There are many reasons why vegans don't drink milk – the male calves who are killed at birth or raised in solitary crates to become “veal,” the brutal toll that modern intensive milk production takes on the bodies of dairy cows. But this moving video from Mercy for Animals tells a story that, in its own way, says it all. Certainly, it says all one needs to know to say “no.”
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Saying it with video ... and music
Six years ago, a friend and associate asked me to produce a Christmas video of a different kind – a video, using footage shot in North America and Europe by her investigative group and others of the “farm to plate” experience of countless animals we rarely see in any other context than, say, a warm and fuzzy Christmas dinner. Hence the commissioned title – “Do They Know It's Christmas?” – and the timing: it was released on YouTube on December 21, 2007.
You can view it here.
Unfortunately, the version I had wanted to release was largely set to KD Lang's sublime cover of Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah,” but I was unable to get permission to use it on time. In fact, the permissions people at Sony wound up doddling so much, I concluded they simply couldn't be bothered. So a year later, I uploaded that original version – slightly tweaked – without permission. So there! I also used excerpts from a couple other carefully chosen songs without even trying to get permission. I had gone rogue! The resulting video, “Hallelujah, Silent Night,” is embedded right here, below the next paragraph.
You can view it here.
Unfortunately, the version I had wanted to release was largely set to KD Lang's sublime cover of Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah,” but I was unable to get permission to use it on time. In fact, the permissions people at Sony wound up doddling so much, I concluded they simply couldn't be bothered. So a year later, I uploaded that original version – slightly tweaked – without permission. So there! I also used excerpts from a couple other carefully chosen songs without even trying to get permission. I had gone rogue! The resulting video, “Hallelujah, Silent Night,” is embedded right here, below the next paragraph.
The Witness – a screening and a review
One of the most moving – and surprisingly delightful – documentaries in the world of animal rights advocacy is now free to view online. I reviewed it when it came out over a decade ago (reprinted below). Here it is: the gripping story of a “wise guy”-style New Yorker who became a passionate animal advocate – and a never-look-back vegan.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Little Buddha
Sometimes it takes a morally precocious toddler to help us tell right from wrong.
(To watch this extraordinary video in English, view it here on Youtube where you can click on the transcripts icon next to "add to" just below the video. The translation will then scroll below the video in real time.)
I must have started leaking tears around the same time the boy's remarkable mother did. How many parents just say “shut up and eat your octopus!” Flash forward five years, and this loving, fair-minded little boy may be happily chowing down on a Big Mac with his mother – such are the pressures and inducements of our meat-mesmerized culture.
Or he and his lovingly flexible mother may be helping to lead the movement against our species’ history of violence.
(To watch this extraordinary video in English, view it here on Youtube where you can click on the transcripts icon next to "add to" just below the video. The translation will then scroll below the video in real time.)
I must have started leaking tears around the same time the boy's remarkable mother did. How many parents just say “shut up and eat your octopus!” Flash forward five years, and this loving, fair-minded little boy may be happily chowing down on a Big Mac with his mother – such are the pressures and inducements of our meat-mesmerized culture.
Or he and his lovingly flexible mother may be helping to lead the movement against our species’ history of violence.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
As long as I can't free you, I am bound to help you
Simple compassion and fundamental moral logic say we should strive to alleviate the unnecessary suffering of anyone who is unjustly imprisoned or exploited no less vigorously than we fight for that person's freedom. The two struggles – so-called “welfarism” and “abolitionism” in the case of animal advocacy – are neither contradictory nor incompatible. In fact, in my experience, they’re very highly correlated among the most hard-working animal advocates. Uncompromising abolitionists like Gary Francione and his followers who are hostile to all animal welfare efforts and even achievements are among the exceptions, as are true welfarists who believe it’s acceptable for people to exploit and kill other animals for selfish human purposes as long as we’re reasonably nice to them.
Finally, in my view, when humans “possess” other animals in a benign, nonviolent symbiotic relationship, there is no need for “liberation.”
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Organic Foods Suck! ... says sucky study
Last fall, one of those deliciously contrarian studies came out that grabs headlines but doesn't deserve it. It turned out the flashy study from Stanford University was as much a case of false advertising as the organic foods it portrayed in that light. Annoyed by the study's flaws, I took it to task for The Aquarian. Here's a tweaked version of what I wrote followed by a brief update.
