江阴暑期外语培训美文分享：Animals have rights？江阴学英语推荐哪里？

A江阴上元黄老师

Before the Enlightenment Movement, people thought animals are inferior to human beings. However, Jeremy Bentham put forward the new idea that human beings have duties to treat animals equally (Yip, Jerome＆Oweida, 2016). Since then, people show different opinions toward this issue. It is hard to judge whether animals have rights or not. One the one hand, some people think that animals have no rights. On the other hand, some people think animals do have rights--although animals are different from human beings in some conditions such as degree of cognition, they have sentient ability and intelligence, life and live in the world, and inner value. They should be given rights.
Animals have rights because they have sensibility and little bit intelligence. Jena(2015) argues that pain of animals can be easily know than pain of human beings since animals have no enough ability to control behavior. In this condition, many philosophers thought that “sentience” is the qualifying standard for give rights to living beings. (Jena, 2015). For instance, if a person has a pet, like a cat, he or she should cleanse it. In this behavior, the person pulls the fur of the cat. The cat would scream and probably would avoid the person’s touch. This example indicates that animals have sensibility and can feel pain. The sensibility is a “ necessary condition for having rights.”(Jena, 2015).
Likewise, the pet’s example implies that animals do have intelligence, because animal not only do some behaviors to react pain but also stay away source which cause pain. Similarly Jena also illustrates an example about a dog, and Jena (2015) says that the reaction of dog happens since it recognizes the consequence of the behavior and it is not because of its instinct. (Jena, 2015). This behavior means animals have intelligence. They are possessed of rights.