Alison Hills Do Animals Have Rights 2002

DO
ANIMALS
HAVE
RIGHTS?
DO
ANIMALS
HAVE
RIGHTS?
ALISON HILLS
Published in the UK in 2005

by Icon Books Ltd., The Old Dairy,
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ISBN 1 84046 623 5
Text copyright 2005 Alison Hills
The author has asserted her moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting by Hands Fotoset
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To Philip
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Hills studied philosophy at Cambridge University,
becoming a Research Fellow of Clare College. She is now a
Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. She has
written several articles about applied ethics and Kants
moral philosophy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Tim Lewens, Rebecca Rushforth and
Simon Flynn for their advice and encouragement; and in
particular Paul Bou-Habib, Rowan Cruft, Finn Spicer and
Marian Scott for their helpful comments on a previous draft
of the book.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
1 Introduction
2 Animal Rights Through the Ages
Part One: Animal Minds
3 Can They Suffer?
4 Can They Reason?
5 Animal Intelligence and Human Minds
viii
1
6
27
29
48
61
Part Two: All Animals Are Equal ?

6 Rights and Moral Status
7 The Moral Community
8 Pain, Pleasure and the Value of Life
9 The Right to Life
10 All Animals Are Equal ?
81
83
90
109
122
145
Part Three: How Should We Treat Animals?

11 Factory Food
12 Foxhunting
13 Science and Suffering
14 Mans Best Friend?
157
159
180
199
219
15 Conclusion: More Equal than Others
227
Further Reading
Index
232
239
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William Hogarth, Cockpit

Mole and Ratty discuss the meaning of life
A caged primate in a laboratory
Animal culture: a macaque washing a potato
Treating animals as morally responsible:
the execution of a sow
Battery-farmed chickens
Foxhunting: the image of war without the guilt
An experiment to test the effects of smoking
Rabbits testing the safety of cosmetics
viii
16
30
46
65
97
162
182
204
211
C HAPTER O NE
INTRODUCTION
In December 1998, the animal rights activist Barry Horne

lay dying in prison. He had been found guilty of making
a series of fire-bomb attacks that caused over 3 million
worth of damage, and had been sentenced to eighteen years
in jail. He was on his third hunger strike since his conviction
and he intended to sacrifice his life to the cause of animal
welfare.
At the same time, Robin Webb, spokesman of the Animal
Liberation Front, read out a hit list of ten names issued
by the Animal Rights Militia, an extremist animal rights
organisation: if Horne died, the ten vivisectionists would
be assassinated. Among the ten was Colin Blakemore,
Professor of Physiology at Oxford University, an expert in
vision and the early development of the brain, whose
research involved sewing shut the eyes of kittens. Not only
did he experiment on animals himself, but he was also well
known as a supporter of animal experimentation, arguing
that it was essential to the progress of scientific and medical
knowledge. Professor Blakemore was no stranger to threats
from extremists: he had already been sent letter bombs and
razors from animal rights activists.
1
DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?
Horne survived his hunger strike with his eyesight and

his liver damaged. He died in 2001 after his fourth hunger
strike, and was hailed as a martyr by animal rights organisations. Professor Blakemore continues his research in
physiology, and supports scientific experiments on animals.
He is still targeted by animal rights activists: often his house
is surrounded by protestors and he cannot go out without a
police escort.
Animal rights is an issue so emotive that some people are
prepared to martyr themselves for the cause, and to threaten
to kill other people for it. Yet many of us eat meat, wear
leather and fur, and use medicines that have been tested on
animals. People on each side of the debate have such strong
passions and deeply held convictions that it is difficult for
them to engage in a meaningful dialogue with their
opponents. It is hard for a non-partisan to be sure what
exactly are the arguments for and against granting rights to
animals. Many of the books written about animal rights are
extremist in one way or another: either they argue that
animals and humans have equal rights; or they say that
animals have no rights and that we may treat them in any
way we want. But most of us dont accept either of these
claims, but instead have a moderate view: we think that
there are moral limits to what we may do to animals, but
there are nevertheless important differences between
humans and animals that warrant our treating them differently. This book defends the moderate view.
In early societies, people cared about their own family
and perhaps their own tribe, but thought nothing of treating
2
INTRODUCTION
people from other tribes extremely badly. Today, however,

most of us recognise that the people of our city, nation or
race are of no greater value than those who live on the far
side of the world. Many countries have signed up to the
UN Declaration of Human Rights, acknowledging that all
human life is of equal moral value and all of us have the same
basic human rights.
However, many of us in the West believe that, though
humans are all equally valuable, animals are not. We have
been influenced greatly by the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle and Christian writers such as Thomas Aquinas
and St Augustine, all of whom claimed that humans are very
different from other animals, and that we may use other
animals, but not other humans, in any way that we please.
But this Western tradition is thrown into doubt by Darwins
theory of evolution, and by our recognition that the view we
have inherited from Aristotle and the early Christians is not
the only way that we might conceive of the relationship
between humans and animals. Buddhists, for example, have
quite different views about animals and how we ought to
treat them. Finally, modern philosophers like Peter Singer
question the way we use non-human animals by asking
whether we are guilty of prejudice against creatures that are
not human. Our ordinary ways of thinking about animals
and our everyday uses of them have been challenged. Can
we defend them?
It is natural to think that some animals have minds that
are very similar to ours: many animals can suffer pain and
fear, some appear to be able to think, and some, like the
3
great apes, can even be taught a basic language. But other

animals seem to us very different: surely single-celled
bacteria have no beliefs or feelings at all. But are the assumptions we make about animal minds justified? In the first part
of this book, we look at the evidence that animals can suffer,
have beliefs and reason as we do.
Many of us think that it is wrong to make other humans
suffer for fun. It is wrong because we humans have moral
status: it matters morally what happens to us. But do
animals have this kind of moral status too? I argue that
all sentient animals (that is, those that can feel pain and
pleasure) have moral status: it matters morally when these
animals suffer.
Having moral status is not the same as having rights,
however. Some of our rights depend on our ability to think
and to reason: a right to freedom of speech only makes sense
for beings capable of communication. Many animal activists would not worry about denying animals the right to
freedom of speech; however, their concern is with the most
fundamental right of all, the right to life. They say that
animals have a right not to be killed for food, for entertainment or for scientific research, just as humans do. Do
humans alone have the right to life; or is it simple prejudice
to deny animals that right too?
The final part of the book looks at the proper treatment of
animals, given their moral status. Animals are a source of
food for many of us: is it wrong for us to eat meat from
animals that have been kept in the cramped unhealthy
conditions of a factory farm? More fundamentally, is it
4
INTRODUCTION
morally acceptable to eat animals at all? We can eat well on a

vegetarian diet; we do not need to eat meat in order to keep
healthy. Most of us eat meat and fish for pleasure: is this
morally wrong?
Many of us benefit from scientific research, using new
medicines that were initially tested on animals. Scientists
experiment on animals for many other reasons too: to test
non-medical products like cosmetics and to find out more
about human and animal biology. Are scientific experiments for any of these purposes morally legitimate?
The traditional British country pastime of hunting foxes,
which has long been attacked by animal rights protestors,
has recently been banned altogether in the UK. But what, if
anything, is wrong with foxhunting? Is it the killing of the
fox, or the way that it is killed in a hunt that is objectionable?
Each of these issues needs to be addressed separately, for
it might be acceptable for us to use animals in some of these
ways but not others: perhaps it is wrong to breed animals for
food in factory farms, but not wrong to eat animals; it may
be cruel to make animals suffer for our amusement, but
permissible to injure them in medical experiments that
greatly benefit us. We need to give due weight both to our
rights and interests and to the moral status of animals. In
deciding how we should treat animals, we have to reflect on
fundamental issues about ourselves: on the value of human
life and on what it is to be human.
C HAPTER T WO
ANIMAL RIGHTS
THROUGH THE AGES
The hare laughed when the tortoise took up his challenge of
a race. Having moved into a commanding lead, he thought
he would demonstrate his effortless superiority by taking
a brief nap before finishing the contest. Meanwhile the
determined tortoise, unfazed by these antics, plodded on,
crossing the finish line just as the hare woke up, cursing. So
we learn that flashy arrogance will get its come-uppance,
while slow but steady wins the day.
The wolf inveigled his way into the middle of a flock of
lambs by covering his own fur with a sheeps fleece, and
made off with his dinner. The industrious ant warned the
flighty grasshopper that leaner times were around the
corner, but to no avail. The peacock asked Juno for a beautiful voice to accompany his splendid appearance, but had to
learn to make do with what he had already got.
Children have been fascinated by Aesops fables for
thousands of years. In these stories, animals play two contrasting roles. They take on familiar human characteristics
and teach us about ourselves: lions are powerful and proud
but can be tyrannical; foxes and wolves are cunning, and
will try to trick you with their silver tongue and deceptive
6
ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES
appearance; ants are hardworking and thrive even in the

hardest times. But at the same time these animals are not
like us; there are no complex human characters, mixtures
of good and bad, here. Nor are these talkative creatures
accurate portraits of real animals; they are far too articulate
and sophisticated.
In the ancient world, people lived side-by-side with
animals, and were probably better placed to observe them
than most of us are today. They felt the same tension,
between seeing animals as just like us and as quite dissimilar, which is played out both in Aesops fables and in
the arguments of philosophers, then as well as now, about
the way that animals ought to be treated.
Like us, the people of ancient Greece and Rome ate
animals, hunted them, admired and loved them. They
farmed the same kinds of animal that we do: cattle, pigs,
sheep and goats. In their small farms, the livestock would
roam outside in fields; many people kept a few chickens or a
goat themselves. Most ordinary people usually could not
afford meat, instead eating mostly vegetables; beef was a
rare treat.
In pre-industrial societies like those of the ancient world,
animals were also valued for their work: oxen pulled carts
and ploughs; dogs were used to guard sheep and houses;
men and animals worked together on the farm.
Just as horse-racing and bull-fights are watched by
millions today, in the ancient world, animals were involved
in many kinds of entertainment. Sometimes, as in the
popular chariot-racing, no animals were injured, but often
7
spectators were amused simply by watching animals die.

In amphitheatres throughout the Roman world, leopards,
lions, tigers, bears and elephants would be encouraged to
fight, either against one another or matched with men, from
professional huntsmen to unarmed victims. Bloodthirsty
crowds appreciated the skills of the hunters but were
impressed by the staggering slaughter: hundreds of animals
would be killed in each show.
Whereas using animals for food, work and entertainment is familiar to us today, one significant role of animals
in the ancient world is almost entirely foreign: the religious
sacrifice.
It is hard to overstate the importance of animal sacrifice
in the religions of ancient Greece and Rome. By ritually
killing an animal, any ordinary person could thank the
gods, ask a favour or find out what they willed. Myths telling
of the pleasure taken by the gods in human sacrifice were
common in Greek culture; animals were sacrificed as a
substitute. Either the animal would be burnt whole with
wine and incense, sometimes with a few drops of human
blood symbolically added; or parts of the animal would be
burnt and the rest eaten. The larger the number of animals,
the more pleasing to the gods: a sacrifice of a hundred bulls
was not unusual. The killing of animals was so fundamental
that it was nearly impossible to oppose it without challenging traditional religion altogether.
What did ancient philosophers think about the slaughter
of hundreds of animals for entertainment, or their ritual
sacrifice in religious ceremonies? The most influential
8
ancient writer on animals was the Greek philosopher

Aristotle (384322 BC).
Aristotle had quite a low opinion of the intellect of
animals. It was common among the Greeks to link reason
with speech (the same word, logos, could be used for both),
as if thinking were like talking quietly to oneself. Though
aware that animals could make noises grunts and howls
Aristotle insisted that they could not speak a proper
language and concluded that they had no beliefs at all.
He was also convinced that no animal was capable of true
loyalty, courage or any other virtue, as no animal could
understand the difference between right and wrong. Animals
have nothing in common with us, he said, and so in terms of
justice, we owe them nothing: we may treat them as we like.
Some ancient Greeks disagreed with Aristotle; whereas
Aristotle claimed that we had nothing in common with
animals, Pythagoras (c. 580c. 500 BC) believed that humans
and animals were both made of the same elements: that
the breath that gave life to us also gave life to animals, and
that animals could be reincarnated as humans. He and his
followers opposed cruelty to animals as well as animal
sacrifice.
Theophrastus (c. 372287 BC), a student of Aristotle, also
rejected his views about animals. He argued that it was
wrong to kill animals and make them suffer, because animals
were just like us: their bodies had the same kind of fluids
and tissues as ours; they had emotions and feelings and were
capable of some kinds of reasoning too.
There were considerable differences of opinion about
9
animals in the ancient world: some philosophers argued

that killing animals was wrong. But the popular morality
of the time saw nothing objectionable in eating animals,
sacrificing them to the gods, or watching them die in the
amphitheatre. Aristotle too denied that we owed anything
to animals and it was he, not his critics, who had the most
lasting influence on Western culture.
Gods Creatures
Christianity arose in the ancient world, and immediately
distinguished itself from ancient Greek and Roman religions by opposing animal sacrifice. But early Christians like
St Paul did not base their objections on concerns about
animal welfare. St Paul believed that Christs supreme
sacrifice made all such practices obsolete: in his eyes, sacrifices of animals were pointless, rather than cruel. Despite
rejecting animal sacrifice, Christians generally emphasised
the difference between humans and other animals: we are
made in the image of God, only a little lower than the angels;
animals are another thing entirely.
The major Christian thinkers, St Augustine (354430 AD)
and Thomas Aquinas (c. 122574), argued that animals
are not within our moral community because they have
no reason. Both were influenced greatly by Aristotle, so
important in the Middle Ages that he was known simply as
The Philosopher. Both appealed to the Bibles claim that
humans have dominion over the other animals (Genesis
1:2630), interpreting this as meaning that humans were
10
entitled to use animals as they saw fit, even if that included

killing them or causing them to suffer (though according to
later chapters of Genesis, the dominion of man over the
other animals may not include eating them, for Adam and
Eve were vegetarian in the Garden of Eden).
Aquinas thought that the great divide between humans
and animals lay in the fact that humans alone had an
immortal soul. This view has three important implications.
First, all humans are valuable in virtue of our immortal soul.
And, since each of us, no matter how young or old, rich or
poor, beautiful or ugly, clever or stupid, has a soul, we are all
equally valuable. Second, the decision of whether we should
live or die belongs to God, not to us, so we have no right to
kill anyone who has a soul. All human life is sacred; we all
have a right to life, but animals, without an immortal soul,
do not. Third, since we are much more valuable than soulless animals, we have dominion over them and are entitled
to use them for our own purposes.
The Christian view of the essential equality of all mankind is totally different from the ancient Greek and Roman
conception of humanity. Aristotle thought that noble and
virtuous men deserved more than the weak and corrupt: it
was obvious to him that men were not all equally valuable.
But the Aristotelian and Christian views of animals were
similar: animals were a lower kind of creature, quite different from man, which we might use in any way we pleased.
Although some Christians, including the followers of St
Francis, emphasised the importance of treating animals
well, in recognition of their value as part of Gods creation,
11
the idea of man having dominion over the animals was

much more dominant in Christian thought, and still influences the way we think of animals and the way we treat
them today.
The Descent of Man

According to Christianity, we humans are higher beings
only a little lower than the angels; we have dominion over all
other animals, which have no soul. But the biologist Charles
Darwin (180982), investigating the origin of species,
explained how closely we are related to other animals and
called into question the Christian image of man as a being of
quite a different kind from them.
Christianity taught that God created all non-human
animals in one single day; Aristotle believed that the same
kinds of animals had always existed. Darwin showed that
both these claims are wrong: all the different species that
exist today have evolved from common ancestors. In each
generation, animals mate and have a number of offspring
that are copies of their parents, each with slight changes.
These animals are very similar to one another, but some,
for example, can run a little faster or have better eyesight
or hearing, which means they can survive better in their
environment and can produce more offspring. So the
fittest creatures thrive and their numbers increase. Groups
of similar animals evolve in different ways, often because
they are in diverse environments, one group living in a
forest, another by a lake, for example. The groups of animals
12
eventually become so different from one another that they

can no longer mate successfully: they are then classed as
belonging to different species.
Darwin called this process evolution by natural selection and he did not restrict its application to non-human
animals. He showed that biologically, there is no great
divide between humans and non-human animals. We are
particularly closely related to chimpanzees, with whom we
now know that we share over 98 per cent of our DNA.
Do Darwins ideas have implications for our treatment of
animals? His theory forces us to rethink our relationship
with other animals. If we should have dominion over them,
it is not because we are higher beings of a different origin
from them; we have the same ancestors as other animals.
Nor can it be because we are very different from other
animals in our biology or physiology. The theory of evolution does not rule out the possibility that there is some other
reason why we have dominion over the animals, even
though our biology is similar to theirs and we have evolved
from the same stock. But it is also compatible with Darwins
theory that we are not superior to other animals, that we
should try to treat them well, perhaps even as well as we treat
other humans.
Darwin himself was deeply concerned by cruelty to
animals, but he also cared about the progress of science. He
campaigned on behalf of animal experimentation, believing
that increasing our understanding of physiology would
benefit mankind. Though he acknowledged that we ought
not to treat animals in any way that pleases us, he believed
13
that we are entitled to use animals if we will substantially

benefit from doing so.
Animals as Property
Darwins view that unnecessary cruelty to animals is wrong,
but that some uses of animals are legitimate, is similar to the
conception of the proper treatment of animals enshrined in
the laws of many countries today. In the UK, for example,
there are laws against animal cruelty, but killing animals for
food and experimenting on them is permitted.
In Britain before 1822, the law viewed animals merely as
property, as things to be protected not for their own sake,
but for the sake of their owner. If I own a table, it is against
the law for you to steal it or destroy it, and if you do steal it or
attack it with an axe, you should be punished. But it is
obvious that the law protects the table, not because it is
worth protecting for its own sake, but for my sake, so that I
can continue to enjoy using it, because there are no laws
governing my treatment of my own table. If I want to hack it
to pieces myself, or sell it to someone who will chop it up,
the law will not condemn me or punish me.
Laws treating animals as property protected those
animals from being stolen (poached) or attacked by people
who did not own them, punishing the poaching of deer, fish
and cattle by death. But there were no laws governing the
treatment of those creatures by their owners. Just as I could
do what I liked to my own table, I could do what I liked to
my own livestock. If my animal attacked someone else, I
14
could be held accountable, and the law might intervene if I

hit my horse in the street and a crowd gathered to watch,
causing a public disturbance. But according to the law, there
was nothing wrong with my beating my own horse in the
privacy of my own home.
When animals are viewed as mere property, the legal
presumption is that whatever you do to animals that you
own or that are not owned by anyone is acceptable unless
there is a specific law against it. There is an assumption that
people who experiment on animals, hunt them or kill them
for food have a right to do so. If you change the law to ban
some of those practices, it looks like you are unfairly
restricting human rights, especially peoples rights over
their own property. Early animal welfare campaigners
found it very difficult to get the law on animals changed.
In the early 1800s, attempts were made in the UK to ban
popular entertainments like bear-baiting, which involved
tying a bear to a stake and encouraging several vicious dogs
to attack it. There were two grounds for banning such
pastimes: they were cruel and they caused public disorder
(many criminals gathered together to watch the show).
These attempts at bans failed, but in 1822, the first animal
welfare law in Britain was passed: it became an offence for
anyone to treat wantonly and cruelly any cattle, sheep or
horse, on pain of a fine. In 1835 the act was extended to
cover dogs and other domestic animals (and imprisonment
was introduced as a possible punishment); animal fighting
and baiting were prohibited. At about the same time,
some other countries also passed animal cruelty laws. For
15
William Hogarth, Cockpit. These entertainments were banned by

some of the earliest animal welfare legislation
example, in the USA, laws were passed banning the

unjustified infliction of pain on animals; but they did not
have much impact, as almost any human use of animals was
considered legitimate, no matter how the animals suffered,
on the basis that man had dominion over the animal world.
Since 1835, UK law has usually regulated activities rather
than banned them outright. For example, in 1876 the
Cruelty to Animals Act was passed to regulate animal
experimentation: it became an offence to perform an
16
experiment giving pain to a living animal, unless that

experiment would advance physiological knowledge,
reduce suffering or prolong life. Currently in the UK,
scientists must have a licence to experiment on animals, and
their project must also have a licence; animal experiments
are permitted only if they are expected to give us significant
benefits and there are no adequate alternatives. There is,
however, no international consensus on laws governing
animal experimentation. The UK laws are currently among
the most demanding in the world. In the USA, whose
scientists carry out more experiments on animals than
those of any other country, there are some protections for
animals. Some South American countries have no legislation at all.
There are also laws regulating farming, a practice that has
changed enormously since the first British animal welfare
laws in 1822. Many of us like to picture farms in which
animals roam freely across wide-open fields, fed and tended
by a jolly farmer who knows each cow by name and looks
after each newborn lamb like one of his own children. Of
course, no farm was ever quite like this ideal, but today
many are factory farms, on an enormously large scale,
ruthlessly commercial and prepared to impose any amount
of suffering on farm animals if doing so will increase profits.
In factory farms, chickens are kept in tiny cages that prevent
them stretching their wings or turning round, in windowless sheds with no natural light that house up to 100,000
birds. As so many birds live so close together, diseases are
17
common: one of the main jobs for the farmer is to remove

the bodies of dead birds.
In the UK, the USA and many other countries, the laws
applying to factory farms permit chickens to be kept in very
small cages, though some European countries including
Switzerland are committed to phasing out battery farming.
The rules for cows, pigs and sheep are typically more strict.
But the legal regulation of factory farms has more than one
purpose: as well as preventing cruelty to animals and
improving animal and human health, it also protects the
commercial interests of the factory farm. The resulting laws
have strange anomalies: according to British law you, an
ordinary person, might be prosecuted for keeping a chicken
in a pen the size of an A4 piece of paper but factory farmers
would not, as it is considered too costly for them to provide
larger cages.
Much of our common-sense attitude towards animals
in modern Western countries is influenced by Aristotles
view that we owe nothing to animals because they have
nothing in common with us, and the Judaeo-Christian view
that man has dominion over the other animals. We treat
animals as our property; we kill and eat them and experiment on them when we want to. We have some laws
preventing animal cruelty, but make sure that they are
not so strict that they interfere with our eating meat as
cheaply as possible. But what seems obvious to us is quite
alien to societies influenced by other ethical and religious
traditions, which view animals rather differently.
18
The Wheel of Life

Buddhists divide the world into two categories: the physical
universe, and the life-forms (sattva) which live in it. The
physical universe forms world-systems which undergo
cycles of evolution and decline over billions of years.
Dharma is the universal law that governs the physical and
moral order of the universe; Buddhists picture the physical
and moral worlds as intertwined. If the farmers become
more lazy the land may become more barren: a decline in
morals can lead to physical deterioration.
Within a world-system there are various realms of rebirth:
gods, humans, titans, ghosts, animals, hell, all depicted in
the wheel of life (bhavacakra). Hell is the worst place to be,
a place of torment. Rebirth as an animal is better than hell,
but not a great deal better: animals are governed by brute
instinct, and lack the intellectual capacity to understand
their situation or to improve it. Next is the realm of ghosts,
former humans who have strong desires that they can never
satisfy binding them to the earth. Above the ghosts are the
titans, who are violent and desire power; and then the
human realm, a desirable realm that is difficult to attain.
Humans have reason and free will, and can use these to
understand the dharma and implement Buddhist teachings.
At the highest levels are the gods. You can move up or down
these realms depending on how well you live your life,
through karma, a kind of natural law.
Both animals and humans, unlike the higher gods, are in
19
the sphere of sense-desires, but we humans are the higher

life-form, with a greater capacity for moral and spiritual
development. Nevertheless, we do not have dominion over
the animals: we should be kind to lesser beings, rather than
exploiting them. A human who treated animals particularly
badly might well return, through karma, as an animal.
Buddhists believe that we should try to avoid inflicting
suffering on animals as well as on humans: we should show
compassion for every sentient creature.
Buddhists also believe in ahimsa or the inviolability of
life. They reject animal sacrifice (which had been common
in early Indian religion), they do not usually permit
harming or killing animals in scientific experimentation,
and they do not think that anyone should kill an animal for
food. There are, however, some misconceptions in the West
about the traditional Buddhist attitude towards vegetarianism. Traditional Buddhists reject the killing of animals,
including the killing of animals for food, but not the eating
of animal flesh. If the animal is already dead and it has not
been killed on your behalf its meat is blameless and you
are permitted to eat it. Even a Buddhist monk, even the
Buddha himself, would eat meat that is pure in this way.
There are restrictions on what meat monks may eat, but
these prohibitions tend to be symbolic: they may not eat
elephants or horses, symbols of royalty; dogs and snakes,
which are considered disgusting; and lions, tigers, bears and
hyenas, for it is too dangerous to try to kill them.
Unlike the AristotelianChristian tradition, Buddhism
emphasises the similarity between humans and animals, as
20
creatures that can feel and suffer, and claims that we owe to
animals duties similar to the duties we owe to humans.
Animal Liberation
The modern animal welfare movement was galvanised by
the publication of Animal Liberation, often known as the
animal rights bible, written by the philosopher Peter
Singer in 1975. The book is about the tyranny of humans
over non-human animals; it is a political work whose aim is
to force us to question our treatment of animals and our
attitudes towards them. Singer reports in considerable detail
many examples of the deeply unpleasant ways animals are
used in scientific experiments and in factory farming; his
book has been very effective in changing many peoples
views about animals and converting them to vegetarianism.
Singer is a utilitarian. Utilitarians believe that it is our
moral duty to bring about as much happiness and as little
suffering as possible; they think it is wrong to steal and to kill
because stealing and killing tend to lead to more suffering
than happiness.
Suppose that I am wondering whether to give some
money to charity or to buy myself a couple of new CDs. As a
utilitarian, I should try to work out how much pleasure I
would gain by buying myself the CDs: quite a bit, if they are
any good! Then I should work out how much suffering I
would relieve by giving the money to charity. By making a
donation to charity, I could save the lives of some children
who live in great poverty on the other side of the world.
21
Even though these children are strangers to me and I may

never meet them in the rest of my life, their suffering and
pleasure count equally with mine. Even if I would enjoy my
new CDs a lot, these children will benefit more from my
money; so, according to utilitarianism, I should send the
money to charity.
Utilitarians think that pleasure and pain, happiness and
suffering are morally important, no matter who rejoices or
suffers, whether it is I or distant children I never meet. It
does not even matter whether it is other humans who are
affected. If cats and dogs, pigs and sheep can feel pain and
pleasure, they count too, as the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham
(17481832) wrote:
The question is not, Can they reason: nor, Can they talk,
but Can they suffer?
According to utilitarianism, all sentient creatures have an
equal moral status: their pain and pleasure should count
equally when we decide what to do.
Animals kept in factory farms suffer terribly. They live in
uncomfortably small pens, are fed inappropriate foods to
fatten them as quickly as possible, and suffer from disease
because so many are kept close together. Of course, many
humans benefit from factory farming: the farmers themselves make large profits, and many people enjoy eating the
cheap meat the farming produces. But Singer argues that the
suffering of factory-farmed animals far outweighs these
22
human pleasures: factory farming is wrong; we should stop

supporting these farms and stop eating factory-farmed
meat. In fact, any large-scale farming of animals is likely to
lead to more suffering than pleasure, he claims, so it would
be best if we became vegetarians and stopped eating animals
altogether.
Singer argues for other changes in our attitudes to animals
too. He thinks that the benefits of scientific experimentation on animals do not outweigh the suffering imposed on
those animals: most experiments on animals are morally
wrong and should be banned.
Of course, Singer is very much aware that most of us do
not count the suffering of animals equally with our own
suffering and pleasure; we act as if our pleasure in eating
meat is far more important than the suffering of factoryfarmed animals. But he thinks our attitude is simply a
mistake: it is an example of speciesism. Just as racism is a
prejudice in favour of your own race, speciesism is a prejudice in favour of your own species: humans are speciesist
whenever they favour humans over other animals. Singer
thinks that we are guilty of speciesism whenever we allow an
animal to be treated in ways that we would never permit of a
human child of similar mental capacity. We would never
kill a human child for food, however brain-damaged, so
why do we think that such treatment is acceptable for a
sensitive and intelligent animal like a pig?
Singer is a powerful advocate for the better treatment of
animals, and is certainly an important influence on the
23
recent changes in the law that have given more emphasis to

animal welfare. But he is not a supporter of animal rights.
According to utilitarianism, if killing an animal, or even a
human, would bring about more happiness than anything
else, we ought to commit murder. Of course, it is very
unusual for murder to lead to happiness rather than misery,
so for the most part utilitarians will not support it. But in
exceptional circumstances, for the utilitarian, murder is the
right thing to do; since no one has the right not to be killed
in those circumstances, no one has a right to life. Many
people find this implication of utilitarianism troubling. This
is a problem for Singer, because his defence of animal welfare is based on his utilitarianism, and if we question that
theory, we must also question his conclusions about how we
ought to treat animals.
Even if we reject his utilitarian theory, however, Singer
gives us a difficult problem to consider. Many of us treat
animals very differently from how we treat humans. We eat
animals, we allow them to be killed for our benefit in scientific experimentation. But when we are asked why it is
wrong to kill humans for food, but fine to kill animals, we do
not know what to say. Surely the fact that an animal is not of
our own species cannot be so very important?
Singer presents us with a dilemma. Either we must point
to the difference between animals and humans that explains
why we are entitled to eat animals and experiment on them,
even though it is wrong to do the same to humans. Or we
must accept that it is not true that animals have nothing in
24
common with us, and we must treat them with as much

consideration as we give to other humans. Anyone, whatever they think about utilitarianism, must answer Singers
dilemma.
25
PART ONE
ANIMAL MINDS
C HAPTER T HREE
CAN THEY SUFFER ?
It was spring, and a mole was working hard in his burrow.

But this was no ordinary mole, and no ordinary work: he
brushed and dusted and painted his home with whitewash
until he felt so frustrated that with a heartfelt Hang springcleaning, he ran away to the riverbank.
Thus begins Kenneth Grahames novel The Wind in the
Willows, in whose pages we are introduced to the timid
Mole, good-hearted Ratty, grumpy Badger and conceited
Toad, who go on adventures, enjoy picnics of potted meat
with pickled gherkins and ginger beer, love rowing little
boats and driving motorcars and, all in all, act exactly like
good English gentlemen of the Edwardian era.
This charmingly outrageous anthropomorphism is not
to be taken seriously we are not likely to mistake these
characters for real creatures: we know that animals do not
wear slippers or sit in armchairs. But some philosophers
and scientists believe that we are nevertheless prone to more
insidious forms of confusion. Though we may feel confident that some animals have thoughts and feelings as we do,
where, they ask, is the scientific evidence confirming that
we are right?
29
Mole and Ratty discuss the meaning of life E.H. Shepard 1933,
reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London
It may seem obvious that your cat Felix feels pain when
you pull her tail, or that your dog Rover would suffer if you
kicked him. But it is not so obvious that all animals can feel
pain: what about fish, mussels, slugs or ants? How can we
tell whether worms feel anything at all?
The question of whether animals can feel pain is part of a
wider problem of whether animals are conscious. Do they
have an inner mental life? We see things as coloured, as
bright or dark; we hear and taste things; we have pleasant
and painful experiences. We assume that Felix and Rover
have experiences too, perhaps rather different from ours
because their ways of sensing the world are not like ours,
but we think that there is something it is like to be Felix or
30
CAN THEY SUFFER?
Rover, just as there is something it is like to be you or me.

