A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Animal Rights and Issues

  • HSUS for Obama-Biden

    Not that animal protection is likely to be high on the next President’s list of priorities, but, for what it’s worth, the Humane Society recently endorsed Obama-Biden. Interestingly, it seems this is the first time they’ve ever endorsed a presidential candidate (they routinely endorse congressional candidates), but were moved to this time in large part Read more

  • Irony and hunting

    Turns out that Sarah Palin’s RNC speech was written by former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who also happens to be the author of Dominion, a conservative polemic on behalf of animal rights. (An excerpt from Scully’s book that appeared in the American Conservative several years back actually helped set me on the path to vegetarianism.): Read more

  • Do it for the hens

    Via bls at The Topmost Apple comes word of a Humane Society campaign to get religious people to replace eggs from battery hens with cage-free eggs or egg substitutes during the month of October. Great idea. St. Francis would be proud. Be warned, though, that there are a lot of labels (organic, free-range, cage-free, certified Read more

  • The end of (cheap) meat

    I’m agnostic, because under-informed, about whether “free-range” meat would result in higher meat prices than the factory farmed variety once you’ve taken into account all the hidden costs. But Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, contends that, even under the best circumstances, making the (necessary) switch to free-range Read more

  • Hypocrisy

    George Monbiot: Sure, we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations – they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism. Read more

  • Kristof on Prop. 2

    The NY Times columnist, an admitted meat-lover, writes in favor of the California ballot measure to outlaw some of the most egregious practices of confinement farming: “My hunch is that in a century or two, our descendants will look back on our factory farms with uncomprehending revulsion.” Via Erik Marcus. Read more

  • At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

    I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be Read more

  • Strawman watch

    Julian Sanchez provides a devastating take-down of this astonishingly bad article by Wesley Smith. Amazingly, Smith doesn’t even mention the conditions under which animals are raised in factory farms, which is surely one of the most salient motivating factors for vegetarians and vegans. Instead, he rests his argument, as Sanchez notes, almost entriely on a Read more

  • Rights of apes, rights of men

    Are animal rights activists being persecuted in Austria? Read more

  • The Victorian PETA

    The Post weekend book section has a nice write-up of a new book called For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, written by Kathryn Shevelow. The book focuses on the animal protection movement that arose in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, a movement that came in the face Read more