Presenter:
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I’m Sharon Ro
binson. Our program
today presents the case for and against animal rights. Ever since Roman
times, animals have been legally defined as property, objects for humans to
use. But in the last decade, we’ve seen the emergence of a rights movement
for animals.
With
us today is David Blatte, a lawyer who specializes in animal rights.
David, why should we give rights to animals?
.David:
Let me begin by saying that historically there have been different forms of oppression.
.Pres.:
What do you mean?
.David:
500 years ago, the Jews were oppressed in Spain because of their religious views.
Africans were taken to the US and made slaves on the basis of color
differences. One hundred years ago, women in most countries could not vote.
All these things have changed
. These days animals are still viewed as objects.
The next step is to give them the rights they should rightfully have.
.Pres.:
Let me then ask you what rights animals should have.
.David:
Okay, the ideal situation would be that animals are no longer seen
as objects. As
property. They have the right not to be hurt by humans. And that pretty much
covers everything. That would include the right not to be killed
—
either for food,
or for any other reasons.
.Pres.:
So, in fact you are suggesting that everybody
becomes a vegetarian.
.David:
When talking about people, we say that humans have the right not to be killed, and no
one questions that.
.Pres.:
Ok. This implies that you are against raising cattle. What about poultry, chickens, and
all the rest?
.David:
No animals should be killed. That is my clear opinion.
.Pres.:
So for you human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom are on the same level as
far as these rights are concerned?.
.David:
Right. If you look back historically to some of the great thin
kers in the west, they
believed animals had their own rights. We can go back to one of the great
thinkers of ancient Greece, Pythagoras. We all know his theory.
.Pres.:
I must admit that I don’t remember much about it.
.David:
Well. Anyway, he was an ethi
cal vegetarian. He was very influential in his day and
most of the ancient Greeks were vegetarians. If we move into modern times,
we have DaVinci and Einstein, who were ethical vegetarians. So there’s a
strong tradition in the west of giving animals rights
.
.Pres.:
But animals cannot use language nor think.
.David:
Well, intelligence is not important when deciding rights. And what’s more relevant is
whether these animals feel pain. For example, if you... if you hit someone in
the stomach, the fact that t
hey’re intelligent doesn’t mean anything. It’s still
going to hurt.
.Pres.:
So what you are saying is that there’s a kind of continuum of rights and there’s no
sharp break between human beings and primates.
.David:
Yes.
.Pres.:
Let me now shift our pe
rspective a little. There are people who believe that humans
need animals to perpetuate the species. What do you think about that?
.David:
Right. Some people have said that we need animals for nutritional reasons, to feed
the world. But, if we take a wider
perspective, we see that we don’t need them.
Beef raising, for instance, is extremely inefficient. It’s also the second greatest
source of pollution after cars. So using animals for food works against our
species.
.Pres:
If this is so, how is it that y
ou know it and the free market doesn’t? Why hasn’t
the market discovered it?
.David:
Because people enjoy eating animals and they’re willing to pay for that, even if it’s
economically inefficient. They are eating animals not for nutritional reasons, for
su
rvival. And this is the fundamental question: do we have a right to take that
animal, to kill it, just for our enjoyment?
.Pres.:
Things will probably change in the future. So, let me ask you a final question.
Can you actually predict what is going to hap
pen in the next five years?
.David:
I believe these changes are going to take a little longer than five years but I believe
that gradually, over time, animals will be given more and more rights, more
and more protection. And again...
.Pres.:
David, you see
this then as the kind of cause to which you’d like to devote your whole
life, your whole career?
.David:
Yes, me and hundreds of thousands of other people. Again, we see this as just a form
of oppression, exactly like other forms of oppression before. An
d we see that
the history of the world can be interpreted as a process of liberation
-
from any
type of oppression. And, as always, it’s a gradual process. It happened with
slavery. It was true with women’s rights. And over time, more and more people
will a
gree to give back to animals their rights.
.Pres.:
David, thank you very much.