Which would you rather have?
And to clarify, "libertarian animal rights" mean that the pet owner can abuse and/or slaughter their own pets because it is their property.
under true libertarianism, animal rights are respected and we do not violate the NAP towards them. we have no more right to exploit an animal nonconsensually than we do a human.
read nozick
By the same logic used to justify violating the rights of animals, there's no reason to care about violating the rights of other humans.
@Alex Humans can petition for their rights. Animals cannot.
Murray Rothbard made that distinction in The Ethics of Liberty.
If you were to cut out a human's vocal chords and break their hands, do they suddenly lose all of their rights because they can no longer petition for them?
@Alex They can still communicate via mouthing. They can blink their eyes in Morse code or in binary.
An animal can communicate their pain through various nonverbal means as well. Their inability to speak our language doesn't deprive them of their rights any more than someone who's forced to communicate via morse code. I don't know about you, but I don't know morse code - the person in this theoretical certainly couldn't communicate with me.
To extend this - your argument is that a human needs to be capable of communicating to have rights. This means that a human who is unable to communicate would logically lack rights. A child who was never taught to speak, or someone stuck in a land where no one speaks their language, or the victim of some horrific accident that deprived them of their ability to speak, would lack rights in such a scenario. If an organization was to breed human slave labor and never teach any of them how to speak or communicate, would any of those people have rights, since they're unable to petition for their rights?
I'm morally opposed to abortion but also believe in an absolute right to bodily autonomy and by extension support it remaining legal.
