All Blog Posts (692)

Please Assist or Pass this along to qualified parties: Seeking trace-route documentation on IP addresses (including geographical locations) of Naysayers and Trolls: Please see comments attached to the article here.I suspect the attacks on me are originating from certain local establishments and would like to…

My dear friends,



During the last incident involving the homeless in Rome, Georgia, you made the article in the Rome News-Tribune the “Most Commented Upon” issue for the week. Of course, you had some help.



As I have always said, “Controversy turns a mere subject into an issue.” The naysayers are at it again.…

Yale University Professor of History Timothy Snyder reviews Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136957/timothy-snyder/war-no-more?page=show

According to Snyder, Pinker's libertarian bent contributes to a basic flaw in his analysis: he "overlooks the crucial relationship between…

Transcript of Prof. Priscilla Cohn’s Live ARZone Guest Chat

17 December 2011

5pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

The Ethics of the Ecology of Fear against the

Nonspeciesist Paradigm:

A Shift in the Aims of Intervention in Nature

by Professor Oscar…

Recently I’ve been viewing an impressive 8-disc historical documentary series (produced by Octapixx and narrated by James Earl Jones) entitled “The American West.” Discs 3 and 4 of the series cover the infamous “Trail of Tears” experienced by the Cherokee and other tribes of Native Americans. As a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson, thousands of indians were snatched from their homes and forcibly marched some 800 miles…

Transcript of Josh Harper’s ARZone Live Guest Chat

10 December 2011

5pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

If you’re like me while on vacation, you turn off the smartphone, avoid watching all that dreary news coverage or reading depressing newspapers, and instead grab a juicy paperback novel (Grisham? Kellerman?) to enjoy under a palapa near the gorgeous blue of Caribbean waters. Work? Forget about it. Guilt? What’s that? Saving the environment? Maybe next trip.

What would you…

In a recent very interesting Facebook discussion, Tim Gier wrote (in part, and perhaps it is unfair to extract this out - but I'm gonna anyway!), “I don’t accept that the property status of other animals necessarily entails harm towards them.” 

[I began to write a response to Tim’s observation for the FB discussion - but then realised that I was writing a blog entry, so that is why I have decided to post it here instead. In addition, I have not written a blog entry for a while,…

Being vegan is difficult, and if it is going to mean anything, and result in anything, then it must be difficult.…

Ordinarily, those who are concerned about animal ethics or animal welfare would instead ask, “Does culling justify hunting?”—In other words, “Does the need to curtail overpopulation in a species justify killing them (even from helicopters!) in large numbers to ensure their own survival and that of their prey?” This is a fair question, and one that requires careful consideration by conservation biologists.

However, if the political propaganda of hunting lobbyists (and of course gun…

There is no doubt that the gun culture is replete with euphemisms. Terms such as “sport”, “harvest”, “game”, and “livestock” grace the rhetoric of those who want to subdue animals and gather trophies of victory and dominance with impunity. 

To ask if hunting is analogous to either a sport or a harvest is often to evoke passionate debate between animal lovers and “arms-bearing” traditionalists. Certainly, an argument can be made for the taking of “livestock” in the wild by hunters…

"I am not suggesting that we abandon our desire to conserve other species, but rather that we develop a system of values which would accommodate the interests of all animals, not just those to which we choose to give preference in our own particular decade or century.



The reasons for shooting bison and shooting feral sheep are similar in that both species were targeted for eradication because they violated our idea of what a particular landscape should look like, and our preference…

Transcript of Dylan Powell’s ARZone Live Guest Chat

19 November 2011

5pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

Introduction: My Grassroots Activism

New blog post by ARRNT; a vegan abolitionist group in North Texas!  Taken from here:

https://arrnt.wordpress.com/

Hello there ARRNT and fellow supporters!  I’d like to take a moment and speak with you about what you can do, as individuals, to benefit other animals today!  Activist groups should be encouraged because of the camraderie and cooperation they bring, but it is, of course, always still important to realize…

Built-in Fairness Meters

The more biologists and psychologists delve into understanding innate behavioral drives, the more they find that we humans seem to be hard-wired to be highly sensitive to fairness in social interactions. Interestingly, this universal taboo against unfairness in human relationships is also…

Many years ago, my brother in law was diagnosed with bone cancer. As he was laying on the operating table waiting to be put under for a mid thigh amputation, he tried selling the surgeon his financial services. Today, he's still just as passionate about what he does. I was always envious that he'd found his purpose ... he had a raison d'etre ... something that lit him up and kept him interested day after day after day. Not all that long ago, I realized *this* is my raison…