AHC: animal rights movement in U.S. has higher trajectory?

To some extent, it's been a victim of its own success. A lot of reforms have been achieved which took the impetus out of further reforms.

And, Henry Spira died on Sept. 12, 1998. He was a special activist. A pragmatist in the best sense, skilled at picking battles.

So, how could the animal rights / animal welfare movement in the United States have had a higher trajectory?
 
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/spira01.htm

' . . . First, David Smyth, head of the British Research Defence Society, a group which exists to counter attacks on animal experimentation, had admitted in print that the Draize test would be a good candidate for replacement by non-animal-using methods, both because it clearly caused suffering and because the development of an alternative should not present any major scientific problems. So from the start, when we asked for the development of an alternative to the Draize test, we were covered against the criticism that it wasn't possible. Here we had a scientist who was the head of a pro-research group saying that it was possible. . . '
And that's key. The possibility of better alternatives.

Henry first tried to talk with Revlon and was met with by an executive who was at least polite.

And then the full-page ad in the New York Times on April 15, 1980, asking "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" And that got the ball rolling.

Henry seemed to have an interesting combination for better world activism of colleagues he could talk with and bounce ideas off of, doing his own homework and thinking through strategy himself, and action. A healthy feedback between theory and practice which is so lacking in some many areas. Henry did better than average.
 
With cosmetics and medical research, the battle is there to be won because nonanimal alternatives are cheaper.

With factory farming, it's a much harder problem because keeping the animals in crowded and deplorable conditions and pumping them full of antibiotics might well be the way to go on a strictly profit-loss basis.
 
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