Let Them Eat Meat

"Vegan Mainstream" Names Lierre Keith the #8 Great Vegan Activist

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:32:54 -0400

"Vegan Mainstream" Names Lierre Keith the #8 Great Vegan Activist:

Alicia Silverstone and mad cowboy Howard Liman are ranked higher than the author of the anti-veganism book The Vegetarian Myth, but Lierre Keith has apparently done more for veganism than T. Colin Campbell:

Lierre Keith is an author and vegan activist. She has written “The Vegetarian Myth” which explains the importance of sustainability, as well as her political beliefs. She has spent twenty years as a vegan and holds the earth and all its belongings close to her heart. Lierre takes her activist position seriously and speaks regularly at different events all over the country.

They’ll realize their mistake and replace her with John Robbins by the end of the day.

Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Tovar Cerulli

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:13:22 -0400

Tovar Cerulli is an ex-vegan turned hunter who writes the blog A Mindful Carnivore. But isn’t “mindful carnivore” a contradiction in terms, like… “Ethical Butcher”?

Even some meat eaters see hunting as barbaric, but it doesn’t take much time on Cerulli’s blog to figure out that he didn’t give up compassion and thoughtfulness when he left veganism. In entries such as Reverberations of a Kill, Cerulli describes the conflict he feels over killing to live — he doesn’t treat hunting as the giddy bloodsport that some vegans imagine it to be (and which, for some hunters, it is).

A comment Cerulli wrote on “Reverberations of a Kill” explains his position succinctly:

I don’t need absolute proof of, or perfect understanding of, animal suffering to make me take it seriously and to avoid doing unnecessary harm. If I felt that continuing to be a vegan (as I was for 10 years) could (1) give me full bodily health and (2) truly avoid causing harm to animals or their habitats, I don’t think I’d be eating animals or hunting today. In a sense, my hunting is underpinned by the same values that made me a vegetarian.

Cerulli is currently working on a book that—based on his journey from veganism to hunting—explores the ethics, ecology and spirituality of human-nature-food relationships.

(photo courtesy of Tovar Cerulli)

What got you into veganism?

I grew up fishing, and eating just about anything and everything. In my late teens, I started eating less beef and pork simply because I’d heard and read that excess red meat was unhealthy. And my girlfriend at the time was vegetarian, as were her parents and sisters, so I was learning more about other ways of eating.

When I was twenty, I had an experience with a trout I caught. In the moment of killing it, I realized its death hadn’t been necessary. I could have eaten something else. That was the end of my flesh-eating.

Not long after that, I eliminated eggs and dairy, too. My concerns, like those of so many vegans, were both ethical and ecological: the mistreatment and confinement of animals, the impact of livestock operations on the environment, and the use of farmland to grow animal feed instead of food for hungry humans.

After a while, I couldn’t think of any reason for me or other humans to eat eggs or dairy products, let alone flesh of any kind.

What got you out of veganism?

Two things.

One factor was nutrition. Or, rather, my wife’s study of it. She was learning about herbal medicine and holistic health, and her instructors—including former vegans and vegetarians—offered cautions about the long-term effects of veganism. A lot of sick people had come to them for help after decades of complete abstention from animal products.

My wife wondered if we, and especially I, might do better if we starting eating yogurt and eggs again. I wasn’t ill, but my energy wasn’t great and I had some allergic sensitivities. Once we started eating dairy and eggs, things improved for me. They improved more when we started eating chicken, and occasionally fish.

The other factor was my recognition that everything I ate had a cost to animals. Clearing land for agriculture destroys wildlife habitat. Birds, rabbits and rodents get minced by grain combines, and fish get poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide runoff. Because we have exterminated most of the large four-footed predators in North America, growing crops of all kinds now depends on keeping white-tailed deer populations in check: hunters and farmers kill them by the millions every year. Though I was vegan, my diet was still killing animals.

Even in the organic garden my wife and I were growing, we had to face the dilemmas of dealing with ravenous insects and fence-defying woodchucks. That didn’t make me abandon veganism, but it did put me in a different frame of mind. It opened me to the idea of changing my diet and made me see that veganism wasn’t as harmless and innocent as I had believed.

Then again, even after I stopped being a vegan, I had no interest in buying supermarket meat from animals whose lives I knew nothing about. I still wanted to live and eat compassionately and ecologically.

To vegans, eating compassionately means “no animal products.” Is that too simplistic? How do you think compassion can be compatible with meat eating?

I do think it’s too simplistic.

Compassion is important: for fellow humans, for fellow creatures, for the earth itself. But how compassionate is a vegan diet if the production of that food maims and kills animals, harms ecosystems, and utilizes underpaid migrant workers? My point is not that these harms are unique to the growing of fruits, vegetables, and grains; they occur in the livestock industry, too. My point is simply that “no animal products” is too simplistic a measure of “compassionate.”

Following a path of compassion is far more complicated than eating-meat or not-eating-meat. So your question could be rephrased as “How can compassion be compatible with living and eating?”

And that’s not a question I can answer briefly. It runs throughout my blog and my book.

Do you think hunting is the most compassionate way to get meat?

It depends. We have to look both at how animals live and at how they die.

I think that the animals I hunt—primarily white-tailed deer, within a few miles of home in Vermont—live good lives, free and wild. And if my kills are quick, as they all have been so far, then I think the animal dies well, too, losing consciousness in seconds, before fear surfaces and before shock can become pain: a faster exit than starving in winter, being mangled by a car, or getting dragged down by coyotes.

On the other hand, hunting kills can be botched. Even the most conscientious, careful hunters can make mistakes. Animals can get wounded, feeling pain until the hunter finishes the job, the animal recovers, or the animal dies. I dread that possibility in my own hunting.

With domesticated animals, I again look at their lives and their deaths. In many of the factory farming conditions we see and read about, I think animals live horribly. On the other hand, I’ve seen meat chickens contentedly pecking away in a grassy backyard. I’ve read about botched slaughters, yet I also know folks who take care to make every livestock kill instantaneous.

You don’t want animals to suffer, yet you kill them. Why is suffering bad but death is okay?

One element of this way of thinking is, I think, very common. Most people don’t want to cause suffering, for other humans or for animals. This is true for vegetarians, meat-eaters, livestock ranchers, hunters, and so on. Are there exceptions: people who don’t care about suffering at all, or actually enjoy inflicting it? Sure. But they are relatively rare among hunters, as they are among the general population.

The killing element is less common. Virtually all of us cause some animal deaths, whether we eat meat or not. But few of us do the killing ourselves. We don’t look directly at the animals. We don’t know how swift or tortured their deaths are. So we don’t need to think about it.

Those of us who do actually kill have to find a way to make peace with it.

For me, it’s not so much a moral judgment that death and killing are “okay” as it is an acceptance that death and killing are inevitable. Whatever I do, my existence causes some amount of animal death. Hunting is part of how I come to terms with that.

Of course, hunting involves a lot more than killing. It involves getting to know the land, the habits of the animals there, and more. Most of my time hunting, I don’t even see deer. When I do see them, I usually don’t get a clear, legal, ethical shot. If I do get that once-a-year shot at a deer, my highest priority is to make death instantaneous.

I don’t enjoy killing at all. But I kill anyway, because I don’t want to distance myself from it, always letting others do the killing for me.

You seem to have conflicting emotions while hunting. Is your conscience trying to tell you that you’re doing something wrong?

My feeling is that my conscience is telling me that I’m doing something difficult. Something troubling. Something that stirs up questions about what it means to be a living, eating being with a moral conscience.

