The following is an excerpt from Empty Cages by Tom Regan People of a religious bent, especially Christians who take the Bible seriously, often agree that rights are not the moral currency of their faith-based ethic. You just don’t find moral rights in the Bible. What you do find, very unambiguously, is that God gives [...]
The following is an excerpt from Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World by Bob Torres and Jenna Torres …Animals should be treated as beings rather than things, and we do not have the inherent right to subjugate other beings for our own purposes. In human society we call that slavery, and when we [...]
The position we hold — the abolitionist position — is often said to be “extreme,” and those of us who hold it are said to be “extremists.” The unspoken suggestions are that extreme positions cannot be right, and that extremists must be wrong. But I am an extremist when it comes to rape — I [...]
This speech was given by Tom Regan, at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in 1989. The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap and exploit in a variety of other ways have a life of their own that is of importance to them, apart from their utility to us. They are not [...]
“‘There are so many daunting human problems we face,’ so [the] objection goes, ‘from famine and war, to health care and illiteracy. After we solve these problems, then we can turn our attention to animal rights.’ You don’t have to be a cynic to see that this is a recipe for perpetual neglect of animal [...]
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each [...]
Animal-rights activists are famous for talking about what we don’t want. But what kind of rights do we want? Let’s start by thinking about why we use the term “rights” at all. We’ve constructed a system that treats everything and everyone on the planet as a person or as a piece of property. Water and [...]