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104 Animal Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Animal rights is a topic of great importance in today's society. As our understanding of animals and their capabilities continues to grow, so does our responsibility to treat them with compassion and respect. Whether you are a student writing an essay or a concerned citizen looking to learn more about animal rights, here are 104 topic ideas and examples to inspire and inform your writing:

• The ethical implications of animal testing in scientific research.
• The impact of factory farming on animal welfare and the environment.
• The effectiveness of animal rights organizations in promoting change.
• The role of animal rights in the vegan and vegetarian movements.
• The relationship between animal cruelty and violence towards humans.
• The rights of animals in captivity, such as in zoos or aquariums.
• The controversy surrounding the use of animals in entertainment, such as circuses or rodeos.
• The moral dilemma of using animals for their fur or skin in the fashion industry.
• The legal protections for animals and their enforcement.
• The connection between animal rights and environmental conservation efforts.
• The role of pets in our society and their rights as sentient beings.
• The impact of hunting and trophy hunting on animal populations.
• The use of animals in medical research and the search for alternatives.
• The treatment of animals in the food industry, including slaughterhouses and fishing practices.
• The rights of endangered species and efforts to protect them.
• The psychological and emotional experiences of animals in different environments.
• The impact of climate change on animal habitats and their rights to survival.
• The role of animals in traditional and indigenous cultures, and their rights within those contexts.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in product testing, such as cosmetics or cleaning products.
• The role of animals in therapy and their rights to be treated with care and respect.
• The impact of animal agriculture on deforestation and habitat destruction.
• The rights of animals in educational institutions, such as in dissection practices.
• The role of animals in scientific advancements and the ethical boundaries that should be considered.
• The impact of animal trafficking and the illegal trade of exotic animals.
• The rights of animals in the entertainment industry, including in movies and TV shows.
• The connection between animal rights and feminism, and the intersectionality of these movements.
• The rights of animals in the tourism industry, including elephant rides or swimming with dolphins.
• The role of animals in sports and the ethical implications of their use.
• The impact of animal rights activism and the strategies used to promote change.
• The rights of animals in disaster situations and the importance of disaster management plans.
• The connection between animal abuse and domestic violence, and the need for intervention.
• The rights of animals in scientific experimentation, including the use of primates or rodents.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in circuses, including the training methods used.
• The impact of animal agriculture on water pollution and the rights of aquatic animals.
• The rights of animals in the pet trade, including puppy mills and exotic pet ownership.
• The connection between animal rights and indigenous rights, and the need for cultural sensitivity.
• The ethical implications of using animals for organ transplantation or medical advancements.
• The rights of animals in the fashion industry, including the use of fur or exotic skins.
• The impact of animal rights legislation on farming practices and the economy.
• The role of animals in human therapy and their rights to be treated with dignity and respect.
• The rights of animals in the military and the ethical considerations of using them in warfare.
• The connection between animal rights and children's education, and the importance of teaching empathy.
• The impact of animal rights on the tourism industry and the promotion of ethical travel.
• The rights of animals in the pet food industry and the regulations that should be in place.
• The ethical considerations of using animals for entertainment purposes, such as in theme parks.
• The connection between animal rights and climate justice, and the need for intersectional activism.
• The rights of animals in research institutions and the importance of ethical guidelines.
• The impact of animal rights on international trade and the need for global regulations.
• The role of animals in traditional medicine practices and the ethical implications involved.
• The rights of animals in the fashion accessories industry, such as in the production of leather goods.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in art and the boundaries that should be respected.
• The impact of animal rights on the pharmaceutical industry and the search for alternatives.
• The rights of animals in disaster response efforts and the importance of animal rescue teams.
• The connection between animal rights and environmental justice, and the need for collaboration.
• The rights of animals in the tourism industry, including in wildlife sanctuaries and safaris.
• The ethical implications of using animals for military experiments or weapons testing.
• The impact of animal rights on the food industry and the rise of plant-based alternatives.
• The role of animals in cultural traditions and the need for cultural sensitivity in animal rights.
• The rights of animals in the entertainment industry, including in commercials and advertisements.
• The connection between animal rights and social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in scientific education, such as dissection practices.
• The impact of animal rights on the pharmaceutical industry and the development of cruelty-free products.
• The rights of animals in disaster preparedness plans and the importance of evacuation protocols.
• The connection between animal rights and sustainable development goals, and the need for collaboration.
• The rights of animals in the fashion industry, including the use of animal-derived materials.
• The ethical implications of using animals for cosmetic testing and the search for alternatives.
• The impact of animal rights on the tourism industry and the promotion of ethical travel practices.
• The role of animals in cultural heritage and the importance of preserving their rights.
• The rights of animals in research institutions and the regulations that should be in place.
• The connection between animal rights and indigenous knowledge, and the need for cultural exchange.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in film and the boundaries that should be respected.
• The impact of animal rights on the pharmaceutical industry and the search for cruelty-free alternatives.
• The rights of animals in disaster response efforts and the importance of animal welfare organizations.
• The connection between animal rights and environmental sustainability, and the need for collective action.
• The rights of animals in the tourism industry, including in wildlife conservation projects.
• The ethical implications of using animals for military purposes, such as bomb detection dogs.
• The impact of animal rights on the restaurant industry and the rise of plant-based menus.
• The role of animals in religious practices and the need for religious tolerance in animal rights.
• The connection between animal rights and LGBTQ+ rights, and the need for intersectional activism.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in scientific education, such as in university laboratories.
• The impact of animal rights on the pharmaceutical industry and the development of cruelty-free medications.
• The rights of animals in disaster relief efforts and the importance of veterinary care.
• The connection between animal rights and sustainable agriculture, and the need for ethical farming practices.
• The ethical implications of using animals for cosmetic testing and the search for cruelty-free alternatives.
• The impact of animal rights on the tourism industry and the promotion of eco-friendly travel.
• The role of animals in cultural heritage and the importance of respecting their rights.
• The connection between animal rights and traditional knowledge, and the need for cultural exchange.
• The impact of animal rights on the pharmaceutical industry and the search for cruelty-free medications.
• The rights of animals in disaster response efforts and the importance of emergency veterinary care.
• The connection between animal rights and sustainable development, and the need for collaborative efforts.
• The rights of animals in the tourism industry, including in responsible wildlife tourism.
• The ethical implications of using animals for military purposes, such as search and rescue dogs.
• The impact of animal rights on the food industry and the rise of plant-based diets.
• The rights of animals in the entertainment industry, including in live performances and shows.
• The connection between animal rights and disability rights, and the importance of inclusion.
• The ethical considerations of using animals in scientific education, such as in school laboratories.
• The connection between animal rights and sustainable fashion, and the need for ethical clothing choices.

These topics provide a broad range of perspectives and issues within the field of animal rights. Whether you choose to focus on the ethical implications, legal protections, or the impact on various industries, there is no shortage of ideas to explore. Remember to conduct thorough research, consider different viewpoints, and present a well-balanced argument in your essay. Happy writing!

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170 Animal Rights Research Paper Topics That Will Inspire You

Just as almost every social issue or topic can be written about as an essay or a research paper, so can you write about animal rights in either your dissertation, school essay, or whatever reason you’re writing a research paper for. Exploring your research writing with animal rights topics can provide you a lot to write about considering how mainstream the animal rights movement has been over time. When writing an essay on animal rights, there are so many angles through which you can structure your topic to get what you want. It’s better to hire a custom research paper service and get your papers complete on time.  Your research paper can either focus on animal welfare vs. animal rights topics, looking either at how animals are catered for today or the challenges animals in our societies face today and how they can be addressed. It’s important to note that animal rights topics for research papers can be drawn from different angles. Many sample topics engage animal rights issues and here are some of the modern topics to include in your animal rights research paper.

Animal Rights Research Paper Topics

The first step to understanding what you’re required to do when presented with a research paper on animal rights is to first understand the rationale behind animal rights. Animal rights focus on addressing the issue that surrounds the treatment of animals by humans and how with the enabling of animal rights, these issues can be curbed and in turn, the animal protected. There are so many topics that can be coined out when you’re writing precisely on animal rights. Here are some of them.

• Why do animals need to be treated with respect
• Local and exotic breeds: should crossbreeding be encouraged?
• The inhuman nature of animal experimentation.
• The use of animals for carrying out experiments and why it should be addressed
• Why animal rights should become legally binding across the globe
• The sustainability of animal rights sensitization
• Why animal advocates require legal backings
• How the growth of pet owners is gradually increasing the cases of pet abuse
• Navigating the pain and suffering of Animals
• Pet Abuse: why animals rights should be looked into
• How the embrace of vegetarianism is addressing the issue of using animals for food
• A sustainable measure on how to promote animal safety in the human environment
• The worth of animals as opposed to being used for consumption
• The inhumane nature of using animals as a means of transportation
• How the use of animals for sports can be detrimental to their health.
• How humans and animals can peacefully coexist
• An analysis of the animal legislative rights
• Legislation: how animals can feel safe in the environment
• How the legislation of animal rights affects man
• Should animals be viewed as properties?
• A study into the protection of animals in the United States.
• Why does animal cruelty will practically take longer to be eradicated
• The economic limitations animal rights can cause man
• A look into the future of animal rights in the human environment
• How culture backs animal cruelty

Animal Rights Debate Topics

Not every single human backs the animal rights movement. And the only way to draw the attention of people towards the challenges animals face in the human environment can be achieved in a research paper about animal rights that takes the form of a debate. Debates are mostly argumentative where either the speaker or writer compels the audience or reader through carefully chosen and thought out words to convey interests, ideas and emotion. There are so many growing conversations today surrounding animal rights and here are some animal rights debate topics to consider when writing.

• Does the promotion of animal rights affect humans?
• Mental health in animals: is that a real thing?
• Does the right of animals include the right of wild animals to exist as well?
• Why veterinary medicine should be encouraged in every locality
• Does the increase in the human population affect the welfare of animals?
• Do animals suffer challenges like distress and pain due to animal cruelty?
• Should every locality embrace the fundamental rules for animal protection?
• Should the law against animal violation be punitive?
• Can eating meat be completely stopped with the help of animal movements?
• How sustainable is the Vegan lifestyle to animal rights?
• The psychological effect of animal cruelty on animals
• The violation of animals right by using them as experiments and specimens
• Do animals have any legal rights?
• Should legal backing be encouraged for animals?
• Can the absence of legal rights affect the existence of animals?
• Are animals destined to be subjected to the whims of man?
• Animal right vs. animal welfare: what are the ways they diverge
• What are the moral backings of the use of animals for scientific research?
• Could personal belief play a role in animal cruelty?
• Does personal belief rub off on animal rights?
• Should animal welfare be chosen over animal rights?
• Why there needs to be a control to animal cruelty
• How historical events set the precedent for animal violation
• How history sets precedent for the animal rights movement
• Should the promotion of animal drugs for wild animals be encouraged?

Animal Rights Research Topics

Since the animal rights movement is still burgeoning, sensitizing people on the need to promote animal rights, there are therefore so many researchable topics into the subject that can be highlighted as a research topic. Here are some of them to look into.

• How the use of animals for food undermines animal rights
• How animal cruelty threatens to wipe off the existence of animals shortly
• The dispose of refuse into rivers, oceans, and seas and how detrimental it is to aquatic animals
• The regulation on scientific experiments on animals
• How hunting negates the animal rights movement
• Vegan lifestyle and how it promotes animal welfare and rights
• The role of empathy in the animal rights movement
• Animal welfare: the separation of domestic animals from wildlife
• The inbound nature of animal cruelty amongst animals
• Measures to curb animal cruelty amongst themselves
• Why sheep should be saved and wools forgone
• How detrimental human violence is to animals welfare
• Does owning a pet improve animal welfare?
• Affordable healthcare for animal welfare
• The role of zoo managers in animal welfare
• Animal welfare: the need for an affordable diet plan for animals
• The benefits of pet supplies to the animal rights movement
• Government’s role in improving the situation of animals and their welfare
• How Wildlife could wipe out domestic animals
• Should domestic animals be chosen over wildlife in the movement?
• The sustainable benefits of consuming organic eggs
• How crossbreeding benefits animals
• The potential threat of overbreeding.
• Fear is the default mode for most animals

Persuasive Speech Topics on Animal Rights

• Why purchasing meat should be discouraged to promote animal welfare
• Animal cruelty should be punitive
• Indecent acts against animals and how they must be addressed
• Why domestic animals should be tendered to more than wildlife
• Using chains as Dog leash is unethical
• Why animal rights agencies should supervise pet owners
• The moral backing of animals as pets
• Importance of cross-breeding amongst animals
• Why the view of animals as disposable is offensive
• Why domestic animals deserve human treatments
• Should how wild lives are a reason for animal cruelty?
• Surviving within a society without reliance on meat
• The importance of animal vaccination and checkups
• The diverse nature of domestic animal cruelty
• How egg consumption violates animals privacy
• Why farm animals need legal protections
• Why animals brought to the movies deserve compensation fees
• Another form of animal cruelty: Abandonment
• Effects of animal abandonment on animals
• Why animal insurance is important today
• The defense of violence on wildlife
• Getting leather from animals: how disturbing is that?
• The importance of protecting animals from violence, cruelty and the provision of shelter for them
• The importance of animal shelters and why they should be promoted

Animal Rights Controversial Topics

If you are passionate about animal rights and you’re embarking on writing an essay based on the topic, choosing controversial topics will give you an upper hand as you’ll be drawing in people’s attention through the topic of what you write as it’ll gradually marinate into the content of your work. The thing about choosing a controversial topic is that it requires that your essay will be persuasive enough to convey the thoughts and emotions.

• Why wildlife animals should be prioritized
• Why stray dogs and abandoned dogs should be fostered by founders
• Why humans must pay attention to animal abandonment
• Animals should be in the shelter and not in homes
• Why animal abandonment should be punishable by law
• The disturbing fact about bullfights
• Taking away chicken eggs and how unethical it is
• Invasion of animal privacy should be followed with adequate punishment
• The disturbing nature of butcher animals
• Animals play important roles in the society
• How Thanksgiving Turkey negates the principle of animal welfare
• License to rescue pets from violent homes
• Why pet emergency fund is important
• The use of animals as race materials: problematic or not?
• The importance of healthy eating for animals
• Why animal healthcare should be promoted.
• Domestic pets: why they need a hotline for rescue and protection
• The need to curb malnutrition in animals
• Why does the health of exotic animals matter more than their economic importance
• Animals should not be killed for human benefits
• Is it wise to keep animals as pets?
• Why the use of animals as a means of transportation should be stopped
• How to promote intensive care amongst animals
• The effect of climate change on animal health and welfare.

Argumentative Essay Topics About Animal Rights

So many conversations are ongoing on the need to prioritize the existence of animals and how to improve the general welfare of animals in society. These issues can be presented in an argumentative format and here are some topics that go in handy.

• Human violence is the leading cause of Animal cruelty
• Why embracing a vegan lifestyle will improve animal welfare
• Hunting as a sport contributes to the fatal extinction of animals
• How the continuous testing and experimentation using animals will lead to the decline of animals in the near future.
• Are farmers exposing animals to more harm?
• Why the legislation would improve the livelihood of animals
• Animal welfare for sustainable environmental growth
• Why pet adoption is better than buying pets
• Animal rights should be a human concern
• Why should the government legislate against the production of garments from animal skin
• Why animal rights should be included in students’ curriculum.
• Why butchering of animals is a barbaric practice
• Principal ways through which animal welfare can be encouraged
• Why society needs to pay more attention to the protection of wildlife
• Why cross-breeding amongst animals should be encouraged
• How water pollution is affecting aquatic animals
• Why do we need legislation for free pet healthcare
• Animal insurance should be free
• Domestic animals should be protected from wildlife
• How humans can improve the lives of animals through welfare
• Why animal welfare should be of community importance
• Testing of cosmetics on animals leads to health complications in animals
• Why animals should not be used for farm practices
• Why animals cannot protect themselves against abuse

Hot Topics on Animal Rights

Today, animals go through so much due to the increase in their commercial needs. With the help of movements on animal rights issues and the need to create awareness and consciousness on animal welfare and rights, so many aspects of animal-related topics are being looked into and some of the topic examples include:

• Battery cages for hen confinement as an animal welfare issue
• Factory farming: a growing discomfort to animal welfare
• The need to curb the slaughtering of wildlife for commercial purpose
• How overcrowded confinement causes depression in farm pigs
• Increase in the demand for Dairy milk as a challenge to Dairy cows
• Consumerism: a negative impact on Dairy Cows
• How Truth in labeling legislation will create awareness of animal cruelty
• A case study on how animal cruelty impacts the psychological well-being of farm animals
• The negative impact of Duck confinement
• How puppy farming risks the health of dogs
• The growing cases of animal cruelty on the wildlife.
• How factory farming affects animal welfare
• How overbreeding impacts the health and welfare of animals
• A psychological analysis of farm animals
• How animal cruelty negatively impacts animals
• Do animals develop mental aversions?
• How commercial slaughtering heightens animal violence
• Violence against animals and ways to curb it
• The displacement of animals through live exportation
• Undiagnosed depression amongst farm animals
• How Voiceless Animal Cruelty impacts animal welfare
• Addressing the issue of animal exploitation in American farm factories
• Growing need for animals shelters
• Why pet adoption should be encouraged

If you need the ideas and reliable assistance of professional writers or help with research paper writing on animal rights for your college essay, or you need assignment help in this field; look no further for there are expert online writers, best rated for their ability to coin brilliant research titles, carry out research writing effectively and also provide high-quality materials at an affordable and cheap rate. Contact us with a “ do my research paper now” request and get an A+. 

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Article Contents

1. introduction: the need for legal animal rights theory, 2. can animals have legal rights, 3. do animals have (simple) legal rights, 4. should animals have (fundamental) legal rights, 5. conclusion.

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Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

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Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 533–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa007

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With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Legal animal rights are on the horizon, and there is a need for a legal theory of animal rights—that is, a theory of animal rights as legal rights. While there is a diverse body of moral and political theories of animal rights, 1 the nature and conceptual foundations of legal animal rights remain remarkably underexplored. As yet, only few and fragmented legal analyses of isolated aspects of animal rights exist. 2 Other than that, most legal writing in this field operates with a hazily assumed, rudimentary and undifferentiated conception of animal rights—one largely informed by extralegal notions of moral animal rights—which tends to obscure rather than illuminate the distinctive nature and features of legal animal rights. 3 A more systematic and nuanced theorisation of legal animal rights is, however, necessary and overdue for two reasons: first, a gradual turn to legal rights in animal rights discourse; and, secondly, the incipient emergence of legal animal rights.

