The animal rights movement has failed to achieve its core goal—the legal abolition of animal property status—and likely will not in our lifetimes. The sheer anthropocentric inertia of global economies, protein demand in low-income nations, and cultural traditions (bullfighting, foie gras, ritual slaughter) is immense.
This judicial conservatism is not mere speciesism. It reflects a genuine conundrum: rights entail responsibilities. A chimp cannot be sued for breach of contract. So what does “right to liberty” mean when the subject cannot integrate into human-defined society? Sanctuary—the fallback solution—is itself a form of captivity. A fascinating development is the strategic compromise adopted by major organizations like the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and Mercy For Animals. They are “new welfarists”: they pursue welfare reforms (e.g., Proposition 12) as stepping stones to eventually reduce and eliminate animal agriculture by making it economically unsustainable. Higher welfare standards increase production costs, making plant-based alternatives more competitive.
My review finds this critique compelling but incomplete. Empirical evidence from Europe suggests that banning battery cages did indeed lead to a reduction in the number of hens (since aviaries are more expensive to operate). Welfare reforms can act as a ratchet, not a safety net. The question is whether the ratchet moves fast enough given the scale of suffering—over 80 billion land animals slaughtered annually. Most welfare/rights discourse is astonishingly narrow: it focuses on farmed vertebrates and, secondarily, lab animals and pets. Wildlife suffering (starvation, disease, predation) is generally excluded as “natural,” despite the fact that humans cause vast wildlife deaths via habitat destruction, roads, and wind turbines. A rights view that ignores ecological suffering is incomplete.
There is a clean, uncompromising beauty to this view. It avoids the hypocrisies of welfare—it doesn’t ask whether a slightly larger cage is okay, because the cage itself is wrong. It aligns with abolitionist moral frameworks we accept for humans: we don’t argue for “humane slavery,” we argue for its end. Where the rights approach stumbles is on the ground. Absolute rights are difficult to enforce in a world of competing interests. What happens when a rat infestation threatens human health? What of feral cats decimating island bird populations? The rights paradigm offers few answers beyond “non-interference,” which can conflict with ecological preservation.