The Vegan Vine

A Tribute to Max

2020-05-27T11:01:00.001-04:00

Max was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and passed away at home in my arms around noon on April 2, 2020.

I adopted Max from the Bucks County SPCA in Pennsylvania 14 years ago today. He was about four and a half months old. I remember holding his little face next to mine and instantly knowing that he was the one. He had big ears and paws. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he would grow into a beautifully large and long adult cat.

Some might say that I saved Max by adopting him out of the shelter, but he saved me. He changed my life forever and brought me so much joy. I quit smoking cigarettes for good that year (2006), and returned to veganism, acknowledging little difference between Max and any other animal who wants to live and be happy.

Max was my only nonhuman companion. He was my whole world and the love of my life, my best friend, confider, and soul mate. We were alike in so many ways: cautious, insistent, inquisitive, affectionate, vocal, and creatures of habit. Max loved to curl up in small spaces. Sometimes he would sneak into the linen closet, and I would find him fast asleep on a shelf.

I remember the first week after I brought Max home. Initially guarded, he slept under the bed, but at some point that week, in the wee hours of the morning, he crept out from underneath the bed and curled up next to me. It was heavenly. Earning Max’s trust then and over the years to come was like receiving a badge of honor.

Max was handsome, smart, athletic, and playful. We would chase each other around the house and he loved to climb his cat tree, which was fascinating to watch. I would throw his toys up to him and he’d bat them down better than any volleyball player. Quite often my head would be the receiving end of those toys, which would cause me to break out in laughter. His favorite toys were his little plush beaver and catnip-stuffed banana. When I brought cat grass home from the supermarket, he would get so excited that his tail would puff up. Each week when I changed the bed sheets, he’d love to jump on the mattress and hide under the sheets and we’d play hide and seek.

There was no other place in the world I ever wanted to be than home with Max. Our apartment was our sanctuary and he was the epitome of home and happiness. I hated leaving him to go to work and I knew he felt the same because he would often try to engage me (successfully) with play as I stood by the door, not quite ready to leave. Other mornings, he went to the bed to nap and I would return to him one, two, three times for “one more kissy” and to let him know how much I loved him and would miss him. I would tell him I missed him when I was on my lunch break and call out to him in the car on my way home to let him know, “I’m coming, Max!” My favorite time of the day was when he greeted me at the door. We were so happy to see each other. I’d pick him up and hold him for as long as he would let me, and he would rub his head next to mine or nuzzle my ear.

Max was very good about telling me what he wanted and when, but we had such a soulful connection that we frequently communicated without words. Sometimes I would be sitting on the couch and think about him and, even though he would be sleeping in the bedroom, he would somehow know I was thinking about him and suddenly emerge to hang out with me. If I wasn’t quite ready for bed when he was, he’d often join me on the couch and fall asleep next to me.

I loved the way Max scrunched his nose when he was eating or covered his eyes with his paw to block out the light when he was napping. As I turned down the covers for bed, Max would patiently wait and then instinctively snuggle up on his side of the bed and bury his face under his pillow. Many a day I would linger nearby and watch him sleeping, marveling at how beautiful he was, and how happy and blessed we were to have each other.

Max was my connection to the nonhuman world. Whenever I saw oppression, pain, and suffering among my nonhuman friends and felt helpless, it was through loving Max that I felt a little less sad and a little more useful. I gave him the love I wish all animals felt and received. Max was a constant reminder to me of what is really important. Our relationship was so vital and meaningful to me; it made me highly conscious of the experiences of other animals as I tried to see life from their eyes.

Max was so innocent, holy, and good. I came to recognize how much better he was than me. Max taught me to be less selfish as I made every effort to put his needs ahead of my own. He taught me the importance of being still and being together. He taught me the importance of play and enjoying the simple things in life. In caring for Max, I learned the value of time and patience, and the true meaning of love. Lastly, he taught me how to endure and to be brave.

I tried very hard to understand and respect Max for who he was—an equal and autonomous being—and to make him happy. I was constantly researching the best food, litter, and toys for him, and tried to provide him with the best care. I was devoted to him.

In the end, it wasn’t enough to keep him from getting sick. He took a turn for the worse. Constantly throwing up, he finally stopped eating and spent most of his time under the bed. I knew he was in pain. In fact, he told me so three times by his water bowl the morning of his passing. His voice was hoarse and weak, but his words were resolute: “I don’t feel well.” I reached down and hugged him. “I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

The hardest thing I ever had to do was release my Max. My heart is broken because he is no longer here to talk with, curl up with on mornings, or play with. I deeply miss his daily presence in my life and not being able to kiss him and give him “lots of lovie.” I feel empty and useless without him. If home is where the heart is, I feel lost and displaced because Max was both my home and my heart.

I'm sorry, Max, for the times in our early years together when I was ignorant about food and nutrition. I’m sorry for when I left you alone to do things that I wanted to do. I'm sorry for the times when I didn't understand or when I was impatient and irritated. I'm sorry for the times when I was distracted and didn't give you my full attention. I'm sorry for any shortcomings, but I always tried to do better and learn from my mistakes.

I miss and love you so much, Max. I’m grateful to God for the 14 wonderful years I had with you. You’ll always be my guy. You’ll always be with me because the bonds we have are everlasting. Please come visit me, bunny; don’t be a stranger. I miss you so very, very much. I look forward to the day when we can both be home, together again.

Forever yours,
Bethany

What greater gift than the love of a cat. –Charles Dickens

Please consider making a donation to Tabby's Place, a cage-free, no-kill cat sanctuary.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Meat Is Not Only NOT Essential, It's Deadly

2020-05-10T14:54:00.001-04:00

Courtesy of We Animals Media

Amidst a pandemic originating from a Chinese meat market and hundreds of cases of Coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses, President Trump has done the unthinkable: declared that animal flesh (meat) is essential, subsequently ordering all slaughterhouse workers back to business as usual.

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to keep slaughterhouses open—thereby spreading the Coronavirus—even though he refuses to use the same executive order to produce the necessary tests and personal protection equipment (PPE) that will help stem the spread of COVID-19. What's more, animal enslavement operations, which Trump seems so determined to defend, are why we have pandemics in the first place as they create opportunities for similar viruses like bird and swine flus.

Trump pretends to care about human health and human lives, however, his actions say otherwise as he looks to satisfy the economic interests of a declining and death-ridden industry.

Most slaughterhouse employees are poor, low-wage workers and unprotected immigrants so Trump's complete lack of concern for their well-being shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Slaughterhouse workers are a means to an end, just like the other animals they are paid to kill and “process".

An industry that is hostile to nonhuman animals is no less hostile to the people it employs to do our dirty work. In a 2011 VegNews article, "Injustice for All", Mark Hawthorne investigated the conditions of slaughterhouse workers and found their jobs to be one of the most dangerous in the world. Most animal enslavement operations are owned by giant, wealthy conglomerates like Tyson, Smithfield, and Cargill. Nothing is more important to these peddlers of flesh than keeping the production line—the killing, eviscerating, slicing, and packaging—moving at all times.

Everything about slaughterhouses is antithetical and detrimental to the health and safety of all animals, human and nonhuman. Products made from the flesh, milk, and eggs of chickens, cows, turkeys, and pigs contribute to chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease that make us susceptible to viruses. And because captive animals used for food are so sick and genetically engineered to grow much larger than they would normally, they are laden with antibiotics. "Farmed" animals currently account for 80 percent of all antibiotic usage. When humans ingest the corpses of other animals, not only do our own bodies have to work harder to digest another entity, but virulent viruses grow resistant to all the antibiotics and pharmaceuticals we consume through them.

As a vegetarian for the last 26 years and a vegan for 17 of them, I, along with millions of others, can attest to the fact that no one has to eat the flesh, eggs, and milk of other beings to live and live well.
Plants have protein and are completely adequate for humans, who are natural herbivores. To continue to subject nonhuman beings to forced reproduction, confinement, abuse, and death for mere personal pleasure is not only unnecessary, it's immoral.

In a full page advertisement, Tyson complained that the animal flesh "food supply" is "breaking," however, a system that turns nonhuman persons into lifeless commodities was already broken. The lack of "meat" available thanks in no small part to a virus that is directly related to meat consumption is a self-correction for a sick and archaic industry that should have been shuttered a long time ago if not but for our depraved demand for blood. In addition, so-called "farmers" who oppress, manipulate, and massacre other sentient beings for an economic living are not victims and don't deserve any government assistance to assist in these violent efforts.

A plethora of vegan companies offer better, ethical alternatives to fill the recent vacuum left by the purveyors of death. Eating the eggs, milk, and flesh of other animals is not essential but protein is, and this nutrient can be found in any number of plants and plant-based products that don't result in widespread environmental catastrophe, zoonotic viruses, ill health, and the genocide of 3 billion nonhuman animals every single day.

This is not the time for conventional, status quo thinking or behavior. If we are smart, compassionate, and just, we will learn from this painful tragedy and abandon this deceitful and destructive ideology that insists "meat" is essential and nonhuman animals are ours to do whatever we want to them. It's a lie and it has always been a lie, even before it came out of the mouth of the chief of all liars.

How Do I Go Vegan?

The Silver Lining of COVID-19

2020-04-14T14:05:00.000-04:00

I look out my window and I see trees and flowers in bloom, I hear birds chirping, I watch rabbits scurrying about and crows soaring high above. Life goes on for them as usual and this brings me great comfort. Seasons still change, the sun rises and sets, spring brings renewal, and hope springs eternal.

While human animals all over the globe hunker down in an attempt to avoid catching and spreading the Coronavirus virus (COVID-19), life as we know it has grounded to a halt. The natural world, on the other hand, seems mostly immune and for good reason. There is a silver lining to this pandemic as nature and many nonhuman animals benefit from reduced human activity, travel, and consumerism.

Airplanes that devour oil, adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and interfere with bird migrations have had their flights severely curtailed.

Cruise ships that dump thousands of gallons of human sewage, engine oil, and medical waste into our oceans and seas are docked indefinitely.

Restaurants, bars, and other non-essential food operations that serve up gratuitous products made with nonhuman animal flesh, milk, and eggs are no longer operating.

With more and more governors ordering citizens to stay at home, less humans are traveling, which means a decrease in gasoline usage and air pollution.

More humans at home also means less cars on the road and a reduction in the number of gruesome deaths to millions of free-living animals on our roads.

More people at home means less interference with free-living animals in general, and less chance of us hurting them.

With many businesses closed, people forced to work at home are less likely to order takeout and contribute to more plastic pollution that is choking our forests and oceans and the animals who call them home.

Sporting events, casinos, concerts, nightclubs, gyms, theaters, conventions, and all kinds of human activities have been cancelled, resulting in all the above, including less accumulation of scattered trash.

Racetracks, circuses, rodeos, and other mass attractions that involve endless exploitation and abuse of other animals have also ceased.

As the stock market nosedives, equity in our shared environment goes up. Greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and depletion of natural resources are declining, which benefits all animals, both human and nonhuman. While a moratorium on human enterprises and environmental destruction goes into effect, the earth and its inhabitants take a deep sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, the "elephant in the room" continues to be ignored. Like the previous swine flu and bird flu pandemics, the Coronavirus is a consequence of human overpopulation, deforestation, and our persistent exploitation, confinement, and killing of nonhuman animals for consumption.

Though bats have been deemed enemy number one, they are scapegoated for our indefensible and unjustifiable use of other animals as "food." That is to say, even if bats are the source of infection in pigs or other animals, there would be very little impact on humans if it weren't for the fact that we choose to hold captive, kill, and eat pigs and other animals, inducing our own contagion.

The Coronavirus is not an act of God, but an act of man. It didn't have to happen. So, why do we still engage in behaviors that generate zoonotic diseases like COVID-19? Why do we permit convenience and a perverse desire for the taste of another being's flesh to override our own health and the wellbeing of all other animals? Sadly, these questions remain neglected and go unanswered.

As COVID-19 rages on I mourn, not just for the lives lost and the broken hearts left behind, but for the inability and unwillingness of humans to grasp the painful lesson of this moment. If we would only stop treating nature and other animals as objects to be used and consumed, and learn to live alongside our nonhuman brethren and sistren in equality and justice, we could all breathe a deep sigh of relief.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Torturous Animal Experiments Continue in Secrecy at Rutgers University

2020-03-08T12:30:00.001-04:00

"As a graduate student, I ordered ten rats, like so many test tubes, for experimental use because they were 'laboratory rats' and I was a 'researcher'," confessed Joan Dunayer in the introduction of her book, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. "Those labels permitted self-disguise. I didn't see myself as an abuser—not yet. Then I observed vivisection for the first time. At the University of Pennsylvania every veteran vivisector in the psychology department treated rats with callous indifference. I heard rats scream as their ears were hole-punched for identification. I saw them flung by the tail into metal boxes that fit them like coffins. There they stayed 23 hours a day, unable to look out. So that they would work for food, some rats were kept half starved. Others received electric shocks. Still others were subjected to painful injury such as stomach puncture. Termed 'procedures' and 'methods,' all forms of torture escaped moral judgment." After reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, Dunayer finally realized that she had "failed to consider most nonhuman animals, the vast majority of the world's living beings. My actions," she wrote, "had displayed as arrogant, self-serving, and self-deceiving a mindset as sexism or racism. The concept of nonhuman rights completed my shift in worldview. No conscious being should be treated like an exploitable thing."

The animal activist group Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! (SAEN) recently filed a federal complaint against Rutgers University after three nonhuman animals were discovered to have endured horrific deaths in Rutgers University laboratories: a rabbit was boiled alive during cage sterilization, a goat died after becoming stuck in a feeder, and a pig died when her bowel was accidentally perforated during an experiment.

These deaths are only the tip of the iceberg. While the rabbit, goat, and pig fatalities were considered "accidents" and negligent violations of federal regulations, their deaths were not illegal because nonhuman animals are still considered property under American law. The University's use of these and other animals in unnecessary, wasteful, and costly experiments directly result in the untimely and obscure deaths of thousands of living beings every year. When I speak to Rutgers students and alumni, they are shocked to learn that Rutgers conducts animal experiments. The business of torturing other animals is not something Rutgers advertises, but it should outrage every student, alumni, and taxpayer who supports the University.

Vivisection is the restriction of individuals to confined environments and the routine infliction of pain, injury, deprivation, and death for experimentation. Vivisection commonly involves torture under the guise of "science," yet it is inherently unscientific. Many LGUs (Land-Grant Universities) devise all kinds of schemes—including creating new diseases—to acquire "research" monies to torment nonhuman animals and fund archaic experiments. Research is big business, so breeders, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, universities, and others who profit generously from vivisection will do anything to keep the money flowing in.

Laboratories are living hells. Some nonhuman animals are born there and never leave. Many spend their entire lives surrounded by concrete and steel, subjected to nonstop physical and emotional pain. Reactions to trauma include persistent gagging from repeatedly having tubes stuck down their throats; chewed off fingernails from anxiety; rocking, and banging their heads on cell walls. In addition, hypervigilance, depression, and self-abuse—biting themselves—have also been exhibited in nonhuman animals manipulated in laboratories. These symptoms of distress have also been observed in human animals who have undergone physical and sexual abuse, war, and other traumatic experiences because suffering is universal, no matter who is experiencing it.

Before the Trump Administration removed the website, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) kept an online database called the Animal Care Information System, which provided an annual list of the types and numbers of nonhuman animals experimented on by universities. When I last accessed the online database four years ago, I found that at least 6 nonhuman primates, 12 guinea pigs, and 14 rabbits were exploited for research at Rutgers in 2014. In 2010, 9 nonhuman primates, 12 cats, 3 pigs, 114 guinea pigs, 86 rabbits, and 445 "other" sentient beings (deer, gerbils, voles, and mice) were left to languish in laboratory cages, experimented on, and/or subjected to pain, and killed at Rutgers. The database had included countless numbers of nonhuman animals used and discarded at Rutgers going as far back as 1999.

In response to the federal complaint, the University insists that "the highest standards of science, safety, service, and humane care for the animals in our care are met." Despite what Rutgers spin doctors claim, nonhumans confined to laboratories and subjected to experimentation are not—by their very use, oppression, and enslavement—treated humanely.

Like the sadistic activities enshrouded behind slaughterhouse walls, unethical and unjust laboratory operations are purposely concealed from the public. And, similarly to the younger Joan Dunayer, students and workers who participate in vivisection are often in denial themselves, rejecting their victims' very capacity to suffer. Vivisectors employ speciesist language to mitigate their killing for professional and financial gain and exhibit moral schizophrenia when they insist they "love animals" while justifying their participation in animal abuse and exploitation.

"Whatever their intellectual capacity, humans are spared vivisection because we consider it morally repugnant to inflict suffering or death on any innocent human," wrote Dunayer. "Nonhumans deserve equal justice. . . . They need—now—to be spared deprivation, pain, and death. They need—right now—to be freed. Evil is no less evil when its victims are nonhuman."

As a former alumna, I have since renounced Rutgers for their flagrant cruelty and disregard for nonhuman life throughout their corporate-laden "animal science" programs. I have grown weary with Rutgers' cozy and symbiotic relationships with "research" facilities, the pharmaceutical industry, and government agencies like the USDA and the National Institutes of Health. The fact that student tuition, alumni donations, and taxpayer money is funneled into funding outright torture of other animals should disgust everyone, not just those affiliated with Rutgers.

I implore the Daily Targum and other organizations to do a thorough undercover investigation into these injustices. Regardless of financial constraints, journalistic institutions like the Daily Targum have an obligation to expose wrongdoing and inform its student body and alumni of what their money is aiding and promoting. I hope students and alumni will join me in withdrawing their financial support of Rutgers University and demanding an end to the sanctioned abuse and exploitation of nonhuman animals everywhere.

How Do I Go Vegan?

