Dr. Joel Marks on his Amoral Veganism

For some professors and authors, making a career out of philosophy means developing a theory or set of principles that they then elaborate on — and never seriously question — for the rest of their productive lives. Not so for Dr. Joel Marks, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University. For instance, you don’t have to travel too far back in the works referenced on his main website to figure out that Marks used to believe in morality.

His 2009 book Ought Implies Kant: A Reply to the Consequentialist Critique took the existence of right and wrong as a given, and argued for a version of Kantian ethics that would extend moral duties to animals and universally obligate humans to follow a vegan diet. Now, however, Marks is putting the finishing touches on a new book titled Ethics Without Morals, suggesting that he changed his mind about a few things in the past two years. What changed is that Marks stopped taking right and wrong as a given. In fact, he had an epiphany and decided they were myths. His “Moral Moments” column at Philosophy Now magazine became “Ethical Episodes,” he took to questioning some key components of animal rights philosophy such as inherent value and announced his new thinking in a New York Times column called “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist.”

But none of this affected how Marks felt about animals. He still wants people to go vegan — it’s just that now he emphasizes that his call for a vegan humanity is based on his own desires and aversions, not innate rules that he deduced by objectively observing the workings of the universe. Since its tendency toward moralizing is the main thing I don’t like about standard vegan proselytizing, I admire Marks’ amoral “desirist” approach (and can’t wait to read his next book), even though I don’t share his desire for everyone to stop eating animal products.

Joel Marks

Could you summarize why you don’t believe in morality?

It’s very simple (although devastating to our everyday but unexamined assumptions). The universe as we now understand it consists of such things as spacetime, dark energy, dark matter, gravity, stars and planets, quarks and gluons, beliefs and desires, plus the natural laws that govern all of these things, plus mathematics and logic. Granted we do not yet have a single overarching theory of everything that explains how all of these things fit together perfectly, but there is a certain type of reality that adheres to them that does not adhere to moral values. In other words, it is not to be expected that the final theory will have any place in it for moral good or moral bad or moral right or moral wrong, nor any of their attendant concepts such as moral responsibility and moral desert. Everything that needs explaining can be explained without postulating any of those phenomena.

For example: There is no need to postulate the notion of moral wrongness in order to explain why most human beings believe that torturing babies is morally wrong. All you need is some kind of evolutionary explanation along the lines of: Creatures that thought it was OK to torture babies would (or did!) simply die off because their offspring would be too debilitated to reproduce. But suppose that under certain environmental conditions the only successful reproducers were those who had been “toughened” to the max. Then maybe under those conditions, torturing babies would be the ticket to survival (that is, of the genes that in combination with that environment, motivate the torturing of babies). So there is no “objective” or “absolute” wrongness attaching to the torturing of babies; there is simply the survival, under given conditions, of certain practices and prohibitions, some of which assume the mantle of objectivity or absoluteness in order better to motivate us to carry them out.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With a Vegan: Speciesist Vegan

If you think humans are better than other animals, you’re a speciesist, and you might as well be judging humans on the color of their skin.

At least, if you believe anti-speciesist vegans. 

Speciesism, they say, is no more acceptable than other forms of discrimination; looking down on organisms because of their biological classification is just as arbitrary and loathsome as doing the same to humans because of their gender or sexual orientation. We’re not nature’s most impressive creation — we’re just nature’s most arrogant, our delusional sense of self-importance blinding us to the reality that we’re just one of many kinds of sentient creatures who happen to inhabit this planet, none more or less valuable than the rest. 

Many who go vegan for ethical reasons believe that anti-speciesism is a key component of any serious vegan philosophy, and that vegans who don’t accept it are vegan for the wrong reasons and are part of the problem. For this reason, vegans who can’t quite get into the idea that species is a meaningless division which shouldn’t really be considered at all tend to be private about this view. 

But not Speciesist Vegan, the anonymous vegan writer who uses his blog — also named Speciesist Vegan — to discuss why he thinks anti-speciesism doesn’t make sense, as well as why there is still an argument for veganism anyway.

The blog is only about a month old but is already one of the most fascinating vegan blogs I’ve read. Which is why I did this interview. 

And in case you prefer your speciesist veganism in small doses and can’t commit to the full interview just yet, CarpeVegan has the abridged version.

SpeciesistVegan

Many vegans say that speciesism is a form of discrimination akin to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, classism and heterosexism. You, however, are speciesist, yet maintain an opposition to prejudice against different groups of humans. What makes speciesism different than those others?

Well, to state the obvious, all the -isms you mentioned in the first sentence concern intraspecies relations and speciesism deals with interspecies relations. 

Basically, for various reasons, but largely because I AM a human and not some other type of animal, I feel that humans have more moral worth than other animals. I hope it will be more clear why by the end of this interview.

And just to be clear, it’s not like I don’t see any similarities between how some people treat animals and how some people treat (or used to treat) other humans who are different from them. There are plenty of analogies to be drawn. I just have a general distaste for moral argumentation by analogy. Even if there are some legitimate parallels that can be made between dairy farms and slave plantations, the analogy is offensive to me (and almost all non-vegans). If I have to explain to you why the analogy is offensive, you’re definitely a vegan and your name might be Gary.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With a Vegan: Adam Weitz……

Adam is a graduate student and instructor of philosophy, maintains the food blog H.E.A.L.T.H., and is a film review editor for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. He emailed me in March of this year; he’d come to my blog wanting to hate it, but found himself appreciating some of my arguments, and hoped I would discuss veganism with him. I didn’t follow up on the email, but Adam got harder to ignore once he became one of my most challenging and intriguing commenters. I’m relieved when Adam agrees with me, because when he doesn’t, it’s not an easy fight. I once took an entry down in defeat after Adam thoroughly dismantled its core point. But hey… only once.

The problem with debating Adam is that he doesn’t rely on the standard animal rights or suffering reduction arguments, both of which I believe have fatal flaws. It’s not hard to poke holes in the arguments positing an (unattainable) logical perfection though “cruelty-free” consumption, but Adam doesn’t fall into that trap. He argues for veganism from a “perspective of care,” a concept that is harder to explain than other cases for veganism — drastically curtailing its mainstream appeal — but one I’m not sure I could debunk. If anyone could convince me that I’m wrong about veganism, it’s Adam. 

Many of Adam’s answers could stand alone as individual essays, which is why Adam posted longer versions of some them as entries on his blog. (Be sure to visit it if you want to see more.) But the interview is worth reading if you’re curious to see the strongest formulation of vegan beliefs that I’ve seen.

Adam 2

You don’t agree with how mainstream veganism is often practiced. What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream advocates promote?

