Specific Rights in Nonhuman Animal Rights Declarations (Part 1)

The term “freedom” has a broad range of meanings from “total absence of restraint to merely a sense of not being unduly hampered or frustrated” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary n.d.-b). Freedom is intuitively valued, since “being free allows animals to pursue those things that are in their own interests” (Browning and Veit 2021, 1). Humans, for example, often rate the wellbeing of nonhuman animals kept in zoos less favourably than the wellbeing of nonhuman animals living in the wild, since they might consider the former to be “bored and sad” (ibid.). In line with this intuition shared by many, “Donaldson and Kymlicka condemn capturing animals and putting them in zoos, even in the most progressive zoos, as ‘a violation of their basic individual rights, and a violation of their rights as members of sovereign communities’” (Keulartz 2021, 119). Castelló (2022, 145) suggests that Nussbaum seems to be in agreement when she states that “depriving animals of their differential ways of living and existing causes “a kind of premature death, the death of a form of flourishing that has been judged to be worthy of respect.” In contrast to this view, Browning and Veit (2021, 2) make the case that “captive animals, when well-cared for, need not necessarily suffer and can even do well in captivity—perhaps even better than in the wild.” “Interests in control or autonomy could […] be outweighed by the factors that reduce autonomy in the wild such as predation, disease, and time spend [sic!] on foraging” (Browning and Veit 2021, 10).