objectivism is objectionable

Rights are ethical principles applicable only to beings capable of reason and choice.

Rights protect men against the use of force by other men. (evidently not)

None of this is relevant to animals. Animals do not survive by rational thought (nor by sign languages allegedly taught to them by psychologists). They survive through inborn reflexes and sensory-perceptual association. They cannot reason. They cannot learn a code of ethics.

To claim that man's use of animals is immoral is to claim that we have no right to our own lives and that we must sacrifice our welfare for the sake of creatures who cannot think or grasp the concept of morality.

The animal "rights" terrorists are like the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombers. They are not idealists seeking justice, but nihilists seeking destruction for the sake of destruction. They do not want to uplift mankind, to help him progress from the swamp to the stars. They want mankind's destruction; they want him not just to stay in the swamp but to disappear into its muck.

Rights can only be held by beings who are capable of reasoning and choosing.

Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D. is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

[O]bserve that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature"—there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival.

The logic of environmentalism, for example, leads to a society without technology . . . even if various environmentalists . . . would deny this . . . The full implications of an ideology’s central principle are often evaded by its adherents.

Reject Environmentalism, Not DDT Bush and Congress Should Lift Environmental Restrictions on Energy Production

Thanks to intimidation by animal rights terrorists, Cambridge University has dropped plans to build a laboratory that would have conducted cutting-edge brain research on primates. According to The Times of London, animal-rights groups "had threatened to target the centre with violent protests … and Cambridge decided that it could not afford the costs or danger to staff that this would involve."

While most animal-rights activists do not inflict beatings on animal testers, they do share the terrorists' goal of ending animal research–including the vital research the Cambridge lab would have conducted.

Millions of humans would suffer and die unnecessarily if animal testing were prohibited. Animal rights activists know this, but are unmoved. Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: "If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn't make any difference to me."

The goal of the animal-rights movement is not to stop sadistic animal torturers; it is to sacrifice and subjugate man to animals. This goal is inherent in the very notion of "animal rights." According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the basic principle of "animal rights" is: "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment"–they "deserve consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans." This is in exact contradiction to the requirements of human survival and progress, which demand that we kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them to fight disease.

To ascribe rights to animals is to contradict the purpose and justification of rights–to protect the interests of humans.

While these terrorists should be condemned and imprisoned, that is not enough. We must wage a principled, intellectual war against the very notion of "animal rights"; we must condemn it as logically false and morally repugnant.

Scientists are closer than ever to finding cures for AIDS, cancer and other deadly illnesses. But more research and testing are needed and much of it must be done on animals. But will it occur? Not if the animal "rights" terrorists plaguing Huntingdon Life Sciences have their way.

Ominously, the crimes against Huntingdon are not isolated incidents; animal rights terrorists commit more than 1,000 crimes annually. Some animal rights leaders are even openly in favor of criminal action. According to Alex Pacheco, director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): "Arson, property destruction, burglary, and theft are 'acceptable crimes' when used for the animals' cause."

It is common to write off terrorist activity and the vicious statements of animal rights leaders as "extremist," while maintaining that the majority of people in the animal rights movement have benevolent intentions. But man-hatred is not limited to a few leaders, it is inherent in the very notion of animal "rights." According to PETA, the basic principle of animal rights is: "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." To abide by this principle, we must leave animals free–to overrun and destroy our property, to eat our food, even to kill our children. As Michael Fox, vice president of The Humane Society explains, "The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration."

Today, animal rights advocates want to make the progress of medical science impossible–so that rats may live. The only goal of a doctrine that demands such a sacrifice of man to animals can be the annihilation of man.

This July, Edwards Dam, a small hydroelectric facility on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, will be torn down by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Its crime? It is blocking the path of fish that swim upstream to spawn. As recounted in a N.Y. Times article, "the hindrance the Edwards Dam posed to migratory fish outweighed the benefit it provided in electric generation."

The common view of environmentalism is that its goal is the betterment of mankind–that it wants to purify our air and clean up our parks so that we can live healthier and happier lives. But that is a very superficial interpretation. When environmentalists are faced with a conflict between the "interests" of nature and those of man, it is man who is invariably sacrificed.

Environmentalists often declare their philosophy openly. For example, David Graber, an environmentalist with the National Parks Service, described himself as among those who "value wilderness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. . . . We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, of free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value–to me–than another human body, or a billion of them."

