Unless you’ve been living in a cave or are an average college student who gets his news from Sports Illustrated, you’ve surely heard about the avian flu by now. Oh yes, friends, this nasty little bugger also known by its influenza A subtype as H5N1, is basically coming for us. It is gunning hard, and with a few evolutionary mutations, it could become transmissible between humans. And then we could be staring down the barrel of a very long gun.
To borrow from Dirty Harry, “are you feeling lucky, punk?”
I’m not.
This is a nasty bugger. Like the 1918 flu, it ravages the young and healthy, and were it to mutate into a virus capable of being transmitted human-to-human, it’d likely take out some debatable number of millions of people worldwide. In short, this is something not to be fucked with. Nevertheless, it is important to understand some of the emergent problems, and in this way, I see the avian flu as a problem of both animal and human exploitation and oppression.
animal oppression
In all the reporting, there’s scant attention being paid to the fact that this is a disease that’s gained steam because of the problems with intensive chicken confinement. In his recent, excellent, and scary-as-hell book The Monster at Our Door
human oppression
Davis talks about the questions of intensive animal confinement in his book, but the real strength of his work is that it also highlights how this is a problem of human inequality as well. Because of the entrenched problems of global inequality and human oppression, we’re apt to see this disease spread even more rapidly. In discussing this, Davis writes that “Third World urbanization with the attendant growth of megaslums are responsible for turning influenza’s extraordinary Darwinian mutability into one of the most dangerous biological forces on our besieged planet.” Sadly, in the book, Davis paints a portrait of a world system that is besieged by urban poverty and people so poor in parts of the developing world that their chickens represent all of their worldly wealth. On top of all of this, public health sectors the world over have been gutted in favor of free-market solutions which under-value vaccine development as “unprofitable.”
fuck newsweek, again
Does much of this excellent analysis that Davis does come out in the pop media? Not really. And here’s where we take another jab at our beloved weekly ‘news’ mag Newsweek. Some of you may recall us telling Newsweek to fuck off a few months back, and we’d never miss another opportunity. In the most current issue, they have a small box describing what one can do to protect one’s family from the bird flu.
Given that intensive poultry confinement could be part of the problem, do you think Newsweek would ever look to the heart of the issue? Oh, hell no. Instead, they assure their readers that there’s no reason to stop eating chicken. Considering that I’m a vegan and any advice to eat chicken bothers me inherently, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this advice would get under my skin. But beyond that, doesn’t the advice of Newsweek basically ignore the role of factory farmed chicken and eggs in potentiating this whole disease? Hey, maybe instead of eating more chicken mindlessly, we could begin to think about what role our consumption of cheap, factory-farmed chicken might have in this whole scenario.
But why would we do that?
dirty harry, again
In the 1971 flick Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood says:
I know what you’re thinking: “Did he fire six shots, or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But, being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya punk?
I can’t help but feel like the guy who’s on the other end of the gun in this particular scene. I mean, is the sixth shot going to be fired, and are we going to watch as the world suffers under a virulent strain of the flu, potentiated by the oppression human and non-human animals? Or are we going to get our shit together and recognize that this massive and oppressive system is coming back to bite us in the proverbial ass? Pardon the black humor, but the chickens are coming home to roost.
you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya punk?
Even if you do, luck may not be enough this time. Only by toppling all of this interlinked oppression can we begin to fight the root causes of the spread of this disease. Until then, we’re going to be doomed by the systems that we’ve created.
Posted by Bob Torres 
Filed under: Over on our forums there’s an interesting thread that Gary (who runs the excellent animalwritings.com site) started that talks about how most Western meat eaters are a combination of schizophrenic and ignorant when it comes to the impacts of their diet on animals. Gary’s post finishes up with some pretty ace advice for getting meat eaters to think about their meat eating in non-confrontational ways, but just the other day, I found myself in this strange land of divided-consciousness about animals, and I thought I’d share my experience and frustration.
Our local NPR affiliate was doing their annual fundraising drive, and every year, they have people call in and donate on behalf of their pets. So instead of hearing something like “thanks for that generous donation of $40 from Ima Liberal in Liberalville, NY” you hear “Ima Liberal called in to donate on behalf of her dog Hillary, who loves to run and jump in the woods, and who goes completely bonkers every time our theme song runs.” This is an amazing tactic for our NPR affiliate, since during the hour or two that they run this, tons of people call in on behalf of Fluffy, Spot, and the other companion animals in their lives. In sum, this is definitely in the category of “cute,” or “completely fucking cheezy” if you’re a bit more cynical.