We are less confident that there is something it is like to be
an ant, slug or bacterium. But are we right to be so sure
that Felix and Rover have an internal life? Perhaps we
humans are the only ones to have any experiences at all.
If only humans were conscious, then only we could suffer,
and we would have no need to worry about causing
animals pain.
Even if we are convinced that animals are conscious,
there is a second very important question: what kinds of
experiences are they having? If we care about animal suffering, we have to have some way of telling when they are having
painful experiences and how unpleasant those experiences
are. But we can be pretty sure that the inner life of some
creatures is quite different from ours. Bats experience the
world through their hearing: they make high-pitched noises
and work out where objects around them are placed by the
echoes of those sounds. We can try to imagine what it would
be like to be a bat, but it is extremely difficult for us to know
what it is really like: do bats get a picture of the world
through echo-location as we do through our eyes, or is it
quite different? It is hard for us to know which experiences
are unpleasant for animals and how unpleasant they are. I
can imagine what it would be like for me to be caged like a
lion in a zoo; but I have really no idea whether what the lion
experiences is at all similar. So even if we were convinced
that animals could suffer, we would need to know a lot
about their inner experiences if we wanted to avoid causing
them suffering.
31
Perhaps we ought not to worry about what kind of

experiences animals have, however, until we are confident
that they have an inner mental life at all.
Living Robots
Ren Descartes (15961650) thought that animals were like
robots, without minds and unable to feel pain. By contrast,
he believed that humans had a soul, in virtue of which we can
think, have desires, hopes, dreams and feelings. Our minds
reside in our souls, which are separate from our bodies: our
souls can live on after our bodies die. But the mental and the
physical can interact: if you drop a heavy rock on to your
toe, the physical world (rock hitting toe) will cause a change
in your mind (your toe will hurt), and that may in turn
change the physical world (you will shout ow and start to
limp). Descartes thought that the soul and the body interacted in a special part of the brain, called the pineal gland.
Descartes view that our minds and bodies are separate is
known as Cartesian dualism. This theory does not rule out
the possibility that animals have minds: because minds are
quite separate from the physical world, many kinds of
animal with very different brains and nervous systems from
ours might have a soul and therefore a mind. But since
animals cannot talk or reason, Descartes thought that they
in fact had no soul. He admitted that animals sometimes act
in ways that make us imagine that they feel pain. If a heavy
rock drops onto the foot of your dog, Rover, he will make
noises and limp too. But this does not prove that he is
32
CAN THEY SUFFER?
suffering, for his brain may cause him to act that way
when a rock drops on his foot, even though he feels nothing
at all.
Scientists who followed Descartes put these ideas into
practice, as an unknown contemporary of Descartes
described:
They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the
creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were
clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were
only the noise of a little spring that had been touched,
but that the whole body was without feeling.
It is tempting to think that the scientists who followed
Descartes adopted his views as an excuse for carrying out
their gruesome experiments without guilt. It may be convenient for us to claim that animals do not feel pain, but
surely we know that their suffering is real.
But we cannot just dismiss Descartes view. We say that
the beaten dogs cried because they were in pain; we explain
their actions in terms of what they thought and felt.
According to Descartes, we should explain the dogs cries
mechanistically. A clock chimes on the hour because inside
it are various parts arranged appropriately. It is absurd to
think that the clock wants to chime, or feels like chiming,
that it chimes because it is happy, or to attract attention
when it is feeling miserable. The clock doesnt feel a thing.
Perhaps the parts of the dog are arranged so that it barks
33
automatically when it is hit; but it suffers no more than a

chiming clock.
Descartes explains animal behaviour as similar to the way
that we humans respond when our reflexes are triggered. If
you are hit just below your knee, your leg will jump
upwards. You respond to being hit; but you dont feel any
pain. Similarly, animals may respond to an injury by
moving away and crying out, without feeling anything.
We now have two alternative accounts of what happens
to dogs when they are beaten: which should we prefer? It is
generally accepted that when we choose between two
theories, we should use Ockhams Razor: we should prefer
the theory that explains the phenomenon in the simplest
way. The best theory would explain everything we wanted
in as simple terms as possible. Descartes explanation is
simpler than ours. We have to assume that animals can feel
pain, as well as that their bodies are organised so that they
respond when hurt. Descartes just has to assume that their
bodies are arranged to respond when injured: he can explain
the same behaviour while making fewer assumptions. In
that respect, his mechanistic explanation is better than ours,
but only if it can adequately explain all animal behaviour.
Behaviourism: Scientific Psychology

In the early 20th century, psychologists were worried
that studies of animals were unscientific. Some animal
researchers were lapsing into talk of the feelings and beliefs
of animals, talk which these psychologists considered to be
34
CAN THEY SUFFER?
anthropomorphic nonsense. They insisted that psychologists

should describe both their experiments and the animals
behaviour in neutral, physical terms. For example, a
researcher might be interested in what happens to rats when
they are repeatedly given electric shocks. A scientific
psychologist would describe the experiment in physical
terms the rat was given a certain number of electric shocks
of a certain intensity and describe the animals response in
physical terms: the rat made a number of noises and
sustained injuries of a particular kind. To say that the rat
acted as if it were in agony would be inappropriately going
beyond a pure science.
This behaviourism was advocated by John Watson
(18781958) and B.F. Skinner (190490). According to
Skinner, animal behaviour did not depend on genetics at all,
but could be explained entirely through the animals interaction with its environment. A rat can learn to act in a
certain way for example, to press a lever by positive
reinforcement: if the rat is rewarded with food for pressing
the lever, it will learn to keep pressing it. Behaviourists
mostly experimented on rats and pigeons, but believing that
environment alone affected behaviour, they thought there
were no significant differences between different species of
animal: what they found out through experiments on rats
could in principle be applied to any other animal. Skinner
and Watson did not treat humans differently from other
animals; in their view, humans too learnt through positive
reinforcement, and a scientific human psychology would
not mention mental states at all.
35
According to Skinner and Watson, the proper methodology for psychology was to use only physical descriptions
of behaviour. They were methodological behaviourists.
Some philosophers, like Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951),
went further, arguing that the very idea of inner experiences
does not make sense. When I use the word pain, I cant be
talking about an inner experience, he claimed. For if I were,
since I can never know for sure whether anyone else feels
the way I do, I could never know whether they were using
the word pain in the same way as I was or whether we were
constantly talking at cross-purposes. And further, no one
could have taught me to use the word in the first place.
Though a word like pain seems to be used of inner mental
states, really it must concern observable outward behaviour.
This philosophical theory about the meaning of words like
pain is called logical behaviourism.
According to both kinds of behaviourists, a true scientist
would not use any mental terms. But it proved very difficult
if not impossible for researchers to describe animal behaviour without referring to feelings. There is a huge variety of
behaviour associated with feeling pain: cringing, crying out,
limping, avoiding the source of the pain, cradling the part of
the body that has been hurt and so on. It is nearly impossible
to describe all of these accurately in purely physical terms,
but it is very straightforward if you are permitted to say: the
rat acted as if it were in pain.
Behaviourists have particular problems when mental
states interact with one another, because the creature will
act quite differently from how it would if it had either
36
CAN THEY SUFFER?
mental state without the other. If you are in pain, but you
dont want anyone else to know that you are, you will try not
to cry out or limp. Similarly, if a rabbit has hurt its leg, but
does not want a fox to know that it is weak and cannot run, it
will try not to limp. How can a behaviourist explain a rabbit
trying to disguise its limp without mentioning its pain, its
beliefs and its desires?
Behaviourists were right to emphasise the links between
different types of mental states, their causes, and the kind of
behaviours that express them: pain is often caused by an
injury, and is expressed by crying out and moving away
from the source of the injury. But they were completely
wrong to say that it is unscientific to think that animals and
humans have minds. We cannot understand humans or
animals properly without making sense of their inner
mental states, so we have to reject theories like behaviourism that deny that humans and animals have minds.
Evidence for Pain

Imagine that you burn yourself on a hot frying pan, twist
your knee stepping in a rabbit hole, fall ill with influenza, or
hit your head on a low door-frame. Obviously you will be in
pain. How do you know that youre in pain? Thats obvious
too: you can feel it! Each of us knows in a very direct way
when we are in pain. But we cannot be so sure about other
people.
If you see me touch a hot frying pan, how do you know
what I am feeling? You know that in the same circumstances,
37
your hand would be hurting; you can imagine what it would

feel like if you touched the pan. You see me reacting in the
same ways that you would if you were in pain: I drop the
pan, clutch my hand and cry out. Perhaps I even tell you
how much it hurts, and beg you to do something about it.
You may have some scientific knowledge about human
physiology: you know that all humans have similar nervous
systems. Since your own nervous system causes you to feel
pain when you touch a hot frying pan, it is likely that mine
does the same for me.
Of course, some people are very good actors. You may
not be sure that I am in pain: perhaps I feel nothing at all, but
am just pretending. The outward signs of pain screaming,
avoiding the source of the pain, moaning, cradling the
painful part of the body and so on can be present when I
am not feeling pain, and can be absent when I am. But in
general, you can be confident that I feel pain in the same
sorts of circumstances that you do.
Do non-human animals feel pain? To judge whether I felt
pain, you used certain kinds of evidence. You looked at
what might have caused me pain and at how I reacted. You
can look out for these same signs of pain in an animal. Some
things are obviously likely to cause an animal pain getting
an electric shock, getting scratched or bitten and animals
react to these in the same ways that humans react to painful
stimuli: they avoid the source of the pain, they cry out, they
nurse the damaged part of their body and so on.
Physiologically, some animals, especially higher mammals, have similar nervous systems to us, and they respond
38
CAN THEY SUFFER?
as we do when they are in the kind of circumstances in

which we would feel pain: their blood pressure rises, their
pulse rate increases, their pupils dilate, glands in their
brains secrete chemicals that we know act as painkillers.
Many animals react to pharmaceutical painkillers like
opiates in the same way that we do; that is why it is often
helpful to test them on animals.
The evidence that animals feel pain is similar to the
evidence that other humans feel pain. Of course there is a
difference between humans and animals: you can ask me
whether I am in pain, and I can tell you; animals cannot. Is
this difference important? It does not seem likely that
having language is crucial, or very small babies who could
not talk would never feel pain either. Of course, it is harder
to tell what animals are feeling, since it is harder for them to
communicate with us. But we should not deny that animals
feel pain just because they cannot tell us that they do.
What about animals that are less similar to us than
mammals? Can we tell if and when they are in pain? If their
pain behaviour is not the same as ours, that is, if there are
no changes to their pulse rate or blood pressure, and they
do not cry out, flinch or avoid sources of pain, it is harder
to judge whether they feel any pain. Some creatures are
biologically quite different from us and it is harder to say
whether they have evolved so that they can experience pain.
Reptiles and fish do not have nervous systems like ours, but
they respond in ways that look like they are experiencing
alarm, aggravation and stress. Crustaceans react as if they
feel pain, though again, they have a very different nervous
39
system from ours. Can these creatures feel anything? Or are

they responding to stimuli without feeling anything at all?
Even advocates of animal liberation draw a line between
animals they think feel pain and animals they think do not.
Peter Singer is certain that mammals feel pain, is fairly
confident that fish do, but strongly suspects that primitive
organisms such as molluscs do not.
Natural Selection
Humans are biologically similar to other animals, and as
Darwins theory of evolution tells us, all the species that now
exist, including humans, evolved from common ancestors.
Consequently, it would be surprising if humans were
unique in being the only species to be conscious and capable
of feeling pain.
On the other hand, it is quite possible for one species to
have characteristics that it does not share with any other. It
is reasonable to think that humans are the only creatures
currently capable of building rockets that can fly to the
moon. No matter how biologically similar we are to other
animals, they do not share all of our abilities. It may
seem arbitrary to draw a line between humans and other
animals, and claim that only we are conscious. But presumably there must be some line dividing conscious and
non-conscious creatures, and wherever it is drawn will
seem arbitrary.
Though Darwins theory does not prove that animals
other than humans are conscious, it gives us good reasons to
40
CAN THEY SUFFER?
think that they may be. According to the theory of evolution, each new generation of animals is copied from their
parents with a few small changes, or mutations. The fittest
creatures, those best able to reproduce in their environment, are more likely to survive and have offspring. If an
animal has some feature that makes it better able to survive
and reproduce, after a long time, more of its descendants
with copies of its genes will live than descendants of animals
without it. It is useful for a gazelle to be able to run fast to
escape from its predators. Gazelles that can run fast survive
for longer and reproduce more often than slower gazelles;
eventually there are more fast gazelles (descended from
successful faster gazelles) than slow gazelles (descended
from less successful slower gazelles). If a conscious animal
were better able to survive and reproduce than a nonconscious animal, we would expect that after a time, the
species would evolve so that all the members of that species
were conscious. Presumably our ancestors who were conscious and could feel pain were more successful than their
non-conscious brethren, and as a consequence our species
evolved so that all humans are conscious.
Pain has the effect of making us avoid things that can
injure us, which is surely likely to enhance our success at
survival and reproduction. If an animal can feel pain, and so
avoid dangers that might harm it, that animals chances of
survival are good. It is likely that animals that evolved to
have a nervous system physiologically similar to ours did so
for the same reason that we did. It would be very surprising
if humans were the only kind of animal that evolved to feel
41
pain: we should expect that non-human animals, especially

those with a similar nervous system to ours, feel pain too.
This argument assumes that pain has a useful function,
and that anything that has such a useful function is likely to
have evolved in other animals as well as in humans. Both
these assumptions have been questioned.
It is controversial whether pain, or more generally consciousness, has a useful function at all. Many philosophers
think that only physical things, like states of the brain, can
cause physical effects. If some state of your brain were to
cause you to avoid dangerous things even when you did not
feel pain, you would survive as well as a creature that avoids
injury to avoid feeling pain.
Suppose that pain does have a useful function, encouraging one to avoid danger. Humans could still be the only
species that has the capacity to feel it. It is possible that
conscious creatures have evolved so recently that there is
only one species that feels pain. It is possible that in nonhuman animals feeling pain was useful in some respects but
so costly in other ways that creatures that could feel pain
were less fit than other animals, and did not survive. But it
is nevertheless likely that those creatures with a similar
physiology to ours that exhibit pain behaviour like ours
can feel pain.
Should We Treat Animals as if They Feel Pain?

Like all our best scientific theories, our explanations of
animal behaviour should be as simple as possible. If we do
42
CAN THEY SUFFER?
not need to assume that animals can feel pain, we should

not do so.
This is a good principle when we are studying animals
scientifically, and trying to find out if they do have mental
states, and if so, what kinds of minds they have.
But is it equally good when we think about ethics, about
how we ought to treat animals? There might be some
animals that can feel pain even though we have little
evidence that they do, because their physiology is totally
unlike our own and their behaviour in response to pain is
quite different. If we used the principle assume that nothing
has a mind unless you have evidence that it does, we might
well conclude that these creatures could not feel pain and
that we could treat them how we liked. But these creatures
might suffer just as terribly as an animal that we knew could
feel pain. No animal feels any less pain just because we do
not know about it.
Perhaps this principle is fine for science, but wont do for
ethics. We should be more cautious in ethics, and try to
avoid causing pain to any animal that might be conscious.
Perhaps in ethics we should accept the principle: assume
that everything has a mind unless you have evidence it
doesnt.
But if we accepted that principle, we would have to
assume that trees, shrubs and computers might be conscious and would have to be very careful not to cause them
to suffer, for what evidence do we have that they have no
minds? This is plainly ridiculous: even in ethics, we need
not assume that just anything might be conscious and
43
capable of suffering. We should reject the second principle.

So how should we treat animals?
We should distinguish between different kinds of
animal. Where there is any evidence that animals can feel
pain, we should be prepared to assume that they do. We
should be confident that those animals that have a similar
physiology to us and that act in ways that we recognise as
expressing pain, can feel pain. It is very likely that mammals,
having a similar physiology to us, feel pain like we do. It is
quite likely that fish that respond to painful stimuli in ways
we recognise as pain behaviour also can feel pain. It is
possible, though far less certain, that simple creatures like
molluscs feel pain.
Though we should be wary of attributing consciousness
too broadly, we can be confident that many animals can feel
pain. But humans can suffer in other ways as well, that are
not directly connected with feeling pain. We suffer from
fear, anxiety and distress; do animals too?
Fear, Anxiety and Distress

Fear is an emotional response to danger; it is unpleasant but
it enables us to prepare ourselves: to face up to the danger or
to flee as fast as we can. Anxiety is also a response to a perceived threat, but whereas fear is focussed specifically on the
danger, anxiety is a more general feeling of unease.
There is good behavioural evidence that some animals
feel fear and anxiety. In situations that are likely to produce
anxiety, for example when rats are randomly given electric
44
CAN THEY SUFFER?
shocks, the animals behave similarly to anxious humans:

their pulse rate and respiration quicken, they sweat, their
normal behaviour is inhibited, they tense up and are hyperattentive to their surroundings, constantly looking round
for danger. If an anxious rat is given anti-anxiety drugs, its
behaviour returns to normal.
We can use the same Darwinian arguments that we used
for pain to explain why other animals might feel fear and
anxiety. Fear and anxiety are useful to us because they
prepare us to deal with a potential threat: we are alert and
ready. It would be surprising if humans were the only
species to have evolved with these useful emotions; it is far
more likely that some other species perhaps only mammals, perhaps fish too have developed the same responses.
Distress or suffering is the experience of pain, fear,
anxiety or other unpleasant feelings at a significant level.
Animals can suffer distress just as we can, and in similar
ways. But if we want to take account of animal suffering, we
need to have some way of telling not just that animals can
feel fear and pain, but how unpleasant their experiences
really are. We know that it is difficult to tell even of other
humans what they are feeling: how can we measure distress
in animals?
The best guide to animal distress is how well the animal is
coping with its environment. An animal fails to cope with
its environment if it falls ill, is injured, exhibits behaviour
associated with fear, anxiety or pain (raised heartbeat,
sweating), and so on. This measure is obviously at best a
crude rough guide, because it is difficult to compare these
45
different symptoms, and it is hard to know how much an

animal that fails to cope in these ways actually feels distress.
But this is the most satisfactory current method of comparing, for example, the distress suffered by animals in
A caged primate in a laboratory Brian Gunn / IAAPEA
46
CAN THEY SUFFER?
different kinds of farming. Factory-farmed animals are

frequently injured or ill and have difficulty breathing and
moving around, free-range farmed animals are less often ill
and injured and are able to express their natural behaviour.
Free-range farmed animals cope much better with their
environment than factory-farmed animals do, so we can say
that factory-farmed animals tend to suffer much more than
free-range farmed animals.
47
C HAPTER F OUR
CAN THEY REASON?
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, reputedly the mostread American novel of all time, tells the story of Buck, a dog
kidnapped from his comfortable family home and forced to
pull a sled through the frozen Klondike during the goldrush. Buck, bred from a huge St Bernard, survives and even
thrives in his new life, in part through his immense size
and strength, but also through a mixture of instinct and
intelligence. Buck is a fighter and a killer. He enjoys the taste
of blood. But when it comes to a battle to the death with his
great rival, Spitz, he does not rely solely on his instincts:
feinting as if to shoulder-charge, instead he bites the other
dogs front legs, breaking them and leaving him helpless.
Buck wins because he is thoughtful and cunning, as well as
vicious and powerful.
Jack Londons portrayal of the mind of a dog is certainly
gripping, but is it at all realistic? We often interpret animals
as having thoughts: the cat that stands by the door wants to
go out; the excited dog thinks he is about to be taken for a
walk. We can tell that the dog is expecting to see his owner at
the door, and is disappointed to find a stranger instead. We
interpret a dog as burying the bone so that he can dig it up
48
CAN THEY REASON?
and enjoy it later. But we also know that, like Buck, many
animals act on instinct, without thinking about what they
are doing and why. For example, many animals salivate
when they get food, without believing that salivating helps
them to get food or to digest it.
If you have a belief, you represent the world to yourself in
a particular way: if you believe that it is sunny, you represent
that the sun is shining; if you think it is raining, you
represent the world differently. You choose what to do on
the basis of your beliefs: if you want to sunbathe, you go
outside when you think that it is sunny, and stay indoors
when you think that it is not.
In the last chapter we saw that behaviourists thought that
it was a mistake to attribute any mental states to animals;
they would describe an animals outward behaviour the
cat has moved closer to the door and is vocalising but they
would not explain this in terms of mental states. They
thought that saying the cat wants to go outside was hopelessly anthropomorphic.
Behaviourists tried to explain animal behaviour in purely
non-mental terms. But it proved difficult if not impossible
to understand animals without describing them as having
desires and beliefs. As soon as we accept that the cat wants
to go out, we know why she is standing by the door; for a
behaviourist, it is a mystery. It is not anthropomorphic to
think that animals have minds: it is simple common sense.
Of course, it is possible that only humans have a mental
life whereas all other animals act only on instinct. But just as
it would be surprising if humans but no other animals, no
49
matter how biologically similar, were conscious and could

feel pain, it would be surprising if humans had thoughts and
desires but no other animals did. Having beliefs and desires
rather than mere instincts is useful to us, enabling us to
represent the world in ways that it could be but is not, in
ways that we would like it to be; we can begin to think not
just about how the world is but about how we might change
it. Having beliefs as well as instincts is likely to give any
animal an evolutionary advantage, helping it live for longer
and reproduce more successfully, so we should expect
that at least some other animals have thoughts as well as
instincts.
But we still need to make sure that we are not being
anthropomorphic, ascribing beliefs and desires inappropriately all over the place. It seems natural for us to describe
some animals at least as having beliefs and desires. But it
also seems to be natural for us to talk about the beliefs and
desires of many things, not all of which have minds. We say
that plants like to be watered and to grow towards the light.
We say that a thermostat wants the room to be at 22 degrees,
so it turns on the heating until it thinks that the room is at
that temperature, and then turns it off.
The philosopher Dan Dennett calls this taking the
intentional stance towards thermostats and plants. When
we take the intentional stance towards an object we explain
its behaviour and predict what it will do in the future in
terms of its goals and how it thinks it can achieve them: the
thermostats goal is to keep the room at a particular temperature, and it thinks it can achieve this by altering the heating.
50
CAN THEY REASON?
It can be useful to take the intentional stance towards

animals, describing their behaviour in terms of beliefs and
desires, but it can be useful to take the intentional stance
towards plants and thermostats, too, and we are pretty sure
that plants and thermostats do not really have beliefs and
desires: in fact, they have no minds at all. So we should be
wary of assuming that animals have beliefs and desires, just
because it is useful for us to talk about them as if they do.
Beliefs vs. Instinctive Responses to Stimuli

We know that sometimes animals react instinctively to
stimuli, and that we can affect responses to stimuli by
conditioning, that is, by repeatedly reinforcing with
rewards a new response. But if we find out that an animal
has reacted instinctively, we no longer think that it has acted
on beliefs and desires. How is action based on beliefs and
desires different from instinctive behaviour?
Action based on beliefs and desires is intelligently
flexible in a way that instinctive reactions to stimuli are not.
Your actions are intelligently flexible in this sense: if you
find that one way of pursuing your goal is no good, you
will try to find another way of achieving it; you respond
appropriately to relevant changes in your information. For
example, if you want to get some bread, and you think that
you can get some from the local bakery, you go there first of
all. But if you find that it has sold out, you visit the out-oftown supermarket instead. If the first way you try to get your
loaf fails, you adapt by finding a new means to your goal.
51
Also, you can use the same means to achieve a different goal:
while you are at the supermarket, you may buy some
vegetables too.
After repeated reinforcements, rats can be taught to
press a bar in order to get food. It may seem that they are
acting on beliefs and desires: the desire to get food and a
belief that pressing the bar will get them it. But the rats
response is not flexible. If the experimenter changes the trial
so that the rats do not get fed when they press the bar, the
rats carry on pressing. They do not respond appropriately to
changes in their situation.
The sphex wasp is another creature whose instincts are
not intelligently flexible. The wasp lays eggs in a burrow,
and leaves a stunned locust there for her offspring to eat
when they hatch. She drags the locust to her burrow, goes in
alone to check that it is free of intruders, and then drags the
locust inside. The wasp seems to be acting on the desire to
protect her offspring from predators and the belief that she
can help protect them by carefully checking her burrow.
But if, while the wasp is inside checking her burrow,
someone moves the locust away from its edge, when she
goes back outside, she moves the locust back to the edge and
checks inside again. And if it is moved again while she is
inside, she does exactly the same again. And again. She does
not ever recognise that she has already checked the burrow
and has no need to do so once more. She acts on instinct, not
on beliefs and desires.
A thermostat set to 22 degrees turns on the central
heating when it registers the room temperature as less than
52
CAN THEY REASON?
22 degrees, and turns it off when it registers that the

temperature has reached that figure. It is not flexible; it
cannot aim at different goals, and it can only regulate the
temperature in one way. If the link between the thermostat
and the heating breaks, the thermostat cannot respond; it
cannot cool the room by opening a window instead, for
example.
Agents who act on their beliefs and desires are able to
choose the same means to achieve different goals, and
different means for the same aim, depending on their
circumstances; whereas thermostats are designed to pursue
one goal, and always to pursue it in the same way. Many
animals make conditioned responses to stimuli, some of
which, like a dog salivating before it is fed, are extremely
simple. But it is not just because they are simple that these
behaviours do not count as action based on beliefs and
desires. The instincts of the sphex wasp are quite complex
and sophisticated. Instinctive and conditioned responses to
stimuli are different from action based on beliefs and
desires because they are inflexible, not because they are less
complicated. But are any animals capable of intelligent
action based on beliefs and desires rather than mere
responses to stimuli?
The Link between Language and Belief

We know that humans are intelligent agents because we talk
to each other: using a complex language is a clear sign of
intelligent thought. Many people who insist that animals
53
have no beliefs do so on the basis that animals do not use

language. On the other hand, if we found that some animals
were language-users, we could be fairly certain that they
were capable of thought too. So it is crucial whether animals
do in fact use language. One might have thought that this
was a pretty straightforward issue to settle, but in fact it
turns out to be extremely controversial.
Animals certainly communicate with one another. Many
animals mark off territory using smells (for example urine)
sometimes described as a signature. Other animals tend to
keep out of the territory once they have noticed the scent.
When bees find a large supply of nectar, they fly back to
the nest and perform a dance which encodes information
about the direction and distance of the food. Other bees that
see the dance use this information to find the nectar.
What is notable about these signs is that each time,
similar information is encoded in a similar sign. Bees
communicate the whereabouts of a source of nectar by
dancing in a particular way. They do not have different ways
of encoding information about nectar sources in different
styles of dancing, and they do not express different
information in their dance, for example, about how they are
feeling that day. The same is true of urine signatures; they
can only be used to say that this is some creatures territory.
Our use of language is much more flexible: we express all
sorts of information in all sorts of different ways, we have
many different ways of saying the same thing and we can
put into words lots of different ideas. And the way we use
language to communicate is very complicated.
54
CAN THEY REASON?
Suppose I say to you: This is my land. There is a

convention among speakers of English that the words I have
used mean that this piece of land belongs to me. We both
know this, and we both know that the other knows it. When
I say, This is my land, I intend that you form the belief that
the land is mine, because you recognise that I said what I
did so that you would form that very belief. Any communication of this kind requires the speaker to have
quite complex intentions and beliefs. And similarly the
interpreter needs to know not just what the words mean,
but also that the speaker has those beliefs and intentions.
When animals leave behind urine signatures, are they
communicating in this complex way? They might be, but
they are probably doing something much more simple.
Animals may simply produce urine signatures and other
animals avoid them without thinking at all: such instincts
would keep potentially dangerous rival animals away from
one another, and so are likely to be selected by evolution.
The animals themselves may have absolutely no idea what
they are doing. They certainly need not attribute beliefs or
intentions to other creatures; the system of signatures may
be totally different from human communication.
No other animal naturally uses a language anywhere near
as complex as human languages; it used to be thought that
animals were incapable of doing so. But there have been
more or less successful attempts to encourage chimps,
gorillas and other higher apes to learn sign language.
Washoe and Nim Chimpski were among the first chimps to
be taught sign language intensively.
55
It is controversial how far these chimps mastered sign

language; sceptics think that the claims made by their
trainers are much too generous. Chimps can clearly understand words for material objects (head, nut, cat), and simple
commands (fetch, put), but in other respects their language
use falls a long way short of normal human use, even that of
young children. They rarely start conversations or produce
novel sentences, as human infants do. Though chimps can
produce simple sentences, they do not appear to be able to
talk about the future and have trouble mastering complex
concepts, such as conditionals (sentences like: if X, then Y)
and causation (sentences like: X causes Y).
The difference between human and ape language use is
well illustrated by an unlikely encounter that took place
between William Shatner, the actor well known for playing
Captain James T. Kirk of Star Trek, and Koko, a signing
gorilla. Shatner muses on the significance of the meeting:
Koko and I talked. We touched hands and we touched
minds. Feeling her powerful hand on the back of my
neck was unlike any experience Ive known. The
hand across the border that Koko extended to me taught
me in that one moment that we are linked inexorably
with everything else in nature and that for us to be
destroying species after species is criminal.
Kokos concerns, as expressed in a conversation with her
trainer, Dr Francine Penny Patterson, are more straightforward:
56
CAN THEY REASON?
Candy give-me
Drink apple
Sleep lie-down. This red red hurry.
Whereas Shatner expresses abstract ideas like the problematic relationship between man and nature in quite complex
sentences, Koko talks about her immediate environment,
what she sees and what she wants, in the simplest of terms.
It is clearly wrong to say that no animals are capable of
language use. Many animals encode information in signs,
and other animals respond to that information, as when
creatures make urine signatures. But it is certainly true that
few animals, perhaps only chimps, perhaps higher apes, are
capable of anything like human language use; most animals,
including common domestic and farm animals such as cats,
cows and chickens, are not capable of this at all. Even
chimps do not seem to be able to use human language in
ways as complex as human infants.
Much animal communication may be instinctive, rather
than intelligently flexible action. But we should not conclude that animals cannot think just because they do not use
language as we do. Perhaps their beliefs and ability to reason
are shown in other contexts.
Surprise!
When you go to the local bakery and find that it has sold out,
you are surprised. Your reaction is a sign that you have
noticed that the world is different from the way you had
57
represented it: you had represented the bakery as having

bread you could buy; but in the real world, it has none.
If an animal were surprised when faced with an
unexpected situation, we would have evidence that it had
beliefs representing the world and was puzzled that the
world differed from its representation. We might be able to
tell that an animal was surprised or had changed its plans,
even though, unlike another human, it could not tell us
about it. One reason why we are confident that the sphex
wasp acts on instinct rather than on beliefs is that she does
not show any surprise when the locust is constantly moved
away from her burrow.
We do have some evidence, if anecdotal, that animals do
show surprise and do change their plans. A cat goes to the
place it is normally fed, and finding no food there, goes to
find her owner to complain about it. She planned to eat food
from her dish, but when she realised that the dish was
empty, she changed her mind. Unfortunately, it is always
going to be hard to tell whether a cat was genuinely
surprised at the lack of food or has merely learnt a complex
response: when hungry, go to dish; if no food in dish, go to
owner. But by careful observation of their behaviour, we
have some evidence that animals do have beliefs.
The Content of Animal Beliefs

It is no good saying: animals must have beliefs, but of course
I have absolutely no idea what they are. Suppose that Rovers
owner is Mr Peter Jones. Does Rover believe he will be taken
58
CAN THEY REASON?
for a walk by his owner? Or by Mr Peter Jones? Or by a tall

thing with a particular smell? Each of these is a different
thought. If Rover can think, he must have beliefs that are
about his master, or Peter Jones, or some completely
different things. But how can we tell whether Rover thinks
of Peter Jones as my owner, or as someone called Peter Jones?
Unless we know this, we cannot have any precise idea of the
content of his beliefs, and unless we have a good idea of their
contents, we cannot really ascribe any beliefs to him at all.
We have a similar problem in knowing exactly what
beliefs other humans have. For example, we may not be sure
whether Peter Jones thinks I will take Rover for a walk, or I
will take my smelly dog for a walk. He may think both at
once. But it is easy to find out about Peter Joness beliefs: we
can ask him and he can tell us. Obviously we cannot ask the
dog what he was thinking, so it is very much harder for us to
work out what beliefs Rover has.
On the other hand, if we watch Rover carefully, we
should be able to get a rough idea of what he believes. For
example, Rover chews bones and buries them in the garden;
he does not chew or bury anything else there. It is reasonable to think that Rover has beliefs about bones, like there
are some bones buried in the garden. Of course, he may have
a very different idea of bones than we do, his concept of a
bone may be quite unlike ours; he probably does not know
that both he and his owner have bones inside them as part of
their skeleton, for example. But it is reasonable to use our
own words to describe Rovers beliefs, provided we keep in
mind that his concepts are likely to differ from our own.
59
Conclusion
All of us describe animal behaviour in terms of beliefs and
desires. Are we just hopelessly anthropomorphic? Some
animals seem to act flexibly in response to changes in the
world around them. It is always difficult to tell whether
these animals have merely learnt complex responses to
stimuli, but we have evidence that these behaviours are not
mere instincts or conditioned responses if the animals show
surprise that the world is not as they thought it was and
seem to change their mind about what to do next.
Even if we are confident that these animals do have
beliefs, it is very difficult for us to discover what they are
thinking about. We can get a reasonable idea of exactly what
beliefs dogs have by closely observing their behaviour,
seeing whether they distinguish between cats and other
kinds of animals they can chase, bones and other kinds of
things they can eat. We can use our own concepts to
describe doggie thoughts, but we must use caution, as dogs
are likely to employ much less sophisticated concepts than
we do, and may use different ones entirely; we must be
aware that what we can say about the content of their beliefs
is certainly limited and may be completely wrong. Nevertheless, careful observation of non-human animals can tell
us that some of these creatures have beliefs and can give us
an idea of what beliefs they have.
60
C HAPTER F IVE
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
AND H UMAN M INDS
Clever Hans was a horse who lived in the 19th century. If
you put a number of objects in front of him and asked him
how many there were, he would tap out the answer with his
hoof. Many people believed that Hans the horse could
count, especially when they saw that he did not rely on clues
about the right answer from his trainer; he could get the
answer right even when his trainer was not around.
Hans the horse could not count. When he tapped his
hoof, he was not counting out the number of objects in front
of him, instead, he was responding to the excitement from
people watching when he had tapped out the right number.
If no one who could count was present, there was no
excitement, and Hans kept on tapping his hoof: he did not
know when to stop. At first, it looked as if Hans was an
extraordinary horse who genuinely could understand
numbers. In fact, he was indeed exceptional, but in his
sensitivity to peoples reactions to him, not because he had
outstanding abilities at maths. Hans was clever, but not in
the way that his 19th-century fans thought he was.
Sometimes animals fool us into thinking that they are
intelligent when they are not. At first glance, we are
61
impressed with the foresight and care of the sphex wasp,

checking her burrow for predators before bringing in food
for her offspring. But we soon find out that she is not as
clever as she seems: she always does the same thing, whether
or not she has good reason. The sphex wasp and Clever
Hans show us that we need to be very careful of jumping
to conclusions about animal intelligence: we must be wary
of anthropomorphism, of assuming that animal minds are
exactly like ours.
In the past there have been many attempts to draw a clear
line between human and animal minds, to discover which
of our abilities are distinctively human. Perhaps only humans
can use language? But as we saw in the last chapter, many
animals communicate with one another and some higher
apes are able to learn simple human languages. Perhaps only
humans are self-aware, or have culture, or can use tools: is
there anything we can do that animals cant?
Use of Tools and Tool-making

In the past, many people thought that using tools was a
distinctively human activity. Of course, many of the animals
with which we are most familiar dogs, cats, pigs, cows and
sheep do not use tools at all. But eventually we discovered
that several other species of animal do: some chimps use
stones to break up nuts, some use sticks to poke into ants
nests to help them eat the ants. Egyptian vultures use stones
to break open eggshells; song thrushes carry snails high into
the air and drop them to smash on the rocks below.
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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN MINDS
The ability to use tools is obviously not unique to

humans, for many animals use tools too, but perhaps they
cannot make tools. After all, using tools may not be a sign of
great intelligence, for one might stumble over an appropriate stone or twig and accidentally use it in the right way.
Making a tool, by contrast, seems to involve considerably
more thought. Suppose that you are a chimp and you would
like to eat some ants that are hiding in their nest. You can
pick up ants individually by hand, but thats a very slow
process. You realise that if you poke a stick into the nest, the
ants cling on to it, so that when you pull it out of the nest,
you can feast on the ants. But you need the right kind of
stick, one that you can easily poke into the nest and get out
again: you need a long stick without any side-branches. You
find a stick of a suitable length and pull away the sidebranches and leaves. Now its a perfect tool to pick up ants;
all you need now is to find a nest and you can eat as much
as you want. And in fact, this is exactly what ant-eating
chimps do.
If the chimps were really clever, they might be able to
design tools in the abstract: they might be able to think up
the ideal ant-eating stick by thinking about what they want
the tool for, without trying out different sizes and shapes of
twig. If not, they could find the ideal tool by testing lots of
different types of stick, seeing which worked best, then
modifying other twigs to look like their best effort.
It is not clear whether chimps can design tools in the
abstract or whether they merely find the best tools by
trial and error. But in either case, tool-making is not a
63
distinctively human ability, for chimps at least can do so

as well.
Cultured Creatures
Animals both use and make tools: these abilities do not
distinguish humans from other animals. But there may be
other distinctively human capacities; perhaps humans are
unlike other animals because only humans have culture.
We have many practices that we could have carried out
differently: everyone in our society talks in the same
language, but we all could have preferred a different one;
everyone drives on one side of the road, but we could have
chosen the other side. We learn our language and driving
skills from other humans in our society: no one is born
knowing English or which way to point their car. Culture,
understood in this broad sense, is a huge influence on us;
what we learn in our society affects enormously how we live
our lives.
Do animals have culture? There is evidence that at least
some animals do have practices that are not biologically
determined but that are spread through social learning.
There is a troop of macaques (a kind of monkey) living on
the Pacific island of Koshima that wash sweet potatoes in
the sea before they eat them. Researchers who studied the
monkeys left the potatoes on the beach for them, and
initially, the macaques would eat them without washing
them. One day one of the macaques washed her potato in
the sea, and soon all the other animals in the troop copied
64
Animal culture: a macaque washing a potato

Heather Angel/Natural Visions
her and washed their potatoes too. Young macaques were

taught the practice and it was passed on to the next generation. Similarly, chimps that use stones to break the shells
off nuts do not need to work out what is the best shape
of stone by trial and error; they copy chimps that already
know what to do. Like humans, many apes are very good at
65
imitating what another is doing; this enables them to learn

from one another, so it is not surprising that apes as well as
humans have culture, at least of a simple kind.
Some animals have shown a surprising sensitivity to the
higher forms of human culture too. There are many anecdotes of animals enjoying Mozarts music, and scientists
have discovered that sparrows tend to prefer listening to
Bach than to Schnberg. Pigeons were even proved by
Tokyo scientist Shigeru Watanabe to be extremely discerning art critics. Birds were trained with rewards to peck at
copies of either Picassos or Monets paintings. They were
then presented with another set of pictures, which they had
never seen before. The pigeons were able to pick out works
by the artists they had been trained to recognise, even when
the pictures were entirely new to them. And when presented with paintings by artists of a similar period, the
Picasso-trained birds preferred other cubists, whereas birds
trained on Monet preferred other impressionists like Renoir.
Amazingly, pigeons can apparently distinguish different
schools of art as well as work by different painters. It seems
that even appreciation of art and music is not distinctive of
our species.
Can Animals Think About Themselves?

