By Joel Bartlett and Dan Shannon

In an effort to end the nasty wespeaks being exchanged on both sides of this debate, WARN would like to clarify two points and leave it at that.

The term "speciesism" was first defined in 1975 in the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. Singer is presently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, a prestigious,
tenured academic chair at the university’s Center for Human Values, and is widely considered the most important ethicist of our time. In his own words: "Speciesism... is a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species. It should be obvious that the fundamental objections to racism and sexism made by Thomas Jefferson and Sojourner Truth apply equally to speciesism. If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?" Before the late 18th century, racism was largely considered a made-up concept, but today it is an accepted term and widely considered an unacceptable social behavior. It is the belief of Singer, members of WARN, and many animal rights activists that one day speciesism will be viewed similarly.

WARN would also like to state that we recognize that across the world people are in different situations and that in certain countries eating meat is more necessary for survival than in our own. However, we fight for animal rights within our own country, and especially at Wesleyan, where eating meat is generally not a matter of survival.

Bartlett is a member of the class of 2003 and Shannon is a member of the class of 2001. Both are members of WARN.