First, while animal rights have originally been framed as moral rights, they are increasingly articulated as potential legal rights. That is, animals’ moral rights are asserted in an ‘ought to be legal rights’-sense (or ‘manifesto sense’) 4 that demands legal institutionalisation and refers to the corresponding legal rights which animals should ideally have. 5 A salient reason for transforming moral into legal animal rights is that purely moral rights (which exist prior to and independently of legal validation) do not provide animals with sufficient practical protection, whereas legally recognised rights would be reinforced by the law’s more stringent protection and enforcement mechanisms. 6 With a view to their (potential) juridification, it seems advisable to rethink and reconstruct animal rights as specifically legal rights, rather than simply importing moral animal rights into the legal domain. 7

Secondly, and adding urgency to the need for theorisation, legal animal rights are beginning to emerge from existing law. Recently, a few pioneering courts have embarked on a path of judicial creation of animal rights, arriving at them either through a rights-based interpretation of animal welfare legislation or a dynamic interpretation of constitutional (human) rights. Most notably, the Supreme Court of India has extracted a range of animal rights from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and, by reading them in the light of the Constitution, elevated those statutory rights to the status of fundamental rights. 8 Furthermore, courts in Argentina 9 and Colombia 10 have extended the fundamental right of habeas corpus , along with the underlying right to liberty, to captive animals. 11 These (so far isolated) acts of judicial recognition of animal rights may be read as early manifestations of an incipient formation of legal animal rights. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing practical need for legal animal rights theory, in order to explain and guide the as yet still nascent—and somewhat haphazard—evolution of legal animal rights.

This article seeks to take the first steps towards building a more systematic and nuanced theory of legal animal rights. Navigating the existing theoretical patchwork, the article revisits and connects relevant themes that have so far been addressed only in a scattered or cursory manner, and consolidates them into an overarching framework for legal animal rights. Moreover, tackling the well-known problem of ambiguity and obscurity involved in the generally vague, inconsistent and undifferentiated use of the umbrella term ‘animal rights’, this article brings analytical clarity into the debate by disentangling and unveiling different meanings and facets of legal animal rights. 12 To this end, the analysis identifies and separates three relevant sets of issues: (i) conceptual issues concerning the nature and foundations of legal animal rights, and, more generally, whether animals are the kind of beings who can potentially hold legal rights; (ii) doctrinal issues pertaining to existing animal welfare law and whether it confers some legal rights on animals—and, if so, what kind of rights; and (iii) normative issues as to why and what kind of legal rights animals ought ideally to have as a matter of future law. These thematic clusters will be addressed through three simple yet key questions: can , do and should animals have legal rights?

Section 2 will show that it is conceptually possible for animals to hold legal rights, and will clarify the formal structure and normative grounds of legal animal rights. Moreover, as section 3 will demonstrate, unwritten animal rights could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though such ‘animal welfare rights’ are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. In order to distinguish between these weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law and the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have potentially or ideally, the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ will be introduced. Finally, section 4 will explore a range of functional reasons why animals need such strong, fundamental rights as a matter of future law.

As a preliminary matter, it seems necessary to first address the conceptual issue whether animals potentially can have legal rights, irrespective of doctrinal and normative issues as to whether animals do in fact have, or should have, legal rights. Whether animals are possible or potential right holders—that is, the kind of beings to whom legal rights can be ascribed ‘without conceptual absurdity’ 13 —must be determined based on the general nature of rights, which is typically characterised in terms of the structure (or form) and grounds (or ultimate purpose) of rights. 14 Looking at the idea of animal rights through the lens of general rights theories helps clarify the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights by identifying their possible forms and grounds. The first subsection (A) focusses on two particular forms of conceptually basic rights—claims and liberties—and examines their structural compatibility with animal rights. The second subsection (B) considers the two main competing theories of rights—the will theory and interest theory—and whether, and on what grounds, they can accommodate animals as potential right holders.

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

The formal structure of rights is generally explicated based on the Hohfeldian typology of rights. 15 Hohfeld famously noted that the generic term ‘right’ tends to be used indiscriminately to cover ‘any sort of legal advantage’, and distinguished four different types of conceptually basic rights: claims (rights stricto sensu ), liberties, powers and immunities. 16 In the following, I will show on the basis of first-order rights 17 —claims and liberties—that legal animal rights are structurally possible, and what such legal relations would consist of. 18

(i) Animal claim rights

To have a right in the strictest sense is ‘to have a claim to something and against someone’, the claim right necessarily corresponding with that person’s correlative duty towards the right holder to do or not to do something. 19 This type of right would take the form of animals holding a claim to something against, for example, humans or the state who bear correlative duties to refrain from or perform certain actions. Such legal animal rights could be either negative rights (correlative to negative duties) to non-interference or positive rights (correlative to positive duties) to the provision of some good or service. 20 The structure of claim rights seems especially suitable for animals, because these are passive rights that concern the conduct of others (the duty bearers) and are simply enjoyed rather than exercised by the right holder. 21 Claim rights would therefore assign to animals a purely passive position that is specified by the presence and performance of others’ duties towards animals, and would not require any actions by the animals themselves.

(ii) Animal liberties

Liberties, by contrast, are active rights that concern the right holder’s own conduct. A liberty to engage in or refrain from a certain action is one’s freedom of any contrary duty towards another to eschew or undertake that action, correlative to the no right of another. 22 On the face of it, the structure of liberties appears to lend itself to animal rights. A liberty right would indicate that an animal is free to engage in or avoid certain behaviours, in the sense of being free from a specific duty to do otherwise. Yet, an obvious objection is that animals are generally incapable of having any legal duties. 23 Given that animals are inevitably in a constant state of ‘no duty’ and thus ‘liberty’, 24 this seems to render the notion of liberty rights somewhat pointless and redundant in the case of animals, as it would do nothing more than affirm an already and invariably existing natural condition of dutylessness. However, this sort of ‘natural liberty’ is, in and of itself, only a naked liberty, one wholly unprotected against interferences by others. 25 That is, while animals may have the ‘natural liberty’ of, for example, freedom of movement in the sense of not having (and not being capable of having) a duty not to move around, others do not have a duty vis-à-vis the animals not to interfere with the exercise of this liberty by, for example, capturing and caging them.

The added value of turning the ‘natural liberties’ of animals into liberty rights thus lies in the act of transforming unprotected, naked liberties into protected, vested liberties that are shielded from certain modes of interference. Indeed, it seems sensible to think of ‘natural liberties’ as constituting legal rights only when embedded in a ‘protective perimeter’ of claim rights and correlative duties within which such liberties may meaningfully exist and be exercised. 26 This protective perimeter consists of some general duties (arising not from the liberty right itself, but from other claim rights, such as the right to life and physical integrity) not to engage in ‘at least the cruder forms of interference’, like physical assault or killing, which will preclude most forms of effective interference. 27 Moreover, liberties may be fortified by specific claim rights and correlative duties strictly designed to protect a particular liberty, such as if the state had a (negative) duty not to build highways that cut across wildlife habitat, or a (positive) duty to build wildlife corridors for such highways, in order to facilitate safe and effective freedom of movement for the animals who live in these fragmented habitats.

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

Lastly, some remarks on the relation between animal rights and duties seem in order. Some commentators hold that animals are unable to possess legal rights based on the influential idea that the capacity for holding rights is inextricably linked with the capacity for bearing duties. 28 Insofar as animals are not capable of bearing legal duties in any meaningful sense, it follows that animals cannot have legal (claim) rights against other animals, given that those other animals would be incapable of holding the correlative duties. But does this disqualify animals from having legal rights altogether, for instance, against legally competent humans or the state?

While duties are a key component of (first-order) rights—with claim rights necessarily implying the presence of a legal duty in others and liberties necessarily implying the absence of a legal duty in the right holder 29 —neither of them logically entails that the right holder bear duties herself . As Kramer aptly puts it:

Except in the very unusual circumstances where someone holds a right against himself, X’s possession of a legal right does not entail X’s bearing of a legal duty; rather, it entails the bearing of a legal duty by somebody else. 30

This underscores an important distinction between the conceptually axiomatic correlativity of rights and duties—the notion that every claim right necessarily implies a duty—and the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties—the notion that (the capacity for) right holding is conditioned on (the capacity for) duty bearing. While correlativity refers to an existential nexus between a right and a duty held by separate persons within one and the same legal relation , reciprocity posits a normative nexus between the right holding and duty bearing of one and the same person within separate, logically unrelated legal relations.

The claim that the capacity for right holding is somehow contingent on the right holder’s (logically unrelated) capacity for duty bearing is thus, as Kramer puts it, ‘straightforwardly false’ from a Hohfeldian point of view. 31 Nevertheless, there may be other, normative reasons (notably underpinned by social contract theory) for asserting that the class of appropriate right holders should be limited to those entities that, in addition to being structurally possible right holders, are also capable of reciprocating, that is, of being their duty bearers’ duty bearers. 32 However, such a narrow contractarian framing of right holding should be rejected, not least because it misses the current legal reality. 33 With a view to legally incompetent humans (eg infants and the mentally incapacitated), contemporary legal systems have manifestly cut the connection between right holding and the capacity for duty bearing. 34 As Wenar notes, the ‘class of potential right holders has expanded to include duty-less entities’. 35 Similarly, it would be neither conceptually nor legally apposite to infer from the mere fact that animals do not belong to the class of possible duty bearers that they cannot belong to the class of possible right holders. 36

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

While Hohfeld’s analytical framework is useful to outline the possible forms and composition of legal animal rights, Kelch rightly points out that it remains agnostic as to the normative grounds of potential animal rights. 37 In this respect, the two dominant theories of rights advance vastly differing accounts of the ultimate purpose of rights and who can potentially have them. 38 Whereas the idea of animal rights does not resonate well with the will theory, the interest theory quite readily provides a conceptual home for it.

(i) Will theory

According to the will theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is to promote and protect some aspect of an individual’s autonomy and self-realisation. A legal right is essentially a ‘legally respected choice’, and the right holder a ‘small scale sovereign’ whose exercise of choice is facilitated by giving her discretionary ‘legal powers of control’ over others’ duties. 39 The class of potential right holders thus includes only those entities that possess agency and legal competence, which effectively rules out the possibility of animals as right holders, insofar as they lack the sort or degree of agency necessary for the will-theory conception of rights. 40

However, the fact that animals are not potential right holders under the will theory does not necessarily mean that animals cannot have legal rights altogether. The will theory has attracted abundant criticism for its under-inclusiveness as regards both the class of possible right holders 41 and the types of rights it can plausibly account for, and thus seems to advance too narrow a conception of rights for it to provide a theoretical foundation for all rights. 42 In particular, it may be noted that the kinds of rights typically contemplated as animal rights are precisely of the sort that generally exceed the explanatory power of the will theory, namely inalienable, 43 passive, 44 public-law 45 rights that protect basic aspects of animals’ (partially historically and socially mediated) vulnerable corporeal existence. 46 Such rights, then, are best explained on an interest-theoretical basis.

(ii) Interest theory

Animal rights theories most commonly ground animal rights in animal interests, and thus naturally gravitate to the interest theory of rights. 47 According to the interest theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is the protection and advancement of some aspect(s) of an individual’s well-being and interests. 48 Legal rights are essentially ‘legally-protected interests’ that are of special importance and concern. 49 With its emphasis on well-being rather than on agency, the interest theory seems more open to the possibility of animal rights from the outset. Indeed, as regards the class of possible right holders, the interest theory does little conceptual filtering beyond requiring that right holders be capable of having interests. 50 Given that, depending on the underlying definition of ‘interest’, this may cover all animals, plants and, according to some, even inanimate objects, the fairly modest and potentially over-inclusive conceptual criterion of ‘having interests’ is typically complemented by the additional, more restrictive moral criterion of ‘having moral status’. 51 Pursuant to this limitation, not just any being capable of having interests can have rights, but only those whose well-being is not merely of instrumental, but of intrinsic or ‘ultimate value’. 52

Accordingly, under the interest theory, two conditions must be met for animals to qualify as potential right holders: (i) animals must have interests, (ii) the protection of which is required not merely for ulterior reasons, but for the animals’ own sake, because their well-being is intrinsically valuable. Now, whether animals are capable of having interests in the sense relevant to having rights and whether they have moral status in the sense of inherent or ultimate value is still subject to debate. For example, some have denied that animals possess interests based on an understanding of interests as wants and desires that require complex cognitive abilities such as having beliefs and language. 53 However, most interest theories opt for a broader understanding of interests in the sense of ‘being in someone’s interest’, meaning that an interest holder can be ‘made better or worse off’ and is able to benefit in some way from protective action. 54 Typically, though not invariably, the capacity for having interests in this broad sense is bound up with sentience—the capacity for conscious and subjective experiences of pain, suffering and pleasure. 55 Thus, most interest theorists quite readily accept (sentient) animals as potential right holders, that is, as the kind of beings that are capable of holding legal rights. 56

More importantly yet for legal purposes, the law already firmly rests on the recognition of (some) animals as beings who possess intrinsically valuable interests. Modern animal welfare legislation cannot be intelligibly explained other than as acknowledging that the animals it protects (i) have morally and legally relevant goods and interests, notably in their welfare, life and physical or mental integrity. 57 Moreover, it rests on an (implicit or explicit) recognition of those animals as (ii) having moral status in the sense of having intrinsic value. The underlying rationale of modern, non-anthropocentric, ethically motivated animal protection laws is the protection of animals qua animals, for their own sake, rather than for instrumental reasons. 58 Some laws go even further by directly referencing the ‘dignity’ or ‘intrinsic value’ of animals. 59

It follows that existing animal welfare laws already treat animals as intrinsically valuable holders of some legally relevant interests—and thus as precisely the sorts of beings who possess the qualities that are, under an interest theory of rights, necessary and sufficient for having rights. This, then, prompts the question whether those very laws do not only conceptually allow for potential animal rights, but might also give rise to actual legal rights for animals.

Notwithstanding that animals could have legal rights conceptually, the predominant doctrinal opinion is that, as a matter of positive law, animals do not have any, at least not in the sense of proper, legally recognised and claimable rights. 60 Yet, there is a certain inclination, especially in Anglo-American parlance, to speak—in a rather vague manner—of ‘animal rights’ as if they already exist under current animal welfare legislation. Such talk of existing animal rights is, however, rarely backed up with further substantiations of the underlying claim that animal welfare laws do in fact confer legal rights on animals. In the following, I will examine whether animals’ existing legal protections may be classified as legal rights and, if so, what kind of rights these constitute. The analysis will show (A) that implicit animal rights (hereinafter referred to as ‘animal welfare rights’) 61 can be extracted from animal welfare laws as correlatives of explicit animal welfare duties, but that this reading remains largely theoretical so far, given that such unwritten animal rights are hardly legally recognised in practice. Moreover, (B) the kind of rights derivable from animal welfare laws are currently at best imperfect and weak rights that do not provide animals with the sort of robust normative protection that is generally associated with legal rights, and typically also expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. Finally, (C) the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ are introduced in order to distinguish, and account for the qualitative differences, between such current, imperfect, weak animal rights and potential, ideal, strong animal rights.

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws

(i) the simple argument from correlativity.

Existing animal welfare laws are not framed in the language of rights and do not codify any explicit animal rights. They do, however, impose on people legal duties designed to protect animals—duties that demand some behaviour that is beneficial to the welfare of animals. Some commentators contend that correlative (claim) rights are thereby conferred upon animals as the beneficiaries of such duties. 62 This view is consistent with, and, indeed, the logical conclusion of, an interest-theoretical analysis. 63 Recall that rights are essentially legally protected interests of intrinsically valuable individuals, and that a claim right is the ‘position of normative protectedness that consists in being owed a … legal duty’. 64 Under existing animal welfare laws, some goods of animals are legally protected interests in exactly this sense of ultimately valuable interests that are protected through the imposition of duties on others. However, the inference from existing animal welfare duties to the existence of correlative ‘animal welfare rights’ appears to rely on a somewhat simplistic notion of correlativity, along the lines of ‘where there is a duty there is a right’. 65 Two objections in particular may be raised against the view that beneficial duties imposed by animal welfare laws are sufficient for creating corresponding legal rights in animals.

First, not every kind of duty entails a correlative right. 66 While some duties are of an unspecific and general nature, only relational, directed duties which are owed to rather than merely regarding someone are the correlatives of (claim) rights. Closely related, not everyone who stands to benefit from the performance of another’s duty has a correlative right. According to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties designed to protect their interests. 67 Yet, animal welfare duties, in a contemporary reading, are predominantly understood not as indirect duties regarding animals—duties imposed to protect, for example, an owner’s interest in her animal, public sensibilities or the moral character of humans—but as direct duties owed to the protected animals themselves. 68 Moreover, the constitutive purpose of modern animal welfare laws is to protect animals for their own sake. Animals are therefore clearly beneficiaries in a qualified sense, that is, they are not merely accidental or incidental, but the direct and intended primary beneficiaries of animal welfare duties. 69

Secondly, one may object that an analysis of animal rights as originating from intentionally beneficial duties rests on a conception of rights precisely of the sort which has the stigma of redundancy attached to it. Drawing on Hart, this would appear to cast rights as mere ‘alternative formulation of duties’ and thus ‘no more than a redundant translation of duties … into a terminology of rights’. 70 Admittedly, as MacCormick aptly puts it:

[To] rest an account of claim rights solely on the notion that they exist whenever a legal duty is imposed by a law intended to benefit assignable individuals … is to treat rights as being simply the ‘reflex’ of logically prior duties. 71

One way of responding to this redundancy problem is to reverse the logical order of rights and duties. On this account, rights are not simply created by (and thus logically posterior to) beneficial duties, but rather the converse: such duties are derived from and generated by (logically antecedent) rights. For example, according to Raz, ‘Rights are grounds of duties in others’ and thus justificationally prior to duties. 72 However, if rights are understood not just as existentially correlative, but as justificationally prior to duties, identifying intentionally beneficial animal welfare duties as the source of (logically posterior) animal rights will not suffice. In order to accommodate the view that rights are grounds of duties, the aforementioned argument from correlativity needs to be reconsidered and refined.

