NEWSANIMAL RIGHTS

Gene Baur is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Mr. Baur to respond to questions to provide context for his work and the causes he supports.

Change.org: What cause or causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

At Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization that I co-founded, we work to end cruelty to farm animals and promote compassionate living through rescue, education and advocacy. I support any causes that urge people to live consciously, and to be respectful of others.

Change.org: If you could ask 1 million people to all do 1 thing to advance your cause or causes, what would it be?

Go vegan.

Change.org: If you could ask President Obama and the U.S. Congress to do one thing to advance you cause(s), what would it be?

Eliminate subsidies that support the industrialized animal farming system.

Change.org: Who are other Changemakers who you look to for inspiration?

Jane Goodall, Pete Seeger, Thich Nhat Hanh

You can learn more about Gene's organization and his work by watching this video:

Photo credit: Qthrul

Ingrid Newkirk is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Ms. Newkirk to respond to questions to provide context for her work and the causes she supports.

Change.org: What cause or causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

I would like to urge people to have compassion for the animals who are killed for our plates. Factory-farmed animals are probably both the most severely abused animals and the animals who are abused in the largest numbers. More than 9 billion animals are killed for food in the U.S. every single year—that's more than the planet's entire human population. By far, more chickens are killed than any other animal, and they are afforded the least protection. They are exempt from even the meager protection of the Humane Slaughter Act, which means that it is perfectly legal to paralyze them instead of properly stunning them before their throats are cut and they are plunged into tanks of boiling water.

Change.org: If you could ask 1 million people to all do one thing to advance causes that matter to you, what would it be?

Go vegan. By simply refusing to put meat, eggs, and dairy on your plate, you can save the lives of more than 100 animals every year. You also help save the planet, since animal agriculture is one of the largest polluters and producers of greenhouse gasses (it produces more greenhouse gasses than all the world's cars and trucks combined), and you also help protect your own health (vegans slash their risk of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and other top killers). If you don’t know how to be vegan, try Chef Tal’s book, “The Conscious Cook,” or Alicia Silverstone’s “The Kind Diet” – both on the New York Times bestsellers list. And try ethnic vegan foods like Ethiopian, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Chinese where everything from split peas to tofu to beans and super pasta sauces will leave you amazed at the variety in the diet.

Change.org: When did you first know you wanted to dedicate your life to creating change and helping others?

When I was a little girl growing up in India, I saw a man beating an overloaded bullock who had collapsed from exhaustion. Even at that tender age—perhaps led by the example of my mother, who volunteered with Mother Teresa's charities—it did not occur to me simply to stand by and do nothing. But it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I started looking at animals in a different way. I was living in Maryland and studying to become a stockbroker when a neighbor abandoned some kittens. I took them to the local animal shelter, which was so run down and sad that I couldn’t walk away and took a job there. During my work as a cruelty investigator, I found a fox and a squirrel caught in steel traps, a pig left to starve on a farm, and other animals victimized by what I now know to be fairly routine cruelty. It made me realize that there needed to be a group like PETA out there fighting for all animals, not just dogs and cats, showing how easy it is to be compassionate instead of unthinkingly cruel.

Change.org: If you could ask President Obama and the U.S. Congress to do one thing to advance your cause, what would it be?

I would ask them to cut funding for archaic, inaccurate tests on animals and replace them with modern, high-tech research methods, such as the use of human cell and tissue cultures and computer models based on human genetic data. Millions of animals—dogs, cats, birds, rats, mice, and even endangered chimpanzees—are currently kept in barren cages in laboratories, frightened, alone and hurting. Cats have electrodes implanted in their heads, dogs are forced to run on treadmills as experimenters induce heart attacks in them, pregnant macaques are addicted to cocaine, and chimpanzees are infected with hepatitis and anthrax—all to produce results that are inaccurate predictors of human responses because species differ from one another in so many biologically significant ways. In the 21st century, with whole human DNA on the Internet and modern human cell culture techniques and high speed computers programmed with human data, we should be doing better than this.

