What Rights Do Animals Really Have?

Fee O'Shea
3 min readMay 2, 2023

The Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans was created in 2010 to give dolphins and whales non-human rights, including freedom of movement and residence.

It’s almost laughable because even in 2023, dolphins and whales are still being abused, captured and killed. The famous slaughtering of dolphins in Taiji harbour, as seen in the documentary ‘The Cove’, is still happening even though the fishermen have guaranteed that the killing is ‘humane’ now. What a joke — no such thing as ‘humane killing’ exists.

Humane as defined by the Merriman-Webster dictionary:

humane: [adjective] marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals.

How can you show these traits when slaughtering healthy animals who don’t want to die?

We have human rights — and look how we manage that. It’s abysmal — we can’t even get that right, so how will anyone think that by applying cetacean rights, anything will change the fact that dolphins and whales will still be abused?

But this post is more about the rights we give to all animals, not just those we identify as human-like, such as the great ape, dolphins, whales, and elephants.

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Fee O'Shea

Gold card carrying vegan NZ author. Passionate about all critters (including humans). Can be seen advocating for the animals or speaking at events.