Animal Rights Movement

The animal rights movement is a political movement that ascribes to nonhuman animals some of the same protections that many people recognize as belonging to all humans. It has taken two main tracks. First, there have been diverse activists whose conduct runs the spectrum from those who have made personal choices about animals and have become vegetarian, [Page 94]for example, to those who are much more radical and engage in various public acts of social disruption, upheaval, and, in some cases, even extreme violence. These individuals find grave fault with the way humans treat animals in contexts such as factory farming and agribusiness, the entertainment industry, and in medical experimentation and seek to change practices in these areas. However, this movement also can be depicted ...