Welcome to the New Change.org and the Animal Rights Blog

by Stephanie Ernst

Published October 08, 2008 @ 03:57AM PST

As I'm writing this, and as you are reading this, thousands of animals are dying. In the one minute it takes you to read this paragraph, 19,000 animals will be killed in the United States alone—so that humans can eat them. Thousands more are waiting their turn in line. Some of them are squealing, squawking, or bellowing and straining and fighting for their lives. Others are terrified but too dejected, weak, and injured to fight. But each of them—every single one—is feeling something, something awful. They don't want to die, not now, not like this.

Somewhere else, shelter workers are heaving the bodies of dead dogs and cats, who just a day ago were not only alive but even healthy, into a pile for disposal because no one adopted them in time.

The next city over, a circus is pulling into town, and depressed, stressed, and maddeningly bored animals are crammed in trailers, where they will stay for hours more until it is time to perform unnatural stunts, which they will do out of fear—because they were trained through torture.

Inside a tall building at a local university, a young monkey is cowering at the back of a cage, trying to get as far away as he can from the human hands reaching in to drag him out and perform another experiment, another mutilation, or, if it's a bad day for the researcher or assistant, another act of cruel abuse just for fun.

The list goes on. But something else is happening too.

Someone is having an eye-opening conversation with a friend. Someone is crying as she watches a video that shows her things she's never seen before. Someone is looking into the eyes of an animal and finally seeing a soul there, a personality, an individual life. Someone is sitting down with a book, wondering how it's possible that he never before knew the things he's reading now—why didn't anyone tell him? Someone is seeing the world in an entirely new way. Someone out there is making a commitment to stop contributing to the violence, to the injustices. Someone out there is making a change.

Maybe it's you.

Some of you reading this are animal rights advocates and vegans or vegetarians already. Others of you agree with some of my values and beliefs—you oppose cruelty, you boycott circuses, you believe in adopting rather than purchasing companion animals, and so on—but you aren't quite where I am. And still others of you think I'm nuts—and that's OK. We can work with that.

On a daily basis here, we will be exploring current animal issues; challenging and hopefully changing some ingrained human assumptions about nonhuman animals' worth, purposes, and rights; looking at the myriad ways that animal rights issues intersect with issues of environment, health, human rights, and more; and encouraging changes in humans' behavior toward and use of animals.

Already, there is a great deal of content here for you to explore, so please do take your time to meander around—wander back to the first pages, read the information under the About tab, and scan the list on the left to see if anything specific catches your interest. My hope is that as we move forward, we'll be able to learn a few things from one another—you from me and I from you.

Welcome to the conversation. The animals and I are glad you're here.