Where Are the Rights in the "Animal Rights Movement"?

When Lisa Vanderpump of Real Housewives fame and a nonvegan restaurateur is said by the New York Times to be championing "animal rights" for having dogs and running a dog rescue, you know there is a problem.

For most nonhuman advocates, the term "animal rights" has lost all meaning and efficacy. The phrase has been denigrated by a self-described "animal rights movement" and has been co-opted by anyone and everyone imaginable, from those who promote veganism to those who simply "love animals" like cats and dogs.

When we speak of "animal rights" (AR) it usually has absolutely nothing to do with the actual attainment of legal rights for nonhumans. This is regrettable because doing so only hurts those we're trying to help.

Activists and organizations alike misuse "animal rights" when applying it to the context of treatment and the lessening of cruelty and suffering. This only adds to the confusion and detracts from the real work being done to advance nonhuman rights. Similarly to the way veganism has been watered down by consumerists, fads, and those who want the label without the effort, so has "animal rights."

"Many animal advocates mistakenly think nonhuman animals have rights which 'animal rights' organizations work to enforce. The reality is that nonhuman animals have no rights," said David Cantor of Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA). "Despite massive injustice toward nonhuman animals, the first wave of the 'animal rights movement' has made no progress these past three decades because it is not a rights movement."

A large part of the blame can be attributed to nonprofit groups that encourage and financially benefit from this muddiness. PETA inaccurately advertises itself as "the world's largest animal rights organization" and is therefore falsely portrayed this way by the media.

At last year's misbranded "animal rights conference" an attendee heard PETA President Ingrid Newkirk say that she has long dedicated herself to making PETA synonymous with "animal rights." This is "a little like making the Red Cross synonymous with 'human rights'," quipped Cantor.

According to PETA's website:

PETA's animal rights campaigns include ending fur and leather use, meat and dairy consumption, fishing, hunting, trapping, factory farming, circuses, bull fighting, rodeos, and animal experimentation.

None of these campaigns have anything to do with obtaining rights for nonhumans; rather, they focus on how nonhumans are used. Since nonhumans are considered property under our law—with very few exceptions—they may be used, abused, and exploited however we deem fit. It is important for us to understand this because only rights can empower and protect nonhumans from all kinds of tyranny, including usage.

Mercy for Animals (MFA) also encourages those who want a job in "animal rights" to contact them, despite their work being primarily focused on nonhuman usage. Using double talk, MFA claims to "speak up against cruelty and for compassion." This absurdly includes MFA's endorsement of "cage-free" eggs, and flesh from "crate-free" pigs and cows, as well as Walmart's deceptive "Five Freedoms" program which, ironically, doesn't include actual freedom for its nonhuman slaves.

The weakening and distorting of authentic nonhuman rights advocacy is very problematic for other animals because it fails to address their need for liberation, equality, and self-determination. It further limits the effectiveness of activists who think they're actually doing something to espouse nonhuman rights when they're not.

"The first wave of the 'animal rights movement' has been mired in activities unrelated to establishing rights of new groups of nonhuman persons," wrote Cantor, "and all of the atrocities decried by this first wave of the 'animal rights movement' since the late 1970s persist today, most on a larger scale."

In his Guide to Animal Rights Cantor elaborated: "The current animal-advocacy paradigm—promoting compassion, fighting cruelty to animals, loving animals, promoting veganism—though good in themselves, cannot reduce animal abuse because they do not address its root causes: humanism, speciesism, carnism, pseudoscience, and other false, abuse-promoting beliefs and ideologies and the long-term momentum of animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice—in short, denial of all animals’ equal rights."

Cantor offers a Draft Bill to Establish Rights of All Animals as an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States once human beings embrace nonhuman personhood and recognize the wrongs done to nonhumans as morally unacceptable. Proponents of nonhuman rights can take the first step by signing the draft bill and sharing it with others to raise awareness in public and political spheres.

For the law, "more than all other human forces, directs the progress of events," said poet-author William Allen Butler.

Progress for nonhumans requires rights, but laws not derived from rights—that do not strike at the roots of inequality and oppression—do little for nonhumans. For example, the Humane Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act regulate how nonhumans are used and killed, primarily to increase the economic efficiency of those industries who benefit from their enslavement and slaughter.

