I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!
Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), feminist and anti-vivisectionist
On 23 August 2007 Russian animal-rights activists and vegetarians said farewell to an outstanding individual, Tatyana Nikolaevna Pavlova (12 March 1931-21 August 2007), founder of the Russian vegetarian movement and the person who laid the philosophical basis for the movement for animal rights in Russia.
Her name is known world-wide among animal rights supporters. Her books, which influenced more than one generation of vegetarians, literally revolutionised our consciousness, forcing people to re- think their attitudes to the living world, inspiring them to join the struggle to liberate the creatures with fewest rights on this planet – non-human animals. Tatyana Pavlova was able to articulate the idea that the future spiritual development of mankind cannot take place within an anthropocentric model of society based on enslaving all other species to satisfy our own needs.
In 1989 Tatyana Pavlova founded the first Russian vegetarian society to come into existence since the 1917 Revolution; in 1992 she created two closely allied movements, the Centre for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (CETA), which aimed to combat the exploitation of animals for food, fur and leather, in scientific experimentation and in entertainment, and the Scientific Medical Centre (SMC), which propagated vegetarianism as a means to healthy living and disease prevention. Thanks to research carried out at SMC, scientists officially had to admit – after long years of silence on this subject – the advantages of vegetarianism and in the mid-1990s the SMC was included in the Russian Ministry of Health’s list of institutions encouraging healthy living.
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Kim Stallwood is an independent scholar and author on animal rights. His forthcoming book, Animal Dharma, explores what it means to care deeply about animals. Starting in 1976, he has held leadership positions with some of the world’s foremost organisations in the UK and US, including CIWF, BUAV, PETA, The Animals’ Agenda, Animals and Society Institute and Minding Animals International. A vegetarian since 1974 when as a student he worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. A vegan since 1976. His evil twin is the Grumpy Vegan.
New Book!
Kim Stallwood's forthcoming book explores what it means to care deeply about animals and discovers how we can live peacefully with ourselves and others by proposing four key values: truth, compassion, nonviolence and interbeing.