Photo credit: Takver

When I first joined Change.org's Animal Rights community, Stephanie Ernst had written a post about a compassionate teen from Pennsylvania who opened an animal-friendly/earth-friendly/human-rights-friendly store with her mother -- the kind of inspiring story that's a reminder of why we keep doing what we do amid all the other news stories of animal cruelty and abuse. In the year and a half since she helped launch the Animal Rights cause, Stephanie E. continued to deliver informative posts on a wide spectrum of animal issues, both ones that could be hard to read about, and ones that offered hope. I might not have agreed with every viewpoint, but I could always count on a well-written article from a passionate advocate for animals. As Stephanie E. moves on, I wish her the best of luck in her new internet home.

Here at Change.org, we're still providing daily animal news, actions, advice, and alerts over on the Animal Welfare blog. We're working to stop dog fighting, shut down factory farms, protect wildlife, promote adoption, and prevent animal cruelty. We'll be bringing new perspectives to the blog soon, too, including writers specializing in animal rights issues. As an animal advocate, a rescuer, and a trainer, I'm fighting -- and blogging -- every day for a better world for animals. I'm hoping you'll join me, because the animals need you.

Thanks to Stephanie E., for all of her great work here. And thanks to you, the Change.org community that's been the voice for animals! I know you're a dedicated group who will no doubt continue taking action and being a part of the conversation. I look forward to seeing you on the blog!

- Stephanie F.

Photo credit: coral11

Well, friends, as I'm sure you can figure out from the title, I'm leaving Change.org today, and this will be my last contribution to this space, though as I'll explain in the latter part of this post, I'll be continuing elsewhere and hope you'll visit me there. But first, of course, a look back and some thank-yous:

When I managed to snag this gig a year and a half ago, I'd been aching for a long time to feel like I was contributing something to the world. I truly love running a freelance editing business from home, for many reasons, but I am an activist at heart, and despite loving my work, I additionally wanted to be doing something more meaningful on the side, something that I believed in -- animal rights, in particular. But as an editor and writer living in St. Louis, I wasn't sure how to parlay my particular skill set and location into impactful animal rights activism.

Then this incredible opportunity arose. And suddenly, I had the chance to write about animal rights every day from right where I already was, to daily get information and a message of compassion, respect, and nonviolence out to a mainstream audience -- and even be paid a modest stipend to do it, to boot. I could keep doing the editing I love while also using the written word to advocate for and educate about the most oppressed victims on this planet and for what I know to be the most important movement of our time. I knew this platform could be a life-changing opportunity, not just for me, but for the potential readers and for our fellow animals as well.

Something that always excites me is seeing awesome, thriving vegan businesses that appeal not only to the vegan community but also to the general not-yet(!)-vegan public, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that vegan food is as delicious as it is compassionate. And I want to give a quick shout-out to two that have launched this year, with much yummy success.

First, we'll head to Boston. Regular readers may recall from this summer's Great Whole Foods Cheese-and-Apple-Pie Adventure that I had my first Daiya pizza in the company of some friends at the AR conference, including my pal Eric, who referred to his gobbling up of the good stuff as "research" -- for what a few months later became the best thing to hit Boston's food scene in a long time: Peace o' Pie, an all-vegan, all-awesome pizza joint about which I've heard nothing but praise since it opened up. But though hearing vegans rave about it -- about everything from the quality of the pizza to the welcoming atmosphere to the eager, friendly staff -- was great, what I really loved was seeing the Boston Globe tell the world that there is "no sacrifice needed" to have amazing, delicious, cruelty-free vegan food. Indeed, when there are even vegan pizza places as good as -- if not better than -- any joints offering pies full of suffering, people quickly start running out of excuses not to ditch the cow's-milk cheese. Move over, vegan cupcakes. It may be time for vegan pizza to take over the world.

But pizza joints aren't the only vegan food businesses rapidly popping up. Vegan bakeries full of comforting smells and sugary goodness are spreading too -- wherever you live. Cities such as San Francisco and New York and D.C. are the usual suspects, of course, but one of the newest vegan bakeries is far from these locales: in Saudi Arabia. If you're among those who regularly drool over the Friday Food roundups, you've seen the Voracious Vegan's recipes and photos appear there regularly. And I was uber-excited for her a couple months ago when I learned that she was moving beyond cooking & baking just for herself and her husband (and sharing yummy recipes with us) to opening up her own bakery, Voracious, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. I don't have any plans to visit Saudi, but oh, do her scrumptious photos (including the one above) make me wish I could.

Took, harvested, bagged, downed, secured, dispatched. A whole lot of euphemisms for one very basic concept: brutal killing.

