The Only Vegan Who Ever Saved An Animal’s Life Stole Him From A Factory Farm

Armory of the Revolution

Of all the people on Earth whom animals should be able to count upon for help it is us vegans.

Vegans care enough about animals to alter our lifestyles. We make a commitment to animals every time we eat a meal or don clothing.

We are the most ethical people who have ever lived.

So why are we letting the animals down?

Veganism is proof of one’s values and ethics, but veganism in itself doesn’t save a single animal’s life.

We have deluded ourselves that by eating veggie burgers and tofu we are saving lives.

Wrong.

What we are doing is acting in accord with our values that we do not eat our friends. We will not be complicit in the torture and murder of our fellow creatures. But that is all theoretical.

All being vegan does to the animal industry is reduce the price of meat by a tiny…

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Not Just The Victims You See

This is a post about a contentious topic: abusive people, so I’ll say straight away I talk from a view-point of someone who has witnessed abuse [as a child and teenager], as someone who has been in various forms of abusive relationships, and someone who has unintentionally caused abuse.

Fun fact: Not a one of those cancels out the other. I did not stop being a victim because I was a victimiser (an abuser). I did not become a victim nor abuser knowingly. I would bet my last pound that when you read ‘someone who has been in an abusive relationship’ and straight after ‘someone who has unintentionally caused abuse’ you think of them immediately as separate circumstances or events; the point is, whether they were or not, shouldn’t be what gets called in to question: at what point, then, does someone who’s been hit get to hit back? There’s a thin line between self-defence and ‘waiting til you can’t be called an abuser’ and I’ve known both types.

Do I believe there are people who have not suffered abuse in their life-time yet still like to, being fully aware of themselves as individuals and not just imitators of behaviour they haven’t questioned, abuse others? …well, I might, if I had ever met someone where the criteria matched. As it is all of the people I have known, whether it be from living with them, being friends with them, or talking to them (and I’m aware of the potential for lies to be more easily thrown into it when you don’t have the opportunity to catch someone out in a short space of time), have been thrown in front of a bus, so to speak, before they started throwing others in front of a bus. And whether they started doing it because they’re angry or because it’s the way they’ve been socialised (or both) – there’s the identified issue.

Angry people with no outlet and no ability to work out their behavioural issues without further reprimand and isolation. People who are repeating their behaviour and suddenly they’re being told they can’t act that way when it’s all they’ve known because no one else wanted to step in earlier until they were the ones being affected. This isn’t an apology; this is a call to say that the use of dichotomies has got to stop; in an ideal world, there’d be no abusive people at all, but as it is, the world we’re currently living in doesn’t just have ‘victims or abusers’. Yes, get current victims out of their circumstances, but stop pretending that no research has been done on why abusive people exist. You want to remove a person suffering abuse, great. That is not the only problem to exist. It does not erase abusive people from existence; it does not change what their existence is or has been, and life will go on with them looking for people to abuse, because ‘control’ and ‘power’ are consequences of teachings of interaction.

Yes, condemn a person for being abusive, but you can’t condemn that as their whole personality until you can prove to me they’ve wanted to and worked toward being that since they were young and it is utterly unchangeable.

‘Killing with kindness’ here refers to turning a blind eye to another victim, who can be shunned and ignored because you can’t see – and chances are never will know if their trauma is that tightly packed up – their perpetrator[s]; because this is the second type of victim: the one who no one got to in time in the first place, and now it is to everyone’s convenience to pretend they were always that way. Too, let’s not pretend that the more preferable type of survivor is the one who is gratuitiously swooning under being rescued to the mainstream; most people don’t care for the stories of survivors who manage to dust themselves off afterwards quicker than others and get going again, who are grateful for those who were near when they needed them but aren’t planning to spend the rest of their life simpering about it. Too, let’s not pretend that the world really is based on people destined to be victims and those destined to be abusers. By the time we care to see victims who have become abusers it’s only to see them as destroyers – and often, the sad truth is, we don’t want to try and change people who are hard work.

Change is Not A Seminar; It is Not a Weekend Retreat

People are cowards, disorganised, or are content as they are; any combination or all of these can be in effect. What we must remain aware of is that motivation is not a powerful blast of energy received from a mystical source; if we want to be educated, if we want change, if we want results, we do not work only on the end-goal – that is, of knowing what we are interested in – but of all the steps this entails: what we have to learn, how we learn it and, most importantly, how we can use it. Motivation does not come from wanting every individual step, but from the goal we desire to achieve. If cowardice stops this, you must be the one to change yourself; discover what your weaknesses are and destroy them, step by step. Anyone who is a true coward will keep putting in excuse after excuse; change has never been gained by succumbing to fear, and all idle attitudes are mere habits of inactivity.

