Even if you don't believe that animals should have basic rights in living, consider this: The more that the animals we eat are allowed room to be comfortable and do what they normally do (chickens perching, pigs nosing the ground for insects and plant matter) as well as given the food they are naturally supposed to eat, the healthier they will be. The healther they are, the healthier we will be afer we eat them. Birds, for example, become stressed quickly. If we stress them out by stuffing them together in cages so they can't move, they get stressed out, thier immune systems weaken, we then pump antibiotics in them (or they die), and all of that "sick" meat is then passed on to us.
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The Rights Of Animals
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Milk and cheese are no easier than meat to reconcile. Cows will not give milk unless they are made pregnant each year, and if the calves are left with their mothers, there won't be much milk for humans. The separation of the cow and her calf causes distress to both. Hens are not so concerned about the removal of their eggs, and genuinely free-range hens appear to have a good life, but male chicks have to be disposed of, and no commercial egg producer allows hens to live beyond the point at which their rate of laying declines. That's why animal-rights advocates today tend to be vegans.
Where animals are now used for research, we must find alternatives. In Europe, cell and tissue cultures have already replaced some product testing of live animals, and that will increase dramatically once harmful research on animals is put ethically out of bounds. Research using animals may not cease entirely, but in a nonspeciesist world it could continue only under the same strict ethical safeguards that we use for research on human subjects who can't give their consent.
Our greatest difficulty in respecting other species may lie in our quest for land. The animal movement forces us to consider that land we do not use is the habitat of other sentient beings, and we must do what we can to allow them to continue to live on it, including limiting our own population growth. Even wilderness presents a problem. Are humans ethically bound to prevent animals from killing other animals? To contemplate interfering with the workings of ecosystems would be presumptuous, at least for now. We will do better to concentrate, first, on lessening our own harmful impact on our domestic animals.
Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton. His latest book, "The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty," will be published in March.
© 2008
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