OK, so my cat’s vegan. That I even own a cat is an unusual circumstance, and I should point out that I am co-owner, along with my girlfriend Britty, of this animal. This month-long process has been a very important period in my life, probably one of my most esoteric and persona. The whole idea of “owning” someone bothers me, so sometimes I rationalize the relationship by imagining we are just two beings, inhabiting the same space. But we get to leave, and he doesn’t. We provide for all his nutritional, emotional, health, and sanitation needs. He’s more or less a slave.

My primary point in writing this was to offer a brief synopsis of the Stanis saga, but my yet to be diagnosed ADHD has different plans. Instead, I’m getting tied up in my predictable self-deprecation and vanity. That’s the thing about all of this; it’s all about my ego. I think that because I have a vegan cat, I am by extension more vegan, even though I am perpetuating the species-based hierarchy by holding a less capable mammal hostage. Still, I have to agree for now with a number of other vegans I’ve argued with over the issue of whether or not domesticated animals should be liberated immediately, seeing as Stanis in particular is old, complacent, and declawed. He would not fare very well at all in the wild, and I know he would not be happy. I should point out that he was declawed many years ago by his idiot former owner. We had nothing to do with it.

Maybe it’s better that I have a cat, since I know that everyone else isn’t going to stop adopting them any time soon. If I can show other cat owners that it’s not that difficult to feed their animal a cruelty-free diet, especially if they are already vegan themselves, maybe I can end up helping out more animals in the long run.

Ethical positions are often maintained because of intense vested interests that its holders have, even though their weak underlying moral justifications are exposed upon deeper cogitation. This is particularly evident in the area of animal rights and the moral justifications of eating meat. We probably all grew up eating meat, like the taste of flesh and have diets which centre around meat. It is easy to see why most of us persist in holding and defending the position that meat eating in its present state at least is correct, even though a closer examination suggests otherwise.

I just finished Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the book that launched the animal rights movement and is labeled as the Bible of the movement. Singer argues for and advocates proper regard to be given to animal rights. His main thesis is that a subject can meaningfully be said to have rights and interests only if it has the capacity to suffer. Animals, like humans, have the capacity to suffer, and hence animals should have rights. Current farming techniques are cruel, and treat animals like commodities instead of beings with interests that should be respected.

Singer deplores the prevalent attitude of speciesism: treating organic beings differently on the basis of differing species membership. Humans as a species are given different rights and treatment from other animals and conversely animals are denied similar rights that humans have on the basis that they are of a different scientific genus. To Singer, treating animals differently on the basis of differences in species is untenable and arbitrary; it is no different from racism and is morally deplorable. The proper and moral basis for deciding whether one should treat an entity in a certain manner is not scientific class, but rather the capacity to suffer. In other words, the orthodox view has drawn the line at the wrong place.

The practical consequence of accepting Singer’s approach is that prevalent practises towards farming and animal testing must be altered to be more humane and sensitive to the suffering of animals, or abolished altogether. Humans do not like to be coped up in cramped cages and have affective requirements; concomitantly animals should not be kept in such conditions too and should be allowed to run free and socialise with other animals.

Due credit must be given to Singer for writing about philosophy and applied ethics in such an accessible manner. It is not often that one can find an academic, much less a philosopher, that can reach out to the layman without too much resort to jargon and technicalities.

There are however loopholes and inadequacies in Singer’s thesis. Before writing more about them, I find it appropriate to declare that I personally am a meat-eater. However, I have always had the niggling feeling that somehow it was morally wrong to breed, slaughter and eat animals, and somewhat inconsistent to say that it is not morally wrong to eat meat and it is morally wrong to eat one’s pet and human flesh. The thought of pigs squealing hysterically and cows bleeding to death after their throats are cut gave me the intuitive feeling that there is just something fundamentally wrong with killing another for sustenance.

My motivation for picking Animal Liberation off the library shelf was to find material that rationally explores and elucidates the issues surrounding the ethics of nutrition and enlighten me on the ethics of meat eating such that I can formulate my own position on this issue rationally instead of resorting to mere intuition or emotions.

The first criticism is that drawing the line at capacity to suffer requires further explanation and justification. One can argue that capacity to suffer is as arbitrary a basis as say, race, sex and species. In this sense Singer falls into the same problems as the speciesists.

The principle of minimising or eliminating suffering for those with capacity to suffer is itself not an absolute value. One can easily think of examples in practise where we do not eliminate suffering, and in fact actively encourage it. Boxing, sports, corporal punishment and criminal punishment are good examples of these. Indeed, we have no qualms about taking life when the situation calls for it; think of wars. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that wars are always morally just; the point I am trying to make is stated in the first sentence of this paragraph.

What is so intrinsically wrong with suffering? Suffering builds character, although this is not directly applicable to the rearing and slaughter of animals. The gist is that suffering requires further unpacking, and needs a proper justification. Singer seems to merely assert that capacity to suffer as the determinative golden factor.

