Last May when Oprah went on her 21-day vegan “cleanse,” the vegan blogosphere was awash in a feckless giddiness. To some vegan bloggers and podcasters, Oprah was the seeming deus ex machina who could transform veganism from a marginal consumer movement into a massive cultural powerhouse. At the time, we mentioned that many of you were acting like this was the “second coming of Jesus Oprah Christ.” And thinking back to those days about a year ago, I remember Jenna and I feeling very much like we were the only ones in a suicidal millenarian UFO cult who didn’t believe that the spaceship was coming to take us all back to the home planet.¹

Well, we said it was bullshit then, and now we know it is. Oprah is doing the very un-vegan thing of giving away free chicken from KFC:

Look how much those vegan principles mean to her now...

That Oprah isn’t the great vegan savior that we all hoped for comes as little surprise to me for the two following reasons:

1. Oprah’s main reason for going vegan was not about ethics; instead, Oprah went on a “cleanse,” during which time she gave up foods that can certainly be vegan like sugar and alcohol. To be blunt about it, Oprah went vegan to shit more often, and while I’d never look askance at the gastrointestinal benefits of veganism, I’m vegan because I believe that there is a moral imperative to stop treating animals as instruments for human ends. Oprah may have had a few teary-eyed moments with her guru of the week on national TV where she pretended to care about the plight of animals, but now in light of her being a pimp for KFC you either have to assume that she doesn’t understand that eating animals harms them, or that she’s so crassly commercial in working this promotion with KFC that she doesn’t care. Either way, it says little good about her.

2. While it was obviously good to have a public figure like Oprah talking about veganism, it was also clear that she didn’t really even get it except as a temporary “diet.” Veganism is obviously about what you do and don’t put in your mouth, but limiting veganism to a mere “diet” impoverishes what it is that we as ethical vegans do. Veganism is a lived form of protest directed at the way the world around us is organized, and each of us who is an ethical vegan takes aim at how that organization exploits and oppresses animals by marginalizing their interests. That veganism is fantastic for your colon is really a second order of business for most of us; contrary to the portrait painted by Oprah, we don’t all get up everyday and do wheatgrass enemas. Nor do we all have teams of professional chefs to prepare vegan meals for us, as Oprah did. Point is, Oprah was actually pretty crap for veganism when you get down to it. She seemed to do a fantastic job of sending most people the message that veganism is about some kind of ascetic purity, and that in order to make the food even remotely palatable, one has to have an army of talented chefs and bestselling gurus on hand.

We get the butt hurt. After all, lots of you put a lot of stock into Oprah, and the higher you hold someone up, the farther they have to fall. It is nice to imagine or to deeply hope that one person can come along and make a huge difference in an issue you care deeply about, and the desire at the heart of that longing is admirable. But in truth, it is also naive, because building movements that change the world requires hard and inglorious work, and it means that no single individual can ever be our lone savior, especially someone whose fame and vast fortunes separate them from the daily crap that most of us slug through each day. We need to each do the hard work of educating people around us about why we are vegan and what it means, and in time, we can become the kinds of organic intellectuals who can shift social perception in powerful ways. The idols aren’t worth our time; we have only ourselves, and each of us, you and I alike, are the ones who not only are capable of making the change we need to see, we’re the ones who are obligated to do so because we know that doing nothing is inexcusable.

In the end, the best thing to do about Oprah is to ignore her. As far as I can tell, she’s deeply confused about a great many things, and it looks to me like her show is her working out her own internal demons on a global stage. One week, Oprah believes in the Law of Attraction; the next, she’s a buddhist; the week after that, she’s on a vegan “cleanse.” Then, she’s off giving away KFC and cars and who the hell knows what else. Whatever she’s up to, I hope she channels some positive earth energies or some shit soon, or gets whacked upside the head with a gigantic clue-by-four. Regardless of what happens, this serves as an example of why we can’t put too much stock in Oprah or any other celebrity being vegan. Instead, this whole incident should serve as a reminder that we’re all there is when it comes to this struggle, and that there are no magic shortcuts and no great strokes of providence to suddenly make everyone go vegan. We can’t count on Oprah; we can only count on ourselves to make the change we want in the world.

