Veganacious » Bob Torres

Mylène Ouellet – Abolitionist on Fire

veganacious — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:00:24 +0000

Mylène on the Beach

One of the blogs I find myself returning to again and again is My Face Is on Fire. Mylène Ouellet is the force behind its creation – she states, “I like to poke around and see how much of the issues surrounding (the ethics of consumerism) are (mis)represented in the mainstream media.” Watch out, media, you are being scrutinized! A recent post blasted yet another celeb for promoting a non-vegan burger that she admitted to eating. Not only is Mylène a tremendous worker for the cause of abolitionism, she is an intelligent and dedicated human being that has deep respect for animal life as is in evidence in the following interview:

What is your vegan history? Your abolitionist history?

I spent too, too many years — around a dozen — as a lacto-vegetarian participating in various online “veg*an” discussion forums before going vegan. Although I actually spent many of those years living animal-product-free, I only consider myself to have been vegan a little short of three years, since just after my father died.

Sometime in early 2007, I’d started listening to Bob and Jenna Torres’ Vegan Freak Radio podcast and unlearned a lot of what I’d had drilled into me about veganism the years I’d spent as a non-vegan shuffling various animal products in and out of my diet while convincing myself that I was making ethical choices. Bob and Jenna were the first two vegans I’d ever heard discussing veganism as anything other than a “personal choice.” I’d spent years hearing vegans being dismissed as “extremist” in these online communities where vegans having the audacity to talk about veganism were often chided for hurting others’ feelings by suggesting that consuming dairy or eggs (or using any other animal product) was wrong. Hearing Bob and Jenna’s podcast was an absolute relief. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone presenting veganism as the absolute least we can do if we’re serious about the rights and interests of nonhuman animals, and they did it in this matter-of-fact way that made veganism sound normal and the consumption and use of nonhuman animals sound extremist.

Vegan Freak Radio and the Vegan Freak Forums were also where I first learned about Gary L. Francione. His abolitionist approach to animal rights had the sort of clarity that left me sorry that I’d spent so many years with such muddled thinking. Reading Prof. Francione’s work is what cemented my decision to go — and stay! — vegan and it convinced me that I needed to take things one step further by using my blog to talk to others about veganism.

Do you live with any companion animals? History with nonhuman animals?

I currently live with three cats. Zeus and Sophie were adopted as kittens almost 10 years ago. Friends were fostering them for a local shelter, along with their mother, who’d been abandoned pregnant in an apartment by tenants who’d skipped out on their rent. I had been thinking of introducing another cat to the household and when I met the kittens, I fell in love with both. I had only planned to adopt one, but Sophie had problems with her eyes and I had been told that there was a chance that she would be killed, since it decreased the likelihood of her adoption (her eyes teared constantly — something eventually misdiagnosed as fused tear ducts).

Zeus in the Sunlight

A little over a year later, Sammy was rescued from a neglectful neighbor in my building who’d left him outside 24/7 for several months. I spent a lot of time in my vegetable garden and he decided to starting hanging out with me. After I’d spent an entire summer feeding him and treating his abscessed bite wounds from all of the scraps he’d get into — and after failing miserably at getting the local SPCA to do anything — I approached the neighbor about him and she told me that she’d been hoping he’d just “go away.” I’d intended to rehome him, since I was living with four cats at the time, but he was nervous and tended to snap and I was worried that I’d be unable to find someone willing to be patient with him. As it turns out, he’s just such a really sensitive and intuitive guy and I can’t imagine not having spent the last several years sharing my home with him.