What the Coronavirus, the Film Contagion, and Infectious Diseases All Have in Common

2020-02-04T11:28:00.001-05:00

In the final scene of the 2011 thriller Contagion, we learn that the deadly virus that killed 2.5 million people in the United States and 26 million worldwide by day 26 had originated in a Chinese "meat market." The "chef," who had been handling the corpse of the infected pig, wipes the pig's blood and saliva on his apron and heads out of the kitchen to meet with Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), a customer who requests a picture and to shake his hand. Beth becomes patient zero.

Two things came to mind when I initially heard about the Coronavirus, a zoonotic disease that is rapidly spreading across the globe and whose source has also been traced to a "meat market" in China where nonhuman animals were sold for human consumption. The first, was the movie Contagion, which relied heavily on science and was praised by experts for its authenticity. The second, was the inevitability of such an outbreak due in no small part to our insufferable and systematic exploitation and abuse of other animals.

In "Beyond Humanism, Toward a New Animalism" David Cantor wrote:

Humans’ various holocausts against nonhuman animals . . . brought limitless disaster upon human beings, who until relatively recently were ignorant of organisms invisible to the naked eye. Hundreds of infectious diseases that chickens, pigs, cows, rabbits, camels, sheep, goats, horses, dogs, and others had adapted to over millions of years wreaked havoc on humans who assumed they could enslave other animals with impunity. Supernatural explanations arose for smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, and other scourges that in actuality were zoonotic.

In "Animal Abuse: It's Why We Have Infectious Diseases," Cantor went on to describe the root cause of much human suffering brought about by our animal-abuse policies, cultures, and practices. Here are just some of the more well-known zoonotic diseases he addressed:

AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome):
The best-documented and most likely theory holds that human beings acquired the HIV virus which causes AIDS from unnatural contact with chimpanzees — namely butchering them for their flesh ("bushmeat"), enslaving them as pets, or attracting them to settlements or crops, most likely starting in the late 19th or early 20th century.

Anthrax:
Humans can catch anthrax via ingestion, inhalation, or cutaneous contact. This occurs from unnatural contact with nonhuman animals such as eating them, handling them, or touching their skin or wool. Infection is much more common among those who work in certain professions (i.e., those handling animal skins for the manufacture of shoes, coats, handbags, furniture, etc., chopping animal horns to make buttons, constructing brush bristles from animal hair, etc.).

The Common Cold:
Humans originally caught this airborne illness from enslaving horses for work, transportation, and companionship.

Ebola:
Humans' unnatural contact with fruit bats, monkeys, and other animals in western Africa through hunting and trapping — usually for the purposes of eating "bushmeat" — spread this terrifying, contagious infectious disease to humans.

Gonorrhea:
Known casually as "the clap," gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted infection, is thought to have originated in unnatural dwellings that became early cities and towns. It initially "spilled over" into humans from cattle due to naturally herbivorous humans' unnatural enslavement of and direct contact with those animals.

Influenza:
Human beings catch various strains of influenza from enslaving pigs and birds to use for food and other purposes. Influenza epidemics have been historic events, more destructive than wars or terrorism, sometimes killing millions of human beings. As long as food policy includes the flesh of other animals, it will not be possible to eradicate influenza.

Listeria:
Humans who stray from their natural diet of leaves, fruits, berries, roots, legumes, flowers, and other edible plants commonly contract this bacterial infection when they eat animal flesh and soft cheeses derived from nonhuman milk.

Lyme disease:
Deer ticks — so named because the deer mouse, or white-footed mouse, is their most common carrier — is prevalent due to humans' reckless and unnatural land use, such as destruction of forests and suburban sprawl, which leaves humans vulnerable to the bites of an exploding tick population.

Measles:
Human beings most likely originally contracted measles from enslaving dogs. Today, the measles still kill about one million humans per year.

Salmonella:
Salmonellosis, one of the most common forms of food-poisoning among humans, results from ingesting animal flesh, milk, eggs, and fecal-contaminated water spilling over from animal-enslavement operations ("factory farms"). Symptoms often include diarrhea, nausea, abdominal pain, and fever. Over one million Americans are infected each year.

Shigella:
Humans ingest Shigella, an infectious disease-causing bacterium, through consumption of sea animals, eggs, or the undercooked flesh of chickens and cows. Symptoms include diarrhea (bloody), fever, and stomach cramps.

While the news media often reconciles our many infectious diseases as "natural" occurrences, there is nothing natural about their inception. This is no act of God; it is an act of man.

In 1918, the Spanish influenza infected one-third of the world's human population and killed at least 50 million people (3 to 5 percent of the human population), making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Spanish flu sprung from an H1N1 avian (bird) virus first identified in military personnel in an overcrowded camp in France during WWI. Pigs were also confined to an area of the camp, and turkeys, chickens, and other captive birds were regularly brought in to the camp for "food" supplies. In 1999, virologist John Oxford led a British team of researchers who concluded that the Spanish flu virus harbored in the birds, mutated and then migrated to the pigs and humans.

Since the onset of the Coronavirus, those who have seen Contagion recognize the similarities, but where those similarities end and how many will die from the disease (not including the imprisoned monkeys and mice, who will be made infected and tortured by the CDC in attempts to find a vaccine), only time will tell.

“For years I said that Contagion is one of the scariest films ever made and now here we are,” tweeted actor and director Stephen Ford.

While Contagion may be a work of fiction, the likelihood of another global pandemic is all too real given the monstrous ways in which we breed, torture, and kill other animals on an industrial scale. Economic, social, and political influences continue to drive animal-abuse culture and policies, and we are only too happy to abide them for our own perverse pleasures, conveniences, and entertainment. Each day we have an opportunity to resist violent and oppressive acts against other animals, but we continue to turn a blind eye to their suffering, choosing instead to make our bodies their graves while digging our own in the process.

The Coronavirus has already begun to do its damage. The question remains, will we finally learn from it? Or, will we continue to reap what we sow?

HowDoIGoVegan.com

The Threatening Nature of Vegans and Truth

2019-12-01T12:05:00.000-05:00

I was interviewing for a job and was prepared for the ubiquitous question: tell me a little about yourself. I mentioned a few interests, like organizing, reading, and writing, but it wasn't enough to satisfy my interviewer. I hesitated to mention my being vegan and knew if hired that it would eventually come up, but I went for it anyway. The interviewer seemed intrigued and as most "animal" conversations go, she related to a former dog companion whom she had loved and discussed at length.

"It must be a great sacrifice to be vegan," she finally stated, almost questioningly.

"It isn't a sacrifice, but a great joy," I beamed. "Going vegan is one of the best decisions I ever made because I no longer contribute to animal suffering through what I eat." I could see the wheels turning.

"Well, it's a choice, right?" she asked, rather rhetorically and smugly. "And that's your choice."

I smiled, noting the usual self-protective posturing. "Yes," I said.

Nonvegan rebuttals like the one above are both confounding and instructive, and provide interesting studies in psychology. When confronted with my being vegan, the interviewer quickly sought to make me "the other" so she didn't have to examine her own behaviors. Likewise, she sought to separate herself from me by implying that my being vegan is my own "personal choice," instead of a moral requirement. This begs the question: why would anyone want to defend a choice to do harm to others?

Years of experience has taught me that people need to put distance between themselves and what I'm espousing so they don't have to examine their own self-deceits. When someone insists that my being vegan follows my own "personal beliefs," I promptly point out that we both share the same beliefs. When I ask them if they believe that causing other animals unnecessary harm is wrong, they agree. Thus, when I point out that eating the flesh, milk, and eggs of other animals is unnecessary, causing billions of animals to be needlessly tormented and killed every year, they typically get defensive. The only difference is that I'm acting on our shared values and beliefs, while they are not.

"A person who tells you that eating animal products is a personal choice is experiencing a state of cognitive dissonance," wrote Robert Grillo in "Eating Animals and the Illusion of Personal Choice" (Circles of Compassion: Essays Connecting Issues of Justice, 2014). ". . . they have made this issue personal precisely in response to vegans making it public. Making the issue personal is a nice way of saying, 'I don't want to be judged or held accountable for my actions that harm animals.' So this is not so much an attempt to defend eating animals as it is a defense intended to block any further discussion or evaluation. Moreover, personalization removes animals from public discourse and keeps them tucked away in our closet of denial and silence."

Farhad Manjoo, who is not vegan, recently addressed the topics of guilt and cognitive dissonance that make people hostile to vegans and veganism in his deeply honest and heartfelt piece, "Stop Mocking Vegans."

"Many [nonvegans] understand the toll that meat wreaks on the planet, and we can’t help but feel the tension between loving animals in the abstract while eating them with abandon on the plate. All of this creates feelings of defensiveness, so when a vegan comes along, their very presence seems like an affront."

I recently became aware of the term "moral envy" after reading Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. He describes moral envy as "feelings of envy and resentment directed at another person, not because that person is wealthy, or gifted, or lucky, but because his or her behavior is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier's own." I strongly believe that nonvegan resistance, whether unconscious or conscious, is also tied to moral envy.

There is, however, an easy solution to moral envy: align one's actions and behaviors with one's purported values. Ah, and there's the rub!

Many people claim to love and care for nonhuman animals, but few people actually do. Most people do not see themselves as persecutors and murderers of other animals, so when someone exposes the truth of what their actions bring about, rather than ask what they can do to alleviate this great injustice and make things right, they try to justify their actions to avoid self-correction and to make themselves feel better.

If we believe the lives of other animals matter, then abstaining from manipulating and massacring them for food, clothing, and entertainment is a moral requirement, not a personal choice. Grillo went on to say quite plainly, "mere personal choices don't have victims."

This false sense of choice that makes people think that they have the right to oppress, use, and execute the bodies of other living beings—either directly themselves or by paying someone else to do the dirty work for them—is made possible because the law gives it cover since other animals are still considered property. In addition, because the majority of people exploit and eat animals for personal pleasure, convenience, and entertainment, a mob mentality allows such injustices to continue. I was once told by someone very close to me that "millions of people can't be wrong." Indeed, they can, and centuries of history has borne this out. As Leo Tolstoy once exclaimed, "wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it."

There was once a time when husbands could beat their wives without prosecution and white people could enslave Black people. These and other great injustices were legal, but that didn't make them right. There is a higher moral law than just legal man-made laws. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” in April 1963, “. . . there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws.”

People have a personal choice when it comes to what kind of car they drive, what style of hair they wear, and what color they paint their living room walls; however, their sense of entitlement to the lives and bodies of other animals is morally bankrupt and baseless. It is self-deceptive to argue that one has a right to personally harm another being, which is why murder, assault, and rape are not considered personal choices in our society. The distinction between persons (bodies) arises from nothing more than arbitrary notions of property and what is considered socially acceptable by the masses at a given time.

Which brings me back to my interviewer. While her love for her dog companion was apparent, she was unable to apply the same consciousness and status to those animals whom she imposes upon and consumes.

"In the Western world, we feel it wrong to torture and eat cats and dogs, but perfectly acceptable to do the same to animals equally as sentient and capable of suffering," said Canadian activist Twyla Francois. "No being who prides himself on rationality can continue to support such behavior."

Whenever I share information on animal abuse and exploitation I get lots of push back and, in certain cases, even warnings. I'm not surprised that in a world like ours, facts and truth can be so threatening. People don't want to hear about day-old male chicks ground up alive or suffocated in plastic bags because the egg industry finds them useless. Nor do they want to know about newly born male calves ripped away from their wailing mothers and sold to the veal industry or left for dead because they can't produce milk for dairy enslavers. This knowledge requires action, and action requires change.

"In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

While I try to shine a light on the truth, others seek to cower from it and live in the dark, as if not seeing will make it all disappear. Don't they realize that their own blindness and apathy is the reason why the world is such a terrible place, especially for nonhuman animals?

I am vegan because I'm only doing what I am obligated to do—the most good and least harm. People frequently repel what is good and holy because it deprives them of carnal pleasures, and that is why there is contention. We often know what the right thing to do is, but we fail to do it.

Unfortunately, I have become accustomed to nonvegan opposition. I can only hope that one day soon such reactions will be the exception and not the rule, and that people will realize that I am not so different from them. Social constructs that teach us that it is acceptable to manipulate, use, and kill other animals for personal gain are learned and can just as easily be unlearned. All it takes is a willingness to open one's eyes and do the right thing.

Vegan Starter Kit

"Farmers" Don't Deserve Public's Money or Pity

2019-06-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

Overgrown hooves and anxious looks. © Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

The words "farm" and "farmer" typically portend nostalgic and romantic notions of an American way of life. In the 1980's, like many teenagers, I was a fan of FarmAid concerts that sought to keep families from losing their farms. Songs like "Scarecrow" by John Mellencamp immortalized the financial struggles of farmers. Over the years I've seen many local farms disappear to human development.

When I became vegetarian, then vegan, I found that not all farms and farmers are created equal. I learned to let go of idealized, culturally-programmed concepts of these terms that—like the Old MacDonald nursery rhyme and Oscar Meyer jingle—conjure up naive and harmless impressions. Instead, when I came face to face with the truth of what most "farms" and "farmers" do, I uncovered violent operations where millions of nonhuman animals are needlessly bred, enslaved, and killed for their flesh, milk, and eggs.

There is a world of difference between farmers who grow fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, and vegetables, or operate local, plant-based CSA's (Community Supported Agriculture) and "farmers" who oppress, manipulate, and massacre other sentient beings for a living.

"Divorced from the land, numerous 'animal agriculture' operations have no farming component," wrote Joan Dunayer in Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. "Yet, the exploitation of captive nonhumans for food retains the name agriculture, evoking pastoral images of cows grazing, pigs rooting, and chickens pecking in the spacious outdoors. . . . Farm is largely an anachronism. . . . 'Farmers' and 'producers' who deal in flesh, milk, or eggs actually are slaveholders. Slaughterers are mass murderers. Assisted by words that falsify, consumers of products from nonhuman bodies pretend otherwise."

On May 23, President Trump authorized a $16 billion aid package for "farmers" to tide them over during his trade war with China—this is in addition to the $12 billion they were given last year. It is not the responsibility of taxpayers to bail out food-industry enslavers, otherwise known as "farmers," who uphold the catastrophic animal flesh, milk, and egg cartels. Nor is it our responsibility to finance those who abet these cartels by turning their soybean and corn yields over to feed companies to fatten nonhuman animals for slaughter. In fact, 75 percent of all soy and 95 percent of all corn grown in the United States is used strictly to fill captive nonhuman animals ("live-stock"), in spite of the fact that if this grain were consumed directly by humans, we could feed nearly 800 million people, potentially wiping out human hunger across the world. Furthermore, subsidies to soy and corn farmers indirectly help lower costs for those who breed nonhuman animals for consumption.

Therefore, I see no moral distinction between the "farmer" who reproduces and butchers animals, and the "farmer" who grows the principal crops that—when mixed with antibiotics, chemicals, and other dead animals—become the sludge that increase nonhuman animals for their extermination. These two types of "farmers" are interdependent, and bolster bloody and environmentally-destructive industries.

Last August, the Trump administration announced an additional bailout for "dairy farmers" who saw prices plummet by $1.1 billion in 2018 thanks to a rising vegan milk industry. As part of the bailout, the USDA agreed to spend $50 billion of taxpayer money to buy approximately 12 million gallons of surplus cow's milk. Even though many more Americans are choosing healthier and ethical plant-based milks, we are still forced to redeem the cow-milk industry. Why?

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service office in Madison, Wisconsin, the "Dairy State" lost 903 cow-milk enslavement operations ("farms") in just 15 months. However, it's important to note that the number of cows tyrannized for their milk stayed steady—some of them were just shipped to larger facilities. Moreover, even with less than 20 percent of the cow-milk facilities Wisconsin had in 1979, Wisconsin still set a record in 2018 for the most pounds of cow's milk produced in one year due to bigger confinement facilities (prisons), genetically-altered cows, and genetically-modified feed.

Most "farms" today are owned by giant, wealthy conglomerates like Tyson, Smithfield, ADM, and Cargill. It doesn't matter that the supply of cow's milk exceeds demand when these companies have powerful lobbyists and politicians on their side. The typical Return on Investment (ROI) for lobbying Congress is 20,000 percent, and the animal flesh, milk, egg, and feed industries have a lot of money to go around. Republicans decry welfare and socialism except when it affects their own pockets and corporate interests. Large animal-abuse corporations don't have to adhere to capitalist principles of Economic Darwinism when they're continually bankrolled by taxpayers.

Recently, Wisconsin's Department of Agriculture ordered the removal of vegan "butters" from all state supermarket shelves. If the cow-milk industry can't win, they just eliminate the competition using their government clout. That doesn't strike me as capitalistic.

And Democrats are no better. In 2009, Obama appointee Tom Vilsack introduced the Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) to reimburse “farmers” for any deaths to "live-stock" caused by natural disaster and disease. Think about this for a minute. Food-industry animals are purposefully created to be killed, but if they happen to die natural deaths—as opposed to the unnatural deaths inflicted on them by "farmers" and slaughterhouse workers—then these animal exploiters receive additional money. What's more, the escalation of flooding and disease is chiefly attributable to exploiting nonhuman animals for food. Hence, we should be taxing "farmers" and the animal flesh, milk, and egg industries, not reimbursing them!

Unsurprisingly, the LIP is just one of many "farm" sustaining programs begot by the former governor of Iowa, which produces more corn and kills more pigs than any other state. Since nonhuman animals are still considered property, the program acts like any other insurance to remedy “losses." However, unlike most private insurance, it is funded with taxpayer dollars and goes to preserving vicious, unjust, and unscrupulous animal-abuse enterprises that remain one of the greatest contributors to global warming and environmental pollution.

These bailouts and programs go unquestioned because we have been socially indoctrinated to believe that animal-derived ice-cream, hot dogs, and hamburgers are as American as baseball and, therefore, so are the "farmers" who capitalize on the lives of nonhuman animals to produce such products. Sympathetic news accounts elevate "farmers" who mourn the loss of their trade in flesh, but few seem to grieve for the shackled mothers, fathers, and children who are systematically used and executed for a lousy buck and cheap hamburger flesh.

