25 Reasons to Become an Animal Welfare Advocate
March 1, 2008 · Print This Article
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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated . . . I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man. [Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948]
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Animal welfare advocacy is the practice of preventing animal suffering. Being an animal welfare advocate means that you respect, value, and believe in the humane treatment of animals and their inherent right to life. Animal welfare advocates learn, share, discuss, promote, encourage, and otherwise contribute to the welfare of animals. Why would anyone do this? Here are just 25 of the millions of reasons for being an animal welfare advocate.
- Kittens are cute and puppies are cuddly.
- Cats make great companions. Dogs are loyal. They will be your best friends in the world.
- Over five million puppies, kittens, dogs, cats, and other companion animals are wrongly and unnecessarily killed in U.S. shelters every year.
- Pigs are as smart, loyal, and protective as dogs are and they make great pets!
- Each year, one million baby cows, or calves, are stuffed into 2×2′ crates, with their necks chained to impede any movement. They cannot turn around, stretch, or lie down. This makes their meat tender and it’s how veal is made. So, when you eat veal, you’re having tortured baby cow.
- If you don’t know what factory farms are, watch The Meatrix.
- Studies show that eating a lot of red meat may cause cancer, especially colon cancer.
- Eating tortured animals cannot be a good thing for you, your body, or your karma.
- People who prance around in fur are basically draping a dead animal carcass around their bodies. That’s disgusting.
- Cavemen killed animals for warmth and protection against the elements. That’s survival. Today, people who kill and wear animals do so for prestige because they are ruled by greed. Worse, they are shallow, ignorant, and evil.
- Animal torture and abuse is one of the early signs of a sociopath and serial killer.
- People who torture and abuse animals are weak, impotent, dangerous, violent, and should not be roaming around freely in our society.
- Animal hoarding is a sickness. Hoarders may cause harm to the animals they care for, but hoarders do not operate from malicious intent. They need help and so do their animals.
- If a man or woman wants to get in a ring and senselessly beat or be beaten by another, that’s their choice. When dogs are put in a ring, they don’t have any choice at all. In short, dog fighting is sick and anyone involved in it should be locked up. Forever.
- Nobody seems to talk about rodeos and how the cowboys like to torture poor helpless animals. Not all cowboys ride rodeo, but all rodeo riders SUCK because they’ve got no better skills than hurting animals for sport.
- Animals do not exist for human entertainment. They don’t want to live in a zoo any more than you want to live a prison cell. Sure, some zoos are caring for endangered animals, or protecting animals that can’t take care of themselves in the wild. But marine parks and other touristy animal attractions keep animals and exploit them solely to make money off them. Yes, it’s a lot like slavery.
- PETA consists of radical animal rights activists. PETA doesn’t want you to eat or wear animals, but they kill over 97% of the animals that enter their care because they’re too damn lazy to find homes for them. PETA needs to be exterminated.
- Every year in the U.S., people spend tens of billions of dollars on the comfort and care of their pets. Meanwhile, animal shelter workers kill pets because they’re incapable of finding homes for them. This is not euthanasia. It’s murder.
- Nathan Winograd has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that animal shelter overpopulation is a myth, and that animals die in shelters because the morons who are running the shelters are too lazy, caught up in bureaucracy, and worried about their own self-image to bother keeping the animals entrusted to them alive.
- Here’s the human equivalent to declawing a cat: someone cuts off every single one of your fingers at the second knuckle. Doesn’t that sound nice? Because furniture is more important that the ability to use your hands. Everyone knows that.
- People who have their pets’ vocal chords cut are too incompetent to train them properly and teach them basic social skills like when to be quiet.
- When you buy a pet online, there’s a good chance it’s going to come from a puppy mill. This is NOT a good thing.
- Human beings send their children to school for 13-20 years so they can function in society, and this is after they can already understand and speak the language. These same humans think dogs should magically understand every wish and command without any training whatsoever.
- An animal once saved my life. Maybe one day an animal will save yours.
- Why be an animal welfare advocate? Because animals have rights. They enrich our lives. Because Gandhi said so. It’s the right thing to do.
Help Me!
I want to grow this list. How many reasons do you think we can come up with? 100? 250? 1,000? Tell me why you’re an animal welfare advocate by leaving a comment. Right now, there are twenty-five reasons. Help me double it!
Disclaimer: I stand behind what I’ve said on this list. However, there are exceptions to every rule. I’ve heard enough stories to realize that extenuating circumstances do occur. Also, for the record, I’m not a full vegetarian. I believe that nature created us to eat meat but that we do not need to torture and abuse it before we consume it. In case you’re wondering, I do eat poultry and fish, but not very often.
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This was a fun one so feel free to try it. Oh and try dancing on a bar sometimes too....
Really Nice site!
