When some of these organizations were founded, more than a century ago, the number of animals used each year in the United States was in the hundreds it has since risen to somewhere between 60 and 100 million. Ten years ago there were long-established antivivisection organizations which had kept alive a tradition of concern for laboratory animals but their followers were widely regarded as irrelevant cranks, and their effect on curbing the use of laboratory animals was nil.
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One change is that animal experimentation is no longer a little-known form of animal exploitation. To see whether the animal liberation movement has made any practical difference, then, we must look at what has happened since to both practices.
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In both the essay and the book, I singled out two practices as involving the largest and yet least known forms of animal exploitation: animal experimentation and factory farming. We treat them as if they were things to be used as we please, rather than as beings with lives of their own to live. The essential aim of the essay and the books was to show, on a rational and philosophical level, that nonhuman animals are an oppressed group. 1 What has happened, in theory and in practice, in the intervening years? That essay was followed by the book of the same title, which was also published by The New York Review. The rise of the animal liberation movement, in the view of a number of commentators, is to be traced back to the publication of my essay “Animal Liberation” in these pages just over a decade ago.