The David Cantor and Responsible Policies for Animals Inc. Interview

By Claudette Vaughan

David Cantor's relatively new group “Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc” was formed only a few years ago yet they are one of the most refreshing animal rights centred voices around. They are powerful at a time where we need to hear an abolitionist position.

Abolitionist: You have said the opportunities to take political action for animal rights are infinite. Can you name some of these that your organisation Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc., is currently initiating?

David Cantor: I define “political” in the root sense – of or related to the polis , originally the Greek city-state; today, society as a whole. That is not how the U.S. government defines it in restricting “political” activities of “501(c)(3)” tax-exempt nonprofit organisations like Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) or churches. And it is not the usual definition in the mass media or public discourse. It is a good one, though, for maximizing mindfulness and inventing effective strategies – particularly in a movement like animal rights that is too radical to have quick popular or official appeal.

Consumer choices do not occur in a vacuum but have political origins and political consequences. Purchasing a pound of organically grown potatoes from a local farmer differs politically from purchasing a pound of flesh, no matter how or where the animal was bred and raised. Likewise, learning to juggle three round stones for amusement differs politically from visiting a zoo.

I think understanding the political dimensions of these things will help people help the greatest number of animals for the long term. It enables us to see all government, school, mass-media, and other institutions as inherently political and as promoting human supremacy and other ideologies that I believe can only be answered effectively with animal rights.

Party politics, partisan politics, legislative politics, or electoral politics – these are narrower definitions, often just called “politics.” Substituting these narrow definitions for the true, broad one dulls mindfulness and perpetuates impressions that many choices are merely personal and lack a political dimension. The resulting confusion serves some private financial interests but not nonhuman animals, ecosystems, or the vast majority of human beings.

In that light, everything RPA does is political. Here is a short list of some things the organisation has done, to illustrate:

• Sent four letters – three accompanied by factsheets, one by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals – to the presidents 50 U.S. land-grant universities (these contain colleges of agriculture), one in each state, explaining why their schools' teaching of “animal science” should cease, how it violates nonhuman animals' moral rights that we seek to establish in law and custom, and why it is extremely destructive to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and human beings.

• Held a protest – probably the first of many – at the Washington (D.C.) Hilton Hotel when the National Association of State Universities & Land Grant Colleges was holding its annual meeting there; handed out fliers and displayed a banner reading “Our land-grant universities' assignment : Serve the public, not the flesh, milk & egg industries! ” and providing RPA's name and website address.

• Sent letters and information to the National Association of Realtors (a U.S. trade association boasting membership of about 1 million “realtors”) urging that organization to cooperate with RPA in working to protect wildlife by curtailing suburban sprawl.

• Spoke to the local chamber of commerce, of which RPA is a member, explaining what animal rights is, what the movement's goals are, and how animal rights will benefit nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and human beings.

• Gave similar presentations to other civic and student groups.

• Explained to many animal activists why nonhuman animals will not be protected against abuse and exploitation by human beings until the animals have meaningful legal rights that are enforced.

• Obtained a $1,000 grant to help publicise RPA's community education program and sent letters to hundreds of college and high-school teachers offering classroom presentations on animal rights.

• Produced a bumper sticker showing farm animals and fish and stating, “They're sentient beings, not food choices.

• Published issues of the newsletter Thin Ice explaining how RPA's and some of its members' activities advance animal rights.

• Created a website explaining animal rights and how RPA's campaigns contribute: www.RPAforAll.org .

Abolitionist: You began this organisation because you came to the realisation that some of your previous efforts, although well intentioned, had no potential to advance the cause of animal rights. Please tell us about that.

David Cantor: After obtaining a graduate degree in literature and writing and teaching English at universities for six years, I began working at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1989 and spent the last six of my seven years with the organisation in its Research & Investigations Department. Then I spent a little over a year as director of special projects at the American Anti-Vivisection Society, in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. After that, I worked out of my home office as a consultant from late 1997 forward – for several organisations.

Throughout the years of full-time work for other organisations (now I work full-time for RPA, which does not compensate me financially), I learned about many forms of animal abuse and exploitation: raising animals for food and clothing, factory farming, transport, slaughter, zoos, circuses, dog racing, laboratory experimentation, hunting, fishing, trapping, breeding, killing deer and geese living where people decided there were “too many,” and others. I learned about laws & regulations governing these practices and agencies charged with enforcing them – and the lack of meaningful laws because nonhuman animals have no legal rights.

