Do Animals Have Rights?

We love our dogs. But do they have rights?

Do other animals have rights?

It appears to be such a simple question. Our impulsive answer seems to be "Of course, animals have rights." Or, "They certainly should have rights."

But immediately, the idea becomes complicated. 

What would those rights be? The right to be left alone? The right to not be tortured? The right to have their territory undisturbed? The right to not have their culture (or whatever you want to call it) be destroyed? The right to not face unnecessary pain? The right to not be treated in a way that we wouldn't treat humans? The right to not be imprisoned in a small cage? The right to not be killed for sport (fun)? The right to not be forced to do degrading work? The right to not be eaten?

Let's go to the most basic right of all, the right to live. Do animals have that right? Do humans have that right? Is the human right to live greater than an animal's right to live?

In my recent book, TAHOE HIT, a character poses a question about this to Owen. To make it more poignant, the question comes with a spin. Instead of asking if a man has more right to life than a dog, the question is, "Does a very bad man automatically have more right to life than a very good dog?" The questioner goes on to elaborate that the bad man could be abusive and violent and wicked, while the dog could be sweet and kind and a friend and protector of its human family. I made those qualifiers to put the question in sharper focus.

Obviously, I wanted the question to be thought-provoking. I assumed (and still do) that some people would say that all humans have more right to life than any animals. I imagined the subject would - or could - fall into the realm of "God made humans to be very special, and humans thus have a sacred right to life, more so than any other creatures." I even assumed I'd get some angry email on the subject.

What's interesting is that of the many people who have sent me email, all said something like, "A very good dog absolutely has more right to life than a very bad man."

Of course, people love their dogs. And elephants and dolphins and birds and horses. Are our feelings about them influenced by how beautiful and lovable they are? Can we reconcile laws that say you can't sell horses or dogs for slaughter for their meat, but it's okay to squish spiders? What about mice? Squirrels? If a skunk takes up residence in your crawl space, refuses to come out, and makes your house unlivable with its spray, is its right to life any less?

Of course, we might say, this is my house and I was here first, and you can't invade and live in my house.

But when the housing and shopping mall developers bulldoze the land and "homes" of thousands of animals, have we not done the same thing? The deer and birds and bear and fish and gophers and mountain lion were doing just fine without us. Then we came along and destroyed their world. And we justified it by saying that people needed the housing and the jobs. 

Beneath our behavior lurks a familiar hubris. We humans are the lords of the Earth. Animals are just, well, animals. If our supertankers leak oil and destroy ocean habitat, that's simply part of the price of running our cars and heating our houses and creating all those trillions of plastic things that we throw away, some of which wash into those once-pure oceans. If our greenhouse gases melt the arctic ice and the polar bears and penguins go extinct, that's also part of the price.

The implication is that whatever the rights of those animals, our rights supersede them.

In TAHOE HIT, there is mention of the great naturalist Aldo Leopold. 100 years ago, he proposed that we leave "Blank spots on the map." Areas with no roads, no development, no wilderness trails and campsites, no hotels, no fishing or fish stocking of lakes, no dams, no hunting, no airplane overflights, no mosquito insecticides, no people."  

It doesn't take much observation to realize that people have gone everywhere on the planet, even to the depths of the deepest ocean trenches. And everywhere we've gone, we've taken over and dominated. There are no more blank spots on the map. From the perspective of most animals and other life, we've made the Earth much worse, not better.

Scientists say we're in the midst of the 6th greatest extinction in Earth's history. Previous mass extinctions of plants and animals have come as a result of huge volcanic activity or impacts by asteroids, events that made our planet inhospitable to life for many years.

This new mass extinction that is unfolding is called the Anthropocene Extinction. A fancy word that refers to the fact that this new extinction of life is caused by human activity. Greenhouse/fossil fuel gases that lead to climate change. Habitat destruction that takes away the "home territory" of millions of lifeforms, both plant and animal. Scientists say that millions of plant and animal species have already gone extinct, mostly from climate change. Some, of course, we've directly killed off. The California Grizzly. The Passenger pigeon.

What makes the tragedy worse is that we have the technology to stop and even reverse this decline. We know how to make renewable energy - wind farms and solar farms, etc - and we know how to implement conservation sufficient to create a "carbon neutral" society. (More fancy words to describe an economy that doesn't burn oil, which produces all those greenhouse gases.)

What's in the way of making this better, less-damaging world? There are lots of reasons. The biggest may be spineless politicians who don't have the political will to make a better world. Why? Because they are afraid that whoever is unhappy with change (there are always some people who are unhappy with change), they will lose votes and be out of their cushy jobs. So many politicians spread fear and distrust, as they always have through the ages. And some politicians support policies that nearly everyone knows are bad for the Earth. Why? It's hard to know. The drill-baby-drill attitude and the effort to take away protections of remaining wilderness areas only make sense if you want to appeal to people who don't care about the future of the planet or who believe in the unimaginable conspiracy/hoax notion that the Earth isn't actually changing. Those dry mountains that used to be covered in vast glaciers, that's photo-shopped. Like the moon landing was photo-shopped. Like the Earth is flat.

Meanwhile the rights of animals - whatever those rights are - will continue to be trampled by people.

Maybe if we step back from all the arguing and simply look at all the beautiful animals, we can frame things differently. What's good for the zebras and the tuna and the flamingos, is good for us. Stop arguing about the current events.

Instead, consider your dog. Does he or she have rights? What are you going to do to ensure the continuation of those rights? Somewhere in your answer may be the survival of our Earth, what Carl Sagan called our Pale Blue Dot, floating lonely in the vastness of space. Protecting animal rights might just result in protecting our planet.