Richard D. Ryder

Richard D. Ryder

Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder (born 1940) is a British writer and psychologist.

Ryder became known in the 1970s as a member of the Oxford Group, a group of intellectuals loosely centred around the University of Oxford who began to speak out against animal use, in particular factory farming and animal research. He was working at the time as a clinical psychologist at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, and had himself been involved in animal research in the United Kingdom and United States.

In 1970 he coined the term speciesism to describe the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the protections available to human beings. In 1977 he became chairman of the RSPCA Council, serving until 1979, and helped to organize the first academic animal rights conference, held in August 1977 at Trinity College, Cambridge. The conference produced a "Declaration against Speciesism," signed by 150 people.

Ryder is the author of a number of books about animal research, animal rights, and morality in politics, including Victims of Science (1975), Animal Revolution (1989), and Painism: A Modern Morality (2001).