is consistent with Raz’s definition of rights, according to which ‘having a right’ means that an aspect of the right holder’s well-being (her interest) ‘is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty’. 76 Now, the enactment of modern animal welfare laws is in and of itself evidence of the fact that some aspects of animals’ well-being (their interests) are—both temporally and justificationally—causal and a sufficient reason for imposing duties on others. Put differently: animal interests are grounds of animal welfare duties , and this, in turn, is conceptually constitutive of animal rights .

In conclusion, existing animal welfare laws could indeed be analysed as comprising unwritten ‘animal welfare rights’ as implicit correlatives of the explicit animal welfare duties imposed on others. The essential feature of legal rules conferring rights is that they specifically aim at protecting individual interests or goods—whether they do so expressis verbis or not is irrelevant. 77 Even so, in order for a right to be an actual (rather than a potential or merely postulated) legal right, it should at least be legally recognised (if not claimable and enforceable), 78 which is determined by the applicable legal rules. In the absence of unequivocal wording, whether a legal norm confers unwritten rights on animals becomes a matter of legal interpretation. While theorists can show that a rights-based approach lies within the bounds of a justifiable interpretation of the law, an actual, valid legal right hardly comes to exist by the mere fact that some theorists claim it exists. For that to happen, it seems instrumental that some public authoritative body, notably a court, recognises it as such. That is, while animals’ existing legal protections may already provide for all the ingredients constitutive of rights, it takes a court to actualise this potential , by authoritatively interpreting those legal rules as constituting rights of animals. However, because courts, with a few exceptions, have not done so thus far, it seems fair to say that unwritten animal rights are not (yet) legally recognised in practice and remain a mostly theoretical possibility for now. 79

B. The Weakness of Current ‘Animal Welfare Rights’

Besides the formal issue of legal recognition, there are substantive reasons for questioning whether the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare laws are really rights at all. This is because current ‘animal welfare rights’ are unusually weak rights that do not afford the sort of strong normative protection that is ordinarily associated with legal rights. 80 Classifying animals’ existing legal protections as ‘rights’ may thus conflict with the deeply held view that, because they protect interests of special importance, legal rights carry special normative force . 81 This quality is expressed in metaphors of rights as ‘trumps’, 82 ‘protective fences’, 83 protective shields or ‘No Trespassing’ signs, 84 or ‘suits of armor’. 85 Rights bestow upon individuals and their important interests a particularly robust kind of legal protection against conflicting individual or collective interests, by singling out ‘those interests that are not to be sacrificed to the utilitarian calculus ’ and ‘whose promotion or protection is to be given qualitative precedence over the social calculus of interests generally’. 86 Current ‘animal welfare rights’, by contrast, provide an atypically weak form of legal protection, notably for two reasons: because they protect interests of secondary importance or because they are easily overridden.

In order to illustrate this, consider the kind of rights that can be extracted from current animal welfare laws. Given that these are the correlatives of existing animal welfare duties, the substance of these rights must mirror the content laid down in the respective legal norms. This extraction method produces, first, a rather odd subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’ that have a narrow substantive scope protecting highly specific, secondary interests, such as a (relative) right to be slaughtered with prior stunning, 87 an (absolute) right that experiments involving ‘serious injuries that may cause severe pain shall not be carried out without anaesthesia’ 88 or a right of chicks to be killed by fast-acting methods, such as homogenisation or gassing, and to not be stacked on top of each other. 89 The weak and subsidiary character of such rights becomes clearer when placed within the permissive institutional context in which they operate, and when taking into account the more basic interests that are left unprotected. 90 While these rights may protect certain secondary, derivative interests (such as the interest in being killed in a painless manner ), they are simultaneously premised on the permissibility of harming the more primary interests at stake (such as the interest in not being killed at all). Juxtaposed with the preponderance of suffering and killing that is legally allowed in the first place, phrasing the residual legal protections that animals do receive as ‘rights’ may strike us as misleading. 91

But then there is a second subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’, extractable from general animal welfare provisions, that have a broader scope, protecting more basic, primary interests, such as a right to well-being, life, 92 dignity, 93 to not suffer unnecessarily, 94 or against torture and cruel treatment. 95 Although the object of such rights is of a more fundamental nature, the substantive guarantee of these facially fundamental rights is, to a great extent, eroded by a conspicuously low threshold for permissible infringements. 96 That is, these rights suffer from a lack of normative force, which manifests in their characteristically high infringeability (ie their low resistance to being overridden). Certainly, most rights (whether human or animal) are relative prima facie rights that allow for being balanced against conflicting interests and whose infringement constitutes a violation only when it is not justified, notably in terms of necessity and proportionality. 97 Taking rights seriously does, however, require certain safeguards ensuring that rights are only overridden by sufficiently important considerations whose weight is proportionate to the interests at stake. As pointed out by Waldron, the idea of rights is seized on as a way of resisting, or at least restricting, the sorts of trade-offs that would be acceptable in an unqualified utilitarian calculus, where ‘important individual interests may end up being traded off against considerations which are intrinsically less important’. 98 Yet, this is precisely what happens to animals’ prima facie protected interests, any of which—irrespective of how important or fundamental they are—may enter the utilitarian calculus, where they typically end up being outweighed by human interests that are comparatively less important or even trivial, notably dietary and fashion preferences, economic profitability, recreation or virtually any other conceivable human interest. 99

Any ‘animal welfare rights’ that animals may presently be said to have are thus either of the substantively oddly specific, yet rather secondary, kind or, in the case of more fundamental prima facie rights, such that are highly infringeable and ‘evaporate in the face of consequential considerations’. 100 The remaining question is whether these features render animals’ existing legal protections non-rights or just particularly unfit or weak rights , but rights nonetheless. The answer will depend on whether the quality of special strength, weight or force is considered a conceptually constitutive or merely typical but not essential feature of rights. On the first view, a certain normative force would function as a threshold criterion for determining what counts as a right and for disqualifying those legal protections that may structurally resemble rights but do not meet a minimum weight. 101 On the second view, the normative force of rights would serve as a variable that defines the particular weight of different types of rights on a spectrum from weak to strong. 102 To illustrate the intricacies of drawing a clear line between paradigmatically strong rights, weak rights or non-rights based on this criterion, let us return to the analogy with (biological) ‘parents’. In a minimal sense, the concept of ‘parents’ may be essentially defined as ‘biological creators of a child’. Typically, however, a special role as nurturer and caregiver is associated with the concept of ‘parent’. Now, is someone who merely meets the minimal conceptual criterion (by being the biological creator), but not the basic functions attached to the concept (by not giving care), still a ‘parent’? And, if so, to what extent? Are they a full and proper ‘parent’, or merely an imperfect, dysfunctional form of ‘parent’, a bad ‘parent’, but a ‘parent’ nonetheless? Maybe current animal rights are ‘rights’ in a similar sense as an absent, negligent, indifferent biological mother or father who does not assume the role and responsibilities that go along with parenthood is still a ‘parent’. That is, animals’ current legal protections may meet the minimal conceptual criteria for rights, but they do not perform the characteristic normative function of rights. They are, therefore, at best atypically weak and imperfect rights.

C. The Distinction between Simple and Fundamental Animal Rights

In the light of the aforesaid, if one adopts the view that animals’ existing legal protections constitute legal rights—that is, if one concludes that existing animal welfare laws confer legal rights on animals despite a lack of explicit legal enactment or of any coherent judicial recognition of unwritten animal rights, and that the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare law retain their rights character regardless of how weak they are—then an important qualification needs to be made regarding the nature and limits of such ‘animal welfare rights’. In particular, it must be emphasised that this type of legal animal rights falls short of (i) our ordinary understanding of legal rights as particularly robust protections of important interests and (ii) institutionalising the sort of inviolable, basic moral animal rights (along the lines of human rights) that animal rights theorists typically envisage. 103 It thus seems warranted to separate the kind of imperfect and weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of ideal, 104 proper, strong fundamental rights that animals potentially ought to have as a matter of future law.

In order to denote and account for the qualitative difference between these two types of legal animal rights, and drawing on similar distinctions as regards the rights of individuals under public and international law, 105 I propose to use the conceptual categories of fundamental animal rights and other, simple animal rights. As to the demarcating criteria, we can distinguish between simple and fundamental animal rights based on a combination of two factors: (i) substance (fundamentality or non-fundamentality of the protected interests) and (ii) normative force (degree of infringeability). Accordingly, simple animal rights can be defined as weak legal rights whose substantive content is of a non-fundamental, ancillary character and/or that lack normative force due to their high infringeability. In contradistinction, fundamental animal rights are strong legal rights along the lines of human rights that are characterised by the cumulative features of substantive fundamentality and normative robustness due to their reduced infringeability.

The ‘animal welfare rights’ derivable from current animal welfare laws are simple animal rights. However, it is worth noting that while the first subtype of substantively non-fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ belongs to this category irrespective of their infringeability, 106 the second subtype of substantively fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ presently falls in this category purely in respect of their characteristically high infringeability. Yet, the latter is a dynamic and changeable feature, insofar as these rights could be dealt with, in case of conflict, in a manner whereby they would prove to be more robust. In other words, while the simple animal rights of the second subtype currently lack the normative force of legal rights, they do have the potential to become fundamental animal rights. Why animals need such fundamental rights will be explored in the final section.

Beyond the imperfect, weak, simple rights that animals may be said to have based on existing animal welfare laws, a final normative question remains with a view to the future law: whether animals ought to have strong legal rights proper. I will focus on fundamental animal rights—such as the right to life, bodily integrity, liberty and freedom from torture—as these correspond best with the kind of ‘ought to be legal rights’ typically alluded to in animal rights discourse. Given the general appeal of rights language, it is not surprising that among animal advocates there is an overall presumption in favour of basic human rights-like animal rights. 107 However, it is often simply assumed that, rather than elucidated why, legal rights would benefit animals and how this would strengthen their protection. In order to undergird the normative claim that animals should have strong legal rights, the following subsections will look at functional reasons why animals need such rights. 108 I will do so through a non-exhaustive exploration of the potential legal advantages and political utility of fundamental animal rights over animals’ current legal protections (be they animal welfare laws or ‘animal welfare rights’).

