[We encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
A common question I’m asked when non-vegans find out I’m vegan is “You must have cravings, don’t you?”
Why yes, I do.
Now, I could take this opportunity to describe how I’ve been able to find wonderfully delicious veganized versions of practically every non-vegan foodstuff I once enjoyed eating before I began living vegan, but there are easily hundreds of blogs and other websites devoted to extolling the tummy-tempting virtues of thriving on food made entirely from plants, so I’ll pass. Instead, I’ll tell you what this vegan craves every… single… day.
I crave justice, fairness and basic respect for the vulnerable non-human victims of systematic oppression who are exploited and killed by the billions each year for human pleasure, comfort, convenience and entertainment.
I crave a world in which that shit is no longer normalized, tolerated and marketed as acceptable and desirable via cultural conditioning, tradition, emotional attachment and pseudoscience.
I crave an enlightened society that teaches its younger generations to treat themselves and those around them, regardless of species or any other arbitrary characteristic, with the respect and unconditional love they deserve merely by virtue of each individual’s inherent sentience rather than teaching them to devalue life.
I crave the dismantling of speciesism, the most egregious and deadly form of violent oppression our global society has ever known, until it is nothing more than an ugly scar on our collective heart and a dark stain on the tapestry of our lives, ever reminding us of a barbaric past we ought never repeat.
I crave an end to the self-centered fear endemic to humans that causes individuals and groups to claim false “superiority” over others resulting in the wrongful domination, subjugation, exploitation, humiliation and extermination of those individuals and groups deemed “inferior”.
I crave a time when there is no longer a need to convince goodhearted, rational people that it is wrong to hurt and kill others for their own benefit because they will have already learned to live in accordance with their inherent understanding of right and wrong.
Oh, and soft pretzels. I crave soft pretzels like nobody’s business, and that’s ok because there’s a place near us that makes them with no products of animal exploitation so they’re suitable for vegans!
If the point of the original question was to ask whether I have, in 14 years of living vegan, ever had a craving for animal flesh or secretions, the answer is yes. Early on, I had the occasional craving for certain kinds of sushi (that’s pretty much the only craving I can recall having more than once) and understood two things: 1) the taste cravings I experienced had nothing to do with the fish in the sushi and everything to do with the spices being used which can easily be replicated without any animals being involved and 2) giving in to the craving was not an option.
Having a craving doesn’t mean it’s appropriate or acceptable to give in to the craving, especially when to do so means taking something that belongs to someone else without their consent (i.e.; an animal’s body and/or secretions). That’s called theft, and most people would agree that theft is wrong. Although I could conceivably experience a craving for some animal product such as eggs, cheese, milk chocolate, honey, bacon or anything else that may have once brought me pleasure to eat, it doesn’t mean I will go out and buy or otherwise indulge in any of these items to satisfy that craving. I have the option to either substitute what I’m craving with a 100% plant-based version or to go without… and still continue to live. All cravings pass; the deadly consequences of giving into these kinds of cravings last forever, and my fleeting desire to satisfy my palate pleasure could never justify taking the freedom, body or life of another individual. I’m just not that important.
Having focused on palate cravings to this point, it should also be noted that the same principles apply to desires for other products obtained through the exploitation and killing of non-humans – leather jackets, suede shoes, wool sweaters, fur coats, silk scarves and other such items of personal attire, furniture, automotive accessories and the like.
My sense is that the “cravings question” (and the “protein question“, and the “B12 question“) comes not from the non-vegan’s desire to understand more about my life as a vegan but rather to understand what their life might be like should they choose to start living vegan. It’s a veiled attempt to say “Here’s why I could never be vegan” as if a desire for bacon (for example) gives one moral license to devalue and take the life of a living, breathing sentient being by paying someone to cut her throat and then butcher her body to pieces so one can swallow her flesh and ignobly defecate her remains into a toilet. A more honest question might be, “Will I have cravings for the familiar foods I enjoy and how will I manage to get through them?” It does provide a conversational opening for me to help debunk the erroneous preconceived myths about veganism that they may have come to believe up to that point if I’m willing to take the time and they’re willing to listen with an open mind. I can identify with those fearful questions and recall that the night I began living vegan, I had no idea how I was going to navigate this new life path, but I knew without a doubt that there was no going back to my previous morally indefensible non-vegan path. And with that, I set my mind to figuring out whatever I needed to know to live as nonviolent a life as possible with as much moral integrity as I can. I searched for and found fantastic online resources, books and articles that helped me make sense of how to live vegan, and much of this can be found in the Downloadable Content, Online Vegan Resources and Recommended Reading sections of this blog.
A Few Questions We Hope Non-Vegans Will Ponder
Consider how you would answer this question: “Is my pleasure more important than someone else’s life?” If your answer is”no”, then you already believe what vegans believe and can easily align your beliefs with your actions by living vegan! If you answered “yes”, then the next question to ask yourself is whether you would find it acceptable for you to be harmed or killed for someone else’s pleasure. If you answer “no” to this question, then ask yourself how you justify holding this moral double-standard when you understand that to do so results in the violent exploitation and slaughter of innocent, vulnerable individuals.
If you can identify with any of the cravings mentioned above and are not vegan, I’ll first ask you to ask yourself why you feel one way but act another, and then I’ll ask you to make the one decision that will bring your values and actions into congruence – the decision to live vegan.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read ourDisclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Veganism isn’t about personal benefit – it’s an ethical stance against the unjust use, violent oppression and wholly unnecessary killing of innocent, vulnerable sentient beings. Any ancillary gains one experiences as a result of living vegan are positive, albeit secondary, byproducts and ought never be the focus of vegan advocacy as they only serve to defocus from the ethical issue at hand – when you know it’s wrong to exploit, harm and kill others for pleasure (and we ALL know this), you stop promoting it, engaging in it and paying others to do it for you. That happens the day you start living vegan.
Framed in humans terms, would anyone advocate against spousal abuse by promoting the personal “benefits” of not beating one’s mate? “Think of the money you’ll save on hospital visits! You won’t have sore fists anymore! No more attorney fees! See all the great reasons you should stop?!?”
It’s crucial to remember that veganism isn’t primarily about us and how we can benefit from ceasing to participate in the non-consensual use of animals. Personal health and environmental improvements are side benefits of living vegan, and vegan advocates and educators ought to be careful not to erroneously frame them as the goals or primary motivations. Veganism is an ethical position that represents a return to living according to our almost universally shared belief that harming – and killing – others for no good reason is always wrong. “But their bodies tastegood!” is as morally unjustifiable a reason for taking a life as “But their bodies feelgood!” is for sexually violating another individual. Each represents a terrible injustice that serves only to satisfy the pleasure of the perpetrator to the extreme detriment of the victim.
When the victims of violence and oppression are human, no one compromises or equivocates. The message is always, “This victimization is wrong and it needs to stop now“. When the victims are non-human individuals, suddenly compromises abound. Baby steps become “acceptable” and advocates ask for anything they can get rather than the one thing that matters – the right for non-human individuals not to be used as the property of humans. That’s textbook speciesism, and one cannot effectively advocate for dismantling a form of oppression while simultaneously engaging in it.
A vegan world won’t happen overnight, but if we don’t commit ourselves to dismantling speciesism through clear, consistent vegan education advocacy and instead keep reinforcing it, a vegan world won’t happen at all.
With messaging focused on cruelty and suffering rather than the inherent injustice of animal use itself, FARM intentionally misses an opportunity to promote veganism and instead promotes harm reduction.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Life Outside the Fast Lane
I am pleased to report that for the 4th consecutive year, I did not “fast against slaughter” on World Day for Farmed Animals (October 2). Here are some of my thoughts on why I made that choice… and why I think others should as well.
Before I began living vegan, if I’d known that someone was “fasting against slaughter”, I would not have been compelled in the least to inquire about why they were taking such an action. In fact, it would likely have further solidified my existing belief that “vegans are extremists”, a myth that was fed to me as a byproduct of our human society’s ubiquitous exploitation of individuals of other species for its own pleasure and benefit. In my non-vegan mindset, such activities struck me as ludicrous and I could not have imagined investigating or taking part in something I saw as completely nonsensical. It’s important for those vegans who choose to support and participate in this and related events to understand and carefully consider the probability that a furthering of this “extremist/ridiculous vegan” image may be an unintended outcome of their involvement and association with such single-issue campaigns organized by large, self-serving corporate animal welfare charities. When this happens we move further from, rather than closer to, the goal of dismantling speciesism to achieve the right for non-human animals to no longer be treated as human property.
In this case, the group behind the event is Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), an organization whose founder Alex Hershaft made this revealing statement when asked in a 2015 interview to describe FARM’s mission:
“Our mission is to get people to reduce and eventually eliminate the number of animals killed for food. We tried to make it very simple. We’re not into making vegans, we’re not into reducing suffering, we’re not into ending factory farming. All that other stuff is implicit, but we’re very focused on just reducing the number of animals [killed], however we can do it, and there are lots of ways of doing it. The most obvious way is to get people to go vegan, but you can reduce the number much more effectively by getting some major cookie company, like Keebler, to reduce the number of eggs in making cookies.”
Simple logic proves that these campaigns are not reducing animal use and are, in fact, causing more harm than good by failing to clearly, emphatically and unequivocally call for an end to all animal use and instead promote the message that some animal use is morally acceptable.
While it’s a nice-sounding idea that reducing the number of eggs used by a cookie company will reduce the number of animals killed for food, apply a little critical thinking and it is difficult to believe that when Keebler agrees to use fewer eggs, the result is a decrease in egg production and the freeing of laying hens. Many such reduction initiatives have been implemented in recent years and yet the number of animals being killed every year for human consumption continues to increase, not decrease (for any who might be under the false impression as I once was that “no animals die in egg production”, please read this eye-opening article from Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary). When animal “rights” organizations such as FARM promote the message that “it’s ok to use eggs – but just not too many eggs” – they are reinforcing the speciesistidea that it’s morally acceptable for humans to use animals and their secretions – to steal their property and their lives – for their own purposes.
FARM’s intentional refusal to promote veganism as a non-negotiable moral imperative and instead to present it as just another option to “reduce the number of animals killed for food” (which conveniently overlooks the myriad other uses of non-humans for human pleasure and personal benefit) is the hallmark of the animal welfare movement. As always, one need only frame the issue with humans as victims to immediately see the speciesisminherent in the idea of working to “reduce” rather than advocating for a stop to such violent and oppressive victimization. From a previous Turbulence of Dreaming essay entitled Challenging Our Complacency Vol. 1:
“Unfortunately, it’s quite likely that humans will always rape and murder other humans as they have since the beginning of time, but it’s not likely that anyone is going to advocate for ‘gentler’ rape and ‘kinder’ murder based on that terrible likelihood. When we believe a behavior is morally unjustifiable, we advocate for the abolitionof said behavior rather than ‘nicer’ ways to continue propagating the same injustice. To do the latter only helps the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the injustice feel comfortable about continuing to reap the benefits of their oppression-of-choice.”
Non-Human Resources
Fasting for farmed animals, as my friend and fellow abolitionist vegan educator Colin Wright has noted, does nothing to further the idea that, if we are to change the property paradigm that allows and demands that animals be used as disposable, replaceable resources to be exploited for human pleasure and benefit, we need always promote veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species.
There is no discernible educational value in intentionally refusing oneself nutrition in order to make a vague (and mostly silent) point about standing “in remembrance and solidarity” with the millions of animal slaughtered for food each day. I don’t need to cause my own suffering to enhance my empathy about the unnecessary suffering of my fellow sentient beings.
No, I won’t be fasting against slaughter this year or at any time nor will I ever promote such an idea. Instead, I’ll continue living vegan and educating others about veganism as our moral obligation to those non-human individuals with whom we share this planet.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
“Look into the faces. Look behind their eyes. They are not ‘voiceless’, they are talking to us with their eyes and their body language; they are screaming, we’re just not listening. Be vegan.” – There’s An Elephant In The Room blog
No-nonsense and No Nonsense
I began writing this essay after spending several hours engaged in peaceful, positive conversations with non-vegans about the ethical reasons for living vegan at an Earth Day event at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. As always at our Vegan Education Station, we employed no gimmicks, no tricks, no public theatrics, no graphic videos, no gruesome images, no bribery, no shaming, no intrusiveness, no deceptiveness and no coercion in our interactions with our interlocutors (these are all tactics we have observed being employed by animal welfare and animal “rights” organizations that consistently resist the idea of simply educating the public about veganism). Rather, as always, we politely and patiently provided those who approached us with no-nonsense information about the consequences of their choices (that there is always a victim at the end of one’s choice to consume products of animal exploitation) and asked them to think from a perspective many of them admitted they’d never considered before. Our conversations were respectful on both ends, even when we were challenged with the ubiquitous anti-vegan arguments such as “Lions eat other animals – are you gonna tell them to stop?” (“Lions are obligate carnivores and have no choice but to consume flesh – humans, on the other hand, have many other choices”), “But what if I was in an extreme situation and was starving?” (“You’re not experiencing either condition, so what’s stopping you now?”) and “How will I get my protein?” (click hereto find out my answer).
