Category Archives: Nonviolence

Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, Arguments against veganism, Dairy, Eggs, Nonviolence, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Vegan, Veganism, Violence

“But Meat, Cheese, Eggs and Milk Taste Good!”

November 14, 2016 Keith Berger Leave a comment

One common argument against veganism is, “I like eating meat, cheese, eggs and milk. They taste good!” While that may be the case for some people (I certainly felt that way in my pre-vegan days), personal taste preference is irrelevant in matters of fundamental justice and here’s what this argument really means:

“The satisfaction of my personal pleasure is more important than another individual’s right to have their body treated with respect and not be used as an object.”

Essentially, this same argument could be used by a rapist to justify rape, or by a human trafficker to justify commercial sexual exploitation. If such analogies seem off the mark or offensive, consider that the non-human animals used by humans to provide food are routinely sexually abused by their human “caretakers” through, among other things, non-consensual, forced penetration and manipulation of their reproductive organs under the euphemism of “animal husbandry” (even this term has the ring of bestiality to it…).

The ability to take something from someone else (property, sex, children, money) does not mean we should take those things from them. On the contrary, it means that we, as the more powerful entities in the situation, have a moral obligation to do what is right and not take that which does not rightfully belong to us. To proceed otherwise is to act unethically, unjustly and immorally. It is to act as a bully, an oppressor and a tyrant.

Is that the best we can aspire to, or can we make the simple decision to remove ourselves from the violent oppression and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of our global society – non-human individuals – and start living vegan, right here and right now?

The choice is clear.

Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:

www.HowToGoVegan.org
www.VeganEducationGroup.com
www.BeFairBeVegan.com

Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, Dairy, Eggs, Nonviolence, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Speciesism, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Violence

Open Minds, Open Hearts – An Open Letter To Non-Vegans

October 10, 2016 Keith Berger Leave a comment

My name is Keith and I hope you’ll read this essay.

You are not here by accident, mistake or coincidence. There is a reason you have found this page. I’m asking your attention for only a few minutes and hoping you’ll seek to answer the three questions at the end of this essay.

What is it that opens a closed mind and lets in the light? What image, word or sound softens a heart hardened by societal norms, traditions and expectations and allows fairness and justice to flow? What is the catalyst for one person to change?

I’d like to tell you mine.

I was a staunch meat, dairy, egg and honey eater from as far back as I can remember. I wore leather, wool, silk and used other products derived from the bodies of animals. I used products that involved animal testing and contained animal secretions. I enjoyed various forms of entertainment that involved the use of animals. In short, I did what it seemed everyone around me did – the things society taught me were acceptable – and I did these things without a second thought. When I was too ignorant to know that McDonald’s “food” ought to have quote marks around it, I would routinely order 2 Big Macs, a 20-piece McNugget and a chocolate milkshake and have one Big Mac devoured by the time my lunch companions reached the table with their orders. I ate at every steakhouse I could find, identified my mom’s pork chops as my favorite food on the planet and greedily consumed every type of animal flesh that came my way, from alligator to ostrich, never once giving a second thought to what the consequences of this type of blind consumption were to my health, the health of the planet and – least of all but most importantly – the freedom and lives of the animals I was eating. After all, they were already dead, so I had no part to play in any of that… right?

I mean, it’s not as if my consumption of and demand for animal products for eating, wearing and other uses was a direct contributing factor in supporting a worldwide system of unjust animal enslavement, abuse, torture, suffering, neglect, indignity and, ultimately, the mercilessly brutal taking of their lives… right?

Wrong.

In 2004 when my cousins sat me down to eat a delicious home-cooked vegan meal and watch Peaceable Kingdom, a beautiful documentary that gently challenged me to examine my beliefs about animals – only hours before which I had defiantly declared, “I’m not drinking your vegan Kool-Aid, so don’t get your hopes up” – I became aware in 70 minutes of what I’d been blind to my entire life: I was complicit in a well-hidden, cruelly concealed worldwide atrocity that was, to my mind and the minds of many others (including Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer) nothing short of an animal holocaust [noun – “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale”; Middle English: from Old French holocauste, via late Latin from Greek holokauston, from holos ‘whole’ + kaustos ‘burned’] bearing similarities to the human Holocaust including but not limited to the stark, overcrowded housing conditions, merciless brutality and the increasingly efficient methods of killing, but differing wildly in terms of sheer numbers. In fact, there are six million animals slaughtered for food globally every hour of every day. Six million per hour – the equivalent of the estimated death toll of Jewish people in the human Holocaust every… sixty…minutes.

