Animal Rights Debate

In recent years, as more and more damage to the ecological balance in our society and the emergence of acts of cruelty to animals, animal protection movement and the environmental movement continue to rise. We are facing a problem that our human environment became worse and worse, our natural ecosystems continue to failure, which threatened many animal species and led them directly to extinction. More insight started to pay attention to the importance of animal protection issues, and hoped to solve real problems through giving animals legal rights. In this process, a growing number of philosophy, ethics and legal began to think the relationship between man and nature, humans and animals, although there are many heated debate and theoretical differences, but they are useful for studying the animal protection. In this paper, there are four parts to sort out and analyze the theory of the animal rights debate through the perspective of philosophy of law.The first part is the overview of the animal right debate. This chapter first briefly described the background of animal rights, and find out the hidden theory meaning through carding the issue of animal rights debate in our country, which are the differences between the traditional subject-object dichotomy and postmodernism subject-object integration.The second part is the evolution of animal rights. This chapter reviews the evolution of animal rights theory in the western, from ancient Greece, Rome and Renaissance to modern times. With the rise of modern animal protection movement, animal rights theory developed, there had been some representative animal rights theorists such as Peter·Singer, Tom·Reagan, Cary·Francione and so on, the paper elaborated the views and theories of three scholars.The third part is legal analysis of the animal rights. The profound meaning behind the animal rights debate which was the differences between the traditional subject-object dichotomy and postmodernism subject-object integration, so this chapter first introduced the establishment of subject-object dichotomy. Subsequently the paper explained criticism of animal rights theory by subject-object dichotomy, and then pointed out that there were some problems in this criticism, so we deduced subject-object integration generated from postmodernism and animal rights view under the guidance of this methodology, Finally the chapter explain that subject-object dichotomy can not solve the various problems in practice, subject-object integration had its advanced nature.The forth part is reflections on animal rights. Animal rights theory under subject-object integration although overcame some shortcomings of subject-object dichotomy, but it also had its own dilemma, for example, it was not very feasible on the equality of animal rights, and how to judge the conflict between human rights and animal rights. However, the animal rights theory was useful for consummating the animal legal protection in our country, animal protection mechanism in our country started lately, and there was a large gap on the perfect legislative system between us and western countries, so the idea of animal rights was difficult to achieve in China. The scope of the animal protection needed to be expanded, and the legislative purpose must be changed from the current emphasis on the resources and the practicality of animals into respecting for life and protecting animals, and we had to continue to improve the operability of existing laws.