Category Archives: DXE

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, news

NEWS OF THE WEEK: Vegan Skater Wins The Gold, Activists Protest At Westminster Dog Show, Feb. 13 – Feb. 19, 2018

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Ice skater Meagan Duhamel has been vegan since 2008.

VEGAN SUPERSTAR

Vegan ice skater Meagan Duhamel of Canada did us proud last week, winning the Gold Medal in pairs skating at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics. Vegan since 2008, her coach initially was unenthusiastic about her switch from eating animals to eating plants, believing she would become malnourished. “I felt my body changing,” she told Veg News. “I lost weight, my skin was glowing, my energy levels were on the rise, and I woke up every morning feeling rested and ready to tackle the new day ahead.” Her coach saw her performance and strength improve and eventually came around to asking Duhamel to work with other athletes who were struggling with their diets. (Veg News, Feb. 13, 2018)

PROTEST AT WESTMINSTER DOG SHOW

The Westminster Dog show, inspiration for the hilarious film, “Best In Show,” was met with animal rights protesters last week in Manhattan where the event is held. The activists, including members of PETA, said the extravaganza promotes dog breeding when many dogs living in shelters need homes. Some protesters brought along their mixed-breed dogs. Ashley Byrne of PETA told the AP, “Events like these just promote the buying of dogs as objects instead of adopting.” (Associated Press, Feb 12, 2018)

SLAUGHTERHOUSE SURVIVED APPEAL IN SAN FRANCISCO

Despite the best efforts of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) to stop the establishment of a slaughterhouse in San Francisco’s Bayview District, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 11 – 0 to allow the project to go forward. The ALDF argued that the board should commission an environmental impact report before approving the enterprise but the supervisors countered that the slaughterhouse, which is going to be just over 2000 square feet, didn’t represent serious enough environmental harm. The slaughterhouse will be owned by Saba Live Poultry which is a small national chain of slaughterhouses. Saba owns a facility in Oakland which was the subject of a DxE protest last year. (San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 13, 2018)

THE RACE TO BECOME THE ‘ANIMAL PARTY’

In the UK, the Labour party is trying hard to appeal to animal rights advocates, promising everything from allowing renters to keep pets, to a ban on exporting animals for slaughter, to labeling on meat indicating the farm where it came from, and to providing low-cost vet care for low-income people. Meanwhile the Conservative party says it will institute around the clock CCTV in farms and slaughterhouses, ban puppy farms and increase the penalties for animal abusers 10 times. We think nonhuman animals would approve of ALL that. (The Telegraph, Feb. 14, 2018)

PROPOSING A MORATORIUM ON NEW PIG FARMS IN IOWA

Two retired University of Iowa professors along with several animal rights groups including HSUS and environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on building new pig farms in Iowa. Iowa, the largest pig meat producer in the country, has been building or expanding 500 new pig farms a year for the last 10 years. “For several decades the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state governments have failed to regulate the environmental impacts of factory farms,” the groups wrote in a letter to the Iowa General Assembly. “A moratorium will give legislators an overdue opportunity to evaluate the public health, economic and societal impacts of factory farms while providing Iowa’s communities with important statutory protections from further expansion of this industry.” A pork industry spokesman said such an action would be “devastating” to Iowa’s economy and livestock production. (Farm Journal PORK, Feb. 14, 2018)

DIESTEL TURKEY RANCH SCORES A VICTORY IN COURT

An Alameda Superior Court judge, Ioana Petrou, ruled against DxE, in its claim of false advertising against Diestel Turkey Ranch. The ranch, which had been subject of a months long investigation by the animal rights network was found by that group to be raising turkeys in dark, filthy, crowded sheds, despite labels claiming the birds had been “thoughtfully raised” and “range grown.” Unfortunately, since this labeling had been approved by the USDA, the judge concluded that the state had no jurisdiction in the matter. “Once the USDA has reviewed and approved product labels, any claim that labels as approved are false or misleading is preempted by the PPIA [Poultry Products Inspection Acts],” Petrou wrote in her final ruling, citing a 2017 lawsuit against Campbell Soup Co. Despite this setback, DxE vows to fight on with its lawsuit, challenging claims made by Diestel in materials not approved by the USDA. (Union Democrat, Feb. 16, 2018)

 

 

animal activism, animal rights, drawings, DXE, vegan

Ending Yulin

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yulin dog5

It’s already started. The notorious Yulin Dog Meat Festival, which takes place in southern China, is underway. The “festival” is not a celebration of dogs; it is a celebration of dog meat.

