A rational case exists for the rights of preborn humans. An equally compelling case exists for the rights of animals.

Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors. Author B.R. Boyd in The New Abolitionists (1987), notes that animals exhibit such "'human' behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation."

Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights (1983), notes that animals "have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their being the object of anyone else’s interests."

Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983) notes: "Animals are just as intelligent and communicative as small children or even some mentally defective adult humans. If we do not eat small children and mentally defective humans, then what basis do we have for eating animals?" C.S. Lewis and other Christians have even acknowledged that denying rights to animals merely because they do not exhibit the same level of rational thought most humans exhibit upon reaching full development justifies denying rights to the mentally handicapped, the senile, and many other classes of humans as well.

John Stuart Mill observed, "The reason for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves— the animals." In his 1987 book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, notes that "In some ways, Christian thinking is already oriented in this direction. What is it that so appalls us about cruelty to children or oppression of the vulnerable, but that these things are betrayals of relationships of special care and special trust? Likewise, and even more so, in the case of animals who are mostly defenseless before us."

The way we treat animals is indicative of the way we treat our fellow humans. One Soviet study, published in Ogonyok, found that over 87 percent of a group of violent criminals had, as children, burned, hanged, or stabbed domestic animals. In our own country, a major study by Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale University found that children who abuse animals have a much higher likelihood of becoming violent criminals.

Some of the greatest figures in human history have been in favor of animal rights. These include: Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Walker, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Wesley, Victor Hugo, St. Francis of Assisi, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Pythagoras, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Douglass, Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, the Buddha, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau.

In Animals, Men and Morals (1971), Patrick Corbett, professor of philosophy at Sussex University, captured the spirit of animal rights with these words: "We require now to extend the great principles of liberty, equality and fraternity over the lives of the animals. Let animal slavery join human slavery in the graveyard of the past."

Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment. The animal rights movement should be supported by all caring Americans.