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10,000 Years Is Enough Campaign

Help get our universities to stop teaching animal abuse for profit industries and to teach the truth about human beings and Earth’s other animals.

What

Today it would be deemed utterly absurd to propose university programs in experimentation, research, public relations, sales, propaganda, and lobbying for profit industries that abuse human beings and other animals, cause extreme suffering, break down Earth’s climate, and poison Earth’s rivers, oceans, lakes, groundwater, and soil: the meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, and agrichemical industries. Yet since 2003, our land-grant universities (LGUs), our massive network of agriculture colleges, have stonewalled Responsible Policies for Animals’ effort to eliminate exactly those programs: “animal science,” – “poultry science,” “aquaculture” (fish factories), “dairy science,” and other studies based on animal abuse – our species’ use and breeding of other animals.

Named for the approximate time human beings have enslaved, bred (practiced eugenics on), and industrialized other animals, RPA’s 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign aims to eliminate agriculture-college / land-grant-university (LGU) “animal science” programs – training, research, lobbying, sales, promotions, and public relations for the meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, agrichemical, and other allied animal-abuse industries. The campaign’s purpose is not to promote diet change to plants-only eating by individual personal choice but to change policy – by political means – from animal-abuse policy harming all animals, including human beings, to justice for all animals, including human beings.

Why

There has never been a factually legitimate belief that human beings are entitled to other animals; that human beings need to consume anything from other animals; that it is healthful, normal, or natural for human beings to eat from animals; that human beings evolved as hunter-gatherers; that human beings are natural omnivores; that our species’ use of other animals for food or any other purpose can be humane or just; or that there can be meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, or agrichemical industries that do not devastate the living world.

Though those beliefs are false, harmful, and inconsistent with human morality, fulfillment, and wellbeing, all of our institutions promote and reinforce them. Trusted to teach what is true and substantiated by fact, our LGUs each year teach many thousands of students who take “animal science” and related courses to believe those false and harmful beliefs. Millions of students, parents, alumni, and others in the global LGU community daily get the destructive message – from “animal science” and LGUs stonewalling of RPA’s 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign to end it – that animal abuse and its products are good for human wellbeing.

“Animal science” – “poultry science,” “dairy science,” “aquaculture,” “equine science,” and other training, research, sales, lobbying, promotions, and public relations by our LGUs on behalf of the meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, and agrichemical industries – deceptively applies some aspects of the scientific method on the micro level while flouting scientific knowledge human beings need for fulfillment, justice, physical and mental health, and overall wellbeing and to reduce their harmful impacts on other animals and the living world that saddle all of us with moral injury. Human beings are by nature herbivorous, peaceable, weaponless, and respectful of other animals, sickened by eating from animals and from other unnatural close contact with nonhuman animals. “Animal science” perpetuates civilization’s tyranny-generated fictions that claim otherwise.

Profit industries, especially those extremely hostile to human wellbeing and to the wellbeing of other animals and the living world, should, as long as the industries are lawful, pay their own costs for training, public relations, marketing, sales, advertising, and lobbying. But via “animal science,” our LGUs provide billions of dollars to the meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, and agrichemical industries, sparing them those costs, at the expense of taxpayers, tuition payers, and alumni and parents who donate to LGUs unaware of immense and far-reaching harm from “animal science.”

Had our LGUs begun to heed RPA’s 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign and the hundreds of letters, books, videos, factsheets, and other information sent to them since 2003 about the “animal science” disaster, quite possibly, just to name one example, the horrible ongoing Ebola-virus scourge could have been avoided: As our species learned that eating from animals is unnatural and a health risk for humans, those who killed Ebola-carrying animals and those who contracted the virus from them might have been spared.

Had our LGUs paid attention rather than stonewalling, we humans could have made progress toward less infectious disease; less heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other non-communicable diseases linked to eating from animals; less demand on the medical-pharmaceuticals-insurance complex; fewer bankruptcies due to illness & disease; less moral injury endured by workers impelled by economic opportunity to kill or otherwise abuse nonhuman animals; less moral injury throughout our species from our complicity in animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice; slower climate breakdown from methane and other gases from the meat, dairy, fish, egg, and feed industries; less poisoning of water and soil from massive animal factories; less agrichemical runoff causing vast ocean dead zones, suffering and death of countless animals in and around rivers, lakes and streams – and of course less suffering in the countless billions of nonhuman animals abused because of reckless LGU teachings in “animal science.”

But our LGUs have stonewalled the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign. Together we must intensify it. Your participation and support can help.

How

In the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign, RPA has …

… sent hundreds of letters, factsheets, books, videos, and other information to the presidents and trustees of all 50 states’ main LGUs, the governors of all 50 states (they’re trustees), the 50 states’ agriculture secretaries, and other policy-makers.

… hand-delivered information packs to more than thirty U.S. Congressional committee chairpersons and ranking members on Capitol Hill;

… received coverage in many LGU newspapers and agribusiness publications;

… published letters in The New York Times Magazine, Utne Reader, World-Watch magazine, and other publications;

… published op-ed articles in several LGU newspapers and environmental publications;

… lectured on meat as our most insidious institution, animal rights, and other matters related to the “animal science” problem;

… advertised in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, and LGU newspapers;

… distributed factsheets, fliers, and other campaign literature;

… leafletted and displayed a banner at an annual meeting of LGU presidents in Washington, D.C.;

… sent information to many prominent authorities on food production, nutrition, ecology, zoology, air, water, and soil pollution, climate breakdown, human disease, anthropology, philosophy, and other matters related to the “animal science” problem;

… news-released key 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign activities; and

… petitioned university accreditation agencies to decertify institutions of higher learning that undermine education, knowledge, science, human health & wellbeing, the quality of nonhuman animals’ lives, and the health of the living world by teaching for the meat, dairy, fish, egg, feed, and agrichemical industries.

What To Do

  • Discuss with RPA – RPA@rpa1.org / 215-886-RPA1 / P.O. Box 891, Glenside, PA 19038, USA – how best to take part given your available time, knowledge, and experience. Educating people in many capacities over time by correspondence is a crucial campaign activity.
  • Have RPA send you fliers to inform people associated with your state’s main LGU. We’ll tell you easy ways to distribute fliers without counterproductive confrontation.
  • Read and share with others …