Note: This is one of three sections on Rights Theory. They have in common my belief that Rights theory is usually the weakest way to support any issue. Rights is a weak justifier for three reasons:
o It is easily countered logically with what I call the DMV Defense, "That's not a right, that's a privilege."
o Rights are tightly connected to prosperity because most rights must be materially supported by a community's prosperity -- Rights do not come cheaply, so they are a product of luxury thinking.
o The emotional power behind most rights appeals is guilt thinking. Guilt is a strong emotion, so it leads to some really wacky choices when those choices are looked at from a cost/benefit point of view. Which means the choice is very expensive for the community to support, but the expense is often not noticed by the rights enthusiast.
I see the dark side of Rights Theory being that it is often the Theory of Beggars.
The Animal Rights movement is a not-so-surprising consequence of living in a prosperous society. As a community grows richer it has more resource available for discretionary activities. Some of those discretionary resources are used for material things such as better food, shelter and transportation, some pay for more government in the form of more taxes being paid and more cost-raising regulations on social conduct, and some allow for more varied ways of thinking about things -- more education for all, and representative government instead of one of the top-down forms. Animal rights falls in the more varied ways of thinking about things category and it is most definitely supported by prosperity.
Animal rights is just another in the long list of rights that prosperity can afford to support. It gains support as the community is divorced from the food preparation processes. Even Kant noticed this back in the 1800's, he wrote that butchers and doctors were excluded from English juries because they were desensitized by being too close to the processes that cut up bodies. But I disagree with Kant on this. Rather than desensitivity, I call it being more practical about where we stand in the real world.
I see three basic moral grounds for not feeling we should be too sensitive to animal suffering, as in, not get excited about animal rights:
o First ground: Humans, animals, plants, and all other forms of life, are part of the vast web of life that is life on earth. All these forms are alive -- all of them! Call it slippery slopeism if you like, but I see no good reason to differentiate between humans, animals, and all the other life forms on some kind of suffering basis. We -- as in, all living organisms -- are all here on earth to live, we are all doing that living in different ways, and we are all doing the best we can at it. And doing our best means eating other things that are also living on earth. We are all part of the Biological Cycle. We all feed off of other parts of the biological cycle. Just as important, if we didn't cycle, if we didn't all eat and breathe, then our planet surface would be as sterile and life-free, or nearly life free, as Venus, Mars or Saturn's moon Titan.
It is the cycling -- the eating -- that brings the vibrant richness and huge quantity to the web of life on earth. Without all the eating, we aren't here! Earth's carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements would just be sterile and inanimate compounds.
Given this logic that we are all here on earth to live, being a vegan is not being any more sensitive to life than being a Big Mac eater. Eating is something all life forms do. You aren't living if you don't eat, and all life forms eat other life forms. Yes, plants "eat" too, in addition to sunlight and CO2 they need minerals and nutrients. They symbiote with single-celled organisms to get nutrients and minerals they can't produce with their own metabolic processes and that symbioting is a form of eating.
Therefore it doesn't make sense to say, "I'm causing less suffering by not eating animals." It may be feel-good thinking, but the logic is weak.
o Second ground: Farm plants and farm animals are symbiotes with humans. (And lab plants and lab animals, too. From here on when I say "farm" I mean all human activities which raise animals, plants, and single cell organisms.) They wouldn't be alive at all if humans didn't think they were valuable. Again, because it's so important, these plants and animals would not even be alive if humans didn't find them valuable. They are the product of privilege, not right.
The animals we symbiote the best with have been diligently selected for their symbioting ability. Cows can be fenced and herded, gazelle cannot. Horses can cooperate with humans, zebra cannot -- many an English lord tried to domesticate zebras because they would make striking carriage pullers, and they failed, the zebras did not symbiote well. Apple trees and grape vines are so dramatically adapted that they are one species on top grafted to a different species on the bottom -- this helps fight disease. Again, the point of saying this is that the species that humans symbiote with are carefully selected and bred. They are not just any species and they are no longer well adapted to living in the wild. They are very special and their place in the web of life is to be symbiotes with humans.
These animals provide value to humans, and, in turn, humans spend a lot of time and resource on them, providing them with food, shelter, health care, and secure breeding. Compared to their wild-living counterparts who are living short, nasty, disease and predator-filled, brutish lives, they aren't suffering anything!
The ultimate example of this is the cow. There are no more wild-living cattle. The wild-living cattle ancestors -- the Aurochs cattle -- went extinct in 1627. Cattle thrive now only as a symbiote with humans. How can this be suffering? If humans reduce their beef eating, does this reduce cattle suffering, or does it just reduce the number of cattle living on earth?
o Third ground: Living organisms to not respect the rights of other living organisms. Respect is not part of the natural way. Try telling a mosquito that she's not respecting your rights when she settles down for a tasty meal. She could be a vegetarian. She would be if you weren't around. But you're here and if she gets a good suck out of you, and lives, she will lay ten times the number of eggs that she would as a vegetarian, and after she does she will smile as widely as any mosquito can. Why should we humans treat mosquitoes any differently than they treat us?
In sum, animal rights thinking is a product of human prosperity, and the relation to prosperity is quite direct. It's feel-good thinking and it becomes stronger the further a person's lifestyle keeps him or her from experiencing the day-to-day harsh realities of food production.
There are three logical flaws to the animals rights concept: first, we are all part of the web of life so it is speciesism to not include plants and primitive living organisms in any animal rights thinking. Second, farm animals are human symbiotes, they are animals of privilege, they live only because humans perceive them as useful, if humans do not perceive them as useful they don't live at all. And third, animals do not give humans rights, so there is no moral need to reciprocate.