On this day in vegan history · November 28, 1938
The Man Who Made the Case for Animal Rights Is Born
A butcher's assistant from Pittsburgh grew up to argue that animals aren't ours to use at all, and the movement has been arguing from that floor ever since.
The facts
- Born
- November 28, 1938, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Career
- Professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, 1967 to 2002
- Landmark book
- The Case for Animal Rights, University of California Press, 1983
- Died
- February 17, 2017, Raleigh, North Carolina, age 78, of pneumonia
Tom Regan was born in Pittsburgh on November 28, 1938, worked as a butcher to help pay for college, and spent thirty-four years teaching philosophy at North Carolina State University, starting in 1967. In 1983 he published The Case for Animal Rights, arguing that any creature who is the 'subjects-of-a-life' - who has beliefs, memories, preferences, and a stake in how its own life goes - carries inherent value that can't be traded away for someone else's convenience. That gave the movement something it didn't have before: a case built on rights rather than a ledger of how much suffering is acceptable. He and his wife Nancy founded the Culture and Animals Foundation to keep the argument funded past his own lifetime. He died in Raleigh in 2017, having gone, by his own account, from butcher's assistant to vegan philosopher.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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So if I, Tom Regan, can evolve into a vegan, anyone can do the same.
Tom Regan, writing on his own path from eating meat and working as a butcher to going vegan
Source: The Vegan Society -
The story we need to get out is that these industries not only are abusing animals, they are abusing the trust (and insulting the intelligence) of their customers.
Tom Regan
Source: The Vegan Society
Why it still matters
Regan gave the movement a rights-based floor instead of a welfare ceiling: some things aren't ours to weigh against convenience at all. Every later argument that animals deserve not just better treatment but standing of their own traces back to that 1983 book.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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