Farewell, Satya

When The Animals’ Agenda stopped publishing in 2002, Satya took over as the primary journal of the new welfarist movement, promoting the fantasy that incremental animal welfare reform could provide significant protection to animal interests and pretending that there was no inherent conflict between the abolition and regulationist approaches to animal ethics.

And now, Satya has gone the way of The Animals’ Agenda and has stopped publishing with its June/July 2007 issue. Although in its final year, Satya devoted some of it pages to criticizing the regulationist approach, which is stronger today than it has ever been, Satya remained until the very end a magazine that, as a general matter, embraced the welfarist approach.

I sincerely wish Beth Gould, Cat Clyne, Martin Rowe, and all at Satya best wishes for the future. I am just sad when I think of what Satya could have done if it provided a clear voice for abolishing animal exploitation rather than collapsing under the weight of an incoherent foundering impulse that so many “animal people” feel—to “do something” about animal suffering without a theory of how this change can occur.

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