Animal Rights Now
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Common Interest - Beliefs & Causes
Description:
To promote veganism, abolish the property status and exploitation of nonhuman animals, dismantle speciesism and human supremacy, and defend animal rights.

Nonhuman animals deserve freedom from human domination and control. Each sentient individual's basic rights to life and liberty must be respected. We strive to end all forms of human tyranny over other animals.

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Name:
Animal Rights Now
Category:
Common Interest - Beliefs & Causes
Description:
To promote veganism, abolish the property status and exploitation of nonhuman animals, dismantle speciesism and human supremacy, and defend animal rights.

Nonhuman animals deserve freedom from human domination and control. Each sentient individual's basic rights to life and liberty must be respected. We strive to end all forms of human tyranny over other animals.

[...continued on the "Info" tab...]
Privacy Type:
Open: All content is public.

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News:
The Philosophy of Animal Rights

by Tom Regan

http://www.cultureandanimals.org/pop1.html

[Visit the above link to also read: "10 Reasons FOR Animal Rights and Their Explanation" and "10 Reasons AGAINST Animal Rights and Their Replies"]

The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.

That life includes a variety of biological, individual, and social needs. The satisfaction of these needs is a source of pleasure, their frustration or abuse, a source of pain. In these fundamental ways, the nonhuman animals in labs and on farms, for example, are the same as human beings. And so it is that the ethics of our dealings with them, and with one another, must acknowledge the same fundamental moral principles.

At its deepest level, human ethics is based on the independent value of the individual: The moral worth of any one human being is not to be measured by how useful that person is in advancing the interest of other human beings. To treat human beings in ways that do not honor their independent value is to violate that most basic of human rights: the right of each person to be treated with respect.

The philosophy of animal rights demands only that logic be respected. For any argument that plausibly explains the independent value of human beings implies that other animals have this same value, and have it equally. And any argument that plausibly explains the right of humans to be treated with respect, also implies that these other animals have this same right, and have it equally, too.

It is true, therefore, that women do not exist to serve men, blacks to serve whites, the poor to serve the rich, or the weak to serve the strong. The philosophy of animal rights not only accepts these truths, it insists upon and justifies them.

But this philosophy goes further. By insisting upon and justifying the independent value and rights of other animals, it gives scientifically informed and morally impartial reasons for denying that these animals exist to serve us.

Once this truth is acknowledged, it is easy to understand why the philosophy of animal rights is uncompromising in its response to each and every injustice other animals are made to suffer.

It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands in the case of animals used in science, for example, but empty cages: not "traditional" animal agriculture, but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not "more humane" hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.

For when an injustice is absolute, one must oppose it absolutely. It was not "reformed" slavery that justice demanded, not "reformed" child labor, not "reformed" subjugation of women. In each of these cases, abolition was the only moral answer. Merely to reform injustice is to prolong injustice.

The philosophy of animal rights demands this same answer—abolition—in response to the unjust exploitation of other animals. It is not the details of unjust exploitation that must be changed. It is the unjust exploitation itself that must be ended, whether on the farm, in the lab, or among the wild, for example. The philosophy of animal rights asks for nothing more, but neither will it be satisfied with anything less.

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Resources for theory and practice:

<Sites>

- Rights for Animals - http://www.rightsforanimals.org/

- Animal Liberation Hallmarks - http://www.al-hallmarks.net/

<Books>

- Speciesism -
http://www.amazon.com/Speciesism-Joan-Dunayer/dp/0970647565

- Animal Equality -
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Equality-Liberation-Joan-Dunayer/dp/0970647557

- Animal Rights/Human Rights -
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Rights-Human-David-Nibert/dp/0742517764

Feel free to post your contact information on the Wall or Discussion Board to network with others and promote veganism and animal rights in your community. Don't be a slacktivist, get active!

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ATTENTION:
If you oppose animal rights, do not join this group to attack us. Please think critically about your beliefs and educate yourself. This is a matter of life and death for nonhuman animals.

The ideology that supports the enslavement and murder of other animals is interlocking with the ideology that supports the subjugation and domination of humans. We reject racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression in the same way we reject speciesism.

The purpose of this group is to raise awareness and shift the paradigm from speciesist exploitation to animal rights, human supremacy to animal equality. We oppose reformist campaigns that advocate "humane" use, as this impedes emancipation by legitimizing exploitation and reinforcing the property status of nonhuman animals. Our means determine our ends; therefore, our means must be abolitionist. Veganism is the moral baseline of the animal rights movement. If you are not yet vegan, start today!

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

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On the name change and meaning of the name:

The group name was changed from Abolitionist Animal Rights because this name implied that there is such a thing as "reformist animal rights" which is untrue. Animal rights, correctly understood, is an abolitionist philosophy. Further, advocates who take rights seriously engage only in those activities that facilitate the abolition of nonhuman animal exploitation.

The new name, Animal Rights Now, means we respect the moral rights of other animals by living vegan. Until nonhuman animals are freed from legal property status, they will never join human animals in having their basic rights protected by law. Therefore, promoting veganism and advocating rights will build the base of social and political support for legal protection.

With perseverance, we will achieve justice for all animals. Let's do it!