Animal RightsChapter 8.ppt

Animal RightsChapter 8 Animal Rights There are many different views regarding animal rights. We will examine the views of utilitarians, animal rights advocates, theists, animal liberationists, and environmentalists. Utilitarian view: Bentham wrote: The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum 1 , are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Cruelty to Animals Learned helplessness experiments: learned helplessness-supposedly a model of depression in human beings. In 1953 R. Solomon, L. Kamin, and L. Wynne, experimenters at Harvard University, placed forty dogs in a device called a shuttlebox, which consists of a box divided into two compartments, separated by a barrier. Initially the barrier was set at the height of the dogs back. Hundreds of intense electric shocks were delivered to the dog’s feet through a grid floor. At first the dogs could escape the shock if they learned to jump the barrier into the other compartment. In an attempt todiscourage one dog from jumping, the experimenters forced the dog to jump one hundred times onto a grid floor in the other compartment that also delivered a shock to the dogs fee