(ii) A qualified argument from correlativity

A refined, and reversed, argument from correlativity must show that animal rights are not merely reflexes created by animal welfare duties, but rather the grounds for such duties. In other words, positive animal welfare duties must be plausibly explained as some kind of codified reflection, or visible manifestation, of ‘invisible’ background animal rights that give rise to those duties.

This requires further clarification of the notion of a justificational priority of rights over duties. On the face of it, the idea that rights are somehow antecedent to duties appears to be at odds with the Hohfeldian correlativity axiom, which stipulates an existential nexus of mutual entailment between rights and duties—one cannot exist without the other. 73 Viewed in this light, it seems paradoxical to suggest that rights are causal for the very duties that are simultaneously constitutive of those rights—cause and effect seem to be mutually dependent. Gewirth offers a plausible explanation for this seemingly circular understanding of the relation between rights and duties. He illustrates that the ‘priority of claim rights over duties in the order of justifying purpose or final causality is not antithetical to their being correlative to each other’ by means of an analogy:

Parents are prior to their children in the order of efficient causality, yet the (past or present) existence of parents can be inferred from the existence of children, as well as conversely. Hence, the causal priority of parents to children is compatible with the two groups’ being causally as well as conceptually correlative. The case is similar with rights and duties, except that the ordering relation between them is one of final rather than efficient causality, of justifying purpose rather than bringing-into-existence. 74

Upon closer examination, this point may be specified even further. To stay with the analogy of (biological) 75 parents and their children: it is actually the content of ‘parents’—a male and a female (who at some point procreate together)—that exists prior to and independently of possibly ensuing ‘children’, whereas this content turns into ‘parents’ only in conjunction with ‘children’. That is, the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are mutually entailing, whilst, strictly speaking, it is not ‘parents’, but rather that which will later be called ‘parents’ only once the ‘child’ comes into existence—the pre-existing content—which is antecedent to and causal for ‘children’.

Applied to the issue of rights and duties, this means that it is actually the content of a ‘right’—an interest—that exists prior to and independently of, and is (justificationally) causal for the creation of, a ‘duty’, which, in turn, is constitutive of a ‘right’. The distinction between ‘right’ and its content—an interest—allows the pinpointing of the latter as the reason for, and the former as the concomitant correlative of, a duty imposed to protect the pre-existing interest. It may thus be restated, more precisely, that it is not rights, but the protected interests which are grounds of duties. Incidentally, this specification is consistent with Raz’s definition of rights, according to which ‘having a right’ means that an aspect of the right holder’s well-being (her interest) ‘is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty’. 76 Now, the enactment of modern animal welfare laws is in and of itself evidence of the fact that some aspects of animals’ well-being (their interests) are—both temporally and justificationally—causal and a sufficient reason for imposing duties on others. Put differently: animal interests are grounds of animal welfare duties , and this, in turn, is conceptually constitutive of animal rights .

In conclusion, existing animal welfare laws could indeed be analysed as comprising unwritten ‘animal welfare rights’ as implicit correlatives of the explicit animal welfare duties imposed on others. The essential feature of legal rules conferring rights is that they specifically aim at protecting individual interests or goods—whether they do so expressis verbis or not is irrelevant. 77 Even so, in order for a right to be an actual (rather than a potential or merely postulated) legal right, it should at least be legally recognised (if not claimable and enforceable), 78 which is determined by the applicable legal rules. In the absence of unequivocal wording, whether a legal norm confers unwritten rights on animals becomes a matter of legal interpretation. While theorists can show that a rights-based approach lies within the bounds of a justifiable interpretation of the law, an actual, valid legal right hardly comes to exist by the mere fact that some theorists claim it exists. For that to happen, it seems instrumental that some public authoritative body, notably a court, recognises it as such. That is, while animals’ existing legal protections may already provide for all the ingredients constitutive of rights, it takes a court to actualise this potential , by authoritatively interpreting those legal rules as constituting rights of animals. However, because courts, with a few exceptions, have not done so thus far, it seems fair to say that unwritten animal rights are not (yet) legally recognised in practice and remain a mostly theoretical possibility for now. 79

B. The Weakness of Current ‘Animal Welfare Rights’

Besides the formal issue of legal recognition, there are substantive reasons for questioning whether the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare laws are really rights at all. This is because current ‘animal welfare rights’ are unusually weak rights that do not afford the sort of strong normative protection that is ordinarily associated with legal rights. 80 Classifying animals’ existing legal protections as ‘rights’ may thus conflict with the deeply held view that, because they protect interests of special importance, legal rights carry special normative force . 81 This quality is expressed in metaphors of rights as ‘trumps’, 82 ‘protective fences’, 83 protective shields or ‘No Trespassing’ signs, 84 or ‘suits of armor’. 85 Rights bestow upon individuals and their important interests a particularly robust kind of legal protection against conflicting individual or collective interests, by singling out ‘those interests that are not to be sacrificed to the utilitarian calculus ’ and ‘whose promotion or protection is to be given qualitative precedence over the social calculus of interests generally’. 86 Current ‘animal welfare rights’, by contrast, provide an atypically weak form of legal protection, notably for two reasons: because they protect interests of secondary importance or because they are easily overridden.

In order to illustrate this, consider the kind of rights that can be extracted from current animal welfare laws. Given that these are the correlatives of existing animal welfare duties, the substance of these rights must mirror the content laid down in the respective legal norms. This extraction method produces, first, a rather odd subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’ that have a narrow substantive scope protecting highly specific, secondary interests, such as a (relative) right to be slaughtered with prior stunning, 87 an (absolute) right that experiments involving ‘serious injuries that may cause severe pain shall not be carried out without anaesthesia’ 88 or a right of chicks to be killed by fast-acting methods, such as homogenisation or gassing, and to not be stacked on top of each other. 89 The weak and subsidiary character of such rights becomes clearer when placed within the permissive institutional context in which they operate, and when taking into account the more basic interests that are left unprotected. 90 While these rights may protect certain secondary, derivative interests (such as the interest in being killed in a painless manner ), they are simultaneously premised on the permissibility of harming the more primary interests at stake (such as the interest in not being killed at all). Juxtaposed with the preponderance of suffering and killing that is legally allowed in the first place, phrasing the residual legal protections that animals do receive as ‘rights’ may strike us as misleading. 91

But then there is a second subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’, extractable from general animal welfare provisions, that have a broader scope, protecting more basic, primary interests, such as a right to well-being, life, 92 dignity, 93 to not suffer unnecessarily, 94 or against torture and cruel treatment. 95 Although the object of such rights is of a more fundamental nature, the substantive guarantee of these facially fundamental rights is, to a great extent, eroded by a conspicuously low threshold for permissible infringements. 96 That is, these rights suffer from a lack of normative force, which manifests in their characteristically high infringeability (ie their low resistance to being overridden). Certainly, most rights (whether human or animal) are relative prima facie rights that allow for being balanced against conflicting interests and whose infringement constitutes a violation only when it is not justified, notably in terms of necessity and proportionality. 97 Taking rights seriously does, however, require certain safeguards ensuring that rights are only overridden by sufficiently important considerations whose weight is proportionate to the interests at stake. As pointed out by Waldron, the idea of rights is seized on as a way of resisting, or at least restricting, the sorts of trade-offs that would be acceptable in an unqualified utilitarian calculus, where ‘important individual interests may end up being traded off against considerations which are intrinsically less important’. 98 Yet, this is precisely what happens to animals’ prima facie protected interests, any of which—irrespective of how important or fundamental they are—may enter the utilitarian calculus, where they typically end up being outweighed by human interests that are comparatively less important or even trivial, notably dietary and fashion preferences, economic profitability, recreation or virtually any other conceivable human interest. 99

Any ‘animal welfare rights’ that animals may presently be said to have are thus either of the substantively oddly specific, yet rather secondary, kind or, in the case of more fundamental prima facie rights, such that are highly infringeable and ‘evaporate in the face of consequential considerations’. 100 The remaining question is whether these features render animals’ existing legal protections non-rights or just particularly unfit or weak rights , but rights nonetheless. The answer will depend on whether the quality of special strength, weight or force is considered a conceptually constitutive or merely typical but not essential feature of rights. On the first view, a certain normative force would function as a threshold criterion for determining what counts as a right and for disqualifying those legal protections that may structurally resemble rights but do not meet a minimum weight. 101 On the second view, the normative force of rights would serve as a variable that defines the particular weight of different types of rights on a spectrum from weak to strong. 102 To illustrate the intricacies of drawing a clear line between paradigmatically strong rights, weak rights or non-rights based on this criterion, let us return to the analogy with (biological) ‘parents’. In a minimal sense, the concept of ‘parents’ may be essentially defined as ‘biological creators of a child’. Typically, however, a special role as nurturer and caregiver is associated with the concept of ‘parent’. Now, is someone who merely meets the minimal conceptual criterion (by being the biological creator), but not the basic functions attached to the concept (by not giving care), still a ‘parent’? And, if so, to what extent? Are they a full and proper ‘parent’, or merely an imperfect, dysfunctional form of ‘parent’, a bad ‘parent’, but a ‘parent’ nonetheless? Maybe current animal rights are ‘rights’ in a similar sense as an absent, negligent, indifferent biological mother or father who does not assume the role and responsibilities that go along with parenthood is still a ‘parent’. That is, animals’ current legal protections may meet the minimal conceptual criteria for rights, but they do not perform the characteristic normative function of rights. They are, therefore, at best atypically weak and imperfect rights.

C. The Distinction between Simple and Fundamental Animal Rights

In the light of the aforesaid, if one adopts the view that animals’ existing legal protections constitute legal rights—that is, if one concludes that existing animal welfare laws confer legal rights on animals despite a lack of explicit legal enactment or of any coherent judicial recognition of unwritten animal rights, and that the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare law retain their rights character regardless of how weak they are—then an important qualification needs to be made regarding the nature and limits of such ‘animal welfare rights’. In particular, it must be emphasised that this type of legal animal rights falls short of (i) our ordinary understanding of legal rights as particularly robust protections of important interests and (ii) institutionalising the sort of inviolable, basic moral animal rights (along the lines of human rights) that animal rights theorists typically envisage. 103 It thus seems warranted to separate the kind of imperfect and weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of ideal, 104 proper, strong fundamental rights that animals potentially ought to have as a matter of future law.

In order to denote and account for the qualitative difference between these two types of legal animal rights, and drawing on similar distinctions as regards the rights of individuals under public and international law, 105 I propose to use the conceptual categories of fundamental animal rights and other, simple animal rights. As to the demarcating criteria, we can distinguish between simple and fundamental animal rights based on a combination of two factors: (i) substance (fundamentality or non-fundamentality of the protected interests) and (ii) normative force (degree of infringeability). Accordingly, simple animal rights can be defined as weak legal rights whose substantive content is of a non-fundamental, ancillary character and/or that lack normative force due to their high infringeability. In contradistinction, fundamental animal rights are strong legal rights along the lines of human rights that are characterised by the cumulative features of substantive fundamentality and normative robustness due to their reduced infringeability.

The ‘animal welfare rights’ derivable from current animal welfare laws are simple animal rights. However, it is worth noting that while the first subtype of substantively non-fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ belongs to this category irrespective of their infringeability, 106 the second subtype of substantively fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ presently falls in this category purely in respect of their characteristically high infringeability. Yet, the latter is a dynamic and changeable feature, insofar as these rights could be dealt with, in case of conflict, in a manner whereby they would prove to be more robust. In other words, while the simple animal rights of the second subtype currently lack the normative force of legal rights, they do have the potential to become fundamental animal rights. Why animals need such fundamental rights will be explored in the final section.

Beyond the imperfect, weak, simple rights that animals may be said to have based on existing animal welfare laws, a final normative question remains with a view to the future law: whether animals ought to have strong legal rights proper. I will focus on fundamental animal rights—such as the right to life, bodily integrity, liberty and freedom from torture—as these correspond best with the kind of ‘ought to be legal rights’ typically alluded to in animal rights discourse. Given the general appeal of rights language, it is not surprising that among animal advocates there is an overall presumption in favour of basic human rights-like animal rights. 107 However, it is often simply assumed that, rather than elucidated why, legal rights would benefit animals and how this would strengthen their protection. In order to undergird the normative claim that animals should have strong legal rights, the following subsections will look at functional reasons why animals need such rights. 108 I will do so through a non-exhaustive exploration of the potential legal advantages and political utility of fundamental animal rights over animals’ current legal protections (be they animal welfare laws or ‘animal welfare rights’).

A. Procedural Aspect: Standing and Enforceability

Against the backdrop of today’s well-established ‘enforcement gap’ and ‘standing dilemma’, 109 one of the most practical benefits typically associated with, or expected from, legal animal rights is the facilitation of standing for animals in their own right and, closely related, the availability of more efficient mechanisms for the judicial enforcement of animals’ legal protections. 110 This is because legal rights usually include the procedural element of having standing to sue, the right to seek redress and powers of enforcement—which would enable animals (represented by legal guardians) to institute legal proceedings in their own right and to assert injuries of their own. 111 This would also ‘decentralise’ enforcement, that is, it would not be concentrated in the hands (and at the sole discretion) of public authorities, but supplemented by private standing of animals to demand enforcement. Ultimately, such an expanded enforceability could also facilitate incremental legal change by feeding animal rights questions into courts as fora for public deliberation.

However, while standing and enforceability constitute crucial procedural components of any effective legal protection of animals, for present purposes, it should be noted that fundamental animal rights (or any legal animal rights) are—albeit maybe conducive—neither necessary nor sufficient to this end. On the one hand, not all legal rights (eg some socio-economic human rights) are necessarily enforceable. Merely conferring legal rights on animals will therefore, in itself, not guarantee sufficient legal protection from a procedural point of view. Rather, fundamental animal rights must encompass certain procedural rights, such as the right to access to justice, in order to make them effectively enforceable. On the other hand, animals or designated animal advocates could simply be granted standing auxiliary to today’s animal welfare laws, which would certainly contribute towards narrowing the enforcement gap. 112 Yet, standing as such merely offers the purely procedural benefit of being able to legally assert and effectively enforce any given legal protections that animals may have, but has no bearing on the substantive content of those enforceable protections. Given that the issue is not just one of improving the enforcement of animals’ existing legal protections, but also of substantially improving them, standing alone cannot substitute for strong substantive animal rights. Therefore, animals will ultimately need both strong substantive and enforceable rights, which may be best achieved through an interplay of fundamental rights and accompanying procedural guarantees.

B. Substantive Aspect: Stronger Legal Protection for Important Interests

The aforesaid suggests that the critical function of fundamental animal rights is not procedural in nature; rather, it is to substantively improve and fortify the protection of important animal interests. In particular, fundamental animal rights would strengthen the legal protection of animals on three levels: by establishing an abstract equality of arms, by broadening the scope of protection to include more fundamental substantive guarantees and by raising the burden of justification for infringements.

First of all, fundamental animal rights would create the structural preconditions for a level playing field where human and animal interests are both reinforced by equivalent rights, and can thus collide on equal terms. Generally speaking, not all legally recognised interests count equally when balanced against each other, and rights-empowered interests typically take precedence over or are accorded more weight than unqualified competing interests. 113 At present, the structural makeup of the balancing process governing human–animal conflicts is predisposed towards a prioritisation of human over animal interests. Whereas human interests are buttressed by strong, often fundamental rights (such as economic, religious or property rights), the interests at stake on the animal side, if legally protected at all, enter the utilitarian calculus as unqualified interests that are merely shielded by simple animal welfare laws, or simple rights that evaporate quickly in situations of conflict and do not compare to the sorts of strong rights that reinforce contrary human interests. 114 In order to achieve some form of abstract equality of arms, animals’ interests need to be shielded by strong legal rights that are a match to humans’ rights. Fundamental animal rights would correct this structural imbalance and set the stage for an equal consideration of interests that is not a priori biased in favour of humans’ rights.

Furthermore, as defined above, fundamental animal rights are characterised by both their substantive fundamentality and normative force, and would thus strengthen animals’ legal protection in two crucial respects. On a substantive level , fundamental animal rights are grounded in especially important, fundamental interests. Compared to substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights, which provide for narrow substantive guarantees that protect secondary interests, fundamental animal rights would expand the scope of protection to cover a wider array of basic and primary interests. As a result, harming fundamentally important interests of animals—while readily permissible today insofar as such interests are often not legally protected in the first place 115 —would trigger a justification requirement that initially allows those animal interests to enter into a balancing process. For even with fundamental animal rights in play, conflicts between human and animal interests will inevitably continue to exist—albeit at the elevated and abstractly equal level of conflicts of rights—and therefore require some sort of balancing mechanism. 116

On this justificatory level , fundamental animal rights would then demand a special kind and higher burden of justification for infringements. 117 As demonstrated above, substantively fundamental yet highly infringeable simple animal rights are marked by a conspicuously low threshold for justifiable infringements, and are regularly outweighed by inferior or even trivial human interests. By contrast, the normative force of fundamental animal rights rests on their ability to raise the ‘level of the minimally sufficient justification’. 118 Modelling these more stringent justification requirements on established principles of fundamental (human) rights adjudication, this would, first, limit the sorts of considerations that constitute a ‘legitimate aim’ which can be balanced against fundamental animal rights. Furthermore, the balancing process must encompass a strict proportionality analysis, comprised of the elements of suitability, necessity and proportionality stricto sensu , which would preclude the bulk of the sorts of low-level justifications that are currently sufficient. 119 This heightened threshold for justifiable infringements, in turn, translates into a decreased infringeability of fundamental animal rights and an increased immunisation of animals’ prima facie protected interests against being overridden by conflicting considerations and interests of lesser importance.

Overall, considering this three-layered strengthening of the legal protection of animals’ important interests, fundamental animal rights are likely to set robust limits to the violability and disposability of animals as means to human ends, and to insulate animals from many of the unnecessary and disproportionate inflictions of harm that are presently allowed by law.

