Preface to At Rest With the Animals

At the invitation of Philip Geyelin, I joined the editorial board of The Washington Post in 1969. Phil, the editorial page editor and a man of breadth for whom all political, social or moral issues were fit subjects for comment, promised that I would be writing about big and great things. Really big and great.

Sure enough. My first day at The Post, Phil asked me to write an editorial on whales, on the big and great whites. They were endangered, he said. Get hold of Christine Stevens for the details.

Not long after, some big and great elephants were being poached to the edge of extinction in southern Africa. I called the World Wildlife Fund and a congressional subcommittee for some facts.

So began a journey into lives of animals, lives that were often at risk either because laws didn’t protect them or they were valued for the profits their owners or exploiters raked in. To his credit, Phil Geyelin believed that animal welfare and animal rights deserved as much a place on the paper’s editorial and op-ed pages as any other concern. Along with my bents for a range of public policy matters—corporate fraud, militarism, human rights, families, school reform, sports, religion, civil liberties—I relished not only writing about animals but also getting to know women and men who were the leading professionals in their fields. In addition to Christine Stevens, there was Lewis Regenstein who specialized in grizzlies and wolves, Heidi Prescott, Cleveland Amory and Mark Markarian who knew the art of political persuasion, Paul Shapiro who founded Compassion Over Killing, Ingrid Newkirk who has a soft spot in her heart for animals and gives a hard time to those who don’t, Bruce Friedrich, Andrew Linzey, John Dear and Gary Kowalski who know the links between animals’ consciousness and spirituality, the ethicists Peter Singer and Tom Regan, Ann Free and her daughter Elissa who know the value of Albert Schweitzer ideals, Bill Nooter who knows the music of animals, Katherine Hessler and Gary Francione who teach animals rights law, Congressman Andy Jacobs who was for years the only vegetarian in either the House or Senate, John Grandy, Nancy Lawson, Wayne Pacelle and Nancy Perry of the Humane Society of the United States, John McCarthy who teaches animals rights, Neal Barnard the physician who is making medicine responsible and John Robbins who educated his father and taught his son.

That’s the short list of my reliable sources.

The columns, articles and reviews in these pages couldn’t have been written without the informed opinions and facts of doers and thinkers far more knowledgeable about animals and animal issues than I am. Since the early 1980s when I was able expand my work from a newsroom to a classroom, I began teaching high school, college and law school courses in peace studies and nonviolence. I can’t be certain how many of my 6,000 students all these years have had conversions to animal rights by way of what they eat, wear or spend money, but I am certain that every spring, summer and fall semester all my students have had at least two or three weeks exposure to the most compelling ideas and ideals available on living peacefully with all sentient beings. Intellectually, most students are able to make connections between their own actions and how animals are effected by those actions. Few had ever given this much thought, having been raised in a culture where the eating of animal flesh and the use of animal products is seen as normal and well beyond questioning. I know that I never did, until a slow awakening occurred in my early 20s.

At the three Washington area high schools where I’ve been teaching--Bethesda-Chevy Chase, School Without Walls and Wilson—students see animal rights as an ideal they can act on--at their next meal. They can take a thought and then take a stand. It isn’t that way with most other issues. You can oppose the violence of capital punishment, or think the military budget is bloated, or that global warming is a threat.. But what’s the action step? With animals, it becomes personal. It is the almost the same with my college students at Georgetown University, Georgetown Law, American University, the University of Maryland and Catholic University. I say almost because college and law students are further along in the acculturation process. They are more settled in their diets, more defensive about the choices they have made, more layers of habit need to be stripped off.

That’s why teaching animal rights is the opposite of preaching animal rights. The goal is not make people feel guilty but to feel responsible. If guilt is the issue, is anyone really innocent? We dwell in homes or buildings that once displaced animals, we pay federal taxes to a government that legalizes the slaughter of animals, we travel in cars with leather seats, our highways are unfenced to prevent roadkill, our children attend schools where animal experiments are routine, we take drugs that were tested on animals, we buy newspapers that runs ads for the dairy, meat, egg and fur industries, we shop in food stores that profit from the sale of animal products, we vote for politicians who don’t dare challenge, much less defy, the hunting lobby, we pay the salaries of state and federal judges who interpret a constitution that says nothing about either the welfare or rights of animals, we embrace religions that give humans dominion over animals and where it’s rare pulpit that a sermon on the sacredness of animals is sounded.

For certain, no one is pure, no one is free of complicity and no one should be telling others to shape up as long as our own self-shaping is far from complete. Just as some of the world’s great peacemakers—Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Einstein—were often emotionally violent to their families, so too are some people who abuse humans the way they never would animals. It’s worth remembering that when it comes to society’s treatment of animals, we should strive to be intellectually angry but personally gentle.

As someone who has been extraordinarily privileged to write for one of the country’s greatest newspapers, at which I was well paid for more than four million words in nearly 30 years, and then to have the equally high privilege of being in classrooms with students as loveable as they are loving, I owe some large debts. Unpayable debts, really—except if the currency of ideas and stories can be accepted as a small payment. That’s my intention in collecting the writings found in these pages.