The project of human liberation and environmental sustainability will fail without giving equal importance to anti-speciesism and animal liberation. … - Steven Best

We consider this a case of how nonviolence leads to violence when pacifists refuse to intervene when violence is occurring, as the capitalist speciesist butchers bash the brains and carve up the planet knowing their violence is protected by the shield of nonviolence practiced by opponents with dulled instincts and a slave mentality, opponents who throw down their weapons before entering into battle. The fundamentalist pacifist argument is an ideal pertinent to communities of saints but not to a society of human beings rooted in both a social and biological past riddled with violence, murder and genocide. Nonviolence should be the first option, but not the only option.

A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will grasp the ancient conceptual roots of hierarchy and domination, such as emerged in the practices of early agricultural societies. It will incorporate a new ethics (ecology and animal liberation) and politics of nature that overcomes instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking and institutions in every pernicious form possible. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements of democratic, socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate , feminist, LGBT, and indigenous struggles. It will repudiate ideologies and unequivocally reject alliances or association with the . It will merge human, animal, and earth liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination in of all kinds.

If Francione and Hall were next to a baby seal about to be clubbed to death and the only way they could stop it would be to physically intervene in some aggressive and violent way, or at least to grab and throw the weapon into the sea (an act that earned Paul Watson expulsion from , an organization he co-founded), would they do it? Or would they stand idly by and watch, perhaps making a moral argument for or a plea to the sealer's inner goodness or moral conscience, as he drives the spiked club into the seal's head, grinning ear-to-ear while proceeding to strip the skin off its bloodied but still breathing body?