C. Fallback Function: The Role of Rights in Non-ideal Societies

Because contemporary human–animal interactions are, for the most part, detrimental to animals, the latter appear to be in particular need of robust legal protections against humans and society. 120 Legal rights, as strong (but not impenetrable) shields, provide an instrument well suited for this task, as they operate in a way that singles out and protects important individual goods against others and the political community as a whole. For this reason, rights are generally considered an important counter-majoritarian institution, but have also been criticised for their overly individualistic, antagonistic and anti-communitarian framing. 121 Certainly, it may be debated whether there is a place for the institution of rights in an ideal society—after all, rights are not decrees of nature, but human inventions that are historically and socially contingent. 122 However, rights are often born from imperfect social conditions, as a ‘response to a failure of social responsibility’ 123 and as corrections of experiences of injustice, or, as Dershowitz puts it: ‘ rights come from wrongs ’. 124 Historical experience suggests that, at least in non-ideal societies, there is a practical need for rights as a safety net—a ‘position of fall-back and security’ 125 —that guarantees individuals a minimum degree of protection, in case or because other, less coercive social or moral mechanisms fail to do so.

Yet, as Edmundson rightly points out, this view of rights as backup guarantees does not quite capture the particular need for rights in the case of animals. 126 It is premised on the existence of a functioning overall social structure that can in some cases, and maybe in the ideal case, substitute for rights. However, unlike many humans, most animals are not embedded in a web of caring, affectionate, benevolent relations with humans to begin with, but rather are caught up in a system of exploitative, instrumental and harmful relations. For the vast majority of animals, it is not enough to say that rights would serve them as fallbacks, because there is nowhere to fall from—by default, animals are already at (or near) the bottom. Accordingly, the concrete need for rights may be more acute in the case of animals, as their function is not merely to complement, but rather to compensate for social and moral responsibility, which is lacking in the first place. 127 To give a (somewhat exaggerated) example: from the perspective of a critical legal scholar, meta-theorising from his office in the ivory tower, it may seem easier, and even desirable, to intellectually dispense with the abstract notion of rights, whereas for an elephant who is actually hunted down for his ivory tusks, concrete rights may make a very real difference, literally between life and death. Therefore, under the prevailing social conditions, animals need a set of basic rights as a primary ‘pull-up’ rather than as a subsidiary backup—that is, as compensatory baseline guarantees rather than as complementary background guarantees.

D. Transformative Function: Rights as ‘Bridges’ between Non-ideal Realities and Normative Ideals

Notwithstanding that animals need fundamental rights, we should not fail to recognise that even the minimum standards such rights are designed to establish and safeguard seem highly ambitious and hardly politically feasible at present. Even a rudimentary protection of fundamental animal rights would require far-ranging changes in our treatment of animals, and may ultimately rule out ‘virtually all existing practices of the animal-use industries’. 128 Considering how deeply the instrumental and inherently harmful use of animals is woven into the economic and cultural fabric of contemporary societies, and how pervasive animal cruelty is on both an individual and a collective level, the implications of fundamental animal rights indeed seem far removed from present social practices. 129 This chasm between normative aspirations and the deeply imperfect empirical realities they collide with is not, however, a problem unique to fundamental animal rights; rather, it is generally in the nature of fundamental rights—human or animal—to postulate normative goals that remain, to some extent, aspirational and unattainable. 130 Aspirational rights express commitments to ideals that, even if they may not be fully realisable at the time of their formal recognition, act as a continuous reminder and impulse that stimulates social and legal change towards a more expansive implementation. 131 In a similar vein, Bilchitz understands fundamental rights as moral ideals that create the pressure for legal institutionalisation and as ‘bridging concepts’ that facilitate the transition from past and present imperfect social realities towards more just societies. 132

This, then, provides a useful lens for thinking about the aspirational nature and transformative function of fundamental animal rights. Surely, the mere formal recognition of fundamental animal rights will not, by any realistic measure, bring about an instant practical achievement of the ultimate goal of ‘abolishing exploitation and liberating animals from enslavement’. 133 They do, however, create the legal infrastructure for moving from a non-ideal reality towards more ideal social conditions in which animal rights can be respected. For example, a strong animal right to life would (at least in industrialised societies) preclude most forms of killing animals for food, and would thus certainly conflict with the entrenched practice of eating meat. Yet, while the current social normality of eating animals may make an immediate prohibition of meat production and consumption unrealistic, it is also precisely the reason why animals need a right to life (ie a right not to be eaten), as fundamental rights help to denormalise (formerly) accepted social practices and to establish, internalise and habituate normative boundaries. 134 Moreover, due to their dynamic nature, fundamental rights can generate successive waves of more stringent and expansive duties over time. 135 Drawing on Bilchitz, the established concept of ‘progressive realisation’ (originally developed in the context of socio-economic human rights) may offer a helpful legal framework for the gradual practical implementation of animal rights. Accordingly, each fundamental animal right could be seen as comprising a minimum core that has to be ensured immediately, coupled with a general prohibition of retrogressive measures , and an obligation to progressively move towards a fuller realisation . 136 Therefore, even if fundamental animal rights may currently not be fully realisable, the very act of introducing them into law and committing to them as normative ideals places animals on the ‘legal map’ 137 and will provide a powerful generative basis—a starting point rather than an endpoint 138 —from which a dynamic process towards their more expansive realisation can unfold.

The question of animal rights has been of long-standing moral concern. More recently, the matter of institutionalising moral animal rights has come to the fore, and attaining legal rights for animals has become an important practical goal of animal advocates. This article started out from the prefatory observation that the process of juridification may already be in its early stages, as judicially recognised animal rights are beginning to emerge from both animal welfare law and human rights law. With legal animal rights on the horizon, the analysis set out to systematically address the arising conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues, in order to provide a theoretical underpinning for this legal development. The article showed that the idea of legal animal rights has a sound basis in both legal theory as well as in existing law. That is, legal animal rights are both conceptually possible and already derivable from current animal welfare laws. However, the analysis has also revealed that the ‘animal welfare rights’ which animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law fall short of providing the sort of strong normative protection that is typically associated with legal rights and that is furthermore expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. This discrepancy gave rise to a new conceptual distinction between two types of legal animal rights: simple and fundamental animal rights.

While the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of legal protections that the law may grant to animals, distinguishing between simple and fundamental animal rights helps to unveil important differences between what we may currently call ‘legal animal rights’ based on existing animal welfare laws, which are weak legal rights at best, and the kind of strong, fundamental legal rights that animals should have as a matter of future law. This distinction is further conducive to curbing the trivialisation of the language of animal rights, as it allows us to preserve the normative force of fundamental animal rights by separating out weaker rights and classifying them as other, simple animal rights. Lastly, it is interesting to note that, with courts deriving legal animal rights from both animal welfare law and from constitutional, fundamental or human rights law, first prototypes of simple and fundamental animal rights are already discernible in emerging case law. Whereas Christopher Stone once noted that ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been … a bit unthinkable’ throughout legal history, 139 the findings of this article suggest that we may presently be witnessing a new generation of legal rights in the making—legal animal rights, simple and fundamental.

This article is the first part of my postdoctoral research project ‘Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I am indebted to William Edmundson, Raffael Fasel, Chris Green, Christoph Krenn, Visa Kurki, Will Kymlicka, Nico Müller, Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, MH Tse, Steven White, Derek Williams and the anonymous reviewers for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Seminally, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 1983); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP 2011).

See, notably, Matthew H Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (2001) 14 CJLJ 29; Tom L Beauchamp, ‘Rights Theory and Animal Rights’ in Tom L Beauchamp and RG Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (OUP 2011); William A Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (2015) 23 Journal of Political Philosophy 345; Gary L Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (first printed 1995, Temple UP 2007) 91ff; Steven M Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution—The Eligibility of Nonhuman Animals for Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democracy’ (1998) 22 Vt L Rev 793; Anne Peters, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Animalité: Human-Animal Comparisons in Law’ (2016) 5 TEL 25; Thomas G Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights’ (1999) 27 BC Envtl Aff L Rev 1.

Much legal scholarship deals with animal rights in a rather cursory and incidental manner, because it typically focusses on parallel debates that are closely related to, but seen as preceding, the issue of rights. For example, much has been written about the systemic shortcomings of animal welfare legislation, which—within the entrenched animal welfare/rights-dualism—has served to undergird calls for shifting towards a rights -paradigm for legal protection of animals. Another focal point of legal scholars has been to change the legal status of animals from property to person , which is taken to be a prerequisite for right holding. Yet, even though legal rights for animals may be the ultimate goal informing these debates, surprisingly little detailed attention has been given to such envisaged legal animal rights per se.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Prentice-Hall 1973) 67.

See eg Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia UP 2012) 14–15, 207 (whose ‘account of the moral rights of animals … proposes what the legal rights of animals ought to be ’); cf Joel Feinberg, ‘In Defence of Moral Rights’ (1992) 12 OJLS 149 (describing this indirect way of referencing legal rights as the ‘“There ought to be a law” theory of moral rights’, 156).

As noted by Favre, what is required is ‘that the legal system intervene when personal morals or ethics do not adequately protect animals from human abuse’. David Favre, ‘Integrating Animal Interests into Our Legal System’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 87, 88.

Even though moral and legal rights are intimately connected (see HLA Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 175, 177), a somewhat distinct (or at least modified and refined) theorisation is warranted because, unlike moral animal rights, legal animal rights are constituted by legal systems, and their existence and scope have to be determined based on the applicable legal rules. As Wise puts it: ‘philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights’. Steven M Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus 2002) 34.

Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] [56] [62ff]; see further Kerala High Court 6 June 2000, AIR 2000 KER 340 (expressing the opinion that ‘legal rights shall not be the exclusive preserve of the humans’, [13]); Delhi High Court 15 May 2015, CRL MC no 2051/2015 [3] [5] (recognizing birds’ ‘fundamental rights to fly in the sky’).

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15; this landmark decision was preceded by an obiter dictum in Cámara Federal de Casación Penal Buenos Aires, 18 December 2014, SAIJ NV9953 [2] (expressing the view that animals are right holders and should be recognized as legal subjects).

Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona). This ruling was later reversed in Corte Suprema de Justicia 16 August 2017, STL12651-2017 (MP: Fernando Castillo Cadena). In January 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided against granting habeas corpus to the animal in question.

Similar habeas corpus claims on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants, brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project, have not been accepted by US courts. See, notably, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336.

On the ambiguity of the term ‘animal rights’, see eg Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Rights’ in Lori Gruen (ed), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago Press 2018) 320; in using the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ without further specifications, it is often left unclear what exactly is meant by ‘rights’. For example, the term may refer to either moral or legal animal rights—or both. Furthermore, in a broad sense, ‘animal rights’ sometimes refers to any kind of normative protection for animals, whereas in a narrow sense, it is often reserved for particularly important and inviolable, human rights-like animal rights. Moreover, some speak of ‘animal rights’ as if they already existed as a matter of positive law, while others use the same term in a ‘manifesto sense’, to refer to potential, ideal rights.

Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Clare Palmer (ed), Animal Rights (Routledge 2008) 409; the class of potential right holders comprises ‘any being that is capable of holding legal rights, whether or not he/she/it actually holds such rights’. Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29.

See generally Alon Harel, ‘Theories of Rights’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 191ff.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16; Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1917) 26 Yale LJ 710.

See Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 717; these Hohfeldian incidents of rights are merely ‘atomic’ units, whereas many common rights are complex aggregates, clusters or ‘molecular rights’ consisting of combinations thereof. ibid 746; Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (2005) 33 Philosophy & Public Affairs 223, 225, 234.

First-order rights (claims and liberties) directly concern someone’s actual rather than normative conduct, whereas powers and immunities are second-order rights (‘meta-rights’) that concern other legal relations; by prioritising, for the sake of this analysis, first-order rights regarding (in)actions of and towards animals, this is not to say that second-order rights are not important to accompany and bolster the first-order rights of animals. For instance, just as many complex (eg fundamental) rights contain immunities, that is, the freedom from the legal power of another (the disability bearer) to change the immunity holder’s rights, animals’ claims and liberties may be bolstered by immunity rights that protect those first-order rights from being altered, notably voided, by others. For example, one of the most basic rights frequently discussed for animals, the ‘right not to be property’ (Gary L Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (first printed 2000, Temple UP 2007) 93ff), may be explained as an immunity that would strip away the legal powers that currently go along with the state of legal disposability entailed by animals’ property status, and would thus disable human ‘owners’ to decide over animals’ rights. As passive rights, immunities are quite easily conceivable as animal rights, because they are specified by reference to the correlative position, that is, by what the person disabled by the animal’s immunity right cannot legally do (see generally Matthew H Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ in Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998) 22). By contrast, a power refers to one’s control over a given legal relation and entails one’s normative ability to alter another’s legal position (see Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55). Prima facie , powers may thus seem ill-suited for animals. This is because, unlike passive second-order rights (immunities), powers are active rights that have to be exercised rather than merely enjoyed and, unlike first-order active rights (liberties), powers concern the exercise of legal rather than factual actions and thus require legal rather than mere practical or behavioural agency. Notwithstanding, it may be argued that animals, not unlike children, could hold legal powers (eg powers of enforcement) that are exercisable through human proxies (cf Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Legal Competence and Legal Power’ in Mark McBride (ed), New Essays on the Nature of Rights (Hart Publishing 2017) 46).

For a discussion of Hohfeldian theory in the context of animal rights, see also Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 799ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 96–7; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 6ff.

Joel Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ in Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton UP 1980) 159; Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55.

So far, animal rights theory has largely focussed on negative rights. See critically Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 5ff, 49ff.

cf Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (n 16) 233.

See Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 10.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 162; but see Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 41–2 (arguing that it would not be impossible, though ‘cruel and perhaps silly’, to impose legal duties on animals).

A ‘liberty’ is the negation of ‘duty’ and may thus be redescribed as ‘no-duty’.

On the distinction between naked and vested liberties, see HLA Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ in HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (OUP 1982) 172.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171, 173.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171.

eg Richard L Cupp, ‘Children, Chimps, and Rights: Arguments from “Marginal” Cases’ (2013) 45 Ariz St LJ 1; see also Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (OUP 2018) 116ff.

See David Lyons, ‘Rights, Claimants, and Beneficiaries’ (1969) 6 American Philosophical Quarterly 173, 173–4.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

In this vein, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, p 4, 6; but see critically New York Court of Appeals, Tommy v Lavery and Kiko v Presti decision of 8 May 2018, motion no 2018-268, concurring opinion Judge Fahey.

For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia explicitly departed from this reciprocity paradigm and held that animals are right holders but not duty bearers. Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona), 14ff; for a refutation of the contractarian reciprocity argument, see also Brief for Philosophers as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner-Appellant, Nonhuman Rights Project v Lavery 2018 NY Slip Op 03309 (2018) (Nos 162358/15 and 150149/16), 14ff.

See Peters (n 2) 45–6; David Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Personhood and Dignity of Non-Human Animals’ (2009) 25 SAJHR 38, 42–3; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 163; but see Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, 5.

Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (2013) 123 Ethics 202, 207.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 43.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 9.

For an overview, see generally Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998).

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 183, 188–9.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 30; Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 185.

A problematic corollary of the will theory is its conceptual awkwardness, or inability, to accommodate as right holders not just non-human but also human non-agents, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated. As noted by Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (n 7) 181, the will conception of rights ‘should incline us not to extend to animals and babies … the notion of a right’; see also Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 69.

As pointed out by van Duffel, neither the will theory nor the interest theory may be a ‘plausible candidate for a comprehensive theory of rights’, and it may be best to assume that both theories simply attempt to capture the essence of different kinds of rights. See Siegfried van Duffel, ‘The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake’ (2012) 93 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104, 105, 117 et passim .

Under the will theory, inalienable rights are not ‘rights’ by definition, as they precisely preclude the right holder’s power to waive the correlative duties. See DN MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ in PMS Hacker and J Raz (eds), Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of HLA Hart (OUP 1977) 198f; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 73.

The will theory is primarily modelled on active rights (liberties and powers) that directly facilitate individual autonomy and choice, but is less conclusive with regard to passive rights (claims and immunities) which do not involve any action or exercise of choice by the right holder herself. cf Harel (n 14) 194–5.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 190, conceded that the will theory does not provide a sufficient analysis of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights; legal animal rights, by contrast, are most intelligibly explained as public-law rights held primarily against the state which has correlative duties to respect and protect.

The will theory appears to limit the purpose of rights protection to a narrow aspect of human nature—the active, engaging and self-determining side—while ignoring the passive, vulnerable and needy side. Autonomy is certainly an important good deserving of normative protection, but it is hardly the only such good. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Introduction’ in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (OUP 1984) 11; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 197, 208.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 10ff; for an interest-based approach to animal rights, see eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19); Cochrane (n 5) 19ff.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 192.

J Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (1984) 4 OJLS 1, 12; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 12, 14.

See William A Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (2nd edn, CUP 2012) 97; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 176; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 167.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33ff, 39.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 177ff; see also Neil MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights: A Test-Case for Theories of Right’ in Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (OUP 1982) 159–60.

See RG Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (OUP 1980) 78ff; HJ McCloskey, ‘Rights’ (1965) 15 The Philosophical Quarterly 115, 126; but see Tom Regan, ‘McCloskey on Why Animals Cannot Have Rights’ (1976) 26 The Philosophical Quarterly 251.

Harel (n 14) 195; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 39–40; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person’ in Visa AJ Kurki and Tomasz Pietrzykowski (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn (Springer 2017) 79–80.

See eg Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 207, 227; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166.

See also Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 80.

See Thomas G Kelch, ‘A Short History of (Mostly) Western Animal Law: Part II’ (2013) 19 Animal Law Review 347, 348ff; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 44ff; in this vein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 [57]) noted that ‘the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals ’ (emphasis added); the well-established German concept of ‘ethischer Tierschutz’ expresses this non-anthropocentric, ethical thrust of animal welfare law. See Margot Michel, ‘Law and Animals: An Introduction to Current European Animal Protection Legislation’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 91–2.

1999 Federal Constitution (Bundesverfassung) (CH), Article 120(2) and 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 3(a); 2010 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (LI), Article 1; 2018 Animal Welfare Act (Loi sur la protection des animaux) (LU), Article 1; 1977 Experiments on Animals Act (Wet op de dierproeven) (NL), Article 1a; European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Recital 12.