I managed efforts to end foie gras production, destruction of birds & bats in thousands of small oil & gas extraction devices owned by large oil companies, conservation organisations' abuse of wildlife in the name of conservation, the keeping (and injuring and killing) of “classroom pets,” the use of nonhuman primates in laboratories, the use of live small mammals as collection bags for monoclonal antibodies. I took part in conferences, helped activists throughout the U.S. and sometimes in other countries, did research, received heaps of evidence of cruelty from investigators in the field, responded to calls on a 24-hour emergency beeper. I published articles, letters-to-the-editor, book chapters, did television & radio interviews. Edited newsletters. I worked full-time as an animal advocate for 13 years before founding RPA. Now it's 16 years.

Throughout most of that time, thoughts like these troubled me: If reform is going to be based on nonhuman animals' moral rights that we intend to establish in law and custom (I say “in custom” because rights asserted in laws no one respects will be unenforceable and therefore meaningless) because nonhuman animals experience their lives and can suffer, why are we constantly exposing cruelty?

The animal rights movement puts forward the right not to be exploited at all, not to be the property of humans, not to be in situations where cruelty to them can easily occur or where they rely on people to “care.” But people moved to respond to cruelty naturally assume the objective must be merely to minimize cruel practices, regulate exploitation, improve the anticruelty statutes, and the like.

The demonstrated failure of that approach is the main reason for the animal rights movement in the first place. From a strategic standpoint, it makes no sense to me to call an effort “animal rights” that relies on proving cruelty – or that emphasizes nonhuman animals people readily care about, such as baby seals, and not the trillions of fish abused and destroyed by the same people and institutions.

I see animal rights as a radical social movement – radical in the root sense of the word, seeking fundamental (“root” – “radish,” also a root, comes from the same Latin word as “radical”) change. The animal welfare approach substituted for animal rights, which I've just described, is not a social movement, in my opinion. Since it has been practiced in various ways for centuries or millennia, it is just a new manifestation of the status quo, updating and further popularising the status quo through the use of current media – television, the Internet, modern graphics, extreme marketing & fundraising – and, in fairness, it must be said, increasing the number of species deemed worthy of “help.”

As a newcomer to any form of animal advocacy in 1989 at age 34, however, I recognised that many people with far more experience than me enthusiastically supported the welfarist approach and seemed to have no problem calling it “animal rights.” I gave these matters a lot of thought, reading a lot, examining my written and spoken exchanges with co-workers, adversaries, government officials and explanations organisation directors offered when I mentioned my concerns. I asked myself, If these animal welfare activities do not move the human world toward recognition of nonhuman animals' rights, how would one do so? What would animal rights campaigns look like? With so much well-intentioned and sometimes-successful emphasis on “saving animals” or “doing whatever it takes to help the animals,” how would one promote animal rights, and how would one persuade other people who care about nonhuman animals to help?

By no means have I found complete answers to those questions. But here is my basic theory, which is the basis of RPA's campaigns:

1. Nonhuman animals' rights will not be established as long as very few human beings know what animal rights is, and almost no one, including most animal activists, opponents of animal rights, and people who write or speak publicly about it really knows what animal rights is. That is part & parcel of calling animal welfare “animal rights.” “Helping animals” needs little explaining, so few people read genuine animal rights theory. Some activists dismiss it as “philosophizing when there is so much work that needs to be done.” In a society already languishing under anti-intellectualism, a devaluing of the marketplace of ideas on which democracy is supposed to be based and which should be at the heart of any reform movement, and a “just do it” mentality, the problem is not as surprising as it is just mainly an unfortunate obstacle.

2. The animal rights-advancing reason for only purchasing foods and products not obtained through animal exploitation is not that consumer choices alone can abolish animal exploitation; it is that strengthening “cruelty-free” or “animal-friendly” enterprises and weakening animal-abusing ones will diminish the hold of speciesist, human-supremacist, and anti-animal-rights ideologies on human beings and societies. Money is power and power controls mass media and public discourse, including advertising, marketing, public relations, and “education.”

3. There is no quick or easy way to obtain protection for nonhuman animals, but there is no way ever without obtaining legal rights for them. Even having to say “for them” reflects how dire the animals' plight is and how difficult the animal rights movement's task is. The entire human endeavour for thousands of years, though cloaked in imagined partnerships and symbioses, love for animals and nature, all manner of ambivalence, ambiguity and confusion, has been in large part an anti-nonhuman endeavour.

The so-called Great Chain of Being, claimed to be the work of God or of natural law, is sheer fiction. But it is the fiction of the dominant beings, so it easily masquerades as truth. A couple I know treat extremely well and lovingly the three rescued dogs who live with them. When I visited them at their second home in the Pennsylvania countryside last August, the dogs ecstatically explored the land, enjoying the grassy hillside, the woods, the fresh air filled with bird & insect sounds. The couple told me they had discovered a rattlesnake on the property a few months earlier. They had gotten a local person, who had done work of various kinds for them before, to come and shoot the snake. The snake posed a danger to the dogs, they explained.

