Gary Francione is, without doubt, the most controversial figure in the modern animal rights movement. In the 1980s, before becoming estranged from PETA, he worked closely with Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco on PETA’s most prominent cases, including its exposé of the gruesome head-injury experiments on baboons at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. He was the indefatigable and high-powered young attorney, with the most impressive establishment credentials, who promoted and helped to legitimize PETA’s issues. In 1990, Francione and his colleague and partner, Anna E. Charlton, founded the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic at Rutgers School of Law, the first enterprise of its type in the world, in which law students received academic credit for working on actual legal cases involving animals.

But by the early 1990s, Francione began to be concerned that PETA and the animal rights movement generally were headed in the wrong direction. He eventually broke from PETA and from the organized movement, and, in 1996, he wrote his controversial book Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement, an incisive critique and reenvisioning of the movement. In the book, Francione argued that it was really no different from the welfare movement that started in the nineteenth century, and that it was failing to shift the paradigm away from the property status of animals and toward nonhuman personhood. He was also critical of those who advocated violence as a solution to the problem of animal exploitation. The book infuriated and alienated the animal rights community on all sides. Francione was largely dismissed as “too extreme,” “divisive,” “absolutist,” and “fundamentalist.” But he continued to develop what is now universally acknowledged as the most original and consistent theory of animal rights produced to date.

Francione’s theory is described as the “abolitionist approach.” He maintains that we cannot morally justify using animals as human resources, and that we should abolish animal use. He opposes efforts to reform or regulate animal use, arguing that they will necessarily provide limited protection to animal interests, because of the status of animals as property. He has come out strongly against promoting humane farming, vegetarianism, Proposition 2 in California, the Humane Society of the United States, the boycott of the NFL for allowing Michael Vick on the field, and even PETA’s sexy ads about fur, meat, and other animal uses. In short, Francione rejects nearly all of the campaigns promoted by the large animal protection organizations. He even believes that Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals is hurting, not helping, the cause for animal rights, and much of Francione’s work is sharply critical of the utilitarian theory of Peter Singer, who, although he rejects the concept of animals’...