Elaine Vigneault, the “eccentric vegan,” is hoping to drive some traffic to her sad little site by getting in on the critique that I made of Ryan McReynolds’s entry about his misunderstanding abolitionism. Though I may deal with her entry itself later if I’m bored enough — and hey, it had pictures! That makes anything easier to read! — I just want to publicly correct the lies that Vigneault is attempting to spread about us. I posted a response on her blog, but I do not trust her to be honest about posting it. I suspect she has such a vendetta against us that she’d probably edit the response to say something totally different than what I’d acutally said. In case she refuses to post my comment on her blog, or in case she edits or distorts it, I present her comment and my response here, for the sake of posterity, and so that you can decide for yourself who is distorting what. I realize that I’m giving Vigneault exactly what she apparently didn’t get enough of as a child — attention — but I don’t want there to be any doubt about the kind of ugly project she’s engaged in.

In the comments to her own entry, Vigneault says:

I appreciate your hope that this won’t be seen as a fight, however, I read Bob Torres’s post. It was unusually mean-spirited. He essentially argues that if you haven’t written a book (published under the same name as the one you use to blog) then you don’t deserve to take part in the conversation. Torres’s intro:

“One of the great things about the Internet is that someone who has no real training or background in an area can write whatever they want about it. This is also, simultaneously, one of the worst things about the Internet. This observation is nothing new, but I’m reminded of the downside of it whenever I read blog entries like this one by Ryan McReynolds. Mired in the self-assured certitude that only the truly mistaken ever seem to possess, there are so many problems with McReynolds’s claims (it’d stretch the bounds of generosity to call what he writes an “argument”) that it is almost difficult to know exactly where to begin hacking away. That said, the overarching problem is that it is not clear that McReynolds has actually ever even gone to the trouble to read Francione — or if he did bother, he didn’t understand what he read. Overall, the entry reads largely like a quick term paper written by a bright but lazy student who wanted to make big claims to get that A, but who could only be bothered to Google the Sparknotes on the topic.”

That said, I have to be honest: I think some of my own animosity towards Torres is rearing its ugly head. I like his podcast and think overall he’s doing a good thing by creating, encouraging, and supporting a vegan community. However, I strongly disagree with him on some points and I’m often extremely frustrated by him.

For example, in the last podcast he and Jen answer a question about their favorite vegan restaurants. They answered NONVEGAN restaurants. They live in upstate New York. There’s no reason for them to not have been to vegan restaurants in NYC or Philly. And the response wasn’t along the lines of “even if you live in BFE you can find vegan food,” it was simply the first thing that came to the top of their heads. They don’t bother researching or preparing for the podcast at all.

Better example: someone asked what they could do about their school cafeteria not serving vegan food. Bob and Jen hate PETA so much that they didn’t know/ didn’t care that PETA offers TONS of support in this area: http://www.peta.org/feat/flunk/veganize.html and http://www.peta2.com/COLLEGE/cyc-veganize.asp And they didn’t mention the campaign to get vegan options in public schools across the nation. Instead of offering real, practical advice, they offered empty emotional support.

It’s like Bob is more interested in getting into heated arguments about philosophy with vegans he doesn’t know than about actually working towards a vegan future.

(Bleh, sorry such a long rant. It’s got little to do with you, Ryan. I’m sorry I dragged you into it. I might edit this post above to reflect this conversation…)

My response, which should be here, if she has the guts to approve it:

You are certainly welcome to your misguided opinions, Elaine, but I would like to correct your misrepresentations of my positions and the things that we have said on our show, at least in your comment. If I’m bored enough later, I might take the time to respond to your blog entry.

First, I do not believe that one need have published a book or have a Ph.D. to make a contribution on these issues. I don’t hammer Ryan for his not having published a book; I hammer him for not having read one. That said, I do, however, believe that academic training encourages habits of reflection, thought, and analysis that tend to produce more rigorous discourse. I realize that this is anathema in the animal rights movement, but that also probably partly explains why we’re so deep in the mess that we’re in.

Second, you completely distort what we said on the show—in all seriousness, I wonder if you are a native speaker of English if you can misunderstand us this badly. I went back and listened, to be sure, and anyone else can go do the same: in show 106, it is at about 1 hour and 11 minutes in. Recall that the questions were from Twitter, so they are live during the time we are recording. We were not asked about our favorite VEGAN restaurants, we were asked about our favorite restaurants. The question was “What is your favorite restaurant, both local and global?” To that, we responded that locally, we had few options, but that we could be accommodated even by two local establishments, even where we lived. We then went on to mention Thai Cuisine in Ithaca, NY, which has accommodated us well as vegans. We then discussed our favorite restaurants outside of our area, during which time we suggested TWO vegan restaurants in Philadelphia, Su Xing House and Singapore. We said that we could not remember the names of the places we had been in NYC, but that we had eaten well there. Anyone else can go back and listen if there’s any doubt. What you say, Elaine, is a total distortion.

Third, there’s no one on our show called “Jen,” so I’m not sure to whom you are referring, but if you mean Jenna, then yes, Jenna and I did answer a question from someone about getting vegan options in her college dining hall. Having successfully worked to get vegan options in a college dining hall myself, I told her what worked for us: going to the top, using parents for leverage, and persistence. Vegan options in public grade schools are irrelevant to the question, as this is a college. And PETA is not an organization we support, for many reasons we’ve laid out in many places, so there’s no reason that we would be as inconsistent as to suggest that anyone consult their materials.

Fourth, you claim that we don’t bother “researching or preparing for the podcast at all,” which is a ridiculous claim, especially when you are talking about live questions taken while we are recording the show for which we could not possibly have prepared. One would begin to get the impression that you skimmed through the show just to find a few points to attack us on, Elaine. You wouldn’t be so unkind as to do that, now, would you? In all honesty, there is no way in which one could seriously suggest that we were not prepared for the show. Listen to the interview. It is edited carefully, and the questions show that we did our homework on their latest album. Check the parts where we talk about news pieces. And listen to the voicemails. All of that requires research and preparation.

If you want to attack us, Elaine, have the moral fortitude to do it correctly, by attacking our positions for what they actually are, not for the distortions that you imagine them to be. One might begin to get the sense that cheap shots are the only way for you to attack us, and frankly, that makes you look worse than us.

From this lovely little back-and-forth, I’m left thinking that Vigneault was only fast forwarding through our show to find a few things that she could hopefully attack us with, and in doing so, she somehow missed that we were taking live questions. I wish I could say it was despicable, but it doesn’t even rise to that level. It is just pathetic.

As for the jibes about my wanting to debate philosophy more than wanting to work towards a vegan future, I’ll just say that Jenna and I have worked hard to get people to go vegan, and the thousands of vegans who have emailed us over the years we’ve been doing this to tell us that something that we did got them to go vegan convinces me that we’re not doing too badly at it. It may not work for everyone, but we do exactly what we say others should: we use our talents to the best of our ability to help build a genuine vegan movement that demands social justice for all, animals included. If Vigneault thinks that this isn’t enough, she’s probably right. I always feel that I could be doing more—how can anyone who really understands the problem not feel like that?—but I also think that “debating philosophy” is essential if we’re going to have sensible reasons guiding our actions. As I argued in Making A Killing, the lack of thinking that currently suffices for “theory” in this “movement” is probably why we’re so much less effective than we could be. Certainly, farty mariachis like Vigneault who are more interested in the politics of distortion and self-aggrandizement don’t help the situation.

With that said, I’m now going to get back to the unimportant work of putting the finishing touches on the 2nd. edition of Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World, you know, that worthless book that never got anyone to ever go vegan.

I realize that this is a heavy critique to lay at the doorstep of any author, but there is ample evidence to support my supposition. Most troublingly, McReynolds must rely on constructing straw men to make his argument. Though there any many like it, this paragraph is unique, only because it stands out as the pinnacle of confusion in what is otherwise a Himalayan-sized mountain range of befuddlement:

The problem, to me, seems to be that Francione treats the right not to be property as the end to seek, rather than seeking the actual welfare (in the broadest sense) of actual animals. But rights are abstractions. As Francione correctly states, rights are protections of interests. A right is a tool to protect an interest of an actual sentient being. That is, rights only exist to promote the welfare of rights holders. Promoting the right not to be property is absolutely in the interests of beings currently held as property. But it is not the only thing in their interests, and it is not necessary to ignore all of these other interests in the single-minded pursuit of that one.

