Someone asks about the objectivist stance on animals. They think that “[a]ny philosophy that attributes zero moral value to non-human animals is absurd”. They write:

Someone at the edge of our town breeds hundreds of dogs and cats, only to subject each of them to extreme and drawn out torture. He doesn’t eat them or otherwise put them to productive use. He tortures them because he gets a sick enjoyment out of it. He does this on his own property and inside a barn, so the sound does not carry to his far away neighbors. However, the practice is well known and he readily admits it to whoever asks him about it.

OP wants to know:

1. Does the government have a right to intervene to stop the man from doing this, or would that be a violation of his rights?
2. Is the man commiting [sic] a moral evil against the animals? Surely he’s harming his character and reputation, etc. But is a moral wrong being done to the animals themselves, apart from how the man is effected [sic]?

They want to know “how objectivist principles apply to these cases.”

Below is my lightly edited response.

1. Not a lawyer but from a cursory search it seems like there is a legal basis for US law enforcement to intervene, yes: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/dog-book/chapter13-3.html
2. No. I don’t think animals are sentient or have any capacity to suffer. Before you get angry or incredulous, as most people do when they hear this, please consider that I have an informed opinion on the subject. There’s lots of evidence that animals are not sentient and I address all common questions here. I don’t get that view from objectivism but draw instead from critical rationalism, physicist David Deutsch’s version of it in particular.

I’m not an expert on objectivism but I’ve read a fair amount of objectivist literature. When looking for objectivist principles that might apply in some context, the Ayn Rand Lexicon is a good place to look. There’s no entry for animals. There is an entry for ‘Life, Right to’ with quotes of Rand speaking only of man’s rights (ie human rights). You’ll also find the following quote:

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

In other words, it is the nature of a rational being that necessitates the right to life and, as a consequence, all other rights. While animals do “engage in self-sustaining […] action”, they do not engage in self-generated action: their actions are generated by their genetic code. And even if they did engage in self-generated action, that alone wouldn’t make them rational beings. Even people who think animals are sentient would agree that animals are not rational. (Some of them would disagree that that means animals don’t have a right to life, but you asked about the objectivist view, not theirs.)

Rand also writes in ‘The Objectivist Ethics’ that animals survive “by the guidance of mere percepts.” (As quoted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 7.) This is in stark contrast to man, who can integrate percepts into concepts, and then concepts into ever wider concepts. She emphasizes the role of man’s mind in his ability to survive and says his “essential characteristic is his rational faculty.” Animals do not have this faculty. They survive by mere percepts, man by thought.

So, the objectivist view seems to be 1) that animals are an entirely different class of being and 2) that they have no rights since they are not rational. They do not have a right to life nor any other rights.

For clarity: when Rand speaks of man as a rational being, I think she refers to his capacity to be rational. Someone might act irrationally but that alone doesn’t mean he forfeits his right to life, and I think she would agree that it doesn’t.

Another commenter attributed to Binswanger the view that animals have “lesser gradations of conciousness [sic]”, which is a popular but I think mistaken view, see the links above.

That said, since the guy at the edge of your town thinks animals are sentient, and since he derives some sick pleasure from torturing them, there’s clearly something horribly wrong with him. As others have pointed out, he may not stop at animals. On that point alone, laws protecting animals may not be a bad idea even if animals really are insentient.

I wonder if there’d be a risk in forcing him to stop torturing animals because then he might turn to humans. Sick though it is, there’s some reason he tortures animals and that reason won’t magically be extinguished by preventing him from acting on it. He would first need to do the requisite introspection to figure out why he gets pleasure from torturing animals in the first place. Then maybe he can stop altogether and no force is necessary.

I do think animals have some moral value, but that value is derived from their usefulness to people, not from the animals themselves. For example, pets have emotional value. People shouldn’t be allowed to steal or hurt someone else’s pet, not just because it’s the pet owner’s property but also because that could traumatize him. Some people love their pets and grieve when they die. I think pet owners are wrong to love and humanize their pets like that, but that’s still their prerogative.