Yet, going vegan solely for environmental reasons is a fundamental misunderstanding of what veganism is at its very roots. With ecosexualism at an all-time high these days, and the so-called “green” movement having its own cable channel in the US and a whole range of “green” products to consume, I’d be swimming against a strong tide to suggest that anything done for environmental reasons is somehow not something done for a good reason. Truth is, I’m grateful for the bourgeoning number of envirovegans out there. If the environment gets people thinking about veganism and moving towards veganism, that’s wonderful, but ultimately, those of us who are vegan to respect the inherent persoonhood of animals have to take an active role in moving envirovegans beyond their mere environmentalism and into getting them to see veganism for what it is really about: the rights of non-humans.

Since the very day the term “vegan” was coined by Donald and Dot Watson back the 1940s, veganism has been about the rights of non-humans to receive equal consideration. Veganism has evolved in some very strange ways indeed, but today, full-fledged veganism is still the only rational response that hits at the roots of animal exploitation. A lived refusal of a system that generates huge profits on the backs of living beings who are every bit as sentient as your family cat or dog, veganism is an intervention lived in your daily life. It is your everyday statement that things are not right as they are, your standing up and being counted as one more person opposed to the bloody machinery of animal agriculture. Veganism is about animal rights.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. If I don’t say this at least a few times, I know someone will miss it, so let me repeat: I’m grateful to have people go vegan for environmental reasons. My point, though, is that an environmental impetus alone is an inadequate foundation for a long-term vegan perspective, or for really founding a long-term movement that seeks to accord animals substantial rights. To put it another way, going vegan for mere environmental reasons is rather like opposing the Holocaust because the trains to Auschwitz had a large carbon footprint. I know that’s an inflammatory thing to say, but before you get your undergarments all bunched up in your crack and get all morally indignant and righteous on me, stop, take a deep breath, and think about the essential point I’m making. In either case, yes, the person is opposed to the Holocaust. But most of us — barring, perhaps, primitivist anarchists — would argue that the person objecting on environmental grounds is rather missing the larger point here: namely, that genocide is deeply repulsive and horribly wrong because it violates the basic rights that we think all human beings should have.

With tens of billions of animals dying around the world each year, we’re looking at a situation that is, by all accounts, horrible for the environment — I’d never be so silly as to deny that. But being vegan mostly or solely for environmental reasons misses the point of veganism. For ethical vegans, the point of veganism is to recognize the inherent value of animals as beings in their own right. If ethical veganism is going to have any impact at all, it needs to be a social movement which has at its center concerns about achieving full rights for non-humans. Though the environmental side-effects of the exploitation of humans and non-humans alike are drastic, worrying, and taking an ever-greater toll on our ecosystems, we nevertheless have to put these concerns within a larger context of exploitation, one in which the environmental side-effects of exploitation are understood, but not in which they’re the central aspect of our concern.

What is necessary in the long-run is an understanding that goes yet deeper than either veganism as conceived or environmentalism as conceived, a movement that recognizes that the roots of the destruction of the ecosystem are tied up in complex ways with our economic processes of production and consumption, and that these same processes are behind much of the suffering — both human and non-human — that plagues the world today. Ultimately, a recognition like this would be dangerous, because it would require more than swapping out your incancesdents for CFs, or reducing your carbon footprint by farting less or whatever: it’d require actual, systemic change at the heart of the way we conceptualize our relationship with the world, including the ways in which we treat animals, other human beings, and the planet. I know this is huge, but I like to dream big — is there any other way to dream?