From The Aquarian, Winter 2012
Organic Foods Suck: Study
Actually,
the study does
By SYD BAUMEL
Like a tsunami of cold water on the
good name of organic food, the story was all over the media early in September. You pretty much had to be living off the grid to miss
it. The headlines were
withering enough to dry out a rack of organic grapes:
Facing the Hunter
To nonvegans, a vegan diet typically sounds like the culinary equivalent of a medieval hair shirt or a masochistic vow of chastity.
"You can't even drink milk or eat eggs???" (It's always framed as "can't," as if we're doing penance or have joined some fundamentalist religion*).
No, we can't - I mean won't. But the surprising thing is how bloody great (no pun intended) a vegan diet can be, even for a guy like myself who a) loves to eat, b) loves almost all animal foods and would happilly eat them if they grew on trees, and c) mostly eats his own cooking (I have no training, I don't follow recipes). Thirteen years on, my enjoyment of my vegan diet just keeps getting better as I explore more and more vegetables and other plant-based foods, not to mention the ever-improving variety of faux animal products.
But I digress.
At least hypothetically, a vegan like myself could at some point in his life be faced with the choice of eating meat or starving, or becoming seriously ill. This is not so hypothetical for me. Were it not for the supplement L-carnitine - a nonessential nutrient mostly found in red meat, but easily produced from other dietary nutrients by most vegetarians, but not me - I'm quite sure I would be a basket case. That is what I start to become - a human rag doll - every time I stop taking the supplement.
But what would I do if there were no carnitine supplements and no one, not even the best vegan dietitians and doctors in the world, could keep me vegan and healthy? What to do if I crash-landed in the Arctic Circle, in a post-Apocalyptic world, and all I could eat was seal?
First, there's a possibility that my conscience would stop me from doing it, especially if I continue to have no dependents (beyond a couple of adoptable cats) and to continue not getting any younger. Why am I more important, more worthy of life, than the many** animals who would eventually die to sustain me for the rest of my life?
But more likely I would bite the bullet and do what I must to survive, at the expense of other lives. After all, I - and all other vegans - do already. Even our food is come by at the expense of many mice, rabbits, lizards and other field animals where the crops that feed us grow (but not nearly as many, it must be emphasized, as are killed to produce an omnivorous diet). The inescapable reality is that we all leave a footprint of animal death and suffering. Rational veganism means avoiding or minimizing as much of that harm as we possibly can.
So if I couldn't survive or be healthy without eating meat, where would I get it?
My first go-to choice would be meat from the most humanely treated animals available (in this thought experiment we're imagining that animal byproducts like milk and eggs, as well as fish and seafood, are unavailable or won't suffice). I've been to small humane-oriented farms near where I live where the animals, to all appearances and based on my trust of the farmers (fellow travellers in the war against factory farms), have a really good life - a life worth living, as the expression goes. Most of them are killed young (that's the nature of commercial meat production in today's world) and typically in small slaughterhouses where humane handling may not be a sure thing (the big slaughter plants often are caught in the act of abusing animals, whether deliberately or as a byproduct of their relentless high-speed disassembly practices). Still, this is a distinctly lesser evil for anyone who must eat meat.
But there's another option I would find comparably acceptable: the meat from hunted animals. Not just any animals hunted by anyone with a rifle. But if someone like Canadian author David Adams Richards does the hunting (or even me, having learned to do it his way), I could accept that too as a distinctly lesser evil.
A couple years ago I was asked by the Winnipeg Free Press to review a small book - an extended autobiographical essay, really - in which Richards' makes a case for his traditional brand of hunting, the kind, he says, practised by all the respectable hunters in his native rural New Brunswick. Here it is. Judge for yourself.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 22, 2011 J9
You have to hunt for Richards' message
Reviewed by Syd Baumel
Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life
By David Adams Richards
Doubleday Canada, 224 pages, $30
Unless you're an avid reader of the author's Governor General's Award-winning fiction, it's not until the very last sentence that you learn where his title comes from. It's an enigmatic choice.
But then this is an enigmatic piece of non-fiction. In this era of animal activism and embattled Atlantic sealers, one might expect a spirited intellectual defence by the New Brunswick-bred David Adams Richards of his beloved yet "misunderstood way of life."
But there's little of that in this slim volume, and what there is is personal and repetitious.
Rather, this is a defence by storytelling: story after New Brunswick hunting story, as if told to mates around a campfire in a rambling stream of consciousness.
This vivid immersion in Richards' woodland passion does rub off, assuming you're game to wade through thickets of hunter-speak.
Even a vegan if compelled to eat meat to survive might prefer the conscientious way of hunting practised by Richards and the hunters he respects to stalking factory-farmed animal parts at the supermarket.