A. Procedural Aspect: Standing and Enforceability

Against the backdrop of today’s well-established ‘enforcement gap’ and ‘standing dilemma’, 109 one of the most practical benefits typically associated with, or expected from, legal animal rights is the facilitation of standing for animals in their own right and, closely related, the availability of more efficient mechanisms for the judicial enforcement of animals’ legal protections. 110 This is because legal rights usually include the procedural element of having standing to sue, the right to seek redress and powers of enforcement—which would enable animals (represented by legal guardians) to institute legal proceedings in their own right and to assert injuries of their own. 111 This would also ‘decentralise’ enforcement, that is, it would not be concentrated in the hands (and at the sole discretion) of public authorities, but supplemented by private standing of animals to demand enforcement. Ultimately, such an expanded enforceability could also facilitate incremental legal change by feeding animal rights questions into courts as fora for public deliberation.

However, while standing and enforceability constitute crucial procedural components of any effective legal protection of animals, for present purposes, it should be noted that fundamental animal rights (or any legal animal rights) are—albeit maybe conducive—neither necessary nor sufficient to this end. On the one hand, not all legal rights (eg some socio-economic human rights) are necessarily enforceable. Merely conferring legal rights on animals will therefore, in itself, not guarantee sufficient legal protection from a procedural point of view. Rather, fundamental animal rights must encompass certain procedural rights, such as the right to access to justice, in order to make them effectively enforceable. On the other hand, animals or designated animal advocates could simply be granted standing auxiliary to today’s animal welfare laws, which would certainly contribute towards narrowing the enforcement gap. 112 Yet, standing as such merely offers the purely procedural benefit of being able to legally assert and effectively enforce any given legal protections that animals may have, but has no bearing on the substantive content of those enforceable protections. Given that the issue is not just one of improving the enforcement of animals’ existing legal protections, but also of substantially improving them, standing alone cannot substitute for strong substantive animal rights. Therefore, animals will ultimately need both strong substantive and enforceable rights, which may be best achieved through an interplay of fundamental rights and accompanying procedural guarantees.

B. Substantive Aspect: Stronger Legal Protection for Important Interests

The aforesaid suggests that the critical function of fundamental animal rights is not procedural in nature; rather, it is to substantively improve and fortify the protection of important animal interests. In particular, fundamental animal rights would strengthen the legal protection of animals on three levels: by establishing an abstract equality of arms, by broadening the scope of protection to include more fundamental substantive guarantees and by raising the burden of justification for infringements.

First of all, fundamental animal rights would create the structural preconditions for a level playing field where human and animal interests are both reinforced by equivalent rights, and can thus collide on equal terms. Generally speaking, not all legally recognised interests count equally when balanced against each other, and rights-empowered interests typically take precedence over or are accorded more weight than unqualified competing interests. 113 At present, the structural makeup of the balancing process governing human–animal conflicts is predisposed towards a prioritisation of human over animal interests. Whereas human interests are buttressed by strong, often fundamental rights (such as economic, religious or property rights), the interests at stake on the animal side, if legally protected at all, enter the utilitarian calculus as unqualified interests that are merely shielded by simple animal welfare laws, or simple rights that evaporate quickly in situations of conflict and do not compare to the sorts of strong rights that reinforce contrary human interests. 114 In order to achieve some form of abstract equality of arms, animals’ interests need to be shielded by strong legal rights that are a match to humans’ rights. Fundamental animal rights would correct this structural imbalance and set the stage for an equal consideration of interests that is not a priori biased in favour of humans’ rights.

Furthermore, as defined above, fundamental animal rights are characterised by both their substantive fundamentality and normative force, and would thus strengthen animals’ legal protection in two crucial respects. On a substantive level , fundamental animal rights are grounded in especially important, fundamental interests. Compared to substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights, which provide for narrow substantive guarantees that protect secondary interests, fundamental animal rights would expand the scope of protection to cover a wider array of basic and primary interests. As a result, harming fundamentally important interests of animals—while readily permissible today insofar as such interests are often not legally protected in the first place 115 —would trigger a justification requirement that initially allows those animal interests to enter into a balancing process. For even with fundamental animal rights in play, conflicts between human and animal interests will inevitably continue to exist—albeit at the elevated and abstractly equal level of conflicts of rights—and therefore require some sort of balancing mechanism. 116

On this justificatory level , fundamental animal rights would then demand a special kind and higher burden of justification for infringements. 117 As demonstrated above, substantively fundamental yet highly infringeable simple animal rights are marked by a conspicuously low threshold for justifiable infringements, and are regularly outweighed by inferior or even trivial human interests. By contrast, the normative force of fundamental animal rights rests on their ability to raise the ‘level of the minimally sufficient justification’. 118 Modelling these more stringent justification requirements on established principles of fundamental (human) rights adjudication, this would, first, limit the sorts of considerations that constitute a ‘legitimate aim’ which can be balanced against fundamental animal rights. Furthermore, the balancing process must encompass a strict proportionality analysis, comprised of the elements of suitability, necessity and proportionality stricto sensu , which would preclude the bulk of the sorts of low-level justifications that are currently sufficient. 119 This heightened threshold for justifiable infringements, in turn, translates into a decreased infringeability of fundamental animal rights and an increased immunisation of animals’ prima facie protected interests against being overridden by conflicting considerations and interests of lesser importance.

Overall, considering this three-layered strengthening of the legal protection of animals’ important interests, fundamental animal rights are likely to set robust limits to the violability and disposability of animals as means to human ends, and to insulate animals from many of the unnecessary and disproportionate inflictions of harm that are presently allowed by law.

C. Fallback Function: The Role of Rights in Non-ideal Societies

Because contemporary human–animal interactions are, for the most part, detrimental to animals, the latter appear to be in particular need of robust legal protections against humans and society. 120 Legal rights, as strong (but not impenetrable) shields, provide an instrument well suited for this task, as they operate in a way that singles out and protects important individual goods against others and the political community as a whole. For this reason, rights are generally considered an important counter-majoritarian institution, but have also been criticised for their overly individualistic, antagonistic and anti-communitarian framing. 121 Certainly, it may be debated whether there is a place for the institution of rights in an ideal society—after all, rights are not decrees of nature, but human inventions that are historically and socially contingent. 122 However, rights are often born from imperfect social conditions, as a ‘response to a failure of social responsibility’ 123 and as corrections of experiences of injustice, or, as Dershowitz puts it: ‘ rights come from wrongs ’. 124 Historical experience suggests that, at least in non-ideal societies, there is a practical need for rights as a safety net—a ‘position of fall-back and security’ 125 —that guarantees individuals a minimum degree of protection, in case or because other, less coercive social or moral mechanisms fail to do so.

Yet, as Edmundson rightly points out, this view of rights as backup guarantees does not quite capture the particular need for rights in the case of animals. 126 It is premised on the existence of a functioning overall social structure that can in some cases, and maybe in the ideal case, substitute for rights. However, unlike many humans, most animals are not embedded in a web of caring, affectionate, benevolent relations with humans to begin with, but rather are caught up in a system of exploitative, instrumental and harmful relations. For the vast majority of animals, it is not enough to say that rights would serve them as fallbacks, because there is nowhere to fall from—by default, animals are already at (or near) the bottom. Accordingly, the concrete need for rights may be more acute in the case of animals, as their function is not merely to complement, but rather to compensate for social and moral responsibility, which is lacking in the first place. 127 To give a (somewhat exaggerated) example: from the perspective of a critical legal scholar, meta-theorising from his office in the ivory tower, it may seem easier, and even desirable, to intellectually dispense with the abstract notion of rights, whereas for an elephant who is actually hunted down for his ivory tusks, concrete rights may make a very real difference, literally between life and death. Therefore, under the prevailing social conditions, animals need a set of basic rights as a primary ‘pull-up’ rather than as a subsidiary backup—that is, as compensatory baseline guarantees rather than as complementary background guarantees.

D. Transformative Function: Rights as ‘Bridges’ between Non-ideal Realities and Normative Ideals

Notwithstanding that animals need fundamental rights, we should not fail to recognise that even the minimum standards such rights are designed to establish and safeguard seem highly ambitious and hardly politically feasible at present. Even a rudimentary protection of fundamental animal rights would require far-ranging changes in our treatment of animals, and may ultimately rule out ‘virtually all existing practices of the animal-use industries’. 128 Considering how deeply the instrumental and inherently harmful use of animals is woven into the economic and cultural fabric of contemporary societies, and how pervasive animal cruelty is on both an individual and a collective level, the implications of fundamental animal rights indeed seem far removed from present social practices. 129 This chasm between normative aspirations and the deeply imperfect empirical realities they collide with is not, however, a problem unique to fundamental animal rights; rather, it is generally in the nature of fundamental rights—human or animal—to postulate normative goals that remain, to some extent, aspirational and unattainable. 130 Aspirational rights express commitments to ideals that, even if they may not be fully realisable at the time of their formal recognition, act as a continuous reminder and impulse that stimulates social and legal change towards a more expansive implementation. 131 In a similar vein, Bilchitz understands fundamental rights as moral ideals that create the pressure for legal institutionalisation and as ‘bridging concepts’ that facilitate the transition from past and present imperfect social realities towards more just societies. 132

This, then, provides a useful lens for thinking about the aspirational nature and transformative function of fundamental animal rights. Surely, the mere formal recognition of fundamental animal rights will not, by any realistic measure, bring about an instant practical achievement of the ultimate goal of ‘abolishing exploitation and liberating animals from enslavement’. 133 They do, however, create the legal infrastructure for moving from a non-ideal reality towards more ideal social conditions in which animal rights can be respected. For example, a strong animal right to life would (at least in industrialised societies) preclude most forms of killing animals for food, and would thus certainly conflict with the entrenched practice of eating meat. Yet, while the current social normality of eating animals may make an immediate prohibition of meat production and consumption unrealistic, it is also precisely the reason why animals need a right to life (ie a right not to be eaten), as fundamental rights help to denormalise (formerly) accepted social practices and to establish, internalise and habituate normative boundaries. 134 Moreover, due to their dynamic nature, fundamental rights can generate successive waves of more stringent and expansive duties over time. 135 Drawing on Bilchitz, the established concept of ‘progressive realisation’ (originally developed in the context of socio-economic human rights) may offer a helpful legal framework for the gradual practical implementation of animal rights. Accordingly, each fundamental animal right could be seen as comprising a minimum core that has to be ensured immediately, coupled with a general prohibition of retrogressive measures , and an obligation to progressively move towards a fuller realisation . 136 Therefore, even if fundamental animal rights may currently not be fully realisable, the very act of introducing them into law and committing to them as normative ideals places animals on the ‘legal map’ 137 and will provide a powerful generative basis—a starting point rather than an endpoint 138 —from which a dynamic process towards their more expansive realisation can unfold.