Do animals have a sense of self? If we held up a mirror to a
cat or a dog, would it recognise itself?
Gordon Gallup, an animal researcher, decided to take
this question literally, and test whether chimpanzees could
66
recognise themselves reflected in a mirror. To start with,

the chimps treated their reflection in the same way as
they would another chimp: they stared at it, cautiously
approached it and looked behind the mirror. Afterwards,
they used the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths
and parts of their body they had not seen before. To test
whether the chimps really did realise that they were looking
at themselves, Gallup put them under anaesthetic and
painted a red mark on their faces. When the chimps woke
up and each saw himself in the mirror, he touched the red
mark on his face much more than he normally would; some
chimps touched the mark and then looked at their fingers.
Gallups experiment suggests that chimps do recognise
themselves in the mirror, and further experiments show
that orang-utans, bonobos and human children who are
over the age of two do too. Monkeys, by contrast, do not
seem to pass the test, for they do not touch the red mark on
their face when they see themselves in the mirror.
The significance of Gallups experiments is hotly
debated. Gallup thought he had shown that chimps were
self-aware because they could recognise themselves in the
mirror. Is the test definitive of self-awareness: if monkeys
fail the test, must we conclude that they are not self-aware?
No. Monkeys and other animals might fail the test even if
they are aware of themselves because the test is not well
designed for them. For some species of monkey, staring at
another monkey is a sign of aggression, so many monkeys
do not look closely at their mirror image for fear of starting
a fight with a potential rival. They may not recognise
67
themselves because they are not willing to stare into the

mirror, rather than because they are not self-aware.
Of course, if chimps do recognise themselves in the
mirror, they must be able to think: Thats me! And Gallups
experiment suggests they are also thinking: Whats that
strange mark on my head? But it does not show that they
have any more awareness of themselves than that: chimps
may not be aware of their own thoughts or feelings.
Humans are self-aware in the further sense that we can
reflect on what we are thinking. That was a clever idea of
mine, I think smugly to myself, as I turn down a side-street
to make a short-cut to the shops. No, it was really stupid, I
ruefully reflect, as I realise that Im going to get stuck in the
one-way system after all. I can think about my own beliefs,
and assess them for being clever or stupid, reasonable or
unreasonable, true or false.
I am also aware that I am a creature that exists through
time: I vow that tomorrow, I wont take the wrong shortcut and make the same mistake as I made yesterday. Selfawareness in humans involves more than just the ability to
recognise oneself in the mirror. It includes the ability to
reflect on and assess your own thoughts, and the recognition
that you existed in the past and will exist in the future. Even if
chimps are self-aware in the sense that they pass the mirrorrecognition test, we cannot tell from that test whether they
have these extra abilities that humans have. And at the
moment, we have no other evidence that they do.
The philosopher Donald Davidson, having assumed that
animals cannot reflect on their own thoughts, has argued
68
that they have no beliefs at all. He claims that to have beliefs

at all, a creature has to be able to reflect on its beliefs and
recognise that they are representations of the world that
sometimes are accurate and sometimes are not. We are
capable of this kind of reflection, but we have no evidence
that animals are; Davidson concludes that animals probably
have no beliefs. But it is obviously one thing to represent the
world in a certain way and to act on that basis, for example,
to represent a tree as having bananas in it, to climb the tree
and eat the bananas; it is quite another to recognise that you
have represented the world in a certain way, and that your
representation might be inaccurate, to recognise that though
you think there are bananas in the tree, there might not be.
Davidson is wrong: if you represent the world and act on
that basis, you have beliefs, whether or not you realise that
you might have got the world completely wrong. Even if
animals cannot think about themselves as we humans do,
they may still have beliefs.
Can Animals Understand Other Minds?

Do any other animals have beliefs about the minds of other
animals? Can they tell what other animals are thinking?
There is evidence that they may do: animals have been
observed apparently trying to deceive one another. An ape
that is not badly hurt may go about limping so that the
others share food with him and generally treat him better:
he seems to be deceiving other apes for his own benefit. But
does the ape pretend to limp because he believes that other
69
apes will think that he is injured and feel sorry for him? Or
does he merely discover by trial and error that he gets more
food when he limps? He might limp because he gets more
food that way, without making any assumptions about what
the other apes think about him.
How can we tell whether animals think about what other
animals are thinking? The false belief test has been devised
to find out whether human children can mind-read, that
is, to find out whether they can work out what other humans
are thinking. Normal children can mind-read from the age
of four or five.
A modified version of the false belief test has been
devised to test whether animals (often chimps) can ascribe
beliefs to others. In the first test, a chimp is shown two
opaque boxes, which are then hidden from her view. One
researcher (the hider) hides a reward in one box, while
another (the communicator) watches. The chimp can see
that the communicator knows in which box the reward is
hidden, but she does not know the right box herself. The
chimp can then choose between the two boxes; the communicator points to the right box; when the chimp chooses
it, she gets the reward.
Once the chimp has learnt to choose the box indicated by
the communicator, the set-up is changed. In the next trial,
the hider hides the reward while the communicator
watches. The chimp still cannot see the chosen box and can
still observe that the communicator knows which it is. Next,
the communicator leaves the room, while the hider switches
round the boxes. The communicator returns and indicates
70
the box that he thinks contains the reward (which of course

is empty). If the chimp realises that the communicator is
indicating the wrong box (because he does not know that
the boxes have been switched), the chimp should choose the
other box. Children over five realise that the communicator
has a false belief about the whereabouts of the reward, and
pass the test. No chimp has yet passed the test.
A second version of the false belief test has been designed
to see whether chimps can ascribe beliefs to other chimps,
rather than to humans. First of all, food is hidden in front of
both subordinate and dominant chimps. The dominant
chimp gets most of this food. Next, food is hidden in front of
subordinate chimps when the dominant chimp cannot see
what is going on. The subordinate chimp can see where the
food is hidden and that the dominant chimp does not know
where the food is. The subordinate chimp waits until the
dominant chimp is out of the way, then gets the food and
eats it herself. In this test, subordinate chimps act differently
depending on whether they think that a dominant chimp
knows about the hidden food; they must be mind-reading.
Chimps that failed the first version of the false belief test
can pass the second test; they seem to be able to mind-read
in some circumstances but not others. Perhaps they find it
easier to think about what other chimps believe, rather than
creatures of another species. Perhaps they are more used to
competition than co-operation, and so are better at thinking,
as in the second test, about the beliefs of animals that are competing with them for food, rather than, as in the first test,
about the beliefs of creatures that are co-operating with them.
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Very few animals other than higher apes and dolphins

have passed any false belief test, but this does not prove that
none of them can mind-read: we may simply have failed to
design a test that proves that they can. Alternatively, an
animal could be aware of its own beliefs as mental representations of the world, while assuming that no other creature
had a mind at all: it might be able to reflect on its own beliefs,
though it always failed a false belief test. The experiments
show that at least chimps, dolphins and some other animals
do have a partial grasp of what a belief is, for they attribute
beliefs to other creatures in some circumstances.
Autonomous Action and Morality

Many people have tried to draw a line between humans and
animals, claiming that only humans use tools, or make
tools, or have culture, or use language, or have beliefs about
other minds. But at least chimps and other higher apes are
to some degree like humans in these respects; they use
language and tools and pass some versions of the false belief
test. Human and animal minds are different only in degree,
not in kind. But though human and animal intelligence are
on a continuum, the differences between them can still be
important.
A cat sees a mouse running across a field. She crouches
near to the ground ready to spring. When the mouse trots
nearby, she pounces on him, kills him and eats him.
This cat, like many animals, decides what to do on the
basis of its beliefs and desires. How is this different from
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the way that humans act? Often, we just act on our beliefs
and desires too. But we can also reflect on whether acting on
our beliefs and desires is really a good idea.
Suppose that I want to buy some new clothes to follow the
latest fashions, and also to give some money to charity to
help people in need. I could just act on these desires: go to
the shops and choose some new clothes; send off a cheque
to the charity. I am free to do what I want: there is nothing
to stop me doing either. If I simply did what I wanted, I
would be a free agent, just as animals are free agents when
they act on their beliefs and desires. But sometimes I reflect
on my desires and see whether I really want to have those
desires, whether I think that acting on them is really
worthwhile. When I reflect on my desire to give to charity, I
think that its good to have such desires and act on them, so I
go and give money to the charity. When I think about my
desire to have fashionable clothes, I am not sure that its
good that I have such desires. I have perfectly good clothes
already; why should I care about whether what Im wearing
is fashionable? Isnt it rather shallow and expensive to
follow such trends?
We are capable of reflecting on our beliefs and desires,
and on why we have them. We can assess whether we have
good reasons for them: is a desire to be fashionable harmless
or shallow? And sometimes we alter our beliefs, desires and
behaviour in line with what we think are good reasons: I
change my mind about going shopping because I decide
that its silly to want new clothes all the time; instead I stay at
home and write out a cheque to Oxfam. This capacity to
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reflect on our desires, to assess whether we have genuine

reasons for them, and to choose whether or not actually to
act on them is our capacity to be autonomous. Autonomous
means self-governing: we are self-governing because we
are not slaves to our own desires. We can reflect on whether
our desires are worthwhile; we can choose to act on desires
that seem to us to be good and choose not to act on
desires that seem worthless or bad.
The cat catches the mouse because she wants to eat it.
Animals act on their beliefs and desires, but as far as we
know, they do not think about their beliefs, desires and
actions and assess them as we do. The cat may think about
how she can best stalk the mouse, but she does not wonder
whether she ought not to eat it in the first place. Though we
know that some animals, like the higher apes, have a partial
concept of belief and can think about the minds of some
other animals, we have no evidence that any animals reflect
on whether they have good reasons to do what they want,
whether it would be better if they had different desires or
did something else. We have no evidence that animals are
autonomous.
Moral Responsibility
When we catch Bob the burglar red-handed inside someone
elses house with a bag of swag, we hold him responsible for
breaking the law and acting wrongly. He is dishonest: he
deserves criticism, blame and punishment for what he has
done. Even if he had never thought about whether a life of
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crime was wrong, he could have done, he could have chosen

not to become a burglar. Even if in fact no career path except
burglary ever occurred to him, he should have known
better.
When a human does something wrong, we hold them
responsible for what they have done, except in special
circumstances. If Bob were a kleptomaniac, or under
hypnosis, or if he had taken mind-altering drugs, we would
treat him quite differently: he would need treatment for his
problems rather than blame and punishment. If Bob were a
child, we would try to teach him not to break the law and act
dishonestly, but we do not hold children responsible for
wrong-doing in the same way as adults: children need to
learn what is right and wrong, adults should know.
When we hold Bob responsible for his crime, we treat
him as a moral agent: someone who acts well or badly, who
deserves praise or blame and punishment. We do not treat
drug addicts or kleptomaniacs as moral agents because they
cannot properly reflect on whether they are acting for good
or bad reasons, and even if they do recognise that they are
acting for bad reasons, there is typically nothing they can do
about it: if a drug-addict realises he would be better off not
addicted to the drug, it is very difficult for him just to stop
taking it. Drug addicts and kleptomaniacs are not fully in
control of their thoughts and actions: they are not autonomous. That is why it is not appropriate to hold them
morally responsible for what they do. We treat children as
moral agents in the making: we try to teach them the
difference between good and bad reasons for action, we
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correct them when they act wrongly so that they can learn to
take responsibility for their actions.
We are autonomous; we can reflect on our reasons for
action, decide whether they are good, and change our
behaviour so that we act for good reasons. Animals are not
autonomous; they are not able to reflect on why they do
what they do. To be morally responsible you need to be able
to assess your reasons for action: for example, you must be
able to take into account the probable effects of your actions
on others feelings and on what they want. But very few
animals have any idea what other animals think or feel. It is
no surprise, therefore, that we do not treat animals as
morally responsible for what they do. Though we may try
to train them, altering their behaviour with rewards and
punishments, we do not usually think that animals can be
guilty of crimes or that they deserve blame or punishment.
For example, though chimps and bonobos are biologically
very closely related, their social groups are very different;
chimps are much more aggressive and violent than
bonobos, who usually resolve conflicts by having sex. But
we would not conclude that chimps were morally worse as a
species than bonobos: each acts in ways natural to them.
Similarly, we would not judge the cat that catches and eats a
mouse as guilty of murder; the cat is doing what is natural
for her, and is not capable of wondering whether it is right
or wrong.
Some animals, especially those like chimps who live in
complex social groups, act in ways that we would call
virtuous if we saw them in humans. Many of these animals
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look after their own young, sometimes they even care for
the young of other animals and the old and frail members of
their group; they seem to show sympathy and concern for
others. Some animals have social networks where they
reciprocally help one another. Vampire bats go out each
night to find a meal of blood. When they return to their
cave, the successful bats regurgitate some of the blood they
have eaten to a bat that was not so lucky.
We may be tempted to call these bats altruistic, but we
have no evidence that they think of what they are doing in
moral terms. They may even be acting on instinct. Many
animals may be capable of suffering from fear and anxiety,
as we saw in Chapter 3, but there is little evidence that they
can feel moral emotions like guilt and shame that are
experienced only by those who have an understanding of
moral right and wrong. As Mark Twain said, Man is the
only animal that blushes. Or that needs to.
Of course, we can say that certain animals are acting like
someone who is generous or benevolent, but we should not
praise them for acting well unless we are also prepared to
hold responsible animals that seem selfish or violent. We
cannot consistently praise bonobos for their peacefulness, unless we are prepared to blame chimps for their
aggression, but it is surely grossly inappropriate to blame
animals that are not capable of thinking about the right and
wrong way to behave. Since animals are not autonomous,
we ought not to treat them as morally responsible for their
actions.
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Conclusion
In Chapters 3 and 4 of his book The Descent of Man, Darwin
wrote:
There is no fundamental difference between man and
the higher mammals in their mental faculties The
lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and
pain, happiness and misery There can be no doubt
that the difference between the mind of the lowest man
and that of the highest animal is immense Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the
higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree
and not of kind.
As in many things, he was completely correct. Like us, many
animals can feel pain; some also suffer from fear and
anxiety. Some animals can form beliefs, and act on their
beliefs and desires, rather than merely on instinct. The
traditional ways of distinguishing man from the other
animals as a user of tools, or maker of tools, or user of
language all fail, because other animals are capable of
these too.
Nevertheless, there are some important differences
between human and animal minds. As far as we know, no
animals are autonomous: they are not capable of reflecting
on their beliefs and desires, of assessing whether they have
good reasons to act, or of changing their behaviour in line
with what they think they have most reason to do. As a
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consequence, no animals other than humans are morally

responsible for what they do. This fact is obviously morally
significant: it follows that man is the only animal that can
be innocent or guilty and deserve punishment. But does
it make a difference in other ways to the moral status of
animals? This is a question for the next part of this book,
where we consider whether animals have moral status, and
whether they have rights.
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PART TWO
ALL ANIMALS ARE

EQUAL ?
C HAPTER S IX
RIGHTS AND MORAL

STATUS
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we
not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you
wrong us, shall we not revenge?
In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio borrows some money
from Shylock, a Jew, agreeing to repay it by a certain date.
But when the payment is due, he has lost his money and
cannot keep his word. In these lines, Shylock argues that the
harm Antonio has done to him matters morally, insisting
that he must be allowed to extract compensation for the
wrong he has suffered, just as a Christian would. In
Shakespeares play, his eloquent plea is accepted, though
ultimately his legal case does not go as he had planned.
In arguing that the harm inflicted on him matters
morally, Shylock is claiming that he has moral status. Our
ordinary moral thought distinguishes humans, who have
moral status, from things like stones and pieces of wood that
do not. There is nothing morally wrong with treating an
ordinary stone or a piece of wood mere objects in any
way that you want. It does not matter morally if you smash
them up or stamp on them just because you feel like it, and
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you have no reason to feel guilty for doing so. The value of
an object depends on how useful it is to you: if you need a
stone, that stone is valuable to you; when you no longer
need it, it is worthless.
Unlike stones and pieces of wood, humans are capable of
feeling pain and pleasure, and thinking about their own
lives. It matters morally how you treat other humans: you
ought not to harm them unnecessarily: you should not lie to
them, steal from them, cheat them or kill them. When you
think of doing something that might harm them, you ought
to take into consideration the pain you might cause them
and what they want to do with their life, as well as what you
want for yourself. The value of humans does not depend on
how useful they are.
Do animals have moral status like humans, or do they
lack moral status like sticks and stones? Does it matter
morally if you hurt a dog or a cat? What about slugs or toads,
or bacteria?
Of course, what you do to animals or plants might matter
morally because of the effects on those who own the animals
or plants. I ought not to cut down your tree or kick your dog
without your permission, because they are your property.
But if a dog did not belong to anyone, or if it belonged to me,
would it matter what I did to it?
In this and the following four chapters, I will try to decide
whether animals, like people, have moral status. But first I
want to distinguish the question of moral status from the
question of whether animals have rights. There is enormous
disagreement about what it means to have a right, whether
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RIGHTS AND MORAL STATUS
humans have rights and what rights they have. But we

cannot even begin to consider whether animals have rights
before getting clear about what rights really are.
Legal Rights
You can have two different kinds of rights, legal rights and
moral rights. You have a legal right if it follows from the law
of your country that you are entitled to perform some action
or to be treated by others in a particular way.
For example, you and I and the citizens of many
countries have a legal right to freedom of speech, because we
are entitled to express our opinions in any way we choose.
You and I have a right to life, because no one may
permissibly kill us. If some people try to prevent us from
expressing our opinion, or if they try to kill us, they are
breaking the law. We may bring them to trial and, if they are
found guilty, they will be punished.
In the UK before 1822, animals had no legal rights. There
were laws concerning animals, and some of those laws
prohibited harming animals. But these laws treated animals
as the property of people. Killing a farm animal was wrong
in the same way that burning down a farmers barn was
wrong: it damaged his property. Because it was the farmer,
the owner of the animal, who was protected by the law, he
had rights concerning the animal, but the animal had no
rights at all: someone who killed a chicken violated the
rights of the owner of the chicken, but not the legal rights of
the chicken.
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After 1822, in the UK, some animal welfare legislation

was passed that gave cattle, sheep and horses the legal right
not to be treated cruelly. In time, similar laws were passed to
protect other species, and certain kinds of entertainments
baiting animals, and organising fights between animals
were banned. In the UK and in some other countries,
animals have some legal rights, but of a very limited scope.
Moral Rights
The law of your country defines what your legal rights are.
Your legal rights will change if the law changes: before 1822,
animals in the UK had no legal rights; afterwards they did.
There is a difference between the law as it is in a particular
country, and the law as it should be. In many countries a few
hundred years ago, slaves had no legal rights at all: a master
could kill his slave if he wanted. We can criticise a law of a
land because it is not as it should be; it does not recognise
the moral rights of people in that country. You have a moral
right if you have a claim that others ought to acknowledge.
Slaves who had no legal rights nevertheless had a moral
right not to be killed: a master who killed his slave was
violating the slaves moral rights, even if no one could report
him to a police force or have him punished by the law.
Whereas it is fairly straightforward to tell what legal rights
someone has you find out what is forbidden and what
permitted by the law it is much harder to know what
moral rights he or she has: you need to know what is morally
permitted and forbidden.
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If you have a right to something, you have a special claim

to it, a claim that everyone must acknowledge. When you
play cards, your opponent may have a very strong hand that
would normally win the game; but if you have the trump
card, it does not matter what other cards he or she has:
victory is yours. A right is like a trump card: if you have a
right, no matter how much anyone else would benefit from
violating it, they must not do so. If you own your stereo, you
have rights over it as your property: you are entitled to use it
whenever you want, whether or not other people would
enjoy it more than you do or play better music on it. Everyone else must acknowledge that you have the right over your
own stereo and that you are entitled to refuse to give it up.
Suppose that there are five people dying in hospital with
diseased organs. If the doctors painlessly killed you and
distributed your healthy organs between the patients, they
would all survive and lead happy and useful lives. Everyone
else might be very much happier if the doctors chopped you
up and shared out your organs. But you have a moral right
to life, a trump card, which we must recognise. The rest of us
might be better off if the doctors killed you, but your right
means that we are not entitled to weigh up the benefits of
your death against the costs to you: we must acknowledge
that you are entitled to refuse to die.
You have moral status if it matters morally when you are
harmed, but you can have this status without having any
rights. If you had moral status, but no right to life, we would
have to take into account the grave harm that we would do
to you if we used your organs to save five other peoples
87
lives. But you would have no trump card: we would be

entitled to weigh up the cost to you against the benefit to
those five. If the benefit to the five were sufficiently great, it
could be right to kill you for their sake. If you have moral
status, what happens to you matters morally; but other
things may matter even more.
Most people think that they have a right to life, that no
one is entitled to kill them if they do not want to die, no
matter how much everyone else might benefit from their
death. But what if by killing someone, we could save
millions of lives? Would it be wrong to sacrifice one human
life to avert a terrible catastrophe? Many people think that in
such extreme circumstances it would not be wrong to kill,
even if the victim did not agree to die. So we do not think
that anyones right to life can trump the benefits of his or her
death when those benefits are extraordinarily great. But in
ordinary circumstances, each of us is entitled to refuse to be
sacrificed: we humans have a right to life.
The Grounds of Moral Status

Since it is possible to have moral status without a right to
life, we need to ask two separate questions about animals: do
they have moral status? And do they have a right to life?
Why do we have moral status when sticks and stones do
not? And is this crucial characteristic shared with animals?
We have three features that might be the grounds of moral
status.
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First, we are members of a moral community. We recognise that other members of this community make moral
claims on us just as we make moral claims on them, and we
hold each other morally responsible for treating the others
well. Second, we can feel pleasure and pain. And third, we
are living creatures with needs. If our needs are not met, our
lives will not be successful and eventually we will die.
In Chapters 7 and 8, we will assess whether animals have
moral status by deciding which of these three is the ground
of our moral status. Chapters 9 and 10 will address the
question of the right to life.
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C HAPTER S EVEN
THE MORAL
COMMUNITY
In George Orwells novel Animal Farm, a barnyard of

animals, frustrated with the poor management of their
drunken master Mr Jones, foment a revolution that drives
out Jones and leaves them in charge of the farm. They come
up with a set of seven rules to order their society, which they
paint on the barn wall:
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a
friend
3. No animal shall wear clothes
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed
5. No animal shall drink alcohol
6. No animal shall kill any other animal
7. All animals are equal
The animals accept these rules and live by them, until the
leading pig Napoleon tightens his trotter-grip on power and
their utopia unravels.
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
The creatures of Animal Farm are a moral community.

They have formulated rules that award each other moral
status, and, at least initially, they agree to stick to the rules.
They have made a kind of contract together. This is
remarkably similar to the way that many philosophers think
humans gain moral status.
Ethics as a Contract
If a group of people lived together without any laws, their
society would be chaotic. They would be in constant danger
of harm from one another; their property would be stolen
all the time. Their lives would be, in the words of Thomas
Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short. Any sensible people
would get together to agree on a set of rules to make their
lives safer and more orderly, just as the creatures of Animal
Farm do.
Suppose that you and I live next to each other in the
middle of nowhere, where there is no rule of law and no
police force. We get together to decide on some rules. I dont
want to be hurt, but I know that you could easily harm me
and get away with it; after all, theres no police force to catch
up with you. However, I also know that you dont want to be
hurt either, and you know that I could easily harm you too.
So I suggest that we make a deal: each person who signs up
to the contract agrees that he or she has a reason not to harm
the others, in return for their accepting that they have a
reason not to harm him or her. Everyone who signs the
contract now has moral status.
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The theory that the rules of ethics are the rules that
members of a society would agree to live by is called
contractualism. Contractualists do not think that we have
actually inscribed our signatures on a piece of paper agreeing to award each other moral status. Obviously we have
not. They think that if we were rational and knew all the
horrible consequences of not treating each other as having
moral status, we would sign up.
In the real world, some people know that they are rich
and strong. They can easily build a nice, big, gated apartment block to live in and protect themselves from the rest of
society. They would have no need to sign up to a contract
agreeing to treat anyone else as having moral status, because
they know that they can protect themselves from murderers
and thieves, and it may profit them in the future to treat
other humans rather badly. In the real world, the most
powerful members of a society might refuse to sign up to a
contract agreeing to recognise other peoples moral status.
But imagine that you were asked to sign a contract
agreeing to the rules of your society without knowing what
place you had in it, whether you were one of the rich and
powerful or whether you were poor and weak. If the rules of
your society did not include a rule to treat everyone as
having moral status, and you were poor and weak, you
would be at the mercy of the strong. You would live your
whole life in fear and danger. Of course, you might turn out
to be one of the powerful, and your life would go fine. But
would you really want to take the risk? If you did not know
what place you were going to have in a society, surely you
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
should sign up to a set of rules that treated everyone,

whether rich or poor, as having moral status.
In his book A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defended a
version of contractualism. Imagine you are behind a veil of
ignorance: you do not know what role you have in your
society, and as a consequence you cannot choose rules that
are biased towards yourself you are forced to treat
everyone fairly. Rawls thought that the rules agreed behind
the veil of ignorance have a special authority: they are the
rules of justice. According to Rawls, justice is only one part
of ethics, for you morally ought to be kind and generous as
well as just, so even though the rules of justice are defined
by the contract, there may be important parts of ethics,
including perhaps the parts that concern animals, which
have nothing to do with contracts. By contrast, other
contractualists, such as Peter Carruthers in his book The
Animals Issue, think that the rules that you would choose
behind the veil of ignorance are not merely the rules of
justice, they are the rules of all of morality.
If the whole of ethics is defined by a contract, then
whether you have moral status at all depends on whether
you are part of the contract: you have moral status only
because other people agree to take your interests into
account, in return for your taking their interests into account.
To participate in the contract you need to have two different
qualities. First, you need to be able to assess different sets of
rules and agree to a contract specifying the rules for your
society. If you cannot imagine your society set up in different ways, with a rule against murder, or with no such rule,
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you cannot assess whether your society would be better

with one set of rules rather than another and you cannot
meaningfully choose one set over another.
Second, if you are going to persuade other people to take
your interests into account, you need to assure them that
you will act on the rules you both agreed rather than merely
acting on your impulses or doing whatever you want. If you
cannot help acting on violent antisocial impulses, other
people are not going to allow you as part of their moral
community and party to their contract. They will not see the
point of agreeing to take your welfare into account, because
however good your intentions, you are incapable of respecting their interests in return.
To be a member of a moral community, you need to be
able to assess how you should treat others and to alter your
behaviour on the basis of your assessment. Most humans
can do both, and it is because of this that we hold them
morally responsible for what they do. It is only morally
responsible people who are part of a moral community, who
can take part in contractual agreements. If ethical rules are
the rules of a contract, only those who are morally responsible have moral status.
Are Animals Part of Our Moral Community?

According to contractualism about ethics, animals have
moral status only if they are morally responsible for their
actions. At the moment, we do not treat animals as part of
our moral community; we do not treat them as capable
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
of acknowledging the rules of our society, of taking our

interests into account, or of having moral responsibility for
what they do. But perhaps we are making a mistake.
Apes and some other animals that live in social groups
seem to abide by a social code. For example, male chimps
from the same social group will fight using their hands and
feet but not their extremely dangerous teeth. These animals
form a kind of primitive moral community, fitting their
behaviour to the rules of their society. But they do not
appear to be capable of reflecting on these rules, and assessing whether some other arrangement would be better. Since
it is unlikely they could even grasp what it would be like to
live under different laws, they cannot be said to give their
consent to the rules by which they live.
When we house-train pets, we teach them a set of rules
that they must obey; we call them naughty or good depending on how well they follow the rules, and punish them
when they behave particularly badly. But these rules are not
based on an agreement made between our pet and us. We
do not expect pets to develop their own judgement about
right and wrong and come to understand why they should
accept the rules. Though many owners treat their pets like
members of their own family, they still do not treat their
pets as morally responsible.
In the past, however, some human societies did treat
animals as part of their moral community. In various European countries between the 12th and 18th centuries, there
were at least 93 criminal trials of animals. The animals were
accused of a variety of crimes included killing children and
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bestiality (sexual intercourse between man and beast, both

of whom were put on trial).
In France in 1379, three pigs that had trampled on the son
of the swine-herd were condemned to death. The rest of the
herd had hurried to the scene of the murder and were said
to have grunted in approval of it. They were arrested as
accomplices and sentenced to the same punishment.
In 1750 Jacques Ferron of Vanvres was found guilty of
sexual intercourse with a she-ass and was sentenced to
death. The animal was acquitted. It was judged that she was
the victim of violence; she had been coerced into the act by
Ferron and had not freely taken part in the crime.
These animals were given a full trial, usually in an
ecclesiastic court, with lawyers for the prosecution and the
defence just like in a human trial. If found guilty, the
animals were punished with the same penalties that human
criminals might expect, including hanging, burning and
burying alive.
What was the purpose of animal trials? A pig might be
treated as a scapegoat, and blamed even though everyone
knew that it was not really guilty of a crime. But an animal
trial was an expensive business; the lawyers for each side
had to be paid. And the trial procedure was taken very
seriously; animals were occasionally acquitted (as was the
ass of Vanvres), and their cases could go to appeal. It is hard
to see why anyone would bother with a full trial for an
animal unless they thought that they were establishing
whether or not the animal was genuinely responsible for a
crime. On at least one occasion, a court considered this very
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
Treating animals as morally responsible: the execution of a sow
issue: the defence raised an objection to the trial on the basis

that the animal defendants did not have the qualities, in
particular the intelligence, to be responsible for a crime at
all. But the defence was not accepted and the defendants
were found guilty.
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The people who put animals on trial apparently held

these creatures morally responsible for their crimes, regarding animals as part of their moral community.
The very idea of putting animals in the dock seems
ridiculous to us. We do not hold animals responsible
because we do not think that they have the qualities needed
for moral responsibility: they are not able to assess their
reasons for action or evaluate moral rules; they act on
instinct or on their desires, and cannot choose to act in the
interests of others instead.
We cannot take it for granted that only humans have those
qualities. Other animals too might be capable of autonomy;
it might be appropriate to hold them morally responsible
too. The people who tried animals seem to have thought that
pigs and donkeys and even insects had those qualities. But
our best understanding of animal minds is that those animals
are not capable of autonomy, of assessing the reasons for an
action and acting for the strongest reason, and so cannot be
held responsible for what they do. Putting an animal on trial
for a crime is a mistake, because animals simply cannot be
guilty of a crime in the way that humans can.
Contractualism about the whole of ethics describes
moral status as resting on participation in a moral community. Only those creatures that are morally responsible,
that can agree to a set of social rules and modify their
behaviour to fit with those rules, are part of the moral
community and have moral status. If we discovered that
some animals, perhaps the higher apes, were capable of
making social agreements of the right kind with us, they
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
would be part of our moral community and we would have

to recognise their moral status. But as far as we know, no
animals do have these qualities; none is autonomous, none
can be a party to an ethical contract. Real animals, unlike the
allegorical beasts Orwell describes in Animal Farm, are not
morally responsible for what they do. So, according to
contractualism about ethics, none has moral status.
Is the No Moral Status View Absurd?

