Mission Statement

The mission of this website is to provide a clear statement of an approach to animal rights that (1) requires the abolition of animal exploitation and rejects the regulation of animal exploitation; (2) is based only on animal sentience and no other cognitive characteristic, (3) regards veganism as the moral baseline of the animal rights position; and (4) rejects all violence and promotes activism in the form of creative, non-violent vegan education.

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What YOU Can Do to Help Achieve Abolition!

You’ve watched the presentations and have read the other material on this site. You want to know what you can do to help achieve the goal of abolishing animal exploitation.

The answer is simple.

The most important thing you can do is to go vegan.

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The Six Principles of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights

  1. The abolitionist approach to animal rights maintains that all sentient beings, humans or nonhumans, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others.
  2. Our recognition of the one basic right means that we must abolish, and not merely regulate, institutionalized animal exploitation—because it assumes that animals are the property of humans. We recognize that we will not abolish overnight the property status of nonhumans, but we will support only those campaigns and positions that explicitly promote the abolitionist agenda. We will not support positions that call for supposedly “improved” regulation of animal exploitation.
  3. The abolitionist approach sees abolition as the goal of animal ethics and sees creative, nonviolent vegan advocacy—and not welfare reform—as the means to that end. The abolitionist approach regards veganism as the moral baseline and maintains that we cannot draw a morally coherent distinction between flesh and other animal products, such as dairy or eggs, or between animal foods and the use of animals for clothing or other products.

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Gary L. Francione

Professor Francione with five of his seven rescued pound puppies

Gary L. Francione is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark.

He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa O’Hearn Scholarship that allowed him to pursue graduate study in philosophy in Great Britain. He received his M.A. in philosophy and his J.D. from the University of Virginia. He was Articles Editor of the Virginia Law Review.

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Our Team:
Gary L. Francione
Anna Charlton
Administrative/Technical Assistants: Vincent Guihan, Frances McCormack, and Patricia Soldan