Name: 【TEDx】It's time to re-evaluate our relationship with animals: Lesli Bisgould at TEDxUofT
Uploaded: 2015-01-22T02:46:48.000Z
Duration: 14 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I want to begin by making two statements, one at a time.

don't mind, to raise your hand if you agree.

I can barely see, but it looks like lots of hands going up.

Animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily.

And I would bet that if I ventured outside and put

those statements to passersby, I would likely

find that most people out there agree, too.

More than half of the households in North America

are very upset when we hear the occasional story in the news

which is to say that virtually every jurisdiction in North

protect animals from human-caused suffering

So I thought I would talk about is why that's the case

and why it's time to reevaluate our relationship

with other animals and the emerging field of animal rights

here because I cared about doing this talk

and is in need of a transplant to save her life.

of people whom I could discreetly look over

while I was doing this talk to see who among you looks

And when this event ends, I were to kidnap one of you,

where I could remove your heart to be donated to my child.

You all seem very nice, but I don't love you

as much as I love my child, and your heart

Would that be morally or legally justifiable?

No other person can claim any moral or legal right to it,

Among legal equals, it's absurd to use the word "necessary"

in this context, and we just don't do it.

But it's different when it comes to animals.

from unnecessary suffering, they seem superficially impressive,

that, if the law prohibits causing unnecessary suffering,

it creates a corollary, meaning it permits

So our laws prohibit gratuitous suffering,

But as soon as there's a human purpose-- and, really,

almost any purpose will do-- that suffering

And it's been that way for a really long time.

So he conceived of the notions of property

that are now central to our legal system,

in part because he was trying to find a way

to allocate competing human interests in animals

and other natural resources in a principled way.

thought of animal interests as one of those principles

So in a system of laws that grew to esteem property rights,

animals became property, and humans became property owners.

that an owner can use her thing however she sees fit.

She can do whatever she wants with her things,

so long as she doesn't use that thing to hurt somebody else.

So this idea that animals are things that serve our purposes,

that they are our property, have been really powerful.