Is Shanti a Thing?

I bought Shanti as a piece of property. A thing. Ca-ching! I put him on my credit card and walked out the door with no documentation, no responsibilities, nothing. Nobody asked if I knew the first thing about birds, was a suitable parront, or if I was a zoosadist on a binge.

Nothing prevents me from having Shanti for dinner, setting him on fire, or otherwise tormenting him. Nothing prevents me from giving him away. In fact, birds are the most abandoned pet in the world. People shoot birds for fun. And we factory farm almost 10 billion birds — mostly chickens — annually, killing about a million per hour.

Our animals are immensely vulnerable. We’ve got all the power, and we abuse it.

It is our ownership of animals (or in Biblical terms, our “dominion” over them) that provides us with the fundamental basis for abuse. As long as animals are things, we will continue to do them incalculable harm.

When we start granting them rights, we'll have a revolution in law, culture and relationships. We’ll have a very different planet.

The struggle to expand the scope of rights typically runs into disputes about semantics. When European Enlightenment thinkers began to argue for equality they spoke only of the Rights of Man. The US Founding “Fathers” took "man" to mean white, propertied males. It took us almost 100 years more to abolish involuntary servitude and begin to extend rudimentary rights to African slaves. Then it took another half century to allow women to vote. Today, we are in a civil rights struggle to extend equal rights to same-sex couples, including gays and lesbians in the family of beings with rights.

Animal rights present the ultimate definitional barrier. Opponents argue that only persons can have rights. Only persons are moral agents. Only persons have free will. Only persons can fulfill the responsibilities that are attendant upon rights. Are rights a kind of contract, the terms of which must be agreed upon by the parties? Or can a nonhuman animal also have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

What would it mean to take such an idea seriously and implement it? Let's find out.

The good news is that most people show some sympathy for animals. We love our pets. We abhor cruelty. We deplore waste and gluttony. We support a sustainable ecology, the preservation of the wilderness, the protection of endangered species. We admire animals as a source of wonder, beauty and spiritual sustenance.

But we’re also overwhelmed by the prospect of accepting animals as members of the family of sentient beings. We’re afraid: I’d go crazy being a vegetarian. I’ll die of some terrible disease lab experimentation on monkeys and rats. The economy will collapse without factory farming. My kids will be deprived of their cultural heritage if the zoo stops exhibiting lions and tigers.

We ask, shouldn’t humans be our priority? Yes, of course. If you have to choose between your daughter and your kitten or your mom and you’re her poodle, it makes moral sense to favor the human relationship. If we have to solve the problem of a billion human beings starving or a billion chickens, we'll know how to prioritize. But that’s the wrong way to frame the question. A better way is to ask how can we provide for the needs of our entire family of being, of sentience, of intelligence, of feeling? How can our ethics become all-inclusive? How can we construct a culture that doesn’t sacrifice one set of compelling moral interests for another?