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People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats… - Tom Regan
" "People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats and dogs. Don't get me wrong. Animal Rights Advocates (ARAs) don't want pigs sleeping in our beds or elephants riding in our cars. We don't want to make “pets” of these animals. What we want is something simpler: we just want people to stop doing terrible things to them.
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About Tom Regan
Tom Regan (November 28, 1938 – February 17, 2017) was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.
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Additional quotes by Tom Regan
So the real question, I believe, is not whether some ARA's use violence. The real question is whether they are justified in doing so. Here are the main outlines of a possible justification. 1. Animals are innocent. 2. Violence is used only when it is necessary to rescue them so that they are spared terrible harms. 3. Excessive violence is never used. 4. Violence is used only after nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted, as time and circumstances permit. 5. Therefore, in these cases, the use of violence is justified.
The less gifted do not exist to serve the interests of the more gifted. The former are not mere things when compared to the latter, to be used as means to the latter's ends. From the moral point of view, each of us is equal because each of us is equally a somebody, not a something, the subject-of-a-life, not a life without a subject.
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What I had learned about human rights proved to be directly relevant to my thinking about animal rights. Whether any animals have rights depends on the true answer to one question: Are any animals subjects-of-a-life? This is the question that needs to be asked about animals because this is the question we need to ask about us.
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