In exploring my feelings about hunting and about other aspects of human relationships with nature and animals, I often think about a line from Barry Lopez’s book Arctic Dreams: “No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.”

My aim is to eat honestly, to fully inhabit both my body and my heart. I want to eat, feel compassion, and celebrate life despite the blood. That involves some emotional and moral discomforts.

One of your recent entries was about how the way you honor the animal you’ve killed has evolved over time. Vegans are often annoyed with the idea of a post-killing prayer, since they think the best way to honor an animal is to not kill it — the animal is dead and so it can’t appreciate any prayer you are doing (and even if it were alive it wouldn’t understand the concept). Why do you think it’s important to honor an animal who isn’t aware that it’s being honored?

I understand that kind of criticism. If I’m convinced that an act is wrong, then any secondary act that seems to spin it, dress it up, or excuse it is going to offend me.

As a hunter, I’m not sure “honoring” is quite the word I would use. But I do find that making some ritual gesture is important to me. Partly, the impulse is simply to acknowledge the animal’s death, apologizing for the killing and giving thanks for the food.

Partly, the gesture helps me address and integrate the apparent contradiction of compassion and killing. This goes back to the Barry Lopez quote I mentioned before, to that primal difficulty of being both a creature with a need to eat and a creature with a moral conscience.

And, partly, the gesture comes out of the possibility that it matters to the animals, too. From most scientific perspectives, that sounds crazy. From a religious or spiritual view in which animals have no souls, it sounds misplaced. But traditions all over the world, especially the traditions of hunting cultures, describe animals as “animal persons.” In those traditions, animals are seen as communicative and intelligent beings, with a great deal of spiritual power, and rituals are seen as important ways of maintaining good relationships with them. I didn’t grow up in a tradition like that. Yet—as an agnostic—I think it’s worth staying open to the possibility.

You wrote an entry saying you are more okay with intentional harm (shooting a deer) than unintentional harm (hitting a deer with your car). From the vegan perspective, this is backwards. It’s better to kill something accidentally than intentionally because, as you put it in the comments, “One way to think of it is as the difference between involuntary deerslaughter and first-degree murder.”

Vegans justify eating the products of agriculture even though it is an attack on animals because that killing is the means rather than the end. But when you shoot something on purpose, that death was the intentional end, which makes you guilty of willful killing. Some vegans would even say that if you kill fewer creatures by killing intentionally rather than as a byproduct, it is still better to kill as a byproduct. You admitted feeling similarly when you first started hunting.

Why did you change your mind? Why do you believe that it’s better to shoot an animal and eat the flesh than to accidentally hit a deer with your car or eat the vegan agricultural products that lead to deaths that you never see?

This is a realization I’ve come to fairly recently, and I’m still sorting it out.

For many years, I felt that intentional harm to an animal was far worse than unintentional harm. It wasn’t until that car accident—where a doe ran into the side of our car as we went past and, fortunately, survived—that I realized my feelings had changed. I still don’t understand it fully.

Part of it is this: When I harm fellow creatures unintentionally, that harm serves no specific purpose. The animals that get maimed or killed on our highways, in our farm fields, and elsewhere are merely collateral damage. When I hunt, a purpose is served: death feeds life.

Another part goes back to your question about suffering: Unintentional harm, in agriculture and elsewhere, is often messy. I’m a volunteer firefighter and was once called to an accident scene where a car had hit a deer. The driver thought the deer had run away. But when I walked down the highway in search of the missing front license plate, I saw the doe drag herself into the underbrush. I called the game warden and showed him where she’d gone. She hadn’t gone far and, after he shot her, he told me what I already knew: she had been very badly injured.

I never want to do that to an animal. When I choose to cause harm, as I said above, my priority is to kill as swiftly and painlessly as possible.

If for some reason you couldn’t hunt anymore, how would you get your food? Would you give up meat again?

I don’t eat flesh foods every day.

Also, I’m not a subsistence hunter who absolutely depends on hunting. That’s a good thing, because in my first three years of deer hunting I dragged home exactly zero pounds of venison.

My wife and I still eat other flesh foods, especially chicken, which we buy from local producers. Those folks include another couple of ex-vegetarians who raise their own meat animals—and run a meat CSA—because they care deeply about the quality of those animals’ lives and about the swiftness of their deaths.

So, no, if I couldn’t hunt I wouldn’t give up flesh foods. I would still eat venison if it was given to me by other hunters. I would still fish. And I would still eat chicken. Maybe I’d start raising some of my own birds.

I interviewed locavore hunter Jackson Landers a while back and he admitted not being keen on the organ meats. Are you the same way? Do you feel like you should put the organs to use so that you can kill fewer animals?

I think it’s ideal to use as much of an animal as possible. That said, I don’t eat every last bit. For example, I find deer heart perfectly edible, but have more trouble with the taste of liver. I don’t generally eat the latter, though I will happily pack it home if I know someone who wants it.

Also, the function of the liver includes detoxification. So deer livers, like deer kidneys, sometimes have high concentrations of toxic metals such as cadmium. This is especially true in older deer. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation, for example, has a deer liver consumption advisory on its website. I’m not keen on eating cadmium.

Because I don’t eat flesh foods every day, my decision not to eat one deer liver in a year doesn’t have an appreciable effect on the number of animals I eat.

How much hunting does it take for you to kill one deer? And how long does that meat last you?

The time it takes me to get a whitetail varies wildly. The past couple years—given the density of the deer population here, the state regulations, the places I know and have access to, my modest skills, and the vagaries of luck and whatever other forces are at work in the woods—I’ve hunted a few days in bow season and then a few days in rifle season before getting a deer. The day I get a deer, it might come after a few hours in the woods, or it might come after a few minutes.

But it took me more than three autumns to get my first. And I expect that I, like most deer hunters, have plenty of meatless hunting seasons in my future.

So the meat I get from hunting—though cost-efficient in terms of ecology, fossil fuel consumption, and the like—is not terribly cost-efficient in terms of time. Fortunately, my hunting also rewards me in ways that have nothing to do with food.

We eat that venison—say between 50 and 100 pounds, depending on the size of the deer—throughout the entire year, and also share it with friends and family. It’s a nutritionally and symbolically valuable part of our diet, but it’s not a daily staple. If it was, I would need to kill more deer.

The goals of veganism for most vegans are to reduce animal suffering and death, reduce their impact on the environment and sometimes to improve their health. Is veganism the best way to achieve these goals, or is locavore hunting more effective?

That’s a complicated question.

Nutritionally, it’s not my place to dispense advice on others’ health.

Ecologically, a vegan diet can be low-impact if you’re eating local, organic food produced through farming practices that minimize soil erosion and such. Hunting locally can be low-impact, too: the past two autumns, I killed a deer within a half-mile of home. But a lot of factors come into play. To make precise comparisons, we’d need to calculate everything from habitat displacement and the fossil fuel used in the production, transport, and storage of foodstuffs, to the manufacture of tools and gear such as tractors, shovels, rifles, and blaze orange vests.

In terms of animal suffering and death, it again depends on specifics and on how you measure things. In the case of the deer I’ve killed, thankfully there has been no suffering: just one death, virtually instantaneous, yielding 50 to 100 pounds of meat. Could I get the same volume and nutrient value in vegan foods, while causing fewer deaths or less suffering? I doubt it. But I suppose it’s possible.

In any case, hunting isn’t for everyone. It’s emotionally challenging, even for many hunters.