See eg Steven M Wise, ‘Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The Case for Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ (1996) 2 Animal Law Review 179, 179; Richard A Epstein, ‘Animals as Objects, or Subjects, of Rights’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005) 144ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 18; Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238 [6]; Herrmann v Germany App no 9300/07 (ECtHR, 26 June 2012), separate opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, 38; Noah v Attorney General HCJ 9232/01 [2002–2003] IsrLR 215, 225, 232, 253.

This type of current legal animal rights will be called ‘animal welfare rights’ in order to indicate their origin in current animal welfare laws.

See eg Cass R Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights)’ (2000) 47 UCLA Law Review 1333 (claiming that current animal welfare law creates ‘a robust set of animal rights’ or even ‘an incipient bill of rights for animals’. ibid 1334, 1336); Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 43ff, 48–9 (concluding that ‘the existing statutory framework can already be seen to confer certain legal rights upon animals’: 50 fn 61); Jerrold Tannenbaum, ‘Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights’ (1995) 62 Social Research 539, 581; Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 910ff; this view was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] (stating that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ‘deals with duties of persons having charge of animals, which is mandatory in nature and hence confer corresponding rights on animals’).

See eg Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (n 19) 193–4 et passim ; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 218, 220; Visa AJ Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (OUP 2019) 62–5.

Matthew H Kramer, ‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 188.

eg, for Sunstein correlativity seems to run both ways: ‘Not only do rights create duties, but the imposition of a duty also serves to create a right.’ Cass R Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (1995) 70 Notre Dame L Rev 727, 746.

On this objection, see also Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 8–9.

See Lyons (n 29) 176; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 10; critically Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 85ff; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory’ (2018) 38 OJLS 430, 436ff.

See eg Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 161–2, 166; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 45–6; in this vein, a German high court held that, based on the criminal law justification of necessity (‘rechtfertigender Notstand’), private persons may be authorised to defend the legally protected goods of animals on behalf of the animals, independently of or even against the interests of their owners. OLG Naumburg, judgment of 22 February 2018, case no 2 Rv 157/17, recital II; on why animals need directed rather than indirect duties, see Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 350ff.

See also Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 100.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 181–2, 190.

MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 199.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 167, 170f; see also Alan Gewirth, ‘Introduction’ in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (University of Chicago Press 1982) 14.

See Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 40.

Gewirth (n 72) 14.

For the sake of the argument, I am only referring to biological parents.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 180–1.

See MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 191–2; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 13–14.

According to some scholars, legal rights exist only when they are enforceable. See eg Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard UP 2011) 405–6 (stating that legal rights are only those that the right holder is entitled to enforce on demand in directly available adjudicative processes).

A significant practical hurdle to the legal recognition of animal rights is that in virtually any legal order, animals are legal objects rather than legal persons. Because legal personhood and right holding are generally thought to be inextricably linked, many jurists refrain from calling the existing legal protections of animals ‘rights’. See critically Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 71, 85–6.

See generally Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff.

On this, see Kai Möller, ‘Proportionality and Rights Inflation’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 166; Harel (n 14) 197ff; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 14ff.

Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’ in Waldron, Theories of Rights (n 46) 153.

Bernard E Rollin, ‘The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights’ in HB Miller and WH Willliams (eds), Ethics and Animals (Humana Press 1983) 106.

Tom Regan, ‘The Day May Come: Legal Rights for Animals’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 11, 15–16.

Frederick Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (1993) 27 Ga L Rev 415, 429 et passim .

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (CUP 1993) 209, 215–16 (emphasis added); see also Frederick Schauer, ‘Rights, Constitutions and the Perils of Panglossianism’ (2018) 38 OJLS 635, 637.

Correlative to Council Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 of 24 September 2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing [2009] OJ L303/1, Article 4 and Annex I.

Correlative to European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Article 14(1)(2).

Correlative to 2008 Animal Welfare Ordinance (Tierschutzverordnung) (CH), Article 178a(3).

The permissive character of animal welfare law was highlighted by the Israeli High Court of Justice in a case concerning the force-feeding of geese. Commenting on the ‘problematic’ regulatory language, it noted that the stated ‘purpose of the Regulations is “to prevent the geese’s suffering.” Clearly these regulations do not prevent suffering; at best they minimize, to some extent, the suffering caused’. Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 234–5. See also Shai Lavi, ‘Humane Killing and the Ethics of the Secular: Regulating the Death Penalty, Euthanasia, and Animal Slaughter’ (2014) 4 UC Irvine Law Review 297, 321 (noting the disparity between ‘the resolution to overcome pain and suffering, which exists side-by-side with inhumane conditions that remain unchallenged and are often taken for granted’).

As MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights’ (n 52) 159, has succinctly put it: ‘Consider the oddity of saying that turkeys have a right to be well fed in order to be fat for the Christmas table’; this is not to minimise the importance of existing animal welfare protections. Even though they are insufficient and weak compared to proper legal rights, that does not mean that they are insignificant. See, on this point, Regina Binder, ‘Animal Welfare Regulation: Shortcomings, Requirements, Perspectives’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 83.

eg correlative to 1972 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (DE), § 1 and 17(1).

eg correlative to 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 26(1)(a).

eg derived from Animal Welfare Act 2006 (UK), s 4.

See eg Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [62] (extracting from animal welfare law, inter alia , the right to life, to food and shelter, to dignity and fair treatment, and against torture); similarly, Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238, dissenting opinion Justice Fraser [43].

For example, the prima facie right to be free from unnecessary pain and suffering is, in effect, rendered void if virtually any kind of instrumental interest in using animals is deemed necessary and a sufficient justification for its infringement.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Harel (n 14) 198; Laurence H Tribe, ‘Ten Lessons Our Constitutional Experience Can Teach Us About the Puzzle of Animal Rights: The Work of Steven M Wise’ (2001) 7 Animal Law Review 1, 2.

See Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 209–11.

See Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 17ff, 109.

Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 114.

For Schauer, a certain normative force seems to be constitutive of the concept of rights. He argues that a right exists only insofar as an interest is protected against the sorts of low-level justifications that would otherwise be sufficient to restrict the interest if it were not protected by the right. See Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430 et passim .

In this vein, Sunstein holds that animal welfare laws ‘protect a form of animal rights, and there is nothing in the notion of rights or welfare that calls for much, or little, protection of the relevant interests’. Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1335.

On the universal basic rights of animals, see eg Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 19ff.

‘Ideal right’ in the sense of ‘what ought to be a positive … right, and would be so in a better or ideal legal system’. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (n 4) 84.

In domestic public law, fundamental or constitutional rights are distinguished from other, simple public (eg administrative) law rights. Likewise, in international law, human rights can be distinguished from other, simple or ordinary international individual rights. See Anne Peters, Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (CUP 2016) 436ff.

Indeed, substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights may be quite resistant to being overridden, and may sometimes even be absolute (non-infringeable) rights.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of legal rights is not undisputed within the animal advocacy movement. For an overview of some pragmatic and principled objections against animal rights , see Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 325ff.

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2); Peters (n 2) 46ff.

Today, animals’ legal protections remain pervasively under-enforced by the competent public authorities as well as practically unenforceable by the affected animals or their human representatives for lack of standing. See eg Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1334ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

The link between rights and the legal-operational advantage of standing was famously highlighted by Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 S Cal L Rev 450; see further Cass R Sunstein, ‘Can Animals Sue?’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005); Peters (n 2) 47–8.

See Stone (n 110) 458ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

See eg Constitutional Court of South Africa 8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 (affirming the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ statutory power of private prosecution and to institute legal proceedings in case of animal cruelty offences).

See Frederick Schauer, ‘Proportionality and the Question of Weight’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber (eds), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 177–8.

See generally Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016) 151ff.

For example, under the Swiss 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz), life itself is not a legally protected good, and the (painless, non-arbitrary) killing of an animal does not therefore require any justification.

See also Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 253–4 (pointing out that balancing different interests is ‘part and parcel of our legal system’).

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 736–7.

On this threshold-raising conception of rights, see generally Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Harvard UP 1978) 191–2 (noting that a right cannot justifiably be overridden ‘on the minimal grounds that would be sufficient if no such right existed’).

At present, the overwhelming portion of permissible interferences with animals’ interests can hardly be said to be necessary or proportionate in any real sense of the word. See Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights (n 17) 9, 55.

As noted by Teubner, animal rights ‘create basically defensive institutions. Paradoxically, they incorporate animals into human society in order to create defences against the destructive tendencies of human society against animals’. Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law’ (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 497, 521.

See eg Mark Tushnet, ‘An Essay on Rights’ (1984) 62 Tex L Rev 1363; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991); for a modern reformulation of the rights critique, see eg Robin L West, ‘Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama’ (2011) 53 Wm & Mary L Rev 713.

See generally Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (Basic Books 2004) 59ff.

See Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 754.

Dershowitz (n 122) 9.

Jeremy Waldron, ‘When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights’ (1988) 11 Harv JL & Pub Pol’y 625, 629.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 358.

More generally, the practical need for rights as complementary or compensatory guarantees will vary depending on social context, and may be more immediate and pressing for the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalised, victimised, vulnerable, disadvantaged or even oppressed portions of society. See generally Patricia J Williams, ‘Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights’ (1987) 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 401.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 40, 49; see further Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 2004) 330ff, 348–9; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

See Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

On the aspirational dimension of human rights, see generally Philip Harvey, ‘Aspirational Law’ (2004) 52 Buff L Rev 701.

ibid 717–18; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 14–15, 19; ‘rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche’. Williams (n 127) 424.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Fundamental Rights as Bridging Concepts: Straddling the Boundary Between Ideal Justice and an Imperfect Reality’ (2018) 40 Hum Rts Q 119, 121ff.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 49; see also Gary L Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple UP 2007) 2.

cf Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 331–2.

On the dynamic nature of rights and their generative power, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 171; Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 212, 214.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?’ (2010) 25 Southern African Public Law 267, 291ff.

Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 71.

cf Harvey (n 130) 723 (noting that human rights will always remain a ‘work in progress rather than a finished project’); similarly, Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 333.

Stone (n 110) 453.

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137 Animal Rights Research Paper Topics You Will Enjoy

Finding the right ideas for your animal rights research paper can be a daunting task. Much of the online materials either have insufficient or irrelevant materials on this issue. With the rising cases of people abusing animals, it is necessary to have research titles that address this issue.

There are many sample topics on animal rights that college students can use for their research project. Choosing the right writing prompt is vital for your overall success in any academic paper. That said, we have gathered 137 excellent research paper topics for animal rights that you can use as motivation.

All the best as you put them into practice for top grades. But first, let us take a look at the sample paper of the animal rights.

Animal Rights Research Paper Example Tom Regan ’s work The Case for Animal Rights entrenches monumental and fundamental rights for animals. Because a significant majority of the animals has complex mental lives that resemble that of human beings, Regan postulates some reasons that support the need for animals to be exempted from various activities. For instance, Regan advocates for the absolute abolition of the use of animals in scientific and medical research by various organizations. Additionally, he is an ardent supporter for the dissolution of the entire commercial enterprise, which has played an imperative role in the animal agriculture across the world. Lastly, Regan also emphasizes on the need for exempt animals from trapping and sports since both activities have led to the significant reduction in their population, especially within the regions where legislative frameworks have failed to protect them (Regan 23). Despite his ardent support for the absolute right for animals, the comprehensive implementation of such an initiative would roll back the accomplished gains, which have led to the commercialization of animals, their significant use in advance medical and scientific research. As such, Regan’s ardent support for animals’ rights is an overreaching initiative that may detrimentally affect various analysis initiates aimed at improving the welfare of human being on the society. In an attempt to safeguard absolute rights for animals, Regan has suggested the total abolition of the use of animals in medical research. The implementation of Regan’s recommendation by banning the use of animals in scientific research is a regressive approach, which may hinder the full realization of various medical research findings. For example, the use of animals in scientific research has played an indispensable role in advancing scientific understanding of human beings. Specifically, basic biological research focusing on the various interventional treatment has relied on animals for testing the viability and safety of a different medication before dispensing them for large-scale human and animal treatment. Implementation of Regan’s recommendation in an attempt to accomplish absolute animal right will be dealt a significant blow to medical and scientific research. Apart from banning the use of animals in medical and scientific research, Regan has further recommended the elimination of all commercial animal agriculture (Regan 46). Despite the inhuman treatment that some individuals have meted on animals, the contribution of animals in the agricultural sector is highly imperative, and the absolute eradication would hinder the full realization of various economic gains by farmers in both the advanced economies and developing nations. For example, animal agriculture is the core of the food-producing system in various societies as their products are directly and indirectly applicable in the processing of a variety of products. Because of their significant contribution to the food-producing chains in multiple societies, various institutions have formulated an implemented numerous policies of ensuring the safety of animals while benefitting from them. Hence, a blanket abolition on the commercial use of animals in the agriculture sector is a retrogressive approach, which will impede the production of food and trigger food insecurity across the world. Based on Regan’s recommendations from The Case for Animal Rights, there needs to be an alternative approach of advancing the already existing methods of protecting the rights of animals while ensuring that they benefit human beings instead of a blanket and retrogressive ban in accordance. For instance, governments must strengthen and empower the established institutions that reasonably advocate for animal rights. Such an approach will play an essential role in safeguarding animals’ welfare and protecting them for the future generation. Additionally, such an intervention will improve the various benefits that man derive either directly or indirectly from animals. Hence, inasmuch as Regan’s recommendations highlight the need to protect animals, the specific approaches of accomplishing such a task encapsulates various radical measure, which is unattainable.

Best Rated Animal Rights Research Paper Topic Ideas

• Is it a good idea to rear exotic and indigenous animals together?
• Are animal rights advocates doing enough to protect the rights of animals?
• The evolution of animals rights movements from the 1900s to date
• Should animal rights be enshrined in the constitution as human rights?
• Fundamental interests that give animals both moral and legal rights
• Are dogs the most abused pets at home?
• Why there is a need to alleviate pain and suffering for animals of burden

High-Quality Animal Rights Topics For Research Paper

• Why should animals have to be afforded the same consideration as human beings?
• Why experiments should not be conducted on animals
• Reasons why we should not kill animals for food or clothes
• Is killing animals for medicinal purposes justifiable?
• Reasons why using animals for hard labor is inhumane
• Discuss the inherent worth of animals
• Evaluate the effectiveness of core legislative protections granted to animals
• Are animals considered property under the law?
• Merits and demerits of animal rights to man
• Point of rules on the protection of domestic animals in the US
• What amounts to animal cruelty?
• Is it possible to achieve a world where animals are free from cruelty?
• Social and economic factors leading to animal abuse

Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights Topics

• The role of human emotions and current societal norms in determining animal rights
• Historical practices that have drawn the line between animal welfare and rights
• Cultural habits and behaviors that undermine animal welfare
• Keeping animals as pets: Is it a matter of animal welfare or animal rights?
• Role of the World Organisation for Animal Health championing for animal rights and welfare
• Factors that contribute to animals suffering from unpleasant states such as pain, fear, and distress
• Evaluate what constitutes good animal welfare practices
• How to ensure that animals are comfortable in their final moments of life
• Is euthanasia on animals justified?
• The role of The World Veterinary Association in championing for animal rights and welfare
• Discuss the controversial areas of intensive animal production and the transportation
• The effects of the rising human population on animal welfare and rights
• Results of the changing attitudes of the human population towards animals

Researchable Animal Rights Topics

• Do animals undergo mental suffering as human beings do?
• How to allow animals the freedom to express normal behavior
• The role of rural clients who provide the source of animal-based foodstuffs
• Why veterinary supervision is necessary for the protection of animal rights
• Evaluate the international efforts being led by the World Organisation for Animal Health
• Discuss how animal rights pose an interface between science and society
• What are the fundamental tenets of determining animal rights in the community?
• Ethical concerns that relate to animal welfare and rights
• Why we should ban meat across the board
• Are laws against animal violators punitive enough?
• Discuss the trends in the philosophical views of animal rights
• Is a vegan lifestyle the only moral choice to spearheading animal rights?
• Why using animal products is a violation of animal rights.