This badly distorts the abolitionist approach; as such, I can only assume that McReynolds is either consciously distorting the abolitionist position, or that he’s never bothered to carefully read any of the work which he finds so objectionable. Either way, he’s shitting the bed here, and hopefully someone will be along soon to change his sheets. He’s floundering.

The primary issue with the quoted paragraph above is that Francione and other abolitionists do not say that the only interests that animals have are in not being regarded as property. This is nonsense, and absurd on its face. Instead, Francione argues that there is no way to guarantee any significant protection for animals as long as they are property. As long as animals are property, Francione argues, the interests of the property holder will always override the interests of the property. Thus, until we can overcome this barrier of the property status of animals, any reforms we make will ultimately fail to accord animals any true recognition as persons in the long run. This fundamental point that sits at the center of abolitionist theory is what McReynolds fails to understand most prominently, and his argument, poorly constructed as it is, falls in on itself over this central misunderstanding. Worse yet, this confusion raises a disturbing point. If, as he claims, he was once an “acolyte” of Francione, then he was a rather poor one, because he didn’t even really grasp a theorist he was, by his own admission, “defending” on his “various blogs, comments on others, and messages on forums.”

Going on with the troubling paragraph above, McReynolds calls rights “abstractions.” I can agree in some sense that yes, rights are abstractions, but they’re no more abstractions than any other part of our world that is mediated through the semiotic nature of human interaction. In this same sense, laws are abstractions, but no one suggests that their abstract nature makes them less compelling as a societal force. To be clear, the particular abstractions that we call laws happen to have rather non-abstract enforcement entities and institutions backing them. Try violating the abstraction of a law like robbing a grocery store at gunpoint in front of a police officer picking up some donuts, and you’ll understand very quickly how what McReynolds calls “abstractions” become real. Regardless, what McReynolds calls “abstractions” often have real impacts in the world, and calling something an abstraction and wishing it away as insignificant to make your insipid argument simpler does not make it so. Or, to put it another way, you can say that something isn’t real (which is, I think, what McReynolds is trying to say) but that doesn’t mean that your perception and reality jive. I’d be curious about whether or not McReynolds would like to give up some of the “abstractions” of rights that he enjoys, namely, the right to be free from bodily harm, and the right not to be the property of another. Almost certainly, he would not give them up, abstractions or not, because he recognizes them for what they are: vital guarantees that his interests cannot be violated without reason. Abolitionists seek to guarantee the same to animals. We believe that the best way to do it is through promoting ethical veganism, as this immediately and directly attacks the root cause of animal exploitation.

Leaving aside that one troubling paragraph, additional problems abound throughout the piece. McReynolds claims that the failures of welfarist activism cannot be laid at the feet of welfarism itself, but, instead, are the result of poor vegan outreach. There are two massive problems with this argument. First, this suggests that McReynolds doesn’t even fully believe in the value of welfarist reform in the long term as a tool of reducing the enslavement and subsequent consumption of animals. To this, he looks to veganism. If veganism is the way to reduce consumption most effectively, we should throw our weight behind promoting that, rather than working with industry to find ways to abuse animals ever-so-less horribly. Second, the increase in the consumption of animal products since the dawn of the modern welfare movement proves that the incrementalist agenda that underlies much of the logic of modern welfarism is just simply wrong. If, as many proponents of welfarist measures claim, welfarist measures will help society to see the inherent value of animals as beings in their own right, we should expect to see a concomitant reduction in the consumption of animals and animal products as welfare reforms grow. Yet, instead of the expected reduction, every year posts an increase in the number of dead.  This basic fact proves what Francione has been arguing for at least a decade and a half at this point: that welfare reforms simply cement the property status of animals, and in doing so, they condemn more and more animals to lives of incredible horror year after year. Critics who are incapable of thinking through the systemic nature of these problems often allege that this is an issue of “purity” or “ideology.” Most simply put, it is not. It is recognizing the roots of the problem, and formulating a response that hits at those roots most effectively. (I explore the systemic nature of this economic and cultural exploitation of animals in my book, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Righs.)

