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It is a debate about animal rights and who agrees and not. What is right and what is not. The article is talking about animals and showing that they have rights. It also shows what actual animal rights require. Most people want animal rights so they can be free but also want a loving cuddling animal.

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The case against animal rights

A number of arguments are put forward against the idea that animals have rights.

Animals don't think

Animals are not really conscious

Animals were put on earth to serve human beings

Animals don't have souls

Animals don't behave morally

Animals are not members of the 'moral community'

Animals lack the capacity for free moral judgment

Animals don't think

St Thomas Aquinas taught that animals acted purely on instinct while human beings engaged in rational thought.

This distinction provided the frontier between human beings and animals, and was regarded as a suitable criterion for assessing a being's moral status.

Animals are not really conscious

The French philosopher Rene Descartes, and many others, taught that animals were no more than complicated biological robots.

This meant that animals were not the sort of thing that was entitled to have any rights - or indeed any moral consideration at all.

Animals were put on earth to serve human beings

This view comes originally from the Bible, but probably reflects a basic human attitude towards other species.

Christian theologians developed this idea - St Augustine taught that "by a most just ordinance of the Creator, both their [animals'] life and their death are subject to our use."

St Thomas Aquinas taught that the universe was constructed as a hierarchy in which beings at a lower level were there to serve those above them.

As human beings were above animals in this hierarchy they were entitled to use animals in any way they wanted.

However, as C.S. Lewis pointed out:

Animals don't have souls

Christian theologians used to teach that only beings with souls deserved ethical consideration.

Animals did not have souls and therefore did not have any moral rights.

This argument is no longer regarded as useful, because the idea of the soul is very controversial and unclear, even among religious people. Furthermore it is not possible to establish the existence of the soul (human or animal) in a valid experimental way.

This also makes it difficult to argue, as some theologians have done, that animals should have rights because they do have souls.

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This article discusses whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.

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A lot of kids love animals more then anyone else and in this video they say how it's wrong and if you go to a zoo you can feel guilty for it.

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The article talks about the rights they deserve. It's more back in the old days (some of the information). it just goes over how regular animal rights should be. Some people may be against some thing in here but people who care about animals will understand. It goes back to when animals were more free.

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animal rights, 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. Historically, different views of the scope of animal rights have reflected philosophical and legal developments, scientific conceptions of animal and human nature, and religious and ethical conceptions of the proper relationship between animals and human beings. Since the beginning of the modern animal rights movement, which was initiated by philosophers in the 1970s, animal rights has been a popular topic of discussion within the academic study of applied ethics, or the application of normative ethical theories to practical problems.

Philosophical background

The proper treatment of animals is a very old question in the West. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers debated the place of animals in human morality. The Pythagoreans (6th-4th century bce) and the Neoplatonists (3rd-6th century ce) urged respect for animals' interests, primarily because they believed in the transmigration of souls between human and animal bodies. In his biological writings, Aristotle (384-322 bce) repeatedly suggested that animals lived for their own sake, but his claim in the Politics that nature made all animals for the sake of humans was unfortunately destined to become his most influential statement on the subject.

Aristotle, and later the Stoics, believed the world was populated by an infinity of beings arranged hierarchically according to their complexity and perfection, from the barely living to the merely sentient, the rational, and the wholly spiritual. In this Great Chain of Being, as it came to be known, all forms of life were represented as existing for the sake of those forms higher in the chain. Among corporeal beings, humans, by dint of their rationality, occupied the highest position. The Great Chain of Being became one of the most persistent and powerful, if utterly erroneous, ways of conceiving the universe, dominating scientific, philosophical, and religious thinking until the middle of the 19th century.

The Stoics, insisting on the irrationality of all nonhuman animals, regarded them as slaves and accordingly treated them as contemptible and beneath notice. Aggressively advocated by St. Augustine (354-430), these Stoic ideas became embedded in Christian theology. They were absorbed wholesale into Roman law-as reflected in the treatises and codifications of Gaius (fl. 130-180) and Justinian (483-565)-taken up by the legal glossators of Europe in the 11th century, and eventually pressed into English (and, much later, American) common law. Meanwhile, arguments that urged respect for the interests of animals nearly disappeared, and animal welfare remained a relative backwater of philosophical inquiry and legal regulation until the final decades of the 20th century.