The mainstream discourse and practice of veganism as an individual’s (abstention from) the consumption of animal products, I believe, is problematic in three interrelated ways: practically as an economic boycott, socially as a privileged consumerism, and philosophically as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle.

Practically, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways.

First, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is now sold to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled “vegan”) by the very corporations (i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals.

Second, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). If consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, or—in “a race to the bottom”— to where the industry will be exported, displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities.

Third, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally empower people to practice a wholly vegetarian diet. Since wholesome food is presently regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people who have little to no financial and/or geographic access to vegetarian food and goods are thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegetarian lifestyle. In sum, mainstream vegan discourse and activism’s focus on economic boycott is problematic, not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation. If vegans are sincere about creating a vegan society, veganism ought to be a social space to which people are generously provided access. Veganism will have limited success so long as it remains a luxury reserved for those with privilege, independent of human liberation movements.

Socially, what is so troublesome about understanding veganism as primarily an abstention from the consumption of animal products is that it facilitates a number of objectionable social practices: self-righteousness, identity politics, maliciousness, colonialism, classism, and privileged consumerism. These objections to veganism, however, are not universal to all vegan practices. That veganism has been a medium for such unfavorable sociality is due to veganism being understood as a single-issue to which all other social movements are subordinated, backgrounded, or separated. For instance, consumer vegans are often content calling their food or products “cruelty-free,” even as human animals are exploited and tormented during the production. While I do think most mainstream vegans have very good intentions, the effects of some of their actions and discourse alienate potential allies. There needs to be a shift away from individual consumption to social relations. A politics of alliance that addresses the social structures of oppression in which the degradation of human and animal others are interrelated offers a more promising dialogical medium for vegan advocacy.

Philosophically, when veganism is reduced to personal consumption or political action it becomes an instrument of morality rather than an ethics itself. If veganism is primarily a lifestyle that concerns nothing other than (an abstention from) consumption, then veganism is nothing more than a proper extension of or purification of vegetarianism: veganism is simply a vegetarian lifestyle. It logically follows that, if veganism is the moral baseline, that one’s consumption is the only qualification for being vegan, then one can very well be a speciesist vegan. This may sound peculiar because it is.

According to Ida Hammer, veganism is no “accident.” Veganism is a revolutionary praxis: “an anti-oppression framework that views the abolition of animal exploitation as part of a wider struggle for social justice” and “leads to a way of life (or lifestyle) that is based on noncooperation with, and divestment from, exploitation.” Hammer’s liberation and anti-oppression discourse is notably different from Francione and Singer’s discourse on suffering and equality. Francione fails to recognize how the principles and rights he advocates have not even stopped humans from being oppressed. For instance, Afro-Americans may have been emancipated from slavery, however a new institution was created, the prison-industrial-complex, to place them back into bondage. Hammer explains that “[t]he property status of other animals… is just one piece of the structure of human supremacy, just as human slavery was just one piece of the structure of White supremacy.”

The theoretical discrepancies and historical failure of these principles can be traversed by focusing on renouncing human privilege and the corresponding institution of speciesism. “[S]ince speciesism is an ideology of oppression that legitimates the existing social order, we need to see veganism as a counter-ideology of liberation.” Removing the “-ism” from veganism, risks alienating veganism—an anti-oppression framework—from being a vegan, a “consumptive pattern that is increasingly self-interested and individualized” in contemporary discourse. Actions may speak louder than words, but veganism cannot be reduced to one’s (consumptive) actions alone. The fetishization of consumption practices misplaces the potential of veganism as a transformative social and ecological justice modality.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With a Vegan Paleontologist: “The Humane Hominid”

Robert, aka “The Humane Hominid”, is the vegan paleontologist behind PaleoVeganology, a blog that looks at the evolution of humans and animals, as well as the paleo diet movement, from an ethical vegan perspective.

Robert went vegetarian in high school “to impress a pretty girl,” and stayed that way for the animals. He has been vegan for six years. This didn’t stop Hurricane Ivan from destroying most of his worldly possessions 2004, so he moved to Los Angeles, figuring that he might as well enjoy nice weather while natural disasters nipped at his heels. He got a spec screenplay optioned not long after moving to earthquake country, but Hollywood was only getting his hopes up in order to dash them (as it tends to do), and Robert gave up that dream to return to paleontology school.

The vegan blogosphere is lucky he did. PaleoVeganology is everyone’s favorite vegan paleontology blog, and is one of the most important contributions to the burgeoning “vegan skeptic” movement — the ethical vegan reformers who are more than happy to hack down fallacious arguments for veganism, like the myth that humans are naturally herbivores. To this end, Robert is currently engaged in an online debate with “The Permavegan,” a vegan permaculture advocate who believes that it makes no biological sense for humans to eat meat.

I have my money on Robert. 

Are humans “omnivores”?

Yes, unequivocally. But I’m glad you put that word in scare quotes, because it’s possible for people to read too much into it. The description of humans as “omnivores” is observational, not taxonomic, and definitely not prescriptive. When researchers into human evolution use that word, they mean something a bit different than what, say, paleo dieters or other carnists do. Omnivory does not impose behaviors on us; it’s merely a description of our capabilities and our morphology. We’re neither specialized plant-eaters nor specialized meat-eaters. From the perspective of morphology, it can’t be inferred that we must eat either plants or animals, only that we can eat them both.

Why do you refer to meat-eating humans as carnists?

Honestly, because I just think it’s a cool word, and I am often too lazy to type out the phrase “meat-eating humans.” The word has its origin in the effort by some vegans to label those humans who continue eating meat after being exposed to cruelties of factory farming; i.e., those who eat meat because of a conscious ethical choice, and not out of habit. A carnist is someone committed to the ideology that it is acceptable to eat (some) animals, and is basically the opposite of “vegan.” But like I said, I mostly use it because I think it’s a cool word and a practical shorthand device.

It’s obvious that you are not using your blog to try to prove that veganism is our “natural diet”. What would you say your message is? That evolution is complicated and it doesn’t make sense to try to base lifestyle choices on it?

That’s part of it. Though it’s not just that evolution is complex – far more complex than most people realize, actually – but also, paradoxically, that it’s limited. Evolution is a great tool for figuring out the ancestry of organisms and the mechanisms of speciation and such, but it’s fundamentally about populations, not individuals. As such, it’s not a great guide for figuring out what your “optimal” diet is. The human fossil record is too sparse for that, and even if it were more robust, I think it’d be problematic at best to try to base ethical or lifestyle choices on it.

I should confess here that the “message” of my blog is itself evolving. I started it because I kept running into vegans who, upon learning I was a paleontology student, would ask me for rhetorical ammo to use in their own arguments against eating animals. It’s common for vegans to argue that “humans are natural herbivores,” for instance. But things just aren’t that simple. At first, I was game for the effort, but by the time I decided to start blogging, I had become more skeptical of it.

