Steven Best on Animal rights

“If physical force is needed to save an animal from attack, then that force is a legitimate form of what I call "extensional self defense." This principle mirrors US penal code statutes known as the "necessity defense," which can be invoked when a defendant believed that an illegal act was necessary to avoid great and imminent harm. One only needs to expand this concept slightly to cover actions that are increasingly desperate and necessary to protect animals from the total war against them.”

“The entire human species gains at the expense of millions of nonhuman animal species and countless billion of animals that humans enslave, exploit, and kill. In the greatest zero-sum game of all, human advances exist in inverse relation to the massive loss of freedom and life suffered by animals. Thus, the more humans gain, the more animals lose; the greater the human comfort, the more suffering and death for animals; and growth in human population numbers bring extinction to other animals and reduces biodiversity. While helping humanity in highly uneven ways (as determined by class, state power, imperialism, systems of hierarchy, and so on), modern techno-science intensified the misery and slaughter of animals, and exacerbated the destruction of the earth. This is evident in the growing horrors of vivisection, factory farming, slaughterhouses, fur farming, and sundry systems of exploitation, which polluted and poisoned all aspects of their immediate physical surroundings, and provoked catastrophic climate change on a global scale.”