I only listen to NPR when I waking up, so I was half asleep when I heard this massive pet-driven fundraiser. I rolled over and mumbled something to Pleather about these people probably being meat eaters but loving their pets so much. And just as I’m saying that, the station mentions that one of the premiums is some massive quantity of cheese from a huge dairy co-op in VT and NY.
At that, I briefly contemplate calling the station and offering to pledge $100, but only if they say that I’m calling on behalf of the dairy cows who suffered to produce the cheese, and their now-dead veal calves. I mean, hey, why the fuck not? First, I have the sense that NPR will do almost anything for a pledge, including aligning themselves with particularly nasty corporate interests Second, if you can call in on behalf of a pet, why not call in on behalf of a dairy slave that’s living probably a tenth of its natural lifespan unnecessarily producing milk for humans?
Ultimately, I decided that I didn’t really have $100 to blow on this, and that it’d probably only alienate people further, even if the weak-kneed NPR types who fear offending anyone caved in enough to go through with my demand.
The point here isn’t to detail my half-awake insanity, but rather to wonder how it is that we punch through this veil of half-awareness about animal compassion. This weekend when we spoke to more than 150 people about veganism, I had the sense that we were making some leeway in getting people to think about these issues. Hell, a few people even told us so. But that’s at a veg food fair, which really is a stacked audience in most ways. So the question is, how do we break through to people like Ima Liberal who love their pets but who also go right ahead and cook a chicken or fry up beef? How do we puncture this idea of companion animal royalty?
If we can effectively think about ways of talking about this, I think we can make a lot of progress in getting the average person to think seriously about other animals. The problem is, how?
Our readings in class the other day focused on racism, stereotypes, and whiteness. We had a fairly long and protracted discussion on where racial stereotypes come from, what they mean for people who must live with them, and how they continue in society. Overall, things went pretty well. No one offended anyone else, nobody got into nasty arguments, and on the whole, it was a pretty thoughtful discussion.
After class, though, I was approached by a student from China. During the discussion, someone had mentioned stereotypes about ‘orientals’ and she was curious as to what these stereotypes were. She literally wanted me to tell her so that she could know in case she had to deal with them.
So, I told her.
“Well, probably the biggest stereotype is that Asians are smart and good at math and science.”
“But we are,” she replied.
Holding back a laugh, I said “Maybe so. But isn’t it maybe a little limiting? I mean, what if you aren’t good at math and you’re Asian?”
She agreed. “Okay, what else? Isn’t there something about our food?”
Gulp. How the hell was I going to say this?
“Uhhh, some people will make jokes that dogs and cats disappear when an Asian restaurant opens. Or that Asians eat dogs. They use this as a way of making Asians sound less civilized.”
She looked confused. “We do eat dogs. But they’re raised for that purpose. They don’t know any better.”
“Yeah, well, for some Americans, that’s really troubling. They think of pets as family, and so even Americans that eat meat would probably vomit if they ate dog knowingly. In America, people think it is wrong.”
She looked even more confused. “Of course you think that, you’re a strict vegetarian. But everyone else? Aren’t they being hypocrites? They eat pigs and cows and think dogs are any different?”
“Hey, I agree with you! I don’t eat any of it because I think eating any animal is wrong.”
“Yeah, but the rest of these people, they’re hypocrites. Who are they to judge us for eating dogs when they eat every other animal?”
“Good question.”
And it was a good question. There’s something really troubling to me about people who go to a McDonald’s drive thru with their dog in the back seat while they order a sausage McMuffin. How can people have such a massive disconnect between the animals they’re eating and the animals that they’re petting? And how can we make the connections to help them see the similarities?
Last week the smoking vegan and I met for lunch. For a variety of unimportant reasons, we ended up in the cafeteria near my office.
Here’s what went down:
After grabbing our trays, we slid up to the section of the cafeteria that sometimes has vegetarian entrees, desperately scanning for something good. In the past few weeks, there had been some nice vegan food. On this day, though, we’d not be so lucky.
“Is that vegan?” I asked, pointing to something fried, circular, and mysteriously labeled as “cutlet patty.”
The food service worker behind the counter looked at me blankly.
“I mean, does that have any eggs, meat, fish, dairy, honey, or anything else that comes from an animal in it?”
“Nah, it is VAY-gun,” replied the food service worker. Hearing this, the Smoking Vegan turned to me and flashed me a “if you believe that you’re on crack you fucking idiot” look. Taking note, I went on:
“Are you sure?” I asked, worried I was getting the blow off.
