Animal Rights: Definition, Issues, and Examples

Sure, most people agreed that outright abuse toward animals was unacceptable. Every now and then, you’d even meet people—like my family and me—who elected not to eat animal meat. To suggest, however, that animals deserve some basic rights just as humans do would have been considered really “out there.”

As I got older and learned more about the philosophy behind animal rights, I realized they weren’t actually all that radical of ideas. Animal rights advocates simply want to draw a clear line in the sand between animals and inanimate objects, as they are so often considered by exploitative industries and the law.

The animal rights movement strives to make the public aware of the fact that animals are sensitive, emotional, and intelligent beings who deserve kindness and respect. But before we get into that, it’s important to understand what the term “animal rights” really means, and how it differs from animal welfare.

What are animal rights?

Similar to human rights, animal rights are centered around the notion of freedom. Usually, we’re talking about either guaranteeing freedom to do something, or freedom from something else. In many countries, human rights are enshrined to protect people’s autonomy, like the right to expression, protection from torture, and access to democracy. Advocates for human rights fight to ensure that all people—regardless of orientation, race, class, or gender—are afforded the same basic rights, simply on the grounds that we are all human.

Animal rights activists aim to do something similar for non-humans. They believe that all animals—given scientific data proving their ability to experience pain and emotions—deserve the ability to live as they wish, without being subjected to the desires of human beings. At the core of animal rights is autonomy, which is another way of saying choice.

The opposite end of the spectrum from animal rights is animal exploitation, which are situations in which animals have no choice to live freely, no autonomy over their own lives. Instead, humans dictate every aspect of an exploited animal's life. Animal exploitation occurs in agriculture, where animals are treated as commodities to be turned into food. It occurs in science, as well, when animals are treated as unwilling test subjects. Animal rights can also be violated when humans destroy wild animals’ habitats—often to make room for more farms.

Does the government give animals rights?

Animal rights are very rarely afforded by governments around the world. However, countries do have some basic protections and guidelines for how animals can be treated. Even these baseline protections, we’ll see, come with exceptions. And just because some laws protect animals from the most blatant forms of abuse, doesn’t mean those animals have guaranteed rights—more on this later.

The UK Sentience Bill

In 2022, animal rights activists celebrated the passage of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill in the UK. Fittingly passed 200 years after the Martin’s Act—considered by some as the first piece of legislation in the ongoing movement to give animals legal protection–the landmark 2022 bill marks the first time the country’s government formally recognized the inherent sentience of animals. Why is this recognition important to animals rights activists? With sentience and welfare needs now enshrined in the law of the land, activists now have better legal backing to oppose exploitative industries and practices that inflict cruelty upon sentient, emotional animals. In this case, lawmakers are finally catching up to something that’s been scientific understanding for years: animals feel pain, just like you and me.

The US Animal Welfare Act

In 1966, the United States passed the Animal Welfare Act. While it is the primary federal legislation addressing the treatment of animals to date, its scope is fairly narrow—the law excludes many species, including farmed animals, from its protections. The law does establish some basic guidelines for the sale, transport, and handling of dogs, cats, rabbits, nonhuman primates, guinea pigs, and hamsters when they are used in research, sold commercially, or exhibited. It also protects the psychological welfare of animals who are used in lab experiments, and prohibits the violent practices of dogfighting and cockfighting. Again, this law does not recognize the rights and autonomy of animals—or even their ability to feel pain and suffer—but it does afford non-human animals some basic welfare protections.

Farmed animals are some of the least protected beings in the US. Even something basic like the Humane Slaughter Act, which was passed to ensure animals do not suffer unduly at the time of their slaughter, does not extend to chickens, fish, or rabbits—all of whom have demonstrated sentience in research studies.

What are some examples of animal rights?

Part of learning about animal rights is coming to terms with the fact that, at this point, animals are mostly not afforded many rights at all. We just covered some of their basic protections from abuse, but animal rights activists envision a world where countries go further and ensure animals a level of freedom and autonomy over their own bodies, their own lives.

