A Smart Idea About Community Education
Dear Colleagues: Elizabeth Collins, an abolitionist advocate and podcaster from New Zealand, shared with me an idea about creative, nonviolent abolitionist vegan education. I pass it along to you. Elizabeth is in the process of constructing a stall that she will use to provide community education about animal rights and veganism. She wants to use […]
Taking Care of our HOME
Dear Colleagues: On Friday, June 5—World Environment Day—a remarkable documentary called HOME was released in over 50 countries in movie theaters, on TV, and on the Internet. HOME is the story of the earth and the evolution of sentient life, and how human beings have, in a fairly short time, brought our planet to the […]
“[N]o one was hurt in the blaze.”
Dear Colleagues: Sociology instructor Roger Yates just sent me a news article about a fire at a turkey farm in Minnesota. The article states: An estimated 25,000 turkeys are dead after a fire swept through a large turkey barn in rural Cannon Falls, but no one was hurt in the blaze. Twenty-five thousand turkeys were […]
Human Rights and Animal Rights: Perfect Together
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 […]
Abolitionist Vegan Literature
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 […]
No, It’s Not Natural
“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 […]
Swine Flu: A Problem of Animal Treatment or Animal Use?
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 […]
The Swine Flu, Smithfield Farms, and NAFTA
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 […]
Peter Singer, Happy Meat, and Fanatical Vegans
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 […]
The Pork Lobby and Swine Flu
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 […]
A Call for Humility
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 […]
And Hitler Was a Vegetarian
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 […]
Moral Behavior and Moral Significance
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 […]
The False Message of the New Welfarists
Dear Colleagues: One of the subscriptions that I have is to a newsletter entitled Farmed Animal Watch that is produced periodically by Farmed Animal Net, which is a joint effort of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Farm Sanctuary, The Humane Society of the United States, and others. For the most part, Farmed Animal […]
Some Comments on the Kristof ‘Happy Meat’ Editorial
Dear Colleagues: Today’s New York Times had an editorial by Nicholas D. Kristof. The editorial was an ode to animal welfare and of the supposed progressive ethical development that welfare reform bespeaks. Forgive me for not sharing Mr. Kristof’s enthusiasm. Rather than make a point-by-point reply, I will limit myself to three general comments. First, […]
The Great ‘Victory’ of New Welfarism
Dear Colleagues: In my work, I have argued that animal advocates should not spend their time and resources on single-issue campaigns because as long as there is no political base in favor of abolishing animal exploitation, there can be no realistic hope for legislation that will significantly protect animal interests through the prohibition of various […]
Animal Experiments Increase in Britain
Dear Colleagues: Defenders of animal welfare often claim that the animal protection movement in Britain has been successful in decreasing the number of experiments performed with live animals. The data show that there has been a 21% increase in animal experiments since 1997. Gary L. Francione © 2009 Gary L. Francione
And You Wonder Why We Suffer from Moral Schizophrenia?
Dear Colleagues: Here is an example—one of unfortunately many—of the way that we confuse children about the morality of animal exploitation. One one hand, we encourage children to feel affectionately about nonhumans through the use of animal characters. On the other hand, we use those same animal characters to sell animal products that have been […]
The “commonplace reality of producing livestock for consumption”
Dear Colleagues: Home Box Office recently aired a documentary, Death on a Factory Farm. The documentary concerns an undercover investigation of the Wiles Hog Farm in Ohio. The investigator, who worked for the Humane Farming Association, secretly filmed the hideous treatment of the animals and brought his evidence to the local prosecutor, who filed ten […]
More on Violence and Animal Rights
Dear Colleagues: A number of people have written to me in the past several weeks asking that I blog on the use of violence in the struggle for animal rights. I already did an essay—A Comment on Violence—on this topic and I direct those interested to that essay. My forthcoming book, The Animal Rights Debate: […]