ARCO's Abolitionists - A Vegan Forum

I agree. Well said Sharron.

sharron64 wrote:

'Also worth mentioning are the gender issues involved in animal exploitation. The animals exploited specifically for their milk and eggs are, it should be obvious, females being exploited for their reproductive cycles etc etc'

Pretty powerful stuff!

Will Tuttle writes some pretty interesting stuff on that topic in his book The World Peace Diet.

panthera wrote:Well, nobody on here likes Peta. Basically. Do you?

Hmm, well...

To be honest, I think that PETA is full of mostly well meant, caring people but I think that sometimes the things that they do override the seriousness of the organization.

Also, I would say that I don't really agree with advocating vegetarianism (I think they've been getting better about that lately...but I might be wrong) and using shock tactics to get people's attention (by essentially making fun of overweight individuals or using porn stars in ads who aren't even "veg*n").

So I wouldn't say I support PETA at least.

Sorry if my reply sounded snarky. And thanks to both you & Sharon for being thoughtful about your responses.

I do credit them for having done a ****load of work for non-human animals, and for doing it without apology. Unfortunately, much of that work has been counterproductive and undermines animal rights. And they have been getting further and further from animal rights, I think. Almost none of their literature or ads use the word "veganism." Yes, they mean veganism, but if they keep shying away from the word, they'll marginalize it right out of the public eye.

Anyway, here's another really good post

Exploiting Femaleness and Violating Consent: Intersectional Abuse in the Dairy Industry

Liz wrote:I think that sometimes the things that they do override the seriousness of the organization.

I totally agree with you on this one. Well said! I would even say that because of the things they do they definitely are not a serious organization, but some sort of punk, rebel, hip, interesting thing for teenagers and kids, and PETA has their attention, for sure. Which is a good thing, because it is important to influence the attitudes and eating habits of children and young people. The downside is that I feel those same kids, when they grow up, start a family and career, cannot identify with PETA anymore and cannot do some positive social change under PETA's leadership.

Hi, Liz:

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond (actually, I guess it wasn't that long, but OK). Thanks to Panthera for letting me know there were questions addressed to me on the board.

Liz, you're very funny, I enjoy sarcasm very much, like here:

Liz wrote: [feminists] can’t agree on anything so why bother with it (unlike animal rights activists, where we all agree on everything )

That's funny. And true. You are right to point out we don't agree on numerous points (do we even agree on something? )

However, when I criticize feminism I do it from the standpoint that nowadays it is sold as a branch of academia, in the form of women studies and the like. If veganism was sold the same way I'd say "stop right there, mister". It is OK to analyse societal movements, whatever, but don't go through life literally 'creating' seudo-theories about random stuff. That's why I dislike social sciences and the very, very little critical thinking it is taught in its fields. I've had a lot of discussions with people from the social 'sciences', because incidentally I happen to study in their area, and they tend not to need empirical evidence to believe things, just a nice netted 'theory'. But most of all, people on the social sciences tend to let their political views taint their view of reality. Agreed, we can't all just shut off our opinions or sentiments at will and think objectively, but they don't seem to accept that sometimes the best alternatives to explain reality are NOT really the ones that let us sleep comfty on our beds at night. Sometimes objective explanations are morally unappealing, but they are correct. (For example, the hypothesis that rape is evolutionary adaptive. AFAIK, hasn't been firmly established just yet, but it makes sense and it is quite possible.)

Liz wrote:I suppose what concerns me the most with PETA is that they take a serious, sobering issue then throw naked people into the mix and it gets confusing and above all, idiotic. Porn stars holding bunnies against their bare breasts claiming that they’d rather go naked than wear fur. Well, that’s nice and…um, effective (can you give me empirical evidences that suggests that it is in fact effective? ) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at these pictures and become overwhelm with this gut feeling that perhaps animals should not be used as commodities (sarcasm ends here).

