Humans Have an Ethical Obligation to Animals

Articulating a Claim

Around the world, organizations have sprung up in protection of the ethical treatment of animals. Some of these groups believe in using violence to further their beliefs. At some point, those groups lost sight of the fact that we are the humans, while the animals are just animals. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal's (PETA) guided principal is "Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment." PETA further states that "More lives could be saved and suffering stopped by educating people on the importance of avoiding fat and cholesterol, the dangers of smoking, reducing alcohol and other drug consumption, exercising regularly, and cleaning up the environment than by all the animal tests in the world." The ethical treatment of animals is a very important issue, but we should not go to the extremes of having to become a vegetarian and actuality an accomplice in criminally blowing up research centers either. As human beings we do have an obligation to animal welfare and rudimentary ethical treatments of all animals.

PETA says animals should not be used for experiments of any category. Laboratories have developed cures for, and against diseases that previously destroyed millions of people around the world. Without exhausting animals as experiment subjects, the scientific community could under no circumstances have made those discoveries. Most experiments necessitate thousands and thousands of investigations before being permissible on a human. These experiments are performed on laboratory animals that are generally laboratory raised, or raised on specific research farms, and are not somebody's pet. Laboratory animals are kept sanitary, healthy, and are not subjected to any practice of abuse. It is miserable that certain tests within an experiment will come up with negative results, but the cure for cancer is worth it. Alex Pacheco, Director, PETA has several times quantified "Arson, property destruction, burglary and theft are 'acceptable crimes' when used for the animal cause" (Enemy). The use of these categories of aggressions is tantamount to terrorism which is described in the dictionary as violence or the threat of violence, especially bombing, kidnapping and assassination, carried out for political purposes. In this framework it can be comprehended that PETA is the extreme example that we do not want or need to follow. Laboratories are a necessity that each one of our loved ones has benefited from throughout our lives, and they will continue to benefit humanity in the future with innovative discoveries.

Another detail that PETA insists we should follow is to not consume meat from animals or to wear the fur or skins of animals. The authors, Alan Epstein and Yaron Brook co-authored a non-fiction book titled "The Evil of Animal Rights," in which they expressed their judgment that animal rights have reached an unbearable level of extreme. In the concluding paragraph, Epstein and Brook give a most powerful statement, "To attribute human rights to animals is to ignore the purpose and justifications of rights, which were designed to protect the interest of man. Animal 'rights', which demand man's destruction, are the antithesis of rights" (Epstein 605). If we were to gaze back in time, to when man clambered out of the primordial seas, we discover our ancestors, who were hunters and gatherers. As they learned to protect themselves from wild animals, they likewise learned to consume what they slayed and to use, in its entirety, all fragments of the deceased animal. What we currently refer to as clothes, originally, was skins and furs from animals that had been slain. Our forefathers actually only took, from the animal kingdom, the necessary items they required for survival. Conveying this history to the present day, we need to remember that to take animals for the purpose nourishment and clothing is respectable and unbiased, but to wantonly slaughter animals for no reason other than amusement or torture remains morally and ethically wrong. Hunting is also a necessary evil when it is used to regulate sick, diseased, or over crowded animal populations in a geographical region. Animal husbandry is fundamental to our very existence,