¹ The two most recent high profile cases are those of Barbaro, the decisive winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby, who shattered his leg in the Preakness and after months of extensive treatment was later “put down”, and Eight Belles, who suffered compound fractures in both her front legs in the 2008 Kentucky Derby after finishing second in the race. Her injuries were so severe she was immediately euthanized on the track.

The New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania Widener Hospital for Large Animals maintained a website which updated the condition of Barbaro daily. Although Barbaro could not be saved, his tragic case is an example of bringing good out of evil. The overwhelming sympathy for Barbaro and the publicity surrounding the efforts to save him resulted in the creation of a “Barbaro Fund” at the hospital which provides funding for treatment of animals whose owners would not be able to afford the necessary treatment to rehabilitate their animals and would otherwise have had to euthanize them.

The inhumane treatment of animals in factory farms (and especially pigs) is well-documented. See, for example, David DeGrazia's graphic description of the horrible life of a pig in a factory farm in his article “Meat Eating” in Susan Armstrong and Richard Botzler (ed.), Animal Ethics 2^nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 219. See also the film “Food, Inc.” Dairy farms are not immune to ethical critique either. Even if the milk cows on a dairy farm are treated well, the existence of dairy farms entails the issue of what to do with young male calves. The most common solution is to use them for veal. Since male calves, if not used for veal, would eventually become bulls, there are other “solutions”, like bullfighting or Toro jubilo, but such practices would be inconsiderable (rightly) in our culture.

² Aquinas, like Kant, considers our duties to animals to be indirect; so, for example, his view of the biblical injunction against cruelty to animals is that “this is… to remove man's thoughts from being cruel to other men, and lest through being cruel to animals one become cruel to human being.” Summa Contra Gentiles book III part II chapter CXII.

Andrew Linzey, although a strong supporter of animal rights, also holds a position which amounts to our duties to animals being merely indirect, for he holds that animal rights are grounded in what he calls “Theos-Rights.” As he expresses it, “When we speak of animal rights we conceptualize what is objectively owed to animals as a matter of justice by virtue of their Creator's right. Animals can be wronged because their creator can be wronged in his creation.” Christianity and the Rights of Animals (New York: Crossroads, 1987)Google Scholar.

³ Peter Singer argues for the equality of interests of animals, but eschews arguing for it on the basis of rights. It is not so much that he rejects rights, but thinks that it is putting the cart before the horse. See his Animal Liberation, updated edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), p. 8Google Scholar.

⁴ Elizabeth Anderson holds that there are basically three theoretical approaches in regard to animal ethics: animal welfare, grounded on sentience or suffering; animals rights, grounded on subjecthood; and environmentalism, grounded on life. She argues that “… while each perspective has identified a genuine ground of value, none has successfully generated a valid principle of action that does justice to all the values at stake. The plurality of values must be acknowledged” (279). This seems to me to be a sound principle. See her “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life”, in Sunstein, Cass R. and Nussbaum, Martha, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 277–298Google Scholar.

⁵ As will be evident later, I do not hold that there really are “marginal” humans; but the position that animals have a right to life is considerable only if some humans who nonetheless have a right to life are “marginalized”.

⁶ There are certain rights which are taken for granted as applying to human persons: e.g. the right to life and the right not to be treated as property. Gary L. Francione argues for the rights of animals being grounded in their right not to be treated as property. This has very wide applications in regard to our treatment of animals. See his “Animals—Property or Persons?” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, op. cit., pp. 108–142.

⁷ So, e.g., a moral theorist who thinks that there is no natural law according to which positive law must accord, that rights are established by a mere social contract and are the arbitrary creation of those who articulate, agree upon (and defend) certain claims which are then accorded the status of “rights”. Such a theorist could hold that we have in such a way established the right to life to apply to all humans but not to any other animals.

⁸ See Martha Nussbaum's notion of “animal dignity” (300) in “Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, op. cit., pp. 299–320.

⁹ Schudt, Karl, “Are Animal Rights Inimical to Human Dignity,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 2003; 77: 189–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Cf. Nussbaum's “animal dignity” and Elizabeth Anderson's adoption of that notion in Sunstein and Nussbaum, op. cit.

¹¹ Roger Scruton, in The Rights and Wrongs of Animals (www.demos.co.uk) takes fundamentally the same position.As he states:

It is in the nature of human beings that, in normal conditions, they become members of a moral community, governed by duty and protected by rights. Abnormality in this respect does not cancel membership. It merely compels us to adjust our response. Infants and imbeciles belong to the same kind as you or me: the kind whose normal instances are also moral beings. It is this that causes us to extend to them the shield that we consciously extend to each other and which is built collectively through our moral dialogue. (p. 43)

Of course, the exceptional cases of restricting rights is when the individual is “dangerous to oneself or others”, and in many cases, this is problematic.

¹² See Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, edited by Edward A. Wasserman and Thomas Zentall.

¹³ For an illuminating study of the universal and systematic feature analogical predication in natural languages, see Ross, James F., Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ In his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, John Rawls discusses the veil of ignorance on pp. 136–142. On p. 137, he gives a detailed list of the kinds of “particular facts” which the parties in the original position “do not know.” All the facts which he lists are of contingent properties of individuals.

¹⁵ Narveson, Jan, “Animal Rights Revisited,” pp. 45–60, and Donald VanDeVeer, “Interspecific Justice and Animal Slaughter,” pp. 147–164, in Ethics and Animals edited by Miller, & Williams, , Humana Press, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Rowlands, Mark, Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practices 2^nd Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Rowlands, p. 139.

