From the President of PETA- Mice can be tickled! Please read...

By Ingrid E. Newkirk, People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals

When President-elect Barack Obama was born, numerous states
would have prohibited his black Kenyan father from marrying his white Kansan
mother. The Voting Rights Act was still a few years away, and the Supreme
Court's order to desegregate schools was being fought tooth and nail. Look at
how far we have come. Who alive then would have believed that just a few short
decades later, Americans would elect their first black
president?

We have broken through a significant barrier, but we cannot
stop there. We must now break down the barrier that prevents us from caring
about all the "others" who are "not like us," regardless of race, regardless of
gender _ and regardless of species.

Prejudice and oppression come about because of a belief that
"we" are important and that "they" are not.

In the days of slavery, for example, not so long ago, some
people honestly believed that African men did not feel pain as white men do,
that African women did not experience maternal love as white women do. And so it
was quite acceptable to brand men's faces with a hot iron and to auction off
slaves' children and send them vast distances away from their mothers. All
evidence was to the contrary, yet highly educated people defied their own eyes
and ears and common sense by denying the facts before them. Society accepted
this horrible exploitation, and then, as now, it takes courage to break away
from the norm, even when the norm is ugly and
wrong.

Today, we have abolished human slavery, at least in theory.
But we continue to enslave all the others who happen not to be exactly like us
but who, if we are honest with ourselves, show us that they experience maternal
love as we do, that if you burn them, they feel the same pain as we do, that
they desire freedom from shackles as we do.

In their natural homes, elephants live in complex
multigenerational social groups, mourn their dead and remember friends and
relatives from years past. Yet we tear them away from their families, confine
them with chains to stinking, squalid boxcars and beat them into performing
ridiculous tricks for our amusement.

Rats are detested, yet even these tiny animals, mammals like
us, have been found to giggle (in frequencies that can't be heard by the human
ear) when they are tickled and will risk their own lives to save other rats,
especially when the rats in peril are babies. Although no mouse or rat
bankrupted our economy, invaded Iraq or set poison out for us, we
dismiss their feelings as inconsequential and somehow beneath our
consideration.

Mother pigs sing to their young while nursing, and newborn
piglets run joyfully toward their mothers' voices. On factory farms, a sow
spends her entire life surrounded by the cold metal bars of a space so small
that she can never turn around or take even two steps. Chickens raised for the
table fare even worse and have their beaks seared off with a hot blade. They
will never enjoy the warmth of a nest or the affectionate nuzzle of a
mate.

The time has come to stop thinking of animal rights as
distracting or less deserving of our energy than other struggles for social
justice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere." All oppression, prejudice, violence and cruelty are wrong
and must be rejected no matter how novel the idea or how inconvenient the
task.

And for those who think that we will never be able to achieve
the dream of liberation from oppression, not just for human beings but for all
beings, regardless of race or gender or species, I have just three words for
you: Yes. We. Can.

___

About the Writer:

Ingrid E. Newkirk is the president of People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals and author of the new book "One Can Make a Difference."
Readers may write to her at PETA, 501 Front Street, Norfolk,
Va. 23510; www.peta.org.