My essay, Thinking About Mitt Romney and Seamus, Michael Vick and Dog Fighting, and Eating Animals, was published on Truthout.org. You can read it here. The World is Vegan! If you want it. Gary L. Francione Professor, Rutgers University ©2012 Gary L. Francione
Certain secularists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, often referred to as “New Atheists,” are the latest to tell us that we should look to rationality and science to figure out what to think about important moral issues. These New Atheists generally reject the notion that there can be independent […]
In 2007, Peter Singer, as part of a campaign to promote cage-free eggs, praised the Europeans for supposedly phasing out battery cages: “Battery cages are being phased out in Europe – why are we lagging behind?” As I noted at the time, Singer’s connecting the European effort with cage-free egg farming was misleading: [A]lthough the […]
If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot […]
British celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, promotes “happy” British Rose Veal. He’s not alone. Large animal welfare groups, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Compassion in World Farming, ever eager to make the public feel better about continuing to exploit animals, are also promoting “happy” veal. Fearnley-Whittingstall says: “To […]
Many vegans become irritated with non-vegans who claim to care morally about animals but who continue to consume them. The former will often invoke an analogy to human slavery. It goes like this: we all agree that the use of humans exclusively as resources—the condition known as human slavery—is morally abhorrent. Similarly, if people think […]
I often hear from people that they feel overwhelmed by the poverty and violence of modern life. We are certainly living in difficult and challenging times. But that does not mean that we cannot make a difference. We can. Here are three suggestions to help you to celebrate peace this holiday season: First, don’t consume. […]
On Thursday, January 12, 2012, the Rutgers Federalist Society is sponsoring a debate between me and libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is a research fellow at the Hoover […]
The basis of the animal welfare movement, stretching from its inception in the 19th century until the present day, is that animal use is itself acceptable because animals do not have an interest in continuing to live. According to welfarists, nonhuman animals are not self-aware and cognitively sophisticated in the way that humans are. This […]
I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, […]