David Foreman, founder of the organization Earth First, bluntly stresses the environmental irrelevance of human beings: "Wilderness has a right to exist for its own sake, and for the sake of the diversity of the life forms it shelters; we shouldn't have to justify the existence of a wilderness area by saying: 'Well, it protects the watershed, and it's a nice place to backpack and hunt, and it's pretty.'"

The environmentalist goal, in other words, is to protect nature, not for man, but from man.

Earth Day is an appropriate occasion for challenging the environmentalists' philosophy. It can be the occasion for recognizing the Earth as a value–not in and of itself, but only insofar as it is continually reshaped by man to serve his ends.

As a life-long animal lover, I am deeply sympathetic to arguments that we should treat animals humanely. But the moral issue of how we should treat animals is a different and much wider matter than the issue of what legal obligations there should be for protecting animals. For instance, it is normally immoral to lie to your friend, but that does not imply any legal rights or protections. Similarly, it is immoral to nail a cat to a wall, but that does not ground a legal obligation to refrain from such monstrous behavior. I suspect that the 71-percent support for granting animals some kind of legal protection is based on just this confusion between concern about the welfare of animals and a proper ground for rights.

In fact, I think that the proper basis for individual rights—which I take to be Ayn Rand's theory of rights—excludes extending rights or legal protections to animals. For a concise summary of that theory, the reader should consult Rand's essay "Man's Rights," in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1964). This article will simply describe that theory and then employ it to rebut arguments that claim an extension of rights to animals is morally required.

Furthermore, it does not strike me that attributing these capacities to them is wild speculation or anthropomorphism. Regan is right that some higher-order mammals possess these capacities. In fact, this is probably one of the things that makes such creatures compelling as pets; it may even provide a moral basis for treating animals with a certain amount of sensitivity and care. Nonetheless, this does not show that such creatures have inherent value, nor does it ground a case for animals' possessing rights.

As Ayn Rand argued, value depends on the existence of a being that faces the alternative of continued existence or the end of existence—and a being that must act to continue in existence. Values, then, are those things that are required for the being's continued life. Therefore, a value is always a value for some reason (it is required for life) and to some organism (the being acting in the face of the alternative of life or death).

Moral values are the values pursued by an organism with the capacity to choose and reason. Volitional rationality gives rise to the need for a system to guide choices and actions. Without choice, there is no point to giving guidance; and without reason, we can't formulate and act on the principles that morality provides. Humans are the only organisms that are capable of volitional rationality and, as such, are the only organisms capable of morality. And while animals certainly face the alternative of life or death and thus pursue value, they do not react to this alternative by choosing what actions to take and what values to pursue to maintain their lives. They do not and cannot pursue moral values.

I do not want animals to suffer needlessly, but the capacity to suffer is not a ground for animal rights. Indeed, it is not the basis for human rights.

We have rights because, to pursue life in society by means of reason (which is how one best lives), an individual needs freedom for action and therefore freedom from force.

In regards to children, there is an important, non-arbitrary reason for protecting them: children are going to be rational beings some day. Animals will not. Left to their normal development process, animals do not develop a rational capacity.

In sum, rights are necessary for the peaceful survival of a conceptual, rational being within a social context. Animals are neither conceptual beings nor within our social context, and therefore animal rights are not justified. Since our legal system should be rights-based, legal protections for animals are not justified. Most marginal humans, it might be argued, are a part of the social context, as potential traders, and so certain legal protections could be justified.

But, once again, the arguments for animal rights deal with how animals are to be treated in a legal context. While I think it is clear that animals do not have rights, one must not conclude that it is morally acceptable to treat animals in just any which way. There may not be legal sanctions against individuals who abuse their own animals, but such behavior may still be immoral and there should be severe social sanctions to inhibit it.

"A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context" (Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights"). Man is a being who survives by the use of his conceptual consciousness, the use of reason. This distinguishes him from other animals, which survive primarily by instinct and brute force. Man uses his mind to transform nature to meet his needs. He cultivates the land using machines and implements that are the result of his thought put into action. He designs and builds shelter from raw materials found in nature. He obtains food and clothing by managing plants and animals to his benefit. But unless he is left free to use his mind, to convert his thought into action and to maintain control of the resulting products, he cannot survive.

