Animal Cruelty vs Property Rights

[liberty_student]

@thomasw78

All I’m asking you to do is tell me what is the one thing that makes a person different from all those other animals that makes us exclusively entitled to have rights while other animals are not. And I don’t think “because we’re people and they’re not” is really an answer.

Rational argumentation!

@thomasw78

Well your the one that wants anarchy right? How exactly would you defend your right to life and property without a government?

Landmines.

@thomasw78

Say I propose a law that says slaughterhouses kill cows in a way that causes the least suffering. My rationale is cows feel pain and that pain should be minimized if possible.

But aren’t you forcing someone else to bear the costs of minimizing pain? I mean, it’s well and good to make a law for everything you like or dislike, but who is going to pay to enforce it, and who is going to pay the lost opportunity costs to follow it?

@thomasw78

It would be the law. If you didn’t like it you could try to get it changed, break the law, or move somewhere else.

But why do I have to move? What gives someone else the authority to make laws I must follow?

@thomasw78

I’m sorry to say but we would all have to pay for it. I thought we were debating principles though, not costs.

Forcing me to pay for something I don’t agree with, violates the principle of private property. You might as well make me a slave and take my labour directly (before I turn it into money) in order to build a pyramid. A big pyramid monkey cage.

@thomasw78

@liberty student

What good are rights if you can’t defend them?

Exactly my point a few posts back. Governments and laws are needed to grant and enforce rights. Without them you don’t actually have any rights at all. You can believe you should but that doesn’t get you a whole hell of a lot.

Governments are not needed to grant rights. I have rights without government. And as far as enforcement, it seems to me that government first has to violate my right to property, and if I resist, it will violate my right to life. So I don’t want government enforcing anything. It doesn’t respect my property or my life.

@thomasw78

But you CAN be compelled to pay for welfare for a poor person. Whether you should or not is another matter.

Indeed, that is the question I asked you. Should I be compelled to pay for dog welfare? Do dogs have a right to food? Regular baths? A home to live in? A yard to bury bones in? What about their puppies? Should they get some sort of child welfare when they breed? Do I have to pay for education of the puppies?

@thomasw78

Like I said I never proposed that we put people and animals on an equal footing.

Sure you did. That is the logical extension of your position. If animals are not property, then they must be sovereign beings.

@thomasw78

Nor did I say that because we give an animal a right or two means it then gets full blown property rights by default.

How can you stop it? Do you know of any such scenario where something can be a moral agent (and thus have rights) and at the same time, not have a right to self-ownership, or the product of mixing it’s labour with nature?

@thomasw78

But I’m still curious as to what it is, in your mind, that makes people so different that only us can have rights.

I’m curious as to what you think makes people different than mice. Or grape vines. Or oak trees. Or flying squirrels.

[Laughing_Man]

@liberty student

Landmines.

Hopefully landmines to shoot out chocolate and rainbows

[liberty_student]

@Laughing Man

@liberty student

Landmines.

Hopefully landmines to shoot out chocolate and rainbows

But of course. I will blind trespassers with rainbows and immobilze them with quick hardening liquid chocolate.

[Harry_Felker]

@Fred Furash

Can’t we apply the same principle here? Rather than treating animals as full property, we could say that they had at least some sort of minimal rights with regards to neglect. Besides, the only people to suffer in this case would be those that neglect and abandon their animals by not feeding them (on purpose), etc.

Non-Property status comes from sentience, animals are not sentient, I believe that is the point here…

We will not mention the implications against the owners reputation, which is how the memebers of his society will inflict moral punishment on him, if they do not like the way he treats his property, animal, vegetable or mineral, they will potentially boycott him, socially and in the market…

[sthomper]

In the “real world” things are either ownable or they are not.

bald or not its true…

What a bald assertion. In the real world, things exist, and the only relations that exist between any objects are physical.

is distance a relation? is that physical or interperative relation?

ownership is a mode of interaction that humans (since they developed the word ownership) and gods word (if you believe in that) have developed/stated and i guess refined over time.

if you attempt to own and the object behaves like its owned (your pet rock doenst disobey and run off) and the other humans around you do similarly…then things are owned.

animal cruelty as its called shouldnt have anything to do with the ownership aspect. rats cats and dogs will happily continue to breed and make anew