If we are disorganised, it is merely a matter of knowing where we all stand: we may all want to delegate, rather than be delegated to, but even those who really believe cannot stand up to those who have more to offer; even generals started as soldiers. Even revolutionaries listen to others. If you’re disorganised because you’re intent on leading, but you have no idea where you’re going, step down; revolution – and the future – isn’t a car to be driven by one person, it’s the whole world and it has no leaders.

If you’re content as you are, and as a consequence, believe in non-violence, all you’re really preaching is inactivity. If there were fights in the past you could’ve suffered less by by fighting rather than inaction than you can’t say you didn’t engineer at least some parts of your pain. If you’re content as you are, no preaching, no education, no ‘shock photos’ or undercover videos will change you. You keep yourself as scrap or you make yourself useful; there is no hand, not that of a mystical being or that of a comrade, that will drag you along for the whole journey. You go as far as you want to go. But do not tell others your end is a good place to stop when they can keep going.

The future is for us; and though we all die we do not all share the same end.

We go as far as we want to go.

Personal Post #3

I don’t think there should be too many more after this, but good news: my mum had her first vegetarian meal yesterday, and she’s trying a full vegetarian diet. This has happened a month after I’ve gone vegan and started to make her aware of the reality of [factory] farming, and the health benefits of a meat-free diet. I’m hoping it will lead to a transition to a vegan diet, but right now I’m just glad and proud about this first step!

Current Ambitions

I’m working on a series of consecutive essays at the moment [that I might retool into one larger piece of work after] focusing on the ethics of animals, with a concentrated approach to various points such as

• Can murder be a right, and even in such a state, does that make it right?
• No means of death can be humane, even if all suffering is removed before and after, except by consent (such as assisted death); all that cannot consent and is put to death is wrong (even if ‘necessary’ such as putting potential companion animals to sleep due to high rates of strays). Note: I’m not quite sure where I stand on putting animals to sleep if they’re suffering; it’s done on the presumption that they do not understand their suffering, yet we do not automatically put terminal patients to sleep – the simple knowledge of what one is dying from does not equate knowledge enough to understand the whole of it [or their suffering]; at what point is enough knowledge enough to constitute being alive at that point by one’s own choice?
• The only distance of rights is the species-barrier [subject to platforms of ‘privilege’ put upon certain animals over others, yet still entirely victim to the whims of this other species – us – they’re around regardless of their own existence].
• No reformation or attempts to gain more ‘humanity’ can be achieved so long as it ends in murder.
• Are we able to remove ourselves from the suffering of others by judging the putting out of life [death] as an end to all we have otherwise contributed to?

Personal Post #2

I went with sociology.

Also I should get a preliminary start in July, which is basically sitting in on the courses I’ve chosen for a week, then officially starting in September.

Addressing Animal Abuse

Animals in Society

In New South Wales (Australia) a recent RSPCA case occurred banning “puppy killer” Nathan Thompson from having anything to do with animals for 10 years, after being charged with four counts of animal cruelty that led to the death of nine puppies (story, here). With the outpouring of public emotion on social media we thought it timely to consider our responses to animal cruelty.

In 2007 we conducted a study, published 2009, aimed at assessing public opinion about the Australian Criminal Justice System’s (CJS) approach to animal cruelty.  Using rankings of 1=Not at all important, 2=Slightly important, 3=Important, 4= Very important, 5= Extremely important], we asked over 1200 members of the public the following questions:

1. How important do you think it is for the CJS to take deliberate companion animal abuse seriously – when the victim is a DOG?
2. How important do you think it is for the CJS…

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Personal Post

I have an interview tomorrow for college to study Humanities and Social Studies. I’m going to study Government & Politics, History, and either Cultural Studies or Sociology – unless I can somehow swing it to study both as well as the other two.

Super excited.

Beyond “Animal Rights”

A great read for anyone who believes in more than the ‘purity’ of themselves through their non-meat life-style.

Species and Class

By

Alessandra Seiter

This piece was originally published on Chickpeas & Change.

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I want to complicate the movement’s primary framing of its goal as achieving “animal rights.”

First, I’d like to lay out my understanding of veganism – built upon the work of other radical activists before me – as a radical politics steeped in anti-speciesism (if we define speciesism as the belief of the inherent superiority of human beings over all other beings on earth). As Ida Hammer notes, veganism is a social change movement “based on the […] ideal of non-exploitation,” and certain practices like eating an animal-free diet logically flow from this principle that we should not exploit others (November 2008). This view of veganism as a struggle for societal change rightly frames vegans as those “who seek out the root of a problem so that [they] may strike at it for a solution” (Dominick)—the definition of a radical…

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DAIRY – Daring to Exploit

“A creature born into slavery is a creature born for slavery.” – Rousseau (The Social Contract)

Dairy, alongside meat, is not a necessary evil, but, so long as it keeps making money, it is an evil worth existing.

