An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Tom Regan
April 24, 1988

Speech at April 1988 Last Chance for Animals World Day for Lab Animals, sometimes titled ‘The Torch of Reason: The War on Vivisection.’

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We are gathered here today to declare war on vivisection! Our shared goal is not to reform this great evil but to abolish it completely! It is not bigger cages we want, but empty cages! Anything less than total victory will not satisfy us!

The position we hold — the abolitionist position — is often said to be “extreme,” and those of us who hold it are said to be “extremists.” The unspoken suggestions are that extreme positions cannot be right, and that extremists must be wrong.

But I am an extremist when it comes to rape — I am against it all the time. I am an extremist when it comes…