What is an animal rights advocate to do or say? Let the dogs be bitten by a poisonous snake? Stop letting them out of the house even though it is in their nature to run and explore and play and that is what they are used to? According to the “Chain,” a snake is a lower being than a dog. They thought it went without saying that dogs should come first and snakes deserve no consideration, even though human-bred dogs have no natural place in any ecosystem. Many people who believe in equality among human beings regardless of ethnicity, race, religion and the rest nevertheless believe all human beings and all nonhuman animals they love are by definition inherently more valuable and deserving of more consideration than the countless other beings. Have you ever heard of a squid rescue group?

That is a long way of saying I long ago recognised the would-be animal rights movement has not advanced animal rights significantly or even ensured that many people would know what it is, and, having spent many years doing and learning as part of the problem, I decided to try new approaches.

Abolitionist: Why is it crucial today to adhere to an undisguised, uncompromising animal rights agenda, whatever the short-term odds are?

David Cantor: I don't know of any reform movement that can achieve its goals by disguising its agenda – if the agenda must be disguised for the movement to gain support or make progress, it is by definition a doomed agenda, assuming its unfeasibility from the start. When I see animal welfare organisations using “animal rights” rubric to appeal to people who like the idea but are vague on exactly what it means, I see organisations disguising their animal-welfare agenda to secure popularity among people who “care” but don't make important distinctions.

When I see self-described animal rights organisations using animal welfare tactics and strategies, I see organisations disguising their declared agenda to secure popularity among people who “care” but might not support true animal rights.

Once we understand that popularity does not equate with advancing any particular agenda, perhaps it becomes easier to assert an animal rights agenda unequivocally and pursue it as one thinks best, letting the approval fall where it may, including by the wayside when necessary. Even some esteemed animal rights theorists do not necessarily understand that.

One who reviled some of my former employers as welfarist in the next breath mocked RPA's small membership. That theorist, though brilliant in my opinion, has not to my knowledge run a campaign or built an organisation and has no idea how difficult it is to build support for true animal rights. All the way back to Machiavelli, though, and probably further back in time, political theorists have acknowledged the breadth and depth of animosity to fundamental reform.

Compromise, I think, usually comes into play in working out details of an agenda that is being implemented, not in promoting the agenda as something that deserves to be implemented. Compromise could conceivably occur in wording as legal rights are being established, for example. I assume those who drafted and endorsed the Declaration of the Rights of Animals, proclaimed at the March for the Animals in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1990, discussed pros & cons of various phrasings and that proponents of some phrasings chose to compromise on some of their preferences in order that the document be produced on schedule. Even though the document has some important weaknesses, I don't believe that is a fatal flaw in the animal rights movement. The problem, instead, is that almost no one is promoting animal rights.

Compromise at necessary stages is an entirely different matter than representing as animal rights practices that do not advance animal rights. As long as some sentient beings have no legal rights, obtaining legal rights for all sentient beings must be the goal of the animal rights movement. That should be obvious, but huge numbers of activists act as if the goal were to enforce rights the animals do not yet possess. They might be confusing moral rights with legal rights.

So much is said about the animals' rights – as if they already existed in the real world outside of our beliefs, plans and aspirations – that it is easy to confuse “saving” animals, giving animals good homes, eating plants only, purchasing only “cruelty-free” household & personal-care products, and doing other good things for animals with advancing rights.

So I see the primary task of the animal rights movement as educating as to what animal rights is (and is not) and moving people to help advance animal rights or to get out of the way and stop impeding animal rights and supporting human supremacy.

Abolitionist: There has always existed in every other liberation movement an understanding that you can't change the status quo by joining the status quo. Why are welfare efforts counterproductive to the Liberation/Emancipation Cause?

David Cantor: I and Responsible Policies for Animals work specifically for animal rights, which I think have to precede liberation on any large scale rather than vice versa. To some extent, I see animal liberation as animal welfare in more militant form, animal welfare with loudspeakers and raised fists. That is because merely freeing a small number of animals from laboratories, for example, or even freeing all of those currently used in laboratories, would not in and of itself establish any legal rights for nonhuman animals.

An animal rights campaign can make significant educational inroads without saving any animals or forcing any corporation's hand in the short term, while welfare or liberation campaigns can save animals or change corporations for the better without advancing animal rights – particularly when they do not use the campaign as a platform from which to educate about animal rights. The distinction between welfare/liberation and rights isn't by a degree of militancy but of precisely what we are promoting.

Conventional animal welfare is the status quo without serious threat, whereas liberation threatens some people's financial interests and puts some other people on notice. Both strike me as appealing to people who care about animals and choose not to promote rights per say.

