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In Their Own Words

Miscellaneous animal rightists have this to say ...

Amory, Cleveland Founder, Fund For Animals
Best, Dr. Steven. University of Texas
Churchill, Prof. Ward. University of Colorado
Conroy, Jake Sea Defense Alliance, and other groups
DeRose, Chris President, Last Chance for Animals
F.A.R.M. (Farm Animal Reform Movement)
Katz, Elliot; In Defense of Animals
Manson, Charles
New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance
Nocella, Tony Co-founder, Radical Education Community; president, Houston Animal Rights Team; Center for Animal Liberation Affairs
Singer, Peter
Author of "Animal Liberation"; founder of International Association of Bioethics
Wardle, Tony; Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (VIVA)

Amory, Cleveland
Founder, Fund For Animals
1917 - 1998

"All animals will not only be not shot, they will be protected -- not only from people but as much as possible from each other. Prey will be separated from predator, and there will be no overpopulation or starvation because all will be controlled by sterilization or implant."
(Describing his ideal world, in Sierra, June 1992.)

Best, Dr. Steven
Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at El Paso

"We are not terrorists, but we are a threat. We are a threat both economically and philosophically. Our power is not in the right to vote but the power to stop production. We will break the law and destroy property until we win."
(Addressing International Animal Rights Gathering 2005, in Kent, England, July 16; quoted in "US animal rights fanatic in Britain vows to break law," The Daily Telegraph, July 17, 2005.)

"We are abolitionists. We don't want to reform them [vivisectionist companies], we want to wipe them off the face of the earth. We will fight, and die if necessary, to free the slaves."
(Addressing International Animal Rights Gathering 2005, in Kent, England, July 16; quoted in "US animal rights fanatic in Britain vows to break law," The Daily Telegraph, July 17, 2005.)

Churchill, Prof. Ward
University of Colorado professor

"To assault the meatpacking industry is to mount a challenge to the mentality that allowed well over a million dehumanized humans to be systematically slaughtered by the SS einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe during the early 1940s, and the nazis' simultaneous development of truly industrial killing techniques in places like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka."
(Critiquing animal rights campaigns against the meat industry, in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, by Steven Best and Anthony Nocella, June 2004; for more on the comparison between livestock production and the Holocaust, see Holocaust Imagery and Animal Rights, by the Anti-Defamation League, Feb. 25, 2002.)

"Given the opportunity to do either in, say, 1942, would it have been more effective/appropriate to have torched the office of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat whose peculiar expertise made an orderly implementation of the Final Solution possible, or to have eliminated Eichmann himself? The answer need not be rendered as an abstraction."
(Criticising the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front for not going far enough, in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, by Steven Best and Anthony Nocella, June 2004.)

Conroy, Jake
Sea Defense Alliance, and other groups

"Property damage, in my opinion, is not a violent act."
(Quoted in "Animal Rights Backers Converge in Va.", Washington Post, July 5, 2001; on-line at www.christianveg.com/wpost.htm.)

DeRose, Chris
President, Last Chance for Animals

When confronted this week with a group of animal rights activists protesting biomedical research, UCLA arranged for Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei to meet with Chris DeRose ....ÊDeRose reported that Peccei had asked the protestors to denounce the more violent activities of animal rights extremists, and that in return the university would consider holding more meetings with activists. DeRose refused, stating, "If you're going to be labeled a terrorist, you may as well do it for the right reasons."
(In "Marchers protest animal testing," Daily Bruin [UCLA], Oct. 10, 2006, www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=38315)

"You know I always try to say that certain activities like bombings or arson - I always stay away from those things only because they are uncontrollable. There are things that I am against personally but I've seen them done and they have worked. For example the Managing Director of HLS [Huntingdon Life Sciences] in England was beaten and that put the fear of whatever into those people. It did start to shake up what was going on over there. I think the man that did it got 3 to 5 years but something like that, I think, had an effect. Now am I endorsing that? Not publicly. If it happens and it works, then that's great."
(In an interview with Animal Liberation NSW [Australia], 2002)

"A life is a life. If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn't make any difference to me. In the scheme of things, we're equal."
(Quoted in "Biting back: Animal researchers, industries go on the offensive against increasingly militant activists," Los Angeles Times, Apr. 12, 1990.)

See also:

Interview with Chris DeRose, president, Last Chance for Animals, on "Direct Action" by Animal Liberation NSW, Australia. (Outside link.)

F.A.R.M. (Farm Animal Reform Movement)

"We've been doing a lot of work in this country [the US] for a long time, and what we've done is sort of apply a squeeze maneuver to the livestock industries É and what we've been doing is that, on the one hand, by introducing animal welfare legislation, by introducing environmental legislation, by introducing labor laws, we've increased their cost of doing business. At the very same time, all of our É vegan education campaigns have been cutting into their market and decreasing their profits."
(FARM program director Pattrice Jones, Animal Rights 2002 National Convention, June 28 - July 3, 2002.)

Katz, Elliot
CEO, In Defense of Animals

"It is time we demand an end to the misguided and abusive concept of animal ownership. The first step on this long, but just, road would be ending the concept of pet ownership."
(In "In Defense of Animals," spring 1997.)

Manson, Charles

"God's coming is not for the glory of people but the kingdom of life and that's bugs, birds, bees, wildlife, trees, fish."

"All must have a one world government, money, army, all in order to bring order in fast ..."

New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance

"Liberating our language by eliminating the word 'pet' is the first step. ... In an ideal society where all exploitation and oppression hasbeen eliminated, it will be NJARA's policy to oppose the keeping of animals as 'pets'."
(In "Should Dogs Be Kept As Pets? NO!", Good Dog! February 1991.)

Nocella, Tony
Co-founder,
Radical Education Community; president, Houston Animal Rights Team; head of the Center for Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA)

"CALA supports the ALF [Animal Liberation Front] because we understand the importance of illegal direct action in any movement."
(CALA mission statement.)

"As a person that feels that all tactics must be represented in a respectful manner, I have a responsibility to make sure that property destruction is represented as nonviolent. It is also my responsibility to represent property destruction in a positive manner (describe the benefits of property destruction) instead of only representing the negatives (which marginilize and divide the movement)."
(From "Property Destruction, the Next Tactic," by Tony Nocella, July 22, 2001.)

Click here for Nocella's biography.

Singer, Peter
Author of "Animal Liberation"; founder of International Association of Bioethics

Comparing newborn human babies and pigs: "I would guess that the pig is more self-aware, particularly if the infant has a brain disease and has no capacity to see itself as self-aware." On which has more of a right to life, the infant or the pig: "I think you'd have to say that the pig has the greater claim."
(Boston Globe, in "Singer Savaged in US Arena", July 29, 1999.)

"Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans."
(In Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd edition, 1990.)

"An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable."
(In Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd edition, 1990.)

Wardle, Tony
Associate director, Vegetarians International Voice for Animals

"We carried out research a few years ago that indicated that most Muslims were happy to eat stunned Halal meat. The stun method was introduced in the UK decades ago because of the barbarity of cutting an animal's throat. We are opposed to the slaughter of animals on all counts."
(In "Animal rights activists attack ASDA for stocking 'cruel' Halal meat," Daily Mail (UK), Nov. 5, 2007, citing interview in trade magazine The Grocer.)

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