An introduction to veganism, Part 1 (Transcript)
I’m going to talk tonight about veganism and different ways that we might look at veganism. Are any of you familiar with the animal welfare/animal rights debate that is happening? I’m not going to talk about animal rights very much tonight, but this is a third way of looking at veganism beyond that split that you might read about a lot. So I’m just calling it beyond animal welfare, but it’s also beyond animal rights as well.
I think most of you know my background. I was hanging out at BOAA a bunch, years back. I worked for Vegan Outreach for almost two years and am now independent, working in the area.
So we’ll just cover these three major topics tonight. We’ll talk about animal welfare a little bit, talk about veganism and how it relates with animal welfare, and talk about an anti-oppression view of veganism, which is the one I’ve been working with for the last year or so.
I’ll just talk briefly about animal rights. So there’s animal rights and there’s animal rights. ‘Animal rights’ is a colloquial term we use to talk about anything that is related to animal rights or animal welfare. So it’s a little confusing when we talk about animal rights: which one do we mean? So when I’m talking about animal rights, I mean the technical definition, where it’s based on some theory of rights, and these could be legal rights, these could be moral rights. The main confusion for me with animal rights that I’ve seen is that there are many, many formulations of animal rights. And just as with human rights, we have things such as the right to housing, the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, we have patient’s rights, all sorts of different rights. And there are many different avenues for coming up with what exactly is a right, what rights do we have, who has rights. So there’s a similar sort of split in the animal rights community, where there are lots of different ways of looking at this, including who has rights, which animals have rights, what rights do they have, which rights do we have, do some animals have more rights than other animals.
These are the two animal rights organizations that I know of. There’s the Friends of Animals, which has been around for a long time, and the Great Ape Project, which is an interesting example because it’s a speciesist animal rights group, because they focus specifically on a particular animal. And then IDA up in Marin I think may be an animal rights one, but I’m not exactly sure.
I’m going to talk about animal welfare mostly tonight for the first half. Have any of you seen this book? I have a copy here. This book is important because pretty much the modern animal welfare movement came out of this book, which was published in the mid-70s. So you may be familiar with this. The idea is that suffering is the basic problem, and that we should work to minimize suffering. So it’s pretty straightforward. And like I said, this book had a tremendous influence; almost all the leaders of the animal welfare organizations are directly influenced by this book. So it’s an interesting book to read for that historical reason alone.
The key here is that because we are focusing on suffering, it doesn’t talk anything about use, so there’s a single-minded focus on suffering.
I want to talk a little about the motivation for talking about animal welfare, for talking about animal rights, for talking about anti-oppression. I think it’s important for us to understand what the basis is for our own personal veganism. There are many different reasons why somebody might choose to be vegan. I’m not saying that one is the right version, but I think it’s good for us to understand the implications of the various schools that there are, so that when we’re doing our activism, we understand how it’s influenced by the philosophical basis. So this might seem a little heady, but it really has great practical implications.
I’m talking about this just in a factual way, so it’s not meant to judge one as right and the other as wrong. So it’s just a comparison.
So these are the basic keywords for animal welfare. And if you see any of these in a pamphlet or a website or in conversation, this usually indicates, we’re talking about an animal welfare perspective: suffering, cruelty, treatment, abuse, humane, factory farms. So this is the common stuff that we hear about day to day.
You can see here are various groups. This is Humane Society’s mission statement: talks about cruelty. Vegan Outreach talks about suffering. Farm Sanctuary talks about abuses and factory farming. Pretty much every organization except for the few listed at the beginning are animal welfare organizations.
So, veganism. I had an interesting experience. I worked for Vegan Outreach for two years and I traveled to something like 20 states and talked to a lot of people about veganism leafleting at colleges. One time I was invited to speak with a group of pig farmers at Washington State University on the eastern edge of Washington in Pullman. So I went in there not actually realizing what I had gotten myself into; it was not the smartest move! So I went into this room full of people who knew everything about raising pigs, because that’s what they did, that was their club on campus. They raised pigs and sold them.
I went in there with the Vegan Outreach animal welfare perspective where it talked about the suffering of animals on the farms and talked about all the different things that happened to them. In the pamphlet, there was a picture of a mother sow being belted to the floor, and they took one look at that and they’re like, we don’t do this, and in fact your information is just wrong, because I come from a long line of people who raise pigs and we don’t do this. By this time, I had been working with Vegan Outreach for over a year and I had heard every single argument that people made and so I went back and said, “Yeah, but not everybody raises them this way, these industrialized farms are bad,” and so forth. They kept coming back at me with all these different answers. And it was clear that my knowledge base was very different from theirs. They really knew what they were talking about, and so that also undermined my own credibility. The big problem for me was, no matter what I said, they had a response. And even though I had practiced for over a year, a year and a half, speaking with people about this, I wasn’t able to make any headway.
