 ADDA is launching its annual audiovisual campaign in
Argentina, as it has been doing for the last 25 years with a view to
making the community more conscious of animals’ rights and wellfare.
There
are people who still declare that animals do not have rights due to the
fact that they do not have obligations. Positive Rights must
acknowledge the evolution of humanity taking into account Natural
Rights. Law is not an exact science so it should be flexible to the
natural incorporation of values that human beings need to include
because of their relationship with the environment, society, family,
work and nature.
The internal legislation of countries as well
as global and international treaties are accepting the struggle to
respect animal rights from an ethical point of view, that is,
supporting the idea animals suffer, instead of considering them as
objects that belong to somebody. I have been devising the guidelines
for ADDA’s work taking into account these claims.
In fact, I
was able to apply this ethical point of view to an international treaty
eighteen years ago, when I worked as a journalist in the team that drew
up the Treaty on Ethics, as a response to ECO 92, the Earth Summit,
which took place in Rio de Janeiro. I was patronized by the centenarian
newspaper La Unión, from Lomas de Zamora, to participate in the event.
With the support of the team working on the Project on Ethics, I was
able to include the intrinsic existential value of non human animals
above their utilitarian value.
Let’s take the case of carriage
horses in the streets. This is a typical example as the suffering of
horses is not taken into account. The human beings who exploit them are
poor people who cannot afford to feed them. Their poverty should not be
an excuse to allow them to kill these horses little by little. On the
contrary, due to their lack of economic means, they should not be
allowed to use horses they cannot feed, or provide veterinarian care
for. In most cases, these horses are whipped and overexerted and
obliged to draw from overloaded carriages. If we continue accepting
this fact, we are disregarding the Natural Right of horses –they are
animals sensitive to pain, abuse, punishment and lack of food or water.
They need a clean place to rest after a day’s work.
ADDA
requests regulations to exempt these noble animals from traction tasks
when they depend on people who do not have the means to feed them and
keep them in good health. There more economical ways to transport the
recyclable material they pick up.
It is absurd to allow people
who cannot sustain themselves to be in charge of a horse, an animal
that needs big amounts of food daily as well as vaccines, medicines and
veterinarian controls to be able to accomplish traction tasks.
This
year’s campaign is made up of two 30 second videos with spoken
messages. The first one aims at educating people to value domestic
company animals, not to abandon them and to sterilize them to prevent
abandonment. The second one aims at the obligation to treat horses
kindly, especially carriage horses mentioned in the above paragraph.
In
both messages, we are addressing the community, including the
authorities, who have the resources to find the necessary ethical
solutions to these problems.
It is important to remind the
people who still accept punishment to animals that animals are like
small children and that they do not always understand what people say
to them. In the case of dogs, their capacity to understand is similar
to that of two or three year old children. Who would punish two or
three year old babies because they do not understand an order? The
physical development of animals does not correspond to their mental
capacity. I have been working on the subject of punishment to animals
for more than 20 years and I have been trying to make people understand
the difference between human beings and animals as regards
understanding words. It was about 20 years ago, in New York, where I
spoke with a researcher on animal punishment, that I was able to put
together an argument that I have been using ever since: “non human
animals are incapable of understanding our messages”. As matter of
fact, two or three months ago, I had the opportunity to read a letter
written by an Argentine animal protectionist using my argument, and I
was very glad because the analysis is very graphic and easy to
understand.
Punishment to animals can never be condoned. This is the message our 2010 campaign has the intention to convey.
Martha Gutierrez – Journalist
ADDA President |
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