I had no idea, on any conscious level, that nearly 10 billion land animals and countless sea animals are killed for food every year in the country I call home and in even greater numbers abroad. I had no conscious awareness that my choices about the food I ate, the clothes I wore and the products I used were directly responsible for the unimaginable suffering and death of countless individuals of other species. At the end of the film, I had cried more than once and could only sit and mutter, “I had no idea… I had no idea…” and desperately wonder what I could do to stop supporting this nightmare. The answer was simple – start living vegan. Change what I can where I stand, right now.

In truth, it wasn’t the sheer numbers that affected me – it was the individuals. I can’t imagine what six million or ten billion of anything actually looks like, but looking into the terrified eyes of one calf being torn away forever from her mother, one pig in the slaughter line watching his companions hung by their feet and having their throats slit, one baby chick having her beak seared off with a hot blade, one dog being skinned – ALIVE – and thrown in a pile of dying, mutilated dogs, one cow struggling valiantly to evade the man trying to shoot her in the head with the captive bolt gun… that’s what haunted me. The eyes.

cow-eye

Eyes like yours and mine. Eyes that rolled in their sockets in pain and anguish. Eyes that screamed and cried and pleaded. Eyes that, if they could speak in words, would say, “Why are you doing this to me? What have I done? I don’t understand. Please stop. You don’t have to do this”. And though there were no words, I understood the language conveyed by those eyes and I could not pretend to not understand. I saw the pain, I saw the fear, I saw the misery, I saw the hope and the life drain from those eyes, I saw defeat… and I was affected.

At that moment, when my closed mind opened, the light inside turned on and my heart spoke louder than my stomach, I knew I had been changed forever and that I could no longer participate in the system I now understood for what it was. It was then that I began to live vegan – to eschew, wherever possible and practicable, the use of products of animal exploitation and to educate others where and when I could about how they too could stop promoting this injustice. I hadn’t known till then that there was another choice available – a choice to live a vegan life – and once I knew, I couldn’t un-know.

This footage is not graphic, but it tells a haunting story in three and a half minutes:

My only regret about living vegan is that I didn’t have – or didn’t pay attention to – information that would have gotten me there sooner.

Veganism is a way of living that affords other individuals the dignity, freedom and right to live their lives free from intentional harm and from being treated as the property of others. It is the spiritual principle of Live and Let Live extended beyond one’s own species. It is a selfless act in a world overrun with selfishness. It is putting aside one’s entitlement in favor of allowing other individuals to enjoy life in their own ways. It is stepping out of an ego-driven, fear-based life into the light of Love. It is the conscious choice to stop hurting others and, in so doing, to stop hurting oneself and the world we all share. It is a social justice movement that aims to bring an end to the most violent, egregious and deadly form of oppression on the planet: speciesism.

Speciesism, analogous with racism and sexism, can be defined as a double standard created by humans placing higher moral value on some individual animals over other individual animals, based solely on the morally irrelevant criterion of species membership.

Veganism is not some sort of moral “high ground”, but rather a recognition of and respect for equality between individuals. As my friend Michele McCowan so eloquently put it, “I don’t feel superior because I’m vegan. The truth is I am vegan because I don’t feel superior to others.”

To define veganism as simply as possible, I take you to the source:

“The word ‘veganism’ denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude — as far as is possible and practical — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.” – Vegan Society, 1979

Now that you’ve read what might be some new information (or had some existing information reinforced), I ask you to answer the following three questions:

What is it that might open your mind and let in the light? What image, word or sound might soften your heart and allow fairness and justice to flow? What might be your catalyst for change?

If you have even the slightest interest in living vegan or learning more about veganism, here are great places to start:

www.BeFairBeVegan.com

www.HowToGoVegan.org

From my heart to yours, thank you for listening.