In a recent industry-friendly article in the New York Times, "Farms Have Folded. But the Dairy Breakfast Must Go On.", fellow Wisconsinite Julie Bosman reported on the annual Wisconsin dairy breakfast where "farmers" glutted themselves on milk, yogurt, cheese curds, scrambled eggs, and sausage. Bosman noted one young woman, a sort of ambassador for local cow-milk operations, who was feeding a 3-day-old calf a mixture of electrolytes and water, a "Gatorade for cows" is what she called it. It didn't seem to occur to Bosman to ask any investigative questions like, why is a calf drinking Gatorade instead of her own mother's milk? Sadly, the milk meant for the female calf is, instead, being sold to humans so they can gorge themselves on the aforementioned dairy breakfast products. Bosman wouldn't have seen any male calves because they're useless to the "dairy" industry and already would have been shot or sold off to be turned into veal or pet food. This was a biased piece meant to prop up "farmers," not to uncover the horrors of the cow-milk industry.

These "farmers" deserve as much consolation as a snake-oil salesman or a Big Pharma executive whose salary hinges on opioid addiction.

In 1968, there were many political operatives who wanted the war and carnage in Vietnam to continue regardless of the obvious failures and loss of life, but few had the courage to finally admit it. "Past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation," said Robert F. Kennedy. "All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he know his course is wrong and repairs the evil."

It is immoral to insist on preserving any establishment that causes unnecessary suffering and death to others. Economic excuses for maintaining animal exploitation are deplorable and indefensible. I understand that people are afraid to lose their jobs, but just because something is called a "job" doesn't make it right or entitled to exist. There will come a day when furriers, slaughterhouse workers, breeders, zoo workers, jockeys, carriage drivers, food-industry enslavers, and many others will have to forfeit their "jobs" because we ceased to view nonhuman animals as property and things to subjugate for personal pleasure, entertainment, and financial gain.

In a series of op-eds, Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, espoused government help to transition "farmers" away from animal-enslavement operations:

Our government should stop propping up this untenable situation and wasting billions of dollars in subsidies every year. Instead of prolonging the inevitable failure of dairy farms and subsidizing the overproduction of commodities that consumers aren’t buying, our government should actively invest in transitioning these struggling dairies into producing more of the foods our nation needs, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains and other healthy, plant-based foods.

It doesn't take much to make us feel empathy for animal enslavers because most of us condone and partake in buttressing animal-abuse culture. Politicians and the media use this misguided pity for small animal imprisonment operations in order to gain taxpayer money to reinforce large factory farm operations. In the end, we shouldn't be bailing out any of these depraved institutions and should direct our compassion toward the real victims—nonhuman animals. "Farmers" are not victims, but perpetrators of enormous suffering, death, and environmental destruction. They want to be compensated for their financial losses while animals pay with their very lives. It's time we awoke to the reality of these "farms" and "farmers"—and what we pay them to do—and stop treating them like sacred cows.

To learn more about how you can help end government subsidies for nonhuman-animal exploiters, visit the Vegan Justice League.

NJ Gov and Legislators Help Some Animals, Ignore Others

2019-05-16T13:36:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed another piece of legislation for nonhuman animals.

InsiderNJ.com wrongly noted that Bills S1923 and S2674 were signed into law "to further protect animal rights across New Jersey." These laws do not protect "animal rights" because animals have no legal rights in New Jersey or any other state in the union—they are still considered property under the law. In addition, these bills only pertain to dogs, domestic animal companions, and service animals.

While I applaud the governor and legislators for their advocacy on behalf of some animals (dogs, cats, and "exotic" animals used in circuses), there are many other animals who are being ignored by the governor, legislators, citizens, and media throughout the State.

Follow-up comments made by Governor Murphy, along with Assemblymen Bruce Land, Matthew Milam, and Gordon Johnson indicate an incredible disregard for reality and truth. They also illustrate how profoundly invisible are the lives of countless other animals due to deeply entrenched ideologies and self-serving interests.

"Animal cruelty is abuse, plain and simple," said Assemblyman Matt Milam. "We will not tolerate animal cruelty in New Jersey..."

I agree with Assemblyman Milam that animal cruelty is abuse and should not be tolerated, however, it is tolerated every single day in NJ. Almost everything we do maintains animal abuse culture. The State even goes so far as to subsidize the exploitation, abuse, and massacre of animals using taxpayer money for hunting, vivisection, horse racing, and to promote dubious "animal science" programs at Rutgers University. And what does Assemblyman Milam think happens to thousands of animals every day in NJ slaughterhouses?

“No animal deserves to be abused or neglected,” said Assemblyman Bruce Land. "Unfortunately, some animals wind up in dangerous, potentially life-threatening environments."

Numerous animals don't just "wind up" in dangerous, life-threatening environments, they are deliberately forced into these situations for the benefit of social traditions and industries that economically thrive on their manipulation and use. Nonhuman animals are purposefully conceived and held captive for experiments, their flesh, milk, and eggs, as pets, for target shooting, racing, for their fur, at zoos and aquaprisons, and for other gratuitous objects and abusements. How can Assemblyman Land cry foul on one particular instance of animal abuse but ignore the legion of others?

“The decision to end a life, whether that life is that of a human or of another species, is an incredibly difficult one, and one which should warrant appropriate reasoning and rationale,” said Assemblyman Gordon Johnson.

The State of New Jersey and its residents sanction the irrational and systematic killing of millions of nonhuman animals with reckless abandon. There is no ethical and acceptable reason for taking the life of another animal for food, pleasure, convenience, and entertainment, yet each day NJ government, businesses, and civilians make groundless and callously cruel decisions to kill and commodify animals without a second thought or hesitation.

“As long-time dog owners, animal welfare is close to my and Tammy’s hearts,” said Governor Phil Murphy. “I am proud to sign these bills that will protect animals in danger of abuse and treat our four-legged residents with the compassion they deserve.”

Don't all animals deserve compassion and to live lives free from torture and abuse? If Governor Murphy and NJ legislators are serious about eradicating animal abuse and death in the State of New Jersey, then they will work toward liberating all animals, not just “some” animals. They can begin by banning all hunting and trapping in NJ, including the egregious bear hunts Governor Murphy promised to end; ban the greedy blood sport of horse racing that rewards wealthy slave owners for drugging, electrocuting, and killing horses for financial gain; ban slaughterhouses, Big Pharma animal laboratories, "animal science" programs, furriers, breeders, and the sale of animals in pet shops; and they can endorse healthy, sustainable plant-based foods in all NJ government facilities, public schools, colleges, and universities.

The institutionalized manipulation and abuse of any animal is immoral and must not be tolerated on any level. Our attention and concern ought to extend to all living beings, not just a select few. Every animal, human and nonhuman, deserves equal protection under the law—real, absolute rights.

We don't accept inequities of justice based on race, sex, or class, nor should we regarding species. Talk is cheap. Let your political representatives know that you're holding them accountable.

How Do I Go Vegan?

The Dirty Truth About Panera's "Clean" Foods

2019-03-29T16:28:00.001-04:00

The fast food chain Panera likes to flaunt itself as a chic place for modern foodies. Their commercials boast about their use of "clean" ingredients, particularly those made from the bodies and fluids of other animals. If you believe this advertising scheme, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Hens exploited for their eggs stand on the body of a dead mate to avoid the painful wire flooring.
© Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

So-called clean foods happen to be very trendy right now, yet the term "clean" is as meaningless as the word "natural." What's more, calling animal-based cheese, bacon, and chicken products "clean" is incredibly ironic. Why? Because these products are derived from the most unsanitary, sickly, and brutal operations in the world.

Breeding and killing nonhuman animals for consumption is a very dirty business. Most animals spend their days caged and wallowing in their own urine, feces, and blood, their lungs burning with the concentrated stench of excrement. Over 80 percent of all antibiotics are fed to animals bred for consumption because they're often sick with infections and sores.

No amount of sanitizing semantics can whitewash the horrors of those industries that exploit other living beings for their flesh, milk, and eggs. Animals are genetically manipulated and their lives cut short. They are deprived of every basic pleasure, tortured, and then killed for unnecessary foodstuffs. Their bodies bleed and their deaths are as excruciating as they are squalid.

The environmental destruction resulting from our mass consumption of captive animals is also incredibly dirty and damaging. Manure pits have led to human deaths and birth defects as a result of toxins seeping into groundwater. Many poorer communities surrounding factory farms battle polluted water and air. Fecal waste from cattle flows into rivers and streams, causing algae blooms that deprive the water of oxygen resulting in dead zones that suffocate sea animals to death.

The process by which once-sentient beings are turned into commodities like bacon, pepperoni, and other euphemistic disguises is also awash in filth and grime. In slaughterhouses, blood, urine, feces, vomit, bits of brain matter, and bile are a constant presence on the floor, walls, machinery, knives, clothes, and bodies of the workers themselves, according to Timothy Pachirat's exposé Every Twelve Seconds. The job of inspectors is to make sure none of these fluids and secretions remain on the corpses that get converted into packaged meat, but the number of FDA recalls and reported illnesses from tainted animal flesh tell a different story.

Normally, a new mother will tidy and make a nest. Here, she's unable to even turn around.

© Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Whoever came up with the gimmick of associating animal-derived products with the concept of "clean" is a marketing genius and the devil incarnate. There's nothing clean about spilling the blood of someone who wanted to live and transforming her and her babies into battered, blood-soaked, feces-caked inanimate objects. Only in this day and age of untruth and doublespeak could something so contrary to the meaning of clean—desecrated, disease ridden, dead, corrupt, immoral, unhealthy, unsanitary, unjust—be associated with cleanliness.

Born at a cow-milk facility and then sold for veal, this sickly
male calf covered in flies died soon after this photo was taken.
© Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

There is no legitimate basis for enslaving nonhuman animals for their flesh, milk, and eggs. On the contrary, there are more justifiable reasons why we ought not to, the foremost being ethical. Rather than question our societal norms of what is pleasurable and healthy, we make flimsy excuses that uphold the status quo. These bitter customs of ours would quickly vanish, however, if we were suddenly made to do our own killing or to substitute our cats and dogs for the pigs, chickens, turkeys, and cows we conveniently ignore and thoughtlessly consume.

People continuously look for right ways to do the wrong thing. Companies like Panera and Eat Clean Bro are only too happy to oblige, sustaining a false facade with deceptive marketing all the while bolstering their profits at the expense of the lives of other animals.

Inserting the word "clean" in front of animal body parts and products sounds nice and speciously offers us the absolution we seek, but a truly
clean conscience is not that easy to come by.

How Do I Go Vegan?

"Less Than Human" Labeling is Root of All Evil

2019-02-14T13:19:00.000-05:00

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Henry David Thoreau wrote this in Walden in 1854. At the time, he was referring to the hypocrisy of philanthropists who gave to the poor yet ignored how their own lives contributed to the circumstances afflicting the poor.

In the same way, donating to an organization or signing a petition doesn't exonerate us from contributing to society's large-scale problems or, in the case of other animals, the systemic violence and injustice they face.

There are some evils in the world that are conspicuous compared with those ingrained in institutions and traditions that uphold the status quo. The actions of people like Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black Americans during a prayer service, are obviously abhorrent to most. On the other hand, we choose not to "see" the violence we contribute to on a mass scale in daily life. Campus protests erupt over a neo-fascist ideologue with a microphone while destructive and insidious "animal science" programs endure without backlash.

And like Thoreau's philanthropists, there are evils of benevolence that give the illusion of charity. A good example is the donation of turkey corpses to the poor for Thanksgiving. We make a spectacle of such events, patting ourselves on the back for our "generosity."

In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative said: "The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude: It was the ideology of white supremacy, in which people persuaded themselves that black people aren’t fully human."

In the battle for legal rights for other animals we can similarly assert that the great evil of animal slavery (food production, entertainment, labor, war, science, etc.) is the ideology of human supremacy in which human persons have convinced themselves that other animals are not sentient persons in their own right, but inanimate commodities and property.

Those who "love animals" betray the very beings they claim to love on many fronts. Many animal activists are human supremacists who are no less hacking at the branches of injustice, reproducing oppressive behaviors for all species.

In Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, Aph and Syl Ko ask us to decenter whiteness and humanism in our lives and work. "Veganism isn't just a diet . . . A lot of us aren't just talking about animal oppression, but animality, which is a Eurocentric construct that has contributed to the oppression of any group that deviates from ideal white homo sapiens. . . . There is no human if there is no animal." said Aph Ko.

Violence against animal bodies is legitimized through their "less than human" status. It is this same "less than human" status that has driven white supremacy for so many centuries. Presently, it is why immigrants of color and their babies are imprisoned along the United States border.

Capitalist government industries that thrive on "goods and services" derived from the life and blood of other animals will not be extinguished until the notion of human supremacy is abolished. While white supremacy continues to show itself in overt violence and discrimination, the signs of human supremacy are hidden in plain sight vis a vis factory "farms," aquaprisons, zoos, laboratories, "furriers," rodeos, racetracks, and other deeply entrenched and accepted institutions of slavery.

Myopic and ephemeral measures to enlarge cages or improve living conditions for those enslaved for food, "science," clothing, entertainment, etc. are not striking at the root of our animal industrial complex. The perceived "personal choice" many humans claim to have over the lives of other animals ("It's my right to eat what I want!")—and therefore, whether they live or die—to fulfill some tenuous human pleasure, amusement or convenience involves an ideology that is no less violent and hateful than any other ism.

Last year Stevenson opened a national lynching memorial in order to "create cultural spaces that expose people to the history of enslavement and lynching and segregation and motivate them to say, 'Never again.' " His hope is that we will make the commitment to respond differently when we hear the echo of similar narratives. Those reverberations are all around us. Just imagine an analogous memorial that addressed all the ways we currently use and discard animal persons every single day with such callous indifference.

"The project of physically liberating the animal has to go hand in hand with the work of freeing them from the [human-animal] binary in our heads," said Syl Ko. Animals did not inform our notion of them, rather, white supremacy informed our notion of "animals."

Getting people to choose a veggie burger or vegan ice-cream over the animal-based alternatives is bewilderingly difficult, but not as difficult as getting these same people to engage in the critical thinking necessary to change their views of other animals and to recognize other animals' need for equality and justice.

The irony is that until human supremacy is conquered in every heart and deed,—until we strike at that root—white male supremacy will continue to exist. Human supremacy is a scourge that affects everyone and everything. It brings suffering to all of us, not just the intended victims it targets.

Photo credit: Flickr / Toshihiro Oimatsu

Advocating for Nonhumans Beyond the Grave

2018-11-27T15:36:00.001-05:00

Most of us don't want to think about it, but at some point we are all going to die. Even before that time comes, we may become ill or incapacitated, and our chance for making important decisions will be too late. Who will care for our nonhuman companion(s)? Which charity would we like to leave our money to? There is no time like the present for activists to consider these and other questions.

Too often vegans believe they're invincible, as if being vegan is a guarantee of a long and healthy life. It's not. While a plant-based diet has proven to be an excellent way to reduce our risk of acquiring chronic diseases, it does not promise a life free of illness. In Even Vegans Die: A Practical Guide to Caregiving, Acceptance, and Protecting Your Legacy of Compassion, Carol Adams, et al. addresses vegan biases and how we can all be better advocates to ourselves and others.

If you are a guardian to a nonhuman companion or just want to make sure your ethical vegan values are reflected in decisions made on your behalf, here are some things you can do now to ensure that your advocacy for nonhuman animals continues even after you have become injured, ill, or have passed on.

In-Case-of-Emergency ID Card: Create a card for your wallet that specifies someone you trust to care for your nonhuman companion in the event that you become debilitated. The card should contain your address, the name and telephone number of your emergency contact, and a picture of your nonhuman companion. It should say something like: "My companion (name) is home alone. If I become ill or injured, please contact the following person to care for her." Emergency contacts should also have access (keys) to your home or know where to find them.

Making Arrangements for Nonhuman Companion(s): In the same vein as the ID card, it's also a good idea to leave detailed instructions for the care of your nonhuman companion(s). Designate a guardian and make sure they're on board. You may even request in your will that they receive a monthly or yearly stipend. You should also provide them with detailed instructions. Think about everything you do now to care for your nonhuman companion and list it out. Provide their name, photo, date of birth, physical description, microchip ID number, food preferences, treats, eating habits, schedules, favorite toys and activities, personality, likes, dislikes, vet contact information, medical history, medications, lifestyle, sleep schedule, requirements, etc.—anything that would be helpful in replicating your same level of care.

Green Burial: Your concern for the environment and the homes of other animals does not have to end when you die. According to the Green Burial Council, green burials offer minimal environmental impact, reduce carbon emissions, protect worker health, and preserve habitat. Certified green burials do not use toxic formaldehyde. Using a green burial planning guide, vegans can identify their environmental and spiritual aims, and can choose non-toxic and biodegradable materials such as shrouds, essential oils, and natural markers like trees or wildflowers. For more information, visit the Green Burial Council.

Funeral Donations: Consider making nonprofit organizations or charities that support your values and advance nonhuman interests your beneficiaries upon your death. Also, let the executor of your will or living trust know that you wish to receive donations to your favorite organization or charity instead of expensive and ephemeral flowers at your funeral or memorial service. Flowers are mostly grown in South America and Africa using cheap labor and chemical fertilizers, and even organic flowers require lots of energy to grow, transport, and store them.

Organ Donation: According to the U.S. Government Information on Organ Donation and Transplantation, 20 people die each day waiting for a transplant, yet only 3 in 1,000 people die in a way that allows for organ donation. The more people who sign up to become organ donors, the greater the opportunity to save lives. "Being an organ donor is part of an ethic of generosity and compassion; it's a very vegan decision." wrote Adams. To sign up to become an organ donor, visit OrganDonor.gov and select your state.