Then I actually called Miranda and I was like, “I don’t know what happened. This is so crazy!” It was a really jarring experience and it also brought back to me a lot of other experiences that I’d had on colleges prior to that, where people would talk about, “yeah, I support you, I eat humane meat” or “I buy the free range eggs.” Or people would say, “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” or people would say, “these practices don’t happen,” or whatever it was. There are lots of different things that people come back with. Not all of them are necessarily good reasons not to be vegan, but there are some which are very difficult to refute. So for example, what if somebody says, “I buy the humanely raised meat”? Well, the standard answer is to say, “transport and slaughter are the same, so that still isn’t a way out for you.” And then the person comes back and says, “no it’s not, it’s not the same, I see it right there.” And the standard answer is then, “well not everyone can eat this way. If everyone ate this way, there wouldn’t be enough land, or resources, or so forth.”
So that’s the usual answer. But at some point, we start losing our grip on “eating animals is something we oppose.” That interaction with those farmers was a real big shock to me because it brought back all those conversations I had had. And every single day I would have at least one conversation like that where it didn’t feel quite right to me, where what I was saying wasn’t exactly in line with what I believed.
So I started thinking about why this happened because that was a very difficult experience for me. Like I said, it brought back a lot of other things that were a little off-putting to me in the past, but I never thought too much about it.
So one of the big things for me is if you look at Peter Singer’s book, he actually says in this book, “[D]o not feel obliged to go to great lengths to avoid all food containing milk products.” “[R]eplace factory farm eggs with free-range eggs if you can get them; otherwise avoid eggs.” So this is the so-called father of the modern animal welfare movement and he’s not talking about veganism. And I think it’s interesting because when people read his book, what they got out of it was, “go vegan.” But actually he doesn’t talk about that here.
And this was something that was an ongoing thing for me, where a lot of these vegetarian starter guides were not about veganism. They talk about vegetarianism. And even though they might actually be vegan inside, I think they all are, they don’t actually use the word vegan. So here you see a vegetarian starter guide, veg for life, veg living, guide to vegetarian eating, vegetarian starter kit, vegetarian starter kit, guide to cruelty free eating. So none of these talk about veganism directly. I always thought it was important to say the word vegan, so people know what we’re talking about, and not get confused with a diet that perhaps has milk or eggs. In leafleting with Vegan Outreach, a lot of times I saw how people did get confused. Even though the pamphlet might have battery cages right on the front, people would say, “I’m going to cut out meat, I’ll just eat eggs and dairy.” So I think the languaging is very important.
Another thing that bothered me is that aside from not saying vegan, it seems like they used to say vegan, but moved away from it. This is a vegan starter pack from Vegan Outreach from 2001, 2002, 2005, I can’t remember. So that was their starter kit for a long time. And then they came up with this glossy one a few years back and they took the word vegan out of the title. You can see here, “Staying a Healthy Vegan” became “Staying Healthy on Plant-Based Diets” and if you can read the small text here, it says, “the term vegetarian includes vegetarians who drink milk or eat eggs and vegetarians who consume neither dairy nor eggs. Although this article is focused on vegetarian and vegan diets, many of the nutritional concerns can also be applied to people who eat almost vegetarian diets, sometimes called “semi-vegetarian.” So you see there is a big retreat away from talking about veganism here.
So if you go back to Animal Liberation, we can see that aside from eggs and aside from dairy, which we talked about earlier, Singer writes, “So we must ask ourselves, not: is it ever right to eat meat? But: is it right to eat this meat?” So he’s not even talking about lacto-ovo vegetarianism in this book. And in fact, in some of his newer books, if you look at The Way We Eat, co-written with Jim Mason, he actually has an appendix in the back where he says, “here’s where you can buy the ethically raised meat.”
Of late, the groups have been starting to endorse animal products. This is Compassion in World Farming. I think it’s the largest European group, and they’re starting to hand out awards for companies who are switching to cage free eggs. It’s called the Good Egg Award.
I think it’s significant because they’re endorsing an animal product now, as opposed to saying this animal product is not good, they’re actually endorsing them.
We can see other examples of this. Animal Rights International. This letter caused a big brouhaha a few years ago when it came out in 2005. It’s signed by a lot of the local groups here and a lot of the larger national groups. It praises Whole Foods for their Farm Animal Compassionate Standards, which are their standards for raising meat in a humane way.
I don’t know if any of you have been to the Oakland Whole Foods. There’s a big slab of some animal’s body right there in the meat department. It’s about this big and it’s in a display window with lights on it. And this is what these groups are endorsing. It’s also notable that Peter Singer is the president of Animal Rights International. So he’s really leading the way.
