Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before reading our main essay, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
These questions apply to any movement, for animals, for humans, or for both, dedicated to challenging entrenched power. Exploitative power never gives up without a fight. The Marquess of Queensberry rules never apply. 
OpEds
Is The Animal Rights Movement Really Moving?
by Marcia Mueller | Armory of the Revolution
MOST OF US HAVE COME TO SIMILAR CONCLUSIONS:
- Big Ag and other wealthy corporate exploiters will not relinquish their power or profits.
- Most people will not make sacrifices on behalf of other species.
- Activists click, table, petition, and protest, and we get laws with loopholes and no enforcement.
- Californians recently voted for Proposition 12, which gives calves 43 square feet of space by 2020, and pigs 24 square feet by 2022. If this is a victory, it is only because it replaces something even worse.
- Transport trucks and ships depart with their doomed cows, calves, and sheep for the Middle East and Asia, while horses are flown to Japan, all for foreign slaughter. The “laws” covering animal transport are never enforced.
- The VA will go ahead with new experiments on dogs’ brains and hearts in spite of multiple protests.
- Thousands of shelters will kill the cast-off pets of irresponsible owners. Among the victims will be pit bulls who are killed simply for who they are and for what we made them.
SO PERHAPS WE SHOULD BE ASKING OURSELVES WHAT MORE WE CAN DO
- Will peaceful protests and potluck pacifism ever be enough?
- Will there come a time for more aggressive activism?
- What will we be ready to risk?
- Could the HSUS or PETA or other national groups help more with organization and mobilization of Internet activism?
Or are the animals and their advocates destined to be stalled forever by the powerful forces of corporate and individual speciesism. Will smallest mercy of a few more inches of space be all they ever receive?
Things for activists to be thinking about.
2 comments
The lives of farm animals are still overwhelmingly horrible, even with some states’ passage of humane leaning laws. There has been growing awareness and concern by the public, but progress is slow. The number of vegans continues to grow, according to a recent survey, but it’s still in the single digits. If the questions posted are asking whether people should consider violence to help animals, I’d say no. It’d be like attacking the entire government, basically fruitless. And morally bankrupt. We should be striving for humane treatment of all, humans and nonhumans. Once we can change laws to provide everyone with secure housing, a livable wage, healthcare, education, and support for young and old, we can dismantle all the predatory industries like chemical, big AG, private prisons, oil and gas – basically, all the companies that are slowly poisoning all of society. If all Americans, and eventually all on earth, have the above mentioned support, no one will need to work for or prop up these grim reaper businesses.
We/animal advocates will never prevail to end animal suffering if we try to defeat greed and wealthy opponents who spend billions relative to our thousands. However, human emotional response is usually something that money can’t buy. Our best chance of prevailing to stop animal suffering, especially with human gluttony where plant-based foods can be both nutritious and savory, is to inform the public of the atrocities (such as the cow downed cow being drug into the truck) and education as to how it doesn’t have to be this way. For certain, the animal rights movement is growing, but folks need to know what’s going on and then be very knowledgeable and confident with their options. We need billboards, PSI’s, all kinds of news media ads, etc., to both tell the story and teach alternatives to killing animals for food. The steps for change may not be happening to the degree they could and should, but the times…they definitely are a changin’!