These days, the animal rights movement is more than a preoccupation of closeted Victorian matriarchs. It's a multi-million dollar enterprise, with Washington lobbyists, high-profile celebrity backing, and a burgeoning academic cottage industry ‹ including a course this spring on Animal Rights Law at Harvard Law School, to be offered by well-known animal advocate Steven Wise of the Boston firm Wise & Slater-Wise, P.C.

Harvard, in fact, is only the latest and most prestigious law school to jump on the animal rights bandwagon. Similar courses are slated to debut at Georgetown and Northwestern this year, while UCLA has been providing legal tuition in the field for nearly five years. Why the sudden fascination? Law school administrators, like Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs Alan Ray at Harvard, attribute the new trend to both student interest and the realization that today's law students "can expect to face an animal law issue at some point in their careers."

Wise, for one, predicts an explosion of animal rights lawsuits in the next several years, partially thanks to the ever-growing bankrolls of activist groups like the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF). Some 125 years after the English battle over vivisection, "madness" is again on the rise.

Moreover, modern-day animal rights activists won't stop at seeking an end to animal experimentation, though this is still a main objective; they want a full-scale legal revolution. As the description for Wise's course notes (as if it were a scandalous revelation), "In this class, we will learn that non-human animals are not legal persons and have no legal rights." The aim, then, is to transform radically the status of animals from property to personhood, with liberties guaranteed by the Constitution ‹ an ambitious goal, obviously. To be sure, existing laws, notably the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, provide for the well-being of animals used for human benefit and prohibit unreasonable cruelty. But even in an age when Constitutional theories are routinely spun out of thin air, this is a dubious basis for enfranchising quadrupeds.

A visionary like Wise, however, is unfazed by such juridical stumbling-blocks. In his forthcoming book Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, he suggests resurrecting antebellum statutes that allowed slaves, also legal non-persons, to bring suit against their owners through representatives in court. Wise's outrageous but ingenious approach echoes the broader rhetoric of the animal rights movement, which equates itself morally with the abolitionist movement and decries the exploitation of animals as a form of slavery justified by "speciesism" ‹ the ostensibly pernicious view that human "animals" and "non-human" animals are not created equal.

Not only is this type of moral posturing insulting, it rides roughshod over the roots of our conception of justice ‹ for example, the idea that liberty is the prerogative of beings who can understand the difference between right and wrong (hence the abomination of slavery). As one of the world's foremost evolutionary biologists, Agassiz Professor of Zoology Emeritus Ernst Mayr, has noted, "the difference between an animal, which acts instinctively, and a human being, who has the capacity for making choices, is the line of demarcation for ethics." To blur that line by extending ethical title to animals, which are incapable even in the most rudimentary sense of comprehending their rights, obligations or role in society, is to threaten the notion of ethics itself. Richard Epstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago rightly worries that "there would be nothing left of human society if we treated animals not as property but as independent holders of rights."

At the same time, a large number of animal advocates mysteriously refuse to recognize the right of certain human beings to the very same protections we groundlessly deny, or so the animal rights people claim, to dolphins and bonobos. Princeton's Peter Singer, for example, apparently sees no contradiction in arguing that chimpanzees have a right to life while newborn human infants do not. Infants, the reasoning goes, lack full self-awareness and, therefore, personhood. True, scientists are similarly skeptical about the consciousness of primates, but we are expected to give them the benefit of the doubt. And it goes without saying that the vast majority of animal rights proponents, and especially the Hollywood hobbyists whose faces and checkbooks have done so much to advance the struggle, would be appalled at the suggestion that abortion is morally problematic.

If nothing else, this type of glaring hypocrisy gives the lie to the oft-repeated assertion that respect for animal life fosters respect for human life, or vice-versa. Notably, we might recall that in Nazi Germany animal experimentation was strictly verboten (Hitler himself was a vegetarian), while at the same time experimentation on Jews and other "asocial persons" was encouraged. Though no one is, of course, suggesting that Nazis and animal rights advocates have the same motives ‹ to do so would be abusive as well as absurd ‹ the comparison nevertheless dramatically underscores two important points: first, that the welfare of animals and the welfare of human beings are separate moral concerns which should not be conflated; and second, that in some cases we should not only be permitted but obliged to use animals in ways that would be abhorrent if instead we were to use humans. Not for nothing does the Nuremberg Code mandate that medical research involving humans "should be designed and based on the results of animal experimentation."

Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the disconnect between animal rights advocacy and the desire to diminish human suffering more apparent than where biomedical research is concerned. Celebrity know-nothings like Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Bill Maher can perhaps be excused for supporting contradictory causes like AIDS or cancer research and an end to animal experimentation, but those at the forefront of the animal liberation movement appreciate well the implications of their position. Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has stated without shame that even if animal research produced a cure for AIDS, "we'd be against it."

Which brings us back to the practical implications of teaching animal rights law at a place like Harvard ‹ home, like many other universities with nascent animal rights programs, to flourishing biomedical research departments. A real possibility exists that the precedents set forth in Steven Wise's law school class next fall may someday be used to bring suit against Harvard research centers, and if this occurs on a widespread scale, then progress in key areas of physiology and medicine will ‹ as a prescient Darwin worried in 1874 ‹ "languish or cease." The fact is that all of the major medical advances of this century, from the polio vaccine to modern efforts to treat cancer and Alzheimer's disease, were based on animal research. And because even the most sophisticated technology cannot mimic the behavior of a living organism, no suitable alternative exists.

Scientists are not heartless, and the scientific community in general has a strong interest in animal welfare. But stringent legal requirements already ensure that animals are not abused and that high standards of care are maintained in laboratories and in industry. Beyond that, one can only speculate as to what "interests" animals might have to protect, or how a court would go about determining them. Given that the pinnacle of primate communication thus far has been the synthesized sentence "please buy me a hamburger," it seems like the answers, even if we had them, might not be encouraging.

Unquestionably we, as moral creatures, are obligated to treat animals with respect and to refrain from acts of unreasonable cruelty. Animals are under no such obligation, however, nor is it sensible to speak of their duties toward us; therefore they have no place in the framework of rights. The renowned primatologist Frans de Waal put it best when he proposed "making care, not rights, the centerpiece of our attitude" toward animals. What we need is not more potential litigation, but a sense of responsibility toward the living creatures under our guardianship.