P!nk
"I've always felt that animals are the purest spirits in the world. They don't fake or hide their feelings, and they are the most loyal creatures on Earth. And somehow we humans think we're smarter—what a joke."

Benji Madden and John Feldmann
"We love animals and are here to try to educate people on why we've been vegan for years. Health, planet, animals and environment are all excellent reasons."

P!nk
"I turned down Prince Williams' invitation for me to sing at his birthday bash because he was spearing animals in Africa and bringing publicity to it and I thought that was pretty disgusting."

Bret 'The Hitman' Hart
"I fail to see the glory in taking a high-powered rifle with a targeting scope and blowing away a grizzly bear—often leaving orphan cubs behind to starve, get hit by cars—or to be exterminated themselves by some other jerk so he can mount their little baby heads on his wall. The only thing animal trophies are a testament to is ignorance. In my view, there is absolutely no sport and nothing in any way admirable about hunting in today's times, [when] we do not have the necessity of slaughtering our own food. ... Hunting is just senseless butchering and too often done inhumanely."

Arnold Schwarzenegger
[Speaking about California's anti-chaining bill] "This bill helps protect dogs from cruelty and enhances public safety by preventing aggressive animal behavior that can result from inhumane tethering."

Pamela Anderson
[Regarding fur] "It's terrible because people see stars like JLo and Beyoncé wearing fur and they don't think about the cruelty that goes into it."

Alec Baldwin
"All those animals live a pretty dreary life, then they get chopped up and put on a griddle."

Nellie McKay
"If you took away all the violence in the world, there would still be suffering. Why do people, in so many ways, have to contribute to it? Any celebrity who wears fur …."
"[P]eople who wear fur, they're deliberately being a--holes. They're saying, 'I don't care, period.'"

Susan Sarandon
"Eating vegetarian and jogging regularly have taken me far."

Charlize Theron
[On criticisms about animal rights advocacy] "I come from a country where starvation is huge, AIDS is huge, so I'm very aware of people suffering and I'm involved in those issues as well. I started the first anti-rape campaign in South Africa years ago, when nobody talked about rape. But one is not more important to me than another. My mother used to say, 'You have to fight for things that don't have a voice.'"


Sir Paul McCartney
"Look at early pictures of me in Help, and I've got this black fur coat on that Linda liked because it was such a cool coat, or so it seemed at the time. I understand all too well the attraction of, when you first earn money, you want to show off. You want the most ridiculous furs, you want chinchilla dripping off you, you want jewelry. The trouble is, the difference between fur and jewelry is fur hurts someone."

Alicia Keys
"[The worst] was this fur collar, and PETA should have gotten me with red paint. It was probably not real fur anyway, but the way the collar was up around my face it looked like I was being eaten by a big bear."

Heather Mills
"We have to remind ourselves that meat and dairy lobbyists benefit immensely from our consumption of these products. They have no interest in our health or the fact that they are destroying the planet. Theirs is a short-term vision, motivated by profit. I applaud vegans for being the kindest people on the planet."

Frequently Asked Questions About Animal Rights

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The responses presented in this factsheet are by no means the only answers to the following questions, and the questions are only part of a potentially endless list. They are presented as suggestions that can guide your thinking and give you ideas that help you formulate your own responses. We recommend that you consider our answers and incorporate the information into your own thinking.

General Questions

What do you mean by animal “rights”?
Animal rights means that animals deserve consideration of what is in their best interests—regardless of whether they are cute, useful to humans, or endangered and regardless of whether any human cares about them at all (just as a mentally challenged human has rights even if he or she is not cute, productive, or well liked). It means recognizing that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation.

What is the difference between “animal welfare” and “animal rights”?
Animal welfare theories accept that animals have interests but allow those interests to be traded away as long as there are human benefits that are thought to justify that sacrifice.

The concept of animal rights means that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation. Animal welfare allows these uses as long as “humane” guidelines are followed.

The animal rights movement believes that animals, like humans, have interests that cannot be sacrificed or traded away just because it might benefit others to do so. However, the animal rights position does not hold that the rights it espouses are absolute. An animal’s rights, just like those of humans, can be limited, and the rights of various people as well as animals can certainly conflict.

What rights should animals have?
Animals have the right to consideration of their interests equal to that of any other sentient being. A dog most certainly should not be made to endure pain. We are obligated, as the advocate of that dog, to respect the dog’s right not to suffer.