It can even be argued that suffering may be trumped by other considerations and moral values. The drive to self-sustenance, which is self-interest or self-preservation in the most fundamental sense, may override the need to minimise or eliminate the suffering of animals with the capacity to suffer. It may be morally justified for humans to farm and eat animals in order to provide nutrition for themselves. This is analogous to the individualistic ideal that an individual is morally justified in preferring his interests over that of another person. We can, without contradiction, say that animals have the capacity to suffer and hence should be treated on the same level as humans generally are, and that humans may be put their interests over that of animals on the issue of self-sustenance.

One of Singer’s rebuttal would be that humans can equally sustain themselves on non-animal food sources. However my discomfort with this is that animal sources of nutrition may not be replaceable with plant sources. A good example is omega-3 oils in oily fishes; there are no readily available and substantial plant sources of such oils. Another point is that dietary sciences have not fully unravelled the mystery of food chemistry, and indeed it has been discovered that foods contain countless different elements which we are yet to understand. So there may be nutrients in animal meat that humans need which are not discovered yet. Hence to continue eating meat would be to err on the side of caution in obtaining vital nutrients in one’s diet. Till science proves that humans can stay healthy without eating meat, it makes sense for humans to err on the side of caution.

An interesting point is that Singer’s thesis might allow animals to be eaten nevertheless, should science progress to an appropriate state. If a new scientific technique allows animals to be breed without the capacity to suffer (e.g. desensitising the nervous system), technically speaking it is neither correct nor wrong for us to breed such animals for food. Such animals have no capacity to suffer, and we cannot, as Singer would hold, intelligibly speak of them as having rights. We can breed them in horrible conditions and than eat them because they feel nothing.

Despite some loopholes, Singer ’s work is important. It subjects the topic of animal rights to philosophical scrutiny, and draws much needed attention to this neglected area of philosophy and indeed general thought. It traces the history of anthropocentrism in philosophical and religious thought, and subjects the beliefs of the related philosophers and philosophies to rational scrutiny. As Singer points out, Judeo-Christian thought places Man at the centre of the universe and the Bible states that animals are subject to the dominion of man. Similar is state in the Koran. Even the rationalist philosopher Descartes opined that animals are automatons with no consciousness and no consequent ability to feel and understand pain. Singer very credibly opens up our eyes to our unstated assumptions and the history of misapprehension in relation to animal rights.

In my view, Singer exposes a tendency to bend backwards and invent reasons to forcibly and artificially support a anxiously-held conclusion that Man is superior to all other living things and should be granted superior rights and considerations, instead of finding reasons from the ground up to see if Man should be treated differently from animals. In short, we make up stories to justify why we are special and can dominate and unfairly treat other living things. What should be done is to construct rational grounds for our moral positions, instead of blindly assuming and (even worse) scrambling for reasons to support an emotive and selfish conclusion. While Singer himself tries to prove a new basis for determining animal rights and what we owe to them, his thesis is still incomplete and not totally convincing.

My personal response to Animal Liberation is not to change completely into a vegetarian or vegan, but to eat much less meat. Two of my three meals each day are vegetarian, and I am trying to wean myself off red meat. I am yet to pinpoint the philosophical basis of my decision, since the capacity to suffer basis is not totally convincing, and I have to say that my position remains largely based on emotive and intuitive grounds, that it is just wrong to eat so much animal meat. It is somehow just profoundly wrong to pet cows, rabbits and goats in a farm and squeal over how cute they are, before slitting their throats so that we can put them on our dinner table. That at least I know in my heart.

7th Compassion for Animals Road Expedition CARE-7

A. ISSUES – any or all of the following:

1. Lecture on: “Homo Sapiens Save Your Earth” (Anthony Marr’s 2nd book, available at www.Amazon.com)

2. Lecture on: “M-Bomb – Doomsday Machine 2012″

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=56979555

3. Forge the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition (GAHC)

4. Wage GAHC’s first national campaign – a series of “Funeral Motorcades for the Deer” across the continent – http://homosapienssaveyourearth.blogspot.com/2009/12/funeral-motorcade-for-deer-report-by.html

5. Lecture on “Omni-Science and the Human Destiny” (Anthony Marr’s first book, available at www.Amazon.com)

6. Lecture on “The Meaning of Life according to Anthony Marr” or “The Omniscientific Cosmology”

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=56508858

ITINERARY:

WA – 03-31 – 04-03
OR – 04-04 – 04-06
CA – 04-07 – 05-07
AZ – 05-08 – 05-12
NM – 05-13 – 05-15
TX – 05-16 – 05-22
LA – 05-23 – 06-25
MS – 05-26 – 05-28
AL – 05-29 – 05-31
FL – 06-01 – 06-14
GA – 06-15 – 06-17
SC – 06-18 – 06-20
NC – 06-21 – 06-24
VA – 06-25 – 06-27
WV – 06-28 – 06-30
MD – 07-01 – 08-31
DC – 07-01 – 08-31
NJ – 07-01 – 08-31
NY – 07-01 – 08-31
CT – 07-01 – 08-31
MA – 07-01 – 08-31
NH – 07-01 – 08-31
VT – 07-01 – 08-31
PA – 09-01 – 09-05
OH – 09-06 – 09-10
MI – 09-11 – 09-14
IN – 09-15 – 09-20
IL – 09-21 – 09-23
WI – 09-24 – 09-28
MO – 09-29 – 09-30
KS – 10-01 – 10-03
CO – 10-04 – 10-07
WY – 10-08 – 10-09
MT – 10-10 – 10-13
AB – 10-14 – 10-18
BC – 10-19 -

