“Animal rights” is not the same thing as being nicer to animals. That is animal welfare.
Animal rights is an ideology. Its adherents disdain human exceptionalism and embrace a belief system that what gives a “being” moral value–and hence, rights–is the ability to suffer or feel pain.
This is known in AR parlance as being “painient.” As animal rights ideologue Richard Ryder told The Guardian some years ago:
Our concern for the pain and distress of others should be extended to any “painient” – pain-feeling – being regardless of his or her sex, class, race, religion, nationality or species.
Indeed, if aliens from outer space turn out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture machines who are painient, then we must widen the moral circle to include them. Painience is the only convincing basis for attributing rights or, indeed, interests to others.
In this view, what is done to an animal should be judged in the same manner as if the same thing were done to a human being.
Hence, cattle ranching is the evil equivalence as slavery, and eating meat is like Auschwitz–illustrated by PETA’s infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign of several years ago.
We see this misanthropic belief system at play in a protest against animal experimentation in Cambridge, in which the protesters pretended a mouse was injecting a medical researcher. From the Cambridge News story:
A ‘record’ breaking number of campaigners turned up to watch a ‘giant mouse’ being injected followed by a candle lit vigil in Cambridge. The visual stunt took place at the weekend in which a giant mouse “injected” a vivisector with a giant plastic syringe.
Activists wearing lab coats and lab masks held up placards, chanting and leafleting the public to raise awareness about International Animal Rights Day and AstraZeneca. A candle lit vigil followed.
The candlelight vigil should be for the human beings who will experience otherwise alleviable suffering if these anti-humans get their way and stop animal experimentation.
There is a hierarchy of life, and humans matter more morally than mice and every other animal.
Moreover, requiring animal testing before experimenting on people is a basic human right protection first enunciated in the Nuremberg Code.
Animal experimentation has also resulted in unquantifiable human benefit. Every, I repeat, every medical advance since World War II was facilitated (in part) by animal research, in basic studies to discern biological truths, safety testing, and/or efficacy assurances.
Only after these–and non-animal experiments–are completed, can human subject research can begin.
For more details on the tremendous human harm caused by animal rights, see my book A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.
And here is a column I wrote about how PETA activists materially impeded the development of a tremendous therapy for brain injury victims in the notorious Silver Spring Monkey Case.
Check out the Vegan Fox’s craziness above. Her words are mostly quotes from animal rights activism.