It's Time to Re-evaluate our Relationship with Animals

Do we need to re-evaluate our relationship with animals? If so, in which aspects and how do we go about doing this? Lesli Bisgould gives a compelling argument in her talk and puts everything into perspective throughout various examples. She bins her talk by asking if the audience thinks that animals should be treated humanely and follows up this question with if they think that animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily. Most people agreed to both statements. She explains to us that laws are useless, they do nothing to protect animals from suffering but are superficially pleasing. Laws permit us to cause "necessary" suffering by prohibiting "unnecessary" suffering. She then later says "For every story we see on the news about some terrible act of violence having been done to an individual animal, there is an industrial counterpart where that violence is normalized and multiplied by hundreds or thousands or millions of times."

This very quote from her talk can be tied into the concept of speciesism. We learned that this term means "a prejudice against those of another species" and that value is determined by species alone. While Bisgould does not mention this term in her speech, she definitely talks about. In her examples of how people can love a pet but experiment on others, or love a pet yet eat other animals. I believe that speciesism is a very real issue, although I wouldn't go as far as to compare it to sexism and racism. All of these issues are different in their own ways and I wouldn't say they are the same, because they are not. Speciesism does exist, in act as we learned, it is very common and extreme as it is human life vs. animal life. Bisgould gets us thinking about how we distinguish between species and how animals are of use to us. We are unwilling to let go of them as property because of what they offer us.

We can also think about social construction; it gives us a better understanding of why certain animals are viewed certain ways by us. Our views of animals will change depending on what the animal is or on the context. I fully believe in considering all animals and not just considering them for what they can do for us but for who they are as sentient beings as well. I myself am a vegetarian and I am on board with animal rights as well but that will not make me judge the lifestyle of another person. I will not push my beliefs onto others, but it would be nice for people to consider all animals and how they are treated. Most people never think of animals unless they interact with them in some way, and we need to see them as living beings as well and to consider how our perceptions change.

Bisgould briefly talks about how she became involved in animal rights when she saw an image that disturbed her. She says she felt compelled to learn more and that she saw nothing humane in those images, unless humane means horrible. We learned about the tactics used by animal rights groups and how these images and videos are intended to have a shock value. They are intended to shame companies if nothing else can be done. We've seen videos of these tactics being used and sometimes they are effective and reach people. They do make people like Bisgould and myself go out and find out more, to want to be involved and make changes.

A good point is brought up in the talk, that no one disputes that animals are the subjects of a life who an think and feel. That we do not treat animals badly because they are property but rather classify them as property in order to treat them badly, but we can change all this by classifying them differently. Why is it okay to harm animals but not each other? What are those differences and how can we use those differences to still give them rights? In class we heard about how the moral standing of animals has been debated for thousands of years and how we are ranked according to different categories.

This moral standing/ranking determines the main reasons we treat animals the way we do. We heard in the talk, like I mentioned earlier, that animals are treated as property. In class we also learned that this is one of the reasons why we treat animals with basic respect, it is not for the animal's sake. Bisgould wants to generate equal rights for animals by getting rid of their property status. She talks about how animal rights does not mean extending human rights to animals because no one thinks animals need the right to vote, or to marriage, education, etc.. She says animal rights is about establishing the right to have their fundamental interests respected when actions are considered that will affect them. All this can happen according to the speaker, by changing an animals status to legal person. This wouldn't be weird to think of them this way because churches, municipalities, and other corporations are considered legal persons. This is to protect their interests and be able to advance them. Animals are the only sentient beings who are not considered legal persons.

This applies to what we learned in class about equal consideration of interests rather than equal treatment. It doesn't give equal rights because humans and other animals are different from one another in various ways. Peter Singer definitely believes that animals deserve this consideration from us. Tom Reagan also said that we are all "subjects-of-a-life" and we all have inherent value just by being alive, not by out utilitarian value. I would definitely have to say I agree with these two points of view. Abolition, like Gary Francione believes in, seems way too extreme and I feel we need these interactions with other animals. We are sharing this earth and our homes with them, we need to give them this standing of a legal person in order to protect their rights, not to give them human rights.

Law is constantly evolving, as Bisgould stated. It won't be an easy road just as it hasn't been for any kind of change. We are at a point where yes most of us believe that animals should not suffer unnecessarily but are we really ready and willing to accept them as more than property? I don't believe that humans will ever truly give up animals, they are in all of our lives in one way or another. The animal rights movement is growing as time passes and as Bisgould stated, "Law will begin to reflect our biological kinship with animals as soon as we decide we really want it to." It is up to us individually to re-evaluate these relationships we have with animals and start to put their interests ahead of ours. Individually, as a society, we have the power to bring about these changes. It's all up to us.