According to contractualism about ethics, animals are more
like sticks and stones than people. If we want to eat them, we
can slaughter and cook them. If we want to hunt them, we
can chase them and kill them. If we are interested in science,
we can perform experiments on them. There are no limits to
what we may do: it does not matter morally whether we kill
them quickly or slowly, with suffering or without.
Do we treat animals as if they have no moral status? Many
of us eat animals, use medicines that have been tested on
them, and so on. But while we have no problem with many
practices that harm animals, at the same time most of us
think that there are some limits to what we may do to them.
Cock-fighting, in which two birds fight to the death for the
entertainment of a crowd, and bear-baiting, in which a bear
is attacked by dogs, are both now considered wrong by most
people, and are against the law. Many people think it is
wrong to abandon or to mistreat your pets. But if animals
have no moral status, there is absolutely nothing improper
in abandoning Rover or Felix, and nothing amiss in
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encouraging animals to tear each other to pieces for our

entertainment.
Contractualism about ethics is a No Moral Status view: it
implies that animals do not matter morally. Most of us
disagree. We think that it is unacceptable for us to treat
animals with gratuitous cruelty; we should not torture an
animal for our entertainment. Any theory that claims that
there are no limits to what we may do to animals is surely
ridiculously mistaken and we should reject it.
We should not be too hasty, however, in dismissing the
view that animals lack moral status. Even if animals have no
moral status, we have at least three kinds of reason to treat
animals well: reasons of self-interest, as well as aesthetic and
moral reasons.
Self-interest
Sometimes we benefit from treating animals well. We can
train animals to do useful jobs; we can teach a dog to guard
our house, or a cat to catch mice. It is difficult if not
impossible to train a cat or a dog if you regularly fail to feed
it properly or kick it and shout at it constantly. If you want to
train an animal successfully, you have to treat it reasonably
well. Furthermore, if you treat a cat or dog particularly
badly, it may ultimately turn on you and attack you. So you
have good reason not to treat the animals around you too
badly.
Farmers have incentives to treat their animals fairly well
too. If farm animals are kept in terrible conditions or fed too
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
little of the wrong kind of food, they will not grow properly
and may suffer from disease, cutting down the profits. Any
sensible farmer will pay attention to the health of his or her
animals.
If we care about our own interests, we have some reasons
to treat animals well, but these reasons are few and are of no
great importance. No one has a reason to refrain from doing
anything they like to any animal that is incapable of attacking them or is of no use to them. If you are not interested in
guard dogs or rat-catching cats, you have no reason to treat
them well. And once a guard dog is too old to be helpful to
you, you can do with it what you want. Anyone interested in
eating animals should care about keeping the animals
healthy and increasing their weight. But this will inevitably
be balanced by other concerns, such as our interest in not
spending too much money on our food. If it is too expensive
to feed animals properly and keep them healthy, we may
decide to eat inferior quality meat rather than to spend
more money on farming.
Animals and Art

Think of a great work of art, like the statue of the Venus de
Milo, or Van Goghs paintings of sunflowers. Now imagine
destroying it: taking a hammer and smashing the statue into
tiny pieces, or ripping up the picture, setting light to it and
turning it into a pile of ashes.
Many of us think that we ought not to destroy great
works of art. But we do not think it is morally wrong to do
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so, for paintings and sculptures have no moral status.

Instead they have aesthetic value: great paintings and
sculptures are beautiful. We ought to appreciate beautiful
things; if we destroy them, we make it impossible for us and
for others to admire them. We have aesthetic reasons to
treat works of art well; do we have aesthetic reasons to treat
animals well too?
Some animals are beautiful. We can appreciate the
elegance of a greyhound, the nobility of a stag, the colouring
of a butterfly. Just as it would be wrong to destroy great
works of art the Venus de Milo, the paintings of Van Gogh
perhaps it would also be wrong to damage and destroy
beautiful animals. In the same way that we must have failed
to appreciate properly Van Goghs Sunflowers were we to
use it to light a fire, we must have failed to appreciate a stag
properly were we to hunt it down and shoot it. Even if
animals have no moral status, we may have reasons to treat
at least some animals well, preserving the beauty of individual animals and making sure that species of attractive
animals do not die out, so that they may be appreciated by
future generations of humans.
We obviously do respond differently to animals that we
find appealing than to those we find ugly or disgusting:
many people who do not object to putting down rat-poison
or killing cockroaches strongly disapprove of foxhunting
and killing seals. It may be that we think that foxes and seals
feel pain more keenly than cockroaches or rats. But it is
more likely that we simply find attractive the bushy tail and
intelligent face of the fox, the mournful eyes and sleek fur of
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
the seal-pup, and sympathise with those animals when they

suffer. By contrast, we find the yellow teeth and scaly tail of
sewer-rats revolting, and as a consequence, we are wholly
unmoved by their suffering and death. We feel more
strongly that we ought to treat animals well when those
animals are pretty.
We may have aesthetic reasons to treat some animals
well, and it is likely that we do actually care more about
animals we find attractive. But these reasons are extremely
limited. We ought to appreciate beautiful animals but we
have no aesthetic reason to treat well those animals we find
ugly or repellent.
In any case, aesthetic reasons to treat animals well are
reasons to preserve and enhance the attractiveness of
beautiful animals. There is nothing wrong with treating
them badly if we can do so without affecting their beauty.
We have no aesthetic reason not to cause a fox considerable
pain and suffering provided we could do so without
damaging its appearance; in fact we have reason not to
prevent its suffering if doing so would impair its attractiveness, for example, we have reason not to amputate an
animals painful limb if doing so would make that animal
look less good. But surely the suffering we cause to an
animal is far more important than what the animal looks like.
Indirect Moral Reasons

You might think that according to the No Moral Status
view, we have no moral reasons to treat animals well. After
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all, isnt that what it means to deny that animals have moral
status? But this is not quite right: if animals have no moral
status, we can have no duties to protect an animals interests
for that creatures own sake. But we may have indirect
duties to animals, duties that concern animals, but which
are owed to other people.
The most obvious kind of indirect duty involves animals
that are the property of other humans. If a farmer owns a
barn, it would be against the law and would be wrong for
you to damage or destroy it if the farmer does not want you
to do so. Similarly, if a farmer owns a pig, you ought not to
beat the pig or give it poison without his or her permission.
There is, however, nothing wrong with harming an animal
that you own, or whose owner has given you permission to
go ahead. An animal can be treated in any way an owner
pleases; other people must do what would be good in the
judgement of the owner, not what would be good for the
animal. And this of course offers no protection to foxes,
deer and other wild animals that are not owned by anyone.
Many of us think that we have a moral reason not to treat
any animal badly, whether or not it is anyones property,
and whether or not we have the owners permission. Can
someone who accepts the No Moral Status view agree?
Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that they can. Suppose that
humans have moral status but animals do not. Now suppose
that the way we treat animals affects how we treat humans
people who treat animals badly tend to treat humans badly
too. If this is so, then it does after all matter morally how we
treat animals.
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
Imagine that there is a gang of small boys who enjoy

tormenting animals. They like to kick small dogs and cats,
they try to set light to a cats tail to see what will happen. It is
not hard to guess what these boys will do as they get older:
instead of targeting small animals that they can easily bully,
they will turn to weak and vulnerable people, smaller
children, the elderly, stealing from them and tormenting
them as much as they can.
These boys enjoy causing pain to animals, making them
suffer for their own amusement. According to the No Moral
Status view, their treatment of animals is not bad in itself,
but it is bad because in hurting animals for no good reason,
the boys become cruel. As they get older, they act cruelly
towards other humans, not just towards animals. Their
earlier treatment of animals is wrong because it leads them
to go on to treat humans who have moral status
dreadfully.
But is it really true that everyone who makes animals
suffer for trivial reasons will go on to do the same to
humans? After all, anyone who accepts a No Moral Status
view of animals thinks that there is a huge difference
between causing humans to suffer and causing animals to
suffer: in one case you are harming creatures with a moral
status, in the other, you are not. In one case, causing
harm matters morally, in the other case, it does not. This
will surely affect whether you progress from hurting
animals to hurting people. If the gang of young boys
torment animals for fun but do not go on to torment
humans perhaps because they accept a No Moral Status
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view there is nothing wrong with what they do according

to that theory.
In fact, there may be some people who are less likely
to hurt humans if they harm animals. Some people may
take out their frustration at people their families, their
colleagues at work on animals. Instead of hitting their
boss, they may come home and kick the cat or yell at the dog.
If you are one of these people, if kicking the cat makes you
less likely to kick a human, then hurting the cat is not
wrong, according to the No Moral Status view. In fact, it
might even be your duty to take out your aggression on a
creature with no moral status, instead of a human whose
suffering matters morally.
If you treat animals cruelly are you more likely to go on to
be cruel to humans? This is really a question of psychology
that can be answered only through careful observation of
those who harm animals. But there are several reasons why
we might expect there to be a link between violence towards
animals and violence towards people. If you often express
your anger through violent action, you may find it hard to
control your aggression or express it in a different way. If
you enjoy acting violently, you may find it hard to stop
yourself doing so at every opportunity, whether against
humans, animals or inanimate objects.
But if this is right, you should try to control your anger in
all circumstances, whether it is directed at sticks and stones,
animals or humans it ought to be as bad to kick a rock as it
is to kick a cat which is obviously absurd.
But this does not take into account the extra link between
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THE MORAL COMMUNITY
violence to animals and violence to people. Unlike rocks

and other inanimate objects, animals feel pain. If you kick
the cat, it hurts the cat; a rock doesnt suffer no matter what
you do to it. Violence towards animals is much more similar
to violence towards humans than anything you might do to
a rock. Kicking Felix the cat is more likely to lead you to kick
people, because in both cases you relieve your frustration by
causing pain to others.
But as soon as we admit that violence to animals and
violence to people is quite similar, we should question the
No Moral Status view. According to that theory, people
have a moral status and how we treat them matters morally;
animals have no moral status. But people and animals are
actually very similar. Doesnt the fact that they both feel pain
mean that it matters morally how we treat them both? Just as
we should not cause people to suffer unnecessarily, isnt
it also true that we should not cause animals to suffer
unnecessarily, for the sake of the animals themselves, not
only for the sake of people? If it is in fact true that small boys
who are cruel to animals become cruel to people, perhaps
it is because they recognise that morally, causing pain to
humans is very similar to causing pain to animals. They
know that both matter morally: they simply do not care.
It is hard to see how, if human pain matters morally,
animal pain could not. But if it matters morally when you
cause pain to animals, then animals that can feel pain must
have moral status.
Contractualism about the whole of ethics makes moral
status depend on whether a creature is morally responsible,
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part of a moral community; since animals are not part of the

moral community, they have no moral status. According to
this theory, it is sometimes wrong to treat these animals
badly, because we have self-interested, aesthetic and indirect
moral reasons to treat them well. But it cannot take account
of our direct moral reasons not to make animals suffer pain
for their own sake. Since animals that can feel pain do matter
morally, we have to reject contractualism about ethics, and
reject the idea that moral status depends on being part of a
moral community.
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C HAPTER E IGHT
PAIN , PLEASURE AND

THE VALUE OF L IFE
Imagine that on a very cold day the pavements have become
icy. An old lady has slipped over and is lying on the floor. A
crowd have gathered round her, but instead of helping her
up and making sure she is not hurt, they are laughing at her.
One of them amuses his friends by pushing over other
elderly people. The crowd find this hilarious.
The elderly people who are laughed at by the crowd have
bruises and broken bones. They are frightened by what is
happening to them. They suffer from physical pain, shock
and fear.
No reasonable person could deny that the behaviour of
this crowd is disgusting. They ought to be trying to help the
vulnerable; instead they enjoy these peoples suffering and
encourage the particularly appalling individual who goes
round pushing people over. The crowd are cruel; it is wrong
to find these peoples pain amusing.
Now imagine that a dog is chained up to a lamppost. It
has been left without food and water and is now very weak.
A crowd has gathered round the dog. Two members of the
crowd are teasing the dog by throwing stones at it. Whenever one of them throws a stone, the dog tries to attack them,
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but is held back by its chain. After a time, it stops trying to

fight back and starts trying to avoid being hit. The crowd
encourages the stone-throwers until the dog refuses to
respond; then they get bored and leave.
This group of people is cruel and callous in exactly the
same way as the first crowd, enjoying watching another
creatures pain and fear. They should have tried to make
sure the dog was not hurt; they certainly should not have
encouraged people to harm the dog even more.
Of course, there are important differences between
humans and the animals that can feel pain. We humans can
anticipate pain; the elderly people walking down the street
could see what was happening to the others and naturally
they worried that the same might happen to them, that they
too might be pushed over and ridiculed. We can imagine
different scenarios too: the people who were trapped on the
pavement could picture the crowd stealing from them,
kicking them or even killing them. Even if it is unlikely that
the crowd would ever kill their victims and they never
actually do, the thought of what might happen to them
makes what actually occurs seem even worse. We can also
remember what has happened to us. Every time one of the
people left stranded on the ground recalled their ordeal they
would feel a shiver of fear: they would continue to suffer
even after the events were over.
Some animals may be able to anticipate what may happen
to them in the future; some may be capable of imagining
different scenarios; some may be able to remember what
happened to them in the past. But most animals do not have
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PAIN, PLEASURE AND THE VALUE OF LIFE
these capacities to the same extent as humans, and it is likely

that there are animals that can feel pain but have no imagination and no capacity for anticipating or remembering
harm. Suppose that a human and a cow are both hit with a
stick. We might at first think that this causes each of them
the same amount of pain, but in fact the human may suffer
more than the cow because the human will anticipate
feeling the pain and will be able to imagine much worse
beatings that might be inflicted, whereas the cow will not.
There are important differences between the capacities for
suffering of creatures that have imagination and memory,
and creatures that do not.
Animals that can feel pain but cannot anticipate or
remember their own distress can nevertheless suffer. Painful and frightening sensations are bad whoever experiences
them, whether human or animal. It matters morally what
we do to animals that can feel pain: we ought not to cause
them pain unnecessarily, without good reason. Since their
suffering matters morally, animals that can feel pain must
have moral status.
Though many animals can suffer, as we saw in Chapter 3,
all plants, and probably some animals, can experience
nothing at all. Does it matter morally what happens to these:
are they mere objects, or do they have moral status?
We humans feel pain and pleasure, we prefer that some
things happen to us and that some do not, and we value
certain things in our lives. There is a very straightforward
sense in which we can say that something is good or bad
for us from our own perspective. It is unlikely that any
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non-human creatures value what happens to them; as far as

we know, no other animals can assess their lives as good or
bad. Some animals may have desires, perhaps for food,
water and shelter. But even if a creature has no desires but
merely acts on instincts, provided that it has positive and
negative experiences, we can make sense of what is good
and bad for it from its own point of view, even if it could not
possibly describe things in that way itself: we can say that
something is bad for the creature from its own perspective if
it causes the creature pain, and is good for it in its own eyes
if it causes pleasure. A sentient creature has moral status,
because some things matter from its own point of view, and
what matters to it should matter to us.
Plants have no values, no preferences and no experiences
at all. Since no plant has a point of view, nothing that
happens to it whether it gets plenty of sun and nutrients
and grows to be enormous or is chopped up for firewood
matters to it. Similarly, nothing that happens to an
insentient single-celled bacterium can matter from its own
perspective.
Many people argue that only those creatures that can
suffer have moral status, because they think that harm
matters morally only if it matters from the point of view of
that which is harmed. Environmentalists disagree. They
argue that plants and non-sentient animals have moral
status too, even though they cannot feel pain or pleasure,
simply because they are alive. They claim that we should not
harm any living thing without good reason: we should have
a reverence for life.
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Reverence for Life

I put weed-killer down in my garden to kill off dandelions
and thistles so that my lawn looks good in the summer.
I go away on holiday and forget about my houseplant. It
gradually shrivels up. When I return from holiday, I try to
revive it with lots of water but its too late. The plant dies.
The tree at the end of my garden has grown much taller in
the last few years and is now blocking out the light. I cut
down the tree to let in more light, so I can sit outside eating
breakfast in the sun.
Have I done wrong?
You and I can thrive or our lives can go badly. Our lives
go well if we are healthy, well fed and happy; badly when we
are ill, poor, hungry and in pain. For our lives to go well, we
need certain things: we have basic needs for food, shelter,
water in order to live at all, and we need other things
free speech, some education, some money to lead a really
good life.
It is often thought that we have moral rights for the kinds
of things that are basic needs for us: we have a right to life,
for example, because it is impossible to have a good life if we
are killed or are in constant danger from murderers. But the
relationship between needs and rights is controversial. I
need food and water to survive: does this mean that I have a
right that you give me food and water if I will die without it?
What if you own the food and refuse to give it up arent
you entitled to do what you want with your own property?
What if we both need food to survive, but there is only
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enough for one of us do we both have a right over the same

piece of bread? My right may not automatically follow from
my need, for you may have competing needs, and maybe
competing rights too, that should be taken into account. But
even if we leave aside the difficult question of rights, we
might think that our moral status depends on our having
lives that can go well or badly, and our having needs that
must be met if we are to flourish.
Animals lives can go well or badly too. A dog or a cow
needs food, water, a certain kind of environment, otherwise
it will become ill and die. If the moral status of humans
depends on the fact that our lives can go well or badly and
that we have basic needs, then animals would have moral
status too, as they also have basic needs that must be met if
they are to flourish. Even animals like invertebrates that
perhaps cannot feel pain or pleasure need the right kind of
environment in order to live at all, so these too would have
moral status.
As well as humans and animals, however, plants can
flourish or do badly. Plants have basic needs; they thrive
when they are grown in the right kind of soil, when they
have access to nutrients, water and sunlight. If they are in
the wrong kind of environment, they will not develop
properly and eventually will die. If moral status did depend
on whether something could flourish or do badly, plants
would have moral status too.
Environmentalists think that killing plants and animals
can be morally wrong, just as killing humans is wrong. They
claim that it is wrong to kill weeds just to make your lawn
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look nicer. It is wrong to let your houseplants die of neglect.

And it is wrong to cut down a tree so that you can eat
breakfast outdoors. Are they correct: do trees, houseplants
and weeds have moral status?
Our Place in the Web of Life

Environmentalists think that we are arrogant and foolish to
see our environment as something that we can use in any
way we choose. We ought to appreciate that plants, animals
and people are all part of a web of life that is fragile and easily
destroyed. If we damage part of the web, we cannot expect
the rest of it to stay the same. We cannot isolate ourselves
and remain unaffected. We depend on it for our survival; in
threatening plants, we are threatening ourselves.
As a consequence, environmentalists argue, we need
to change the way we treat living creatures. We have to
recognise that plants and animals are not our tools, we must
be less egotistic about our own importance in the web of life,
and wiser in understanding how much we depend on our
environment.
We might interpret this environmentalist argument as
giving us self-interested reasons for tending to our environment and looking after plants and animals. After all, since
we rely on the environment, we would be very foolish to risk
damaging it so badly that it no longer provided air for us to
breathe and clean water for us to drink. But significant
environmental damage is often very slow. We have a very
strong reason not to set off a nuclear bomb that would
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immediately contaminate the world and which would

certainly affect us, but we have much less powerful reasons
to give up the slow poisoning of the worlds atmosphere,
rivers and lakes with industrial pollution, for we will be long
dead by the time this will have an effect.
On the other hand, if we pollute the planet, our grandchildren will have no clean air or water. If we care about
what happens to them and we should, because they will be
persons with moral status just like us we should change
our ways. We should try to leave the world safe for them.
This environmentalist argument appeals to our own
interests and the interests of future generations of humans.
We could accept this argument even while thinking that
plants have no moral status. We have good reasons to care
about the environment for the sake of humans, even if we
are indifferent to plants for their own sake. But though
environmentalists certainly impress on us how much our
future welfare and the welfare of our grandchildren depend
on our environment, their view is not that we should protect
our community of life for the sake of some privileged
members of it, the humans; instead, we should protect it for
the sake of all its members, human, plant or animal. The
living plants and animals in our environment are not tools
to help humans survive, but are valuable for their own sake,
and as part of a valuable ecosystem.
Suppose that there is a complex ecosystem made up of
trees, shrubs, wild flowers and ferns, but no animals. These
plants are rare and beautiful. The ecosystem has survived in
a similar form for thousands of years, and would probably
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survive for thousands more if no one intervened. If that web

of life is worth preserving, it must be because the plants it
contains are valuable; its value cannot depend on the moral
status of animals or humans, for no animals or humans are
part of it.
Imagine that you found such an ecosystem on a lonely
planet in a distant galaxy that you and your team of
astronauts are visiting. You know that no other humans will
probably ever visit this planet. You could blast off in your
shuttle from the ecosystem, setting light to the plants with
your booster rockets and destroying them, or you could
leave from the other side of the planet, a deserted wasteland
in which nothing grows. Surely you should set off from the
deserted part of the planet rather than destroying all the
plants. And surely you ought to do this because the plants
themselves are morally valuable?
Not necessarily. The plants of this ecosystem may have
no moral status, but some other kind of value. Some of
the plants are beautiful. The complex interconnections
between the different living organisms are intricate and
elegant. It may be true that you ought not to destroy the
ecosystem, but for aesthetic rather than moral reasons.
When Does an Organism Flourish?

Suppose that the environmentalists are right that plants and
animals do have moral status because they are living things
that can flourish or do badly. In that case, there must be a
set of standards that should be used to judge whether
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a particular plant or animal is flourishing. But what could

these standards be?
If we are dealing with animals that have preferences or
that can feel pleasure and pain, we know that things can be
good or bad for those animals from their own perspective.
But how should we judge whether plants are doing well? It is
true that plants and animals can thrive or do badly, they can
live for longer, grow larger, avoid disease, and successfully
reproduce. But it is not always straightforward to judge
when an organism is flourishing. Usually, it is better for a
plant to grow bigger: larger plants tend to be thriving better
than smaller plants. But there would be something wrong
with a dwarf rose that grew too large; it would not be a good
specimen of that type of plant. Is a large dwarf rose thriving
or not? If we judge the plant as a rose, it is; if we judge it as a
dwarf variety, it is not.
Bulldogs are bred so that their faces are flat and squashed;
this makes it difficult for them to breathe. Is a bulldog whose
face is not squashed flourishing or not? In one sense it is
thriving, for it can breathe freely; in another sense it is not,
because it lacks one of the characteristic features of a good
bulldog. There are no natural standards for judging a
bulldog or a dwarf rose: what could possibly decide which
standards we ought to use? We have to choose a set of
standards to judge how well a plant or animal is doing,
depending on why we want to make the assessment. If we
are interested in whether a dog can breathe easily, we will
make one kind of assessment; if we are interested in
pedigree bulldogs, we will make another. It is never true
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that a plant should really be judged as a dwarf variety: it is

up to us.
Think of a chicken, bred to live in a factory farm from a
long line of factory-farmed birds. It is characteristic of a
factory-farmed chicken to live a short life in extremely
cramped conditions. If we judge how well this chicken is
thriving by the standards of other battery birds, it is
flourishing. Of course, compared with free-range birds, it
is unhealthy, has a poor diet and cannot move around
properly: in that sense, it is not thriving at all. It makes a
huge difference whether we compare our chicken with freerange birds or with other battery-farmed birds. But which
comparisons ought we to make? If it is up to us which
standards to use, we have no means of deciding whether
factory-farmed birds are really thriving or not. Of course,
we can try to work out whether factory-farmed birds suffer
more than free-range birds, but then we would have given
up on the task of trying to decide whether the animals are
flourishing or not, relative to some set of standards. Instead
we would be trying to find out whether they are doing well
or badly from their own perspective. In other words, we
would be taking sentience, not having basic needs, as the
basis for moral status.
Sentience as the Ground of Moral Status

If plants had moral status, it would be as bad to harm plants
as to kill and eat animals. Most of what we do every day
would be wrong, for we kill carrots, leeks, potatoes and
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other plants all the time. It is unlikely that we could find

enough food without eating either plants or animals. If
plants and animals had equal moral status we would
inevitably do wrong just by eating enough to survive.
If plants had moral status, much of our current
agricultural practices and our everyday gardening would
be wrong too: it would be immoral to kill thistles and
dandelions, to get rid of a plant you did not like any more, to
move a plant to a less suitable soil because you wanted a
plant of a certain colour in that area of the garden, or to cut
down a tree because it was blocking your light.
A moral theory that claimed that plants had moral status
would be ridiculously demanding. We would have to think
about how our actions affected plants as well as animals, and
we would almost be guaranteed to act wrongly much of
the time. The consequences of such a theory are absurd:
ordinary weeding in the garden is obviously not immoral.
Some environmentalists believe that all life is morally
valuable, and that we should have reverence for every living
creature. But this is an extreme view: it would mean that
ordinary farming and ordinary gardening were morally
wrong, and it would be improper of us to kill plants, even if
we needed to do so to survive. These environmentalists
must also be committed to the claim that there is some set
of standards we ought to use to judge whether a plant or
animal is flourishing, though in fact it seems that there are
many different standards that we could legitimately use,
depending on why we want to make the assessment. The
balance of reasons is against accepting the environmentalists
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view that we should have reverence for all life. Instead we

should accept that, since nothing can matter from the
perspective of a living organism that cannot experience
pleasure or pain, what happens to it does not matter
morally. Only creatures that can feel pleasure and pain have
moral status.
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C HAPTER N INE
THE RIGHT TO LIFE

In 1993, Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri founded the Great
Ape Project. They and other animal rights activists began
a campaign for an improvement in the treatment of the
animals most closely related to us. Their goals were set out
in a document they called A Declaration on Great Apes:
We demand the extension of the community of equals
to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees,
bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans.
The community of equals is the moral community
within which we accept certain basic moral principles
or rights as governing our relations with each other and
enforceable at law. Among these principles or rights are
the following:
1. The Right to Life
2. The Protection of Individual Liberty
3. The Prohibition of Torture
In the last few chapters, we have acknowledged that animals
that can suffer have moral status. But the Declaration on
Great Apes goes well beyond this. It holds that we should
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accept the great apes as part of our moral community. We

have already seen reason to doubt this, for it is unlikely that
any animals, even the great apes, are autonomous, and
hence they are not morally responsible for their actions,
which is a condition of participation in a moral community.
The Declaration adds that scientific experimentation on
the great apes should be prohibited as a form of torture, and
that they ought never to be killed except in self-defence. It
claims that the great apes have rights.
As we saw in Chapter 6, having a right is like having a
trump card that overrides whatever cards other people are
holding. It means that other people are not entitled to do
certain things to you, however much doing so would be in
their interests. If you have a right to life, no one is entitled to
kill you even if they would thereby inherit a fortune and
everyone else would be glad you were out of the way. If an
animal had a right to life, no one should kill and eat it; no
one should hunt it; no one should infect it with deadly
diseases for the benefit of mankind.
Many animal welfare campaigners believe that many
animals, not just the great apes, have the right to life. But
some sceptics think that it makes no sense to award animals
rights, even if they have moral status. Why do they think
that animal rights are absurd?
Rights and Responsibilities

It is a common saying that you cannot have rights unless
you have responsibilities too. Some philosophers have
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turned this into an argument against animal rights. Since

animals are not autonomous and cannot acknowledge the
rights of humans or other animals, no animal can have
responsibilities; so, these philosophers claim, no animal can
have rights. In fact, they continue, it would be unfair to treat
animals as if they had rights, because you would have to
treat them as if they had responsibilities, and punish them
for killing or harming other animals. It would obviously be
ridiculous to send a fox to jail for attacking a chicken; it
is equally ridiculous to claim that the fox or the chicken
has rights. Or so says the hunt-loving philosopher Roger
Scruton, in his book Animal Rights and Wrongs:
A creature with rights is duty-bound to respect the
rights of others. The fox would be duty-bound to
respect the right to life of the chicken and whole species
would be condemned out of hand as criminal by nature
any morality which really attributed rights to animals
would constitute a gross and callous abuse of them.
We saw in Chapter 5 that we have no evidence that animals
can reflect on their reasons for action and choose to act on
what they think are good reasons. As a consequence, it is
indeed a mistake to hold animals responsible for what they
do. Foxes cannot be duty-bound to respect the rights of
chickens; no animal can acknowledge the rights of anyone
or anything. It would be totally inappropriate to punish
animals for what they do naturally when they could not
choose to do otherwise.
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Scruton is correct that animals have no responsibilities.

Does it follow that they have no rights?
There is an important sense in which rights and responsibilities do go together. If Alistair makes a promise to Ben, Ben
has a right that Alistair keeps his promise, and Alistair has a
responsibility to do so. If Charlie has the right to life, then
Alistair, Ben and everyone else have a duty not to kill him.
Rights and responsibilities always come in pairs, but
notice that it is not always the same person who has both
the right and the responsibility. Charlies right to life goes
together with a duty on everyone else not to kill him. Bens
right depends on Alistairs responsibility. Though it is true
that there cannot be a right without a responsibility, the
right can be mine, the responsibility yours.
Suppose that animals have a right to life. Then all of us
have a duty not to kill them, just as Charlies right to life
means that we all have a duty not to kill him. Nothing need
follow about what responsibilities Charlie has, nor what
responsibilities animals have: they may have many duties,
or none at all. Scruton is mistaken: animals can have rights
without themselves having any responsibilities.
Scruton might accept this argument, but reply that when
we look closely into the origin of our rights, we will find that
only those who have responsibilities actually do have rights.
In particular, if rights depended on a kind of contract, no
one could have rights without responsibilities. In Chapter 7,
we argued that moral status is not based on any such
agreement: perhaps moral status does not depend on a
contract, but rights do.
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Suppose that as before, you and I live next to each other in

the middle of nowhere without a police force. Again, we get
together to decide on some rules to live by. This time, we do
not just award each other moral status. If I have moral
status, you will not harm me unless you have very good
reason to do so, but we both know that there might be
circumstances where you do have good reason to kill me:
perhaps you would benefit enormously by consolidating
our two farms. Similarly, there might be circumstances
where I have good reason to kill you. Even if we both acknowledge the others moral status, we are not guaranteed
to be safe from each other. Since both of us are very keen not
to die, we reach an arrangement: we will each accept that the
other has not just moral status, but a right to life. Each of
us agrees to acknowledge a duty not to kill the other that
overrides other reasons we might have to do so.
Now each of us has a right to life, because each of us has a
duty not to kill the other. We acquired our rights and duties
at exactly the same time when we made our joint agreement.
If we acquired our rights and duties by a kind of social
contract, it would be impossible to have rights without
responsibilities. Why would I agree to acknowledge that
anyone has a right to life, that I have a duty not to kill them,
unless they recognised my right to life in return? I have no
reason to take on a duty not to kill animals because they will
never pay me the compliment of recognising my rights.
This argument that animals have no rights rests on the
claim that all rights depend on a social contract or agreement. But we seem to attribute rights to some humans to
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babies, to the mentally disabled who cannot acknowledge

our rights. We cannot rule out the possibility that there are
humans who have rights without responsibilities; so we
ought to accept at least the possibility that animals might
have no duties but nevertheless have rights. Whether they
in fact have any particular right without any corresponding
responsibilities depends on the basis of that individual right.
The Rights of Predators and Their Prey

Animals might have rights even though they have no
responsibilities. But perhaps in fact it is impossible for all
animals to have the right to life. If chickens have a right to
life, dont we have a duty to save chickens by stopping foxes
from attacking them? In fact, dont we have a duty to save
any prey from its predators?
The idea that we might have such a duty is simply absurd,
say those who reject animal rights. For one thing, the duty
would be immensely demanding. We would have to be constantly policing the natural world, leaping in as a predator
closed down on its defenceless victim. We would have no
time for anything else; and no acceptable moral theory
would tell us to spend all our time supervising nature.
But worse, it might make no sense for all animals to have
the right to life. Suppose we succeeded in preventing all
foxes from attacking chickens. Foxes would get food only
when they came across a chicken or some other animal that
had died of natural causes. Most foxes would not find
enough food and would starve to death. If we protect prey
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from its predator, we are in danger of preventing the predator from getting a decent meal, and ultimately violating
its right to life too. It is not possible for all animals to have a
right to life because it would be impossible for anyone to
respect the rights of predators and the rights of their prey.
So animals do not have the right to life.
This argument depends on what it means to have the
right to life. If a chicken has the right to life, does that mean
that I have to protect it from any harm that might befall it,
ensuring that it stays alive as long as possible? Or does it
merely mean that I myself must not wring its neck? If a fox
has the right to life, does it follow that I have to make sure
that it gets enough to eat so that it stays alive as long as
possible? Or is it just that I must not hunt it or shoot it?
Some philosophers have questioned whether there is any
important distinction between killing someone and failing
to protect them from dying: since it is bad for chickens to be
killed and eaten, surely it must be just as bad for them to be
eaten by a fox as to be eaten by me. If it is wrong for me to kill
and eat the chicken myself, how can it be right for me to let
the fox kill and eat it, when I could stop this happening?
On the other hand, many people who think humans have
the right to life believe that though we have a duty not to kill,
we do not have such a stringent duty to protect other people
from dying. After all, everyone must die eventually: we
simply could not protect people from death for ever. Many
people think that we are not required to keep people alive
for as long as we can by whatever means possible it may
sometimes be acceptable to choose not to resuscitate
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someone who is very ill from a terminal disease and

suffering great pain but it is not acceptable to kill them. It
is worse to stab or strangle a person than to fail to send
money to charity, even when that charity saves peoples
lives. When we attribute the right to life to humans, we
mean that we have a duty not to kill, not a duty to protect
them from death. When we attribute the right to life to
animals, we should mean the same thing: we must not kill
animals but need not protect them from their predators.
If the right to life is defined in this way, no absurd
consequences need follow: I must not kill chickens for food
or hunt foxes, but I am required neither to protect the
chicken from the fox nor to make sure that the fox does not
starve. I can respect the rights of predators and prey without
being constantly in demand as natures policeman.
It is not absurd to attribute rights to animals. Since we
ought not to cause animals pain for no good reason, we
should acknowledge that animals have at least one right, the
right that their suffering is taken into account.
But those who defend animal rights claim that some
animals at least have many more rights than this: in
particular, animals have a right not to be eaten for food, a
right not to be hunted and a right not to be the subject of
scientific experimentation. We think that humans have
these rights because humans have a right to life. What is the
basis of this right: why is it wrong to kill humans? There may
be several reasons, but the most obvious is that it is wrong to
kill humans because their death is bad.
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Why Is Death Bad?