Here are some of the rights that the folks at the Animal Legal Defense Fund believe should be enshrined into law in the US.

• The right of wild animals to self-determination and an environment that allows them to engage in their natural behaviors.
• The right of animals under human care to have their species-specific and individual needs fulfilled.
• The right of animals to have their interests represented in legal proceedings without impediments.
• The right of animals subject to criminal acts to be legally recognized as crime victims.

What’s the difference between animal welfare and animal rights?

It’s a popular misconception, but not all animal organizations are animal rights organizations.

Animal rights is a philosophy that exists on a spectrum. At the most extreme, some animal rights activists believe animals ought to be fully autonomous beings, free from exploitation as a source of food, entertainment, and research. At the other end of the spectrum, there are also less stringent animals rights activists who simply argue that pets, farmed animals, and others deserve to have their basic rights—like the ones listed above—ensured by humans.

Animal welfare activists accept that human society uses animals in a variety of ways, and takes a pragmatic approach to demanding protective rules, guidelines, and laws regarding the treatment of those animals. While many animal welfare activists believe in animal rights, they also believe that the more strategic approach is working toward animal welfare reform, as it’s less polarizing, and more likely to reduce animal suffering.

Do animals need rights? Pros and cons

The idea of giving animals rights tends to be contentious, given how embedded animal products are within societies such as the United States. Some people believe in a zero-tolerance approach, where animal rights must be legally enshrined and animals totally liberated from all exploitation. On the other end of the spectrum are people whose livelihoods depend upon animal-based industries. Below are some arguments both in favor of and opposing animal rights.

Arguments in favor of animal rights

Should the rights of animals be enshrined into law, exploitative industries such as animal agriculture would need to be reformed to ensure better treatment for animals. A more compassionate and sustainable agriculture sector could address a host of environmental problems, including water pollution, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. Not to mention the physical ailments and mental health effects that the unwilling (human) neighbors of concentrated feeding operations (CAFOs) are forced to suffer.

Halting the widespread use of animals would also eliminate the systematic cruelty and denial of choice that animal industries perpetuate. The physical and psychological pain endured by animals in places like factory farms has reached a point many consider to be unacceptable, to say the least. Animals are mutilated by humans in several different ways, including castrations, dehorning, and cutting off various body parts, usually without the use of anesthetic.

“

Many species never see the outdoors except on their way to the slaughterhouse.

As their name suggests, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) pack vast numbers of animals in cramped conditions, often forcing animals to perpetually stand in their own waste. Many species—including chickens, cows, and pigs—never see the outdoors except on their way to the slaughterhouse. Recognizing animal rights would necessitate stopping this mistreatment for good.

Arguments against animal rights

Most arguments against animal rights can be traced back to money, because animal exploitation is big business. Factory farming for animal products is a multi-billion-dollar industry. JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, posted more than $100 billion in revenue for the second fiscal quarter of 2024 alone.

A lesser-known, yet also massive, industry is that which supplies animals for laboratories. The US market for lab rats (who are far less popular than mice for experiments) was valued at over $1.32 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow by about 7% by 2030. Big industrial producers of animals and animal products have enough political clout to influence legislation—including passing laws making it illegal to document farm conditions—and to benefit from government subsidies.

Many people depend upon animal exploitation for work. However, animal exploitation tends to go hand-in-hand with the exploitation of farm workers, many of whom are undocumented and enjoy next to no legal protection in the US, despite the acute dangers associated with their jobs. Unfortunately, working in industrial meatpacking facilities is also known to be one of the most dangerous professions in the US. Smaller farmers coming from multi-generational farming families more directly depend upon using animals to make a living and tend to follow welfare standards more judiciously. But these smaller farms have been decreasing in number, due to the proliferation of factory farms against which they often cannot compete.

Although people may lose money or jobs in the transition to animal alternatives, new jobs can be created in the alternative protein sector and other plant-based industries.