At present, I’d say the message of my blog is that veganism is, first and foremost, an ethical stand, and should, first and foremost, be argued and defended as such. Paleontology and evolution can bring a great deal of clarity to our understanding of issues related to veganism and animal rights, but they can’t by themselves be used to build a case for (or against) veganism and animal rights.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With an Animal Activist: Camille Marino

Camille Marino is the founder and Senior Editor of Negotiation is Over and is on the Advisors and Speakers Panel of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. NIO strives to be an instrument of defiance, disruption, disobedience, subversion, creative and aggressive grassroots action, and a catalyst for revolutionary change. NIO’s belief is that “Total liberation — human animals, nonhuman animals, and the earth — will not happen by politely asking abusers to be decent.”

Camille and many of her above-ground activist allies recently made a decisive break from vegans who are content to alleviate their own guilt through personal veganism and baking vegan goodies. Several activists in NIO Florida (her local grassroots group) — as well as many national and international associates — are now targeting biomed students who are on their way to becoming animal experimenters, on the assumption that there is still hope to change them before they become entrenched in careers involving animal exploitation and prolonged animal suffering.

NIO has also gained notoriety by advocating violence against those who are so entrenched, though Camille has remained non-violent in her approach.

Camille

Does simply eating a vegan diet and not buying animal products do anything for animals?

In order to be an ethical and decent human being, one must be vegan. There is no gray area here. You are either vegan or you are complicit in the war on animals.

But, no, being an ethical vegan does absolutely nothing to relieve animal suffering. In the real world “free market,” when demand for meat/eggs/dairy declines, the government subsidizes a given exploitation industry and buys any excess supply of animal products, thus ensuring that the suppliers’ profits as well as the economy remain intact. The government buys the surplus and generally diverts it into schools and welfare programs or the surplus is exported to other countries to satisfy federal debt.

I believe that we are wasting enormous amounts of the vegan community’s time and energy by advocating vegan outreach. The animals are dying in exponentially greater numbers.

Why does Negotiation is Over focus on vivisection more than factory farming and the meat, diary and egg industries?

There are many activists associated with NIO who are doing everything from targeting hunters/trappers to launching creative and aggressive campaigns against slaughterhouses.

Personally, I focus on vivisection because in my community the University of Florida is a beacon of institutional animal torture. More importantly, it is where I believe I will realize my greatest impact. It’s a mistake to choose campaigns simply because they’re available. We need to direct our energies where we can realize quantifiable gains and seize victories and we need to be willing to adapt and evolve our tactics and approach. It is clear to me that animal liberation demands that we subvert and undermine the foundation upon which animal abuse rests in universities. That means biomed students need to be dealt with now before they become fully-entrenched professional sadists.

Read More

--Tagged under: Animal Liberators--

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With a Vegan: Joshua Katcher

Joshua Katcher launched The Discerning Brute in 2008 as a resource for “Fashion, Food & Etiquette for the Ethically Handsome Man”. With a focus on sustainability, social justice and animal rights, Katcher deconstructs the mainstream understanding of masculinity and offers a vision of men that are protectors, defenders, and heroes for animals and the environment. His lecture “Fashion & Animals: Decoding and Harnessing the Dialect of Fashion Culture to Help Animals” has taken Katcher to Paris, Boston, Parsons University in New York, and in June, Washington DC. He will be teaching a course on the subject in NYC this spring with Guilded, and at the American University of Paris in Spring of 2012.

Joshua is on the verge of launching his online men’s lifestyle store, Brave GentleMan, that will feature a highly curated selection of “Principled Attire & Smart Supplies”, including exclusive items and exciting collaborations with some of the most sought-after, high-quality artists and designers. His own line of sustainable, vegan menswear is in development and production. Katcher also launched the initiative, PINNACLE: Reinvent The Icon last year which provides a platform for fashion industry professionals to creatively express their opposition to the fur industry. Joshua lives in New York city where he is a video producer, artist, self-taught chef and a rescued Chihuahua named Enzo’s dad.

On top of all that, Joshua is smart, a good writer, a fan of Battlestar Galactica and nice enough to agree to an interview.

Joshua

Do you see vegan consumerism as the lesser of two evils, with your site being a way to channel destructive modern materialism in a less destructive direction? Or would you say that once someone goes the vegan fair trade route, consumerism becomes a positive thing and the more things they buy that fit vegan ethics, the better?

The former. It’s unfortunate that consumerism and materialism are so pervasive, but it’s also understandable why this is so; it’s sensually exciting, visually appealing, and it strokes our individual egos to think “this is made for me”. I believe that there isn’t anything wrong with the accumulation of objects that serve a function in a mostly-local model - even if that function is purely aesthetic. Even Prehistoric peoples accumulated objects - if they hadn’t, anthropologists would hardly have been able to discover anything about the way they lived.

That being said, there is a glaring difference between a throw-away, built-for-the-dump, cheap-crap, more-for-the-sake-of-more consumption pattern that is reinforced by our current culture (with dire consequences across a spectrum of concern beyond just animal cruelty), as opposed to a business model that takes into consideration how this product is affecting others at each step of the production process.

I include ecosystems and animals as “others” in this equation, as well as workers, laborers and “consumers”. Isn’t it scary that Americans are referred to as “consumers” now as opposed to “civilians” or “citizens”? I think that was an intentional distinction, and we could go on for hours about the problems inherent in a consumer culture. My biggest objection to a consumer economy is that mainstream economists are delusional. Our economic model functions on the false-assumption that infinite resources exist and infinite growth is possible, yet we can see and prove that this planet and it’s “resources” are finite.

My other major objections are that “natural” or “organic” or “fair trade” products are more expensive. This also speaks to the failure of our economic model to provide worth to well-being and cost to detriment. This is so backwards. Why should organic products have to be labeled ‘this isn’t toxic’? Imagine if it were the other way around and toxic crap had a label that said ‘this is toxic crap’? 

The third major objection I’ll highlight is that there is no accountability. Corporations function like a body with no brain. In a recent episode of This American Life, they discuss how criminal psychopaths share many traits with functional, and successful, business leaders. They are able to do terrible things on a massive scale without the effects of empathy or the consequences of accountability. Factory farming is the perfect example of this. Or sweatshops.

And then there is the cognitive dissonance that consumers have who give the benefit of the doubt to the businesses and assume that precautions are taken to ensure that things are in accordance with the values most of us share. I imagine they say to themselves, “If it really were that bad, they wouldn’t be selling it”, and then then business says “If people were really opposed to this, they wouldn’t be buying it”. They’ve got the blinders on, and are living in a perpetual state of infantile self-gratification, as David Orr suggests in Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.