"These kinds of statutes and regulations are plainly inadequate and their inadequacy can never be remedied, for they were enacted not to protect the well-being of nonhuman animals, but rather to regulate the manner in which we humans exploit them," wrote Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) President Steven M. Wise in Letter #1 from the Front Lines of the Struggle for Nonhuman Rights: the First 50 Months. "All history demonstrates that even the most fundamental interests of humans can never be adequately protected without legal rights. It is no different for nonhuman animals."

"There's never yet been an animal-rights movement," continued Cantor "because no well-supported activity with a lot of participation has promoted equal rights of all animals the way equal rights of new groups of persons become established—there's only been welfarism, abolitionism, and veganism/consumerism, and none of those comes close to the long process by which humans have gradually been achieving equal rights since 1215 with the Magna Carta."

Unfortunately, many people conflate vegan consumerism and other efforts on behalf of nonhumans with "rights" activism. Even how we speak about other animals is vital to how we see them, treat them, and defend them. They are not an "it" or a "that". Moreover, humans are animals too, so we would do well to stop referring to nonhumans solely as animals, which only underscores the mentality of oppression based on cultural beliefs of inferiority and otherness. Likewise, characterizing any nonhuman advocacy as "rights" activism when rights aren't even a component or consideration only keeps nonhumans in their subordinate state and ever worsening condition.

"The legal 'thinghood' of all nonhumans is the single most important factor preventing humans from vindicating their interests," maintains Wise.

President Abraham Lincoln believed slavery to be a great and immoral wrong. He also observed a corresponding "slavery of the mind" that required broken shackles and freedom of thought. The Declaration of Independence was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. "The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation," wrote Joshua Wolf Shenk in Lincoln's Melancholy. We now recognize "men" to mean all "persons"—not just "white men." Furthermore, we need to recognize that persons are bodies, and not just human bodies. All living persons are born as bodies deserving of the same autonomous pursuits. Animal-abuse culture is the original slave power that conjointly clings to a "slavery of the mind" and beseeches eradication.

Being vegan is the least we can do, but doing so does not bolster the cause of nonhuman rights nor does it end longstanding policies and practices upheld over the centuries by our societies and cultures. While veganism and aid to nonhumans should not be discounted or diminished, rights do not arise for new groups of persons simply because we are kind to them or because we don't buy products that comprise their bodies. When our efforts have little to do with recognizing nonhuman personhood; when we mislabel our endeavors under the banner of "rights" we are creating a distraction and doing a disservice to the fledgling yet legitimate nonhuman rights movement being touted by groups like RPA and Nonhuman Rights Project.

"The popular political imagination doesn't reflect much on how crucial is the difference between having rights and not having them," Cantor wrote me in an email. Since "humans of recent generations in the U.S. and other 'Western democracies' haven't lived under abject tyranny . . . speciesism persists among animal advocates as among everyone else; so few people have considered that promoting less-effective protections than rights such as humans have under the Constitution might doom nonhuman animals to perpetual second-class status. . . . The facts I find most important are that there has never been a reduction in animal abuse in more than 50,000 years, and it has steadily increased (along with the human population, occupation of land, and intensification of technology). . . . Basic rights are crucial for nonhuman animals before there can be any significant and lasting reduction in animal abuse, because as long as humans have rights to them and their natural homes as property and other legal entitlements to them, they will always be subject to the atrocities decried by animal advocates."

Most vegans, activists, and abolitionists are unaware and are not intending to misapply the term "rights," but we are and we must be open to self-correction. This is an opportunity for us to shake the dust off and renew our commitments—to reclaim the "rights" designation with accuracy and authenticity.

"Animal rights is the most radical political proposal in all of human existence, aimed at reversing radical change brought about by animal abuse over thousands of years," wrote Cantor. "Animal-rights advocacy is not for everyone. But everyone who claims to promote animal rights should promote animal rights."

As long as we keep obscuring the meaning of nonhuman rights advocacy and avoid the actual work of securing rights for nonhumans, humans will continue to exploit and oppress nonhumans at will. We can do better. We must do better.