And right on the heels of all the articles talking about the sexism involved in vegan activism, we have some gross sexism coming from the meat industry. I’m not sure Carol Adam’s book title “The Pornography of Meat” has ever had this literal a representation before. These are some of the sickest images and I can’t even see how omnis would be enticed by them.
As many of you know, I don’t believe we should exclude one cause to promote another. That’s why I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the vegan/animal rights/animal welfare communities (I had to throw animal welfare in there because I’m going to be talking about PETA who is definitely not either a vegan or animal rights organization regardless of what they say). Not that the feminist movement does much or even really cares about animal rights as a rule. Most feminists are omnis who I’ve found don’t like to hear that veganism and animal rights is a feminist issue. However, since the feminist movement doesn’t directly counter the animal rights movement strictly to further their own cause, I won’t be saying anymore about that side of things.
I don’t know how many people reading this have played any of the Harvest Moon games but basically they are sim games where you run a farm. You grow crops, raise cows for milk, sheep for wool, and chickens for eggs. Now, here’s the thing about the game. You never kill your animals and the nicer you are to them the more milk/eggs/wool they produce. And if you don’t take care of them they will stop producing milk/eggs/wool.
I was reading a help guide for one today and read something that both pissed me off a bit and made me roll my eyes at the same time. The person said that they loved this game because it was so educational, and that they had no idea how farms worked before playing. I was really blown away at their comment since I thought that pretty much everyone knew that there was no such thing as the “friendly family farm”.
I’m vegan for a number of reasons, the main one being that I don’t believe animals deserve to be held captive, tortured and/or killed anymore than I believe humans do. Animals are sentient beings who experience fear and feel pain just as real as any human. After all, humans are merely animals.
As a feminist who fights for women’s rights, as a bisexual in support of queer rights, as a proponent of civil rights and as an anarchist who doesn’t believe in any kind of hierarchy, I feel that supporting animal rights is perfectly in line with my other beliefs.
Ask people to name an animal rights organization and a great majority of them will probably name PETA. However, those of us who are abolitionists know that PETA is pretty damn far from being an animal right organization. What most people don’t know is that there are actually two kinds of people in the animal movement, those for animal rights and those for animal welfare.
Anyone who is truly fighting for animal rights is fighting for an end to the commodification of animals. We don’t believe that humans should be using animals for their own gain or entertainment. We believe that all animals should have the right to live a free and natural life without human interference.
So, I overheard a conversation the other day about dog and cock fighting. My father-in-law says that they’re both so horrible and doesn’t understand how anyone could condone either. I immediately thought to myself that this is such a hypocritical thing for him to say since he eats chicken. Anyone who has ever done an ounce of research into animal agriculture would know that our “food” chickens are treated just as bad and sometimes worse than those used for fighting.
I’m Angie Bowen, the voice here at Voice of Dissent. I’m an artist/designer living in the mountains of Colorado. I’m very passionate about feminism and abolitionist animal rights so you can expect to hear a lot about those two topics. I’m also just starting to study anarchy and Marxism (and still don’t really know which fits with my own beliefs more yet), so you can expect musings on those topics as well. And obviously, since I’m an artist, you can expect to see quite a bit of artwork as well as articles about other artists.
