(c) by CLARENCE BROWN

Do animals have rights? I must confess--horrible confession for a pundit!--that I don't know.

Oh, I have my opinion of course. When was ignorance ever a bar to having opinions? My opinion leaps all but automatically to my tongue: of course animals have rights.

I am not in the least ashamed of this opinion. In fact, I think it does credit to my humane sentiments and my generally all-round good-guy status.

But I would have to admit, if pressed, that the opinion is at bottom rather sentimental. Strictly speaking, it is not distinguished for intellectual rigor or dry-eyed clarity of thinking.

And, if pressed further, I would immediately begin to hedge. Of course dogs and cats and horses have rights. But boa constrictors? E. coli? The limpet? Dogs seem to like me, God knows why, but I can't remember the last time the boa constrictor even returned my greetings on the street. So why should he have rights?

I am not ashamed of feeling that animals, some of them, anyway, have rights, but I am far from proud of the mushy thinking behind this feeling.

What would more rigorous thinking look like? Start with an example:

The old sow looks rather pleased with herself when I go out to the barn this morning. She has overnight increased the world's pig population by 11. While I watch, she carefully washes each blind, pink little piglet and seems to line them up, the better to show them off. Then, one by one, she eats the lot of them. After this snack, the sow looks exactly as pleased with herself as she was before.

If the sow has a right to eat her farrow, certain questions suggest themselves. Whence comes this right? And why did the same source not grant to the piglets an equal right not to be eaten?

The sow belongs to me, and I should have thought that her children were my property, too. After all, this sow's mother, who was mercifully less prompt in exercising her right, also belonged to me.

With luck and hundreds of dollars worth of pig pellets, the survivors of the litter would have brought me a nice profit. By exercising her putative rights, she has damaged not only the little pigs' equally putative rights but also my indubitable rights, the rights of the Top Animal, a human being! Now we are getting somewhere.

Suppose, once I saw what was happening, I had intervened to save some of the piglets. Whether my motive was future profit or sentimental kindness does not matter; I would have interfered with the sow's right to eat her farrow, while affirming the piglets' right to go on living.

It is only when rights are in conflict that it seems worthwhile arguing over whether they exist or not.

Are there other rights here that we have not even mentioned? Does Nature have a right to limit the number of pigs, or to deny piglets to an old sow that has outlived her ability to nurse them well?

Where did any of these rights come from? Strange as it may seem, given our general muddle in this area, we human beings are the likeliest source of the rights of animals. This suggests to me one final question. While we were passing round these rights to chickens and walruses and the flu bug, why did it not occur to anyone to hand out some responsibilities to go with them?

We are notoriously easy on ourselves, but even humans would blush to claim that they had rights only, with no strings.