Flashback: HSUS Supports Animal Rights
Skeptical that HSUS is an animal rights organization? Read the following essay written by former HSUS lawyer Peter Lovenheim exploring the extent of the organization's support for animal rights.
Apr 27 2010
HSUS and Animal Rights: A 30-Year Marriage
Once animals have a seat at the table with people, as equals, we've opened Pandora’s Menagerie. And since HSUS president Wayne Pacelle likes to note that “animals can’t speak for themselves,” it’s apparently up to him to step in and articulate what animals really want.
Here’s where all this is headed: in HSUS's view, the idea of animal rights is more far-reaching than merely “loving animals or being kind to them”:
Animals’ requirements are varied, and some are of greater importance than others, but when we recognize them as rights, we have a moral obligation to give them fair consideration, and to deny them only if other rights are overriding. In this way, ’animal rights’ helps us move beyond kindness, towards justice. (Emphasis added.)
So while Pacelle and other HSUS mouthpieces make appeals to “compassion” and “kindness,” they’re really looking farther down the road. And they've been doing it for decades.
