I’ve questioned Princess Michael’s judgement in the past, for example over her conducting a public affair with a young Russian ‘businessman’, who was then shot dead in the middle of Moscow. (I’m not implying a causative relationship there.)
Yet her statement on animal rights is absolutely correct in substance, if somewhat amusing in form. Animals, she said, can’t have rights because they neither pay taxes nor vote.
One can infer that HRH sees those two activities as the defining characteristics of humanity. That leaves her vulnerable to the objection that we all know people who neither vote nor pay taxes, but are still entitled to enjoying a full range of rights.
Children, for example, seldom generate taxable income and they are constitutionally prevented from voting. That, however, doesn’t mean they can’t claim (or have claimed on their behalf) most of the grown-up rights.
Also, a chap who doesn’t believe in democracy and is facing trial for life-long tax evasion still has a right to be represented by counsel in a fair and speedy trial – and not to have a confession tortured out of him.
However, while one can’t really expect intellectual rigour from HRH, her heart, now free from attachment to a Russian ‘businessman’, is in the right place. Animals don’t have, nor can possibly have, any rights.
The right to life aside, all human rights are contingent on duties. For example, take our right to be protected by the state. One of the oldest legal principles states that protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem – protection entails allegiance, and allegiance entails protection.
Hence the state can’t protect Fido because Fido can’t pledge allegiance to the state – this, unlike the truths mentioned in the American Declaration of Independence, really is self-evident. Nor can Fido have any rights contingent on duties because he has no duties.
Neither does Daisy the Cow have the right not to be eaten piece by piece. Since all our jurisprudence is ultimately rooted in Scripture, it’s useful to remember that the Bible has at least 30 verses specifically endorsing consumption of meat, starting with Genesis 3:9: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”
Of course in our enlightened times scriptural morality is ignored as an annoying irrelevance. New times are supposed to produce their own morality, yet this is something they have so far lamentably failed to do.
Instead they’ve produced an infinitely expanding set of shamanistic mantras with no moral, intellectual or indeed physiological support behind them. That flings the door wide open for anyone to claim a right to anything – any wish or passion can pose first as a right and then as an entitlement.
Hence today we’re served up any number of bogus rights: to homomarriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, orgasms, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, paternity leave and so forth. All of these are products of consensus; none is a natural right.
Of these, animal rights aren’t the most pernicious, but they are certainly among the most cloyingly sentimental. Sentimentality is of course the modern surrogate for sentiment, and most people no longer have a natural emetic reaction when exposed to it.
By the same token anthropomorphism has replaced anthropocentrism. We treat animals like humans because we treat humans like animals. This is the inevitable result of knocking the Judaeo-Christian feet from under our civilisation.
To wit: last April, for the first time in history a New York judge granted a writ of habeas corpus brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of two chimps, Hercules and Leo, who were being used for biomedical experiments. This was an indirect assertion that Hercules and Leo are human, or near enough to be entitled to the same rights.
Indeed, if we accept that man is nothing but so many molecules coming together over a jolly long time as a result of some kind of initial biochemical accident, then the NRP’s argument makes perfect sense.
It can be demonstrated that chimpanzees are genetically so close to humans as to make no difference. The two share 99 per cent of their active genetic material, and the genetic distance between them is a mere 0.386.
If that’s all there is to it, then chimps are practically human, even though their intelligence admittedly falls into the low end of the human range, the one inhabited by Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Jeremy Corbyn and most supporters of Chelsea FC.
If, however, we define a human being by unfashionably referring to the part that Darwin somehow forgot to explain, then no animal comes closer to this definition than a mineral or a vegetable. That’s why anyone asserting animal rights is thereby denying our humanity, defined in the only way that has any philosophical or indeed scientific support.
That’s no doubt what Princess Michael had in mind, and I’m glad she no longer bothers her mink-adorned head with Russian ‘businessmen’. Also, I’m proud to be human in her eyes: my tax returns are up to date and, against my better judgement, I didn’t neglect to vote in the general election.