Animal rights

Essay by hedieh400B, November 2014

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Animal Rights

Today, after the evolution of human beings over several millenniums, in the twenty-first century, it is hard to deny animal rights. As most people know, animals have rights just like humans; however, they are unable to defend their own rights. As a result, some humans take advantage of this situation and violate animal rights by hunting, torturing, or abusing them. Given the above situation, a simple question comes to the mind of any rational human: why should we as humans allow this kind of cruelty to take place?

Hunting, the stalking and killing of animals, has been an American tradition most likely since the Ice Age when plant food became scarce. Today it exists as a "sport"; but even when the animal's flesh is eaten, there is no excuse or justification for stalking and killing an animal in his or her habitat. Nevertheless, people not only engage in hunting but strongly defend it as their right to do so.

With an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, handguns, bows and arrows, hunters kill more than 200 million animals yearly - crippling, orphaning, and harassing millions more. The annual death toll in the U.S. includes 42 million mourning doves, 30 million squirrels, 28 million quail, 25 million rabbits, 20 million pheasants, 14 million ducks, 6 million deer, and thousands of geese, bears, moose, elk, antelope, swans, cougars, turkeys, wolves, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, boars, and other woodland creatures (Compiled by The Fund for Animals with data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife agencies).

Less than seven percent of the U.S. population hunts. Hunting is permitted on 60 percent of U.S. wildlife refuges and in many national forests and state parks. More than 200 million animals are killed every year on federal land alone (more than half a...