Will Farm Animals Be Given The Right To Sue Their "Owners"?

Animal rights activists have been trying for several decades to obtain legal standing for animals to sue for their "rights" in court against, for instance, their "owners".  Since the animals cannot verbalize their complaints, courts would appoint guardians to speak for them (as the court does for persons, e.g., children and retarded persons, who cannot speak for themselves). It seems far-fetched to think that animals have "rights" in the same sense as humans that are enforceable in court.  In certain instances, however, our laws have moved in that direction; for instance, animals are protected against cruelty and persons being cruel to them can be sued by the government. Granting enforceable rights to farm animals would greatly restrict the concept of their ownership and make it difficult to raise them. Such might in fact be the goal of vegetarian animal rights activists. At the least, granting animal rights would enable activists to drive small producers out of business, because they could continually harass the farmers with law suits, thereby exhausting their legal resources. We say all this is unimaginable, but then we need bigger imaginations, because activists are intent upon their goal. We need to develop reasonable defenses of property in agricultural animals and, as a matter of philosophy of law, prevent the notion of "rights" being attached to animals. The issue is reviewed by Wesley J. Smith, "So Three Cows Walk into Court ...; Animal rights extremism in the Obama entourage is no joke", The Weekly Standard, July 20, 2009, p. 14.

Note: Why stop with animal rights? Let's push the animal rights activists' logic. As living organisms, wouldn't plants also have rights? Surely the possession of a central nervous system is not a precondition for having a right. Isn't it possible to be cruel to a plant? Might plants sue for insufficient watering or weeding? But what about the rights of the weeds? And I recall a lecture in the 1970s by a quite serious UC Santa Barbara professor of environmental studies, who argued that rocks have rights. (Finally, don't human fetuses have rights, too? Why should a fetus have less legal standing than an Angus steer? Surely, a fetus has a right to life. Wonder what the animal rights movement would say about abortion.)