Like many of my approaches to activism, I see consumerism as a dialect through which to speak to the majority of people who wouldn’t necessarily seek out an academic paper on the failures of consumer capitalism. Ethical fashion is the Trojan Horse in which I hope some other messages can ride in on. I’ll never claim to be doing the flawless thing. My interest is not — and has never been — in puritanism, and I cannot deny that fashion culture has a huge influence on many people doing the most amounts of ecological damage, albeit unwittingly and irreverently.

Is it better to be a vegan shopper, giving money to companies that cater to vegans, than to be a freegan who attempts to have as little impact as possible?

Better in what sense? This is an incredibly complex question. In the sense of having as minimal impact as possible, the least amount of “new” stuff is better for everyone, without argument. Extracting resources always has an ecological cost. Unfortunately, there is a very inconvenient feature to the culture we live in now, and that is the magnification of influence on a global scale, and the appropriation of subculture aesthetics by mainstream businesses. I just saw on the news how Steven Tyler’s rooster feather hair extensions has resulted in such a huge demand for hair-feather extensions that the industry cannot keep up. This affects animals, regardless of where Mr. Tyler got his.

So my next question, as shallow as it sounds, would be about the freegan’s appeal to the mainstream culture. As we know, there is an incredible desire to consume and showcase subculture and authentic individuality in fashion, and what better place to get that inspiration than from an anarchist freegan? You can see the effects of this everywhere in fashion. In fact, it is rumored that the massive fox tail keychain trend is thanks to some freegans who ate roadkill and wore the tails of the roadkill as a symbol of having done so. Someone saw it and thought it looked cool, next thing you know, it’s on Gucci bags.

You can see a similar pattern with the aesthetics of indigenous peoples - the American Indian aesthetic has been totally exploited again and again in fashion, and is really big right now largely in part to Avatar. What is left out, of course, is the context of that aesthetic. As pack animals with a prehistoric legacy of egalitarianism (for the most part), historian Dr. Gwynne Dyer points out that we are driven by what the group is doing, and we seek peer approval. This aspect of our nature has been exploited massively by businesses. And the modern day translation? Keeping up with the Joneses. No subculture is safe from being appropriated, regardless of their intentions or earnestness. In this light, I can’t say one is better than the other. They are both doing good when held up against the current problems we face.

As a vegan, myself, I approach it by embracing the idea of influence magnification, in hopes that values associated with veganism will be magnified, by making sure that THE main features to magnify are appealing versions of social, environmental and ethical empathy. I think many activists who live in communities that are a bit more isolated have the freedom to reject all of mainstream culture. And it’s important to have functioning models that are more consistent like these, but it’s also crucial to have people participating within the mainstream culture who understand its dialects, trying to make change from within as well. I’ll always side with a multi-platform approach as opposed to saying one is good or bad.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Interview With an Ex-Adventist: Ronald L. Numbers

Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies, and a member of the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for over three and a half decades. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard, 2009), Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago, 2010), edited with Denis Alexander, and the recently published Science and Religion around the World (Oxford, 2011), edited with John Hedley Brooke. He is a past president of the History of Science Society, the American Society of Church History, and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.

Numbers is also the author of Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform, a book that arguably did for Seventh-day Adventism what No Man Knows My History did for Mormonism. (In other words, it’s not at the top of most Adventist reading lists.) Revealing Adventism co-founder Ellen White’s talent for plagiarizing the health reformers of her time and casting doubt upon the divine nature of her prophetic visions got Numbers fired from Loma Linda University, the Adventist stronghold in California, but it also got him this interview with me. So perhaps it was for the best.

Vegetarian Adventist dietitians have had a big influence on the American Dietetic Association’s position paper on a vegetarian diet since 1988, when the ADA started endorsing vegetarianism. Not all Adventists are vegetarian — some estimates have it around 50 percent, and Numbers has seen estimates as low as 10 percent — but most Adventists believe that God told Ellen White in a vision that vegetarianism, and maybe even near-veganism, is the proper diet for mankind. Could this be in the back of Adventist researchers’ minds as they conduct studies proving the superiority of a vegetarian diet? You can probably guess what I think, but I’m an outsider on this issue and I wanted to hear what a former Adventist scholar had to say about it.

Were you raised as a vegetarian Adventist?

Yes. I’m a fourth-generation Adventist. My maternal grandfather was president of the international church. And all my male relatives are ministers, or were ministers, both grandfathers, father, uncles on both sides of my family, brother-in-law, my nephew. I went from first grade through college in Adventist schools. So I was thoroughly integrated into the Adventist church.  

Adventism is not the only religion with dietary guidelines. But Mormons don’t care if gentiles drink caffeine and Jews don’t care if gentiles eat treif. Yet it seems to me that Adventists want to spread vegetarianism even outside the bounds of their religion. Is that a correct impression?

Well I’ve got to say that if that were a goal of theirs, they haven’t done very well. Adventists tend to be very insular. And other groups have taken over and promoted vegetarianism and vegetarian meat substitutes more than the Adventists have. By and large, the Adventists are out to convert to world to Adventism, but not to vegetarianism. Keep in mind, I don’t know if as many as 10 percent of Adventists are vegetarians. You know about the theology?  

Which aspect?

So if you’re an Adventist, you’re encouraged not to eat meat. But you can still be saved if you eat clean meat and fish — fish, if they have fins and scales, and mammals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves. It’s the Old Testament Levitical rules.

Now, the only penalty for eating clean meat is that you cannot be translated, which is a term they use for going to heaven without seeing death. So if you eat meat, clean meat, you can be saved but you’ll have to die. If you don’t eat any meat, then you have the privilege of living through the worst period in the history of the earth, “the time of troubles.” I’ve been thinking of setting up workshops encouraging all Adventists to eat one bite of meat so that they die before the time of troubles. That’s a joke.

I, however, have not eaten any meat, even though I left Adventism decades ago. It’s because of psychopathology now. I just think of dead animals. I’m not principled at all.

Read More

--Tagged under: American Dietetic Association--

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

--Tagged under: SeventhDay Adventists--

Interview With a Vegan: Jack Norris RD

Jack Norris and Matt Ball started Vegan Outreach in 1993 to fill a void they saw in animal activism at that time. With the help of volunteers, they now distribute over 1 million pamphlets about the practices of modern animal agribusiness to college students every year. 

Devoting a good chunk of his life to animal activism put Norris in touch with former vegans and vegetarians who had gone back to animal products for health reasons. To figure out why this was and what he could do about it, Norris became a registered dietitian and founded VeganHealth.org. And through his blog JackNorrisRD.com, Norris dispels vegan nutritional myths (like that vegans don’t need to worry much about B12 or calcium) and comments on new studies that are relevant to vegans and vegetarians. 

