Thinking About Caring About Animals

摘要

The company Genetics Savings and Clone recently began taking orders from people who are so enamored of their cats that they are willing to spend $50,000 to have them cloned. Millions of people in the United States consider their pet dog or cat to be a member of their family, and with the development of mat relationship has come a commitment to provide health care that is beyond the reach of most humans. Feline kidney-transplant programs are now available. At the same time, industrial agriculture treats animals as merely part of me production process and attempts to find ways to cram an ever-increasing number of animals into as little space as possible. Most of us who have deep emotional attachments to some nonhuman animal spend little time thinking of the source of the hamburger or chicken we eat or the leather products we happily wear. Yet these practices typically result in the abject misery of large numbers of animals. This incongruity lies at the heart of Animal Rights, a collection of essays edited by Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum.