A Call for a
Greater Sense of Urgency

With the passing of the year 2000, the American animal rights movement enters its third decade as an organized struggle. As those who objectively assess the situation realize, during the past 20 years, the plight of animals in America has steadily grown worse. Indeed, more animals than ever before are killed in the U.S. annually, and the tortures inflicted upon these animals are more unconscionable than ever before.

Of course, this is not to say that the movement has achieved nothing. It is almost certain that without our presence, animals in America would be even worse off than they are today. Moreover, the national awareness of the animal rights philosophy is vastly greater than it was in 1980.

As we've placed the issue of animal rights into society's consciousness; as we've demonstrated to the nation that a growing segment of the population refuses to remain tyrants over other species any longer, the time has now come to begin improving the plight of animals in America.

The animal exploitation industries' only hope for survival is for us to remain docile and complacent. When we sit back idly and just wish for the meat, egg, and dairy industries to disintegrate, they're assured that the status quo will not be altered, that animals will continue to be regarded as the chattel property of humans who can use them for whatever purposes they deem desirable. As Thoreau wrote, "Dissent without resistance is consent."

Confronting Our Disadvantage

Unlike most other social justice struggles, it is not our freedom for which we fight. Rather, we fight to lift out of slavery billions of individuals who can't consciously participate in the movement. Since we aren't the ones suffering the intense confinement of factory farms, since we aren't the ones losing our lives in slaughterhouses, it is all too easy to lose the sense of urgency that our movement would have if nonhuman animals could join us and tell us their ideas about strategies for success.

Only when we mentally place ourselves in the "shoes" of those we fight for will we realize just how urgent the situation really is. Only when we imagine being that animal hanging upside on a slaughter line, watching those before you murdered, will we begin to realize that animal rights truly is the moral imperative of our time.

While no one expects animal liberation to be achieved overnight, we should expect that we're going to have to work harder in the next decade than we have in the past, since it's obvious that animals can't keep on waiting. For them, it is literally a matter of life or death.

It is essential that we renew and increase our efforts to free nonhuman animals from the shackles of human tyranny. Now more than ever, we must devote ourselves fully to building a more compassionate world for all of us who live here. The holocaust that claims the lives of billions upon billions of animals in the U.S. each year will only cease when enough caring people decide they're willing to do what it takes to end it.

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