In this horrifying blog post for "sportsmen" on a Pennsylvania news site, about the joyful "successes" of area bear hunters, the above euphemisms for killing were used 20 times. And animal advocates, I'll warn you now: you may not want to put yourself through reading the story and seeing the bloody photos. The animals' final, frightened, fleeing moments are recounted gleefully, with not a single thought given to what their experience of this "sport" was like.

The callousness and disregard, from both the blogger and the hunters, are disturbing. Take this, for example, which happened minutes after a human dad gunned down a two-year-old female bear, with the help of a "driving gang of 20-25 hunters":

I don't always agree with Nathan Winograd, well-known No Kill advocate and author of Redemption; that is, I don't universally agree with every conclusion he comes to or with his assessments of people's motives. But I often do agree with his observations, and his arguments are as worthy of considerations as anyone else's. That said, Winograd's messages don't receive circulation as widespread as the messages of his detractors and those he challenges, in no small part because his powerful counterparts in these conversations have larger platforms, greater resources, and the ability to just refuse to directly answer his (and others') most challenging arguments.

So this is my small contribution toward (and only "toward" because this platform doesn't have nearly the reach of those over whom Winograd is competing to be heard either) leveling the playing field. I will not say much. I will let Winograd's posts speak for themselves. What I will say is this: We don't bestow sainthood on corporations, and putting blind faith in large nonprofits that more or less function as corporations, complete with some of the tactics and self-interest that make us so wary of corporations and their "truths" and intentions, is dangerous. Assuming that those in positions of power and influence are always honest and open and selfless in their intentions is unwise -- and a disservice to our fellow animals.

When we realize that situations, organizations, and people aren't entirely what we thought, that can be not only troubling but even devastating -- I've been there -- but hearing and considering all sides of the argument, even those that challenge what we support, is vital if our loyalty is to our fellow animals. And our loyalty should be to our fellow animals, not to organizations or prominent figures or what-we-want-to-believe. Seeing the good in organizations does not mean (or excuse) ignoring or burying the bad.

Finally, to Winograd, who in these posts covers some issues that deserve to be covered and that have angered me and many others as much as they have infuriated Winograd, even if most people are hesitant to speak out and say that. Winograd is not hesitant to say it.

Betrayal & Deceit at the Humane Society of the United States

Going Rogue

First, we had the oh-so-funny remarks from Chris Rock and Jay Leno dismissing the torture and killing of pit bulls as not so bad because they're not, according to Rock, "real dogs." And now we have "killer pit bull" obnoxiousness from David Letterman.

Actress Kyra Sedgwick was on Letterman's program Friday night and brought up the pit bull puppy she and husband Kevin Bacon have adopted -- "She was left outside Yankee Stadium - really, she was left for dead," Sedgwick said. And Letterman used the opportunity to perpetuate the hurtful and totally incorrect notion of pit bulls as bloodthirsty timebombs. While Sedgwick kept good-naturedly interjecting that this is a myth, and they're actually very sweet dogs who've gotten an undeserved bad rap, Letterman continued, in seemingly only half-joking fashion, with his insistence that they're inherently dangerous creatures who daily chew people's faces off.

No, really. This is what some dairy farmers want you to believe -- and seem to sincerely believe themselves. Recently, a calf on a Connecticut dairy farm was born with a marking on his forehead resembling a cross, so instead of sending him to the slaughterhouse to become veal, which is what happens on all dairy farms to all other male calves and some female calves (i.e., when the latter aren't needed to be new baby/milk-producing machines, replacements for their worn out, destined-to-be-hamburger mothers), the dairy farm owners are sparing this one, at least temporarily.

From L.A. Unleashed:

Continued from part 1, "Breaking Unjust Laws: Clarence Darrow and Inherit the Wind."

In his essay "Theory of Non-Resistance," Clarence Darrow wrote, "In modern society the controlling forces arrange things as they want them, and provide that certain things are criminal." And in our society, where the majority do not object to oppression of and violence toward our fellow animals -- and indeed, where many even profit from, and much of society is based on, that oppression and violence -- that translates into unjust laws protecting violence and criminalizing, of all things, acts of compassion. Exploitation, abuse, and killing are accepted; rescue, investigation, and free speech opposing the oppression can be prosecuted.

One of my favorite quotations from Darrow fits well with his "controlling forces" statement and is oh-so-relevant for the animal rights movement (and much else) in today's climate: