Can anything other than humans - homo sapiens - have a right to life?
    
     Human beings have a right to life.
    
     What does this mean, on the deepest, essential level?
    
     Humans are animals. They evolved from other species. However, this one species has passed through the identification "animal" to another essential characteristic, namely, human beings possess cognitive integration, triggered by an inner will to think and then act on that thinking. As a result, individual humans are capable of productive cooperation and invention, resulting in what we call civilization.
    
     If you think that humans are on the same level as all other animals, focus on this: if humans were equal to polar bears, wouldn't murder of living things with the right to life be acceptable and honored for mankind? We not only tolerate it in animals, we have a grudging admiration for it. "The King of the Beasts", for instance, and the near-religious esteem in which the polar bear is held, even though the entire focus of this bear - perhaps the most ruthless killer of all mammals -- is on murdering everything that moves, especially baby seals right in front of their mothers.
    
     I submit to all those seeking to elevate animals to the status of equal rights with humans that by doing so, you throw into contradiction the right to life of humans. Most people attempting to do so simply disregard this contradiction; they certainly do not intend to prosecute the polar bears for murder of seals or chimpanzees for murdering their own clan-mates, nor are they willing to let humans murder other humans as a right. Yet, that is the logical conclusion required by the premise "all animals have the right to life." This is a dead solid syllogism. I welcome any rational challenges to it. [as a collarary, note that if anmials have right to life, human beings killing and eating a fish or a chicken or a cow would be murder]
    
     My objection to those with compassion for animals, for those enraged at the extinction of species and the reduction of habitat for wild animals is that they jump to a solution that invalidates human rights. As a consequence of that, they unnecessarily raise up huge, vocal, justified enmity from every true humanist on the planet. Including myself in that last group, my position is:
    
     Stop saying animals have rights like humans. We do not intend to begin allowing humans to murder humans, we do not intend to persecute animals for murder, and we do not intend to let the contradiction bludgeon its way into human civilization and politics.
    
     If you wish to know my level of vehemence on this, I will make it crystal clear.
    
     The passion, zealotry and willingness to be irrational in the hearts of those attempting to establish codified, lawful rights for animals is often matched in them with equal zeal and militancy against the establishment of rights of a human fetus.
    
     I will make my position on the above even clearer.
    
     1) a polar bear or elephant or whale is NOT a human being.
     2) a human fetus is NOT a human being.
     3) neither have rights. Neither ought be protected by law from being terminated.
     4) Any attempt to give non-human animals rights would and should then invoke full human rights for the fetus in the womb.
    
     That having been said, and rising above the level of what ought to be law, I submit that compassion for a human fetus, a potential human being, has value thousands of times - perhaps millions of times -- that of an animal born and living in the wild.
    
     John Donohue
     1/7/07