An Argument for Animals

Today in class we were going over whether or not language is a necessary precondition that produces belief which gives rise to desire and in the qualifies and entitles a being to have rights. R.G Frey claims all of these are a necessary preconditions for an entity to have rights. However, his work does not accommodate for the auto pilot argument. For example, a human driving from work to home that does not realize how he or she got home isn't something that just happens successfully. Likewise, a monkey swinging from tree to tree isn't something that the monkey just gets up and does successfully. Both processes had to occur through habituation. Habituation is a conscious effort to do something to a point where it almost becomes effortless to the conscious entity. Using language as a method to teach is not a necessary precondition to judge consciousness because we do no know whether other being besides ourselves have language. However, we do know that conscious effort is necessary to adapt to a condition. For example, someone in class today mentioned that a wolf was raised by a lion and adapted its way of hunting without regard for its individual disposition compared to the entity that raised it. This wolf habituated itself to an environment that wasn't his own. It's diet may have been altered, but it yet survived like a vast majority of humans who can survive in various climate conditions and different foods that they were not always accustomed to.