The final nail in the coffin of regulationist/welfarist ideology that no welfarist ever is prepared to discuss is the problem of globalization. Let’s assume as a hypothetical that the United States becomes the single largest proponent of animal welfare standards in the world tomorrow, instituting (through abstractions called “laws”) the very best standards for animal care and “husbandry” that are decades ahead of the rest of the world. The result would be that animal agriculture would almost immediately offshore even more of its production to countries with fewer or no regulations, where they would exploit and use animals for profit just as they do here, right now. Not only is this possible, it is happening today as more and more firms offshore various facets of animal agricultural production for cost-savings. During the time I was studying for my degree in agricultural science, I learned that the agricultural industry is one that operates on incredibly thin margins. I also learned that the industry is highly adaptable, and is always looking for new technological or economic solutions to the challenge of extracting more surplus value from the animals they own. Given these points, the central weakness of welfarist propaganda again rears its hideous head: welfare reforms do not and cannot cut to the heart of the problem, because they do not challenge the essential barriers to animals having a full and complete recognition of their interests. They simply delay recognition of the core problem, and convince people of something that the industry is longing for: an assertion that their products are somehow “humane.”

In the end, I’ve read only one decent critique of Francione’s ideas from a regulationist perspective, and that comes from Professor Cass Sunstein, who not only apparently took the time to read Francione (after all, he was reviewing the book), but who also went to the trouble to formulate a response that took his position seriously. (For what it might be worth, I don’t agree with Sunstein, and if you want to know his argument, look it up, since I’m already getting a bit long in the tooth with this entry.) Sadly, McReynolds could not be troubled to perform even the most obvious kinds of due diligence with his own argument, despite having once been a self-proclaimed “acolyte.” Instead of giving the abolitionist perspective the serious thought it deserves, McReynolds would rather defend activism that by his own admission does nothing to stem the tide of animals being killed for human consumption, activism that not only does not strike at the roots of the problem, but which also colludes with exploiters. (What any animal rights organization has to do with Whole Foods — a company that profits obscenely from selling dead animals — is beyond my comprehension, but these are the organizations which, presumably, McReynolds would now support.) What we need is an effective vegan movement to promote widespread, long-term societal change in the status of animals, not a set of so-called “activists” who fail to believe even in the persuasiveness of their own arguments about the moral worth of animals.

On their site, PETA says:

Well, it seems that Zappos.com got the message that people hate fur, because yesterday, the company officially adopted a permanent policy never to sell any products containing the fur of an animal!

Like I told the people on Twitter who nagged me about this pointless single issue campaign, this isn’t really a victory in any real sense for several reasons.

First, Zappo’s may have agreed to stop selling fur, but have a look around their site: they still sell leather and wool. And if you can manage to be honest with yourself—something that a lot of animal rights activists seem unwilling to do, or incapable of these days—what is the real difference between leather and fur when it comes to the animal rights issues involved? Leather is simply the hide of a different kind of animal with the hair removed. Unlike the implicit argument in a lot of these anti-fur campaigns, I do not think that fur is worse because it is more expensive, and in any case, I’m really not into comparing wrongs in this regard: if you believe that animal exploitation is wrong, fur is just as bad as leather—period. Yet, to argue that fur is “bad” while implicitly accepting that leather is okay sends an odd message about what we’re demanding. Do we think that all animal products are cruel, or just ones that wealthy people can afford, and/or ones which we somehow view as “frivolous?” Thanks to PETA, there is ample confusion on this front. This campaign reinforces that confusion.