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Though not cheating is easy for a lot of foods, some people find giving up cheese particularly difficult. For us, it wasn’t hard. We just went vegan one day, and didn’t look back, but for a lot of people we’ve talked to, cheese is the lone item that often still has its hooks in them. So many people have complained to us about how hard it was to give up cheese that we almost felt like we needed to set up some kind of support group in the basement of an area church where we served burnt coffee (with soy creamer) and let people talk about how many days cheese-clean they’ve been. Frankly, the whole thing was perplexing for us until we read up on casomorphins, or opioid chemicals that are present in cow’s milk (and by extension, very much present in cheese). Evolutionarily, these peptides probably had the function of creating a positive association between the calf and its mother and her milk. Now, however, humans consume more cow’s milk than calves do, and – improbable though it sounds – those who consume large amounts of dairy products are probably mildly addicted to them. It isn’t like you’re going to get the DTs or have seizures if you give up cheese, but certainly, these opiate effects can help to explain the more than mild cravings that lots of people have. A study underway during the time we were writing this book is looking at how casomorphins work in the human body, operating under the functional hypothesis that because cheese is one of the most commonly craved foods, it may be exerting mild opiate effects on its consumers. If this hypothesis is true the correct solution isn’t weaning yourself from crackcheeese slowly. As we suggest above, that would probably only lead you back to eating more cheese. The right solution is to stop eating cheese now, and to make an agreement with yourself never to eat it again. If you feel tempted to eat it, slide a paperclip over this page, and when you’re on the verge of eating cheese, come back here and remind yourself of these disgusting cheese facts:

• Cheese is made from milk, and milk almost always contains pus. You may comfort yourself by thinking that the pus is pasteurized, and certainly, pasteurization will prevent you from becoming ill, but you’re still eating pus. Look at it like this: you could stick a dog turd in an autoclave and render it biologically harmless with significant pressure and heat. Yet, we’re willing to wager that you’d not be anxious to eat it unless you have some very strange proclivities indeed.
• Forget about being vegan – most cheeses aren’t even vegetarian. Rennet, a stomach enzyme common to most mammals, is used to make cheese by “digesting” it, leaving behind a solid and a liquid. Rennet is often harvested from the stomachs of cattle in slaughterhouses, and used directly in cheese. Though there are vegetarian rennets synthesized by other means, it is difficult to know which cheeses use vegetarian rennet and which cheeses use the stuff scraped out of the stomachs of slaughtered animals. Yum! Cow stomach excretions obviously go great with pus!
• In order for you to have your beloved cheese, someone had to produce the milk to make the cheese, and we don’t mean a dairy farmer. The someone in this case is a nameless dairy cow, identified only by a number and probably an radio frequency identification tag in her ear that helps the slave ownerfarmer track her productivity so he can send her to slaughter once she underproduces. In the larger dairy operations, this cow may never go outside, and she will repeatedly give birth to calves who will be stolen from her almost immediately after they are born. She will live a short and miserable life, and end up as hamburger on the plate of some fast food consumer, all because you could not find the guts up to stop eating cheese or drinking milk. And you say you care about animals?
• Beyond being a disaster for cows, cheese is a disaster for you. A cup of diced cheddar has a whopping 532 calories, 385 of which come from fat. That includes 28 grams of saturated fat, which is 139% of amount recommended for total daily consumption by the United States government. And really, do you think those figures haven’t already been manipulated by decades of dairy and meat industry intervention in the government? To all that fat, you can add 139 milligrams of cholesterol and 820 mg of sodium. For comparison, if you decided to reach for a cup of chopped carrots instead, you’d be taking in fewer than a tenth of the total calories (52 calories for the whole cup) and less than 1 percent of the fat (3 calories versus 385 calories) than if you ate the cheese.

Cheese may taste good to you now, but really, like every other animal product, there’s no good reason to eat it. It is bad for you and bad for the animals that have to make the raw ingredients that go into it. Give it up now, call it quits, and go cold tofu. If you can do that, maybe you can come to our cheese-eaters anonymous meetings, sip some bad coffee, and tell us how many days you’ve been clean.

