Shaunti Feldhahn: Animal rights vs. animal welfare

Does human consumption trump animal rights? Left-leaning Diane Glass contends that many livestock practices are unnecessarily cruel; right-leaning Shaunti Feldhahn makes a distinction between animal welfare and animal rights.

I can still remember my second-grade teacher explaining the link between rights and responsibilities: As rights increase, so do responsibilities. He said, for example, that he would give us the freedom to talk freely during class breaks as long as we would stop and raise our hands when it was teaching time. If we didn't take responsibility, we lost the right to talk.

(Apparently, I didn't quite grasp the concept of restraining myself, since the other thing I remember about my second-grade teacher is that he taped my mouth shut.)

Most people believe that rights accrue only to creatures with the innate ability to be responsible with them — whether or not any one individual does. Seven-year- old human beings have the emerging capacity to take responsibility for their actions. But even the most militant animal-rights advocates recognize that this is not possible for other living things. For example, a few years back, animal-liberation activists (a polite name for terrorists) raided a British fur farm, setting loose 6,000 mink. Because mink are ferocious creatures, they immediately did what mink do — killed household pets and terrorized families with small children. But no one blamed the mink: Animals simply don't have the capacity to take responsibility for whatever "rights" they are given.

Most people don't think animals really have rights. Instead, since we have rights over animals, we have responsibilities to them. We have a duty to be cognizant of the welfare of the animals we are using. It is ironic that the radical animal-rights groups who use violence to demand that everyone else take responsibility are so unwilling to look at their own.

David Martosko at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a food-industry nonprofit, clarifies the distinction between animal rights and animal welfare. "Animals deserve welfare absolutely!" He said in an interview: "No one should be cruel to animals. But if you want to give rights to animals, then they should expect to embrace responsibility in return. As soon as chickens can make a sensible decision at the ballot box and pay taxes, then they can have rights. Until then, chicken is for dinner."

Harvard-educated Shaunti Feldhahn (scfeldhahn@yahoo.com) is a conservative Christian author and speaker, and married mother of two children.