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      Some materials for teaching about animal rights and animal welfare

      © Gary E. Varner

      Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University

      These pages are permanently under construction
      Last modified June 9, 2003

      What's here:

        1. An on-line lecture on animal rights v. animal welfare
          This is a fairly detailed background lecture that will help you understand in some detail (including suggestions for further reading) how "popular" characterizations of the animal rights/welfare split compare to "philosophical" characterizations of the same.

          (Basically: In popular parlance, "animal rightists" are ill-informed, dangerous wackos, whereas "animal welfarists" are well-informed, reasonable people. But philosophically, "animal rightists" just argue for extending a familiar moral concept, "having moral rights," to animals, whereas "animal welfarists" are hedonistic utilitarians, at least when it comes to non-human animals [and they have more in common than they realize {or would be comfortable admitting!} with Peter Singer, who isn't an animal rights theorist at all, philosophically!])
        2. A summary overview that you could hand out to students
          This summary squeezes into a nutshell the details of the above on-line lecture, and you could use it to familiarize your students with the philosophical distinctions very quickly.

          (From a philosopher's perspective, it's an uncomfortably small, pistachio-nut-sized shell, but so it goes.)
        3. Four sets of cases you could use, concerning:

            1. General agricultural practices.
              Three cases: beef slaughter, milk cows, laying hens.

            2. Specific agricultural practices.
              Four cases: the sow with a broken leg, de-horning, Kosher slaughter, farrowing crates for swine.

            3. Hunting cases.
              Three cases: a farmer, a park ranger, and a high dollar trophy hunter.

            4. The vegetarian meal plan case.
              One (truth is stranger than fiction) case.

          Case sets (A) and (C) are designed to draw out various details of the "summary overview" and "lecture" above. Sets (B) and (D) are written so that they can be used independently of the "summary overview" and "lecture" above.

      Send comments, suggestions, questions, corrections, typo sightings, constructive criticisms, unconstructive complaints, etc. to Gary Varner at this address: gary@philosophy.tamu.edu