I hadn’t heard of Norris when I quit veganism at the end of 2007. If I had, maybe I would have hit him up for some brain fog dissipating tips before self-medicating with salmon, flounder and Thanksgiving turkey, enjoying the results and abandoning veganism forever.

Might I still be vegan if Norris had intervened in time? If his reputation is to be believed, it’s not impossible. I’ve heard from multiple vegans who say that following Norris’ Daily Recommendations for Vegan Adults is the surest way to avoid failure to thrive on a vegan diet. There are plenty of ex-vegans who couldn’t hack it on raw, macrobiotic or low-fat vegan diets, but I have yet to interview an ex-vegan who said “I followed all of Jack Norris’ recommendations and still couldn’t get it to work.” 

That — along with Vegan Outreach’s willingness to critique counterproductive aspects of the vegan movement, rethink and improve its own strategy and treat meat eaters as potential allies — makes Jack Norris one of the most formidable individuals promoting veganism today. 

jack_7-31-10

This quote from a speech Matt Ball gave a while back seems like a succinct description of how Vegan Outreach approaches animal advocacy:

“Ultimately, the bottom line is: Reduce Suffering. Everything has to answer to this. I can’t emphasize this enough: the only thing that matters is to reduce suffering. If you accept this as the What, the next question is, How? At this time, in this country, we choose to promote veganism. However, veganism is not an end in and of itself. We don’t promote veganism because ‘veganism is good.’ Veganism is merely a tool to reduce suffering.”

If Vegan Outreach is concerned with “what reduces suffering” rather than veganism for the sake of it, shouldn’t VO be open to exploring non-vegan approaches to suffering reduction? Eating bivalves, locavore hunting, hunting invasive species, eating eggs from free-range rescued hens and eating insects are all non-vegan ways to reduce suffering. Does consumer veganism, even with its reliance on agriculture, always lead to less suffering than non-vegan alternatives? If not, why doesn’t VO explore these other possibilities?

We want a way to reduce suffering that is sustainable. I have no problem with people eating eggs from rescued hens, but that’s not a realistic model to promote for most people. I don’t think bivalves are conscious of suffering, but there would be environmental concerns with promoting bivalve-based diets for everyone. If someone has a hard time being vegan and eating bivalves does the trick for them, I would have no qualms.

I just blogged about some researchers who think insects might be able to feel pain. I doubt that most species of insects can suffer and if it came between someone eating chickens or insects, my vote would definitely be for them to eat the insects.

It’s hard for me to see how hunting mammals or birds can result in less suffering than eating vegan. I tend to think that for many species, like those who live in packs or who are monogamous, you cause indirect suffering to the animals who are left behind – possibly even more than to the animals you kill.

As society evolves toward being more concerned about the suffering of animals, plant farming will be done in a way that harms as few animals as possible.

I’ve talked to many ex-vegans or non-vegan conscientious eaters who are concerned with reducing animal suffering, but distinguish animal suffering from animal death. They hunt deer, for instance, and even though they are out to kill the deer for food, they try to cause as little pain to the deer as possible. To most vegans, this seems like a contradiction. (How could you care about an animal enough to not want it to suffer, but be okay with ending its life?) From your point of view, is killing an animal only bad in the sense that the process of death is painful? Or is animal death objectionable independent of any suffering?

Animals’ lives matter to themselves and they matter to me. If someone felt that the only way they could possibly live is to kill animals, then I can understand them doing that. But if you must eat animal products in order to be healthy, why must you kill deer? Why not try eating dairy or eggs from companion chickens or cows?

If someone cares about the suffering of the animals they hunt, they could hunt in more humane ways than shooting with bullets (or arrows) — perhaps a dart that isn’t very painful and makes the animal unconscious so they could be killed in a painless way. It’s not something I’ve investigated because it’s not realistic to promote for everyone; it would be easier for society to be vegan.

In vitro meat might be another avenue that will become sustainable for all of society.

Some vegans say that human intent is more important than results. For instance, it’s worse to shoot a deer and kill it quickly than for a deer to die of starvation or get hit by a car, because in those latter scenarios humans are not guilty of willful killing. Does intent matter if the goal is suffering reduction?

My understanding is that fish and wildlife departments manipulate the environment to cause deer overpopulation so that hunters will have more of a political justification for killing them. That said, what happens to the deer matters to me more than the intent in any person’s mind. If we really have to kill deer for their own good, then they should be euthanized, not shot with bullets.

Vegan Outreach calls vegan foods “cruelty-free,” but all foods involve some animal suffering. Why is it not cruel to kill animals to produce crops (displacing them from their habitat, shooting and poisoning them to protect the crops, grinding them in the thresher) but is cruel to kill animals to eat them as food?

I will refer to the argument that vegans kill more animals than they prevent from suffering as the “collateral damage argument.”

The collateral damage argument only applies to eating grass fed animal products, with grass-fed beef being the food normally discussed. If an animal is fed grains, then people who eat the animal foods are inadvertently causing more plants to be raised than are vegans. So by going vegan, you will increase the amount of habitat available for wild animals.

The collateral damage argument gained some momentum around 2000. At the time, a woman from Garden City, MI posted a survey she did of 40 crop farmers throughout the country to the Vegan Outreach message boards (which no longer exist). The overwhelming response to her survey was that vertebrate animals are rarely killed while harvesting crops.

In 2003, Oregon State University professor of animal science Stephen Davis published the paper “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet,” (Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (2003): 387–94). He argued that someone who eats grass fed beef kills fewer animals than someone eating a vegan diet. There have been two academic responses to Davis’ paper.

Gaverick Matheny (Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16: 505–511, 2003) argues that “Davis makes a mathematical error in using total rather than per capita estimates of animals killed; second, he focuses on the number of animals killed in production and ignores the welfare of these animals; and third, he does not count the number of animals who may be prevented from existing. When we correct these errors, Davis’s argument makes a strong case for, rather than against, adopting a vegetarian diet: vegetarianism kills fewer animals, involves better treatment of animals, and likely allows a greater number of animals with lives worth living to exist.”

Andy Lamey (Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 38 No. 2, Summer 2007, 331–348) argues that the numbers Davis uses to estimate the animals killed in growing crops has some flaws (one being that he uses numbers from alfalfa farming and vegans do not eat alfalfa). Lamey sums up his findings by saying, “After reading the same studies as Davis, my own conclusion is that the science of estimating field animal deaths is still in its infancy, and is not a good basis on which to make large-scale recommendations. Davis himself concludes that more research is needed in this area. But we do not know enough to make even the rough calculations that Davis offers.”

If we were to have a society that largely cared about animals, there are probably ways to prevent a great deal of the animal deaths caused by plant harvesting. The vegan movement is striving for a day when society values the lives of animals and being vegan is a good step towards achieving that goal and lessening the most animal suffering over the long term.

