Animal Rights Movement

The animal rights movement, sometimes called the animal liberation movement, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement which seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.

It is one of the few examples of a social movement that was created, and is to a large extent sustained academically, by philosophers.

Read more about Animal Rights Movement:  Terms, History, Current Status of The Movement, Philosophical and Legal Aims, Legal Changes Influenced By The Movement, Criminalization of Direct Action Methods, Public Support

Famous quotes containing the words animal, rights and/or movement:

    Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.
    Stuart Chase (1888–1985)

    The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    What stunned me was the regular assertion that feminists were “anti-family.” . . . It was motherhood that got me into the movement in the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women’s movement that put self-esteem back into “just a housewife,” rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of “instinct” and making it human, deliberate, powerful.
    Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)