Impressive Animal Rights Debate Topics

• Do humans have any moral responsibilities towards animals?
• Do animals have any legal rights as members of the moral community?
• Should human beings be masters or partners with animals?
• Are animals destined to serve man alone?
• Is there a distinction between animal rights and animal welfare?
• Do historical precedents justify contemporary animal abuse behavior?
• Is it right to use animals in biomedical and scientific research?
• Are there ethical differences between the use of animals and humans for scientific research?
• Should ethical or moral principles guide scientific research on animals?
• Do personal beliefs have an impact on animal rights?
• The result of value systems and scientific evidence on animal rights
• Do historical perspectives of animal rights have an impact on future directions?
• Discuss the moral line that exists between public interest and saving animals

Top Animal Rights Research Topics

• Why using animals and animal products for food is against animal rights
• Why overfishing is threatening the survival of the marine ecosystem
• Is it justifiable to claim that there is ‘humane’ meat?
• Why experiments performed on animals are covered under the Animal Welfare Act
• Reasons why hunting as a sport is against animal rights
• Assess the impact of fur coats falling out of fashion
• Does horseracing, marine animals display, or cockfighting violate animal rights?
• Is owning pets ethical?
• Is honey the best option for animal products used as food?
• Reasons why laboratory-grown meat violates animal rights
• Why testing products such as cosmetics, food, and drugs is a violation of animal rights
• Are zoos violating the rights of animals by putting them on public display?
• The need for a suitable diet for the animals

Persuasive Speech Topics on Animal Rights

• Why a pet is not a birthday present to anyone
• Discuss why the animal circus is vicious
• Why committing indecent acts against animals is wrong
• Why animals being kept in a zoo are more dangerous than those in the game reserves
• Why chaining dogs outside is unethical
• Why using animals as companions is not morally right
• Why it is possible to prevent the extinction of rhinos by banning the selling of their horns
• Why it is unethical to modify livestock genetically
• Reasons why it is essential to administer vaccines and drugs to animals
• Using the term ‘guinea pigs’ for vaccination is unethical
• The activities of man are responsible for the extinction of some species
• Animals of the burden should receive humane treatment like any other
• Why animal dissection during class experiments is unethical

Animal Rights Controversial Topics

• Why using animals in biomedical research is wrong
• Are the lives of animals the same as those of humans?
• Is the death of a human being equivalent to the end of a mouse?
• Do standing requirements limit the enforceability of protectionist laws?
• Can animals protect themselves against abuse?
• Is the international whaling law being enforced as it should?
• What farming practices go against the highest ethical standards of animals?
• Is society guilty of conducting irresponsible dog breeding?
• Why cosmetics testing on animals is a violation of their rights
• Is the ongoing underground practice of dogfighting ethical?
• Why caging animals is unethical
• Reasons why trophy hunting of endangered species is unethical
• Impacts of legislation allowing the killing of whole families/packs of wolves

Argumentative Essay Topics About Animal Rights

• Why the animal right is an indicator of a civilized society
• Human violence is the leading cause of animal extinction
• Why animal testing is against animal rights by all means
• Why farms are exposing animals to more harm than good
• Why encompassing the adoption of pets is against animal rights
• Why everyone should be at the forefront of protecting endangered animals
• Why production of garments from mink should not be allowed
• Why everyone has a moral responsibility to eliminating animal abuse
• Why kids should be taught to care for animals
• Principles of maintaining animal health
• Why water pollution is a human-driven threat to marine life
• Why hunting is inhumane
• Why animals living in risky areas need good care

Latest Animal Rights Research Paper Topics

• Why everyone should fight for the legislation of animal rights
• Genetically modified livestock is endangering animal lives
• Laboratory research is the biggest threat to animal survival
• Ecological problems posing a threat to animal lives
• Why invasive species are wiping out the local wildlife
• Why organic, free-range eggs and chickens are the best option
• Reasons why overbreeding pets is a threat to the ecosystem
• Why taking out predators means a collapse in the food chain
• Why using sniff dogs in terrorist environments is wrong
• Why political campaigns sideline animal rights and freedoms
• Why some animals live in a constant state of fear
• Cultural activities that exploit the rights of animals
• Why using glue traps is inhumane

Hot Topics on Animal Rights

• Impacts of factory farms on animal welfare
• Why the commercial killing of kangaroos is wrong
• Why hens in battery cages are unable to perform most of their natural behaviors
• Why broiler chickens in a single shed are deprived of their rights
• Why pigs confined in crowded pens suffer depression
• Do animals suffer from pain and feel emotions?
• Why live exports are wrong
• Using pictures of animals in labels
• The commercial slaughter of calves
• The role of the Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index (VACI)
• Commercial agricultural facilities
• Prolonged depression among animals
• Habitat encroachment

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Animal Law Research

Primary sources: cases, statutes, regulations and treaties, secondary sources: books, articles, news, current awareness, research and advocacy, getting help, credit and cc license.

Animal Law is concerned with the rights and welfare of nonhuman animals, as well as the requirements, responsibilities and liabilities associated with keeping or interacting with them.  Under this umbrella are wild animals as well as animals used for food and research, in entertainment, and as companions, pets or service animals.  This guide contains some research recommendations, highlighting key primary sources, secondary sources and current awareness sources. 

Know that you may not find "animal law" as a discrete topic area in research databases.  Instead, you might look to elements of property law, contract law, tort law, criminal law, environmental law, and agriculture and food law.

"farm animals"  by  lboren2687

Federal legislation

These are among the most researched and cited of animal laws at the federal level:

• Animal Welfare Act (USDA)
• Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (USDA)
• Horse Protection Act (USDA)
• Twenty-Eight Hour Law (USDA)

Congressional Research Service (CRS) and U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports provide additional context on the federal legislation.

• CRS Reports relating to Animal Agriculture Congressional Research Service reports organized by the National Agricultural Law Center
• GAO Reports on the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act GAO 10-203: Actions are Needed to Strengthen Enforcement
• GAO Report on the Animal Welfare Act GAO 10-945: Oversight of Dealers of Random Source Dogs and Cats Would Benefit from Additional Management Information and Analysis (2010)

State legislation

• Massachusetts Law About Animals A compilation of MA laws, regulations, cases and web sources on animal law from the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries.
• NCSL Environmental and Natural Resources State Bill Tracking Database National Conference of State Legislatures tracks environment and natural resource bills introduced in the 50 states, territories and Washington, DC. Search here for wildlife bills, including invasive wildlife species and pollinators.
• National AgLaw Center - State Animal Cruelty Statutes A compilation from the National Agricultural Law Center of the animal cruelty statutes across the 50 states.

Applicable U.S. Government Agencies

• USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
• FSIS (Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service) Part of the USDA.
• Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
• US Dept of Health and Human Services: National Institutes of Health, Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare

Some Relevant International Agreements

• Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
• Agreement on the Conservation of Small Cetaceans of the Baltic and North Seas (ASCOBANS)

Using Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are a great place to begin if you're new to animal law research, or to consult later in your research for legal interpretation and analysis. To learn more about different types of secondary sources and how best to use them, visit the following guide:

• Secondary Sources: ALRs, Encyclopedias, Law Reviews, Restatements, & Treatises by Catherine Biondo Last Updated Sep 12, 2023 3687 views this year

Selected Treatises and Other Texts

Tips on Finding Materials on Animal Law in Hollis

Try the following Library of Congress subject searches in the HOLLIS online catalog  to find additional materials. You can also substitute another country's name or region of the world (such as "Latin America")  where "United States" appears.

Animal welfare --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal rights --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal industry --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal experimentation --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Laboratory  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Working  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Domestic  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animals  in the performing arts --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research.

Legal blogs (or "blawgs") are a good way to tap into current conversation.  Here are links to two blog listings:

• Justia Blawg Search - Animal and Dog Law Blawgs
• ABA Journal Animal Law Blog Index

Research and Advocacy

• Harvard Law School - Animal Law & Policy Program Started in 2014, the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at HLS is "Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system"
• Animal Law Resource Center A site for current information on animal law and advocacy maintained by the National Anti-Vivisection Society, with assistance from Chicago-area law students.

Contact Us!

  Ask Us!  Submit a question or search our knowledge base.

Chat with us!  Chat   with a librarian (HLS only)

Email: [email protected]

 Contact Historical & Special Collections at [email protected]

  Meet with Us   Schedule an online consult with a Librarian

Hours  Library Hours

Classes  View  Training Calendar  or  Request an Insta-Class

 Text  Ask a Librarian, 617-702-2728

 Call  Reference & Research Services, 617-495-4516

Thank you to Stephen Wiles and Terri Saint-Amour for their work on the initial version of this guide.

This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .

You may reproduce any part of it for noncommercial purposes as long as credit is included and it is shared in the same manner. 

• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2023 10:46 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/animallawresearch

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

Articles on Animal rights

Displaying 1 - 20 of 69 articles.

Friday essay: from political bees to talking pigs – how ancient thinkers saw the human-animal  divide

Julia Kindt , University of Sydney

5 ways to make Christmas lunch more ethical this year

Rebecca Reynolds , UNSW Sydney

How the world might look if animals had legal rights

Steve Cooke , University of Leicester

Memes about animal resistance are everywhere — here’s why you shouldn’t laugh off rebellious orcas and sea otters too quickly

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond , University of California, San Diego

Peter Singer’s fresh take on Animal Liberation – a book that changed the world, but not enough

Simon Coghlan , The University of Melbourne

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ urges us to defend real animals

Kendra Coulter , Western University

A horse died on the set of The Rings of Power: more needs to be done to ensure the welfare of horses used in entertainment

Karen Luke , CQUniversity Australia

How Indigenous philosophies can improve the way Canadians treat animals

Courtney Graham , University of Guelph

What is ethical animal research? A scientist and veterinarian explain

Lana Ruvolo Grasser , National Institutes of Health and Rachelle Stammen , Emory University

Talking things out: How institutional transparency could improve animal research

Michael W. Brunt , University of Guelph

Why ‘mercy’ killing wild animals is so controversial

Ellen Deelen , Utrecht University and Franck Meijboom , Utrecht University

From AIs to an unhappy elephant, the legal question of who is a person is approaching a reckoning

Joshua Jowitt , Newcastle University

Bias, politics and protests: how human laws constrain and sometimes liberate animals

Siobhan O'Sullivan , UNSW Sydney

The war in Ukraine is powerfully magnifying our love for animals

Kendra Coulter , Brock University

Cow documentary shows the need for fundamental legal rights for animals

Joe Wills , University of Leicester

Pet theft: criminalisation isn’t the animal welfare boon the government promises

Iyan Offor , Birmingham City University

Geronimo the alpaca – the case for animals having the same legal rights as people

Fred Motson , The Open University

Animal sentience bill is necessary for the UK to be a true world leader in animal welfare

Steven McCulloch , University of Winchester

Pescatarians are right – why I say eating fish is more ethical than eating meat

Martin Cohen , University of Hertfordshire

The government is clamping down on charities — and it could have a chilling effect on peaceful protest

Krystian Seibert , Swinburne University of Technology

Related Topics

• Agriculture
• Animal cruelty
• Animal ethics
• Animal welfare

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Animal Rights

About animal rights, narrow the topic.

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• Do animals have rights?
• Is animal experimentation justified?
• Should animals be allowed to experience pain for medical research?
• Should animals be used for food?
• Is animal experimentation bad science?
• Should the fur industry be shut down?
• How should substances which may be harmful to human health, be tested?
• What is acceptable pain?
• What obligations do humans have to animals?
• Are there alternatives to using animals for research?
• Would the advances in treatments for diseases have been possible without using animals?
• Should technologies replace animal dissection in science classes?
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• Last Updated: Feb 6, 2024 11:38 AM
• URL: https://libguides.broward.edu/animal_rights

Animal Rights Essay: Topics, Outline, & Writing Tips

• 🐇 Animal Rights Essay: the Basics
• 💡 Animal Rights Essay Topics
• 📑 Outlining Your Essay
• ✍️ Sample Essay (200 Words)

🔗 References

🐇 animal rights essay: what is it about.

Animal rights supporters advocate for the idea that animals should have the same freedom to live as they wish, just as humans do. They should not be exploited or used in meat , fur, and other production. At long last, we should distinguish animals from inanimate objects and resources like coal, timber, or oil.

Interdisciplinary research has shown that animals are emotional and sensitive, just like we are.

Their array of emotions includes joy, happiness, embarrassment, resentment, jealousy, anger, love, compassion, respect, disgust, despair, and even grief.

However, animal rights legislation does not extend human rights to animals. It establishes their right to have their fundamental needs and interests respected while people decide how to treat them. This right changes the status of animals from being property to being legal entities.

The statement may sound strange until we recall that churches , banks, and universities are also legal entities. Their interests are legally protected by law. Then why do we disregard the feelings of animals , which are not inanimate institutions? Several federal laws protect them from human interference.

But the following statements are only some of the rules that could one day protect animal rights in full:

• Animals should not be killed by hunting.
• Animals’ habitats should allow them to live in freedom.
• Animals should not be bred for sale or any other purpose.
• Animals should not be used for food by industries or households.

Most arguments against the adoption of similar laws are linked to money concerns. Animal exploitation has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. The lives of many private farmers depend on meat production, and most people prefer not to change the comfortable status quo.

Animal Rights Argumentative Essay

An animal rights argumentative essay should tackle a problematic issue that people have widely discussed. While choosing ideas for the assignment, opt for the most debatable topics.

Here is a brief list of argumentative essay prompts on animal rights:

• The pros and cons of animal rights.
• Can humanity exist without meat production?
• Do animals have souls?
• Should society become vegan to protect animal rights?

As you see, these questions could raise controversy between interlocutors. Your purpose is to take a side and give several arguments in its support. Then you’ll have to state a counterargument to your opinion and explain why it is incorrect.

Animal Rights Persuasive Essay

An animal rights persuasive essay should clearly state your opinion on the topic without analyzing different points of view. Still, the purpose of your article is to persuade the reader that your position is not only reasonable but the only correct one. For this purpose, select topics relating to your opinion or formulated in questionary form.

For example:

• What is your idea about wearing fur?
• Do you think people would ever ban animal exploitation ?
• Is having pets a harmful practice?
• Animal factories hinder the development of civilization .

💡 53 Animal Rights Essay Topics

• Animal rights have been suppressed for ages because people disregard their mental abilities .
• Cosmetic and medical animal testing .
• Laws preventing unnecessary suffering of animals mean that there is some necessary suffering.
• Red fluorescent protein transgenic dogs experiment .
• Do you believe animals should have legal rights?
• Genetically modified animals and implications .
• Why is animal welfare important?
• Neutering animals to prevent overpopulation: Pros and cons.
• Animal testing: Arguments for and against .
• What is our impact on marine life ?
• Some animals cannot stay wild .
• Animal testing for medical purposes .
• We are not the ones to choose which species to preserve.
• Pavlov’s dog experiment .
• Keeping dogs chained outdoors is animal neglect.
• The use of animals for research .
• Animal dissection as a learning tool: Alternatives?
• More people beat their pets than we think.
• Duties to non-human animals .
• If we do not control the population of some animals, they will control ours.
• Animals in entertainment: Not entertaining at all.
• Animals in research, education, and teaching.
• Which non-animal production endangers the species?
• Is animal testing really needed?
• Why do some people think that buying a new pet is cheaper than paying for medical treatment of the old one?
• Animal experiments: benefits, ethics, and defenders.
• Can people still be carnivorous if they stop eating animals?
• Animal testing role .
• Marine aquariums and zoos are animal prisons.
• Animal experimentation: justification arguments .
• What would happen if we replace animals in circuses with people, keeping the same living conditions?
• The ethics of animal use in scientific research .
• Animal sports: Relics of the past.
• Animal testing ban: counterargument and rebuttal .
• Denial to purchase animal-tested cosmetics will not change anything.
• Animal research, its ineffectiveness and amorality .
• Animal rights protection based on their intellect level: It tells a lot about humanity.
• Debates of using animals in scientific analysis .
• How can we ban tests on rats and kill them in our homes at the same time?
• Animal testing in experiments .
• What is the level of tissue engineering development in leather and meat production?
• Equal consideration of interests to non-human animals .
• Animals should not have to be our servants .
• Zoos as an example of humans’ immorality .
• We should feed wild animals to help them survive.
• Animal testing in biomedical research .
• Abolitionism: The right not to be owned.
• Do you support the Prima facie rights theory?
• Psychologist perspective on research involving animal and human subjects .
• Ecofeminism: What is the link between animals’ and women’s rights ?
• No philosophy could rationalize cruelty against animals.
• Qualities that humans and animals share .
• Ancient Buddhist societies and vegetarianism: A research paper.

Need more ideas? You are welcome to use our free research topic generator !

📑 Animal Rights Essay Outline

An animal rights essay should be constructed as a standard 5-paragraph essay (if not required otherwise in the assignment). The three following sections provide a comprehensive outline.

Animal Rights Essay: Introduction

An introduction consists of:

• Background information,
• A thesis statement .

In other words, here you need to explain why you decided to write about the given topic and which position you will take. The background part should comprise a couple of sentences highlighting the topicality of the issue. The thesis statement expresses your plans in the essay.

For example: In this essay, I will explain why animal-based production harms the ecology.

Animal Rights Essay: Main Body

The main body is a place for you to argue your position . One paragraph equals one argument. In informative essays, replace argumentation with facts.

Start each section with a topical sentence consisting of a general truth. Then give some explanation and more specific points. By the way, at the end of this article, you’ll find a bonus! It is a priceless selection of statistics and facts about animal rights.

Animal Rights Essay: Conclusion

A conclusion restates your central ideas and thesis statement. Approach it as a summary of your essay, avoid providing new facts or arguments.

✍️ Animal Rights Essay Example (200 Words)

Why is animal welfare important? The term “animal welfare” evokes the pictures of happy cows from a milk advertisement. But the reality has nothing to do with these bright videos. Humane treatment of animals is a relative concept. This essay explains why animal welfare is important, despite that it does not prevent farms from killing or confining animals.

The best way to approach animal welfare is by thinking of it as a temporary measure. We all agree that the current state of the economy does not allow humanity to abandon animal-based production. Moreover, such quick decisions could make farm animals suffer even more. But ensuring the minimum possible pain is the best solution as of the moment.

The current legislation on animal welfare is far from perfect. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 prevents cruelty against animals in labs and zoos. Meanwhile, the majority of suffering animals do not fall under its purview. For example, it says nothing about the vivisection of rats and mice for educational and research purposes, although the procedure is extremely painful for the creature. Neither does it protect farm animals.

Unfortunately, the principles of animal welfare leave too much room for interpretation. Animals should be free from fear and stress, but how can we measure that? They should be allowed to engage in natural behaviors, but no confined space would let them do so. Thus, the legislation is imprecise.

The problem of animal welfare is almost unresolvable because it is a temporary measure to prevent any suffering of domesticated animals. It has its drawbacks but allows us to ensure at least some comfort for those we unjustifiably use for food. They have the same right to live on this planet as we do, and animal farming will be stopped one day.

📊 Bonus: Statistics & Facts for Your Animal Rights Essay Introduction

Improve the quality of your essay on animal rights by working in the following statistics and facts about animals.

• According to USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service , about 4.6 billion animals — including hogs, sheep, cattle, chickens, ducks, lambs, and turkey — were killed and used for food in the United States last year (2015).
• People in the U.S. kill over 100 million animals for laboratory experiments every year, according to PETA .
• More than 40 million animals are killed for fur worldwide every year. About 30 million animals are raised and killed on fur farms, and nearly 10 million wild animals are hunted and killed for the same reasons — for their valuable fur.
• According to a report by In Defense of Animals , hunters kill more than 200 million animals in the United States yearly.
• The Humane Society of the United States notes that a huge number of cats and dogs — between 3 and 4 million each year — are killed in the country’s animal shelters. Sadly, this number does not include dogs or cats killed in animal cruelty cases.
• According to the ASPCA , about 7.6 million companion animals enter animal shelters in the United States yearly. Of this number, 3.9 Mil of dogs, and 3.4 Mil of cats.
• About 2.7 million animals are euthanized in shelters every year (1.4 million cats and 1.2 million dogs).
• About 2.7 million shelter animals are adopted every year (1.3 million cats and 1.4 million dogs).
• In total, there are approximately 70-80 million dogs and 74-96 million cats living as pets in the United States.
• It’s impossible to determine the exact number of stray cats and dogs living in the United States, but the number of cats is estimated to be up to 70 million.
• Many stray cats and dogs were once family pets — but they were not kept securely indoors or provided with proper identification.