Nevertheless, this is an issue of global concern that seems to be quickly spiraling out of control. The disease itself does not care if you’re a vegan or a meat eater or a saint reincarnated: apart from any genetic predisposition or immunity you may have, you’re just as likely as anyone else to get the flu. The one big difference, though, is that most of you reading this live in countries with medical systems that can attend to you, and which will probably prevent you from dying from it, should you be unlucky enough to end up on the beating end of this particular stick.

In our haste to point fingers in faces with a “told you so,” we’re losing the empathy and compassion that are supposedly at the heart of veganism. Those who will suffer the most in this entire catastrophe deserve our empathy. The many billions of people in the world who have no access to health care will pay the price of this pandemic disproportionately, and I suspect that if it goes global, the global South will suffer the most. Many millions or more could die from this pandemic if it gets bad, and none of the “told-you-so’s” can really help any of them now. We have a duty to remind people of what has caused this problem, but we should do it in a way that educates them about the problems involved, and without the triumphalism.

There’s little doubt that our arrival at the precipice of this particular pandemic was one that was hastened by factory farming. Pigs in intensive agricultural operations are dosed up with antivirals at staggering rates, and the intensive confinement is no doubt a deadly training ground for viral resistance. But let’s not forget that swine flu in some form or another has been around longer than intensive-confinement factory farming. The problem is a larger one of us using pigs altogether as a food source, and humans being near them to “raise” them. Because pigs can harbor both bird and human forms of the flu virus, they’re the perfect laboratory for combining these strains and then communicating them to the humans who are working around them or with them. The problem, then, is a larger one of humans rearing and owning and controlling animals for our ends. To put it differently, while the risk of a swine flu epidemic is almost certainly exacerbated by factory farming, it is not factory farming alone that produces the swine flu.

If this pandemic develops into something worse in the coming weeks, we have to adopt a more responsive posture as vegans. There’s nothing wrong with telling people that animal agriculture is at the heart of this problem, but as we do that, we must remember that many news-consuming publics love to shoot the messengers. Given all of that, we must proceed with an appropriate sense of gravity and, above all, with a sense of empathy for those — human and non-human alike — who will likely die in this horrible pandemic.

Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach » A Call for Humility.

Truth is, we’re not thrilled with the first edition of our book. Though we think there’s a lot in the book that’s worthwhile, our views and ideas have changed significantly in the last 4 years, and we are anxious to get the new version out. The latest version is, in many ways, a more knowledgeable and more interesting approach than the one we took back when we were more or less total n00bs writing the first edition. In the newest version, we concentrate not only on helping people to go vegan and stay vegan, but also on building a larger vegan movement that uses outreach and education as its main tools. We kept the irreverent and personal style of the first edition in many places, but we also get serious and analytical in places where that approach is better warranted. In short, this second edition is significantly better in many ways, and we think it’ll be a more effective book for people. In order to make it more effective, we had to rewrite it from the ground-up, and we’ve revised extensively throughout the process to bring the best possible work forward.

People will probably be surprised by how different the second edition is, but any writer who has a completely staid approach is a writer that’s probably not reading and thinking extensively enough. For some reason I’ll never get, people expect authors to have a wholly stable set of opinions that change little with time. It reminds me of how George W. Bush used to be so proud that he was so set in his opinions and approaches, and that he had “stayed the course” despite the many criticisms of his ideas and policies. Yes, George, you had a stable set of opinions, but that stable set of opinions was obviously the wrong stable set of opinions, and damn, did it ever fuck shit up (and that’s putting it generously).

To my thinking, any decent author has to have the intellectual fortitude to recognize that their previous work is the product of a particular time, place, sentiment, and set of understandings. Any author should throw everything they have into making the work the best they can within the boundaries of that context. But if it later turns out that the tools of that time were limited, there’s no reason to cling to them in the simplistic notion that not clinging to them will somehow make you a more consistent writer, or present a more consistent approach.

