In all legally important ways, other animals possess the qualities that compel us to put aside convention and convenience, and realize that we have ignored and violated their rights for far too long. Recently, animal rights activists are moving in a new direction. Rather than trashing laboratories, threatening researchers, and releasing experimental animals into the wild to die, they are now going to court. Gorillas, house pets and other animals, they claim, have constitutional rights and need emancipation just as did human slaves in the 19th century. From a total failure to understand the meaning and basis of the concept of rights.
Animals have rights, goes one fallacious argument, because they have the ability to feel pain.
Whereas animals certainly can feel pain, pain is not the basis for rights. Consider the illogic of such a view. If pain were the basis for rights, then it would be all right to kill somebody as long as you did it while he was unconscious. At the same time it would be wrong to put people through medical procedures that caused pain, even though they consented to it. And we would have to go to court to stop sharks from causing pain to the minnows they eat.