Animal Person

MAY 10, 2009

In " 'Animal Rights:' Pernicious Nonsense for Both Law & Public Policy ," Massachusetts attorney and "sportsman" Richard Latimer is on the mark with some concepts, and way off with others. It has absolutely nothing to do with any genuine environmentalist ethic. Now, I know you're saying: That's not what animal rights is.

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Animal Person

DECEMBER 18, 2009

Stephanie Ernst, formerly of Change.org , has started a new space called " Animal Rights and AntiOppression " and she has invited yours truly to post there! Stephanie has also invited Deb from Invisible Voices , Kelly G from easyVegan.info and Marji, who blogs for Animal Place sanctuary and For the Pits.

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

This morning I posted " On California's Animal Abuse Registry Proposal " over at Animal Rights & AntiOppression and welcome any discussion about it. The outcome: "worship of human beings." Tags: Activism Current Affairs Ethics Language. What a fitting addition to discussions about speciesism!

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Did you see that Change.org now has an Animal Welfare page? is clearly someone who advocates for animal rights. Ernst believes we don't have a right to use sentient nonhumans and all of her posts (and those of Alex Melonas, who also posts at animalrights.change.org) are unequivocal about animal use.

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Critter News

SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

An enormous victory was achieved for animals this week when nearly 200 dogs and 54 cats were rescued from a North Carolina animal testing facility that closed its doors after an undercover investigation revealed apparent abuse of the animals by workers at the facility.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 12, 2010

If there has been progress in ethics recently it has been through the realization of some ethicists that animal happiness and suffering has to be considered equally with that of human beings. I should draw attention here to the remarkable book Animal Liberation by Professor Peter Singer of Monash University.

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Critter News

JUNE 16, 2010

From what I recall, chimpanzees share at least 95 percent of human DNA, although the number that floats around the most is 98.6 If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as "human rights"? Tags: animal experimentation animal research.

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Critter News

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

Former Baywatch star and model Pamela Anderson has accused one of India's most prestigious research centres of animal cruelty, urging it to retire decades-old test monkeys and adopt humane practices. But the animals suffering behind closed doors at AIIMS must endure this nightmare every day."

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10,000 Birds

JANUARY 3, 2023

Baby birds are cuteness personified, possibly even more so than other baby animals, including human babies, and pose interesting questions of survival and development. Baby birds may be separated from the nest and their parents because of natural occurrences (violent weather, floods) or unknowing human interference or predators.

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Today's New York Times gives us Adam Shriver's Op-Ed " Not Grass-Fed, But at Least Pain-Free ," which presents its dilemma at the end: If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

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10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 17, 2014

But the tenets of the North American Model were developed in the 19th century, when wildlife ethics and science were a mere glimmer of what we understand today. Now, in 21st century America, we’re entertaining new considerations, in keeping with our modern understanding of wild animals and conservation.

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Critter News

APRIL 4, 2009

They're not necessarily questioning the ethics, but the efficacy. The feud between animal rights activists and researchers is among the bitterest in science. Indeed, it often isn't even the best science: New drugs that show great promise in mice, for example, often confer zero benefit to humans, or even prove harmful.

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Animal Person

MAY 23, 2009

I've used the term "animal activism" lately as an experiment. I notice that if I use "animal rights activist" or anything with the word "rights" in it, because it's loaded and misunderstood, my listener often has an immediate bias of some kind. People have a relationship, whether or not they are aware, to the term "animal rights."

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Animal Person

APRIL 24, 2009

Yesterday, regarding being a minority within a minority , mikey commented (among other things): While I am fairly new subscriber to this blog, therefore not knowing your particular stance, I've often felt like a minority within a minority for my stance on animal birth control. Tags: Activism Current Affairs Ethics Gray Matters.

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Animal Person

MARCH 9, 2010

A handful Animal Person readers since May of 2006, when I started this then-daily blog, have asked me if I've read Joan Dunayer. And now that I've read Animal Equality and begun Speciesism , I think I know why. Dunayer devotes a chapter each to the language used in hunting, zoos, "marine parks," vivisection and "animal agriculture."

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 25, 2016

Other animal control issues that involve mass killing make for easier decisions, according to Peter P. There is evidence that toxoplasma leads, in humans, to an elevated risk of mental illness and depression. On the other hand, the extinction of the Spotted Owl is completely unacceptable.

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Animal Person

JULY 25, 2010

Thanks, once again, to James LaVeck and Jenny Stein of Tribe of Heart for kindly and carefully bringing attention to what should be a stunningly-obvious moment of hypocrisy by groups that exist to advocate for and save animals. Tags: Activism Current Affairs Ethics Film animal rights Tribe of Heart.

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Animal Person

JANUARY 23, 2010

A couple of years ago I catalogued the dozens of excuses/rationalizations from well-meaning, compassionate people about why they eat animals, and all fell into one of six categories: It's what god wanted (and other versions, such as: That's why they were put on the earth. Cain=farmer=evil murderer; Abel=slaughtered animals=victim/good son.

