Merritt Clifton,
Animals24-7.org
February 2017
Visit Animals24-7.org for a collage honoring Tom's life
Concluded Regan in Empty Cages, “Our faith in a better world is deeply rooted in history. There was a time when many thought it was utopian, unrealistic and hopeless to achieve equal rights for Native Americans, African Americans, women, the mentally challenged or the physically disabled. Nevertheless, the verdicts of history teach that entrenched social practices not only can change, they have changed––but never without a struggle.”
Evolved from butcher to leading advocate of vegan philosophy
RALEIGH, North Carolina–– Animal rights philosopher Tom Regan, 78, died on
the morning of February 17, 2017.
“He had taken pneumonia last week,” longtime family friend Bernard Unti told
ANIMALS 24-7. “The family was all with him,” including Nancy, Regan’s wife
of more than 50 years, and their adult children Karen and Bryan.
“He had two very bad years after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. It was a
severe case in its onset, and it was not possible to control,” Unti
elaborated.
“Personal & professional debt”
“He was exceedingly kind to me,” Unti added, “and I have a great personal
and professional debt to him,” a statement which could have been echoed by
hundreds of other animal advocates, philosophers, authors, former students,
and personal and professional contacts around the world, including China,
where Regan’s writings about animal rights have recently become popular in
translation.
Remembered Regan of his early years, “I was born and raised in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My neighborhood was a child’s paradise, a place
where a kid could luxuriate in the steamy dirt of industrial urban living.
Cats, dogs, & horses
“As a kid of the streets, the animals I knew were mostly the animals of the
streets. Mainly cats and dogs, but there were horses, too. In those days
vendors and junkmen rode four-wheeled wagons through the city, pulled by
stoop-shouldered, weary creatures who were occasionally aroused from their
dolorous fatigue by the high pitched clang of a trolley’s bell or the crack
of the driver’s whip.”
Regan had his own dog as a child, named Tippy. “One hundred percent
mutt,” Regan recalled, “she was an energetic tri-colored wisp of a dog with
a small but clear tip of white at the very end of her tail. She was eager
for affection and designed by nature to be free. Give her just the slightest
crack in the gate and pow! — she was gone! Like a shot she was through the
gate and around the corner. I understand now that she lacked the space she
needed to be the dog she was.”
“Visited friends who had farms”
While Regan spent most of his childhood living alongside railroad tracks
beneath sooty clouds boiling up from the smokestacks of the steel mills for
which Pittsburgh was then famous, and environmentally infamous, “Not
everything was urban in my youth,” he continued. “Along with my parents and
sister I enjoyed fishing along the upper Allegheny River. We also visited
friends who had farms. Sometimes I stayed on for a day, maybe a weekend,
occasionally a week.”
But Regan’s early experience with animals did not make him an animal
advocate, or even cause him to think much about animals, he later
acknowledged.
“Unmindful”
“Like most Americans,” Regan wrote, “I grew up unmindful of the food on my
plate and the death of the creature it represents. The animals I knew
personally, Tippy for one, I considered my friends. But I lacked the
imagination then to make the connection between my fondness for these
animals and the silent pieces of flesh that came from my mother’s skillet or
oven.”
Opened to the possibilities of education and a life outside of the
industrial environment by a family relocation to the suburbs when he was in
his early teens, Regan took up writing and music in high school.
Musician & athlete
“By my junior year,” Regan recalled, “I was making a little money playing in
big dance bands and in small combos. I played any reed instrument, but
mainly clarinet and tenor sax. I doubt if I ever would have become a really
good musician had I continued playing,” Regan admitted. “I enjoyed the
camaraderie as much as the music.”
As a high school athlete Regan lettered in football, track, and golf, then
moved on to Thiel College, where he learned after two years that 138-pound
halfbacks even then had little future in college football.
From butcher to teaching
Regan worked his way to his undergraduate degree as a butcher.
“I sliced, I diced, I minced, I ground. Cold flesh gave way to my cruel
will,” Regan told later interviewers. “The pieces of meat I was working with
might as well have been blocks of wood. I was so distant from any kind of
identification with the animals, or any kind of spark of compassion. Not
that I was intentionally cruel to the companion animals in my life. They
were always special. But the other animals were like blocks of wood.”
After graduation Regan became first an instructor and then for two years,
beginning in 1965, an assistant professor of philosophy at Sweet Briar
College. In 1967 Regan relocated to North Carolina State University in
Raleigh, where he taught from 1967 until retirement in 2001.
North Carolina State University
“Although I was an outspoken proponent of animal rights on a campus where
students take degrees in animal agriculture and where hundreds of faculty
use animals in their research, I was never punished or threatened for
speaking my mind,” Regan said.