Donating Body to Science: Ethical vegans do not support vivisection or the use of nonhuman animals in research, "scientific" or otherwise. Besides, human bodies are better equipped for treating human diseases. By donating your body to science or to a university body-donation program, you can help advance better science, ethics, and the improved learning of future doctors. In addition, you may even help other animals by replacing them in laboratories, where they are caged, subjected to torturous experiments, and killed. Donating your body to science also has the added benefit of eliminating funeral and burial costs. In addition to medical schools, there are also private organizations like BioGift and Science Care that accept whole body donations. Some organizations will even allow organ donation because they deal in body parts as well as whole cadavers.

Additionally, it is important that hospital staff and medical professionals know about your commitment to veganism and how you feel about medications that may include or have been tested on the bodies of other animals. An Advanced Healthcare Directive or Living Will is a legal document in which a person specifies what actions they authorize and oppose regarding their health care should they no longer be able to make decisions for themselves.

While we're still alive and well, it's crucial to make our wishes known. By accepting our eventual demise and preparing for it, we can ensure that our nonhuman advocacy is meaningful in both life and death.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Christianity and Veganism, United in Purpose

2018-10-26T12:35:00.000-04:00

There is a deeply spiritual side to my veganism, one that feels natural and harmonious with the original vision of Eden and the ideals of Christianity. But as this church sign shows (left), it's popular to make fun of vegans. More than that, the morality of veganism—advancing fairness and justice—is lost on many, especially those you least expect who advocate charity and goodwill. I wrote to the Rose Hill Church in response to their sign:

I realize you're just trying to be funny and that it's trendy to mock vegans, but many of us see nonhuman animals as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and in doing so, we choose not to exploit, abuse, and murder them. These messages are not harmless and support a speciesist and abusive belief system that promotes ill will toward other living beings. You would not make light of hurting a cat or dog, yet you do make light of hurting and killing cows, who are no different. I prefer to live a life that doesn't impose unnecessary suffering on others. I can't understand how any person or organization, especially a church, chooses to do otherwise.

Pastor Brian North of Rose Hill Church returned:

Thanks for your feedback on our sign . . . I don’t think our sign guy realized it’s trendy to mock vegans. I know I didn’t. Regardless, we apologize for our insensitivity. It certainly wasn’t our intent to offend anyone but simply have fun with words. We will be more sensitive about these kinds of things in the future. Thanks again.

I appreciated his response; however, Pastor North ignored the central petition of my complaint, so I concluded:

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I care less, however, about any insensitivity to vegans than I care about what the message means for the treatment of other animals. Any offense I took pales in comparison to the offenses committed daily against those nonhumans who have the hopeless misfortune to be labeled "food" or "steak." Through abject violence, these living, feeling beings are turned into commodities. We pay slaughterhouse workers to do our bidding and to carry out our dirty work. It's something we like to forget. The message on your sign was just another attempt to trivialize and distance ourselves from our contribution to needless cruelty and exploitation. We like to say we love animals, but we don't. Sadly, our actual behaviors rarely live up to our spoken values.

Every year around the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi (Oct. 4), many churches hold a special service to "bless the animals," opening their doors to both parishioners and their pets. This year, nonhuman visitors to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan included a large tortoise, horse, cow, and camel, among many others.

"If you bless an animal, does that mean it has a soul, and if it has a soul, does that mean you shouldn’t eat it?" asked photographer Dina Litovsky, who took photos of the event for the New York Times. Litovsky, who eats flesh occasionally, admitted to a "conflicted relationship with meat."

Most humans are raised as speciesists and taught to believe that other animals are inherently inferior. It is not surprising, therefore, that their love for some nonhumans raises moral concerns about their eating others. Bishop Clifton Daniel, dean of the cathedral, replied cavalierly to these genuine concerns: "Yes, animals and all living things carry some aspect of God's image. And no, this did not preclude eating them."

How convenient!

What the bishop fails to acknowledge is what has to transpire for nonhuman animals to be turned into consumable merchandise: a lot of awful and disturbing things that he and very few others care to admit or acknowledge as they casually sit down to eat them. Furthermore, eating the flesh, milk, and eggs of other animals is unnecessary for optimum human health, so this captivity, pain, and death we subject other animals to is completely gratuitous and self-indulgent. How can our voluntary contribution to such avoidable bloodshed be pleasing to God? Or to us, for that matter?

In his scholarly work, Disciples: How Jewish Christianity Shaped Jesus and Shattered the Church, Keith Akers examined the movement that preceded Jesus and formed both him and his disciples. The Ebionites and Nazarenes rejected war, wealth, and animal sacrifices, while espousing simplicity, nonviolence, and vegetarianism. "Vegetarianism was more than just an optional way to self-improvement," wrote Akers; "it was a necessity for Godly living." Despite the injection of fish into certain passages of the Gospels, there is strong evidence that both Jesus and his brother James were vegetarians, as well as John the Baptist, who most likely did not eat insects (locusts) but locust beans from the widely available carob tree, also known as St. John's bread.

In spite of heartfelt intentions, the "blessing of the animals" is performed for the benefit of parishioners and the church; it is not carried out in the best interests of their nonhuman friends, who probably prefer to remain "home" or in their natural habitat than be transported to and paraded around an unfamiliar and unsuitable place that's loud and filled with strange smells and faces. (See photo of the poor tortoise on the cart.) I imagine this experience is traumatic for most of them. But what about the millions of nonhumans trapped in cages of their own filth and excrement, who are sick and filled with fear, waiting to be slaughtered? Who thinks of them? What are churches and their parishioners doing for them?

If you ask most people whether it's generally acceptable to unnecessarily hurt other animals, they would answer "no, it is not." Yet, that is exactly what they do every day. For now, it's still socially acceptable to manipulate the reproduction of nonhumans for their eggs and milk and slaughter them for their flesh, so we rarely question it. This indifference ensures that some nonhumans remain outside our moral and social purview. But whether we concede to our participation in such atrocities against other animals, we still bear moral responsibility for them. The "blessing of the animals" is indicative of our attempts to rationalize our self-contradictory beliefs—our claim to "love animals" even while we continue to oppress them. Instead of being honest with ourselves, we excuse our cruel choices and delegate the gruesome task of killing to others.

“Do I think I’ll meet my animals in heaven?” Bishop Daniel pondered. “Surely they’ve made sacrifices and given us great joys. I can’t imagine that their sacrifice goes unnoticed by God.”

What "sacrifice" is Bishop Daniel referring to? The sacrifice of domestication, the sacrifice of their bodies and their lives? His comment sounds primitive, like something a nineteenth century Southern plantation owner might have said about his slaves.

One thing is certain, however. Nonhumans do not willingly "sacrifice" their lives for our use—their lives are taken. Anyone who is willing to confront what takes place in a slaughterhouse will discover that the individuals who are dragged into these factories of death fight very hard for their lives. If anything, I believe their entry into heaven is more assured than our own.

But the bishop is right about one thing. I don't believe these "sacrifices" go unnoticed by God. In Luke 12:6, Jesus reminds us, "Yet not one sparrow is forgotten by God."

How Do I Go Vegan?

A Titanic Mindset for a Doomed Planet

2018-09-20T12:31:00.002-04:00

The New Jersey office where I work will likely be under water in less than twenty years. When I mentioned this to a coworker, she just smiled and walked away.

"Long-term disaster is now the best case scenario" wrote Nathaniel Rich in "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change." The planet is warming much more quickly than climate models predicted. It is now very probable that global temperatures will increase to 3.5 degrees by 2035 and may possibly warm to 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, according to NASA.

In the past two million years it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees and yet we stand to do it in just one century, a rate of warming that is extremely unusual and at least 20 times faster. Already the oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up prompting one meteorologist to describe it as "scary."

The writing has been on the wall for some time, but it continues to get pushed under the rug for many reasons, not the least of which is apathy. There are the proponents of economic-growth-at-all-costs. There are the climate deniers, deregulation diehards, and the human extremists. And there are those who nullify the moral depravity of exploiting and consuming the bodies and fluids of other animals, which happens to contribute mightily to our and our planet's woes.

The numbers speak for themselves. A recent analysis of life on Earth published by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America showed that humans are directly attributable for the deaths of 83 percent of all non-domesecrated nonhuman animals, as well as half of all plants.

We have replaced these free-living beings with tormented captives. Now 70 percent of all birds on Earth consist primarily of enslaved chickens and turkeys, while 60 percent of all mammals comprise mostly of captive cows, pigs, and goats. We murder 60 billion of these birds and mammals and trillions of sea animals annually just so we can needlessly eat them.

Our changing planet has been so impacted by humans in such a short amount of geologic time that scientists have coined this epoch the Anthropocene—the age of humans. Human overpopulation, farming, logging, development, resource depletion, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the sixth mass extinction in roughly 540 million years. Half of Earth's nonhuman animals have already died in the last 50 years and many species will become extinct by the end of this century, to say nothing of the individuals within these species who will lose their lives.

Professor Ron Milo from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the work published by the National Academy of Sciences, reiterated our monstrous influence on the natural world and at least one step all of us can take immediately—adopt a vegan diet. "Our dietary choices have a vast effect on the habitats of animals, plants, and other organisms," he said.

He's right. Raising other animals for their flesh, milk, and eggs has caused worldwide pollution and soil erosion, and is responsible for converting one-third of the earth's surface to desert. It also consumes much of our land and most of the world's depleting fresh water supply, polluting what is remaining with excrement, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and hormones. From feed to fertilizer, to refrigeration and transport, enormous amounts of fossil fuels are needed to power the nonhuman flesh, milk, and egg industries, making these enslavement cartels one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

"I would hope people would take this [work] as part of their world view of how they consume," Professor Milo said. And yet Milo went on to admit, almost contritely, that he has failed to commit himself to a vegan diet. "I have not become vegetarian . . . but I do take the environmental impact into my decision making, so it helps me think, do I want to choose beef or poultry or use tofu instead?"

And therein lies the problem. As dire as things are, even when we know what the right thing to do is (both ethically and environmentally), we still don't do it, which is disheartening (especially coming from a scientist who knows the facts), and doesn't bode well for our future and the future of all life on Earth.

Rich found a common principle: "Human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations."

According to Rich, thirty years ago we had a chance to put policies and actions in place to forestall climate change but there was little political will to overcome competing short term self-interests . . . like making money. The inevitable has caught up to us and thus far, economic concerns and personal pleasure (if you can call eating the babies, milk, and ovum of other animals pleasurable) still trump environmental disaster even though we stand to lose a lot more than just money and our affinity for flesh.

Our policies are as self-centered and myopic as we are. For example, the NJ Shore will one day be a thing of the past, but that hasn't stopped state and local governments from wasting billions of dollars to "restore the shore" even though that money could be better used elsewhere. In spite of the menace of Hurricane Sandy and hurricanes that have taken place since then, there has been rapid coastal development. Many local governments, in cahoots with developers, fuel this insanity. The Lofts Pier Village in Long Branch, NJ, (a Kushner Companies project, as in Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law) offers a 30-year tax abatement to buyers of million dollar beach condominiums so they can enjoy lower property taxes at the expense of everyone else. People continue to move to places that are likely to end up disaster areas and then taxpayers foot the bill for programs that help people rebuild in these same high-risk locations. Stephen M. Strader, an assistant professor in the geography and environment department at Villanova University, refers to this folly as disaster amnesia.

"I'm not waiting for the next Sandy," said Roman Grinshpun, 40, who recently moved to a flood-prone area in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, even after his previous building was flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
"I don’t think it’ll ever happen."

Simple forgetfulness is too easy a scapegoat; immediate self-gratification seems to be the name of the game. This kind of mindset, this arrogance, is analogous to that which compelled people to believe the RMS Titanic couldn't/wouldn't sink.

It's a surprisingly common attitude even within families. For many, their own children's future isn't reason enough to make the necessary changes to preserve the planet for them. The majority keep spending and consuming and devouring more and more. As a childless, vegan, environmentalist, it's ironic that my choices are doing more to help preserve the planet for other children than some of their own parent's choices.

Nonhuman oppression and climate change are interconnected, human-created atrocities. There are parallels not just between these two grave injustices but between the mindsets that allow them to happen. We've identified the problems; we're just lacking the personal and political wills to enforce the solutions. But there is a price to be paid for such obstinacy.

Check out Climate Central's interactive map to see what these temperature increases will mean for flood-prone areas around the world.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Separating Families of Any Kind is Wrong

2018-08-14T16:16:00.004-04:00

A friend and I were lamenting the injustice of President Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. Even though the policy was later reversed, it will have residual negative effects for those families (many who still remain separated), as well as the United States. For my friend, the horror of seeing families being torn apart conjured up harrowing stories and images of other animals enduring the same and worse.

Humans are not the only species to experience closely connected bonds between mother and child. Cows, like many other mammals, are known for their deep maternal instincts. Human supremacists, however, resist acknowledging that nonhumans have thoughts, feelings, and genuine relationships because empathy and exploitation are mutually exclusive. A willingness to relate to other animals is often dismissed as anthropomorphism.

"There are a number of very valid arguments against anthropomorphizing the creatures with whom we share this world, not least of which is that their inner lives deserve to be evaluated on their terms—not ours," wrote Susan Casey in The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us about Tahlequah, a whale who mourned her deceased daughter by carrying her body for seventeen days. "At times, interpreting their behavior through a human lens might be misleading, silly or even harmful. But at other times—and they occur more often than science would care to admit—perceiving ourselves in these others is exactly the right response. When an animal’s emotional state is obvious to anyone with eyes and a heart."

Clarabelle had been deeply scarred by the loss of her previous children. Clarabelle isn't an immigrant; she's a cow who had been confined at a cow-milk factory. Her milk had been waning so her enslaver decided she wasn't worth keeping alive anymore. A sanctuary heard about her plight and took her in only to discover that she had secretly given birth. Clarabelle had hidden her newborn in a nearby patch of tall grass in fear of another baby being stolen from her.

Dr. Holly Cheever, a former veterinarian, relayed another story about a pregnant cow who gave birth to twins. Knowing that her enslaver would take away her babies as he did many times before, the mother took only one calf back and kept the other calf out in the pasture, hoping her enslaver wouldn't notice. When he realized she was carrying less milk than usual (because she was feeding her calf), he found the baby and took him away, too.

The way in which racism impedes people from identifying with other races is similar to the way that culturally indoctrinated speciesism inhibits people from relating to their fellow earthlings. We often intellectualize our perceived superiority to excuse our perpetuating wrongs against others.

People often take offense when nonhumans are compared to humans. "Allow me to make a point of clarification. Humans are animals," noted Christopher-Sebastian McJetters in "Slavery. It's Still a Thing." "This is not a comparison of human animals to nonhuman animals. This is a comparison of like systems of oppression. Whether talking about white humans and brown ones or horses and pigs, slavery is an abuse of power. . . . At the root, most of us are insulted because we feel like we're better than another group based on physical distinctions. This is discrimination. When one group of humans does it to another group of humans, we call it racism. When humans do it to nonhumans, this is called speciesism."

The fact that many political writers and pundits compared Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy to treating immigrants "like animals" only speaks to this pervasive inequality. Our exploitation and abuse of nonhuman animals is so commonplace and acceptable that we use it as a barometer to compare other forms of exploitation and abuse.

"The barbarity of American slavery should be recalled more often . . . It was the grief of losing one’s child, being raped, beaten, tortured and separated from your own language, family and friends at a whim. It was a system that normalized and codified its everyday brutality. It was life in constant fear and punishing, exacting labor. And it was completely legal," said Khadijah Costley White in a New York Times op-ed. White was referring to oppressed humans in the age of Trump, still everything she described afflicts our nonhuman brothers and sisters today.

"While human slavery at least was always deemed wrong by large segments of the human population, the vast animal abuse system hardly stirs controversy, although it afflicts living beings with feelings, emotions, and families—sentient beings with no less moral right than humans to live unmolested on this planet," wrote Anteneh Roba in "Injustice Everywhere" in Circles of Compassion.

Cows used for their milk are raped and artificially inseminated to keep them constantly pregnant and lactating throughout their lifetimes. They are generally separated from their calves within the first few hours after giving birth, which has traumatic short-term and long-term physical, emotional, and psychological effects.

In a Wired article about the emotional lives of cows, Mary Bates learned that calves who are allowed to stay with their mothers after birth develop a strong bond that slowly wanes as they grow older and are weaned at about eight months of age. (It's worth noting that humans are the only species that chooses to consume the milk of other animals, and the only one to do so over the course of their lifespan!)

According to Daniel Weary, an applied animal biologist at the University of British Columbia, abrupt separation and weaning, which occurs on typical cow-milk facilities, is distressing for both calf and cow. "The calves will engage in repetitive crying and become more active," he said, "and sometimes you'll see a decline in their willingness to eat solid food." See video here:

According to Marina von Keyserlingk, also a professor at the University of British Columbia, high rates of sickness and death observed in both calves and cows after birth arise because the cow is taken away from her baby.

Weary found that cows became anxious and depressed after separation just as they do after they are de-horned, a common yet ghastly procedure whereby a cow's horns (the sensitive tissue that protrudes from their skulls) are burned off using hot irons or caustic chemicals. Cows born with one or more extra nipples suffer further amputations so that their breasts are better fitted to milking machines.

Some 3,000 human children were separated from their parents after Trump initiated his "zero-tolerance" policy. Some 39 million cows and calves are separated, tortured, and killed each year in the US. Daughters are doomed to repeat the same fate as their mothers, while sons get sent off to the veal industry and are killed before they reach six months of age. Eventually, they all end up as flesh for human hedonists.

By failing to recognize rights-denied nonhumans as persons innately equal to ourselves with similar feelings, wants, and needs, we humans bring harm to ourselves and the rest of world. That tribalism that Trump is so fond of, that destructive us-vs-them thinking is what racists, sexists, and speciesists thrive on. Nonhumans, like immigrants, don't belong to our tribe, the thinking goes, so we can do what we want to them.

