As an educational tool, I think this is better than Earthlings.

Dr. Milton Mills (see HERE for an earlier talk from this blog site) gave a talk at the recent "World Vegan Summit" entitled: "Traditional African Diet vs Today’s Plate of Plantation Food."

Interesting stuff.

The Democracy Now clip (below) is interesting in itself. For me, in particular, I was interested in what Keegan Kuhn, Cowspiracy director, says about government and industry working hand in hand (see 51.28 mins in, at the end of the clip).

That, for me, underscores yet again the strength of sociologist Richard Gale's implication that social movements need not work directly with the industries they oppose to impact on them.

In the national-group drenched animal advocacy movement, the huge amounts of money being spent by duplicated copy-cat organisations on various welfare reform may well be an example of this unnecessary practice. Because animal agriculture works hand in hand with government, vegan animal rights advocates can create social change by stirring things up on the cultural level (perhaps as DxE does [although I have a few problems with them]).

This evening I went with a second Vegan Information Project volunteer to an event in Dublin entitled, “Climate Conversations 2015 Launch Event: Communicating the Challenge” which featured, among others, Eamon Ryan of the Green Party in Ireland, Claire O'Connor, former international director for Vice President Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, Oisín Coghlan of Friends of the Earth, and media expert Terry Prone. This was the first of five events about the challenge of climate change.

A couple of things cropped up during the night that I think are relevant to the animal advocacy movement. One topic in particular. Claire O’Connor said that one strategy she was involved in organising during her time in Gore’s team was suggesting to people that they begin by doing fairly easy things that will help the environment. The first thing suggested was to change light bulbs to environmentally-friendly ones.

The strategy is simple. When people get used to doing this relatively easy thing, they’ll move on to other things that they can do for the environment, maybe eventually something like changing the type of car they own.

This is a sensible incremental strategy they thought. Don’t want to scare people off by asking them to do something substantial right from the get go.

However, they found that many people did not necessarily “progress” to more meaningful activities that would help the environment, and so they set about to find out why. They were told by many people that it had been suggested to them that changing light bulbs would be great for the environment. They said, in effect, “I’ve changed the light bulbs, so I’m tackling climate change.”

O’Connor says that their initial strategy has subsequently been called into question due to its failure. People simply did not move incrementally from one environmentally-friendly measure to another. The Gore team are now trying to find out if being straightforward and honest about what they really wanted people to do would have been a better strategy right from the start.

While this story was unfolding, I began to think about the campaigns in the animal advocacy movement to encourage “meat reducers” - and the endeavours to motivate people to participate in “Meatless Mondays.” Are these “easy-steps-first,” “baby-steps” campaigns going to ultimately fail just like the environmental ones described by O'Connor?

Might it be the case that telling people the truth is best from the beginning? Go on, utter that word “VEGAN.” There, wasn’t too hard, was it? Vegans – you want people to live vegan, right? So perhaps that’s what we vegans should ask of people. Nice and open and nice and honest.

Let the vegetarians campaign for vegetarianism, and let the who-knows-what try to influence the “meat reducers.” You, vegan brothers and sisters, have grown-up vegan work to do.


The other issue that came up was raised by Terry Prone in her very entertaining talk. She said we can think, essentially, of three types of people.

1. The Converted.
2. The Unconvertible.
3. The Undecided.

Don’t bother talking too much to the 1s, they are already on your side, she said, and it’s pretty much a complete waste of time talking to the 2s. Your audience are the 3s, the undecided, and probably the majority to boot.

It made me think of a point Brendan McNally made in a presentation he did at the animal rights conference in Luxembourg (see below). Brendan said that we in the animal movement have this unfortunate habit of socially constructing “the enemy” who we can hate and campaign against. In Prone’s schema, these are the 2s, those we’ll never convince.

Interestingly, she said that, in the fullness of time, the 2s will just have to be forced to buckle to our will with laws and legislation after we’ve won over the 3s.

This is why, in the animal advocacy movement, it’s often said that we should engage with the political system with the aim of achieving “animal-friendly” laws, rules, and regulations. That may be so – although the anarchists among us will object to that. In any event, what is certain right now is that now is NOT the time for political campaigning. It’s way too early.

Our job is to bring about cultural change and that means talking to the 3s. And remember where we started, be honest with them now!

A guest blog entry from Michele Spino Martindill, former adjunct professor at University of Missouri Columbia.


