Richard Cupp, “Moving Beyond Animal Rights: A Legal/Contractualist Critique,” San Diego Law Review, 2009
Pepperdine University School of Law Professor Richard Cupp argues in this article that the better way to protect animal welfare is to focus on the human moral obligation to treat animals without cruelty. He contends that the current, rapidly expanding movement to endow animals with legal rights would be counterproductive if successful. Cupp reports that 94 law schools either now teach animal law or are planning to do so; three scholarly journals focus exclusively on animal law; and national, state and local bar associations have inaugurated sections
dedicated to the subject.
Among other matters, Cupp suggests that allowing some animals to ‘earn’ dignity rights if sufficiently intelligent “implies that perhaps some humans should lose their dignity rights if they are sufficiently unintelligent.” He envisions what would happen to our view of infants and mentally incapacitated adults if intelligent animals were accorded rights because of their intelligence. He also claims that animal “rights” activists “risk ignoring or minimizing societal costs” when they “casually use rights concepts to address animals’ welfare.” According to Cupp, if “killing all animals capable of suffering for food, clothing, research, or other human use were held suddenly to violate the animals’ rights, our current economy would, of course, collapse.”
He concludes by noting that state laws against cruelty to animals have dramatically increased without the need to endow animals with legally protected “rights” and points to recent outrage over the football celebrity who raised dogs to fight. In this regard, Cupp states, “Americans appropriately focused anger toward Vick for his failure to properly care for the dogs under his control rather than on rights for the dogs . . . None of these measures to enhance protection of animals from cruelty required an assignment of rights. All of these measures called upon participants in the social contract to exercise reasonable responsibility,” which, he argues, “is what shall ultimately determine whether
animals—as well as humans—will be treated humanely.”
Cupp reports that the National Association for Biomedical Research and the Pepperdine University School of Law provided separate research grants related to his article.
