Jim Mason | |
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Born | September 30, 1940 |
Occupation(s) | Lawyer, journalist |
Jim Mason (born September 30, 1940) is an American lawyer, journalist and animal rights activist.
Mason was born in Superior, Wisconsin on September 30, 1940. [1] He grew up in rural Missouri on a farm. He was educated at the University of Washington. [1] He dropped out and spent the next two years traveling in New York and New England before joining the United States Army. [1] After he completed his military service, Mason attended the University of Missouri where he obtained his J.D. degree. [1] He formed his own law practice in Bridgeport in 1973. [1]
Mason was introduced to philosopher Peter Singer in 1974. [1] The next year they began discussing the possibility of collaborating on a book-length treatment of factory farming. Mason did much research on factory farming and travelled around the United States and Canada visiting intensive farming facilities. Their book Animal Factories was first published in 1980 and revised in 1990. It provides a critical review and photographic documentation of factory farming practices in North America. [1] The book is known for having "played a role in the United States similar to that of Harrison's book in the United Kingdom and Europe in providing a critical expose of the factory farm system." [2]
He was elected to the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2001. [3] Mason is a vegan. [4]
Mason was the co-founder and editor of the animal rights magazine Agenda, later titled The Animals Agenda. [5] He left the publication in 1986. [6]
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.
Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions. Some specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while others define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species". Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals in exploitative ways which is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder is an English writer, psychologist, and animal rights advocate. Ryder became known in the 1970s as a member of the Oxford Group, a group of intellectuals loosely centred on 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.
Conversations regarding the ethics of eating meat are focused on whether or not it is moral to eat non-human animals. Ultimately, this is a debate that has been ongoing for millennia, and it remains one of the most prominent topics in food ethics. Individuals who promote meat consumption do so for a number of reasons, such as health, cultural traditions, religious beliefs, and scientific arguments that support the practice. Those who support meat consumption typically argue that making a meat-free diet mandatory would be wrong because it fails to consider the individual nutritional needs of humans at various stages of life, fails to account for biological differences between the sexes, ignores the reality of human evolution, ignores various cultural considerations, or because it would limit the adaptability of the human species.
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.
Gene Baur, formerly known as Gene Bauston, is an American author and activist in the animal rights and food movement. He’s been called the "conscience of the food movement" by Time magazine, and opposes factory farming and advocates for what he believes would be a more just and respectful food system. Baur is president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, a farm animal protection organization. He is vegan and has been involved with animal rights since he co-founded Farm Sanctuary in 1986. Baur has authored two books and various articles.
Jon Linden Wynne-Tyson was an English author, publisher, Quaker, activist and pacifist, who founded Centaur Press in 1954. He ran Centaur Press from his home in Sussex and was a distinguished independent publisher. He authored books on animal rights and vegetarianism. At one time Wynne-Tyson held the title of "King of Redonda", a literary title referencing a small island.
The concept of moral rights for animals is believed to date as far back as Ancient India, particularly early Jainist and Hindu history. What follows is mainly the history of animal rights in the Western world. There is a rich history of animal protection in the ancient texts, lives, and stories of Eastern, African, and Indigenous peoples.
Several individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy. The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.
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Marc Bekoff is an American biologist, ethologist, behavioral ecologist and writer. He is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder and cofounder of the Jane Goodall Institute of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and cofounder of the Jane Goodall Roots and Shoots program.
Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971) is a collection of essays on animal rights, edited by Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, both from Canada, and John Harris from the UK. The editors were members of the Oxford Group, a group of postgraduate philosophy students and others based at the University of Oxford from 1968, who began raising the idea of animal rights in seminars and campaigning locally against factory farming and otter hunting.
Philip John Lymbery is the Global CEO of farm animal welfare charity, Compassion in World Farming International, Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester’s Centre for Animal Welfare, President of Eurogroup for Animals, Brussels, founding Board member of the World Federation for Animals and a Leadership Fellow at St George's House, Windsor Castle.
Charles W. Patterson is an American author, historian, and animal rights advocate, best known for his books, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond, Animal Rights,The Civil Rights Movement, and Marian Anderson.
Vegetarian ecofeminism is an activist and academic movement which states that all types of oppression are linked and must be eradicated, with a focus on including the domination of humans over nonhuman animals. Through the feminist concept known as intersectionality, it is recognized that sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of inter human discrimination are all connected. Vegetarian ecofeminism aims to include the domination of not only the environment but also of nonhuman animals to the list. Vegetarian ecofeminism is part of the academic and philosophical field of ecofeminism, which states that the ways in which the privileged dominates the oppressed should include the way humans dominate nature. A major theme within ecofeminism is the belief that there is a strong connection between the domination of women and the domination of nature, and that both must be eradicated in order to end oppression.
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), formerly known as Effective Animal Activism (EAA), is a US-based charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused nonprofit founded in 2012. ACE evaluates animal charities and compares the effectiveness of their different campaigns and strategies. The organization makes charity recommendations to donors once a year. Its stated purpose is finding and promoting the most effective ways to help animals.
Do Animals Have Rights? is a 2005 non-fiction book on animal rights by British philosopher Alison Hills from the University of Bristol. The book explores the ethics of factory farming, animal experimentation and other issues involving animals from a philosophical analysis.
The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System is a 2018 book by Jacy Reese that argues animal farming will end by the year 2100 based on effective altruism reasoning and social movement strategy.
Jasmin Singer is an American animal rights activist. Since 2022, she has been the host of Weekend Edition for WXXI, Rochester, NY's NPR member station. She is the co-founder of the non-profit organization and podcast Our Hen House, serves as editor-at-large of VegNews, and is the former Vice President of Editorial at Kinder Beauty. She also supports LGBTQ+ and overlapping social justice issues.
Yves Bonnardel is a French activist, philosopher, writer and editor. He advocates for antispeciesism, libertarianism and egalitarianism. Bonnardel is one of the founding members of the French journal Cahiers antispécistes and of the events Veggie Pride, Les Estivales de la question animale and the march to close all slaughterhouses.