1. Why 'Animal Rights Violations'?
Most people, when they hear the phrase 'animal rights movement' assume two things: 1) that it exists and 2) that it has been around for years. However, this is only partly true. There has been an animal protection movement in existence since the nineteenth century. There have been plenty of animal advocates, too, over the years. However, if we think that 'animal rights advocate' implies those who take rights seriously, or those who speak of nonhuman animals as rights bearers and what happens to them when used by humans as rights violations, then there have been few of these.
As for the existence of the 'animal rights movement', yes it does exist, but it is very, very, young. How young? About three years old. A toddler. The 'animal rights movement' that has been around for years is made up of people who do not usually take a rights-based view; their claims are not in the main about animal rights violations: they say they want to reduce suffering, end abuse, but many are often quite ambiguous about ending all animal use. 2. Why write 'rights-based Animal Rights Movement'? Surely that label applies to all animal rights advocates?
No, the situation is more complicated than that. Historians and social movement analysts tell us that there was a large growth in animal advocacy in Britain, certainly, in the 1970s. For example, by the end of the decade, the national organisation Animal Aid had been founded, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) had been 'radicalised' and there was a big upsurge in activities associated with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). A good deal - but not all - of this renewed advocacy for animals can be traced to the 1975 publication of the book Animal Liberation by philosopher Peter Singer.
Animal Aid were influenced by Singer's position on human-nonhuman relations and, at present, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) regard Peter Singer as their philosopher. PeTA are generally described as the 'largest animal rights organisation in the world' but they do not adhere to animal rights philosophy - despite PeTA's false claims about Animal Liberation, its author Peter Singer is a utilitarian philosopher who does not believe in moral rights in either human or nonhuman animals. [1] R.J. Dalton & M.
Kuechler (eds.) Challenging the Political Order, Cambridge: Polity Press.Jasper & Nelkin suggest that the modern-day animal movement experienced a division between 'fundamentalist' and the 'pragmatist' advocates. When social movements solidify and 'mature' they may moderate and substantially retreat from the fundamental principles with which they began.[1] This has been the fate of the leading organisations in the animal advocacy movement. At the same time, the term 'animal rights' sounds radical and cutting edge. The solution: keep the name and call Singer's utilitarianism 'animal rights philosophy.' Regan said in the 1980s, "I cannot begin to count the number of times I have sat through discussions or read essays in which my views regarding the rights of animals were attributed, not to me, but to Singer." Peter Singer, for his part, expressed his dissatisfaction with the situation now and again in academic journals (eg, as reproduced here). Apparently Singer's distress is of no concern to PeTA who continue to deliberately misrepresent his position as animal rights. Currently, both Singer and PeTA acknowledge that they use the word 'rights' rhetorically, as a 'convenience', as 'political shorthand' but not as a fundamental basis for a moral position on human-nonhuman relations. 1990s. In the 1990s, Gary Francione began writing about human-nonhuman relations. For a period he acted as lawyer to PeTA. Therefore, he was perfectly positioned to see the moderation in PeTA's aspirations and, as a law professor, could expertly analyse the problems in them moving more and more to rely on animal welfarism which increasingly became PeTA's trajectory. Countermovements will insist that PeTA are rabid animal rights advocates. They tend to be armed with (mostly 1980s and early 1990s) pronouncements from PeTA representatives while pointing to PeTA's early slogan, 'Animals are Not Ours To...' (which was, in fact, borrowed from the BUAV in the 1980s) but Francione realised that they were increasingly adopting a progressive version of animal welfarism which he called 'new welfarism'. The concept of new welfarism was introduced, explored and analysed in his 1996 book, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and has been the subject of further elaboration in his 2008 publication Animals As Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.  Gary Francione is the most important theorist writing about human-nonhuman relation at the present time. His theory of animal rights is clearer than Regan's and there are a number of areas where the two differ. Francione's work, like Regan's before him, inevitably contains within it a severe critique of animal welfarism and Peter Singer's utilitarian position because the latter cannot rule out all animal use, has difficulty objecting to the 'free-range farming' of nonhuman animals, and regards nonhumans, apart from some exceptional cases, as 'replaceable'. 3. Animal rights? What is a 'right' anyway? The modern view of rights is that they are social contructs. Clarifying the meaning of a right. |