And if everyone wanted local, wild meat to be central to their diet, North America’s game populations couldn’t support it. In the US, for example, white-tailed deer numbers are roughly what they were before European contact. In some parts of the country, overpopulations threaten forest biodiversity as well as crop production, and wildlife managers are working hard to bring those numbers down. But, with over 300 million people in the US, we still only have about one whitetail for every ten humans. If the majority of us suddenly started hunting, game regulations would quickly adjust to protect wildlife from the kind of massive overhunting that almost exterminated many species in the late 1800s.

You were influenced to leave veganism by hearing the experiences of ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians who had negative long-term effects from avoiding animal products. Most vegans prefer to think that ex-veg*ans “did it wrong” and that the same thing would never happen to them. It is only once they have health problems themselves that they start to question this. Why were you open to listening to the ex-veg*ans even though you had no health problems of your own?

It’s true that I didn’t have any severe health problems. My system was just somewhat weak: low energy, active allergies, and the like. That might not have been enough to convince me to change my diet.

By that time, though, I had already realized that my vegan diet had impacts: that agriculture destroyed habitats, that many critters (especially deer) were getting killed to bring food to my plate. I had begun to see that I was part of nature. My existence affected other beings. There was no escape, no way to achieve innocence.

That opened me to the possibility of eating flesh and other animal products. I still cared about the kind of impact my diet had. But the illusion of “no impact”—which had made me highly resistant to changing my diet—was gone.

In the comments to the CNN article on you, an upset vegan said that you were never a real vegan, simply on the basis that you are no longer vegan. Some vegans do believe that if someone quits veganism, then they were never vegan to begin with. Why do you think vegans react that way?

When someone makes a claim like that, I imagine that, for them, being “vegan” means much more than not eating animal products. I understand that. For me, too, veganism was much more than a diet. It was a way of living, a way of perceiving, and a way of trying to change the world for the better. It was both a system of ideas and a program for action.

I can’t speak for other vegans, but—putting myself back into the mindset I once held—I can imagine being angry at someone who abandoned veganism. I don’t know that I would have felt threatened, but I might have thought, “This guy’s convictions can’t ever have been as real and strong as mine are. He wasn’t ever a real vegan like I am.”

Changing my diet involved shifts at levels far deeper than my dinner plate.

Is there anything wrong with veganism?

I don’t think so.

Morally, it’s a fine stance to take, based as it often is on the admirable commitment to not harm mammals, birds, fish or even insects. My only concern is that some vegans delude themselves into believing that their diet is harm-free, which is exactly what I did for many years. What I ate was my business, but my holier-than-thou judgments were based on ignorance about the costs incurred by agriculture.

Nutritionally, I’m not so sure. I’m no expert and I try to remain open-minded. Long-term veganism may work for some folks. It just didn’t work for me and it hasn’t worked for a lot of other people I know. Nor did it work for Mahatma Gandhi, who tried veganism and went back to consuming milk. Nor did vegetarianism work for the current Dalai Lama, who tried it and went back to eating meat.

You mentioned making holier-than-thou judgments as a vegan. Is there something innate to veganism that turns people judgmental?

I don’t think this is particular to veganism. It can happen when people get invested in any kind of absolute moral certainty—dietary, religious, or otherwise.

I should note, too, that I know vegans and vegetarians who are not rigidly judgmental.

On the one hand, I think the capacity to make moral judgments is vitally important. Without it, we can easily slide into the murky realm of ethical relativism, where nothing is right or wrong. On the other hand, I need to temper my ethical perceptions and judgments by reminding myself that they aren’t perfect or absolute.

That’s part of what I’m getting at in my most recent post, about how Gandhi was simultaneously committed to the truth as he saw it and to the recognition that it was a “relative truth.”

Moral questions remain crucial—for me and, I think, for the world. I still pass judgments on others’ behavior. But I’ve come to a place where the quest for absolute certainty feels less relevant than it once did.

"The China Study vs the China Study"

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:58:00 -0400

"The China Study vs the China Study":

Another critique of The China Study, this one from Dr. Michael Eades.

Vegans React: Arson in the Name of Animals

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:06:00 -0400

Last week, agents of the USA (United Speciesists of America) captured the fire-happy animal liberator ALF Lone Wolf, aka Walter Bond. His neck tattoo — “Vegan” — already marked him as a deviant flesh-abstainer in our bloodthirsty world, but it was his alleged arson against a sheepskin factory, leather factory and restaurant that served fois gras that gave us an excuse to cuff him.

Do vegans support this renegade for giving a voice to the voiceless by any means necessary, or do they wish he’d stuck to buying vegan soy frappuccinos at Starbucks?

Dnadenzien: Fellow vegans - don’t do stupid shit like this in the name of veganism, the vast majority of us will not have your back.

Sneakay: This is fucking nuts, my god.

Saucercrab: Yeah, needlessly skinning thousands of sheep to sell archaic commodities is pretty nuts!

Alex Melonas: I for one FULLY support the use of “violence”, be that property destruction or physical aggression, in principle, to stop a moral wrong. … Our exploitation of nonhuman animals is an enormous moral wrong, causing as it does unimaginable quantities of unjustifiable harm and death. So, the moral question at issue (re: is “violence” to stop this horrible wrong justified) is Yes, as it was in the past.

Eugene: The people who are ultimately responsible are the consumers: People who consume meat and other animal products. … So, since the people responsible for the torture of animals consists of all our closest family and friends, what are we going to do? Set all of their homes on fire?

Michele McCowan: Should we feel bad for the loss of livelihood of murderers? The loss of a building? … They make money off of the cruelty and death of others. How can I feel for them?

veganbikepunk: the vast majority of vegans are more interested in feeling a sense of superiority and fitting into a clique than ending animal suffering. The ALF saves animal lives, absolutely. Can PETA say the same?

‘til it breaks: Suffice to say, we hope the informant gets what’s coming to them, and may the fires of revolt burn ever more fiercely.

Ian: May the informant rot in hell.

Clare Godwin: The ALF only acts in this way once they’ve done all they can in a non-violent way but when nothing seems to be being done and the extreme suffering still exists despite the millions of petitions and protests you kind of learn that they won’t change without direct action being taken…

Mario Righi: full solidarity with him…

Ali Stone: When the breaking news came through that Lone Wolf had been captured…there was overwhelming silence from the Animal Rights so-called Community. … The silence is shameful. Have we all been so cowered and brainwashed by the likes of Roger Yates and Gary Francione that we are a movement of “non violence” (do nothing for fear of doing the wrong thing) instead of FIGHTING FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS. … It’s time the Animal Rights “community” started to realise this WAR will not be won by abandoning those doing the fighting.

ShadowVegan: May this hero soon be free so that he may go on defending the innocent.

Alice: Our official stance here at [Tiny Green Bubble] is that we do not condone violence at all, in any way. Use your words, Bond — come on! That being said … well, foie gras pisses us off, too.

"Vitamin B12 Supplements: How Much is Enough?"

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:02:15 -0400

"Vitamin B12 Supplements: How Much is Enough?":

“The Vegan Dietitian” Virginia Messina comments on a study showing that most vegans are deficient in B12 and disses The China Study for downplaying the need for vegans to supplement.

"Ultimately we should be aiming to abolish words like ‘vegetarian’ and..."

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:41:36 -0400

“Ultimately we should be aiming to abolish words like ‘vegetarian’ and ‘vegan’ completely - normality does not need a label, it’s the flesh-eaters who should be branded as abnormal.”

