Michael W. Fox
Key Player
Senior Scholar, Humane Society of the United States; syndicated columnist of “Ask Your Animal Doctor”Michael W. Fox is senior scholar at the Humane Society of the United States, the world’s richest animal-rights organization, which poses as an animal-welfare organization. Fox is widely known as the syndicated columnist of “Ask Your Animal Doctor,” which appears weekly is over 120 newspapers nationwide. But he holds extreme views on the relationship between humans and animals.
Fox is a veterinarian who was born and educated in England. He is the author of more than 40 books, including Eating with Conscience: The Bioethics of Food. He and his wife founded the India Project for Animals and Nature (IPAN) and its sanctuary, Hill View Farm Animal Refuge. Using the picture of one of the refuge’s animals, IPAN proclaims, “This sanctuary donkey will never experience the cruel fate of being sold into hard labor like other sanctuary donkeys before our arrival.”
Fox joined HSUS in 1976, and is a director of an HSUS affiliate called the Center for Respect of Life and Environment. Former HSUS CEO John Hoyt said the Center was created “to let Dr. Fox direct some of his views in a channel that was an arm’s length removed from the HSUS.”
What are those controversial views about which Hoyt was so concerned? Fox holds the radical view that humans and animals have the same moral standing. “We are not superior. There are no clear distinctions between us and animals,” Fox once told Washingtonian magazine. In his book The Inhumane Society, Fox’s opines: “The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration.”