Dear Colleagues: “There are too many human problems in the world that we have to solve first before we think about animals.” “Let’s work on world peace first; we can then work on animal rights.” Anyone who pursues animal advocacy frequently encounters these and similar comments. I am often asked how I respond to such […]
Dear Colleagues: As you know, I maintain that for those concerned about animal exploitation, the decision to go vegan is the single most important thing one can do. If you want to do more, then you should engage in creative, nonviolent vegan education. This week, I became aware of another example of nonviolent vegan education […]
“But isn’t eating animals natural?” This question is probably the one that I have gotten most frequently in the almost thirty years that I have been promoting veganism. Students in our courses; people in public lectures; listeners who call in on a radio show that I am on; the passenger sitting next to me on […]
Dear Colleagues: The animal welfare movement led by The Humane Society of the United States is claiming that the swine flu outbreak is the result of factory farming and that the solution is to provide more “humane” treatment for farm animals by supporting HSUS efforts like California’s Proposition 2. This approach is problematic for several […]
Dear Colleagues: According to this article, the source of the current outbreak of swine flu is Carroll Ranches, a hog farm in Mexico that kills 800,000 hogs yearly. Carroll Ranches was opened by Smithfield Farms in 1994, the year that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. The article claims that Carroll […]
Dear Colleagues: In a recent interview, Peter Singer makes a number of statements that, in my view, indicate just how sharp the difference is between the new welfarist or protectionist approach and the abolitionist approach. First, he states: I’m very pleased to say that there have been a lot of changes, especially in Europe, but […]
Dear Colleagues: According to the Wall Street Journal Agricultural groups, worried that the swine flu outbreak is scaring consumers away from eating pork, are successfully prodding the federal government to refer to the virus by its scientific name: H1N1. The Agriculture Department, which used the term “swine influenza” as recently as Monday, clung to the […]
Dear Colleagues: Well, once again we have a swine flu outbreak that may become a pandemic. As this article makes clear, pandemics often originate with domesticated nonhumans that we raise to eat. We kill approximately 53 billion animals every year worldwide (not counting aquatic animals). This amount of suffering and death is staggering; indeed, it […]
Dear Colleagues: In what appears to be an attempt to address the criticism that President Obama got when the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement and a report on right-wing extremism, the FBI has just announced that terror can come from the “left” as well: the first domestic terrorist named to the FBI’s list […]
Dear Colleagues: Humans usually seek to justify their oppression and exploitation of nonhumans by pointing to supposed empirical differences. One of the many claimed differences is that nonhumans, unlike humans, are unable to think or act morally. That is, we claim that only those who can recognize and act on moral obligations to others can […]