Gary Lawrence Francione (born May 1954) is an American legal scholar. He is the Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law & Philosophy at Rutgers School of Law–Newark.
. . . eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.
If you claim to 'love' animals but you eat animal products, you need to think critically about how you understand love.
If we can live and prosper without killing, why would we not do so? I do not see veganism as 'extreme' in any way. I see killing for no reason as extreme in every way.
When it comes to animal agriculture, there is conventional, which is rally hideous, and 'compassionate' and 'certified humane' or whatever, which 'may' be 'slightly' less hideous. But it is all torture. It's all wrong. These 'happy' gimmicks are just designed to make the public feel better about exploiting animals. Don't buy the propaganda of 'happy' exploitation. Go vegan and promote veganism.
Veganism must be the baseline if we are to have any hope of shifting the paradigm away from animals as things and toward animals as nonhuman persons.
They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.
There is no difference between sitting around the pit watching dogs fight and sitting around a summer barbecue roasting the corpses of tortured animals or enjoying the dairy or eggs from tortured animals.
People say that being a vegan creates a social problem in that others may react negatively. But isnt that the case if you take a principled position on any issue, whether its racism, sexism, heterosexism, violence as a general matter—or speciesism? The key is to educate others about *why* you take the position.
An aim of an argument should be progress, but progress ultimately means little without victory.
We do not think clearly about our moral obligations to animals.
99% of our uses of animals, including our numerically most significant use of them for food, do not involve any sort of necessity or any real conflict between human and nonhuman interests. If animals matter morally at all, then, even without accepting a theory of animal rights, those uses of animals cannot be morally justified.
Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.
It's really not rocket science. If animals are not mere things; if they have moral value, we cannot justify eating, wearing, or using them particularly when we have no better reason than palate pleasure or fashion. If you are eating, wearing, or using animals, then your actions say that you regard them as mere things, despite what your words say.
You don't have to love animals to recognize that it is immoral and unjust to exploit them. But if you do love animals, but you continue to participate in their exploitation, you need to rethink your idea of what love means.
I maintain that we ought to abolish the institution and stop causing or facilitating the existence of more 'companion' animals.
Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.
Does veganism require a “sacrifice”? Yes. It requires that you give up that which you never had any right to in the first place.
Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you. And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan
Every sentient being values herhis life even if no one else does. That is what is meant by saying that the lives of all have inherent value.
Vegetarianism as a moral position is no more coherent than saying that you think it morally wrong to eat meat from a spotted cow but not morally wrong to eat meat from a non-spotted cow.