The caption reads in part: “We had just left Everest Base Camp where we slept for the night, and headed to Mt Kala Patthar to hike to the summit (5,550m)… Within about 6/7 minutes we were hit with a blizzard, temperatures of -5 with wind chill and hard hitting snow, so we had to abandon – but we did manage to speak to 1 couple who took a card!” Yes, when you want a neat photo, try “activism” at 18,000 feet – you’re guaranteed to reach (nearly) no one but you’ll look cool in the process!
In 2016, in what appears to be another in a countless series of attempts to reinvent the animal welfare wheel (one that’s been spinning ceaselessly – and going nowhere – for over 200 years), a group in Melbourne, Australia (now with international membership) calling itself Anonymous for the Voiceless began engaging in what their website describes as “street activism” in which “Cubes of Truth” are formed by individuals wearing Guy Fawkes masks who arrange themselves into a human square and hold laptops or other media devices playing videos depicting the inherent horrors of the animal agriculture industry. I can identify with the idea of wanting to trigger, as their website suggests, “…curiosity and interest from the public” in an “…attempt to lead bystanders to a vegan conclusion through a combination of local standard-practice animal exploitation footage and conversations with a value-based sales approach”, as it’s not much different from the so-called “vegan” outreach in which I used to participate in Miami and other parts of South Florida, although we didn’t wear masks and only had a single video screen playing an endless loop of nauseatingly dreadful animal abuse.
I came to the understanding some time ago that our “vegan” outreach was anything but vegan, as we failed to deliver a clear, consistent message that all animal use is morally unjustifiable and instead offered passersby a confusing combination of vegan and vegetarian messaging through the videos we played and the litter-ature we handed to peoplewhether they wanted it or not.
[It appears that “Cubes of Truth” are being staged in Miami, so it’s possible that the so-called “vegan” outreach mentioned above, soon to be featured in an upcoming essay here at The Turbulence of Dreaming, has morphed into this new version]
Here again is why I no longer believe in, support or engage in speciesist efforts such as these: my ten years of hands-on experience with this kind of activism has led me to the sad conclusion that such messaging, like allanimal welfare messaging, misses the point entirely. By focusing our activism on showing the public how awful non-humans are treated in the animal exploitation industries, we fail to make clear that all animal use is inherently unjust and this plays directly into – and tacitly reinforces – a deeply speciesist cultural mindset that as long as we treat non-human individuals “humanely“, “kindly” and “compassionately” while we’re confining them against their wills and forcibly breeding them into existence for the express purpose of violently taking their lives to serve our desires, it’s acceptable in the end to kill them and consume their bodies, skins and secretions because, after all, they’re only “things” and objects to be used, not individuals. By focusing on the symptoms (“cruelty“, “abuse”, “mistreatment”, etc.), we fail to address the problem, and the problem is not how we use animals to serve our own needs; the problem is that we use them at all.
Speaking of problems, here are several problems inherent in Anonymous for the Voiceless:
Problem – Animals Have Voices – We Just Refuse To Listen
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” – Arundhati Roy
Anonymous for the Voiceless’ implication that non-human individuals don’t have voices is not only incorrect, it’s also ableist. Here’s why.
“The ableism embedded in animal-rights discourse is evident in a common rallying cry used by animal advocates. To be a ‘voice for the voiceless’ is a sentiment with which many activists within advocacy communities identify. It became common to use the biblical phrase ‘a voice for the voiceless’ to refer to animals after the publication of a poem written in 1910 by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox… this poem was radical in its acknowledgment of animal suffering.
The phrase a ‘voice for the voiceless’–giving voice to a population that is unable to defend or speak for itself–inevitably conjures the sentiment in Wilcox’s poem: that the voiceless are physically unable to speak or help themselves… But [it] is wrong to suggest that animals are not telling us what they want…
Animals consistently voice preferences and ask for freedom. They speak to us every day when they cry out in pain or try to move away from our prods, electrodes, knives, and stun guns. Animals tell us constantly that they want to be out of their cages, that they want to be reunited with their families, or that they don’t want to walk down the kill chute. Animals express themselves all the time, and many of us know it. If we didn’t, factory farms and slaughterhouses would not be designed to constrain any choices an animal might have. We deliberately have to choose not to hear when the lobster bangs on the walls from inside a pot of boiling water or when the hen who is past her egg-laying prime struggles against the human hands that enclose her legs and neck. We have to choose not to recognize the preference expressed when the fish spasms and gasps for oxygen in her last few minutes alive. Considering animals voiceless betrays an ableist assumption of what counts as having a voice.
…When animal advocates describe animals as voiceless, even when it is meant simply as a metaphor, it gives power to those who want to view animals as ‘mindless objects.’ In the long run, activists will help animals more if we treat them as active participants in their own liberation–as the expressive subjects animal advocates know them to be–remembering that resistance takes many forms, some of which may be hard to recognize from an able-bodied human perspective.”
The compelling arguments made in Taylor’s article offer a new perspective on the idea of “a voice for the voiceless”, the very phrase I must admit I’d used to describe myself in the early days of my animal “activism”. Having eloquently explained the ableism inherent in the phrase, Taylor has helped me understand the unsettling feeling I experience whenever I hear animal advocates refer to non-human individuals as “voiceless”. I knew the idea was wrong, but I hadn’t considered that it also carries the weight of oppression.
Problem – Value-Based Selling = Selling Out Our Values
Prior to seeing the term on the Anonymous for the Voiceless website, I was unfamiliar with the idea of a “value-based sales approach”, which is defined as “the process of understanding and reinforcing the reasons why your offer is valuable to the purchaser“. By definition, a value-based sales approach is about catering to the selfishnessof the consumer to get them to agree that what you’re proposing will benefit them in some way. Such an approach, in animal advocacy terms, would necessarily put the focus on the ancillary benefits of living vegan (i.e., personal health) and would fail to take into consideration and make primary what matters most – the value to the victims of continuing their lives free from use, commodification, exploitation and execution by humans. To understand why such an approach is problematic from a vegan advocacy perspective, please consider this from a previous essay on this site:
“It can be argued that those who ‘go vegan’ for their own health and personal betterment – which really translates to adopting a plant-based diet, the definition of which is anybody’s guess these days – are essentially acting from the same place of selfishness that had them eating animals and their secretions to satisfy their own pleasure in the first place. When that’s the case, there’s little to stop them from reverting back to their original selfish position of consuming products of animal exploitation (one supported and encouraged by mainstream speciesist society) and resuming their complicity in the violent oppression of non-human individuals, and this happens far too often. Other than an alteration in diet, nothing’s changed for them in any meaningful and fundamental way. There’s been no move from selfishness to selflessness, no firm and unwavering commitment to eschew participation in all forms of animal use and no realization that all of these constitute injustice. Everything is still all about them, and the animal victims of human selfishness remain sadly overlooked.”
Problem – “We Hold An Abolitionist Stance…” But They Don’t
On the Anonymous for the Voiceless website, they loudly proclaim in all caps (like everything else on the page): “WE HOLD AN ABOLITIONIST STANCE ON ANIMAL EXPLOITATION.” As an abolitionist veganeducator, I found this statement intriguing so I sought to find out whether their assertion holds up when put in the Reality Machine.
Brain + critical thinking = Reality Machine
Here’s what I found with a minimum of investigation:
In a 2016 interview with Freedom of Species (a podcast website that features a mix of single-issue animal welfare campaigns and unequivocal vegan campaigns) Paul Bashir, co-founder and director of Anonymous For The Voiceless, is asked about the organization’s “abolitionist position” and has this to say about a “baby steps” approach to veganism, which would be in direct opposition to the abolitionist approach (I’ve italicized some notable quotes in the passage):
“We would never behave that way [promote incremental baby-step reduction efforts] in the face of any other injustice and therefore it is totally an injustice to expect that…in respect to veganism”.
He then draws analogies to human oppression and states that:
“Humans are animals and therefore the cruelty that we inflict on animals needs to be considered equally to the cruelty that’s inflicted on humans… it is just as serious and it’s just as problematic and it’s just as much of an injustice, therefore, no, nobody should be cutting back, everybody should be realizing that this is outright insanity and we all need to just stop. I refuse to compromise on that, on our values. No science or any sort of rational experiment has ever compelled me, that I’ve ever come across, to believe that ‘baby steps’ works, that it gets people to go full-blown vegan… since we would never compromise on those other injustices that occur within our own species, we shouldn’t be doing that with non-humans.”
If Bashir, the group’s co-founder and director, truly believes that “nobody should be cutting back” and is honest when he says, “I refuse to compromise on that, on our values” and so on, then one has to wonder how it came to pass that rather than adopting a stance of unequivocally promoting veganism, Anonymous for the Voiceless instead prominently promotes on their website a three-week dietary “challenge” that, in addition to erroneously positioning veganism as a mere diet and something challenging to achieve, clearly promotes a baby-steps approach. One needs only click the handy link to the Challenge22 (“Let’s try vegan!”) website to find that the FAQ page states that friends and families of those already vegan “…don’t have to commit to being vegan for life, just agree to give it a try for 22 days.” In fact, that appears to be all they ask of anyone as they offer “participants a free, supportive online framework for trying veganism for 22 days.” The Challenge22 focus is clearly on “trying”, not committing to, a diet and lifestyle (as opposed to the ethical position that veganism is – “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose…” –Vegan Society 1979) as the participants have access to “culinary experts” and “certified dietitians who give nutritional advice” so that they will be “equipped with nutritional information, cooking tips and recipes that enable them to maintain a healthy, tasty vegan lifestyle.” There is no mention of abstaining from any of the other myriad forms of animal use nor any mention or indication of veganismas one’s personal commitment to justice and nonviolence toward non-human individuals. One can only conclude from the information they provide that Challenge22 is far more committed to maintaining speciesism than it is to dismantling it through veganism. They’re not “trying” to promote speciesism – they’re promoting it.
To understand why this is speciesist, one need only frame it in human terms – imagine an anti-spousal abuse organization promoting a platform for spousal abusers to take a few weeks vacation from beating their partners but not have to commit to such a drastic lifestyle change permanently. Hard to imagine? It ought to be, much as it should be hard to imagine that an organization seeking to create a vegan world would promote anything less than living vegan as far as possible and practicable, and yet Challenge22 is doing exactly that.
Here’s a 2017 quote from Bashir’s Deskgram page chronicling one interaction he’d had:
“They couldn’t believe how young animals were slaughtered in the meat, dairy and egg industries. They were disgusted by the standard practices in free range farming. They despised animal cruelty, like most people; and after 10 minutes of chatting they realized there was no way you can be a non-vegan and truly represent those values. I told them about Challenge22+ and they said they’d do it. Why and how. In that order.”
I won’t belabor the aforementioned point about why focusing on the specifics of animal “cruelty” makes no sense from an abolitionist animal rights perspective, however I will point out that helping people realize they need to live vegan and then immediately directing them to a website that only asks people to “TRY vegan!” for 22 days is morally inconsistent. “Give it a shot for a few weeks and see what you think” is not a clear vegan message. It lets people off the moral hook and that’s unacceptable. Bashir seems to agree with this concept and yet, puzzlingly, this is his tactic and that of his organization.
Is it possible that Anonymous for the Voiceless simply hasn’t found an online vegan resource that does better than asking non-vegans to become 3-week plant-based dieters?
“Get 22 days of full support: Challenge22.com” – Paul Bashir
I find it perplexing that Anonymous for the Voiceless, while claiming to be “abolitionist”, would promote organizations that equivocate about or entirely avoid the idea of veganism as a moral imperative… and allow their organizers to be similarly noncommittal:
In a January 2017 article in the Guardian, Matt Stellino, an Anonymous for the Voiceless co-organizer in Sydney Australia, comes across like someone who is as serious as anyone could be about wanting people to live vegan and yet, at the end of the article, the equivocation comes: “The kebab shop doesn’t have to close,” Stellino offers. “We just want falafels for everyone.” That’s not asking for veganism. That’s asking for plant-based options and, contrary to what some vegans assert, offering plant-based foods to non-vegans is not getting us closer to dismantling speciesism and ending animal use. It merely adds more choices to the menu and further identifies veganism solely as a dietary option.
Problem – It Sounds Good, But What Does It Mean?
Every so often in the animal welfare sphere, a new organization arises promising a fresh and exciting “new” approach to “saving” or “sparing” animals, usually asking for volunteers to recruit members and needing large amounts of donations. If this sounds suspiciously like the modus operandi of a multi-level marketing scam, there’s a good reason for that… Notice that with such organizations the math involved in calculating the amount of “saved” or “spared” animals is always very fuzzy, but the math involved in calculating the amount of money needed in donations is always very clear. I’m not sure whether Anonymous for the Voiceless is on the same level as the large, donation-based animal welfare corporations (yet), but I am curious about the math I’ve seen posted by them on various sites: “125,253 bystanders taking veganism/animal liberation seriously!”, “32,851 conversions!” What exactly does it mean to “take veganism seriously” and at what point in the conversation does that become clear? Does it mean they will start living vegan from that moment or is it just something now being considered by someone who hadn’t previously given it much, or any, thought? And at what point in the conversation is a “conversion” recorded? These seem like intangibles to me and the statistics carry more than a whiff of self-justification and marketing.