Even the dairy cow eventually joins the meat herd. When not bred exclusively for ‘good-quality’ beef, they get turned into fast-food beef (think McDonalds, Burger King, etc) and cheap mince. But before the day of execution arrives there are many days – the years allotted to them, in fact – of cruelty and suffering to endure.

The life of a dairy cow starts young. As soon as they are able to become pregnant (around 12-13 months old), they are artificially inseminated (which, to an animal incapable of consent, amounts to rape). For a creature that can live to be twenty years old, it’s the equivalent of expecting an 11-14 year old girl to carry around a child; just because it can happen at that age doesn’t mean it’s healthy, beneficial, or (arguably) natural for it to occur.

Smaller farm-holdings are more likely to pair the cow off with a mating bull, but the results are the same for all involved: after nine months gestation the cow gives birth – and then the calves are taken away forever after just 12-48 hours of being with their mum. Just as human mothers are aware of an instant bond between their baby, so too are cows (and pigs, chickens, sheep…) and they are just as devastated by the removal of a baby as a human mother would be. But feelings are irrelevant where money is concerned.

If the calf is female she becomes a milk producer like her mother; if the calf is male, one of three things will happen to him:

1. He becomes a beef bull, fed up to become prime beef and will be slaughtered at around two years old.
2. He is taken away to become veal and locked in a crate barely bigger than he is. Veal calves are tethered down so they can’t even stand up. This is to keep his body soft, his muscles undeveloped, and his meat tender. He is also kept in the dark for the whole time he is alive just so his flesh looks pale on our plates. This results in blindness. By the time it comes to be killed at around 16-20 weeks veal calves have to be carried to the kill-room as they cannot support themselves.
3. He will be shot. This option is usually taken because there is no need for him to be a veal calf, and no need for him to become a beef bull. This can occur within the first four weeks of a calf’s life, but usually and regularly happens between a day and a week of being born. The equivalent would be shooting a toddler in the head.

Dairy cows, of course, need to give birth in order to produce milk, and dairy production is no innocent sector. In small farm-holdings or even in sancturary settings, a cow can produce milk for some time after her calf stops feeding if her feed is kept up and she is being milked (which prompts her hormones into thinking she is still being suckled from); this makes it no less exploitative (it is much the same as if a new mother had just stopped suckling her own child, and then other women had the audacity to latch their child onto her breasts; if it sounds obscene it’s because it is – for all species). In factory-farm settings, there is no guaruntee that feed quality will be kept up, so the most efficient option to make sure she keeps producing milk is to keep getting her pregnant – and then taking away all calves so they don’t get what is produced only for them.

You can be assured the dairy milk you drink has been directly stolen from a mother cow and her calves, and is responsible for her sons being killed in one way or another, as well as paying for her daughters to be put through the same slave-hell; thus, whole generation of families are stolen, enslaved and killed for others – our – pleasure. Just as slaves of the pre-industrial era suffered the same torment – minus being cannibalised – for centuries for the very same reason: we wanted what they could give with no cost to ourselves. The only difference between all livestock and poultry nowadays is, as with slaves, there are no consequences – it’s a right, even – for the reality that is exploitation.

What part of that sounds humane?

Dairy cows live on average for about a quarter of their natural life-span. Milk production starts dropping after five years of being pregnant for nine months out of every year. They don’t stop producing milk altogether – it just drops below acceptable levels. A bit like if you were to start struggling at work due to overload, but instead of getting talked to – or even fired – you were killed. Humanely, of course.

By the time the day of slaughter arrives, the cow has probably suffered from mastitis at least once, a condition caused by the friction from milking machines, and which afflicts 50% of all dairy cows. She is probably suffering from laminitis too, a condition which cripples her.

For five years of her life she will have carried, almost constantly, 40lbs of milk in her udders – far more than before human selective breeding intefered.

For five years she has had child after child snatched away from her. All animals are capable of nurting and sharing love – it is human arrogance that chooses to believe otherwise. Love is not unique to people.

For five years she will have been raped by human hands for human profit, over and over.

All of this comes to an end when her milk yield drops and, like every other cow before her, her throat is ‘humanely’ slit, quite often while she is still conscious, aware and bellowing.

The purchase (and subsequent consumption) of milk, cheese, cream and butter is a purchase of a share into that exploitation, theft, rape and murder.