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, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong People's Zoo, Animal rights, also known as '''animal liberation''', is the idea that the basic interests of non-human animals—for example, the interest in avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as the basic interests of human beings." Animal Rights ." ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. 2007. Animal rights advocates argue that animals should not be regarded as property, or treated as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as Legal Persons "'Personhood' Redefined: Animal Rights Strategy Gets at the Essence of Being Human" , Association of American Medical Colleges, retrieved July 12, 2006. and members of the moral community.Taylor, Angus. ''Animals and Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate'', Broadview Press, May 2003. Extending personhood to animals is supported by legal scholars such as of Harvard Law School ,. The Seattle-based , who teaches animal rights law at Harvard Law School, has said of this approach, quoting economist Robert Samuelson: "Progress occurs funeral by funeral." (Wise, Steven M. "Address at the 5th Annual Conference on Animals and the Law," Committee on Legal Issues Pertaining to Animals, Association of the Bar of the City of New York, September 25, 1999) Critics of the concept of animal rights argue that animals do not have the capacity to enter into a Social Contract or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of moral rights. The philosopher Roger Scruton argues that only human beings have duties and that " {Link without Title} he corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights."Scruton, Roger. ''Animal Rights and Wrongs'', Metro, 2000.ISBN 1-900512-81-5. Critics holding this position argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals for food, as entertainment, and in research, though human beings may nevertheless have an obligation to ensure they do not suffer unnecessarily.Frey, R.G. ''Interests and Rights: The Case against Animals''. Clarendon Press, 1980 ISBN 0-19-824421-5 This position is generally called the animal welfare position, and it is held by some of the oldest of the animal protection agencies. HISTORY History of the concept The 20th-century debate about animal rights can be traced back to the earliest philosophers. In the 6th century BC, . ''Animals and Ethics''. Broadview Press, p. 34.Pythagoras's thought has been the subject of much debate; none of his original work is extant. See Huffman, Carl. "Pythagoras" in Zalta, Edward N. ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', Winter 2006, retrieved January 10, 2007. Peter Singer , in the ''Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', writes that the first chapter of Genesis describes how God gave human beings Dominion over animals, tempered in the Torah by injunctions to be kind; for example, by being required to rest one's oxen on the Sabbath . The New Testament is, he writes, devoid of such injunctions, with Paul interpreting the sabbath requirement as intended to benefit the human owners, not the animals themselves. Augustine argued that Jesus allowed the Gadarene Swine to drown in order to demonstrate that man has no duty of care toward animals, a position adopted by Thomas Aquinas , who argued that we should be charitable to animals only to make sure that cruel habits do not carry over into our treatment of human beings, Singer, Peter . "Animals" in Honderich, Ted (ed). ''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1995. a position later supported also by Locke and Kant . Aristotle , writing in the 4th century BCE, argued that non-human animals ranked far below humans in the Great Chain Of Being , or ''scala naturae'', because of their alleged irrationality, and that they had no interests of their own. One of his pupils, Theophrastus , disagreed, arguing against eating meat on the grounds that it robbed animals of life and was therefore unjust. Non-human animals, he said, can reason, sense, and feel just as human beings do. Taylor, Angus . ''Animals and Ethics''. Broadview Press, p. 35. This view did not prevail, and it was Aristotle's position—that human and non-human animals exist in different moral realms because one is rational and the other not—that largely persisted until challenged by philosophers in the 1970s. In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals have no souls or minds, and are nothing but complex Automata . They therefore cannot think or even feel pain. They do have sensory equipment so they can see, hear and touch, and may even feel anger and fear, but they are not, in any sense, conscious. Against this, Jean-Jacques Rousseau , in the preface of his Discourse On Inequality (1754), argued that man starts as an animal, though not one "devoid of intellect and freedom." Rousseau, Jean-Jacques . '' Discourse On Inequality '', 1754, preface. However, as animals are sensitive beings, "they too ought to participate in natural right, and … man is subject to some sort of duties toward them," specifically "one {Link without Title} the right not to be uselessly mistreated by the other." Contemporaneous with Rousseau was the Scottish writer John Oswald , who died in 1793. In ''The Cry of Nature or an Appeal to Mercy and Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals'', Oswald argued that man is naturally equipped with feelings of mercy and compassion. If each man had to witness