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"Animal Rights"

Ah, but you kind of contradict yourself here. The Bible (along with many believers) clearly states that God's ways are higher than ours, and it's futile to try to understand them (in my opinion, this is just a self-sustaining ruse in order to justify merciless death, cruelty and murder, but that's a different story). Anyway, if God's ways are higher than ours, and we can never hope to understand them, then why are we so hell-bent on instilling so-called "God-given rights"? This is in direct opposition to the first paragraph you wrote. If we are incapable of understanding God's ways, why are we deserving of his rights?

Wouldn't it be... pointless, in God's eyes?
You seem to confuse "God's rights" and "God-given rights". I think it's obvious that as humans we don't have God's rights, and I think it's obvious that we cannot instill rights given to men by God. We can only rediscover or preserve them.

God's ways are beyond us, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to understand Him. Being made in His image, there is a certain amount of God we can understand. The parentheses haven't taken proper notice of God's status as a ruler, and humanity's status as beings beneath Him- it is in fact His right to destroy and kill, and it's not man's place to do the same. And yet, we can if we want to... Oh, that stupid free will of ours.

We don't deserve rights, in God's eyes. What could humans have done to deserve them? But we have them, and so we should preserve them.

On topic-
Animals are an odd case to me. They do fine without rights when undisturbed by people, because the concept of "rights" is for humans. But I think they should have rights, if only because humans, who have pole position on Earth, are supposed to keep watch over them. And hey, it's better for us too. The fewer people care about this issue, or don't see it as a responsibility we have, the worse animals will be treated.
 
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You seem to confuse "God's rights" and "God-given rights". I think it's obvious that as humans we don't have God's rights, and I think it's obvious that we cannot instill rights given to men by God. We can only rediscover or preserve them.

God's ways are beyond us, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to understand Him. Being made in His image, there is a certain amount of God we can understand. The parentheses haven't taken proper notice of God's status as a ruler, and humanity's status as beings beneath Him- it is in fact His right to destroy and kill, and it's not man's place to do the same. And yet, we can if we want to... Oh, that stupid free will of ours.

We don't deserve rights, in God's eyes. What could humans have done to deserve them? But we have them, and so we should preserve them.

I think you misunderstood me, or I wasn't clear enough... I'm not talking about God's personal rights, moreso, like you said, "God-given rights". My question was that if we can't understand God's ways, why would he bother giving us rights? It was a connection to Pachy's case that because animals don't understand us, then why should we give them rights. I think, given the context, it's a valid argument.

On topic-
Animals are an odd case to me. They do fine without rights when undisturbed by people, because the concept of "rights" is for humans. But I think they should have rights, if only because humans, who have pole position on Earth, are supposed to keep watch over them. And hey, it's better for us too. The fewer people care about this issue, or don't see it as a responsibility we have, the worse animals will be treated.

For once we are in complete agreement, methinks.

And a little final note here:

This really isn't about religion or God or the Bible and it's claim that humans have dominion over animals... let's grow up for a minute and see the bigger picture here. When you boil this idea down to the bone, animal rights is really just about making sure unnecessary harm doesn't come about to living things not called humans. Personally, I feel if you can't agree with that little point, not only are you blatantly ignorant, but you lack what makes us humans a higher order species. That is, the ability to understand the situation.

Oh, one last note about hunters - I think we should take all the hunters in the world, and all of the bears, and lock them in a massive cage. No guns, no weapons, just clean and simple (ah hem) God-given tools, and let's see who wins. Kinda puts perspective on things, if you ask me.

(Personally, I'd support the bears).
 
Can you please answer me how the hell you got god/religion connected to this? Maybe it's because I'm atheist but I don't see any connection at all.
Religion dictates how to conduct oneself, how to treat others, etc. It is intended to govern many if not all aspects of life, so somebody to whom religion is sufficiently important will often bring it up.
 
Can you please answer me how the hell you got god/religion connected to this? Maybe it's because I'm atheist but I don't see any connection at all.

It comes from the fact that written in the Bible is the idea that "humans have dominion over animals", or something along those lines (Pachy or Azure might know the exact quote). This is somehow used to say that animals are at our mercy, and God allows us to do to them what we wish (something like that).

I'm an atheist myself, and I generally try to move these discussions away from religion. See, there's this real moron thing I do called thinking, and I think to truly have a good debate, one must separate from the "because the Bible says so" argument.
 
I never said you can gauge the emotions of pets. It's the same with another person, unless you share an extremely good connection with each other, opinions, etc, you can't really gauge their emotions easily, if at all. However, I believe properly raised pets can and will show those "truly ungaugable" emotions you speak of.