New Doesn’t Always Mean Better
It’s easy to be lured in by the shine and flash of the new, especially to those who see the injustice of animal use and feel a desperate desire to “do something“, but we need always remember the following:
A disease is not cured by merely exposing and treating its symptoms but rather by directly addressing the root cause that creates the symptoms. This compelling essay from Gentle World entitled Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective? discusses the matter eloquently. An excerpt:
“…a united front of widespread public education focused on why and how to become vegan would address the root of the exploitation problem by challenging not only all of our uses of animals, butour society’s decidedly speciesist attitude in and of itself.
To illustrate the point, it’s helpful to consider the analogy of a tree. The animal exploitation tree can be divided into several sections, including the roots, trunk, and branches.
The roots of the tree – mostly hidden underground – represent our society’s underlying speciesism; the cultural prejudice against all animals (other than humans) that makes it possible for us to ignore the basic needs of others in favor of our own trivial desires. Speciesism, like racism, sexism, and other oppressive cultural prejudices, ignores morally relevant characteristics (such as the fundamental interests of the oppressed or exploited), in favor of morally irrelevant characteristics (such as membership of a species, race, sex, and so on). When we eliminate speciesism (individually or as a group), we respect the interests of individual members of other species sufficiently to take those interests into account with our own, and everyone else’s interests. The behavioral result of such respect is veganism – avoiding animal products and uses in our lives as much as is reasonably possible.”
It makes no sense, is counterproductive and is unethical to engage in one or more forms of violent, systematic, exploitative oppression while working to end another. It is particularly counterproductive to engage in the same form of exploitation – in the case of Anonymous for the Voiceless, speciesism – one is trying to end.
And The Reality Machine Says…
By applying critical thinking rather than taking everything at face value and accepting words that don’t match actions, it becomes clear that Anonymous for the Voiceless is, sadly, not only engaging in ableism by portraying non-human individuals as “voiceless” but also promoting speciesism through their focus on animal “cruelty” and their affiliation with speciesist organizations such as Challenge22.
Therefore, while it seems to me that Mr. Bashir is a committed animal activist and appears to want to help end all animal exploitation, the organization he’s co-founded has unfortunately strayed from their stated “abolitionist stance” and landed deeply in animal welfare territory.
The Simple Solution – Vegan Education
If you oppose at least one form of violent oppression because you recognize it is morally wrong, then to live in integrity requires opposing all forms of violent oppression because they are all morally wrong. Speciesism, simply by virtue of having the largest number of victims and the highest ever-increasing death toll worldwide, is the most egregious form of violent oppression our world has ever known. It’s time to dismantle speciesism, and the way to do that, again, is through living vegan and educating others to live vegan.
Animals are not voiceless and truth doesn’t come in cubes. There are no masks or laptops required to educate others about veganism. If you want to dismantle and end speciesism, carry the vegan message of nonviolence and justice for non-humans by speaking your truth clearly, consistently and directly with words, not theatrics. Provide the public with the simple, logical idea that when you realize it’s wrong to hurt, steal from and kill vulnerable individuals for your personal pleasure and satisfaction, the only rational and just response is to live vegan.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
A recent bout of cold weather in South Florida had the disturbing effect of causing iguanas, a non-native species introduced to the area by humans, to become immobilized and fall out of trees where they generally sleep. Even more disturbing were the ensuing discussions and news reports about what to do with them where conversations ranged from moving the iguanas to where they could get warm and recover from this cold-induced condition (that would be my choice, and I confirmed with a wildlife rehabilitation expert that they can and often do fully recover when assisted and given the opportunity to do so) to calls for “humane euthanasia” (a euphemistic rationalization for opportunistic killing) and even suggestions that they be butchered and eaten.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, the loudest, most fervent voices seemed to be the ones advocating for either killing these sentient individuals or just letting them die, with these lethal options often being framed as a “favor” to the local environment the “problem” reptiles are accused of destroying.
The underlying issue here is this:
Humans create “problems” like this all the time through actions that include unnecessary introduction into the local environment of non-native species brought in as pets/property, forced overbreeding of companion, farmed and “wild” animals, urban/suburban sprawl, overuse of resources causing displacement and starvation of native non-humans – to name a few – while seeming to have no workable long-range strategy in place for dealing with the consequences. The default “management” plan often ends up being the violent extermination of innocent, vulnerable individuals and groups who wouldn’t be here in the first place had it not been for human interference by bringing them in and throwing the ecosystem out of balance.
I often wonder how long it’ll be before the idea that humans occupy special protected status erodes to the point that the “cure” for human homelessness is to start “humanely” dispatching those nuisance layabouts whenever possible.
If anyone can combine speciesist proverbs and cannibalism, it’s Ray Bradbury… 😉
Response Ability
Historically, our specieswide refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, combined with our socially accepted laziness in seeking morally justifiable solutions for the problems we’ve created yet refuse to own, results time and again in our resorting to the use of unnecessary violence and killing as a brute “solution”.
We cause unmanageable situations and later position ourselves as victims of circumstance when inconvenient consequences arise and grow beyond our control. Our irresponsibility creates true victims – in this case, the iguanas we thought would make such cute and interesting pets who couldn’t possibly end up outside their enclosures and alter the ecosystem – and we justify killing those victims (and others such as pythons and other non-native species again imported as pets/property, then discarded into an unsuitable environment and left to fight for their survival) by hiding behind the rationalization that we are merely defending ourselves and being protectors of the environment.
It’s a tragic narrative worthy of Mary Shelley:
“I brought you here and created an unexpected condition. I don’t like the consequences. I’ll have to kill you now. Sorry, it’s for the best.”
As a species and as individuals, we can do much better than this. It’s time we start.
“I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest…”
Victim Eyes
When our actions create victims, it’s time to change our behaviors.
Our action of living non-vegan creates trillions of victims every year through our consumption and use of land-dwelling and aquatic non-human sentient beings whose vulnerable bodies we thoughtlessly exploit in order to satisfy our personal pleasure, comfort, convenience and entertainment. But it’s not about abstract numbers, as this excerpt from a previous essay explains. It’s about individuals:
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.
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.
The Simple Solution
Consider if the iguana situation described above had instead involved kittens, puppies, rabbits, horses or other non-humans who are generally looked upon as “cute” (but still have the potential to wreak havoc on the environment). More than likely, people would fall all over themselves organizing efforts to rescue and re-home these unfortunate individuals, however this clearly was not the case for the iguanas and this difference in attitudes, approaches and behaviors based solely on species membership points to the glaring speciesism that pervades our largely non-vegan society.
As individuals, when we make the commitment to live vegan by abstaining from the exploitation of other vulnerable individuals for our selfish benefit (as we generally tend to do without hesitation when those potential victims are human), we live in integrity with our values, aid in the dismantling of the violent form of oppression known as speciesismand help create a peaceful, fair and just world for all beings regardless of species.
Live vegan – there’s nothing to it but to do it.
[I encourage all readers to click theblue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
“Education is key. You give a person a vegan meal and they’ll eat vegan for a day. You educate them and give them inspiration to go vegan, they’ll be vegan for life.” – Elena Brodskaya
From an actual conversation:
Long-time vegan: “Do you know the best way to get someone to go vegan?” [smile] Me: “No, what is it?!?” Long-time vegan: “Cook them a delicious vegan meal!” [BIG smile] Me: [blink…… blink…… blink……]
I find myself in disbelief each time vegans tell me they think they can convince people to truly live vegan – meaning to embrace a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose – by merely showing them how delicious 100% plant-based meals can be and how easy they are to prepare. Yes, plant foods are delectable, satisfying and meet our nutritional needs (just some of the wonderful ancillary benefits of living vegan), however most people have prepared, eaten, and continue to eat tasty and satisfying foods that are not derived from animals – and yet 98% of the population continues to indulge in the consumption of animal flesh and secretions right alongside, below, atop, within and around those delicious vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains and legumes that comprise a plants-only diet. A “hot dog with everything”, for example, is literally surrounded on all sides by mouthwatering plant foods, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone swear off hot dogs because they became enraptured with relish. As Elena Brodskaya has said many times, veganism is not a diet and without a morally compelling reason to stop consuming products of animal exploitation, plant-based cuisine exists as just another option among many and not a replacement for any:
“What do you feel like eating tonight? Italian, Mexican, Asian… Vegan?”
We’ve had family and friends prepare us countless meals suitable for vegans (I try not to use the phrase “vegan food” because it reinforces the mistaken idea that “vegan” represents a food category rather than an ethical stance against violence and injustice) that they themselves partook of, so they knew without a shadow of a doubt the simplicity of preparation and the delightful tastiness of the food they were serving and not once did any of them exclaim, “That’s it – this food is so good, I’m going vegan!” I’ve had many enjoyable meals in restaurants of various ethnicities and can say that I’ve never felt an overwhelming desire to suddenly embrace every aspect of another culture because their food is yummy.
When a person is unaware that, through behaviors they’ve been indoctrinated to believe all their lives are appropriate, acceptable and necessary, they are complicit in the victimization of vulnerable individuals, it is crucial to not just offer them an alternative option to those behaviors but to take the time to educate them as to why those behaviors are morally unjustifiable in the first place. Imagine a scenario in which you know your friend is a spousal abuser and, rather than having a frank and honest discussion about why spousal abuse is fundamentally unjust and that he should stop this at once, you suggest instead that he might consider joining a bowling league as a way to “blow off some steam” on the weekends since it’s fun, communal and gives him something more productive to do with his hands. While bowling might present a distraction and perhaps interfere temporarily with the pattern of abuse, it fails to address the underlying problem, offers no real solution and is far from a guarantee that the abuse at home will cease or even diminish.
Now consider a scenario in which a vegan serves a non-vegan a plate of spaghetti and meatless meatballs and says, “Isn’t this vegan alternative to meatballs delicious? Now you never have to eat ‘real’ meatballs again, right???”
Without making a compelling case for why it’s wrong to continue consuming products of animal exploitation (because it represents one’s support of and engagement in the bullying, victimization and slaughter of the most vulnerable group of beings on the planet and is therefore antithetical to most people’s morals), all that’s been accomplished here is that another option has been added to an existing list of menu items. Nothing in the non-vegan’s belief system has been challenged, so nothing has changed. And when nothing changes, nothing changes.
Again, the common misconception that “vegan = diet”, bolstered by celebrities like Dr. Oz (only one among countless others) who blithely promote that erroneous message, moves the focus from where it needs to be: ethics.
If one believes that non-human individuals matter morally and that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering and death on them, then the only logical response is to start living vegan immediately.
“Does [anyone] believe that asking non-vegans to go ‘meat-free’ seven days out of the year (which tacitly condones the consumption of animal flesh the other 358 days per year) is bringing us closer to the abolition of animal exploitation? It’s not as if the animals currently confined and scheduled for execution so that their bodies can be disemboweled, dismembered and distributed for sale in neat packages will be spared that fate when some unknown number of people take a one-week meat vacation… The results will be the same as if it never happened – all those animals will die and be eaten soon enough (and then be replaced by other animals forcibly bred into existence for commodification and consumption), and most likely by the same people who didn’t eat them that week. To believe otherwise is to employ a form of magical thinkingthat is counterproductive to the cause of eliminating the violent oppression of non-human animals.”
“When you ‘go’ someplace (to the store, to the movies, to work, on vacation), more often than not you come back to the very same place you came from, and that’s usually the place where you live. Conversely, when you live a particular way, you embody your ethics and take them with you wherever you happen to find yourself (just as you would in opposing racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism and any other form of oppression, all of which are analogous tospeciesism).
What convinces people to livevegan, as opposed togovegan, is the internalization of the idea that when we know it’s wrong to unnecessarily hurt and kill innocent sentient beings for our personal benefit (usually palate pleasure, comfort, convenience and entertainment) and continue to engage in this injustice, we are living in opposition to our own morals and ethics.
When it comes to living vegan, it’s not the taste on our tongue but the voice of our conscience that effects meaningful, lasting change.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Imagine you and your family are traveling in a foreign country that considers people from your country to be of an inferior race, and that the country’s economy is based on capturing, enslaving and ultimately murdering citizens of your country once they’re no longer useful with no serious legal repercussions other than an economic inconvenience here and there and a couple of low-level patsies losing their jobs after some undercover video evidence of “horrific practices” is leaked (but soon finding jobs in similar situations), mostly slap-on-the-wrist stuff leading to promises to “be more humane” and assurances that “We had no idea about these isolated incidences, we are appalled!”.
