| Sumario: | The issue as to whether animals have rights is a complex, divisive issue that is apt to generate debates. While there are many reasons for the unhappy state of affairs, in Western cultures, a fundamental underlying reason has to do with the fact that the issue of the moral status of nonhuman animals is intertwined with issues of long standing concerning the relative positions of humans and nonhuman animals in nature. Contemporary controversies surrounding man's relations to other animals have come to be focused on the usefulness of animals in the context of biomedical research. It is important to remember that the animal rights debate is not simply a debate about moral theory, nor is it simply a debate about the utility of animals. Importantly, it is also, in part, a debate about what science has and has not revealed about man's relative positions in nature from the standpoint of cognitive abilities. There are at least two identifiable positions concerning the moral status of nonhuman animals in contemporary thought: the animal liberationists, and the animal rightists.
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