• Abolition Versus Regulation

    “Just as in the 19th century, there was a real schism between abolitionists of slavery and people who wanted to make slavery more humane…The abolitionists said, Look, I’m not interested in making an unjust institution more humane. I’m interested in abolishing the institution.”

    Gary Francione

     

  • The Principle of Equality

    “Here you have human beings who basically have no autonomy, no consciousness, no sentience at all being treated as legal persons with a whole panoply of rights. And here you have, say chimpanzees or bonobos, who are pygmy chimpanzees, who are extraordinarily cognitively complex, who have autonomy, who should have dignity, and yet they’re treated as things. So as a matter of equality there is something wrong here.”  – Steve Wise

    There are two versions of this clip. For the longer version, please see The Principle of Equality (extended version).

     

  • One Thing to Improve the Lives of Animals (Peter Singer)

    “[T]he simplest thing really, is to stop eating them because it’s in the food industry that the greatest amount of abuse of animals occurs. In the United States alone, 10 billion animals get killed for food each year. It’s vast. It dwarfs all of the other forms of abuse of animals.”

     

  • Drawing the Line (David Priestman)

    “There is one movement for giving personhood to great apes. I find that difficult to understand because I understand personhood to be something that can only be intrinsic to humans.“

     

  • Ideal Kind of Judge for Changing the Law

    “Our most famous judges are Principal judges. The ones who say, ‘This is right and the law needs to right’. The judges who say, ‘This is how it’s been done for 800 years this is how it’s going to be done now’ are not the famous judges of our world. It’s the ones who changed something because it had gone out of fashion, it had gone out of date, become archaic. And so you want to go in front of those judges.” – Steve Wise

     

  • Animal Welfare Act’s Role in Laboratories

    “If your IACUC committee deems it is necessary for the science,  there’s nothing that cannot be done to an animal in research and the Animal Welfare Act has absolutely no jurisdiction over that.”

    -Theodora Capaldo

     

  • Endangered Species Act: Split Listing

    “What the Fish and Wildlife Service did, is it issued a special regulation that said, we are going to designate chimpanzees in the wild as Endangered but we’re going to keep captive chimpanzees listed as Threatened, subject to this special rule. The special rule being none of the protections of the statute apply.”

    – Katherine Meyer

     

  • How Animal Rights Became Associated with Eco-Terrorism

    “We have a Federal law that targets people who…are accused of doing certain crimes that would have been considered criminal anyway but now because it’s against an animal enterprise the penalties are far stricter.”

    – Lee Hall

     

  • Historical Influences

    “René Descartes, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham really provide…a lot of the background noise about how we think about animals now.”

    – Gary Francione

     

  • One Approach to Rights: Proportionality Rights

    “The thing about Proportionality Rights is that they are real rights…You have fewer rights but you have rights that have been cut down in a way that still leaves you as a legal person, not as a legal thing. You’re not owned by anybody and you’re not a slave.”

    – Steve Wise

     
 

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