by Professor Steve Best -
[email protected]
Like all of you, I have watched the recent attacks
unfold with grief and horror. Like you, I have heard numerous
soul-shaking accounts of survivors and victims as I watched the
spectacle of violence with horror. Needless to say, animal rights
activists do not rejoice in human suffering, rather we are moved by
suffering of any kind. With the big picture in mind, working for animal
rights furthers works toward human rights, as our work and lifestyle
choices advances the human moral conscience and protects the natural
world.
I began my activism in the early 1980s as an
undergraduate student at the University of Illinois. In the midst of the
Reagan era, the raging civil wars throughout Central America, and the
apartheid system in South Africa, I worked fervently on various human
rights campaigns. I organized events that raised medical funds for the
suffering people of Nicaragua and El Salvador, volunteered to help house
and protect refugees fleeing the terror in Central America, participated
in anti-apartheid actions, and chaired a committee in solidarity with
the Central American people. My activism on behalf of people persisted
until the late 1980s when, already a vegetarian, I read Peter Singer�s
Animal Liberation. This book rudely awakened me to the horrors of animal
suffering and changed my mind forever; I decided then and there to help
the most defenseless victims of violence, the nonhuman animals.
As with every other animal rights activist I know, this
doesn�t preclude compassion for human beings, it simply deepens the
empathy that already existed from a human rights perspective. The
actions that resulted in the terrorist attacks on the United States, and
those long-standing policies that provoked them, are rooted in violence.
What animal rights people share in common with the human rights
community is a condemnation of violence. Ultimately, we are working
toward the same goal � an enlightened and compassionate world free of
suffering and violence, where all beings share the right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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