"Establishing a hierarchy of oppression only serves to help the oppressor," McJetters concluded. "The better narrative—the stronger narrative—is in choosing to seek freedom for everyone. Otherwise, we're only fighting for the right to oppress someone else. Solidarity is the key to establishing equality. Division only perpetuates more tyranny.

Dr. Martin Luther King once intoned that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Tearing apart immigrant families who are trying to better their lives and escape violence is a crime, but so is the separation, mutilation, incarceration, and murder of countless nonhuman persons. And while we may have very little control over what happens to immigrant families beyond supporting progressive candidates, we do have a say over what happens to nonhuman families through the everyday choices we make. We each can adopt a vegan way of life that precludes the eating, wearing, and using of other animals, and we can ask legislators to enact laws that give nonhuman animals the rights they deserve—equal protection under the law.

"There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it," wrote J. M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello.

Which one are you?

The sooner we realize the interconnectedness of all living beings and the intersectionality of nonhuman and human discrimination, the closer we will be to creating a more just world.

HowDoIGoVegan.com

Frogs in Peril

2018-07-17T15:01:00.000-04:00

by guest writer Matt Ellerbeck, frog advocate and conservationist

Frogs are in terrible trouble. Around 30 percent of all the world's frog species are threatened with extinction! Many human-induced hazards are killing frogs and contributing to their decline.

Habitat destruction is largely responsible for the loss of frogs. Areas that were once suitable for these nonhumans to live have now been destroyed. The areas that still remain are often polluted with hazardous substances like chemicals, oils, gasoline, and pesticides.

Habitats are often isolated and cut off from one another by roads and highways that now slice through them. Countless frogs are killed on roads and highways every year when they are hit by vehicles.

A 2006 study from Carleton University in Ottawa found heavy traffic to be a larger threat to frogs than habitat loss.

Sadly, many frogs who are migrating to mating and egg-laying sites must cross over roads to reach such areas where many of the maturer individuals are killed. This greatly limits their reproductivity and makes it incredibly hard for various frog species to rebound.

Being struck and killed by vehicles is not the only threat that roads create for frogs. Chemical run-off from vehicles contaminate roadside ditches and pools. These sites are often utilized by frogs for mating and birthing.

Climate change is among the most serious threats that frogs face. Increased temperatures, changing humidity levels, desertification, and droughts wreak havoc on frogs as they do other animals. Frogs are generally adapted to moist and cooler habitats and may require very specific conditions to thrive, therefore, changes to these conditions can be life threatening. Since frogs can live in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats, shifts in these environments results in dying frogs and dwindling frog species. Changes in climate can also effect the forming and availability of critical habitat features such as vernal pools (utilized as mating and birthing/egg-laying sites). Certain frog species have small natural ranges and within these ranges show fidelity to over-wintering sites. Thus, they have limited opportunities for movement if their habitats are degraded. Climate change is often cited as one of the reasons why frogs are disappearing from otherwise pristine and protected habitats.

Disease is another issue plaguing frogs. Chytridiomycosis is an often fatal infectious skin disease that seriously affects frogs. The condition is caused by the chytrid fungus—Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd. It has been devastatingly deadly to frogs. Bd has been found on all of the continents where frogs reside and may be responsible for the greatest disease-caused loss of life and biodiversity in recorded history (Skerratt et al. 2007).

Chytridiomycosis has been linked to many frog deaths and extinctions of frog species in western North America, Central America, South America, eastern Australia, East Africa, and in parts of the Caribbean. The fungus is capable of causing sporadic deaths in some and 100 percent mortality in others. Sadly, no effective measure is known to control the disease in natural environments. Ranavirus is another affliction affecting frogs. The pathogen causes severe bleeding of their internal organs.

Numerous frogs are also seized from their homes by humans who exploit them as bait for fish, for the lucrative pet trade, for use in vivisection, and as a delicacy food. These misuses account for millions and millions of frogs who are captured and killed annually! David Bickford from the National University of Singapore estimates that between 180 million to over a billion frogs are killed each year just so humans can eat them.

The aforementioned diseases affecting amphibians are also being spread throughout various groups and to other previously healthy animals via these unethical trades and uses. When sick nonhuman animals are abducted from their natural habitats and then shipped and sold in other locations they bring their diseases with them.

Myriad frogs are being lost each year through the combination of human-caused pollution, development, exploitation, abuse, and climate change. Their unnatural decline cannot rebound on its own, which is why the protection of frogs, like so many other animals, is necessary. Without rights and assistance, many simply will not survive the onslaught we have brought to bear on them.

To learn how you can help, visit www.saveallfrogs.com

The Bigoted Vegans Among Us

2018-06-27T13:09:00.002-04:00

Our world is awash in hatred and no one seems to be immune, not even vegans.

Having learned about the interconnectedness of all systematic forms of oppression and their root in nonhuman exploitation, it confounds me how some vegans can advocate for nonhumans while disparaging fellow humans over race, sex, class, religion, etc. It's like "shelters" for cats and dogs that hold fundraising events where they serve up the bodies of pigs, chickens, and cows. How can anyone who abhors the oppression of one group support the persecution of another?

"To see real change for nonhuman animals, advocates must challenge inequality for all," wrote Corey Wrenn in "Status Contamination: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and Intersectional Liberation."

Earlier this year, two former senior officials at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) were accused of sexually harassing employees for some ten years. "According to interviews, emails and an internal document reviewed by POLITICO, [Paul] Shapiro suggested a female employee should 'take one for the team' by having sex with a donor, sent pornography and lewd emails to male employees, and discussed with colleagues his sexual philosophies, such as having as many sexual partners as possible." According to another employee who attended a work trip in 2006, former CEO Wayne Pacelle "asked her to take off her clothes and perform oral sex, and asked her whether he could masturbate in front of her."

At HSUS, Shapiro and Pacelle apparently sought to reduce the objectification of nonhumans as things to be used and consumed all the while objectifying their own female colleagues as sexual playthings to be used and consumed.

Carol J. Adams, author of the Sexual Politics of Meat, referred to Shapiro as a perpetrator. "You can be an anti-feminist and be in the vegan movement," she said in an interview with Erin Red for T.O.F.U. magazine. "I think some people are willing to deal with their privilege over other animals, but not deal with their privilege over women or people of color. They don't want to examine that privilege."

When Colin Kaepernick chose to take a knee during the national anthem at NFL games in protest of racial injustice and police violence, I supported him. As protests expanded to include other NFL players, I noticed the anger, hatred, and racism it aroused, including nationalism and militarism—all cloaked as patriotism.

A vegan (and Trump supporter) responded negatively to Kaepernick's actions on Facebook, to which I responded. Not only was I stunned by the misogynist hate lobbed at me by his friends but, what's worse, this particular vegan ignored their comments (below) until I called him out on it, and then he only did so superficially.

Another time I joined a group called Vegans for Jesus, assuming once again that it would be one of inclusiveness and social justice, but was quickly met with other vegans' concerns over the "gay lobby."

Most of us think of a vegan "community" but the fact is that vegans are simply many individuals who identify with veganism (some of whom are not even vegan!) and who are susceptible to bigotry and ignorance. Those who are less secure and who benefit from the status quo (speciesism, racism, sexism, etc.) do not want to relinquish their power or see their place in society disrupted.

What many vegans fail to realize is that—in addition to nonhumans—women, children, immigrants, the poor, and other vulnerable populations are part of the argument for ethical veganism, not against it.

A few months ago a picture of a slaughterhouse worker punctured in the face by one of the tools he used to stab food-industry captives was circulated across social media. Some people found the grotesque image humorous and deserving. I found it horrifying. I surely don't condone what slaughterhouse workers do, but I know that they tend to be people with the fewest opportunities.

The enslavement and slaughter food industry has a history of exploiting nonhumans, as well as humans of color. The vast majority of slaughterhouse laborers are immigrants, undocumented workers, and refugees from Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa who take the least desirable jobs offering low wages, grueling hours, and dangerous work conditions. Slaughterhouse work is among the most deadliest and injurious, and requires that workers be a witness to and/or participate in daily violence.

"The line speed on the kill floor is approximately three hundred cattle per hour," Timothy Pachirat revealed in Every Twelve Seconds. It is hard to imagine anyone who would want to work in an environment slitting another being's throat every twelve seconds for ten hours a day while wading in ankle-deep blood.

The pressure to kill as many nonhumans as fast as possible has forced some slaughterhouse workers to wear adult diapers at work. A new US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found, among other abuses, that slaughterhouse workers are often denied bathroom breaks so as not to disrupt productivity (killing).

President Trump doesn't need to build a wall. Iron-clad walls already exist that sever the contemporary front office spaces from the blood, feces, and fetuses of the slaughterhouses behind them. "This wall both demarcates and enables the volatile combinations of citizenship, race, class, and education that separate the industrialized slaughterhouse's zones of privilege from its zones of production," observed Pachirat. "Those who benefit at a distance, delegating this terrible work to others while disclaiming responsibility for it, [bear] more moral responsibility, particularly in contexts like the slaughterhouse, where those with the fewest opportunities in society perform the dirty work."

Racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia among activists are also prevalent in single-issue campaigns such as those targeting the Yulin Dog Meat Festival and the eating of dogs in Asia. Dr. Linda Alvarez, Co-Founder and Director of the Vegan Advocacy Initiative, attended one such protest in California and watched as a participant yelled "You're sick! You're sick people!" at Asia bystanders ("Up and Downs: Facing Racism in the Animal Rights/Vegan Community," Issue 12, T.O.F.U. magazine).

Not only are these campaigns racist, but they are speciesist, too, insist Gary Francione and Anna Charlton in Advocate for Animals! These protests imply that eating dogs is morally worse than eating any other animal. Furthermore, many of the people who support these welfarist campaigns are not vegan, so they condone the abuse and exploitation of other animals; they are not promoting veganism at these events, only the idea that eating dogs is wrong.

Something else I had been unaware of was just how common fat-shaming is within vegan circles. I suppose it reflects the same amount of fat-shaming in society as a whole; still, I thought vegans would behave better than the hoi polloi.

"Animals have always been who I lean on for support. . . ." wrote Chelsea Lincoln in "Unconditional Compassion: The Need for Fat Acceptance in the Animal Rights Community in the Book of T.O.F.U. "When it comes to humans, however, I have always felt I was looked at and treated differently because I am fat. I have been discriminated against and even experienced this prejudice within the 'animal rights' community. I do not fit the stereotype of what a vegan looks like and have been told that I am a bad vegan example. . . . Thin privilege does exist."

Like white supremacists, there are also human supremacists. "Human supremacists resist applying the same vocabulary to humans and nonhumans," wrote Joan Dunayer in Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. "Separate lexicons help maintain a false dichotomy that bolsters human conceit and soothes human conscience. The greater the apparent psychological distance between nonhuman and human animals, the more secure humans' assumption of species superiority and uniqueness. This assumption provides a rationale for exploitation."

Intersectionality recognizes that different forms of oppression interact and strengthen one another. "We can and should identify the various forms of oppression that catalyze into injurious outcomes, but we cannot and should not try to treat them as separate forces operating independently of each other," wrote Pattrice Jones in The Oxen at the Intersection.

Ethical, intersectional veganism can appear radical and destabilizing, which makes people anxious. But "why are we trying to accommodate veganism to a dominant world in which that dominance includes oppressing other[s]?" asked Adams. "It's irreconcilable."

In response to the latest sexual harassment allegations at HSUS, James LaVeck and Jenny Stein wrote in Domination Games, "It is time to recognize and support the leadership potential of people of all gender identities, races, religions, abilities, sexual orientations, and ages, and to take special care to include people from less privileged backgrounds and other underrepresented groups in our movement. It is also time to recognize that membership in a particular group does not make one immune to power addiction and abusive behavior."

Ethical vegans typically can't make it through a single day without being flooded with images and accounts of society's prejudices, injustices, and violence against nonhuman animals. As we work toward nonhuman liberation, we mustn't ignore other forms of oppression and we certainly shouldn't contribute to them. After all, better human beings make better activists.

Bigotry graphic provided by VeganShift.org.

Intersectionality by Vegan Voices of Color

U.S. Taxpayers Forced to Pay $38+ Billion a Year to Kill Other Animals

2018-05-23T14:00:00.000-04:00

A cat used in deadly experiments inside USDA laboratory.

Follow the money!

It's a commonly heard phrase that originated with the Watergate scandal. We hear it a lot today in reference to the investigation into President Trump's ties to Russia. But the popular phrase also applies to the nonhuman-abuse-industrial-complex. If you want to cut through the lies and deceptions to get at the truth, just follow the money.

Over the centuries we have built an entire economy and culture around the enslavement and exploitation of nonhuman animals. Working to end this grave injustice is as much an economic issue as it is a matter of political and social will. We simply cannot ignore the financial incentives that continue to drive nonhuman oppression.

Successful operations, whether they be military or social, usually require besieging the opposition on multiple fronts. Likewise, nonhuman advocates have many battlegrounds. In addition to advancing veganism and nonhuman legal rights, it is essential that we also deprive nonhuman enslavement institutions of their financial enticements. Nonhumans do not yet have legal rights in large part because too many sectors of society profit off their exploitation and deaths.

"People who purport to act on behalf of nonhuman animals must be urged to do much more than change their shopping, eating, etc. . . . citizens have to make time for policy," said David Cantor of Responsible Policies for Animals.

In his 2013 book, Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon found that $38.4 billion of United States taxpayer monies are used to further the nonhuman flesh, milk, and egg industries. Here's what else he found:

63 percent of federal and state government subsidies go to promoting nonhuman flesh, milk, and eggs, while less than 2 percent go to fruits and vegetables.

Taxpayer subsidies create artificially low prices for nonhuman-derived "foods" that do not reflect the real costs to produce them, thereby encouraging Americans to consume greater amounts. For example, if we were to account for the full burden of a Big Mac—the abuse, environmental and health care costs, etc.—a Big Mac would actually cost $12.

A significant portion of the nearly $1 trillion in annual health care and lost productivity costs related to just three diseases—cancer, diabetes, and heart disease—are directly linked to the consumption of nonhuman-derived "foods."

Nonhumans bred for their flesh, milk, and eggs are routinely fed 75 percent (28 million pounds) of the US market of antibiotics to bolster their abnormal growth and prevent imprisoned-induced diseases.

Nonhuman flesh, milk, and egg industries now rank with mining, oil production, and electricity generation as one of the most ecologically damaging to the planet. The EPA found that groundwater sources in one-third of US states are contaminated with urine and feces from factory farms.

Subsidies used to exploit nonhumans for their flesh, milk, and eggs originated in 1929 during the Great Depression and were quickly taken over by large corporations thriving on government handouts. Today these unethical and unhealthy industries collect $251 billion annually. So why are we still supporting them?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and other alleged conservatives bloviate about the need for entitlement reform. How about addressing entitlements to the flesh, milk, and egg cartels? If politicians were really serious about cutting the federal deficit they would start by eradicating this $38 billion taxpayer slush fund.

Matthew Scully, a conservative journalist and former senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush, agrees. "Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones and antibiotics."

The Farm Bill, which is expected to be reintroduced this year, sounds harmless enough but it sets the agenda for future subsidies. Hundreds of special interest groups and lobbyists with ties to the food-industry enslavement and slaughter business wheel and deal to sway lawmakers. Simon found that members of Congress who received donations from the cow milk industry were almost twice as likely to vote for dairy price supports as those who received no money. Moreover, the greater the amount of money a member received, the more likely they were to endorse industry-friendly legislation.

"It is certainly no secret that governments and big business work together to make meat and animal products widely available, convenient, and inexpensive," wrote Marla Rose in "Why We Eat Meat (VegNews, March/April 2018). ". . . this federal interference ripples, affecting everything from school lunches to hospital food, and results in a profound impact on how we make sense of what we eat."

For example, checkoff programs use monies collected from the cost of particular items to fund marketing programs for those items. As Simon reported, "With annual promotional funds of $389 million, the dairy industry enjoys nearly three times the checkoff spending of all fruit and vegetable producers combined."

I can't think of one marketing slogan for vegetables, but the following advertising gimmicks generated by checkoff programs are quite familiar to many of us:

Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.

Pork. The Other White Meat.

Milk. It Does a Body Good.

Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) is one such checkoff program. A marketing arm of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), DMI teamed up with Domino’s in 2009 to rescue the company from declining sales by using $12 million to develop and market a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese.

And taxpayers are not just footing the bill to bolster the sale of nonhuman bodies and babies for their flesh, milk, and eggs. The National Institutes of Heath (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Wildlife Services are just some of the many government agencies funneling billions more to poison, torture, rape, kill, and otherwise use nonhumans for various products and services. State agencies are no different. For example, the governments of New York and New Jersey use taxpayer money to subsidize gambling and tracks for injurious horse racing.

White Coat Waste Project recently exposed a USDA laboratory (photo above) that uses taxpayer dollars to breed 100 kittens a year in order to feed them Toxoplasma-infected raw meat, collect their feces, and then kill them. While many rightly find the killing of kittens using taxpayer money to be "sickening and abusive," less Americans are equally outraged by the billions spent on the systematic killing of trillions of nonhuman persons for "food" every year.

The United States Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC) is just one of 41 taxpayer-funded USDA laboratories that conducts Frankensteinian genetic experiments on nonhumans to increase their numbers for the flesh, milk, and egg industries. Pigs and cows endure starvation and grisly procedures that cause them to give birth to deformed, dying, and dead piglets and calves. A 2015 New York Times report disclosed their horrors at the USMARC, however, unlike the recent exposé involving cats, this one received little public attention or backlash.

"Demand is a symptom of animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice, generated by the industries and their institutional allies—the land-grant universities, the US and state departments of agriculture, the news industry, and others," explained Cantor. "Those forces are far more powerful in maintaining the industries and perpetually manufacturing demand for their products."

