All animals are individual and irreplaceable

255a

There are many issues competing for public attention today - global warming, the environment, world hunger, animal welfare, human ethics - and each is significant and none should be sidelined, but the key issue which impacts on all the others is the routine and unthinking way we make use of animals. If that were fundamentally tackled our most serious problems wouldn’t be so intractable - human health would be transformed, the environment far less damaged and greenhouse gas emissions greatly reduced.
I think animal advocates should have, as their first priority, the goal of changing people’s attitude-to-animal-use. As it stands at present, because we love animals and seem to need to have them close by, many activists become owners of animals ... and so aren’t ready to promote abolition of use ... and when people look to the activist for a lead in this and find none it lets them off the hook, so it’s business as usual. Because activists fiddle at the edges of the animal-use problem, surprise, surprise, no significant change of attitude in the community takes place.
There’s nowhere near enough momentum being created by the Animal Rights / Animal Liberation movement - we fail the animals because we won’t make a loud enough noise about animal-use. Protests are organised, literature printed, web sites created, a few animals are liberated from their hell-hole imprisonment, and it all looks good on the surface. And in fairness, gradually the worst conditions are exposed and some welfare improvements are achieved. But never enough to swing the mass of people around to our way of thinking.
We don’t mean to fail the animals, we try sincerely, we pull out all the stops we can, but there’s so much to do and so few people doing it ... so the considerable energy and talent of activists is being used up with nothing left over for shifting public attitude to animal use.
I think activists face a dilemma. When I joined Animal Liberation in the early eighties we tried to cover many issues, today liberation groups concentrate their efforts on a few main issues only - they don’t want to spread themselves too thinly. They’re heartbroken (as I am) at the conditions on factory farms and they think the public will be deeply moved if they can show them what’s happening. But perhaps the compassion in people and their willingness to think things out for themselves is overestimated. People are much more brain-washed than one likes to think.
The activist wants reform and I admire their radical action and outspokenness, and their daring rescue raids on factory farms in the dead of night ... but I don’t think it’s radical where it counts.
We should be heard more often speaking about animals, about their sovereignty, about never regarding them as our playthings or a source of food and clothing, about each animal being important, individual and irreplaceable. If we are to be seen to be protecting animals’ rights, those rights should apply to all animals, companion animals included.