Monday, February 27, 2006

Legal rights for working animals!

In light of the poor Toronto Police horse who was killed by a hit and run driver, I propose that hurting or killing any working animal should incur the same punishment as hurting or killing its human handler. (With a possible exception of dogs that are trained to bite or attack, because there's a self-defence element there. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet).

Generally-accepted ethical standards consider a human life to be of more value than an animal life, but I think that for working animals, this is cancelled out by the fact that the working animal has no choice about being in the situation.

In the case in question, all the police officers made an informed decision to become police officers, fully aware of the risks they might face. The horse made no such informed decision. He was bought by the police department, and trained to be a police horse. Since there is no way to properly and fully inform a horse of the risks that he'd face being a police horse, he didn't even have the option of deliberately flunking his training so as to avoid being in the line of fire. Even if the horses can talk to each other and the other horses could tell him what they'd seen, they had no way of knowing about abstract risks that they might possibly face in the future but haven't faced yet. A human has some chance of figuring out that an enraged crazy person in a motor vehicle might try to run them over. A horse can't figure that out.

Because the horse is truly an innocent, his death should be punished more severely. I think it is most appropriate for the punishment to be the same as it would be for hit-and-running a human officer.

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