Animal rights movement

The animal rights movement challenges the use of animals for human purposes and argues that animals deserve moral consideration, often including protection from exploitation.

Peter Singer: An Australian philosopher whose 1975 book Animal Liberation helped popularize modern concern for animals’ suffering. His book gave the movement a widely read argument against species-based discrimination.
Speciesism: Discrimination that assigns different moral worth or consideration based on species membership. The movement uses this concept to challenge human preference as a moral justification.
Animal welfare movement: A social movement seeking to improve animals’ treatment and reduce their suffering, including in human-controlled settings. It often supports reforms that rights advocates consider insufficient while animal use continues.
Veganism: A way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as practicable, the use of animals for food, clothing, or other purposes. Vegan practice is a prominent personal response to the movement’s opposition to animal exploitation.
Animal Liberation: A 1975 book by Peter Singer that argues against using animals’ capacity for suffering as a basis for excluding them from moral concern. Its publication became a landmark in the movement’s modern resurgence.
Sentience: The capacity to have subjective experiences, including sensations such as pain and pleasure. Many animal-rights arguments ground moral consideration in animals’ capacity to experience harm.
Animal testing: The use of nonhuman animals in experiments, including biomedical research and product safety testing. Opposition to experiments is a prominent point of conflict over animal use.
Animal law: The body of laws and legal doctrines governing animals, their treatment, and human responsibilities toward them. Legal campaigns seek to change how animals are protected and treated under law.
Henry Salt: An English writer and reformer whose 1892 book Animals’ Rights argued for extending ethical consideration to animals. His work shows that organized arguments for animal rights predate the movement’s contemporary wave.
Moral status: The degree to which an entity is owed moral consideration or has interests that count ethically. The movement disputes which beings have moral status and what that status requires.

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