The question of animal rights has been of long-standing moral concern. More recently, the matter of institutionalising moral animal rights has come to the fore, and attaining legal rights for animals has become an important practical goal of animal advocates. This article started out from the prefatory observation that the process of juridification may already be in its early stages, as judicially recognised animal rights are beginning to emerge from both animal welfare law and human rights law. With legal animal rights on the horizon, the analysis set out to systematically address the arising conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues, in order to provide a theoretical underpinning for this legal development. The article showed that the idea of legal animal rights has a sound basis in both legal theory as well as in existing law. That is, legal animal rights are both conceptually possible and already derivable from current animal welfare laws. However, the analysis has also revealed that the ‘animal welfare rights’ which animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law fall short of providing the sort of strong normative protection that is typically associated with legal rights and that is furthermore expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. This discrepancy gave rise to a new conceptual distinction between two types of legal animal rights: simple and fundamental animal rights.

While the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of legal protections that the law may grant to animals, distinguishing between simple and fundamental animal rights helps to unveil important differences between what we may currently call ‘legal animal rights’ based on existing animal welfare laws, which are weak legal rights at best, and the kind of strong, fundamental legal rights that animals should have as a matter of future law. This distinction is further conducive to curbing the trivialisation of the language of animal rights, as it allows us to preserve the normative force of fundamental animal rights by separating out weaker rights and classifying them as other, simple animal rights. Lastly, it is interesting to note that, with courts deriving legal animal rights from both animal welfare law and from constitutional, fundamental or human rights law, first prototypes of simple and fundamental animal rights are already discernible in emerging case law. Whereas Christopher Stone once noted that ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been … a bit unthinkable’ throughout legal history, 139 the findings of this article suggest that we may presently be witnessing a new generation of legal rights in the making—legal animal rights, simple and fundamental.

This article is the first part of my postdoctoral research project ‘Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I am indebted to William Edmundson, Raffael Fasel, Chris Green, Christoph Krenn, Visa Kurki, Will Kymlicka, Nico Müller, Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, MH Tse, Steven White, Derek Williams and the anonymous reviewers for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Seminally, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 1983); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP 2011).

See, notably, Matthew H Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (2001) 14 CJLJ 29; Tom L Beauchamp, ‘Rights Theory and Animal Rights’ in Tom L Beauchamp and RG Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (OUP 2011); William A Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (2015) 23 Journal of Political Philosophy 345; Gary L Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (first printed 1995, Temple UP 2007) 91ff; Steven M Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution—The Eligibility of Nonhuman Animals for Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democracy’ (1998) 22 Vt L Rev 793; Anne Peters, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Animalité: Human-Animal Comparisons in Law’ (2016) 5 TEL 25; Thomas G Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights’ (1999) 27 BC Envtl Aff L Rev 1.

Much legal scholarship deals with animal rights in a rather cursory and incidental manner, because it typically focusses on parallel debates that are closely related to, but seen as preceding, the issue of rights. For example, much has been written about the systemic shortcomings of animal welfare legislation, which—within the entrenched animal welfare/rights-dualism—has served to undergird calls for shifting towards a rights -paradigm for legal protection of animals. Another focal point of legal scholars has been to change the legal status of animals from property to person , which is taken to be a prerequisite for right holding. Yet, even though legal rights for animals may be the ultimate goal informing these debates, surprisingly little detailed attention has been given to such envisaged legal animal rights per se.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Prentice-Hall 1973) 67.

See eg Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia UP 2012) 14–15, 207 (whose ‘account of the moral rights of animals … proposes what the legal rights of animals ought to be ’); cf Joel Feinberg, ‘In Defence of Moral Rights’ (1992) 12 OJLS 149 (describing this indirect way of referencing legal rights as the ‘“There ought to be a law” theory of moral rights’, 156).

As noted by Favre, what is required is ‘that the legal system intervene when personal morals or ethics do not adequately protect animals from human abuse’. David Favre, ‘Integrating Animal Interests into Our Legal System’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 87, 88.

Even though moral and legal rights are intimately connected (see HLA Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 175, 177), a somewhat distinct (or at least modified and refined) theorisation is warranted because, unlike moral animal rights, legal animal rights are constituted by legal systems, and their existence and scope have to be determined based on the applicable legal rules. As Wise puts it: ‘philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights’. Steven M Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus 2002) 34.

Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] [56] [62ff]; see further Kerala High Court 6 June 2000, AIR 2000 KER 340 (expressing the opinion that ‘legal rights shall not be the exclusive preserve of the humans’, [13]); Delhi High Court 15 May 2015, CRL MC no 2051/2015 [3] [5] (recognizing birds’ ‘fundamental rights to fly in the sky’).

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15; this landmark decision was preceded by an obiter dictum in Cámara Federal de Casación Penal Buenos Aires, 18 December 2014, SAIJ NV9953 [2] (expressing the view that animals are right holders and should be recognized as legal subjects).

Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona). This ruling was later reversed in Corte Suprema de Justicia 16 August 2017, STL12651-2017 (MP: Fernando Castillo Cadena). In January 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided against granting habeas corpus to the animal in question.

Similar habeas corpus claims on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants, brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project, have not been accepted by US courts. See, notably, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336.

On the ambiguity of the term ‘animal rights’, see eg Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Rights’ in Lori Gruen (ed), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago Press 2018) 320; in using the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ without further specifications, it is often left unclear what exactly is meant by ‘rights’. For example, the term may refer to either moral or legal animal rights—or both. Furthermore, in a broad sense, ‘animal rights’ sometimes refers to any kind of normative protection for animals, whereas in a narrow sense, it is often reserved for particularly important and inviolable, human rights-like animal rights. Moreover, some speak of ‘animal rights’ as if they already existed as a matter of positive law, while others use the same term in a ‘manifesto sense’, to refer to potential, ideal rights.

Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Clare Palmer (ed), Animal Rights (Routledge 2008) 409; the class of potential right holders comprises ‘any being that is capable of holding legal rights, whether or not he/she/it actually holds such rights’. Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29.

See generally Alon Harel, ‘Theories of Rights’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 191ff.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16; Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1917) 26 Yale LJ 710.

See Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 717; these Hohfeldian incidents of rights are merely ‘atomic’ units, whereas many common rights are complex aggregates, clusters or ‘molecular rights’ consisting of combinations thereof. ibid 746; Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (2005) 33 Philosophy & Public Affairs 223, 225, 234.

First-order rights (claims and liberties) directly concern someone’s actual rather than normative conduct, whereas powers and immunities are second-order rights (‘meta-rights’) that concern other legal relations; by prioritising, for the sake of this analysis, first-order rights regarding (in)actions of and towards animals, this is not to say that second-order rights are not important to accompany and bolster the first-order rights of animals. For instance, just as many complex (eg fundamental) rights contain immunities, that is, the freedom from the legal power of another (the disability bearer) to change the immunity holder’s rights, animals’ claims and liberties may be bolstered by immunity rights that protect those first-order rights from being altered, notably voided, by others. For example, one of the most basic rights frequently discussed for animals, the ‘right not to be property’ (Gary L Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (first printed 2000, Temple UP 2007) 93ff), may be explained as an immunity that would strip away the legal powers that currently go along with the state of legal disposability entailed by animals’ property status, and would thus disable human ‘owners’ to decide over animals’ rights. As passive rights, immunities are quite easily conceivable as animal rights, because they are specified by reference to the correlative position, that is, by what the person disabled by the animal’s immunity right cannot legally do (see generally Matthew H Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ in Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998) 22). By contrast, a power refers to one’s control over a given legal relation and entails one’s normative ability to alter another’s legal position (see Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55). Prima facie , powers may thus seem ill-suited for animals. This is because, unlike passive second-order rights (immunities), powers are active rights that have to be exercised rather than merely enjoyed and, unlike first-order active rights (liberties), powers concern the exercise of legal rather than factual actions and thus require legal rather than mere practical or behavioural agency. Notwithstanding, it may be argued that animals, not unlike children, could hold legal powers (eg powers of enforcement) that are exercisable through human proxies (cf Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Legal Competence and Legal Power’ in Mark McBride (ed), New Essays on the Nature of Rights (Hart Publishing 2017) 46).

For a discussion of Hohfeldian theory in the context of animal rights, see also Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 799ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 96–7; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 6ff.

Joel Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ in Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton UP 1980) 159; Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55.

So far, animal rights theory has largely focussed on negative rights. See critically Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 5ff, 49ff.

cf Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (n 16) 233.

See Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 10.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 162; but see Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 41–2 (arguing that it would not be impossible, though ‘cruel and perhaps silly’, to impose legal duties on animals).

A ‘liberty’ is the negation of ‘duty’ and may thus be redescribed as ‘no-duty’.

On the distinction between naked and vested liberties, see HLA Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ in HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (OUP 1982) 172.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171, 173.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171.

eg Richard L Cupp, ‘Children, Chimps, and Rights: Arguments from “Marginal” Cases’ (2013) 45 Ariz St LJ 1; see also Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (OUP 2018) 116ff.

See David Lyons, ‘Rights, Claimants, and Beneficiaries’ (1969) 6 American Philosophical Quarterly 173, 173–4.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

In this vein, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, p 4, 6; but see critically New York Court of Appeals, Tommy v Lavery and Kiko v Presti decision of 8 May 2018, motion no 2018-268, concurring opinion Judge Fahey.

For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia explicitly departed from this reciprocity paradigm and held that animals are right holders but not duty bearers. Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona), 14ff; for a refutation of the contractarian reciprocity argument, see also Brief for Philosophers as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner-Appellant, Nonhuman Rights Project v Lavery 2018 NY Slip Op 03309 (2018) (Nos 162358/15 and 150149/16), 14ff.

See Peters (n 2) 45–6; David Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Personhood and Dignity of Non-Human Animals’ (2009) 25 SAJHR 38, 42–3; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 163; but see Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, 5.

Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (2013) 123 Ethics 202, 207.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 43.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 9.

For an overview, see generally Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998).

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 183, 188–9.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 30; Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 185.

A problematic corollary of the will theory is its conceptual awkwardness, or inability, to accommodate as right holders not just non-human but also human non-agents, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated. As noted by Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (n 7) 181, the will conception of rights ‘should incline us not to extend to animals and babies … the notion of a right’; see also Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 69.

