Recent Posts

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  The Principle of Equality (extended version)

  “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

  Please note: There are two versions of this clip. For the shorter version, please see The Principle of Equality.

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  Anti-Cruelty Laws

  “We allow animals to be treated in ways which if we treated humans that way would be considered as torture…But those things are customary within the industry.“

  – Gary Francione

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  “No Animals Were Harmed”

  “The chimpanzees…were struck or kicked or had something thrown at them…but they also sometimes just got hit out of the blue by the Head Trainer and my sense was that he did that to keep them focused and keep them paying attention to him.”

  Sarah Baeckler

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  The Reality of the Animal Welfare Act

  “You’re not really gonna have any kind of law substantially creating circumstances where animals are going to be treated well if that law has nothing ultimately to do with the mission of the enterprise, with the end result that they want. Think about it, it’s not gonna happen.“

  – Lee Hall

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  What is the Animal Welfare Act?

  “The Animal Welfare Act is a statute that was passed by Congress in the 1960’s to protect certain animals from inhumane treatment.”

  -Katherine Meyer

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  What Does “Necessary” Suffering Mean?

  “It’s very difficult to find anyone who would disagree with the proposition that it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. Now, what do we mean when we say ‘necessary’?”

  Gary Francione

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  About The Great Ape Project

  “The mission is to get basic rights for all great apes. By basic rights I mean the rights that we grant to all human beings irrespective of their rationality or intellectual level…They should have rights to life, liberty and protection from torture, subject to reasonable constraints.”

  – Peter Singer

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  Why Care About Animal Rights?

  “There should really be no borders when we think in terms of ethics.”

  Lee Hall

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  Why are Great Apes Property?

  “If we’d simply said great apes are being cruelly treated and we should be less cruel, we would not have got people to think about the basic question of, ‘Well, what is their moral status? Why is it that though they have all these remarkable characteristics and qualities…Why is it that they’re still property?’”

  – Peter Singer

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  Treatment, Use and Animal Protection Laws

  “You want to value the dog high? Fine. You want to value the dog low? Fine. As far as the law’s concerned, the only interests that you have to protect are the interests that are absolutely necessary in order to exploit the dog.”

  – Gary Francione