People tend to picture animal rights activists as the outliers, people who think a bit weirdly about the world. But on a surface level, most people already believe in animal rights. They just haven’t followed the belief to where it logically ends.
You May Already Agree With Them
Ask almost anyone whether animals should be used against their will, exploited, or put in situations that threaten their safety and wellbeing, especially when this can be avoided, and the answer is an obvious yes. That’s not a fringe position. In fact, the opposite position is fringe and a cause for concern.
The trouble is that this belief, once granted, doesn’t stay neatly contained. If it’s wrong to harm an animal unnecessarily, then it’s wrong to pay someone else to do it on your behalf. Buying a product is not a neutral act that floats free of its consequences. It funds acts that had to happen to produce it. If the thing that happened was harm the animal didn’t consent to and didn’t need to endure, then paying for it isn’t separate from causing it.
Once you accept the starting premise, veganism isn’t a radical leap. It’s just where the premise was always going.
The Inconsistency
Animal rights activists have pushed against specific practices that the general public overwhelmingly supports banning once they understand what’s involved. Circuses using elephants and tigers, or lobsters and crabs kept in tanks at restaurants, on display before being boiled alive. Beagles bred specifically to be experimented on in laboratories. Orcas, animals who in the wild travel up to 100 miles a day, are confined to tanks at marine parks so people can watch them perform. When these steps are taken, the public agrees. But then disagreement begins when the animal rights activist proceeds with their goals of animal liberation.
But for the same reasons it’s bad to use animals in such ways mentioned above, it is bad to use them altogether.
Most people don’t need convincing that an orca suffers in a tank, or that a beagle bred for a lab has a life worth moral consideration; that means they should never be in such a position. The activists who raised these issues weren’t on the fringe.
Animals have the preference to live their lives freely. When they are used as resources, they aren’t free. The rules surrounding what is morally permissible and legally acceptable to do to animals are largely inconsistent. Many people may say that they value intelligence as an attribute to morally consider an animal. But a pig is widely accepted as more intelligent than a dog. Some of the same people who support pig farming would never support dog farming. A person who loves dogs may never think to farm them, but they’d perhaps crop their ears or buy them from a breeder, even though the premise of ‘You should morally consider them and they’re not ours to use’ is held in only some cases.
This Isn’t Sustainable
A social norm cannot stand firmly if its foundations are weak. Questions will arise, and they will strongly harm the norm. The same scrutiny that has largely ended elephants in circuses and is steadily closing down marine parks does not have a natural stopping point that excludes farmed animals, or animals tested in labs, or those who are slaughtered for their body parts to be accessories.
Moral progress has a pattern: a glaring contradiction sits in plain sight for a while, treated as normal, necessary, and justified, until enough people ask the obvious question and find there’s no good answer.
Not Fringe, Merely Unfinished.
Animal rights isn’t a fringe position. It’s a commonly held position that hasn’t been applied consistently yet. The values are already in place, somewhere screaming faintly in the back of people’s minds. It’s what makes them hesitate to kill a hen at the homestead. It’s what causes an aftertaste after consuming a sandwich with the body of a pig in it.
What’s missing is the willingness to follow those values to their actual conclusion, rather than stopping wherever happens to feel comfortable, as it’s validated to do so.
Logical consistency tends to win out, eventually, because the alternative is maintaining a position you can’t actually defend. The question of why a pig’s suffering matters less than an orca’s is not a difficult one to ask; it’s just a difficult one to answer.
