SELECTING ANIMAL SPECIES TO BE CONSIDERED AS RIGHTS HOLDERS

Abstract

Overcoming the anthropocentric speciesist paradigm in an Animal Law perspective, where non-human animals are subjects of subjective rights and consequently participants of a plurispecific moral community, even if in the quality of moral patients and being sentience or as for some authors - animal conscience, the criterion that assesses the ability of an animal to enter the category of subjects of rights, with their interests recognized as deserving of respect and legal and moral consideration, we arrive at the enormous challenge of how the ethical and legal world can contemplate hundreds of billions of individuals so different in their specificities and how to draw the line of inclusion and cut of which species can be holders of rights? Do such rights include insects? Unfortunately, we still have little information about the breadth of the potential behavioral repertoire of many species and sound scientific basis for comparing species and thus making an informed decision about which species should be granted rights. The question concerning the demarcation of the dividing line between living beings that have rights and those that do not must still be discussed at length with rigorous scientific and ethical bases, in order to include species within a moral community and the graduation of “rights” of each species according to the degree of sentience. Animal Law is a science under construction and depends on the contribution of knowledge from various branches of science for its consolidation. But the indeterminacy of which are the sentient species does not prevent the immediate application of the constitutional right to prohibit cruelty when faced with animal suffering. Either we defend animals, applying in fact and in law the moral principle of equal interests, or we have no moral justification for upholding human rights. Intelligence, autonomy or rationality are criteria that exclude not only animals but also a portion of human beings. Morally and biologically, human rights and those of nonhuman animals draw from the same source.