Beagles, golden retrievers, cocker spaniels, collies, chows, muts, you name it, are often stolen from people’s yards and the streets and violently beaten to death for human consumption.

The anti-Chinese racism is underway as well – much of it from passionate dog lovers. Horrified by the practices in Yulin, activists have lashed out at China, perhaps without realizing that only 8 percent of Chinese consume dog meat. Do we forget that 98 percent of Americans consume cows, chicken, fishes, goats and pigs?

Pigs, dogs — are they really so different?

People who live with pigs understand they are not. All animals feel pain, all animals love their young, all animals desire freedom of movement. If animals didn’t feel these emotions and desires, how would they survive?

Animals regarded as mere things or as cogs in a machine in this country suffer – the same as the dogs of China. Yet do you see Americans taking to the streets to protest this violence? Not often. But recently in China over one hundred thousand people came out to protest the dog trade and some animal rights groups based in the United States have joined them asking the government of China to stop this horror. So far, Chinese officials haven’t budged.

It’s not so hard to understand the reluctance. What if millions of Chinese sent petitions calling on the American government to stop the production and consumption of animal products? Would Americans suddenly shut down butcher counters, restaurants and animal farms? Absolutely not.

I would suggest that the American reaction to some Chinese eating dogs smacks of colonialism. Americans and Europeans arrive to save the day and stop the barbarism of the “developing nations.”

How easy it is to point a finger at others and fail to see our own complicity.

The United States kills some 9 billion land animals a year. Each American eats, on average, 270 lbs. of meat per year. Each Chinese person eats about 130 pounds a year. Yet we sit on our couches watching ABC’s recent episode of “Nightline” recoiling in horror at the cruel exploitation of dogs in China.

How helpful it would have been if the producers of the show had also, at the very least, noted the violence, suffering and anguish inherent in our own system of animal agriculture? While the horrors of the dog meat trade are indisputable, true change must start with an unsparing assessment of our own behavior.

True understanding must start with the realization that all nonhuman animals are deeply connected to human animals. Scientists have even shown that rats have empathy and will forgo food to help another rat.When will us humans achieve that same level of compassion?

As the noted animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) proclaims, “It’s not food, it’s violence.”

— A Vicious Vegan blog post —

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, protest, vegan

A DXE CONVERT

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Activist Leslie Goldberg.

By Leslie Goldberg

I really didn’t know what to make of the DxE video I was watching: Animal rights activists marching into restaurants and yelling about animals who wanted to live and how “meat” isn’t food, it’s violence. The activist/troublemakers usually held AR signs and stony expressions. The restaurant customers looked amused, embarrassed or annoyed. The staff? Angry, then frazzled.

As an animal rights activist myself, generally of the polite variety, I was intrigued, but also intimidated— especially when I’d see a DxE video of someone going into a restaurant alone and starting to shout. I said to myself, I COULD NEVER DO THAT. My husband said, “YOU’D BETTER NOT DO THAT.”

I live close to a Nations Giant Hamburgers, a KFC, a Jack ’n’ the Box and a Burger King – so many opportunities, I thought. But no, I can’t. I just can’t.

Weeks passed and still I kept wondering about DxE. I’d check out the notices on Facebook for Direction Action Everywhere Meetups, held on Saturday mornings at the DxE House in Oakland.
The DxE House. I had a picture in my mind – White frame house, falling apart, in a rough part of Oakland. My imaginary house was…

Read the rest of this essay here.

