Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Karen Davis, PhD,
UPC United Poultry Concerns
June 2018
Anthony Bourdain was NOT a hero. He was a braggart who got off on abusing animals before the camera and equating ethical vegetarians with 'terrorists. I mourn for his victims, not for the loss of him.
Art by Nigel Burroughs
Once again I thank the MANY people who have thanked me privately and
publicly for sticking up for animals and animal rights over a Meatopian
Monster and his followers. [See
Regarding Anthony Bourdain: Thank You for Reading and Writing] One reader was particularly aggrieved by my
invocation of Hitler, which I did in part to draw attention to the
cheesiness of some of the rhetoric over Bourdain’s suicide and the chatter
about how he was “evolving” and other blushing sentimentalisms that can only
be uttered when the victims of a notably cruel individual are “just animals”
instead of humans.
So to those wondering whether I “care” about humans . . .
Regarding Hitler: I became so ill learning about Hitler and Stalin in
college in the 1960s that I had to leave school and see a psychiatrist.
I’ve written elsewhere about the connection I later made between the
attitude and behavior of Hitler and Stalin and the attitude and behavior of,
speaking abstractly, the poultry industry, animal agribusiness, and human
beings generally toward our other-than-human coinhabitants.
I got involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1962 at Westminster College
in New Wilmington, PA and later worked as a volunteer in Washington, DC for
Sterling Tucker’s organization during the Poor People’s Campaign and the
March on Washington, in which I took part. I have always hated cruelty and
injustice and degradation inflicted on anyone and have turned this visceral
revulsion into conscious, productive advocacy work for over half a century.
My work before I founded UPC in 1990, twenty-eight years ago, included being
a teacher of kindergarten children in a poor black neighborhood in Baltimore
where I taught in a daycare center called, prophetically, The Little Red
Hen.
For 5 years I was a juvenile probation officer in Baltimore City in the
1970s where I counseled hundreds of teenagers and their families in the most
depressed parts of Baltimore.
I managed an apartment building in San Francisco, also for 5 years, in a
part of the city where drugs and people forced out of mental hospitals by
the government congregated and were preyed upon by the corner stores which
took their welfare checks in exchange for cheap wine. As apartment house
manager, I worked successfully to make a better life for my tenants, most of
whom were elderly people on Social Security.
I taught English at the University of Maryland-College Park for 12 years,
during which time I founded the student Animal Rights Coalition in 1989.
As for what the Jewish people and other victims of Hitler endured, it was
incommensurate, but so was that of the 93 million victims of Stalin of whom
we hear little, and the countless Native Americans whom the Europeans
exterminated, enslaved, mutilated, raped, and forced from their homelands.
Most Americans know nothing of the horror of the Europeans’ arrival on this
continent and what they did to both the human Native Americans and the
nonhuman Native Americans. As I write in my book More Than a Meal: The
Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality: “While it is fair to say
that turkeys were not treated particularly well by the Native Americans, a
worse fate awaited them under the European invaders and their descendants,
who conducted a full-scale assault upon the species” (p. 43). And not just
on turkeys, but on everything and everyone. Self-adulation and saccharine
sentimentality aside: “God” did not “give us” this land, and it has not
benefited by our presence.
And yes, it is still a shock to realize the torture and degradation,
enslavement, murder and misery endured by African Americans in the South and
elsewhere at the hands of their fellow humans – from the 18th Century on.
These atrocities are mere glimpses of the atrocities humans have been
perpetrating against one another throughout history. However, in terms of
numbers alone, our animal victims surpass anything we can imagine. Right
here on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, millions of chickens are in hell
every single second of every day and night.
Anthony Bourdain was NOT a hero. He was a braggart who got off on abusing
animals before the camera and equating ethical vegetarians with
“terrorists.” Talk about projection! He made his celebrity mainly on his
“bad boy” stunts toward animals, which millions of viewers got a sick thrill
out of watching. There is so much pathology in Bourdain and his adoring
fans. Worst of all is so-called animal advocates slobbering and blubbering
over him and calling for a “toast with fine wine” for his “contribution” to
humanity, and because he hanged himself. Since clinical psychology has been
invoked to excuse him, to his “depression” let us add our own Stockholm
Syndrome and Stockholm Syndrome by Proxy.
Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering all committed suicide. Rapists and
murderers hang themselves in their jail cells. Suicide is not per se a
reason to mourn, let alone celebrate, someone’s life or death, nor is the
fact that he or she could be “charming,” was a celebrity, had a flair with
the pen or an eye for the camera. So what.
There you have it, my answer. I mourn for his victims, not for the loss of
him.
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