Ah, the Peace Loving Advocacy of Animal Rights Extremists

The animal rights movement claims to be peaceable—despite the terrorists in its midst. But how peaceable can it be when so many advocates use vividly violent imagery in their advocacy. From an editorial, Animal Rights & Ethical Veganism,” by one Gary Yourofsky, published in the University of Southern Indiana newspaper, The Shield. He writes:

So, while my lifestyle and lectures are based on compassion, those who refuse to stop harming animals force me to support ‘eye for an eye’ and ‘by any means necessary’ philosophies...

Institutionalized violence doesn’t simply vanish with a peaceful protest, a dose of logic and whole lotta love. If people continually deny animals their inherent right to be free, radical tactics are necessary and justified...

Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly.

Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice vivisection.”

This reads like the rantings of a very disturbed mind. But note: Yourofsky is apparently no fringe rider if this identifier is true:

Gary Yourofsky is one of the nation’s most outspoken and spirited activists. He has given 1,403 lectures in 27 states at 134 institutions to more than 35,000 students.

Animal rights advocates like to compare themselves to the Civil Rights Movement. Would Martin Luther King have ever written and spoken like this? Moreover, would any advocate for another movement who came so close to advocating violence ever be fought for by professors and students to be invited to speak on college campuses?

I am old enough to recall how the violent language and/or actions of groups like the Black Panthers and H. Rap Brown-types severely undercut the Civil Rights Movement that had made so much progress through nonviolent protest and love of enemies. The same thing will happen to animal rights if Yourofsky comes to epitomize the movement.