Was my parrot biting everyone he could was me being a bad owner? Might be, but some sources say that it's how much of "education" they got during their chickhood. Also, I can't say I could know what my parrot feels all the time, but I know for certain that he felt safe on my shoulder, considering the moment he got on my finger he rushed to my shoulder, and climbed even if I put something in his way. When his wings fully grew, he tended to fly for my shoulder often too.

That could be said exactly for humans. Wouldn't you prefer living in one place where everything's served to you? You get everything you need easily. Wouldn't you prefer to stay there than a place you have to, say, struggle / fight for your food?

Those bears were example of animal abuse. You know what drug dealers are made off; fortune looking *******s, and no regard to others as long as their butt is okay.

Wild animals are wild animals, they do not equal animals that was taken care of by humans from a little amount of time after birth. Take a wild animals and put it in a cage, it might get used to it, but will suffer endlessly. It will not be friendly to humans at all. Take a human raised one, easier to contact with, and they even consider the cage to be their home.

Not feeding them.. is.. I don't know, really. Some people just throw them out of generousity, and I've yet to hear someone say it's a bad thing to feed wild animals. Maybe if school kicked out some history lessons (too bad for you history lovers, I don't care what happened in the past, not in the long run at least, and most things I learned was past things that have little affect currently and nobody really gives a sheep about them.) and use that time to teach us about the current, and treating wild animals as wild animals might have helped. Or cut literary classes. I'm getting a bit offtopic though, but it would be great if we'd have some animals / other subjects education even if it was minimal instead of our teacher saying how bad we act etc etc etc.

Explain me what domestication is. And what do you mean by chimereas breeds? Also, I cannot participate in a cat/dog argument since I never liked them. I prefer birds.

And as for the chickens, we all know how they feed them. Make them big and fatty, if I remember correctly.

Also, if you're another of those animals free in nature crap people bought up, I hate this. I don't see any bad living alongside animals in harmony. Not harmony, but a certain connection, I find it lovely.

I'll guess I'll address this by paragraph...

1. Well, this was my point to begin with. Though, even poorly raised pets can't be gauged because animals cannot communicate verbally with humans.

2. Biting is most likely an instinctual adaptation. Birds, being such relatively hard to train animals, are less likely to grow out of their instincts. Though perhaps taking an animal out of its instinctual realm is inhumane in and of itself. Then, it grows to be a problem that those who teach their pets to be "good" in terms of human are actually stripping animals of what makes them animals. Besides, animals never attack out of malice (since malice is very much a byproduct of humanistic want), so you can't really consider bestial bellicosity as an inherently "bad" thing, but something "bad" to humans.

And about the shoulder thing, not to devalue your friendship, but birds... Do that to trees too.

3. The problem does not arise from finding a place where food is given to you, but from having an unreliable food source. Sure, if the same old man comes to the park every day and throws a loaf of bread on the floor, then that is great. However, most animal feeders only toss out food on a whim, without obligations, and are therefore unreliable food sources -- who knows if they'll be there tomorrow or not.

4. The bear-tamers being marijuana planters is irrelevant to my point. If I had neglected to mention that point, then you would have deemed it less severe. The point is that feeding animals is bad because it strips them of their ability to survive by habituating them to free service. The bears were added as a point because they, being wild animals, should definitely not be docile in the wild. Now, after having been tamed, they have basically forgotten how to defend themselves or hunt.

5. Perhaps the fundamental problem here is: what gives the human rights to raise the animal at all? And, I have never once met an animal that preferred its cage over the outside world (though, I have met one very sweet dog that was afraid to go indoors).

6. Skipping over this one because it's irrelevant elephant.

7. Domestication is the assimilation of a species of animals into the human realm. Domestication is the single most influential method of artificial selection humankind has imposed on the animal world (rather than let natural selection take its course, we selectively breed certain individuals and prevent others from having children in order to have offspring with certain traits).

Chimera breeds are those that arise from breeding two different breeds of any species. For example, a chihuahua mixed with any large-sized dog will make its offspring dwarved. Sure, cute, but also rather evolutionarily useless and cruel (the dog is stuck that way for the rest of its life). Bird point is moot because we have chimera birds too. Another problem lies in the fact that breeders only breed for aesthetics and the pursuit of making a breed that will generate a good amount of money (sound familiar?).

I'm not sure how I feel about this, though. We have bred a lot of animals in the past, and while some benefit humans greatly, others are pretty idiotic. For example, bulls now have much larger flanks than they did in the past because we stopped bulls that had small flanks from breeding. We get more meat. On the other hand, we've also created the monstrosity known as the Japanese hornet, the most ferocious species of hornet yet, going out of its way to harm anything that even dares move in its environment.