A recent DxE meetup.
animal activism, animal rights, DXE, humor, vegan, vegan psychology

WHY THE VEGAN HEALTH ARGUMENT DOESN’T WORK

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By Leslie Goldberg

It’s the old pitch: “heart disease, blah, blah, blah, diabetes, blah, blah, blah, cancer, blah, blah, blah, cholesterol, blah, blah, blah, obesity, blah, blah, blah, saturated fat, blah, blah, blah, arthritis, blah, blah, blah and on and on and on.

Their eyes glass over and then they say, “Protein, blah, blah, blah, calcium, blah, blah, blah, omega 3’s, blah, blah, blah,” and/or “My uncle ate eggs, steak and cheese every day of his life and he lived to be 117.”

And, maybe, maybe, maybe, “OK, OK, OK, I’ll try it.”

Another ex-vegan is born.

Actually, when you think of it, why would anybody think they could persuade anyone to do anything based on health? Have you ever gone to a birthday party and said, as the cake was being cut, “You know we shouldn’t eat this because it’s bad for us.” Or maybe, you’re at a ballgame and your friend is just about to bite into a hot dog and you say that could give you cancer or a heart attack.”

What about saying to someone who has just settled into a little TV watching that they should really be out there running?

I changed my eating because of the animals. I just couldn’t be a part of the holocaust. But I didn’t think other people would be moved to go vegan because of that. I pitched to friends’ and family’s self-interest. I talked about health and weight and I talked about health and weight some more. Talk, talk, talk, until it was suggested that I do something that is anatomically impossible.

The reason the health argument doesn’t work is that it depends on human will-power. Is there any power on earth weaker than that? Cheese, which contains an opiate called casomorphin, is actually physically addictive. It takes about 10 pounds of milk to produce one pound of cheese. “Like it or not, mother’s milk has a drug-like effect on the baby’s brain that ensures that the baby will bond with Mom and continue to nurse and get the nutrients all babies need,” said Dr. Neal Barnard, founder of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Cow’s milk is “mother’s milk,” folks, just not your mother’s milk.

In addition to addiction, animal rights activists are up against an inescapable, 24-7 barrage of milk, meat, dairy and fish advertising and lobbying. (Remember, if those stupid and insulting ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t spend billions on them.)

Recently I found another clue as to why the vegan health argument doesn’t work in an article by New York Times columnist Jane Brody. In it, she wrote about a new book by Michelle Segar called “No Sweat: How Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness.”

Segar, who is the director of the Sport, Health and Activity Research and Policy Center at the University of Michigan, told Brody, “Health is not an optimal way to make physical activity relevant and compelling enough for most people to prioritize it in their hectic lives.”

Brody went on to write, “Though it seems counterintuitive, studies have shown that people whose goals are weight loss and better health tend to spend the least amount of time exercising.

“Rather, immediate rewards that enhance daily life – more energy, a better mood, less stress and more opportunity to connect with friends and family offers far more motivation, Dr. Segar and others have found,” she wrote.

Doing the right thing, i.e., stopping the exploitation of animals in our daily lives is also something that offers immediate rewards. Suddenly a weight of guilt is lifted. Nothing offers a better sense of well-being than knowing you’re living in accordance with your deepest values.

Esteemable acts create self-esteem.

It’s not rocket science: When you’re doing shitty stuff, you feel shitty.

Animal agriculture is torturing and murdering animals – you would have to be living under a rock to not know that. It takes a lot of energy to keep trying to push away awareness. Become truly aware and whoosh! Feel the energy.

Yet, standing up for animals can be a lonely job in this society. And you might not feel that great arguing with family and friends. You might not feel that great not arguing with family and friends and keeping everything inside yourself.

Perhaps, try not arguing AND speaking up for animals. Something small. A friend of mine, Mike, works at a place where the management serves lunch. There’s nothing for him to eat so he goes out and gets his own food. When his co-workers would ask him why he did that, he used to say, “because I’m vegan.” Now he says, “I don’t eat animals.”

Mike has also found that the very best solution to the “Lonely Vegan Syndrome” is finding friends who are also working for Animal Liberation, ideally an animal rights group that gets together for not only protests, but for fun.

