Samenvatting

Two petitions on the internet strive to include ‘animal rights’ in the Dutch Constitution. Jeremy Bentham stipulated that animals should not be denied the right to happiness, because they suffer. The Dutch philosopher Eskens made a plea to grant animals the same fundamental rights as humans. Theoretically, this leads to special, bizarre and sometimes paradoxical situations. This indicates that the logic in this theory is missing.
In the past fifty years, ethological science made enormous progress and we have learned much more about the emotions and the behaviour of animals. Animals travel consciously through ‘time’ and hurt their brains in the search for knowledge and experiences. But this does not yet make humans and animals equal. Within the legal discourse there is no place for universal rights for animals because these must always be asserted through human intervention. The energy to maintain the bureaucracy Eskens proposes should be used to formulate animal protection as a human obligation.