If we believe that nonhuman animals matter morally—that they are not commodities or things for us to use—then going vegan is the very least we can do as individuals. Doing so also aligns our behaviors with our values. Collectively, we must also strive to provide nonhumans with legal rights in conjunction with removing the financial rewards that keep nonhumans from being recognized as persons instead of property.

As a consumer activist, I am very selective about what I support through my purchases and whom I do business with, and yet I have no control over how my income is spent by the government. I do not want my money sanctioning nonhuman slavery any more than I would want it to sanction human slavery. The Vietnam War spawned a movement of war tax resisters. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, who withheld his poll tax in protest of the Mexican-American War and the expansion of human slavery, maybe it's time ethical vegans do the same and withhold their taxes in protest of nonhuman slavery and our government's direct involvement in perpetuating it.

Follow the money and you will find that everyone pays a steep price for the abuse and injustice we impose on food-industry captives and others snared in the nonhuman-abuse-industrial-complex. It is vital that we challenge these institutions socially, politically, and economically.

If our elected officials refuse to terminate these subsidies then we should elect those who will. Such a drastic measure as not paying our taxes, on the other hand, will give new meaning to the expression "drain the swamp," but it may be needed to finally begin to undermine and bankrupt a corrupt capitalist system that puts profits above all life.

Tell your federal and state elected officials to cease using your money to subsidize agencies, industries, and universities that enslave, exploit, and slaughter other animals, and to ensure that federal and state agency secretaries no longer come from these same destructive industries.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Where Are the Rights in the "Animal Rights Movement"?

2018-04-12T16:25:00.000-04:00

When Lisa Vanderpump of Real Housewives fame and a nonvegan restaurateur is said by the New York Times to be championing "animal rights" for having dogs and running a dog rescue, you know there is a problem.

For most nonhuman advocates, the term "animal rights" has lost all meaning and efficacy. The phrase has been denigrated by a self-described "animal rights movement" and has been co-opted by anyone and everyone imaginable, from those who promote veganism to those who simply "love animals" like cats and dogs.

When we speak of "animal rights" (AR) it usually has absolutely nothing to do with the actual attainment of legal rights for nonhumans. This is regrettable because doing so only hurts those we're trying to help.

Activists and organizations alike misuse "animal rights" when applying it to the context of treatment and the lessening of cruelty and suffering. This only adds to the confusion and detracts from the real work being done to advance nonhuman rights. Similarly to the way veganism has been watered down by consumerists, fads, and those who want the label without the effort, so has "animal rights."

"Many animal advocates mistakenly think nonhuman animals have rights which 'animal rights' organizations work to enforce. The reality is that nonhuman animals have no rights," said David Cantor of Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA). "Despite massive injustice toward nonhuman animals, the first wave of the 'animal rights movement' has made no progress these past three decades because it is not a rights movement."

A large part of the blame can be attributed to nonprofit groups that encourage and financially benefit from this muddiness. PETA inaccurately advertises itself as "the world's largest animal rights organization" and is therefore falsely portrayed this way by the media.

At last year's misbranded "animal rights conference" an attendee heard PETA President Ingrid Newkirk say that she has long dedicated herself to making PETA synonymous with "animal rights." This is "a little like making the Red Cross synonymous with 'human rights'," quipped Cantor.

According to PETA's website:

PETA's animal rights campaigns include ending fur and leather use, meat and dairy consumption, fishing, hunting, trapping, factory farming, circuses, bull fighting, rodeos, and animal experimentation.

None of these campaigns have anything to do with obtaining rights for nonhumans; rather, they focus on how nonhumans are used. Since nonhumans are considered property under our law—with very few exceptions—they may be used, abused, and exploited however we deem fit. It is important for us to understand this because only rights can empower and protect nonhumans from all kinds of tyranny, including usage.

Mercy for Animals (MFA) also encourages those who want a job in "animal rights" to contact them, despite their work being primarily focused on nonhuman usage. Using double talk, MFA claims to "speak up against cruelty and for compassion." This absurdly includes MFA's endorsement of "cage-free" eggs, and flesh from "crate-free" pigs and cows, as well as Walmart's deceptive "Five Freedoms" program which, ironically, doesn't include actual freedom for its nonhuman slaves.

The weakening and distorting of authentic nonhuman rights advocacy is very problematic for other animals because it fails to address their need for liberation, equality, and self-determination. It further limits the effectiveness of activists who think they're actually doing something to espouse nonhuman rights when they're not.

"The first wave of the 'animal rights movement' has been mired in activities unrelated to establishing rights of new groups of nonhuman persons," wrote Cantor, "and all of the atrocities decried by this first wave of the 'animal rights movement' since the late 1970s persist today, most on a larger scale."

In his Guide to Animal Rights Cantor elaborated: "The current animal-advocacy paradigm—promoting compassion, fighting cruelty to animals, loving animals, promoting veganism—though good in themselves, cannot reduce animal abuse because they do not address its root causes: humanism, speciesism, carnism, pseudoscience, and other false, abuse-promoting beliefs and ideologies and the long-term momentum of animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice—in short, denial of all animals’ equal rights."

Cantor offers a Draft Bill to Establish Rights of All Animals as an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States once human beings embrace nonhuman personhood and recognize the wrongs done to nonhumans as morally unacceptable. Proponents of nonhuman rights can take the first step by signing the draft bill and sharing it with others to raise awareness in public and political spheres.

For the law, "more than all other human forces, directs the progress of events," said poet-author William Allen Butler.

Progress for nonhumans requires rights, but laws not derived from rights—that do not strike at the roots of inequality and oppression—do little for nonhumans. For example, the Humane Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act regulate how nonhumans are used and killed, primarily to increase the economic efficiency of those industries who benefit from their enslavement and slaughter.

"These kinds of statutes and regulations are plainly inadequate and their inadequacy can never be remedied, for they were enacted not to protect the well-being of nonhuman animals, but rather to regulate the manner in which we humans exploit them," wrote Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) President Steven M. Wise in Letter #1 from the Front Lines of the Struggle for Nonhuman Rights: the First 50 Months. "All history demonstrates that even the most fundamental interests of humans can never be adequately protected without legal rights. It is no different for nonhuman animals."

"There's never yet been an animal-rights movement," continued Cantor "because no well-supported activity with a lot of participation has promoted equal rights of all animals the way equal rights of new groups of persons become established—there's only been welfarism, abolitionism, and veganism/consumerism, and none of those comes close to the long process by which humans have gradually been achieving equal rights since 1215 with the Magna Carta."

Unfortunately, many people conflate vegan consumerism and other efforts on behalf of nonhumans with "rights" activism. Even how we speak about other animals is vital to how we see them, treat them, and defend them. They are not an "it" or a "that". Moreover, humans are animals too, so we would do well to stop referring to nonhumans solely as animals, which only underscores the mentality of oppression based on cultural beliefs of inferiority and otherness. Likewise, characterizing any nonhuman advocacy as "rights" activism when rights aren't even a component or consideration only keeps nonhumans in their subordinate state and ever worsening condition.

"The legal 'thinghood' of all nonhumans is the single most important factor preventing humans from vindicating their interests," maintains Wise.

President Abraham Lincoln believed slavery to be a great and immoral wrong. He also observed a corresponding "slavery of the mind" that required broken shackles and freedom of thought. The Declaration of Independence was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. "The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation," wrote Joshua Wolf Shenk in Lincoln's Melancholy. We now recognize "men" to mean all "persons"—not just "white men." Furthermore, we need to recognize that persons are bodies, and not just human bodies. All living persons are born as bodies deserving of the same autonomous pursuits. Animal-abuse culture is the original slave power that conjointly clings to a "slavery of the mind" and beseeches eradication.

Being vegan is the least we can do, but doing so does not bolster the cause of nonhuman rights nor does it end longstanding policies and practices upheld over the centuries by our societies and cultures. While veganism and aid to nonhumans should not be discounted or diminished, rights do not arise for new groups of persons simply because we are kind to them or because we don't buy products that comprise their bodies. When our efforts have little to do with recognizing nonhuman personhood; when we mislabel our endeavors under the banner of "rights" we are creating a distraction and doing a disservice to the fledgling yet legitimate nonhuman rights movement being touted by groups like RPA and Nonhuman Rights Project.

"The popular political imagination doesn't reflect much on how crucial is the difference between having rights and not having them," Cantor wrote me in an email. Since "humans of recent generations in the U.S. and other 'Western democracies' haven't lived under abject tyranny . . . speciesism persists among animal advocates as among everyone else; so few people have considered that promoting less-effective protections than rights such as humans have under the Constitution might doom nonhuman animals to perpetual second-class status. . . . The facts I find most important are that there has never been a reduction in animal abuse in more than 50,000 years, and it has steadily increased (along with the human population, occupation of land, and intensification of technology). . . . Basic rights are crucial for nonhuman animals before there can be any significant and lasting reduction in animal abuse, because as long as humans have rights to them and their natural homes as property and other legal entitlements to them, they will always be subject to the atrocities decried by animal advocates."

Most vegans, activists, and abolitionists are unaware and are not intending to misapply the term "rights," but we are and we must be open to self-correction. This is an opportunity for us to shake the dust off and renew our commitments—to reclaim the "rights" designation with accuracy and authenticity.

"Animal rights is the most radical political proposal in all of human existence, aimed at reversing radical change brought about by animal abuse over thousands of years," wrote Cantor. "Animal-rights advocacy is not for everyone. But everyone who claims to promote animal rights should promote animal rights."

As long as we keep obscuring the meaning of nonhuman rights advocacy and avoid the actual work of securing rights for nonhumans, humans will continue to exploit and oppress nonhumans at will. We can do better. We must do better.

The Untold Victims of Gun Violence

2018-03-13T16:10:00.001-04:00

Hunted Haunt the Hunter
Sue Coe

The recent Parkland, Florida school shooting has raised the specter of gun violence once again. And once again, politicians and pundits alike employ hunting rhetoric to absolve themselves and others of their own contribution to violence.

Almost every discussion following a mass shooting pointedly incorporates what I call the "hunting clause," whereby the purposeful targeting of nonhuman animals is deemed an "appropriate" use of guns in contrast to the inappropriate use of guns to purposefully target human animals. This self-gratifying distinction by which nonhumans are "hunted" whereas nonhumans are "killed" or "murdered" is deeply speciesist and immoral. What's worse is that these same people, who seek to justify their gun ownership for the purpose of slaughtering other animals, brag about teaching their children to do the same.

"Like Texas church shooter Devin Kelley, Nikolas Cruz also had a history of hurting animals. For Kelley it was beating a dog. For Cruz it was a string of reported cruelty that included shooting squirrels and chickens with a pellet gun, trying to get a dog to attack a piglet, jamming sticks into rabbit holes and killing toads. His social media reportedly included photos of dead animals," reported Jessica Scott-Reid in the New York Daily News.

Akin to hunters of humans, hunters of nonhumans also get a thrill from murdering. In a 1996 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer detailing a canned hunt, Rex Perysian, a hunter, was anxious to begin. "I wanna peg one of these babies," he said. The boar Perysian set his sights on writhed and cried out with each shot. After four minutes of hell, she laid down and died. "I was pumpin’, man," Perysian said. After wiping blood from the boar's nose, he lifted her head by the ears for the cameras, and then dropped her head "and bellowed into the woods, boasting that the kill had sexually aroused him." Later, as ranch workers dragged away the corpses, Perysian sang a Miller beer jingle and summed up his enjoyment of hunting for the reporter. ‘‘It's just adrenaline, it’s great," he said. I'm sure Cruz and Kelley experienced similar adrenaline rushes at they aimed at students and churchgoers respectively.

Edward Stack, Dick's Sporting Goods chief executive, who was praised for his decision to remove all assault-style guns from his stores after the Parkland shooting, explained why his company will restrict some gun sales. "We don't want to be part of a mass shooting," he said. But Stack doesn't seem to mind being part of some mass shootings.

"Each year in the U.S., hunters kill more than 125 million nonhuman animals, excluding untold millions killed 'illegally' or left fatally wounded. To preserve their 'sport,' hunters verbally camouflage suffering and death," wrote Joan Dunayer in Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. . . . "To avoid seeing themselves as murderers, hunters apply separate vocabularies to violence against humans and violence against nonhumans. Hunters' guns never should be called 'weapons' but 'firearms,' one hunter exhorts. As expressed by another, a shotgun is a 'weapon capable of savage carnage' when handled in a way that endangers humans but a 'delightful tool' when fired at a nonhuman."

One hunter saw her companion shoot a doe through the neck. "After waiting an hour, the hunters began to follow her trail. Pools of blood marked places where she had collapsed before stumbling on. 'At last we found her. She was dying. She was on her knees and hocks [ankles]. Her ears . . . were sagging. Her head was down. Her nose was in her blood . . . Somehow the doe lurched up. Stumbling, bounding, crashing blindly into the brush,' she disappeared. The hunters never found her. . . ." One hunter "recalls a young buck shot in the spine. Bleating loudly, the buck dragged himself through the snow by his forelegs. One of his hind legs dangled by a tendon. . . ." Another hunter was seen "cutting off the hindquarters [back legs] of a wounded doe while she watched." This is the gratuitous savagery hunters, gun owners, and Second Amendment fanatics defend.

"Civilization is far more dangerous than nature," wrote David Cantor in "Beyond Humanism, Toward a New Animalism" in Circles of Compassion: Connecting Issues of Justice. "Humans . . . demonized certain animals as being inherently unworthy of life. Thus, speciesism became Homo complexus' first harmful invidious distinction, initiating a long series in what would become a violent and oppressive history.

Our lust for blood is ubiquitous. As we are all animals, the leap from nonhuman to human—from one life to another—is a small one. Yet who dare tear away the hobbyist and hunter from his fun . . . from murder and suicide or his macabre collection of weapons and bodies? Depriving others of their lives is a poor rationalization for gun ownership. And who are the mentally ill? A society that encourages the murder of nonhumans for entertainment, food, and sport is indicative of a widespread cultural illness—propped up by greed, patriarchy, and machismo—that thrives on bloodshed and destruction.

In Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict, David A. Nibert noted that for most of human existence, humans lived in peaceful, communal, egalitarian societies with nonhumans. An armed professional warrior or military class arose from domesecration and agricultural society—the exploitation of nonhumans for their flesh and labor and, hence, the wish to keep these nonhumans and other property from raiders. Likewise, the status of men and their brutality increased among those who commandeered manufactured weapons to stalk, capture, or kill other animals.

The failure of the human species to take the lives of all other animals into consideration and to ensure their rights to lead fulfilling lives is incredibly tragic and self-destructive since our own grief, hardship, and demise is directly linked to their abuse, desecration, and deaths.

". . . the weaponed class prevailed, developing into the tyrant class our species still struggles to free itself from today," Cantor explained in Animal Abuse: It's Why We Suffer. . . . "The more status the weaponed class acquired, the more human societies came to depend on animal abuse; the more humans depended on animal abuse, the more they suffered from it themselves."

"A mistake many people make is to think caring about nonhuman animals means not caring about human beings," continued Cantor. "The reality is that nearly all human misery is rooted in animal abuse . . . the vast scope of animal abuse starting hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans started killing off their natural predators and killing nonhuman animals for food, clothing, weapons, tools, and other purposes."

We diminish and deaden our true nature, each other, and our union with the natural world when we condone our reckless, anti-life policies. We do the same when we insist someone is "just" a squirrel, a deer, a cow, a bear, a chicken, an "animal." We accept and tolerate the hunting and killing of other beings—as long as we ourselves are not the hunted—and incorrectly assume the moral universe will look the other way.

Until we accept that it is just as wrong to take the life of a nonhuman as it is to take the life of a human—that the core of our anguish and suffering is inextricably tied to the misery and torment we rain down on every living being—we will keep getting the world we deserve.

Vegan Starter Kit

Vegans Confusing Consumerism With Activism

2018-02-06T14:09:00.000-05:00

Necessity and activism as defined by PETA

An activist lamented the lack of participation at his fur protests: "I'm going to start organizing protests with the heading 'Vegan Food Event.' The numbers would quadruple," he said sarcastically. Another added, "Sad but true. Use 'Fest' too."

VegFests are all the rage and are popping up all over the country. Exposure to vegan foods and nonhuman sanctuaries is beneficial, but these are temperate events meant to peddle goods, not to advocate for the rights and freedom of other animals or inspire political and social activism. Instead of advising people to consume less, they push people to buy more and, in doing so, send the message that veganism is a personal, consumer choice, instead of a moral imperative.

The Tri-State VegFest held in Edison, New Jersey, last summer was sponsored by the Humane League, well known for its welfarist campaigns like persuading universities to switch to "cage-free" eggs. Instead of opposing the enslavement and killing of nonhumans and the violation of their moral rights, such campaigns seek only to make exploited nonhumans more comfortable, and their murders to appear less cruel.

The mastermind behind the NJ Tri-State VegFest was described on the website as "a natural-born entrepreneur" and the event was characterized as being "all about food, community, and entertainment. . ." A friend overheard another vegfest attendee speaking to a cutlery salesperson. "Which knife is best to use with [on] fish?" the guest asked. These functions are not exactly hubbubs of resistance. I'm not suggesting that we don't have vegfests, but I do think we should expect more of them and their participants.

The distinction between vegan activism and consumerism is becoming less and less apparent. Many have turned veganism into a trendy lifestyle, one that people feel they can take or leave whenever the mood strikes or a social affair beckons. Most vegan books and magazines cater to food and advertisers. They address clothing, travel, cosmetics, and other trivial nonsense as opposed to less glamorous topics like education, government policies, and critical thinking. Speciesist language, the animal-industrial complex, nonhuman rights, and other important issues are seldom, if ever, discussed.

Some people are intentionally shying away from using the word "vegan" and opting for "plant-based" instead because they think "vegan" is too controversial and off-putting. In one article, a woman bragged of being aligned with the "modern vegan movement" (?) in which she claimed no interest in nonhuman advocacy. If being content with nonhuman oppression and enslavement—and ashamed of the word "vegan" and the political charge it generates—means being aligned with this "modern vegan movement," then count me out.