Each essay on animals rights makes humanity closer to a better and more civilized world. Please share any thoughts and experience in creating such texts in the comments below. And if you would like to hear how your essay would sound in someone’s mind, use our Text-To-Speech tool .

• Why Animal Rights? | PETA
• Animal Rights – Encyclopedia Britannica
• Animal ethics: Animal rights – BBC
• Animal Health and Welfare – National Agricultural Library
• The Top 10 Animal Rights Issues – Treehugger
• Animal welfare – European Commission

Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

Film analysis: example, format, and outline + topics & prompts.

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• v.8(6); 2007 Jun

Animal rights, human wrongs? Introduction to the Talking Point on the use of animals in scientific research

Frank gannon.

1 Frank Gannon is the Senior Editor of EMBO reports and senior scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany [email protected]

The balance between the rights of animals and their use in biomedical research is a delicate issue with huge societal implications. The debate over whether and how scientists should use animal models has been inflammatory, and the opposing viewpoints are difficult to reconcile. Many animal-rights activists call for nothing less than the total abolition of all research involving animals. Conversely, many scientists insist that some experiments require the use of animals and want to minimize regulation, arguing that it would impede their research. Most scientists, however, try to defend the well-established and generally beneficial practice of selective experimentation on animals, but struggle to do so on an intellectual basis. Somehow, society must find the middle ground—avoiding the cruel and unnecessary abuse of animals in research while accepting and allowing their use if it benefits society.

In any debate, one should first know the facts and arguments from each side before making an educated judgement. In the Talking Point in this issue of EMBO reports , Bernard Rollin provides ethical arguments against animal experimentation ( Rollin, 2007 ). Rather than simply demanding adequate regulations to ensure animals are well treated and do not suffer unnecessary and avoidable pain, Rollin questions the assumption that humans have an automatic right to make decisions for other animals. In his expansive and stimulating article, he concludes that there is no logical basis for the way in which we treat animals in research; in fact, we would not tolerate such treatment if the animals were Homo sapiens ; therefore, we cannot tolerate such treatment for other sentient creatures that, like us, are able to experience and suffer pain.

Practicing scientists will be comforted by the views of Simon Festing and Robin Wilkinson from the Research Defence Society in London, UK, who emphasize the extent to which legislation already limits the use, and ensures the welfare, of animals used in research ( Festing & Wilkinson, 2007 ). With a particular focus on the UK, they highlight how public opinion and legislation have worked together to control invasive research on animals within a legal and ethical framework, despite objections from the scientific community to the additional bureaucracy and costs that such laws engender. It is ironic then, that the UK is also where militant opponents of animal research have committed the most attacks against scientists and research institutes.

Turning to the wider picture, the European Commission is now rewriting its 1986 Directive on the protection of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes. The Commission intends to reiterate its emphasis on the 3Rs—replacement, reduction and refinement—as a way to reduce the number of animals used in biomedical research ( Matthiessen et al , 2003 ). However, the recent passage of the REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) directive, which calls for the additional testing of tens of thousands of chemicals to determine if they pose a danger to humans and/or the environment, inevitably means bad news for laboratory animals. According to the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the implementation of REACH will involve the killing of up to 45 million laboratory animals over the next 15 years to satisfy the required safety tests ( Hofer et al , 2004 ).

Although optimists might think that cell-based tests and methods could replace many of the standard safety and toxicity tests for chemicals or medicines, regulatory bodies—such as the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products—are not in a rush to accept them. After all, their task is to protect society from the devastating side effects of new drugs and other compounds, so any replacement test must be at least as reliable and safe as existing animal-based tests.

There are also good scientific reasons to retain the use of animal-based tests. Most scientists who work with cell lines know that they are full of chromosomal anomalies; even cells from the same line in two laboratories are not necessarily biologically identical. Cell-based tests also have other limitations: they assume that the cell type in which side effects manifest is known; that there are no interactions between different cell types that are found in many tissues; and that culture conditions adequately mimic the whole organism. Even if cell-based tests could replace animal-based tests, there are still no alternative methods available to test for teratogenicity or endocrine-disrupting activity, which require animal-based tests over several generations. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that cell and tissue cultures can sufficiently replace animals in the short term.

In the absence of safe alternatives to replace the animals used in research, the emphasis shifts toward reduction and refinement. However, this implicitly accepts the need to use animals in the first place, which is the point that Rollin challenges. Following his arguments, it is easy to see how anti-vivisectionists question whether humans have the right to decide how to use animals in what is generally thought to be the common interest. Similarly, it is easy to understand why researchers and society pass over these difficult questions, believing that the end justifies the means.

In my view, the most important point in this debate is the cost–benefit analysis used to justify certain types of research while prohibiting others. Society at large already relies on this: it accepts the use of animals in biomedical research but does not tolerate their use in cosmetics testing. This is a pragmatic distinction based on weighing the benefits to society—such as drug safety—against the costs to animals: pain, suffering and death.

In some cases, the benefits seem to outweigh the costs. If a cure for cancer was found, or a vaccine against malaria developed, the treatments would have to be tested on animals—for toxicity, unexpected side effects and efficacy—before being administered to millions of people. Here, the benefit to society might be obvious, and the use of animals morally justifiable. In other cases, the costs seem too high to justify the benefits. In experiments that could and should be done with cell lines, using higher animals as ‘laboratory consumables' is ill-conceived and expensive. Such unnecessary use of laboratory animals was widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, but thankfully is no longer officially tolerated.

Between these extremes, however, is a huge area in which the balance of costs and benefits is more difficult to achieve. Understanding ourselves and the world in which we live is not merely an intellectual exercise—it defines us as humans. To gain this knowledge relies on experiments, some of which require the use of animals—for example, generating transgenic mice to understand the function of a gene. These might reveal crucial information for tackling a disease, but in general it is hard to justify every such experiment with potential benefits for human health. Consequently, it is not possible to determine a priori whether an experiment is morally justified if its outcome merely advances understanding rather than producing a cure.

In my view, we should adopt a pragmatic attitude. An experiment that uses animals would be justifiable if it is done in such a way that causes minimal pain to the animals involved and if all possible alternative methods have been explored. When scientists take the lives of animals into their hands, they have a particular duty to avoid unnecessarily cruel treatment—not only during experiments but also in the way the animals are kept and handled. In this regard, a legally binding regulatory framework that reflects ethical considerations is not necessarily an undue intrusion on the freedom of research: it provides scientists with a good guide of what is socially permissible, and instills a greater awareness that animals are sentient beings, which are able to suffer and experience pain as much as humans do. If it strikes the right balance, such a framework might do more to reduce the number of animals used in research than any attacks on scientists and scientific institutions. To guide lawmakers in drafting regulations that both address valid criticism and enable valuable research, scientists and society must continue this debate to define what is needed and what is necessary.

• Festing S, Wilkinson R (2007) The ethics of animal research . EMBO Rep 8 : 526–530 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hofer T, Gerner I, Gundert-Remy U, Liebsch M, Schulte A, Spielmann H, Vogel R, Wettig K (2004) Animal testing and alternative approaches for the human health risk assessment under the proposed new European chemicals regulation . Arch Toxicol 78 : 549–564 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Matthiessen L, Lucaroni B, Sachez E (2003) Towards responsible animal research . EMBO Rep 4 : 104–107 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rollin BE (2007) Animal research: a moral science . EMBO Rep 8 : 521–525 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

51 Animal Welfare Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best animal welfare topic ideas & essay examples, 📝 most interesting animal welfare topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about animal welfare.

• Animal Welfare vs. Rights: Compare and Contrast One can state that the term animal rights refers to the privileges that animals should enjoy. While comparing animal rights and welfare, one also has to consider the fact that animals cannot have the same […]
• The Animal Rights and Welfare Debates The traditional attitude towards animals was based on the assertion that animals have no rights, and therefore it is not the subject of moral concerns. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Animal Sentience: Impact on Animal Welfare Movement The difficulty is that it is unknown how sentience arises from the brain cells, how to study it and what to look for. Fear of anthropomorphism is a second reason why it is difficult to […]
• Biotechnology and Animal Welfare: How Genetically Modified Chicken Serves the Demand in Fast Food Chains Beef was the most often used meat for the restaurants due to its containing in burgers, however, in 2020, the tendency started to move in the direction of chicken consumption.
• Holistic View Over Animal Welfare in the Health System It is paramount to note that the management of the health systems needs to focus on an integrated approach to the management of these animals to have healthy and useful animals.
• Consumer Attitudes Towards Animal Welfare Emerging challenges experiencing in different parts of the world have managed to transform people’s attitudes and perceptions about domesticated animals and the use of the products they give.
• Canadian Animal Welfare and Role in the Charity Canada’s government and the justice system must oversee the welfare of pets, livestock, and performance animals equally to ensure an ethical approach to animal rights protection.
• Animal Experimentation: The Animal Welfare Act
• Activists and Animal Welfare: Quality Verifications in the Canadian Pork Sector
• Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Comparative Analysis
• Overview of Animal Welfare Assurance Programs
• Animals and the Environment: Animal Welfare
• Assessing Consumer and Producer Preferences for Animal Welfare
• Animal Testing and Changing the Animal Welfare Act
• Behavioral Enrichment and Monitoring for Animal Welfare
• Animal Welfare and Conservation: An Essential Connection
• Brand Information Mitigating Negative Shocks on Animal Welfare
• Animal Welfare and Economic Aspects of Using Nurse Sows in Swedish Pig Production
• Citizens, Consumers, and Farm Animal Welfare: A Meta-Analysis of Willingness-To-Pay Studies
• Animal Welfare and Economic Optimisation of Farrowing Systems
• Consumer Attitudes Toward Farm-Animal Welfare: The Case of Laying Hens
• Animal Welfare and Human Ethics: A Personality Study
• Consumer Preference for Eggs From Enhanced Animal Welfare Production System
• Animal Welfare and Eggs – Cheap Talk or Money on the Counter
• Consumer Preferences for Animal Welfare Attributes: Case of Gestation Crates
• Animal Welfare and Livestock Supply Chain Sustainability Under the COVID-19 Outbreak
• Demand for Farm Animal Welfare and Producer Implications
• Animal Welfare and Social Decisions: Is It Time to Take Bentham Seriously
• Economic and Social Impacts of COVID-19 on Animal Welfare and Dairy Husbandry
• Animal Welfare and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
• Economic, Environmental, and Animal Welfare Performance on Livestock Farms
• Animal Welfare: Banning Wild Animals From Circuses
• Improving Animal Welfare Through Genetic Selection
• Animal Welfare Campaign Should Be Banned
• The Science and Practice of Captive Animal Welfare
• Animal Welfare Payments and Veterinary and Insemination Costs for Dairy Cows
• European Agricultural Policy and Farm Animal Welfare
• Farm Animal Welfare: Crisis or Opportunity for Agriculture
• “Animal Welfare” Practices Along the Food Chain
• Evaluating Animal Welfare With Choice Experiments: Application to Swedish Pig Production
• Factors Affecting Broiler Livability: Implications for Animal Welfare and Food Policy
• Farm Animal Welfare, Consumer Willingness to Pay, and Trust
• High Animal Welfare Standards in the EU and International Trade
• Industrial Farm Animal Welfare in the United States
• Into the Void: International Law and the Protection of Animal Welfare
• Market and Policy-Oriented Incentives to Provide Animal Welfare
• Consumer Benefits of Improving Farm Animal Welfare to Inform Welfare Labelling
• Monocropping and Animal Welfare in Sustainable Agriculture
• Organic- And Animal Welfare-Labelled Eggs: Competing for the Same Consumers
• Public Policy for Animal Welfare in India
• Reconsidering the Political Economy of Farm Animal Welfare
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Animal Sentience: Acknowledging Consciousness in the Fight for Rights

This essay about animal sentience explores the profound ethical implications of acknowledging consciousness in non-human beings. It into the evolving landscape of scientific understanding, highlighting studies revealing animals’ advanced cognitive capacities beyond instinctual reactions. The once-prevailing notion of animals as automatons is dismantled, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the rich tapestry of their experiences. The text advocates for a paradigm shift in ethical considerations, challenging anthropocentrism and calling for a reevaluation of our treatment of animals. It discusses the moral imperative arising from the exploitation of animals in various industries and emphasizes the growing momentum for legal frameworks safeguarding animal rights. The essay concludes by highlighting the interconnectedness of environmental and ethical considerations, portraying the fight for animal rights as a collective endeavor towards a more harmonious coexistence.

How it works

In the vast tapestry of life that adorns our planet, one thread stands out in its intricacy and depth – the question of animal sentience. As humans, we have long prided ourselves on our intelligence and self-awareness, but in the quest for understanding the minds of other creatures, we unearth a profound ethical dilemma. It is a journey that beckons us to acknowledge the consciousness that resides within the eyes of the myriad beings we share our world with.

The scientific community, once hesitant to delve into the realms of animal cognition, is now witnessing an evolution of thought.

Rigorous studies reveal that animals possess a level of sentience that extends beyond mere instinctual reactions. From elephants displaying mourning rituals for their deceased kin to the complex problem-solving skills exhibited by octopuses, the evidence is compelling. The debate on animal consciousness is no longer confined to the realm of philosophy; it has firmly rooted itself in the empirical landscape.

Acknowledging animal sentience demands a paradigm shift in our ethical considerations. The once-prevailing notion that animals are mere automatons, devoid of emotions and self-awareness, has crumbled in the face of mounting evidence. It is not just a matter of biological processes; it is an acknowledgment of the rich tapestry of experiences that shape the consciousness of animals.

The recognition of animal sentience has profound implications for the way we perceive and treat our fellow inhabitants on Earth. As we unravel the mysteries of the animal mind, we are compelled to reassess our ethical obligations. The fight for animal rights transcends the realm of anthropocentrism, challenging us to broaden our moral compass.

In our pursuit of progress and prosperity, we have often overlooked the silent suffering of the beings we share our ecosystems with. Factory farms, laboratories, and entertainment industries have exploited animals for economic gain, often at the expense of their well-being. But as the curtain lifts on the cognitive capacities of animals, a moral imperative emerges – the recognition that sentient beings are entitled to a life free from unnecessary suffering.

The burgeoning field of animal welfare science amplifies the call for change. Researchers and advocates tirelessly work to bridge the gap between scientific understanding and societal attitudes. It is a call to arms, urging us to reconsider our treatment of animals not merely as resources or commodities but as sentient individuals deserving of compassion and respect.

The push for legal frameworks that safeguard animal rights gains momentum as societies grapple with the implications of sentience. It is a testament to our evolving moral consciousness that legislative efforts are underway to protect animals from cruelty and exploitation. The acknowledgment of animal sentience lays the foundation for a more just coexistence, challenging us to extend our circle of empathy beyond the boundaries of our own species.

In the realm of conservation, recognizing animal sentience serves as a catalyst for more holistic approaches. Biodiversity is not merely a collection of species but a complex interplay of sentient beings, each contributing to the delicate balance of ecosystems. Conservation efforts must transcend traditional boundaries, embracing a paradigm that values the intrinsic worth of all living beings.

As we navigate the intricate web of animal sentience, the intersectionality of environmental and ethical considerations becomes apparent. The fight for animal rights intertwines with the broader struggle for environmental sustainability and social justice. It is a collective endeavor that transcends individual species, highlighting the interconnectedness of all life on Earth.

In conclusion, acknowledging animal sentience is not just a scientific revelation; it is a moral imperative. It beckons us to redefine our relationship with the diverse array of beings that share our planet. The fight for animal rights is an invitation to weave a compassionate narrative into the fabric of our societies, one that recognizes the consciousness that pulses through every living being. In embracing this paradigm shift, we embark on a journey towards a more harmonious coexistence, where the rights of all sentient beings are not only acknowledged but fiercely protected.

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Animal Sentience: Acknowledging Consciousness in the Fight for Rights. (2024, Mar 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/animal-sentience-acknowledging-consciousness-in-the-fight-for-rights/

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Animal Rights Law: Topics--Legal Standing

• Statutes & Case Law
• Topics--Factory Farming
• Topics--Legal Standing
• International and Foreign Animal Law
• Nonhuman Rights Project Lawsuits
• Nonhuman Rights Project Blog
• Tilikum v. Sea World

• Articles on Legal Standing Law review articles on legal standing for animals from the Animal Legal & Historical Center at MSU College of Law.

• Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner? Article about Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project by Charles Siebert, N.Y. Times Mag., Apr. 23, 2014.
• Standing for Animals Cass L. Sunstein. University of Chicago Law School, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 06, Nov. 1999.

Many of the books on animal rights  discuss legal rights and standing.

• Blackfish by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, director Call Number: SF408.6.K54 B53 2013 DVD (Law in Film Collection) Publication Date: 2013 A discussion on the keeping of intelligent creatures in captivity. Employs the story of Tilikum, the notorious performing whale who, unlike orcas in the wild, has taken the lives of several people while in captivity

On Dec. 2, 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of Tommy the chimpanzee, who is held captive in a cage in Gloversville, NY. Two more lawsuits were followed in the days after, one on behalf of Kiko, who lives in a private home in Niagra Falls, and another on behalf of Hercules and Leo, who are used for research at SUNY Stony Brook. The Nonhuman Rights Project sought relief for the chimpanzees via the writ of habeas corpus, which requires the captors of the chimpanzees to show cause as to why they have the right to hold the chimpanzees captive. The day after the petition in Tommy's case was filed, an hour-long hearing was held in Fulton County Supreme Court. At the end of the hearing, the habeas petition was denied. A year later, on appeal, the Third Department ruled that Tommy "is not a 'person' entitled to the rights and protections afforded by the writ of habeas corpus . . . unlike human beings, chimpanzees can't bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities, or be held legally accountable for their actions." In September of 2015, the Court of Appeals denied a motion for leave to appeal in Tommy and Kiko's cases. December 4, 2016, a new petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Tommy in New York County Supreme Court, but the Judge dismissed the action claiming that the Third Department had already decided the legality of Tommy's detention. After filing an appeal with the First Judicial Department, the court ruled in June 2017 that the NhRP cannot file a second writ of habeas corpus for Tommy and Kiko. In May 2018, the Court of Appeals again denied leave to appeal in the case. The NhRP continues to try and work to free Tommy and Kiko.

