Question Earthority!

“Since I got interested in the question of what claims animals have on humans — their rights, if you will — I’ve suggested that it probably makes sense to consider animal rights and human obligations on a level well below that of the Kingdom. Apparently the Spanish are thinking similarly. While I find Ingrid Newkirk’s ‘a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy’ formulation absurd, I find the tacit or explicit Objectivist/Rothbardian/Evangelical (some, by no means all) counterpart, ‘a rat is a pig is a dog is a wrench,’ to be as obviously ridiculous. The duck and the gavage machine are not equivalent beings. Your moral system can sensibly consider a pet dog or a steer to be ‘property,’ but if you imagine them to be the same kind of ‘property’ as a car or an etch-a-sketch, your classifications are as vacuous as your betes (oops!) noires at the extreme end of the animal rights movement. ‘Property’ is a capacious term, and ‘property rights’ have always come in culturally inflected bundles.” (07/01/08)