Animals and the law

In the 3rd or 4th century ce, the Roman jurist Hermogenianus wrote, "Hominum causa omne jus constitum" ("All law was established for men's sake"). Repeating the phrase, P.A. Fitzgerald's 1966 treatise Salmond on Jurisprudence declared, "The law is made for men and allows no fellowship or bonds of obligation between them and the lower animals." The most important consequence of this view is that animals have long been categorized as "legal things," not as "legal persons." Whereas legal persons have rights of their own, legal things do not. They exist in the law solely as the objects of the rights of legal persons-e.g., as things over which legal persons may exercise property rights. This status, however, often affords animals the indirect protection of laws intended to preserve social morality or the rights of animal owners, such as criminal anticruelty statutes or civil statutes that permit owners to obtain compensation for damages inflicted on their animals. Indeed, this sort of law presently defines the field of "animal law," which is much broader than animal rights because it encompasses all law that addresses the interests of nonhuman animals-or, more commonly, the interests of the people who own them.

A legal thing can become a legal person; this happened whenever human slaves were freed. The former legal thing then possesses his own legal rights and remedies. Parallels have frequently been drawn between the legal status of animals and that of human slaves. "The truly striking fact about slavery," the American historian David Brion Davis has written, is the

antiquity and almost universal acceptance of the concept of the slave as a human being who is legally owned, used, sold, or otherwise disposed of as if he or she were a domestic animal. This parallel persisted in the similarity of naming slaves, branding them, and even pricing them according to their equivalent in cows, camels, pigs, and chickens.

The American jurist Roscoe Pound wrote that in ancient Rome a slave "was a thing, and as such, like animals could be the object of rights of property," and the British historian of Roman law Barry Nicholas has pointed out that in Rome "the slave was a thing...he himself had no rights: he was merely an object of rights, like an animal."

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, humanitarian reformers in Britain and the United States campaigned on behalf of the weak and defenseless, protesting against child labour, debtor's prisons, abusive punishment in public schools, and, inevitably, the cruel treatment of animals. In 1800 the most renowned abolitionist of the period, William Wilberforce, supported a bill to abolish bull- and bearbaiting, which was defeated in the House of Commons. In 1809 Baron Erskine, former lord chancellor of England, who had long been troubled by cruelty to animals, introduced a bill to prohibit cruelty to all domestic animals. Erskine declared that the bill was intended to "consecrate, perhaps, in all nations, and in all ages, that just and eternal principle which binds the whole living world in one harmonious chain, under the dominion of enlightened man, the lord and governor of all." Although the bill passed the House of Lords, it failed in the House of Commons. Then, in 1821, a bill "to prevent cruel and improper treatment of Cattle" was introduced in the House of Commons, sponsored by Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton and championed by Irish member of Parliament Richard Martin. The version enacted in 1822, known as Martin's Act, made it a crime to treat a handful of domesticated animals-cattle, oxen, horses, and sheep-cruelly or to inflict unnecessary suffering upon them. However, it did not protect the general welfare of even these animals, much less give them legal rights, and the worst punishment available for any breach was a modest fine. Similar statutes were enacted in all the states of the United States, where there now exists a patchwork of anticruelty and animal-welfare laws. Most states today make at least some abuses of animals a felony. Laws such as the federal Animal Welfare Act (1966), for example, regulate what humans may do to animals in agriculture, biomedical research, entertainment, and other areas. But neither Martin's Act nor many subsequent animal-protection statutes altered the traditional legal status of animals as legal things.

This situation changed in 2008, when the Spanish national parliament adopted resolutions urging the government to grant orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas some statutory rights previously afforded only to humans. The resolutions also called for banning the use of apes in performances, harmful research, and trading as well as in other practices that involve profiting from the animals. Although zoos would still be allowed to hold apes, they would be required to provide them with "optimal" living conditions.

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Animal rights | Definition, Issues, & History

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Animal rights, 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. Historically, different views of the scope of animal rights have

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These kids say how they want animal rights and one girl talks about her hamster, some kids actually like taking care of their animals and others just leave them around.

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0:00 / 4:33•Watch full video

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The Article just talks about regular animal rights. It says how humans don't really have the rights to do disrespectful things to animals. Luckily there are more laws that were made if people are caught abusing their animals, Or they are left outside. The article talks about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. And also human rights versus animal rights.

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Advocacy groups and humanitarians alike have long argued for the rights of animals around the world, fighting for their right as sentient creatures to a life free of torture and suffering. Some advocate for not using animals as food, clothing or other goods and others such as vegans even go as far as to denounce the use of animal by-products.

In the United States, people often say that they love animals and that they consider their pets to be part of the family, but many draw the line at animal rights. Isn't it enough that we treat them humanely? Why should animals have rights? What rights should animals have? How are those rights different from human rights?

The fact of the matter is that since the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, even animals used in commercial farming are entitled to a certain base-level of treatment. But that differs from the wants of animal rights activist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or the more extreme British direct-action group known as the Animal Liberation Front.

Animal Rights Versus Animal Welfare

The animal welfare view, which is distinguishable from the animal rights view, is that humans can use and exploit animals as long as the animals are treated humanely and the use is not too frivolous. To animal rights activists, the main problem with this view is that humans do not have the right to use and exploit animals, no matter how well the animals are treated. Buying, selling, breeding, confining, and killing animals infringe on the animals' rights, no matter how "humanely" they are treated.

Furthermore, the idea of treating animals humanely is vague and means something different to everyone. For instance, an egg farmer may think that there is nothing wrong with killing male chicks by grinding them up alive to cut feeding costs versus yield. Also, "cage-free eggs" are not as humane as the industry would have us believe. In fact, a cage-free egg operation buys their eggs from the same hatcheries that factory farms buy from, and those hatcheries kill the male chicks as well.

The idea of "humane" meat also seems absurd to animal rights activists, since the animals must be killed to obtain the meat. And for farms to be profitable, those animals are killed as soon as they reach slaughter weight, which is still very young.

Why Should Animals Have Rights?

Animal rights activism is based on the idea that animals are sentient and that speciesism is wrong, the former of which is scientifically backed - an international panel of neuroscientists declared in 2012 that non-human animals have consciousness - and the latter is still hotly contested among humanitarians.

Animal rights activists argue that because animals are sentient, the only reason humans are treated differently is speciesism, which is an arbitrary distinction based on the incorrect belief that humans are the only species deserving of moral consideration. Speciesism, like racism and sexism, is wrong because of animals popular in the meat industry like cows, pigs and chickens suffer when confined, tortured and slaughtered and there is no reason to morally distinguish between humans and non-human animals.

The reason that people have rights is to prevent unjust suffering. Similarly, the reason that animal rights activists want animals to have rights is to prevent them from suffering unjustly. We have animal cruelty statutes to prevent some animal suffering, although U.S law prohibits only the most egregious, extraordinary animal cruelty. These laws do nothing to prevent most forms of animal exploitation, including fur, veal, and foie gras.

Human Rights Versus Animal Rights

No one is asking for animals to have the same rights as humans, but in an animal rights activist's ideal world, animals would have the right to live free of human use and exploitation - a vegan world where animals are no longer used for food, clothing or entertainment.

While there is some debate as to what basic human rights are, most people recognize that other humans have certain fundamental rights. According to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights include "the right to life, liberty and security of person..an adequate standard of living...to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution...to own property...freedom of opinion and expression...to education...of thought, conscience and religion; and the right to freedom from torture and degrading treatment, among others."

These rights are different from animal rights because we have the power to ensure that other humans have access to food and housing, are free from torture, and can express themselves. On the other hand, it's not in our power to ensure that every bird has a nest or that every squirrel has an acorn. Part of animal rights is leaving the animals alone to live their lives, without encroaching on their world or their lives.

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Advocacy groups and humanitarians alike have long argued for the rights of animals around the world, fighting for their right as sentient creatures to a life free of torture and suffering. Some advocate for not using animals as food, clothing or other goods and others such as vegans even go as far as to denounce the use of animal by-products.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IW8dNiIoFZYxLQtd6jfMur4nA4IfPdw755800agLLSM/edit

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This one goes with animal rights by saying something about animal testing some animals are abused during it so they can test and a lot of them die from experimentation on them.

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This article pretty much debates about animals rights. In some things they are talking about that humans have no right to abuse an animal. These people are writing back and forth to each other. It talks about animal population and

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This one goes with the argument by showing that obviously the fox needs his fur more then some people do, that means there is no reason at all to kill a regular animal who's trying to live wild.

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This one shows that when animals are abused they aren't allowed to speak to you, to scream at you and stop like a kid can, and they can't call anyone or tell anyone because they are dogs and cannot talk to people.

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This image has a bunch of things that have to do with animal rights, some things show what it is when they don't have rights, or just what is put towards them.

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This one goes with the animal rights topic by saying that they need to live and they have the rights to live as well, they shouldn't be abused or harmed they should just be able to live, don't get an animal if you're just going to abuse it.