Just by being alive we cause animal suffering. Could the logic of minimizing animal suffering ultimately lead to a case for suicide?

It would be hard for me to fault anyone who absolutely must kill to stay alive – whether they have to kill animals or even humans. But you are talking about accidental deaths and whereas I have said that the consequences matter more than the intent, I do not think it is fair to hold animal advocates to a higher standard than you would hold human rights advocates.

For example, whenever we drive our cars, we take a chance of killing other humans. Yet, very few people do not drive because of this possibility. And yet, most of these people do believe humans have rights. Most human rights advocates pay taxes and some of those taxes go to violating other humans’ rights, such as collateral damage in war. Is this an argument for human rights advocates to commit suicide? I don’t think so.

Some utilitarians get around this problem by saying that by being alive and working to prevent suffering, they are preventing more suffering than they are causing, so they are a net gain to the world.

Is that part of your own reasoning for being an activist for the animals?

Not really. If I were to cease being an activist for animals, I would not feel the need to kill myself in order to avoid causing any accidental animal (or human) deaths.

Vegan Outreach passes out pamphlets to college students, hoping to open their eyes and help them change to a more moral way of living. How is this different than the booklets college students get from Christians about how they need to see the light and change their ways?

That’s an interesting way to put it. I think a more accurate analogy would be to compare us to students who pass out literature to try to get other students to boycott the products of sweat shop labor or human slavery.

The pamphlets talk about “saving animals” through veganism, which sounds like living animals are being freed, but since animal farmers don’t release their animals if they overshoot demand, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say veganism is “saving non-existent animals from being born”?

Yes, it is more accurate to say that we are “saving non-existent animals from being born.” We are not trying to mislead people, just trying to make our sentences easy to read.

Since humane improvements in animal farming affect animals that are here, whereas veganism works in defense of animals that are not yet conceived, might the fight for humane farming be as important as veganism?

If everyone who donated to helping animals were willing to donate to spreading veganism, there might be an argument for spending it all on spreading veganism. But since many people will not donate to such a radical (in their view) proposition, there is a lot of money that can be spent making farms more humane. At any given time, there are only a small percentage of people who are amenable to going vegan. Once we have saturated those people with our message, additional funds would probably be more effective at making farms more humane. Currently, there are more funds available for making farms more humane, or putting rescued animals in sanctuaries, than for spreading veganism.

Suffering reduction is one way to improve the world, but increasing pleasure might be another way. Does the pleasure humans get from animal products, and the sacrifices vegans make to be vegan, figure into the calculation of suffering? If so, could that make a lifestyle that includes humanely raised animal products (smaller sacrifice for a reduction in animal suffering) more appealing than veganism, which requires a larger sacrifice for its reduction in suffering?

One thing missing from this calculation is the emotional suffering caused to humans who care about the animals being killed. I suffer knowing that right now there are warehouses with tens of thousands of chickens scrambling frantically to escape from wire cages that are digging into their bodies, or pigs who have not been allowed to turn around or walk in months. For some people, living with such knowledge is terribly painful and I suspect some of the animal activists who have committed suicide have done so at least partly because they could no longer bear thinking about these things.

I know you have written about what an inconvenience being vegan is to people (both to the person who is vegan and to their friends and family), but I haven’t found being vegan to be such an inconvenience. It seems like the very least I can do.

While suffering matters more to me than rights, I do view many species of animals as having rights. Most people agree that humans have a right to life, and the species of an individual should not matter in this regard, only that individual’s characteristics. So if we had the ability to breed humans to have awareness similar to pigs and raise them and kill them humanely, but we do not do so because we think it would violate their rights, then we should not be breeding and killing pigs.

People seem to think that there is some magical difference between the human species and all other species. But why not draw the line between genus, family, class, etc.? I realize the practical reasons – because most groups of humans have had the ability to stand up for their rights, whereas other species have not been able to do this. But being able to exert political pressure to force others to recognize one’s rights should not be required for them to be recognized.

One of the sacrifices I see in veganism is the alienation of living in a world that you perceive as 99 percent murderer. This seems to be what leads to the stereotype of the misanthropic vegan. Is it possible to believe that meat is one of the world’s great wrongs, responsible for so much suffering and (some vegans say) tantamount to slavery and murder, yet think that meat-eating friends and family members are not bad people?

I can remember that I wasn’t always vegan and that these issues are not as black and white to many people as they are to me. Plus, it does no good to be angry towards them. I cannot say that it doesn’t bother me that they do not want to take a stand, but I take solace in the idea that things are changing for the better.

You became a dietitian after hearing from many people who quit veganism for health reasons. Have you been successful at helping vegans stay healthy and thus stay vegan?

I’ve helped a number of people suffering from either a B12 or vitamin D deficiency, as well as making the vegan community aware of the need for reliable sources, which has probably prevented many vegans from getting a deficiency.

I have also pushed for vegans to get more calcium. There are many vegan nutritionists who say things that lead to vegans being complacent about calcium, so this is an ongoing effort.

Some vegans like to think they can get the B12 they need from tempeh, spirulina or dirty vegetables. Even some vegan leaders downplay the need for B12. Why do so many vegans want to think they don’t need to supplement?

Because they want to think that the vegan diet is natural. Many vegans believe that a vegan diet is the most natural and, therefore, the healthiest, and so everyone should stop harming animals and live an Eden-like existence. I understand the appeal of this, but the evidence that humans evolved as vegans is simply not there, not to mention the important fact that what is “natural” is not necessarily what is the healthiest.

But this cuts both ways. The vegans who want to base their nutrition on a return to Eden are no sillier, in my opinion, than the paleo dieters who want to return to hunter-gatherer times.

There are people who are too lazy about nutrition to supplement regularly or eat with necessary nutrients in mind. Are these people better off as omnivores?

If these people happen to consume vitamin B12 and calcium-fortified soymilk each day, they probably will fare about the same as most omnivores. If they don’t, then it’s hard to say because someone who pays little attention to nutrition as a vegan probably will do the same as an omnivore, increasing their risk for chronic disease.

If a vegan gets no dietary B12 at all, then it is just a matter of time before they run into acute health problems and so they will be worse off at some point until they correct that problem.

You’re a critic of “the health argument” for veganism, which says that veganism is the healthiest possible diet. What is wrong with that argument?

As an animal protection group, we focus on ethical arguments regarding animals and reducing their suffering, and we try not to make promises to people about any improvements a vegan diet might have for their health. Unfortunately, nutrition and health do become tangential to our promotion of animal protection because we are asking people to change their diets and so we try to make sure that we give sound nutrition advice.

There is evidence that for most people, a vegan diet is healthy in the short term. Cross-sectional studies of vegans show them to have lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and also show them to be less likely to have hypertension, obesity and type-2 diabetes.