As pointed out by van Duffel, neither the will theory nor the interest theory may be a ‘plausible candidate for a comprehensive theory of rights’, and it may be best to assume that both theories simply attempt to capture the essence of different kinds of rights. See Siegfried van Duffel, ‘The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake’ (2012) 93 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104, 105, 117 et passim .

Under the will theory, inalienable rights are not ‘rights’ by definition, as they precisely preclude the right holder’s power to waive the correlative duties. See DN MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ in PMS Hacker and J Raz (eds), Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of HLA Hart (OUP 1977) 198f; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 73.

The will theory is primarily modelled on active rights (liberties and powers) that directly facilitate individual autonomy and choice, but is less conclusive with regard to passive rights (claims and immunities) which do not involve any action or exercise of choice by the right holder herself. cf Harel (n 14) 194–5.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 190, conceded that the will theory does not provide a sufficient analysis of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights; legal animal rights, by contrast, are most intelligibly explained as public-law rights held primarily against the state which has correlative duties to respect and protect.

The will theory appears to limit the purpose of rights protection to a narrow aspect of human nature—the active, engaging and self-determining side—while ignoring the passive, vulnerable and needy side. Autonomy is certainly an important good deserving of normative protection, but it is hardly the only such good. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Introduction’ in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (OUP 1984) 11; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 197, 208.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 10ff; for an interest-based approach to animal rights, see eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19); Cochrane (n 5) 19ff.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 192.

J Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (1984) 4 OJLS 1, 12; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 12, 14.

See William A Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (2nd edn, CUP 2012) 97; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 176; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 167.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33ff, 39.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 177ff; see also Neil MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights: A Test-Case for Theories of Right’ in Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (OUP 1982) 159–60.

See RG Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (OUP 1980) 78ff; HJ McCloskey, ‘Rights’ (1965) 15 The Philosophical Quarterly 115, 126; but see Tom Regan, ‘McCloskey on Why Animals Cannot Have Rights’ (1976) 26 The Philosophical Quarterly 251.

Harel (n 14) 195; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 39–40; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person’ in Visa AJ Kurki and Tomasz Pietrzykowski (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn (Springer 2017) 79–80.

See eg Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 207, 227; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166.

See also Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 80.

See Thomas G Kelch, ‘A Short History of (Mostly) Western Animal Law: Part II’ (2013) 19 Animal Law Review 347, 348ff; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 44ff; in this vein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 [57]) noted that ‘the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals ’ (emphasis added); the well-established German concept of ‘ethischer Tierschutz’ expresses this non-anthropocentric, ethical thrust of animal welfare law. See Margot Michel, ‘Law and Animals: An Introduction to Current European Animal Protection Legislation’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 91–2.

1999 Federal Constitution (Bundesverfassung) (CH), Article 120(2) and 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 3(a); 2010 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (LI), Article 1; 2018 Animal Welfare Act (Loi sur la protection des animaux) (LU), Article 1; 1977 Experiments on Animals Act (Wet op de dierproeven) (NL), Article 1a; European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Recital 12.

See eg Steven M Wise, ‘Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The Case for Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ (1996) 2 Animal Law Review 179, 179; Richard A Epstein, ‘Animals as Objects, or Subjects, of Rights’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005) 144ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 18; Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238 [6]; Herrmann v Germany App no 9300/07 (ECtHR, 26 June 2012), separate opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, 38; Noah v Attorney General HCJ 9232/01 [2002–2003] IsrLR 215, 225, 232, 253.

This type of current legal animal rights will be called ‘animal welfare rights’ in order to indicate their origin in current animal welfare laws.

See eg Cass R Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights)’ (2000) 47 UCLA Law Review 1333 (claiming that current animal welfare law creates ‘a robust set of animal rights’ or even ‘an incipient bill of rights for animals’. ibid 1334, 1336); Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 43ff, 48–9 (concluding that ‘the existing statutory framework can already be seen to confer certain legal rights upon animals’: 50 fn 61); Jerrold Tannenbaum, ‘Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights’ (1995) 62 Social Research 539, 581; Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 910ff; this view was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] (stating that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ‘deals with duties of persons having charge of animals, which is mandatory in nature and hence confer corresponding rights on animals’).

See eg Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (n 19) 193–4 et passim ; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 218, 220; Visa AJ Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (OUP 2019) 62–5.

Matthew H Kramer, ‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 188.

eg, for Sunstein correlativity seems to run both ways: ‘Not only do rights create duties, but the imposition of a duty also serves to create a right.’ Cass R Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (1995) 70 Notre Dame L Rev 727, 746.

On this objection, see also Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 8–9.

See Lyons (n 29) 176; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 10; critically Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 85ff; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory’ (2018) 38 OJLS 430, 436ff.

See eg Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 161–2, 166; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 45–6; in this vein, a German high court held that, based on the criminal law justification of necessity (‘rechtfertigender Notstand’), private persons may be authorised to defend the legally protected goods of animals on behalf of the animals, independently of or even against the interests of their owners. OLG Naumburg, judgment of 22 February 2018, case no 2 Rv 157/17, recital II; on why animals need directed rather than indirect duties, see Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 350ff.

See also Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 100.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 181–2, 190.

MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 199.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 167, 170f; see also Alan Gewirth, ‘Introduction’ in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (University of Chicago Press 1982) 14.

See Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 40.

Gewirth (n 72) 14.

For the sake of the argument, I am only referring to biological parents.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 180–1.

See MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 191–2; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 13–14.

According to some scholars, legal rights exist only when they are enforceable. See eg Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard UP 2011) 405–6 (stating that legal rights are only those that the right holder is entitled to enforce on demand in directly available adjudicative processes).

A significant practical hurdle to the legal recognition of animal rights is that in virtually any legal order, animals are legal objects rather than legal persons. Because legal personhood and right holding are generally thought to be inextricably linked, many jurists refrain from calling the existing legal protections of animals ‘rights’. See critically Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 71, 85–6.

See generally Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff.

On this, see Kai Möller, ‘Proportionality and Rights Inflation’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 166; Harel (n 14) 197ff; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 14ff.

Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’ in Waldron, Theories of Rights (n 46) 153.

Bernard E Rollin, ‘The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights’ in HB Miller and WH Willliams (eds), Ethics and Animals (Humana Press 1983) 106.

Tom Regan, ‘The Day May Come: Legal Rights for Animals’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 11, 15–16.

Frederick Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (1993) 27 Ga L Rev 415, 429 et passim .

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (CUP 1993) 209, 215–16 (emphasis added); see also Frederick Schauer, ‘Rights, Constitutions and the Perils of Panglossianism’ (2018) 38 OJLS 635, 637.

Correlative to Council Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 of 24 September 2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing [2009] OJ L303/1, Article 4 and Annex I.

Correlative to European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Article 14(1)(2).

Correlative to 2008 Animal Welfare Ordinance (Tierschutzverordnung) (CH), Article 178a(3).

The permissive character of animal welfare law was highlighted by the Israeli High Court of Justice in a case concerning the force-feeding of geese. Commenting on the ‘problematic’ regulatory language, it noted that the stated ‘purpose of the Regulations is “to prevent the geese’s suffering.” Clearly these regulations do not prevent suffering; at best they minimize, to some extent, the suffering caused’. Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 234–5. See also Shai Lavi, ‘Humane Killing and the Ethics of the Secular: Regulating the Death Penalty, Euthanasia, and Animal Slaughter’ (2014) 4 UC Irvine Law Review 297, 321 (noting the disparity between ‘the resolution to overcome pain and suffering, which exists side-by-side with inhumane conditions that remain unchallenged and are often taken for granted’).

As MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights’ (n 52) 159, has succinctly put it: ‘Consider the oddity of saying that turkeys have a right to be well fed in order to be fat for the Christmas table’; this is not to minimise the importance of existing animal welfare protections. Even though they are insufficient and weak compared to proper legal rights, that does not mean that they are insignificant. See, on this point, Regina Binder, ‘Animal Welfare Regulation: Shortcomings, Requirements, Perspectives’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 83.

eg correlative to 1972 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (DE), § 1 and 17(1).

eg correlative to 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 26(1)(a).

eg derived from Animal Welfare Act 2006 (UK), s 4.

See eg Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [62] (extracting from animal welfare law, inter alia , the right to life, to food and shelter, to dignity and fair treatment, and against torture); similarly, Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238, dissenting opinion Justice Fraser [43].

For example, the prima facie right to be free from unnecessary pain and suffering is, in effect, rendered void if virtually any kind of instrumental interest in using animals is deemed necessary and a sufficient justification for its infringement.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Harel (n 14) 198; Laurence H Tribe, ‘Ten Lessons Our Constitutional Experience Can Teach Us About the Puzzle of Animal Rights: The Work of Steven M Wise’ (2001) 7 Animal Law Review 1, 2.

See Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 209–11.

See Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 17ff, 109.

Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 114.

For Schauer, a certain normative force seems to be constitutive of the concept of rights. He argues that a right exists only insofar as an interest is protected against the sorts of low-level justifications that would otherwise be sufficient to restrict the interest if it were not protected by the right. See Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430 et passim .

In this vein, Sunstein holds that animal welfare laws ‘protect a form of animal rights, and there is nothing in the notion of rights or welfare that calls for much, or little, protection of the relevant interests’. Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1335.

On the universal basic rights of animals, see eg Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 19ff.

‘Ideal right’ in the sense of ‘what ought to be a positive … right, and would be so in a better or ideal legal system’. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (n 4) 84.

In domestic public law, fundamental or constitutional rights are distinguished from other, simple public (eg administrative) law rights. Likewise, in international law, human rights can be distinguished from other, simple or ordinary international individual rights. See Anne Peters, Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (CUP 2016) 436ff.

Indeed, substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights may be quite resistant to being overridden, and may sometimes even be absolute (non-infringeable) rights.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of legal rights is not undisputed within the animal advocacy movement. For an overview of some pragmatic and principled objections against animal rights , see Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 325ff.

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2); Peters (n 2) 46ff.

Today, animals’ legal protections remain pervasively under-enforced by the competent public authorities as well as practically unenforceable by the affected animals or their human representatives for lack of standing. See eg Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1334ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

The link between rights and the legal-operational advantage of standing was famously highlighted by Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 S Cal L Rev 450; see further Cass R Sunstein, ‘Can Animals Sue?’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005); Peters (n 2) 47–8.

See Stone (n 110) 458ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

See eg Constitutional Court of South Africa 8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 (affirming the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ statutory power of private prosecution and to institute legal proceedings in case of animal cruelty offences).