Last week I went to “Pizza Night” at the Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) House. I had several kinds of pizza including some chocolate, banana and brown sugar pizza (I hate that expression, “to die for,” but in the case of that chocolate pizza it seemed right on.) The get-together was fun and a lot of friends were there as well as several newcomers.

It made my day. Well, that and going to the gym.

P.S. I once chatted with one of the godfathers of the vegan health movement Dr. John McDougall. McDougall has been in the trenches for decades. He knows what plant-based doctors are up against. He knows the truly depressing recidivism rates among people who try a vegan diet. I was talking with him about some animal rights activism I was doing and he said, “It’s you guys (meaning the animal rights acitvists) who are going to make this whole thing happen.”

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

(By the way, my new book of humerous drawings, The Sex Lives of Cats, has just been published. Check it out here.)

animal activism, animal rights, climate change, DXE, environment, vegan, vegan psychology

THE LONELY VEGAN

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Mary McCartney, vegetarian and daughter of rock legend Paul McCartney.

By Leslie Goldberg

Even the beautiful and rich daughter of Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles’ fame has known the isolation of being vegetarian. Mary McCartney told the Daily Mail.com, “In a way (being a vegetarian) made me feel a little bit of an outsider. When I was at home it was perfect… but when we would go out, it would be a bit of a different story.”

She told the English online publication that meals out with friends when she was in school in the ‘80s used to turn into interrogations: “It would feel like I was being grilled about being a vegetarian. It was quite difficult. I came away feeling like, ‘Leave me alone.’ ”

God knows what it would have been like for her back then if she’d been vegan.

Mary McCartney said she doesn’t feel so bad anymore and she’s glad there are many more vegetarian foods available now.

Yes, yes, yes, there are more meatless and vegan foods available, but for many, that stereotype of the “lonely vegan” isn’t a stereotype. It’s real.

I remember one day a few years ago – I was tired and hungry, but mostly lonely. My friend and I went to grab something to eat at the Museum of Modern Art Café in San Francisco.

Since she was a long-time vegetarian and I was a relatively new vegan we’d talked about factory farming and about some of the health problems associated with eating animal foods. I tried to talk about the atrocities rampant in the egg and dairy industries. She was sort of non-committal. She wouldn’t really say where she stood on the issue of veganism but my impression was she wasn’t going to give up eggs or dairy any time soon. While there was no animosity, there was a wall between us that hadn’t been there before.

Standing in front of the café pastry counter, I guessed that nothing was vegan. I didn’t want to ask. I was sick of being the picky vegan, always focused on food, always pleading my case. I didn’t like the wall. Somehow I wanted to show her that vegans are like everybody else. I was the same person I’d been before. Fuck it. I ordered a bran muffin and a cup of coffee.

When we finally sat down, I took a bite of the thing. The taste of butter almost made me gag. I set the fork down. “Does it have butter in it?” she asked me.

I couldn’t say anything. I just nodded yes. Later, still hoping to dissolve the wall, I told her she could have the muffin if she wanted it.

Personal isolation weakens the Animal Rights Movement and maybe even our resolve to stay vegan.
My sense is, getting out of vegan solitary confinement is super important.

It can be tough because a lot of vegans are kind of loners to start with. We’re willing to stand apart from the crowd if the crowd violates our convictions. Maybe some vegans feel closer to non-human animals than human animals.

But it can get to be too much.

A lot of us need somebody to mirror back to us that we’re not crazy, strange and/or deluded. We need to know we’re not the only people horrified by the animal cruelty implicit in animal agriculture and we’re not the only people worried sick about what animal agriculture and the public’s eating habits are doing to the environment. We need to know we’re not the only people pissed off by the whole thing.

Living in the Bay Area, I go to a lot of vegan functions – veg fests, lectures, seminars, vegan group dinners. And I’m a member of some online vegan groups.

Still, the most important thing is not only having a vegan partner, but belonging to some vegan face-to-face groups (not to be confused with Facebook groups.) For two years now, we’ve gone to a wonderful twice-a- month vegan book meetup, the Marin Vegan Book Group and we belong to the local DxE chapter which gets together every week.

