Gary Lawrence Francione is an American legal scholar known for his work on animal rights theory.
He is a pioneer of the abolitionist theory of animal rights and he argues that non-human animals require only one right, the right not to be regarded as property, and that veganism – the rejection of the use of animals as mere resources – is the moral baseline of the animal rights movement
Animal agriculture, in addition to slaughtering billions of animals every year, also produces massive amounts of animal waste including urine and manure that emit a whopping 400 harmful gases into our planet's’ atmosphere. These gases can include nitrous oxide, ammonia, particulate matter, endotoxins, and hydrogen sulfide, and to worsen the impact of these gases, because thousands of animals are kept together in factory farms, the concentration of the gases produced can be extremely dangerous local humans and other animals. Roughly 80 percent of ammonia produced in the U.S. comes from animal waste, and this ammonia can lead to dead zones in water ecosystems. Also, when factory farm waste decomposes, it releases airborne debris along with the harmful gases.This debris can include dry manure, feathers, bits of feed, and animal dander which can travel through the air for miles and make the sky of the surrounding area appear hazy.
The antibiotics that livestock are fed regularly to promote unnatural growth in a filthy environment are also dangerous airborne matter. In an experiment, researchers from Texas Tech placedair samplers 10 to 30 yards both upwind and downwind from beef and dairy feedlots within the fall and winter months. A startling 100 percent of the samples tested positive for Monensin, an antibiotic commonly used in human medicinal practices. While this antibiotic is not thought to promote bacterial resistance, tetracycline antibiotics, that do contribute to bacterial resistance, were found in 60 percent of the downwind samples and 30 percent of the upwind. Tetracycline antibiotics are used to treat pink eye and urinary tract infections in humans, both of which are becoming more difficult to treat as bacteria develop resistance because of overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture.