8. Problem isn't with how we feed them, it's with the homes we raise them in. Maybe the image of pleasant farms with animals roaming in meadows is still ingrained in our heads, but almost all of the world's large farms today look like this:

Spoiler:


9. I can admit that there is a certain natural kinship between humans and animals, and that animals can be friends across species (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4OD8dxIry8), however, I feel that having pets around falls far from symbiosis and boils down to solely personal gain (read this:) most of the time.
 
I do not believe in the entire religious idea that we rule over the animals. :/ In fact we are animals but just happen to have evolved to be intelligent and have the ability to disregard some of our primitive instincts. We still contain basic instincts and sometimes we don't even know we use instincts such as paternal instincts. But that is a completely different story.

Animals have rights but they are consider specific to the specie. Obviously wild animals are very, very different to that of domesticated animals. Domesticated animals should have rights to protect them from abuse and essentially, killing them for no reason what so ever. They should be treated like "property" but like living, breathing creatures. With wild animals they have the right to be protected if we think they need our protection and the right to fight for their survival. They have the right to live on the land with equal space and fair share of the world. Humans have over taken the planet and causing more harm then good. We like to kill everything we touch and instead of protecting the world around us, we destroy it. Why? Because we think we have entitlement too do so. Then again nature entitled us to be intelligent and learn from our mistakes. So the argument can go both ways.

I do believe animals have rights but not that of humans, that of the actual animal... This is why it is called animal rights not rights for animals similar to humans. It is different and sometimes many people misconceive the idea of what "rights" mean in the idea of animal rights.

Now, do I agree with domesticating animals? Well, kind of too late considering humans already did such a thing and no turning back. You can not stick a dog into the wild without problems... The same with all domesticated animals. All you can do is treat them with respect and give them a good, healthy home. Domestication will happen whether most of us approve of it or not.

I am not a PETA member... I actually dislike PETA. The organization I do like is the Humane Society. I am not a fan of any organization that goes extreme or does stupid things for attention.
 
[FONT=georgia, bookman old style, palatino linotype, book antiqua, palatino, trebuchet ms, helvetica, garamond, sans-serif, arial, verdana, avante garde, century gothic, comic sans ms, times, times new roman, serif]Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction. ~Charles R. Magel

Animals have rights, and deserve humane treatment, but we need to draw a line. Were I in the forest, and a grizzly bear were attacking me or a friend, I'd shoot the grizzly no question. Same with a dog attack. The threshold has been crossed.

A Human life is more important than an animal's life, but, at the same time, animals are quintessential to our existence. Our ancestors couldn't have survived the Ice Age were it not for Mammoths and other fauna. Certain animals like Bats, eat mosquitoes and other insects that carry disease. We rely on other animals to exist. The 'Web of life' is more than just a saying, its a truth.

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I don't believe animals should have rights. I agree with most of what you said, though I'd argue that the extent of animal "feelings" is so minimal as to be irrelevant. I think worrying about people is a much more important endeavor than worrying about animals who, if instinct instructed such, would kill us without a second thought.
 
I don't believe animals should have rights. I agree with most of what you said, though I'd argue that the extent of animal "feelings" is so minimal as to be irrelevant. I think worrying about people is a much more important endeavor than worrying about animals who, if instinct instructed such, would kill us without a second thought.

^ This.

Exactly, I wouldn't quite give animals "feelings", at least human feelings, because we don't know if animals have feelings, or a moral sense like we do. I wish there was a human rights group as fervent about protecting human life as PETA is for animal rights.
 


^ This.

Exactly, I wouldn't quite give animals "feelings", at least human feelings, because we don't know if animals have feelings, or a moral sense like we do. I wish there was a human rights group as fervent about protecting human life as PETA is for animal rights.
There are plenty. Take your pick.
 
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I wouldn't go as far to say they're as fervent as PETA though. :/ PETA gets downright nasty until their views are acknowledged. Don't get me wrong, what they do is great. They're more civil, though.
I don't think a humanitarian group could be as horrible to people as PETA is and still be called a humanitarian group.

Also, I'll take back the link to the Salvation Army. They're more politicized than I thought if they're pushing anti-pornography so much. Still, there are plenty of humanitarian groups out there. I have a lot of respect for Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.
 
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I don't think a humanitarian group could be as horrible to people as PETA is and still be called a humanitarian group.

Also, I'll take back the link to the Salvation Army. They're more politicized than I thought if they're pushing anti-pornography so much. Still, there are plenty of humanitarian groups out there. I have a lot of respect for Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.

