Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? - Softcover

Gary L. Francione

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566396921 ISBN 13: 9781566396929

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Argues that the way humans treat animals results from the contradiction between the ideas that animals have some rights, but that they are also property, and offers ways to resolve the conflict.

About this title

From the Publisher:

A guidebook for examining our personal and ethical beliefs about human treatment of animals

From the Back Cover:

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 about 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 never fail to inform, enlighten, and educate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1566396921
• ISBN 13: 9781566396929
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280