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Meat-Free Mondays - The Egg Industry's Best Friend, Part Two

6/26/2019

The egg industry seems to have very good reason to absolutely love Meat-Free Mondays. While reducetarians and celebs such as Paul McCartney celebrate the idea, the animal rightist can't help but wonder what people consume instead of animal flesh on the chosen day. As previously reported in this blog, the egg industry in the USA have claimed that Meat-Free Monday has boosted their sales of eggs, thus perpetuating the rights violations that occur in egg production.

In Britain (26/6/2019), Radio 5 Live's Drive show featured a spot on the increase in the sales of plant-based meats. However, in this 26 second audio clip, can you begin to guess what this person replaces animal flesh with on her Meat Free Mondays...

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60-70,000 Animal Advocates March in North America

6/11/2019

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Almost 30 years ago, on June 10th, 1990, thousands of people turned out for a "March for the Animals" in Washington DC. Interviewed in 2007, Tom Regan, author of the The Case for Animal Rights, the book that kick-started rights-based abolitionist animal rights in the 1980s, estimated that between 60,000 and 70,000 people attended. It remains the largest march that the animal advocacy movement has ever organised.

Regan can be seen to the right of the lead banner of the 1990 march.

Tom Regan says that this time was one of "great optimism in the movement" and the 1990 march enabled and ennobled its participants. In 1996, a second "March for the Animals" drew only 3,000 people. Regan declared it "a disaster." One explanation that Regan offers to explain this fall-off within six years was the firming up of the "sharp divide" between animal welfarists and animal rightists.

The Gary Francione countermovement offer the same analysis. See HERE. It seems that the welfare corporations grasped back the initiative in the animal movement. For example, between the two marches, the once radical People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) began their deradicalisation into a large welfare corporation. In 1992, for example, PeTA's Ingrid Newkirk took the reformist line against the abolitionism of Regan and Francione in a famous Animals' Agenda article - see HERE.

In the 2007 interview, Regan still held a critical view of how the animal movement had developed, saying that the most powerful national organisations had adopted a "corporate business model." He called for the democratisation of the movement away from the dominance of the national groups.

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AUDIO: Gandhi's "Talk" to Tom Regan leads to the Start of Abolitionist Animal Rights

6/3/2019

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When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi "spoke" to anti-war activist and philosopher Tom Regan, who could have predicted its far-reaching consequence?

In this 2005 interview, Regan explains how Gandhi's views on violence lead an ex-butcher to rights-based animal rights.

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The Case for Veganism by Donald Watson

6/3/2019

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Those who know me and my work will be aware that I seek to recover the radical vision of the vegan social movement pioneers which is rapidly becoming lost in vegan consumerism, and in efforts to reduce veganism down to the idea that it is merely a diet, or else only "for the animals."

It is undoubtedly true that the best known of the vegan social movement co-founders is Donald Watson, the man regularly claimed to have coined the word "vegan." That claim is contested. It is also claimed that Watson saw veganism exclusively in terms of diet - this is not true.

Indeed, in the first edition of the second volume of The Vegan magazine (Spring 1946), Donald Watson took the opportunity to restate "The Case for Veganism" as its editorial.

Watson states that earlier issues of the magazine had already set out the suggestion that a review of humanity's relationships with other animals would further "the interests of both animals and of ourselves." On page two of the editorial, this remarkably radical vision of the new relationship between human beings and other animals is recounted...

Please bear in mind that every one of us is a product of our time. We no longer use the term "man" is mean the whole of humanity, for example, and modern day writers would likely hesitate in using the phrase "thug species" as a description of humanity. However, once more it is crystal clear that the pioneers of the vegan movement, who founded the movement in 1944 during "World War Two," saw veganism as not restricted to a cause "for the animals" alone - but felt that vegan philosophy and the diet that follows from it would massively benefit humans and other animals - and more, since Watson concludes the editorial by stating that other animals will not become extinct through veganism, quite the reverse, as veganism would free up land for "unexploited creatures living natural lives." Furthermore, he argues that veganism would also see the restoration of the fertility of the soil which was being (as it perhaps still is) lost.

18 years later, in 1964, vegan pioneer Eva Batt would reassert their concern for the soil in this powerful statement of vegan values...

My plea to fellow vegans, especially those who have recently entered the movement, is please do not be fooled either by a new generation of "vegan activists" who themselves know or care little of the movement's history, and who will confidently tell you the lie that veganism has nothing to do with human issues, or others who suggest that veganism is merely a diet. The dietary aspects of veganism are directly linked to the radical vision of a vegan world in which all sentient beings, including humans, are benefited and, indeed, liberated.

Veganism as a social movement has always been about the moral evolution of humanity resulting in a new freedom for, as Donald Watson declares, other animals and for ourselves.

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Meat-Free Mondays - The Egg Industry's Best Friend, Part Two

60-70,000 Animal Advocates March in North America

AUDIO: Gandhi's "Talk" to Tom Regan leads to the Start of Abolitionist Animal Rights

The Case for Veganism by Donald Watson

Roger Yates

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