The Orbis

I’ve always cared about animals. In elementary school, I convinced my science teacher to raise funds for manatees and other wildlife. But it wasn’t until I got to college that I thought about the animals who are never the subject of a Discovery Channel special, even though they are the animals we come into contact with the most—on our dinner plates.

Despite my Indian heritage I grew up eating meat like most Americans—and lots of it! It wasn’t until I reached college that I began to think about farm animals, animals in laboratories and the other animals used by our society.

Before I learned about farmed animals, I thought the brochures from animal protection groups were extremist propaganda from people who had seen Bambi one too many times.

However, as I investigated, I learned that the groups are telling us the truth: animals are mutilated without pain relief. They’re trucked to slaughter through extreme weather for days without food or water. They’re killed in ways that defy our worst nightmares. And it’s all perfectly legal. These are the facts.

I also learned that organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) could be sued if they lied about the treatment of farmed animals. Animals, however, rarely get their day in court; the beef, pork and chicken industries can make vague claims about “caring” for animal welfare, and it’s very difficult to sue them. PETA’s successful consumer fraud lawsuit against KFC last year, which forced KFC to make sweeping changes to its information call line, was a first. Now KFC just speaks in generalities—even as it continues to support horrific cruelty to chickens.

Even with all I had learned, I still thought, “They’re just animals. There are bigger concerns for me to worry about.” Then I found out about some past animal rights supporters were great moral visionaries as well—people like Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albert Schweitzer, who used his Nobel Peace Prize speech to challenge the world to include animals in the list of beings deserving our compassion.

I began to think more carefully about the animals in this world and what they endure at human’s hands.

The true test of moral insight is not just to acknowledge the suffering of our peers or past human atrocities like slavery or the Holocaust. Clearly, to renounce these problems is crucial, but it’s also easy. The real test is to look at those who are unlike us and grant them due consideration, to look at the world today and ask what we’re doing now that future generations will find immoral and unconscionable.

This line of thought led me to PETA, where I now work. Now I ask you to think about animals and what is happening to them everyday.

Right now, for example, PETA is campaigning against cruelty at KFC. We call on the company to stop breeding and drugging animals so that they can barely walk and, instead, to phase in better slaughter technology, so that chickens are executed using a more humane process called “controlled-atmosphere killing.” And we’re getting some high-profile support from some of today’s moral visionaries, including Alice Walker, Dr. Cornel West and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who wrote to KFC: “On behalf of my friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), I am writing to ask that KFC abandon its plan to open restaurants in Tibet, because your corporation’s support for cruelty and mass slaughter violate Tibetan values ...”

You can read his entire letter on our Web site, KentuckyFriedCruelty.com.

Renowned scholar and Princeton professor Dr. Cornel West wrote: “As a person who is concerned about all injustices, I am asking you to direct KFC’s suppliers to stop breeding and drugging animals so that they collapse under their own weight or die from heart failure and to phase in humane gas killing, a method of slaughter that protects birds from broken bones and wings, electric shocks, and even drowning in scalding-hot tanks of water.”

You may never have spent much time around chickens, pigs, fish and other animals, but those who have know they are as intelligent and as interesting as the dogs or cats we do know. Find out more about them at GoVeg.com.

They are made of flesh, blood, and bones, just like us. What is done to animals on factory farms, in laboratories, in circuses and on fur farms would warrant felony cruelty charges if the victims were the dogs or cats who share our homes.

If you want to learn more, please visit PETA.org. Feel free to email me directly at PulinM@peta.org, and I’d be happy to send you a free vegetarian starter kit and DVD or to help you become more involved with animal rights activism on campus.

Pulin Mondi is a youth coordinator of PETA and currently is working with Vanderbilt students to increase animal rights activism.

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