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Gallup Reports: One-Third Believe Animals Deserve Equal Rights

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I hope these people didn’t think the question through: Gallup reports that a worrying 32 percent of respondents believe animals should have “the same rights as people.”

Good grief. That would mean no ownership of animals. After all, people have the right not to be owned.

It would also mean no eating meat, no animal experimentation to achieve medical and scientific advances, or perhaps even the ownership of pets — unless you had to obtain a guardianship for dogs, cats, fish, and birds as one often does for a dependent human.

Sixty-two percent agree that animals deserve “some protection from harm and exploitation.” Of course they do. That’s the difference between animal rights — an ideology positing human/animal equality — and animal welfare, which posits a human obligation to treat animals humanely.

I am an animal welfarist. Animal rights is anti-human.

Image by Ann Harrison [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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