“Just the opposite. The university honored my work, presenting me with every
award for teaching and research for which I was eligible,” including through
the formation of the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive at the North Carolina
State University Library, “inaugurated in 2001,” Regan remembered, “when in
response to the library’s invitation, I donated my papers, covering the
whole of my personal and professional life.”
Anti-war activist
Early during Regan’s tenure at North Carolina State University, he and Nancy
cofounded North Carolinians Against the [Vietnam] War.
Believing he should be able to make a philosophical contribution to the
antiwar movement, Regan was visiting the university library one day in 1972,
he remembered, “and I took down a book by an author whose name I recognized,
but I had never read anything by him. The title of the book was My
Experiment With Truth by Mohandas K. Ghandi,” called Mahatma as an
honorific.
“Ghandi had an enormous influence on me,” Regan continued. “Basically he
said to me from the pages of his work, ‘I understand, Professor Regan, you
are against unnecessary violence.’ And I said. ‘Yes, that’s why I am
campaigning against the war. And he said, ‘Well, what are those dead body
parts doing in your freezer?’”
“Moral truth”
Later in 1972 the Regan family were plunged “into a period of intense,
shared grief,” Regan said, when their dog Gleco was killed by a car.
“My head had begun to grasp a moral truth that required a change in
behavior,” Regan said. “Reason demanded that I become a vegetarian. But it
was the sense of irrevocable loss that added the power of feeling to the
requirements of logic.”
In April 1973 the New York Review of Books published a review by
Australian philosopher Peter Singer of an essay collection entitled Animals,
Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans, edited by
Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch, and John Harris.
During the next two years, hosted much of the time as a houseguest of Animal
Rights International founder Henry Spira (1927-1998), Singer expanded the
essay into his influential 1975 book Animal Liberation.
Animal Rights & Human Obligations
Regan was involved in the discussion that informed Animal Liberation, and
became Singer’s next book project, Regan’s first in the animal rights field.
“As it happened,” Regan remembered, “I had an opportunity to teach at Oxford
during the summer of 1973. I had read Singer’s review and wrote to him,
explaining that we shared many of the same interests. While I was at Oxford,
we met several times. We agreed that an anthology of mainly philosophical
writings on our duties to animals would be both timely and useful. By the
fall of 1975, we had a manuscript.”
Published in 1976, Animal Rights & Human Obligations became one of the first
of a genre.
The Case for Animal Rights
“It is no exaggeration to say,” Regan assessed late in life, “that during
the past thirty years philosophers have written vastly more on the topic of
ethics and animals than our predecessors had written in the previous three
thousand. This has made a profound difference in the classroom. Whereas
there was not a single philosophy course in which the idea of animal rights
was discussed when I began writing The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism (also
published in 1975), today there are perhaps as many as a hundred thousand
students a year discussing this idea.”
During the next eight years Regan expanded The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism
into The Case for Animal Rights (1983).
“This work,” Regan said, “comes as close as I’ll ever come to getting at the
deeper truths on which, in my view, the animal rights movement stands or
falls. When I started writing The Case for Animal Rights, I did not hold the
‘radical’ conclusions I reached in the final chapter. I was against causing
animals ‘unnecessary’ suffering in scientific research, for example, but I
was not against making them suffer if this was ‘necessary.’ What was perhaps
the most remarkable part of working on The Case for Animal Rights was how I
was led by the force of reasons I had never before considered, to embrace
positions I had never before accepted, including abolitionism.”
Sought religious support
But while The Case for Animal Rights was generally well received by critics
and became one of the foundation works of the then already rapidly growing
animal rights movement, Regan was disappointed in the lack of response it
received from mainstream theologians.
Regan continued trying to enlist religious support for animal advocacy.
At invitation of Ethel Thurston (1912-2006), founder of the American Fund
for Alternatives to Animal Research in 1974, and Colin Smith (1941-2001),
founder of International Association Against Painful Experiments on Animals,
Regan in 1984 chaired a conference on religion and animals.
The proceedings, Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of
Animals in Science, appeared in book form in 1986.
“We Are All Noah”
In the interim, Regan wrote and directed a 30-minute film, We Are All Noah,
that won a silver medal at the 1985 International Film Festival of New York.
“We thought we finally had a teaching aid that would rouse the sleeping
giant of organized religion,” Regan remembered.
Fiasco
North Carolina Network for Animals cofounder Dietrich von Haugwitz
(1928-2007) “found a place where We Are All Noah could be shown. Hundreds of
invitations were sent to clergy in the area, even as the event was
publicized in other ways. A lovely spread of meat-free finger food was
prepared. Dietrich had composed a first-rate introduction to the film.
“So there we all were, waiting for the first arrivals. And there we sat,
waiting. And waiting. And waiting. No one came.”