This is the Humane Farm Animal Care. This is another certification program. You can see the ASPCA and the Humane Society are listed as partners and they’re actually more than partners: senior members of both of those groups are on the board of directors for this group. And you can see that they tell you where to buy beef, lamb, chicken, eggs, veal, pork, goat cheese, wool, lamb, anything you want. So they’re sending people to the places where they can buy these products. This is basically an advertisement for these companies to sell animal products.
Freedom Food. This is another really controversial one in the UK. This is a really big deal there because this has been really popular there and people are all into welfare friendly animal products. And if you click around on this website you can see there’s a page where these chickens are kicking soccer balls around and it’s really ridiculous.
Here’s a letter from the Humane Society, a fundraising letter. And it says “Help free hens from tiny cages by choosing cage free eggs!” A lot of people have worked on the Prop 2 and I think there is a difference between going from don’t eat [battery cage] eggs to buy cage free eggs, but it actually winds up being, in the minds of the people who we’re speaking with, sometimes it’s not so great of a divide. And, in fact, here it’s actually telling people to go ahead and do that which I think is a disservice to veganism.
This is the head of Farm Sanctuary way back when, years ago, talking on Larry King Live:
Larry King: Are you opposed to the eating of animals?
Gene Baur: Personally, I’m a vegetarian, but that’s a decision each of us has to make for ourselves.
Larry King: So those who want to be able to eat it should be able to eat it, you’re just saying that there’s a more humane way of treating them and killing them?
Gene Baur: Absolutely.
I think the way we talk about things is really important. I think the people who work for these groups and work on these campaigns, by and large, their hearts are in the right places. I think that once we start talking about things in a particular way and start framing things in a particular way, we start changing our thinking and then it starts going down this path where perhaps we were really staunchly vegan and promoting veganism and suddenly find ourselves saying that eating animals is okay. It may be that we feel that way, in which case that’s a perfectly fine thing to say, but I think for a lot of vegans that’s not acceptable because that’s why we’re vegan. So I think it’s important for us to look at what we’re starting from and make sure we’re staying true to what we really believe.
Not all these things I knew at the time, but these were the sorts of things that were really bothering me once I started wondering what happened at the pig farm. This is my theory for how it all works:
The basic premise is that we start from a desire to reduce suffering, which is something that pretty much nobody can argue with. So it seems very solid and I think it’s a perfectly great thing to want to do and to work on.
And then we start looking at the particular practices which inflict the suffering on non-human animals. This makes sense, of course, as well, so we can reduce the suffering.
And then we start working against factory farms, because factory farms are where 99% of the animals are confined, and I’ve actually said this myself, so I’m guilty of the same thing. I think it makes sense once we start from this premise to get the most bang for your buck, so to speak.
Next we start working on welfare reforms because that’s another way to reduce the most suffering on factory farms. So that all makes a lot of sense.
Now here’s where it gets a little weird to me, and that’s where we stop promoting veganism, because we’re working on welfare reforms, which are fundamentally incompatible with veganism. Because if we’re telling people the problem is the way we’re treating animals, it’s difficult to mesh that with a message that animal use is not okay. And that’s what I found time and again in speaking with people on college campuses. I started from reducing suffering, objecting to suffering, and people came back to me and said, “well, I just won’t eat the animals who were treated this way.” And it’s a very difficult thing to get past. I don’t know if any of you have had this conversation. For me, it’s really frustrating because I actually didn’t want people to be eating animals. I could either say, “No, what I really meant was I didn’t want you to eat animals at all” and look like I was very inconsistent, or I could say, “Well, I guess so. Go hunt your meat.” This is a sticking point that I think a lot of us run into. For me, this was also very confusing because the starting point of reducing suffering is very clear, it’s very obvious: how could anyone object to that?
The final step is that we start endorsing animal products. We can see this on the web sites of these various organizations, where they actually tell people where to buy eggs. Peter Singer in his book tells people where to get humanely raised meat. We’ve met a vegan who goes out and does a lot of outreach and he carries around with him a list of places where people can go buy humanely raised meat. And when he tells people, “Go vegan!” and they say, “No, I could never go vegan,” he says, “well, then go buy something from this list.” And I think that’s a really big mistake, personally. But it also makes sense. There’s a certain kind of logic to it which follows.
So when I called up Miranda that night in a frenzy, I suddenly understood actually the problem is not … this all makes sense, the problem is we started from the wrong point. So there’s something that comes before a desire to reduce suffering, that causes us to object to the suffering.
So then the cruel practices are something we can talk about, but bring it back to what the problem actually is. What I thought was the problem is the use without consent of animals, the use without their free consent of non-human animals by humans.