“Well, all this stuff is VAY-gun,” the food service worker said, casting her hand over a few steam trays, one of which contained pasta floating in a bath of cream sauce. Yellow oil was unattractively pooled in places where the pasta had not been disturbed. All in all, it was nasty looking, even for the ontologically nasty pasta alfredo itself.
“This is labeled ‘pasta alfredo,’ and that’s not usually vegan. Is it made with soymilk?” I asked, trying to politely remind the food service worker that milk was an animal product.
“I’m not sure. Let me go find someone.”
“There’s absolutely no fucking way that fucking pasta is vegan,” the Smoking Vegan interjected (note all the ‘fuckings’; we are, of course, talking about the Smoking Vegan). “Look at that shit, they’d never make that with soymilk. That’s heavy fucking cream. Vegan my ass.”
“Well, technically, your ass is vegan,” I responded.
“Fuck this, I’m getting a veggie burger. At least they’re vegan,” and with that, the Smoking Vegan skulked off to the burger station.
I hung around, waiting for another food service worker. I wasn’t going to eat any of this stuff, but I thought I should at least wait around to be polite. After all, I had started this quest.
Finally, minutes later, a higher-up appears.
“Well, these cutlet-things are VAY-gun but they have honey in them.”
“Okay, thanks, but lots of vegans don’t eat honey….”
At that point, the Smoking Vegan returns from the burger station, and hearing about the honey-vegan thing, is clearly on the verge of a brain hemorrhage. Before he can flip out, I interject.
“So, what about this pasta? Is that vegan?”
“Oh, that has cream and milk in it. It isn’t VAY-gun. But this other stuff is.”
“Okay, thanks.”
And with that, I do what I should have done to begin with: I get a veggie burger and french fries, and resign myself to eating VAY-gun junk food yet again.
Oh well, at least the company was good.
Don’t vegans just love to argue about honey? Today, as I picked up my latest copy of Satya Magazine, I was surprised to see an article by Dr. Michael Greger suggesting that honey is vegan.
Yeah, that’s right. He says that honey is vegan.
The following paragraph sums up his view pretty well:
I’m afraid that our public avoidance of honey is hurting us as a movement. A certain number of bees are undeniably killed by honey production, but far more insects are killed, for example, in sugar production. And if we really cared about bugs we would never again eat anything either at home or in a restaurant that wasn’t strictly organically grown—after all, killing bugs is what pesticides do best. And organic production uses pesticides too (albeit “natural�). Researchers measure up to approximately 10,000 bugs per square foot of soil—that’s over 400 million per acre, 250 trillion per square mile. Even “veganically� grown produce involves the deaths of countless bugs in lost habitat, tilling, harvesting and transportation. We probably kill more bugs driving to the grocery store to get some honey-sweetened product than are killed in the product’s production.
These are good points overall, but they miss one thing: honey is unnecessary cruelty. We may not be able to avoid killing insects when producing crops, driving to the store, or doing other daily activities. But it is really simple to avoid honey, and no one needs it to live. Why should we recklessly abandon our commitment to reducing cruelty in this area of our lives, particularly when it is so easy to avoid? As Dr. Greger points out, we can probably dissect our lives in a million ways to figure out all of the ways that we knowingly or unknowingly exploit animals, and this can lead to pointless navel-gazing. Nevertheless, this isn’t one of those marginal cases like animal products being in tires, or insects being killed to produce food. This is a clear-cut case. Honey kills bees. Honey is easy to avoid. Therefore, if reducing suffering matters to you, you should avoid honey.
Finally, to fend off a common critique:
Veganism isn’t about perfection, but it is about reducing cruelty to the greatest extent possible and respecting the life of other beings when we can. When possible, we should make choices that respect compassion and life. So why eat honey for the sake of expediency? Also, Dr. Greger makes it seem like this will help improve the public standing of vegans. I have my doubts. Most of the world sees us as so marginal to begin with that something like this isn’t likely to improve our standing much. With that being the case, why engage in what is an avoidable form of cruelty?
(p.s. should you doubt that bees deserve some consideration, I’d encourage you to read this article. )
The Harbourfront Centre hosts the Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair. One of the major sponsors of the Harbourfont itself is apparently a Canadian milk interest.
Put vegans around milk ads, and you can see what happens. (make sure you check the note on the picture!)
This, from MSNBC.com:
CONCORD, N.H. – Even after five years, Christy Pugh has no trouble sticking to her vegetarian regimen.