- John Davis

The News Hates Veganism for a Week

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:09:09 -0400

There were a lot of anti-veganism, or at least semi-anti-veganism articles in the news this week:

Steak or Veggie Burger: Which is Greener? (7/19, Mother Jones)

Bacon Lovers Vs. Soy Huggers: The Smackdown (7/19, Mother Jones)

Veggieworld: Why eating greens won’t save the planet (7/20, New Scientist)

When Veganism is an Eating Disorder (7/22, The Daily Beast)

Pantry Raid: Vegan doesn’t necessarily mean healthy (7/24, The Los Angeles Times)

Erik Marcus at Vegan.com wasn’t happy about this onslaught and responded to three of the articles here, here and here.

Speciesist Society Ensnares "Lone Wolf," Animal Liberator/Fire Master/Hamburgler

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:59:00 -0400

Speciesist Society Ensnares "Lone Wolf," Animal Liberator/Fire Master/Hamburgler:

“Lone Wolf” — the pyro-maniacal animal liberator who endeared himself to Peter Young of Voice of the Voiceless by setting fire to a sheepskin factory, leather factory and a restaurant that served fois gras — has allegedly been caught. The animal kingdom is wiping away a collective tear this week now that Walter Bond is in jail:

Disturbing to think that anybody could be a liberator and you would never know to look at them.

According to someone quoted in the Denver Post, Bond ate two beef hamburgers a couple of days before he was arrested. An animal liberator who appreciates a good burger! Maybe he forgot he was vegan. He’d have to be looking in a mirror to see his tattoo, after all. If I were Bond’s attorney, I would blame the hormones in all the meat Bond eats for the rage that inspired him to revolt against animal users.

(Not that this applies in Bond’s case, meat lover that he already is, but does eating non-vegan food in a prison with no vegan options when your crime is animal liberation constitute a grey area in vegan philosophy?)

The investigators found a book called A Declaration of War, Killing Humans to Save Animals and the Environment on Bond. Though Bond didn’t kill any people, the book helps explain the rationale behind committing arson in the name of the “the voiceless.”

Here are some excerpts:

Liberators believe that a human has a no greater claim to life than a mole or a sea bass. They feel that humans are the lowest form of life, and that the world would be a much better, more peaceful place without them. If you agree with this position, then you will love this book.

If you believe that humans are the chosen species or the highest point of biological evolution, and that this somehow gives them a right to abuse other creatures, then this book is important to you, too. It will let you know that you are a target for animal liberators. Every time you abuse another creature, look over your shoulder. Through liberators, the animals are now fighting back.  …

There is a reason why people who become liberators turn to animals for affection. There is an honesty about non-humans. They don’t play games. They are direct. And they are never intentionally cruel.  …

Liberators believe in killing humans to save animals!

If an animal researcher said: “It’s a dog or a child,” a liberator will defend the dog every time. A liberator also believes that disposing of a few researchers will save even more dogs from their cruelty.

Liberators have come to one unavoidable conclusion: HUMANS WILL NEVER MAKE PEACE WITH ANIMALS! It is not in their natures or in the natures of the societies they have created. In fact, liberators believe that if people really want to save the animals, they must stop wasting their time trying to improve the human race and its societies. They must declare war against humans. They must join in this revolution! …

Liberators believe that only physical harm will dissuade people from abusing animals.  … Liberators hold that nothing will result in the freedom of all animals, short of the extinction of human species.   …

In defending their position, liberators ask, what would you do if your sister was being raped each day? Would you have a peaceful talk with the rapists, or write your Congressmen, who is also a rapist? Or should you take a gun and blow the bastards’ balls off? Liberators know what their sister would want them to do.

"Another thing I hate: how all the New Yorkers are so very enchanted by the whole elephants having to..."

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:14:46 -0400

“Another thing I hate: how all the New Yorkers are so very enchanted by the whole elephants having to walk through Manhattan every year. OMG it’s just so totally amazing. I’m like, STFU JERKS! Why are people so selfish? Probably because it’s our world and animals are just here for entertainment and food because they can’t protect themselves from the cancer called humans.”

- Megan at Vegansaurus!

Morality, Immorality and Grey Areas in Vegan Doctrine

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:09:00 -0400

Suppose your ailing grandfather musters the strength to cook his famous turkey and parsnip stew. As a kid you thought this was the best meal in the whole wide world. But that was before your eyes were opened to factory farming and the inalienable rights of brutes. You’ve explained veganism to your grandfather a hundred times, but he still doesn’t get it, as the bowl of rotting corpse chunks in front of you makes wretchedly clear.

Your grandfather looks at you with an expectant smile. Your childhood proclamation, “It’s the best darn food in the whole wide world, grandpa!,” echos in his mind. Nothing can bring this turkey back, but you can bring some joy to the last few months of your grandfather’s life. Do you at least try it… for his sake?

Fuck no!

Never eat a dead body just to make a flesh eating monster feel better about his own depravity! It may be “polite” to your grandfather, but it’s hardly “polite” to the turkey who was decapitated just so gramps could show off his cooking skills! Shove the bowl of death food away and demand something moral, like animal crackers. It might be awkward between you and your grandfather for the rest of his life, but so be it. Maybe he’ll wise up and repent on his death bed.

“Breast milk is an animal product, isn’t it?” Yes but boiling veganism down to “no animal products of any kind ever” is reductive and unfair. The main problem vegans have with animal products is that we take them without consent. We don’t know what moo, oink, baa and cluck mean, so to be safe, vegans interpret it as “no.” A human mother, however, says “yes” every time she lifts a crying baby to her breast. That goes for other bodily fluid exchanges too — if it’s between consenting humans, vegans are all for it. There are other groups for pointing out the immorality in those.

There’s no specific rule in veganism about not painting elephants or trimming poodles to look like snails… but it just can’t be right.

Promoting immoral industries such as the circus? Check. Indulging the sick fantasies of foodies by allowing them to chew on representations of exotic animals like lions, bears and elephants? Check. Using real animal byproducts to make the fake animals? Check. Giving the animals smiles as they dive into a cereal bowl filled with cow pus to perpetrate the myth that animals want to be eaten? Check. Making the prize inside a vegan candy to tempt vegans into buying a non-vegan cereal? Yes.

The only thing more immoral than eating this cereal would be whipping an elephant and stabbing a bull while eating it.

This man is taking advantage of the pregan paradox, a moral loophole that allows vegans to wear animal skins that they purchased before reaching vegan enlightenment. He might be flaunting the animal parts a wee bit too much, but otherwise he’s golden.

On the left is the KFC double-down. The closest thing to a vegetable on it is the fried breading, and even that is loaded with animal secretions. This is an immorality that punishes itself with an immediate (and well-deserved) heart attack.

The stiff, unmelted “cheese” and homogeneous “bacon” in the sandwich on the right are telltale sighs that this is the veganized all-vegetable double down. No animals were (intentionally) harmed in the making of this one, so chomp away.

A meat replacement, it must be moral! Nope, check out ingredient number four: “Partially rehydrated egg white.” True, it’s more fungus than animal so it’s not pure concentrated evil, but I would love to see someone manage to eat around every molecule of egg white in there. Even more troubling, some Quorn products have milk as well. (No other animal eats the milk of another species, and they call this “natural”?) Join the “Make Quorn Vegan” facebook group today!

Many brands of beer and wine are not vegan. Yet for the most part, vegans don’t care and drink them anyway. Vegans are used to determining the morality of a product by its ingredients label, and alcohol bottles don’t have one. Even if they did, the animal products are often used in the filtering process without being actual ingredients.

A site called Barnivore makes it easy for vegans to weed the animal-exploitation out of their pub crawls. Yet it’s rare for a vegan to turn down alcohol because fish bladder was used to filter it. Either they’re okay with animal products when they’re in something that doesn’t seem like it would have animal products, or they just really like beer.

