Special Editorial: Animal Rights & Ethical Veganism

Ever since Pythagoras promulgated peace to our planetary companions some 2,600 years ago, the animal rights community has utilized pacifism in its attempts to facilitate substantive change.

As a proponent of education, my activism is no different.

Each year I give around 250 lectures on ethical veganism to over 10,000 students explaining that victims of discrimination, slavery and murder come in all shapes and sizes.

Many students thank me for removing their blinders and subsequently eliminate meat, cheese, milk and eggs from their diets.

After all, consuming the cut-up corpses of murdered animals - and the things that ooze out of their bodies - is hardly an enlightened way of living. However, author Sam Harris explained a major flaw with pacifism activism:

"When your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand."

So, while my lifestyle and lectures are based on compassion, those who refuse to stop harming animals force me to support 'eye for an eye' and 'by any means necessary' philosophies.

In a world full of lying politicians and deceitful public relations, I hope you'll appreciate my willingness to unapologetically say what I'm about to say.

Empathy should only be reserved for innocent beings - human or nonhuman.

Institutionalized violence doesn't simply vanish with a peaceful protest, a dose of logic and whole lotta love. If people continually deny animals their inherent right to be free, radical tactics are necessary and justified.

Physically preventing an abuser from committing abuse and killing a murderer to stop the murder are noble, vicarious acts of self-defense.

This is why furriers - who anally-electrocute foxes or break the necks of mink - deserve the same treatment in return.

The same goes for anybody who wears fur.

If you pay someone to commit acts of cruelty, then you are complicit and therefore, just as guilty.

Rapists, murderers and child molesters should be vivisected, executed and dissected, allowing researchers the opportunity to gather useful information that would actually benefit human health for a change. I see nothing wrong with capital punishment because if you willfully destroy someone else's life, then you automatically relinquish yours.

I believe in God but am vehemently opposed to organized religion and its attempts to sanctify cruelty in His name.

Harming or killing animals is Satan's milieu.

Christians, Jews and Muslims need to represent their faiths through peaceful compassionate living, not the barbaric tradition of meat-eating or the inane rituals of singing songs to the sky, growing long beards, covering the head in cloth or dipping each other in water.

The next two paragraphs can be found on my adappt.org Web site in the What's Wrong with PETA and HSUS section.

They're the reason why the USI administration canceled my lecture last year and why journalism Professor Chad Tew and his students fought to change the school policy and bring me back.

Tew knew I had a First Amendment right to speak on campus.

"Sometimes I think the only effective method of destroying speciesism would be for each uncaring human to be forced to live the life of a cow on a feedlot, or a monkey in a laboratory, or an elephant in the circus, or a bull in a rodeo, or a mink on a fur farm. Then people would be awakened from their soporific states and finally understand the horror that are inflicted on the animal kingdom by the vilest species to ever roam this planet: the human animal! Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly.

Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice vivisection."

I'll be lecturing at USI on Tuesday, January 29, in the Mitchell Auditorium from 7-9 p.m.

Gary Yourofsky is one of the nation's most outspoken and spirited activists. He has given 1,403 lectures in 27 states at 134 institutions to more than 35,000 students. You can peruse his Web site (above) or contact him directly at GaryTofu@earthlink.net.