Hi Melissa, I call myself simply an “advocate for animals.” I agree with your critique of the “animal rightists”; however, one of the reasons the “animal welfare” movement rejects the term “animal rights” is precisely that that movement, too, reserves for itself the right to kill animals. PETA doesn’t like the notion of pets at all, it seems. All of the shelters and animal control organizations that kill for “space” and say they do it “humanely” claim the “animal welfare” banner.
Hi Kim, thanks for stopping by and thank you very much for your compliments!
Barbara,
Stick around, because I have a lot more to say about PETA. Their philosophies regarding animals are pretty twisted and there’s a lot of information about them that the public never receives.
Also, I’ll be posting extensively on No Kill, which denounces shelter killing and explains why it is completely unnecessary. I recommend reading Redemption by Nathan Winograd as it’s quite an eye opener in terms of how shelters are poorly managed on the whole.
Melissa
This is a good list. I’m running a competition right now on my blog to help out the animal shelters. Pedigree quit helping them feed the animals in their care, so I’m urging people to step up. It’s not enough for people to say they love animals. Thank you for urging people to take action.
Geri, that’s great work you’re doing. Declaring love is never enough, it must be shown through our actions. That’s my philosophy anyway.
Disclaimer: I am hardly perfect as I eat a good amount of chicken, turkey, fish, and the occasional red meat. I also declawed my cats. That said, I commend you for your list and beliefs, as does my cat, Boo. There are various levels of animal rights, but some cases are clear as day. For me, some absolutes are torture, hunting, abuse, horse and dog racing, wearing fur, and animal testing. On the last, people say animal testing leads to disease cures. I don’t buy the argument. First, what works on a rat, does not work on a human. Also, I should note that I am a cancer survivor, and do not feel cures come via animal testing. Second, being cruel to one living creature for another’s benefit is immoral.
Wonderful list! Thank you so much for sharing! You put into very simple, clear terms what is so hard to explain sometimes to people outside the world of animal advocacy.
@Jen, Sometimes people just need a reminder
I think that animals in endangered home are abused and the owners need a more serious and harsh punishment under animal rights. I also think that the reason why animal population is out of control is because some people dont care. I think that for every animal saved, they should be capable to find great homes for, especially with the amount of people in this country, and the amount of time that goes into finding and saving them. I wish all people would be animal lovers and stop the animal problem in this country.
@Crista, I agree. People who abuse animals are sick and twisted and they need help or punishment. The shelters can find homes for all the animals if only they would try harder. Collectively, they put very little effort into it, and if you research enough, it seems sometimes they actually put up barriers to finding homes for the animals in their care. I will talk more about that in the future. However, the public does hold some responsibility. They need to see through a commitment of adopting an animal, and they need to spay/neuter. They need to be educated and train their animals properly. There’s a lot that we can all do.
In his book “Animal Rights,” the brilliant philosopher Pete Singer systematically and logically argues that treating animals like lesser beings is unquestionably immoral.
Imagine that we discover a planet inhabited by a single type of being. These alien beings are social, care for their young, each other and their environment to the best of their abilities, follow rituals for mating and grieve for their dead.
However, they don’t display the same level of meta-cognition (being able to think about thinking), innate intellegence, or influence on their environment as humans do.
Would the wholesale slaughter, torture and enslavement of such beings be defensible in any way?
If not, we cannot justify such treatment of beings to whom we are genetically closely related (that means nearly every living creature on the planet, if you believe Darwin).
Like you, I understand that humans are omnivores, an adaptation that has allowed us to thrive over the course of our evolution, and I do not suggest that all people should eat only plants.
However, I do feel strongly that as conscious beings we are obligated to do our best to relieve the suffering of others whenever possible - no matter what species they belong to. We have not fully evolved until we acknowledge and accept that responsibility.
@Diane,
“treating animals like lesser beings is unquestionably immoral”
I agree wholeheartedly with the above statement. I struggle with the issue of being omnivore vs. vegetarian vs. vegan. One thing I feel very strongly about is how animals that are raised for consumption are treated. I am against factory farms, veal, fois gras, etc.
However, consumption is obviously an integral part of nature and we see it not just with humans but many animals on the planet. I was recently contacted by a die-hard vegan who criticized me for not being vegan. That led to an interesting, albeit mostly one-sided conversation about whether lions, tigers, and sharks could/should be converted to the vegan lifestyle. Are they immoral? Something to think about.
This issue is one that I’ll address in greater length in a future post, but for the time being I just wanted to respond that I agree in that animals are not lesser beings than humans. Not at all.
Animals have feelings too!! So many people think just because they cannot speak like humans they don’t feel the way we do. But they do and so many people don’t understand that. Have empathy people please!!
@Donna, I couldn’t agree more! People make all kinds of assumptions about animals without taking any time to learn or try to understand their nature.