Veganism in a Nutshell: Animal Rights by Bruce Friedrich, PETA The final reason I hear for adopting a vegan diet, and this may be the most important reason for teens and college kids, is the growing understanding that animals feel pain in the same way we do—in fact, it’s this realization, that animals are not automatons, that forms the basis of the modern animal rights movement. Before coming to PETA, I spent six years working in a shelter for homeless families and helping to run a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. While there, a friend of mine sent me a book by a theologian at Oxford University, Dr. Andrew Linzey, who argues that animals were designed with certain needs, desires, species-specific behaviors and inclinations, and so forth and that animals have the capacity for pain and suffering, just as human beings. From Dr. Linzey’s perspective, denying animals the things they were designed to do and inflicting pain on them for reasons of convenience are categorically unethical. Linzey argues that causing pain to an animal is the moral equivalent of causing pain to a human being. This was the first time that I’d heard that particular argument. The logic of it spoke to me on a deep level. Of course, if animals have the same right to be free from pain and suffering as do humans, we certainly can’t eat them, rip their skins off to wear them, experiment on them, or beat them into doing senseless acts in circuses or rodeos. It was this argument, which I heard after I’d already been a vegan for about 4 years for human rights and environmental reasons, that caused me to become an animal rights activist and to come to eventually come to work for PETA. Basically, Linzey’s is the animal right’s perspective. The animal rights perspective holds that animals have a right, just as human beings do, to be free from pain and suffering. Back in the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, the father of the Utilitarian Movement, stated that if we’re talking about a being’s right to be free from pain and suffering, the morally relevant variable is not whether that being can think or talk or how we relate to that being’s life, but his or her capacity to feel pain, to suffer. Of course, any introductory physiology course will teach you that birds, mammals, and fish, have basically the same capacity to suffer. We share this capacity with all animals. Alice Walker, the civil rights activist and humanitarian who wrote The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, wrote the introduction to a book entitled, The Dreaded Comparison, by Marjorie Spiegel. In this book, Spiegel compares the treatment of human slaves in the 16th through 19th centuries to the way animals are treated today. Alice Walker agrees, saying, “The animals of the world … were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women were created for men.” That’s quite a statement. “The animals of the world … were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women were created for men.” The animal rights movement is a movement for justice, just like abolition, suffrage, civil rights, and women’s rights. Most people today understand that bias on the basis of race or gender or religion or nationality—any bias against other human beings—is wrong. The neglected link, for many, is species bias—having the idea that just because certain beings are not human, we can do whatever we wish with them. Dr. Albert Schweitzer put it well when he stated that “[c]ompassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to [hu]mankind.” Again, prejudice is prejudice, whether it is based on race or gender or religion—or on species. In each case, a line is drawn, separating those in the group above the line from those in the group below the line. Nobel laureate Dr. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland, called species bias the “purest form of racism” and animal rights the purest form of justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals is the epitome of the “might makes right” moral paradigm—a moral paradigm that is ethically bankrupt. Interestingly, the animal rights perspective has been embraced by a range of brilliant thinkers and humanitarians that includes, in addition to those I’ve mentioned: Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, C.S. Lewis, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, Dick Gregory and Mahatma Gandhi.