Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach

August 2, 2009

I was in a lakeside dog park this weekend and ran into a women who is active in the local political scene dealing with the proposed culling of deer in South Western CT.

We spoke for a while about the biased coverage in the local press; hunters are the reasonable ones who want to prevent you from dying when your car strikes an errant deer or contracting Lyme disease. Animal Rights Activists are shrill, un-American crazies who want to take your guns and rights away.

She told me about Gary L. Francione‘s blog Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach. Francione takes a strict vegan approach to animal rights, here’s part of his mission statement:

The mission of this website is to provide a clear statement of a non-violent approach to animal rights that (1) requires the abolition of animal exploitation and rejects the regulation of animal exploitation; (2) is based only on animal sentience and no other cognitive characteristic, and (3) regards veganism as the moral baseline of the animal rights position.

Now I’ll admit up front that tonight I’m grilling cedar plank catfish and I’m well-known for my orange-ginger pork chops, so I’m not as good a person as Francione. Although I do like the line about vegetarians being people who are too insensitive to hear a carrot scream. Still, I enjoy reading points of view that differ from my own in areas of particular interest. So I plan on delving deeper into Franciones’ writings.

Along these lines I will also point you to Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully which provides powerful arguments against our current practices.

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