As I said on my home page, my name is Laura Moretti. I have been involved in animal protection for more than 30 years — first as an undercover anti-cruelty investigator for state humane societies, and then as an editor and designer of numerous animal defense newsletters and magazines, most notably the award-winning, international animal protection publication, The Animals Voice Magazine (which I also created and am still currently publishing).

Over the years, I have been employed by The Fund for Animals, Farm Sanctuary, The Animals' Agenda, and In Defense of Animals (to name just a few organizations), as well as by the Compassion for Animals Foundation, underwriter of the award-winning animal defense web site that I founded, The Animals Voice. I am also an author and editor of several nonfiction animal defense books, and an unpublished author of novels (which I'm working on changing into a published author!).

I stay busy producing animal rights material, writing fiction, rescuing horses, and enjoying old movies.

On Equines
I am the past Vice Presidents of Return to Freedom: The American Wild Horse Sanctuary, and the National Wild Horse Rescue & Sanctuary, which oversaw the rescue capture of 236 wild horses from the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon. My story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that I was the person chosen by a horse on his way to slaughter to be an ambassador on behalf of equines worldwide (see Shilo).

The excerpt below is from People Promoting and People Opposing Animal Rights: In Their Own Words, edited by John M. Kistler:

Biographical Profile
I’m Laura Moretti. I was born in Massachusetts, on a U.S. Air Force Base in 1958; my father retired a colonel. I was raised across the globe from Europe to South America. My childhood experiences in other countries not only triggered my animal rights activism, but also helped me to enjoy the differences between animals and humans, as well as between other cultures and our own.

I enjoy history, politics, Native American philosophy, writing fiction, and spending time with two cats (who live with me) and a horse I rescued from slaughter more than a decade ago. I also enjoy close family ties, good books, and really good movies. Although I can’t truly say that I enjoy animal rights activism, I’m thankful that it is in my life. Ignorance is not bliss.

Becoming Involved
I have very vivid memories of certain shocking events that took place in both Spain and Bolivia when I was six and nine years old, respectively.

When I was six, a large white husky-type dog followed me home from school. It seems that I was always bringing home animals, from beetles to frogs and gophers to snakes, plus a lot of cats and dogs. So I wasn’t concerned about the huge white dog who trailed me along the pathway. He stood nearly at my shoulder and was covered in a thick, dense coat. In my view, he was utterly massive and strikingly beautiful.

But when I got home and Mother opened the door to allow me entry, she seemed suspiciously wary of my companion. She ordered me in quickly and closed the door, shutting the dog in the open yard behind the screen. I don’t recall being told there was any reason for her caution, but I vividly remember watching from a window as the dog hiked to the top of a nearby plateau. I was curious about why I should be so wary of him as he had followed me all the way home without incident.

On the road, not too far away, a patrol car came into view. And I watched, mortified and helplessly, while the dog was gunned down in the street. Later I would learn there had been a rabies scare, and all stray dogs were to be shot on sight.

In Bolivia, I watched again with that morbid dread that came from sheer helplessness and inexplicable outrage, while a dog was strangled to death in the street, to become a family’s evening meal. I saw llamas viciously beaten into carrying heavy loads. I glimpsed the old woman across the street — the one who lived in the adobe hut with her children, cows, pigs, and chickens — wringing the necks of small, screaming rabbits, whom she later sold at the open market.

Dead dogs and livestock littered the riverbed that I had to cross every morning on my way to school. Soon I found a private place on the side of the mountain behind our house where I’d take their remains, bury them, and pray for their souls — despite the local Catholic church’s claim that animals didn’t have souls.

I can’t say it was any single event that put me on this road of life-long activism, but I knew at a very early age that there was something terribly wrong with the way humans viewed and treated animals. I empathized with their helplessness and innocence. So it was only inevitable, I guess, that when we returned to the States and I watched a news documentary showing the brutal slaughter of seal pups in Canada, that my life would change in that moment and never be the same.

Important Issues
Perhaps like a lot of animal defenders, it was years before I made the connection between the atrocities committed against, say, seal pups in the name of fashion, and veal calves in the name of food. I picked up a book by Ruth Harrison entitled Animal Machines, and was so mortified by what I learned that I became a vegetarian on the spot. How I had missed the direct link between the pig and the pork chop is something I am only recently beginning to fully understand and appreciate.

I think the plight of “food animals” is probably the single most important issue of our times. Every year, nearly 10 billion animals are butchered for human consumption in the United States alone. By sheer numbers, the treatment and exploitation of animals in the name of food should demonstrate that we must end this practice. The flesh-eating industry destroys the environment, human health, and animals’ lives in unfathomable numbers.

More than that, ending our consumption of animals (unlike ending war) is one thing that each and every one of us can do to improve our health, protect the environment, and abolish the abuse, suffering, and exploitation of animals. I truly believe that a higher plane of consciousness rises in the individual who leaves off eating animals, an awareness that opens the mind and empowers the soul, which allows us to embrace the true essence of humanity: our empathy.

Goals and Strategies
A single image changed my life: a seal hunter kicking a seal pup in the face until it was dead left me with a sense of purpose from which I would never escape (nor would I want to). A single picture of a crated calf in a veal barn altered forever my behavior. I still believe in images, and so I spend my time and my life finding ways to bring those images to the widest audience possible.

In my youth, I did that by designing and posting my own flyers, purchasing newspaper ads, writing letters to the editors of local newspapers, selling magazine articles, and publishing my own books, such as All Heaven in a Rage: Essays on the Eating of Animals. I also founded and edit an international animal rights magazine, The Animals Voice, to bring awareness to the plight of animals worldwide. Now, my outreach is encompassed in the web site by the same name, with more than a dozen satellite sites in development. It is, I believe, the most cost-efficient, far-reaching way to educate others about the plight of animals.

The ironic thing is that I wanted more than anything to work in the local school system and teach the psychology of prejudice, of humans and animals. In college, I was told animal rights was a bogus concept, and I dropped out. In a roundabout way, you could say I found another path to my initial dream. With a computer keyboard, I have become a teacher.

Religion & Spirituality
I left the church and God when I was living in La Paz, Bolivia, by wondering what sort of creator could visit upon helpless, innocent animals the kinds of atrocities I had witnessed as a child. In recent years, I’ve come to realize that I replaced that religion, not with atheism, as I once believed, but with pantheism: the belief that there’s a spirit, a soul, in all there is — mountains, rivers, the way geese migrate. It is this newly found religion, if you will, that now inspires me and secures my dream that one day we shall achieve, as Einstein puts it, the goal of all evolution: nonviolence, the highest ethics. To achieve such a goal we must, I am certain, include animals in that moral sphere.

In the Christian Bible, God created the Garden of Eden. In it God created vegetarian humans. In essence, my purpose in life, through my newly discovered “religion,” the sacredness of life, is to bring us back to the Garden’s Gate.

To read more of this interview, see
People Promoting and People Opposing Animal Rights:
In Their Own Words
(edited by John M. Kistler)

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