The “Rights” of Animals

Guest post by Murray N. Rothbard.

It has lately become a growing fashion to extend the concept of rights from human beings to animals, and to assert that since animals have the full rights of humans, it is therefore impermissible—i.e., that no man has the right—to kill or eat them. There are, of course, many difficulties with this position, including arriving at some criterion of which animals or living beings to include in the sphere of rights and which to leave out. But the fundamental flaw in the theory of animal rights is more basic and far-reaching.
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