Dear Humans,

We speak to you today to inspire you to recognize that we share a privilege to inhabit the earth. We need your help to shut the lights out on every factory farm, fur farm, circus, laboratory, hunting ship, and puppy mill and to end the peddling of our confined, tortured, and slaughtered remains for consumption, exploitation, and profit in every grocery store, retail store, and restaurant. You are our only hope.

We ask that the caretakers of this planet will recognize the pain and suffering we endure en route to your backs, seats, stages, and plates and begin an unyielding movement of compassion, making thoughtful decisions to choose supporting your health, the planet, and our well-being over violence, convenience, and destruction.

We want you to realize that there is no difference in the right or desire to live between a dog and a cat, a cow and a pig, or a bird and a fish except the one created in your mind for your convenience. We are all animals, equally deserving of life on earth. The way you have categorized us allows you to bury your conscience, pave a road of indifference, and create a divide that impedes you from living out your true potential as thoughtful stewards of the earth.

We are asking you to realize the illogical nature of your actions, to make a simple lifestyle change, and to use your voices to rescue us. To those who have not yet made the transition, we beg you to marry the compassion in your heart and mind with your actions. Neither compassion in theory nor a self-ascribed compassion is any compassion at all; true compassion comes in the form of actions that do not support the abuse of animals. Nobody is absolved. There are no free passes through the gates of compassion.

You are not fulfilling your moral obligations as people or your commitment to human decency when you contributing to our demise. Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. Death is death. Only a failure to self-educate or denial for convenience allows someone to suggest that one pain is worse than another. It is not. Our pain hurts. Your pain hurts. It all hurts and you have the power to stop it with the decisions you make every day.

We hope that one day all of us–the chickens, cows, fishes, goats, hens, pigs, whales, foxes, calves, lambs, muskrats, minks, dolphins, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, chinchillas and all the other animals exploited by humans live our lives as free as the freest inhabitant on earth. Not until you let us live and die our natural lives will you fully live your own. It is doubtful you can imagine the barbarism of the whale hunt, the horrors of the fur industry, or the ruthlessness of animal agriculture but it is as present as our pain is severe.

It is our never-ending hope that you join your fellow citizens on our behalf and embark on a revolution to abolish senseless acts of cruelty to animals. It is with this ever-growing faith that amidst our cries for help, the sounds of horror that echo throughout this land, you will continue to use your voices for us. With this faith, you will be able to transform indifference into a new world order where we are respected and admired for our endowed qualities.

Please do not stop the march towards liberation until every cage is empty, every hunting gun is laid down, every circus is closed, every net is cut, and every store is emptied of the stench of our pain and suffering. To those who say you will never achieve complete abolition, don’t be dissuaded by incremental success. To the contrary, embrace it. History has taught you where it leads. We expect you to make the decision you know is right and to end your support of cruelty to animals–in the leather you buy, the food you eat, the game you hunt, the show you pay to see, the products you use, and the fur you wear. Arguing that not everybody will stop and therefore you will not stop is an argument unworthy of your character. Stop and others will follow.

Let us imagine the day when we live in a more peaceful time, when billions like us never know the life and death those before us endured. Revolutions begin in theory when people are agitated; they work when people take action. It is time for you to take action. We are waiting and we are running out of time.

We don’t speak your language but we hope you can hear us speak through the look in our eyes and our unanswered cries for help. We want out of the cages. We want to be free. We hope you will speak for us. HELP!

Respectfully,

The Animals