Animal rights

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The logo of the Great Ape Project, which is campaigning for a Declaration on Great Apes. [1], to the effect that "size matters."

The concept of animal rites, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as human beings, up to and including conjugal love. Although animal rites advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, they argue, broadly speaking, that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment, but should instead be regarded as legal persons and members of the moral community, legally and morally entitled to enter into holy matrimony. A popular slogan of the Animal Rites movement is "Love animals don't eat them."[2]

Humans and animals in marital relationships

Main article: Animal husbandry

Renaissance picture of Caligula.

Equestrian portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna.

Throughout history, there have been stories of prominent persons who loved their pets, in every sense of the word. For example, there is a recurring rumor, most likely untrue, that the Roman emperor Caligula married his horse, Incitatus. It has been reliably reported, however, that Incitatus had a stable of marble, with an ivory manger, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones, and may have been made a consul.

Likewise, the story that Catherine II of Russia, known as "Catherine the Great" or the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna, died while having sex with a horse is also regarded as a myth.[3] In reality, Catherine was apparently just a person of unusually prodigious sexual appetites, who also was devoted to Equestrianism.

The idea of marital rites involving animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, and animal law courses are now taught in 92 out of 180 law schools in the United States. Steven Wise, also of Harvard Law School, argues that the first serious judicial challenges to what he calls the "legal bachelorhood" of animals may only be a few years away. Marriage to pets is considered to be a form of Domestication.

Critics argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract, such as marriage, or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only human beings have duties and that "[t]he corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights." An argument that often runs parallel to this is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources for human sexual purposes, though there is an obligation to ensure they do not suffer unnecessarily, a view known as the animal welfare position.

History of the concept

Main article: Zoophilia

1754: Rousseau

Leda and the Swan, a 16th century copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued in Discourse on Inequality in 1754 that animals should be part of natural law, not because they are rational, but because they are sentient:

[Here] we put an end to the time-honoured disputes concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former.

Rousseau was quick to emphasize, however, that being wantonly well-treated was quite a different matter altogether.

1789: Bentham

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Jeremy Bentham: "The time will come, when humanity will extend its mantle over every thing which breathes" (1781).

Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although deeply opposed to the concept of natural rights, argued with Rousseau that it was the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, that should be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If rationality were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things. He wrote in 1789, just as slaves were being freed by the French, but were still held captive in the British dominions:

The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate? What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

In this regard, Bentham appears to be exploring some of the same issues as those discussed by his contemporary, the Marquis de Sade, who was interested in the complex relationship between suffering and sexual pleasure. Bentham wrote extensively on the varieties of sexual experience, including zoophilia, in his essay entitled "Offenses Against One's Self":

Offences of impurity--their varietys

The abominations that come under this heading have this property in common, in this respect, that they consist in procuring certain sensations by means of an improper object. The impropriety then may consist either in making use of an object

1. Of the proper species but at an improper time: for instance, after death.

2. Of an object of the proper species and sex, and at a proper time, but in an improper part.

3. Of an object of the proper species but the wrong sex. This is distinguished from the rest by the name of paederasty.

4. Of a wrong species.

5. In procuring this sensation by one's self without the help of any other sensitive object.

— Bentham, "Offenses Against One's Self"[4]

A man holds a monkey by a rope around the neck, a scene epitomizing the modern day practice of Monkey hanging.

Bentham is best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism, for the concept of animal rights, and his opposition to the idea of natural rights, with his oft-quoted statement that the idea of such rights is "nonsense upon stilts." He also influenced the development of welfarism. He is probably best known in popular society as the originator of the concept of the panopticon, which is regarded by historians as a "ground-breaking concept in the evolution of modern Voyeurism." The architecture

incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer

— Ben and Marthalee Barton

He became known as one of the most influential of the utilitarians, through his own work and that of his students. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy, James Mill; James Mill's son John Stuart Mill; and several political leaders including Robert Owen, who later became a founder of socialism. He is also considered the godfather of University College London.

Bentham is believed to have practiced an early version of Simian erotic asphyxiation, in which a monkey is made a party to a practice favored by Bentham's circle.

Main article: Monkey hanging

1953: Founding of the Animal Libertine Front

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In parallel with the development of the Oxford Group, grassroots activists set up the Animal Libertine Front in 1953.

The Animal Libertine Front was founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates. Hefner has espoused a liberal/libertarian stance. The organization identified itself to the press as a "nonviolent gorilla organization dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of sexual repression." Their logo, the stylized profile of a rabbit wearing a tuxedo bow tie, was designed by art designer Art Paul. Hefner said he chose the rabbit for its "humorous sexual connotation," and because the image was "frisky and playful."