The main distinction seems to be in the temperaments of those who work in conventional animal welfare (less confrontational, more risk-averse, more patient, less convinced of their own power) versus the temperaments of those who focus on liberation (more confrontational, less risk-averse, less patient, more convinced of their own power).

One's heart can easily be in the right place while one's tactics and strategy fail or while success in short-term objectives has no connection to potential success in long-term goals. A predictable public response to even a highly successful animal liberation movement while nonhuman animals lack legal rights – which I don't consider likely because rights are necessary to accomplish large-scale liberation, not vice versa – will be

1. to intensify security of animal-exploiting facilities (this has already been done in some cases);

2. to accentuate, organise, and indoctrinate more effectively industry, government, mass-media, and public indoctrination in human supremacy, animals-as-property, and benefits to humans of animal exploitation (this has long been underway);

3. to clamp down officially on alleged criminal activity by liberationists (this is done to officials' political advantage, because legally they are not violating nonhuman animals' rights, so many people disapprove of militant activities they don't fully understand and that they don't see as serving their own immediate material or political interests, and public understanding is undercut by status quo-controlled institutions).

Liberation keeps the dispute framed as being between those who think the status quo is right and those who think it is wrong. “It is right to use animals humanely for medical research and to use fur to keep warm” versus “It is wrong to conduct cruel experiments on nonhuman animals who cannot consent and to torture and kill nonhuman animals to sell their skins for clothing humans don't need.”

I don't see talk of rights on either side of that exchange, even though the public and some activists confuse the liberation side of it with animal rights. That dispute can go on and on with no talk of rights, no explanation of why human beings should not be the only rights-holders, no education that corrects speciesism or human supremacy. Especially when cruelty and suffering are deemed the core “issues.”

Thinking animal liberation can get very widespread support underestimates the willingness of the vast majority of people to listen to defenses of the status quo and their unwillingness to consider challenges to it. Few people change their minds without seeing a rapid groundswell. That is not happening in favor of animal liberation.

It ends up inadvertently supporting the status quo because the industry-government-media complex so easily portrays “angry,” “lawbreaking” “animal rights activists” – as they're often wrongly called – as enemies of the common good. The truth is that if animal liberationists had their way, the common good would be served. Without promoting a world view that could enable them to have their way, they will be right, they will be heroes, and they will not significantly reduce animal abuse or exploitation or advance animal rights.

About animal welfare, the non-reformist, non-militant arm of the human-nonhuman status quo:

It cannot provide meaningful protection to large numbers of Earth's sentient beings because;

1. it accepts human supremacy, human ownership of nonhuman animals / nonhumans' property status;

2. based on “caring about” nonhuman animals exploited and abused by humans, not on abolishing exploitation and abuse, it does not articulate a new world view aimed at reforming the human-nonhuman relationship fundamentally – to do so would eliminate welfare organisations' insider status and their ability to build large memberships and gain large amounts of financial support;

3. it works to limit “cruelty” or “gratuitous cruelty,” not to abolish a system that is inherently cruel – so it treats tiny and sometimes illusory reductions in cruelty as “victories,” enhances the popularity of officials only willing to propose tiny changes, and promotes acquiescence in the inherently cruel status quo by insisting progress is being made for the animals;

4. it subverts important basic words like “humane” by promoting notions of “humane slaughter,” “more humane animal research,” and the like. When we understand the true meaning of “humane,” we understand welfare promotes a through-the-looking-glass perspective on the entire world – a perspective like that taught by the “Great Chain of Being” and other false, pseudo-intellectual foundations of the status quo.

Abolitionist: You have said that government officials never risk their careers for nonhuman animals' wellbeing yet neither do institutionalised animal welfarists by being in line and conciliatory with what the animal abuse industries want also.

David Cantor: Animal welfare represents the human-nonhuman status quo, conventional thinking based on the pre-scientific, elite-serving “Great Chain of Being.” So, many elected and appointed officials are glad to champion animal welfare or to appear to serve that “cause.” We have to remember that for officials a sine qua non of keeping the job is always to avoid threatening or injuring wealthy and influential private interests. Large animal-exploiting industries claim to support animal welfare – and some of them do.

It doesn't mean protecting animals against suffering, destruction, or exploitation; it just means agreeing to regulations and “standards” to maintain an image of caring about the animals. By going along with that but never advocating for animal rights, officials don't risk anything and typically bolster their careers.

An elected representative with whom I struck up some friendly conversations and sent information about animal rights and RPA's work, at his request, during his campaign for office, had an aide phone me and schedule a meeting between the representative and me after he was elected.

I provided additional information at the meeting and explained the nature and significance of RPA's two main campaigns: 10,000 Years Is Enough and This Land Is Their Land. After appearing to listen to my explanation of the work and how it promotes animal rights, he said something like this: Well, we probably won't eliminate “animal science” overnight; would your organisation support legislation to improve the treatment of farm animals in Pennsylvania?

