Seb Alex is an animal rights activist, lecturer, photojournalist and author who runs the Middle East Vegan Society and has given animal rights advocacy workshops to over 1300+ activists across Europe, the Middle East and Australia. He is the author of the free e-book When Logic and Animal Rights Meet, which explains how logical fallacies are used to justify animal exploitation and how you can detect them. 

Q: Why do you recommend animal advocates study logic and argumentation? 

Alex: The reason why I believe it’s important for people to understand how arguments work in order to discuss animal welfare issues intelligently is because I strongly believe that we have reason, logic and ethical consistency on our “side” of the argument. Although emotional approaches also work with some people, an appeal to emotion isn’t always as powerful as a simple logic-based argument that someone can’t build an answer against. Ultimately, the cause we fight for is one where the suffering or exploitation of other animals depends on how well we fight for them. Given the importance of this issue, I believe every advocate should understand how to build strong arguments for animal rights.

Q: What’s an example of the kind of logical thinking you’re talking about? 

John Sanbonmatsu is Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His powerful new book The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves “peels back the myriad layers of myth, falsehoods, and bad faith that keep us eating meat.”

Q: You have said that “The animal economy today is the greatest system of mass violence and injustice in the history of the world.” What do you mean?

Sanbonmatsu: The Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as the attempt to obliterate a people’s or ethnic group’s identity by undermining its “biological structure” and “elemental means of existence.”  By analogy, we as a species are engaged in genocide against all the other animals of the earth—that is, against sensitive beings known to possess intelligence, subjectivity, complex emotions, and a demonstrated vulnerability to trauma.  So extreme are the harms we routinely inflict on other animals that we would consider them war crimes were they inflicted on members of our own ...

Sinergia Animal is an international animal protection organization working in countries of the Global South to reduce the suffering of farmed animals. They are currently running a divestment campaign to pressure the World Bank to cut off factory farm funding. Fiona Cameron of Sinergia spoke to Current Affairs.

Q: Why is cutting off the financing an important part of addressing factory farming? Tell us a bit more about what kinds of pressure can be exerted this way.

Cameron: To address the core problems of factory farming, we have to follow the money. Banks are key drivers of factory farm expansion. Much financing supporting industrial animal agriculture comes from large commercial ...

Marina Bolotnikova is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on factory farming and animal activism. She has previously contributed to Current Affairs and presently serves as an editor for

Q: What are some of the stories you’ve covered that you think are the most important?

Bolotnikova: I’d point to a 2023 feature I wrote for Vox, “The bitter civil war dividing American veterinarians.” It’s about the veterinary profession’s support for factory farming, and a movement of insurgent veterinarians ...

Captain Paul Watson is a Canadian environmental activist and co-founder of Greenpeace who later founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Known for his direct-action tactics against illegal whaling, overfishing, and ocean exploitation, Watson has spent decades at sea, leading controversial but influential campaigns to defend marine life. He joined Current Affairs to explain why he has spent his career ramming and sinking whaling ships. 

Q: Could you tell us a bit about your efforts to stop whaling? How have you attempted to intervene in order to save whales?

Watson: I began my opposition to whaling in 1974 as a cofounder of the Greenpeace Foundation. I served as first officer on all the early Greenpeace anti-whaling voyages, and in 1977 I established the Sea Shepherd movement to intervene against illegal whaling operations by using a strategy that I called “aggressive nonviolence”—meaning intervention without causing any injury. 

In 1979, I hunted down and rammed ...

Alene Anello is an animal law attorney and the founder of Legal Impact for Chickens. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she previously worked at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The Good Food Institute, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

Q: Tell us about chickens. Why are they your focus?

Anello:  Chickens are sensitive, intelligent animals. They develop friendships with one another, and can even befriend people. These birds feel pain just like a cat or a dog. In sanctuaries or in the wild, chickens reveal their curious, unique, strong, and loving personalities. They develop social hierarchies and befriend both people and one another. They recognize patterns and do other complex cognitive tasks.  And they deserve to be treated with kindness.

Yet in modern America, chickens suffer greatly—and in huge numbers. U.S. companies raise and slaughter nine billion chickens each year. That’s more than the entire population of humans on the planet. Because chickens are so small, it takes about 200 chickens to produce the amount of meat that comes from one cow. Partly as a result of this, nine out of every ten land animals farmed nationwide is a chicken. And 99.9% of U.S. chickens live on factory farms. 

Chickens raised on factory farms for ...

The North American Animal Liberation Press Office communicates on behalf of underground activists who perform animal rescue operations. In the last few years, there have been a number of actions to liberate mink from mink farms, which have resulted in tens of thousands of mink being set free. The NAALPO answered questions on behalf of the mink liberators. 

Q: Tell us about mink and the fur trade. Why have mink farms been singled out by those who want to liberate animals?

A: From killing more than 5 million defenseless fur-bearing animals per year, to “only” 783,000 last year, fur profiteers are under severe pressure to cease their morally-defunct trade. Because it is so vulnerable, the industry is being selectively and heavily targeted by organizations such as Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).

Mink on fur farms suffer from the moment they are born until the moment they die. They spend their entire lives trapped in tiny wire cages, crammed by the thousands into squalid sheds, unable to take more than a few steps in any direction. As wild animals, they are deprived of every natural act that is ...

How Much Can a Banana Cost? 

A price, such as a rent or wage, that remains

fixed, recurring and agreed on for a long

period of time eventually becomes a ghost. 

The agreed upon amount no longer exists in any

real way even as your boss still pays the number.

The number is no longer the same. Each time you pay

your landlord the number, the number invisibly

changes, becomes less the number you stated

when you started paying. Just stating your wage,

after a year or two, becomes a kind of nostalgia,

a lie you tell yourself about the distance

between yourself and the past. Worse, 

the number becomes a lie the market

tells you about the distance between

yourself and the past. Worse, the real

marker between yourself and the past;

the dead; have no mention in this equation, 

just the infinitesimal and invisibly mounting

lied about number. The best part; eventually 

you cannot understand any number in the world, 

because your frame of reference for the cost of

an hour or a day or fifteen hundred square feet is twenty

years ago, two thousand miles away, and one day 

you find yourself ...