Many vegans will avoid Guinness, however, because that’s the one they know for sure uses animal parts.

Sometimes a non-native species will dominate an area, becoming a threat to the local ecosystem and endangered species. Locavore hunter Jackson Landers advocates hunting and eating these destructive aliens as a tasty and nutritious way to help the environment and other animals.

But if you think vegans would be cool with this, you need to spend more time trolling vegan message boards.

It’s with nuanced issues like this where vegans expose the true purpose of their ideology: personal guilt absolution, not results. Vegans are relatively okay with harm as long as they do not feel that they or other humans are responsible for it. It’s better for pigs to be blamed for environmental havoc than for us to be blamed for the deaths of the pigs. Intentionally killing animals, even to save more animals, always puts blood on our hands.

To vegans, invasive species hunting is yet another case of humans playing God, favoring rare animals that we like and sentencing to death animals we deem a nuisance. It is “biological xenophobia.”

Veganism does allow humanity some Godlike dabbling: we can spay and neuter animals and use birth control on an invasive species. But if that doesn’t work, as far as vegans are concerned, we just have to let ‘em all live and let nature sort it out.

Here is another scenario in which intent bests results. Agriculture requires the deaths of animals by destroying habitats and killing thieving animals to protect crops; then any animals dumb enough to hang around get chopped up during the harvesting. But these deaths don’t count because they are a byproduct of the process rather than the intended end. Though these deaths are foreseeable, the products of this death don’t go directly into our mouths, and that’s what matters.

Even though several mice were sacrificed in the production of that bun, it’s the mouse we can see that makes this sandwich so wrong. (Also, just from a culinary perspective, don’t you need to skin it first?)

If a plant could jump and it jumped off a bridge, would you? No? Then why are you using venus fly traps as an excuse to eat Jiminy Cricket?

Insects are animals and vegans don’t eat animals. Simple as that.

What makes insect eating almost a grey area is that millions upon billions, if not trillions, of insects are killed in the production of crops every day. Vegans say that meat is an inefficient food source because you have to feed animals lots of plants to make it. But by that logic, plants are an inefficient food source too because you have to kill so many insects to make them.

Vegans like to eat lower on the food chain, and insects are arguably about as low as you can get. But again we’re undermined by the importance of intent over results. Even if eating insects were better for insects, the environment and our health, it still stimulates a demand for the production of animals for consumption, and that can never be okay.

Sorry guy, it’s wrong to eat bugs even if almost everything we do leads to their demise, so spit those poor sentient creatures out of your mouth. It may seem unfair that plants get to do something that we don’t, but hey, we get to walk around. We gotta give plants something.

It is, however, okay to kill bugs that are biting you or invading your turf. Vegans claim self defense on that one. Some vegans will attempt to free these pests rather than cut their lives short, but almost no vegan will judge another vegan for lasering a mosquito.

Speaking of self-defense, in a life or death struggle with an animal, vegans are allowed to fight back. Even more so if it’s against a human in a bear costume.

Horseback riding is on the verge of unforgivable animal torture, but some vegans consider it akin to pet ownership, usually a good deal for animals. A philosophy that bars horseback riding outright just seems joyless, so it’s smart for veganism not to take a definitive stance on it. Still, it’s arguably not in the best interest of horses to jump over bars with heavy creatures perched on them, shouting and kicking them in the side.

The main problem that some vegans have with horseback riding is that it requires leather equipment. You could get around this buy buying the saddle second hand, but that’s a grey area too. It’s better to be a horseback rider before going vegan so you can exploit the pregan loophole.

If you do decide to be a horseback riding vegan, make it a point to protest rodeos, which are always immoral. That will draw a clear line between your “good” horse exploitation and the evil kind.

You find this half-eaten meat and french fry sandwich in the dumpster. The fries were cooked in lard, the bun is drenched with butter, eggs and milk, and the cow that beef came from grew up on Conklin Dairy Farms where it was stomped on and prodded with a pitchfork hourly. Doesn’t matter. You didn’t pay for it, you’re not contributing to the demand for it, you are not responsible for it.

That’s called freeganism and it’s perfectly moral. So eat it. But maybe start from the other end.

Some vegans don’t like freeganism because eating meat “sends the wrong message” no matter the context. Also, by maintaining your taste for animal products, you’re more prone to eat them under immoral circumstances. But there’s no Precrime unit in the vegan police yet, so being more vulnerable to immorality is not in itself unvegan.

You went out to eat with some omni friends. You didn’t buy anything because there was nothing vegan except falafel and hummus, which for some reason always makes your nose bleed. Your friends shamelessly devour their meaty meals in front of you, except for one who had eaten earlier and only manages a few bites. Nobody else at the table believes in eating after someone else, so he offers it to you. The animal is dead. Just like a freegan taking meat from a dumpster, you’re not contributing to the demand for it. Do you eat the sandwich?

Better not. Even though this food is on its way to the trash if you don’t eat it, you need to jump through a few more hoops before this is definitely moral. How do you know your friend didn’t feign fullness just to induce you to eat the meat and sully your purity? Maybe he’ll be hungry in a few minutes, and if you eat this sandwich, he’ll have to order another one. How do you know nobody in the kitchen will eat it? Will eating it send the wrong message (that vegans are desperate for meat and will take it any way they can get it)? Will your friends laugh and cheer you on for putting a dead animal in your mouth?

The vegan thing to do is to stare at the food until the server comes and takes it away. As soon as that sandwich hits garbage, it’s yours.

Technically bivalves are a grey area. As Christopher Cox explained in Slate earlier this year, oysters fit all the vegan criteria. They’re healthy, good for the environment, and don’t suffer. They’re animals, though, which makes them off-limits for vegans, but maybe okay in a moral sense.

Because this one is such a close call, whether oysters are moral or not depends on your demeanor as you eat them. The woman on the left is too into it. It’s indecent how much she relishes the taste of flesh. How much thought do you think she has given to sentience and suffering in her life? I’ll tell you — zilch. She would be eating bivalves even if they burned eternally in hell for touching human mouths. She doesn’t give a shit. She lives for pleasure. Her own pleasure. The brainless creatures may not have the capability to witness her hedonism, but we do.

The restrained and civilized manner of the man on the right is what turns this grey food moral. He eats this senseless animal flesh deliberately and without passion. He doesn’t eat bivalves because he likes them — he eats them because he believes they don’t feel pain. If science proved otherwise, he would throw up at once and live the rest of his life as an apology to all the lives he took.

Test tube meat, potentially grown without the use of any animal products. When the idea was first announced, vegans weren’t sure how they should feel about it. But that changed after PETA announced a $1 million cash prize to any company that developed a marketable version of it. Few vegans are against “vat meat” anymore, though even fewer intend to eat it themselves.

I think I first heard about meat created from animal DNA without animal products around the time I quit veganism. Back then I thought it was the perfect solution. Now I’m a little bit against it, only because it won’t be as good as normal meat, but vegans are going to give meat eaters so much more hell for eating real meat once lab meat exists.

This is a fake hand, but fakeness doesn’t always guarantee morality. The fingernails and wrist bone are made of onion, but the hand is meat, the skin is cheese and there is probably butter in the mashed potatoes. Nothing fake about that death.

“What about free range eggs from a farm that you know treats their chickens well? That’s cruelty-free, isn’t it?” Sure, and why don’t you tell me where the brothers of all these happy hens are. Oh that’s right, they were ground into a bloody paste and turned into dog food the moment their gender was confirmed, fated to oblivion because of the crime of being born male.

