When we see the horrors that human beings inflict on animals in slaughterhouses, fur farms, circuses and other settings, how can we not act?
JAY SHOOSTER: ‘I’ve worked with many human rights organizations and admire their goals, but I’ve also felt a profound sense of despair, loneliness, and disappointment at how communities that are so deeply concerned with justice can so thoroughly fail to stand up for the rights of non-human animals. When we see the horrors that human beings inflict on animals in slaughterhouses, fur farms, circuses and other settings, how, as decent people, can we not act? That was the question posed to me by a senior ACLU attorney when I sat down to talk with him about animal rights last fall…
A week after that meeting I learned that the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University — one of the premier human rights programs in the world — was taking a stand for animal rights and committing to an all-vegetarian food policy, which was announced publicly in April of 2018… CHGRJ isn’t alone. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), another of the world’s leading human rights organizations, recently embraced a vegan/vegetarian policy as “a meaningful act of solidarity” with the animal rights movement. The CCR policy further recognizes that an “increasing number of CCR staff members see violence against animals as contrary to a fundamental commitment to justice”…
Importantly, this support for animal rights is beginning to extend beyond internal food policy to the substantive work of human rights organizations. In April 2018, the CCR supported the Nonhuman Rights Project’s lawsuit to grant legal rights to chimpanzees by filing an “amicus brief” on their behalf in the Court of Appeals of New York… The fact that change is happening in such organizations is a strong indication of a much broader, movement-wide shift towards the embrace of animal rights’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: