The Secret World Inside the Animal Rights Agenda — Part One
by Lowell E. Baier, President, Boone and Crockett Club, Fall 2010 issue of Fair Chase Magazine [here]
Queen, country and fox hunting are dear to England’s landed gentry, all part of the rarefied world of inherited privilege and tradition. However, when the British Labor Party banned fox hunting in England in 2004, the victory went not to the liberal politicians, but rather to the secretive, clandestine, Machiavellian worldwide animal rights and liberation movement begun in the early 1960s by a group of United Kingdom Oxford University academics known as the “Oxford Group.” Animal rightists and liberationists are of a very different orientation than the anti-hunting movement, which is a minor component of their agenda.
Rightists are a distilled, radical extension far beyond anti-hunters, driven by intellectuals, academics and the scholastic legal community in a global political movement. Animal rights advocates seek to end the rigid moral and legal distinctions drawn between humans and animals, end the status of animals as property or prey, and end their use in research, food, clothing, hunting and fishing, and the entertainment industries. Their aim is to remove an animal’s current status as “property,” and to recognize and grant animals “personhood”; that is, to award them legal rights and standing on the same terms humans enjoy fundamental rights to protect their basic interests. The “bible” of the modern animal rights movement, Animal Liberation, was authored in 1975 by Professor Peter Singer from Princeton University.
The philosophical and moral foundations for the animal rights position are that animals have the ability to suffer and feel pain, and that capacity is the vital characteristic that gives every creature with a will to live the right to equal consideration which must be recognized in any moral community and philosophy of natural law. Contrarians argue that animals lack rationality to distinguish between right and wrong; they lack language and are not able to enter into a social contract, make moral choices, assume moral obligations, nor have a moral identity; and hence, cannot be regarded as a possessor of rights. Only humans have duties, therefore only humans have rights, and rights must be accompanied by duties. …
Full text [here]