Also, would you mind if I stole your stereo? Oh you would? Then what makes you think it’s okay to steal the equivalent from chickens (their eggs)? Just because animals have never heard of property rights doesn’t mean they don’t have them.

There is one possible scenario in which taking eggs might be okay: if the hens are rescue hens, which absolves you of responsibility for their dead brothers, and if you’ve offered their eggs back to them and they turn them down. At most this will get you something like half a dozen eggs in your lifetime. Enjoy your one moral omelet.

In some areas it’s just not possible to be vegan. There is no Red Star nutritional yeast, no TVP, no Teese, no tofu, no almond milk, no B12 pills and not even many fruits and vegetables. Are people in these areas subject to vegan morality?

It’s hard to say. Murder is murder no matter your locale. But people in such hostile climes would starve if they accepted vegan ethics, arguably making meat “necessary.” It is homicide, no doubt, but maybe it’s justifiable homicide. On the other hand, maybe the lack of vegetables is a good sign that nobody should be living in these areas anyway. Why don’t they move some place where they could survive as vegans?

It’s conceivable that they are unaware of veganism. That raises an issue similar to whether people are doomed to hell for not accepting Jesus Christ even if they never heard of Him. Is it okay to eat meat if you have never heard of veganism founder Donald Watson? Most vegans would say “no.”

Also, if vegans were to officially grant certain areas immunity from vegan morality because of the lack of plant life, bloodthirsty omnivores could move to these places and eat as much meat as they wanted with vegan approval!

What’s clear is that the existence of cultures without a ready supply of nutritional yeast does not give us an excuse to eat animal products. We are lucky enough to live in a land where we can consult vegan nutrition experts and get our nutrients in pill form. So that’s what we are morally obligated to do.

However, if you are in an extreme version of the above example, a castaway on a desert island who will immediately starve if you don’t fish or hunt, then fine, you can kill some animals. But vegans hate this hypothetical, so don’t bring it up.

It used to be an interesting irony that vegans — the group most in need of a supplement to make beans more digestible — couldn’t take beano because it contains a fish-based gelatin and is thus immoral. Unfortunately, this irony died with Bean-zyme, the moral gelatin-free version of beano.

These rabbits were poisoned for devouring crops, which makes them casualties in the battle for human vegetarianism. The lives of rabbits don’t amount to a hill of beans in this vegan world, because at least the beans vegans can eat. These rabbits threatened to make it harder for us to eat morally. It was them or our morals: the rabbits had to go.

Poisoning rabbits is the most moral way to kill them because it renders them inedible. If anyone tries to make a meal out of them, they’ll get what they deserve. Let’s just hope these farmers have the decency to set them on fire rather than exploiting them for key chains and other adornments.

These rabbits weren’t culled to protect crops — they were murdered for their meat and skins. No! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

This dumb birdbrain has no concept of morality and so he can eat whatever he damn well pleases.

Just like the heron, this dog doesn’t know any better… but her owners should. Some vegans who haven’t read Obligate Carnivore will feed their pets meat, but these vegans are as guilty of animal murder as petless omnis. Think of all the animals being sacrificed for your one favored animal. Hypocritical much? It would be better to throw Fido off a cliff than participate in that daily massacre.

Vegans can eat road kill, but that’s about as likely to happen as the desert island scenario.

Vaccines and prescription medicine are tested on animals and generally contain animal products. Some vegans avoid them for these reasons, but most vegans will take them if they need them. One of the rationalizations for this is that a sick vegan won’t convert anybody, so vegans taking medicine that exploits animals will help more animals in the long run. Also, few vegans are willing to die for animals that they’ll never meet.

Vitamin D3 always comes from animal products, whereas D2 is vegan. Sometimes D3 is made from lanolin (oil extracted from wool), which makes it appropriate for wool-wearing vegetarians, but that’s not good enough for vegans who know what happens to sheep after they’re all dried up. Vegans are very serious about this one, sometimes not even buying all-but-vegan dog food if it contains D3.

Pet ownership is sometimes a contentious issue in veganism, with some vegans (the minority) arguing for the segregationist point of view, that any form of human/animal interaction is destined for exploitation and suffering. The majority of vegans will say that pet ownership is moral as long as your animal is from a shelter and vegan.

I’m not sure how pro-pet vegans would feel about wearing your dog like it were a hip accessory. They would probably feel a little uneasy about this, but would have to admit that Mr. Snowball is having the time of his life.

Most vegans are left-leaning and pro-choice. There are pro-life vegans, but that has nothing to do with official vegan doctrine, which doesn’t take a stance on human life before birth. Killing the fetus of a non-human animal, however, is a clear-cut case of murder.

Also less moral than an abortion is this abortion of a veggie burger, which was vegan until new management took over and added whey as the last ingredient.

But a trace amount of milk in this soymilk is not a moral problem because it’s there accidentally, from being produced on the same machines as dairy, not because dairy was intentionally added to the product.

All these things contain animal products. But that’s okay because just about everything in the world has animal products and you have to draw the line somewhere. If vegans actually wanted to use no animal products, they would have to leave civilization. And that wouldn’t help much anyway because then they would have to hunt to survive. So there comes a point when vegans say “Screw it, I know there’s animal products in this, but I have to live, don’t I?”

Now why do they draw the line where they do? Why is it okay to watch a movie shot on celluloid but not eat food that contains gelatin? It seems kind of arbitrary, but from what I gather, if you don’t ingest or wear the animal products, and it’s not obvious that the item in question would have animal traces (like cigarettes), they are okay from a vegan perspective. Also it helps if there is no vegan substitute for the animal-exploiting non-food item a vegan wants to use.

Basically, vegans are expected to check ingredients labels and clothing tags, but they don’t have to obsess too much beyond that. They have to live, don’t they?

There’s a general agreement that it’s okay for vegans to cook meat for significant others, though most would prefer not to. (“Yuck!”) But what about a vegan who actually slaughters the animal for her family? At least a vegan undercover in a slaughterhouse is killing animals for the cause. But this woman here is getting blood on her hands just to appease her immoral family. True, the bird had to die no matter what, but why not leave that task to one of these grinning jackals who are all beyond hope anyway?

Well shit, if the motherfucker just jumps right in, ain’t nobody complaining about that!

Chinchilla Coats and the Pregan Paradox

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:12:22 -0400

These women are wearing matching chinchilla coats which they all bought at the same store two months ago. It’s hard to imagine anything more immoral than wearing the peeled-off skin of sentient beings as a fashion statement, yet for one woman the coat is moral, for another it is in a grey area, and only for the third is it pure evil. Get ready for some intricacies in vegan philosophy, for here is a situation in which future intent and what is in a person’s mind are more important than what is on her body.

A month after buying her coat, the woman on the left got lost and wandered into a Veggie Fayre. She went to the Vegan Outreach booth, thinking “vegan” was a brand of sausage or cheese and that there would be free samples.

Instead she got a booklet that at first glance looked like something Jews for Jesus would hand out. A few nights later she found the crumpled “Why Vegan?” pamphlet in her patent leather D&G handbag. She’d always known meat was from animals, but had previously been able to put it out of her mind. The shocking images from factory farms and slaughterhouses changed that forever. She watched “Meet Your Meat,” burst into tears and resolved never to exploit animals ever again.

“Oh shit,” she thought. “What about my new coat?”

She joined a vegan support board and asked for their expert opinion. Did she need to burn her leather handbags, her snakeskin boots, her mohair sweaters, her polar bear rug and her chinchilla coat to wash the oceans of blood off her hands? Because if that’s what it took, that’s what she was going to do.

