ABSTRACT
The concept of animal rights is a modern notion, one closely tied to the earliest development of modern human and civil rights. By the late eighteenth century, ethical vegetarianism had become a serious intellectual current in the British isles, and by 1822, the British parliament had enacted the first of many subsequent animal-cruelty laws. The current animal rights movement derives from the same historical and cultural context as the modern human rights movement specifically, the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century that legitimated and codified the belief in natural and inalienable rights. Some animal studies critics maintain that we can better understand the processes of capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction through the lens of animal domination. The human rights paradigm seems ambiguous or unstable so long as it cannot find a way to incorporate the "other" upon which it has constituted its own identity as a discourse of liberation.
