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Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

A Solstice Wish: Freedom From This Kind of Love

From Lee Hall, Vegan Place: The Art of Animal Liberation
December 2023

Pivot to reality. The St. Bernard's ancestors were wolves. We stole their life story, their evolution, away from them. And the animals in ag should have been left in their ancestral communities, free to evolve in their own spaces, on their own terms. The goal isn't to make them friends; it's to stop breeding them.

Pranav Jassi on Pexels

When we become vegans, and throughout our lives as vegans, we are usually programmed by prevailing vegan wisdom to say something like this:

Why do we pet some animals and stick forks into others?

As though being born to be petted is a great thing. And as though the process of producing animals to be petted doesn't even matter. Imagine how many animals don't turn out to meet the standards of breeders and get the proverbial fork stuck into them.

Here's another version of the same thought nugget:

Why do we love dogs, wear cows, and eat pigs?

Why? Tell them, dear vegans. Tell them. Because our system decides on the particular use of a purpose-bred animal. The purpose that's marketed could be love for sale, or leather for sale, or a pork chop for sale.

Then there's the snappier...

Friends, not food!

And there's the image of the animal in agribusiness juxtaposed with the image of a dog or a cat, captioned with this frequently asked question:

Why eat one and love the other?

To point out that this is not the vegan question will annoy and even offend many advocates. These phrases become hallmarks of certain advocates or advocacy groups' work. And I know they mean no harm. It's Solstice Day, and I want to say something uplifting, but oh, dear friends, I can't absorb this nonsense any more. And I don't believe any of us ought to. This is not fair. This is not love.

"Kansas-bred." Care to speculate on the conditions of travel from Kansas to Florida for this now-discounted St. Bernard puppy? Never mind; I can tell you. I previously worked as a freight and baggage handler for the airline industry and for a time I worked at this particular airport: Fort Myers. (I got the card in these photos from a pet shop during that time.) It was absolutely excruciating to witness puppies or any other animals being shipped through commercial contracts.

I'll leave it at that. This is Solstice Day, after all.

Some people say they know the breeder. It's someone local, they say. Well, there's the pet version of the "local, humane" lie we hear all the time about the cows and pigs. You are either a consumer or you are not.

I'm not saying people don't love their particular pets. I know they do. But the challenge "Why love Frankie and eat a frank?" is incomplete, and if you leave this challenge uncompleted, you go along with a grotesque custom. Pivot to reality. The St. Bernard's ancestors were wolves. We stole their life story, their evolution, away from them.

And the animals in ag should have been left in their ancestral communities, free to evolve in their own spaces, on their own terms. The goal isn't to make them friends; it's to stop breeding them.

Please, dear friends. Make a Solstice resolution. Call out the friends-not-food rhetoric. Challenge the use of happy domesticated animals in vegan advocacy. We'd never accept imagery of "loved" human beings who were selectively bred to be docile or to be physically "cute" etc. We shouldn't accept it for nonhuman beings, either.

Love and liberation,
Lee 

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