Should animals have rights? | Award-winning LSE iQ podcast

That's Pip, my two year old whippet. I'm currently sat at my desk at home. She's by my feet bugging me for a bit of cheese from my sandwich. She's fast, curious, and completely uninterested in the idea that she might be part of this very podcast. But if you've spent any time with a pet like Pip, it becomes very easy to feel that she matters not just to me, but in her own right.

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While many of us care deeply about animals like our pets, we treat other animals very differently, whether they use for food, for research, or for our entertainment. So why do some animals seem to count more than others, and should they? Welcome to LSK, the podcast where we are social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm Mike Wilkerson from the IQ team, where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas and talk to people affected by the issues we explore.

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In this episode, I ask, should animals have rights? We explore how a chimpanzee ended up in a New York City core. We found out why we're lucky to have a backbone and how without mice, we might still be in lockdown. First, I spoke to Jeff Sieber, associate professor of environmental studies at New York University and author of the book The Moral Circle.

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So when people talk about animal protection, they might have very different forms of protection in mind. One might be environmental conservation. This would be a concern for animals as species or as part of biodiversity. And here what we would be interested in protecting are the ecological holes and the roles that they play in our ecosystems. But then we can also have a more individual approach to animal protection, and that could take the form of either welfare or rights.

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So normally when people talk about animal welfare protections, what they have in mind is ensuring humane, compassionate treatment of animals. In the course of interacting with them, though that can still sometimes be seen as compatible, rightly or wrongly, with using animals for food or research or other human purposes. The other would then be rights, and this would be more similar to how we treat each other, how we treat human populations.

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This is the idea that certain types of harmful or wrongful activities are simply not acceptable, simply not permissible, no matter how much good they might do for humans. We simply should not use animals for food, or use animals for research in invasive or lethal ways, even if we stand to benefit from it. So even when people agree that we ought to be protecting the animals disagreements or uncertainties about whether that should take the form of conservation or welfare or rights or some combination of all three, can really affect what kinds of goals people have and what kinds of strategies they pursue.

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In your book, The Moral Circle, you talked about human exceptionalism. I think this is kind of the point you were just discussing there, and how we kind of prioritize ourselves over animals. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Human exceptionalism is a concept that can have different meanings for different people. When I use it in my work, I use it to describe a moral stance that our species sometimes takes towards nonhumans, where we might think that they matter.

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We might think that they merit a little bit of consideration and decisions that affect them. But we think that we take priority. We matter the most. And so if there is ever any kind of conflict between human interests and non-human interests, even trivial human interest should take priority over really existential nonhuman interests. And that is a form of priority for our species that I think goes too far and ought to be challenged.

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So environmental conservation links animals well-being to their surroundings, like ensuring the giant pandas bamboo forests are protected. Animal welfare refers to the physical and mental state of an animal, like how I make sure that Pip is fed and has five different dog beds in our two bedroom house, and then we have animal rights, which are similar to our own human rights.

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But who gets to decide them? And when does human exceptionalism come out on top? Early animal rights cases in US courts have been like early human rights cases in prior generations. Prior centuries. They have focused specifically on the right to bodily liberty as protected by the writ of habeas corpus. And so, for example, about five, 6 or 7 years ago now, the Nonhuman Rights Project brought to the New York Court of Appeals a case on behalf of Kiko and Tommy to chimpanzees who were held in solitary confinement in upstate New York.

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Kiko and told me, were both being held in cages by private owners. Kiko suffered from hearing loss due to physical abuse in the past. This is from when he was struck in the head, when he was a performer on the set of Tarzan in Manhattan, and the Nonhuman Rights Project made a simple argument. These are sentient agents, autonomous beings.

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They exist in our communities. They ought to be recognized as legal persons with rights that are appropriate for their own interests and needs and vulnerabilities. That is not to say they should have all the same rights as us. It is to say that they should have rights that make sense for who they are, including a right to bodily liberty that at least allows them to live in a sanctuary that welcomes them with other members of their own species and opportunities to explore.

