On Creating Abolitionist Literature
If you’re starting an abolitionist group (wink wink, nudge nudge), you need literature on veganism, right? Dave directed me to the Friends of Animals Vegan Starter Guide, and I LOVE IT. Now, it’s 24 pages and not exactly written for your average village idiot. It’s a serious work, well-written, and covering some very interesting bases, without a hint of pop culture or kitsch. This is either a plus or a minus. I think it’s a plus, but I can see how some might view it as a minus.
I think it’s a plus because this isn’t a joke. I am ambivalent about the way we often dumb our topic down, particularly to reach college students, as if they’re unable to have a logical, rational conversation devoid of expletives and filled with complete sentences. As if they need to be convinced that something is "cool" before they do it, and convincing them that it’s right isn’t enough. My husband and I have chosen to be child-free, at least for the last seven years (despite the fact that he’s quite enamored with his own face, and I’m quite obsessed with the idea of giving a foster child a home. We agree to disagree for now.), so I say this as a person who is not a parent, and you parents out there could be laughing uproariously. But I was once a kid, and I was a kid with an overly developed sense of injustice. Not authority and rules, heaven knows, but justice.
What I would like to see, in a shorter document, is a vegan message that is unapologetically abolitionist and doesn’t focus its argument on suffering ("a clear, unequivocal vegan education," as Professor Gary Francione wrote in his blog this week) . When I think back to when I became a vegetarian, two things were occurring:
- My beloved 13-year old kitty was getting old (she lived until 19!), and I wondered why I found the prospect of eating her so vile. When I was a tot I asked my parents why we didn’t eat cats and they gave me some ridiculous spiel about how some animals are for petting and some are for eating. I would have none of it. The older I got, the more unacceptable it became to eat animals.
- However, my intolerance of eating animals collided with the start of college and all the activists focused on was the pain. The suffering. The cruelty. And I became well-versed in that component, and the abolitionist component atrophied.
I share this story because if there had been abolitionist literature to avail myself of, perhaps I would have been able to blossom into an abolitionist directly, rather than going through the painstaking new welfare phase, which ended a scant year ago with my introduction to Professor Francione. Now that we have the theory and the shortcomings and faux victories of welfare have been outted, don’t we owe it to future generations to be intellectually honest and focus on nonviolence and respect for the lives of nonhuman animals, whom we simply have no right to use?
this is a good post with some useful links:
1. the friends of animals Vegan Starter Guide is generally well-done (regardless of what one thinks of friends of animals). this document to some extent also, clears up the long-standing misunderstanding of the terms vegan and vegetarian referring back to the historical roots of the former.
2. the link to francione's blog where he suggests that the ar movement really needs a theoretical foundation with a baseline of veganism
a comprehensive approach should include these components:
1. vegetarian diet, specifically health,environment,ethics (originally suggested by john robbins) rather nicely expressed in concise form here:
http://towardsfreedom.com/veggiechess/goVeg.html
2. animal (ab)use in various arenas (entertainment,research,fashion etc)
3. a clear definition of vegan, specifically the avoidance of all animal products (not just the dietary reference it has acquired thanks to incorrect popularization of the word)
4. a deontologically based rationale for the abolitionist point-of-view, which btw is the only valid point-of-view because it looks at things from the perspective of the oppressed instead of the conveniences of the oppressor.
until the ar movement agrees to a unified theory, the practice will continue to be fragmented.
Yes, maybe I am partial (I work for Friends of Animals), but I think our Vegan Starter Guide is fabulous, too! Leaving out all references of pop-culture, I believe, is its strength and appeal. Surely, those who read it find its intelligent, well-articulated information a welcomed breath of fresh air. I sat on the lacto-ovo vegetarian fence for many years, and even though I have picked up more than a few "guides" over the years—the ones featuring graphic images and sound-bytes geared towards those with Attention Deficit Disorder—I wasn't thoroughly convinced until someone attempted to give me some credit; that I am intelligent enough and worthy of hearing the facts without all of the pornographic hyperbole. I love to give out our Vegan Starter Guides, as I am surprised, over and over again, how positively people react to them. I wish there was more vegan abolotionist literature along these lines; guides that stated that this movement isn't about the "reduction of suffering," but rather the end of animal exploitation altogether.