Peacelovevegan,

Keith Berger

Co-founder, South Florida Vegan Education Group

[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimer regarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]

Dismantle speciesism. Live vegan. Educate others.

Start now, here’s how:

HowToGoVegan.org

VeganEducationGroup.com

BeFairBeVegan.com

Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, Nonviolence, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Speciesism, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Welfarism

Essay – I’m An Abolitionist Vegan

October 5, 2016 Keith Berger Leave a comment

This is a slightly edited version of my submission in 2015 for a collection of essays being compiled and edited for publication by my friend and long-time vegan Butterflies Katz. The topic I chose is I’m An Abolitionist Vegan.

I’m an abolitionist vegan , but that wasn’t always the case.

For the first 36 years of my life, I did as those around me did – I engaged in the daily consumption of products of animal exploitation. I thought nothing of eating dead and dismembered animals, swallowing their secretions, wearing their skins and enjoying various forms of entertainment their use provided. I mean, it wasn’t as if my demand for animal products was a direct contributing factor in supporting a worldwide system of animal enslavement, injustice, suffering, neglect and, ultimately, the mercilessly brutal taking of their lives… right?

Wrong.

Once exposed to the truth of the system I’ve just described, I was horrified and desperately wanted to “do something” to end these horrors, so I engaged in what I thought was effective animal “rights” activism through animal welfare organizations and their single-issue campaigns. I was unknowingly caught in a wave of welfarism that often had little or nothing to do with promoting veganism. Organizations spoke about compassion and I couldn’t articulate then that the problem isn’t a lack of compassion but rather the presence of injustice. They promoted “incremental changes” and said “every little bit helps”, so I bought into the defeatist attitude that “the world will never go vegan, so let’s make the cages more comfortable”. I know now that when we advocate for anything less than living vegan, we engender, foster and promote speciesism.

After a decade of welfarism, I learned of the abolitionist approach to animal rights and my entire perspective changed. The unassailable logic and clarity of Professor Gary L. Francione’s ideas rang true and helped me understand that clear, consistent vegan education is the most effective way to bring justice to animals by working to give them the right not to be used or abused by humans as disposable, replaceable resources and commodities.

[It is important to note that, while it’s true that my first exposure to abolitionism was through Francione’s work from the 1990s to present, the idea of nonviolent abolitionism, as directly opposed to welfarism, was being developed in relation to veganism and animal rights as far back as 1967 with the publication of Out of the Jungle by H. Jay Dinshah, founder of the American Vegan Society.]

(please see our disclaimer about the mention of groups, individuals and organizations)

When we have the opportunity to educate people about veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species, then as vegans I feel it is incumbent upon us to do so, unflinchingly and unequivocally, and here’s why: Convince one person to become vegan and you immediately eliminate support for dozens of animal exploitation issues. Convince ten and you multiply the effect accordingly. Conversely, convince one person that, for example, circuses are cruel (but not discuss veganism) and s/he may leave the circus… only to arrive two hours earlier at the neighbor’s barbecue and feast on slaughtered animals, never making the connection between the elephant under the big top and the burger on their plate. Which approach sounds more effective? Which approach leads to an internal ethical shift? Which approach leads us in the direction in which we want to go?

I choose the abolitionist approach. I am an abolitionist vegan.

Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:

Be Fair Be Vegan
How To Go Vegan podcast
www.facebook.com/VeganEducationGroup

Abolitionism, Animal Ethics, Animal Rights, Arguments against veganism, Cognitive dissonance, Heterosexism, Intersectionality, Nonviolence, Racism, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Speciesism, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Violence

On Cognitive Dissonance, Denial and Selfishness

September 8, 2016 Keith Berger Leave a comment

Would those who argue against veganism (and therefore, by default, in favor of speciesism) be just as quick to argue in favor of racism, sexism, heterosexism or some other form of oppressive injustice involving human victims if perpetuating that particular form of injustice personally benefited them in some way, as does continuing to consume products of animal exploitation?

Fighting against any moral and ethical stance that works toward ending the exploitation of a group, the abolition of which threatens one’s personal pleasure, comfort and convenience (and always at the expense of the exploited group), exposes a perverse form of selfishness on the part of the defender(s) of the exploitation.

