A modern day Dr. Doolittle

He's brash, outspoken and highly controversial, but activist lawyer Gary Francione also is a dog's best friend.

Twenty years ago, if you had asked law student Gary Francione his position on animal rights, he probably would have shrugged his shoulders and replied, "They don't have rights." Ask him that same question today, and the answer would be different. Very different.

These days the fast-talking, opinionated vegan--that's right vegan--attorney spends his time racing between the courtroom, classroom and his office at the Rutgers University Animal Rights Law Center in Newark, N.J. Cofounded in 1990 with his wife Anna Charlton, the Rutgers center is the only program in the country where law students receive credit for championing animal-rights causes through the U.S. legal system. Each semester, 10 to 12 Rutgers law students are accepted into the program, which includes a weekly seminar that explores the application of civil rights law to groundbreaking animal-rights cases. Students also are required to devote 18 to 20 hours a week to real cases wending their way through the courts. It's good practice, for most of the students carry on similar pro bono work long after graduation. Francione, often passing the overflow of his staggering caseload to former students, is essentially staffing up the animal-rights movement with his own team of legal eagles.

Francione's conversion dates back to 1978. With his naivete well intact, he began arguing with a classmate that slaughterhouse animals were not inhumanely treated. His adversary challenged him to visit a slaughter-house; Francione accepted--it changed him forever. "I went home and threw OUt every last piece of meat," he recalls. "And I haven't eaten it since." He became vegan a few years later after learning that dairy cows suffer the same cruelties--dehorning and branding without anesthesia, for example--as beef cattle, and they often wind up in the same slaughterhouses. "I realized there's even more suffering in a glass of milk than in a pound of meat," he says.

Backing up that conviction is an impressive legal career: University of Virginia Law School, a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and a position with the blue-chip Manhattan law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore. But when it became clear that this firm, which represented several major pharmaceutical companies, would not support the animal-rights law he was driven to practice, he quit. The next six years were spent taking on pro bono animal-rights cases and building a career as a professor of law. Both, eventually, afforded him the opportunity to open The Animal Rights Law Center in 1990.

Now, eight years and more than 100 graduates later, the center is thriving, taking on cases that range from students opposing animal dissection requirements and prisoners fighting for a vegan diet to grassroots organizations being strong-armed to abandon antihunting protests.

If these don't sound like clear-cut animal-rights cases, that's because, strictly speaking, there's no such thing. The problem with fighting for the rights of animals is that, legally, they have none. The center, therefore, must fight its battles within the confines of existing law, drawing specifically on human civil rights precedents to champion animal issues in the courtroom. Although fighting on principle is often an uphill battle, the center has a nearly 100 percent success rate in its student and prisoner issues. "They are First Amendment cases," explains Francione. "You're vindicating the civil rights of people. Animals are regarded as property, and all you can do is find the loopholes in the system...to educated society about the injustices that we visit upon nonhumans."

You will not, however, find Francione cooing over kittens. He is logical and matter of fact. "What we do has nothing to do with loving animals; it has to do with respecting them," he says. While the passionate idealist in him many abhor the law's position on animals, the seasoned attorney that he is views cases with a healthy degree of realism. "Some years ago, the Animal Legal Defense Fund wanted to bring a lawsuit to stop the patenting of genetically altered animals," he recalls. While the ardently supported the case, he knew it was futile. "They consulted me, and told them they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, and the case would get thrown out. And that's exactly what happened."

But question the right of prisoners to have vegan food and out comes the idealist. "We tell these prison officials that the whole point of their jail is to turn prisoners into non-violent people. But when they occasionally succeed and a prisoner wants to be nonviolent and not eat meat, the first thing they say is, `Oh no, you have to be violent and eat meat." For many, this is a hot topic--too hot, in fact, to touch. "We got into the issue because prisoners are not going to get help from animal-rights groups. [They] can't do fund-raising off first-degree murderers."