- McLibel -

Re: There is a greater need for ANIMAL RIGHTS than human rights

Posted by: Mike Schmidtman ( USA ) on December 31, 1997 at 16:48:43:

In Reply to: There is a greater need for ANIMAL RIGHTS than human rights posted by Miika on November 17, 1997 at 15:18:11:


:There is no reason why the pain of nonhumananimals is any less traumatic than the pain of humans.

Actually, there is plenty of reason to feel that way. Pain in the animal world has no value judgement placed upon it. (In fact, I doubt that animals place a value judgement on ANYTHING. I defy you to prove otherwise. Most "evidence" to the contrary is anthropomorphic).

Pain is only "bad" in the human world. It serves strictly as a survival tool for animals, warning them that something is threatening their survival. While infliction of prolonged, chronic pain can be considered cruel, that consideration makes more sense from the perspective of not allowing animals to escape what is basically a "danger" signal to them.

Value judgements are exclusively human. We say that pain is bad, but that is simply our intellectual interpretation of a physical sensation to which we ascribe a moral value. It should be obvious that there is no moral value to pain in animals as animals don't make moral judgements.


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