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Agriculture
‘Home is Where the Heart is’: Leicester (UK) recognized as home of veganism
WILL JEFFORD: Leicester has been recognised as the home of veganism with a new heritage panel, installed to commemorate the man who coined the word. Donald Watson and his wife Dorothy created the name while living in Leicester in the 1940s, the Leicester Vegetarian and Vegan Group said. A new panel has been installed in Evesham Road, where Mr Watson lived.
Mr Watson became vegetarian at 14 after witnessing the slaughter of a pig on his uncle's farm, the group said. The resident was a woodwork teacher and started eating a vegan diet after learning about milk and egg production.
Despite…
BREAKING BAD: Public opinion of Animal Rising’s protest of Grand National horse race
SOCIAL CHANGE LAB: Animal Rising (AR) disrupted the 2023 Grand National (GN), the biggest horse racing event in the UK, causing a delayed start to the race and kickstarting a national conversation about society’s relationship with animals...
By its nature, disruptive protest is unpopular. When the US Civil Rights movement was active in the 1960s, approval ratings for Martin Luther King were extremely low. Despite this, civil disobedience has been a vital ingredient for social movements to draw attention to the issues they are fighting for... Heightened salience of an issue leads to more…
‘Et Tu Brute?’: Veganism and betrayal
SILVIA CAPRIOGLIO PANIZZA: One of the most common, and most obvious, reasons for ethical veganism is to save animal lives and reduce suffering. This reason is based on broadly consequentialist thinking: animal consumption causes suffering and death; reducing the demand will reduce the number of animals bred and raised for exploitation and slaughter. There are well known intermediaries along this causal chain, as the great majority of consumers of animal products rely on others to bring the animal, their parts of products, to their table. On a large market, this means that a single vegan will…
Animal Cruelty Out, Mushrooms In: These farmers are leaving factory farming behind
WHITNEY BAUCK: Some farmers have turned from livestock to crops to avoid the financial pitfalls and thorny ethics of industrial agriculture... Farmer Tom Lim had been raising poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him saddled with debt and unsure of where to turn. “My heart just dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know where to make money to pay off our loans"...
Lim is one of a number of farmers transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture in favor growing vegetables and mushrooms. Though Lim’s contract ending forced…
DEFIANT DISSENT: Voluntary prosecution and the case of animal rescue
JUSTIN MARCEAU, ET AL: The impacts of voluntary prosecution are canonical in American history, from the women’s suffrage movement to the civil rights movement... They can reverse the traditional accountability rationale of the criminal law, which counsels, “Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time.” If the public views the charges (or even the criminal statute itself) as unjust or unlawful, then accountability may come, but in the form of a backlash against the legal system. The prosecutor, the judge, and even the law itself will be held to account when the injustice of a prosecution —…
Stunningly ‘Pignorant’: Documentary exposes the horrific use of gas chambers in animal holocaust
CLAIRE COLLEY: New undercover footage showing British pigs being gassed prior to slaughter has led to renewed calls to investigate the use of CO2. Campaigners say the pictures – the first of their kind to be obtained in a UK abattoir – show the “utterly inhumane” nature of using CO2 to stun pigs before being killed. But the pork industry says its use is recognised as the most welfare-friendly method available, and says alternatives are being sought.
The images published today were obtained, say campaigners, using hidden cameras at Pilgrim’s Pride abattoir in Ashton-under-Lyne in north-west…
‘Feeding Tomorrow’: New documentary will make you rethink where your food comes from
CHARLOTTE POINTING: 'Feeding Tomorrow' is the people who grow food and the people who eat food working together to transform the entire ecology of the planet,” says farmer Mark Shepard in the new documentary Feeding Tomorrow, released on January 23.
The film, which has already won multiple awards, including Best Feature Documentary at the Ceres Food Film Festival, guides viewers through the current reality of the food system, which prioritizes fast and cheap production, and as a result, is destroying ecosystems, fuelling climate change, and threatening our health. But, as the name suggests,…
‘Mother Cow, Mother India’: The sacred and the profane exploitation of cows in India
AMBIKA AIYADURAI: In India, it is not rare to see the veneration of the cow on one street corner, and the same animals feeding on trash at the next. The contradictions of “sacredness” attached to cows exist comfortably with the violence against them in our society. Yamini Narayanan’s 'Mother Cow, Mother India' asks crucial questions to help us understand this paradox.
Narayanan is well known for her research in animal studies and multispecies research, and she brings her fascinating work to bear in this book on cows, dairies and their linkages to nationalism and capitalism. This is…
OMNIVORE DILEMMA: Moralistic stereotyping of vegans
BEN DE GROEVE: Attitudes toward vegans can be markedly ambivalent. On the one hand, vegans may evoke admiration among omnivores for their moral commitment to their vegan diet and lifestyle. On the other hand, vegans may be subjected to stigmatization for appearing to display moralistic traits indicating arrogance and overcommitment. This ambivalence in stereotypical impressions has recently been termed the “vegan paradox” and is theorized to stem from the cognitive dissonance people may feel from eating meat: Omnivores may view vegans as morally committed because they embody care for…
‘Christspiracy’: Documentary set for release in over 600 movie theaters around the world
POLLY FOREMAN: Christspiracy will be screened in over 600 movie theaters around the world on March 20th and March 24th in all of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria... Tickets available now at Christspiracy.com ...
Christspiracy caused a huge stir when it was first announced last year, and people around the world have been waiting in anticipation for news of its release date...
The film comes from Kip Andersen, the maker of Cowspiracy, What the Health, and Seaspiracy. He teamed up with Kameron Waters, a US-based Christian who posed…