d to include education, for example, as well as the rights to life and freedom from persecution of various kinds. Animal rights would protect those things established as fundamental to good animal welfare � the five freedoms.
Combine the idea of animal rights with that of the five freedoms, and we have a powerful interpretation of what the decent treatment of animals, in any context, should actually involve. Assuming that we are going to carry on using animals, then those animals should enjoy freedom from hunger, thirst, fear and suffering, and freedom to perform behaviour in their natural repertoires.
Objections to animal rights
There are vociferous opponents of extending rights to animals. A common argument against the notion is that rights go with responsibilities. In other words, a person can't be given rights unless they can be held responsible for respecting the rights of others. Animals cannot be held responsible; therefore animals cannot have rights. But rights are not withdrawn from humans who, for whatever reason, have a restricted capacity for responsibility (for example, human babies are granted rights). So why should they be withheld from non-human animals for the same reason?
The capacity for responsibility should, in any case, be irrelevant. Given that rights are granted to protect fundamental quality of life, the prerequisite for having them is, surely, the capacity to have a quality of life. This has to do with the capacity to experience pain and pleasure or, put more broadly, to experience life as fulfilled or frustrated, as going well or as going badly. This is a capacity that humans and many other animals share, and it can be present whether or not a creature has the capacity to take responsibility for their behaviour.
A different sort of objection to the notion of animal rights is that granting them will have far-reaching practical implications. This is undoubtedly true. A fundamental feature of rights is that they are not to be traded off against benefits. If animals receive rights to the five freedoms, then pointing to the benefits of research or agriculture will not do as a way of arguing, for example, that pain or behavioural restrictions are justified.
Current UK legislation, however, permits experiments that cause significant pain, providing the pain cannot be avoided and providing that this 'cost' to the animals is outweighed by the likely benefits to humans or other animals. Of course, many procedures routinely performed under the umbrella of scientific research, taking blood for example, involve very little pain.
But it's simply not the case that UK legislation protects animals from practices that do inflict pain or distress and there is nothing to protect animals from laboratory housing systems that impose behavioural restrictions.
Some research and some systems raise welfare issues which are very significant indeed because they clearly cause pain and suffering to the animals concerned. Granting animals rights would mean that in these cases research should not continue. And it would activate a range of constraints on the kinds of research that could be carried out in the future.
That difficult practical implications would follow doesn't, however, show that the animal rights argument is flawed. This is especially so considering that the parallel human rights argument is precisely what underlies our position with regard to humans and scientific research. In many cases, the best animal for research into human diseases is a human. But we're all clear that this doesn't justify using people in experiments that cause significant pain, that involve certain kinds of risks, or that severely curtail their ability to lead a quality existence. And we adhere to this, no matter how difficult the practical challenges of designing research that doesn't use human subjects or how much potentially life-saving information is forgone as a result.
In fact, all parties agree that the extent to which we use animals in research must at least be reduced. The UK government has recently announced plans for a new centre