Imagine you’re all taken hostage and your captors’ stated intentions are that the males in your family are to be put to hard labor, tortured and then executed and the females kept alive to be tortured, raped and forced to produce more offspring for enslavement (again, eventually everyone’s executed once their “productivity” wanes) and keep the cycle going for generations, as has been their common practice for years. Now, as one of the hostages (pick a gender), would you want, need or be in any way satisfied with advocates working to get you “improvements” such as a better view while you wait to die, a smaller blowtorch with which to be tortured or a more comfortable bed on which to be repeatedly raped? Doubtful. If those are the goals for which they advocate, they might as well help sharpen the killing blade while they’re at it to make your death as painless as possible (another “improvement”, some might say) because, inevitably, death is what’s coming.
If I and my family were taken hostage in such a scenario, our instincts for survival and sense of self-interest would dictate that we would want someone to come to the rescue and get us the hell out of there as quickly as possible. While that would provide immediate relief to us, it would create a vacancy soon to be filled by others (the repercussions of which will be discussed two paragraphs from now). And what becomes of those held hostage alongside us and those who will find themselves in the same situation in the months, years and decades to come? While rescue has its benefits to those being rescued, it would be much more important to educate these people (and the world) that this behavior is morally unacceptable on every conceivable level and that my race deserves equal consideration as their race – which means the right not to be used and abused by anyone as their property – thus shifting the paradigm to bring an end to this cycle of ritualistic, systematic, psychopathic abuse and needless, unjustifiable killing.
All forms of exploitation are morally unjustifiable and have their roots in the myth of human supremacy
But the scenario I’ve just described isn’t a simple hostage situation and this isn’t happening to us – it’s happening to animals.
What I’ve described is what humans do to individuals of other species by the billionsevery year across the world. And what we would NEVER knowingly or willingly allow to happen to humans for any preventable length of time, we keep allowing to happen to animals. In fact, we demand it with our dollars. “But we’re really trying“, say those who, with all good intentions, implement, support and engage in single-issue, welfarist campaigns designed to minimize – as oppose to end – the injustices we regularly impose on non-human animals (there’s a saying in certain circles that “trying is lying”). Our current laws consider animals our “property”, which gives them no real rights ever and essentially gives permission for humans to do as they please to non-humans. There is no “negotiation” to gain freedom for these individuals, as they are someone’s property and there’s nothing illegal about confining them against their will, as there is with kidnapping humans. In fact, if one rescues an animal from such a situation, the “rescuer” is the one who has broken the law. Since changes in law follow social change rather than the reverse being true, when we advocate for anything less than living vegan we engender, foster and support speciesism, a double standard (analogous with racism and sexism) 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. It would logically follow that those who do not support racism and sexism would havea moral obligation not to support speciesism, and yet, people of seemingly good moral character continue to do just that, offering no better reasons than palate pleasure, comfort, convenience, entertainment and habit – in short, selfishness.
The Repercussions of Open Rescue
There is another factor that should be considered in scenarios where animals are removed from facilities that confine and use them for profit, a form of direct action “activism” that has again become fashionable – and financially lucrative – under the designation “open rescue” as coordinated by various animal “welfare” corporations who intentionally do not focus on unequivocal vegan education but rather take a scattershot, every-little-bit-helps approach to “saving the animals”. As long as non-human animals are considered property/things and disposable, replaceable economic units, then every animal “rescued” from such facilities will be replaced by at least one other individual in order to restock the shelves and keep the system rolling along and profitable. In order to bring in the replacement(s) for the one(s) rescued, someone needs to be held captive and forcibly impregnated with sperm forcibly obtained by someone else held captive (which is, without argument, interspecies sexual abuse) and another someone needs to be born and forcibly removed from their mother to be used to fill that newly empty space in the facility. So, sadly, while one individual has been granted some sort of freedom (and hopefully brought to a sanctuary, though that’s never a guarantee), at least three more will have been exploited and nothing will have changed in terms of shifting the current paradigm of animals-as-property.
Although they tug at one’s heartstrings, the reality is that the net result of “open rescues” is more exploitation and more death, rather than less, which would indicate that these forms of “activism” are ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.
They do, however, successfully tug at purse strings and result in an uptick in popularity and donations for the animal welfare organizations that coordinate these counterproductive activities:
“I know you’ve been moved by our breathtaking rescues… We’re hoping to raise $100,000… Wayne”
Please read this essay from Legacy of Pythagoras that examines Direct Action Everywhere’s (DxE) misguided philosophy and strategy:
The solution to the problem of animal use is to dismantle speciesism through clear, consistent vegan education.
For those who are afraid of “driving people away” by unequivocally advocating veganism, I find this fear to be unfounded and without merit. If anything about vegan advocacy “drives people away”, it isn’t the idea of veganism; it’s likely the method by which some individuals aggressively and abrasively present the simple, gentle, logical idea of living a nonviolent vegan life. Isn’t it time we stopped operating from fear and just did what we know is right according to our own morals and ethics? Fear is the driving force behind every atrocity the world has ever known, including the animal holocaust we’re dealing with here. Einstein (by all accounts, a pretty bright fella) is quoted as saying, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.
If you’re “afraid” to be direct and honest about veganism, I challenge you to move through the fear and do what you know is right. After all, your “fear” is nothing compared to the real fears being felt right now by the animals we all want to save. To operate from fear in this light is to operate from pure selfishness and ego, and that helps no one. In fact, it only serves to allow more injustice, unnecessary suffering and death to all involved.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue linksembedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Gimme Some Truth
Someone asked me recently whether Thanksgiving will be “hard” for me, considering “all the turkeys that are killed”.
I replied that Thanksgiving is no “harder” than or different from any other day as billions of innocent non-human lives are brutally taken every year (six million per hour each day in the US alone) for no more substantial reason than the satisfaction of personal pleasure.
And for those non-vegans who are bothered by the notion of animal “cruelty“, such euphemistic labeling allows them to continue consuming animals while under the comforting yet erroneous belief that they are discharging their moral responsibility toward non-human individuals by only choosing the ones who weren’t overtly brutalized before being butchered.
This is why I define marketing as“lies designed to separate people from their money and their morals“.
I submit the following from the above photo of packaged animal parts for your consideration:
“Grateful Harvest” – the decapitated, de-feathered, disemboweled remains of an exploited individual is nothing for anyone to be grateful about. This is not a harvest – it is a life cut short for no justifiable reason, as is the life of any sentient individual taken for palate pleasure or other selfish human conveniences.
“Organic” – seriously, who cares? Dead is dead, and decomposition of flesh begins immediately upon death. Does it really matter if the corpse one is putting in one’s mouth is “organic”?
“Raised without antibiotics… added hormones or steroids” – what’s not mentioned here is “killed with a sharp knife across the throat while struggling for her life after having endured unimaginable torment and misery from birth to blade” which, while accurate, would probably be frowned upon from a marketing perspective. The truth usually is.
“Fed no animal by-product” – well that’s a relief, ‘cos no one wants to eat an animal who’s eaten an animal… right? It’s always ironic that so many humans, who as a species are biologically and physiologically herbivores, choose mostly to consume members of other herbivorous species in a misguided effort to meet their nutritional needs by eating animals who we feed plants… rather than just eating the plants directly and leaving the animals to live their lives autonomously and free from exploitation and premature death. A whole foods, plants-only diet is a win-win for everyone – we get our nutrients directly from the source with optimum bioavailability (as they’re not filtered through another animal’s digestive system, which is like asking someone to eat and digest your food for you and then killing and eating them so you can eat and digest the food you asked them to eat and digest for you. Does that make any sense at all? If you answered “no”, then ask yourself why, if you consume animals, you’re doing exactly that) and no individual is condemned to death and dismemberment to become someone else’s food.
“No preservatives”– again, who cares? This is a corpse; it’s only slightly removed from roadkill. I would think that eating rotting flesh ought to be considered far less appetizing than consuming “preservatives”.
“Free-range” – if whatever passes for that “range” (usually a giant warehouse crammed wall-to-wall with thousands of turkeys awaiting execution – just Google “free range facility” to put that myth to rest) was truly free, this turkey and his/her relatives would still be intact, alive and enjoying their freedom.
Bottom line – no matter how much one polishes a turd, it’s still gonna stink like shit. In this age of readily-available information, there is no excuse for believing this kind of shit. To paraphrase a line from Steve Martin’s brilliant L.A. Story, one of my favorite films:
Free your mind and your body will follow.
This Thanksgiving – and every day – please stop pretending there’s nothing morally repugnant about having an autopsy on your dinner table… and ask yourself whether you’d so willingly accept that if the victim on the plate were human instead of non-human.
[I am republishing this essay in the wake of the horrific tragedy in Las Vegas on 10/1/2017 that has claimed nearly 60 lives, injured over 500 others and will have repercussions far beyond those numbers.]
I am deeply saddened by all the recent loss of life our society has experienced this year and, like so many others, am struggling to find answers to very difficult questions. I want to share my thoughts on one concept that has me puzzled.
I’m trying to understand how this “everyone should carry a gun so we’ll all be safe from people with guns” thing works or, specifically, might have worked in the horrendously tragic Orlando incident on 6/12/16 (or similar incidents) and it simply doesn’t make sense to me. Here’s how I think it could have played out had the majority of patrons at the Pulse Nightclub been armed:
Mass murderer walks into a nightclub with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle (apparently it wasn’t an AR-15, as originally reported), hellbent on doing as much lethal damage as possible.
People are dancing, clubbing, whatevering – safe to assume lots of alcohol and other drugs on board, flashing lights, possible smoke in the air and loud music (not an environment conducive to making quick, clear, life-and-death decisions) – but certainly not standing around with guns drawn anticipating the arrival of a mass murderer they’ll have to heroically stop with a perfectly placed kill shot.
Mass murderer starts shooting. Panic ensues. Lights and music continue for a time.
Those with guns (at least the ones who aren’t already wounded, in a blind panic, running for their lives or being pushed and trampled by others running for their lives) draw guns and see, guess what, lots of other people with guns frantically looking around, ducking and covering, trying to figure out who’s shooting and who to shoot.
At this point in the scenario, ANYONE with a gun is a potential target for anyone else with a gun, because nothing is clear and obvious (murderers don’t conveniently wear Kiss the Shooter aprons or black hats like bad cowboys used to, and this isn’t the movies where the lights and camera focus on the shooter so we can all identify him or her) and just carrying a gun does not automatically imbue someone with the skill set of James Bond, John McClane or a Navy SEAL. You’re still you, the person who does office work at a desk 8 hours a day or bags groceries or drives for Uber – like it or not, that’s your primary skill set – only with a lethal weapon on your person. Those paper targets you shoot at don’t move or shoot back, and you’re probably not sweating and shaking from adrenaline in fear for your life out there on the gun range. In this scenario, people with guns are gonna shoot other people with guns (right after shitting their pants and pissing down their legs – that’s how false bravado leaves the body, by the way), which is going to start a chain reaction of people shooting at those who are shooting at those who are shooting, not to mention those scurrying in all directions who will be caught in the crossfire… it’ll quite literally be a shit show, and the murderer will most likely target those with guns first as a means of damage control and self-preservation, because he’s in control of the situation and knows where to look.
I don’t see this scenario ending well or even much better than the actual terrible event.
Now, some who read this may think, “Oh, great… here we go. Another peace-loving, tree-hugging, bleeding-heart liberal hippie who’s never even fired a gun in his life. He just doesn’t know how the world works, and now he wants all our guns taken away!” Please allow me to offer some perspective:
Since 2004, I have been living vegan and doing the best I can to carry the vegan message of nonviolence and justice, but that wasn’t always the case. As a child, adolescent and young adult, I was OBSESSEDwith guns and collected other weapons with which I became proficient due to my perception of the world as a dangerous and hostile place: knives, bows and arrows, nunchakus and various homemade weapons. But it was always guns that were the most alluring and seemed to have the most power. I owned countless toy guns of all varieties, then graduated to BB and pellet guns. I would read gun magazines, collect shell casings, draw pictures of guns, fantasize about guns, warfare, sniping and sleep with actual weapons next to my bed and under my pillow. At various times, I’ve handled and fired shotguns, rifles and handguns. I was an excellent marksman back when I was shooting and once, on a dare, took the life of an innocent non-human individual, an action of which I am not proud and one which I am glad I never repeated. Killing once is horrible enough, and I will always regret that awful choice and live with the sadness it brings.
I’ve also had loaded guns pointed at my face twice in my life, once as a young child and again as an adult, and could easily have died either time had things gone differently – one move from me or the potential shooter and I’m not here. I have been on both ends of the barrel of a gun, and I am uncomfortable on either end.