There are lots of reasons why death is bad. Death can be
particularly terrible not just for the person who dies but for
those who are still alive. When you die you leave behind
many people, your friends, family and colleagues, who miss
you. Your colleagues feel sad, while your husband or wife,
children or parents are devastated. Some people are missed
more than others. Some people have no one to grieve for
them when they die; but their death is still bad.
Before you are dead, you go through a process of dying
which can be deeply unpleasant. A prolonged, undignified
and painful death is much worse than one that is swift and
painless. But a premature death is bad even if it is quick and
without pain.
Why is this so? After all, once you die, surely nothing
matters to you any more. A throbbing headache is bad for
you because it feels painful and unpleasant. But once you
are dead, you cannot suffer pain at all. Losing a leg is bad for
you because you are constantly frustrated in your attempts
to do many of the things you want: you cannot walk down to
the shops or run for the bus any more, your dream of
becoming a professional footballer will never come true.
But once you are dead you have no desires. You have no
frustrations: there is nothing you dream about or hope to
achieve.
Death is bad precisely because you do not experience
anything, want anything or dream of anything when you are
dead. After your death you will never have any more pleasure,
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successful projects or valuable relationships. Once you are

dead you can no longer satisfy many of the desires you had
when alive: a premature death prevents you from becoming
a footballer just as surely as does losing a leg. Death is bad
because you can no longer have any of these goods. If you
had lived for longer, you could have achieved greater things
and enjoyed yourself more.
Of course everyone must die at some time and some
people are deprived of more when they die. If a toddler
James dies in an accident when he would otherwise have
lived for another 80 years, his death is particularly bad
because he misses out on so many good things. If Sarah dies
in her sleep at the age of 95 after a long, full and happy life,
her death is not so bad for her. She would not have expected
to enjoy a much longer life even if she had not died when she
did. When we judge how bad a death is, we ought to take
into account how much more life a person could reasonably
have expected to enjoy if he or she had not died prematurely, and what quality of life he or she would have had.
Suppose that Jeremy has cancer. He has no chance of
recovery and could only expect to suffer unbearable pain in
the remainder of his life. He is not deprived of much when
he dies; in fact, death may be a welcome release for him.
The Deaths of Humans and the Deaths

of Animals
How bad is it for an animal to die? Dying can be bad for
animals just as it is for humans: an animal may suffer
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terribly from a long and painful process of dying, though

most animals would not experience the indignities associated with severe illness in the way that we do.
Some animals seem to understand what it means for
other animals to die, and there are anecdotes of elephants
that appear to mourn their dead. But many animals do not
understand what death is; many animals are not upset for
the death of one of their number, even of a creature closely
related to them. The death of a human is often worse than
the death of an animal for those who are left behind.
Suppose that an animal dies quickly and painlessly and
no other creatures realise it is dead and mourn it. Is its death
bad? When an animal dies, it misses out on the pleasures it
would have experienced if it had lived for longer; its death is
bad because it is deprived of these goods. If the animal were
young and healthy, it would be deprived of many pleasant
experiences; if it were very sick, it would not have had much
of a life even if it had lived for longer, and its death would
not be as bad.
The deaths of humans and animals are bad for similar
reasons: in each case, the victim is deprived of what they
would have enjoyed had they lived longer. To compare the
deaths of humans and animals, we need to compare the
kinds of goods humans and animals would typically have
experienced if they had not died. Of course, the death of
each human and each animal will be different. Some deaths
are a welcome release, when the human or animal would
only have suffered if they had lived for longer. Some deaths
are not very bad, because the human or animal would not
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have enjoyed many goods in the rest of the life they would
have had. But would a human who died prematurely
typically miss out on more or less than an animal that died
young?
Animals are capable of simple pleasures, of eating,
drinking, finding a mate and so on; these are the things they
are deprived of by death. Humans enjoy these simple
pleasures too. But human life is much more complicated
than animal life, and there are many kinds of pleasure that
humans can enjoy but animals cannot. We enjoy reading
philosophy and poetry, listening to music, watching films,
making works of art and appreciating what other artists
have produced. The philosopher John Stuart Mill (180673)
thought that higher pleasures like the pleasures of art were
more valuable than the lower pleasures of which animals
are capable. Perhaps it is true that if they had the choice,
most humans would prefer to enjoy higher pleasures at least
some of the time; we would find an animal life of simple
pleasures unsatisfying. But whether or not some kinds of
pleasure are more valuable than others, it is certainly true
that humans can take pleasure in a much greater variety of
activities than can animals, and so are deprived of more by
an early death.
Some of our most precious pleasures come from spending time with our friends and family. An early death cuts
these relationships short, before they can develop fully.
Many animals, even those that live in social groups, do not
have friendships with other creatures that are intimate and
enduring and that mature in the way that human relation133
ships can. Animals cannot be deprived of such relationships

by a premature death; but humans can.
Most of us make plans and projects for our life. We want
to have a successful career; we want to see our children grow
up healthy and happy. An early death prevents us from
carrying out our plans and seeing our projects come to
fruition; it frustrates all our hopes for the future. Many
animals have no concept of the future and cannot think
about it at all; they certainly have no projects they would like
to carry out in their later life that would be frustrated when
they died. Some animals may be able to think of themselves,
and they may have a few simple plans: they may hope to
have a mate and plenty of food. But they certainly have no
projects as complex as ours, and they have many fewer
preferences for the future that would be thwarted by a
premature death.
As well as planning for the future, many of us try to make
sense of our lives as a complex whole; our capacity to see
events as contributing to that whole can significantly alter
their value for us. Something bad that happens to you when
you are young can be redeemed if it contributes to something good that happens to you later on. The misery of your
early life is not so bad if you can learn not to make the same
mistake with your own children. The struggle of passing
exams as a student becomes worthwhile when you succeed
in your career. If you die before you enjoy success in your
life, any early mistakes you made, any unhappiness you
suffered cannot be redeemed. Most animals cannot reflect
on their life as a whole, and most cannot devise or carry out
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projects sufficiently complex so that early incidents can

contribute to a project that is good overall. The suffering of
animals cannot be redeemed, however long the animal lives;
an early death could not deprive them of this benefit.
It is usually bad for a human or an animal to die early,
because they miss out on many good things that they would
have enjoyed if they had lived for longer. Arguably, the
goods that humans can enjoy are more valuable than the
goods that animals can enjoy. But in any case, it is certainly
true that humans miss out on a much greater variety of good
things when they die than do animals and they have many
more complex plans and projects that are frustrated.
It is also true that the deaths of some animals are likely to
be worse than the deaths of others. The more sophisticated
an animals mind, the wider the range of goods it can
experience: it will be able to pursue a greater variety of more
complex projects, it may be able to form more sophisticated
emotional bonds with other creatures, and it may even have
some concept of itself and its own life. Death is likely to
be worse for the more intellectually developed animals,
including the higher apes, than it is for other creatures, just
as usually the early death of a human will be worse than the
early death of an animal.
Whats Wrong with Killing?

It is natural to think that it is wrong to kill any human,
because death is bad for each of them. It is certainly true that
killing humans causes their death and their deaths are
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typically bad. But in fact, as we have seen, death is worse for

some humans than for others. It is worse for the toddler
James to die when he would otherwise have enjoyed many
happy years than for the nonagenarian Sarah who would
have died soon afterwards anyway. But it is morally wrong
to kill Sarah, just as it is morally wrong to kill James.
All normal humans have the right to life; it is wrong to kill
any of them, even though death is much worse for some
than for others. Their right to life must be based in part on
the fact that death is bad for them, but at least in part on
something else that they all have to the same extent.
Normal humans can consent or object to what happens
to them in their lives. They can assess whether they think
that there are good reasons for them to die for example
perhaps their organs could be used to save the lives of
several other people and choose whether or not to die for
those reasons. We ought to respect peoples own decisions
about their life, whether or not we are inclined to agree with
their judgement, especially when those decisions are about
something as important as their own death and even more
so when what we are proposing is bad for them. It is wrong
to do something harmful to a person, such as to take one of
their organs for transplant, when they have withheld their
consent and asked us not to go ahead, and it is wrong to do
so without bothering to ask for their consent. In both cases,
we would be refusing to take account of the victims
judgements about their own life; we would be denying that
their decisions matter.
Murder is wrong because death is bad and because
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typically people do not consent to be killed. Because we

should respect a humans choice about their own life, each
has the right to prevent us from doing harmful things to
them, even if we would thereby benefit a great deal. This is a
persons trump card, their right to life. A person is entitled
to refuse to die for the sake of others.
As far as we know, no non-human animals can give or
withhold their consent to anything. They cannot understand
any complex situation, and they cannot assess whether or
not there are good reasons for them to live or die.
Animal rights activists argue that we should never kill
humans without consent, and since animals cannot give
their consent, we should never kill animals either; so
animals have a right to life. They claim that we deny animals
a right to life to protect our own interests, because we
benefit so much from killing them.
This argument is fundamentally mistaken. It is wrong
to kill a person without their consent because we should
respect a persons judgement about their own life, especially
when we are proposing to do something as harmful to them
as killing them. But animals cannot make judgements about
their own life. They cannot meaningfully give their consent
or withhold it. If we do something to them without their
consent, we are not failing to respect their own assessment
of what to do with their life because they cannot make that
assessment.
If some animal were to have the capacity meaningfully to
give its consent to what happened to it, we should respect its
decisions about its own life: that animal would have a right
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to life. If it turned out that great apes or dolphins could

make assessments about reasons for action, then they would
have a right to life. But as far as we know, no non-human
animals are capable of this: it is literally impossible for us to
respect any animals decision about its own life, because no
animal can make such a decision.
Animal rights activists may be right that we are often
influenced by our own interests when we think about
whether it is wrong to kill animals for food or in the course
of scientific experiments. But we can perfectly well consider
cases in which human welfare is not involved.
Imagine a herd of baboons living in the wild that we
know have an infectious and highly dangerous disease. We
have no means of isolating this herd, and they will infect all
the nearby animals unless we cull the sick. We should weigh
up the harm of killing those animals against the benefit to
the others of being saved from the disease. If the benefits
outweigh the harms, we should go ahead and kill the sick
animals. In fact, it might be wrong not to cull them, and put
the other animals at risk. These animals have moral status
what happens to them matters morally but they have no
right to life.
By contrast, imagine that a group of humans have a
similar infectious disease, and will make many of us ill if we
do not intervene. We might be entitled to isolate these
people to stop the disease spreading, but we are not entitled
to kill them. We are not entitled to weigh up the benefits of
saving the rest of us from the disease against the harm to
them of being killed, because humans have a trump card: we
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must respect their decisions about their own life. Humans,

unlike baboons, have a right to life.
Though animals do not have a right to life, it should be
obvious that we are not always entitled to kill them. Killing
an animal deprives it of all the good things it would have
experienced in the rest of its life; we ought not to do so for a
trivial reason. Even if animals have no right to life, it does
not follow that we must be entitled to kill them for food, for
example. Moreover, since death is worse for the more
intellectually sophisticated animals, such as the great apes, it
is worse to kill those creatures. But it is not wrong to kill an
animal, terminally ill with a painful disease, that would not
experience many goods in the rest of its life, because death
does not deprive that animal of much that is good, even
though the animal does not and could not give its consent to
being killed.
Humans Who Cannot Make Decisions about

Their Own Life
Most humans have the right to life, because for most of them
death is bad and they do not consent to being killed. But
some humans are not capable of understanding complex
circumstances and assessing reasons: they are very young,
or have severe mental disabilities. Like all animals, these
humans cannot give or withhold their consent to anything.
Just as there is no such thing as our respecting the
judgement of animals about what happens in their lives, we
cannot respect the judgements of these humans. In that
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sense, they cannot refuse to sacrifice their lives, and so they

do not have a right to life in the same way that normal
humans, who can make decisions about their own lives, do.
Obviously it is bad if these humans die, for they are
deprived of the pleasures they would have enjoyed if they
had lived for longer. We ought not to kill these humans as
we ought not to kill animals, though our reasons for not
killing humans will be stronger than our reasons not to kill
animals whenever we would deprive the humans of more
goods by a premature death. In many cases, we also have
very powerful additional reasons not to kill humans.
Some humans cannot make judgements about their life
in the present but will be able to do so in the future. Normal
human babies cannot make these decisions but they will
grow up to be adults who have the potential to understand
complex situations and give or withhold their consent.
Since they are sentient, human babies have moral status;
what happens to them matters morally. It therefore matters
morally whether they fulfil their potential to become fully
responsible adults who deserve our respect. The parents of
these babies have a duty to do as much as they can to help
their children achieve their potential: to look after their
children when they are sick and to help them to become
independent and able to make their own decisions as they
grow older. The rest of us do not have special obligations to
bring up other peoples children, but we do have a duty not
to stop them achieving all that they can: we ought not to
stand in their way. It would be very wrong for us to kill a
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normal healthy child, because we would cut short their life

before they could realise their potential.
Some babies are born with brain damage, and may never
be able to think about their own future or reflect on what
matters to them. When we are uncertain whether a baby will
develop normally, we should act on the assumption that he
or she does have the potential, so that, at the very least, we do
not prevent the baby from achieving what he or she can. It
would be wrong to kill a brain-damaged human baby even if
there were only a remote possibility that he or she might
develop into a fully reflective adult.
There are normal adult humans, capable of reflection and
judgement, who lose this capacity as they grow older and
become ill. Suppose that Peter suffers from Alzheimers
disease. In the early stages of the disease, he was quite
forgetful, but he could still enjoy his life: he liked talking to
his children and grandchildren. At this stage, Peter was able
to reflect on his life and evaluate it, and therefore we should
have respected his own judgements about his life and, as far
as we could, we ought not to have forced him to do things to
which he did not consent. However, now he is suffering
from the later stages of Alzheimers, Peter can no longer
make decisions about his own life at all. Similarly, suppose
that Susan has been involved in a terrible car accident and
has fallen into a coma from which she will probably never
waken. Peter and Susan could once make reflective judgements about their lives but we know that they probably
never will be able to do so again. How should we treat them?
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Sometimes people make their wishes clear about what they

would want to happen to them were they to become
incapable of making their own decisions. We should respect
those judgements, and where possible follow their wishes. If
they have not made known their wishes, it still makes sense
for us to try to decide what they would have consented to
have happen to them if they had thought about falling into
a coma. We should take account of their wish to be kept
alive in such circumstances, or their preference to be
allowed to die.
Peter and Susan will probably never again be capable of
making decisions for themselves. Some human babies are
born with such terrible brain damage that we can be certain
that they never have been and never will be capable of
reflecting on anything at all. Whenever there are humans
who are not and will never be capable of reflection, we need
to take into account what is in their interests is their life
worth living? as well as what their parents and relatives
want. If we consider that their life is worth living and their
parents want them to be kept alive, we should respect their
decision.
Some people think that all human life is sacred and
should be preserved in all circumstances. But it is hard to see
why human life as such should be more important than the
lives of animals. Nevertheless, there are important differences between normal humans and other animals: normal
humans have the capacity to make reflective judgements
about their own lives that the rest of us should respect. In
addition, though some humans, like all animals, may not be
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THE RIGHT TO LIFE
able to make this kind of judgement, it is usually worse to

kill them than to kill animals. Human babies have or may
have the potential to develop into independent, reflective
adults who can make their own decisions; normal animals
do not have this potential. Some humans used to have the
capacity to make their own decisions but now this capacity
is impaired or non-existent; we ought to respect their
previous judgements about what they would choose in these
circumstances. No animal has ever had the capacity to make
these judgements. Finally, we need to take into account the
decisions of the relatives of the unfortunate humans about
whether they should be kept alive or allowed to die, whereas
no animals have relatives that could make considered
judgements about them.
It will usually be worse to kill a human than an animal for
these reasons, even when the human has similar mental
capacities to the animal. We have good non-prejudiced
reasons to treat humans differently from animals, reasons
that are based on the significant differences between most
humans and other animals.
The argument of this chapter proves that it is a very
complicated question when, if at all, it is morally acceptable
to kill a human being or animal. It is a mistake to think that
the matter is resolved when we decide whether or not a
creature has the right to life. The right to life is a trump card
that means that we must not kill the right-holder even if
many others would benefit greatly by his or her death. This
trump card is based on the moral requirement that we respect
peoples judgements about their own life, particularly when
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we are considering doing them great harm, and so applies

only to those who can make judgements about their own
lives. Consequently, campaigners for animal welfare would
be well advised not to concentrate too much on the case for
animal rights. But there are many other considerations that
we must take into account too, including the quantity of
different kinds of goods that the creature would have
enjoyed had it not died prematurely. In debates about the
proper treatment of animals, it is vital that we pay attention
to the forceful reasons against killing animals and in favour
of promoting animal welfare, rather than focussing solely
on the issue of rights.
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C HAPTER T EN
ALL ANIMALS A RE
EQUAL ?
Anna Sewell wrote only one book in her whole life, completing it just before her death in 1878. A devout Quaker,
she hoped that her novel would contribute to the campaign
against animal cruelty. Her wish was fulfilled: the impact of
the book was huge. It sold more than 30 million copies, and
is still loved by readers today.
The book was Black Beauty. Subtitled The Autobiography
of a Horse, the novel is narrated from the animals point of
view, as he is sold from owner to owner, treated more and
more badly, until he finally finds contentment at the end of
his life.
Black Beauty is intended to be propaganda for the better
treatment of animals, and it undoubtedly gains some of its
power from echoes, conscious or unconscious, of another
great crusade, the campaign against slavery; it is often
compared to Harriet Beecher Stowes influential antislavery novel Uncle Toms Cabin. The structure of the book
is similar to a slave narrative. Black Beauty, who is
identified by his colour and often referred to as Darkie,
suffers under the yoke of a variety of different masters, good
and bad, and is terribly injured at the whim of a drunk. His
story is intertwined with that of Ginger, a more rebellious
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horse who stands up for herself, and as a consequence, fares

much worse. Ginger is eventually worked and whipped
until she longs for death as a release from her pain.
Animal rights protestors have long drawn analogies
between their struggle and the fight for the abolition of
slavery and for womens emancipation, and compared their
opponents to the racists and sexists who resisted those
movements. As we have finally come to recognise the
essential equality of mankind, they argue, we ought to
accept that all animals are equal too.
Sexism, Racism and Equal Rights

If you have moral status, then anything that harms you
matters morally; if you do not have moral status, nothing
that happens to you is morally important. Everything that
has moral status has equal moral status: if a sentient animal
and a human both suffer by the same amount, their distress
is of equal moral significance. There is a sense, therefore, in
which all (sentient) animals are morally equal.
Many people think that all humans have equal moral
status but that they also have equal rights. Of course, in
many past societies equal rights for all humans would have
been considered ridiculous. Aristotle thought it obvious
that morally good people were more worthy and were owed
more than the wicked, and that natural slaves, people who
were incapable of looking after themselves, had no rights at
all. Many societies have found it natural that men, mistakenly
believed to be the naturally superior sex, should have more
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ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
rights than women. There are very noticeable differences

between individuals: some are prettier, cleverer, stronger,
wiser or morally better than others. Surely it is surprising
that even though we are not equal in all these important
respects, we should be moral equals and have equal rights.
When we claim that people have equal rights, we usually
do not mean that they are exactly equal in all these other
ways. We do not have to deny that some people are prettier
than others and some are cleverer than others. We can even
accept that there are differences between groups of people:
perhaps most men are naturally stronger than most women.
All we need to claim is that in certain key areas, there is no
morally significant difference between people of different
sexes or races.
It is obvious that whether someone is male or female is a
biologically significant feature of them: there are many
respects in which men and women are different. And these
differences affect how you should treat them; it is quite
acceptable to treat men and women differently in some
circumstances. What is wrong with sexism is that a sexist
treats men and women differently when their sex does not
matter. It is sexist to pay women less for doing the same job
as a man when their abilities and skills at doing the job are
identical; when men and women do equal work, there
should be no difference in their pay. It is sexist to deny
women the vote, when they are as capable as many of the
men who are already permitted to vote of understanding the
significance of political questions and using their vote
sensibly. Even if it were true, as some sexists wrongly
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believe, that on average men are more able than women to

understand politics, women are plainly intelligent enough
to qualify for the vote. When women claim the right to vote
or the right to equal pay for the same work, they need not
claim that they are the same as men in all ways: they need
only say that they are the same in respect of the quality
needed for that right: the ability to work or to use a vote.
It would be absurd to claim that animals ought to have
the right to vote and the right to equal pay for equal work. In
the key respects, the ability to use a vote, the ability to do a
particular paid job, animals are not the equals of humans.
No one ever thought that they were, and defenders of
animal rights never claimed anything so ridiculous. Some
animal rights activists say that animals, like humans, have
the right to life, because they are equal in this respect: death
is bad for animals just as it is for humans. But in the last
chapter, it was argued that there are differences between
humans and animals that are crucial to the right to life. It is
typically worse for a human to die prematurely than an
animal, because the human will usually miss out on a wider
range of more valuable goods than the animal. The human
right to life is also based on the capacities of humans to give
and withhold their consent to what happens to them in their
lives: we ought to respect other peoples judgements about
their own life, and in particular we ought not to treat them
badly against their will. If any animal had these capacities, it
would have the right to life; but as far as we know, no animal
does. Though it is bad to kill animals without good reason,
they do not have the right to life because they are not the
148
equals of humans in the ways relevant to the right to life. It is

not biased or prejudiced to deny that humans and animals
have equal rights.
Speciesism
Racists often deny that people of different races have equal
rights but racism is sometimes defined more broadly, as a
kind of bias or prejudice: it is racist to treat some person
differently from another merely because of his or her race.
Recently there has been much debate about positive
discrimination on behalf of a previously oppressed group,
for example, using a quota system to ensure that a certain
percentage of people who join a university or police force
are of a particular race. If positive discrimination is justified
at all, it is because it partially rectifies injustices that have
been carried out in the past to people of a certain race
or because it counteracts on-going discrimination. When
positive discrimination is justified, race is not morally
irrelevant, because injustices have been, and maybe still are,
targeted at a particular racial group.
There are times when it may be right to treat people
differently on the basis of their race or sex. Racism and
sexism are wrong not because people should never be
treated differently on the basis of their race or sex, but
because they should not be treated differently when their
race or sex is irrelevant.
Speciesism is, according to Peter Singer, a prejudice or
attitude of bias towards the interests of ones own species
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and against those of members of other species. If you cared

about whether humans were killed, but not whether
animals were killed, simply because they were not of your
species, you would be guilty of speciesism.
The term speciesism is supposed to emphasise the links
between speciesism, racism and sexism; since most people
think that sexism and racism are wrong, they are likely to
think speciesism is wrong too. But is the analogy valid?
If species were a morally significant category, it could be
appropriate for us to treat other creatures worse than we
treat humans: speciesism would not be wrong. Different
species of animals have a variety of needs and wants and it
is entirely appropriate to treat animals that have diverse
basic needs and preferences differently. No sensible person
would treat a snake, a flea, a hippopotamus and a canary in
exactly the same way: they need different kinds and quantities of food, and totally different living conditions. The
species of an animal is often related to what the animal
wants and needs: a difference of species can be correlated
with features of an animal that are morally relevant. But can
a difference of species carry moral significance by itself?
First we need to know what it means for two animals to be
of the same species. Biologists disagree about exactly how
to answer this question, but most say that it depends on
whether the animals are able to mate together and produce
fertile offspring: two horses are of the same species because
they can mate successfully; you and I are of the same species
because we can mate together. If species were a morally
relevant feature of animals, it would have to matter morally
150
whether or not two animals could successfully mate. But

why on earth would that be morally relevant?
Imagine that another species evolved at the same time as
us, the species human*. Humans* have remarkably similar
mental capacities to us, they look exactly like us, and they
even have similar cultures and societies: humans and
humans* can talk together, live together and work together.
But we cannot reproduce together. It would be surprising if
we ought to treat humans* differently from humans just
because we cannot have children with them. We might find
that we felt a stronger bond with humans than with humans*
(though perhaps not, if humans* looked just like us and
shared our culture). But however we felt about humans*,
surely we ought to treat them just as we would treat humans.
A difference in species by itself cannot matter morally.
Friends, Family and Species

Must we think only about an individual animals needs and
wants when we decide how to treat it? When we consider
how to treat other humans, it is obvious that we take many
other things into account. In particular, we spend a lot more
time on our friends and family than we do on strangers.
We think it important to pay them more attention than
strangers, for if we did not, we could not have meaningful
relationships with them at all.
We dont accuse people who have friends of friendism,
of a prejudice of treating people who happen to be their own
friends disproportionately better than strangers. We think
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that it is natural and good to have friendships, and it is

right to look out for your friends. Of course, this does not
mean that you should entirely neglect everyone else, treat
strangers really badly or favour your friends and family in
every circumstance, but sometimes it is perfectly acceptable
to give them extra consideration.
We feel a natural bond towards members of our own
species, other humans, particularly when they are under
threat. We feel that they are our kin, if a more distant kin
than our friends and family. Imagine that you are passing a
burning house. You manage to go in to check whether anyone
is still inside, and see a baby and a parrot in a cage. Suppose
that you can only carry one of them out. Which do you save?
Of course, you save the baby. It would be odd if you
even had to think about your answer. When a human and a
non-human are under threat, you choose to save the
human: it is natural to feel most concern for the member of
your own species. This bias is not unique to humans: a
special concern for their own species seems to be natural for
many animals.
If Its Natural Is It Right?

A feeling or a way of behaving is natural for us if it is
common to many humans who are brought up in very
different circumstances and in very different cultures. It
may be natural for us to bond with members of our own
species more than with members of any other species, just as
chimps bond with other chimps, dogs with dogs and so on.
152
This may lead us to care more for other humans than for
non-human animals and to treat animals differently on the
basis of their species: we naturally treat most other humans
better than most non-human animals, just as we favour our
friends and family over strangers.
But unlike other species, we humans are capable of
altering our natural behaviour on the basis of what we think
is right. Just because some behaviour is natural to us, it is not
automatically either right or wrong. It may be natural for us
to care a lot about our children, which is good, because we
look after them more carefully. It may be natural for us to be
too selfish, which is bad, because we are simply unmoved by
other peoples suffering even when it would cost us very
little to help them. Our natural behaviour can be good, but
often it is not.
Even if we do care for humans much more than for other
animals, we can ask ourselves whether we are right to do so,
just as we can ask ourselves whether we are right to benefit
our friends and family over strangers. If we decide that we
favour our friends too much, we can take steps to change the
way we act towards them, showing more consideration for
the basic needs of strangers, and less for the whims of our
friends. Similarly, if we decide that it is wrong to treat
humans better than animals, or at least that it is wrong to
treat them so much better than we treat animals, we can at
least try to pay greater attention to the needs of animals, and
less to the minor concerns of humans.
Suppose that it is natural for us to bond more closely with
other humans than with animals and to treat humans better;
153
it is natural for us to be speciesist. Speciesism can be

compared to racism and sexism, and it can be compared to a
special concern for family and friends. But most of us think
that whereas caring for ones friends and family is good, a
particular concern for members of ones race or sex is not.
We would judge speciesism to be good if it were like caring
for friends and family, but bad if it were more similar to
racism and sexism.
A bias towards ones friends is different from a bias
towards ones race: they result in very different kinds of
relationships. A special concern for our friends and family
enables us to be very close to a few people. We know them
very well, and they know us. We enjoy being in each others
company. We go on holiday with them, play sport together
or share hobbies, join the same clubs. We could not have
close friendships if we treated our friends no differently
from strangers. So although we should not entirely neglect
strangers for the sake of our friends, we are justified in
treating our friends differently from strangers at least
sometimes, because friendships are a hugely significant
component of a good life.
Having a bias towards ones race or sex does not contribute to a special relationship with those people. Racists and
sexists tend to have contempt for those not of their race or
sex and usually treat them particularly badly, rather than, as
in a friendship, treating some people particularly well and
developing valuable bonds with them. The bias that racists
and sexists have for their own race and sex does not contribute to their having a good life.
154
A special concern for ones species is most similar to

racism and sexism. Speciesists tend to treat non-human
animals particularly badly, rather than treating humans
particularly well. A speciesist does not have a special
relationship with his fellow humans: how could he when he
has not even met most of them? Speciesism does not
contribute to having a good life, in the way that having
friendships does.
Even if it is natural for us to have a bias towards our own
species, it is open to us to reconsider that concern and see
whether it is justified. Defenders of animal rights are correct
to say that a prejudice towards your own species is wrong,
just as racism and sexism are wrong. They go on to conclude
that animals and humans have equal rights, just as humans
of all races and sexes have equal rights. But this is a mistake.
Humans of all races and all sexes have equal rights because
they are equal in the ways relevant to having those rights:
they can use their vote, they can do the same jobs, they can
give or withhold their consent to what happens to them.
Animals are not equal to humans in these ways. It is wrong
to treat non-human animals worse than humans merely
because of their species. But because there are other differences between humans and other animals that are morally
relevant, it is not true that all animals have equal rights.
Conclusion
The seventh and final commandment of Animal Farm all
animals are equal was also the most important. But as we
155
have seen, this claim oversimplifies a much more complex

reality.
The ground of moral status is the capacity to feel pain and
pleasure. Any animals that can feel pain have moral status: it
matters morally when they suffer. Plants and non-sentient
animals, by contrast, do not have moral status.
The death of a human is usually worse than the death of
an animal, because we are typically deprived of more goods
by a premature death. The more intellectually sophisticated
the animal, the more it misses out on by an early death, and
so the worse it is to kill that animal. It is therefore worse to
kill a highly developed great ape than it is to kill a mollusc.
The right to life is like a trump card that (usually)
entitles its bearer to refuse to be killed in order to benefit
others. Humans have a right to life because death is bad for
us and we can withhold our consent to being killed. As far as
we know, animals cannot give or withhold their consent to
anything. So no animal has a right to life.
In one respect, we can endorse Animal Farms seventh
commandment: humans and other animals are of equal
moral status; an equal harm to each matters equally. But in
other respects we cannot agree with it: typically it is worse to
kill some animals than others and with regard to the right to
life, humans and animals are not moral equals.
How should we treat animals that have moral status but
no right to life? In the next part of the book we assess our
most controversial uses of animals: farming for food, foxhunting, and scientific experimentation. Are any of them
acceptable; or should they all be banned?
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PART THREE
HOW SHOULD WE
TREAT ANIMALS?
C HAPTER E LEVEN
FACTORY FOOD
We are born, we are given just so much food as will
keep the breath in our bodies the very instant that our
usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with
hideous cruelty The life of an animal is misery and
slavery: that is the plain truth.
Old Major, the prophesying pig of Animal Farm, bemoans
the lot of a farm animal, before recounting his vision of a
better life in a farm run by the animals themselves. But he
was in fact lucky, even though he did not know it. He could
not possibly have guessed what was in store for future
generations of livestock, as traditional free-range farms
turned into industrial factories for manufacturing food.
Many people buy meat from the supermarket every week
knowing little or nothing about the conditions in which the
animals they eat were kept when alive. Most supermarket
meat now comes from factory farms. Chickens are farmed
as broilers for meat, and as battery hens for eggs. Over
600 million broilers are killed each year in the UK, and there
are over 33 million battery hens. Broilers are kept in huge
windowless sheds in enormous flocks of 50,000100,000
birds. Their food, water, temperature and ventilation
159
are controlled automatically; the food contains growthpromoting antibiotics. The shed floor is covered in a layer of
litter that is not changed throughout the lifetime of the bird.
The birds are not caged, but have little space (about the size
of one A4 piece of paper per bird); as they grow very fast,
their shed becomes increasingly cramped. Often, their
skeleton is unable to support their own weight, and up to 80
per cent of broilers suffer from broken bones; the birds that
are the worst crippled die of hunger or thirst, unable to
reach their food and water. Diseases spread easily in the
crowded sheds; salmonella is particularly prevalent; about 6
per cent of birds die in the sheds. Broilers reach full size in
just six or seven weeks and are slaughtered straightaway;
twenty years ago it took them twice as long to reach that size.
The natural life span of a chicken is six to seven years. Birds
are often injured while they are captured in their sheds; they
can get much too cold or hot during the transport to the
slaughterhouse depending on the weather. They are usually
stunned before they are killed, but the stunning is often
inadequate and the birds can still be conscious when their
necks are cut.
Battery hens live in similar sheds containing up to 30,000
birds in rows and rows of cages. These cages allow about
two-thirds of the size of an A4 sheet of paper to each bird.
Feeding and watering are automated; the food can contain
the remains of unwanted male chicks as well as growthpromoting antibiotics. Hens kept in battery cages are
unable to carry out their normal behaviour: wing-flapping,
dust-bathing, scratching, pecking, and so on. The resulting
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FACTORY FOOD
frustration leads to aggressive behaviour: the hens often

peck each other. To prevent this, the beaks of the birds are
sometimes partially removed, but de-beaking is often carried
out without anaesthetic and causes the birds distress.
Diseases like salmonella are widespread in the overcrowded
sheds. Because the hens cannot exercise, their bones are
brittle and often break; because they cannot scratch their
claws, these grow too long and can become entangled in the
floor of the cage preventing the bird from getting to its food
and water. As with the broilers, mortality is about 6 per cent
in the battery sheds. These specially bred hens can produce
300 eggs a year; an astonishing increase from their wild
ancestors that produced twelve to twenty. After twelve
months their ability to lay eggs declines and they are
slaughtered and used in processed food.
There are around 3 million dairy cows in the UK. Most
graze on pasture during the spring and summer and are
housed indoors in cowsheds for about seven months during
the winter, though the practice of keeping them indoors for
all of the year is increasing. Dairy cattle are kept almost
constantly pregnant. Calves are usually taken away from
their mother within 24 hours, and the cow is then milked
two or three times a day for about ten months. Selective
breeding and concentrated feeds have meant that dairy
cows can produce ten times more milk than their calves
would suckle. This overmilking results in up to a third of all
dairy cattle each year suffering from mastitis, an infection of
the udder that is potentially fatal, and from a variety of other
diseases exacerbated by poor hygiene and overproduction,
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Battery-farmed chickens
including BSE. Male calves, which cannot provide milk and

are unsuitable to be raised as beef (dairy cattle are bred for
high milk yields, not to produce high-quality beef), are byproducts of the dairy industry. The typical fate of these
calves is to be raised as veal, by a process that has become
notorious. Veal is prized for its soft white meat; to make the
flesh of the calves soft they are fed only liquids and given no
solid food in the whole of their short lives. To keep their
flesh pale-coloured, they are housed in the dark and are
deliberately made anaemic, fed only foods low in iron. They
are kept in special wooden slatted crates too small for them
to turn around in so that they cannot expend any energy
moving. Five per cent of veal calves die in their first three
weeks of life. Three weeks later, more than half of the
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FACTORY FOOD
surviving calves have a respiratory disease. In 1990 the use

of veal crates was banned in the UK, where veal is in any case
not popular; but dairy farmers in the UK transport their
unwanted calves to continental Europe where veal is still
highly valued and veal crates are still used.
Pigs are highly intelligent and social animals that
traditionally lived in woodland, foraging for nuts and seeds.
The pig industry in the UK is large, with about 9 million pigs
reared each year in very intensive conditions. About half of
the breeding sows are kept indoors, until recently either in
barred stalls so narrow that the sow was unable to turn
around, or tethered by a heavy chain attached to a strap
around her neck or body. Lameness, leg, back and hip
problems and sores are all common. Intensified rearing
has led to increased disease problems, particularly among
piglets; viral pneumonia and meningitis are common. On
average, each sow produces 22 piglets per year and spends
two-thirds of her life pregnant. After three or four years
a sow is slaughtered for sausages, pork pies and other
processed products. The piglets are usually slaughtered
after four to seven months. The pigs are stunned before
their throats are slit, but the stunning is not always effective.
The natural lifespan of a pig is ten to fifteen years.
Is Factory Farming Morally Acceptable?