Man's nature is the source of rights. In a social setting, rights are what protect an individual's liberty from others. "[Rights provide] a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law" (Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights").

Animals, by their nature, are amoral–they can neither understand rights nor act morally. It is meaningless to ascribe rights to them. Any attempt to do so undermines the very concept, endangering man's rights and man's life. Similar to Socialists' attempts to dilute the concept of rights by claiming there are rights to the products of others' efforts, like a "right" to a nice home, a steak dinner, medical treatment or an education, animal rights advocates destroy the authentic concept. What they are really trying to accomplish, under the guise of caring for animals, is the destruction of the human species.

According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the basic principle of "animal rights" is: "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." Animals are not to be used in any fashion to further the life of humans.

Given the real goal of the animal rights movement, it is no surprise they use violence to impose their views. When the use of reason is abandoned, rights are abrogated and only the use of force remains. This is precisely why an intellectual understanding and defense of the concept of rights is necessary. Our profession, our freedom and our lives hang in the balance.

As Ayn Rand pointed out in The Virtue of Selfishness and elsewhere, rights exist and arise objectively from our natures as volitional beings (rational animals). Those rights – those principles for guiding us in social interactions – simply needed to be discovered.

As Ayn Rand says, "Rights are a moral concept." (In "Man's Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 92.) They provide a transition from ethics – those principles which guide individual behavior – to those principles which guide interactions between and among individuals. Individual rights serve to subordinate the State to the individual and thereby protect individual moral autonomy.

Rand defines a right as: "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life." ("Man's Rights," p. 93.) She goes on to point out that rights pertain only to actions, that is, to the freedom to act; it is a freedom from direct or indirect "physical compulsion, coercion, or interference by other" people. For the individual, a right is a positive: it is a freedom to act. For others, "rights impose no obligations…except of a negative kind": to refrain from violating the rights of another.

Animals one owns are property. A person may use his property as he sees fit (in a way that does not violate another's rights). The way one manages one's property may be wise or foolish. Regardless, no one else – neither private citizens nor agents of the state – has the right to stop a property owner from acting on his decisions.

There are any number of positive and ethical ways we can gain (objective) value from animals.

Animals are also often used in ways that should be judged as unethical (though not violating anyone's rights).

No one – repeat, no one – has the right to violate another person's rights.

Most assuredly, do not advocate the dangerous notion that animals possess rights…not if you value your life and your freedom. If the animal rights crowd gets its way, both you and your liberty will go the way of the dodo.

Do you ever wonder why terrorism has become so widespread? Consider the crucial role played by terrorism's enablers: those intellectual and cultural leaders who act as apologists and excuse-makers for violence.

Lynch notes, "During the past 30 years, Watson takes credit for sinking eight whaling ships and ramming six other vessels," and Lynch quotes him as justifying the violence this way: "Sometimes you have to break laws because it's dictated to you by your conscience, because it's the moral thing to do."

Moral? Here's where animal-rights philosophers come in, providing Watson the necessary ethical rationalizations for violence and property destruction. The often-arrested Watson, a fervent proponent of animal rights, "sees himself as a modern-day Copernicus, trying to make humans understand they're not the center of the universe." (As reported by the January 18, 2004 Los Angeles Times, Watson's animal rights philosophy leads him to conclude, "Human beings are literally stealing resources from all the other species on this planet.")

Author Patti Strand, who heads up the National Animal Interest Alliance, describes Watson as a dangerous inspiration to people like Michael J. Scarpitti, aka "Tre Arrow," the fugitive eco-terrorist and arsonist arrested March 13 in Canada. Concludes David Martosko of the Center for Consumer Freedom: "He has trained some of the most radical and violent thugs involved in the animal-rights movement in North America."

And so, philosophically corrupt contemporary intellectuals, abetted by the morally corrupt Hollywood Left, continue their cultural jihad against America's battered moral infrastructure. In their unswerving efforts to "define deviancy down," these enablers of modern terrorism are set to canonize yet another human-hating thug, and to rationalize the private initiation of force and violence for political purposes.

Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a successful consulting career, holding economic views influenced by Ayn Rand. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a "rock star". The subprime mortgage crisis occurred within months of his departure from the board, and inquiries into the possible role of his policies in the crisis have tarnished his image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan