The Great Minds: Editorial

The Case for Animal Rights
by Tom Regan
I regard myself as an advocate of animal rights — as part of the animal rights movement. That movement, as I conceive it, is committed to a number of goals, including the total abolition of the use of Animal Research; the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture; and the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping...

Animal Liberation
by Peter Singer
Animal liberation is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over...

Animals’ Rights
by Henry Salt
Have the lower animals “rights?” Undoubtedly — if men have. That is the point I wish to make evident in this opening chapter. But have men rights? Let it be stated at the outset that I have no intention of discussing the abstract theory of natural rights, which, at the present time, is looked upon with suspicion and disfavour by many social reformers, since it has not unfrequently been made to cover the most extravagant and contradictory assertions...

An Unnatural Order
by Jim Mason
Some think human society seems to be steadily going insane. They note the ridiculous hatreds that keep us nearly constantly at war with each other. They see we are fouling our global nest, wiping out much of the planet’s life and making life more and more miserable for ourselves. I don’t think we are going insane; I think we have just not learned to look deeply enough into the causes of our current social and environmental problems. I believe with a growing number of others that these problems began several millennia ago when our ancestors took up farming and broke the primal bonds with the living world and put human beings above all other life...

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