utes decent treatment?
First, it is worth noting that we don't need the language of rights to argue that having bought non-human animals into human social and economic systems, we should treat them decently. More or less all parties in the debate over the use of animals in medical and scientific research in fact agree that sentient animals (those capable of experiencing pain and pleasure) are owed such treatment.
What different parties in the debate mean by 'decent treatment', and to what extent this is translated into practice, is another matter. From within the research industry, decent treatment typically means keeping animal pain and distress to a minimum; keeping careful guard against unnecessary experiments, such as those that duplicate research findings; and using non-sentient animals when possible.
From the farther end of the animal rights spectrum, the issue is not just that we sometimes inflict pain and suffering on the animals we use, but that we use them at all. From their perspective, treating sentient animals simply as a means to human ends, like any other item of laboratory equipment, is unacceptable no matter how carefully they are treated.
The whole institution of animal-dependent research is held to be profoundly unjust, and a parallel is sometimes drawn with slavery. It's argued that as with slavery, the ethically appropriate action isn't simply to tidy up the institution by reducing suffering; the only ethically sound course of action is to abolish the practice altogether. From this perspective the decent treatment of animals means that they shouldn't be used as means to our ends at all.
The 'five freedoms' benchmark
The 'five freedoms' provides a powerful way of moderating between those who are for and those who are against the use of animals for human ends. Back in the 1960s the highly respected, UK government appointed, Brambell Committee argued that the decent treatment of sentient animals should mean ensuring they have good welfare. Good welfare, they said, is achieved by ensuring that animals have the five freedoms: freedom from hunger, thirst, fear, suffering and freedom to perform behaviour in their natural repertoires. The latter refers to the range of behaviours that animals perform if unrestricted, like grooming, grazing, roaming, flying, nesting, spending time with other animals of the same species, digging, burrowing and so on.
This all sounds straightforward enough. But in fact, given the way we currently keep and use animals, translating the five freedoms into practice is extremely challenging. This is especially true of the freedom to perform behaviour in their natural repertoires. For example, intensive farming (from which the majority of European meat and dairy produce still comes) is premised on the
restriction of natural behaviour, so that food the animals eat is turned into food for humans with maximum efficiency � without 'wasting' any of it by allowing animals to move around.
Interestingly, the use of animals in research falls short perhaps most consistently with regard to this freedom as well. While the UK research industry is, in the main, conscientious about limiting suffering with the use of anaesthesia, the majority of research animals are kept in barren cage environments, in isolation from other animals of their own kind.
Rights protect the five freedoms
It is still true, in general, that humans routinely inflict pain and suffering on animals, across a whole range of different contexts. Including those in which there is a genuine commitment to 'decent treatment'
This is where the concept of rights comes into its own. The term 'rights' is used in a variety of ways, but the core idea is that a right is like a protective fence around an individual. To say that an individual has a right is to say that there are certain things that may not be done to that individual, regardless of the benefits that might result from doing so. Rights protect those things that are fundamental for the animal (human or otherwise) to lead a life of basic quality. Thus, human rights are typically hel