It's a hunt, Richards insists, that takes no pleasure in taking life; that would rather miss bagging that elusive 20-point buck if it might turn out to be the female of the species with dependent young or if that risky long shot might wound without killing, condemning the prey to a slow and painful death.
It's a hunter's code that commits to "hunting the wounded down" (to quote a title of a Richards novel) even if it takes days, so the animal doesn't suffer and the meat isn't wasted.
Richards' problem -- and he's wounded and dangerous about it -- is that ignorant city-slickers, including fellow literati, look at conscientious hunters like himself and see a stereotype: the redneck taking potshots between swigs of beer, the trophy hunter with a heart of stone. But Richards despises hunters like these and tells a few stories at their expense.
Poor man: it's as if urban cultural warriors are preying on endangered woodland sportsmen.
But Richards doesn't draw that ironic parallel. Indeed, there's little facing of the hunter in the mirror here.
Not even when recalling his earliest boyhood kills does Richards describe his emotions when sighting his prey, pulling the trigger and watching an innocent die by his hand.
There is only a parenthetic aside where he confesses to once killing a doe: "I never felt good about it, and I mention it because I never felt good about it." Instead, it's always fast-forward to "dressing" (cutting and gutting) the prey or tracking it, if wounded.
But this is glossed over, too. Not a word about what it's like to finish off a gasping deer, not a whiff of ripped open belly and steaming entrails or the pathos of a great carcass hauled from its woodland home.
But Richards does face the supermarket hunter -- with relish. Three times he throws down the gauntlet: "those who eat meat should be morally obligated to kill at least once in their lives that which they eat."
He doesn't mean fire a captive bolt into the skull of a cow or pig, hoist its unconscious body, slash its throat, bleed it, saw and chop it.
Nor does he suggest that urban meat-eaters (like Richards himself, a 60-year-old Torontonian now, he thinks his hunting days may be over) be morally obligated to witness how their shrink-wrapped prey are raised (the battery cages, the sow stalls, the feedlots) and shipped to slaughter (the densely crowded truck rides without food, water, heat or AC, sometimes lasting days, sometimes deadly in themselves).
But that kind of reality check might be too disturbing even for a hunter to face.
Winnipeg writer and editor Syd Baumel is the creator of eatkind.net and a vegan hunter of faux meats.
*Okay. You got me. For some people veganism is like a fundamentalist religion.
"You can't even drink milk or eat eggs???" (It's always framed as "can't," as if we're doing penance or have joined some fundamentalist religion*).
No, we can't - I mean won't. But the surprising thing is how bloody great (no pun intended) a vegan diet can be, even for a guy like myself who a) loves to eat, b) loves almost all animal foods and would happilly eat them if they grew on trees, and c) mostly eats his own cooking (I have no training, I don't follow recipes). Thirteen years on, my enjoyment of my vegan diet just keeps getting better as I explore more and more vegetables and other plant-based foods, not to mention the ever-improving variety of faux animal products.
But I digress.
At least hypothetically, a vegan like myself could at some point in his life be faced with the choice of eating meat or starving, or becoming seriously ill. This is not so hypothetical for me. Were it not for the supplement L-carnitine - a nonessential nutrient mostly found in red meat, but easily produced from other dietary nutrients by most vegetarians, but not me - I'm quite sure I would be a basket case. That is what I start to become - a human rag doll - every time I stop taking the supplement.
But what would I do if there were no carnitine supplements and no one, not even the best vegan dietitians and doctors in the world, could keep me vegan and healthy? What to do if I crash-landed in the Arctic Circle, in a post-Apocalyptic world, and all I could eat was seal?
First, there's a possibility that my conscience would stop me from doing it, especially if I continue to have no dependents (beyond a couple of adoptable cats) and to continue not getting any younger. Why am I more important, more worthy of life, than the many** animals who would eventually die to sustain me for the rest of my life?
But more likely I would bite the bullet and do what I must to survive, at the expense of other lives. After all, I - and all other vegans - do already. Even our food is come by at the expense of many mice, rabbits, lizards and other field animals where the crops that feed us grow (but not nearly as many, it must be emphasized, as are killed to produce an omnivorous diet). The inescapable reality is that we all leave a footprint of animal death and suffering. Rational veganism means avoiding or minimizing as much of that harm as we possibly can.
So if I couldn't survive or be healthy without eating meat, where would I get it?