Even though he is a graduate of a prestigious law school and ostensibly knows much about the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions and many laws and regulations, he could not seem to comprehend my seeing his proposal as antithetical to RPA's campaigns rather than as being consistent with it. Not only with regard to nonhuman animals but in all areas, I see no evidence of his or other legislators' raising significant challenges to any entrenched financial interest. That means no significant change in the human-nonhuman relationship from those quarters in the near future.

Rarely or never have I seen an official in the U.S. take a stand for animal rights. The closest they usually come is to sponsor or support legislation to prohibit particular atrocities, such as cockfighting or the force-feeding of ducks & geese to make foie gras. In all but two U.S. states, cockfighting is banned. But that does not mean birds or other animals have any rights in the U.S. or in the 48 states that prohibit cockfighting. Because nonhuman animals lack legal rights, the conditions persist in which birds can be bred for cockfighting and cockfighting can still take place. There are reports of it, and it is often difficult to get law-enforcement action, where it is banned.

A ludicrous so-called “ban” on foie gras production and sales was signed into law in California – one of the two U.S. states known to produce it – a year or two ago. It explicitly declares force-feeding lawful through 2012 – and it prohibits prosecution of foie gras companies for cruelty to animals! Maybe a ban will occur in 2012, but as far as I am concerned, no ban exists, and I suspect production will continue beyond 2012.

In my view, the legislative sponsors of the so-called ban got compassion-for-animals “points” through animal-organisation publicity without risking or changing anything. The large California foie gras company's owner actually thanked the legislature for this supposed “ban” of his product! Business interests had no reason to attack the officials as they would if they truly outlawed any form of animal exploitation.

I agree with Gary Francione's writings: Legislation can favor the eventual establishment of animal rights by abolishing a form of exploitation without substituting another form. The problem with animal welfarist legislation, and especially work for animal welfare disguised as animal rights or erroneously called “animal rights,” is that it reinforces the animals' property status and the status quo generally. It declares officially and publicly that animals lacking rights and existing as property can receive humane treatment so no fundamental reform is needed.

Because of these dynamics inherent in electoral and legislative politics, and because so few people know what animal rights is and therefore the public cannot truly signal to its officials that it favors establishing rights, I believe it is not yet a good time for the animal rights movement to emphasize legislation to advance animal rights.

I like to meet with legislators and their aides and attend their public meetings when I can to educate them about animal rights, and I mail legislators information and requests concerning RPA's campaigns. But RPA does no lobbying, endorses no candidates, and does not use its members' donations for sustained legislative efforts.

Abolitionist: In order to develop a new non-specisistic culture, it is vitally important to choose the right instrument for mobilising people towards animal rights and surely that would include the obvious assumption that you can't kill the object of your efforts to liberate. Correct?

David Cantor: I've been asked whether I believe nonhuman animals have a right to life. I think that is at the heart of this question. First, I believe nonhuman animals have the right not to have their reproductive lives controlled by humans, which includes the right not to be bred by humans. Under a system already based on breeding dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and many other animals, thereby violating that basic moral right of nonhuman animals, I believe once humans cause or allow animals under their control to reproduce, those humans have a moral obligation to ensure that offspring who result lead good lives to their natural lifespans.

Obviously, that occurs only in a very small fraction of cases. And the animal rights movement specifically aims at getting nonhuman animals out from under the human boot so they will only live in their naturally occurring forms, not in human-generated forms. So on the one hand, I believe humans should manage “domestic” nonhuman animal species humanely to extinction – as Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson puts it in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon .

As long as we fail to do that, anticruelty laws should be strictly enforced, animals should not be abandoned or killed, and government should take full responsibility, under the animal welfare regime that currently exists due to current laws and the lack of animal rights, to secure all animals' wellbeing with regard to their treatment by humans.

Because that is rare and animal advocates outside of government naturally find animals' suffering and homelessness extremely distressing, they often involve themselves in de facto enforcement of the anticruelty laws. Some are also trained and certified humane officers not currently employed by government or agencies with government contracts to enforce the anticruelty statutes (that is how it typically works in the U.S.).

Euthanasia of course only refers to killing to end irremediable suffering; it does not include killing merely because an animal at the moment lacks a suitable home.

