Rights

What distinguishes animal rights from animal welfare? In essence, animal welfare looks to see that animals are treated as well as possible in the context of their being creatures owned by humans and deployed for humans’ purpose. Animal welfare has been a concern for a long while - for two centuries. A cornerstone in relation to livestock welfare are the Five Freedoms (which emanated from the 1965 Brambell Report). The perspective of animal rights is that animals should not be subject to what humans want from them, but should have rights to certain things and with which humans must comply.

It can be argued that animal welfare initiatives cannot go far enough because conditioning the initiatives is that due to what humans want from their animals - to deploy the animals for human purposes - the outcome will never be of the well-being of an animal having full sway and being put first. So, a right, and likely with legal enforcement, is required for what is best for animals to prevail and be the totally governing principle.

Non-human animals, sheep therefore, should have the right of good treatment by human animals. The rights that non-human animals should have are: to live life as they wish and as suits their kind; to express their normal behaviour (as one of the Five Freedoms articulates); to have their sentience both fully-recognised and manifested in the calibre of treatment of the animal; to have a full span of life. 

In the difference between animal welfare and animal rights resides where lies power- with either the human or the creature. What animal welfare constitutes and how far it goes towards seeing that an animal is treated well is likely to be governed by: the extent to which the human is demanded to tend to the animal’s welfare; the amount of attention to animal welfare the human needs to give for their objective. Gary L Francione speaks of the ownership dimension, saying ‘If animals are property, welfare standards will always be low and will be shaped more or less by what level of protection is necessary to exploit animals in an economically efficient way. Animal welfare is about economics, not morality.’ (Why Veganism Matters: The Moral Value of Animals, 2020, p 46). In the Glossary of the book Animal Rights Law (2023) by Raffael N Fasel and Sean B Butler, Welfarism (or Classic Welfarism) is defined as ‘an approach according to which animals should be treated humanely because they can suffer (ie they have welfare), but they may nevertheless be owned, used, and killed because human interests are considered to be morally weightier than non-human interests. Classic Welfarism is the philosophy underlying animal protection laws around the world.’ (p 202).     

Now to look at what is already happening and to the future. There is reason to hope that animals will attain rights.

The Party for Animals in The Netherlands describes itself as ‘an integral part of a worldwide growing movement of people working for the rights of animals, in politics, in public administration, and in society.’

Roanne Van Voorst calls for law changes. She says that we need ‘… to look at ourselves in a different way; to look at what a human is, and what a nonhuman animal is, and what animal rights could look like as a result, and how these differ from human rights, and the meaning of all these laws in relation to one another in an age in which humans have long since stopped behaving humanely.’ (Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals: The Future of Food, 2021, p 213). And Martha C Nussbaum states ‘If animals have rights, this means that legal mechanisms to enforce them must either exist or be created.’ (Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, 2022, p 279). She remarks ‘… we must not forget that a justice that is truly global is a justice that takes up the burden of protecting the rights of all sentient creatures …. And it must really by justice - concerned ... with removing barriers to sentient creatures who strive to attain their ends.’ (p 314).

Gary L Francione states ‘When we recognize that animals have a right not to be used as property, we reject treating them exclusively as means to ends.’ (Why Veganism Matters: The Moral Value of Animals (2020) p 150). 

For sheep to attain rights, society needs to change how it sees sheep. 

Sheep should have a right to be treated well; humans have no right to treat sheep as humans choose.