Wesley J. Smith, a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute, is the author of the prizewinning Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, as well as Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World and Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the New Duty to Die.  He blogs regularly at Secondhand Smoke, a First Things blog.  He lives in Castro Valley, California, with his wife, the syndicated columnist Debra J. Saunders. 

“Like every antidemocratic ideology, this one [animal rights] is by definition antihuman, and like any antihuman ideology, it ultimately deteriorates into a nihilistic bitterness that is anti-life. . . .  Wesley J. Smith knows too well that if the activists ever succeeded in their goals, if they established through culture or law that human beings have no intrinsic dignity greater than that of any animal, the world would not be a better place for either humankind or animals.” 
—Dean Koontz