¹⁸ Ibid. pp. 133–134.

¹⁹ Ibid. p. 134.

²⁰ Ibid. p. 135.

²¹ Ibid. p. 139.

²² Ibid. p. 149.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid. p. 143.

²⁵ Ibid. p. 148.

²⁶ Ibid. p. 149, Cf. p. 150. It seems to me that Rowlands’ position on the intuitive equality argument presumes an atheistic bias. His position is that if we are not responsible for being rational and it is just decided by “nature”, then rationality is a morally arbitrary and hence undeserved property. However Christians would not accept this position. Christians would agree that humans are not responsible for their own rationality; but would not argue that the property of rationality is not undeserved because it is not decided by mere blind nature but by a providential God.

²⁷ Ibid. p. 151.

²⁸ Ibid. p. 158.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid. p. 160.

³¹ Ibid. p. 165.

³² See http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070711132338AAjiH3s and http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AnimalVeterinary/GuidanceComplianceEnforcement/ComplianceEnforcement/BovineSpongiformEncephalopathy/ucm129596.pdf.

³³ McMahan, Jeff, “Our Fellow Creatures,” The Journal of Ethics (2005) 9: 353–380, pp. 359–361CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Mary Midgley, in Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), argues that humans are by nature bonded to other humans. This is not based on some other proposition as a premise, but it is just based on a natural emotional attachment which we have to other humans. There is no reason to think that this attachment is irrational and not an indication of a well-functioning human.

³⁵ In The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3, 3.2, McMahan considers the question of comembership in the human species as a special relation which distinguishes the rights of marginal humans from the rights of animals with similar capacities. He thinks that for comembership in the human species to ground the distinction “implies that the species relation is as significant morally, or nearly as significant, as the parental relation. That, however, is clearly false.” (p. 225) McMahan holds that “Our vague, intuitive commitment to a fundamental moral equality among all human beings—all members of the species Homo sapiens—has to be abandoned.” (233) Nonetheless, he thinks that it may still be morally required to treat severely retarded human beings differently from similarly endowed animals. This is because the persons who are closely personally related to the severely retarded are typically motivated by love and compassion to care for them, “(a)nd the rest of us are morally bound to respect these people's feelings and commitments.” Hence marginal humans have an “enhanced moral standing… by virtue of their being specially related to certain people.” (232) The problem with such a view, however, is that the enhanced moral standing is contingent upon there being people who care for them: if no others cared about them, it would seem that they would then not have the enhanced moral standing that entails the requisite treatment. Of course a theist would not face such a problem, because for all humans, there is another person (actually, three) who cares about them motivated by love and compassion, viz. God.

³⁶ For a realistic and sensitive consideration of the issues surrounding horseracing, see Linda Hanna, Barbaro, Smarty Jones, and Ruffian: The People's Horse (Moorestown: Middle Atlantic Press, 2008. Elizabeth Anderson, in op. cit. (287), points out that the rights to provision for domesticated animals is contingent upon a relation of reciprocity, the reciprocity being based upon the discipline of the animal. Of course, the discipline needs to be formed by the human individuals responsible for the animal, and hence this imposes obligations upon such humans to conscientiously train their animals. These obligations are analogous to the obligations of parents to their children.

³⁷ See Budiansky, Steven, The Nature of Horses: Exploring Equine Evolution, Intelligence, and Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Francione, in op. cit. p. 108.

³⁹ Francione, pp. 110f.

⁴⁰ Francione, p. 131.

⁴¹ Gary L. Francione, in op. cit., claims that most of the suffering imposed upon animals is unnecessary, but of course this claim is colored by his position that animals are to be treated not as property, but as persons.

⁴² Temple Grandin, a consultant for the meat industry specializing in developing more humane means of treating livestock, states that “The animals we raise for food would have never lived at all if we had not raised them.” See her “Thinking Like Animals” in Animal Ethics, op. cit., p. 227.

⁴³ As Bernard E. Rollin states, “Assuming that an animal has adequate welfare requires that it be in a position to actualize the needs and interests dictated by its biological and psychological nature or telos—the “cowness” of the cow, the “pigness” of the pig—and that, experientially, it does not experience prolonged noxious mental states, such as, fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, social isolation, and so on.” See his “To Control Pain and Suffering in Farm Animals” in Animal Ethics, op. cit., p. 257.

⁴⁴ The Ethics of Killing, p. 194.

⁴⁵ Ibid. p. 105.

⁴⁶ Ibid. p. 197.

⁴⁷ Steven L. Davis argues that more animals would have to be killed in the U.S. if we adopted a vegetarian (vegan) diet rather than a diet which includes the eating of meat. The reason is that more animals would die in the creation and use of the agricultural fields needed to produce a sufficient vegetarian diet than die in the slaughterhouses. See his “The Least Harm Principle May Require that Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet”, in Animal Ethics, op. cit., pp. 243–247. If Davis is right, there would still be one considerable difference: the animals killed in the production and use of agricultural land are not intentionally killed, whereas the animals killed for meat are intentionally killed. The doctrine of double effect of course entails that intentional killing and unintentional foreseen killing are not morally equivalent: e.g., whereas intentionally killing an innocent human being is never justifiable, unintentional foreseen killing can be justifiable if it is in aid of a greater good. So vegan advocates could argue that even if more animals are killed by the adoption of a vegan diet, these animals are killed unintentionally and hence, unlike what happens in the slaughterhouse, is justifiable. However this response to Davis's position begs the question, for the doctrine of double effect is applicable to cases which involve what are granted to be bad alternatives; but killing animals is bad only if animals have a right to life, which I am arguing against.