“Can you return the coat?” someone with a vegetable-related pun username asked her. No, the 30 days were up. Nor could she exchange it for anything vegan, since everything at the store was made from flayed animal parts. “You’re in luck!” someone with a fruit-related pun username replied. And that’s when she learned about salvation through “preganism.”

Because she bought the coat before her vegan conversion, because burning the coat wouldn’t bring any animals back, and because she now knew the coat was wrong and would never buy another one like it again, the coat was deemed “pregan” and thus acceptable to wear. She doesn’t even have to say a prayer for the deceased rodents whose fur now keeps her warm and sexy. (But when she thinks of it, she does.)

Thus, knowing the coat is wrong is what makes it not wrong. Which is why it’s called “the pregan paradox.”

But there can be no pregan loophole without veganism, so let’s look at the case of the woman in the middle, who never got the “Why Vegan?” memo.

On the day of purchase all three of these coats were unconscionable. And they stayed that way until 30 days later when it was no longer possible to return them. If the store had an exchange policy that lasted indefinitely and vegan items to exchange for, these coats could have remained immoral forever. But neither of those things were true.

Nevertheless, only one of the coats has gone full moral. As you can see, the coat of the woman in the middle exists in far murkier territory. But why is she possibly guilty while the woman on the left is in the clear? The situation is the same for both of them in the sense that the damage is done and not wearing the coat isn’t going to save any animals. Just like the woman on the left, the woman in the middle couldn’t return the coat even if she wanted to.

Ah see, but there’s the catch. She doesn’t want to, because she’s not vegan.

Middle woman doesn’t think that wearing the fur of murdered animals is wrong, and that misconception is what makes it wrong. Mainly this is because of the implications for her future actions — nothing is stopping her from buying another morbid death coat, unlike the woman on the left who has promised her message board to buy a Park Slope neighborhoodie next time.

The reason she’s in a grey zone rather than out-and-out evil is because we can’t discount the possibility that she’ll discover veganism before she buys her next coat. If she does that, and her next coat is V-certified, then it will turn out that her chinchilla coat had become moral as soon as she could no longer return it. If, however, she never discovers veganism — or worse, rejects it — and buys another fur coat, this original coat will retroactively become immoral.

Which brings us to the woman on the right. She is an ex-vegan. She gave up 10 years of moral living for a piece of bacon, and she didn’t stop there. Getting the girls together for “a wild and glamorous fur day” was her idea, a selfish “fuck you” to the animal kingdom she had thanklessly defended for too many years. Of course she was never a real vegan and did it wrong, but that’s another issue. There is no hope that she will ever be vegan again, which makes her coat (and her) as bad as it gets.

The China Study Debate Rages On. Let The Best Woman Win

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:45:00 -0400

The China Study Debate Rages On. Let The Best Woman Win:

T. Colin Campbell and ex-vegan raw foodist Denise Minger are still struggling to reach an agreement over Campbell’s conclusions in The China Study. Now Campbell has posted a response to Denise’s response to his response to her critique. And T.’s son T. Jr. has chimed in too.

"I went raw last December to sort of “put things in perspective.” I was having thoughts..."

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:15:48 -0400

“I went raw last December to sort of “put things in perspective.” I was having thoughts of relapsing back to dairy and eggs after my sixth month of going vegan, so I decided to try out a more restrictive diet in an attempt to make me appreciate the relative amount of freedom that a regular vegan diet gives you.”

- DoctorClockwork

"Animal Advocacy Leaders Hall of Fail"

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:42:00 -0400

"Animal Advocacy Leaders Hall of Fail":

My Face is on Fire’s Mylène Ouellet damns John Robbins to the animal advocacy leader “Hall of Fail” for commending small animal farms and singling out factory farms as the bad guys in a Huffington Post column.

As Ouellet explains, Robbins once wrote that there’s no such thing as a happy dairy cow. Now, apparently, Robbins has no objection to meat and dairy from small farms that treat their animals well and “try to bring a healthy product to market.” (It seems Robbins is still reluctant to admit that animal products could ever be healthy). Robbins even cites notorious omnivory advocate Michael Pollan in the comments: “In any event, we all need to eat, as Michael Pollan puts it, ‘mostly plants.’” Mostly… but not all?

If only Robbins had realized this sooner! Instead of renouncing the Baskin Robbins fortune and proclaiming that humans are natural herbivores, he could have turned his dad’s company into a small-farm-supporting organic ice cream behemoth, with pastured bacon bits alongside the sprinkles and peanut butter chips.

"If you want to know the truth, start with the United Nations report on livestock, then read The..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:33:59 -0400

“If you want to know the truth, start with the United Nations report on livestock, then read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman.”

- Carolyn

Denise Minger's Response to T. Colin Campbell's Response

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:00:00 -0400

Denise Minger's Response to T. Colin Campbell's Response

Yummy Vegan Yumminess (abridged)

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:49:00 -0400

Vegans like to use the word “yummy.” Though “yummy” hasn’t entered the vegan lexicon as something unique to animal-free living (the way that “compassionate” has), per capita they use it more than anybody else. My guess is that it’s to make vegan food sound more palatable than it actually is, but who knows, it could be any number of reasons, all of which would say something negative about veganism.

Here are a few search phrases to show you what I mean.

“Vegan and yummy” gets 677,000 results. “Yummy and vegan” gets 666,000 results, suggesting it’s slightly more popular to emphasize the veganness before the yumminess.

“Yummy in my vegan tummy,” alas, only gets 44.

A search for “yummy” by itself brings up 25,500,000 results. Add “vegan” to the search and you decrease that by a little over half: 12,000,000 results.

“Yummy food” gets 574,000 results. “Yummy vegan food” gets more than half that, 322,000 results.

That’s impressive considering vegans hover around one percent of the population. And some searches are even closer than that.

“Yummy cupcakes”: 85,400 results; “Yummy vegan cupcakes”: 70,600 results.

“Yummy breakfast”: 79,600 results; “Yummy vegan breakfast”: 63,900 results.

“Yummy restaurant”: 61,100 results; “Yummy vegan restaurant”: 58,700 results.

“Yummy cookies”: 47,400 results; “Yummy vegan cookies:” 44,000 results.

“Yummy pies”: 19,500 results; “Yummy vegan pies”: 12,300 results.

And sometimes the vegan version of a yummy search brings back even more results than its cruel counterpart.

“Yummy meat”: 56,300 results; “Yummy veggie”: 102,000 results.

“Yummy burger”: 38,300 results; “Yummy veggie burger”: 62,800 results.

“Yummy baking”: 19,700 results; “Yummy vegan baking”: 36,000 results.

“Yummy cruelty” (-free): 9 results; “Cruelty-free yum”: 997 results.

“Yummy meaty goodness”: 852 results; “Yummy vegan goodness”: 6,740 results

Quite a few vegan blogs even have “Yum” or “Yummy” in their names: Yummy Vegan Dinners, Vegan YumYum, Yummy Vegan, The Yummy Vegan, Yummy Cookbook and Vegan Yummy are a couple of examples. There’s also Yummy Vegetarian Recipes and Yummy Diet Food, but those sometimes include dairy.

Speaking of vegetarians, they use “yummy” less often than vegans in total, even though there are more of them. “Yummy vegetarian” gets 93,300 results while “yummy vegan” gets 131,000.

I could go on. In fact, I originally did. But it was so tedious that it was the final straw for one (valued, as they all are) reader who promptly unsubscribed from this blog. So I’ll cut it off right here. The point is, vegans say “yummy” too damn much. If you don’t believe me, just re-read this entry.

