Animal rights

From RationalWiki

Animal rights is the notion that non-human animals have some rights. Depending on the person talking about it, these rights can vary widely, and range from "we should try to minimize the harm we inflict and not engage in needless cruelty" to "animals are people and should have basically the same rights". Many animal rights activists are also some degree of vegetarian.

Many conservatives seem to have a visceral hatred of any notion of animal rights. Many have even claimed that "animal rights" is a logical inference from the theory of evolution, since evolution says that people and animals are somehow "equal." Don't ask.

Of course, there are less evolved individuals who claim that we should be able to kill and eat all the fluffy animals we want because, hey, we're the evolved species. They don't really understand evolution.

Many animal rights activists have earned the ire of some in the scientific community, by trying to put an end to animal testing, and even threatening to kill scientists who engage in animal testing. According to some, this ignores the real contributions animal testing has made to our understanding of drugs and disease.