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By Jack MacLean

Toffler claimed that the animal rights movement was going to be one of the big developments of the new century - let’s hope he was right. Well, maybe this is wishful thinking, but I think the animal rights movement is an important part of human evolution.

In “caveman” times, humans had a very narrow set of ethics, in which moral considerations were only given to members of their own tribe. Slowly, humans made progress in expanding their ethical considerations to members of other groups. Unfortunately, most humans are still mired in one or more of the various forms of tribalism that go by other names - nationalism, jingoism, fundamentalism, patriotism, racism, sexism, fanaticism, and of course the biggie, speciesism. All of these “isms” once had a place in preventing the tribe from being wiped out, but all of them are narrow, and have been perverted to exclude nonmembers of the tribe from protection. All of them are ethical dinosaurs, and they are a net drain on the evolution of compassion and the best parts of humanity.

Now Star Trek, on the other hand, (the “Next Generation” version) represents to me the state humans are evolving to. The episodes had a message, a thread of highly evolved compassion, running subtly and sometimes not so subtly through almost all of them.

And the animal rights movement seems to be one of the driving forces of that evolution. Most evolution begins with a few mutations or outliers spreading their characteristics more and more widely. Outliers like Gandhi, Shaw, Bashevis-Singer, Einstein, Singer, and yes Pacheco and Newkirk sowed the seed, and the idea of universal compassion is spreading through us to more and more humans. But without reinforcement, we could see this spread slow down and even reverse itself, and we could lose the beginning steps of what could be real progress in human evolution.

The animal rights movement can provide a bridge between the “ isms” of the caveman and the compassion of Star Trek.

The entertainment industry, from Bobby Berosini and his abuse of the Las Vegas orangutans, to traveling circuses and their abuse of the nonhuman performers, to the zoos that occasionally get caught on camcorders trying to control their prisoners with brutality, are starting to get the negative publicity they so richly deserves. But the public’s short memory needs continual reinforcement, and we should reinforce it until the truth becomes an integral part of people’s attitudes, and they truly understand the cruelty and fear that motivate those animals.

More people are becoming aware of the perversion of the farming industry in pursuit of lower costs and higher profits, and its selection of workers who look at nonhuman animals as meat machines or as targets for the release of personal fears and frustrations. But groups with money and advertising and slap suits are trying to suppress that information, and we can keep bringing it back to the public’s attention.

I’m a news junkie, and I’m beginning to see more and more news stories about drugs released to humans with significant testing on only nonhuman animals - drugs that weaken and kill people because the animal laboratory industry controls the government agencies that determine testing and approval regulations. I see more frequent disclaimers on television by scientists who try to tell the public that the results of their tests on non-human animals probably won’t apply to humans. And credentialed scientists are beginning to write books that document the insanity of using nonhuman beings to predict the effects of chemicals on human beings.

But none of this information exposes the cruelty of the confinement and testing process, and here is where the animal rights movement faces a huge challenge. Only inside whistleblowers or undercover video can get this information to the public, and we have to get the mass media interested in these issues.

These issues all have a common thread - the need for communication by us outliers to the mass of humanity that has the potential to evolve from animal abuse to universal compassion. Like the brontosaurus, some of that mass can never evolve, but people in the animal rights movement can provide the communication that might keep this evolution moving and even accelerating. If we don’t, our dreams of human evolution toward compassion may go the way of the dinosaur.

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