DxE is the first vegan group I’ve encountered which takes the problem of vegan isolation seriously. In his recent lecture titled “Why DxE?” organizer Brian Burns cited “animal rights activism of the past” as “vegan consumerism.”

He described it: “We want people (usually people we know) to change their diets,” he said. “That approach is lacking in community and has focused on incremental changes like ‘Meatless Monday’ and California’s ‘Prop 2.’ It’s ‘welfarism.’”

He talked about this activism as being nice to everybody, getting your friends to change, making sure nobody gets upset. “That leads to isolation,” he said.

No shit.

That kind of activism has also done nothing to stop the number of animals killed for food from increasing. He noted that today vegetarians are 5 percent of the population compared to 6 percent in 1999.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that DxE is hoping to buck that trend by causing non-violent animal rights disruptions or protests. It’s kind of a “Forget changing your friends and your siblings who seem to have made it their life’s mission to disregard any and all of your suggestions. Don’t try to change friends. Change society. Change the system.

OK, that, and get together for vegan potlucks and farm sanctuary work days once in while.

And never forget “animal food” is NOT food, it’s VIOLENCE.

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, environment, vegan

Brilliant Video From Bay Area DxE

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DxE did three protests advocating animal liberation on Saturday, May 23, 2015 in San Francisco. This video shows excerpts from all three protests.

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, environment, protest, vegan

LIVING OUT LOUD

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Trader Joe’s demonstration.

By Leslie Goldberg

Elbow to elbow, animal rights protesters lined up in front of a Berkeley Trader Joe’s meat counter last Thursday.

Despite a security guard’s plea: “Hey, you guys can’t do this here, I’m sorry,” members of the nonviolent activist group, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), shouted out for animal liberation one by one, in languages as diverse as Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindi, Danish, Persian and Ukrainian.

DxE members from all over the world gathered in the Bay Area for a conference last week which included lectures, protests and social gatherings.

The group, which started only two years ago with five people tossing around ideas in somebody’s living room, has now spread to 110 cities in 25 countries. Why the groundswell? I asked one of the key organizers Chris van Breen.

“I think people have been waiting for this for a long time,” he said.

Yelling out loud is a kind of joy, albeit somber, when one has been screaming inside for years. Yelling feels like an authentic human response after one has had to see the dead body parts laying in grocery store “meat” departments every single week. Yelling is a demand for freedom inside these serene even cheerful places of business that calmly traffic in unspeakable cruelty to animals, including some which add insult to injury by claiming you can be humane to animals and kill them at the same time for trivial reasons such as the oft-repeated “It tastes good.”

But why would activists trying to win people over to veganism do such an “extreme” thing?

Compared to stealing someone’s baby or skinning her alive or cutting his throat, practices common in the animal foods industry, yelling, carrying signs or even blocking traffic is not extreme.

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, protest, vegan

ANIMAL RIGHTS PROTEST STUNS SAN FRANCISCO

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Animal Rights protesters in the street.

By Leslie Goldberg

For five minutes, maybe three minutes, I’m not sure exactly, — animal rights activists stopped the world.

Today as cars backed up on Geary Street in San Francisco and as other cars were blocked from leaving a big downtown underground parking lot, over 100 protesters from the animal rights organization DxE formed a large circle in the street. Wearing blue T-shirts and white bloody masks, we held signs with pictures of animals and signs reading, “WHO WILL THEY KILL TODAY?”

For those few moments people stopped, looked and heard a magnificent choir of full-throated voices rising to the heavens chanting:

“ONE STRUGGLE ONE FIGHT”

“HUMAN FREEDOM ANIMAL RIGHTS”

“THEIR LIVES”

“NOT OURS”

“THEIR BABIES”

“NOT OURS”

“THEIR SKIN”

“NOT OURS”

“THEIR FLESH”

“NOT OURS”

“THEIR MILK”

“NOT OURS”

I felt my voice strong and my feet solid on the ground. Finally I was up off my knees. You see, for six years I’ve been either silent or begging, pleading, cajoling, even joking in an effort to persuade people to give up the murderous habit of using animals for food, entertainment, shoes, clothing and research. It hasn’t worked.

