Why I support Animal Rights.

          I have supported animal rights for as long as I remember.  It's probably because I have always had animals in my life and I have always known they all have their own personalities.  I understand where everyone is coming from when they say humans come first, but I just can't think that way because to me animals and humans are equal.  We all feel emotions and have personalities.  I try to live by my rule of "If I wouldn't do it to a human, I wouldn't do it to an animal."  I never really applied this much to fish though, until last summer when I read the book The Emotion Lives of Animals, which was sort of like all of our articles combined into one book.  That was when I first learned that fish could feel a lot more than I thought.  I made the decision after that that even though fishing was fun there was really no good reason for me to be fishing.  This book in general though just made me feel really bad for how much animals have to deal with for the sake of humans.
         Another reason I support animal rights is that animals aren't bad.  When animals kill its for food or protection.  The only animals that kill just because they can are humans and apes (because they are so closely related to humans).  Also, humans really haven't done anything good for this planet other than pollute and overpopulate it.  Maybe this sounds crazy, but if there wasn't a law against cruel and unusual punishment, I'd much rather them test medicine on criminals than animals.  Mostly because those animals have never done anything wrong in their lives, in fact most of them are born in labs, so they don't even have a chance to do anything that people might consider "bad".  They've done nothing to deserve such a horrible life, while people like Charles Manson are just sitting in prison.  I would probably feel better about testing medicine on animals if it weren't so inhumane.
          I believe animals really need to be treated with more respect because they are so much more intelligent than we think.  Every time I see something about Koko I'm amazed because a gorilla was able to learn sign language.  I just don't see how we think of them as so much lower than us just because they aren't the same as us.  I mean we keep whales and dolphins in captivity and have them to tricks for us when they are so much smarter than that.  It has been proven that the have their own languages and they have names for each other, which is just mind blowing because that was something that was very distinctly human and now we know whales do that.  Animals deserve so much more than being forced to sacrifice their lives for us.