The secret to her success? Eating meat.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a bad vegetarian, that I’m not strict enough or good enough,� the 28-year-old bookkeeper from Concord said recently. “I really like vegetarian food but I’m just not 100 percent committed.�
(thanks to True Blue Semi-Crunchy Mama for the pointer).
Well, Christy, you aren’t a bad vegetarian. Know why? Because you’re not a vegetarian at all. The equation is actually pretty simple. Vegetarians don’t eat meat. If you eat meat, you’re not a vegetarian. It is really that simple.
Carol Adams calls these pseudo-vegetarians ‘saboteurs’ because they’re screwing with the very meaning of what it is to be vegetarian. If vegetarian means eating meat and chicken ‘on occasion’ then it might as well mean absolutely nothing. It loses all of its power and meaning.
This is where the article above comes in. The MSNBC piece uses the new term ‘flexitarian’ to describe people who are ‘mostly vegetarian’ but who just aren’t “100% committed” (the words of our friend, Christy, above). The article itself is about how wishy washy fools flexitarians are changing vegetarianism itself, and how some vegetarian publications are more than eager to go along. To wit:
“To target the part-timers many [publications] have softened their approach to meatless diets, even at risk of alienating the far smaller reader pool of true vegetarians.”
Their prime example, without surprise, is the dairy and egg industry lovefest of Vegetarian Times, which used to annoy me with its abundance of cheese-covered egg dishes even when I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian.
It is good that people are limiting their intake of meat. I applaud that. But why hijack vegetarianism with your flexitarian ways? My real gripe is that flexitarianism lends further legitimacy to the narcissism of american culture and the way it understands the choices of vegetarians (e.g. being veg*n for health is fine; being veg*n for ethics is weird).
I’m not trying to be the vegan police. I’m not trying to create an exclusive club. But this flexitarian shit is annoying, pointless, and threatens to confuse the meaning of vegetarianism. If you’re a flexitarian, congratulations! We’re here to help you go all the way. But don’t sabotage us by screwing with the meaning of vegetarianism.
(oh, and p.s. Molly Katzen, you suck! (if you don’t get it, read the article)).
I think the world is one giant free range idiot farm.
Apparently, we’re just growing idiots and letting them run around out in society. Free range idiots seem to be everywhere, just going about their business, getting in your way, slowing you down, and generally annoying you. But for some reason, there seem to be no shortage of free range idiots who think that free range animal agriculture is god’s greatest gift to people who can afford to eat free range meat.
By now, most lefty vegans are used to the right-wing attacks. You must know the familiar litany: meat is good for you, meat makes you manly, meat is traditional, meat is right, meat is good, meat makes you strong, meat gives you a big weenie, meat makes you happy, ‘i like the taste,’ etc., you name it. We’ve all heard it all a million and one times.
As a lefty vegan, the last place you might expect to get shit is from your lefty companions who—surely!—understand that your veganism is just another part of rejecting yet another form of intolerable oppression. But cross a meat-eating lefty, and man, you just may find yourself doing a birkenstock-ectomy from your own meaty bum. If you try talking to a meat-eating leftist about veganism or animal rights, you’re apt to hear in whiny tones just how great free range meat is, how we really can raise animals sustainably, and how free range is better because the animals “die happier.” (I’ve noticed that the person saying this is always forcing a smile under which they’re hiding a tiny bit of horror).
For the record, I’m tired of this shit, and I’ll never understand why these otherwise good-hearted lefties have to be so damn stupid on this point.
I’m a vegan (duh). I think using animals for our own purposes is wrong. I think eating animals is wrong. To me, it is pretty damn nice that animals enjoy the fresh air, frolic in the field, and have a good time before they die a horribly bloody death, but free range and organic production is still horrible exploitation. Organic milk is still about forced pregnancy, still about animals and their ‘productivity’ and still about the fact that if the animals aren’t productive enough, they’re killed. This may be more “sustainable” than conventional factory farming, but it certainly isn’t a joyous outcome, and it still reinforces the idea that animals are ours to exploit as we see fit.
When I’ve raised these points to the free range idiots, they always tell me that they’re happier eating meat if they know the animal lived a happy life and was raised well, as if this justifies the death. To me, it doesn’t justify the death; it simply helps the free range idiot justify the creeping feeling that what they’re doing isn’t right. For them, free range isn’t about making animals feel better: it is about making themselves feel better.
This post over at vegblog reminded me that I wanted to write an entry about an interview I read with Donald Watson in the latest Veg News.