There is a smaller percentage of vegans today than in 1999. Part of the reason our numbers have decreased instead of grown is a wildly successful advertising ploy/scam by the animal foods industry called “Humanely-Raised,” “Cage-Free,” “Organically Grown” and “Free-Range.”

Out on Geary, the drivers were getting angrier and angrier, laying on their horns.

Eventually the protest in the street stopped and we moved to continue our Direct Action on the sidewalk. I never knew that the front of Macy’s could be a sacred space, but today it was. With the masks now off we stood silently outside the automatic doors of the store: witnesses to the unimaginable suffering that is going on every minute of every day in research laboratories, on fur farms, in slaughterhouses and on farms which raise animals for food.

Nine billion land animals are killed every year in the United States for food.

Clutching shopping bags, a lot of people scurried past us. Others just stood and stared as we resumed chanting. Others snickered, but even a street musician’s upbeat (and loud) electric guitar playing right next to us couldn’t dent the solemnity or the gravity of our witnessing or obscure the magnitude of the worldwide “Eternal Treblinka” endured by animals on this earth.

We’re not going away until every animal is free from suffering.

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

animal activism, animal rights, BOAA, DXE, protest, vegan

MOTHER’S DAY

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Animal rights protest at Safeway, Berkeley, CA. Photo by Michael Goldberg

By Leslie Goldberg

My impulse was to run when the security guard started grabbing our signs and knocked to the floor my husband’s iPhone he’d been using take pictures of our animal rights protest at a Berkeley Safeway.
She hit my hand in an attempt to rip my sign which read, “THE DAIRY INDUSTRY EXPLOITS COWS FOR THEIR BREAST MILK” and tried to push one of the demonstrators standing next to me.

“Don’t touch me,” the protestor said.

All I could think of was, “I’m going to hang on to my goddamn sign, no matter what this security guard tries to do.”

It was Mother’s Day, a day when the animal rights groups Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy (BOAA) and Direct Action Everywhere (DXE) try to remind the public of the millions and millions of forgotten mothers – the dairy cows who are forced to stand in one spot indoors and be milked and milked and milked for fucking months on end until their udders are bleeding, swollen to the point of dragging on the floor and infected with mastitis. Mothers who frantically search in vain for their newborns who are stolen by humans shortly after birth. Mothers who cry and moan for days and days for their lost babies.

You see, all that violence is so we can have our milk, our yoghurt, our ice cream, our milk shakes and our butter.

But the violence doesn’t stop with the mother. The calf, if he is male, is whisked away to either a veal farm or a veal auction, sometimes still covered in afterbirth and blinking in confusion under the harsh lights. Then the baby is either killed immediately or is ushered into a darkened stall and tied at the neck so he can’t move, until he too, is killed at 18 weeks for his flesh, or, if you will, “veal.”

The female is usually forced into a small plastic crate which is not unlike a dog crate where in her bewilderment she’ll be left alone without her mother, without anyone. Eventually she’ll be given a mixture of whey (a byproduct of the cheese-making process), high fructose corn syrup and even sometimes cow’s blood.

These babies don’t experience the comforting nuzzle of their mother or the warmth of her milk, milk that was intended by God for them, not us.

At Safeway I managed to hang on to my sign and hear the brave BOAA and DXE members explain to the grocery shoppers and employees the heinous crime against nature and animals which is the dairy industry. We screamed and yelled:

Their lives!

NOT OURS!

Their babies!

NOT OURS!

Their families!

NOT OURS!

Their milk!

NOT OURS!

Their lives!

NOT OURS!

It was quite a Mother’s Day for me.

The first part of the day was spent in the loving embrace of my family – my husband, our son, our daughter-in-law and our little grandkids, Norah and Sam.

I thought about the hours after our son was born. It was shortly after midnight. Because he’d been born with a mole on the side of his head, he’d been taken to the hospital nursery and I was rolled into my room. Unlike dairy cattle, I knew my baby was safe. Still, despite the fact I’d been in labor since early that morning and was completely exhausted I couldn’t sleep.