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Now, the New York Court of Appeals did not hear that case, but one judge, Eugene Fahy, wrote a very interesting opinion as as part of that decision, saying this is an injustice and we will have to reckon with it at some point. Several years later, the nonhuman rights projects then brought a very similar case on behalf of Happy the Elephant to the very same court.

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The court had a slightly different composition at this point. They did hear the case this time. They ultimately decided against happy. They decided that she should stay where she is at the Bronx Zoo, that she is not a legal person with legal rights. However, two judges wrote powerful dissenting opinions, including the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals.

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So this is the first time that the highest court in an English speaking jurisdiction heard a nonhuman rights in personhood case, and two judges wrote opinions affirming the case for nonhuman rights and personhood on the basis of a right to bodily liberty. In that case. So none of this has been a victory for a nonhuman animal in a US court yet.

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But every single case is chipping away at the presumption that they are simply not the type of entity that can have legal rights. The word sentience comes up a lot when we talk about animal rights and what kind of animals deserve protection. Jeff uses the phrase sentient genetic autonomy when talking about Kiko and Tommy. So to explore that a little more, I spoke to Professor Jonathan Birch.

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He's the director of the Jeremy Collier Center, and his research mainly focuses on animal sentience and welfare. When it comes to questions of sentience. We can't talk about proof. I would say we shouldn't talk about conclusive evidence about definitively showing, because there's always this room for doubt around feelings, because we don't just directly see immediately how any other being is feeling or even another person.

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We have to try and infer it from their outward behavior. There's always some uncertainty there in that inference. Nonetheless. You know, I think there's lots we can base the influence on. It's true enough that when we're thinking about other animals, they can't talk to us as such. But this is also true of preverbal children. And if you think about preverbal children, while they're obviously having feelings, and they communicate that to us in so many ways through their non-verbal expressions, through their behavior, and we can get a long way by looking at the relevant kinds of behaviors in other animals to y animals for yourself.

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Why did you really find yourself looking into this research specifically? I think I got drawn into these topics through debates about invertebrates that in the UK, our animal welfare laws for a long time have protected all vertebrates, including fishes, but they excluded invertebrates like octopuses, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, insects and so on. And that to me seemed a little bit strange.

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It would be odd if the presence or absence of a backbone was this fundamental dividing line in nature between the animals that felt things and the animals that didn't. So was long fascinated by that question, as I think we all are. But I got drawn into debates about what view the law should take on these questions. Should our animal welfare laws be expanded in their scope to include some invertebrate animals?

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What Jonathan doesn't mention here is just how influential this line of research has been. He's shaped UK law when it comes to establishing animals as sent him. Beings capable of feelings and emotion. His work on the Animal Welfare Societies Act meant that not only vertebrate animals were recognized as sentient, but if formally recognized animals like octopuses, crabs, and lobsters as sentient beings too.

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Here he is talking about the act that he helped shape. So the the Animal Welfare Sentience Act came into force in 2022. It's created a committee called the Animal Sentience Committee that scrutinizes government policy for whether policy makers are taking the animal welfare impacts of their decisions into account. And I've always thought that was a really important positive step.

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We do need to be seeing more, because there's still so many ways in which animal welfare consequences of decisions are not really taken into account. We need to be seeing other UK animal welfare laws change too, to be brought into conformity with the new one. We need to see slaughter regulations changing, for example, animals in science regulations changing.

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So obviously I'm hoping that the current labor government will do something about some of those issues. And let's go into that in a little bit more detail. What does that Welfare Act cover for animals in the UK? What it is, is this very high level piece of legislation that creates a duty on policymakers to consider the animal welfare impacts of their decisions.

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It was not that came about because we left the EU, and in leaving the EU, we left the EU's Lisbon Treaty, which has this line in it, about respecting animals as sentient beings. And that line never really did all that much, and that there was no clear enforcement mechanism attached to it. But when the UK left, the government declined to import that line into UK law.

