In article <483b0ee8$0$25027$607ed4bc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Tony Harding <ToHard@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Yeah, so? PETA says a lot of things, mostly whacky. Personally I cannot
> see how a non human animal can have rights --- will they be voting next?
> Or busing the white cows into black cows' neighborhoods?
Read "The Omnivore's Dilemma". There is an interesting discussion of
that in there. The book is basically a natural history of several
dinners that the author ate, where he traced everything on the table
back to its origins. It is quite fascinating to see where our food
comes from.
There's an interesting section where, as he eats a nice steak dinner in
a top restaurant, he's reading a book by one of the leading pro-animal
rights philosophers, and it is causing him some problems with that meal.
He summarizes that arguments from the philosopher, and they are pretty
good.
The thing that gives the most difficulty is that if you try to pin down
a good reason *why* animals should not have rights, you either end up
with reasons that apply to narrowly (so that, say, babies and retarded
humans would not have rights), or you end up with arguments that sound
uncomfortably like the arguments that were used to justify things like
keeping blacks as slaves, or committing genocide on Jews.
The good news for those of us who want to eat the tasty critters,
without having to end up sounding like slave owners or nazis, or
conceding that babies and retarded humans should have no rights, is that
what these pro-rights arguments argue for is that animals should have
the right to be free of human-inflicted suffering.
Our food animals are mostly animals that in nature depend on being
preyed upon for the health of the species. That is, without predators,
their herds would become unhealthy and overpopulated, and then die. So,
there is no ethics problem with humans taking the role of the predators.
When we kill a cow to eat it, that might be bad for that cow, but it is
a good thing for Cowkind. So, as long as we are humane in *how* we do
our predation, we are in the clear ethically. It is quite doable to
raise and slaughter animals in a way that does not inflict suffering on
them.
--
--Tim Smith
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