Who will inherit the animal rights movement?
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:
Shouting through a bullhorn on the steps of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City throughout the summer of
1976, competing for attention with the U.S. Bicentennial celebration
and the near-bankruptcy of New York itself, the late Henry Spira
embarrassed the American Museum of Natural History into cancelling a
series of cruel sexuality experiments on brain-damaged cats. Never
before had anti-vivisection activists stopped research that was
already funded and underway.
Inspired by philosopher Peter Singer, who wrote much of his
1974 opus Animal Liberation as Spira’s house guest, Spira had
already researched the 3,000-year recorded history of animal
advocacy. Spira found that he could not identify any specific time,
place, or issue that marked a definitive defeat for the cause of
animals in the court of U.S. public opinion. Spira could not find
record of any elected leader speaking in favor of animal suffering,
as opposed to abstract and sanitized defenses of hunting, trapping,
animal agriculture, and animal research that almost always included
paens to sportsmanship, good husbandry, and not “sacrificing”
animals unnecessarily.