Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
The fatal flaw in the slavers' argument was of course that the slaves actually were human. They lost the argument on their own terms, once it was widely understood that human slaves were being treated with less dignity than their humanity demanded.
The question now is whether the treatment of a hunted fox is less than that demanded by its status as a fox. Leaving aside the fact that animals have no status in law - our laws being framed in terms of what people can and cannot do to animals, rather than what "rights" animals have - I would argue that a fox being hunted down by a pack of dogs, even being "torn to pieces" by that pack, is receiving no different treatment than it could have expected in the wild, had humans themselves not removed the apex predators such as wolves and eagle owls (though these are, I believe, beginning to make a comeback).
I have no doubt that the fox is distressed by the hunt. I have no doubt that its death is painful. However it is suffering nothing that is not routinely suffered by all wildlife, everywhere, every day. The argument that it is cruel does not stand up. Life is cruel. Death is cruel. You can't legislate against that.
What we're actually left with is people projecting their own feelings on to animals - a phenomenon pretty much confined to the cosseted, urbanised, Disneyfied Western world, where animals dress up in waistcoats to sing and dance for our entertainment, and meat is a mysterious pink substance that magically appears in shrink wrap on supermarket shelves - and arbitrary morality such as that articulated by Damien earlier: it's wrong because "it just is". All of which is fine as far as it goes. But to then legislate for that is as illiberal as legislating that everyone must be in church on Sunday morning.
And it's nothing at all like the smoking ban, which isn't a ban at all - simply a restriction on where you can smoke, enacted not for the benefit of the smoker but as a health and safety measure intended to protect those who work in public spaces and therefore don't have the choice to avoid passive inhalation.
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You may well argue that, but many would say that you're arguing from an archaic position. It simply is no longer the case that we judge the way we treat animals by the way they are treated in nature. These days, we recognise that animals deserve to be treated with a certain amount of respect, and should be spared unnecessary suffering. That, rightly or wrongly, is the background of the ban on fox hunting. By and large, society has decided that animals deserve respect. That's democracy doing its job, not democracy misfiring.