One-hundred billion. It's truly an astronomical number. It's the number of galaxies in the known universe, the number of neurons in the human brain, and it's the number of animals that human beings slaughter for food every year. Staggering though this figure is, it does not include the billions of additional animals who are killed, maimed, and tortured every year in laboratories, circuses, fur farms, zoos, and marine parks around the world.

Each of these deaths represents an appalling injustice, an innocent life stolen from a citizen of this planet, whose only crime was to have been born at the mercy of human beings who believe that their own interests and desires –no matter how trivial– are more important than the lives of other living, breathing, sentient beings. The human race can and must do better than this. Our status as the dominant species on Earth does not give us the right to treat non-human animals as mere objects, commodities, and machines, as mere means to human ends. It does not make us sovereigns over those vast numbers of animals with whom we share this tiny planet and our brief time on it.

We are not their masters and they are not our slaves. To go vegan is to recognize that the ethos of tyranny, in which might makes right, is no more defensible when applied to the relationship that exists between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, than it is when applied to the relationship of one group of human beings to another.

All civilized people recognize that the law of the jungle should not govern the relationships that exist between nations and between neighbors. The mission of Vegan Future Now is to hasten the day on which the civilized people of the world recognize the rights of all non-human animals to be free from suffering, abuse, and exploitation at the hands of human beings. It is our mission to establish among the thinking, caring people of the world a consensus that one-hundred billion animal deaths a year are one-hundred billion too many.