Unfortunately, too, by existing as part of the current human-supremacy regime with human overpopulation and hyper-technological impact on nonhuman animals and ecosystems, animal rights advocates like me, through our use of electricity, automobiles, and other far-reaching technologies, take part in the killing of many animals collectively by our species. One particularly difficult problem is the electrocution of enormous numbers of fish at hydroelectric plants. This is discussed in The Riverkeepers Two Activists Fight To Reclaim Our Environment As a Basic Human Right by John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As I wrote to RFK Jr., who not surprisingly did not reply – but I think it is important that he understand as he can wield influence – as long as we speak of “our environment” and only a “human” right, such efforts will continue to fail; animals will continue to suffer and die; and the strictly-human endeavour will march forward with all other beings trampled under the human boot.

Abolitionist: Do you think we will have to legislate against entrenched speciesistic ideology to ensure the beginnings of real change will filter through and consolidate itself in the wider community in years to come?

David Cantor: I personally do not believe in legislating against thought or speech, and I do not believe ending speciesism per se is necessary for establishing nonhuman animals' legal rights or seeing to it that they are enforced. That is not to downplay the importance of fighting speciesism, though.

The less speciesistic people and their societies are, the better the animals' chances. Where human or civil rights apply to all humans without regard to race, ethnicity, creed, color, age, ability, or religion, racism and other forms of prejudice have not been eliminated. I believe the mental states and ideologies on the one hand and the laws and rights on the other have reciprocal relationships with each other and that improving both enhances the effectiveness of each.

In the U.S., Congress failed for decades to pass, and still has never passed, a law specifically prohibiting lynching – horrendous atrocity-murders committed almost entirely against black Americans. As far as I can tell, the tremendous drop in those atrocities in recent decades occurred largely due to enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, in the mid-1960s and their enforcement.

Even though the U.S. remains a largely racist society, certain forms of discrimination are prohibited by law; the law is fairly well enforced though not well enough; and overt and covert white supremacists have found their way around the law to a degree. A critical mass was reached, at which point it became unseemly to practice racism, so efforts at stamping it out benefit politicians – as proposing animal rights would not at this time.

I think it is naïve to think large numbers of people will quickly stop being speciesist. Distinguishing between one's own group and other groups is deep-seated. Nonhuman animals do this, too. Monkeys' warning calls regarding raptors differ from their warning calls regarding snakes. Deer react differently to the presence of a cougar than to the presence of a groundhog.

Even when nonhuman animals' legal rights are established, I believe it will take considerable time before most humans recognise the rights of copperhead snakes, brown recluse spiders, and brown rats precisely as they recognise the rights of pandas, elephants, and “domestic” dogs. Research shows certain appearances – not just cultural prejudices – determine which animals humans define as “cute” and therefore supposedly more lovable and worthy of more respect than others.

I don't say I want things to be that way; I just believe that is how things will play out due to a combination of human nature, past practices and attitudes, and the nature of change. That is reason to fight for animal rights, not reason not to.

So, even though I might not live to see it – having recently begun my second half-century of life – I believe first an animal rights movement will need to develop based on justice, compassion, increased recognition of the ravages of speciesism, equality under the law for all sentient beings, and education based on a genuine search for the truth that leads humanity out of the human supremacy syndrome.

That will have to leave the animal welfare regime as we know it by the wayside as a thing of the past and an obstacle. But the true meaning of “welfare,” like that of “humane,” once restored, will describe what nonhuman animals experience: wellbeing. I think improved education and the taboo against speciesism will improve enforcement of the established rights of nonhuman animals and that the improved enforcement of those rights will strengthen the taboo against speciesism.

A shift in thought that must be accomplished is away from “man the hunter/predator” as Homo sapiens sapiens' genetic inheritance and toward what is much closer to the truth: Homo sapiens sapiens as having evolved from hominids who were much more prey than predator and whose social organization arose to protect against predation rather than to devise ways of killing “beasts” for food. The 2005 book Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution by Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., and Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., makes this crucial point.

I have spoken to many civic, student, and other groups on animal rights and have had many private conversations with individual people in many walks of life. Invariably, at rock bottom, people base their speciesism and their unwillingness to consider animal rights on the misconception that humans evolved to kill and to eat flesh. (How people might make a leap from that to drinking other mammalian species' milk, I'll never know!)

For educating along those lines, a written work that I think is under-used in the animal rights movement is “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating” by Milton R. Mills, M.D. Anyone may locate and read it just by “googling” the title. Listing every anatomical and physiological trait related to obtaining, ingesting, and digesting food, Dr. Mills demonstrates that human beings are natural herbivores, not omnivores as so many people incorrectly believe. This helps to explain why vegan diets are so much more beneficial to humans than those that include flesh, milk & eggs.

I think, as long as people tell themselves the ogre tale – used to justify many other evils in addition to animal abuse & exploitation – that a successful human is by definition a successful predator, it will remain difficult for them to embrace the true natural human diet or the true natural relationship between themselves and the rest of the living world, including the world of other human beings.

