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Fight for Their Rights
Animals deserve rights, regardless of how they taste or how convenient it is to experiment on them. Like humans, animals are capable of suffering and have an interest in leading their own lives. They are not ours to use for food, clothing, experimentation, or entertainment.
Cruelty
When people think of cruelty, they often think of a person starving or beating an animal. In other words, they think of actions that are against the law. They may also think of things done by other nations, such as whale hunting, bear farming, bull fighting, or clubbing seal pups.
Certainly all of these actions are cruel, but animals also suffer much closer to home. Mostly people don't think about everyday suffering, for example, animals killed for food, battery hens, laboratory animals, animals that are trapped, poisoned, or hunted for sport. These actions aren't illegal, but they cause suffering to more individuals than people who starve or beat their animals.
So what is cruelty? In what ways do animals suffer?
-Pain. All animals with backbones (vertebrates) feel pain like we do. Hooking fish, fire branding cattle, catching animals in steel-jaw traps, cutting tails off lambs and beaks off hens, all cause pain.
-Stress and Fear. Vertebrate animals feel anxiety like we do. Transport is very stressful for animals, especially live export overseas. Being pulled out of the water and left to suffocate causes great stress to fish. Dairy calves taken from their mother after 1 day and trucked to slaughter at 1 week of age suffer greatly.
-Frustration. Animals need more than food and water for their well-being - they also need to be able to carry out the behaviour that is natural to their species. Otherwise they become frustrated and may develop abnormal behaviour, just like a mentally disturbed person. Signs of frustration can be seen in battery hens, pigs in tiny stalls, rabbits in laboratory cages, foxes and mink on fur farms, and some zoo and circus animals.
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.†—Schopenhauer
