Ultimately, the rights of animals threaten the freedom of some human beings to use them as they see fit, or to further their own particular ends. The arguments against the rights of animals withstand neither logical nor ethical scrutiny because they are the rearguard action of a defeated, specious philosophy. The pretence that human affairs exist in isolation from those of all other living creatures on our planet is no longer sustainable. Evolution teaches us not arrogance but humility, and the greater follies of our technological century serve to reinforce the lesson that the natural world is neither our property or our servant. The further pretence that the exclusion of others from the benefits of compassion and justice can be justified by our status as the dominant species is untenable.
Power is no longer the measure of moral worth.
That is the lesson of our age. Just as the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights acted both in the long established philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment and in response to the horrific events of the first part of this century, so the framers of the Declaration on Animal Rights were motivated both by the humanist philosophical tradition and by the unprecedented nature and extent of animal exploitation at the end of the 20th Century. Factory farming, the destruction of the natural environment and the introduction of novel scientific procedures such as cloning and xenotransplantation represent abuse of the lives and interests of animals unimaginable even half a century ago. The coexistence of the recognition of the principle of individual rights for human beings and of the institutionalised abuse and exploitation of individual animals on a global scale represents an ethical challenge that can no longer be ignored, and which, we believe, will determine the progress of morality and, inevitably, civilisation in the coming century. The Declaration of the Rights of Animals is as much a statement of intent as it is of principle.