See Frederick Schauer, ‘Proportionality and the Question of Weight’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber (eds), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 177–8.

See generally Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016) 151ff.

For example, under the Swiss 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz), life itself is not a legally protected good, and the (painless, non-arbitrary) killing of an animal does not therefore require any justification.

See also Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 253–4 (pointing out that balancing different interests is ‘part and parcel of our legal system’).

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 736–7.

On this threshold-raising conception of rights, see generally Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Harvard UP 1978) 191–2 (noting that a right cannot justifiably be overridden ‘on the minimal grounds that would be sufficient if no such right existed’).

At present, the overwhelming portion of permissible interferences with animals’ interests can hardly be said to be necessary or proportionate in any real sense of the word. See Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights (n 17) 9, 55.

As noted by Teubner, animal rights ‘create basically defensive institutions. Paradoxically, they incorporate animals into human society in order to create defences against the destructive tendencies of human society against animals’. Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law’ (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 497, 521.

See eg Mark Tushnet, ‘An Essay on Rights’ (1984) 62 Tex L Rev 1363; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991); for a modern reformulation of the rights critique, see eg Robin L West, ‘Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama’ (2011) 53 Wm & Mary L Rev 713.

See generally Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (Basic Books 2004) 59ff.

See Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 754.

Dershowitz (n 122) 9.

Jeremy Waldron, ‘When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights’ (1988) 11 Harv JL & Pub Pol’y 625, 629.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 358.

More generally, the practical need for rights as complementary or compensatory guarantees will vary depending on social context, and may be more immediate and pressing for the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalised, victimised, vulnerable, disadvantaged or even oppressed portions of society. See generally Patricia J Williams, ‘Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights’ (1987) 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 401.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 40, 49; see further Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 2004) 330ff, 348–9; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

See Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

On the aspirational dimension of human rights, see generally Philip Harvey, ‘Aspirational Law’ (2004) 52 Buff L Rev 701.

ibid 717–18; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 14–15, 19; ‘rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche’. Williams (n 127) 424.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Fundamental Rights as Bridging Concepts: Straddling the Boundary Between Ideal Justice and an Imperfect Reality’ (2018) 40 Hum Rts Q 119, 121ff.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 49; see also Gary L Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple UP 2007) 2.

cf Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 331–2.

On the dynamic nature of rights and their generative power, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 171; Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 212, 214.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?’ (2010) 25 Southern African Public Law 267, 291ff.

Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 71.

cf Harvey (n 130) 723 (noting that human rights will always remain a ‘work in progress rather than a finished project’); similarly, Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 333.

Stone (n 110) 453.

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Writing an argumentative essay on animal testing

Academic writing

Essay paper writing

Writing any academic assignment requires rigorous preparation, and animal rights essay is not an exception. The issue of animal rights is considered to be one of the most topical nowadays. Of course, you have your own opinion about this topic, and it can be different from what you can find in other essays about animals on the Internet when searching for some materials. Don't worry – you have to understand that the purpose of writing this particular assignment is to describe your perception of this issue. You can compare opposing views, give examples of researches performed by other people, but your thesis statement and ideas should definitely be unique. The same thing is about the conclusion in which you briefly summarize all the major turning points as well as provide the new approach to the issue under investigation. Animal rights became a widely debated topic over the last century. The number of activist groups fighting for animal rights is growing as well as the number of cases when people exploit animals. So, while working on this academic topic, you will face two opposite views on this problem. However, it is up to you how to develop this topic. Now, you need to know where to start and how to move in the process of your writing to ensure that every single aspect of excellent academic writing is addressed. If you want to know more tips on how to do this when working on essays on animal testing, keep reading this article, and you will find a lot of useful pieces of advice to prepare the best assignment!

Animal testing essay

Animal testing essay is one of the most popular topics for consideration and research in universities across the world. With the ongoing heated debate about whether it’s appropriate to perform animal testing of various kinds, you can find an extensive list of evidence suggesting quite opposing variables.

Where do we start to work on this assignment? There are tons of information on this topic in libraries and online sources. It could take ages to study all of them. In order not to get lost in this amount of information, you need to formulate your animal testing thesis statement succinctly. What is your approach and your personal opinion about animal rights and animal testing in particular? Write down all the ideas that come to your mind because otherwise, you can forget something essential. Writing animal testing persuasive speech requires conducting an extensive research. You need to know the most popular and the latest studies, be aware of possible objections, and be sure of how you would cover them. Make sure you employ all the basic principles of logic when arguing your point, and don’t forget about the importance of critical thinking that you’ve been taught as a freshman. Yes, we know this can sound like a too obvious kind of advice, but you are never going to believe how many students fail to provide the convincing proof simply because they forget or neglect the common list of logical fallacies. So, as soon as you remember the proper structure that every academic essay should have and are aware of the formatting rules of your university, you need to get clear with what type of essay you will be writing. Is it a persuasive or argumentative essay? Or maybe, it’s a research paper? All of these types have slightly different principles of writing, and you have to understand them correctly to write a decent paper. Let’s look at each of them in more detail.

Animal testing argumentative essay

The essay structure mostly depends on the type of paper that you are writing. In the case of an animal testing argumentative essay, your main task is to defend a point that you propose as your thesis statement. For better understanding, we are going to explain some of the most common types of claims, with the help of which you can formulate an appropriate statement worth a professional academic assignment.

The first one is answering a question about whether some idea is true or not. In an argumentative essay on animal testing, for example, you can answer the question if animal testing indeed harmful for any animal or some of them still remain useful for humanity and relatively safe for animals.

The next claim that you can use in your essay could be this: what do some definitions that you choose mean? In an essay like this, you can examine animal testing in laboratories for cosmetic or for pharmaceutical companies. What do they do with animals? How ethical is that?

Another type of thesis statement claim focuses on value. You can highlight it in your argumentative essay against animal testing. It literally answers the question of how important this topic is. Animal rights have become quite a burning issue over the past few decades because, according to ASPCA, a significant level of testing of medications that appeared to be safe for animals, caused a harmful effect on humans, or in better cases were just ineffective. In this regard, another burning question is the following: is animal testing relevant for further investigations in the field of the pharmaceutical industry? The same goes for an argumentative article on animal testing. At that point, you can also claim that according to the applicable law, a medical drug, to be approved for national and worldwide selling, has to be tested on no less than 10,000 humans.

It is useful to write your ideas on little pieces of paper when preparing to formulate an animal testing argumentative essay outline and rearrange them on the table until you have perfect logical order. For example, by showing the proper facts, data, statistics, and references from authoritative sources, you can lead to the point that animal testing in too many cases results in false conclusions about the safety measures of medicine constituents.

Another type of argument is focusing on policy. After proposing the thesis statement of an essay on using animals in research, you can lead to the point of assuming what strategies could be applied to resolve the problems revealed as a part of researches using animals for the experiments. In many of these types of claims, you can use the deployment of the subject throughout history to make your evidence even more showing. For example, if you are writing an argumentative essay on animals being used for research, you can start with a notion that, in Middle Ages, for example, people widely exploited animals because this was the only way to survive, and they didn’t really care neither about animal rights nor about the excessive number of humans dying from diseases as a result of the lack of hygiene and means of security. However, centuries have passed, and our civilization has chosen another way of development. The first recorded organization that had an intention to fight for animal rights was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England, established in 1824. If you live in the USA, you can also examine the current laws that are applicable to the issue of animal testing, and that would be the Animal Welfare Act passed by Congress in 1966, with an amendment in 1986, which you can view as a law that needs revising again, as the 21st century gains traction. It is also useful to prepare animal rights debate questions in advance in case if you have to defend your point in front of the class and your professor. Don’t forget to prepare the most persuasive answers to possible questions and memorize or at least write them on small pieces of paper. The structure of an animal cruelty argumentative essay doesn’t differ from most of the other types of essays. What’s important here is to keep the debate going. This method is also widely used for another kind of essay, which could be called animal testing debate essay, and it would focus mainly on the debate of two opposing points of view rather than on proving your statement based on other scholars’ conclusions.  After formulating your thesis statement, it is time to create an outline and to start writing the first part of your paper – the introduction. Ideally, it should contain a so-called hook statement. This idea should be slightly different from the clear and persuasive thesis statement that indicated directly what you mean and why you think it should be considered credible. An animal testing essay hook must immediately draw the attention of your prospective reader so that they want to immerse in reading your essay till the very end. This could be a witty rhetorical question that sets the scene for the main statement before you address it, or it could be a timely quote to think about or an intriguing idea that, most likely, no one has thought about the way you propose it until now.

Animal rights essay introduction and body

When writing an animal rights essay introduction, you have to present the information in such a way that your audience will be interested in continuing reading your paper. Besides, this section should gradually lead your reader to the thesis statement, which has to be relevant and to the point. Remember that you shouldn’t use valuable arguments that you have collected before body paragraphs of your animal testing controversy essay. Your main task in this part is still presenting a good thesis statement, which you will have to reinforce with arguments in the body of your essay.

The next thing you have to think about is body paragraphs. A conventional academic essay typically consists of three to five body paragraphs. Each of them should have a traditional structure, which is simple to follow step by step, whether you are writing why should animals have rights essay or any other type of argument related to this topic. Any body paragraph starts with a topic sentence. These sentences represent the main idea of this part and act as a transition from one argument to another. After this, you have to introduce the sub-argument that you planned to discuss in this section when creating an essay outline. After the topic sentence and the following section are introduced, you can develop your argument further on.

The next thing to do in an academic assignment like animal experimentation essay is to reinforce your argument by using some evidence and examples. Supportive evidence like facts, statistics, and references from authoritative literature pieces might all be used for proving that your point of view is valid. Finally, at the very end of your body paragraph, it’s time to summarize everything that you have written in this section. At this point, you need to strengthen your defendable claim and supporting evidence stated above with a persuasive final statement. In other words, try to answer the question: why was this point so important and relevant?

Animal testing essay conclusion

After you are done writing all of your body paragraphs, it’s finally time to write the last part, which is the animal testing essay conclusion. With this final point, you can either prove your thesis statement is right or fail with it, so we recommend you to be exceptionally patient when working on this part. Note that basic principles of how to write an essay conclusion can be applied to practically all types of papers, including animal rights argumentative essay. You can divide your conclusion into some parts. In the first sentence, you have to rephrase the central message – your thesis statement. The difference between this sentence and your thesis statement in an introduction is that now you are completely sure that the presented idea is true because you have just proved your rightness. In the following few sentences, you can briefly repeat all the sub-arguments that you have stated before. In the end, the best way to finish your essay is to add the concluding thesis about animal testing. This one can represent some universal truth, hold an interesting idea, or give some food for thought to your readers.

