Animal Rights

The concept of animal rights is an obvious absurdity as rights are a human concept pertaining exclusively to human beings and cannot be plucked and wrenched out of context and transposed arbitrarily onto animals.Animals therfor have no legal protection and even where they are abused by callous humans albeit regrettably - and those who do so are morally reprehensible - animals, falling outside the realm of rights cannot be protected by them.

The attempt to ascribe rights to animals is part of the anthromorphising of animals and actually undermines the whole concept of rights and devalues them reducing humans to the same level as animals. Rights are a human construct designed to protect people form the initiation of force by others.Humans are not animals living in an evolutionary survival of the fittest system where the strong can use force against the weak.How would the rights of a mouse be protected from the attentions of a cat?Would the cat have to go to court to face charges?To ask the question is to see the absurdity of the animal right's advocate's claim.

The concept of rights is an intellectual construct and part of a hierachy of knowledge in a chain of cognition and is the end product of centuries pursuit of knowledge and application of philosophy contributing to human progress.Animals are non conceptual creatures and it would make as much sense to apply rights to them as it would to a piece of wood protecting it from being used by humans to build a house.When animals can produce philosophical treatises on politics and law they can have rights.

To confer rights on animals is a deliberate attempt to undermine rights of human beings by trivialising the concept and depriving them of the necessary protection required for a free civilized society.The Freedom Party would abolish all legislation and laws protecting animals and negate and reject the very concept of animal rights.