Cognitive dissonance (the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual when confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values) can make it difficult to accept certain truths, but denial of reality never actually changes reality. Rather, it creates a false premise upon which to predicate one’s behavior and takes one further from the truth of a situation, always with deleterious effects to oneself and others.

Personally, when I was presented with overwhelming evidence that my behavior as a non-vegan was directly contributing to a system of animal slavery, exploitation and needless death (in essence, an animal holocaust claiming billions, and possibly trillions, of sentient beings every year), I took an immediate and unequivocal stand against this injustice and started living vegan within the hour. It was the only direction that made sense to me, the only way of living I could live with and the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life. The “transition” was fairly simple and living vegan quickly became, as vegan educator Elena Brodskaya put it, “…not second or third nature, but just Nature”.

It would save an abundance of time and energy – as well as countless lives – if those who oppose veganism would cease their mental and ethical gymnastics, stop trying to find, in the words of the Roman philosopher Seneca, “a right way to do the wrong thing” and just start living vegan.

Keith Berger and Elena Brodskaya – co-founders, SFVEG

Dismantle speciesism. Live vegan. Educate others.

Start now, here’s how:

HowToGoVegan.org

VeganEducationGroup.com

BeFairBeVegan.com

Animal Ethics, Nonviolence, South Florida Vegan Education Group, Vegan, Vegan Education, Veganism, Welfarism

If You Are New To South Florida Vegan Education Group, Please Start Here

September 8, 2016 Keith Berger Leave a comment

We at South Florida Vegan Education Group believe that clear, consistent, unequivocal vegan education is the only advocacy method that will successfully bring about the changes for the animals’ lives that we seek in the world. We believe in creating a peaceful, fair and just world for all beings, regardless of species, through veganism. We are passionate about empowering individuals with the knowledge that veganism is the primary means of dismantling speciesism and achieving the abolition of animal enslavement, exploitation and execution for human pleasure and convenience, and we do this in a unique way that challenges the status quo of the animal “welfare” movement (and the animal exploiters with whom they purposely partner) as it continues to focus on everything but veganism in order to maximize each other’s profits and keep the wheels of animal agriculture turning.

For anyone who’s new to our page and our group (or for long-timers who haven’t read this yet), we ask that you please read the following:

Having been involved in numerous animal “rights” campaigns over the past decade or more, we find ourselves turned off by these money and membership-driven organizations promoting small “victories” while purposely not focusing on veganism, which is the key to addressing the root of the problem (as opposed to flailing away at the myriad branches of specific abuses growing in every direction). We can no longer support the big, donation-based, so-called Animal “Rights” organizations in good conscience (their idea of “rights” is actually welfare and “harm reduction”), as our blinders have been lifted and we can see clearly how ineffective their approaches are other than to maintain the status quo that allows – and demands – that non-human individuals be used as disposable, replaceable human property. The Single Issue Campaigns (SICs) promoted by every major animal welfare organization have not been effective in the past; in fact, they have been hurting the very movement they purport to be championing for over two hundred years!

Please read the following two essays:

My Thoughts on Petitions and Single Issue Campaigns

My thoughts on single-issue animal rights campaigns

It seems that more and more advocates are focusing their time and energy on animal welfare and abuse “reduction” – while animals remain enslaved in a food/entertainment/fashion/science lab industry – rather than focusing on achieving animals rights through promoting veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species. There is a huge difference between the two. Welfarists celebrate hollow “victories” like bigger cages or one species’ “retirement” from the circus (only to be replaced by another species) while the vegan movement seeks to focus on clear, consistent, unequivocal vegan education.

How You Can Help Our Education Efforts

South Florida Vegan Education Group is raising funds to cover printing, travel and entry costs for participation in numerous events in Florida which will help us provide important education to people across the state and beyond. We feel it is crucial that there be a clear and consistent vegan message at events such as these. By directly engaging with the public, our group provides such a message in an unequivocal manner. To make a secure, tax-deductible online donation, please click here.

For more information on veganism, please visit:

HowToGoVegan.org
BeFairBeVegan.com

South Florida Vegan Education Group is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Turbulence of Dreaming | South Florida Vegan Education Group Blog