When did the animal welfare and animal rights movements begin in the US?

Animal welfare

To understand the history of animal rights in this country, we first need to understand the formation of animal welfare. The birth of the animal welfare movement in the United States can be traced back to the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866. The group’s founder, Henry Burgh, believed that animals are “entitled to kind and respectful treatment at the hands of humans and must be protected under the law.” The organization worked with the New York City government to pass and enforce anti-cruelty laws that prevented the abuse of carthorses and provided care for injured horses. Since then, the ASPCA has expanded its advocacy across different non-human animal species—including farmed animals—and many more animal protection groups have sprung up, both locally and nationwide, including The Humane League.

Animal rights

The argument could be made that the founding of this stalwart animal welfare organization helped lay the groundwork for the animal rights movement, which really picked up steam more than a century later with seminal publications like Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals” in 1975. Within five years from that book’s release, the country would see the birth of the previously referenced Animal Legal Defense Fund, as well as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which calls itself the “largest animal rights organization in the world.”

Why are animal rights important?

Animal rights are important because they represent a set of beliefs that counteract inaccurate yet long-held assumptions that animals are nothing more than mindless machines—beliefs popularized by western philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century. The perception of animals as being unthinking, unfeeling beings justified using them for human desires, resulting in a world where farmed mammals outnumber those in the wild, and the vast majority of these farmed animals are forced to endure harsh conditions on factory farms.

“

Farmed mammals outnumber those in the wild.

But the science is increasingly clear: The animals we eat (pigs, chickens, cows, fish, the animals we use in laboratories (mice and rats), the animals who provide us with clothing, and those whose backs we ride upon have all been found to possess more cognitive complexity, emotions, and overall sophistication than has long been believed. This sophistication renders animals more susceptible not only to physical pain but also to the psychological impacts caused by the habitual denial of choice. Awareness of their own subjugation forms sufficient reasoning to rethink the ways animals are treated in western societies.

The consequences of animal rights

Currently, laws in the US and UK are geared toward shielding animals from cruelty, not giving them the same freedom of choice that humans have. (Even these laws are sorely lacking, as they largely fail to protect livestock and laboratory animals.) However, the animal rights movement can still have real-world consequences. Calls for animal liberation from places like factory farms can raise public awareness of the poor living conditions and welfare violations these facilities perpetuate, sometimes resulting in stronger protections, higher welfare standards, and decreasing consumer demand. Each of these outcomes carries economic consequences for producers, as typically it is more expensive for factory farms to provide better living conditions such as more space, or using fewer growth hormones which can result in lower production yields.

Of course, should the animal rights movement achieve its goals, society would look much different than it does today. If people consume more alternative sources of protein, such as plant-based or cultivated meat, the global environment would be far less impacted. Clothing would be made without leather or other animal products; alternative sources, such as pineapple leather created from waste products from the pineapple industry, could replace toxic tanneries. The fur industry is being increasingly shunned, with fashion labels rejecting fur in favor of faux materials. Ocean ecosystems would be able to recover, replenishing fish populations and seafloor habitats. Today these are razed by bottom trawling fishing, resulting in the clear-cutting of corals that can be thousands of years old.

How you can advocate for animals

A world in which all animals are free from human exploitation still seems far off, but rights activists and welfare advocates can come together to make steps in the right direction. When we come together, we can fight for better protections for animals in the US and around the world.

Click to learn more about important changes you can help push for: like keeping dangerous language out of the Farm Bill, ending the cruel starvation of hens in the egg industry, or demanding a ban on gestation crates for mother pigs.

When faced with all the cruelty animals face every single day, taking action can feel daunting, even hopeless. But consider the old adage about the young girl on the beach, after a storm where thousands of starfish have washed ashore. The girl begins picking them up, one by one, and throwing them back into the ocean. A man walks by and says to her, “But there are too many for you to save them all. You’ll never make a difference.”

The girl shrugs, picks up another, and says, “I can make a difference for this one.”