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Animal Person

JANUARY 6, 2010

I did tweet about " Scientists Say Dolphins Should Be Treated As 'Non-human Persons' " yesterday, as I think this is a Gray Matter for a lot of people and might be interesting to explore. You could be for or against animal rights and believe the gateway theory. You could be for or against animal rights and believe the gateway theory.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

The film Partitions (running time: 14 min) by Audrey Kali gives an intimate glimpse of the ethical struggles that five small-scale meat farmers face when their animals are slaughtered. In this film, we see farmers interacting with the animals they will eventually transform into food (chickens, pigs and cattle).

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Angus sent me a link to " Animal Parts: High Style of Just Plain Beastly " wherein Zosia Bielski reports that "hipsters are going whole hog, donning road kill as accessories and cow hooves on their feet.". The underlying philosophy is that the dead animals "should be used in their entirety." It's giving the animal purpose after life.

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 6, 2010

He writes: There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.). Tags: Current Affairs Ethics Language. I'll set it aside here.

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.). product that comes from an animal ). product that comes from an animal ).

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 9, 2012

Surely any sentient or conscious being has states that matter to it in a positive or negative way—pleasure matters to an animal in a positive way, pain or fear in a negative way. So if human beings are ends in themselves, why not animals, since they too have feelings and goals that they value?

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10,000 Birds

MAY 26, 2017

Looking back, they can seem quite dated – questionable environmental ethics and anthropology and all that – but the sense of adventure that they conveyed, and the sense that I too, if necessary, could someday rise to the occasion and share a bond with nature, were catnip to a middle-grades reader.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 13, 2010

You say that "Family Farms do not exist and that they don't care about their animals." Does he own the human members of his "family?" Does he really equate the cows with the human sentients in his family? Can the humans come and go as they please? That is not true. Does it include ownership of individuals ("our cows")?

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Critter News

FEBRUARY 6, 2012

A federal judge for the first time in US history has heard arguments in a case that could determine whether animals enjoy the same constitutional protection against slavery as human beings. when the constitution was adopted.

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Animal Person

JULY 15, 2010

Or to get struck by an automobile, die slowly, of failing internal organs, and be unfit for human consumption." Let's deconstruct: What we have here is the myth that killing animals in the wild and then eating them is somehow a compassionate act. thinking about the ways in which the deers have a "BIG" human problem.

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Animal Person

MARCH 29, 2010

I finally read SPECIESISM , by Joan Dunayer, which was published a couple of years after ANIMAL EQUALITY , which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Whenever the media report that someone has killed "an endangered animal" or "an endangered species," they too confuse an individual with a species. To be consistent (and nonspeciesist).

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Animal Ethics

MAY 28, 2012

This is human chauvinism. The anthropomorphic side reads: "It is anthropomorphic to attribute characteristics to nonhumans that belong only to humans." The human chauvinism side reads: "It is chauvinistic not to attribute characteristics to those nonhumans who have them and to persist in the conceit that only humans do."

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Animal Person

MAY 30, 2009

Bea directed me to an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Parker , the "chair man " (my emphasis) of the Animal Agriculture Alliance at CattleNetwork, which apparently is "The Source for Cattle News." If any "drastic measures" are employed, they are to remove animals from suffering, not to impose our dietary choices on others.

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Animal Person

APRIL 14, 2009

There is a profound difference between what Sea Shepherd does and what the Animal Liberation Front does, but there are also similarities, and those similarities increase in number if a direct action by the ALF (or anyone else) is an open rescue and therefore a direct defense of sentient nonhumans being attacked by humans.

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Animal Person

APRIL 1, 2010

Meanwhile, "new speciesism" is the notion that within a paradigm where rights are included for nonhuman animals, some are more deserving of rights than others for any of a variety of reasons (e.g., No nonhuman alive today belongs to the same species as some ancestor of humans. We want them to be free and independent of humans (119).

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 25, 2016

Philosophers have shown that the standard reasons offered to exclude animals from the moral circle, and to justify not assessing our treatment of them by the same moral categories and machinery we use for assessing the treatment of humans, do not meet the test of moral relevance. 41 in A Companion to Bioethics , 2d ed.,

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Animal Person

JULY 26, 2009

There has to be something I can do to reduce all of the suffering of the animals we use as food, I thought. Luckily, I think I've found a way to assuage my conscience about all of the suffering, environmental devastation and negative health impacts of eating animal products all day. I call it VBM: Vegan Between Meals.

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Animal Person

JUNE 16, 2010

From the Introduction : "Humans are fascinated by animals. For all our devotion, though, we sometimes seem not to recognize the needs and wants of animals. Do animals have rights? Do human beings have duties toward them regardless of whether they have rights? What kind of souls do animals have?

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Animal Person

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes I get comments that make me realize I wasn't clear about a fundamental point, or I assume everyone remembers other posts or has even been to Animal Person before. Why are Leftists to shoulder the blame for the exploitation of animals simply because of their tardiness in arriving on the animal rights scene?

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