The last time I fired a gun (and the last time I will ever willingly handle or fire a gun) was, outwardly, quite a neutral experience. I was at a shooting range with a gun owner who let me shoot targets with their Taurus 9mm pistol. I shot well and followed all the necessary safety precautions… but at some point, I realized I felt incredibly uneasy holding that gun in my hand. I could feel the power it seemed to exude – to me, it was all but glowing – and knew it had the potential to turn life to death in an instant. To me, it felt like it wanted to do things – dangerous, deadly things – all by itself. I placed it safely on the stand, walked away and I was done with guns. To reiterate, I was a gun fanatic, so this revelation or awakening or whatever it was came as a complete surprise to me… but that’s what happened and here I am.
As for the other points in the imaginary argument I’m having with the imaginary gun-loving readers:
Am I peace-loving? Absolutely. Am I a tree-hugger? Nope. I’m a tree-humper, ‘cos trees are SEXY! Am I liberal? I guess so, though the more appropriate term is probably progressive. Am I a hippie? Technically no, however I’m the child of the most awesome hippie I know (that’s you, JoniRay!). If loving peace is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. Today I exercise the choice to live from love rather than fear.
I may not have an elegant solution to offer (other than to create peace right where each of us stands by choosing to live a non-violent vegan life), but I just don’t believe the answer to gun violence is to arm everyone and just hope society doesn’t devolve into Deadwood or a Tarantino film.
[I encourage all readers to click the bluelinksembedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Overheard: “How about taking a stand against the murder of unborn children through abortion? When I see you joining that cause perhaps I will listen to the rest of your moral outrage and the weeping for sheep…”
The above is an actual quote I saw recently from a pastor in response to a conversation about veganism. [Please note that this essay does not attempt to make a correlation between abortion and animal rights. The example used by the pastor might well have involved any human rights issue or plight – natural disaster, genocide, famine, etc. – involving humans]
It’s important to remember that veganism is not about humans – it’s about abstaining from any and all uses of non-human individuals for human pleasure, comfort and convenience.
Yes, people say things like this. It’s a version of one of the archetypical arguments against veganism that usually goes like this: “Humans come first. Once we get human problems sorted out, then I’ll worry about non-humans “.
Let’s apply a bit of critical thinking to these ideas by putting them in the Reality Machine.
Aside from being a blatantly speciesistposition (simply substitute the words “non-human” and “human” with different human races or genders and the unjust bias is immediately clear), this justification for continuing to engage in the exploitation of vulnerable individuals hasn’t a leg to stand on, and here’s why:
Livingvegan (eschewing the use of all products and forms of animal exploitation wherever possible and practicable) takes zero energy, resources, time or effort away from advocating for any other cause, whether human rights-related or otherwise. One can live vegan and still engage in any activity one chooses, probably with even more energythan when living non-vegan!
To further examine the fallaciousness of the argument, the idea that there will come a day when humanity’s myriad problems are finally put to rest is, in a word, preposterous. Therefore, to claim that one will gladly engage in working for animal rights once all human rights have been permanently secured is nothing more than a lie based on an impossible premise designed to derail the animal rights conversation and justify one’s continued use of products of animal exploitation. It is a disingenuous position designed to obfuscate the underlying selfishness motivating the argument, and it by no means presupposes that one is spending one’s days and nights engaged in any form of advocacy or activism whatsoever. It’s a bluff that is easily called and checkmate is soon to follow.
“Giraffes probably think ‘Giraffes first’, so what’s the problem??”
In and of itself, veganism is passive – it doesn’t require one to do anything but rather to not do certain things (i.e., not eat, wear or otherwise use and/or objectify non-human animals for one’s personal benefit). From there, if one chooses to spend one’s time, energy and resources engaging in animal rights advocacy through clear, consistent vegan education, that is one’s choice (and one we highly recommend) but again not a requirement.
Armed with the knowledge that one can live vegan and continue to participate passionately in whatever activities or advocacy one feels compelled to participate in, why – other than for purely selfish reasons of pleasure, comfort and convenience – would anyone not choose to do so?
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
Keith Berger and Elena Brodskaya – co-founders, SFVEG
What could possibly follow “but” in any of the above statements that would morally justify making an exception to the ideas as presented? The answer is simple: nothing.
Imagine hearing someone say, “I agree that racism is wrong, but the Ku Klux Klan is having a bake sale fundraiser this weekend and they make delicious cupcakes, so I’ll be buying some!” The moral inconsistency in such a situation would be glaring, and yet people routinely say they disagree with specific injustices while participating in and supporting, sometimes without realizing it, those same injustices.
Speciesism 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. To disagree with speciesism is to agree with veganism, which is defined as “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—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
I’ve had countless conversations with people who said they agreed it’s wrong to hurt and kill animals unnecessarily… and then the “but”s came – “But I love eating my meat/chicken/fish/steak/bacon”, “But I could never give up my dairy/eggs/cheese/honey”, “But I need my protein”, “But my leather shoes are so comfortable”, “But I don’t eat much red meat” and on and on. It should be noted that referring to “my meat”, “my dairy”, “my leather”, etc. (which seems to happen more often than not) overlooks and negates the fact that these “products” were once the bodies, skins and secretions of autonomous individuals and are therefore stolen property. It exposes the underlying selfishness that drives speciesist behavior. When framed in this way, might those same people counter with, “I agree that stealing is wrong, but…”?
Interestingly, the problem in examples like this doesn’t lie after the “but”.
In all of the example statements above, the reality is that everything before the “but” is an untruth. Here is what’s really being said:
“I agree that [fill-in-the-blank form of oppression] is wrong, but since I’m personally benefitting from it in some way, I’ll just look the other way and pretend nothing’s happening and that I’m not participating in something I say I find morally reprehensible even though my actions tell an entirely different story.”
When one truly agrees that a form of oppression is fundamentally wrong, one does not equivocate or make exceptions in order to satisfy one’s desires for personal pleasure, comfort and convenience. Being morally consistent means not engaging in, supporting and/or promoting racism, sexism, heterosexism, speciesism or other forms of oppression because one finds it inconvenient not to. One simply stands in one’s truth and follows where one’s moral compass points, making course corrections along the way wherever necessary.
Since most people believe it’s wrong to hurt and kill vulnerable sentient beings for no justifiable reason, living vegan gives every individual the opportunity to be true to themselves, to live honestly and to live in congruence with their moral values and in harmony with their fellow travelers on this planet we all share.
One final statement to consider:
I agree that the simplest and most immediate action one can take to stop the violent oppression and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of our global society – non-human individuals – is to start living vegan. There are no valid reasons not to; there are only morally unjustifiable excuses to hide behind.
There is no “but” here. There is only truth.
[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.]
Speciesism, analogous with racism and sexism, can be defined as an unjust 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.
Speciesist Comment of the Day
Here’s a statement from one of the “superstars” of the animal welfare movement in an article promoting, among other welfarist strategies, MeatlessMeaningless Monday:
“It’s not about being perfect, it’s about moving in the right direction,” Nick Cooney, Executive Vice President of the non-profit animal advocacy organization Mercy for Animals and co-founderThe Good Food Institute, tellsBustle. “Keep in mind no one is perfect and change takes time. If you don’t think you can resist the craving [to eat animal flesh and secretions] right now, it’s much better to have a burger once a week than to give up entirely on your desire to move toward plant-based eating.”
[It should be noted that while MFA – and other large animal welfare corporations – lack moral consistency by promoting speciesism on a daily basis, they do maintain consistency in their messaging as versions of Mr. Cooney’s statement can be found in other MFA publications. This striking similarity in strategy to certain political organizations and individual politicians should not go unnoticed.]
Consider how such a statement would sound if the victims of injustice were human rather than non-human. For example, what if the issue at hand (no pun intended) were spousal abuse? It would sound like this:
“If you don’t think you can r̶e̶s̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶r̶a̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ resist the urge to beat your spouse right now, it’s much better to h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶u̶r̶g̶e̶r̶ beat your spouse once a week than to give up entirely on your desire to move toward p̶l̶a̶n̶t̶-̶b̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶e̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ not beating your spouse altogether.”
Of course, Mr. Cooney fails to point out (as usual) that “plant-based eating” does not equate to living vegan. A 100% plant-based diet is only one component of a way of living that seeks to exclude all forms of animal exploitation/use.
When the innocent, vulnerable victims of violent injustices are human, advocates call for an immediate end to said injustices, rather than a gradual shift in a nonviolent direction. When the victims are non-human, advocates often take a much more relaxed, “take your time” approach.
Using one set of standards for human victims of injustice and another for non-human victims of injustice is an inherently speciesist position and is fundamentally unjust itself, as it would be if the sets of victims were not of different species but of different races, gender identities, sexual orientations, classes, etc. One cannot hope to effectively advocate against injustice while participating in injustice.
[I encourage all readers to click theblue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimer regarding external sites.]
In addition to new content, this essay containspreviously published materialin examining a controversial animal welfare single-issue campaign I see promoted weekly and exploring the speciesism behind it:
Meatless Monday
The problem is not how we exploit animals – the problem is thatwe exploit animals in the first place, so the solution is not to reduce animal abuse; it’s to eliminate animal use… and that solution lies in educating people to live vegan.
If you’re a bank robber and one day realize that robbing banks is morally wrong, you don’t seek better ways to rob banks – you just stop robbing them (unless you’re determined to be a criminal and are willing to pay the consequences if caught, or a sociopath and can’t determine right from wrong). To paraphrase the Roman philosopher Seneca’s wise words, there’s no point in trying to find the right way to do a wrong thing.
Meatless Monday – A Toothless Campaign
According to my research, the idea of Meatless Monday began nearly 100 years in the United States as a way to ration food to help with the war effort. It was revived in 2003, according to www.meatlessmonday.com, as a “public health awareness campaign” in order to address “…the prevalence of preventable illnesses associated with excessive meat consumption.” On their “Why Meatless?” page, in 11 paragraphs and 796 words, there is nothing that speaks about the suffering, confinement, enslavement and slaughter of the non-human animals the campaign is suggesting people abstain from eating one day a week. This campaign is clearly not part of any social justice movement intended to help abolish the property status of animals, nor to help any animal in any way – unless that animal is of the human variety and wants to optimize her/his health, as its stated aim is to help humans lower their risk of contracting preventable chronic diseases linked with the consumption of animal products (heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease, to name a few). In short, Meatless Monday is rooted in the same self-centered egotism, speciesism and myth of human supremacythat allows humans the self-proclaimed “right” to destroy the lives of non-human animals wantonly and with no regard for their well-being, feelings or right to live autonomous lives without human interference.
There is nothing funny about the killing of vulnerable individuals… except if you’re MeatlessMonday.com, that is. The text reads: “Do you have the day off from work tomorrow? You’re not the only one… ~wink~ “.
Even though it’s clear that the Meatless Monday campaign has nothing to do with helping to bring an end to the exploitation of non-human animals (even though some people claim every meatless meal “saves” X-number of animals, as if skipping a hamburger results in, somewhere, a cow being magically transported from a slaughterhouse to a sanctuary), many vegans – including high-profile celebrity “vegans” – lend their names to and continue to support this campaign, rationalizing that it is “part of a journey” toward veganism –even though it promotes a version of vegetarianism rather than veganism. Some seem to believe it’s necessary to encourage non-vegans to take “baby steps” and that “every little bit helps”.
Eating plants won’t save animals. Dismantling speciesism to abolish animal use will save animals.
It’s my contention that one does not encourage people to practice ethical behavior only when personally convenient or in accordance with some arbitrary set of rules. Coddling those who continue to exploit others when they are well aware that their choices and behaviors condemn individuals to miserable lives and horrific, unnecessary deaths is simply unacceptable. We would never suggest that serial killers take “baby steps” and observe Murder-Free Mondays, would we? Of course not. We would explain to them why their behavior is wrong (assuming they didn’t already know) and demand they stop at once or face dire consequences. What consequences do we impose on those who pay others to do their killing for them so they can dine on the carcasses of vulnerable animals? None… but Nature does (see preventable chronic diseases listed above).
“Meatless” Does More Harm Than Good – From the Industry’s Own Mouth
Further, asking non-vegans to go “meat-free” may do more harm than good as it has been shown that people who give up meat for a short time tend to increase their consumption of animal secretions such as dairy and eggs to offset their deprivation of meat through that time period. Here is a quote connecting “meatless” campaigns and rises in egg demand and consumption from a 2015 interview on the Diane Rehm show (the specific audio clip comes at about 43:23, a courtesy for those who don’t want to sit through listening to rationalizations and justifications abouteggs and “welfare”):
“Just back to that other question about the ‘Meatless’. One of the reasons why the egg industry and demand is (sic) going up is because a lot of the families, like one day a week, are having meatless dinners and they’re substituting eggs for that meatless meal, so that’s another good reason why the egg consumption is going up in this country.” – Paul Sauder, president of Sauder Eggs, chairman of the American Egg Board and a board member of United Egg Producers
Interestingly, if that’s the effect of only one meatless meal per week, the net effect of an entire meatless day (3-5 meals?) such as on Meatless Monday or an entire meatless week would be to cause an even greater increase in egg consumption.