Persuasive essay on animal testing

When deciding on what approach to focus on when writing an animal testing persuasive essay, you are probably wondering how a persuasive essay is different from the argumentative one. In this case, you have to remember that writing a persuasive essay, you employ principles of morality and emotional influence to argue the stated point of view. In this type of assignment, you have a chance to appeal to your reader’s emotions and not to eliminate your own for the sake of a rational viewpoint. Your purpose, in this case, is to influence people through their emotional reactions and feelings. Even though, don’t forget that you are still writing an academic assignment and your essay or your persuasive speech on animal testing should remain perfectly logical, contain strong evidence as well as opposing views. Keep in mind that any persuasive speech should contain a call to action. Social messages like stop animals abuse make an excellent topic for such speech. Your ultimate goal to achieve when writing a persuasive essay on animal testing is to convince your readers that your point is valid and to encourage people to take action towards resolving the problem that you highlight. Imagine yourself being a lawyer or a head of an animal rights activist organization. What line of reasoning would you choose to attract random people to join your movement? It is also important to picture a portrait of your readers because the whole structure of an assignment like animal cruelty persuasive speech depends on them. So determine your target audience and don’t forget to maintain awareness of their possible biases; that would help you to structure a perfect counter-argument to any probable objections. So as you can see, writing animal cruelty persuasive essay is quite a challenging task, so do your best to come up with a high-quality text that can really change people’s attitudes. Just make sure that your arguments are strong enough to persuade even the biggest skeptics. Before you start writing, we recommend you to look through persuasive essay topics about animals that your professor had provided or to find them on the Internet. You will be surprised how well-developed this subject is. Of course, you need to find a particular topic of animal abuse persuasive essay that will appeal to you. By doing that, you will be able not only to stay motivated and finish the essay way before deadlines but also to choose the right audience unmistakably. Useful advice is to look for the emotional link that connects you and your audience. For example, this could be the fact that you are a pet owner, or one of your older relatives was treated by a medicine, which was tested on animals, and it was proved to be ineffective. There are thousands of stories like this, and almost anyone can find them relatable. You should also think about the strong opening phrase that will help you to grasp the attention of your reader. The easiest way to come up with an idea for the part that is called ‘the attention grabber’ is to be familiar with the subject and to care about this problem. For example, in the should animals be kept in zoos persuasive essay, you are encouraged to appeal to people’s emotions, as we remember from the explanations above, but you also should not forget about morality and logical reasoning of the question that you want to discuss. As a result, you can start with a memory of your childhood when you went to the zoo. How animals looked there? What did they do? How visitors reacted to them and how they reacted in return? Did animals look happy and healthy? The answers to all of these questions might not appear positive. Use these memories to picture the life of the animals in captivity. You can also highlight your ideas with the extensive research that you have performed.   Some students prefer to write an outline after they jot down the first draft of their essay, especially if it’s a relatively short three-paragraph assignment. Some of them even look for animal testing essay titles after they finish working on the text of the essay. However, it is up to you to decide on which stage to write an outline or a title, and there is no solely successful formula. Moreover, you can even add the introduction and the conclusion at the very end of your writing, but if you feel inspired by the topic that you have chosen, it will be quite effective to write an introduction right from the start, before you write your actual animal abuse assignment.

Animal rights research paper

Writing an animal rights research paper might not be the most challenging assignment during your studies because this subject has become a touchy topic for recent years. Almost all the people inevitably love animals; that’s why it is essential to question out morality norms in terms of our actions towards innocent creatures whose lives sometimes fully depend on us. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said — ‘You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.’ Animal rights movement research paper has a very traditional structure similar to those we described earlier in sections about persuasive and argumentative essays. By the way, you can either choose an argumentative or analytical paper to write. The main difference between them lies in the ultimate goal of your writing. The argumentative paper focuses on some very controversial topic, and it looks much like a debate between two opposing points of view. At the same time, an analytical research paper has a more rational than persuasive approach. In a paper like the latter, you are allowed to gather as many references as you want, and they don’t have to oppose each other. You may compare them, but your main goal in this essay would be searching for the truth. When writing assignments like a research paper on animal abuse, the research itself becomes the most important part of your work. There can be multiple sources of information about animal testing, animal rights, animals bred in captivity, etc. You can go the traditional way and collect valuable and authoritative information to make your strongest points with it. The sources could be academic databases that can be found online. You can also visit the library at your university.

Of course, the Internet search is boundless, and you can also find valid sources from any location in the world, which expands your perspectives for writing a persuasive animal cruelty research paper a lot. You will find various articles, blog posts, news posts, encyclopedias, historical documents, web pages, books, and interviews. However, make sure you use no less than five authoritative sources in your research paper. When looking through the non-scholarly sources of information like blog posts, videos, and web articles, check whether they are unbiased and trustworthy.

After you collected the information, it might seem daunting to sort it all out and write a perfect academic paper. Don’t worry, you can do it! Just divide your work into easy steps. For example, the first thing to do after your research is to organize the sources of your animal abuse research paper. For example, use small colored slips of paper to recognize different kinds of sources. It is also useful to stick to each of them little papers with notes of what you find important in this reference and why, what idea you want to develop on the basis of this document, etc. Don’t forget to construct a bibliography list for your paper. It is exceptionally quick and easy to do if you have organized your references the way that is described here. Now you can also come up with a good title for animal testing essay. Your title should be intriguing but at the same time informative for your readers.

Now it’s time to take a few more steps of preparation for the actual writing of your paper. The next thing to do is to develop your animal testing research paper outline. When you have all your notes organized, you won’t spend much time and effort on this stage. Just remember to familiarize yourself with formatting guidelines that you are required to follow. Most of the types of formats are used for specific fields of study, so make sure that the norms and rules that you want to use are approved by your university or school. Only after you know how you should format your paper, you can create a relevant outline and move on. After this, it’s time to formulate an animal testing essay thesis. Make sure it clearly represents your idea without stating any references yet. A good way to shape your thesis statement is to pose it as a question or as a persuasion. For example, it could sound like ‘Should animal testing be prohibited in the USA?’ or ‘Animal testing should be prohibited.’ Both options are right; you just have to show the argument in a necessary light since all of your sub-arguments and counter-arguments throughout the whole paper will revolve around your thesis about animal testing. Before getting down to writing body paragraphs, you can make it easier for you and highlight the most important turning points that you will be discussing. Note that one pivotal point should not be necessarily deployed in a single paragraph. You can complete your idea in one section, but you can also develop it through a few paragraphs. Just make sure to keep the thesis statement as the ultimate point of your paper. Even if you are writing controversial animal rights vs medical research paper, which is simple to follow because you are only describing two of the contradictory views in relation to each other, keep in mind that you should maintain your focus straightly on the essay topic. Keep an eye on your animal rights essay outline, and don’t let your thoughts wander, especially if you’ve collected a lot of evidence and sources. It might be a good idea to spend some time relaxing. After this, you can reread what you have already written and get some fresh ideas. Surprisingly, you might suddenly find that some points need further elaboration, whereas some of them have to be cut down or eliminated. You might also want to make your language sound more professional and academic, even if you’ve chosen a very modern and up-to-date topic like the research paper on animals in zoos. In this case, we recommend you to swap some of simple, casual words into brainier ones! Also, it’s important to make your direct quotes as concise as possible. Even if the piece that you found seems over the top relevant in your given context, it will look more professional if you avoid inserting too long citations. When writing an animal testing should be banned essay, don’t forget to save your witty thoughts for transitional sentences between the paragraphs, because they should link the two separate sections together and make your animal protection essay look more cohesive and logically explained.

Now, the best way to emphasize the importance of your findings is to write a strong conclusion for your animal rights assignment like an essay on animals for research purposes. When writing a conclusion, you need to restate the thesis statement with more confidence and to briefly remind the reader of all the major turning points that you covered throughout the whole essay. It’s a good idea to write an essay conclusion right after you finish the body paragraphs because your evidence remains clear in your mind. Ultimately, at the end of an assignment, when you have already proved your thesis statement against animal testing, try to answer the question ‘So, what?’ to create memorable and convincing final sentence.

