Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
The message is that some animals matter but there’s no need to be extreme. They don’t all matter equally and it’s perfectly fine to harm and kill them as long as we are ‘concerned about husbandry’.
Let’s keep the focus on veganism as it truly is; honest, simple and clear. Vegans stand against violence, against creating victims.
During this month of the media year when veganism is widely
misrepresented as a dietary fad and a menu choice that we can ‘try out for
size’, there are several articles and interviews circulating where
celebrities are given air time, ‘personalities’ who for some reason imagine
that the sudden change in their eating pattern now qualifies them to discuss
and inform about veganism.
I can imagine the ‘raising awareness’ keyboards firing up at this point but
there’s something here that just has to be said. There is no doubt that
celebrity status opens doors to media circulation that those who actually
know and understand the subject are seldom afforded. I’ve just watched one
such interview where the topic of a ‘try it for a month’ celeb with a farmer
was the ‘concern that vegetarians and vegans have about animal husbandry’
and the difficulties local farmers face in competition with ‘factory farming
operations’.
My jaw quite literally dropped. It’s hard to know where to even start with
such a basis for any discussion about Animal Rights. In fact it’s a basis
that specifically precludes all possibility of a discussion about Animal
Rights; it’s a discussion in which animal use is assumed and taken for
granted, an accepted fact centring a PR pitch in favour of local farming.
The ‘discussion’ has nothing whatsoever to do with veganism and could well
be mistaken for a publicity stunt by (in this case) the dairy industry.
Menu choices
For starters, only someone who regards veganism as a menu choice would
conflate ‘vegetarians and vegans’ as if they were in any way similar.
Vegetarianism is indeed a dietary restriction whereas veganism is a moral
and philosophical stance against the violence of all the uses that our
species makes of others. For the sake of brevity I won’t dwell here on all
the reasons why they are not connected in any way other than the letters
shared by the two words, but for those who are curious, please check out
Vegan and vegetarian – why they are not similar or the slightly shorter In a
nutshell: the victims of vegetarianism.
Animal Welfare
To then go on to say that vegans have ‘concerns about animal husbandry’, is
once more a serious and fundamental misunderstanding of the whole vegan
ethic. Concern about animal husbandry aka ‘welfare‘ is the term given to a
set of standards developed by the animal use industries themselves, in
collusion with their supporters and enablers, that detail methods of
exploitation and use. ‘Welfare’ in the context of our use of other species,
has come to focus on consideration of the degrees of the torture to which
they are subjected; the details of the environment in which they are
unnecessarily confined, the means by which their bodily integrity and
reproductive systems may be unnecessarily violated, the methods by which
they may be unnecessarily surgically mutilated, the means and duration of
their transport to their place of unnecessary death, the methods by which
their unnecessary killing can occur and so on.
It is at best naďve to think that any regulations, including those that
misleadingly use the word ‘welfare’ in their description, are in ANY way
designed to protect the feelings, wellbeing or individual integrity or
autonomy of these ‘resources, commodities and commercial assets’. Indeed,
any lessening of the level of torment to which our victims are subjected is
purely coincidental because the purpose of ‘welfare’ regulations is to
safeguard the commercial value of those who are deemed to be resources,
commodities and assets by reassuring the consumer public that they can buy
the products of violence and death without their conscience being troubled.
I have written frequently that making judgements about what we think are
reduced levels of harm and calling for yet more legislation about such
levels, is still promoting harm. And promoting harm to our needless victims
is not vegan, however we choose to represent ourselves.
Animal Rights
In complete opposition to this, stands the Animal Rights position, never
more eloquently stated than in the words of the late Tom Regan.
I regard myself as an advocate of animal rights-as part of the animal rights
movement. That movement, as I conceive it, is committed to a number of
goals, including:
There are, I know, people who profess to believe in animal rights but do not
avow these goals. Factory farming, they say, is wrong-it violates animals’
rights-but traditional animal agriculture is all right. Toxicity tests of
cosmetics on animals violates their rights, but important medical
research-cancer research, for example-does not. The clubbing of baby seals
is abhorrent, but not the harvesting of adult seals. I used to think I
understood this reasoning. Not any more. You don’t change unjust
institutions by tidying them up.
What’s wrong-fundamentally wrong with the way animals are treated isn’t the
details that vary from case to case. It’s the whole system. The forlornness
of the veal calf is pathetic, heart wrenching; the pulsing pain of the chimp
with electrodes planted deep in her brain is repulsive; the slow, tortuous
death of the raccoon caught in the leg-hold trap is agonizing. But what is
wrong isn’t the pain, isn’t the suffering, isn’t the deprivation. These
compound what’s wrong. Sometimes-often-they make it much, much worse. But
they are not the fundamental wrong.
The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our
resources, here for us-to be eaten, or surgically ·manipulated, or exploited
for sport or money. Once we accept this view of animals-as our resources-the
rest is as predictable as it is regrettable.
~ Tom Regan
Read more here -
The Case for Animal Rights
So what harm do the uninformed do?
Lets just have a recap about why we’re in this fight for Animal Rights. In a
single year:
That’s a hell of a lot of bloodshed, a sickening number of lives. THEY are
who we’re fighting for. They are depending on us and they need us to be
absolutely clear about what they need. They need consumers to stop demanding
their use and their deaths for the products they put in their shopping
trolleys. They need us to be vegan.
Yet we live in a world of celebrity adulation where celebrity status allows
the uninformed to reach the ears of their admiring public without the
challenges that other mere mortals would face. And through those whose
absence of knowledge is not seen as any kind of impediment to their
discussing ‘veganism’, far from ‘raising awareness’ about the victims of our
species, a completely different message is proclaimed to a non-vegan world
only too happy for the reassurance.
The message is that some animals matter but there’s no need to be extreme.
They don’t all matter equally and it’s perfectly fine to harm and kill them
as long as we are ‘concerned about husbandry’. This is such an utter
betrayal of our victims that it’s truly heartbreaking that some will hear it
and think, ‘Yeah, now I know about veganism’.
Yet when we look back at the words of Tom Regan, at ‘abolition’, at
dissolution’, and ‘elimination’; there’s nothing in there about competing
with ‘factory farms’.
Let’s keep the focus on veganism as it truly is; honest, simple and clear.
Vegans stand against violence, against creating victims. To live vegan is to
recognise that every individual, whatever their species, has the right to
own their body and their life.
Be vegan. Today!
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