As Bob Dylan puts it in a favorite song of mine, “Man thinks ‘cause he rules the Earth he can do with it as he please, / And if things don't change soon, he will.”

Even where scientists have claimed to recognise humans' natural affinity for other animals – by coining the term “biophilia” and compiling many authors' views of it – they have, wrongly in my view, portrayed that affinity as being directed at species, an abstraction, rather than at individual animals, the actual sentient beings people really can empathise with. That perpetuates a human-supremacist concept of biodiversity that entails ecosystem management by humans and for humans, granting no rights to any nonhuman being. Like some animal welfarists, these authors, even though extremely intelligent and learned, find it difficult to break out of the human supremacy syndrome.

Taking the right course – creating a humane future – needn't diminish human dignity, as some already complain. True dignity comes from enhancing everyone's life and prospects, not just one's own.

Animal rights will apply empirical science more thoroughly and enhance our dignity by including an appropriate measure of humility and infinitely less violence and oppression. I believe it is the best bet for nonhuman animals and their ecosystems and therefore also for humans.

Abolitionist: Can the administrators of the animal rights movement in place at the moment use the abolitionist stance for welfarism measures? Take PETA's position on euthanising (killing) shelter animals. Aside from its obvious betrayal of these animals, isn't this really the perfect example of the crux of the problem when you try and play off one entirely different thing against something else?

Because PETA marketed themselves as an animal rights group initially and enjoyed for many years considerable popularity in doing so my question is, if they had marketed themselves as an animal welfare group (euthanasia being the expected norm in welfarism) then their recent debacle of killing pound animals would largely go unnoticed (not morally but politically). Yet because they still maintain they work for animal rights this hypocrisy seems even more so glaringly apparent than if they just admitted from the beginning they were animal welfarists.

David Cantor: As I see it, the heavy lifting the animal rights movement has barely begun to do goes much further than showing what is wrong with famous organisations associated with the term “animal rights.” I believe the entire approach of mass-marketing animal rights, popularising it through celebrities, presuming popularity equals progress, and the like is bound to fail in the case of animal rights even though it sometimes succeeds in the case of a soft drink or a pop-music recording.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet, which persuaded many people to fight for the American Revolution, for example, was much more substantive and sophisticated than any mass-marketing or sloganeering campaign. So was The Federalist , explaining why the U.S. Constitution should be ratified as it was in 1789.

Animal rights is far more radical in its substance than the American Revolution, involving more diverse and fundamental matters – how humans use land, produce and distribute food, control their population, provide and distribute medical care and pharmaceuticals, travel and transport manufactured goods, make clothing, shoes, and “accessories,” obtain energy for cooking and reading, who and what shall or shall not be considered property, and more.

As I began to realise years ago after thinking I had been working to advance animal rights for more than a decade, almost no one knows what animal rights is. Someone I met recently seemed thrilled, at first, to learn that I advocate for animal rights full-time. He eagerly told me of his foray into “animal rights”: Observing terrible conditions at a pet shop in a large shopping mall, he'd contacted the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals charged with enforcing the Pennsylvania anticruelty statute in the jurisdiction. This resulted in the shutting down of the pet shop. “Good for you!” I said. Then I inquired as to how the purebred dog asleep in the corner came to be living with him. The answer: “We looked really hard for a responsible breeder.”

Like countless others, this well-intentioned person thinks the rights the animal rights movement seeks to establish include the right to be bred by “responsible breeders,” the right to be owned by “responsible owners,” and the like.

Informed that the movement in fact seeks to eliminate nonhuman animals' property status and end their breeding by humans altogether, they immediately lose their enthusiasm or even become hostile. Some launch into elaborate rationalisations about how domination by humans has made life so much better for so many animals or enabled them to exist when otherwise they never would have. There's always the nonsense about how laboratory experiments on animals provide benefits to veterinary medicine, not only human medicine.

All of this adds up to animal rights' not easily showing short-term results in the minds of many, because it doesn't quickly “save” animals. Conventional nonprofit-organisation strategists and fundraisers often equate popularity with success in a social movement. Popularity is suggested by numbers of supporters and amounts of money raised.

However, animal rights is such a radical political proposal that we should not expect it to be popular soon. The popularity of some large organisations does not indicate success of the animal rights movement. Some of their directors, understanding that animal welfare is the status quo and not a social movement, have taken to referring to welfarist activities as “animal protection.” But protection is not afforded under the welfare regime; it is what rights offer. For some time, welfare may remain more popular, but it will continue to impede, not advance, animal rights.

As with the popularity syndrome, one of the biggest problems reflected in your observation about what I call the animal welfare oligarchy is that the mass media almost never accurately explain animal rights. I see time and time again animal welfare advocates – even some who defend flesh-eating and animal experimentation on the air – described as “animal rights activists.” We all must understand that the mass media, like most of the public, support the financial and ecological status quo, not a free marketplace of ideas or a need to make informed decisions.