the death of the animals he ate, he argued, a vegetarian diet would be far more common. The division of labor, however, allows modern man to eat flesh without experiencing what Oswald called the prompting of man's natural sensitivities, while the brutalization of modern man made him inured to these sensitivities. Later in the 18th century, one of the founders of modern , must be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If the ability to reason were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things, famously writing: In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that non-human animals have the same essence as humans, despite lacking the faculty of reason. Although he considered vegetarianism to be only Supererogatory , he argued for consideration to be given to animals in morality, and he opposed Vivisection . His critique of Kant ian ethics contains a lengthy and often furious polemic against the exclusion of animals in his moral system. The world's first , who had formed the Humanitarian League a year earlier, with the objective of banning hunting as a sport. By the late 20th century, animal welfare societies and laws against cruelty to animals existed in almost every country in the world. Specialized animal advocacy groups also proliferated, including those dedicated to the preservation of endangered species, and others, such as People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (PETA), that protested against painful or brutal methods of hunting animals, the mistreatment of animals raised for food in Factory Farms , and the use of animals in experiments and as entertainment. History of the modern movement See Also: Animal liberation movement The modern animal rights movement can be traced to the 1970s, and is one of the few examples of social movements that were created by philosophers, and in which they remain in the forefront. In the early 1970s, a group of , who coined the phrase " Speciesism " in 1970, first using it in a privately printed pamphlet to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular species.Ryder, Richard D. "All beings that feel pain deserve human rights" , ''The Guardian'', August 6, 2005 Ryder became a contributor to the influential book ''Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans''Godlovitch R, Godlovitch S, and Harris J. (1972). ''Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans''. It was in a review of this book for the '' New York Review Of Books '' that Peter Singer put forward the basic arguments, based on Utilitarianism and drawing an explicit comparison between Women's Liberation and animal liberation, that in 1975 became '' Animal Liberation '', the book often referred to as the "bible" of the animal rights movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement was joined by a wide variety of academic and professional groups, including theologians, lawyers, physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, veterinarians, pathologists and former vivisectionists. Other books regarded as ground-breaking include Tom Regan 's ''The Case for Animal Rights'' (1983); James Rachels's ''Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism'' (1990); Steven M. Wise's ''Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals'' (2000); and Julian H. Franklin's ''Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy'' (2005). PHILOSOPHY Animal rights is the concept that all or some animals are entitled to possess their own lives; that they are deserving of, or already possess, certain moral rights; and that some basic rights for animals ought to be enshrined in law. The animal-rights view rejects the concept that animals are merely capital goods or property intended for the benefit of humans. The concept is often confused with Animal Welfare , which is the philosophy that takes cruelty towards animals and animal suffering into account, but that does not assign specific moral rights to them. The animal-rights philosophy does not necessarily maintain that human and non-human animals are equal. For example, animal-rights advocates do not call for voting rights for chickens. Some activists also make a distinction between Sentient or self-aware animals and other life forms, with the belief that only sentient animals, or perhaps only animals who have a significant degree of self-awareness, should be afforded the right to possess their own lives and bodies, without regard to how they are valued by humans. Activists maintain that any human being or institution that commodifies animals for food, entertainment, cosmetics, clothing, Animal Testing , or for any other reason, infringes upon the animals' right to possess themselves and to pursue their own ends. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Martin E. P. Seligman demonstrated that dogs repeatedly exposed to inescapable electroshocks are very similar to severely depressed humans. He wrote:
In contrast, animals like Jellyfish have simple nervous systems, and may be little more than automata, capable of basic reflexes but incapable of formulating any ends to their actions or plans to pursue them, and equally unable to notice whether they are in captivity. But the biology of Mind is largely a Black Box and claims regarding the existence or absence of mind in other animals, based on their physiology, are speculative. American writer Sam Harris , currently writing a doctoral thesis on the neuroscience of mind, argues:
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