Animals have the right not to be eaten: This is a direct quote from one of the most respected legal

scholars in the field. Seriously. Setting aside the matter of rights for a moment, lets acknowledge inescapable reality: in nature, every animal dies and is eaten. All life depends upon death. If you truly love and respect Nature, you cannot reject its most central process. Not only is being eaten a virtual certainty for every animal, this vital biological mechanism provides food for every living animal: billions of animals make it through each day by eating the bodies of those who died the day before. Even when not ripped apart by a predator, animals are eventually consumed by small organisms that are then consumed by larger organisms. This is the cycle of life: you may celebrate this truth or lament it, but you cannot change it. If you could enforce the notion that no animals be eaten, in a few swift weeks life on Earth would cease. Animals have the right to a life without suffering: So absurd is this argument that it is astonishing that anyone might accept the assertion, yet it is the bedrock quicksand of the animal rights movement in general and PETA in particular: 1. In the natural world, animals possess no rights, no protections, no guarantees. Rights are a human construct, conferred by society or god: this abstraction has nothing to do with nature. 2. Even if we were to extend the general concept of rights to animals, one we could not grant would be the right to life free from suffering. No animal in the wild is free from suffering, nor is any human. A life free from suffering is not a right, but a fantasy. 3. Life in nature is a struggle full of suffering cold, heat, hunger, thirst, parasites, injury, illness, predation, conflict. Leave the confinement of your house and go live in the wild for a few months, then decide whether you prefer the freedom of the wild or the comforts of your home. 4. If we pretend that a life without suffering were a reasonable goal, there is only one way to imagine achieving it: capture all the animals in the wild and bring them into our world and devote ourselves to ensuring that their lives are as free from suffering as possible. The only animals, including humans, that come close to life free of suffering are the millions of pampered pets whose every need and desire are met by doting owners, with the help of groomers, veterinarians, chiropractors, nutritionists, and others. Animals deserve to be free: Very few animals are free: their movements are curtailed by other animals ranges, by geographic barriers, by predators. Freedom is a human illusionwe are all constrained. More important, anyone who has spent time around animals knows that, with few exceptions, animals do not want to travel: they want to establish a home range and stay there, safe and comfortable. If their range happens to be defined by fencing, and if within that range all their needs are met, animals do not yearn for some hypothetical freedom.

Animals deserve the longest possible life: Life in nature is seldom long. Most wild animals die well before maturity, and few live long enough to see old age. If you believe that animals deserve the longest possible life, you cannot simultaneously believe that they should be in the wild: captive animals indisputably live considerably longer than wild animals. ... Eat meat, do not eat meat. It matters not to the animals of the world. They do not care whether they are eaten by you or some other animal, although you are hopefully persuaded by the arguments above that eating meat is neither immoral nor necessarily harmful to animals.