Animal Rights and the Implications for Business Quiz

PDF page 262: Ethical questions about our treatment of animals arise in several different industries, such as agriculture, medicine, and cosmetics. This section addresses these questions because they form part of the larger picture of the way society treats all living things—including nonhuman animals as well as the environment. All states in the United States have some form of laws to protect animals; some violations carry criminal penalties and some carry civil penalties. Consumer groups and the media have also applied pressure to the business community to consider animal ethics seriously, and businesses have discovered money to be made in the booming business of pets. Of course, as always, we should acknowledge that culture and geography influence our understanding of ethical issues at a personal and a business level.

PDF page 262: Ethical questions about our treatment of animals arise in several different industries, such as agriculture, medicine, and cosmetics. This section addresses these questions because they form part of the larger picture of the way society treats all living things—including nonhuman animals as well as the environment. All states in the United States have some form of laws to protect animals; some violations carry criminal penalties and some carry civil penalties. Consumer groups and the media have also applied pressure to the business community to consider animal ethics seriously, and businesses have discovered money to be made in the booming business of pets. Of course, as always, we should acknowledge that culture and geography influence our understanding of ethical issues at a personal and a business level.

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 269: animal rights the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment diversity dividend the financial benefit of improved performance resulting from a diverse workforce inclusion the engagement of all employees in the corporate culture income inequality the unequal distribution of income among the participants of an economy reasonable accommodation a change or adjustment to a job or other aspect of the work environment that permits an employee with a disability or other need to perform that job undue hardship a difficulty or expense to the firm significant enough that reasonable accommodation may not be required

PDF page 263: Rhode Island, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, led the way in enacting legislation recognizing individuals as guardians, not owners, of their animals, thus giving animals legal status beyond being just items of property. Many U.S. colleges now teach courses on animal rights law, there is strong support for granting fundamental legal rights to animals, and some attorneys, scientists, and ethicists dedicate their careers to animal rights. The animal movement started in the late nineteenth century when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was formed, along with the American Humane Association. The American Welfare Institute and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were established in the 1950s. The first federal animal protection law, the Humane Slaughter Act, was passed in the 1950s to avoid unnecessary suffering to farm animals (ten billion of which are killed every year). The most important U.S. law forbidding cruelty to animals in laboratory settings was enacted in 1966; the Animal Welfare Act requires basic humane conditions to be maintained for animals in testing facilities. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the modern animal rights social movement emerged. It has led to an increased awareness of animal ethics by consumers and businesses. However, despite significant progress, research using animals for product testing continues to be controversial in the United States, particularly because improved technology has offered humane and effective alternatives. The use of animals in biomedical research has drawn slightly less negative reaction than in consumer product testing, because of the more critical nature of the research. Though animal welfare laws have ameliorated some of the pain of animals used in biomedical research, ethical concerns remain, and veterinarians and physicians are demanding change, as are animal rights groups and policy and ethics experts. Increased integration of ethics in business conduct is operating alongside the desire to recognize animal rights, the entitlement of nonhuman animals to ethical treatment.

PDF page 265: Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who has teaching appointments at Princeton University and Monash University in Australia. His book Animal Liberation, originally published in 1975 but revised many times since, serves as a sort of bible for the animal rights movement. Yet Singer is highly controversial because he argues that some humans have fewer cognitive skills than some animals. Therefore, if we determine what we eat on the basis of sentience (the ability to think and/or feel pain), then many animals we eat should be off limits. Watch Singer’s talk, “The Ethics of What We Eat,” which was recorded at Williams College in December 2009 (https://openstax.org/l/53PeterSinger) as an introduction to Singer’s philosophy.

PDF page 265: Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who has teaching appointments at Princeton University and Monash University in Australia. His book Animal Liberation, originally published in 1975 but revised many times since, serves as a sort of bible for the animal rights movement. Yet Singer is highly controversial because he argues that some humans have fewer cognitive skills than some animals. Therefore, if we determine what we eat on the basis of sentience (the ability to think and/or feel pain), then many animals we eat should be off limits. Watch Singer’s talk, “The Ethics of What We Eat,” which was recorded at Williams College in December 2009 (https://openstax.org/l/53PeterSinger) as an introduction to Singer’s philosophy.

PDF page 265: Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who has teaching appointments at Princeton University and Monash University in Australia. His book Animal Liberation, originally published in 1975 but revised many times since, serves as a sort of bible for the animal rights movement. Yet Singer is highly controversial because he argues that some humans have fewer cognitive skills than some animals. Therefore, if we determine what we eat on the basis of sentience (the ability to think and/or feel pain), then many animals we eat should be off limits. Watch Singer’s talk, “The Ethics of What We Eat,” which was recorded at Williams College in December 2009 (https://openstax.org/l/53PeterSinger) as an introduction to Singer’s philosophy.

PDF page 266: As explained by Stephen Latham, the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale, possible legal and regulatory approaches to animal testing vary on a continuum from strong government regulation and monitoring of all experimentation at one end, to a self-regulated approach that depends on the ethics of the researchers at the other end. The United Kingdom has the most significant regulatory scheme, whereas Japan uses the self-regulation approach. The U.S. approach is somewhere in the middle, the result of a gradual blending of the two approaches. A movement has begun to win legal recognition of chimpanzees as the near-equivalent of humans, therefore, as “persons” with legal rights. This is analogous to the effort called environmental justice, an attempt to do the same for the environment (discussed in the section on Environmental Justice in Three Special Stakeholders: Society, the Environment, and Government). A nonprofit organization in Florida, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is an animal advocacy group that has hired attorneys to present a theory in court that two chimpanzees (Tommy and Kiko) have the legal standing and right to be freed from cages to live in an outdoor sanctuary (Figure 8.12). In this case, the attorneys have been trying for years to get courts to grant the chimps habeas corpus (Latin for “you shall have the body”), a right people have under the U.S. Constitution when held