"Animals cannot have rights because they do not have interests. They cannot have interests because they cannot have desires or emotions. They cannot have desires or emotions because they cannot have the thoughts required for them. And they cannot have those thoughts because they cannot speak."
Okay, you made sense until that last part there. They cannot have thoughts because they cannot speak? Like speech is a prerequisite to thinking? No way. I totally agree with Midgley when she says that this statement is complete rubbish. She acknowledges that infants cannot speak, and yet we don't say that they cannot have thoughts. And then what happens when they are taught to speak? Do they magically just start having thoughts to voice? And what about people who are never taught to speak, like feral children, or something? Or the mute who simply can't speak for whatever reason, such as physically lacking the capacities to do so? No, I don't think that the argument that animals can't feel or think because they can't speak really holds up. Midgley notes that animals have to have some capacity to think and feel and plan, because there are cycles they must catch onto (migration cycles, seasons, even taking their owner for a walk every Friday). In addition, Koko the gorrila proves a prime example of an animal's ability to think, thus feel, thus have interests. Not being able to vocalize as humans do, Koko was taught to spak through sign language. I doubt that she didn't have thoughts or feelings before she learned to sign. And what about the progress of her language? She has learned more and more signs as the years have passed, so has she begun to think and feel more and more than she did before? I think not. I doubt an argument that humans with expansive vocabularies think or feel more than those without would be accepted either.
And besides, animals, though not communicating through vocalization, do communicate in a myriad of different ways. Shouldn't this indicate that they have interests? When one considers that somewhere up to 90% of human communication is nonverbal or paralanguage, rather than verbal communication, one can't help but acknowlege the letitimacy of other animals' nonverbal forms of communication. Just because they can't speak, doesn't mean they don't communicate.
I have to say, whoever thinks that because you can't talk means you don't have rights. That's complete junk. I do not see how those two thoughts even correlate. So when someone looses their voice, they loose all rights? Now, I know that is the extreme but not having a voice doesn't equal not being able to think and have desires. A baby can reason that they're thirsty and point the fridge and a person who is mute is able put thoughts together they just cannot communicate it. To me that is just a way to get out of treating animals with respect. I'm not saying that they should be fed steak at night or that you could adopt every stray cat, but you also shouldn't kick them either. I also don't think that animals can't speak. They can, it's been proven that dolphin communicate with each other through different calls, we just cannot understand it.
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