The work that we do is simply too important to approach any other way. When the publisher of the second edition came to us about a new version, they suggested that we rewrite 20% of the book. Our deal with them was that we’d do it only if we could rewrite the whole thing. In this latest version, we have indeed done that, and when the book is finally released, you’ll be reading a book that benefits from tighter and more entertaining writing while also taking a new approach to the subject matter that will motivate and hopefully inspire many to go vegan and stay vegan.

This is the best-selling guide that thousands have used to go vegan and stay vegan. Read on to find out how to channel your own inner vegan freak!

Elaine Vigneault, the “eccentric vegan,” is hoping to drive some traffic to her sad little site by getting in on the critique that I made of Ryan McReynolds’s entry about his misunderstanding abolitionism. Though I may deal with her entry itself later if I’m bored enough — and hey, it had pictures! That makes anything easier to read! — I just want to publicly correct the lies that Vigneault is attempting to spread about us. I posted a response on her blog, but I do not trust her to be honest about posting it. I suspect she has such a vendetta against us that she’d probably edit the response to say something totally different than what I’d acutally said. In case she refuses to post my comment on her blog, or in case she edits or distorts it, I present her comment and my response here, for the sake of posterity, and so that you can decide for yourself who is distorting what. I realize that I’m giving Vigneault exactly what she apparently didn’t get enough of as a child — attention — but I don’t want there to be any doubt about the kind of ugly project she’s engaged in.

In the comments to her own entry, Vigneault says:

I appreciate your hope that this won’t be seen as a fight, however, I read Bob Torres’s post. It was unusually mean-spirited. He essentially argues that if you haven’t written a book (published under the same name as the one you use to blog) then you don’t deserve to take part in the conversation. Torres’s intro:

“One of the great things about the Internet is that someone who has no real training or background in an area can write whatever they want about it. This is also, simultaneously, one of the worst things about the Internet. This observation is nothing new, but I’m reminded of the downside of it whenever I read blog entries like this one by Ryan McReynolds. Mired in the self-assured certitude that only the truly mistaken ever seem to possess, there are so many problems with McReynolds’s claims (it’d stretch the bounds of generosity to call what he writes an “argument”) that it is almost difficult to know exactly where to begin hacking away. That said, the overarching problem is that it is not clear that McReynolds has actually ever even gone to the trouble to read Francione — or if he did bother, he didn’t understand what he read. Overall, the entry reads largely like a quick term paper written by a bright but lazy student who wanted to make big claims to get that A, but who could only be bothered to Google the Sparknotes on the topic.”

That said, I have to be honest: I think some of my own animosity towards Torres is rearing its ugly head. I like his podcast and think overall he’s doing a good thing by creating, encouraging, and supporting a vegan community. However, I strongly disagree with him on some points and I’m often extremely frustrated by him.

For example, in the last podcast he and Jen answer a question about their favorite vegan restaurants. They answered NONVEGAN restaurants. They live in upstate New York. There’s no reason for them to not have been to vegan restaurants in NYC or Philly. And the response wasn’t along the lines of “even if you live in BFE you can find vegan food,” it was simply the first thing that came to the top of their heads. They don’t bother researching or preparing for the podcast at all.

Better example: someone asked what they could do about their school cafeteria not serving vegan food. Bob and Jen hate PETA so much that they didn’t know/ didn’t care that PETA offers TONS of support in this area: http://www.peta.org/feat/flunk/veganize.html and http://www.peta2.com/COLLEGE/cyc-veganize.asp And they didn’t mention the campaign to get vegan options in public schools across the nation. Instead of offering real, practical advice, they offered empty emotional support.

It’s like Bob is more interested in getting into heated arguments about philosophy with vegans he doesn’t know than about actually working towards a vegan future.