Animals cannot always have the same rights as humans because their interests are not necessarily the same, and some rights are irrelevant to animals. A dog doesn’t have an interest in politics and, therefore, is not a being whose right to vote must be protected. Having that right would be as meaningless to a dog as it would be to a child.


Where do you draw the line?
As long as an animal is capable of suffering, we should do whatever we can to avoid causing that animal pain. Sometimes it isn’t possible to prevent an animal’s suffering, but just because we can’t stop all suffering, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to mitigate whatever pain we can control. Today’s world presents virtually unlimited choices, and there are kinder, gentler ways for most of us to feed, clothe, entertain, and educate ourselves than by killing animals.

What about plants?
There is no science today that supports the belief that plants experience pain—devoid as they are of central nervous systems, nerve endings, and brains. The main reason why animals have the ability to experience pain is so that they can protect themselves from harm. If you touch something that hurts you, the pain teaches you to leave it alone in the future. Since plants cannot move to escape pain and lack the mobility or processes to learn to avoid certain things, the ability to feel pain would be superfluous and evolutionarily illogical in plants.

Even if plants were able to suffer, it wouldn’t justify causing pain and distress to animals like dogs, cows, rodents, or chickens, who we know are capable of great suffering.

It’s fine for you to believe in animal rights, but how can you tell other people what to do?
We don’t try to dictate, but we understand that freedom of thought does not mean

Inside the Wool Industry
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Without human interference, sheep grow just enough wool to protect themselves from temperature extremes. The fleece provides effective insulation against both the cold and heat. Wool was once obtained by plucking it from sheep during their molting seasons. Breeding for continuous fleece growth began after the invention of shears.(1)

Shearing and Mulesing Equal Sheep Abuse
With approximately 100 million sheep, Australia produces 25 percent of the world’s wool.(2) Flocks usually consist of thousands of sheep, making it impossible to give individual attention to their needs; it is considered normal in the Australian wool industry for as many as 6 million sheep to die each season.(3) Because there is so much death and disease in the wool industry, the rational solution is to reduce the number of sheep who are used for their wool in order to maintain them decently. Instead, sheep are bred to bear more lambs in order to offset the deaths.

In Australia, the most commonly raised sheep are merinos, who are specifically bred to have wrinkled skin, which means more wool per animal. This unnatural overload of wool causes animals to die of heat exhaustion during hot months, and the wrinkles also collect urine and moisture. Attracted to the moisture, flies lay eggs in the folds of skin, and the hatched maggots can eat the sheep alive. In order to prevent this condition, called “flystrike,” Australian ranchers perform a barbaric operation—mulesing—by carving huge strips of skin and flesh off the backs of unanesthetized lambs’ legs and around their tails. This is done to cause smooth, scarred skin that won’t harbor fly eggs, yet the bloody wounds often get flystrike before they heal. Under the threat of an international boycott of Australian wool products, wool-industry officials have said that they will find an alternative to mulesing and will phase out the practice by 2010.(4) One farmer—who successfully protects his sheep from flystrike by using a combination of fly traps, chemical sprays, breed selection, and grazing management—attributed the industry’s resistance to giving up mulesing to “a bit of old-boys’-club arrogance in a once-grand industry that is now struggling a bit.”(5)

Sheep are sheared each spring, after lambing, just before some breeds would naturally shed their winter coats. Timing is considered critical: Shearing too late means wool loss. In the rush, many sheep die from exposure after premature shearing.

Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast work without regard for the sheep’s welfare. Experienced shearers clip more than 350 sheep in one day, and that pace is maintained for up to four weeks.(6,7)

Live Exports
When sheep age and their wool production declines, they are sold for slaughter. This results in the cruel live export of millions of sheep every year to the Middle East and North Africa. In January 2006, in conjunction with Animals Australia, PETA conducted an undercover investigation to expose the handling and slaughter conditions endured by sheep who are exported to these destinations from Australia.

Contrary to claims made by the Australian government and live-export industry that animals are treated humanely, investigators found that sheep and cows were dragged off trucks by their ears and legs and left to die in barren feedlots. They were bound and thrown into the trunks of cars, and they were slaughtered in prolonged and cruel ways that are illegal in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Live exports to Egypt have since been temporarily suspended. Please visit SaveTheSheep.com for more details about this investigation.

Other Kinds of Wool
It may be called wool, mohair, pashmina, shahtoosh, or cashmere. But no matter what it’s called, any kind of wool means suffering for animals.

Contrary to what many c