I don’t know how many times I buzzed the nurses asking to see my baby but they wouldn’t let me. I had to wait until the day shift nursing staff came on. I was so frustrated and upset, my body was shaking uncontrollably. When I was finally able to hold him in my arms I wept with joy. I was completely overwhelmed by the love I felt. I had the knowledge that I’d give up my life for this child.

Maybe dairy cow mothers don’t feel the earth-shaking passion that human mothers feel for their young, but I’ve read that the wail of a mother cow who has lost her baby is one of the saddest sounds in the world.

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –

animal activism, animal rights, DXE, environment, protest, vegan

ANIMAL RIGHTS PROTEST CALLS OUT WHOLE FOODS

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DXE protest. Photos and video by Michael Goldberg

By Leslie Goldberg

I’ve never yelled inside a Whole Foods Market or in a Safeway or in any grocery store. I’ve never even wanted to. When I’ve walked past (quickly) the neon-lit graveyards they have in the back of these stores, which showcase the dead animals or their chopped-up flesh, I’ve felt a grief and revulsion that makes me quiet.

Yet despite my despair at the obvious animal cruelty that’s taken place, I have to admit I’ve always kind of liked Whole Foods. I like that they have a gazillion different plant-based milks (that taste good); that they have a pretty good bulk section; that the employees are nice; that one of the store’s founders, John Mackey, was persuaded to become a vegan; and I always liked that the checkers would ask me, “Credit or donation?” when I brought in my own bag. I’d get a little warm feeling when I’d say, “donation.”

Yet there I was – pissed and yelling my head off with the other protestors in the meat department of Whole Foods on Sunday: “It’s Not Food, It’s Violence.”

I joined a group of Direct Action Everywhere (DXE) members to protest Whole Food’s truly bizarre, if not Orwellian, $20 million ad campaign: “Values Matter.” The ads feature such slogans as “Know What Kind of Life Your Dinner Lived” or “Choose a Fish, Cook a Fish, Save a Fish.”

Welcome to the house of mirrors world of “humane meat.” Or “sustainable agriculture.” Or “cage free.” Or “cruelty-free food.” Or “grass-fed.” It’s a wonderful dreamy world where the environment is pristine: no water pollution, no climate change, no destruction of wildlife. You can still kill and eat animals and/or consume their secretions and feel good about it. Hell, you can eat animals and save animals at the same time!

Ask most people to envision a “cage free” egg farm and they will tell you about open green pastures with chickens playing and frolicking in the warm sunlight. I once heard a natural foods co-op customer describe it as “like summer camp.” And if you can’t imagine a summer camp for so-called food animals, Whole Foods has a picture of one of these places on their website.

It just ain’t so, folks.

Cage free is just that: cage free. OK, farmers aren’t cutting off a chunk of chickens’ beaks and stuffing the birds into cages so small they can’t move. Instead they’re cutting off a chunk of their beaks and stuffing them into darkened sheds encrusted with feces, filth and dead body parts. These places are so crowded the chickens can barely move. Yet on the Whole Foods website, the store insists their chickens aren’t mutilated and that each and every one of them has access to the outdoors. Also Santa Claus lives at the North Pole in a house decorated with candy canes where he makes beautiful toys for all the children in the world.

Here’s an undercover video taken by DXE at one of Whole Foods’ cage free egg suppliers.

I watched it. It won’t kill you. You’ll see chickens in crowded sheds with missing feathers and with bruised, distorted bodies — chickens seeming so sick and weak they can’t even get up or open their eyes.

Ok, photos and videos can lie. Maybe you say, well, if Whole Foods can create a fantasy world with pictures, why can’t animal rights activists create another fantasy world with pictures?

You might say, what if Whole Foods is actually a non-profit organization devoted to bringing healthful foods to The People and really makes sure its farmed animals are loved and cared for? And what if the grocery chain hires multitudes of employees, gives them a living wage and health insurance and asks them to gently put these cared-for animals to sleep after they’ve lived long and happy lives?

