Advocacy is a lifetime commitment. If you have a movement that’s trying to attract new people, and that’s losing old people faster than it can attract new people, then it’s going backwards rather than forward. The most important thing I have to say to any animal rights activist today is that you need to be an animal rights activist tomorrow. And the next day. And the next…
Above left: Tom Regan is interviewed about his 1988 Los Angeles “War on Vivisection” speech (interviewed April 2014 at North Carolina State University by Gary Comstock). Above right: Tom’s 1988 speech, called “the greatest animal rights speech ever given.”
To all you good, decent people currently in the vivisection industry, we issue this healing call: Lay down your weapons. Lay down your scalpels and prods. Lay down your Pavlovian slings and restraint chairs. Lay down your stereotaxic devices and your rodent guillotines. Lay down your wires that shock and plates that burn. Lay down your tanks that drown and chambers that deprive. Lay down your sutures that blind and vices that crush. Lay down these weapons of evil and join with us, you scientists who are brave enough and good enough to stand for what is just and true.
“There is more than food on our plates. With every meal, we consume something of the substance of our own values and commitments. Do we respect the demands of reason? Do we value our ability to think and act on our own? Are we satisfied that we are doing the best we can with our lives? These are the truths we consume every day.”
“Everyone understands that there is a limit to what we can do in the name of defending the victims of injustice. We simply cannot do everything for every victim. For all of us, however, this limit is not zero. That we cannot do everything in defense of those who cannot defend themselves does not mean that we should content ourselves with doing nothing.”
“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 absolute injustice is to prolong injustice. Animal rights demands this same answer: abolition.”