Here’s why the mainstream vegan movement is dying: Capitalism a Janus faced monster—it will produce products for any group out there and accrue the wealth as it goes along at the expense of every living being and every resource the planet has to offer. Donald Watson, the acknowledged founder of veganism, certainly expressed concern for the planet being lost to greed and wealth, especially in his final interviews. The products, including products suitable for vegans, are the opiate of capitalism. They not only pacify vegans, they keep vegans defending capitalism!! It’s an awesome plan—the victims of capitalism are the ones defending the system and the wealthy elite whose wealth is gained on the backs of the oppressed and exploited.

As long as you claim the capitalist vegan products are needed by people new to veganism in order for it to be “easy” for them to be vegan, you’re reducing veganism to a diet and the clothes a person wears. You’re also saying that if enough vegans buy these products, then we will end cruelty to animals. How many times do we have to say it: We can’t shop our way to veganism!! Shopping and capitalism are the antithesis of veganism. We can’t support capitalism and veganism at the same time. Supporting capitalism means supporting child slave labor, women getting paid less than men for doing the same jobs, the lack of adequate health care around the globe, higher education becoming corporatized and available only to the elite class, wars fought over the cost of oil and the endless slaughter of animals for human consumption.

No, we can’t cherry pick the good parts of capitalism and toss out the bad. We know historically that social movements have failed or at least stalled when they try to get along with capitalism. Capitalism stalled the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Yes, the voting laws in the U.S. changed, making it easier for Blacks to vote. Yes, Hollywood cast more Blacks in TV and films. Yes, it became illegal to deny housing to anyone based on the color of their skin. Now, fifty years later racism is back in full force. Capitalism kept anger over racism in the background by providing products aimed at the Black market, letting Blacks vote as long as whites continued to be the dominant voice (the voting rights laws were recently rescinded), by casting Blacks in TV and film roles that continued to stereotype them as lazy and poor, or as people who could be accepted if they acted according to white beliefs and values. Today Blacks and some whites are starting to see they’ve been had or fooled. The vegan movement is following a similar path, and vegans don’t seem capable of seeing how the same oppressors who stalled the Civil Rights Movement (among others) are stalling, if not killing, the vegan movement.

Capitalism is not simply a matter of supply and demand, as you refer to it. Nor is capitalism ruled by some invisible free hand that keeps government from interfering with the economy, and at the same time insuring equilibrium between product availability and costs. As a matter of fact, government is deeply involved in regulating capitalism, and consumers have little or no role in determining which products are made available or the cost of any products. How is this system happening? Capitalism and corporatism go hand in hand. Corporations own governments around the world and do so in a variety of ways. In the U.S. corporations contribute to election campaigns with the expectation that politicians will act in the favor of corporations. Corporations pay lobbyists to stick to politicians like glue and make sure the interests of corporations come first in any piece of legislation.

Corporations are only interested in profits and ever increasing dividends for their shareholders. They work to create products and services to sell, to find ways to convince people to buy those products even if they don’t really need them, and to be ready with new products and services when interest in current offerings lag. Of course, corporations realize people need money to buy these products, so they give them jobs making the products and pay them just enough to be able to afford them. Consumers aren’t setting the price—the price is determined by how much profit a corporation wants and what it has to pay workers to make the products while still giving them enough to buy the results of their labor. Products suitable for vegans may not contain animals or animal by-products, but they have no ethical economic basis in a system where the workers who make them are exploited and oppressed.

Vegans love to say that it is too much for new vegans to think about all of these things, that all that matters is stopping cruelty to animals. Cruelty, violence, abuse, exploitation—whatever you want to call it—wont’ stop until vegans see the root of the problem, the economic and governmental system that limits our opportunities for compassionate living. Vegans also have to stop using the clichéd thinking that it’s too overwhelming to think about all of these problems all at once. Give people some credit. Humans are aware of the social problems that surround us, including problems in the vegan movement. It’s time to face what can’t be hidden anyway, including the racism, sexism, classism, ageism and ableism of the vegan movement. It’s not big numbers of movement members that matter, especially not big numbers gained by hiding problems in the vegan movement. Saying nothing or doing nothing is as much an act of violence as spray painting racial slurs on someone’s house, as making sexist cat calls to a woman walking down the street, as eating a meal of murdered animal parts.

Veganism can benefit from open discussion of social problems within the movement, from envisioning different economic models for society, from stressing that veganism is not a diet, and learning to listen to other groups that are similarly marginalized and disenfranchised by mainstream society. Or vegans can continue to be defensive, narrow in their vision of the world and not using critical thinking to grow their movement. There are choices.

There is a serious structural problem in the animal advocacy movement and it has persisted for decades. It seriously damages the ability of grassroots campaigns – exemplified by many of the groups in Ireland – from fulfilling their potential.

