The scientific meeting “Animal Rights in Fiqh” was recently held. In this meeting, Dr. Yaqub Ali Borji, a member of the faculty of Al-Mustafa International University, presented his views in this meeting. It is worth mentioning that the secretary of this meeting was Sayyid Hamid Jushqani.
In this meeting, Dr. Burji discussed some animal rights in Shi’ah jurisprudence. Pointing out that the first right of every animal over humans is the right to life, he said: “We have no right to kill an animal without reason.” For example, we have in jurisprudence that if you have some water and you have a thirsty animal, if you perform ablution with this water, the animal will remain thirsty, if you water the animal, you will not have water for ablution. What to do here? All the jurists agree that watering the animal precedes ablution. That means you have to give water to the animal.” From this point of view, according to some jurists, such as al-Shahid al-Thani in the book al-Masalak, even saving an animal from destruction is a sufficient obligation (wajib kefa’i).
Among the other animal rights that were mentioned is the right to alimony and food, and according to the author of the book al-Jawahir, if the owner of the animal does not attend to the animal, the ruler should personally take care of the animal’s alimony and then take it from the its owner.
This professor considers another area of animal rights in the area of animal exploitation. According to him, “the writer of al-Jawahir has a clear fatwa in volume 31, page 397. He issues a fatwa and says: It is forbidden to ride 3 people on the back of an animal, but it is also forbidden to do hard and difficult work that is against custom and habit. Therefore, he says that I issue a fatwa based on this.”
He added: “In our narrations, it is strictly forbidden to torture animals, whether physical or mental. Hitting animals with a whip or something else is condemned and it is always emphasized to be kind to animals. You saw that lmam Amirul Mu’minin (‘a) also had in his recommendations. It is about Imam al-Sajjad (‘a) that he went to Hajj with his camel 40 times and in these 40 times he did not whip this camel even once. It is stated in Wasa’il al-Shi’ah, volume 11, page 483. From this point of view and according to the narration in Shaykh Tusi’s the al-Amali, not only one should not cause harm to animals, but preventing harm to others is a public duty, like forbidding evildoing.
It is worth mentioning that this meeting was held on Tuesday, November 16, at the Research Institute of Contemporary Jurisprudence.