By Paul Kinzie
From The Animals' Agenda - March/April 2002
Around May 2000, Kerron Ramnath became vegetarian. He
did so because he "simply did not like killing things" and because he
believes eating meat is "a violent way to live, and it did not need to
be done." Kerron is a 20-year-old student at Huntingdon College in
Montgomery, Alabama. It did not take long for his commitment to deepen,
or to have larger effects.
About six months later, Kerron accidentally logged on to
www.factoryfarming.com,
where he saw how meat, milk, and eggs are produced. He learned that, in
the United States alone, about 200 million chicks -- the unwanted males
of the egg industry -- are killed each year. They are, as Kerron
describes, "thrown onto trash heaps to suffocate under their brothers,
or ground up alive." He went to "the People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals web site (www.peta-online.org)
to confirm the story of factory farming. Satisfied that factory farming
is a morally grave practice, Kerron became a vegan.
He also became an activist. He does "a lot of stuff at
school"; for example, he is trying to get Huntingdon College to end a
rat lab that it runs in conjunction with a course in behavioral
psychology. Kerron notes that there is no ethics committee with
authority over the lab, although an exploratory committee has been
formed to study the issue in response to his actions. He also points out
that there currently are no rules governing the treatment of rats under
the Animal Welfare Act. Kerron has asked Huntingdon College for material
relating to the lab but was refused.
In addition, Kerron participated in last year's PETA
campaign against Burger King, and did a three-week internship at PETA in
the summer. He attended the Animal Rights 2001 conference outside
Washington, D.C., and plans to work with the British Union for the
Abolition of Vivisection. The college student also took part in Farm
Sanctuary's "Say No to Veal" campaign, which aims to get restaurants and
stores to renounce the sale of veal and to educate consumers about the
cruelty of keeping calves crated and anemic. While attending summer
school at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Kerron was shocked by
the number of places in the city that sell veal. He spoke with Jerry
Gordon, owner of Eddie's Market, a grocery store near the Hopkins
campus. Eddie's sold one veal item: a Swanson's Traditional Favorites
Veal Parmagiana frozen dinner. Gordon agreed to remove the veal if
Kerron would petition in front of the store for five days, eight hours a
day. Kerron and a colleague did so, collecting 601 signatures on a
petition urging Eddie's not to sell veal. Gordon signed a pledge
renouncing the sale of veal, and the offending dinners were removed.
Although it was just a small step, the Baltimore success
offers several lessons. One is that reasoned, cooperative approaches, in
which definite objectives are set, can succeed. Another is that many
people do deplore the suffering of animals, and are willing to express
this to businesses they patronize. And lastly, one doesn't always need
to have been schooled for years in activism in order to score a victory;
rather, a creative approach to problem solving and persistence are
sometimes all that is needed to make a difference.
Paul Kinzie is formerly the AWI Collection Coordinator
for the Animal Rights Network Inc.
"Reprinted with permission from The Animals' Agenda,
P.O. Box 25881, Baltimore, MD 21224; (410) 675-4566;
www.animalsagenda.org.
Email:
[email protected].
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