In 2017, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a habeas petition on behalf of Beulah, Minnie, and Karen, all elephants born in the wild and imported into the U.S. for use in circuses, fairs, and zoos. The petition was filed in November in Litchfield County Connecticut Superior Court. The petition was dismissed in December. In January a motion was filed to reargue the case, but this was denied in February. The court also refused to allow amendment of the original petition. NhRP filed a notice of appeal for the denial of the original petition and the motion for reargument in March. In April, the NhRP filed a motion for articulation with the Connecticut Appellate Court seeking explanation for the legal and factual basis behind the February and December decisions. Only one of the 16 points asked for articulation is granted. Most recently, the NhRP filed a second petition in Tolland County claiming the experience of that court in habeas petitions.

In November 2018, New York Supreme Court Justice issued the world's first habeas corpus order on behalf of Happy the elephant. In February 2020, although the Habeas relief was denied in Happy's case, the decision noted that arguments from the NhRP to transfer Happy from her solitary area at the Bronx Zoo to an elephant sanctuary were persuasive and that Happy was an intelligent autonomous being who might be entitled to liberty. 

• Appellate Court Hearing in Tommy Case Oral argument heard on October 8, 2014, in the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division. Brief filed by Nonhuman Rights Project.
• Lawsuit Filed Today on Behalf of Chimpanzee Seeking Legal Personhood Article by Michael Mountain, posted Dec. 2, 2013.
• Rights Group Is Seeking Status of ‘Legal Person’ for Captive Chimpanzee NY Times articles, Dec. 2, 2013.
• Concurring Opinion Concurring Opinion by Judge Fahey in denial of leave to appeal with the Court of appeals in 2018.
• Annotated First Department Ruling Ruling by the First Department in the Tommy case annotated by the Nonhuman Rights Project.
• Appellate Brief Appellate brief filed by NhRP in the First Department.
• Second Habeas Petition Petition filed in 2015.
• Opinion of the Third Department
• Appellate Brief Filed in Third Department.
• First Petition in Elephants Case First petition for writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Beulah, Karne, and Minnie.
• Memorandum of Law to Support Motion to Reargue Memo filed in January 2018.
• Decision on motion to reargue Decision from February 2018.
• Motion for Articulation Filed in April 2018.
• Second Habeas Petition in Elephants Case Second habeas corpus petition filed on behalf of Beulah, Minnie, and Karen.
• Decision in Happy's Habeas Petition Decision issued February 19, 2020.
• Court of Appeals Decision on Happy's Habeas Petition Issued June 14, 2022.

Court documents in the case of  Tilikum  v. Sea World Parks & Entertainment, 3: 11-cv-02476-JM-WMC , filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California (San Diego) on Oct. 25, 2011. This case was filed by  PETA  (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) on behalf of five  orcas  forced to perform at Sea World. The complaint in this case of first impression seeks "a declaration that they [the  orcas ] are held by the Defendants in violation of Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. Plaintiffs were forcibly taken from their families and natural habitats, are held captive at SeaWorld San Diego and SeaWorld Orlando, denied everything that is natural to them, subjected to artificial insemination or sperm  collection to breed performers for Defendants’ shows, and forced to perform, all for Defendants’ profit. As  such,  plaintiffs are held in slavery and involuntary servitude. . . . Plaintiffs also seek an injunction freeing them from Defendants’ bondage and placing them in a habitat suited to their individual needs and best interests."

• Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief Filed Oct. 25, 2011
• Memorandum of Amicus Curiae Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, Inc. Memorandum filed Jan. 24, 2012.
• Motion of Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, Inc. for Leave to Appear as Amicus Curiae Motion filed Jan. 24, 2012.
• Order Granting in Part and Denying in Part Application for Leave to Appear as Amicus Curiae Order granted Jan 24, 2012.
• Order Granting Motion to Dismiss Judge Miller's order granting defendants' motion to dismiss issued Feb. 8, 2012.
• A Whale of a Business Interviews and other material relating to PBS documentary on the business behind captive marine animals.
• << Previous: Topics--Factory Farming
• Next: International and Foreign Animal Law >>
• Last Updated: Nov 3, 2023 11:40 AM
• URL: https://libraryguides.law.pace.edu/animals

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Argumentative essay topics about animals, rachel r.n..

• September 10, 2022
• Essay Topics and Ideas

Looking for a good argumentative essay topic about animals? You’re in luck! We’ve put together a list of 20 topics that will get you started.

Argumentative essay topics about animals can be divided into three categories: animal rights, animal welfare, and animal testing. Each one of these topics could be argued from multiple perspectives.

Animal rights is the belief that animals should have the same basic rights as humans, including the right to life and liberty. Animal welfare is the view that animals should be treated humanely and with compassion, and that their well-being should be given consideration. Animal testing is the use of animals in scientific experiments to further our understanding of health and disease.

All three of these topics are controversial , which makes them perfect for an argumentative essay. So without further ado, here are 20 argumentative essay topics about animals!

What You'll Learn

Thirty Argumentative Essay Topics about Animals

1. Zoos are inhumane and should be banned. 2. Animal testing is cruel and should be outlawed. 3. Pets should not be allowed in public places. 4. Service animals should be exempt from laws banning animals in public places. 5. Hunter education should be mandatory for all hunters. 6. Trapping should be banned because it’s inhumane. 7. Fur coats should be banned because of the cruelty involved in obtaining the fur. 8. The exotic animal trade should be banned because it’s cruel and often results in the animal’s death. 9. Animal hoarders should be required to get help for their mental health issues and have their animals seized. 10. It should be illegal to breed dogs for physical characteristics that cause them health problems.

11. Puppy mills should be outlawed because of the inhumane conditions the animals are kept in. 12. Animal fighting should be banned because it’s cruel and often results in the animal’s death. 13. The use of animals in entertainment should be banned because it’s cruel. 14. Factory farming should be banned because of the inhumane conditions the animals are kept in. 15. Animals should not be kept in zoos because it’s cruel and they’re often not able to live a natural life. 16. It should be illegal to hunt animals for sport because it’s cruel and often results in the animal’s death. 17. The use of animals for research should be banned because it’s cruel and often results in the animal’s death. 18. It should be illegal to buy or sell ivory because it contributes to the poaching of elephants. 19. It should be illegal to buy or sell endangered animal parts because it contributes to the decline of those species. 20. The ownership of exotic animals should be banned because it’s cruel and often results in the animal’s death

Twenty Argumentative Essay Topics on Animals to Write About

1. Is it morally wrong to keep animals in captivity? 2. Should the hunting of animals be banned? 3. Is it cruel to declaw cats? 4. Should there be a ban on bullfighting? 5. How does the animal welfare movement impact the lives of animals? 6. Is it morally wrong to eat meat? 7. Should more be done to protect endangered species? 8. What is the impact of zoos on animals? 9. How do humans benefit from keeping animals in zoos? 10. Are factory farms cruel to animals? 11. What is the impact of animal testing on human health? 12. Should the use of fur be banned? 13. What are the benefits of having a pet? 14. How does animal agriculture impact the environment? 15. What is the relationship between humans and animals? 16. How does our treatment of animals reflect our values as a society? 17. Do we have a responsibility to care for all animals, or just those that are cute and cuddly? 18. How can we make sure that all animals are treated humanely? 19. What are some ways that people mist

Animal topics for research papers

There are many different animal topics that you can choose to write about for your research paper. Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Animal testing: Is it necessary? 2. The pros and cons of zoos 3. Are exotic animals good or bad pets? 4. The link between animal abuse and domestic violence 5. How do we define “humane” treatment of animals? 6. Should there be more regulations on the breeding of animals? 7. The impact of climate change on wildlife 8. How humans can coexist with dangerous animals 9. The ethical debate surrounding the consumption of animal products 10. Are there alternatives to using animals for research purposes?

Animal topics for essay

There are many different animal topics that you can choose to write about for your essay . Here are some ideas to get you started:

-The pros and cons of keeping animals in captivity -The ethical considerations of animal testing -The impact of human activity on endangered species -The complex social hierarchies of animal societies -The fascinating world of animal communication -The incredible adaptability of animals to changing environments-The unique and important role of animals in ecosystem

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162 Best Animal Research Topics To Nail Your Paper In 2023

The world is filled with living things. There are some animals that we know about, some that we will discover, and there are many that we might never know about. All our knowledge about animals is mostly dependant on researchers. Well, we are rooting for you to be the next great researcher. Be it zoology, veterinary, or live wild stock, your study needs a research topic. If you’re looking for the best animal research topics to nail this year, we’re here with your help.

Table of Contents

Best Animal Research Topics

We have 162 Animal Research Topics that will help you get the best grades this year.

Physiology of Animals Research Topics

• Description of the knowledge required to work in animal physiology
• Study of animal species with different specialties in the sciences of nature and life
• Life sciences and socioeconomic impacts
• Neurulation appendages birds
• Exercises on gastrulation and neurulation
• Gastrulation amphibians birds
• Fertilization segmentation in the sea species
• Gametogenesis: A Detailed Introduction
• Study of Delimitation: bird appendages
• Particularities of the developmental biology of certain species
• Technical-commercial animal physiology
• Terrestrial and marine ecosystems
• Animal biology and forensic science: Is there a connection?
• Animal Biology Biotechnology and molecules of interest regarding food and industry
• The interest in biology in the diagnosis of animal and plant diseases
• Toxicology and environmental health concerns in animal physiology
• Animal and plant production
• Fundamentals of animal physiology research and analysis
• Behavior and evolution Genetics of behavior in animals
• Adaptation and evolution of behavior
• Comparative studies of general ecology, zoology, and animal physiology
• Study of animals about the conditions prevailing in their immediate environment
• Endocrine and neuroendocrine systems in animals
• Studying the nervous systems in birds
• Genitals and reproductive physiology of birds
• Understanding of the anatomical and functional particularities of invertebrates
• Biology and physiology of invertebrates
• Reconstruction of phylogenetic trees
• Morpho-anatomical arguments and the importance of fossils
• Argued classification of animals
• Study of the evolution of living organisms by making updates on recent advances in Animalia
• Phylogeny and animal evolution
• Principles of echolocation in the bats
• Possible evolution of the increase in complexity of the primitive nervous system
• The nervous system of the insect
• Circulation in animal physiology
• Animals without a differentiated circulatory system
• Water and mineral balance in animals
• Thermoregulation in animals
• Musculoskeletal system in animals
• Study of animal blood
• Biological rhythms of animals
• Skin and teguments of mammals
• Animal nutrition and metabolism
• Hormones and endocrine system of animals
• Emerging organic pollutants
• Mechanisms of toxicity in animals
• Animal physiology in animals from temperate regions
• Genetic correlations between animal species
• Animal communities, forest ecology, and forest birds
• Wildlife-habitat modeling

Looking for research topics in general? Read 402  General Research Paper Topics

Animal Research Topics For Student

• Impact of the agricultural raw materials crisis on the marketing of livestock feed
• Analysis of the competitiveness of poultry produced in the USA
• Animal cruelty in USA and European countries
• Seroprevalence of neosporosis in cattle herds
• The peri-urban dairy sector
• Effect of the liberalization of the veterinary profession on the vaccination coverage of livestock
• Why do people kill animals? The psyche behind animal cruelty
• Evaluation of the growth performance of three sheep breeds
• Study on the protection of terrestrial ecosystems
• Ecology of African dung beetles
• Effects of road infrastructure on wildlife in developing countries
• Analysis of the consequences of climate change related to pastoral livestock
• Strategies for management in the animal feed sector
• The feeding behavior of mosquitoes
• Bee learning and memory
• Immediate response to the animal cruelty
• Study of mass migration of land birds over the ocean
• A study of crocodile evolution
• The cockroach escape system
• The resistance of cockroaches against radiation: Myth or fact?
• Temperature regulation in the honey bee swarm
• Irresponsible dog breeding can often lead to an excess of stray dogs and animal cruelty
• Reliable communication signals in birds

Also see:  How to Write an 8 Page Research Paper ?

Animal Research Topics For University

• Color patterns of moths and moths
• Mimicry in the sexual signals of fireflies
• Ecophysiology of the garter snake
• Memory, dreams regarding cat neurology
• Spatiotemporal variation in the composition of animal communities
• Detection of prey in the sand scorpion
• Internal rhythms in bird migration
• Genealogy: Giant Panda
• Animal dissection: Severe type of animal cruelty and a huge blow to animal rights
• Cuckoo coevolution and patterns
• Use of plant extracts from Amazonian plants for the design of integrated pest management
• Research on flying field bug
• The usefulness of mosquitoes in biological control serves to isolate viruses
• Habitat use by the Mediterranean Ant
• Genetic structure of the  African golden wolf  based on its habitat
• Birds body odor on their interaction with mosquitoes and parasites
• The role of ecology in the evolution of coloration in owls
• The invasion of the red swamp crayfish
• Molecular taxonomy and biogeography of caprellids
• Bats of Mexico and United States
• What can animal rights NGOs do in case of animal cruelty during animal testing initiatives?

Or you can try 297 High School Research Paper Topics to Top The Class

Controversial Animal Research Topics

• Is it okay to adopt an animal for experimentation?
• The authorization procedures on animals for scientific experiments
• The objective of total elimination of animal testing
• Are there concrete examples of successful scientific advances resulting from animal experimentation?
• Animal rights for exotic animals: Protection of forests and wildlife
• How can animal rights help the endangered animals
• Animal experimentations are a type of animal cruelty: A detailed analysis
• Animal testing: encouraging the use of alternative methods
• Use of animals for the evaluation of chemical substances
• Holding seminars on the protection of animals
• Measures to take against animal cruelty
• Scientific research on marine life
• Scientific experiments on animals for medical research
• Experimentation on great apes
• Toxicological tests and other safety studies on chemical substances
• Why isn’t research done directly on humans rather than animals?
• Are animals necessary to approve new drugs and new medical technologies?
• Are the results of animal experiments transferable to humans?
• Humans are not animals, which is why animal research is not effective
• What medical advances have been made possible by animal testing?
• Animals never leave laboratories alive
• Scientific interest does not motivate the use of animal research
• Animal research is torture 
• How can a layperson work against the animal testing?

Every crime is a controversy too, right? Here are some juicy  Criminal Justice Research Paper Topics  as well.

Animal Research Topics: Animal Rights

• Growing awareness of the animal suffering generated by these experiments
• What are the alternatives to animal testing?
• Who takes care of animal welfare?
• Major global organizations working for animal rights
• Animal rights in developing countries
• International animal rights standards to work against animal cruelty
• Animal cruelty in developing countries
• What can a layperson do when seeing animal cruelty
• Role of society in the prevention of animal cruelty
• Animal welfare and animal rights: measures taken against animal cruelty in developing countries
• Animal cruelty in the name of science
• How can we raise a better, empathetic and warm-hearted children to put a stop to animal cruelty
• Ethical animal testing methods with safety
• Are efforts being made to reduce the number of animals used?
• The welfare of donkeys and their socioeconomic roles in the subcontinent
• Animal cruelty and superstitious conceptions of dogs, cats, and donkeys in subcontinent
• Efforts made by international organizations against the tragedy of animal cruelty
• International organizations working for animal welfare
• Animal abuse: What are the immediate measures to take when we see animal cruelty
• Efforts to stop animal abuse in South Asian Countries
• Animal abuse in the name of biomedical research

Talking about social causes, let’s have a look at social work topics too: 206  Social Work Research Topics

Interesting Animal Research Topics

• The urbanization process and its effect on the dispersal of birds:
• Patterns of diversification in Neotropical amphibians
• Interactions between non-native parrot species
• Impact of landscape anthropization dynamics and wild birds’ health
• Habitat-driven diversification in small mammals
• Seasonal fluctuations and life cycles of amphipods
• Animal cruelty in African countries
• Evolution of the environmental niche of amphibians
• Biological studies on Louisiana crawfish
• Biological studies on Pink bollworm
• Biological studies on snails
• Biological studies on Bush Crickets
• Biological studies on Mountain Gorillas
• Biological studies on piranha
• Consequences of mosquito feeding
• Birds as bioindicators of environmental health
• Biological studies on victoria crowned pigeon
• Biological studies on black rhinoceros
• Biological studies on European spider
• Biological studies on dumbo octopus
• Biological studies on markhor
• Study of genetic and demographic variation in amphibian populations
• Ecology and population dynamics of the blackberry turtle
• Small-scale population differentiation in ecological and evolutionary mechanisms
• Challenges in vulture conservation

Also interesting: 232  Chemistry Research Topics  To Make Your Neurochemicals Dance

Submarine Animals Research Topics

• The physiology behind the luminous fish
• A study of Fish population dynamics
• Study of insects on the surface of the water
• Structure and function of schools of fish
• Physiological ecology of whales and dolphins
• Form and function in fish locomotion
• Why do whales and dolphins jump?
• Impact of Noise on Early Development and Hearing in Zebrafish
• Animal cruelty against marine life on the hand of fishermen

Read More:  Accounting Research Topics

Animal Biology Research Topics

• Systematic and zoogeographical study of the ocellated lizards
• Morphological study of neuro histogenesis in the diencephalon of the chick embryo
• Anatomical study of three species of Nudibranch
• The adaptive strategy of two species of lagomorphs
• The Black vulture: population, general biology, and interactions with other birds
• Ocellated lizards: their phylogeny and taxonomy
• Studies on the behavior of ocellated lizards in captivity
• Comparative studies of the egg-laying and egg-hatching methods of ocellated lizards
• Studies on the ecology and behavior of ocellated lizards
• The taxonomic and phylogenetic implications of ocellated lizards
• Research on the egg-laying and egg-hatching methods of ocellated lizards
• Studies on the ecology and behavior of ocellated lizards in their natural environment
• Comparative studies of the egg-laying and egg-hatching methods of ocellated lizards in different countries
• Studies on the ecology and behavior of ocellated lizards in their natural environment in the light of evolutionary and ecological insights

Animal research topics are not hard to find for you anymore. As you have already read a load of them. You can use any of them and ace your research paper, and you don’t even need to ask permission. If you are looking for a research paper writing service , be it animal research, medical research, or any sort of research, you can contact us 24/7.

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