Response to Mr. Fitzpatrick

After reading 'Property' under law, I thought on what was said regarding animal "ownership" and Brian brings up a good point about economic use of animals, that being, there shouldn't be any. As he puts it, "animals are not capable of entering into a contract and therefore any utilization of them in an economic setting is forced labor."

Now, I am not a political science major by any means, but I wanted to look into this idea of "what is defined as forced labor and I found out that in the USA constitution, 13th amendment  forced labor is defined as "Labor or service obtained by: threats of serious harm or physical restraint, any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to believe he would suffer serious harm or physical restraint if he did not perform such labor or services, and/or the abuse or threatened abuse of law or the legal process."

Looking at animals such as pets or test subjects, or food animals being used for forced labor... I don't believe they fall into that category. We are not actively threatening them or making them believe that, if they don't function well, they will receive harm. They probably can't even link "good performance = no harm" rather "this action = harm" I would say that, assuming animals have rights, it isn't a forced labor situation, but more a case of exploitation, extortion, and exaction. The flesh and organs being property of the animal and, since there is no legal way to sign away your organs as an animal (like we can through organ donating), we are taking their bodies and using it for ourselves as though they have no rights to their own property.

I believe that there needs to be a compromise when it comes to animal property rights, since animal products are still useful in our society, even though we are making progress towards separating animals as economic items, yet there are somethings that we have trouble going without, such as drugs and, under current laws, we are required as scientists to test on the lowest form of life, getting progressively higher and higher in the photogenic tree before reaching human testing. If we can find a way to diverge from that to human testing, we would save many animals, yet we would be faced with the predicament of "well, this may kill you or not, we will see" which we want to avoid. It is an interesting world we live in now, but we will see where technologies advance us. For now, I feel it is important to try and respect animals as much as possible, but I feel the economics of animal use can't go without some exploitation.