United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
9 September 2019

"Stop Mocking Vegans" - My Reaction
By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

NY Times Opinion: Stop Mocking Vegans
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My first reaction to "Stop Mocking Vegans" by Opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo in
The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2019, was: Here we go again - the usual sop thrown
to people who, for ethical reasons, refuse to eat animals, the usual concession
couched in the same old "yeah they're right, animals suffer, but we - you and
me, dear reader - don't care enough about animals or what they go through for
food, compared to our love of consuming them."

Thus, when a few emails came saying what a nice article, finally some respect! I
wrote back that I disliked it. New York Times journalists who write about farmed
animal investigations - Nicholas Kristof and Mark Bittman, for example - tend to
cast their coverage in terms that blunt the ethical and emotional impact.
Kristof:

Maybe in a century or two our descendants will look back on our factory farms
with revulsion. Meanwhile I love a good burger.

Bittman scolds animal rights advocates for wasting time on foie gras because
meat production is cruel anyway, and while cramming ducks and geese may be
"unnatural," it is not necessarily "torture."

So when we feel gratitude for crumbs sprinkled to the populace from a
journalist's perch of detachment, I feel the hurt of what animals endure even
more. We're grateful for so little when it comes to them, I feel. If a
mainstream journalist pretty much bypasses the animals but offers up some
"respect" for their advocates, we pleaders and workers for peace and justice for
animals feel vindicated by this bit of condescending approval from the citadels
of our animal-abusing society.

Following my original scan of "Don't Mock Vegans," I read it more closely. At
least it doesn't have the smirking tone of a Kristof or a Bittman piece,
although I think it overdoses on the theme of how despised vegans are in today's
society. Here is the paragraph that particularly diminishes the power that
"Don't Mock Vegans" could have had:

Manjoo writes:

"I am not a vegan. I am barely, failingly, a vegetarian/pescatarian - I make
an effort to avoid meat, but for reasons of convenience and shameless hedonism
still end up eating it several times a month, especially fish. My purpose here
is not to change how you eat, dress or think about the ethics of consuming
something like the Popeyes' sandwich. Instead, as a fellow omnivore and a
person concerned about the planet's future, I want to ask you to do something
much more simple: to alter how you think about vegans."

What if instead of enslaved chickens and other "food" animals, the victims were
human? How about rewriting Manjoo's paragraph as a contemporary message to
19th-century slaveholders:

"I am not an Abolitionist. I have not freed my slaves. I know I don't need to
own slaves, but I keep them for convenience and for the pleasure of watching
them pick cotton in my fields. My purpose is not to change your slaveholding
behavior, or how you think about the ethics of owning human slaves. As a
fellow slaveholder, and a person who cares about America's future, all I'm
asking is that you show the Abolitionists some respect."

(Dear enslaved person: what is your opinion of this?)

How, I ask, does this type of plea address, or even relate to, what Manjoo calls
next in his column: "the criminal cruelty of industrial farming; the sentience
and emotional depth of food animals; [and] the environmental toll of meat"?
Should ethical vegans be grateful for a plea to people who presumably don't want
to join us to at least "love" and "celebrate" and "salute" us for being
"irrefutably on the right side of history"? I don't know about you, but I am not
grateful for this corny plea for a "salute." I worry that ethical vegans could
feel so grateful for such tokens of "respect" for our commitment to animals (or
the call for it) as to consider them a kind of compensation for animals getting
nothing. If ethical vegans get "respect," and the animals do not substantively
benefit, what's to celebrate?

Twice in his piece, at the beginning and again at the end, Manjoo gushes over
the "deliciousness" of a Popeyes' fried chicken sandwich. This - and his
assurances that he himself is not vegan or even "vegetarian," and that he is not
urging readers to do anything but "respect" or at least "not mock" vegans- all
of this sends a more visceral and relaxing public signal than the actual
urgencies he reports on. If we really want to help chickens and save the
rainforests from being destroyed by soybean production to feed them - Manjoo
points out that three quarters of the world's soybeans are fed to "fast-food"
chickens and other farmed animals - should we harp on how "delicious" fried
chicken sandwiches are and give a shoutout to Popeyes? If the moral issue is
presented as a choice between a "delicious" fried chicken sandwich that
"everyone" wants, and saving the rainforest, what message resonates loudest with
the majority?

It would be a terrible irony if ethical vegans (by which I mean animal rights
advocates) were to get "respect" at the expense of and as a substitute for the
respect the animals so desperately need and for which we are working and
longing. Any respect we receive that does not include the animals is, at best, a
Pyrrhic victory.

_________________

KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into
the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal
Liberation, she is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and campaigns.
Her latest book is For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation: Essays on
Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl (Lantern Books, 2019).

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--
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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