I've communicated to some large-audience news venues a need to get these things straight. I've communicated with some animal organisation directors the need to tell interviewers before and during their interviews that they and their organisations are not working for animal rights.

I plan to make more systematic efforts in this area. It is by no means a matter of any one organisation or necessarily a plot to confuse, but public relations often amounts to creating confusion. Hence the popularity of eating flesh, milk & eggs, the atrocious “wildlife management” system, rampant suburban sprawl, human overpopulation, and so much else that oppresses and destroys nonhuman animals.

Perhaps the bottom line is that, as long as the vast majority of people only learn passively and do not actively, even aggressively, educate themselves, all animals are unsafe.

Abolitionist: I think the fight ahead in progressive politics will be against large industries, the transnational and multinationals. Whether the animal rights movement can strengthen and fortify itself sufficiently in readiness for the fight ahead remains to be seen. Could you comment about your views on what direction the animal rights movement is heading or where AR should devote its energies now to strengthen itself David?

David Cantor: Where I differ with people who insist on short-term “results” is in my beliefs that “education” in the short term is superficial and relatively meaningless and that superficial changes – like cruelty-free shopping – do not advance animal rights sufficiently to warrant self-congratulation or optimism.

As I've already suggested, I think a small number of truly educated people will take the movement much further than a vast number of superficially “educated” people can. That applies even though those truly working for animal rights may for some time only be able to address small groups and not mass audiences. We've always seen that mass media do not permit true animal rights to be explained to their audiences.

When I began working at PETA in 1989, I understood the idea of cruelty-free purchasing, vegan living, and other less-cruel practices as being that people advocating for animal rights need to show consistency between their word and deed. Not that reducing animal testing or slowing the growth of the flesh, milk & egg industries suffice to establish animals' legal rights.

To illustrate via RPA's main campaign, 10,000 Years Is Enough, we harbor no illusion that large universities will eliminate large entrenched “animal science” programs quickly because RPA convinces them animals indeed should have legal rights. Instead, it is important to pursue a campaign like this because in doing so we show many people, of all degrees of influence, that a serious case is being made that 105 “educational” institutions and hundreds of professors are doing a terrible disservice by teaching that nonhuman animals have no moral rights (despite the fact that the case for animal rights has never been refuted, only rejected not through valid argument); that flesh, milk & eggs are ethically legitimate, natural, healthful, ecologically sustainable food for humans; that the “Great Chain of Being” is correct; and other horrendous teachings at the heart of “animal science.”

In presentations we give to civic, student, and other groups and in things we write for the benefit of the general public and animal activists, we explain animal rights and how the relevant facts show the need for reform of major institutions.

I explain the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign by way of showing how theory relates to practice. The fact that the universities are not changing quickly in no way means they will not change, and we have received replies from 20 of the 50 schools we have written to at fairly little cost to our members – we've heard from some of them multiple times.

I also explain RPA's This Land Is Their Land campaign by insisting that for animal rights to be meaningful, nonhuman animals, not only humans, must have rights to significant amounts of Earth's land – and air, water, and sky. Humans are land mammals; we do not belong in the sea or in the sky, yet there we are destroying countless beings who do belong there.

Again: No illusion that the real-estate, automobile, oil, tire, boat, airplane, and other industries are going to answer, Oh, yes, we hadn't thought of that; we'll have to change our ways starting at 9:00 tomorrow morning. Instead, while explaining things to executives and officials, we use the campaign as a platform to educate about what animal rights really means, about the need to stop promoting a strictly human endeavour. I say, Those who seek to protect only human beings and not the rest of the animal world are doomed to destroy both. I also insist the environmental movement is a failure and that and that ecosystem protection will only succeed when animals have legal rights to land, water, air and sky.

Animal rights advocates all have countless opportunities to do this kind of thing in their own ways, using methods and venues linked to their communities and ways of life. It takes more time and creativity – and involves more frustration – than just responding to action alerts and exhortations to “save” a particular animal every day. But once people understand the rate at which we can prevent abuse and destruction of nonhuman animals who have no legal rights and are nearly universally considered to have no moral rights will always be slower than the rate at which abuse and destruction increase, I believe and have faith that more people will commit themselves and dedicate their efforts to promoting animal rights and not substitutes.

Thank you, by the way, for your interest in promoting animal rights, for your publication, and for asking about my work and ideas and the work of Responsible Policies for Animals. Good luck!

If you would like to talk through any of the thought-provoking ideas David has provided he can be contacted at:

RPA4all@aol.com

Website: www.RPAforAll.org