“When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain… come closer, as close as you can to him who suffers, and try to help him.” -- Leo Tolstoy
:vegan-liberation-rad:
In terms of philosophy, Animal Liberation by Singer is one of the most well-cited in terms of opening our eyes to how we view animals and their pain and suffering, even if it's a bit old. Quite a dense read though.
But for a marxist lens, some of the sidebar has really good references. In particular I'd recommend Aph Ko's book. In terms of dietary change, I like veganricha.com for indian recipes (though she has some non-indian ones as well)!
Awesome :D. My absolute favorite there is the vegan malai kofta, when I wasn't vegan I used to love it so this version doesn't use any dairy and is sooo tasty: https://www.veganricha.com/vegan-malai-kofta-recipe/
There's a bunch resources in the sidebar here that might be able to help you out. There's actually some more things I'd like to add to it, but I can't anymore. Anything you're looking for in particular?
Yeah, on mobile, at least for me, it's on the bottom of the page so you have to scroll down.
I haven't watched neither Earthlings or Dominion. I've heard similar descriptions of those movies and decided that by being vegan I earned the right to not put myself though this kind of thing. Tbh if I watched them right now they would probably make me much more serious about activism and turn me into the kind of vegan that gets banned from this site.
:sadness:
That's actually a thing in activist circles. Sometimes when we're feeling discouraged, we'll go and re-watch one of these docs to light that fire under us again.
Living in a carnist society, there's a lot of pressure to normalize, ignore, and forget the violence brought upon animals. Out of sight, out of mind.
That's why one major type of activism is just getting people to stop looking away.
Sometimes when we’re feeling discouraged, we’ll go and re-watch one of these docs to light that fire under us again
Shit. That's a little bit fucked. When I was more active in the activist scene and was on twitter and facebook I was subscribed to a whole bunch of activists I knew. My timeline looked like something from a horror movie, 60% of it was blood, gore and suffering, like a window straight to the depths of hell...
Oh yeah, activist culture needs to use way more trigger warnings. I think there's just (justifiable) fear that the people who need to see it will refuse to look. Nevertheless, CWs protect activists (and everyone else) from getting compassion fatigue and secondary trauma.
Me? I just got a habit of defocusing my eyes every time I saw a hint of red on a facebook page.
Yeah, I stopped following a lot of people. I think it's important to share it, they just need to add a CW.
That's sort of it though, no one who should be the viewing it will opt-in because they haven't already.
It's the difficulty in this sort of outreach.
We do have to avoid criticizing the actual workers that do the slaughtering, they're often undocumented immigrants and only do the work because they can find nothing else. They're exploited as well, often at threat of deportation by the factory farm company.
I'm sure there's a lot of coping mechanisms needed to work in a place beating the shit out of animals all day, the smell of blood and rotting around you. Apparently a lot of slaughterhouse workers get PTSD from it.
I knew it was bad. I never, ever could’ve imagined how horrific it is to see.
Also (since I already responded to this)
"If it's good enough for your stomach, it's good enough for your eyes." That's an adage activists use sometimes to convince carnists to watch documentaries or footage like this.
You'll see some users here get very upset when we refer to meat as a tortured corpse, even hyperbolically accusing vegans of emotional abuse for using that language. But it's important to eschew euphemisms and abstractions. We need to stop putting carnist fragility over the literal trillions of lives we take every year.
and then every fucking human element in the process is a complete fucking sadist.
They have to be. There's not a lot of other ways to cope. Here's more info on slaughterhouse workers:
https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/slaughterhouse-workers/
As a vegan who was banned from this site earlier today, (and then unbanned) I feel confident in encouraging you to watch it.
Really, the level of information in it is so useful, especially if you're trying to talk to other people about it. Two people not really knowing what the processes they're talking about don't get anywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
The sections go by animal, so skip to whichever animal derivative you're looking for a better understanding of.