For those of you who don't know, Donald Watson was the first to coin the term vegan back in 1944, and he started the Vegan Society in the UK. He's turning 95 next month, is still active in the vegan community, and still goes hiking (if that alone isn't a good advertisement for a vegan diet I don't know what is).
In the interview he comes across as being very sensible about veganism, yet of course compassionate. His six reasons for veganism are "it's humane, it's healthy, it's esthetic, it's pleasant, it's economical, and it's sustainable." He says other great things during the interview:
I thought yesterday ... the biggest industry in the world ... is animal exploitation, which is the one thing that veganism is opposing. Not just farming, but ... making [clothing] and everything else: medicines, vivisection, everything that comes from animals. And ... probably the second biggest industry in the world ... is the healing industry.
To a large extent man's illness comes from his trying to turn himself into something he never was intended to be, a carnivore or a parasite. If they are directly connected we are really on to something big. Aren't we? I should think mainly to my conviction that man is biologically not a carnivore or a parasite. I'm thinking particularly of milk drinking. We've got over 500 different mammals throughout the world and man is the only one who takes milk throughout life. All the others drink it as infants, then they're weaned and it's not available. It's only man who is capable of exploiting the reproductive nipple system of cows and goats and other animals. As a general system it wouldn't work. And although Nature gives us lots of examples of carnivores and vegetarians, it gives us no examples of lacto-carnivores or lacto-vegetarians. These are freak groups that never could have been intended as part of the natural scene.
I love how he makes dairy milk drinkers look like the freaks! It's great. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this interview with a vegan pioneer, even though some of the questions that he was asked were a little strange. Even so, the interview is interesting because it gives us a little perspective on the development of veganism throughout the 20th century.
I just got done reading George Will’s weekly column in Newsweek about Matthew Scully’s work (the author of Dominion and of an article in a conservative magazine about how we need to be less cruel to animals). The first thing I have to say is kudos to George for even writing about it – most people just ignore these arguments and avoid thinking about these issues.
And I’m not going to critique or analyze his essay (that’s Bob's department, since he does it so well), but reading it did make me think more about my own thoughts on animal welfare, which I’d like to talk about.
I’m all for more humanely treating animals – let’s start there. I think factory farming is abysmal and needs to be improved.
But, I have a real problem with those who advocate for animal welfare over the abolition of animal agriculture altogether, for several reasons.
If someone asked me “if we got rid of all factory farming practices and the animals lived a wonderful life and were killed completely painlessly and humanely, would you then eat meat?” – my answer would be NO. I do not believe that animals should be killed for my use at all. Killing them is making their normal lifespan shorter than it would be. Do I want healthy, young humans euthanized so they can be used for some purpose? No, so I don’t want animals to be either. (I can get all Star Trek or Twilight Zone on you here. Say an alien race came to earth and wanted to use humans for food. We are allowed to live in our houses and go about our normal daily business, but occasionally the aliens would come harvest a family and you’d be euthanized and eaten. Not fun. Who says the animals still don’t feel fear upon watching others of their kind being put to death?)
My other argument against the animal welfare position is that it just makes people feel better about eating meat, and MORE people would be willing to do it. We may be treating them better, but then we’d be killing even more of them. Peta’s new campaign is to get chickens killed by gassing them rather than cutting their throats. Yes, it’s a more humane way of killing them, but they still live miserable lives confined in their crates and you’re still killing them. All of that kind of reminds me of Auschwitz.
This is a tough issue for me, since I absolutely hate thinking about the animals being tortured in today’s factory farming practices. But, I think the way to deal with is for more people to become vegans, not to have them feel better about eating their chicken. Will says in his article not to worry, since Scully’s not trying to take away your BLT. Well, in my opinion, he should be.
Humane slavery is still slavery.
MakingA Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights explores the intersections between human and animal oppressions and their relation to the exploitative dynamics of capitalism. Combining nuts and bolts Marxist political economy, a pluralistic anarchist critique, as well as a searing assessment of the animal rights movement, Bob Torres challenges conventional anti-capitalist thinking and convincingly advocates for the abolition of animals in industry — and on the dinner plate.
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Vegan?
we don't eat nothin' that farts. or anything with a face. or anything from anything that farts or has a face. Basically, vegans avoid animal products to the greatest extent possible, with the overall goal of abolishing animal exploitation. No eggs, meat, dairy, honey, wool, leather, etc. This sounds onerous, but trust us, it isn't. Why kill to eat when you don't have to?
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