Animals in captivity essay

An ongoing debate about breeding and keeping animals in enclosed spaces like zoos and circuses intensifies each day. That is why writing animals in captivity essay is extremely in demand right now as it is interesting both for knowledgeable and general audience. The trick with this theme is that there is no actual right or false statement. Both kinds of arguments, let’s say, for and against keeping animals in zoos, sound realistic and to the point. Let’s discover some of the most popular statements on this topic. Animal rights activists view zoos and circuses like hell for animals. They rely on the emotional state, questioning what would you feel if you have been trapped in the cage for a lifetime and used for entertainment. Such an approach that appeals more to people’s feelings on this subject is more appropriate to adopt for should zoos be banned essay. Moreover, activists keep saying that wild animals suffer in enclosed spaces because they cannot do what’s natural for them like hunting for food. If you are writing should animals be kept in zoos argumentative essay, you should focus on more objective evidence both for and against keeping animals in captivity, which we will continue discussing further on in this section. Another argument against zoos is that by watching animals living in zoos, we can’t learn anything about their life in the wild. When writing a zoos ethical essay, you can use this argument as an opposing viewpoint to the one that suggests that zoos are created for educational purposes. Furthermore, a piece of supportive evidence against zoos could be the fact that only 2% of the world’s 6000+ endangered species are breading in the enclosure. This means that zoos are functioning mainly for making money, and they don't help threatened species to stay alive in safer conditions than in the wilderness. Most zoos also provide improper care like cramped spaces and faulty diet for animals. An opposing idea on this topic for an argumentative essay on zoos lies in the fact that its proponents view the problem from a totally different perspective. Those who support animals being in captivity insist that zoos are the safest places for breeding and keeping animals that could be endangered otherwise. In the wilderness, the small population of some species could be fully exterminated because other animals would eat them. Another case is that lots of people keep hunting wild animals, killing them for food, fur, skin, and horns. Animals should not be kept in zoos argumentative essay could also be supplemented by the idea that smaller animal exhibitors like roadside zoos and petting zoos keep animals in improper conditions. Sometimes a lion lives his whole life in a barren of concrete with metal bars on the sides or in a small cage. But even if the conditions of accredited zoos create a space for lions and bears that resembles their natural habitat, animal activists question if mankind has a right to confine animals for science, education, and entertainment. Finally, we are going to discuss the most popular and widespread opposing arguments that support keeping animals in the zoos, which will help you to collect the solid evidence for your cruelty against animals essay, to formulate an appropriate thesis statement and to build a strong line of reasoning around it. As we have already mentioned before, keeping animals in zoos helps people develop an appreciation for animals and become educated more about wildlife. As a result, by watching how they live, children and adults gain the understanding that it is immoral to kill these animals for fur and food, and it is much better to help them grow and live in peace. Furthermore, if you watch people who are working in zoos, you can see how much effort they put into keeping animals healthy. It requires bringing them the food they like, cleaning and nursing them, helping to bring up babies, and sometimes even doing surgeries. Moreover, large zoos also deploy programs of rescuing the endangered species by looking after them in a safe environment free from predators and starvation. They also have specific breeding programs that help to grow the number of threatened species. However, to support this argument when writing an assignment about animals in captivity, you should perform extensive research to prove that these programs really function and that they help to save species. It is great if you can bring some statistics on the number or percentage of saved animals due to these programs. You can also choose are circuses immoral essay to explore the question of keeping animals in circuses for entertainment. The largest organization fighting for animal rights PETA suggests that circus shows are the cruelest on Earth, mentioning the UniverSoul circus in particular. They say that lots of species there have to suffer from transportation as well as forced training and performances. The trainers whip lions if they don't obey their commands. These people train elephants to perform uncomfortable tricks like standing on their heads, and if they fail to do this, they get beaten by sharp metal billhooks until they bleed. Besides, these animals have to live in small cages. During transportation, they have to wait in small trailers for days. An elephant Heather at King Royal Circus even died in one of such trucks from heat exhaustion. While animals are isolated from everything natural for them like playing, running, breeding, searching for food, and defending their territory, they develop abnormal behaviors like head-bobbing and constant pacing. Some of them attempt to run away, mutilating people and damaging property. For example, an elephant named Tyke was killed when she ran away from Circus International of Honolulu, Hawaii. We strongly recommend adding this argument in your why animals should not be used for entertainment essay.

So now you know how to approach a paper on such a controversial and sore topic. Just remember that when writing an essay like this, try not to get overwhelmed with emotions, be logical and perfectly rational until the very end to defend your point and propose the right solution to the problem. 

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Animal Rights and Human Responsibilities: Towards a Relational Capabilities Approach in Animal Ethics

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In this thesis, I analyze some of the most important contributions concerning the inclusion of animals in the moral and political sphere. Moving from these positions, I suggest that a meaningful consideration of animals' sentience demands a profound, radical political theory which considers animals as moral patients endowed with specific capabilities whose actualization needs to be allowed and/or promoted. Such theory would take human-animal different types of relationships into account to decide what kind of ethical and political responsibilities humans have towards animals. It would be also based on the assumption that animals' sentience is the necessary and sufficient feature … continued below

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Guerini, Elena May 2018.

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• Greig, Michael
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• Name: Master of Arts
• Level: Master's
• Department: Department of Political Science
• College: College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
• Discipline: Political Science
• PublicationType: Master's Thesis
• Grantor: University of North Texas

In this thesis, I analyze some of the most important contributions concerning the inclusion of animals in the moral and political sphere. Moving from these positions, I suggest that a meaningful consideration of animals' sentience demands a profound, radical political theory which considers animals as moral patients endowed with specific capabilities whose actualization needs to be allowed and/or promoted. Such theory would take human-animal different types of relationships into account to decide what kind of ethical and political responsibilities humans have towards animals. It would be also based on the assumption that animals' sentience is the necessary and sufficient feature for assigning moral status. I start from the consideration that in the history of political philosophy, most theorists have excluded animals from the realm of justice. I then propose an examination of utilitarianism, capabilities approach, and relational-based theories of animal rights (in particular the works by Kymlicka and Donaldson, and Clare Palmer) and borrow essential elements from each of these approaches to build my theory. I claim that a political theory which attaches high importance to individual capabilities, as well as to the various types of relationships we have with animals, is the most appropriate to tackle the puzzle of human responsibilities to animals.

• Animal Ethics
• Animal Rights
• Capabilities Theory

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• Animal rights -- Political aspects.
• Animal welfare -- Political aspects.
• Thesis or Dissertation

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Animal Rights Essay. Research Paper on Animal Rights

Published by gudwriter on January 4, 2021 January 4, 2021

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Animal Rights Argumentative Essay Outline

Introduction.

Animals are entitled to fundamental rights.

Paragraph 1:

Animals have an inherent worth just like human beings and this value is completely separate from their usefulness to humans.

• They should enjoy the right to freedom from suffering and pain.
• It wrong for society to view them as existing solely for human use
• They have emotions
• Animals have rights just like human being rights .

Paragraph 2:

Denying animals their rights is based on no meaningful argument but prejudice that is conducted by humans.

• It is only prejudice that makes humans to deny others the rights that they expect to have for themselves
• Prejudice is morally unacceptable in the society whether it is based on species, sexual orientation, gender, religion, or race.

Paragraph 3:

Animals are sentient just like the human species and it is only speciesism of animals that makes humans treating them differently.

• Speciesism is the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of nonhuman animals
• Speciesism is wrong because animals suffer when they are tortured

Paragraph 4:

Human rights opponents may argue that animals do not deserve rights because rights should be accompanied by responsibilities.

• This is wrong because animal rights are essentially about allowing animals to live freely
• This is a fundamental right that any creature should naturally enjoy by virtue of being a living being

Paragraph 5:

Opponents may contend that animals do not have the capacity to make free moral judgment

• However, some animals such as chimpanzees at times show behaviors that are truly altruistic
• Moreover, humans do not always make moral judgments
• Animals should have rights because they are living beings with the right to live freely
• They have an inherent value that cannot be separated from them just like humans
• There is no moral ground upon which humans should deny them their rights

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Animal Rights  

Almost everybody grew up going to zoos and circuses, wearing leather, and eating meat. People also visited pet shops and bought and kept their beloved “pets” and even went fishing and wore clothes made from silk and wool. Well, it turns out that while people did not care to find out the effects of all these activities on animals, they were going against animal rights. The debate about whether non-human animals have rights still rages on with some people saying they do while others saying they are non-human and thus do not. This debate is however irrelevant because animals, just like humans, are entitled to fundamental rights.

Animals have an inherent worth just like human beings and this value is completely separate from how they might be seen as being useful to humans. Every being that has a will to live should be able to enjoy the right to freedom from suffering and pain. It is thus wrong for society to view nonhuman animals as existing solely for human use. When it comes to such emotions as fear, loneliness, joy, love, and pain, the same feeling a human being has is the one an animal has. Each attaches immense value to their life and fights to keep it and that is why animals too try to avoid harm as much as they can (Smith, 2012). It is surprising that humans see no wrong in snatching this freedom from animals. Moreover, determining whether a living being has rights or not should not rest on whether it can reason or talk but on whether it has the capacity to suffer. Thus, humans should consider the extent of harm or suffering they would expose animals to before subjecting them to certain acts. This is because the capacity to suffer has more sensitivity and significance as compared to other characteristics such as the capacity to think, talk, or worship. Animals undergo suffering when exposed to harm just like humans do, and can also succumb to pain. They can feel pressure, frustration, and motherly love as well.

Denying animals their rights is based on no meaningful argument but prejudice that is conducted by humans. This is because it is only prejudice that makes humans to deny others, including animals, the rights that they expect to have for themselves (Smith, 2012). Prejudice is morally unacceptable in society whether it is based on species, sexual orientation, gender, religion, or race. It is this prejudice that makes humans to think of some animals as food and others as companions or pets. If a dog should be kept at home for security purposes, why should a cow for instance be butchered for its meat? Society should give similar levels of attention it gives to different forms of prejudices against humans to prejudices against animals because they are not justifiable.

Animals are sentient just like the human species and it is only speciesism that sends humans into treating them differently. Cochrane (2012) defines speciesism as the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Out of this assumption, humans have developed an incorrect belief that they are the only species among all species that deserve to be treated morally. Speciesism is wrong because when animals such as chickens, pigs, and cows are slaughtered, tortured, or confined for their meat, they suffer. Such sufferance is unjustified because morally, there is no reason that creates a distinction between nonhuman animals and humans. The reason for which people have rights, which is to prevent unjust suffering, is the same reason why animals should have rights.

Animal rights opponents may argue that animals do not deserve rights because rights should be accompanied by responsibilities. They may say that humans are granted rights and are at the same time expected to be responsible by for instance abiding by universal laws. Since animals may not be in a position to exercise such responsibility, the opponents feel they should not be entitled to any rights (Cavalieri, 2004). People promoting such an argument are however forgetting that animal rights are essentially about allowing animals to live freely, free from human exploitation and use. This is a fundamental right that any creature should naturally enjoy by virtue of being a living being. It is not like animal rights involve animals coming to scramble for economic, social or political opportunities with humans or compete with them in any manner.

Opponents may also contend that animals do not have the capacity to make free moral judgment and thus deserve no moral treatment. It is for example often argued that animals are selfish in their behavior and are only interested in their own wellbeing and not of other beings. The argument goes on that on the other hand; humans will always offer a helping hand to others even if it means getting disadvantaged in the process. This argument fails to recognize that some animals such as chimpanzees at times show behaviors that are truly altruistic (Isacat, 2014). Moreover, it is not true that humans will always help fellow humans since there are situations in which a person would actually rejoice when another person is experiencing difficulties.

Animals should have rights because they are living beings with the right to live freely as long as they have the will to. Humans are not in a position to determine when an animal should die or what its life should be like. Animals have an inherent value that cannot be separated from them just like humans. They value their lives very much and are sentient and this is why they try to avoid any harm that may come their way. There is no moral ground upon which humans should deny them their rights. Moreover, granting them their rights will take nothing away from humans.

Cavalieri, P. (2004). The animal question: why nonhuman animals deserve human rights . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cochrane, A. (2012). Animal rights without liberation: applied ethics and human obligations . New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Isacat, B. (2014). How to do animal rights . Raleigh, NC: Lulu.

Smith, W. J. (2012). A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy: the human cost of the animal rights movement . New York, NY: Encounter Books.

