Recently a new bill sponsored by California State lawmakers official known as Assembly Bill 797 or the “The Right to Rescue Act” has been announced before the state General Assembly.

According to Fox News 11,

“In a nutshell, AB 797 would provide immunity from civil liability to a person who rescues an animal from a locked car, even if that rescue entails breaking a window or otherwise damaging the vehicle.”

Since information on the bill went public it has been widely supported. This only makes sense. After all, no non-psychopathic human being would want to see an animal burning to death in a locked car. Yet, upon deeper examination of the bill and its quest to indirectly bestow rights upon animals, it quickly starts to fall apart philosophically. Soon the justifications for it are stripped away one by one until only raw emotion is left, and laws aren’t meant to be made off emotions.

Bill 797 or the “Hot Dog Bill,” as it has been recently nicknamed, which gives civil immunity to an individual who breaks a car window to “rescue” the animal (usually a dog), is suspending the owner of the dog and car’s property rights because it gives them no legal course to sue for damages. The owner, therefore, is ceding his right of property (one of the three fundamental Lockeian natural rights) so the dog can gain its own right to life which is arguably the most superior of the natural rights. This would be perfectly acceptable if well it was a toddler in eminent threat, but its not. It… is… an… animal… people.

I’m sure many of you already think I’m Cruella de Vil and even by the end of this piece I still won’t convince all of you I’m not, yet, really try not to misunderstand me. I love animals and like I said before no non-psychopath can stand to see animals suffer. Yet the issue of dogs locked in hot cars must be solved via education not legislation.

It has to be this way because animals have no legitimate claim to rights. Enacting laws that attempt to bestow them with rights destroys the definition of and qualification for rights; which is dangerous because the moment you can give rights to anything, you can just as easily take away rights for anything. Rights are solely the domain of humans, and no one can explain why this is better than the renowned Austrian economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard. He states in his “Ethics of Liberty” that,

“But the fundamental flaw in the theory of animal rights is more basic and far-reaching.1 For the assertion of human rights is not properly a simple emotive one; individuals possess rights not because we “feel” that they should, but because of a rational inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. In short, man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man’s capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social animal. No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor.”

So in our quest to protect our cherished pets from harm, it would be quicker for sure to ram through legislation, than to educate or publicly shame individuals in order to reduce the amount of pets locked in hot cars. Yet at what price would that immediate gratification of our emotional needs come? It would come at the price of degrading true human rights, for which philosophers from John Locke to Voltaire tirelessly pained for decades on end to pen down in terms comprehensible for the human mind. It would come at the price of degrading the millions that have died in wars and revolutions to defend those sacred rights. While I love animals greatly I must also proudly proclaim I love the past, present, and future of the liberty of mankind a great deal more.