The Benefits of Factory Farming: Cheaper Meat
Factory farm workers do not keep animals in small pens and
feed them growth-promoting chemicals because they enjoy
163
hurting animals; they do so because they are the optimal

conditions to produce the fattest chickens, pigs and calves
as quickly and cheaply as possible. It costs a lot to run a freerange farm where animals are kept in smaller numbers and
allowed to roam free or are kept in large pens: factory farms
produce meat much more efficiently. Consumers respond
by buying these products, rather than more expensive meat
from free-range animals: factory farms give the customers
what they want.
In the past, meat was an expensive luxury; only the rich
could afford to eat it regularly. Factory farms provide cheap
meat so that all the people who could not have bought meat
every day now can do so.
Why does it matter whether eating meat is the preserve
of the rich? There are two main reasons why it might be
important that the less well off can eat meat: because it is
good for them; and because they want to do so.
Is it really good for people to eat meat? Meat is a good
source of protein and of minerals such as iron; it is easier for
some people to eat well if they eat some meat as well as
vegetables. But it is not essential for most people to eat meat
to keep healthy. In fact, there is now plenty of evidence that
most vegetarians can be as healthy if not more so than meateaters: vegetarians tend to have lower cholesterol, and are
less likely to suffer from diabetes, heart attacks and certain
kinds of cancer.
Factory farming gives people what they want: those who
could not buy meat produced in other ways can afford the
cheaper meat; those who could have bought more expen164
FACTORY FOOD
sively produced meat can purchase cheaper factory-farmed

meat and have money left over for whatever else they desire.
If factory farming were banned, both groups of people
would be somewhat more miserable, because they could not
eat meat as often or as cheaply as before. But this would not
be too great a cost for them to bear. In addition, it would be
possible for a government to subsidise free-range farms so
that the meat produced by such farms was not as expensive
as it is now. Issues of the cost of meat would no longer be so
important. Factory-farmed food would have no significant
benefits over free-range farmed meat.
The Costs of Factory Farms: Animal Suffering
It is difficult to see pictures of a factory farm, the huge
industrial shed, the rows of tiny wire cages crammed with
birds, the dead and dying creatures, without thinking that
this is an extremely peculiar life for an animal. Chickens
should be pecking about in the dust outside a farmhouse in
the countryside, not trapped in an industrial space too small
to spread their wings. Many peoples strongest objection to
modern farming is that factory farms seem so unnatural.
What does it mean to say that a type of farming is
unnatural? We often contrast the natural and the artificial:
natural things would be the same as they are now if there
were no humans or if humans had not interfered with them;
artificial things would not exist or would be different if there
were no humans or if humans had not intervened. The moon,
the Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon are natural; televisions,
the Taj Mahal, and a cheeseburger with fries are artificial.
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Farm animals like cows, sheep, pigs and chickens have

been bred by farmers for thousands of years. They are alive
today in part because of the choices made by farmers in the
past about which animals should breed together. These
farmers selected animals that had useful characteristics: that
tasted best, that fattened quickly and that were easy to look
after. Farm animals are natural in a sense of course: they are
living organisms that are part of the natural world. But the
kind of creatures that they are has been influenced for many
years by human desires and decisions.
Factory-farmed animals are often bred for a life of factory
farming; they are not animals brought up on a traditional
farm that have been kidnapped and placed in conditions
unlike any they previously knew. Most factory-farmed
animals never know anything other than what it is like
inside their own shed, many never see the sun or a field
in the countryside. Of course, it was not inevitable that
factory-farmed animals would live in a factory farm. If the
farm owners had made a different decision, the animal
might have been killed immediately, or might have lived its
life on a traditional farm. But in what sense is it unnatural to
keep an animal in the conditions of a factory farm? You
might say that if humans had not intervened, no animals
would have been living in tiny cages without sunlight. But
if farmers had not made their selections, there would be
no chickens, pigs or cows as we know them now either. If
humans had not interfered with other animals at all, there
would be no farms of any kind. Both traditional free-range
farms and factory farms are artificial in the sense that they
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would not have existed if there were no humans: in this

respect factory farms are no more unnatural than traditional free-range farms.
Another sense of natural distinguishes what humans
do in any society from what is cultural, dependent on a
particular cultural setting. It may be natural for humans to
eat food, but what food they eat depends on their culture.
Traditional forms of farming are more natural in the sense
that they have existed in a wider range of cultures than
have factory farms. But even if factory farms are less natural
than traditional farms, is this an objection to them? Not
everything that is unnatural is bad: it may be that in very few
societies, men treat women with respect, but it is obviously
not bad when they do. Factory farming is not morally worse
just because it is found in only a few cultures.
Objecting to factory farms on the grounds that they are
unnatural is no use. In the first place, all forms of farming
are in a sense unnatural, and secondly, not everything that is
unnatural is therefore bad.
But factory farms do keep animals in conditions that
cause them distress and suffering: this is the real reason why
factory farms are morally worse than traditional free-range
farms.
We can be confident, for the reasons given in Chapter 3,
that the kinds of animals that are factory farmed chickens,
pigs and cows can feel pain. But though we can be sure that
these animals can suffer, we should not be so confident that
we know when they are in distress. It is easy to think that
factory-farmed animals suffer in the same way that humans
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would if they were kept in cramped conditions in a steel

barn and constantly fed chemicals. But this may be a
mistake: animals bred to live on a factory farm may not
suffer from being caged as humans would, for they cannot
understand what it means to lose their freedom and they
have been bred to be docile and content: they are certainly
not as frightened as wild animals would be in the same
circumstances. Nevertheless, factory farms clearly do make
animals suffer: they are kept in very unhygienic surroundings, without clean air to breathe and in such cramped
conditions that diseases easily spread. They are often sick
and many of them die. Hens that are unable to carry out
their natural behaviour of pecking, dust-bathing and so on
are often visibly distressed.
Even though factory-farmed animals are bred for life on
the farm, factory farming causes much more suffering than
does free-range farming, for no significant extra benefits,
and so it is morally worse. If we have the choice between
buying free-range meat and buying factory-farmed meat,
we certainly should not purchase the products from factory
farms.
A factory farmer might object to these claims as follows:
suppose that farming is morally acceptable, that it is not
wrong to raise animals with the intention of killing and
eating them. If farming is permitted, surely regulations
about how you keep the animal before you kill it are mere
cosmetic window-dressing. Isnt it hypocritical to worry
about the size of a chickens cage when you know you are
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going to slaughter it in a few weeks anyway? So if farming

animals for food is permitted at all, factory farming should
be allowed too.
It is a terrible mistake to think that it does not matter
what happens to an animal before it is killed. In factory
farms, animals are kept in conditions that cause them
considerable suffering. It is bad that creatures of moral
status suffer, whatever happens to them in the future. So
it is incorrect to say that if animals are killed, their life
beforehand is of no consequence and their pain during that
life does not matter. It is morally worse for the animals to
suffer than for them to have a happy life free from pain even
if afterwards they are killed.
Factory farming is morally worse than traditional freerange farming, because factory-farmed animals suffer more
than animals on free-range farms. Though it is always
difficult to work out how much animals suffer, and to weigh
up their suffering against human pleasures, it seems
overwhelmingly likely that factory farming imposes far
more suffering on animals than it benefits us. Animals are
treated so badly in factory farming that it should not be
allowed to continue in its present form. There should be
much stricter regulations in farming to raise the standards
of animal welfare, even if the cost of meat must rise as a
consequence, and in the meantime, none of us should
support factory farms by buying meat produced under
factory farm conditions.
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Is Eating Meat Ever Morally Acceptable?

The Benefits of Eating Meat: Nature, Culture, Health
and Pleasure
If it were necessary for us to eat meat to have a healthy diet,
we would surely be entitled to do so, to ensure that we might
stay alive and flourish. In some parts of the world, where
plants do not thrive, it is difficult to survive on a vegetarian
diet. If we are in the unusual circumstances of needing to eat
meat to survive, we may eat meat; but of course most of us
could survive and would even be healthier on a vegetarian
diet; we do not need to eat meat at all.
Some might argue that it must be acceptable for us to eat
meat because it is natural for us to do so. Humans seem to
have evolved as omnivores, eating a diet of meat and plants.
But we have seen many times already that what is natural for
us to do may not be right: like racism and sexism, meateating may be natural but wrong.
Eating meat is not just natural for us, however, it is also
culturally important: many cultures and religions put a lot
of emphasis on preparing and eating special kinds of food.
Roast beef, fish and chips, and egg and bacon breakfasts are
traditional British foods. Jewish families always eat lamb at
Passover. These practices are important to our sense of
identity as members of a particular culture or religion. Since
many people think that we ought to support different
cultural and religious traditions, oughtnt we to encourage
meat-eating too?
If a cultural or religious practice involves doing some170
FACTORY FOOD
thing harmful and wrong, it is not acceptable to carry on

with it however long and venerable its tradition. Instead,
the harmful part of the practice should be outlawed, the
remaining aspects of it should be retained. For example, a
crucial element of the ancient Roman religion was the ritual
sacrifice of bulls, goats and other animals, through which
the Romans believed they could communicate with the
gods. Animal sacrifices were often symbolically replaced
with cakes shaped as animals that were much cheaper to
provide than live animals. The Romans were prepared to
alter their ritual so that it did not include the actual killing
of animals (though for reasons of cost rather than animal
welfare), and the modified ritual could play the same
important role for them. Just because eating meat is part of
our culture does not mean that we must continue to be
carnivorous.
Many people have jobs in the meat industry, in farms,
vets, slaughterhouses, butchers and supermarkets, that
would be lost if everyone became a vegetarian or if freerange as well as factory farming were banned. They would
lose their means of support, which would be bad for them,
their families and their communities too. Some of them
might find jobs in similar fields, but many probably could
not. The cost to these people would be considerable if we all
became vegetarian. But on the other hand, if eating meat
and raising animals for food are morally wrong, people
ought not to make money out of them. The fact that
thousands of jobs depend on the meat industry does not
mean that we must all support it by eating meat.
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The main benefit to us of eating meat is obviously that

many of us enjoy it. That is why eating meat is a part of so
many cultures and religious traditions, and why the vast
majority of us are not vegetarians, despite the increase in its
popularity in recent years. Our enjoyment of eating meat
need not be cruel, for we are not taking pleasure in killing
animals or causing them suffering (indeed many of us go
out of our way to avoid being reminded that animals must
die for our food). Eating meat is a genuine benefit to us. On
the other hand, it is a benefit that we could live without. Are
we morally entitled to buy and eat meat and to farm animals
for food?
The Cost of Eating Meat: Lack of Respect
If you came across an animal that had died of natural causes,
and you were not responsible for its death, would there be
anything wrong with eating its meat? Some might argue that
even when you had neither killed the animal nor caused it to
suffer, it would nevertheless be wrong to eat the animal.
After all it would be unthinkable for most of us to eat a dead
human in the same circumstances. Obviously eating the
dead animal would not harm it, for it can no longer suffer.
But, it might be argued, it would still be wrong to eat it, for
you would be expressing a lack of respect towards the animal.
Eating an animal might express the view that you are
entitled to use the animal for your own enjoyment; and just
as we ought not to use animals in any way we choose, we also
ought not to act in ways that symbolically express that we
may do so.
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It is true that we often think that the way we treat the body
of a person after they are dead can express respect to them:
that is why people in many different cultures place so much
importance on carrying out ceremonies for their dead
relatives and friends and most would be revolted by the idea
of eating a human body. But in different cultures, the
ceremonial treatment of the dead is quite different. In some
cultures the dead are buried, in some their bodies are burnt,
in some their bodies are left to be eaten by vultures. There
is no single way of treating the bodies of the dead that
expresses respect towards them; one might burn a persons
body respectfully or without showing any respect. There is
nothing in particular about eating an animal that expresses
either respect or a lack of respect towards it: it is possible to
carry out the same activity with either attitude. It need not
be wrong to eat meat, at least when you are not responsible
for the death of the animal.
So eating meat is not always wrong: it is morally acceptable in certain circumstances. But this does not show that
eating meat from farmed animals is morally acceptable; for
in buying farmed meat, even free-range farmed meat, you
are supporting an industry that imposes death on millions
of animals. Is it ever acceptable to eat meat from farms?
The Costs of Eating Meat: the Harms to Farm Animals
If we all gave up eating animals, in the future there would
be far fewer chickens, cows, pigs and sheep alive, because
we would not breed large numbers of them as our food.
Some good does come from eating meat for the farm
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animals themselves: if no one ate meat, most of these

animals would never have lived at all. If the animals have a
life worth living, they benefit from our support of farms and
our eating meat.
This argument could not be used to defend factory farming, as it is highly unlikely that factory-farmed animals do
have a life worth living. But the argument has force in support
of free-range farming, provided that free-range farmed animals do have a worthwhile life. Of course, all farm animals
typically have a much shorter life than they would if they
were not farmed, for they are slaughtered as soon as they
reach maximum weight. They may also suffer more than
they would have done if they had not been farmed: even
free-range animals are often kept in confined conditions
and may be more prone to diseases; they certainly can suffer
when they are transported to slaughter and sometimes too
when they are killed (especially if they are not properly
stunned beforehand). But it is reasonable to think that
their lives are nonetheless worth living, that it is good for
them that they exist, and that far fewer of them would
have lived at all if we did not have farms and we did not
eat meat.
Nevertheless, we would obviously object strongly to a
system of human farms, where humans were bred, brought
up and slaughtered for food, and surely we could make a
parallel argument in favour of farm humans: these humans
would die at some point in time; all we are doing is intervening so that they die sooner rather than later. Farm
humans have a life worth living, and many of them would
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not have lived at all if we did not have this farming system.
It would be monstrous to farm humans for food; how can it
be acceptable to farm animals?
As we saw in Chapters 9 and 10, it is typically much worse
to kill a human than it is to kill an animal. Humans enjoy a
much wider range of goods, and more valuable goods, than
do animals. When humans die prematurely, we miss out
on a greater variety of experiences than do animals: we
typically have many plans and projects that are frustrated,
we are deprived of the opportunity to develop mature,
intimate, valuable relationships, and so on. Animals that die
early, by contrast, miss out on a few simple pleasures, but
that is all. In addition, humans typically do not give their
consent to be killed. Since killing a human is typically much
worse than killing an animal, it is deeply misleading to
compare human and animal farming. It would be wrong to
farm humans, because it would be wrong to cut short a
human life even if you immediately brought into existence a
replacement human who also had a worthwhile life: it
would violate the first humans right to life. But it is not
necessarily wrong to kill animals, especially when at the
same time you breed replacement animals that also have
lives worth living; this cannot violate any animals right to
life, for no animals have such a right. Whether it is morally
acceptable to support free-range animal farming depends
on whether humans and animals overall benefit by the practice. If the benefits to humans and to farm animals outweigh
the harms imposed by any large-scale farming, then freerange farming is acceptable; otherwise it is not.
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Is It Wrong to Kill Animals for Food?

Death is bad for an animal, because it deprives that animal
of all of the goods it would have had if it had not died
prematurely. It is acceptable to kill an animal only if the
benefits to humans and other animals outweigh this harm
to the animal itself. To decide whether it is morally acceptable to kill animals for food, we have to weigh up these
harms and benefits. On the negative side is the harm we do
to the farmed animal, which is typically deprived of several
years of life it might have enjoyed, and which may also
suffer from disease or maltreatment even in a free-range
farm. On the positive side is our enjoyment in eating meat;
and also the benefit to the chickens, cows, sheep and pigs
that live a worthwhile life for at least a short while, which
would not have been born at all if we did not farm animals
for food. It is very hard to measure and to compare these
harms and benefits: whether we are entitled to eat meat may
turn out to depend on the kind of animal, and the exact
details of the way it is farmed and slaughtered.
For example, it is questionable whether shellfish are
sentient at all, whether they have any experiences, pleasant
or unpleasant. If they are not sentient, there is nothing at all
wrong with killing them for food.
The brains of fish do not seem to be sufficiently developed for fish to have a complex mental life. It seems likely
that fish may be sentient but have at best a primitive mind.
Killing a fish deprives it only of simple experiences; this
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harm to the fish may be outweighed by the enjoyment to

humans of eating it. In addition, we can expect that fish that
live wild before they are caught enjoy their natural life; we
impose no suffering on them at all until they are netted.
Increasingly, however, as the stocks of fish in the oceans are
depleted, we are turning to farming popular fish such as
salmon. The welfare problems of farmed fish are similar to
those of factory-farmed chickens, cows and pigs: the fish are
kept at very high density and diseases are rife. It is possible
too for the fish to be contaminated by polluted water, and to
pose a risk to human health when we eat them. For the sake
of our own health and for animal welfare reasons, we ought
to eat wild rather than farmed fish.
Unfortunately, catching some wild fish such as tuna
carries with it a risk of killing other marine creatures
including dolphins that have an impressively complex
mental life. Dolphins are deprived of more by death than are
fish, and we should use only those methods of tuna fishing
that do not risk killing them.
Is it wrong to kill farm animals chickens, pigs, cows
and sheep for food? These animals seem to have a more
complex mental life than fish, but less than dolphins. Are
the goods that they are deprived of in death greater than the
benefits we gain from eating them and the benefits they gain
from having lived a brief, but worthwhile life (assuming that
they enjoy living on a free-range farm)? This question is
very difficult to answer, and reasonable people may disagree
about what is the right response. I think that, in at least some
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circumstances, it is acceptable to kill free-range farm

animals for food. Many humans certainly enjoy eating meat
and, since this need not be a cruel pleasure, it should be
included in the sum of the harms and benefits of free-range
farming. Though the animals will almost inevitably suffer
during transportation and slaughter, they can have lives
worth living. These lives are cut short when they are
slaughtered, but the farmer breeds new animals to replace
them that have lives worth living too; overall, free-range
farmed animals can benefit from the practice of farming, for
without it they most likely would not have lived at all. It
seems to me that the benefits of free-range farming can
outweigh the costs, and so it can be morally acceptable to eat
free-range meat.
It is possible, however, that this evaluation of these costs
and benefits is mistaken, that any commercial farming
imposes suffering on animals so great that it outweighs the
benefits to them of life itself and the benefits to us of eating
meat, in which case even free-range farming would be
wrong, and it would always be morally wrong to farm
animals for food.
Some people who do not eat the flesh of animals also do
not drink milk or eat other dairy products. In principle, we
can eat dairy products without harming animals; in these
circumstances, there is nothing wrong with our use of them.
In practice, however, most current dairy farming is a kind of
factory farming, in which cows are bred to produce enormous quantities of milk and their calves are slaughtered.
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The same objections to eating meat produced by factory

farming also apply to drinking factory-farmed milk. It can
be acceptable to drink milk and eat dairy products, but only
when they are not produced by methods of farming that
inflict such suffering on so many animals.
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C HAPTER T WELVE
FOXHUNTING
Foxhunting is the sport of kings, the image of war without

its guilt and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger. So
wrote Robert Smith Surtees in his 1843 novel Handley
Cross, or Mr Jorrocks Hunt. Huntsman and comic writer,
precursor of Dickens, Surtees wrote several novels recounting the sporting adventures of Jorrocks, the cockney grocer,
as well as others with titles like Mr Facey Romfords Hounds
and Mr Sponges Sporting Tour.
The idea that foxhunting is somehow comparable to
warfare is quite common among huntsmen, who claim to
admire and respect the cunning of the fox, as one might
appreciate the manoeuvres of a rival general. But there
cannot have been many wars as one-sided as a typical
foxhunt, which pits some 30 riders and their hounds against
a single quarry with no weapons of its own and no chance to
counterattack, that can hope at best to outrun or outwit its
enemy and escape with its life. Estimating the dangers of a
hunt as a quarter of those of a war looks somewhat excessive
with regard to the riders and their dogs, but remarkably
optimistic from the point of view of the fox.
A typical foxhunt lasts all day, beginning in the morning
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as the hounds set off, searching for the scent of a fox to

follow. The fox is sometimes chopped: found and killed
instantly without a chase. Otherwise, the hounds pursue the
fox with the riders following at a distance, unable to keep up.
The chase can last from a few minutes to over an hour, but
the average is fifteen to twenty minutes. When the dogs
catch the fox, they bring it down and kill it very quickly,
tearing at the carcass until the riders catch up and call
them off.
Before the hunt begins, volunteers block up the foxholes
to prevent the fox from escaping the chase. If the fox finds
an uncovered hole and goes to ground, a terrier is sent down
after it to flush it out, and it is either chased again or shot
immediately.
In November 2004, against considerable opposition, the
British parliament banned hunting with hounds. At the
time there were 175 registered foxhunting packs in England
and Wales. Foxhunts took place between August and April
and 20,00025,000 foxes were killed each year; on average,
each hunt killed one fox during each day of hunting. It
is likely that more foxes than this were killed because unregistered hunts took place as well.
Most of the arguments made here about hunting rely on
information from the Burns Report, commissioned by the
British government to investigate the pros and cons of
hunting. There are significant problems in trying to decide
whether the UK parliament was right to ban foxhunting
because many of the facts of the case are in dispute. It is
controversial whether there are good reasons to cull foxes,
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Foxhunting: the image of war without the guilt?
how much the fox suffers during the hunt and how much it
would suffer if it were killed by an alternative method. Since
these key facts about foxhunting are not yet known, at best
we can draw only provisional conclusions about the
morality of hunting.
The Culture of Hunting

Surtees was quite right that kings are keen on foxhunting:
Edward I had a pack of foxhounds in the 13th century; and
hunting has been a popular pastime for the nobility for
hundreds of years. The defenders of hunting identify strongly
with this countryside tradition.
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Hunting is clearly a minority culture, but in other

contexts, many people think that minority cultures should
be encouraged and supported rather than outlawed,
because living in a country with diverse cultures is simply
more interesting than living in a wholly homogeneous
community. Though few people speak Welsh compared
with other languages, there have been campaigns to prevent
Welsh-speaking from dying out, for the Welsh culture has a
long and rich history that might be forgotten if the language
was neglected and allowed to wither. Many people identify
themselves specifically as Welsh, and it is immensely valuable for them to be able to connect with their forebears by
speaking the same tongue. This obviously does not mean
that everyone ought to take up speaking Welsh, but we
should at least not put obstacles in the way of those who
want to speak the language.
Foxhunting has a long history, its own language,
customs, and very distinctive costumes. It is not surprising
that followers of the hunt identify with its traditions, feeling
that they are participating in a practice special to the British
countryside and that hunt protestors are townspeople who
are ignorant of country life. In Spain, supporters of bullfighting have made a similar defence of their sport, arguing
that it is part of the Spanish identity, and that it deserves to
be protected as an important cultural practice with a rich
history.
But, as we saw in discussing the cultural importance of
food, a culture is valuable, no matter what its history, no
matter how many people participate in it and how much
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they identify with it, only if it is morally acceptable. It may be

good to live in a society that includes a variety of customs,
but not when the diversity includes morally deplorable
cultures. The custom of lynch mobs in the racist southern
states of America may have had a long history lying behind
it, and no doubt some Americans identified strongly with it,
but we should all be extremely glad that that culture has
died out.
Many cultural practices have some aspects that are
morally questionable and some that are not. The morally
questionable part of foxhunting is the chasing and killing
of a fox. Of course hunt supporters claim that the kill is
justified and that hunting is morally acceptable. But even if
they are not correct about this, there are many elements of
the hunt that are not morally wrong: there is nothing wrong
with wearing special clothes, meeting with other people
who are similarly dressed, riding round the countryside on
horses (provided you have permission from the owners of
the land) or following a trail with dogs. Drag hunting is an
alternative to foxhunting that involves using horses and
hounds to follow a scent-trail that has been laid down earlier
in the day by human volunteers. The only elements of
foxhunting that drag hunting does not incorporate are the
morally questionable ones: the chasing and killing of a fox.
If hunters prefer foxhunting to drag hunting as a form of
entertainment, as they plainly do, it must be because they
particularly enjoy the chasing and killing of a fox. Even
though foxhunting clearly gives pleasure to its participants,
we ought not to weigh their gratification against the cost to
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the fox, because their pleasure is cruel: it is essentially

connected to harming the fox. Since it is wrong to take
pleasure in the suffering of a creature of moral status, these
pleasures should not count as part of the benefits of
foxhunting. It is morally wrong to hunt foxes purely as a
form of entertainment.
If there are no good reasons to kill foxes, foxhunting
should be banned. But drag hunting could be encouraged
instead. Of course, drag hunting could not have the history
or incorporate all the traditions of foxhunting. But it would
be possible for supporters of hunting to carry on customs
similar to those that they wish to preserve.
The Benefits of Hunting: Jobs and the

Environment
The Burns Report estimated that between 6,000 and 8,000
people depended on hunting for their livelihood, some
directly employed by the hunts, others in businesses that
supply the hunts but also do other work. When the hunt ban
is enforced, some of these jobs will inevitably be lost. Some
are very specialised to hunting, such as the kennelmen who
look after the hounds, and it is unlikely that these people will
find similar work.
The number of jobs involved in hunting is not large,
however, compared with the number of jobs lost when
other industries became obsolete: 36,000 jobs were lost in
coal mining in the UK between 1980 and 2000, more than
four times as many as are under threat from a hunt ban. In
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any case, if someones job involves acting wrongly, they

ought not to do it anyway; moreover, the government could
support initiatives to help those who lose their jobs to find
other work.
Defenders of foxhunting argue that it has had a beneficial
effect on the environment. In recent decades, the size of farms
has increased massively, and the hedgerows that used to
divide smaller plots of land have been destroyed, endangering the wildlife that made their homes there. Huntsmen
have managed the countryside to ensure that foxhunting
continues, in particular by planting and maintaining woodland and hedges that provide cover for the fox. But foxhunts
can cause conservation problems too, for instance during
the hunt badgers and their setts are sometimes attacked
by accident. Though hunts contributed to conserving the
environment, there are many other ways of achieving this
goal: the government could encourage farmers to protect
hedgerows and promote biodiversity. The impact on the
environment of the hunt ban need not be a problem.
Outlawing foxhunting is likely to lead to some job losses,
and there could be a negative impact on the environment.
But these costs have to be weighed against the reasons for
supporting an outright ban.
The Law on Hunting

Foxhunts are seen by many as a pastime for a privileged few
who trample on other peoples land dressed in ridiculous
costumes. If most people dislike foxhunts, and find the
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practice repellent, arent we justified in passing a law that

bans hunting?
The law should not be based on what a few people like or
dislike. It should not even be decided by what the majority
of people like or dislike. Even if most people could not bear
the very thought of Mars bars deep-fried in batter, it should
not be against the law to eat them. Whether people choose to
eat Mars bars in batter is their own business.
Most people who oppose hunting do not just dislike
hunting, as some people hate the idea of certain foods. They
think that we ought not to hunt foxes, that people who
join the hunt are morally bad. If most people agreed that
foxhunting was morally bad, wouldnt we be justified in
banning it?
Some things that are morally wrong are not matters for
the law. Most people would agree that it is morally wrong to
lie to your friends that you have forgotten your wallet when
it is your round in the pub; but it is not against the law to do
so, nor should it be. In the past, many people thought that
homosexuality was morally wrong, but in the end they
accepted that this was not a matter for legislation either.
Even if the majority of people in a society dislike some
practice or think that it is morally wrong, it does not follow
that we are justified in banning that practice. So are there
any reasons for thinking that hunting should be banned?
Many of our laws, like the laws against theft and murder,
are to prevent us from harming each other. If we were
justified in making a law only to prevent harm to humans,
there would be no grounds for a law against hunting: a ban
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would be an unwarranted restriction on the freedom of

huntsmen.
We do, however, have laws whose purpose is to protect
animals not humans. There are laws banning bear-baiting,
cock-fighting and cruelty to animals. Animals that are
capable of suffering have moral status: it matters morally
when we make them suffer; it matters morally when we
harm them. So it is appropriate to have laws that regulate the
harm we may do to animals, just as it is right to have laws
regulating harm to humans.
It is reasonable to ban foxhunting if foxhunting is cruel.
Many people think that it must be, since its purpose is to
chase down and kill an animal. But the defenders of hunting
argue forcefully in response: killing foxes is necessary, for
the sake of farm animals that foxes attack and for the sake of
the fox population as a whole; trapping foxes is actually
more cruel than hunting them, as the death of a fox in a hunt
is swift whereas the death of a fox in a trap is often painfully
prolonged. Whether or not we should ban foxhunting
depends on these two issues: Are there good reasons to cull
foxes? And does hunting cause foxes substantially more
suffering than alternative methods of culling?
What Reasons Do We Have to Cull Foxes?

Hunt protestors argue that killing foxes is entirely
unnecessary: foxhunting is gratuitous cruelty. They claim
that hunters cause foxes to suffer for no purpose at all
except their own pleasure.
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FOXHUNTING
Supporters of foxhunting reply that there are good

reasons to cull foxes. They claim that those who are against
hunting sentimentalise the fox, without being aware of the
realities of life in the countryside: foxes kill other animals,
including chickens and lambs belonging to farmers, and
they spread disease. Not only are there good reasons to kill
foxes on the basis of the welfare of other animals, there are
even good reasons to cull the fox population for the sake of
foxes themselves. Or so they claim.
Are foxes a significant threat to other animals? It is
possible for them to transmit bacterial and viral diseases
and parasites to pets and farm animals, though there is no
clear evidence that they in fact regularly do so.
Many farmers believe that foxes attack their sheep and
chickens. In places where lambs are born outdoors, it is
estimated that 1 per cent of newborns are killed by foxes.
Piglets are sometimes killed too if they are reared outside.
Foxes will also attack poultry. These attacks can be
devastating because the foxes do not limit themselves to
killing what they can eat: they slaughter as many as they can.
The vast majority of chickens are not at risk from foxes,
though, because they are reared indoors in enormous
factory farms that foxes cannot penetrate. Most vulnerable
are those chickens reared in small free-range farms, which
can lose more than 2 per cent of their birds.
Are farmers entitled to protect their livestock by killing
foxes? Surely farmers could give extra protection to their
own animals, for example by strengthening the fences
that keep out predators, without actually killing anything.
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Farmers should protect their animals in this way if they can.

