Snippets From The Animal Activist’s Handbook
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Alternet has an excerpt from The Animal Activist’s Handbook by Matt Ball and Bruce Friedrich. Here are a few sections that I found particularly worthwhile…
Regarding funding and animal rights movement:
“The largest animal-rights organization in the world has a budget of some tens of millions of dollars per year to work against all of the combined injustices against the more than 10 billion land animals that are killed annually in the United States. Planned Parenthood took in 30 times more for work on women’s health; Catholic Charities took well over 100 times more to work on poverty issues. One human disease – cancer — gets thousands and thousands of times more money devoted to it than is contributed to every single issue related to animal rights.”
Regarding allocation of resources:
“we all have limited resources and time. It’s a simple fact that when we choose to do one thing, we’re choosing to not do another — there’s no way around it.” [...]
“There are a myriad of worthy pursuits, and of course we appreciate anyone working to make the world a kinder place. [...] we challenge everyone — including ourselves — to constantly strive to maximize the efficacy of our actions.”
Regarding getting active and making a difference:
“The people we admire are not those who went along with the crowd, who did whatever was allowed by the norms of their times. Rather, the people we rightly respect are those who stood up to the prejudices of their society. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, and so many other individuals changed their world. We are all called to do no less.”
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