By encouraging non-vegans to take just one day off per week from a particular form of animal use, tacit permission and support are given for them to continue their use unabated the rest of the week. Is that really the message we want to give, whether directly or indirectly? Supporting animal exploitation 6 days a week instead of 7 is like supporting spousal abuse 85% of the time instead of 100%. Who does that?? Answer:
Perpetrators who want to get away with what they can whenever they can, that’s who.
There are those who support the baby-step “journeys” of non-vegans to become vegan – some of which take 2-3 decades or longer – and suggest we should “give them a break, they will eventually arrive”. While I understand that not every person will go vegan overnight (though many of us have), we vegans must remain clear that this is their choice and not our suggestion, remaining unequivocal that anything less than embracing veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species is to continue being complicit in animal exploitation and needless death. For the billions of non-human animals who suffer and die waiting for “eventually” to happen, “eventually” is unacceptable and arrives much too late. If we see a woman being raped, we don’t go help her “eventually”, nor do we wait for the rapist to complete his “journey” to living a rape-free life, asking him to maybe rape a little less every day and applauding him when he goes a whole day without raping anyone.
What drives some people to accept such an unacceptable double-standard when the victims are non-human animals? The answer is speciesism, the most egregious and deadly form of oppression in existence on our planet today.
Veganism should be the starting point on a journey to live as ethically as possible, not some future goal to attain when one is finally ready to live nonviolently.
Some ask why this same debate repeats every “Meatless” Monday, so here’s why:
Every Monday, some people take a mere 16 hours off from participating in an endless worldwide animal holocaust and actually seem to believe this is somehow commendable and effective. During the Holocaust, I’m sure all the Nazis took naps now and then. That didn’t help their victims at all because, after nap time was over, the terrorism and killing continued. The sad reality of this ineffectual campaign is that every Meatless Meaningless Monday is immediately followed by Return to Terrorism Tuesday and We Keep Killing Wednesday (and on through the week). Imagine if there were campaigns for Rape-Free Fridays or Child Abuse-Free Thursdays – would we applaud those well-intentioned baby steps too? Isn’t it a better use of our limited time, energy and resources to work on creating Exploitation-Free EveryDay by consistently promoting veganism?
If we as vegans refuse to commit to a 100% effort toward clear, consistent, unequivocal vegan education, how can we expect non-vegans to commit to a 100% vegan life when, by engaging in and promoting speciesist single-issue campaigns, we’re essentially giving them permission to exploit animals most, but not all, of the time?
Baby steps are for babies. I challenge my fellow vegans to be the adults we are and stop promoting reduction over abolition, which only makes the unacceptable seem acceptable and maintains the speciesist status quo. This behavior is known as enabling and, the sooner it stops, the sooner real change begins.
If you’re already vegan, please stop making it OK for others to continue destroying the lives of non-human animals by lending your support to half-measures like Meatless Meaningless Monday and the other useless, ineffective and counter-productive single-issue campaigns promoted by animal welfare organizations that treat “vegan” like a dirty word. Instead, let’s focus our efforts on clear, consistent vegan education wherever and whenever we can, being unequivocal about the idea of veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of the animals with whom we share this small planet.
[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.]
Please note that, during the show, I lost my Internet connection for roughly ten minutes around the 38-minute mark but was able to return before the close of the program.
We hope to be invited back again for more opportunities to speak with Steve and further discuss veganism on Real Progressives!
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites.]
I frequently hear some version of the question, “Since you’re vegan, don’t you miss meat/cheese/eggs/milk/honey/leather/wool (or other products of animal exploitation)?”
No, I don’t. Once I knew how those products were obtained and what my part was in making that happen, my decision to cease my complicity in that violent and deadly system was immediate and unwavering. My only choice was to start living vegan.
The way I understand it, there’s nothing to “miss” about causing unnecessary harm and death to innocent, vulnerable individuals.
It was recently suggested to me, once again, that vegans ought to “encourage and support incremental changes made by non-vegans on their journey to becoming vegan”. In something of a new slant on the idea, this individual likened the situation to alcoholics becoming and hopefully remaining sober in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and finding support from other AA members during that process. They said, “AA has Twelve Steps and that’s ok, so why should it be different with non-vegans?”
It was immediately clear that this individual had little if any understanding of how 12-Step support groups function, nor much understanding of just how far short their “non-veganism-is-like-alcoholism” analogy fell.
[This essay briefly discusses correlations between defense mechanisms used by addicts to protect their maladaptive behaviors and those used by non-vegans to protect their use of products of animal exploitation. From that perspective, non-veganism can be compared with alcoholism.]
Having had over two decades of experience both professionally and personally with many facets of substance abuse recovery, I have come to understand that the 12-Step process in AA and similar recovery fellowships doesn’t lead to sobriety as an end goal to be achieved, but rather presents sobriety (or at least abstinence from addictive mood-and-mind altering chemicals) as a starting point on a path of recovery that will hopefully last a lifetime. In order to fully benefit from and move through the Steps, one must cease the maladaptive, self-destructive behavior of substance abuse at the onset of the 12-Step journey of honest introspection, internal moral inventory, spiritual housecleaning and daily behavior maintenance. Otherwise, if one continues their chemical use, one’s chances of growing, healing and recovering from the damage done by one’s addiction(s) diminish by the day. As it says in the Alcoholics Anonymous basic text (commonly known as the Big Book), “Half measures availed us nothing.”
I’m not opposed to encouraging and supporting any individual who wishes to stop abusing themselves no matter how quickly or slowly they cease their self-destructive behaviors nor how many times they relapse and resume damaging themselves. I’m firmly in support of self-improvement. However, here is a key distinction between alcoholism (and other manifestations of addiction) and the consumption of animal products – alcoholics who drink (and addicts who use) primarily victimize themselves* through engaging in active addiction while non-vegans primarily victimize innocent, vulnerable individuals through the consumption and use of products of animal exploitation to satisfy their pleasure, comfort and convenience. Of course, mountains of scientific evidence make it abundantly clear that non-vegans also compromise their own health by consuming animal flesh and secretions, so they can also be counted among their own victims.
[*it should not be discounted that alcoholics and other addicts do harm others, including but not limited to family members, loved ones, employers/employees, co-workers and friends, both directly and indirectly through their self-destructive behaviors, however those others, in many cases, have choices as to how much abuse they are willing to take and have the ability to set boundaries to limit their exposure to the damaging behaviors of the alcoholic/addict in their lives. Conversely, the animals who are unnecessarily harmed and killed for use by non-vegans have absolutely no choice nor ability to take action to seek safety on their own behalf. They are, in the purest sense, defenseless innocent victims who are powerless over our relentless oppression.]
Encouraging and supporting people as they strive to stop hurting themselves and become physically, emotionally and spiritually healthy is appropriate and acceptable. Encouraging and supporting people to take their time (sometimes for decades) in ceasing their complicity in the morally unjustifiable exploitation, enslavement and execution of the most vulnerable members of our global society – non-human individuals – is inappropriate and unacceptable. The transition timeline for anyone to embrace veganism is up to each individual who moves in that direction (for many of us, the transition was instantaneousonce we understood the fundamental injustices in which we were participating and knew immediately we had to stop). What is up to us, as vegan advocates, is to present a clear and morally consistent message that anything less than veganism means a person is still engaging in violent, unacceptable, oppressive exploitation of the vulnerable and to encourage the fastest transition possible. To think and behave otherwise is to engage in and reinforce the current cultural paradigm of speciesism, as one would never take such a laissez-faire position if the victims of any oppressive situation were human.
Is Veganism “Difficult”?
When we clearly define an idea or concept, especially one that is routinely misunderstood, misinterpreted and mischaracterized, it becomes easier to understand and identify whether it is something with which one resonates ethically. Veganism is:
“A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—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
There is a difference between something being “difficult” and something being “inconvenient”. To many, the prospect of living vegan can seem daunting at first, as it is a way of living that goes far beyond mere dietary choices and extends into most aspects of life and the choices we make on a daily basis (clothing, cosmetics, body care products, home cleaning products, furniture, automobile upholstery, etc.). I have found, as have many other vegans with whom I’ve spoken, that the changes I once may have thought of as “difficulties” turned out to be “inconveniences”. For example, it was never actually “difficult” to reach ten inches past the cow’s milk to pick up the almond milk – it was merely inconvenient. In reality, any perceived inconveniences I have ever faced in living vegan pale in comparison to the actual difficulties (which is far too weak a word to adequately describe a lifetime of horrific and perverse agonies) suffered by every animal used to satisfy human pleasure.
Hi. My Name is Keith, I’m a Recovering Non-Vegan
Does making the commitment to live vegan require a Twelve Step process? No. The only Twelve Steps I know that relate to veganism are the twelve steps it takes to walk past the meat/dairy department to the produce department in my local supermarket, and I find those are twelve incredibly easy steps to take!
Here are the Two Steps we suggest when it comes to veganism:
Why waste time – and continue causing unnecessary suffering and death to others – by intentionally putting roadblocks in our own way? Perhaps it’s better to heed AA’s popular slogan, “Keep It Simple”.
If you are already vegan, please educate others about veganism. If you are not vegan and believe that animals matter morally at all, please consider living vegan as it is the choice that matches your morals.
[I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. Also, please read our Disclaimerregarding external sites, organizations, individuals, etc.]
[Author’s note – I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites. The podcasts and essays connected to those links will help to expand on the ideas presented here.]
Imagine you’re on a crowded bus and it’s your stop. As you exit, you pass the driver whom you know from previous trips and, as usual, wish him a nice day. As he replies, you clearly smell alcohol on his breath and notice his eyes are red and glassy. What do you do?
Do you leave the bus and go about your day, hoping the driver won’t crash the bus and injure or kill himself, the other passengers and possibly some pedestrians and other drivers? Or do you exit and say a little prayer for them all, sending positive energy their way (“Nama-stay-in-your-lane, Mr. Bus Driver!”)? Do you dive into denial and tell yourself you didn’t see what you saw or smell what you smelled, convincing yourself that it’s just your imagination because, after all, you respect this bus driver and he’s a professional? Do you leave the bus and call the bus company to report the driver? Or do you confront him, alert the other passengers to the situation and call 911?
I hope I’m never in such a situation but, if I am, I hope I’d take the kind of action airport security screeners took in Miami on July 1, 2002 when they smelled alcohol on two America West pilots’ breath – they took a stand and did the right thing by calling TSA, who then called the police and (barely) stopped the plane from taking off for Phoenix with 127 passengers and 3 other crew members on board.
What’s this got to do with veganism?
Imagine you’re vegan and you become aware, as I and many others have, that the animal welfare/protection groups you and others trust to carry an anti-speciesist vegan message and work for animal rights are actually doing quite the opposite. What do you do?
Do you continue to support such organizations, either financially or otherwise, and promote them because “at least they’re doing some good work, right?” while ignoring the moral inconsistency of their campaignsthat a) ask for an end or, more often, only a reduction to some forms of violent oppression toward non-human individuals while doing nothing to stop other forms, all of which are equally unjust and morally unacceptable, b) engage in blatant speciesism by advocating for specific favored species rather than working to end all animal use by promoting veganism through vegan education and c) help animal exploiters streamline their productivity and become more profitable? [the list of ways such organizations betray and fail the animals they purport to help is quite long – these were the first three that came to mind]
Do you “hope” that through the promotion of such ideas as vegetarianism, reducetarianism, “ditching meat”, “ditching fur”, eating “cage-free”, “humanely-raised” or “local” animals and their secretions and the myriad other non-vegan dietary and fashion options offered by these organizations, consumers of animal products will somehow “make the connection” – a common phrase among those who promote welfare – stumble into the decision to live vegan (hopefully within a decade or three…) and embrace the ethical stance that lies at the heart of veganism – despite the intentional absence of a clear, consistent vegan message coming from these organizations (I will provide an example of one such organization’s current campaign below)?
Or do you take a stand for justice by removing your support from such organizations and making public their betrayal of animals while focusing your limited time, energy and other resources on engaging in clear, consistent grassroots vegan education that truly addresses the underlying cause of animal exploitation – the fallacy of human supremacy that has created and fostered a paradigm of globalspeciesism claiming the lives of billions of vulnerable individuals every year?