Companies like Vaute Couture, which peddles $400 vegan sweaters, detract from ethical veganism and give the false impression that veganism is only for the privileged few. There are vegan gurus and now even a vegan flag, but veganism is not about us, about losing weight, or conspicuous consumption. The quest for nonhuman rights and emancipation does not require that you eat at the coolest vegan restaurant or carry the chicest vegan handbag. In fact, it doesn't require you to buy anything at all.

In "How Amanda Chantal Bacon Perfected the Celebrity Wellness Business" Molly Young noted "...this is what lifestyle gurus do. They insist on a connection between what you buy and who you are. And then they sell you stuff."

A woman on Facebook sent an urgent plea. "I need more AR [Animal Rights] gear," she said. "Spam me with your favorite shirts." At last count, she received recommendations for 19 T-shirts and one pair of slippers. My brief response to her request, connecting our nonstop consumption and subsequent waste and pollution of resources to the destruction of nonhuman lives and habitats, went unheeded.

Vegan or nonvegan, consumer-capitalism is largely driving the destruction of the natural world. Less consumption—not more—should be part of every ethical vegan's mantra.

"We must struggle politically and not merely as 'consumers'—a term which itself undermines our citizenship, our obligation to make policy," said David Cantor of Responsible Policies for Animals.

In "Animal Rights: Remedy to Trumpism" Cantor noted that deregulation and uninhibited capitalism are mainstays of the Trump administration and the radical right. However, both major parties are engines of capitalism and the Biocaust. They both "accept the basic humanist-extremist premises that only human beings are innately entitled to a chance at a fulfilling life; our pursuit of fulfillment needn't take other beings' experience or ecological value into account; our species' population explosion, its rampage over Earth, and its impacts on other animals and the living world are self-justified; and dividing 'the pie' among humans is their only responsibility."

Last year Daiya, the maker of vegan cheeses, sold their company to a Japanese pharmaceutical company that tortures and kills nonhuman persons under the guise of "research." Likewise, other vegan companies have sold out to nonvegan manufacturers—Silk, So Delicious, LightLife, and most recently Field Roast. Companies are not in the business of eliminating nonhuman oppression; rather, they're merely concerned with bolstering consumerism and the economic interests of their proprietors.

"Whilst veganism is a necessary step toward animal liberation, there is a presumption that buying products marked 'vegan' or 'cruelty-free' is the end game of the animal advocacy moment, but veganism on its own is limiting and not sufficient by itself to bring about animal liberation," wrote Lara Drew and Daniel Kidby in Animal Testing Giant Joins the Vegan Movement #Daiya. "The acquisition of Daiya is a reminder that corporations have no ethics, and that there are ethical implications when consuming anything within an economic system that encourages unlimited growth" and views the earth, nonhumans (both free-living and "domesticated"), and humans as mere capital to profit from and exploit.

Activists don't buy, they act. We mustn't confuse activism with vegan consumerism because we cannot liberate animals through the existing framework of the consumer-capitalist model. We don't need more goods, vegan or otherwise, that deplete resources, pollute ecosystems, fill landfills, and kill free-living nonhumans—we need less of everything.

"Veganism is played out and imagined as a revolutionary perspective of existence only as far as the standards set by capitalist colonial society, thereby restricting its very potential before it has even begun," wrote a.b. in "Alternate Realities" in Issue 12 of T.O.F.U. magazine.

Case in point, a chatty salesman from a local pizzeria stopped by the office on a particularly busy workday to drop off a brochure. In an attempt to dissuade him, I rather brusquely told him I was vegan and not interested. He said "We can make you a vegan pizza, we offer gluten-free dough." I told him that I'm not interested in avoiding gluten; I'm interested in avoiding products made with the bodies of animals. My being vegan meant nothing more to this man than an opportunity for him to sell me something.

The association of veganism with gluten-free seems like such an absurdity, but it is a comparison that is made often. Anna Charlton of the Abolitionist Approach addressed it in a recent webinar. "We have to shake the whole issue away from it [veganism] being just a casual consumer choice. All too many times . . . you talk about a vegan diet and people will ask if you're gluten free, too, as if those are similar considerations. . . Deciding to go vegan and choosing gluten-free bread are not the same thing and it's a shame that it's [veganism] degenerated into this casual consumer choice stuff."

At its crux, veganism is about avoiding and eliminating nonhuman exploitation whenever possible, but it is also about dismantling a system that depends and thrives on the ongoing enslavement and abuse of nonhuman lives. If we mean to advocate for nonhumans—not ourselves—we should do so in every capacity; reducing or eliminating our travel, our reproduction, consumption, "development," waste, staying educated, informed and engaging others, being politically active, remaining vigilant, and be willing to take a stand and speak out with our voices and deeds instead of our "vegans rule" T-shirts.

"It doesn't take more time to be vegan than not to be, and citizens have to make time for policy, the only means to eliminating consumer choices that shouldn't be available," Cantor told me in an email. "Progress requires undermining specious [and speciesist] ideologies of consumer-capitalism, which include the notion that the proper influence over policy by individual citizens is to 'vote with your wallet.' Serious animal and environmental advocacy has been very effectively undermined by that mode of thought."

"If we want an ethical society, we should fight for a social revolution," continued Drew and Kidby. "A social revolution is needed otherwise veganism will remain entrenched in a capitalist system that reinforces vegan lifestyle-ism rather than making veganism part of a movement to oppose the political, economic, and social systems which oppresses all life."

To commit to veganism is a defiant act, but it is just the starting point to a more nonviolent and just world. We need to educate, disrupt, resist, confront, and change institutions that shape policies and culture and make animal abuse possible in the first place. It's a tall order that requires discipline and courage . . . not vegan chocolate chip, cookie dough ice-cream.

Rights Campaigns

The Problem Vegans and Nonvegans Don't Want to Acknowledge

2018-01-04T17:25:00.001-05:00

Surrealist painting of industrialized human, artist unknown

Here are some frightening statistics from Population Matters:

There are now more than 7.5 billion humans on Earth.
It took until the early 1800s for the human population to reach one billion. Now we add a billion humans every 12-15 years.
10,000 years ago, humans made up 1% of vertebrate land animals. Today, free-living nonhumans make up just 1%. The other 99% are humans, our food-industry captives, and our domesecrated pets.
Populations of free-living nonhumans have halved since 1970, whereas the human population has doubled.

The human population crisis can be a contentious subject for many people. I touched briefly on it in a Facebook post a couple of years ago and managed to release all kinds of vitriol. I had noted that the best way to help the planet is to adopt a vegan diet and not have children. Some folks lost their minds and inferred that I was condemning them for the children they already had. My mere intention was to encourage people to rethink their future eating and breeding habits.

Last month a group of more than 15,000 world scientists concurred and issued a Second Warning to Humanity (since we didn't heed the first alarm back in 1992). They report that we are failing greatly to restrict human population and economic growth, among other threats, and that we must "re-examine and change our individual behaviors including limiting our own reproduction (ideally to replacement level at most) and drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of fossil fuels, meat [flesh], and other resources."

Some 20 years ago a college friend pointed out that choosing to procreate is a selfish and egocentric act. Like most human-centered speciesists, I didn't give it much thought, but it made a lot of sense. "Therefore because the [parent] has enjoyed sensual pleasure, the [child] must live, suffer, and die," scribed 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

People will go to great lengths to create mini-mes. The wealthier among us opt for technological extremes like In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), uterus transplants, or pay poorer surrogates to carry their children. And still—much like homeless nonhuman companions—the ranks of homeless human children in need of forever loving homes never seem to wane.

Humans are often no less prejudiced about their own species than they are about their own skin color, religion, or nationality. Self-interest and self-justification are huge drivers in everything we do. As a human in a human-extremist world, I didn't always think about how my living and doing afflicted other animals, but now I make a point of reassessing everything.

Being an ethical vegan, I'm very concerned about my intrusion on innocent nonhumans and their environments, therefore, my activism extends to my reproductive choices, no less so than any other choice I make. My purpose is to reduce suffering, not increase it. As such, I feel a responsibility not to bring any more humans into an already overburdened world.

The impact humans have had on Earth has been so colossal, even in such a short amount of time (200,000 years), that scientists have dubbed this the Anthropocene Period—age of humans. In their second warning, scientists marked that "we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century."

In her Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert details our entry into the Anthropocene Period and the Sixth Extinction. "David Wake, of the University of California-Berkeley, and Vance Vredenburg, of San Francisco State, noted that there 'have been five great mass extinctions during the history of life on this planet.'. . . Those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life's history, we are also causing it. 'One weedy species,' the pair observed, 'has unwittingly achieved the ability to affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.' " Kolbert uses each chapter to focus on a particular species encompassing millions of individuals who are either dead or dying because of human omnipresence, speciesism, and the mass slaughter and consumption of other animals and nature.

According to "Meat India" by Sangamithra Iyer, India alone has seen a jump of 340 million humans in only 22 years. In that time 300 McDonald's and 288 Kentucky Fried Chicken stores have opened in India. Land and water resources are strained, and greenhouse gas emissions have multiplied. Universally confined in crowded, dark, and ammonia-saturated factories with no windows; frightened and despairing hens are forced to produce 56 billion more eggs in India alone. Free-living nonhumans can't escape human severity either. A recent photo, “Hell Is Here”, shows two elephants, a mother and her child, screaming and running for their lives after being set on fire by an angry mob of encroaching humans.

And the problem of human population is not relegated to India, but it just may be more visible there because most of the "developed" world is just that—"developed" over. Human expansion, as well as economic interests (read: greed), have simply wiped out most free-living nonhumans and their habitats in other parts of the world like the United States. The raging fires out West have killed and/or displaced thousands, perhaps millions of nonhumans and destroyed their homes, but the speciesist media avoids reporting on their suffering unless humans are involved. The cumulative effect of all this destruction is what David Cantor of Responsible Policies for Animals has coined the Biocaust.

Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been attributed to toxic pesticides, climate change, and other human factors, has caused billions of bees to die and disappear. According to expert entomologists, overall insect populations have declined by 75 percent in the last 25 years, also leading to the deaths of many insect-eating birds. When asked if all insects would perish considering such alarming rates, Martin Sorg, a longstanding member of the Entomological Society in Krefeld, Germany, told a reporter not to worry. “All the vertebrates will die before that,” he said.

There are many reasons why people have children. Sometimes it's mindless and they do it just because that's what everyone else does or because they think that's what they're supposed to do after they find the right job, the right home, and the right spouse. Sometimes people have children to recreate and relive their own childhoods, to save their marriages, as an additional source of labor, or to have someone to take care of them as they age. In the end, people are always consuming even through their children, buying borrowed time.

Aren't there other ways for us to offer love without confining it to the next of kin? We demand motherhood and reproductive rights for ourselves but we deny it to other animals whose reproduction we control and exploit for more of their own babies, flesh, milk, and eggs. We breed countless numbers of nonhumans for pet consumption and then decry their homelessness and euphemistically call their murders "euthanasia." Each time we create, we destroy. We act as though we care, but our actions say otherwise.

"Zoos readily sacrifice individuals to the supposed eventual good of species. Of course, the sacrificed individuals never include humans, even though human population causes environmental devastation and humans are the primary destroyers of species and ecosystems," discerned Joan Dunayer in Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. "Like all other speciesists, zoo professionals apply a double standard. Zoo apologists contend that nonhuman rights would accelerate the extinction of species. The opposite is true. Humans' presumed right to kill nonhumans and take their land has caused the widespread extinction that zoos publicly bewail. In a society that respected nonhuman rights, it would be illegal to kill nonhuman animals . . . Their habitats would be off-limits to further 'development.' Instead of manipulating nonhuman reproduction, humans would curtail their own."

Humans are not entitled to everything in nature. Nonhumans are not inferior, and they should not have to suffer and endure proliferating and abusive industries, policies, cultures, and practices created and maintained by humans with superiority complexes.

"By the legal standards of human democratic societies, nonhumans are innocent. Yet, the law fails to protect them. . . . We're guilty if we participate in needless, unjust practices that cause suffering or death. Most humans are guilty. Yet, the law fails to punish them," continued Dunayer.

Human population growth adversely affects both nonhumans and humans. More humans mean more violence, war, and competition for land and diminishing clean water; more hunger, poverty, and economic inequality, lower wages and higher unemployment; more devastating floods, fires, and storms; more disease, pollution, and rising temperatures, and on and on. All of our pain and suffering is self-inflicted.

To abide on the current path is not only unsustainable, inequitable, and unethical—it is insane! Unfortunately, we will most likely carry on just as we have been until our collective hand is forced and it will be too late. The innocent will be punished along with the guilty. Perhaps we have "Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that," wrote Stephen King in The Stand. "Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest."

Vegan Starter Kit

Book Reviews: Two Tales on Eating the Unthinkable

2017-11-13T13:02:00.000-05:00

Under the Skin by Michel Faber and Animals by Don LePan couldn't be more different as far as stories go, but both authors have managed to spin two unique and compelling narratives from one identical, unimaginable act.

Animals is a thought-provoking tale that takes place in the twenty-second century, long after the mass extinction of most nonhuman animals.

The novel follows a human child named Sam who is disabled and therefore, is considered inferior and deemed a mongrel. We follow Sam from his original family and his loving, but working poor, single mother's home to his newly adopted home with Naomi, a brave, young girl who sees Sam as more than just the family pet and takes him under her wing.

Animals is a great achievement as it intricately combines two fictional manuscripts written in the future by Naomi and Broderick Clark, Sam's oldest brother. Clark interjects throughout to explain how things used to be before there were mongrels.

Even though Animals is a work of fiction, LePan shows what life is really like for billions of nonhumans today by skillfully illustrating, via a futuristic lens, similar experiences through another species.

Animals is for anyone who treasures a good narrative and the evolution of characters as they experience crises of morality and conscience. I thoroughly enjoyed the story of Sam, the extraordinary relationship he develops with Naomi, and their emotional and trying experiences as they contend with the limitations of the adults in their lives.

LePan has given us an engrossing tale that questions the way humans determine moral value based on false dichotomies. Readers will need a little patience, however, as the story line unfolds somewhat slowly due to the book's unique structure and Clark's footnotes toggling between the past and future, which makes for choppy reading. It's not until the reader is fully submersed in the growing but tenuous relationship between Naomi and Sam that the drama really begins to pick up steam.

If his aim was to raise people's consciousness about the persons they eat, I think LePan achieved his goal stupendously. Though he seems to conclude that eating products derived from nonhuman beings is wrong,—

"We treat them purely as food, . . . as things to be eaten, as things to be tortured if that will make the milk and flesh and eggs cheaper or tastier" (LePan, p. 159).

—LePan takes a disappointingly welfarist slant in the "Author's Afterword" and concedes that he is not vegan despite his novel's vegan bent. Still, Animals is a laudable piece of writing notwithstanding its author's personal shortcomings.

Likewise, I think readers will be surprised to learn that Michel Faber, author of Under the Skin, is admittedly not a vegan since he also incorporates the evil reality of meat production into his suspenseful and unsettling fable.

Under the Skin is a fast-paced thriller following Isserley, a Vess Industries employee, around the Scottish Highlands as she goes trolling for hitchhikers (vodsels) to bring back to the farm where she lives.

Having relocated after being discarded by the Elite, Isserley is forced to adapt a skewed human form to survive and fulfill her responsibilities for Vess Industries.

Exhausted and lonely, she grows weary performing her perfunctory duties and airs her grievances to a visiting Amlis Vess, heir to the company. Much to her surprise, Amlis disapproves of his father's work and takes an interest in Isserley, attempting to break through her bitterness and indifference.

" 'All I'm trying to get across to you,' he [Amlis] persisted, nettled, 'is that the meat you we're eating a few minutes ago is the same meat that is trying to communicate with us down here' " (Faber, p. 185).

If Under the Skin is anything, it is an irresistible and unusual suspense story that you don't want to put down but, thankfully, it is so much more than that.

There are a lot of similarities between Animals and Under the Skin. Both are gripping tales centered on morality and compassion, and both tactfully address cultural notions of classism, sexism, and speciesism. The authors' titles also communicate oneness (Under the Skin we're all Animals) in contrast to the epithets used to display otherness and the commodification of their characters (mongrels and vodsels).

As with the exploited mongrels in Animals, the vodsels Isserley targets in Under the Skin are dysfunctional and marginalized, nevertheless both authors ask us to identify with others, and they elicit sympathy for victims and perpetrators alike, irrespective of species. Is it easier to relate to a female alien who has little hope in her future or the violent human traveler she picks up, a deaf mongrel child or a broken human mother who feels forced to abandon him, a frightened cow who despairs over what she sees awaiting her on the kill line or the impoverished human slaughterhouse knocker who will take her life?

Whether intentionally or not, both LePan and Faber deftly used satire and allegory to examine universal exploitation and our senseless and automatic consumption of nonhumans. While both novels are works of fiction, they reiterate prevailing egregious truths: in our reduction of others as inferior, we selfishly preserve cruelty and injustice and only end up hurting ourselves.

Animals and Under the Skin are strong in their captivating characters and poignant storytelling, and raise challenging and thoughtful questions. Some may find these two dystopian portrayals to be dark and pessimistic, but they are fair presentations, no more painful and frightening than our current dystopian world.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Vegans Are the Furthest Thing from Elite

2017-10-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

I endeavor to live a simple life. I reside in a cozy, one bedroom apartment of 673 square feet. I earn a modest salary and rarely dine out, and I prefer to rent movies for free from the library. I don't subscribe to the latest fashions or fads, and last year I spent zero dollars on clothing, shoes, and accessories. In an effort to limit my impact on the planet and other animals, I try to curtail my consumption of goods and limit my travel. Those who know me and are familiar with my minimalist habits and vegan ways would not label me an elitist, yet that is often how vegans are mischaracterized.