Sophie's Cave

I’ve been rescuing, fostering and rehoming cats for over 20 years now. Every single one of them was a person to me and has had an impact on my life. I’m grateful to have had a chance to get to know each one and to have been able to help each one. Some, like Tarwater who came to live with me in 1994 and died just last summer, I still mourn. So many people have this unfortunate notion that cats are aloof, and they view them as being sort of generic, when nothing could be further from the truth. You need to get to know them, to establish relationships with them — as you would with anyone. They’re incredible individuals. I agree with what Vincent Guihan says of them. He calls them refugees. These cats, dogs and all the rest of the animals bred into existence to be our so-called pets and then abandoned to shelters — we need to give them homes, to let them live our their lives. People go on about open rescue — busting animals out of factory farms — when there are over 3-4 million cats and dogs (and rabbits, mice, rats, et al.) killed in shelters every year in the US alone. And why? Because they were bred into existence for human pleasure and then tossed aside when those humans were done with them. If you have the space, please adopt a non-human refugee from your local shelter.

Is there a viable vegan community where your live?

I live in a really small city in a tiny Canadian province that is mostly rural. Hunting and fishing are favourite pastimes and animal agriculture is everywhere. Veganism has entered the mainsteam and more and more people I encounter are familiar with the idea of it, however, speciesism is such a part of the culture here that I’ve only ever so briefly met one other vegan in this city (and our politics were significantly different). She very much believed that veganism was a personal choice and that it didn’t matter whether or not other people used animals. To me, that’s like saying that you’re against child slavery so won’t enslave children personally, but that you don’t care whether or not others do. I think that some vegans, although refraining from using animals themselves, still very much need to come to terms with their own speciesism in this sense.

The very first time I was ever knowingly in a room with vegans was when I met Prof. Francione and his partner Anna Charlton early last September. They’re absolutely wonderful people, both of them.

Sammy Relaxing

Is your family supportive of your veganism?

I grew up in a very small town in a working class family. Both of my parents had been raised on farms and had been taught to view animals as existing for human use. I was the sort of kid who’d bring home every single stray I encountered, but my mother believed quite strongly that non-humans either belonged in the woods or in barns — certainly not inside houses. I’d already been living away and on my own when I started changing my consumption habits, and my parents respected my choices as personal choices, but for the most part, my family members had it in their heads that I had stopped eating animals because I was a big old softy — that it was an emotional thing. My father used to say that he could relate to it since although hunting season was a very big deal when I was growing up, he refused to hunt, stating that he couldn’t bring himself to kill another living being. During his last few years, he asked me a lot of questions about my actual reasons and the ethics behind it, though, and soon expressed an interest in reducing his own consumption of animal products and in having me cook some vegan dishes for him, but he had so many dietary restrictions at the time that my mother — who did all of his cooking — was opposed to it. I’m convinced, based on our conversations, that had circumstances been different, my father would have eventually gone vegan.

Any advice for budding activists?

Read all that you can get your hands on and think critically about everything that you read and about any information you’re given by anyone. A lot of people get into animal advocacy thinking that there’s immediate gratification to be had from it and get disappointed when they realize that we have a lot of work to do to change the status quo significantly and permanently. Part of changing this status quo involves informing yourself of the issues and arguments so that you can be a better advocate. Part of it also involves staying focused on what we owe non-human animals and to talk to people about going vegan and about rejecting the commodification of non-human animals. Read Gary L. Francione’s Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog to gain a better understanding of animal rights and Rain Without Thunder to learn why it is that anything other than an abolitionist rights-based approach falls so incredibly short in helping non-human animals. Focusing on regulating their use accomplishes nothing except to make people more comfortable with using them. Is that what we really want?

It’s also important to get to know other vegans — other animal rights activists. Start an abolitionist vegan group in your school or city. Start an animal rights book club. There’s a great discussion forum online called Animal Emancipation where abolitionists come together to discuss everything from advocacy to animal ingredients — come join in the discussion.

Mylène posts frequently on Facebook, and you can follow her on Twitter, too (MFIoF). Be sure to check out her new podcast, either on her blog (My Face Is on Fire) or on iTunes. Her passion for ethical consumerism, abolitionist animal rights, and simple fairness are all apparent in her writings and podcasts.

Sammy Before Adoption - (Now an indoor cat!)

