Animals can be granted legal rights and personhood without diminishing human equality or rights. Sentience and similar capacities often apply across members of the same species, supporting rights extended by species membership. The Species Membership Approach allows societies to confer legal rights on animals based on species membership rather than on individual cognitive capacities. Litigation strategies claiming animal legal personhood have provoked concern that human rights might be undermined. A species-based legal framework offers an alternative to capacity-focused approaches and creates a pathway to recognize fundamental legal protections for animals while preserving human legal status and equality. Societal choice determines which species receive such protections.
Many people, including animal advocates and others who want to grant legal rights (including personhood) to nonhuman animals, are often criticized for their views because others fear it will diminish what it means to be human. I frankly never have understood these unfounded fears because if one looks, for example, at sentience―the ability to feel―if one member of a species has the capacity to feel, then so too do others of the same species.
Over the last decade, animal rights advocates have advanced a radical new litigation strategy. Instead of simply claiming violations of animal welfare provisions, some litigants have argued that animals are legal persons with fundamental legal rights―rights that are akin to human rights and go well beyond what current animal welfare legislation protects. However, as such lawsuits have become more prominent, so has the criticism by those who worry that giving rights to animals would undermine human rights.
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