By definition alone ethical vegans are not elitist for the simple fact that they hold little to no power or influence in the overarching animal-industrial complex that controls everything from communication and government to universities and major corporations. In fact, our efforts often run counter to and challenge the existing system of oppression upheld by the elite.

It's all too easy for non-vegans to bully and belittle minority vegans as elitist while defending and excusing their own unjust choices, which is ironic considering the forced labor of animals and the consumption of their murdered bodies, milk, and eggs elevate and sustain the upper classes. Here are some brief examples of interconnected scourges linked to financial interests in animal oppression:

Violence: Animal industries are inherently violent operations that function by remaining invisible. Animal products can only be consumed when animals are treated as merchandise—things. Supported by non-vegan dollars; the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries profit from the forced breeding and killing of billions of beings every year. In addition, slaughterhouse workers have few options and do the revolting work of killing for those who won't do it themselves. In "Vegan in the Dairy State" Cori Mattli noted that "there is a high correlation with slaughterhouse work and post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence." Workers often become desensitized to the violence they are paid to inflict on other animals and society pays a steep price for accepting such unnecessary violence as routine. Towns harboring slaughterhouses have higher rates of domestic violence and violent crimes, including murder and rape.

War/Genocide: In his groundbreaking book, Animal Oppression and Human Violence, David A. Nibert expounded how the need for more resources to maintain nomadic herds of animals for food and labor has resulted in centuries of war and conflict. From Genghis Khan to today's commercial cattle ranching operations, the upper echelon continue to expand their capitalist interests through the manipulation and exploitation of land and animals. Nonhumans are continually used as sources of food, tools, and labor to support conflicts and conquests. The influx of cattle, sheep, horses, and other animals to North, Central, and South America from European explorers through the Columbian Exchange helped fuel military expeditions, warfare between native tribes, and genocide. As the demand for beef (and land and water for sustaining cattle) increases—even now—so too do conflicts with indigenous groups (e.g. Darfur).

Hunger: Much of the grains grown all over the world are used solely as feed to fatten cattle for slaughter. Impoverished countries have been persuaded to convert their lands to cattle rearing in order to supply richer countries in the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United States with cheap meat. Private and public lands are often stolen by corporate and government entities for the purpose of grazing cattle, which has only increased food scarcity. In South and Central America and Africa, peasant farmers are violently ejected from their lands in order for cattle ranchers to supply Americans with steak and hamburgers, producing earnings for a small percentage of elites while displaced natives go homeless and hungry. Approximately eighty percent of US crops go to feeding live-stock which, if redirected, could alleviate the needs of at least 800 million starving and malnourished people.

Environmental Destruction: Raising other animals for food has caused worldwide soil erosion and is responsible for converting one-third of the earth's surface to desert. It also consumes most of the world's depleting fresh water supply and pollutes what is remaining with animal waste, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, hormones, and other toxins, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. From feed to fertilizer, to refrigeration and transport, enormous amounts of fossil fuels are needed to power the meat, dairy, and egg industries. Furthermore, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane) resulting from an ever expanding human population and increased animal consumption make live-stock production the biggest contributor to climate change, which will mean more destructive and deadly floods, fires, and hurricanes.

Disease: Most infectious diseases, HIV, anthrax, bubonic plague, Ebola, and the common cold originated from the confinement and use of nonhumans. In addition, many non-communicable diseases like cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, as well as most chronic diseases are linked to the consumption of animal products. Some of the poorest and sickest US citizens reside in southeastern states in which large amounts of animal products are consumed.

CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) or factory farms are typically located in poverty-stricken communities and their employees suffer ill health as a consequence. According to a 2008 Pew Charitable Trust study, CAFOs pose major health risks not only to workers but to neighbors and surrounding communities, too.

Big Pharma, animal laboratories, and other medical facilities owned by elites continue to prosper off of preventable human diseases and the abuse of animals for parts and research. New Jersey is considered the pharmaceutical capital of the world and offers huge tax incentives to pharmaceutical corporations.

Slavery/Sex trafficking: For centuries, human and nonhuman slave labor on plantations, ranches, and mines were bankrolled through the sale, trade, and consumption of animal flesh, skins, and furs to benefit European monarchies and aristocracies. The transatlantic slave trade comprised both human and nonhuman slaves and profited from the sale of animal skins and the use of animal bodies to feed human slaves. As animal industries expanded into other less developed countries, so too did slave labor. According to Nibert, "between 1995 and 2001, 49 percent of the cases of slavery in Brazil occurred in cattle ranches and 25 percent were related to deforestation" in expansion of cattle ranching. Women have been particularly vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation. Those who have had their land expropriated have resorted to prostitution or have been lured to cities with the promise of jobs only to be sold into the sex trade.

Poverty: High turnover and low wages have been staples of industries that exploit both human and nonhuman animals. Very little has changed from the stockyards and meat packing plants of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century (illustrated so vividly in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) to today's slaughterhouses and fast food restaurants. In "Injustice for All", Mark Hawthorne found that the average abattoir worker earns just $11.42 an hour and is required to kill a large number of animals per minute. Many workers are immigrants (38%) and a growing number are undocumented, keeping them silent and powerless to meager pay, substandard conditions, and work-related injuries.

Death: Over the centuries, zillions of domesecrated and free-living animals, as well as millions of humans, have been directly and indirectly murdered through the promotion and expansion of animal abuse industries. With our continued ignorance, indifference, and greed, millions more will die.

Treating nonhuman animals as less than, as living slaves for labor, science, and entertainment, and marketing and consuming their dead bodies, skins, babies, fluids, and flesh satisfies an immoral capitalist economy and the rapacious captains of industry, not to mention our depraved pleasure for the taste of another's flesh. Our continued consumption bolsters elitism and promotes all the interconnected and preventable tragedies listed above and then some.

Animal abuse is human abuse and vice-versa; all of our lives and deaths are intersected. Each time we eat nonhumans, buy products made from their tortured bodies, or endorse their abuse and manipulation, we foster a system built on oppression and inequality. In essence, we join the oppressors, we endorse the elites and the status quo, and we hasten our own demise.

Photo courtesy of The New Yorker.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Feeding Desires, Appetites for Destruction

2017-09-06T13:13:00.000-04:00

From the cover of
The Sexual Politics of Meat

In my never-ending quest for self-improvement I've been working on not succumbing to cultural notions of femininity. As a straight, cisgendered woman, I've had to unlearn decades of programming, which has not been easy. Perhaps, just as difficult as for those attempting to unlearn cultural notions of what is—and who is not—food.

I spent 20 years eating what I had been instructed to eat and another 15 years doing all those things women have been trained to do—consciously and subconsciously—to be appealing to the opposite sex. Like most females, I've been objectified, but I've also treated other animals as objects.

It’s been a slow but deliberate process in which I’ve unburdened myself from the lies and the liars, from being the consumer and the consumed, transitioning from the non-vegan oppressor to the vegan liberator of my own life and the lives of others. I still have a long way to go, but I'm on the potter's wheel.

At the age of 20 I began eliminating the bodies of animals from my intake. After learning about the dairy and egg industries, I aspired to remove the use of all animal products from every area of my life and home. I committed myself to ethical veganism, which had a snowball effect on my psyche. I became acutely aware of how animal enslavement impacts the environment, buoys economic inequality and capitalism, intersects sexism and racism, and affects my perception of myself, other animals, and institutions I had once revered. I discovered that being an ethical vegan is not merely about food, but about campaigning for animal rights and defending truth and social justice.

I began to see things anew after adopting a cat named Max from a local shelter. I abruptly quit smoking cigarettes having realized the hypocrisy in caring for other animals but not caring about my own animal self. I read Zoe Weil’s Most Good, Least Harm and rethought our concept of possessions and how the deleterious effects of consumerism and development are depleting our planet’s resources, and destroying lives and habitats. I have strived to void my home of meaningless things that rob me of time, energy, and money, and I seek to minimize the buying of new things that require still more resources. While doing so, I have also managed to end fruitless and corruptible relationships which have similarly stolen my time, energy, and self-respect. When a boyfriend angrily demanded sex, insisting that I owed it to him because it was his birthday, I knew I had been reduced to a body with serviceable parts.

According to John Berger in Ways of Seeing, “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. . . . A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. . . . Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object.”

I tried online dating periodically for a few years. The last man I communicated with seemed promising; he was a police officer and father to a twelve-year-old girl. His descriptions were thoughtful and somewhat compatible, until I read his last response to the site's profile prompt: You should message me if . . . to which he replied “you like your porn hardcore.” This retort unnerved and disturbed me. Pornography sexualizes dominance and violence, and reduces women to objects and body parts to be visually consumed. Much the same as the degradation and physical consumption of nonhuman beings, it is viewed as harmless and tolerable. I wondered what his daughter would think about what her dad wrote.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? This phrase, which has been around since at least the seventeenth century and was popular with my grandmother's generation, was often said by women to younger women as a warning not to have sex before marriage or they might find themselves husbandless. The phrase still resonates today—with women in particular—in spite of its overt sexism and speciesism, and its making light of the exploitation and enslavement of other female animals. It's also worth noting that animal husbandry is a field of study taught by many taxpayer-funded state university animal science and agriculture departments in the breeding and keeping of farmed animals for their flesh, milk, and eggs.

I gave up my bras decades ago simply because they were annoying and unnecessary. While they made other people comfortable, they made me uncomfortable. Over time, I saw little need for poisons such as artificial nails, nail polish, and perfume. Later, I rid myself of high heel shoes, one pair at a time until there were none—no more pinched toes or the potential for damaged joints and nerves. “High heels themselves are part of the message of subordination,” wrote Carol J. Adams in The Pornography of Meat. “The message of heels becomes, ‘we will gladly hurt ourselves for you.’ ”

No, I will not.

I decided to stop shaving for a stretch. Why, I wondered, did I ever start? I was twelve. Advertisers and magazines like Seventeen taught me that shiny, hairless legs were beautiful and desirable. Women are often encouraged to resemble young girls or powerless figurines with shaven legs and disturbingly bare pubic regions—not as mature adults. “Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion," continued Berger. "Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”

Being vegan and fighting against speciesist cultural norms and traditions is not very different from battling sexist and patriarchal customs. Together, ethical veganism and feminism counter the fairy tales (Old MacDonald, Prince Charming), the false choices, and the ideas of masculinity and femininity that have brainwashed us—who is consumable . . . tasty chicks with shapely, hairless thighs and large, tender breasts?

“Get Yours!”

That was the slogan on a Rutgers fraternity t-shirt I saw a friend wearing while I was working a dinner shift in the dining hall during my undergraduate studies. The t-shirt featured a large cartoon character of the Tasmanian Devil. The figure held a mug of beer in one hand and in the other, the beer's apparent equivalent—a curvy, busty, bikini-clad woman with long blonde hair. I was incensed and cleverly acquired the phone number of the president of the fraternity. I was able to get him to concede to the t-shirts’ offensiveness—not only to women but to those men who neither consider themselves nor want to promote themselves as shallow, beer-guzzling misogynists.

As a child, I was not one of those girls who enjoyed playing dress up or with dolls because I thought it boring. I envied the often casual ease with which boys got to dress—and men today—and have reclaimed my inner tomboy self; however, I can remember a time as a young adult when I was more than willing to turn myself into a living ornament for what I thought was sexy, which usually equated with what men desired.

What some men desire often gets women into trouble, even killed. “Abusive men are the major source of injury to adult women in the United States,” continued Adams. “The World Health Organization, in the first comprehensive documentation of global violence released in October, 2002, found that 40-70 percent of female murder victims in Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel, and South Africa were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. . . . many women realized that their partners were planning to kill them when they killed a dog, a cat, a horse.”

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), killing, harming, or threatening to harm animals are weapons used by abusers to manipulate victims into silence and to destroy the comfort animals provide. Abuse is not a problem with anger management, but rather a way to establish and maintain control over victims.

The oppression of women and oppression of nonhuman animals often overlap and reinforce one another. I do not share these statistics and anecdotes as a means to male bashing but to bring awareness and insight. Sadly, these are facts of life that impact women and nonhuman animals every single day.

As I work for the liberation of other animals, I’m also working for my own liberation. As I educate people about the injustices of the meat, egg, and dairy industries—the incessant rape of nonhuman animals, the hijacking of their reproductive processes to produce more of their milk, eggs, and babies for human consumption—I’m reminded that the way we perceive nonhuman animals is not so different from the way we often view female human animals and vice versa. The manner in which we objectify and violate women and other animals for food and entertainment is analogous. Through advertising and cultural messages, women are visually consumed for their sexualized bodies and body parts right alongside the butchered bodies and body parts of those animals (absent referents) who are physically consumed. (See these fast food commercials)

And sometimes there is no distinction, like when a Tennessee man was charged with dismembering the body of a woman and eating part of her corpse. Or when a New York City cop was arrested for planning to rape, kill, cook, and eat women, including his wife. In his defense, his lawyer claimed they were just—wait for it— fantasies.

For any objectification to happen, someone always becomes something. In our current world order, speciesism and sexism work hand in hand, making it acceptable for humans to reduce nonhuman animals to objects of pleasure to be used, controlled, and consumed if it is pleasing and profitable to consumers and corporations. Even though whole food vegan diets provide better health and nutrition to the human herbivore anatomy, plant consumption has been falsely aligned with inferiority, weakness, and women, while the commodification and consumption of other animals—derived from violence—has been insidiously associated with strength, vitality, and manliness. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that systems of nonhuman exploitation tend to be dominated by men while the animal rights movement is dominated by women.

The personal is political. Men's subjection of women and nonhuman animals reinforces hierarchies of power . . . and so do our diets. What we subscribe to and consent to as individuals and as participants of institutions is as relevant to animal advocacy and social justice as to our very own lives. Every day we have choices to make. We can participate in our own exploitation and suffering and that of countless other beings. Or we can choose to respect our own bodies and the bodies of others. I choose the latter.

How Do I Go Vegan?

Should Ethical Vegans Invest in the Stock Market?

2017-07-21T11:09:00.001-04:00

Many people invest for retirement, often blindly, focusing on returns and not knowing what they're really investing in.

There was a time when I invested, too—before the economy tanked and before I saw Michael Moore’s documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. But is investing conducive to ethical veganism?

As with all big purchases, before investing I did my due diligence. I started my financial education by subscribing to Money magazine, I read Suze Orman’s Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke, and subsequently researched various companies and funds.

I chose Vanguard to manage my investments after I learned they charge the lowest fees, but I was disappointed with the choices available to me. While I was able to find mutual funds that offered solid returns, they weren’t ethically agreeable since they included companies like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, and Procter & Gamble, which are neither environmentally-friendly nor vegan. So I began to look into something called Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), an approach that considers social issues in addition to financial returns.

For centuries, people have been practicing consumer activism and have been making conscientious decisions about how to spend their money. The Quakers prohibited their members from participating in the buying and selling of humans through the slave trade; during the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King advocated the boycott of businesses and corporations promoting segregation, and many peace activists protested against companies profiting off the war in Vietnam.

As it relates to stock exchanges, Socially Responsible Investing didn’t really take on global significance until the 1990s tech boom when SRIs addressed issues like tobacco, alcohol, and gun use. By the late '90s, environmental concerns and fossil fuels garnered more attention, however, by 2006, SRI portfolios still included companies that exploited animals for their products and/or services—and also charged higher fees.

In a recent online search for vegan stocks, Invest Snipsidentified only three companies on US stock exchanges, although at least one, Hain Celestial, is not vegan as they also sell meat and dairy products.

Optimized Partners, an investment advisor claiming to specialize in the investment needs of the vegan/environmentally conscious investor, advertises a “Vegan Growth Portfolio” on its website, however on closer inspection the fund includes companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland and Morgan Stanley, which have been linked to funding the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), as well as Belmond Ltd., a hotel and leisure company that offers safaris and serves animal products throughout its hotels, trains, and cruises.

Then there is Baleine & Bjorn Capital, a firm that invests in seven "companies creating solutions to outdated animal products." Two of the companies use animal cells to make cultured meat and leather-like goods. I do not classify these companies as vegan, especially when one pronounces "We love meat." Another company in their portfolio, Vaute Couture, sells vegan, recycled cotton sweaters for $398!

According to VegNews magazine, the plant-based milk market will be worth some $35 billion by 2024. Vegan products are making enormous strides as evidenced by the newly created Plant Based Foods Association, a trade group promoting policies and practices that improve conditions for vegan foods. And while vegan companies like Hampton Creek and Beyond Meat—the makers of Just Mayo and the Beyond Burger respectively—haven’t gone public yet, mounting sales and interest in the companies make it only a matter of time. Tyson Foods, which kills billions of chickens every year to turn them into nuggets, recently purchased a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat and launched a $150 million venture capital fund to invest in meat alternatives.

Vegans who want to invest have more research to do than the average investor, but that's par for the course for those who give great thought to how their lives impact others. Most retirement accounts offered by employers are very limited and will not appeal to ethical vegans who, instead, may want to invest in individual vegan companies.

Personally, I have found investing immensely challenging from an ethical standpoint and impractical from a financial one. Animal-abuse culture is omnipresent and Wall Street is awash in companies capitalizing on the exploitation of nonhumans, humans (workers, children), and the environment. Just by their sheer existence, companies—even vegan ones—are responsible for habitat destruction and the loss of life due to development, use of resources, consumption, and waste.

Investing for retirement as an ethical vegan proves to be illusory and affirms the old adage that you can’t serve two gods. Vegans have to look at what's available and ask themselves whether investing in the traditional stock market and the Wall Street machine is not only feasible but just. Do we want to be part of a system that continuously grinds up lives and nature and spits it back out as more gratuitous consumer goods and services? Will we be happy knowing our financial future came at the expense of so much suffering and so many broken hearts?

For a comprehensive list of publicly traded companies that exploit animals and those that do not, check out Cruelty Free Investing.