Though this thread isn't really to discuss the methods by which animal rights are enforced, I also agree that at times PETA is a bit too militant and extremist. Though, they do fight against many different moral issues related to animals, such as vivisection (live dissection of organisms) or euthanasia. I don't, however, like how staunchly they promote and try to impose fickle things like vegetarianism.
 


^ This.

Exactly, I wouldn't quite give animals "feelings", at least human feelings, because we don't know if animals have feelings, or a moral sense like we do. I wish there was a human rights group as fervent about protecting human life as PETA is for animal rights.

I don't like the fact that you're saying we don't know if animals have feelings.

When my dog got run over a few months ago my other dog was so depressed you could see he was upset and you can see when a dog is happy and any other animal (maybe besides fish, not sure on that tho)
The only thing that is different between people and animals personality wise is we have common sense and we know right from wrong, oh and we know how to speak.
I don't think animals NEED animal rights because they have us to protect them from things like abuse, extinction etc. So instead of animal rights there needs to be laws towards animals, stronger laws anyway.
 


I don't like the fact that you're saying we don't know if animals have feelings.

When my dog got run over a few months ago my other dog was so depressed you could see he was upset and you can see when a dog is happy and any other animal (maybe besides fish, not sure on that tho)
The only thing that is different between people and animals personality wise is we have common sense and we know right from wrong, oh and we know how to speak.
I don't think animals NEED animal rights because they have us to protect them from things like abuse, extinction etc. So instead of animal rights there needs to be laws towards animals, stronger laws anyway.

All I'm saying is that we're giving animals human attributes. Animals have feelings, yes, but not complex human emotions as we like to see it.

I had two Golden retriever dogs, Gus and Moose. The best breed there is, and I loved them a lot. Gus was a lot older, and when he passed away, Moose was sad and depressed for a long time afterward. But remember dogs are descended from Wolves, and that depression was a natural instinct from the pack leader dying.

Emotions =/= Instinct, is what I'm trying to say.
 
I keep seeing people confuse 'rights' with 'humane treatment'. It's annoying. Humane treatment of animals is not the animal's right, it's generally a Human's moral obligation.

Animals do not have rights. They don't get a voice in anything unless they somehow miraculously prove that they're about as sentient as we humans are. (Which I think is unlikely)
 
Babies should not have rights. They can't speak, they can only feel basic emotions and have very low intelligence. Because babies are less intelligent, I propose we revoke any rights they have so we can rape and kill as many of them as we like.

Should animals have equal rights to humans? No, of course not.
Should animals have some rights? Yes, making it legal to torture and kill animals for no reason other than sick twisted pleasure would be ridiculous.

I don't see any problems with the current legalities concering animals.
 
Babies should not have rights. They can't speak, they can only feel basic emotions and have very low intelligence. Because babies are less intelligent, I propose we revoke any rights they have so we can rape and kill as many of them as we like.
Babies are covered because they have the potential for free will and higher level thinking (in fact, it's almost a guarantee that they will obtain it at some point) and are of emotional importance to someone.

Other than your analogy, I pretty much agree with you, though.
 
Babies are covered because they have the potential for free will and higher level thinking (in fact, it's almost a guarantee that they will obtain it at some point) and are of emotional importance to someone.

Other than your analogy, I pretty much agree with you, though.
What if it's a baby that's been put in an orphanage, or what if it was unwanted? I'm sure there are plenty of babies that aren't loved, as well as people that love animals very much, and plenty that love animals more than babies as well.

Potentially, our slaughtering of animals has prevented them from evolving naturally which could have interuppted their development of higher level thinking.
One cow somewhere could have been carrying the genetic code which would later develop and allow cows to talk! Then it was killed, a shame.
Of course, this is a silly situation, but I don't see how the point of "they're less intelligent so deserve to die!" is a stronger argument.

I'm neutral on this subject really. We slaugher so many animals, just because we can. Nobody's going to stop us, who cares? I don't think animals are any more or less deserving of rights than humans, we get rights for the same reason, nobody's going to stop us making rules so we just go ahead and make them.

There are many humans that are less deserving of rights than animals. If people were threatening to kill a dog that had previously saved a baby's life, I'm sure there would be opposition to it. Just because the dog did something that's seen as heroic, it apparently has now earnt respect and the right to live. There are some humans that murder other people, or scam other people, or are generally just nasty people that don't do anything good in their entire life, yet they get more rights than thousands of animals that are just minding their own business.

I don't think there's any real justification for the slaughter of animals. I don't really oppose it very much because I'm just apathetic to the whole situation. Humans can do whatever the hell they want, guess it's just bad luck if an animal happens to be tasty.
 
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