We do not have much long-term data yet, but a group of researchers who has studied vegans has said that there is no reason to think vegans have higher rates of mortality than other groups. The number of kids raised vegan from birth and who seem to be thriving is an indication that a vegan diet can provide all the necessary nutrition (assuming it’s supplemented with vitamin B12).

Since we do not yet know the disease rates of vegans over time, it is impossible to know if the average vegan diet is healthier than the average meat-eating or lacto-ovo diet. Two prospective studies containing the most vegans of any studies to date are under way and in the next decade we will start getting disease rates.

Some people with heart disease have been able to reduce the level of blockage in their arteries and live longer by using a very low-fat (15% or less of calories), vegan or near vegan diet. But, Vegan Outreach is not a heart disease prevention group so we refrain from promoting eating programs for people with heart disease.

The American Dietetic Association says that “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”

How can they know this if there hasn’t been enough research on the long term effects of veganism? Do they mean that veganism might be appropriate for each life cycle separately, but not necessarily all together?

The authors of the position paper base their statements on two lines of reasoning. The first is by looking at studies of different groups of vegetarians or vegans at different stages in the life cycle and finding them to be healthy. The second is by examining the known nutrient needs of people during different stages of the life cycle and determining if a vegetarian or vegan diet theoretically meets those needs.

There have been long term studies done on “vegetarians” most of whom have been lacto or lacto-ovo vegetarian, but which included some vegans. In a meta-analysis of those studies published in 1999, the vegans’ mortality was exactly the same as the regular meat-eaters at 1.00. Due to there being so few vegans in the study, I consider the data to be preliminary. I would guess that very few if any of those vegans had been vegan their entire lives. It will be a long time before there are enough vegans from birth into adulthood to be able to measure chronic disease rates of people who are vegan from birth.

If the new prospective studies show that long-term vegan disease rates are higher than on other diets, how would that affect your outlook and your promotion of veganism?

That would be a problem.

One study has shown vegans to have higher bone fracture rates. Luckily, the vegans in the study getting more than 525 mg of calcium had the same rates as those in the other diet groups indicating that if vegans get more calcium, they should be no worse off. Some vegans dismissed these results, but I responded by telling vegans to get more calcium.

That was an easy solution, but other diseases might not be. In the meantime, I am hoping for a positive outcome. Most of the disease markers (cholesterol levels, type-2 diabetes rates, etc.) from cross-sectional studies on vegans give us reason to be optimistic.

It used to be that health-conscious vegans would choose between macrobiotic, raw foodism or low-fat veganism. But you don’t recommend any of those approaches. How would you describe the diet you recommend?

I’m more pro-protein and pro-fat than most traditional vegan nutritionists. Vegans should make sure they get enough of both – and try to get a balance with each meal.

Vegans should make an effort to eat some form of legumes (including soy foods, beans, peanuts, lentils, and peas) at most meals for protein. If you cannot eat legumes, there are other sources of protein, but you need to be more diligent.

Studies on vegans show them to get an average of just under 30% of their calories as fat and I think that’s about right, especially if the fat is mostly mono-unsaturated like nuts, avocados, olive oil, and canola oil. People with heart disease might benefit from less fat than the average vegan.

Many vegans assume that if someone fails to thrive as a vegan it is because they eat too much junk food rather than whole foods. I have not really found that to be the case – the people I talk to who fail do not seem to eat more junk food than the vegans I observe who do not fail. But, this is just anecdotal evidence, no study has looked at this phenomena. Some of the processed foods, especially soy and wheat meats, are very high in protein, which might provide a benefit to some vegans.

How much whole foods you should eat depends on your activity level and risk for diabetes or heart disease. The more active you are, the more processed foods you can eat — you might even need processed foods to get enough calories and protein. But if you are less active or you are at risk for those diseases, less processed food is a good idea.

I also think most vegans do not get enough calcium without using fortified foods or supplements.

Ex-vegans who quit for health reasons are often told by current vegans that they did it wrong. Some of these vegans also say that if they had followed your recommendations, the now ex-vegans could have avoided failure to thrive. You have said that you make no such guarantees, but is there truth to the claim that people who give up veganism for health reasons must have done something wrong? Or is there reason to believe that not everyone can thrive on a vegan diet?

While rare, I have come across people who have tried everything I can think of and the diet doesn’t seem to work for them. Other people quit before exhausting the possibilities. Because I have advertized that I try to help vegans who are having a hard time, I probably hear from a lot more of them than just about anyone. And while this body of experience does make me laugh to hear what some other vegans say regarding health and the vegan diet, the number of people who are both ethically opposed to eating animals and who exhaust all the legitimate possibilities and still cannot make the diet work is a pretty small percentage.

But for the people who do think animal products have helped them regain their health after not thriving on a vegan diet, I would like to point out that animal products do not contain magic. If there is something in animal products that makes some people healthier, it comes down to molecules in food, not some sort of life force they get from the animal. My hope is that in vitro meat will one day solve these problems.

What are the most common problems vegans approach you with before exhausting all vegan nutritional possibilities? Do they usually require the same basic solutions, or have there been some unusual cases?

I have only dealt with a few people who have tried all the usual suspects.

If someone is not thriving even on vitamin B12, vitamin D, and with normal iron levels and a decent protein, fat, DHA, and zinc intake, then I suggest carnitine which has significantly helped one person. Saturated fat can help boost cholesterol and steroid hormone levels if they are low and can improve sex drive – I know of one person who went this route and got his sex drive back. Creatine, choline, taurine, and beta-alanine are other possible supplements that theoretically could help (though I don’t know of any cases where they actually have).

The most common way I’ve helped people has been with vitamin D deficiency. Three people I knew were having some combination of bone pain and fatigue and vitamin D supplements cured them.

A common complaint I hear is that someone is having too much gas. Digestive enzymes and eating more processed sources of protein (like soy meats or tofu rather than whole beans) are two things to try.

Before I quit veganism, I was suffering from chronic fatigue, depression and brain fog. I started eating a little fish and then turkey and I felt a lot better. But if I had emailed you for advice before doing that, what would you have told me? I assume you would have said to get a blood test. (Something I never did.) But just based on the symptoms, would you have had a theory what the problem was?

I would have first found out if you were taking a reliable source of vitamin B12 as those symptoms sound like fairly classic B12 deficiency. If B12 deficiency were ruled out, I would have suggested DHA. Blood tests can help, but they wouldn’t be necessary before trying out B12 and DHA. Vitamin D and iron would be next on the list — blood tests would be more helpful for those.

Is there anything you want to add?