(Bleh, sorry such a long rant. It’s got little to do with you, Ryan. I’m sorry I dragged you into it. I might edit this post above to reflect this conversation…)

My response, which should be here, if she has the guts to approve it:

You are certainly welcome to your misguided opinions, Elaine, but I would like to correct your misrepresentations of my positions and the things that we have said on our show, at least in your comment. If I’m bored enough later, I might take the time to respond to your blog entry.

First, I do not believe that one need have published a book or have a Ph.D. to make a contribution on these issues. I don’t hammer Ryan for his not having published a book; I hammer him for not having read one. That said, I do, however, believe that academic training encourages habits of reflection, thought, and analysis that tend to produce more rigorous discourse. I realize that this is anathema in the animal rights movement, but that also probably partly explains why we’re so deep in the mess that we’re in.

Second, you completely distort what we said on the show—in all seriousness, I wonder if you are a native speaker of English if you can misunderstand us this badly. I went back and listened, to be sure, and anyone else can go do the same: in show 106, it is at about 1 hour and 11 minutes in. Recall that the questions were from Twitter, so they are live during the time we are recording. We were not asked about our favorite VEGAN restaurants, we were asked about our favorite restaurants. The question was “What is your favorite restaurant, both local and global?” To that, we responded that locally, we had few options, but that we could be accommodated even by two local establishments, even where we lived. We then went on to mention Thai Cuisine in Ithaca, NY, which has accommodated us well as vegans. We then discussed our favorite restaurants outside of our area, during which time we suggested TWO vegan restaurants in Philadelphia, Su Xing House and Singapore. We said that we could not remember the names of the places we had been in NYC, but that we had eaten well there. Anyone else can go back and listen if there’s any doubt. What you say, Elaine, is a total distortion.

Third, there’s no one on our show called “Jen,” so I’m not sure to whom you are referring, but if you mean Jenna, then yes, Jenna and I did answer a question from someone about getting vegan options in her college dining hall. Having successfully worked to get vegan options in a college dining hall myself, I told her what worked for us: going to the top, using parents for leverage, and persistence. Vegan options in public grade schools are irrelevant to the question, as this is a college. And PETA is not an organization we support, for many reasons we’ve laid out in many places, so there’s no reason that we would be as inconsistent as to suggest that anyone consult their materials.

Fourth, you claim that we don’t bother “researching or preparing for the podcast at all,” which is a ridiculous claim, especially when you are talking about live questions taken while we are recording the show for which we could not possibly have prepared. One would begin to get the impression that you skimmed through the show just to find a few points to attack us on, Elaine. You wouldn’t be so unkind as to do that, now, would you? In all honesty, there is no way in which one could seriously suggest that we were not prepared for the show. Listen to the interview. It is edited carefully, and the questions show that we did our homework on their latest album. Check the parts where we talk about news pieces. And listen to the voicemails. All of that requires research and preparation.

If you want to attack us, Elaine, have the moral fortitude to do it correctly, by attacking our positions for what they actually are, not for the distortions that you imagine them to be. One might begin to get the sense that cheap shots are the only way for you to attack us, and frankly, that makes you look worse than us.

From this lovely little back-and-forth, I’m left thinking that Vigneault was only fast forwarding through our show to find a few things that she could hopefully attack us with, and in doing so, she somehow missed that we were taking live questions. I wish I could say it was despicable, but it doesn’t even rise to that level. It is just pathetic.

As for the jibes about my wanting to debate philosophy more than wanting to work towards a vegan future, I’ll just say that Jenna and I have worked hard to get people to go vegan, and the thousands of vegans who have emailed us over the years we’ve been doing this to tell us that something that we did got them to go vegan convinces me that we’re not doing too badly at it. It may not work for everyone, but we do exactly what we say others should: we use our talents to the best of our ability to help build a genuine vegan movement that demands social justice for all, animals included. If Vigneault thinks that this isn’t enough, she’s probably right. I always feel that I could be doing more—how can anyone who really understands the problem not feel like that?—but I also think that “debating philosophy” is essential if we’re going to have sensible reasons guiding our actions. As I argued in Making A Killing, the lack of thinking that currently suffices for “theory” in this “movement” is probably why we’re so much less effective than we could be. Certainly, farty mariachis like Vigneault who are more interested in the politics of distortion and self-aggrandizement don’t help the situation.