But it is not always practical to do so adequately when they
are kept outdoors; it is not always possible to fence securely
an entire field of sheep and lambs, for example. One
solution would be to move all livestock that are at risk from
foxes indoors, and rear no chickens, young sheep or pigs
outside. But there are obvious welfare reasons not to farm
these animals indoors. There are good reasons for farmers
to insist on keeping their livestock outside; in which case it
may not be practically possible to protect them adequately
without killing foxes.
Hunt supporters argue that there are other reasons for
culling the fox population too. A hunt selectively kills the
weakest foxes, for weak and diseased foxes are typically the
slowest and most likely to be caught by the hounds. As a
result, the creatures that are left alive after a hunt are usually
the strongest. Since it is these animals that go on to breed,
producing the next generation of cubs, the population as
a whole tends to become stronger. Hunting produces a
population of fast, healthy and intelligent foxes. In addition,
though it is by no means uncommon for species to be
hunted to extinction, the fox population of the UK is not in
immediate danger and huntsmen have powerful reasons to
ensure that it never dies out; it is paradoxically true that so
long as foxes are hunted, they will also be protected.
If the numbers of foxes were not managed through hunting and other kinds of selective cull, they would increase
until there were too many foxes for their food supply. Then
there would be a natural reduction of fox numbers. In
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FOXHUNTING
practice, this means that great numbers of foxes would die

slowly and painfully from starvation or disease. If foxhunting were banned, we would condemn many foxes to an
agonising death.
Defenders of foxhunting argue that we should consider
the benefits of hunting to the fox species as a whole: the
species is unlikely to die out, the population of foxes is likely
to be healthier and stronger, and fewer foxes will die slowly
of starvation. By contrast, critics of hunting emphasise
that a foxhunt deliberately forces an individual fox to suffer
pain and fear in the chase and the kill, and this is both
unnecessary and unjustified.
When we consider our own species, we do not think that
we are entitled to inflict suffering and death on an individual against their will for the benefit of the species: we
would think it horrific if it were common practice to kill off
the weakest human children. One element of the argument
over foxhunting stems from a disagreement over whether
benefits to the fox population can outweigh the cost to an
individual fox, or whether, as in the case of humans, the
individual has a trump card, the right to life.
There is a second crucial issue: given that we ought not to
kill or harm animals ourselves, shouldnt we also try to
prevent suffering in the animal world caused by others?
If we ought not to kill but need not prevent suffering,
we ought not to hunt foxes at all. On the other hand, if
we should prevent animal suffering where we can, we can
be justified in culling animals, either when a cull of a
species benefits the animals of that species that are left
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alive, or when the culled animal inflicts suffering on other

species.
In Chapter 9, it was argued that animals do not have the
right to life. As a consequence, it may be right to kill one
animal for the sake of saving other creatures from premature death. In at least some circumstances, killing foxes
saves lambs, piglets and chickens from being killed, and
saves other foxes from death by starvation: in those circumstances, killing foxes may be justified.
Although there are some circumstances in which killing
foxes may be justified, this does not show that supporters
of hunting were right all along. First, the hunts that took
place may have been wholly unjustified: they may have
killed foxes without benefiting other animals. Killing an
animal can have far-reaching effects on the rest of the
biological community on other members of its species, on
its predators, its prey and on their prey; effects that are very
hard to predict. It is very difficult to know whether killing
any animal will have good consequences, and in practice it
may be exceptionally rare for killing foxes to be morally
justified.
Second, even if a cull of foxes is permissible in some
circumstances, foxhunting may still not be justified. There
are several methods of killing foxes other than hunting them
down with dogs: foxes could be trapped and slaughtered or
shot instead. To see whether foxhunting is morally acceptable, we need to compare how much suffering each mode of
culling involves. If foxhunting caused significantly more
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FOXHUNTING
suffering than the alternatives, foxhunting would be morally

wrong, even when killing foxes was justified.
How Much Suffering Does Hunting Cause?

It is difficult to tell how much an animal suffers: I might be
able to imagine how I would feel if I were hunted by a pack
of dogs, but I have no good reason to think that a fox would
feel the same. We cannot try to work out how much
suffering hunting causes by using our imagination. Instead,
we need to find out in more detail what hunting involves,
and how it affects a particular kind of animal. There has
been a detailed study by the scientists Patrick Bateson and
Elizabeth Bradshaw into deer hunting, but less work on
foxhunting. Their study of deer hunting attempted to
measure the effect of hunting on welfare, by estimating how
much pain the deer had to endure as well as the stress it
suffered during the hunt.
In a deer hunt, the deer initially outruns the dogs easily,
and sprints until it is far enough away from the hounds to
feel safe, where it remains until the hounds get too near once
more, and it sprints away again at top speed. The deer
continues to make these swift sprints, until its muscles
suffer glycogen depletion and it cannot run any further. It
then turns to face the dogs at bay, making its last stand.
How much does the deer suffer during a hunt? Bateson
and Bradshaw argue that in the past deer would have been
hunted by wolves in short bursts, and so they have not
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evolved to cope with a long chase. They examined the

bodies of hunted deer, and found that they contained very
high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, suggesting the
deer had suffered from stress during the hunt. Their findings are disputed, because high levels of that hormone are
also linked to exercise: humans who have run in a race often
have high levels of cortisol too. But it is extremely likely that
hunted deer do suffer from stress: the levels of cortisol are
much higher than would be expected if the deer had merely
been exercising.
If deer suffer stress during a hunt, isnt it obvious that
foxes must do too? It does not necessarily follow that foxes
suffer as deer do during the chase, for there may be significant differences in physiology between foxes and deer, and
in any case the chase in a foxhunt is quite different from a
deer hunt. A deer hunt consists in a series of sprints by the
deer until it can run no more. The foxhunt is a continuous
chase, typically lasting fifteen to twenty minutes, until the
dogs overpower the fox. The fox is not chased until it cannot
run any further. There is some evidence that the fox suffers
physiological changes as a result of being chased that are
most likely to be signs of stress, though again, they may
merely be the result of vigorous exercise.
How much does a fox suffer during the kill? Supporters of
foxhunting claim that the death is instantaneous and painless: a hound grabs the fox by the back of the neck and
breaks its neck. There has not been an adequate survey of
the injuries to hunted foxes to check whether this is true, but
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FOXHUNTING
the evidence there is suggests that though hunted foxes may

sometimes die instantly from a broken neck, they may
instead be killed by massive damage to internal organs as
they are attacked by the hounds. In either case, however, it is
estimated that the fox will die within seconds; its death is
certainly not prolonged, though it may be painful.
If the fox manages to escape from the hunt underground,
it is dug out, that is, a terrier is sent down the hole to bring
it out. This part of hunting almost certainly does cause
significant injuries and stress to the fox, which is trapped in
a confined space, and should probably be banned.
Alternatives to Hunting
Suppose that we accept the claims of hunt supporters that
it is sometimes right to cull foxes. Hunting may still be
morally unacceptable, if there are alternative methods of
culling that cause less suffering than hunting. There are two
main alternatives to hunting: trapping and shooting.
Traps or snares can be used to catch foxes so that they can
be killed humanely. There are two main problems with
snares from a welfare perspective. The first is that a fox that
is caught round the neck does not wait calmly for someone
to come along and put it out of its misery. Wild animals tend
to suffer considerable stress when they are trapped and
cannot escape. The second problem is that a trap will capture any suitably sized animal that is passing: about half the
animals found in snares are not the intended victims. Of
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course, these animals can be released alive: trapping the

wrong animal does not mean killing the wrong animal. But
trapping inevitably means inflicting suffering on as many
non-foxes as foxes. From a welfare perspective, trapping is
arguably at least as bad as hunting, if not worse.
The main alternative to hunting animals is stalking and
shooting them. If the marksman is accurate, shooting is a
quick and painless death for an animal. The Burns Report
argues that stalking and shooting deer is better from a
welfare perspective, because it eliminates the need for the
chase. The problem with shooting is that an inaccurate
marksman can wound the animal rather than kill it. It is
estimated that about 10 per cent of deer are killed using two
or more shots, and that about 2 per cent of shot deer escape.
A wounded animal can suffer greatly: it may die slowly from
its wound in a few days or even longer, whereas a fox that is
caught in a hunt dies very quickly, and a fox that is chased
but escapes does not usually suffer significant injuries.
A fox is much smaller than a deer and therefore a more
difficult target to hit. The most successful form of shooting
foxes is known as lamping: the fox is caught in the beam of
a high-powered spotlight and shot with a rifle. The Burns
Report recommends lamping instead of hunting foxes, but
recognises that it cannot be used in all circumstances.
Because the spotlight is mounted on a vehicle, lamping is
impossible on very hilly ground, and it is less successful in
areas where there is good cover so that the fox can hide from
the guns.
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FOXHUNTING
Should Foxhunting Have Been Banned?

Foxhunting for fun is morally unacceptable. We should
hunt foxes only if we have good reasons to cull foxes and
hunting is an acceptable method of culling.
Because the dispute over foxhunting is so heated, it is
difficult to find reliable information about it. But there is
some evidence that culling foxes has good welfare implications for their prey (especially chickens and lambs) and
for the fox population as a whole. This suggests that culling
foxes may be morally acceptable in at least a few circumstances.
If we do cull foxes, should we hunt them or use an alternative method? No method of culling is without negative
implications for welfare. It is difficult to say how much
suffering hunting causes: the actual kill is likely to be swift,
but the fox may well suffer in the chase. The major alternative to hunting is shooting, which can kill foxes instantly,
but can also merely wound them, causing them a painful
prolonged death. It is likely that in terms of the welfare of
the fox, shooting by a skilled marksman is the best method,
but hunting may be more acceptable than shooting by an
unskilled marksman who wounds rather than kills the
animal. We need more information on the stress experienced by foxes in the chase to give a final verdict on the
moral acceptability of foxhunting.
Should foxhunting be against the law? If we found out
more about foxhunting, we might discover that the fox in
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the chase did not suffer much more than if it had exercised
vigorously for half an hour, in which case there would
not be grounds for a ban. Alternatively, we might discover
that the suffering caused to the fox in the chase was
unacceptable, in which case a ban would be appropriate. At
the moment there is insufficient evidence to justify an
outright ban.
Given this crucial lack of evidence, why did the British
parliament make foxhunting illegal? Some of those who
voted against foxhunting genuinely believed it to be cruel
and barbaric. But some admitted that they were motivated
mainly by class warfare: they were keen to outlaw a sport
whose participants and supporters were mainly upperclass. Meanwhile, hunt supporters portrayed themselves as
a downtrodden minority whose rights, freedoms and jobs
were under threat from the tyranny of the majority. Despite
the 700 hours of parliamentary time devoted to foxhunting,
both sides managed to neglect what ought to have been the
main issue: the effect of hunting on animal welfare. The
evidence that we have suggests that many of the hunts that
used to take place were probably unjustified. There was a
great need for careful regulation of foxhunting to make sure
that it occurred only where there were good reasons for
culling foxes and where no better method of culling was
available. But a total ban on the grounds of cruelty was not
warranted.
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C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
SCIENCE AND SUFFERING
On 18 May 1984, five members of the Animal Liberation

Front broke into the Head Trauma Research Centre at the
University of Pennsylvania and stole about 30 videos made
by members of the centre of their research on head injuries
to baboons. When the tapes were shown in public, they
shocked the whole of America.
The tapes showed baboons strapped into special helmets
as a hydraulic piston hit the animals head. The baboons
suffered injuries similar to severe whiplash as the soft tissue
of their brains moved inside their skulls, and ended up
paralysed or comatose. The animals were supposed to be
anaesthetised while these experiments took place but the
anaesthetic used was inadequate and the baboons were
sometimes conscious when the piston struck them. The
researchers used instruments that were not properly
cleaned, and could be seen laughing at the injured animals
that were unable to move their limbs. The scientific
justification for the experiments was wholly unclear; the
researchers were investigating head injuries but they were
not sure exactly what hypothesis they were trying to test.
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The Research Centre was criticised for its procedures,

but after some modifications, its funding was renewed.
Experimentation on Humans and Animals

Before the 19th century there were few experiments on
animals or humans, but during that century doctors started
to study medicine scientifically. They began to develop
theories of various illnesses and how to cure them and
to test these theories on both humans and animals. In
America, new kinds of surgery were tried out on slaves with
little concern for their suffering; scientists infected people
with syphilis and gonorrhoea to study these diseases. After
the Second World War, it was discovered that Nazi and
Japanese scientists had conducted horrific experiments on
their prisoners of war. They deliberately infected prisoners
with malaria, typhus and jaundice, tried out different kinds
of poison, and experimented with methods of sterilising
men and women. Many prisoners died after terrible
suffering.
Twenty-three Germans were tried for war crimes involving scientific experiments; sixteen were found guilty. In
their defence, the scientists and doctors argued that in order
to gain significant medical advances, they were justified in
inflicting suffering on a few people, and claimed, as was
almost certainly true, that there were many precedents in
the past of medical experiments being carried out without
the consent of the subjects. In response, the Nuremberg
Court set out the Nuremberg Code, ten elements needed to
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justify a medical experiment on humans that included: the

experiment should lead to an important result, it should be
properly designed, similar experiments on animals should
previously have been carried out, it should be conducted by
properly qualified scientists, and any human subject should
have voluntarily consented to the experiment.
The Nuremberg Code restricted experimentation on
humans severely by requiring that all human subjects give
their consent, ruling out any experiments on humans who
could not give consent the unconscious, the mentally
disabled, and the very young but of course permitted
experiments on animals (in fact, it went so far as to require
experimentation on animals prior to experimentation on
humans). But the Nuremberg Code was deemed to be too
demanding by the medical profession, who preferred to
adopt the Helsinki Declaration, set out by the World
Medical Association in 1964. The Helsinki Declaration
requires only that any human involved in an experiment
should have given their voluntary consent to their involvement, if they are capable of giving their consent. If they are
unable to consent, consent is not required.
It is estimated that over 41 million animals are used
in experiments each year worldwide. The experiments
range from basic research into biology, physiology and
psychology, to research into the diagnosis, treatment and
prevention of disease, from the testing of consumer
products for safety, to the training of students in dissection.
A huge variety of animals are used, including mice, rats,
rabbits, pigs and primates, sometimes bred as laboratory
201
animals, sometimes captured from the wild. In 1876, the

UK became the first country to pass legislation controlling
animal experiments, and British law is currently among the
most demanding in the world. In the UK, scientists have to
be licensed to carry out experiments on animals and their
research has to be monitored by qualified inspectors. The
suffering of the animals in the experiments is ranked as
mild, moderate or severe, where the last might include
severe trauma and death. The more serious the suffering of
the animal, the more significant and worthy the outcome of
the experiment must be if it is to go ahead. The experiment
will not be permitted if there are alternatives that would
inflict less suffering on animals, or that do not involve
animals at all. A handful of other countries have followed in
legally requiring certain standards in animal experimentation, a few more have a code of practice, but many
countries have no laws at all governing animal research.
Experiments and Voluntary Consent

Many scientists used to think that science was valueneutral. They believed that though their research might be
used in morally problematic ways, as when their understanding of the fundamental nature of the atom was used
in developing nuclear weapons, the research itself raised
no awkward ethical questions. The Nazi experiments on
humans show beyond any doubt that they were mistaken:
scientific research itself can be morally wrong. Even if the
Nazi experiments had given us useful information about
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diseases like malaria and possible treatments of them, it was

wrong for those scientists deliberately to infect humans
with diseases without their consent.
It is often thought that doctors should make sure that
their human patients voluntarily consent to every medical
procedure before it is carried out on them. In practice, this
is often impossible: the patient may be too sick to give his or
her consent or may even be unconscious. If the doctor
is about to give the patient a therapeutic treatment, that
is, a procedure in the patients best interests, it is usually
acceptable for the doctor to continue without the patients
consent, particularly if the patients relatives have been
consulted.
Animals cannot give their voluntary consent to any
scientific or medical procedure. No scientist could explain
to the animal what it involved or why it was necessary; even
if an animal could grasp the point of a treatment, it could
not reflect on the reasons for and against it and come to a
reasoned decision. Of course, you could open up the doors
to the cages of animals in laboratories to see if the animals
would run away. But you could not interpret the animal
staying in its cage as consent to continue with the treatment,
for the animal might be conditioned into dependence on its
familiar surroundings. Nor could you take the animals
leaving as a sign that it had made a decision not to continue
the experiment: it might have been moved by a mere
instinct, perhaps an instinct to avoid a confined space.
Some medical treatments of animals are therapeutic; vets
often operate on animals in the best interests of the animal.
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An experiment to test the effects of smoking
It is clearly ethically acceptable for a vet to treat the animal

in its own interests to operate on the broken leg of a dog
or cat, for example even though the animal did not, and
could not, give its consent to the treatment. But most
scientific research on animals is non-therapeutic: the beneficiaries of the research are usually human.
In a non-therapeutic experiment on humans, one human
is harmed and perhaps killed for the sake of benefiting
others. It is generally accepted that for humans who can give
consent, such an experiment is justified only if the benefits
sufficiently outweigh the harms, and the human to be
harmed has given his or her consent. Why is consent
important here? One possibility is that we are not justified
in harming one person for the sake of others, even when the
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benefits to them are enormous (suppose that you could

develop a drug to save thousands of people from malaria by
deliberately infecting one person with the disease), because
it is wrong to use one person for the sake of others. But if the
patient consents to the experiment, even though they are
still harmed in order to benefit others, we are no longer
using them unjustly: the experiment can go ahead.
According to this conception of the importance of
consent, non-therapeutic experiments are not justified
unless one has the patients consent, because in any nontherapeutic experiment the patient is harmed for the sake of
others. The Nuremberg Code endorses this conception of
consent by requiring that no experiment on a human
should ever take place without his or her consent, whether
or not he or she is autonomous and so capable of making
such a judgement.
Despite the fact that the Nuremberg Code permits experiments on animals, if we accept the view of the importance of
consent that the Code endorses, it is hard to see how any
non-therapeutic experiments on animals could be justified.
If it is wrong to use humans who are not autonomous by
harming them for the sake of others, surely it must also be
wrong to use animals that are not autonomous in the same
way. However much we might benefit from research on
animals, all such experiments must be illegitimate.
On the other hand, consent might be important in quite a
different way. It may be acceptable to use one person for the
sake of others provided that the benefits are sufficiently
great, but unjust to disregard the consent of the people
205
involved. The Nazi and Japanese doctors may be wrong, not

because they harmed prisoners for the sake of others, but
because they did so in ways to which the prisoners did not
consent. These prisoners were certainly capable of giving
or withholding their consent to the medical experiments to
which they were subjected, but they were not given a chance
to refuse, and their objections were ignored. On this view,
it is not necessarily wrong to perform a non-therapeutic
experiment on a person; it is wrong to do so if they have
refused to participate, or if you have not allowed them to
decide whether they want to do so.
On this alternative model of the significance of consent,
if a human has not been and never will be capable of giving
his or her consent to a non-therapeutic experiment, it may
sometimes be acceptable to carry out the experiment nonetheless if the benefits for others are great. The Helsinki
Declaration endorses this conception of consent because it
permits experiments on humans who are not autonomous.
If this conception of consent is right, experiments on
animals can be justified if the benefits are sufficient, even
though animals cannot give their consent.
Whether or not we ought to experiment on animals
depends on which conception of consent is correct. Though
this is a controversial matter, it seems to me that we ought
to accept the conception endorsed by the Helsinki Declaration. There is an important moral difference between
harming David, a normal human, without his consent, and
harming Fido, a normal dog. When you harm David without his consent, you refuse to accept that what he chooses
206
for himself matters. You fail to treat with respect his own
judgements about his own life. When you harm Fido
without his consent, you cannot be ignoring his own choice
about his life, you cannot be failing to respect his judgement, because he cannot make any reasoned choices or
judgements at all.
Of course, just because an experiment might produce
some benefits for us, this certainly does not mean that the
experiment is justified. There are many other reasons why
an experiment might be wrong: it may be wrong to perform
an experiment on a human who is incapable of consent
without gaining the consent of his or her near relatives.
Many experiments on animals may be prohibited because
the suffering imposed on the animal would be too great, and
the expected benefits of the experiment do not sufficiently
outweigh that pain and distress. For example, the experiments performed on baboons at the Head Trauma Research
Centre at the University of Pennsylvania appear to be
wholly unjustified, because significant harms were inflicted
on the animals without clear benefits in terms of improved
scientific or medical understanding. The Helsinki Declaration implies that some experiments on animals may be
acceptable; many such experiments may be totally wrong.
What Kinds of Experiments on Animals Are

Justified?
There are at least three different reasons for experimenting
on animals:
207
1. For educational purposes, for example for dissection

and practising surgery.
2. To test consumer goods for safety.
3. To contribute to basic research in biology, physiology
and psychology (for example about the nature of the
brain), and to biological research about the nature
of diseases and the development of treatments (for
example research into Alzheimers disease and potential
treatments).
Some of these uses of animals are easier to justify than
others, because their benefits are more significant.
Dissection in Education
Dissection used to be a standard part of the school biology
curriculum, especially in America where an estimated 3
million frogs a year were dissected by schoolchildren and it
was not uncommon for a student to have dissected a frog, a
foetal pig, a cat and a dog before leaving school. Frogs are
becoming an endangered species in the USA as a result, and
there is really no need for schoolchildren to dismember
animals at all. Students of biology can learn anatomy from
textbooks and computer simulations of dissection instead.
Since there is little educational benefit in most dissections of
animals in schools, but the harm to animals, which must be
killed, is considerable, the practice should not continue
except in the case of university students training to be vets
or researchers who need to be skilled at dissection.
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Safety Tests for Consumer Goods

European legislation requires that the ingredients of consumer products from washing powder and washing-up
liquid to lipsticks, shampoo and sunblock are tested on
animals for safety. These tests protect the customers who
use the product and the chemists who manufacture it from
injury, and also help to protect the environment from
pollution. Though some well-known companies advertise
that they do not test products on animals, many of the
ingredients of their products have been tested on animals at
some time for some purpose.
Some of the safety tests on animals have become
notorious after campaigns by animal rights protestors. The
Draize eye test involved putting a diluted solution of the test
substance into the eyes of six rabbits. The rabbits eyes were
observed for three days for signs of irritation and any
damage was monitored for a further three weeks to see
whether or not the eye repaired itself. In early forms of the
Draize test, the rabbits heads were clamped into position so
that they could not touch their eye and they were caused
considerable pain and sometimes blinded. The test is now
modified to cause them less pain: the rabbits may be free to
move about and anaesthetic may be used. In addition,
significantly fewer Draize tests are now carried out: the test
is not performed on substances that we already know to be
irritants, such as strongly acidic or alkaline substances and
those that on previous tests were shown to irritate. But
nevertheless there remain serious questions over the Draize
209
test, in particular over whether its results are relevant to

humans at all. The rabbit eye is significantly different from
the human eye: unlike humans, the rabbit has a third eyelid
and rabbits produce fewer tears than humans. But there is
no accepted alternative to the test, and it is still used in its
modified form.
The LD50 test for toxicity was used to determine how
much of a given product could be ingested by rats until half
of the test population of 60 to 80 rats died. In other words,
every time the test was carried out, at least 30 rats had to lose
their lives. Sometimes the quantity of the test substance
needed to kill 30 rats was far beyond the amount that any
human might ingest. The LD50 test is no longer commonly
used; instead, where possible, scientists estimate the toxicity
of substances based on the known toxicity of similar
chemicals. When new substances have to be tested, the test
has been modified so that fewer rats are used and it is no
longer essential for any of them to die during the experiment: typically about twenty rats are given a specific
quantity of the test substance; if the rats are unharmed, it is
considered non-toxic; further tests are made only if two or
more rats die.
The most notorious animal tests of the past have been
modified to reduce animal suffering and to restrict the
number of animals dying during the test. But should we test
these consumer products on animals at all? Of course, it
would be wrong to allow untested, potentially dangerous
chemicals, cosmetics and household cleaners to be sold to
the public. But we could instead simply refuse to allow new
210
products containing untested chemicals to be sold; after all,

we have a lot of consumer goods already.
Many people think that animal testing of cosmetics and
other consumer products should be banned, because though
new products make our lives somewhat more pleasant, they
could not be said to give us significant benefits that outweigh the harm we inflict on animals in testing their safety.
If the safety tests could be modified further so that animals
barely suffered during them, it is possible that the pleasure
we gained from our new consumer goods would outweigh
the harm inflicted, and it would be acceptable to test these
products on animals. But though it is very difficult to weigh
human pleasures against animal suffering, it seems likely
that often the animal suffering outweighs the benefits to us,
Rabbits testing the safety of cosmetics
211
and so in most cases new consumer products should be

tested using alternatives to animal testing, or should not be
released at all.
Scientific and Medical Experiments

Many people think that if we can cure human diseases with
drugs that we have researched and developed through
testing on animals, there need be no further argument: if we
could find a cure for cancer by research on animals, we
ought to go ahead, its just obvious that such experiments
would be justified. But things are not so simple.
First, it is rare for scientists to know that the outcome of
a course of experiments will be so successful. They might
discover a new wonder drug that cures cancer; they might
find that their drug is only partially successful, that it has
terrible side effects, or that it does not work at all. When a
scientist begins her research, she cannot be certain what the
benefits of the research will be, or even if there will be any
benefits; whereas she knows for sure that she will inflict
suffering on some animals.
Second, even if the research does produce a new wonder
drug, it is not obvious that it should take place. The Nazi
research on humans could have produced a significant
medical breakthrough, but their means, deliberately infecting prisoners with malaria and other diseases, did not justify
their end.
Third, some medical and scientific experiments on
animals are not intended to produce new drugs that will
212
improve the health of future generations of mankind. They

are intended to give us knowledge, a better understanding
of the physiology and psychology of animals and hopefully
of ourselves too. Sometimes basic understanding of biology
and physiology can turn out to be crucial in combating
disease, sometimes it has no immediate practical applications, and sometimes it is never of any practical use.
Scientific knowledge can be worth having for its own sake.
It is important for us to understand our own bodies and
minds and the animals around us if we can. But is the value
of scientific knowledge so great that it is worth causing
suffering to animals to gain that knowledge? When
scientists want to experiment on animals to find a cure for a
disease such as Alzheimers, we can compare the harms
imposed on the animals during the experiment with the
suffering we will prevent if we can cure that disease. Of
course it is very difficult to weigh up these harms and
benefits, but there are at least some similarities between the
harms we cause in the experiment and those we avert. By
contrast, when we experiment to gain scientific knowledge
that has no immediate application, we have to weigh up very
different things: the harm of suffering compared with the
value of scientific understanding. Because this comparison
is so difficult to make, it is much harder to decide whether
animal experiments are justified when the goal is knowledge rather than a useful drug. Certainly many animal
experiments would be totally unjustified, because the value
of the understanding we would gain by performing the
experiment would not outweigh the harm to the animal, but
213
at least some experiments on animals to gain pure knowledge, without practical applications, may be acceptable.
Fourth, it is not always possible to apply results about
animal biology, physiology and disease to humans. There
are obvious differences between humans and rabbits, rats
and even primates. Sometimes a drug that has no side
effects on humans is dangerous to animals: aspirin causes
birth defects in monkeys but not in humans. Some drugs
have no side effects on animals but can be deadly to
humans: carbenoxalone, a drug used to treat gastric ulcers,
has no dangerous effects on monkeys but can cause heart
failure in humans. The notorious drug thalidomide was
tested extensively on animals and found to be harmless
before it was released for sale, but caused appalling birth
defects when taken by pregnant women. In fact, thalidomide has very variable results in different species: it can
cause birth defects in humans and in certain kinds of rabbits
and primates, but not in rats, mice, guinea pigs and other
primates. Testing Aids drugs on chimpanzees turned out to
be of little benefit, as chimps infected with the HIV virus,
unlike humans, rarely develop full-blown Aids. There is no
guarantee that animal experiments will be of any benefit to
us at all.
Citing these and other examples, some animal rights
protestors argue that experiments on animals should be
banned because they are worthless, never contributing to
useful medical research or to the development of successful
drugs and vaccines. In fact, they say, animal testing can
actually make us worse off, because we end up using drugs
214
like thalidomide, thinking they are safe when they are not.
The protestors are correct that it is not always possible to
apply the results of tests on animals to humans. But their
claims that tests on animals are never useful or that
experiments on animals never contribute to medical
advances are simply false. For example, in 1922, Banting
and Best discovered insulin and showed that it could be
used to treat diabetes by experimenting on dogs and rabbits.
Their discovery saved millions of peoples lives.
In January 2004, vigorous protests by anti-vivisectionists
contributed to the decision of Cambridge University not
to build a neuroscience laboratory that would have investigated brain disorders including Parkinsons disease and
Alzheimers. The costs of the laboratory had risen sharply,
partly in order to provide adequate security for the scientists
and staff to protect them from the animal activists. The
Cambridge scientists had intended to conduct experiments
on primates, the animals that are most closely related to us,
because primate brains are most similar to ours, but their
use is extremely controversial for precisely this reason.
Scientists who are involved in such research face a
dilemma. In some experiments, less developed animals that
may not even be able to feel pain, such as invertebrates, may
be used, but for research into diseases of the brain, it is
important that the animals tested are much more similar to
us. The most useful experiments, whose results are most
likely to apply to humans, are those performed on other
humans and on primates. But the more closely related the
animals are to humans, the more ethical questions the
215
experiments raise: it is harder to justify experimenting on

an animal for our benefit when we know that it is both
sensitive and psychologically complex. If possible, scientists
should avoid experimenting on primates and research brain
disorders in different ways, for example by using brainimaging scans on humans who suffer from the disease.
Some animal rights activists want experiments on primates
completely outlawed. Such a ban might be warranted if
primates were autonomous, that is, if they, like humans,
were capable of making reasoned judgements about their
own life. The evidence that we have is that though primates
have more sophisticated minds than nearly any other nonhuman animal, they are not autonomous. If research on
primates could bring us great benefits that we could not
achieve in any other way, those experiments might be
justified. Primate research should not be banned, but it is
morally acceptable in very few circumstances.
When Is Animal Research Justified?