The reason I decided to do this interview is that I suspect that you are saying publicly what a lot of people are thinking about veganism. It would be easy for us in the vegan movement to pretend that people with your view should be dismissed as unreachable, but I think it’s a conversation our culture is going to have to have.

I just read your post about vegan weddings and it got me thinking about the difference between how you see the world and how most ethical vegans see it. While some animal liberation advocates approach the subject from a purely rational point of view, my sense is that most vegans come to view animals the way they do because they have had a meaningful relationship with one or more. These relationships led to viewing animals as very similar to humans, with many of the same emotions and having an inner life. To us, animals are “persons.”

In your post on weddings, you say the following about comparing killing animals to human slavery, “Of course it’s an outrageous comparison, but that’s how many ethical vegans see it (your eyes can open to some truly offensive comparisons once you accept anti-speciesist logic).” I have never seen someone explain how these comparisons are so offensive; they simply state that they are and then rely on other humans -who have a clear self-interest in seeing the world that way - to agree.

History has been riddled with one group exploiting another group and justifying it by convincing themselves that the exploited group is inferior. The exploiters have failed to recognize these claims of inferiority for what they were at the time – self-interested rationalizations. So how likely is it that we have finally reached the pinnacle of moral evolution and are now able to set aside our own self-interests to accurately recognize which other groups are inferior?

Even if human slavery is much worse than animal slavery, there is still room to believe that animals are more than just pieces of meat to be enjoyed at a wedding. I hope most people would not consider their dog to be only a piece of meat to be eaten at a wedding reception.

Another difference is that you think veganism is only about symbolism and doesn’t actually do any good. If you believe that, then I can see why your attitude is critical towards vegans who are causing such a fuss over something you think is merely symbolic.

The idea behind ethical veganism is not only to remove one’s self from support of animal cruelty, but to be part of a growing movement that will one day become the norm. If someone doesn’t actually become vegan themselves (or close to it), they cannot be part of such a movement. You have said that you believe it’s inevitable that any given vegan will one day reject veganism. While some people try veganism for a while and then stop, I know many people who have been vegan for decades and show no indication of changing. Our numbers and impact are growing.

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

--Tagged under: Health--

Interview With an Animal Rights Professor: Jean Kazez

Jean Kazez is a professor of animal rights at SMU and author of the recently published Animalkind: What We Owe The Animals. She also blogs at the excellent In Living Color, which is how I discovered her.

What struck me about her site, and then inspired me to ask her for an interview, was the nuance in her discussions of animal rights, morality and her vegetarianism. Unlike some blogs (*ahem* let them eat meat *cough*) In Living Color is very comfortable in grey. I haven’t read Animalkind, but based on James Garvey’s review of it, it’s just as non-dogmatic as her online writing:

Our thinking about animals is a mess. We moo at a cow in the countryside, maybe pat a little lamb on the head, then enjoy burgers and kebabs for lunch. Philosophers have tried to tidy things up in two ways. The old school argues that animals are more like things than people, so why not treat them as we wish? Recent philosophers say that animals are like us in some morally relevant sense, and we must therefore treat them with the respect owed to human beings. Liberate them from zoos, labs and factory farms, give them rights, and so on.
Jean Kazez explores a middle path between these views in her book, Animalkind. Animals aren’t just things, she says, but they’re not our equals either. Our lives matter more, but animal lives do still matter – we have to treat them with all due respect, depending on the value their lives have. It’s complicated – and you have to think things through carefully, case by case. Kazez takes the world’s ragged edges seriously. The result is a readable, compelling, and thought-provoking account of our difficult relationship to animals. 

Naturally, then, Kazez is on the shitlist of abolitionist vegan leader Gary L. Francione and his consistency-obsessed followers. She critiqued Francione’s off-putting, puritanical approach to reducing the suffering of animals and instantly became their symbol for compromising animal welfarist saboteurs.

Which just makes me like her even more. But of course we don’t agree on everything. Jean started off by saying, “Thanks for this interview, Rhys. You’re a hilarious satirist of a certain segment of the animal rights world that needs to be satirized, but I want to make it clear at the outset that I’m not an ex- or anti-vegan.”

Hmm… balance. Can this blog withstand the consideration of another viewpoint? Read on and find out.

Jean  Animalkind

How long have you been vegetarian?

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years. I became a vegetarian not long after seeing The Animals Film. I’d been thinking about these things for years, but the disturbing images in that movie made me “ready” to make a change. The truth is, though, that I didn’t actually make the change until I met my husband some months later. He was already a vegetarian, but more for health reasons. I talked him into the idea that the moral reasons were more important.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

--Tagged under: Ethics--

Interview With a Vegan: Jed Gillen

Jed Gillen is the former owner of Vegan Cats and the author of Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs & What it Really Means to be Vegan. I bought his book for two reasons: to help an entry I was writing about vegans with vegan pets, and to laugh at veganism at its most extreme. A vegan who argues that we should raise our miniature carnivorous felines as herbivores? Obligate Carnivore would surely represent the fringe of the fringe.

Obligate Carnivore

But I was wrong. On both counts. Rather than help my entry about vegan pets, it made me rethink it entirely until I decided not to write it at all. And yes, the book did make me laugh, but not by taking veganism to higher heights of absurdity. Obligate Carnivore uses vegan cats merely as a jetée to write hilariously about veganism and life in general; it is legitimately (and intentionally) amusing.

Far from being the fringe of the fringe, Gillen is veganism at its best. His ultra-logical and humorous take on animal-product-free living gave me the first and probably only sustained nostalgia I’ve had for veganism since quitting two years ago. It wasn’t enough to make me vegan again — I can’t imagine anything outside of convoluted hypotheticals that would accomplish that — but Obligate Carnivore reminded me why I had been vegan in the first place.

I liked Gillen’s writing so much, I took the next step and Googled him. Through Gillen’s Facebook profile, I learned he was no longer in the vegan cat food business, and was now making short funny videos through his company Liv Films. I emailed Gillen, told him about this site and asked if he would agree to be interviewed.

It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out by now that he agreed.

Meson

Most vegan books are grim, somber and dull. That is not the case with Obligate Carnivore. Your own work aside, do you find veganism to be an ultra-serious movement?

Jed Gillen: Definitely, but this is true of any social movement.  It’s not like feminists or pro-lifers are a bundle of laughs either.  I think this has more to do with the activist mindset than veganism specifically. To some extent, I think it’s just that activists feel very strongly about their chosen cause and think that humor would dilute their message (incidentally, they are 100% wrong about this).  I also believe that, just as pedophiles are drawn to the priesthood, many people are drawn to activism as an outlet for unrelated psychological issues.  The fringes of every movement, both on the left and on the right, could all probably benefit from some group counseling.

Read More

--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Theme created by: Roy David Farber and Hunson. Powered By: Tumblr...
1 of 2