With that said, I’m now going to get back to the unimportant work of putting the finishing touches on the 2nd. edition of Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World, you know, that worthless book that never got anyone to ever go vegan.

I realize that this is a heavy critique to lay at the doorstep of any author, but there is ample evidence to support my supposition. Most troublingly, McReynolds must rely on constructing straw men to make his argument. Though there any many like it, this paragraph is unique, only because it stands out as the pinnacle of confusion in what is otherwise a Himalayan-sized mountain range of befuddlement:

The problem, to me, seems to be that Francione treats the right not to be property as the end to seek, rather than seeking the actual welfare (in the broadest sense) of actual animals. But rights are abstractions. As Francione correctly states, rights are protections of interests. A right is a tool to protect an interest of an actual sentient being. That is, rights only exist to promote the welfare of rights holders. Promoting the right not to be property is absolutely in the interests of beings currently held as property. But it is not the only thing in their interests, and it is not necessary to ignore all of these other interests in the single-minded pursuit of that one.

This badly distorts the abolitionist approach; as such, I can only assume that McReynolds is either consciously distorting the abolitionist position, or that he’s never bothered to carefully read any of the work which he finds so objectionable. Either way, he’s shitting the bed here, and hopefully someone will be along soon to change his sheets. He’s floundering.

The primary issue with the quoted paragraph above is that Francione and other abolitionists do not say that the only interests that animals have are in not being regarded as property. This is nonsense, and absurd on its face. Instead, Francione argues that there is no way to guarantee any significant protection for animals as long as they are property. As long as animals are property, Francione argues, the interests of the property holder will always override the interests of the property. Thus, until we can overcome this barrier of the property status of animals, any reforms we make will ultimately fail to accord animals any true recognition as persons in the long run. This fundamental point that sits at the center of abolitionist theory is what McReynolds fails to understand most prominently, and his argument, poorly constructed as it is, falls in on itself over this central misunderstanding. Worse yet, this confusion raises a disturbing point. If, as he claims, he was once an “acolyte” of Francione, then he was a rather poor one, because he didn’t even really grasp a theorist he was, by his own admission, “defending” on his “various blogs, comments on others, and messages on forums.”

Going on with the troubling paragraph above, McReynolds calls rights “abstractions.” I can agree in some sense that yes, rights are abstractions, but they’re no more abstractions than any other part of our world that is mediated through the semiotic nature of human interaction. In this same sense, laws are abstractions, but no one suggests that their abstract nature makes them less compelling as a societal force. To be clear, the particular abstractions that we call laws happen to have rather non-abstract enforcement entities and institutions backing them. Try violating the abstraction of a law like robbing a grocery store at gunpoint in front of a police officer picking up some donuts, and you’ll understand very quickly how what McReynolds calls “abstractions” become real. Regardless, what McReynolds calls “abstractions” often have real impacts in the world, and calling something an abstraction and wishing it away as insignificant to make your insipid argument simpler does not make it so. Or, to put it another way, you can say that something isn’t real (which is, I think, what McReynolds is trying to say) but that doesn’t mean that your perception and reality jive. I’d be curious about whether or not McReynolds would like to give up some of the “abstractions” of rights that he enjoys, namely, the right to be free from bodily harm, and the right not to be the property of another. Almost certainly, he would not give them up, abstractions or not, because he recognizes them for what they are: vital guarantees that his interests cannot be violated without reason. Abolitionists seek to guarantee the same to animals. We believe that the best way to do it is through promoting ethical veganism, as this immediately and directly attacks the root cause of animal exploitation.

