Animal rights

“A right is a thing to which an entity is entitled”. Traditionally only human beings have been said to possess rights and even then many philosophers understand the term “rights” as having only legal currency rather than moral authority. The notion of animal rights extends rights to certain non-humans, typically those with sentience, that is, the ability to feel pleasures and pains. Those who advocate animal rights maintain that to allow humans rights but to deny them to all other species is discriminatory.