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And it led to this pushback around, well, ministers don't think animals feel pain anymore. And so they committed to bringing in new legislation that would put that respect for animal sentience back into UK law. And that would do better than the Lisbon Treaty, because it would really create this meaningful duty on policymakers to consider the consequences of their decisions.

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I think that's a great idea. Of course, it opens a huge number of questions about what is this duty and how is it being forced. But I think it's great that we've taken that step and created that duty. And you already kind of mentioned that there's a lot more work that needs to be done. What do you think those next steps ought to be?

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Well, on the on the legal side, there's a huge amount that still needs to be done for animals generally, not just invertebrates. Huge number of issues that have not been properly addressed. But on the invertebrate side, it really feels like things are barely getting started. What we need, I think, at minimum, is to see really egregiously cruel practices like dropping crabs and lobsters into pans of boiling water, banned in a really clear, unambiguous way.

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And I think when we see that that will be a kind of watershed where it's now. Now there are ethical and legal limits on how you can treat those animals. I think there should be a first step to much more detailed, meaningful guidance on how to treat them. Yeah, it seems as though the accepted principle here is that when animals are sentient, there are some ethical limits on how we can treat them.

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And then there's a lot of disagreement about what those limits are and whether rights is the right way to think about those limits or not. I mean, I'm someone who thinks even insects have a form of sentience. And of course, the idea of rights for insects is very, very hard to get your head around. Now partly depends on what you mean by a right and how demanding you're taking that notion to be.

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Because some say that animal welfare laws already create very minimal kinds of rights. Because if you have a law that says if you care for this animal, you're under a duty of care there. There's certain things you have to do and there's certain ways you cannot treat that animal. Then in a way, the animal has a right not to be treated in ways that violate that duty of care.

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Now, that is, of course, a very minimal right. And it's a right that in country like the UK, clearly compatible with lots of slaughter of animals for food and for other purposes, and so for animal rights activists, that's not the kind of rights they're talking about. They want far more robust rights than what the law currently grants. Pixar a classic case where they're very clearly sentient and no one ever goes around saying they're not sentient.

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Nonetheless, even though the sentience is obvious, they're not treated well and they're certainly not afforded rights. And in fact, you get these controversial practices like killing them with carbon dioxide gas often takes over a minute. And you just think, well, how how can we still be doing this in the 21st century? How can we still be treating sentient animals in this way?

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And it's very tough because sometimes you get these these very powerful industries with very entrenched practices, and they're very skillful at going to governments and arguing for why they shouldn't have to change. It's why we need people who are really trying to hold that industry to account and trying to counter these arguments. So I think when people hear about what's going on, when they see what's going on.

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Actually it's not in line with people's values at all. People do not find a lot of these practices acceptable. They just don't know about them. A lot of the time.

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00:15:09:14 - 00:15:31:15

It's free and open to everyone. Get your tickets now by visiting the link in this episodes description. And now back to the podcast. Up until this point, we've been working on the idea that sentence should equal rights for the more we can confirm an animal's ability to feel, the more rights they have access to, right? Well, Jonathan just exposed a big contradiction.

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And it comes back to that human exceptionalism that Jeff mentioned. We know that picture sentient. There is research that shows they have the intelligence of a three year old child and have been seeing morning family members. Yet they are still the third most eaten meat on our plates globally. So for them, sentence does not equal rights because, well, some humans have decided our preference for eating them comes first.

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I would say that by and large, animals don't have rights. This is Joanne MacArthur. She's an award winning photographer, activist and author. She says even when animals do have rights in legislation, it's not always enforced on the ground. We have laws for their welfare, but those aren't enforced. I can attest to that. As someone who is a front liner, as someone who has been to factory farms almost all over the world now, I have looked into the trucks carrying animals across countries where there are laws for them to disembark and have water and have rest, and those laws aren't enforced.

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So we'll. Will I say these animals have rights? Do they even have laws that are, you know, upheld for their benefit? I would say not. So I would say we have a very long way to go. We are getting there bit by bit. Law is an important way of tackling and highlighting this issue, but we have a very long way to go before animals obtain any kind of rights.

