Every year, tens of thousands of people travel to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for a week devoted to radical self-expression—the freedom to shed everyday constraints, explore, create and live more fully on their own terms.

For one week, Burning Man becomes a city built around that idea. Participants leave behind many of the expectations and routines that shape everyday life. They create art, build communities, challenge convention and celebrate individuality. At its heart is something most of us instinctively understand: Freedom is essential to a meaningful life—the freedom to make choices, pursue what interests us, form relationships and decide for ourselves how we will spend our days.

We cherish that freedom. We defend it fiercely, write songs about it, build philosophies around it and travel hundreds of miles into the desert to experience it more fully.

Self-expression looks different for every species, but the desire to exercise some control over one’s own life is hardly ours alone. A raven collects objects that catch her eye and invents games. An octopus rearranges his den with shells and whatever other treasures he finds. Mustangs form friendships, choose companions and roam for miles. Pigs root through the earth following scents we cannot detect. A chicken dust-bathes, explores and settles beside favored companions. Cows form deep bonds with their calves.

Their lives, like ours, are made up of choices: where to go, what to investigate, whom to trust, whom to avoid, when to play, when to rest and when to be alone. And then humans take those choices away.

We decide where animals will live and whether they may move. We decide whom they may touch, whether they may raise their young and what will happen to their bodies. We confine mother pigs so tightly they cannot even turn around. We crowd chickens by the tens of thousands into windowless sheds. We take calves away from their mothers hours after they give birth. Dogs in puppy mills spend years producing litter after litter in filthy cages. We force elephants to perform. We imprison monkeys in laboratories and subject them to experiments they cannot escape. Orcas who travel vast distances through the ocean circle tanks built for human entertainment. Yet their freedom matters to them, just as ours matters to us.

Burning Man’s celebration of radical self-expression rests on the idea that individuals should not exist merely to fulfill someone else’s expectations or interests. None of us would accept being bred because someone wanted our offspring, confined because our body parts were profitable, used in painful and invasive experiments or made to perform because someone else found it entertaining. A life should belong only to the one living it.

Other animals may not dream of desert art installations or dancing beneath the stars. But they have preferences, relationships, fears, curiosity and purposes of their own. They want to move toward what interests them and away from what frightens them. They want choices. Their lives matter because they matter to them. Every animal is someone.

The wooden figure at the center of Burning Man will burn. The temporary city will disappear. But the ideals celebrated there should be extended far beyond the desert. Freedom. Autonomy. The opportunity to live according to one’s own nature. If we consider these things fundamental to a meaningful life, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we willingly and unnecessarily take them from someone else.

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Melissa Rae Sanger is a licensed veterinary technician and a senior writer for the PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

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