
According to the Wikipedia encyclopedia animal rights "also known as animal liberation, is the movement to protect non-human animals from being used or regarded as property by humans." In these movements people seek out to improve animal treatment. They want animals to be referred to as "legal persons". For quite some time now there have been many efforts towards helping animals and giving them more respect. These efforts go back to numerous philosophers. Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher and mathematician who believed in reincarnation. Because of this he felt that if someone killed an animal they could be killing their ancestor. He did not believe in using animals as sacrifice or as food and so he was a vegetarian. An English philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that the pain animals went through was exactly the same as the pain humans went through. Bentham felt that “the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, must be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If the ability to reason were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things.” The philosophy these men believed in is that animals deserve certain moral rights and laws should be made to insure of it. In a way I agree but also disagree with these philosophers. I don't think I would ever be able to become a vegetarian and I feel that one reason animals were put on this earth was to use them for food to survive. However, I do agree that we don't need to kill animals for useless things such as for fur on our clothes or to make alligator shoes. What I'm tyring to say is that there should be a limit on how animals are treated or used.
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