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It'll be interesting to see which animals win rights first, and there are some lawyers and academics who are working on giving personhood, allocating personhood at the legal level to animals like elephants who are in zoos, chimpanzees, they are more relatable. We can believe that they are, you know, sentient. It's going to be a much more difficult journey to give legal rights to the animals we want to eat, that we want to eat cheaply and in abundance.

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So that's that's the longer road. Joe's work doesn't just document animals. It asks us to see them differently. So I wanted to understand the role images play in shaping how we think and whether they can actually drive change. I see animal photojournalism as a piece of the puzzle. It's an essential contribution to what animal advocacy as a whole is doing.

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We need to see. We need the law. We need the research. We need the grassroots. We need the people pounding the pavement, talking to people, educating people. We need the humane educators and and all of these are vital components. And it's really exciting that we get to we get to contribute to that. Joe explained a bit more about how she got into this work in the first place.

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I loved all of the war and conflict photography in the world that illuminated big problems and galvanized people, but that wasn't happening for animals and those big books of war photography that I saw out there in the world. Animals didn't have those. And so I wanted to do that for animals. And that's what we do, and that's what we've done.

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And with your work with we animals, is it difficult to highlight a certain animals with there being so many different varieties? We choose who we photograph very strategically. It depends on what the animal advocacy movement needs. It depends on what our partners need. We try and get really good images of underrepresented animals as well. For example, fish is very hard for us to show them in a way that makes us care.

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It's it's easy to make people care about a cute dog. And so we need to elevate the photography. It can't just be a document shot from far away blurry, you know, it has to be as good as the work in major magazines. It has to be as good as the humanitarian work. How do you get people to connect with a fish?

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Well, that's very difficult. And so we have to find very creative, close up, interactive ways of doing it. We animals. It's not just about pictures of hidden animals. When Joe says hidden animals, what she's talking about is the invisible animals in our lives, the ones we have a close relationship to, but do not necessarily pay attention to their the animals we eat and where.

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It's about bringing in the science and the data on animal sentience, their experiences. And it's where the journalism comes into photojournalism. We need that research. We need that proof. So here is a picture of a pig in a gestation crate. But here is the animal behavioral science showing telling us how sentient they are. You know, as smart as a toddler, definitely as smart as the dogs who live in your house and so on.

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And it's also about the how we use language with animals. We don't say it, we say who. And that is brought into, you know, all of our captions and our descriptions of the work. And that's one of the ways that animal photojournalism uplifts the idea that animals are somewhat not something. In a documentary about her work called In the Field Moving Animals, Joe says, I'm not a photographer of animals.

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I'm a photographer for animals. In the film, she covers how cows are being transported from Belgium to Turkey for slaughter. It shows how little space, water and care they have on this journey, how at times pregnant cars will give birth on rue and their newborn calves are left as there's no space for them. This is what I believe Joe means when she talks to us about being a photographer for animals, to show people what animals really need us to see.

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I asked Joe about what needs to happen in the future for animal rights to be equal for all animals. I think that one of the key components of advancing our knowledge of animal sentience, and that we need to protect them, is humane education. We need a lot more social justice in schools and transparency about who needs protecting. It's not just people.

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It's not just the environment, but it's the billions of fellow earthlings that we share this beautiful place with. We need more photographers doing animal photojournalism stories. We don't need them to do it full time. But I would like the conservation, wildlife and nature photographers to be interested in the hidden animals, the animals in cages and behind behind walls all over the world.

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And the more that they are telling those stories as well, the more we have influential people getting visuals out into the world they want to enjoy life to. They shouldn't be in cages. And I think humane education is is one of the fundamental components, so that young people have the awareness to grow up, to want to be involved.

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There are many animals who do spend their lives in cages. I spoke to Doctor Carey Freeze, from LSU's Department of Sociology, about her book and mouse in a cage. She highlights the dilemma at the heart of animal research and animal welfare. When I was writing the book, I was in a cage. It was during the Covid lockdown, and as I was writing that book, I kept thinking those mice that were being produced for aging research that was related to vaccine were secured as the involved in this Covid vaccine that that I'm now taking.

