From moral rights to constitutional rights: beyond élitist and electiv speciesism

Abstract

Animal rights movement and the laws it have propounded since the 19 th Century are critically analyzed in this article under the perspective of the elitist and elective speciesism that constitute both the foundation of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric ethics. Moral tradition considers non human animal species as inferior to the human species since non human animals lack any characteristic for being morally considerable. This is conceived here as elitist speciesism. On the other hand, animal protection movements consider certain kinds of animals as morally considerable while ignoring thesuffering and pain of all others; this represents another kind of speciesism called in this article elective speciesism. The history of animal protection laws shows that even in England and in the United States of America the first laws evidenced elective speciesism. The same kind of bias is typicalfor Brazilian animal protection laws. I hope to contribute to the notion that if we really want to protect animals, not only a certain kind of them, we have to give up our emotional preferences and predilections for some animals and move toward a complete abolition of both institutionalized and particular forms of animal use, abuse and murder.