Leaving aside that one troubling paragraph, additional problems abound throughout the piece. McReynolds claims that the failures of welfarist activism cannot be laid at the feet of welfarism itself, but, instead, are the result of poor vegan outreach. There are two massive problems with this argument. First, this suggests that McReynolds doesn’t even fully believe in the value of welfarist reform in the long term as a tool of reducing the enslavement and subsequent consumption of animals. To this, he looks to veganism. If veganism is the way to reduce consumption most effectively, we should throw our weight behind promoting that, rather than working with industry to find ways to abuse animals ever-so-less horribly. Second, the increase in the consumption of animal products since the dawn of the modern welfare movement proves that the incrementalist agenda that underlies much of the logic of modern welfarism is just simply wrong. If, as many proponents of welfarist measures claim, welfarist measures will help society to see the inherent value of animals as beings in their own right, we should expect to see a concomitant reduction in the consumption of animals and animal products as welfare reforms grow. Yet, instead of the expected reduction, every year posts an increase in the number of dead.  This basic fact proves what Francione has been arguing for at least a decade and a half at this point: that welfare reforms simply cement the property status of animals, and in doing so, they condemn more and more animals to lives of incredible horror year after year. Critics who are incapable of thinking through the systemic nature of these problems often allege that this is an issue of “purity” or “ideology.” Most simply put, it is not. It is recognizing the roots of the problem, and formulating a response that hits at those roots most effectively. (I explore the systemic nature of this economic and cultural exploitation of animals in my book, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Righs.)

The final nail in the coffin of regulationist/welfarist ideology that no welfarist ever is prepared to discuss is the problem of globalization. Let’s assume as a hypothetical that the United States becomes the single largest proponent of animal welfare standards in the world tomorrow, instituting (through abstractions called “laws”) the very best standards for animal care and “husbandry” that are decades ahead of the rest of the world. The result would be that animal agriculture would almost immediately offshore even more of its production to countries with fewer or no regulations, where they would exploit and use animals for profit just as they do here, right now. Not only is this possible, it is happening today as more and more firms offshore various facets of animal agricultural production for cost-savings. During the time I was studying for my degree in agricultural science, I learned that the agricultural industry is one that operates on incredibly thin margins. I also learned that the industry is highly adaptable, and is always looking for new technological or economic solutions to the challenge of extracting more surplus value from the animals they own. Given these points, the central weakness of welfarist propaganda again rears its hideous head: welfare reforms do not and cannot cut to the heart of the problem, because they do not challenge the essential barriers to animals having a full and complete recognition of their interests. They simply delay recognition of the core problem, and convince people of something that the industry is longing for: an assertion that their products are somehow “humane.”

In the end, I’ve read only one decent critique of Francione’s ideas from a regulationist perspective, and that comes from Professor Cass Sunstein, who not only apparently took the time to read Francione (after all, he was reviewing the book), but who also went to the trouble to formulate a response that took his position seriously. (For what it might be worth, I don’t agree with Sunstein, and if you want to know his argument, look it up, since I’m already getting a bit long in the tooth with this entry.) Sadly, McReynolds could not be troubled to perform even the most obvious kinds of due diligence with his own argument, despite having once been a self-proclaimed “acolyte.” Instead of giving the abolitionist perspective the serious thought it deserves, McReynolds would rather defend activism that by his own admission does nothing to stem the tide of animals being killed for human consumption, activism that not only does not strike at the roots of the problem, but which also colludes with exploiters. (What any animal rights organization has to do with Whole Foods — a company that profits obscenely from selling dead animals — is beyond my comprehension, but these are the organizations which, presumably, McReynolds would now support.) What we need is an effective vegan movement to promote widespread, long-term societal change in the status of animals, not a set of so-called “activists” who fail to believe even in the persuasiveness of their own arguments about the moral worth of animals.