Quote Originally Posted by ksst View Post
I don't believe animals have rights. With rights come rules of law and responsibility to obey them. We don't want to get into prosecuting polar bears or tigers for eating people, or deer for destroying crops, so we should not give them the rights that people have.
If we could sue deer for destroying our crops, they could with equal justice bring countersuit for our destroying their habitat. (And I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers who would take their case on contingency.) In any case, you're talking about reponsibility to obey laws made and enforced by humans, and it's universally recognised as unjust to impose laws on people who don't have any say in making or judging them. If there were laws that applied to all living creatures - and it is a defensible concept - then it is widely argued that humans are the great lawbreakers, the gangsters of ecology. So let's not go there.

In any case, it's not the case that rights automatically imply responsibilities: children have rights laid down by law, so do mental hospital patients and convicts. None of those are held to the same standards of responsibility as free adult humans, but we respect their rights (well, most people do, see the ongoing thread on prisoners' right to vote) and defend their rights on their behalf. There's nothing conceptually difficult about doing the same for the rights of non-humans, if once we agreed that they have them.