Today, thanks to my bumper stickers, I had a guy stand outside in the rain waiting for me to come out of the post office to talk to me about how I'm wrong to both support reproductive rights and animal rights. The two can, obviously, not be mutually exclusive. This is due to three bumper stickers I have: two about animal rights (one about climate change and one that says "Kindness is magic") and one that says "Reproductive Rights are Human Rights." As I was driving away after telling him that I did not want to discuss my bumper stickers with a stranger, I heard him yelling some nonsense about human babies.
I've known that there's a group of people who yell "But what about abortion?!??!?!!" when you're leafleting about animal rights, but I didn't realize that they're so hard core as to wait outside in the rain to talk to a stranger about a few pieces of plastic. The issue, I suppose, is that if you care so much about animal lives then it's hypocritical to not care about human baby lives. I think that makes total sense. I have never, not once in my entire life, eaten, tortured, abused, or mercilessly slaughtered a human baby.
I guess the difference between me and this man is that I don't consider a fetus to be a baby but also that I believe strongly that a woman, a fully formed human being, has the right to decide what happens to her body. I am pro-life in that way, I suppose. I am pro-women's lives; I'm pro-women not dying for the sake of fostering a growing fetus in her womb. But I'm also pro-fetuses no growing up in a home with a mother that is unsuited to care for the child, either physically or emotionally. I'm pro-keeping the number of kids in the foster system down. I'm pro-happy and healthy children who have parents that truly love and want them.
But there's also the larger issue of animal rights versus human rights that I think needs to be addressed here. When discussing animal rights with my non-vegan friend, he said, "I guess I'm just more on the human rights side of things." This is a serious problem that non-vegans don't understand - there is no disconnect between human rights and animal rights, and in fact, on the contrary, animal rights ARE human rights.
Animal rights, while a movement that fights for the safety and positive treatment of animals, also fights for labor and workers rights. It;s a movement that fights for better health for every human. It's a movement that fights for nonviolence in every sense of the word. In fact, (shameless plug) my new nonprofit, Para los Animales de Honduras, Inc. (PAH), is being formed for the purposes of nonviolence. Yes, when I was in Honduras I saw a lot of animal cruelty that changed my life, but it is impossible to separate the violence against animals with the human violence, especially in a place as violent as Honduras.
Studies have found that humane education efforts, that teach children how to treat animals in a nonviolent way, actually decreased overall violent behavior of the children who participated in humane education.
The goal of PAH, then, isn't only to make the lives of the animals in Honduras better, though that is one of our main goals. The reason why our mission is "to create a compassionate Honduras by advocating for animal rights through education and promoting compassionate policies" is because it isn't just about animal rights. It's about human rights as well.
When someone says they're a human right person rather than an animal rights person, you can bet your bottom dollar that that person doesn't know much about either.
