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The issue of "Animal Rights" has become a growing concern worldwide. It varies from concern regarding the unnecessary injury and pain of animals during their care and slaughter to "Animal Activists" who want to have laws preventing the slaughter of animals for food or clothing. Some have even claimed that animals should fall under the protection of the 5th and 14th Amendments.
The Constitution has two parts to play in this controversy. First, the above-mentioned amendments require the national and State governments, respectively, to protect property so that no one's property can be arbitrarily taken away without due process. Of course if the government frees the animals for public benefit, it must compensate the owners under the 5th Amendment and the Armstrong case. Second, some activists hold that animals should have the 5th and 14th Amendments right to life protection. State governments can restrain property rights in cases where there is a compelling interest, which is, unfortunately for animal activists, a high standard to reach, and it would be difficult to find a compelling interest for preventing the slaughter of farm animals unless it could be shown that some serious harm would arise therefrom or that the animals have a Constitutional Right which would prevent this. Thus, the 5th and 14th Amendments would have to provide protection. These amendments provide such protection to persons, not creatures or objects. So for such protection to apply, animals would clearly have to be people. Now, the definitive case for who and what meets the standard of being a person is the Roe v. Wade case. In that case, Justice Blackmun applies a three-part test for meeting the standard: the prior case law, history, or a Constitutional provision clearly stating that members of the group in question qualify as persons. In actuality, this is probably a two-part test since any case opinion holding animals to be persons within the meaning of the Constitution would be unconstitutional - unless that prior case based its decision on one of the three. If it is based on case law, then, unless that original case law was based on history or a clear Constitutional provision, it cannot have been based on prior case law and was overturned by the Roe decision, since it would not have met one of the three bases. That leaves history or a Constitutional provision. Since to this day the people in the United States and many other countries continue to kill and eat animals, it will probably not fall under the former and no Constitutional provision clearly states animals are people. Therefore, animals |
cannot be considered persons and cannot received the protection of the 5th and 14th Amendments. The result is that, barring a successful Constitutional Amendment, unless Roe is overturned, animals have no rights and can only receive protection if a compelling interest, other than animals' rights, can be found.
The question then arises whether, regardless of the issue of unborn rights, if the Roe opinion were overruled on the determination of who and what qualifies as a person, animals might then fall within the category and be considered to have innate rights. If it were found that animals have a right to life, one of three possibilities would occur: these rights would extend to both carnivores and herbivores, only to herbivores, or only to carnivores. In the first and second cases, this would involved protecting herbivores from other animals as well as from mankind. It would seem, then, that the predators would have to be prevented from killing herbivorous animals and, in the first case, from killing each other. In either case, such predators would have to receive a trial and, possibly, also face incarceration or the death penalty! Further, the herbivorous population, including those released from the various farms and ranches, would likely experience a drastic increase until they reduced vegetation to such a limit that many of them would starve. In the third case, where only carnivores would have rights, Man would be able to keep the herbivorous animals on farms and ranches, but the other herbivores would still be subject to predation by the carnivore-citizens. However, the latter would have to be restrained from eating each other and, in such cases, would have to face the possibility of incarceration and death! - or an institution, as there would probably be a finding that the animals did not know what they were doing was morally or legally wrong.
In light of the previous reasoning, it is clear that animals cannot have inalienable rights. This does not mean that States may not be deemed to have a compelling interest in preventing unnecessary cruelty to animals in the food production industry and in sports hunting. Limits on the number of wild animals killed can also be - and are - put into effect to sustain animal populations, but it appears to be neither legally possible nor realistically practicable for non-human animals to have rights. |