LETTER: Letter errs in concept of animal rights

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by C.S. Miller

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I read with interest Bahl and Rashad's letter about animal rights in your April 7 issue. The authors rightly state that society cannot be based on majority prejudice.

They make a laudable attempt to justify the concept of "rights" but miss the mark because of mistaken premises.

Bahl and Rashad contend that "the only distinction to be made is that animals are not human," insofar as humans, not animals, have rights.

These authors never make any important distinction between animals and man and, in the end, draw upon a dubious similarity between the two ("the ability to feel suffering and joy") to assert that both have rights.

The essential difference between man and other animals is that man is, in Aristotle's terms, the rational animal. Man's basic tool of survival is his mind , not brute force, spinning webs or chewing his cud.

Barring accidents of nature, the only way to prevent a man from using his mind to survive is for other men to prevent him from it by force . It is this fact that leads to the concept of rights, the fundamental right being the freedom to use one's mind without interference from others.

Rights thus stem from the nature of man and are not "given" as Bahl and Rashad state.

Also, rights are not based on superficial "equalities" among men such as color, sex or income.

Men can profit from using their minds in a society by specialization and trade only when that society recognizes and protects their rights. The alternative is varying degrees of tyranny.

Incidentally, this is why a society based on majority prejudice (of which Bahl and Rashad disapprove without explanation) is wrong.

A society that does not protect individual rights is one that allows force to interfere with the free exercise of one's mind, i.e. survival.

Jim Crow laws and hiring quotas are examples of violations of individual rights with disastrous consequences.

Bahl and Rashad also mention abortion and the rights of children and the retarded.

These are not isolated issues, but applications of the fundamental right to use one's own mind.

Abortion reflects the right of a woman to plan her own life rationally and the fact that a fetus (only potentially human) has no rights. The incompetent are protected to the extent that they have some degree of rationality.

Finally, since rights pertain strictly to man, animals have rights only in the sense that they exist as property of men.

We, like other animals, do eat animals. We have also gained valuable knowledge from animal research. Since we, like other animals, are products of nature, there can be no argument against these uses of animals. Cruelty to animals for its own sake, however, is indicative of an unhealthy psychology at best, but in the sense of violating rights, it is not wrong.

Finally, Bahl and Rashad contend that "most animal rights activists do not base their ideology on the belief that other animals are equal to humans."

This is true, but the animal rights movement obfuscates the meaning of "rights" by trivializing the term.

When "rights" can mean anything from being kind to animals to voting, how can we argue against someone's "right" to rule us in the fashion of Adolf Hitler?

Furthermore, it is the leadership of a movement that guides its course. Most of the businessmen who supported Hitler's ascent to power were being pragmatic; they did not want concentration camps.

Likewise with the rank and file of animal rights, who simply desire kindness toward animals.

How many of them agree with their intellectual leaders, like Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature , who approvingly quotes John Muir's benediction to the alligator: "May you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!"?

C.S. Miller

Graduate Student

Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 21, 1995 issue.

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