Animals and Objectivism:
The Hardest Truth

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Introduction

Many people accept Objectivism in politics, economics, and ethics — until the subject of animals arises. Then the question appears:

“If they can feel pain, or even show intelligence, don’t they have rights too?”

The Objectivist answer is clear: rights are a moral concept that applies only to rational beings.

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Why Animals Cannot Have Rights

Rights are not gifts from nature. They are principles that define the conditions of survival for rational beings living together.

Rights presuppose reason — the ability to form concepts, to choose, to take responsibility for actions.

Animals lack this capacity. They act on instinct. They can feel, they can adapt, some can even learn symbols — but they do not think conceptually.

Take the famous example of Koko the gorilla, who was taught hundreds of signs. Impressive? Yes.
But Koko never built a theory, never created knowledge, never produced values to sustain her life.
She used signals, not concepts. That gap makes all the difference.

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What This Means For Us

You have the right to eat meat.

You have the right to wear leather.

You have the right to use animals in research.

“Animal rights” is a contradiction in terms.

But that does not mean morality disappears. How you treat animals is a reflection of who you are. A rational man may use animals for his values, but he does not take joy in pointless cruelty.

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The Hardest Truth

Imagine a man who, every day, tortures a bonobo for his own amusement.
The bonobo has no rights. The law should not intervene.

But morality does. Such a man reveals himself as irrational, sadistic, corrupt — the kind of person no rational mind should admire or sanction.

This is the hardest truth: to recognize that animals have no rights, yet to also recognize that cruelty to them corrupts the soul of the man who inflicts it.

And the proper moral response is not silence.
Such a man deserves to be judged and condemned — not by courts of law, but by the moral judgment of other men. He should be shunned, ostracized, and treated with contempt — not because the bonobo has rights, but because he has forfeited the moral stature of a man who values life.

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Conclusion