Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

by Gary Francione

Overview

Two-thirds of Americans  polled by the Associated Press agree with the following statement: "An animal's right to live free of suffering should be just as important as a person's right to live free of suffering." More than 50 percent of Americans believe that it is wrong to kill animals to make fur coats or to hunt them for sport. But these same Americans eat hamburgers, take their children to circuses and rodeos, and use products developed with animal testing. How do we justify our inconsistency?

In this easy-to-read introduction, animal rights advocate Gary Francione looks at our conventional moral thinking bout animals. Using examples, analogies, and thought-experiments, he reveals the dramatic inconsistency between what we say we believe about animals and how we actually treat them.

Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? provides a guidebook to examining our social and personal ethical beliefs. It takes us through concepts of property and equal consideration to arrive at the basic contention of animal rights: that everyone -- human and  non-human -- has the right not to be treated as a means to an end. Along the way, it illuminates concepts and theories that all of us use but few of us understand -- the nature of "rights" and "interests," for example, and the theories of Locke, Descartes, and Bentham.

Filled with fascinating information and cogent arguments, this is a book that you may love or hate, but that will not fail to inform, enlighten, and educate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439905128
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	07/29/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	997 KB

About the Author

Gary L. Francione is Professor of Law and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University Law School, Newark. He is the author of Animals, Property, an dthe Law and Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (both Temple).

Table of Contents

Contents


Foreword by Alan Watson

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Diagnosis: Our Moral Schizophrenia about Animals

2. Vivisection: A Trickier Question

3. The Cause of Our Moral Schizophrenia: Animals as Property

4. The Cure for Our Moral Schizophrenia: The Principle of Equal Consideration

5. Robots, Religion, and Rationality

6. Having Our Cow and Eating Her Too: Bentham's Mistake

7. Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

Appendix: Twenty Questions (and Answers)

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Well written, passionately argued, and clearly reasoned, this book still suffers from one major flaw: na vet . While no one can argue that there are problems with the way our society views and treats animals, specifically the status of animals as property, Francione expresses the common animal-rights position that every use of animals--whether for medical testing, entertainment, or even consumption--is immoral or inherently wrong. Taking on Descartes, Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and even Peter Singer (known by many for Animal Liberation, long considered a foundation text for the animal-rights movement), Francione argues that animals can only be considered as having moral status or as being things--there is no other choice. While his argument may well have some validity, the status of animals in our society (and beyond) is more like a compromise between the two. Recommended for larger animal-rights collections.--Alicia Graybill, Lincoln City Libs., NE Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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