Animal Writings

"A quote from a 2004 animal agriculture textbook: 'For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.' They know that hundreds of millions of people would be against them if they only knew the truth. Everybody is against cruelty to animals. So the industry’s only chance is to marginalize our movement and distract the public from the real issue. And the real issue is the violence that goes on inside their factory farms, their labs, their slaughterhouses. Our secret weapon, therefore, is effective education."

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"In our sheltered activist circles it’s easy to forget how effective the industry has been at concealing the ugly truth. People still simply don’t know what goes on in factory farms. Most people, for example, don’t even know that dairy cows are slaughtered. In the biggest study on transitioning towards vegetarianism to date involving thousands of high school seniors across 52 schools, only 29 percent of the young women and 17 percent of the men disagreed with the statement 'I think meat production is done humanely.' There is much educational work to be done."

"A few pipe bombs are not going to topple multi-billion dollar industries. What they may do, however, is play right into the opposition’s blood-stained hands and make our education efforts more difficult. It may plant a wedge and further distance society from being open to our message.

Who cares what they think, though? Why should we care about public opinion? Because unless we think there are enough vegans in this world, unless we think there are enough animal activists, unless we are content that we have reached some kind of revolutionary quorum, then it matters what society thinks because we need to grow. We need to be a movement that people want to join. We can go on and on about the victorious availability of soy milk everywhere now, but we’re losing. We’re losing more and more animals every single year. We need to become a mass movement.

The T-shirts of Animal Rights Hawaii quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 'The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kinds of extremists we will be.' I think we should be nonviolent extremists for the animals.