Fantasy Farm – Podcast #005

veganacious — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:47:53 +0000

PETA recently sent a letter to Zynga (creator of social media games such as Petville, Fishville, Farmville, Treasure Isle and Mafia Wars) protesting their plan to use virtual dogs for fighting in their Mafia Wars game. PETA was concerned that the use of such dogs in fantasy play might lead to an increase in dogfighting in the real world. PETA requested that Zynga remove fighting dogs from their games.

Virtual Farming

This brought to mind what I had been noticing in their other games – the exploitation of animals, much as they are exploited in the real world. But PETA never complained about the animals on Farmville. A quick glance around the farms in Farmville land will show animals crammed so close together that they cannot move at all — sound familiar to anyone? Just like a factory farm, only these farms have daylight. Animal hoarding was really becoming a problem over in Farmville. The vegans I know who play this game have their farms looking more like sanctuaries, either without animals or a few free-moving animals in a garden setting.

I began noticing – sorry, it is the therapist in me – that people playing Farmville had farms that often represented traits about that person. The obsessive type A’s had all their trees neatly lined us, all their plots evenly spaced; the laid back people had things spread across the landscape haphazardly. The creative types had beautifully landscaped gardens and the super achievers went straight for the gold (or in this case, the XP). When Farmville introduced co-op farming, even more was revealed. Those with management genes went into overdrive to coordinate the type of seeds to be planted, when the co-op would open, who would be invited, and precisely when the crop would be harvested. All for fun, of course. It seemed like people just loved the idea of farming, at least in the virtual world.

Romancing the Farm

While I was noticing what was going on in Farmville, I was also noticing how farming in general is being romanced. I just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, and was surprised at this glowing reports he related about farmers who grew animals for consumption the old way. Of course the old way meant slaughter as baby animals, too – just a much less horrific life until that time. (More on Foer’s book in another podcast.) The recent push, even with the support of animal protection organizations like PETA and HSUS, towards “humane” meat seems like more of the same – a way to romance the family farm.

As far back as the 1970s, George McGovern called on people in the United States to limit the amount of dairy and meat they consumed in order to improve the health of the general population. Here is a quote from a New York Times article:

Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ”Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

(Here is a clip of Robert Kennedy Jr. talking about this disregard for what McGovern found.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Power of Agribusiness

The same moral confusion that allows us to think we love animals while subjecting billions of them to hell on earth allows a people who pride themselves on unrestricted free market capitalism to simultaneously have institutionalized farm subsidies that ensnare an entire nation into unhealthy eating habits that damage the globe while damaging our health – and still allow a good portion of the population to fight doing anything about health care, either. Farm subsidies promote dairy and meat consumption despite volumes of scientific information decrying their harmful effects on health and increasing diseases such as colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, and high cholesterol. The actual cost of these products would be enormous if they weren’t backloaded, with everyone paying the costs to the environment, to the farmers, to the poor health of the nation.

Farms are not as numerous as they once were; they have been replaced by industrial operations that dismember animals while they are still fully conscious and destroy, injure, and traumatize the human beings, often undocumented workers, who are forced to work in their polluted, demanding mechanized death chambers. These workers have a very high turnover rate and very high incidence of injury and worker mortality. They are destroying the landscape, air quality and waterways near their operations, and they are getting very wealthy in the process.

If PETA is correct, and the Zynga games do reflect reality, then when Farmville releases all the animals and introduces GMO and organic produce and goes completely vegan, it will mean things are moving in a positive direction.

If you are interested in seeing a Fantasy Farm, consider The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a documentary about a third generation farmer who was free-spirited and creative and moved beyond traditional ways of farming to form a co-op and develop organic produce. If this was a vegan farm, it would truly be a Fantasy Farm. For another good film about the power of the food industry, try The Future of Food. Both films are available on Netflix.

PETA’s letter to Zynga

SPQN’s Secrets of Farmville

New York Times Article – George McGovern

Ring of Fire with Robert Kennedy Jr.

The Real Dirt of Farmer John