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And I think those experiences show me how much I am reliant upon lab animals, how much so many of you know, most of us, most people I know very much are. And I think we can forget that the whole infrastructure of biomedicine is really based on these on these animals lives and their deaths, and we all participate in that system when we use medicine.

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That's why I think the idea that we could just sort of stop using laboratory animals doesn't account for the immense amount of human suffering that this would likely result in. I know that there are people who dispute the value of laboratory animals, but from what I've seen and witnessed, while I think we could probably use a lot less, I don't feel convinced by the argument that we could do away with them.

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If we accept that these animals are essential to modern medicine, then a difficult question follows what right do they actually have? And are those rights enough? I would say that laboratory animals have rights. They have rights certainly in the UK and the EU. But in most countries, like governance, science, animals have have rights. Those rights vary. The UK and the EU are often considered to have the most stringent regulations regarding laboratory animal rights, and part of that is by implementing what's called the three R's.

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So reduce, refine and replace animals from research. The focus is often on replacing animals from research. That's kind of the desire. I spoke with a researcher who worked with fish and and I think in the UK it's become quite accepted that that fish are sentient. Because of that, there was a time where fish were viewed as replacements that be better to use a fish than it would be to use a cat or a dog, or even maybe a mouse.

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So we have this kind of hierarchy that that doesn't really map on to the question of sentience, but we view sentience as a way of giving, giving rights to animals and making the claim that which I would agree with, that fish aren't an animal replacement because they are animals. The focus can also be on refining and the way an experiment is set up.

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The scientists we spoke to were often concerned about unnecessary research being done. One of the scientists I was following was doing research that required this gene to be present, but it was only present in one out of, say, eight mice in any given litter. So that means in order to produce ten mice that have the gene, they had to produce 80 mice in total.

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So why do I take my dog Pip to go shopping for dog beds? When pigs suffer in firing crates where they aren't able to fully turn around while we're fish wants replacements for mice in research, when both are seen as sentient, there's concern for animal welfare, and animal rights only extends so far, right up until animals are needed for medicine or for food.

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Sentient or not, there seems to be so much contradiction. And as Carey mentions, a kind of hierarchy with how we as humans view animals. Here's Jonathan Birchington. The animal advocacy movement is quite exciting to me at the moment, because I think it's never been bigger. It's never been more full of ideas, full of energy, full of young people.

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And that's very exciting. The same time, you could argue the the enemy has never been more powerful. That demand for these factory farmed, industrially farmed animal products just continues to rise. So it is up against this industry that is getting stronger and stronger globally. And so there's a sense of, well, our things heading in the right direction or are things heading in the wrong direction?

00:27:29:23 - 00:28:13:04

It's good directions in some ways, bad directions in other ways. I always try to remain hopeful. I think there is certainly a lot of excitement right now around replacing the use of animals in research. In one of my other roles, I'm on the UK's Animals in Science committee. It's been advising the government on some of these issues, and if the government and other governments around the world, including in the US, is trying to do a big push at the moment for trying to reduce the number of animals used in animal testing by developing AI, by developing organoids, organ on chips is exciting technologies that can give us the data that animal research used to give

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us, or maybe even better data, but without actually using the animals. And I think we are seeing quite rapid progress in that. So full disclosure, I love animals, but I'm not planning to remove me from my diet completely. And I'm not giving up on vaccinations anytime soon either. That tension will feel familiar to many. Sitting somewhere between concern for animal welfare and debates about rights, between practical choices and ethical ideals, between caring for animals and using them.

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So where do we go from here? I asked Jeff what he thought. I personally think that animals do deserve rights because even if ultimately what you care about is welfare, which I do, rights can still serve as a very useful check against biased, self-serving applications of harm benefit analysis. And if all we aspire to do is protect animal welfare and ensure humane, compassionate treatment of animals, then people will conveniently interpret that in ways that are compatible with ongoing exploitation of animals for food and research and other human purposes.