Here’s an example of one such organization and their unwillingness to provide a vegan message at the risk of losing donations and other funding:
I watched a recent video by The Humane League advertising their new chicken-specific 88% Campaign aimed to “reduce their immense suffering” by campaigning “for companies to make meaningful changes”, “address health issues” of birds who will still be killed, “improve living conditions” of birds who will still be killed and “replace slaughter methods”. They purport that “things are starting to change” (this alleged “start” comes after 200+ years of similar animal welfare campaigns – after a solid two centuries, are we to believe that The Humane League has finally cracked the code and is making substantive change with their repackaging of the same methods that have yet to achieve such change? That’s called branding and marketing) and trumpet “some major victories for chickens”, showing a Huffington Post headline stating “There’s A Major New Effort To Help The Billions Of Chickens We Eat Every Year” and “New protections for farm animals in 2017” from the San Francisco Chronicle. Those are feel-good ideas, but the truth behind them is that the so-called “protections” don’t protect these individuals from being killed nor “help” them in any significant way considering they are still destined to be eaten by the billions every year by a largely non-vegan human population. THL goes on to ask that donors “support the movement to reduce the suffering of billions of chickens” (a focus on abuse rather than use, which is at the core of the welfare movement) and that “Together, we can create the change” (accompanied by footage of a chicken gasping for her last breaths). There is, of course, no definition of what “the change” is, so that is left open to interpretation by the viewer who has now seen images of animals being neglected and abused and will likely take away the idea that animal abuse, rather than use, is the problem that needs addressing. When The Humane League’s logo appears seconds later, the deal is sealed – here the viewer is (mis)led to believe THL is diligently working to make “the change”, whatever that is. With three seconds to go in this one minute and forty-one second video, a tiny message appears:
If you squint…
I’ll enlarge the intentionally minuscule message here:
REMEMBER: THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO REDUCE THE SUFFERING OF FARM ANIMAL IS TO ELIMINATE MEAT, DAIRY AND EGGS FROM YOUR DIET.
How is the viewer supposed to “remember” information that has at no point previously been provided to them? Up until that moment, there is no imagery or verbiage in the video to support or even hint at the information in that statement – it’s all about the suffering of chickens. Moreover, that statement would be easily missed as it appears in tiny font at the bottom of the screen after The Humane League’s logo has disappeared and the screen has faded to black. As the video boasts high production values, it isn’t a stretch to say that this sizing, placement and timing is quite intentional. It’s also not a vegan message by any definition, as it excludes any mention of the myriad non-food-related uses of animals and, interestingly, overlooks honey in its menu of dietary items.
In reading the 88% Campaign White Paper, I was not surprised to find the following passages lamenting how the quality of modern chicken meat has been reduced, discussing how to “improve” slaughter conditions and explaining how the implementation of THL’s recommendations for chicken welfare would help the animal agriculture corporations and the consumers of animal products simultaneously:
“The quality of chicken meat is also substantially affected too (sic), with white striping and wooden breast impacting the texture, fat content and nutritional value”. “Meat that comes from birds suffering from woody breast or from those with both conditions are found to have a harder texture, impaired ability to hold water, and poorer nutritional value… White striping by itself also impacts the general appearance of the breast meat… These conditions are forcing the downgrading of meat due to the lack of aesthetic appeal… There is an alternative; breeds exist that can alleviate many of the negative predispositions we see with the current typical fast-growing breeds. By utilising these higher welfare breeds and giving birds more space, enriching the environment, and improving slaughtering conditions using CAK or LAPS, the industry would see an improvement in meat quality [italics added] and, most importantly, an improved level of welfare for the billions of chickens farmed for meat production every year.”
“Slaughter conditions are improved by the use of controlled atmosphere stunning or killing (CAK) which involves transferring the birds to a controlled atmosphere chamber with gases or gas mixtures (gases permitted are carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and inert gases such as argon and nitrogen)… Low atmospheric stunning may also provide a more humane method of slaughter… The birds are thus stunned or killed, depending on the length of exposure to the gases or low pressure. Both methods eliminate the need for live handling, shackling and inversion of conscious chickens, and should ensure chickens are fully unconscious at neck cutting and dead by the time they reach the scald tank.”
This is from a corporation claiming to help animals, yet it sounds eerily like something one would expect to read in an animal agriculture insider publication.
From the SF Chronicle article comes a disturbing quote from THL’s executive director, David Coman-Hidy: “We’re [italics added] looking to raise birds that are not just bred to suffer, that are bred with some consideration to the quality of their lives”. “We’re”?? Does this indicate that The Humane League is now in the business of raising chickens? One has to wonder whether Mr. Coman-Hidy has lost sight of the blurry boundary where his multi-million-dollar corporation and the multi-million-dollar animal agriculture corporations begin and end, or whether he’s simply acknowledging that the two are truly partners in profit. Either way, the quote could just as easily have come from the mouth of any duplicitous farmer seeking to placate animal welfare proponents. I shudder to hear the head of an organization that purports to have the best interests of animals in mind make such a statement.
Sadly, campaigns like this from The Humane League don’t aim to end the use of chickens (or other non-human individuals) for food and other purposes. They simply aim to alter or, to use their marketing terminology, “improve” conditions for chickens that will still be killed for human consumption (their slaughter method improvement recommendations take a page out of PeTA’s book) and, in so doing, increase THL donations, create better and more profitable conditions for the animal suppliers and assure consumers that they can have “higher-welfare” animal products. The one group that loses every time and pays with their lives is the chickens. If this is a “victory”, then it is a victory under some new definition of which I am not aware.
Playing nicely in the sandbox
More often than not, those of us who make the choice to live vegan upon coming to understand, abhor and eschew participation in the injustices being done to non-human individuals tend to speak out against those and other injustices. We carry the message that living vegan is the clearest path toward dismantling speciesism and creating a world in which all sentient beings are given the right to live autonomous lives free from being used without their consent to satisfy the pleasures and conveniences of more powerful others.
When one engages in critical thinking, which is different than being critical and which I believe every social justice advocate ought to do, one can quickly see past the marketing propaganda of the animal welfare corporations (which is similar in form and function to the marketing techniques of the animal exploiters they purport to oppose) and begin to understand just how dishonest they truly are.
I find it interesting and disturbing that, when some of us challenge and call attention to individuals and groups when we see them engaging in intentional deception and manipulation to further their own ends (said deceptions and manipulations resulting in the continued exploitation and needless deaths of animals and increased profits for themselves and animal exploiters), we are told we’re being “divisive” and are rebuked for “not playing well with others”. It’s important to remember that being vegan doesn’t mean one is above reproach nor that one is incapable of being as dishonest, calculating, manipulative and lacking in integrity as any other person, vegan or not. I have observed some of the most “highly regarded” animal advocates engaging in blatantly disingenuous efforts, claiming to be working in the best interests of animals while in reality fostering speciesism and working to advance their careers and make a profit. Examples of this abound in animal welfare corporations and I seem to see more of them by the day. I can think of no reason why I would want to “play” or work with anyone who would choose to behave in such a way, either in vegan advocacy or anywhere else. Boundaries keep individuals and organizations healthy; engaging with toxic individuals and organizations is damaging on many levels.
I recently had the privilege of having a conversation with a paid employee of a multi-million dollar animal welfare organization, though I will not identify that individual or their organization here as I did not ask their permission to do so (it wasn’t my intention to do an interview and exposé) and respect their right to anonymity. Here are the salient points from that discussion:
Despite our obvious philosophical differences when it comes to animal advocacy methodologies (abolitionism vs. utilitarian welfarism), we both agreed that animal exploiters are not the problem and that the real solution lies with educating animal product consumers about veganism. They stated their organization “targets” animal suppliers “but always talks about going veg in our presentations”, and I asked that “veg” be defined, as I found it unclear. They told me “It means vegan”, so I asked why they don’t just say “vegan” if that’s truly what they mean and if it’s because it’s not a “marketable” word, and I was informed that “studies show people respond better to words like veg and vegetarian” (I personally find that approach dishonest – say what you mean and mean what you say – and believe that an organization that asks for one thing when they mean another lacks integrity. I also believe the studies cited are inherently biased and flawed). I asked whether they would agree that, since we as individuals and groups have “limited resources” (their term with which I wholeheartedly agree), a better use of those resources might be to engage the public in clear, consistent vegan education to strike at the root of the problem rather than flailing at the branches that only grow back stronger once they’re pruned. Their answer was a simple “No”.
It was brought to my attention later that this is the only answer one could give to such a question when one’s career depends on a steady stream of income through a steady stream of donations brought in by a steady stream of single-issue campaigns that avoid a clear vegan message in order not to disrupt the status quo of animal use in any meaningful way. After all, the reality is that if animal welfare corporations truly focused their efforts and resources (and hundreds of millions of combined dollars) on getting people to live vegan and brought an end to animal exploitation, they would have to shutter up their businesses and go find other work… and that’s just not something careerists are interested in doing when they’ve carved out a comfortable niche for themselves.
With the current animal welfare movement heading in no discernible direction (backward seems to be the most likely choice), abolitionist vegans face an uphill battle that’s twofold – 1) educate the non-vegan public about veganism and 2) educate fellow vegans about the inherent and systemic hypocrisy of the animal welfare corporations and the single-issue marketing campaigns they frequently design and implement (and recycle and repeat) in order to keep the donor dollars rolling in. If we truly want to create “the change” – changing the animals-as-property paradigm that that allows for and demands the morally unjustifiable enslavement, exploitation and execution of billions of non-human individuals every year for no better reason than to satisfy the fleeting pleasures, comforts and conveniences of humans – this is how we do it:
Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:
Image shared with kind permission of Vegan Musings – www.facebook.com/ThoughtsPicturesPoems
What is veganism?
A wise person once said, “It is what it is… and it’s not what it’s not.” In the interest of dispelling some common myths and misconceptions, let’s begin with what veganism is not.
Veganism is not:
a vague concept open to a vast array of interpretations that has “as many definitions as there are vegans”.
It is not a “diet”, a “lifestyle”, a “fad” or a “phase”.
It is not a lofty, seemingly unattainable goal at the end of a long and arduous “journey” (if veganism is any part of a journey, it’s the first step on the path toward living a life where justice is a priority and morals matter, not the last step).
It is not some “moral high ground” or a (faux) ivory tower from which one claims superiority over those who are non-vegan.
It is not a game where one makes up one’s own rules and “cheats” when the mood strikes.
It is not a “menu choice” or cuisine option.
Veganism is not the same as vegetarianism, which is the arbitrary exclusion of one or more animal products from one’s diet while continuing to consume other animal products and/or secretions (thereby promoting some animal exploitation rather than all animal exploitation) and there is no such creature as a “vegan-vegetarian” or “vegetarian-vegan”. To refer to oneself (or someone else, or a diet) as such would be like saying, “I flew here in an airplane-helicopter” or “Look at that beautiful elephant-walrus!”. The fact that the two may have similarities does not make them synonymous or interchangeable. Just ask any walrus who’s had an unwanted encounter with an overstimulated elephant…
To treat veganism as anything other than the definition that follows is to confuse some very important matters and is a tremendous disservice to the non-human individuals whose lives depend on presenting and maintaining a clear, consistent vegan message.
Veganism is:
“A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—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
Please note that, in the definition, the dietary aspect of veganism is mentioned secondary to the ethicalaspect. This is not an accident or an oversight. It is intentional and for good reason. While there is an obvious and important dietary component to living vegan, it goes much deeper than mere food choices.
If we are to educate others about veganism, it’s incumbent upon us to not only have a clear understanding of what veganism is, but to make sure we’re able to convey that message clearly and consistently by not intentionally or tactily promoting what veganism is not. We need to say what we mean and mean what we say (and not say it mean!) if people are to understand the information we’re trying to give them because, again, billions of innocent lives are at stake.
The simplest and most immediate action one can take to stop the violent oppression of the most vulnerable members of our global society – non-human individuals – is to start living vegan, as this is the primary means of dismantling speciesism and moves us toward achieving the abolition of animal enslavement and exploitation for human pleasure, tradition and convenience. If you are already vegan, please educate others about veganism. If you are not vegan and believe that animals matter morally, please consider living vegan as it is the choice that matches your morals.
I encourage all readers to click the blue links embedded in this essay and explore the information on those sites.
Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:
A non-vegan once asked me, “Isn’t it hard being vegan?”
OK, it wasn’t “once” and it wasn’t “a” non-vegan – I’ve been asked many times by many non-vegans, some out of well-meaning curiosity and some who were looking to poke holes in the foundation of my ethical stance to abstain, wherever possible, from meat, dairy, eggs, honey, leather, wool and all other products of animal exploitation. My answer always starts with “No”. Sometimes it ends there and we go our separate ways, but more often than not I will take the time to explain just how easy it was (and still is) for me to choose to live vegan once I understood the injustices involved in turning a cow into a steak, a chicken into a cutlet, a pig into bacon and a baby calf into a suede jacket, to list but a few examples of the tyrannies humans force on vulnerable individuals of other species.
A good question to ask non-vegans who believe living vegan is “hard” is, “Who told you that?” In my experience, it’s never a vegan who tells someone that living vegan is hard… because it isn’t. It’s usually someone or some company with a product to sell that counts on such misinformation to keep consumers from thinking critically about veganism and the moral obligation it entails. Stretching one’s arm 6 inches beyond the cow’s milk to reach the almond milk, for example, is not a difficulty – it’s a minor inconvenience and slight change in a habit pattern that will become a new habit when practiced for a short while. Shopping for affordable non-leather shoes may take a little more time that simply buying ones made from the skins of dead animals, but this is again only a minor inconvenience and one easily overcome. In my experience, this is true of nearly all shifts from using products of animal exploitation to living vegan and, once new habits are in place, everything is easy again.
