Two-thirds of Americans polled by the "Associated Press" agree with the following statement: "An animal's right to live free of suffering should be just as important as a person's right to live free of suffering." More than 50 percent of Americans believe that it is wrong to kill animals to make fur coats or to hunt them for sport. But these same Americans eat hamburgers, take their children to circuses and rodeos, and use products developed with animal testing. How do we justify our inconsistency? In this easy-to-read introduction, animal rights advocate Gary Francione looks at our conventional moral thinking about animals. Using examples, analogies, and thought-experiments, he reveals the dramatic inconsistency between what we say we believe about animals and how we actually treat them. "Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?" provides a guidebook to examining our social and personal ethical beliefs. It takes us through concepts of property and equal consideration to arrive at the basic contention of animal rights: that everyone - human and non-human - has the right not to be treated as a means to an end. Along the way, it illuminates concepts and theories that all of us use but few of us understand - the nature of "rights" and "interests," for example, and the theories of Locke, Descartes, and Bentham. Filled with fascinating information and cogent arguments, this is a book that you may love or hate, but that will never fail to inform, enlighten, and educate. Author note: Gary L. Francione is Professor of Law and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University Law School, Newark. He is the author of "Animals, Property, and the Law" and "Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement" (both Temple).
Gary L. Francione is Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark.
He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa O'Hearn Scholarship that allowed him to pursue graduate study in philosophy in Great Britain. He received his M.A. in philosophy and his J.D. from the University of Virginia. He was Articles Editor of the Virginia Law Review.
After graduation, he clerked for Judge Albert Tate, Jr., United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court. He was an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1984, where he was tenured in 1987. He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1989.
Professor Francione has been teaching animal rights and the law for more than 20 years, and he was the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school. He has lectured on the topic throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including serving as a member of the Guest Faculty of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has been a guest on numerous radio and television shows. He is well known throughout the animal protection movement for his criticism of animal welfare law and the property status of nonhuman animals, and for his abolitionist theory of animal rights.
He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal rights theory and animals and the law, including Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (2000), Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (1996), Animals, Property, and the Law (1995), Vivisection and Dissection in the Classroom: A Guide to Conscientious Objection (with Anna E. Charlton) (1992), and Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (2007).
Professor Francione and his partner and colleague, Adjunct Professor Anna E. Charlton, started and operated the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic/Center from 1990-2000, making Rutgers the first university in the United States to have animal rights law as part of the regular academic curriculum, and to award students academic credit not only for classroom work, but also for work on actual cases involving animal issues. Francione and Charlton represented without charge individual animal advocates, grassroots animal groups, and national and international animal organizations. Francione and Charlton currently teach a course on human rights and animal rights, and a seminar on animal rights theory and the law. Professor Francione also teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, jurisprudence, and legal philosophy.
