Animal Rights

A very good article espousing animal rights. Not being a animal rights believer myself, it takes a lot for me to agree with such opinions. However, this article comes close, grabbing my attention with the very first powerful paragraph.
In 55 BC, the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then "entreated the crowd, trying to win its compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation." The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey — feeling, wrote Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race.
Interestingly, it also contains many ideas that can be applied just as well outside the context of the argument on animal rights.
Sympathy, however, is malleable. It can all too easily be corrupted by our interest in protecting the comforts of a way of life that includes the use of other animals as objects for our own gain and pleasure. That is why we typically need philosophy and its theories of justice. Theories help us to get the best out of our own ethical intuitions, preventing self-serving distortions of our thought. They also help us extend our ethical commitments to new, less familiar cases.
Maybe the reason I liked this piece is because of the universal nature of many of its arguments.

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