The Huffington Post recently published an article by Bruce Friedrich of PETA called “Why Animal Activists Should Support Incremental Reforms to Help Animals”. I’d suggest reading it through before reading the rest of this article, as he makes some excellent points. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ok great. So, reading the comments on there, and the comments I got when I posted it on the vegaroo facebook page inspired me to write this article, which is something I’ve been wanting to write for a while as someone committed to vegan outreach, while also working as a campaigner for an animal welfare organisation.

I get a lot of flack from vegans for working on a welfare campaign and see a lot of mud flung in the direction of welfarists, and I’m here to add to Mr Friedrich’s arugment for why vegans should support all steps towards improving the lives of animals. To be clear I’m not telling anyone how they should focus their individual work and energy. We all have limited time and resources and should make the most of it. Rather, I’m saying it’s counterproductive to criticise those working on welfare reform.

To make real progress for animals we need people working on both. We need the abolitionist vegans who recognise that humans enslave animals for our benefit and work to educate people and move them towards a vegan lifestyle. But for every one person who recognises this enslavement, there are 99 who willfully ignore it, find justifications or excuses for it, or most likely just don’t care. Welfarists work to make sure that in the interim, while we wait for those other 99% to see the light, that the animals they’re consuming can at least lead better lives.

The cold hard reality is that the majority of people will tell you that they would “never go vegetarian” let alone vegan. I point to my parents as an example usually, to which someone replied “But they’ll die off eventually.” Callous, yes, but I see the point.

Abolitionists are not stupid of course, and none would say that this kind of “conversion” (though I hate to use a word linked to religion, I’m going to borrow it for the sake of analogy) is going to happen over night. It’s not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog. It’s going to take decades of education, reaching out to people while they’re young, etc. I certainly agree with and support this approach. The downside to welfare campaigns, they argue, is that it makes people feel better about eating “happy meat.” But I would argue that this is a good thing.

You’re still moving people up the morality ladder. You’re getting them to acknowledge that animals don’t deserve to suffer extreme cruelty. Of course we wish they would all realise that no animal deserves ANY suffering. But the fact is that most people could not care less.

The campaign I work on is to end the live export of sheep. It’s regarded as one of the most shamefully awful animal practises in Australia and certainly easy to make the connection to slaves on ships, dying painful deaths and suffering awful slaughter. It’s going to take many years before we end this trade and even then these animals are still going to be turned into meat. They just won’t have to suffer an agonising month at sea first.

Getting people to care about this issue is one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my career. If we are going to spend years getting from point A to point B, how long will it take to get to point Z? In Australia, farmers are gods, and we are the #3 consumers of meat in the world. Moving the masses to veganism would require a major cultural change. Making people care just enough about the suffering of animals to pay an extra 10 cents for free-range eggs may seem like a teeny tiny baby step, but that’s because our task is monumental.

Working as a campaigner has taught me how slowly the government changes and how difficult it can be to sway attitudes. Many welfarists are abolitionists who just live in the real world. It’s easy to spout on about moral philosophy from behind a keyboard. I know that in order to affect change you sometimes have to make compromises. And when you tell people they have to do all or nothing, it’s a lot easier to do nothing.

When I posted that HuffPo article, one commenter asked me what I would do with $1 million if I had it to spend helping animals. Ever the realist I have to point out, I don’t have a million dollars. Nor do most organisations. There’s a reason why – there are simply not enough vegans to support organisations that can affect large-scale change. It’s not an issue you can fundraise on. But you know what you can fundraise on? PUPPIES! Which is why animal welfare organisations have more mainstream appeal.

Now I’m not saying that it’s not possible. I would love to see an organisation in Australia working on vegan campaigns. If anyone would like to give me a million dollars, that’s what I’d do. Rather than spending it in one go on a large campaign, I’d invest it into setting up a sustainable organisation that could continually work on vegan outreach.

But until a rich benefactor comes my way I’m going to continue working on welfare reform 40 hours a week, writing vegaroo and hosting vegan events in my spare time, and living a kickass vegan life that I hope inspires others.

(Editor’s Note: Tim doesn’t write a lot for vegaroo but when he does he goes full-on kick-arse editorial style. I also recommend this post from his personal blog: If Trees Could Scream. Please note, though, that the opinions expressed here may not necessarily represent all vegaroo writers.)

There are so many things wrong with “Vegans and the Quest for Purity”, Harold Fromm’s misinformed screed against veganism—or, rather, against the fictional ideology he believes veganism to be—that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I’ll start with these two: Fromm completely misrepresents what veganism is about, and while attempting to tear down the straw-man he built, he defends a callous, selfish personal ethic apparently without realising that every one of his arguments could just as well justify brutality towards other people.

Attacks on vegans are nothing new, of course, but Fromm seems to believe he’s made an insight that has escaped not only every vegan on the planet, but all of our previous critics. “The unspoken concept behind the debate over vegans is ‘biocentrism.’” OK, sounds interesting. What is it? Let’s consult the interwebs:

Biocentrism states that nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many^[3], and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part, adversely affect us as well^[3][4], whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview^[3].

It sounds pretty reasonable to me, and it sounds like Mr Fromm wouldn’t disagree:

My own diet is very high in plants and low in meat, and my carbon footprint is very small indeed, but mainly out of concern for my own health and the planet that keeps us alive. Beyond that, I’m an admirer of J.M. Coetzee, Michael Pollan, and Singer, and I well approve of their revulsion at the brutal treatment of animals raised for our consumption. I think vegetarianism is admirable. I would recommend it.

Great! So what’s the problem?

Read the rest of this entry »

So yesterday I was thinking I should get a “fanny pack” to carry change for the Sydney Vegan Bake Sale. And then I realised that my innocuous American slang probably means something profane here so a friend clued me in that I should call it a “bum bag”. Hahaha our terms are equally silly! Anyway… point of the story is that I googled for bum bags and found this interesting Melbourne-based company called Happy Cow.

Happy Cow makes bum bags, shoulder bags, belts and other accessories using recycled leather. That is to say, leather scraps that are leftover from furniture makers because they are too small to be made into chairs. They posit that this is an ethical and eco-friendly alternative to buying retail leather products.

While I would certainly agree that it is more ethical than contributing to the demand for leather I can’t help but still feel a little bit… icky about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought it would be interesting to compare two of the first restaurants reviewed here on vegaroo: Funky Pies and Peace Harmony (both located in Sydney), as they have distinctly different approaches to veganism as it relates to their marketing.

Although Funky Pies talks a lot on their website about their food’s eco-friendliness and general “good karma” they opt to use the term “plant-based” in describing their ingredients rather than the “v-word”.  I’ve also heard anecdotally that they wouldn’t put up a flyer for a vegan event in their window because they didn’t want customers to realise they were eating at a vegan establishment.*

Contrast this with Peace Harmony whose vegan literature abounds on the restaurant’s walls, their menu, and website. It would be virtually impossible, in their sit-down location anyway, to dine here without knowing your food was vegetarian.

So which approach is better?

Read the rest of this entry »