I don't particularly like PeTA and I'm certainly not going to defend them. What I'll say is this. People don't go through life thinking every single serious aspect of life and trying to solve it. Even considering that morality is naturally selected and wired in all of us, it is most certainly not the thing that occupies our minds on a daily basis. It is more like a knee-jerk reaction and to expect people to munch on every little detail of their morality strikes me as unrealistic (nowadays, a few years back, not so much).
SO, what I was getting at with my original critique was that vegan 'thinkers' --most of them (all?) being from the humanities-- take a very simplistic view of human minds. Something like early connectionism or something and assume that you can't swallow a serious message like veganism if it is presented in the form of a commercial with naked people jumping around on it, because you'll somehow associate from then on sex with veganism, which are totally different things and everything will be lost and the world will explode. Well, I take issue with that. I'm convinced minds don't work as simply as that and the brain can take multiple inputs to different modules and later on revise the information separately.

Where's my evidence? I don't need any. And neither does PeTA. I'm not defending PeTA, what I'm saying is that if they choose to take that road, they are taking a chance in being wrong, but if you're going to criticise them THEN you need to be sure that what they're doing doesn't work. Are we really? That is my question. I'm not sure it doesn't work and I won't be convinced by a neatly netted piece of 'theory' that somehow appeals to my moral instincts instead of providing data collected by empirical research. On the other hand, if we all did our research and THEN decided to choose the form of our activism, that would be so great. Instead of just thinking "no, we can't do that, that is immoral", we should be thinking "does this work? then, let's do it!", especially --ESPECIALLY-- because most of the time we're not really dealing with harming people but with some kind of hypothetical moral situations that never even really impact on real beings.

[quote"Liz"]Also they advocate for vegetarianism more often than veganism... and should they be advocating for vegetarianism at all really? This is my own personal issue, nothing to do with the blog.[/quote]

I'm not sure if they should not advocate vegetarianism. They should certainly advocate veganism, though. And use the bloody word.

Liz wrote:Lastly, Veganomante, I’m confused as to what you want evidence on. Is it just modern feminism in general you have a problem with? You feel that the post is being unfair to PETA? Is it a number of things? Please, tell me your thoughts.

I think I covered everything before. If not, then tell me and I'll clarify.

Liz wrote:Anyway, I just google imaged PETA and now I feel like I need to take a shower.

Myself

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond (actually, I guess it wasn't that long, but OK).

Well, I'll forgive you this time.

I'm not sure if they should not advocate vegetarianism. They should certainly advocate veganism, though. And use the bloody word.

But if they're an animal rights organization, wouldn't you agree that they ought to *only* advocate veganism?

Not to scold vegetarians but really I feel it is important to point them towards veganism.

I think I covered everything before. If not, then tell me and I'll clarify.

All covered.

Liz wrote:

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond (actually, I guess it wasn't that long, but OK).

Well, I'll forgive you this time.

You're kind

Liz wrote:But if they're an animal rights organization, wouldn't you agree that they ought to *only* advocate veganism?

Ethically, maybe. But this all comes back to the point I was making earlier. Suppose that there was empirical research that supported the hypothesis that promoting vegetarianism alongside veganism was a far better strategy for creating vegans than just advocating veganism. Then what? Would it be an argument against promoting vegetarianism to say that 'ethically' AR organizations should only advocate veganism? I'm not even convinced it would be unethical to do so.

Sadly, I see no way to get said research in any way, shape or form in the near future.

Cheers!

What do you call it when people (oh so many many people) point out, "Most people were vegetarian before they went vegan," and then follow up with "having a halfway step is critical to their making the journey at all." That's set forth as being self-evident. It does make intuitive sense, but doesn't exactly count as hard evidence. I actually would question whether ovo-lacto-vegetarianism counts as a "halfway step" anyway.

Most people were indeed vegetarian before going vegan (I think a scientific study might confirm this). However, "having a halfway step is critical to their making a journey at all" is not neccessarily true if the first statement is true. In fact, it might be that most people were first vegetarian because there was only vegetarian education and influence in their time, and veganism was given much less attention. So, if from now on we did just vegan education, I bet most people would turn vegan immediately and never consider vegetarianism.
So, basically, I think any proper scientific study would suggest that a halfway step was not critical for vegans to make their journey.