My first go-to choice would be meat from the most humanely treated animals available (in this thought experiment we're imagining that animal byproducts like milk and eggs, as well as fish and seafood, are unavailable or won't suffice). I've been to small humane-oriented farms near where I live where the animals, to all appearances and based on my trust of the farmers (fellow travellers in the war against factory farms), have a really good life - a life worth living, as the expression goes. Most of them are killed young (that's the nature of commercial meat production in today's world) and typically in small slaughterhouses where humane handling may not be a sure thing (the big slaughter plants often are caught in the act of abusing animals, whether deliberately or as a byproduct of their relentless high-speed disassembly practices). Still, this is a distinctly lesser evil for anyone who must eat meat.
But there's another option I would find comparably acceptable: the meat from hunted animals. Not just any animals hunted by anyone with a rifle. But if someone like Canadian author David Adams Richards does the hunting (or even me, having learned to do it his way), I could accept that too as a distinctly lesser evil.
A couple years ago I was asked by the Winnipeg Free Press to review a small book - an extended autobiographical essay, really - in which Richards' makes a case for his traditional brand of hunting, the kind, he says, practised by all the respectable hunters in his native rural New Brunswick. Here it is. Judge for yourself.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 22, 2011 J9
You have to hunt for Richards' message
Reviewed by Syd Baumel
Facing the Hunter
Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life
By David Adams Richards
Doubleday Canada, 224 pages, $30
Unless you're an avid reader of the author's Governor General's Award-winning fiction, it's not until the very last sentence that you learn where his title comes from. It's an enigmatic choice.
But then this is an enigmatic piece of non-fiction. In this era of animal activism and embattled Atlantic sealers, one might expect a spirited intellectual defence by the New Brunswick-bred David Adams Richards of his beloved yet "misunderstood way of life."
But there's little of that in this slim volume, and what there is is personal and repetitious.
Rather, this is a defence by storytelling: story after New Brunswick hunting story, as if told to mates around a campfire in a rambling stream of consciousness.
This vivid immersion in Richards' woodland passion does rub off, assuming you're game to wade through thickets of hunter-speak.
Even a vegan if compelled to eat meat to survive might prefer the conscientious way of hunting practised by Richards and the hunters he respects to stalking factory-farmed animal parts at the supermarket.
It's a hunt, Richards insists, that takes no pleasure in taking life; that would rather miss bagging that elusive 20-point buck if it might turn out to be the female of the species with dependent young or if that risky long shot might wound without killing, condemning the prey to a slow and painful death.
It's a hunter's code that commits to "hunting the wounded down" (to quote a title of a Richards novel) even if it takes days, so the animal doesn't suffer and the meat isn't wasted.
Richards' problem -- and he's wounded and dangerous about it -- is that ignorant city-slickers, including fellow literati, look at conscientious hunters like himself and see a stereotype: the redneck taking potshots between swigs of beer, the trophy hunter with a heart of stone. But Richards despises hunters like these and tells a few stories at their expense.
Poor man: it's as if urban cultural warriors are preying on endangered woodland sportsmen.
But Richards doesn't draw that ironic parallel. Indeed, there's little facing of the hunter in the mirror here.
Not even when recalling his earliest boyhood kills does Richards describe his emotions when sighting his prey, pulling the trigger and watching an innocent die by his hand.
There is only a parenthetic aside where he confesses to once killing a doe: "I never felt good about it, and I mention it because I never felt good about it." Instead, it's always fast-forward to "dressing" (cutting and gutting) the prey or tracking it, if wounded.
But this is glossed over, too. Not a word about what it's like to finish off a gasping deer, not a whiff of ripped open belly and steaming entrails or the pathos of a great carcass hauled from its woodland home.
But Richards does face the supermarket hunter -- with relish. Three times he throws down the gauntlet: "those who eat meat should be morally obligated to kill at least once in their lives that which they eat."
He doesn't mean fire a captive bolt into the skull of a cow or pig, hoist its unconscious body, slash its throat, bleed it, saw and chop it.
Nor does he suggest that urban meat-eaters (like Richards himself, a 60-year-old Torontonian now, he thinks his hunting days may be over) be morally obligated to witness how their shrink-wrapped prey are raised (the battery cages, the sow stalls, the feedlots) and shipped to slaughter (the densely crowded truck rides without food, water, heat or AC, sometimes lasting days, sometimes deadly in themselves).
But that kind of reality check might be too disturbing even for a hunter to face.
Winnipeg writer and editor Syd Baumel is the creator of eatkind.net and a vegan hunter of faux meats.
*Okay. You got me. For some people veganism is like a fundamentalist religion.
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