Why We Believe in the Rights of ALL Animals

Or, Where the Journey to Save Dogs Has Led Us

While the journey of the Center for Animal Litigation began with fighting against the harm and suffering companion animals endure in so many aspects of their lives, we are not ignorant of the horrific realities that burden the lives of ALL animals. The thought that dogs and cats have the inherent defensible right to life and to live free of harm as sentient beings with the ability to feel pleasure and pain (which is a basis of every legal challenge we bring defending dogs on death row) is one that cannot be logically divested from this fundamental concept based in our morality that all such creatures are equally deserving.

The Golden Rule

What can justify under any theory of moral philosophy, eating a pig and not a dog? They both have the capacity to suffer just like humans. How can people believe in their superiority over all other creatures, and that they can therefore do what they wish with the animals on this earth, be reconciled with the time-honored maxim of the Golden Rule?

The Horrors of Being an Animal With and Without Companion Status

Humans cage companion animals against their will, kill them at unprecedented levels because their lives have no value, rip out their claws and reproductive organs, cut off their tails and ears, through breeding grotesquely deform their bodies (a toy poodle was once a wolf except for human intervention), all for human’s purpose and certainly not the animal’s. We couldn’t fathom justifying such behavior toward our fellow humans. And yet these animals under the law are mere property existing solely for the ownership, pleasure and benefit of humans.

Since most people have no reason to purposely harm companion animals, anti-cruelty laws exist to provide a modicum of safety against the more egregious behaviors toward our nonhuman companion brethren. Yet a chasm has been formed between companion animals and those animals seen as a nuisance or merely considered a food source.  Chickens are stuffed in tiny crates for their entire tortured and short-lived lives, calves are murdered after six weeks of life for a meal of veal, whales are captured from their ocean homes and jailed in pools for the rest of their lives, elephants and others are kidnapped from their natural homes and forced to exist in prison zoos, or worse to suffer a life in a traveling roadshow, just so people can gawk at them for shillings to their captors’ profit.

Is it too great a logical stretch that we oppose capturing horses, filling them with drugs and forcing them to live completely unnatural, deplorable and shortened lives merely for entertainment as sport? Where in our moral construct is anyone justified to unilaterally decide that the lives of others shall be one of perpetual suffering, in complete disregard of their needs, welfare and their right to live under terms we profess we are so sacredly entitled to ourselves?

Call To Action

The Staff of the Center for Animal Litigation has and will continue to join likeminded people with the goal of extinguishing cruelties imposed on all animals by humans.  Whether it is opposing the proposed development of a horse racetrack, protesting the incarceration of beluga whales within tiny pools, or just serving up some delicious vegan food, it is always special for us to spend time with those who truly live by the Golden Rule regarding all creatures.

People will someday come to grips with the insupportable human belief in the superiority over all others. We aim to be on the right side of history and do what we can to educate that compassion cannot be restricted to just those who look like you, but that all creatures are entitled to empathy. This fundamental belief is the foundation of the ethics and morals we choose to live by. We could not think of spending a more meaningful and heartwarming day doing anything else.

Saving companion animals one life at a time

&

Expanding the fundamental rights of all.

THE CENTER FOR ANIMAL LITIGATION, INC.

a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered under EIN: 81-4967902