Why Care About Animals?
No matter your worldview, there are very compelling reasons to care about animals and believe they are entitled to legal protections.
Virtually all the world's great religions prohibit cruelty to animals. And from the perspective of secular morality, cruelty to animals is wrong for the same reasons that cruelty to humans is wrong: because it violates the rights of autonomous beings, and because it causes physical pain and psychological distress to conscious, sentient beings.
The fact that a being is of another species does not mean it lacks moral rights, and does not mean its suffering is unimportant.
Yet cruel and inhumane treatment of animals is terrifyingly widespread, even in our relatively enlightened Canadian society. Billions of animals are regularly confined, beaten, and forced to undergo painful procedures without anaesthetic -- in factory farms and research facilities across the country.
Virtually all Canadians agree that cruelty to animals is unacceptable. And while there are anti-cruelty laws on the books, they do not protect the vast majority of animals in Canada. This needs to be changed. The growth and expansion of legal rights in this country -- for which Canadians are rightly proud -- does not end at humans. There are still billions among us whose lives are reduced to agonizing pain and suffering, and our law ignores them.
Virtually all the world's great religions prohibit cruelty to animals. And from the perspective of secular morality, cruelty to animals is wrong for the same reasons that cruelty to humans is wrong: because it violates the rights of autonomous beings, and because it causes physical pain and psychological distress to conscious, sentient beings.
The fact that a being is of another species does not mean it lacks moral rights, and does not mean its suffering is unimportant.
Yet cruel and inhumane treatment of animals is terrifyingly widespread, even in our relatively enlightened Canadian society. Billions of animals are regularly confined, beaten, and forced to undergo painful procedures without anaesthetic -- in factory farms and research facilities across the country.
Virtually all Canadians agree that cruelty to animals is unacceptable. And while there are anti-cruelty laws on the books, they do not protect the vast majority of animals in Canada. This needs to be changed. The growth and expansion of legal rights in this country -- for which Canadians are rightly proud -- does not end at humans. There are still billions among us whose lives are reduced to agonizing pain and suffering, and our law ignores them.