If there is anything “hard” about living vegan, it’s dealing with the cognitive dissonance of non-vegans.
Just another day at the office…
Non-vegans. They come one at a time. They come in groups. Sometimes I feel like Bruce Lee entering a room full of black belt warriors and having to defend myself against their simultaneous assaults. They come online, at work, at the grocery store, in restaurants… sometimes I’m surprised they don’t come knocking on my door when passing my house and spying the vegan bumper stickers on my car (usually, those random doorknockers are Jehovah’s Witnesses wanting to share their “good news” with me. Want to know my definition of fair trade? Graciously accepting some of their literature and handing them some clear, consistent vegan information in return after discussing why veganism needs to be the moral baseline for our treatment of all sentient beings. That’s the best news I know).
As a recovering non-vegan (more of an anti-vegan when I really think about it), I get it. I was the classic, stereotypical animal product consumer, waving hamburgers under my vegetarian friends’ noses, snarkily asking my PeTA-supporting former boss where the “People for the Ethical Treatment of Humans” pamphlets were and thinking up clever ways to derail their veg-trains. I understand where non-vegans are coming from and why many, but by no means all, behave as they do toward vegans:
I was unable to diagnose, recognize and deal with my fears back then. Instead, I acted out in denial and avoidance of those uncomfortable feelings. Somewhere inside, probably near the pounds of undigested red meat rotting in my intestines, I understood that every hamburger begins with a cow begging for her life. I knew something dreadfully awful was happening to veal calves and it wasn’t, as I so cleverly rationalized (and I’m not proud of this, though I was at the time), “the only life they know anyway so, since they have no frame of reference for what a happy life is, why does it matter? And if their lives are so bad, it’s actually merciful that we slaughter them so young and put them out of their misery. We’re doing them a favor!” I knew that chickens didn’t “sacrifice” themselves to become the nuggets I was eating twenty at a sitting. I knew… and I denied. And I defended. And I attacked. Those were the methods I employed to keep from hearing, understanding and – worse – feeling the truth about animal exploitation and my complicity in it. I kept the truth a comfortable distance away and drowned out the voice of my conscience with pseudo-intellectual rationalizations and justifications that, as I now know, were mere fabrications of my frightened ego.
When I deal with non-vegans now, especially in terms of vegan education, I try to meet them where they are, remembering that I once stood where they stand – blinded and misguided by a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine that would have us believe we need to eat animals to survive (false), that we would suffer and maybe die if we didn’t (false), that animals were put on Earth to serve us – the “superior race/top of the food chain/most advanced species” in the history of the planet (false) and on and on. I remember that I too was once afraid to take a stand for my ethical beliefs in a society that marginalizes, ridicules, bullies and berates those who swim against the current of cruelty and go against the grain of gluttony, afraid to be looked at as “abnormal”, afraid to no longer be accepted by those who engage in behaviors I now consider morally unacceptable…
So I do my best to let them know how it was for me, what happened to cause me to change and what it’s like for me now. I let them know that making the choice to live vegan is the single best choice I’ve ever made and that living vegan is the best action I’ve ever taken. I let them know that it’s best to follow one’s ethics instead of one’s palate. I let them know that veganism is not a diet, a fad, a lifestyle or a phase – it is one’s personal commitment to a social justice movement that seeks to dismantle speciesism, the most egregious and deadly form of oppression on the planet today. I let them know that every argument against veganism is an argument in favor of slavery, bullying, misery and horrible, needless death. I let them know that if they believe animals matter morally at all, then living vegan is the only rational response. I let them know that living vegan is as easy as making the decision to withdraw support from and cease complicity in a worldwide system of animal exploitation. I let them know that vegan food is nutritious, delicious and all one needs to survive and thrive in optimum health.
And I let them know that I, and millions of other vegans, are here to offer education, informationand supportif they are willing to put their fears aside and embrace that which they already believe in – justice for all.
Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:
“Become vegan and the world says you’re extreme. Become abolitionist vegan and vegans say you’re extreme” – Keith Berger
When I began living vegan in 2004, I immediately began involving myself in every bit of animal rights activism I could find, feeling a passionate, desperate need to “do something” about the horrors and injustices I suddenly understood were taking place all around me and all around the world. I didn’t know where to start and I couldn’t see where or how it all might end – all I knew is that I had to get involved and start making a difference. I continued engaging in various avenues of activism, hoping to educate people that, for example, to attend animal circuses is to directly support slavery and abuse. I wrote letters to editors and was published. I took part in city council meetings to have circuses banned. I removed countless discount circus coupons from local businesses and took down circus advertisements. I attended demonstrations, held signs, passed out leaflets and engaged circus-goers in groups and one-to-one on their way in and out of the arena, giving them the best I had in what little time was available, which was often no longer than a few seconds. I stood and watched, with tears in my eyes, the Parade of Slaves as burly men armed with bullhooks marched dispirited elephants through parking lots and into the next performance. Was this effective? Possibly, but if the effect was merely to open a person’s eyes to one specific type of abuse and convince her/him to tear up their tickets and take the kids home only so they could get to their neighbor’s barbecue and eat the burnt corpses of dead animals or stop at McDonald’s a few hours earlier, then my definition of “effective” needed an overhaul. Where was the message that making the choice to live vegan was the real answer to ending animal exploitation? Were we all hoping the people we challenged outside the circus (including the circus employees themselves) would go home, research these issues and be moved to change their lives and, in doing so, change the world? That was doubtful, especially considering that, as I looked around at my fellow activists, very few were vegan and many didn’t even seem open to the message of living vegan when we brought it up. They were “just here to help the poor elephants”.
When I began reading Professor Gary Francione’s* work regarding the abolitionist approach to animal rights, my eyes, mind and heart opened even wider and my definition of “effective” did indeed begin to change.
[*please read our Disclaimerregarding the mention of individuals and/or groups not necessarily endorsed by or affiliated with this site, our group or its members.]
The animal rights movement abounds with myriad single-issue campaigns (SICs) – circuses, gestation crates, fur farms, vivisection, “humane” slaughter methods, whales, orcas, dolphins, cat and dog meat… the list is endless – that serve to be most effective at doing one thing: reducing the effectiveness of our movement by sending us scurrying in a thousand (a conservative estimate) different directions and thereby preventing us from presenting a unified, unequivocal message that, if we truly believe in and desire liberty and justice for all, veganism must be the moral baseline for our behavior toward non-human animals. Start there, and the rest of the issues will begin to fall away. Continue on the present course and be divided and conquered. Giving support to welfarist organizations that treat veganism like an afterthought or a nice, but unattainable, ideal (or worse – denigrate it as a quest for “personal purity”) is a misuse of valuable time, energy, money and resources.
This essay deals with one such SIC I see every week and the speciesism behind it: Meatless Monday.
The problem is not how we exploit animals – the problem is thatwe exploit animals in the first place, so the solution is not to reduce animal abuse; it’s to eliminate animal use… and that solution lies in educating people to live vegan.
If you’re a bank robber and one day realize that robbing banks is morally wrong, you don’t seek better ways to rob banks – you just stop robbing them (unless you’re determined to be a criminal and are willing to pay the consequences if caught, or a sociopath and can’t determine right from wrong). To paraphrase the Roman philosopher Seneca’s wise words, there’s no point in trying to find the right way to do a wrong thing.
According to my research, the idea of Meatless Monday began nearly 100 years in the United States as a way to ration food to help with the war effort. It was revived in 2003, according to www.meatlessmonday.com, as a “public health awareness campaign” in order to address “…the prevalence of preventable illnesses associated with excessive meat consumption.” On their “Why Meatless?” page, in 11 paragraphs and 796 words, there is nothingthat speaks about the suffering, confinement, enslavement and slaughter of the non-human animals the campaign is suggesting people abstain from eating one day a week. This campaign is clearly not part of any social justice movement intended to help abolish the property status of animals, nor to help any animal in any way – unless that animal is of the human variety and wants to optimize her/his health, as its stated aim is to help humans lower their risk of contracting preventable chronic diseases linked with the consumption of animal products (heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease, to name a few). In short, Meatless Monday is rooted in the same self-centered egotism, speciesism and myth of human supremacy that allows humans the self-proclaimed “right” to destroy the lives of non-human animals wantonly and with no regard to their well-being or feelings.
Even though it’s clear that the Meatless Monday campaign has nothing to do with helping to bring an end to the exploitation of non-human animals (even though some people claim every meatless meal “saves” x-number of animals, as if skipping a hamburger results in, somewhere, a cow being magically transported from a slaughterhouse to a sanctuary) , many vegans and high-profile celebrity vegans lend their name to and continue to support this campaign, rationalizing that it is “part of the journey” toward veganism. Some seem to believe it’s necessary to encourage non-vegans to take “baby steps” and that “every little bit helps”. It’s my contention that one does not encourage another to practice ethical behavior only when personally convenient or in accordance with some arbitrary set of rules. Coddling those who continue to exploit others when they are well aware that their choices and behaviors condemn individuals to miserable lives and horrific deaths is simply unacceptable. We would never suggest that serial killers take “baby steps” and observe Murder-Free Mondays, would we? Of course not. We would explain to them why their behavior is wrong (assuming they didn’t already know) and demand they stop at once or face dire consequences. What consequences do we impose on those who pay others to do their killing for them so they can dine on the carcasses of animals? None… but Nature does (see preventable chronic diseases listed above).
While people are taking “baby steps” toward living vegan, billions of innocent babies continue to suffer and die each year. Given the opportunity, would those baby-steppers be willing to baby-step through a slaughterhouse and look those suffering individuals on Death Row in their haunted eyes and tell them “Gee, I think living vegan is a great idea for some people, I’m working on going vegan but I need more time, I’m just not ready, it’s such a big change to make, my family wouldn’t understand, I’m really sorry but you’ll be dead and eaten by the time I make a commitment to justice instead of my own selfishness”? Would anyone be willing to take that kind of personal responsibility for their unwillingness to spare someone’s life at the expense of their own palate pleasure? Supporting animal exploitation 6 days a week instead of 7 is like supporting spousal abuse 85% of the time instead of 100%. Who does that??
Perpetrators who want to get away with what they can whenever they can, that’s who.
There are those who support the baby-step “journeys” of non-vegans to become vegan – some of which take 2-3 decades – and suggest we should “give them a break, they will eventually arrive”. While I understand that not every person will go vegan overnight (though many of us have), we vegans must remain clear that this is their choice and not our suggestion, remaining unequivocal that anything less than embracing veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of individuals of other species is to continue being complicit in animal exploitation and needless death. For the animals who suffer and die waiting for “eventually” to happen, “eventually” is unacceptable and arrives much too late. If we see a woman being raped, we don’t go help her “eventually”, nor do we wait for the rapist to complete his “journey” to living a rape-free life, asking him to maybe rape a little less every day and applauding him when he goes a whole day without raping anyone. What drives some people to accept such an unacceptable double-standard when the victims are non-human animals? The answer is speciesism, the most egregious and deadly form of racism in existence on our planet today.
Veganism should be the starting point on a journey to live as ethically as possible, not some future goal to attain when one is finally ready to live nonviolently.
Some ask why this same debate repeats every “Meatless” Monday, so here’s why – because every Monday, some people take a mere 16 hours off from participating in an endless worldwide animal holocaust and actually seem to believe this is somehow commendable and effective. During the Holocaust, I’m sure all the Nazis took naps now and then. That didn’t help their victims at all because, after nap time was over, the terrorism and killing continued. The sad reality of this ineffectual campaign is that every Meaningless Monday is immediately followed by a Return to Terrorism Tuesday and a We Keep Killing Wednesday. Imagine if there were campaigns for Rape-Free Fridays or Child Abuse-Free Thursdays. Should we applaud those well-intentioned baby steps too, or shouldn’t we base our work on creating Exploitation-Free EveryDay?
If we, as vegans, can’t commit to a 100% effort toward clear, consistent, unequivocal vegan education, how do we expect non-vegans to commit to a 100% vegan life when, by engaging in and promoting SICs, we’re essentially giving them permission to exploit animals most, but not all, of the time? Would you tell a heroin addict to only shoot dope every other day (and thereby continue to cause himself harm and support the livelihood of his drug dealer and his dealer’s dealer), or would you suggest total abstinence?
Baby steps are for babies. I challenge my fellow vegans to be the adults we are and stop making the unacceptable seem acceptable. This is known as enabling and, the sooner it stops, the sooner real change begins. If you’re already vegan, please stop making it OK for others to continue destroying the lives of non-human animals by lending your support to half-measures like Meatless Monday and the other useless, ineffective and counter-productive single-issue campaigns promoted by animal welfarist organizations that treat “vegan” like a dirty word. Instead, let’s focus our efforts on clear, consistent vegan education wherever and whenever we can, being unequivocal about the idea of veganism as the moral baseline for our treatment of the animals with whom we share this small planet.
Live vegan. Educate others. Start now, here’s how:
