Animal Rights by law

456:

Animals, especially when they’re around humans, certainly need their rights to be legislated. The story of domesticated animals is all about loss of dignity and loss of life. We should atone for what we’ve done to them, or at least leave them alone … but, as it happens we’ve damaged them so badly for so long that we can’t simply let them out of their prisons. We need to protect them. Domesticated animals wouldn’t be able to survive on their own. Importantly we owe them ‘safe passage’, to live out their lives in a sanctuary or refuge … to be retired in other words. At the very least they are entitled to an unmolested rest-of-their-life.
Since we know that neither animal muscle tissue or animal by products are essential for a healthy life, there are no arguments left to support non-vegan living. In fact these animal items are detrimental to our health, so all the more reason to let them go.
Existing animals should have their lives given back to them, but certainly we can’t allow the billions alive today to breed indiscriminately, since we need to have their numbers (whole populations of them in fact) drastically reduced, and as quickly as possible. If we keep large numbers of animals alive and then let them breed without fertility control we’d defeat the whole purpose of rescuing them. Their numbers wouldn’t reduce … and we know what would happen then … as the number of ‘useful animals’ remains high or even increases the more their dollar-earning potential will tempt the unscrupulous human back to using them again, at a later date. Most humans are not to be trusted around animals any more than paedophiles are to be trusted around kids.
Without fertility control the animal-liberation-solution is untenable. Even as it is, the cost of caring for our present-day’s animals could be an intolerable burden on the public purse. But retiring the animals still alive today is probably a relatively minor problem in the greater scheme of things, since people do love being around animals. Any government could find potential animal-refuge workers, ready and willing (and probably for low wages) to work at animal retirement centres. These sanctuaries could be set up on land no longer used for animal farming.
The details, however, concerning reproduction, must include the possibility of denying the animals reproduction rights. We would have to, in some way, control birth rates. But free them we must. We can’t use our energies better than in the work of dis-enslaving these presently incarcerated animals.