The fiasco led Regan to “spend the better part of five years reading
everything I could about the most important struggles for human justice. I
learned,” he wrote in a personal memoir, that “Any time some people (the
‘Ins’) want to exploit other ‘inferior’ people (the ‘Outs’), the Ins will
always have two powerful forces on their side. One will be organized
religion; the other, the ‘best’ science of the day. Both will say, in their
authoritative voices, ‘The Ins really are better than the Outs. Our sacred
books say so. So do our esteemed scientists. So, the Outs are exactly where
they belong. Under the boot of the Ins.’”
“March for the Animals”
An even larger fiasco was a 1990 “March for the Animals” in Washington D.C.,
at which Regan was keynote speaker. Among the planners were attorney Bill
Wewer, who almost simultaneously incorporated the “March” organization, the
Doris Day Animal League (merged into the Humane Society of the U.S. in
2006), and the long defunct anti-animal rights group Putting People First.
Media releases projected possible participation of more than 100,000 people.
In actuality, crowd photos documented participation by not more than 20,000,
while the diversion of donor support to the “March” brought the economic
collapse of half a dozen then nationally prominent animal rights
organizations within the next year, and more than 50 state and regional
animal rights groups.
“In 1996, when a second march was organized,” Regan lamented, “fewer than
3,000 people participated,” while much of the funding donated to organize
the march was never accounted for by directors who subsequently disappeared
from view within the cause.
Beyond Animal Rights
At about the same time Regan took something of a philosophical beating in
Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals,
a 1996 anthology assembled by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams.
The Beyond Animal Rights authors argued that “the discourse of rights and
interests led since the 1970s by male philosophers Peter Singer and Tom
Regan has failed to appropriately address the practical issues involved in
what In A Different Voice author Carol Gilligan in 1982 called women’s
conception of morality…concerned with the activity of care, responsibility,
and relationships.”
In particular, Beyond Animal Rights explored perceived inherent
contradictions between recognizing the rights of animals and making
impositions upon animals such as sterilizing them and keeping them confined,
or asking them to push on past the normal limits of athletic endurance, a
sort of challenge that dogs and horses, in particular, seem to often enjoy.
Welcomed challenge & diversity
Regan welcomed the challenge and the diversity of voices that Beyond Animal
Rights amplified.
“The animal rights movement is so varied in its membership and programs
that it will never have one leader,” Regan said. “the movement goes forward
because of the efforts of many hands on many oars.”
Regan believed attracting new people and perspectives to the animal rights
cause to be of paramount importance, and that “educating ourselves about our
deep cultural roots — in philosophy and poetry, art and sculpture, music and
dance” is an essential part of recruitment.
“Moreover,” Regan said, “we must continue to add to the body of cultural
resources.”
Culture & Animals Foundation
For that reason Tom and Nancy Regan formed the Culture and Animals
Foundation, best known for hosting an annual International Compassionate
Living Festival at North Carolina State University.
Post-retirement, Regan was active in helping to extend discussion of animal
rights ideas internationally, especially to China, and produced two of his
most influential books, both further developing ideas discussed in The Case
for Animal Rights.
Defending Animal Rights
Defending Animal Rights (2001) originated most directly from nine of Regan’s
frequent lecture topics.
Comparing the rhetoric used against other social reform movements with
public criticisms of animal advocates, Regan compared the split in the 18th
and 19th century anti-slavery movement between reformers and abolitionists
to the divide he and many other activists perceive between advocating for
animal welfare and advocating for animal rights––although donor surveys show
that about 90% of the money in the animal cause comes from people perceiving
no practical difference at all.
Regan recommended Henry Spira’s strategy of pursuing incremental abolition,
targeting specific abuses that are recognized as affronts to both animal
welfare and animal rights, to create a shared agenda attracting the
endorsements of most people who are concerned about the issues from whatever
philosophical perspective.
Empty Cages
In Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights (2002) Regan listed
eleven issues that he believed to be priorities for achieving a shared
animal welfare/rights agenda:
“Faith in a better world”
While none of these goals were totally achieved during the 15 years between
Regan articulating them and his death, all eleven have been substantially
advanced in the U.S., Europe, and parts of the rest of the world.
Stalwartly opposing the use of violence in the name of animal advocacy, Regan wondered nonetheless “not that there is violence, but that there is not more of it,” when winning even basic protections for animals has taken so long to achieve.
Concluded Regan in Empty Cages, “Our faith in a better world is deeply rooted in history. There was a time when many thought it was utopian, unrealistic and hopeless to achieve equal rights for Native Americans, African Americans, women, the mentally challenged or the physically disabled. Nevertheless, the verdicts of history teach that entrenched social practices not only can change, they have changed––but never without a struggle.”
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