Second, false “victories” like these distract from the actual issue at hand. If you read around Twitter and search on the terms “fur” and “zappos”, you’ll see that people seem genuinely excited about this so-called “victory,” and many have again pledged to shop at Zappo’s after threatening to boycott the store if they did not cave to PETA’s demands. But again, I remain confused by this excitement. The best thing I can come up with to explain it is that people who are supporting this are not thinking clearly about the similarities between leather and fur. The result is that people who ostensibly care about animals are distracted by these pseudo-wins from the actual single thing that can make a real difference in this whole fight: going vegan and getting others to do the same. Veganism is the conscious rejection of all forms of animal cruelty and exploitation in one’s life; it is the only real and all-encompassing solution. If you want to make a difference, don’t bother with Zappo’s and fur; don’t bother with cage-free eggs; don’t bother with organic milk. Go vegan, use your talents to get others to consider veganism, and help build a genuine movement of people who will directly challenge the root causes of animal exploitation. Anything else is ignoring the real problem.

Finally, if this campaign was good for anyone, it was good for the public relations machine that is PETA. Sadly, however, PETA has ceased to be much more than a propagandist for its own brand. That said, I know the predictable reactions from those of you who supported this campaign, or who think it is a good idea. Some of you will say “we have to start somewhere,” or “doing something is better than doing nothing,” and I agree: we do have to start somewhere, and I obviously believe doing something is better than nothing. To be completely clear, I’m not urging inaction, I’m just urging a different kind of action. In a world where time and attention are limited, we need to be especially cautious and thoughtful about what we promote and what it says about our overall message in the long run. The only sensible place to start is to go vegan if you aren’t already and to promote ethical veganism. Anything short of that is forestalling actual awareness of the issues.

“Quebec City, Quebec–Wearing nothing but skimpy bikinis made of vegetable leaves, PETA’s lovely Lettuce Ladies will hand out delicious samples of the new Classic Vegetarian Sandwich, which is now available at KFC restaurants in Quebec City.”

PETA obviously has never been afraid to use sexism to sell their own campaigns and to promote their own brand, but now they’re out on the streets using sex to promote their own brand plus the brand of a multinational fast food chain that, last I checked, still sells dead animals. On top of it all, I’m sure the samples the “lettuce ladies” are handing out are not actually vegan.

But you know, times are changing. Expecting an animal rights organization to promote veganism is almost like expecting the United States to stick to the Geneva Conventions. Both are apparently artifacts of a more “quaint” time when we could actually have ideals and principles.

Thanks to the Vegan Wookiee for passing this along to us.

And I’m not going to critique or analyze his essay (that’s Bob’s department, since he does it so well), but reading it did make me think more about my own thoughts on animal welfare, which I’d like to talk about.

I’m all for more humanely treating animals – let’s start there. I think factory farming is abysmal and needs to be improved.

But, I have a real problem with those who advocate for animal welfare over the abolition of animal agriculture altogether, for several reasons.

If someone asked me “if we got rid of all factory farming practices and the animals lived a wonderful life and were killed completely painlessly and humanely, would you then eat meat?” – my answer would be NO. I do not believe that animals should be killed for my use at all. Killing them is making their normal lifespan shorter than it would be. Do I want healthy, young humans euthanized so they can be used for some purpose? No, so I don’t want animals to be either. (I can get all Star Trek or Twilight Zone on you here. Say an alien race came to earth and wanted to use humans for food. We are allowed to live in our houses and go about our normal daily business, but occasionally the aliens would come harvest a family and you’d be euthanized and eaten. Not fun. Who says the animals still don’t feel fear upon watching others of their kind being put to death?)

My other argument against the animal welfare position is that it just makes people feel better about eating meat, and MORE people would be willing to do it. We may be treating them better, but then we’d be killing even more of them. Peta’s new campaign is to get chickens killed by gassing them rather than cutting their throats. Yes, it’s a more humane way of killing them, but they still live miserable lives confined in their crates and you’re still killing them. All of that kind of reminds me of Auschwitz.

This is a tough issue for me, since I absolutely hate thinking about the animals being tortured in today’s factory farming practices. But, I think the way to deal with is for more people to become vegans, not to have them feel better about eating their chicken. Will says in his article not to worry, since Scully’s not trying to take away your BLT. Well, in my opinion, he should be.

Humane slavery is still slavery.