http://animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/18948 I send a thank you to all of those engaged in strong yet peaceful activism

Karen Dawn's words reflect AAS's fifteen years of animal welfare activism through advocacy and action:

"I send a thank you to all of those engaged in strong yet peaceful activism -- the heroes on the high seas and ice floes, or rescuing animals from horrendous conditions -- and to the thousands at computers, sending notes that bring a museum to shut its doors and hold a forum. Forums change thinking. And as nothing influences thinking in the modern world as powerfully as the media, I thank all those who engage in constant peaceful communication with the media. The effect of your efforts over the last few years has been enormous."

AAS has run ads, created a website and messageboard, built contact lists, utilized the media, and publicly supported those who engage in non-violent animal-welfare reform

The rule of law is weakened by laws patently out of step with public sentiment. Historically, legislators have passed many very bad laws; laws that enslave the many and enrich the few; laws that increase the power of the few and take away the civil rights of the many. When that happens, then begins the slow process of changing bad laws by many different people and ways, but all pulling together to reach the same goal by lobbying, voting, demonstrating, advertising, engaging the media, peaceful civil disobedience and not least of all, by courts which see the wrong in laws that favour the powerful and write decisions that help to limit that power.

Threats and violence do not create real regime change: the gun of bad publicity held to the head produces promises and sometimes even some change; but change by force can't be trusted to be true intellectually-absorbed or ethically-driven change.

As Karen Dawn pointed out, real change comes from a change of mind. Occasionally force causes a real change of mind, but more often force results in a desire to find another way to act the same. Regime change may be successful, if the bad regime is replaced by a good one. If not, the fight will go on.