Truth alert: Whole Foods is a for-profit company that answers to its shareholders. If they can make money selling junk food, they do it. If they can make money selling animal body parts and animal secretions they do that too.

Nobody puts these so-called food animals “to sleep,” otherwise the eaters of such animals would also get “put to sleep.” They don’t live long and happily – that costs too much. No, as soon as these “humanely-raised” animals reach “market weight,” they’re killed in slaughterhouses, same as any other “food animal.” It’s terrifying and excruciating for all. “Grass-fed” beef cows are killed. “Free-range” turkeys are killed. “Humanely raised” ducks are killed. “Sustainable” goats are killed. “Organic” rabbits are killed. Monterey Bay Aquarium-approved fish are killed. “Cage free” laying hens are killed. “Happy” dairy cows are killed. There’s no retirement farm for dairy cows or laying hens. Dairy cows become hamburger and the chickens often become fertilizer or even animal feed as soon as they stop producing.

It’s an outrage that Whole Foods would rip off the Black Lives Matter slogan and use it to sell animal suffering to people who are concerned about farm animals. I truly believe those customers do care about animals. Plus, why would anyone give all that extra money to the shareholders of Whole Foods if they didn’t care?

DXE founder Wayne Hsiung at protest.

About 30 or 40 of us walked into a Whole Foods Market in San Francisco from a nearby park where we’d all met up. Trying (probably unsuccessfully) to look like customers we entered the store with our “It’s Not Food, It’s Violence” signs kind of hidden under our shirts or rolled up in our hands.

For a few minutes we kept sort of trying to look like normal customers despite the fact that none of us bothered to get a cart or a basket and we were all hanging around near the meat department when we heard the voice of one of the DXE’ers, shouting “Excuse me, could I get your attention?’

That was our cue to assemble in front of the meat counter and hold high our signs while other protesters gave short speeches about the suffering of animals whose bodies were now lying dead in the glass case. One of the speakers held a carton of milk and talked of dairy calves and baby goats torn from their mothers shortly after birth so that humans could steal their milk. Another speaker spoke of a lucky goat, Domino, who had been rescued and was now able to live in safety and to love and be loved by others. She talked about how Domino was an individual, no different from anybody’s dog or cat.
Despite the stories, a woman with a shopping cart seemed irritated as she made her way to the meat counter through our crowd.

Standing there with my sign I looked down to see a galvanized steel tub filled with shaved ice and fish bodies. The fishes’ eyes stared at me. The fish were packed in the ice as if the tub was a little pond and the fish were looking up out of the water. They seemed alive, friendly and playful, decorative, even. As the protest continued, I wondered if customers just picked up the fish themselves or if they got someone from the meat counter to come around and do it for them.

I thought it might be easy for someone to forget that these fish actually suffered cruel and unnecessary deaths. These silent sentient beings who remember and have companions painfully strain to breathe for as long as a half hour after they’ve been caught in nets; or they writhe in agony as the most sensitive part of their body which is their mouth is pierced with a senseless merciless metal hook and they’re dragged out into the air to their deaths.

Outside Whole Foods Market Street store in San Francisco.

As our loud animal rights speeches continued and the Whole Foods employees looked either passive, bemused or annoyed. A lot of the customers looked the same way, but somebody in our group said she heard some customers chanting right along with us. “ANIMALS SUFFER – JUST LIKE US.” “ANIMALS FEEL PAIN – JUST LIKE US.” “ANIMALS WANT TO LIVE – JUST LIKE US.” “WHAT DO WE WANT? – ANIMAL LIBERATION.” “WHEN DO WE WANT IT? – NOW!” “WHAT DO WE WANT? – ANIMAL LIBERATION.”

We must have chanted loudly for nearly 10 minutes while the security and police officers just watched us and then, still chanting, we walked out.

Crossing San Francisco’s Market Street, we went into a Safeway store: “ANIMALS’ LIVES ARE THEIR RIGHT – WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT.”

– A Vicious Vegan blog post –