Step 1: Become a Vegan, or at least a Vegetarian
This is the first and possibly most important thing you can do to help alleviate animal suffering. If you care about animals, you cannot eat them! Unless you, yourself, make a conscious decision to make your choices in your food, personal care products, or other products reflect your stance of compassion and respect for animals' sentience, you cannot convince others that they should do the same. Your opponents will love to point out inconsistencies and hypocrisy in their opponents, and being a meat-eating supporter of animal liberation will give them an excuse to dismiss everything you have to say more or less offhand.
The best way for an animal liberation activist to avoid hypocrisy is to become a full-fledged vegan. Vegans are vegetarians who eat no animal products, including dairy, eggs, or seafood. Vegans use only personal care and other products that are not tested on animals and contain no animal ingredients. Finally, vegans do not wear leather, wool, or any material that is made by exploiting animals. The egg and dairy industries are as ruthless and as cruel as the meat industries, treating animals as food-producing machines, and not as sentient, feeling creatures. Contrary to popular belief, animals do die and suffer greatly to produce milk and eggs for human consumption. For more on this, go to my Go Vegan! page.
Step 2: Join Letter-Writing Campaigns
Several charitable organizations start letter-writing campaigns about which you can be instantly notified via e-mail or by visiting a website. The Fund For Animals has a section of its website devoted to such campaigns, at which you can sign up for their e-mail newsletter for free. The Humane Society and PETA have similar services. These letters do not take all that long to write, and they are very important methods of ensuring that the animal liberation movement continues to move forward. Don't let yourself become a "silent vegan" or a closeted supporter of animal liberation. If you believe in helping animals, do something about it!
Step 3: Visit This and Other Click-To-Donate Sites Daily
As a webmaster of a click-to-donate site, I obviously believe in the power of these sites to help raise money for good causes. There are many of these sites, the best of which can be found at the site www.DonationJunction.com. Supporting click-to-donate sites is a small time commitment that can make a big difference-all at no cost to you.
Step 4: Donate Time and/or Money to Animal Rights/Liberation Organizations
This is perhaps the hardest of the four listed here, but it is also very important. I suggest that anyone interested in donating time to the cause of helping animals first read PETA's "Guide to Becoming an Activist," which can be found on their web site. Then research various organizations and determine which you want to support. You may become a member of this group, or you may even start your own group. At any rate, there are many organizations to which you can give money and many ways that you can help animals by volunteering your time. Anything from handing out fliers at public meetings, to organizing public speecking events, to organizing protests of farms or other animal-abusing companies, to volunteering time at a local animal shelter-whatever you can do to help will not be wasted.
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