Thanks for being open minded about challenging your own position :rosa-salute:
Thank you for seeking out the documentary. This is precisely how we feel, after seeing and realizing every single second/minute/hour we go about our day, vast numbers of animals are slaughtered and have their lives taken away from them just for meat. I couldn't do anything for like a week just thinking about it. It's absolutely horrendous.
I made extremely angry posts all over facebook for like a week after watching Earthlings.
it's narrated by Joaquin Phoenix
:joker-dancing:
"We do not exploit animals because we deem them to be inferior, rather, we deem animals to be inferior because we exploit them."
-Marco Maurizi
Of course! If you would like the full context, it's contained here http://www.assoziation-daemmerung.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TP_English_A6.pdf on page 27. At the crux of it is applying post-hoc justification to animal treatment.
It's fine to take it in parts, and more helpful to have someone to watch it with.
yeah, i watched for 15 mins and stopped to wash the dishes because that shit is rough. i'll finish it bit by bit so i don't lose my mind.
why in the goddamn fuck did I have this image of cows being milked as just like the gentle, loving ranch-hand going to say hi to Bessie in the morning?
That's not unique to you, there is a LOT of money and effort that goes into putting that image into people's heads.
Yeah, one of the things to remember is at any scale, to get more milk the mother must be impregnated. And her babies drinking that milk (which is why it was produced) would take away from the profits of selling it, so they will separate the babies from the mothers so as to get as much milk as possible, and then repeat this. Once the cow cannot produce milk anymore/isn't profitable, the cow ends up getting killed for meat, sometimes leather, etc. It's awful. And even small farms' goal is to make money, the local small farms near me all do this (having visited most of them).
And not to mention all of this views animals as commodities.
Far and away, the vast majority of animal "products" come from factory farms. Even small farms, despite how they sell themselves, are vanishingly rare and far from idyllic.
For anyone else who ought to witness, here is the film
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
Link to the Youtube version so the views increase on it and Youtube recommends it to more people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
Here's some timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
04:12 - Pigs
23:19 - Egg-Laying Hens
30:49 - Broiler (Meat) Chickens
41:11 - Turkeys
45:29 - Ducks
53:03 - Cows
1:11:07 - Sheep
1:17:19 - Goats
1:21:57 - Fish
1:26:46 - Rabbits
1:29:24 - Minks
1:30:55 - Foxes
1:32:23 - Dogs
1:37:58 - Horses
1:40:43 - Camels
1:42:16 - Mice
1:43:51 - Exotic Animals
1:46:07 - Seals & Dolphins
1:49:16 - Conclusion
1:55:47 - Closing Credits
I'm glad to hear you're doing some introspection, and making changes right away. Earthlings is what originally pushed me over the edge. Something about bearing witness to the horror meant I had to take action.
Oh man, I've never watched Dominion, but I did watch Lucent, which is a full documentary just about pigs in Australia, going over their entire life from birth to death. It's so long, it's almost boring, like the monotony of a horror that just goes on and on, and things just never get better :(
I don't think the images will or should be permanently out of our minds, personally. They're often a huge part of what breaks the walls that our brains put up to defend our habits. Of course, we learn to deal with them in our own ways. I'm not constantly thinking about the grisly consequences of treating animals as commodities. But when I do, it usually lights a fire in me.
After having already sat through the treatment of dogs, cats, cows, pigs, and chickens, the footage of circus animals and the whaling industry in Earthlings broke me. Far from a happy moment, but it was vitally important, and I don't ever want to forget what I felt then. Not until every cage is empty, at least.
I almost couldn't finish Earthlings. It really does drive the point home about introspecting on our interaction with animals and the planet.
It really is fucked up what the animal product industry does.
Since no one's linked it yet:
Dominion [TW: Animal Cruelty, Death] full doc is free on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
Would be nice to see the doc pinned here with timestamps in the post for each section
It's one of the most comprehensive docs I've seen on the subject, I love how into detail it goes, even if horrifying. Having that information affirms my stances and empowers me to convince others
