User:DeirdreAnne/Animal Egalitarianism

N.B. This was moved to my userspace in September 2008 after an MfD to assist me in looking for references for the subject.

Animal Egalitarianism, or non-speciesist egalitarianism, advocates the rights of all sentient beings, humans and non-humans alike.

History
The concept of merging human rights and animal rights has been promoted by a vast number of writers throughout history. The following quote, pulled from a book written by Jeremy Bentham in 1780, was included by Henry Stephens Salt in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (Henry Salt came to have a very important influence on Mahatma Gandhi's life after he picked up Salt's A Plea for Vegetarianism in a vegetarian restaurant in Farringdon Street, London, in 1887):

"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hands of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned, without redress, to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villocity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is, beyond comparison, a more rational, as well as more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

Books

 * The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights By Paola Cavalieri, 2001
 * Animal Rights, Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation By David Alan Nibert, 2002

Quotations
"How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism?" - Paola Cavalieri