Animal testing

Domesticated animals are private property and as such may be treated, used, misused, or mistreated, by the owner in anyway he/she pleases. No one has moral authority to separate him from his lawfully obtained property.


As for the real question: Do animals have natural rights?
The answer is: mostly, no.

It is often said that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have a right without a responsibility, nor should you have a responsibility without a right. Thus for animals to have rights, they must also have responsibilities.

A man set loose in a city will not murder, steal, or enslave people. If he does then he forfeits his natural rights (because he has neglected to uphold his responsibility not to violate the rights of others), and those who bring him to justice are morally justified in allowing him only a subset of his original rights for a period of time (such as imprisonment or return of stolen property).

On the other hand, a lion set loose in a city will very likely murder people, as that is his nature. Because he (the lion) is unable to comprehend the concept of responsibility, and shows no sign of already having responsibility, he necessarily has no rights. No responsibility = no rights.

The same argument is true of children in human society. While children are growing they have a limited scope of responsibility, and thus, during this time, they have a limited set of rights. By the time the child is fully responsible for his actions, however, he gains a full set of natural rights, along with a full set of responsibilities.

One might argue that certain types of animals exhibit behaviour tending toward more responsibility than others. Such as the comparison between a dog and a wolf. There may or may not be a case for such an argument. Personally I don't believe any animal on this planet is intelligent enough to qualify for natural rights.

 

Of course it makes you feel bad. The vast majority of humans have empathy. Empathy is a necessary limitation on the rational mind so we do not disregard others who may be necessary to our continued existence by mistake. The advantage with respect to animals is that we generally treat them well enough to keep them relatively happy and alive; An economic benefit.

Empathy and natural rights are separate things. You may feel sorry for a murderer in prison, because he is having a hard time of it. This does not mean he should have the right to walk down your street at night.

Here we must make a distinction between sets of responsibilities. If it is likely that the entity in question (be it human, animal, alien, whatever) will later develop a full or partial set of responsibilities, then we ourselves have the responsibility not to mistreat it or put it to death, unless that is the only way to save ourselves from immediate peril.

So, like the murderer in prison, you may feel sorry for a retarded adult, but you are still not going to afford him, say the right to operate an automobile, because he is likely to kill someone, having not understood his responsibilities nor the nature of his actions.

However, unlike an animal, if there is a chance that one day the retard will recover (say by an advance in stem cell research) or by his own healing processes then you have the responsibility not to directly harm him (unless there is no other way to save yourself from immediate peril) during his period of retardedness. This however does not make him your responsibility to take care of. That responsibility can only be taken on voluntarily, and is usually taken on by the parents or a private charity.

If, in the extreme case, a dangerous retard (say a retard with a gun or vehicle) were not taken care of by anyone, then he could be thought of as immediately similar to a dangerous animal prowling the streets. He may wind up in prison because of this, or dead. This is nobody's fault. It is just a clean fact of metaphysical justice. If the retard were left to fend for himself in the wilderness he would wind up dead there too.

Arguably the retard, the child, and the criminal are not wholly dissimilar, in that they all have limited responsibility (or have shown a lack of responsibility), and thus all have limited rights for a period of time. The animal on the other hand has no possibility of accepting responsibility for its actions and thus never had rights to begin with.

Contribution? This is a fallacy of terms. A dog cannot contribute. To 'contribute' is to do so willfully as a result of the intention. By the same logic gravity contributes, and water contributes, and the sun contributes. No, these are just constants of nature which do not contribute in any human sense, they follow their nature and we take advantage of that nature through our rational understanding.

I think you are missing the point. Dogs, cats, animals, having no rights, are deemed private property. There would be no way 'to abuse all', because the private property is not all owned by one person. Further, if you were to mistreat your pet and turn him into an aggressive untrusting beast, then you've damaged the value of your asset. Very few people would buy a dog which is going to bite their neck during the night -- unless of course it is a special breed.

Well the right to free speech is not actually a fundamental natural right. It extends from the right to own and exchange private property. What good is free speech if you cannot own or hire a meeting hall in which to speak to an audience? What good is free speech if you cannot own a newsletter and give it away or exchange it for coin?

The right to bear arms is also an extension of the fundamental natural right to own private property. Even the right to own an atomic bomb (if you can obtain one) is granted to every fully responsible human. Obviously the right to own something does not imply the right to use it in every situation. The use of an atomic bomb, for example, would almost never be justified because it almost always kills innocent people and damages the private property of others. Further, the people who lived around you might contest your right to keep it anywhere near their town and property. This too would be valid because you cannot ensure complete responsibility for the detonation of such a device (it might go off by accident). This does not eliminate your right to keep it, just your right to keep it near other people.

Are you kidding? Rats are probably the most widely used experimental means for testing new medication and medical hypothesis.

 

Again, you've got to be joking. With almost all medical experiments the specimen is put to death and cut up, before being turned into microscope slides for examination.

I think you have a grossly simplistic view of the wide range of processes and experiments performed on captive animals. From the testing of new military weapons, to the testing of new drugs, to the breaking of spines to test stem-cell spine repair research, animals are treated poorly most everywhere they are experimented on. I don't have a problem with this, clearly you do.

Review my natural rights argument and tell me which responsibilities you believe animals exhibit that would afford them rights on a level equivalent to humans.