Archive for category: Podcast

Dear Colleagues:

Victor Schonfeld, director of the influential 1982 film, The Animals Film, followed up his two-part BBC World Service program, One Planet: Animals and Us, with an editorial, The Five Fatal Flaws of Animal Activism, in the Guardian, one of the leading U.K. newspapers.

Schonfeld once again made clear that the mainstream movement had lost its way. He criticized welfare campaigns, the promotion of “happy” meat and animal products, giving awards to slaughterhouse designers, and PETA’s relentless sexism. He once again endorsed the idea that veganism should be the moral baseline.

Schonfeld was quite remarkably criticized by Vegan Outreach, which is now transparently part of the animal welfare/”happy” meat initiative. But even more remarkable was that three days after Scholfeld’s editorial appeared, PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk replied in the Guardian, defending PETA’s status as an animal welfare organization and calling its sexist campaigns “harmless antics.”

I did a blog entry on Newkirk’s editorial.

In this Commentary, I discuss whether the tide is turning in favor of creative, nonviolent abolitionist-vegan advocacy. My guests are Roger Yates, who is an adjunct lecturer in sociology at University College, Dublin and Vincent J. Guihan, a doctoral student at Canada’s Carleton University and a person who has a finely-tuned sense of the politics of the animal movement.

THE WORLD IS VEGAN! If you want it.

Gary L. Francione
©2010 Gary L. Francione

Dear Colleagues:

On December 31, 2009, the BBC World Service broadcast the first segment of the two-part program One Planet: Animals and Us. This program was hosted by Victor Schonfeld, who did the highly influential The Animals Film in 1982. The Animals Film was among the first—if not the first—film to reveal how humans actually treated nonhumans. Animals and Us involves Schonfeld’s return to the topic 27 years later to ask whether anything has changed since 1982. The first segment dealt primarily with the use of animals for food and focused on factory farming.

In this Commentary, sociology instructor Roger Yates and New Zealand podcasting phenomenon Elizabeth Collins, and I discuss and critique this first segment.

If you are not vegan, go vegan. It’s easy; it’s better for your health and for the planet; and, most importantly, it’s the morally right thing to do.

And remember: THE WORLD IS VEGAN! If you want it.

Gary L. Francione
©2010 Gary L. Francione

Dear Colleagues:

In this, Commentary #11, I have a discussion with Gary Steiner, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Bucknell University. Gary recently had an editorial in the New York Times about veganism and we talk about the reactions that he got to his editorial, including the criticisms from welfarists, many of whom praise slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin and other supporters of speciesist exploitation.

We also discuss how welfarists refuse to engage abolitionists in debate because they have nothing to say in response to the argument that welfare reform merely increases the production efficiency of animal exploitation.

Gary L. Francione
©2009 Gary L. Francione

Dear Colleagues:

Would Martin Luther King have had an “I’d Rather Go Naked than Sit in the Back of the Bus” campaign?

Of course not.

He would have recognized that such a campaign would trivialize the important message of civil rights.

Why don’t animal advocates recognize that sexist campaigns similarly trivialize the issue of animal rights and give people yet another reason to dismiss the animal rights issue?

That is the topic of our ninth Commentary.

Gary L. Francione
©2009 Gary L. Francione

Dear Colleagues:

I refer to the delusional and confused way that we think about animals as a social/moral matter as constituting “moral schizophrenia.”

I had a recent encounter with moral schizophrenia in dealing with a deer who had been hit by a car and the hunters who stopped to help the deer.

In this Commentary, I describe and discuss what happened.

Gary L. Francione
© 2009 Gary L. Francione