And what about animal rights? If a dog eats me, will it be acquitted?

анонимный вопрос

What will happen to animal abusers in a Free Society (stray dogs and cats)?

Roman

Hi. Regarding Varlamov’s recently released video, a question: how does ancap view circuses and animal abuse? Is it possible to limit torture and abuse through the court if animals are not subjects?

Vadim

Three questions about animal rights arrived almost one after another, which gave me a reason to talk about this topic out of turn. True, I have already answered a question quite close in meaning, it’s a pity that you are not very keen on watching old answers and instead ask as if nothing happened. So, mostly, read the answer in the old post.

I read Varlamov’s post about the Zapashny animal abusers with great respect. Varlamov is not calling for the Zapashnys to be banned; he condemns the ban on Cirque du Soleil. Against animal abusers, he calls for voting with your feet, as the institution of reputation works much more reliably than state bans. Today they will be banned, and tomorrow they will start organizing underground performances that crowds will attend. No, let the market decide on humanism, not the tsar.

I first read that circuses with animals are disgusting at a rather tender age from one of my favorite writers (even though he was a communist) — Jack London. I don’t know if the original authorship of this thought belongs to him, but at least he did a very good job for the moral condemnation of such things, and I thank him for that. I hope Russia will not need hundreds of years for the rooting of corresponding ideas. To be honest, I even find it unpleasant to watch clowns in a circus (too many jokes about violence and humiliation), but aerial gymnasts, for example, are a different story!

And in conclusion, I will briefly answer the first question, which stands out a bit from the general row. A dog that has mauled a person will neither be tried nor acquitted. If the dog was not someone’s property, and no one had undertaken to protect the residents of that territory from wild animals, then there is no one to hold accountable for the fact that the dog mauled someone. How the next person who encounters it deals with it is their personal business. If the humanism toward animals that I raved about in the previous paragraph forces someone to start protecting it from people, it will be equivalent to turning the dog into property and taking responsibility for its further behavior.