Animal rights

Animal rights, or animal liberation, is the movement to protect non-human animals from being exploited by humans. It is a radical movement, insofar as it aims not merely to attain more humane treatment for animals, but to include many animals within the moral community — that is, all those whose basic interests (for example, in not being made to suffer unnecessarily) ought to be given the same consideration as our own similar interests. The claim, in other words, is that non-human animals must no longer be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated merely as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as persons. To this end the movement advocates that many animals be given legal rights to protect their basic interests.

Further reading

• Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1996.
• Adams, Carol. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum, 2004.
• Adams, Carol, & Donovan, Josephine. (eds). Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. London: Duke University Press, 1995.
• Clark, Ward M. Misplaced Compassion: The Animal Rights Movement Exposed, Writer's Club Press, 2001
• Francione, Gary. Introduction to Animal Rights, Your child or the dog?, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000
• Nibert, David. Animal Rights, Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation, New York: Rowman and Litterfield, 2002
• Scruton, Roger. Animal Rights and Wrongs Claridge Press, 2000
• Spiegal, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, New York: Mirror Books, 1996.
• Steeve, Peter H. (ed.) Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. New York: SUNY Press, 1999.
• Taylor, Angus. Animals and Ethics. Broadview Press, 2003
• Weil, Zoe. The Power and Promise of Humane Education. British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2004.
• Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2003.
• Wolch, Jennifer, & Emel, Jody. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. New York: Verso, 1998.