Kind or cruel?
People have argued for two hundred years about what we owe the animals we eat, wear, test, watch and love. This wing lays out the ideas, the laws, the groups on every side and the hard cases, so students can weigh the evidence and decide where they stand.
Welfare or rights?
Animal welfare
People may use animals for food, work, research and company, but must treat them humanely and spare needless suffering.
- Asks: how should we use animals?
- Held by most laws, veterinarians and farmers
- Tools: the Five Freedoms, audits, better housing
Animal rights
Many animals have lives of their own and rights that should not be traded away, so using them is wrong even when done gently.
- Asks: may we use animals at all?
- Held by philosophers such as Tom Regan and groups such as PETA
- Tools: ending farming, testing and shows that use animals
Most people sit somewhere between. Peter Singer, often called the father of the movement, argues from suffering rather than rights.
Walk the wing
Can they suffer?
Machines or minds? Bentham's question, the Five Freedoms and the Five Domains, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, and the welfare and farmer views.
From Martin's Act to the PACT Act
Two hundred years of laws and the people who pushed them, from a London coffee house to Florida's Trooper's Law.
Who speaks for animals?
PETA, Humane World for Animals, the ASPCA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the industry-funded critic, the farm groups and the zoo association: each in its own words, with the criticism each faces.
Hard places: farm, ring, tank, lab, wild
Crates and cages, Proposition 12 at the Supreme Court, the circus without elephants, orcas, fur, the laboratory, big cats and the wildlife trade.
The price of kindness, and the link
Who pays for welfare, what labels mean, the egg-price shock; then the link between cruelty and violence, and how a society decides what is cruel.
What you can do
Know the signs, report in Manatee County, adopt and plan for storms, help out, and a class debate: where do you stand?
Being kind to animals
For our youngest visitors: animals have feelings, what every pet needs, gentle hands, wild animals stay wild, and telling a grown-up.
Drawer: Friendly Beasts: Kind or cruel?
Next door: The Zoo: Should zoos exist? · Bred, sold, kept, adopted, killed · Pigs: Reality? · Animals made to fight (9-12)
Stories about kindness and cruelty
Black Beauty
A horse tells its own life, kind owners and cruel ones. It helped end the bearing rein.
Charlotte's Web
A spider saves a pig raised for the table: friendship, and the question every farm raises.
The One and Only Ivan
A gorilla who lived for years in a shopping-mall cage tells his story; based on a real gorilla who later moved to Zoo Atlanta.
Animal Farm
A fable in which farm animals overthrow the farmer. It is about power among people more than about animals; read it to ask why writers use animals to tell hard truths.