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110 Animal Abuse Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best animal abuse topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 most interesting animal abuse topics to write about, 🔎 good research topics about animal abuse, ❓ animal abuse research questions.

• Causes and Effects of Animal Cruelty Therefore, it is vitally important to understand the negative impact of animal maltreatment on society, particular individuals, and the animals to realize the seriousness of the problem and take decisive actions.
• Cosmetic Testing on Animals The surface of the skin or near the eyes of such animals is meant to simulate that of the average human and, as such, is one of easiest methods of determining whether are particular type […]
• Animal Cruelty, Its Causes and Impacts In the second part of the body, I will be more specific on the effects of animal cruelty in respect to ethics.
• Experimentation on Animals However, critics of experimenting with animals argue that animals are subjected to a lot of pain and suffering in the course of coming up with scientific breakthroughs which in the long run may prove futile.
• Animal Testing: History and Arguments Nevertheless, that law was more focused on the welfare of animals in laboratories rather than on the prohibition of animal testing.
• Animal Experiments and Inhuman Treatment Although the results of such a laboratory may bring answers to many questions in medicine, genetics, and other vital spheres, it is frequently a case that the treatment of such animals is inhumane and cruel. […]
• Animal Testing and Ethics I believe it is also difficult to develop efficient legislation on the matter as people have different views on animal research and the line between ethical and unethical is blurred in this area.
• Animal Testing in Medicine and Industry Animal testing is the inescapable reality of medicine and industry. However, between human suffering and animal suffering, the former is more important.
• Preclinical Testing on Animals The authors argue that despite the recent decline in the level of quality and transparency of preclinical trials, the scientific communities should always rely on animal testing before moving to human subjects and the subsequent […]
• Program for Addressing and Prevention of Animal Cruelty While it is unreasonable to expect that a larger number of people will be interested, ensuring that at least 5% of the population is invested will help to promote knowledge actively and target the remaining […]
• Using Animals in Medical Research and Experiments While discussing the use of animals in medical research according to the consequentialist perspective, it is important to state that humans’ preferences cannot be counted higher to cause animals’ suffering; humans and animals’ preferences need […]
• Laboratory Experiments on Animals: Argument Against In some cases, the animals are not given any painkillers because their application may alter the effect of the medication which is investigated.
• Animal Testing From Medical and Ethical Viewpoints Striving to discover and explain the peculiarities of body functioning, already ancient Greeks and Romans resorted to vivisecting pigs; the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment era witnessed animal testing becoming the leading trend and a […]
• Animal Cruelty: Inside the Dog Fighting In most cases the owner of the losing dog abandons the injured dog to die slowly from the injuries it obtained during the fight. The injuries inflicted to and obtained by the dogs participating in […]
• Negative Impacts of Animal Testing To alter these inhumane laws, we should organize a social movement aiming at the reconsideration of the role of animals in research and improvement of their positions.
• Animal Testing: Long and Unpretty History Nevertheless, that law was more focused on the welfare of animals in laboratories rather than on the prohibition of animal testing.
• Animal Abuse Registry Justification Due to the extensive unfairness to the animals, the Veterinary department of most developed countries has established laws concerning the treatment care and support that animals have to be accorded with.
• Animal Testing as an Unnecessary and Atrocious Practice Such acts of violence could be partially excused by the necessity to test medications that are developed to save human lives however, this kind of testing is even more inhumane as it is ineffective in […]
• Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals In order to safeguard its mission, the organization runs several services, all of which aim at promoting the value of life and enhance the well-being of animals.
• Animal Testing and Environmental Protection While the proponents of animal use in research argued that the sacrifice of animals’ lives is crucial for advancing the sphere of medicine, the argument this essay will defend relates to the availability of modern […]
• Animal Testing for Scientific Research Despite the fact that the present-day science makes no secret of the use of animals for research purposes, not many people know what deprivation, pain, and misery those animals have to experience in laboratories.
• Animal Testing: History and Ethics Moreover, in the twelfth century, another Arabic physician, Avenzoar dissected animals and established animal testing experiment in testing surgical processes prior to their application to man. Trevan in 1927 to evaluate the effectiveness of digitalis […]
• Dealing With Animal Cruelty One of how animal cruelty is exercised is in the way they are used to obtain meat and eggs. Various strains of diseases arise in these areas and have the potential of becoming lethal to […]
• Animal Testing Effects on Psychological Investigation In this context, ethical considerations remain a central theme in psychological research.”Ethics in research refers to the application of moral rules and professional codes of conduct to the collection, analysis, reporting, and publication of information […]
• Animal Abuse as a Public Health Issue As we have seen, the problem of animal abuse, being linked to interpersonal violence, is directly related to the sphere of public health.
• Animal Testing: Why It Is Still Being Used The major reason for such “devotion” to animal testing can be explained by the fact that alternative sources of testing are insufficient and too inaccurate to replace conventional way of testing.
• Effects of Animal Testing and Alternatives Another challenge to the proponents of animal testing is related to dosage and the time line for a study. Animal rights values rebuff the notion that animals should have an importance to human beings in […]
• The Debate on Animal Testing The purpose of this paper is to define animal testing within a historical context, establish ethical and legal issues surrounding the acts, discuss animal liberation movements, arguments in support and against the act of animal […]
• Animal Testing: Ethical Dilemmas in Business This means that both humans and animals have rights that need to be respected, and that is what brings about the many dilemmas that are experienced in this field.
• Use of Animals in Research Testing: Ethical Justifications Involved The present paper argues that it is ethically justified to use animals in research settings if the goals of the research process are noble and oriented towards the advancement of human life.
• Ethical Problems in Animal Experimentation The banning of companies from testing on animals will force the manufacturers to use conventional methods to test their drugs and products.
• Animal Cruelty as an Ethical and Moral Problem It is due to the fact that this paper stresses that actions related to the needless and non-progressive act of animal cruelty should be considered a felony with the appropriate amount of incarceration put into […]
• Utilitarianism for Animals: Testing and Experimentation There are alternatives in testing drugs such as tissue culture of human cells and hence this is bound to be more accurate in the findings.
• Use of Animals in Biological Testing Thus, these veterinarians have realized that the results that are realized from the animal research are very crucial in the improvement of the health of human being as well as that of animals.
• Psychoactive Drug Testing on Animals The alterations in behavioral traits of animals due to psychoactive drugs are primarily attributed to the changes in the brain functions or inhibition of certain brain components in animals which ultimately translates to changes in […]
• On Animal Abuse and Cruelty In these cages, the animals are confined indoors for the whole year denying them their right to roam and feel the heat of the sun.
• Negative Impacts of Animal Testing In many instances it can be proofed that drugs have been banned from the market after extensive research on animal testing and consuming a lot of cash, because of the dire effects that they cause […]
• The Psychological Relationship Between Animal Abuse & Adolescents in the Judicial System
• Animal Abuse and Cruelty Is Wrong Sociology
• Unveiling the Global Issue of Animal Abuse and Its Impact on the World
• Animal Abuse, Inhumane, and Inhumane Experimentation
• The Unsettling Connection Between Animal Abuse and Domestic Abuse
• The Link Between Animal Abuse and Domestic Violence
• Politics, Human Nature, Science, and Animal Abuse in the Mouse Petition, a Poem by Anna Barbauld
• Vets Struggle Against Animal Abuse
• The Connection Between Animal Abuse and Other Violence
• Animal Abuse: Why Protecting Bees Should Be Our Top Priority
• The Circus and Animal Abuse
• Animal Cruelty: Physical Abuse of Animal in Traditional Farm
• Animal Cruelty: Animal Abuse as Dirty Play
• Animal Abuse and Neglect of Animal
• Animal Abuse and Animal Rights Nowadays
• Enforcing Harsher Animal Abuse Penalties
• Seaworld and PETA: The Need to Work Together to Address the Issues of Animal Abuse
• Slaughterhouse Abuse and Animal Abuse
• Fundamental Interests That Give Animals Both Moral and Legal Rights
• How Can Animal Abuse Be Prevented
• Should Animal Rights Activists Be Held Accountable for Abuse Videos
• The Need for Social Change Regarding Animal Abuse
• The Dark Side of Animal Experimentation and How to Avoid It
• Reasons Why Using Animals for Hard Labor Is Inhumane
• Critical Issues Concerning Animal Abuse
• Animal Abuse and Other Types of Abuse
• Animal Abuse: The Issue of Torturing of Animals
• The Relationship Between Animal Abuse, Human Abuse, and Antisocial Behavior
• Solutions for Cruelty to Animals
• Animal Abuse Is Wrong and There Should Be Laws to Protect Them
• The Relationship Between Animal Abuse and Criminal Behavior
• Animal Rights, Welfare, and Abuse
• Cultural Appropriation and Animal Abuse at Events
• Animal Abuse: Animal Suffering in Factory Farms
• Animal Abuse and Its Effects on America
• The Argument for Stopping Animal Abuse
• The Reasons Why Undeveloped Countries Care Less About Animal Rights
• Animal Abuse and the Evolution of Animals Rights Movements From the 1900S
• Animal Abuse and Its Effects on Society
• Punishments for Animal Abuse Are Still Too Mild
• What Animal Is the Most Abused in the World?
• How Are Animals Abused in Animal Testing?
• What Is the Main Reason for Animal Abuse?
• How Many Animals Are Abused Each Year?
• Is Hitting a Dog Animal Abuse?
• When Did Animal Abuse Start?
• What State Has the Highest Animal Abuse?
• What Dog Breed Is the Most Abused?
• Is Animal Abuse a Red Flag?
• Why Do Kids Abuse Animals?
• How Can We Stop Animal Abuse?
• How Many Abused Animals Are Killed Every Day?
• Is Animal Abuse Increasing or Decreasing?
• How Many Animals Are Abused Each Day?
• Why Do People Abuse Animals?
• How Common Is Animal Abuse in the World?
• What Percent of Animals Are Abused in Zoos?
• Dogs and Cats: Which Animals Abused More?
• Do Animals Forgive Their Abusers?
• Does Your Animal Remember if You Abuse Them?
• How Do I Say Sorry to My Abused Animal?
• What Do You Do When Your Child Abuses the Animal?
• Is Shouting at the Animal Abuse?
• What Are the Arguments for Stopping Animal Abuse?
• What Are the Facts About Animal Abuse?
• What Happens if You Abuse an Animal?
• What Is the Difference Between Animal Abuse and Animal Cruelty?
• Where Are Animals Most Abused?
• What Are the Types of Animal Abuse?
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