Some animals are more equal than others

So the new topic is out. I like the subject area, but I'll a little wary of the phrasing.

First of all, normally we look at justice as fairly resolving conflicting claims. Now even if I grant that animals might have legitimate claims, I can't cover this in a blanket statement, and I wonder how much we'll end up arguing about what we're arguing about rather than simply arguing it.

Animals might have a legitimate claim on not suffering needlessly. I mean, it's wrong on all counts to torture cats, for instance, because it inflicts unwarranted pain. Do mosquitoes have a similarly legitimate claim? Maybe. The pain we inflict on mosquitoes is warranted by the pain they inflict on us. Maybe we can warrant safe passage to any living creature that provides safe passage to us. Quid pro quo in the animal world. That's relatively easy, a reciprocal live-and-let-live approach.

Where we would mostly want to suggest that animals have some rights is where their legitimate concerns outweigh ours. Or maybe more to the point, animal rights would mean that if their legitimate concerns outweigh ours, they should be granted. There's a difference. Areas like medical testing, for instance, theoretically posits the rights of animals versus the rights of humans. Should humans have a prior claim? Since it's humans that are doing the claiming, that seems a little unfair. What greater right does a human have to live than, say, a gorilla? I ask this not rhetorically, because if you can't answer it, you can't argue this resolution. I wouldn't go about blinding rabbits so that Madame will smell sweeter, but to go about killing non-humans so that humans can live? Different question.

Animal rights wouldn't necessarily preclude human omnivorousness, would it? An animal might have the right to be treated humanely (note the root of that word) but still get eaten with cherry sauce. The distinction, again, is meaningful for those debating this topic.

Still, I have trouble drawing a line from the word justice to the concept of animal rights because animal is a big, complicated mental construct. It's hard to weigh. Me versus you is a couple of schmegeggies with conflicting claims, and probably we can do a cost-benefit analysis of our dispute and come to terms on that basis. It's way hard to CBA you versus a donkey. (Me versus a donkey, on the other hand, is a no-brainer.) I like a cleaner field for discussions of justice, myself.

This will be fun to talk about, though. It is a good subject. I worry that bad debaters will make a hash out of it, getting so lost in definitions and meaningless distinctions that heads will burst, but bad debaters do that no matter what the topic. For the rest of us, it's a topic with some meat vegetables on its bones stalks.