Abolitionist Approach Goes International

international | rights, freedoms and repression | press release Sunday October 14, 2007 13:53 by rogy

Internet future for animal advocacy

Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach, based on philosopher and law professor Gary Francione's vision of the rights of nonhuman animals, takes rights seriously. It provides an alternative to existing animal advocacy which is most frequently based on Peter Singer's utilitarian animal welfarism and other non-rights perspectives.

Although Francione's abolitionist approach to animal rights has been published in a series of books since the mid-1990s, it made its breakthrough in 2006 with the launch of a comprehensive web site and blog outlining what animal rights would look like if animal advocates took rights seriously. The existing "animal rights movement", exemplified by organisations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA), use rights rhetorically rather than as the fundamental basis of their claims about human-nonhuman relations. Francione describes such advocates, at least those inflenced by Singer, as "new welfarists" who base their position on welfarist cruelty claims rather than on rights violations. Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach argues that many nonhuman animals are rightholders and the use of nonhuman animals by human beings amount to rights violations. The abolitionist approach seeks to end rather than regulate the human use of nonhuman sentient beings.

Francione's web site features text, audio and video presentations of the abolitionist case and has just announced that its video presentations are now available in a number of languages, with Spanish and Japanese "coming soon".