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Animal 'Rights' versus Human Rights ( Us vs. PETA )

| 06/02/05 | Edwin A. Locke
Animal "Rights" Versus Human Rights
by Edwin A.. Locke
Locke, E. (2005). “Animal Rights” vs Human Rights. The Intellectual Conservative.

Rights can only be held by beings who are capable of reasoning and choosing.

Human life versus animal life. This fundamental conflict of values, which was dramatized a few
years ago when AIDS victims marched in support of research on animals, is still raging. PETA
(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has just launched a campaign against Covance,
Inc., a biomedical research lab in Vienna, Va., that uses animals for drug testing.

It is an indisputable fact that many thousands of lives are saved by medical research on animals.
But animal rightists don't care. PETA makes this frighteningly clear: "Even if animal tests
produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against it." Such is the "humanitarianism" of animal rights
activists.

How do these advocates try to justify their position? As someone who has debated them for years
on college campuses and in the media, I know firsthand that the whole movement is based on a
single -- invalid -- syllogism, namely: men feel pain and have rights; animals feel pain; therefore,
animals have rights. This argument is entirely specious, because man's rights do not depend on
his ability to feel pain; they depend on his ability to think.

Rights are ethical principles applicable only to beings capable of reason and choice. There is
only one fundamental right: a man's right to his own life. To live successfully, man must use his
rational faculty -- which is exercised by choice. The choice to think can be negated only by the
use of physical force. To survive and prosper, men must be free from the initiation of force by
other men -- free to use their own minds to guide their choices and actions. Rights protect men
against the use of force by other men.

None of this is relevant to animals. Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign
languages allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through sensory-perceptual
association and the pleasure-pain mechanism. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of
ethics. A lion is not immoral for eating a zebra (or even for attacking a man). Predation is their
natural and only means of survival; they do not have the capacity to learn any other.

Only man has the power, guided by a code of morality, to deal with other members of his own
species by voluntary means: rational persuasion. To claim that man's use of animals is immoral
is to claim that we have no right to our own lives and that we must sacrifice our welfare for the
sake of creatures who cannot think or grasp the concept of morality. It is to elevate amoral
animals to a moral level higher than ourselves -- a flagrant contradiction. Of course, it is proper
not to cause animals gratuitous suffering. But this is not the same as inventing a bill of rights for
them -- at our expense.
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The granting of fictional rights to animals is not an innocent error. We do not have to speculate
about the motive, because the animal "rights" advocates have revealed it quite openly. Again
from PETA: "Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth"; "I do not believe that a
human being has a right to life"; "I would rather have medical experiments done on our children
than on animals." These self-styled lovers of life do not love animals; rather, they hate men.

The animal "rights" terrorists are like the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombers. They are not
idealists seeking justice, but nihilists seeking destruction for the sake of destruction. They do not
want to uplift mankind, to help him progress from the swamp to the stars. They want mankind's
destruction; they want him not just to stay in the swamp but to disappear into its muck.

There is only one proper answer to such people: to declare proudly and defiantly, in the name of
morality, a man's right to his life, his liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Edwin A. Locke is Dean's Professor Emeritus of Leadership and Motivation at the University of
Maryland at College Park and is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA.
The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
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2. ANIMAL LOVERS AND MAN HATERS

By Edwin A. Locke. Edwin A. Locke, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, is

on the board of advisers of the Ayn Rand Institute, Marina del Ray, Calif. and for which he
wrote this article

Chicago Tribune

Apr 21, 1988

A new attack on individual rights is spreading like a cancer through the world. This
attack does not come from kings, or dictators, or the Master Race. It comes from
animal-rights advocates.

Contrary to popular belief, they are arguing for much more than the prevention of
cruelty to animals. They maintain that it is immoral for man to intervene at all in the
lives of animals. They oppose everything from commercial fishing to the owning of
pets. But the immediate goal of the movement is to stop the use of live animals for
scientific research.

In their efforts to halt medical research, animal-rights advocates have stolen or

released experimental animals, vandalized laboratories, threatened researchers and
disrupted scientific meetings. They have pushed for legislation that would restrict or
even prohibit the use of animals in research. Experiments and even entire laboratories
have been shut down, due to the skyrocketing research costs of meeting security needs
and government regulations.

The premise behind the animal-rights movement is that it is all right for man to suffer
and die, as long as animals are protectd.

There is an ''endangered species'' involved in the animal-rights movement; it is man.

For what is being jeopardized is one of man`s chief means of sustaining, improving
and extending his life: medical research.

From the treatment of rabies in the 19th Century to the development of anti-cancer
drugs and experimental AIDS vaccines, animals have played and must continue to
play a crucial role in the growth of medical knowledge and medical technology.
Millions of human beings will die unnecessarily if animal research is stopped. There
are no practical alternatives to the use of live animals. But the facts about medical
research are simply denied by many animal-rights advocates and rejected by others as
irrelevant. Animals, they claim, have rights regardless of the medical benefits to man.
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The fact is that animals have no rights at all. Rights are not based on the capacity to
feel pain, but on the capacity to think. Rights are a form of ethical principle and
therefore apply only to beings capable of reason and volition. Animals are not ethical
beings. The role of ethics is to guide man`s actions in order to further his life and
well-being. Rights are moral principles needed to protect the individual`s mind-his
freedom of thought and thus of action-against the initiation of force by other men.

The concept of individual rights is therefore strictly human; it is a repudiation of the

creed of self-sacrifice; it derives from the idea that man- every man-is an end in
himself, not a means to the ends of others (as in all forms of statism). Rights grant to
man, not to the subhuman, freedom to act on his own judgment and to promote his
own interests, provided he does not violate the rights of other men.

If man has rights, this includes the right to use animals for his own ends, including
food, clothing and medical research. If, in contrast, animals have ''rights,'' then the
concept is obliterated.

The above view cannot be refuted by specious arguments to the effect that we grant
rights to infants and the cognitively impaired, none of whom are fully rational. We do
so because they are still forms of humanity. The concept of rights, like all philosophic
principles, is derived from the essential nature of human beings, not from borderline
cases.

Howard University professor Charles Griswold identified the key principle: ''It`s not
just a question of saving or not saving animals. It`s a question of saving or not saving
us-not just in the sense of self-preservation, but in our understanding of what it means
to be human. The thesis that there is no moral difference between man and a rat
amounts to the ethical and moral debasement of man.''