What are Animal Rights?
There is not a single definition for animal rights. It can refer to either vegan abolitionism or animal welfare, or both. Animal rights advocates generally agree that cruelty towards animals should be ended, since they can feel pain and fear and have wishes and desires. Since the ability to feel hunger, thirst and emotions such as fear are primitive and do not require great intelligence, people who believe in animal rights generally agree that animals should be granted rights based on their sentience alone. The major disagreements are about what kind of rights animals should have, and whether or not animals have lesser moral value than humans. There is also some disagreement about where to draw the line on which species should be granted rights. One major animal welfare position is that while animals have an interest in the quality of their lives, they do not have a desire to go on living in the same way that humans do. Therefore the quality of their lives matters, but not the length o
