They’re worried about our welfare.

My last philosophy class discussed animal rights, and pretty much agreed that the issue isn’t rights, as such, but welfare. You don’t have to give animals rights to be nice to them – right?

I look forward to this principle being applied by the Alpha Centaurians when they get here. They probably won’t ask to be taken to our Leader – I mean, when you go into the paddock do you ask for the head cow? They’ll just, you know, assume dominion (since the Intergalactic Bible states that God has given them authority over the universe and all the beasts within), and then they’ll begin farming us. If we’re good for anything. Exterminating us, if we’re not.

Rights are a funny thing. I saw a sign in Target a while ago that said ‘You have the right to look good on a budget!’ I do? Maybe I also have the right to be a famous novelist and …no hang on, I don’t think you can just claim rights, Rose. Somebody has to be prepared (and able) to give them to you. Which is why pigs don’t have them. Or Chechens, most likely.

Carl Cohen says that rights are ‘a claim that one party can make against another’. Apparently, you have to belong to a species whose members have ‘moral agency’ to have a right to rights. That is, you have to be human. What good luck, to be born into the only species on earth with the unique qualities necessary to have rights! Phew!

Which led me to think…what if a lost tribe of Australopithecii were discovered living in the swamps of Paraguay (ok I don’t know if Paraguay has swamps but let’s just say it does). Would they have rights (in virtue of being, perhaps, pre-human)? Or would we just have an obligation to ‘minimise their suffering’? Because as our cousins, or ancestors, or whatever, they’d be great for medical experimentation, you’d think…

I mean, isn’t being human a sort of continuum? Stan the Man writes out his New Year’s Resolutions, plans his next trip to Fiji and agonises about the homeless. Chad the Chimp resolves not to get into another fight with Big Bruce, plans to seduce that sexy chick with the red butt, and is pretty damn cross about that time he got beaten up for stealing the bananas when it wasn’t even him, it was that sneaky two-faced bastard who goes round picking out everybody’s fleas like butter wouldn’t melt!

Basically, I think it comes down to this. If you want rights, you have to be able to fight for them. You have to be powerful enough to demand them. You’re an Iranian woman who doesn’t want to wear her headscarf? A guy in an orange jumpsuit in Gitmo? A sheep? You have no rights.

Not yet, anyway. But if you did, you’d have something more than just ‘welfare’. You’d have something to wave around, to appeal to. You could say ‘you bastards, you’re denying MY RIGHTS!’.

That is, you could say that, if you could talk.