Stephen Budiansky on Animal-Rights Groups

The extreme abolitionist agenda of the animal-rights groups has made little headway in the past decade, and if anything there has been something of a societal backlash against their more outrageous and criminal acts. The generally favorable press coverage of animal-rights groups that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s began to shift in the late 1980s, and that trend has continued in the 1990s, with journalists exercising far more critical scrutiny of the groups' claims, tactics, and motives. The animal-rights groups have made almost no progress in their abolitionist campaigns against animal agriculture and pet ownership—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the popularity of dogs, cats, and steak.

(Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, with a new preface [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999 (1992)], vii-viii)