This is because they money that is given towards animal advocacy ends up getting sucked into the national groups like Animal Aid.

I say, don’t plan to visit wasteful corporate events in 2015 – use the year to encourage people to boycott these dinosaurs and, instead, help fund local campaigners who need the cash a hell of a lot more than the relatively rich corporations.

The problem.

It will undoubtedly be the case that that there are quite a few Irish members of the national and multi-national waste machines. This is campaigning cash which would be better spent if it remained in Ireland.

Think of some of the national groups: PeTA, Animal Aid, BUAV, NAVS, VIVA! What have they in common? Well, for a start, apart from their names, their campaigning is interchangeable by and large. They, moreover, all have expensive staff bills – they all have expensive buildings – they all have similar sales goods – they all have similar literature.

In a word, they are all about duplication and they WASTE thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds/euros/dollars of the animals’ money every year.

They love nothing more than trucking around the UK and other places, facilitated by the likes of VegFest, putting on these once-a-year corporate events with all the same people and with all the same outcome – the resources get centralised.

In Defence.

What do people say in defence of these corporations?

1. They make good videos and leaflets
2. They have good websites
3. They provide valuable information from their “research officers” (most have them, all duplicating the same jobs)

The question is – in the age of the internet - is there anything they do which is good that the local groups cannot do for themselves? Their videos and literature are a product of them being able to afford to produce them. The quality of their information is down to their ability to buy expertise and research. With adequate funding, the local groups can do just as well… scratch that, the local groups can do better, because they can produce locally-relevant material and react to events much quicker.

There are several people who have wanted to (re)start hunt sabbing in Ireland. This aspiration seems to have been frustrated – ah, we don’t have the numbers – we don’t have the vehicles – RIGHT: we can only afford to use private vehicles: cars. No group has its own minibus which is the best and safest way to sab because everyone is together.

One way to get members is to increase visibility. The organisers of the well-attended Paris Vegan Days argue that the key to local success is visibility. We can gain visibility through having access to campaigning funds now locked away in wages and brick and mortar in London and Kent.

This means that Irish advocates could put on their own vegan fairs if they want – but not the once-a-year VegFests – local advocates can fight the culture of speciesism all year round – WITH IMAGINATION, not restricted to the small-scale, the limited, the slimmed down, as of now. We could think outside of the box.

However…

If we let them, the national groups will continue to bleed this movement dry and that means, in the context of Ireland, that funds will continue to fly across the Irish Sea and we’ll never see it again.

It was my great pleasure to welcome to On Human-Nonhuman Relations Podcast sociologists Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart to discuss themes from their new book, Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood.

This important book looks at how children are "socialised into relations of domination."

Matthew Cole is a sociologist and an associate lecturer and visiting honorary associate at the Open University, UK. Kate Stewart is Lecturer in Social Aspects of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Contents:

• Part I Conceptualizing Western Human-Nonhuman Animal Relations: Introduction; The use of names: socially constructing animals as ‘others’; The historical separation of children from other animals; The construction and study of children and childhood.
• Part II The Contemporary Socialization of Human-Nonhuman Relations in Childhood: Family practices and the shaping of human-nonhuman identities; Cute style: mass media representations of other animals; Education: making anthroparchal domination reasonable; Playing with power: virtual relations with other animals in digital media.
• Part III Reconstructing Children’s Relations with Other Animals: Vegan Practices and Representations: We’ve got to get out of this place: the Utopian vehicularity of vegan children’s culture;
• Conclusion: resisting the zooicidal imperative.
• Bibliography;
• Index.

• Enjoy!

or LISTEN HERE

Philosopher Steve Best gave a talk at the controversial FARM-run Animal Rights Conference (2014) which, as ever, is a bit of a careerist-fest with all the usual subjects jockeying for power in the power elite of the animal welfare movement.

He describes the talk like this: "I was asked to speak on the meaning of animal rights, and I contrasted it to animal welfare, contextualized both in the setting of modern capitalism, and underscored the subversive and revolutionary nature of animal rights."

Best talks about Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Gary Francione, and utilitarianism and rights in the context of capitalism. He claims that while utilitarianism became rather conservative, rights became a radical idea in human history. He also says that, as soon as people began to talk about human rights, there was talk of the rights of other animals too.

He complains that, through Francione, the idea of abolitionism has been stripped of its political character and its historical militancy. He says abolitionism is now "de-clawed and de-fanged" and the abolitionist movement needs to get out on the streets. No longer should it be about the private consumption and consumerism of delicious vegan meals.

He says there's a lot of co-optation going on in the modern animal advocacy movement.

