The root of the animal rights movement would seem to hang on the
issue of rights and the definition of rights. On its face, the premise
of rights of animals has always struck me as absolutely ridiculous.
Perhaps it is an innate understanding of my position in the food chain.
Perhaps it is the inevitable result of a cursory examination of the
issue unfettered by the obfuscating effect of raw emotionalism. Not
mean to demean emotions - but raw emotion without reason is the basis
of much suffering in this world. To formulate the concept of rights requires a high cognitive
capacity. Indeed, the formulation, exercise, and protection of rights
requires a sustained mental effort that no species other than man even
comes close to possessing. The call of rights for animals then is
really a call for man to invest animals with his rights – those rights
he (or possibly someone higher) created. What natural laws or set of
morals exist that bestow rights to animals? None, unless one ignores
the carnage manifest in nature in order to maintain an ideological
premise. Any argument in favor of animal rights must acknowledge that
man is the arbiter of those rights unless the protagonist wishes to
assume that those rights stem from an even higher source of
cognitive reasoning.
There is a dilemma, therefore, for those who see a world without
God. If man and only man is responsible for the creation, maintenance,
and delegation of rights, there can be no convincing moral component to
an argument in favor of animal rights when this argument is juxtaposed
to the historical cultural record of man. If you don’t believe in God,
you believe man is an animal. If man is an animal, he is not subject to
any morality contrived by a small minority of idealists when history,
as seen by any objective atheist, proves that man is only acting true
to his animalistic, carnivorous instincts with such behavior approved
by all majorities of historical and contemporaneous mankind. Morality
abides meat eating if morality is man-made.
If one continues to argue in moral terms after this they are
acknowledging either their own willful and determined ignorance of the
animal nature of man or they acknowledge the existence of some
ecclesiastical standard of morality.
Stuart Gort
