“Life is as dear to mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.”
-Dalai Lama
Each year, approximately 920,000 dogs and cats are euthanized in shelters around the United States. To many people, this fact is highly disturbing. Dogs and cats are our companions and sources of immense happiness. However, many of the same people disturbed by the euthanasia of companion animals continue to participate in and support an agriculture industry that slaughtered an estimated 9.76 billion land animals in the United States in 2020.
It is easy to see that our culture gives more worth to certain species of animals than others. Nowhere is this more obvious than the law. Recently, laws have been enacted that provide greater protection to companion animals—such as dogs and cats—while agricultural animals are afforded little to no legal protection. For example, consider the fact that the egg industry routinely kills male chicks by suffocation, decapitation, or maceration. Yet, similarly cruel treatment has been found illegal when committed against companion animals and, of course, human animals.
Non-human animal activists are split in their approach to handling the problem of non-human animal exploitation. The main ideological divide is the difference between the non-human animal welfare approach (hereinafter “the welfare approach”) and the non-human animal rights approach (hereinafter “the rights approach”). The welfare approach generally allows for the exploitation of non-human animals for human uses but attempts to make the means of exploitation less “cruel.” On the other hand, the rights approach argues that non-human animals “have rights similar [to] or the same as humans.” Under the rights approach, non-human animals should never be exploited for human benefit. This Note defends the rights approach against its critics and begins the project of defining which rights should be afforded to non-human animals. Part II gives background information relating to the non-human animal rights and welfare movements. Part III defends the position that any difference in legal rights and protections afforded to sentient beings based on species membership alone is arbitrary and wrong. This Note does not argue for a particular normative framework for determining which rights ought to be afforded to different sentient beings, but it does argue in Part IV that no matter which framework is adopted, procedural due process is one of the rights that must be afforded to all sentient beings.