We have to understand that abolitionist animal rights is not about regulating use, it is about eliminating. We seek to abolish use industries like the meat industry and the fur industry. The fight is not about regulation or bans that just push the problem elsewhere - we want to stop them altogether. Not reformism but revolution.

Best finishes with nods towards alliance politics and intersectionality because, he argues, animal rights means we have to challenge as humans our own privileges.

 A guest blog entry by tina cubberley of the Vegan Information Project.

tina cubberley is a straight-edge vegan anarchist. She believes that conforming to "correct" grammar, structure, and punctuation, is bending to a stifling hierarchical authority. 

For this reason, I have included tina's contribution exactly as she wrote it.

However (bloody Liberal!), just in case this style does your head in, you can click HERE for a "normal version of this important blog entry. 


[this is author tina cubberley and Zami]

resently a very important individual came into my home an my life . zami is a loving , smart , forgiving , lazy, curius , nervous, joyful & endlesly beautiful person . in the just-over-two weeks of us living together, she has adopted me very desisivly - she is posessive an protective , an folows me from room to room to make sure i havnt disapeared .she is a greyhound who was used for 'lamping' foxes , befor being discarded with leg injurys an a life threatning chest infection .      the point of this piese of writing is this - i believ that we, as vegan campaigners, hav a troublingly limited understanding of the nature an depth of cultural speciesism in our society . this was demonstrated to me by the reaction of folks on the street whenever zami an me go out walking together .      the standard question i get is "do you race that dog?" ,& when i say no , they tell me she looks grate so i should . when (if im not feeling too disilusioned with humanity that day ) i start to xplain to them that i opose greyhound racing as a form of exploitation ,& that any use of our fellow animals for any purpose is a violation of ther rights , i dont usualy get very far . the standard respons is " but they were born an bred to race " , tho i do get the ocasional elaboration on this depressing theme - such as "ther wouldnt be any greyhounds if we stoped racing them " , & one guy who told me that ,although he used to breed dogs for racing ,he wasnt "one of the ones who cut the ears off " ( presumably he thought this particular atrosity was the only part of the entire exploitative industry that botherd me .)      all this opened my eyes mor fully than ever befor to a truth that we activists all too often overlook .why , activists often ask ,can those we try to conect with not see cows as they see dogs ? the thing is - they do . it is only the function that is diferent . the instrumental view of sentient life , the reduction of person to object, is identical .      we hav all seen, i am sure , those popular pictures of dogs touching noses with pigs or cows that usualy acompany the movement line of "why do we love this one but eat that one ?" to me ,with my newly clarifyed understanding of the not-so-sutle manifestations of speciesism that this line ignores, a beter question would be " why do we use both of them ?"      becaus , tho the way we look at our fellow animals difers in its results for individuals depending on the socialy constructed purpose we hav asigned ther species  ,the way we look is always the same . we look at an individual ,wether cow,pig,cat or greyhound , an insted of thinking "who is this person?" we think "what is this resourse for?" .we see an object to be posessed, used , or disposed of as unsatisfactory . we see profit, tradition , convenianse, entertainment ,or some blend of all of these . when those of our species who eat the flesh of cows an pigs xpress horror an revulsion at the thought of eating a dog or cat , they do not react lik this becaus they 'love' the members of these species or think they should not be used by humans ,but becaus to them these species hav a diferent purpose .an wether that purpose is profit , 'sport' , guard, child substitute ,toy for the kids or status symbol ,it is not the individuals own purpose - ther own reason for xistanse . it is stil a human reason, a human definition of ther life . when any of the people zami an i hav met see a cow , they think dinner . when they see zami , they think a night "at the dogs " . wether those indivduals unlucky enough to be born nonhuman in a human supremasist world are murdered for ther flesh , raced to death ,or paraded as an acsessory alongside a desiner handbag , they are defined an diminished by the human denial of ther reason for xistanse . wether they are geneticaly manipulated to grow so huge that they cant walk in order to produse as much flesh as posible for our consumption , or to hav xagerated an deformed featurs that lead to eye infections, dislocated hips , fragile bones an chronic breathing problems for the sake of looking 'cute' or fashionable by human standards , they suffer for our gain .  the 'love' we refer to when picturing members of specis used as 'pets' or 'sport' alongside those used for 'food' is about as far from a vegan understanding of love as its posible to be .      i want to begin my concluding thought for this entry with that beloved quote from alice walker - " the animals of the earth exist for ther own reasons . they were not made for humans , any mor than blacks were made for whites or women for men ." this quote apeals to me becaus it touches on the intersectional nature of opression an resistanse. it is part of the violence of hierarchy that the value, an very xistanse , of those subjected to opression is difined by ther usefulnes acording to those above them on the social ladder . i thought about this quote when we encounterd yet another racing fan who told me racing greyhounds is ok becaus they love to run . i said i know that dogs love to run . they love to run free . zami dancing ahed of me in the park is one of the happiest sights ther is .the guy then said huriedly "wel, ther you go ". i said he had overlooked a profound diferense . in the park, she is running for herself , not for the profit or amusement of humans . just becaus she feels lik it . she runs lik she xists - for her own reason .as a deeply speciesist society ,our understanding of this reason is almost nonexistant , our apresiation of the xistanse of our fellow animals human-centric an instrumental .      veganism reaches beyond this shalow , self centred instrumentalism .it demands that we are empathetic enough to conseive of purposes beyond human desires , & that we are humble an respectful enough to honor these purposes . from a vegan perspectiv , no use of anyone is harmles , an to discribe that use as 'love' is to rob the word of all meaning . it is becaus of this self serving misunderstanding that those who xploit ther fellow animals an make money from 'breeding ' them can stil be known as 'animal lovers' . we as vegans hav alowed this harmful  ilusion for too long .now is the time to shatter it , an to xpose our narrow anthroposentric worldview as the violent lie which it is in ALL its forms .   the nonvegan world has so much to learn about love .

