Peter Singer's Argumentative Essay: The Rights Of Animals

Animals deserve rights because just like humans, they feel excruciating pain, suffer and have feelings. One would argue that animals don’t experience emotions? But the answer is of course they do. It is emotions that allow animals to display various behavior patterns. According to the theory of utilitarianism, all sentient beings should be given consideration in the society and this includes both animals and humans. Also, animals cannot speak for themselves and for this reason they should be treated equally, protected and given the same respect as human beings. Peter singer’s approach also supports the argument on equal consideration in that animals deserve the same respect as human beings but just in a different view. In today’s society humans exploit animals for milk, meat, fur, scientific experimentation etc. and animals are constantly injured or killed. Their pain and sufferings should be taken into consideration, as this unjust treatment is morally unacceptable. Similarly speciesism is an
Animals just follow their instinct and cannot differentiate between good or bad. For example, one cannot convince a lion not to hunt when it’s hungry, even say when the prey is someone’s child. This is because the lion does not see hunting a child as something bad and so cannot make a choice between sparing the life of the child or satisfying it’s hunger. On the contrary, the lion is not found guilty if it kills the child because the lion lacks high order thinking capabilities to choose between their courses of action or to make decisions. In this scenario, the lion is just taken as an example but this applies to the majority of animals. This is the most obvious distinction between human beings and animals. In my opinion, “right” is the ability of choosing what is better on a moral basis and the inability for animals to do so makes them unqualified for possession of any