We ought not to make animals suffer unnecessarily, but the
benefits of scientific research can be considerable, and can
warrant experimenting on animals. Scientific research on
animals should not be prohibited altogether, but it should
be very carefully regulated, to ensure that scientists carry
out experiments only when the expected outcomes are sufficiently worthwhile and that they avoid causing unnecessary
suffering. Animal activists are right to campaign to ensure
216
that appropriate animal welfare regulations are enforced,

though it is quite wrong for them to do so by threatening
violence to scientists and laboratory staff.
Scientists should use specially bred laboratory animals
where possible rather than animals brought in from the
wild, because wild animals suffer severe trauma when they
are captured, transported and kept in captivity. Lab animals
should be housed in an appropriate environment, and be
properly fed and watered; if possible, social animals should
not be kept in isolation. The suffering imposed by any given
experiment should be kept to a minimum; anaesthetics
should be used to reduce distress whenever doing so does
not interfere with the research. The experiment must be
carefully assessed before it begins to determine what suffering the animal is likely to undergo, what the potential benefits
are, and whether they are worth the harm inflicted on the
animal. As part of this assessment, the scientist and his or her
research committee need to consider whether there is any
equally valid method of experimentation that would impose
less suffering on the animals, that would require fewer
animals to be harmed or that would involve less developed
animals (for example invertebrates rather than vertebrates).
Finally they need to consider whether it is essential to
experiment on animals at all: some animal experiments can
be replaced by in vitro experiments on cells or organs and
sometimes computer simulations can be used instead.
Scientists who experiment on animals should obey the
three Rs:
217
Refinement: the experiment must be designed so that

the animal suffers as little as possible.
Reduction: as few animals as possible should be used in
the experiment, and the animals used must be of as low
psychological development as possible.
Replacement: computer simulations, mathematical
models and in vitro experiments must replace experiments on animals wherever possible.
Animal rights activists claim that all experiments on

animals could be replaced. They are right to point out that it
is increasingly possible for scientists to use other kinds of
model in their research. But it seems unlikely that in the
future all experiments on animals will be worthless, and we
should not rule out such research when its outcomes can
be immensely valuable. Scientific experiments on animals
should not be banned, but must be carefully regulated.
218
C HAPTER F OURTEEN
MANS B EST F RIEND?
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, left his home and family to fight in

the Trojan War. The war lasted for ten years, but Odysseuss
troubles had barely started. As he tried to return to Ithaca,
he encountered a series of terrible obstacles: the fearsome
one-eyed Cyclops; the Sirens who lure men to their death;
Scylla the monster and Charybdis the giant whirlpool; and
many more. Odysseus finally reached home twenty years
after he had left. Returning in disguise, the king was recognised by no one, until he came across Argos, a dog he
himself had trained before sailing for Troy. Argos was old
and sick but wagged his tail and tried to summon the
strength to crawl up to him. Odysseus wiped away a tear as
his dog, having seen his master one last time, lay down
to die.
Homers Odyssey describes a memorable emotional bond
between a man and his dog, who know each other and care
for each other even though they have been parted for many
years. Similarly, in The Call of the Wild, Jack London
portrays a fierce love between Buck and John Thornton that
leads the dog many times to risk his life to save the man.
219
Although many books on animal ethics discuss hunting,

eating animals and experimenting on them, few devote
attention to pets. This is surprising because the relationship
between a pet and its owner clearly has a moral dimension.
Many people become extremely fond of their pets, lavishing
attention on them, feeding and looking after them extremely
well. They treat their pets far better than other animals.
When people treat their pets badly, neglecting or abandoning them, even deliberately harming them, it is natural to
think that these people have done something worse than
when they neglect animals that are not their pets; most of us
think not just that pet-owners may give special consideration to their pets, but that they ought to do so.
Pets are companion animals; they are quite different
from wild animals that are not domesticated, that cannot
live among human beings but can survive on their own:
most pets could not live without our assistance. Perhaps this
reliance of pets on humans generates a special relationship
between humans and animals.
The philosopher Roger Scruton is sceptical that animals
have rights in general, but makes an exception for pets,
which he thinks of as honorary members of our moral
community. We have special responsibilities to pets, he
argues in his book Animal Rights and Wrongs, because we
made our pets dependent on us by leading them to expect
that we would look after their needs.
Is the basis of our obligations to our pets their expectations that we will treat them in a certain way? It is very hard
to believe that our obligations can be explained in this way:
220
MANS BEST FRIEND?
in the first place, a pet would have to have beliefs about what
will happen to it in the future, whereas it is very controversial whether any animals can think about the future at all;
second, many owners feel that they ought to give their pets
medicine when they are ill, but it is obvious that most
animals have no beliefs at all about what medicine they
ought to take. And even when animals do clearly form
expectations about how we will treat them, we do not always
have obligations towards them. Imagine that I spill some
caviar outside my house, and a stray cat that eats it forms the
expectation that I will give it the same treat every day. It is
obvious that I have no obligation to give the cat caviar. So
Scruton must be mistaken: we do not owe to our pets
whatever they expect us to provide for them.
Friendship
Many people think of their pet, especially a pet dog, as their
friend. Others are sceptical about this claim: surely people
who think that they have a meaningful relationship with an
animal are foolishly anthropomorphic and sadly deluded.
Is it ridiculous to think that you could be friends with
your pet?
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle describes
friendships as relationships that involve mutual good will;
different kinds of friendship depend on diverse reasons for
wishing your friend well. Some friendships are based on
pleasure and depend on the friends enjoying each others
company and taking pleasure in shared activities. If the
221
friendship is genuine, we will be happy when our friends are

happy or successful; we will sympathise when our friends
are upset or unhappy. Other friendships are deeper and
more important than friendships of pleasure: Aristotle calls
these moral friendships. Moral friends trust one another
with their most personal confessions and problems; they
confide in each other, ask for advice about what to do, and
offer advice when requested. We rely on our moral friends
and trust them, sharing our thoughts and feelings with
them. We know that our moral friends rely on us too, and
we try to be worthy of their trust.
Moral friends whom we can confide in and who give us
good advice may be our best friends, but friendships of
pleasure are still genuine friendships that are both valuable
and important to us. Both kinds of friendship can make our
lives happier. We care more for our friends and treat them
better than other people, but we are entitled to do so (within
limits) because our lives would be so much more boring and
miserable without friends.
Can we have friendships with animals? It is unlikely that
we could have this kind of relationship with a stick insect or
a goldfish. But we may be able to have friendships with some
animals, such as dogs. There are many popular stories
of special relationships between dogs and humans, from
Odysseuss dog Argos, to Buck and, best known of all,
Lassie, who always came back home to her family.
Many people who have dogs are very close to their pets.
They care about their dog for the animals own sake. They
buy the right sort of food for it, make sure it is regularly fed,
222
MANS BEST FRIEND?
and if it is sick, they get advice from a vet and nurse it back
to health. They know that their pet is a long-term commitment; they expect to live with it until the dog dies or
becomes very ill. They are usually the best-placed people to
notice if there is something the matter with their dog,
because they know their own pet so well; they are unhappy if
their dog is miserable.
At least some owners have the right kind of attitudes
towards their dogs for their relationship to count as a kind
of friendship: they care for Rover for his own sake, enjoy his
company, and are happy when he is happy.
Does Rover have good will towards his owner? Some
dogs seem to be able to tell the difference between their
owners and other people: they are less likely to bark at or
bite their owners and more likely to expect food from them
and to be taken for a walk. This tendency can be accentuated
through training: a dog can be taught to come to his owner
when called, and to obey other simple commands. Of
course, these dogs may simply have been conditioned with
rewards or the prospect of food to be nice towards their
owners, but it is not out of the question that they are
responding with good will to the good will that their owners
show to them, as Buck and Argos do, even if they do not
consciously recognise it as such. If so, dogs can be friends
with their owners.
What kind of friendship can we expect between dogs
and humans? An ideal dogowner relationship is typically
pleasant for the owner and dog; both enjoy the others
company and their shared activities. Dogs and humans can
223
have friendships of pleasure, but it is much more difficult to

believe that they can have a moral friendship, based around
mutual confidences, the exchange of feelings and of judgements, and the giving and receiving of advice. You can tell a
dog your most intimate confidences, but he will not understand what you are saying to him; he will never be able to
judge whether what you did was right or wrong, or whether
or not you should feel guilty; nor can he tell you his confidences in return. Dogs cannot be our moral friends because
they cannot understand morally complex human situations;
they could not give advice or help us to work out what to do,
even if they could communicate with us.
Dogs are sometimes thought of as particularly loyal companions, as mans best friend. This is a mistake. Although
they could not have the flaws that might prevent a human
from becoming a moral friend they are not disloyal, they
do not betray you or lead you into wrong-doing with their
bad advice nor are they capable of the virtues that your
best friends ought to have they cannot share your most
private thoughts and worries. They do not choose to be loyal;
they can never lead you towards doing the right thing with
their good advice.
We can enjoy pleasurable and useful friendships with our
pets. If you decide to take on a dog, you should look after
him, ensure that he is well fed and healthy and train him to
be domesticated so that you can live with him. You should
take on hobbies going for walks, playing with sticks that
you can share with the dog, to develop your friendship
with him.
224
MANS BEST FRIEND?
We are justified in treating our human friends of pleasure

better than strangers because pleasant friendships are valuable. A special concern for ones dog is justified in the same
way: we are right to treat our pets better than we treat other
animals because we have worthwhile relationships with our
pets, which we can nurture and develop by treating our
pets well.
Because you live closely with your pet, you are particularly well placed to know what it needs. Ignoring those
needs would be callous; only if you were exceptionally
obtuse could you remain unaware of them. It is more
understandable to neglect the needs of animals that are not
right in front of you. In addition, if you mistreat your pet,
using your dog to take out your frustrations, kicking and
shouting at it for fun, you are exploiting the fact that it lives
with you and is almost entirely dependent on you to treat it
cruelly. In hurting your dog, you are subverting what ought
to be a valuable relationship in order to do harm. So it is
usually worse to mistreat your pet than to neglect or harm
other animals.
Once we understand the ways in which dogs can be
friends with us, we can explain why we ought to give extra
attention to our pets. But at the same time we need to
acknowledge that there is an important moral difference
between dogs and humans, as we cannot share the most
valuable kinds of relationship, moral friendships, with dogs
or other animals. Petowner relationships cannot be as
important as human friendships and it would be a mistake
to devote ones life to animals at the expense of developing
225
long-lasting, intimate human relationships that have at least

the potential to be more worthwhile.
The nature of friendship with dogs shows that there are
morally significant qualities of animals that are not directly
connected to sentience or intelligence. Many wild animals
respond to us too defensively or aggressively for us to be
able to develop valuable relationships with them. Wolves
may be as intelligent as dogs and as sensitive, but their
emotions and their responses to emotions in us are simply
incompatible with human social life; we cannot develop
friendships with them. As a consequence, we may be justified in treating dogs better than wolves even though both
species are equally sensitive to pain and equally intelligent.
We may even be justified in treating dogs better than
equally sensitive and more intelligent wild animals, such as
chimpanzees, for it is hard for us to develop friendships with
chimps, but we can be friends with dogs.
226
C HAPTER F IFTEEN
CONCLUSION:
M ORE E QUAL THAN
O THERS
After the revolution that left them managing Animal Farm,
the animals all agreed to live by a set of seven rules. When
Napoleon and his porcine lieutenants took over the farm,
they changed the final commandment from:
All animals are equal
to the rather less perspicuous:
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal
than others.
While it does not strictly make sense to say that anything is
more equal than anything else, it is easy enough to grasp
what the pigs were trying to express: that they were the
superiors of the other animals. According to Orwell, believing oneself to be more valuable than others is a distinctively
human characteristic, for it is when the pigs make this claim
that they finally become indistinguishable from men.
227
Orwell is right that some humans think they are better

than other creatures and that they are entitled to treat
nature as their dominion. On the other hand, there are
animal rights activists who accept Animal Farms seventh
commandment in its original form: they think it obvious
that all animals are equal. Both these views are too extreme,
and both are too simplistic.
Any animal that can suffer has moral status: it matters
morally when it is harmed. In this respect all sentient
animals are genuine equals. It is therefore wrong to treat
animals cruelly. It is wrong to make them suffer for our
entertainment. It is wrong to kill them for trivial reasons.
We do not have dominion over the natural world.
But in other ways animals are not equal. They have very
different mental capacities. Some animals probably cannot
feel even simple emotions like fear and anxiety; some are
not capable of simple reasoning to help them get what they
want; some are not able to think about the future and make
plans about it; some have no idea about other creatures
minds.
Because they have more developed minds, some animals
can enjoy more sophisticated kinds of goods than others. If
they die prematurely, they are deprived of these goods. So it
is, for instance, typically worse for a human to die than a great
ape, but it is also worse for a great ape to die than an insect.
We know that there are moral limits to our treatment of
animals; and we know that these are not the same as the
moral limits to our treatment of humans. But what should
be our relationship to the rest of the natural world?
228
CONCLUSION: MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
Should we try to efface ourselves entirely, withdrawing

until we have a minimal impact on the natural world? This
goal of the invisible man is plainly unrealistic. The natural
world is where we live; we are part of it and we cannot avoid
affecting it.
Should we try to supervise nature, minimising suffering
and preventing animals from killing one another? While the
role of invisible man calls for too little intervention in
the natural world, the role of policeman calls for far too
much. It would be immensely demanding to have to be for
ever improving nests, burrows and warrens and making
pigeons, rats and badgers more comfortable. And there are
enormously complicated connections between different
species, so that any intervention we made to benefit some
animals could have a huge negative impact on other
creatures, an effect that we simply could not predict.
We need to find a way to live with animals, taking account
of the benefits and costs to them as well as to ourselves. But
once we see that animals have moral status, but are not in all
respects equal to one another, we find that it is exceptionally
difficult to balance their interests with ours.
It is clear that for too long we have weighted the scales
enormously on our own side, allowing great harm to animals
for the sake of small benefits to us, factory farming being an
obvious, and indefensible, example. Animal welfare activists have campaigned long and hard to alter this mindset.
They have met with considerable success, raising awareness
of the plight of the worst-treated animals, and producing
steady, if slow, change. There is a general acknowledgement
229
that the number of scientific experiments on animals

should be reduced. The living conditions of livestock on
the farm and creatures in the laboratory have gradually
improved, though much remains to be done.
The excellent work of activists who campaign for stricter
animal welfare laws, and for proper enforcement of current
laws, should ensure that this progress continues. It is
important, however, that their protests take place within the
law. Threatening violence towards people who are thought
to be guilty of cruelty towards animals is completely wrong.
As most activists know, acceptance of the moral status of
animals will not be encouraged by failures to respect the
moral status of humans.
Should animal activists aim to end scientific experimentation on animals, to ban hunting and farming? Many
activists obviously do regard these as their goals. But as we
have seen, each of these issues is extremely complex.
Foxhunting is a good example of this. Many protestors
see foxhunting as a paradigm of unjustified cruelty that
obviously should be banned. But we find that there are good
reasons for us to manage the fox population, and foxhunting may be a legitimate way of doing so. While there are
excellent grounds for strict and carefully enforced regulation of hunting, it is not at all clear that an outright ban
is justified.
Similarly, many animal activists think that scientific
experiments on animals are never justified. But though
there is a constant danger that scientists fail to weigh the
interests of animals against their desire to make progress
230
CONCLUSION: MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
or to test their pet theory, improvements in scientific

understanding and in medicine can justify animal experimentation. We need very powerful reasons to justify
experimenting on animals, but sometimes we do have such
reasons.
Perhaps the hardest questions of all are about eating
animals. While some kinds of farming plainly cause a great
deal of suffering, animals can benefit as well as be harmed by
farming, and it is hard to say where the balance of reasons
lies here. At the least, though, it is not absolutely clear that
all farming is wrong and that no one should eat meat. In
general, animal activists should campaign for better treatment of animals within these familiar practices, rather than
trying to end them altogether.
Though, like other animals, we are part of the natural
world, we humans are nevertheless unique within it. We are
the only creatures that are morally responsible for our
actions. This is a great benefit to us: the same capacities that
enable us to be morally responsible are also, in part, the
grounds of our right to life. But moral responsibility is also a
burden: it compels us to think very hard about our relationship with the rest of nature, and especially our treatment of
other creatures with moral status. None of these issues is
easy to resolve, but they present a challenge we cannot
refuse: striving to find the answers is part of what it is to be
human.
231
FURTHER READING
Chapter 2: Animal Rights Through the Ages

The views in the ancient world about animals are described by
Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993). A Christian perspective,
sympathetic to animal rights, can be found in Andrew Linzey,
Animal Rights (London: SCM Press, 1976), while details of
Buddhist views on animals are given in Chapter 4 of Peter
Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Charles Darwins theories can be found in his great works, The
Origin of Species (London: Murray, 1859) and The Descent of
Man (London: Murray, 1871).
The changes to the UK law on animals are explained in Mike
Radford, Animal Welfare Law in Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
Peter Singer has written a large number of books, many of which
outline his views on life, death, rights, and the ethical treatment of humans and animals. He wrote probably the most
influential defence of the moral status of animals, Animal
Liberation (New York: Random House, 1975; London:
Pimlico, 1995). His philosophical views can be found in more
detail in Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), which also defends the moral significance of
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FURTHER READING
animals. His views are discussed in Singer and His Critics,

edited by Dale Jamieson (Oxford: Blackwells, 1999).
The quote from Jeremy Bentham is taken from his Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
Chapter 3: Can They Suffer?
The quote from Descartes contemporary is reported by Peter
Singer, Animal Liberation, p. 201.
Excellent, scientifically informed accounts of the evidence that
animals are conscious and feel pain are found in Bernard
Rollin, The Unheeded Cry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), especially pp. 97129, 13761; and David Degrazia,
Taking Animals Seriously (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), Chapter 5.
A seminal article on the problems in knowing what other
creatures experience is Thomas Nagels What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?, reprinted in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
More sceptical about animal minds are Dan Dennett, Kinds of
Mind (New York: Phoenix, 1997), Chapters 3 and 6; and Peter
Carruthers, The Animals Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter 8.
Kenneth Grahames wildly anthropomorphic novel The Wind in
the Willows (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 1999) was first
published in 1908.
Chapter 4: Can They Reason?
There are some extremely interesting books written by animal
experts, including Marc Hauser, Wild Minds (New York:
Henry Holt, 2000), and numerous works by Frans de Waal,
including Chimpanzee Politics (New York: Harper and Row,
233
1982). Vicki Hearnes Adams Task (London, Heinemann,

1986) gives insights from a dog trainer who is also philosophically well informed.
The useful collection Readings in Animal Cognition, edited by
Marc Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996,
1999), contains a range of articles by philosophers and experts
in animal cognition. Tom Regan puts forward arguments that
animals can think in The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), Chapters 12; this view
is supported by Dale Jamieson, Moralitys Progress (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapter 4. Dennett is more
sceptical in Kinds of Mind, as is Donald Davidson in his article
Thought and Talk, reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The
conversation between Koko and Dr Patterson is reported by
The Gorilla Foundation on their website: www.koko.org.
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (Oxford: Oxford Worlds
Classics, 1998), was first published in 1903.
Chapter 5: Animal Intelligence and Human Minds
The evidence that animals have culture (and can use and make
tools) is marshalled by Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi
Master (London: Penguin, 2002); he also reports the experiments showing that animals can appreciate art and music.
Our current understanding of animal intelligence and its limits
is described by David Degrazia, Taking Animals Seriously,
Chapters 67, and by Marc Hauser in Wild Minds.
Gordon Gallups self-awareness experiments are reported in his
article Chimpanzees: Self-recognition, Science (1970), pp.
867.
234
FURTHER READING
Chapter 6: Rights and Moral Status

The difference between rights and moral status is explained in
Mary Anne Warren, Moral Status (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), Chapter 1; and Regan, The Case for Animal
Rights, Chapters 6 and 8.
Shylocks great speech appears in Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeares
The Merchant of Venice.
Chapter 7: The Moral Community
John Rawlss views about justice as a contract are set out in
A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Peter Carruthers applies contractualist ethical theory to
animals in The Animals Issue, arguing that animals have no
moral status. This view is criticised by Regan in The Case for
Animal Rights, especially pp. 15094.
More detailed accounts of animal trials are to be found in E.P.
Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of
Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906).
George Orwells novel Animal Farm (London: Penguin, 1994),
whose bestial characters represent leading participants in the
Russian Revolution, was first published in 1945.
Chapter 8: Pain, Pleasure and the Value of Life
Powerful arguments that any creature that suffers has moral
status are given in Chapter 1 of Peter Singers Animal Liberation and Chapter 8 of David Degrazias Taking Animals
Seriously.
The view that all living creatures are morally significant is
defended by Holmes Rolston III, Respect for Life: Counting
What Singer Finds of No Account, in D. Jamieson, Singer and
His Critics (see also Mary Anne Warren, Moral Status,
Chapters 23).
235
Chapter 9: The Right to Life

A book arguing that great apes are part of our moral community
and should have rights, called The Great Ape Project and
edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, was published in
1993 (London: Fourth Estate).
Tom Regan defends animal rights in The Case for Animal Rights,
Chapters 89. Roger Scruton argues that animals do not have
rights in Animal Rights and Wrongs (London: Demos, 1996),
pp. 66105 (the quoted passage is from p. 67). Peter Singer
defends his view of the moral significance of killing humans
and animals in Practical Ethics, Chapters 47.
Jeff McMahan gives very dense and difficult arguments about life
and death in humans and animals in The Ethics of Killing
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chapters 2 and 3.
Chapter 10: All Animals Are Equal ?
Peter Singer discusses the concept of speciesism in Chapter 1
of Animal Liberation. Mary Midgley gives a subtle view of
discrimination among different humans and between humans
and animals in Chapters 7 and 9 of Animals and Why They
Matter (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983).
Anna Sewells Black Beauty (London: Penguin Popular Classics,
1995) was first published in 1877.
Chapter 11: Factory Food
Peter Singer mounts a powerful attack on factory farming in
Chapter 3 of Animal Liberation. R.M. Hare, another utilitarian, argues for a more moderate view in Why I Am Only
a Demi-Vegetarian, reprinted in his Essays on Bioethics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), and in Singer and
His Critics, ed. Dale Jamieson. Tom Regan addresses eating
meat in Chapter 9 of The Case for Animal Rights.
236
FURTHER READING
Roger Scruton defends eating meat (but not factory farms) in his
Animal Rights and Wrongs, pp. 8085.
There are some informative fact-sheets on factory farming
produced by the Vegetarian Society, available online at
www.vegsoc.org, and from the RSPCA at www.rspca.org.uk.
The speech from Old Major appears in the first chapter of
Orwells Animal Farm.
Chapter 12: Foxhunting
An invaluable resource on foxhunting is the Committee of
Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs in England and Wales,
popularly known as the Burns Report after Lord Burns, the
chairman of the committee, which can be found online at
www.huntinginquiry.gov.uk.
Roger Scruton defends foxhunting in Animal Rights and Wrongs,
pp. 8796. The view that cultural traditions like bull-fighting
should be protected is questioned in Paula Casal, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals? Journal of Political Philosophy,
2003.
Chapter 13: Science and Suffering
Peter Singer applies utilitarian reasoning to scientific research
on animals in Chapter 2 of Animal Liberation. A moderate
position is defended by Tom Regan and Dale Jamieson in
Moralitys Progress, Chapter 8. Regan later changed his view,
and he argues that no experimentation on mammals is
warranted in Chapter 9 of The Case for Animal Rights.
There are a number of very useful articles on human and animal
scientific experimentation collected in the Blackwell Companion to Bioethics, ed. Singer and Kuhse (Oxford: Blackwells,
1998), including Paul McNeill, Experimentation on Human
Beings, Barbara Orlans, History and Ethical Regulation of
237
Animal Experimentation: An International Perspective, and

Bernard Rollin, The Moral Status of Animals and Their Use
as Experimental Subjects.
Several real-life examples of animal experiments are described in
Barbara Orlans et al., The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies
in Ethical Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
Chapters 29.
The animal rights group Animal Aid was a leading figure fighting
against the primate laboratory in Cambridge. There is information about that campaign and about animal experimentation more generally on its website: www.animalaid.org.uk.
Chapter 14: Mans Best Friend?
Aristotles famous account of friendship is found in Books 89 of
Nicomachean Ethics (trans. S. Broadie and C. Rowe, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002). Roger Scruton writes about
companion animals in Animal Rights and Wrongs, pp. 6972.
Vicki Hearne in Adams Task and Raymond Gaita in
The Philosophers Dog (London: Routledge, 2003) combine
philosophical insight with a love for their dogs. The reunion
of Odysseus and Argos is described in Book 17 of Homers
Odyssey; and the famously loyal Lassie first appeared in Lassie
Come Home, a short story by Eric Knight published in The
Saturday Evening Post (1938).
238
I NDEX
Aesops fables 67
aesthetics 1013
ahimsa 20
Aids 214
Alzheimers disease 141, 208,
213, 215
animal experimentation
and consent 2034, 2067
Darwin on 1314
extent 2012
head injuries 199200
laws on 1617, 202
reasons for 2078
reduction 218
refinement 218
replacement 218
scientific and medical
experiments 21216
Singer on 23
viewed as torture 123
when justified 21618
Animal Farm 901, 155, 156, 159,
2278
Animal Liberation (book) 21
Animal Liberation Front 1,
199
animal rights bible 21

Animal Rights Militia 1
Animal Rights and Wrongs 124,
220
animal welfare activists,
behaviour 230
animal welfare laws 15, 230
Animals Issue, The 93
anthropomorphism 29, 49, 62
anxiety 445
apes
culture 66
deception 6970
imitation 656
language use 55, 56, 57
as part of moral community
1223
social code 95
see also bonobos; chimpanzees;
gorillas; orang-utans
Aquinas, Thomas 3, 1011
Argos 219, 222
Aristotle
on animals 3, 910, 11, 12
on friendships 2212
on people 11, 146
INDEX
art 66
animals and 1013
aspirin 214
Augustine, St 3, 10
autonomy 724, 75, 76, 98
babies 13941
moral status 140
baboons 199, 207
baiting of animals 15, 86, 99, 188
Banting, Frederick 215
Bateson, Patrick 1934
bats 31
vampire 77
battery hens 159, 1601
bear-baiting 15, 99, 188
Beecher Stowe, Harriet 145
bees 54
behaviour, natural 1523
behaviourism 347, 49
logical 36
methodological 36
beliefs 4951, 69
actions based on 724
attribution to other creatures
72
content of 589
language and 537
reflection on 734
vs. instinctive responses to
stimuli 513
Bentham, Jeremy 22
Best, Charles 215
bestiality 96
bhavacakra 19
Black Beauty 1456
Blakemore, Colin 12
bonobos 67, 76, 77, 122
Bradshaw, Elizabeth 1934
brain damage 141, 142
brain disorders, research into
21516
broilers 15960
BSE 162
Buck 48, 219, 222
Buddhism 3, 1921
bulldogs 118
bullfighting 183
Burns Report 181, 185, 196
Call of the Wild, The 48, 219
Cambridge University 215
carbenoxalone 214
Carruthers, Peter 93
Cartesian dualism 32
cats 72, 74, 76
and surprise 58
treatment of 100
cattle see cows
Cavalieri, Paola 122
chickens
assessment whether thriving
119
battery hens 159, 1601
broilers 15960
factory-farmed 119, 15961,
1678
farming rules 1718
foxes and 124, 1279, 189
numbers 173
children, and responsibility
756
240
INDEX
chimpanzees 13, 122

aggression 76, 77
Aids drugs testing on 214
false belief tests 702
friendships with 226
language use 556, 57
rules of fighting 95
self-recognition in mirror
678
social groups 76
tools usage 624, 65
Christianity 1012
Clever Hans 61
cock-fighting 99, 188
cockroaches 102
coma patients 1412
communication, animal 54
competition 71
conditioning 51
consciousness 301, 402
usefulness of 42
consumer goods, safety tests
20913
contractualism 923, 98
as no moral status view of
animals 100
co-operation 71
cosmetics, animal testing 211
cows 1613, 167, 173
animal welfare legislation 86
dairy 1612, 1789
farming rules 18
veal 1623
cruelty to animals
and cruelty to humans 1057
laws against 14, 1516, 188
Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) 16

crustaceans 3940
culture 646, 1701, 173, 1845
of foxhunting 1825
Welsh 183
dairy cattle 1612, 1789
dairy products 1789
dances, bee 54
Darwin, Charles 1214, 78
Davidson, Donald 689
dead, ceremonial treatment of
173
death
of animals compared with
humans 1315
preference for 136, 142
reasons why bad 1301
deception 6970
Declaration on Great Apes, A
1223
deer, stalking and shooting
196
deer hunting 1934
Dennett, Dan 50
Descartes, Ren 324
Descent of Man, The 78
desires 4951, 112
actions based on 724
reflection on 734
dharma 19
diabetes 215
discrimination, positive 149
dissection, in education 208
distress 45
measurement 457
241
INDEX
dogs
assessment whether flourishing
118
experimentation on 215
training 223
treatment of 100
dolphins 72, 177
dominion, of humans over
animals 1012, 13, 228
drag hunting 1845
Draize eye test 20910
drug addicts 75
dualism, Cartesian 32
duties, owed to animals 21
ecosystem 11617
Edward I, King 182
elephants 132
entertainment, animals in 78
environmentalism 112, 11415,
11617
equal rights 1469, 155
ethics
as a contract 914
in treatment of animals 434
evolution, theory of 1213, 402
experimentation
on animals see animal
experimentation
on humans 2001
voluntary consent 2023,
2046
factory farming 1718, 223,
15963
benefits 1635
costs 1659
distress suffered in 467,
1679
unnaturalness 1657
false belief tests 702
family 1512, 154
farming 1718
acceptability 1735
distress suffered by animals
467, 1679, 1745
health of animals 1001
see also factory farming
fear 445
Ferron, Jacques 96
fish 1767
farming of 177
and pain 39, 40, 44
foxes 1023
and chickens 124, 1279, 189
necessity of killing 188
reasons for culling 18893
shooting 196
foxhunting 18098
alternatives 1956
ban by parliament 181, 198
benefits 1856, 191
comparison to warfare 180
culture 1825
flushing out of foxes 181,
195
jobs involved 1856
law 1868
suffering caused 1935
trapping 1956
Francis, St 11
242
INDEX
friendships 1512, 154, 155,

2216
with animals 2226
moral 222, 224
of pleasure 2212, 224, 225
frogs 208
future, planning for 134
Gallup, Gordon 668
gonorrhoea 200
gorillas 55, 56, 122
Grahame, Kenneth 29
Great Ape Project 122
guilt 77
guinea pigs 214
Handley Cross, or Mr Jorrocks
Hunt 180
Hans the horse 61
Helsinki Declaration 201, 206,
207
Hobbes, Thomas 91
Homer, 219
Horne, Barry 12
horses 86
house-training 95
human rights 3
hunting, see deer hunting; drag
hunting; foxhunting
imagination 11011
imitation 656
inner mental life 302
see also consciousness
instincts 4950
vs. beliefs and desires 513
insulin 215
intentional stance 501
jaundice 200
justice, rules of 93
karma 1920
killing
of animals 1379
for food 139, 1768
consent to 1367, 139
of humans 1357
kleptomaniacs 75
Koko 567
lamping 196
language
ape 56
and belief 537
sign 556
Lassie 222
LD50 test 210
life
as duty not to kill 1289
inviolability of 20, 142
reverence for 112, 11315
right to
of animals 1223, 125,
1279, 1378, 139
of humans 878, 113, 136,
139
web of 11517
London, Jack 48, 219
macaques 646
malaria 200, 203
243
INDEX
mammals, and pain 44

mastitis 161
meat-eating
benefits 1702
costs 1725
medical experiments 21216
memory 11011
mental states 49
interaction of 367
Merchant of Venice, The 83
mice 201, 214
milk 1789
Mill, John Stuart 133
mind-reading 702
mirrors 678
molluscs, and pain 44
monkeys 67, 214
see also macaques
moral agents 75
moral community
animals as part of 949
moral responsibility
requirement 94, 978
moral friendships 222, 224
moral responsibility 747, 94,
978, 231
moral rights 868
moral status 83, 878
of animals 99100, 1078,
228
dependence on membership of
moral community 108
equality of 146
grounds of 889
moral responsibility
requirement 94, 978
sentience as ground for 112,

11921
morality, rules of 93
murder 1367
see also killing
music 66
natural selection 402
natural world, human impact on
229
Nazi research 200, 2023, 212
needs, rights and 11314
nervous systems
fish 39
higher mammal 389
reptile 39
Nim Chimpski 55
Nuremberg Code 2001, 205
Ockhams Razor 34
Odyssey 219
orang-utans 67, 122
Orwell, George 90, 2278
pain
anticipation of 11011
behaviour associated with 36
capacity to feel 84, 11112, 167
disguising of 37
evidence for 3740
remembrance of 110, 111
usefulness of 412
see also suffering
painkillers 39
Parkinsons disease 215
Patterson, Francine (Penny) 56
244
INDEX
Paul, St 10
Pennsylvania, University of,
Head Trauma Research Centre
199200, 207
pets
dependence 220
expectations 2201
mistreatment 225
pigeons
art appreciation 66
pigs 163, 167, 173
criminal trials of 96
farming rules 18
pineal gland 32
plants
assessment whether flourishing
11719
insentience 112
moral status 11920
needs 114
pleasure
capacity to feel 84, 11112
friendships of 2212, 224, 225
varieties 133
positive discrimination 149
positive reinforcement 35, 512
primates, experimentation on
201, 21516
projects 1345
property, animals as 1418, 84, 85
psychology, scientific 347
Pythagoras 9
rabbits 201, 20910, 214, 215
racism 147, 149, 1545

rats
and anxiety 445
experimentation on 35, 201,
210
looks of 1023
Rawls, John 93
rebirth, realms of 19
redemption, of suffering 1345
reflection
on beliefs and desires 734
loss of capability of 1412
in mirror 678
on thoughts 68
reinforcement, positive 35, 512
relationships 1334, 1512
religion 1701
see also Buddhism; Christianity
reptiles, and pain 39
respect 1723
responsibilities, rights and 1237
responsibility, moral 747, 94,
978, 231
rights
dependence on contract 1256
equal 1469, 155
legal 856
moral see moral rights
needs and 11314
of predators and prey 1279
and responsibilities 1237
to life see life, right to
robots, living, animals as 324
rules
of all of morality 93
of justice 93
245
INDEX
sacrifice, animal 8, 20, 171

safety tests 20913
salmon 177
salmonella 160, 161
sattva 19
science, as value-neutral 202
scientific experiments 21216
Scruton, Roger 1245, 220, 221
seals 1023
self-awareness 669
self-interest
for tending to environment
11516
and treatment of animals
1001
sentience, as ground for moral
status 112, 11921
Sewell, Anna 145
sexism 1468, 149, 1545
Shakespeare, William 83
shame 77
Shatner, William 567
sheep 86, 173
farming rules 18
shellfish 176
shooting 196
sign language 556
signatures, urine 54, 55, 57
Singer, Peter 3, 215
on animal experimentation
23
on animal rights 24
on pain 40
on speciesism 23, 14950
Skinner, B.F. 356
slaves 86, 145, 146, 200
social groups 767, 95

soul 11, 32
sparrows 66
species
bias towards own 152
meaning 150
moral relevance 1501
speciesism 23, 14951, 1545
sphex wasp 52, 53, 58, 62
sterilisation experiments 200
stress, to animals during hunting
1935
suffering 45
capacities for 111
caused by factory farming
467, 1679
caused by hunting 1935
redemption of 1345
see also animal
experimentation; pain
surprise 578
Surtees, Robert Smith 180
Switzerland 18
syphilis 200
thalidomide 214
Theophrastus 9
Theory of Justice, A 93
Thomas Aquinas 3, 1011
thrushes, song 62
time, sense of 68
tools
design 63
making 634
use 623, 65
torture, prohibition of 1223
246
INDEX
toxicity tests 210

training of animals 100
treatment of animals, reasons for
treating well 1007
trials, criminal, of animals
958
tuna 177
Twain, Mark 77
typhus 200
veal 1623
vegetarianism
Buddhism and 20
and health 164
influence of Singer 21, 23
violence, to animals and humans
1057
vultures, Egyptian 62
UN Declaration of Human Rights

3
Uncle Toms Cabin 145
USA
animal cruelty laws 16
animal experimentation in
17
factory farming laws 18
utilitarianism 212, 24
Washoe 55
wasp, sphex 52, 53, 58, 62
Watanabe, Shigeru 66
Watson, John 356
web of life 11517
Webb, Robin 1
Welsh culture 183
wheel of life 19
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 36
wolves 226
247

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Published in the UK in 2005

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Part Two: All Animals Are Equal ?

Part Three: How Should We Treat Animals?

15 Conclusion: More Equal than Others

William Hogarth, Cockpit

In December 1998, the animal rights activist Barry Horne

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

Horne survived his hunger strike with his eyesight and

people from other tribes extremely badly. Today, however,

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

great apes, can even be taught a basic language. But other

morally acceptable to eat animals at all? We can eat well on a

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

appearance; ants are hardworking and thrive even in the

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

spectators were amused simply by watching animals die.

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

ancient writer on animals was the Greek philosopher

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

animals in the ancient world: some philosophers argued

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

entitled to use animals as they saw fit, even if that included

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

the idea of man having dominion over the animals was

The Descent of Man

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

eventually become so different from one another that they

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

that we are entitled to use animals if we will substantially

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

could be held accountable, and the law might intervene if I

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

William Hogarth, Cockpit. These entertainments were banned by

example, in the USA, laws were passed banning the

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

experiment giving pain to a living animal, unless that

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

common: one of the main jobs for the farmer is to remove

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

The Wheel of Life

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

the sphere of sense-desires, but we humans are the higher

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

Even though these children are strangers to me and I may

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

human pleasures: factory farming is wrong; we should stop

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

recent changes in the law that have given more emphasis to

ANIMAL RIGHTS THROUGH THE AGES

common with us, and we must treat them with as much

CAN THEY SUFFER ?

It was spring, and a mole was working hard in his burrow.

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

CAN THEY SUFFER?

Rover, just as there is something it is like to be you or me.

DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

Perhaps we ought not to worry about what kind of