Almost two years ago, I wrote about the possibility of abolitionising single-issues - I prefer thinking about single-issue events rather than single-issue campaigns.

In a recent Go Vegan Radio show (15th June 2014), Gary Francione explains that such an idea is possible within a movement in which veganism is regarded as the moral baseline.



or listen here

It seems increasingly clear that what we may regard as the original vision of veganism has been lost. On the other hand, that vision, formed in the 1940s onwards, was incomplete and somewhat confusing due to understandable definition issues and the way The Vegan Society was formed.

Essentially The Vegan Society came into existence due to a rejection of its vision by vegetarians, and we can see that vegan co-founder Donald Watson was critical of vegetarianism from the start. He and others had recognised that vegetarianism was, at best, a half-way house - but it really makes no sense even by its own principles of not wanting to live without killing other animals.

The Vegan Society was formed in the 1940s and there was immediate pressure to show that a human being could actually survive by not consuming animal produce. I believe that this pressure resulted in a lot of writing about health matters and less on "the vision thing." There was also the small complication known as World War II.

So, we have hints, statements, sentences, in writings from the 1940s and 1950s that alert us to that vision.

Rather than thinking expansively about veganism, modern vegans and, tragically, modern vegan societies (including TAVS), seem content to look narrowly at what veganism is, or what it could be - or should be.

There is a current and, to me, very depressing emphasis on health and diet but even when vegans do talk about ethics, they seem to suggest that veganism is limited almost exclusively to human relations with other sentient beings.

That, I suggest, is to badly misread the past history of the vegan movement, and the deeper far-reaching aspiration of the founders of it. Indeed, I think we are often guilty of betraying the early vegan pioneers.

Even though they were caught up in early concerns about health, they did sometimes explain veganism to be a grand overarching view about the future of humanity; about our relations with other sentient beings, of course, but also about how we live on the planet, and how we could live peacefully with each other.

They talk about peace and "peace aims," about human evolution, and they hinted that veganism could be central to a radical view of humanity. With global climate change brewing to be such an issue, to continue what they began is even more vital. We have to campaign for veganism in ways that make clear its vision of non-violence, of peace, and of justice for all sentient beings.

I believe that the early pioneers of the vegan movement thought in ways that we would now call "intersectional." Veganism, to them, was part and parcel of humanitarian aims. Humanitarianism has been described as "irresistible compassion" and "fellow-feeling," and is generally associated with concern about human rights and human welfare. I think they would be disappointed by the current vegan societies; the emphasis on human health, celebrity, and the endless pot lucks and "vegan cupcakes."

The earliest vegan pioneers talked, albeit often in vague terms, about veganism being connected to the moral evolution of humanity. They seemed convinced that veganism in some way was concerned, not only to peace and justice, but to human fulfillment, if only we would stop oppressing others.

Some points early vegan pioneer Leslie Cross (1914-1979) makes are strikingly similar to David Nibert's domesecration thesis, that the "domestication" of other sentient beings is directly associated with human-on-human violence and oppression.

Do you agree that we need to continue the conversation that the early vegan pioneers began - and really sort out what we stand for in terms of scope and radical vision for the future?

I think such a conversation would remind us that veganism is a vision of different human relationships with other sentient beings, the planet, and each other.