Kurt was Director of the Institute of Ethics and Catholic Social Thought at the University of Graz in Austria. He regularly taught courses in environmental and animal ethics, both at his own university and at the University of Minnesota (fall semester 2007) and Gonzaga University (academic year 2011/12). He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and has voiced his concern about the treatment of animals in lectures and newspaper articles, on the radio and on TV.