ABSTRACT
Animals possess rights (in my view) because of their nature as conscious beings; so we must consider that, briefly. If animals were only remarkable automata, as Descartes proposed (Rosenfield 1968; Cottingham 1978; Clark 1989:14-15), it would not matter to animals how we treated them, any more than it matters to plants what we do to them (unless, of course, they have a ‘secret life’!). I agree with Peter Harrison (1991) that, if we had no good reason to suppose animals could feel pain or suffer in any other ways, there would still be aesthetic reasons for not treating them ‘brutally’ or vandalistically, and I shall argue in Chapter 8 that there is a very important aesthetic and conservational respect owing to animals, and to anything else natural or artificial worth conserving. But I also believe (unlike Harrison) that individual animals claim our respect because they can feel, suffer pain, and experience pleasure, and because, in short, it matters to them how they are treated.