For Rvnbrgj11, Meatless Monday leads to frustration and...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 02:00:38 -0400

For Rvnbrgj11, Meatless Monday leads to frustration and self-ruin. Judging by the end of her rant, that could be just what proponents of Meatless Monday are hoping for.

"The animal rights movement is in complete turmoil with no great direction and a large part of this..."

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:35:00 -0400

“The animal rights movement is in complete turmoil with no great direction and a large part of this is caused by the Gary Francione cult. … Francione is a US government agent/informer and his mission is to make sure the animal rights movement remains divided and unorganized. The quicker true activists realize the danger this man and his cult pose to animal rights the better. Cult members will lie and lie and lie to try and convince you this is nothing more than a personal hate campaign, absolute bullshit! Former cult members and others who have realized the truth are now trying to inform the community of the truth.”

- Negotiation is Over

Has Vegan Abolitionist Gary L. Francione Started Eating Meat?

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:34:00 -0400

(Ex-?)Vegan abolitionist Gary L. Francione on May 31, 2010:

Hey, all: I am taking a leave of absence from Twitter while I do some other projects. Keep visiting www.abolitionistapproach.com. Go vegan.
May 31, 2010 11:05:32 AM CDT via web

Excuse me, a leave of absence from Twitter? Is it really so difficult to copy and paste 140-character references to the “moral schizophrenia” of eating meat now and again? Francione’s last tweet implied that he would keep his followers informed of any breaking anti-speciesism news through his blog, but he hasn’t posted a new entry since May 2. Could that be because Francione hasn’t had any new anti-speciesism insights to relay?

And if he hasn’t, is that because Francione has finally embraced who he really is — a meat-starved, cheese craving, human-idolizing speciesist? The documentary Outrageexplores politicians who enact anti-gay policies but are secretly gay themselves. Is Francione a self-hating speciesist who makes a big public show of anti-speciesism to hide the truth? Might “other projects” include a burger tour of the tri-state area perchance?

It may seem like a leap to assume all this from Francione’s silence, but the fact is Francione’s rigid anti-speciesism veneer was starting to crack even before that last tweet. Let’s examine some earlier tweets that were quite telling in retrospect:

Now here’s smart thinking. Meat causes cancer so let’s keep eating it but reduce the risk by using spices. http://bit.ly/bL9VED
May 24, 2010 8:37:51 AM CDT via web

Yep, that was Francione telling his followers to eat meat as long as it was covered in spices. He was being sarcastic, true, but Francione damn well knows that his abolitionist devotees take everything he says literally and believe it unquestioningly. He knew the consequences of that tweet — abolitionists eating spicy meat — and he tweeted it anyway. Probably to assuage the guilt he felt over indulging his own latent omnivorism.

vegannovice Per-capita meat consumption in the United States has increased by 8 percent since 1970 http://bit.ly/93wJeD

May 19, 2010 4:53:15 PM CDT via web
Retweeted by garylfrancione and 3 others

This is a retweet, but it gives a good indication of how Francione was feeling about his own efforts, and the efforts of anti-speciesists in general: beyond useless, to the point of counter-productive. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation was published in 1975 and Francione joined the chorus of voices for the voiceless in 1984. Nevertheless, we eat more meat than ever. How do you want to divide the blame, Francione? To be nice I’ll give PETA credit for six percent of the meat consumption increase, but that still leaves Singer and Francione splitting the last two.

With that retweet, a defeated Francione seemed to be conceding that the focus should be on animal welfare rather than rights. “People are always going to eat meat,” Francione was apparently saying. “Meat consumption is up eight percent. No doubt it will be up nine percent tomorrow. To think animal use will ever drop to zero is a fantasy so childish it would make Peter Pan blush. We must steer course away from abolitionism and put all our efforts toward making sure these animals get the best treatment possible.”

Unfortunately, that was too long to fit into a tweet, so we got that enigmatic retweet instead.

Talk with at least one other person today about veganism.
May 7, 2010 7:48:26 AM CDT via web

Notice that Francione didn’t say “listen to my old podcasts and read my old blog entries about veganism,” the surest way to keep his flock happily in the fold. No, he ordered his followers to talk to regular people, people who are likely not to be abolitionists or even vegans. In other words, he demanded their exposure to other viewpoints, knowing his followers would face difficult questions like “Where do you get your protein?” and “What about cavemen?”

Francione is no fool. He knew this would have repercussions — many abolitionists would become speciesist animal users overnight. And that’s exactly what Francione wanted.

I am going to eat my vegetarian dinner, which is completely plant based,as all vegetarian dinners should be & then The Tudors on Showtime.

4:30 PM Apr 18th via web

April 18, 2010 at 4:30 pm is where I’d pinpoint Francione’s first forays into happy meat. Look how desperately he insists that his meal is meat-free. He’s an abolitionist vegan who once tweeted “Go vegan” multiple times a day. Shouldn’t it go without saying that his meal that night was going to be “completely plant based,as all vegetarian dinners should be”?

And then he quickly changes the subject to “The Tudors,” making sure to name-drop Showtime. Why? So we know he has premium cable? What does this have to do with sentient beings, other than distracting us so we don’t ask for details of his meal, which was almost certainly a pile of butchered sentience? Did you say a prayer to the murdered animals before you ate their delicious decaying flesh, Francione?

Much of this is speculation, but now comes the most damning piece of evidence. Check out this excerpt from a Rutgers News story on June 28, 2010, which includes a quote from Francione, making it the most recent thing the father of abolitionism has said on record:

Four rising young scholars will begin teaching at Rutgers School of Law–Newark during the 2010-11 academic year. “We are absolutely delighted to have been able to hire four excellent entry-level people who show every indication of becoming leaders in their fields. The appointment of these new faculty members demonstrates that Rutgers–Newark remains highly attractive to top candidates entering the teaching market,” said Gary L. Francione, Distinguished Professor of Law, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law & Philosophy, and Co-Chair of the Appointments Committee.

Who are these “excellent” “top candidates” that Francione was so “delighted” to have at Rutgers? They are: Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Christina S. Ho, Chrystin Ondersma and Reid K. Weisbord. They seem fine to me, except for one little thing… none of them are vegan! They’re all avowed speciesists! Just look at this this quote from Henderson in The Dartmouth, from when she was in college (a time when most people of a compassionate bent are at least experimenting with vegetarianism):

Taja-Nia Henderson ‘97 said Byrne has “the best food on campus, honestly.” … Henderson said, “I eat at Byrne Hall because it makes more sense than walking to the Food Court to eat a hamburger or some random pasta dish. At Byrne they have several choices whether it be stir-fry or chicken and rice. You don’t have to worry about whether it will be tasty or not. The food is always good,” she added.

“The food is always good,” eh Henderson? Is that what you call abused and murdered sentient beings rotting over rice… “food”? And Francione is delighted?!

In an interview with Columbia University Press a while back, Francione said: “Our only justification for using nonhuman animals in experiments is our species bias, or speciesism, and that prejudice can no more defended than can racism, sexism or heterosexism.” By that logic, a speciesist (non-vegan) professor is no better than a racist, sexist and homophobic professor. Would Francione be delighted to have David Duke as a professor at Rutgers if he were a “top candidate”?

Talk about “moral schizophrenia”!

Unless, that is, Francione is now a speciesist, which is the only conclusion I can draw from this that makes any sense.

So enjoy your happy meat, Francione. At least the cow was smiling before you decapitated it.