, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong People's Zoo, Sichuan, 2001, by the Asian Animal Protection Network. The AAPN writes that the animal was kept hungry so that visitors could feed him live eels from a ladle. ]] Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the basic interests of non-human animals — for example, the interest in avoiding suffering — should be afforded the same consideration as the basic interests of human beings. "blank">Animal Rights." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Animal rights advocates argue that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or treated as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as _legal persons blank">"'Personhood' Redefined: Animal Rights Strategy Gets at the Essence of Being Human", Association of American Medical Colleges, retrieved July 12, 2006. and members of the moral community.

The idea of extending personhood to animals has the support of legal scholars such as _Alan Dershowitz Dershowitz, Alan. Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, 2004, pp. 198–99, and "Darwin, Meet Dershowitz," The Animals' Advocate, Winter 2002, volume 21. and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, and animal law courses are now taught in 92 out of 180 law schools in the United States. Steven Wise, also of Harvard Law School, argues that the first serious judicial challenges to the "legal thinghood of nonhuman animals" may only be a few years away.

The Seattle-based Great Ape Project is campaigning for the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on Great Apes, which would see gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos included in a "community of equals" with human beings, extending to them the protection of three basic interests: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. blank">"Declaration on Great Apes", _Great Ape Project, retrieved 8 March 2007. This is seen by an increasing number of animal rights lawyers as a first step toward granting rights to other animals. Michael, Steven. blank">"Animal personhood: A Threat to Research", The Physiologist, Volume 47, No. 6, December 2004.

Critics of the concept of animal rights argue that animals do not have the capacity to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of moral rights. The philosopher _Roger Scruton argues that only human beings have duties and that "[t]he corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights." Scruton, Roger. Animal Rights and Wrongs, Metro, 2000.ISBN 1-900512-81-5. Critics holding this position argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals for food, as entertainment, and in research, though human beings may nevertheless have an obligation to ensure they do not suffer unnecessarily. Frey, R.G. Interests and Rights: The Case against Animals. Clarendon Press, 1980 ISBN 0-19-824421-5 This position is generally called the animal welfare position, and it is held by some of the oldest of the animal protection agencies.