Help needed in any or all of the following:

1. Join the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition

2. Host local speaking events

3. Organize local Funeral Motorcade for the Deer

4. Donations to cover cost (Anthony Marr is not paid)

5. A place for AM to stay

The Earth and the animals need our help, and Anthony Marr needs yours.

Together we stand.

Anthony Marr, founder and president
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.MySpace.com/AnthonyMarr
www.YouTube.com/AnthonyMarr
www.HomoSapiensSaveYourEarth.blogspot.com
www.ARConference.org
www.AnimalVoices.org
604-222-1169

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

by Steven Best

“The World is Vegan If You Want It.” This the most delusional campaign in recent history; it is symptomatic of a vegan movement which has, in fact, degenerated into a satire of itself and reinforces the worst stereotypes of vegans as elitist, privileged puppy-hugging whites indifferent to the nightmare of oppressed races and classes amidst the collapse of the industrial-capitalist world order. This last campaign shows, more clearly than ever, that Francione is throwing in the towel, admitting defeat, acknowledging his utter impotence and complete irrelevance in a time of planetary crisis. Nothing could be more disabling that this campaign at this time.

“Let’s be honest. The animal rights movement as we now know it will never become a revolutionary struggle because the representatives of the oppressed enjoy enough privilege from the system they oppose to prevent them from supporting, let alone engaging in actual revolutionary activity that would risk those comforts.” —Rod Coronado, Former ALF Activist and Political Prisoner

Read more at Negotiation Is Over…

OPERATION: 12 DAYS OF XMAS ‘09

(images thanks to: http://www.artholes.de/swat.htm)

DAY 4: RECRUITING FOR
FUR PATROL/ FUR S.W.A.T.

On our 4th Day of Xmas for 2009, we turn our attention to the selling of fur.  In keeping with our commitment to making New York City fur free, next year we will be launching our “FUR PATROLS”, or FUR S.W.A.T.s.  Training for Fur Patrol will be available at the WAR website after the first of the year. Certification will be relatively easy after completion of the on-line training modules on spotting, hunting and bagging fur hags. Upon completion of coursework, qualified candidates will be accredited and given FUR PATROL badges authorizing their activities.

Our mission will be to patrol Midtown Manhattan streets (or any other village, town or city) in search of fur hags (both male and female….we don’t discriminate).  When we find them they will be tagged, bagged and photographed for a new “FUR HAG GALLERY” on the WAR website.  Once tagged, a fur hag will be educated about the horrors of the fur industry in the nicest, most compassionate ways possible.  The cold weather this weekend should see many of these hideous ignorant targets walking the streets of New York City.

This weekend will be one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year, especially for high end designers and retailers.  Please join us in support of three extremely important campaigns, as well as our on-going campaigns against any NYC stores that sell fur.  The first two are global campaigns to make Escada and MaxMara fur free. The third is a local campaign, near and dear to our hearts, and that is the campaign to get New York City’s premiere fur ghoul, Dennis Basso to go fur free.

Join us for anti-fur street action in New York City.  This will be a roving protest very much like on Fur Free Friday. If you get to the meeting point late and we are not there, call: 1-646-267-9934

When:  Saturday, December 19, 2009 @ 3:00 pm*
Where: Prada – 724 Fifth Ave. & 56th St. (next door to Abercrombie & Fitch)
(note: although we are meeting at Prada, this may or may not be our first protest location)

Whether you are joining us for demos in New York City or wish to participate from wherever you are, now is the time to make those phone calls and send those e-mails and letters.  The stores are busy, lets remind them that millions of animals have suffered and died for their shopping and selling pleasure.  Remember that every call you make to retail outlets during the busy holiday weekend directly impacts their ability to sell fur.  If you are coming to demos, please dress for very cold weather and wear comfortable shoes as we will be doing a lot of walking.  The more comfortable you are, the longer you will stay out to be the voice of those who cannot speak for themselves.

PRADA:

Prada – Fifth Avenue
724 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10019
Phone: 1-212-664-0010
Fax: 1-212-664-0020

ESCADA:

ESCADA USA HQ
1412 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10018
1-800-869-8424

ESCADA Shop
715 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Phone: 1-212-755-2200
Fax: 1-212-832-3750

Saks Fifth Avenue
611 Fifth Avenue
US New York, NY 10022
Phone: 1-212-753-4000
Fax: 1-212-940-4849

ESCADA Shop
The Americana
2006 Northern Blvd.
US Manhasset, NY 11030
Phone: 1-516-869-0966
Fax: 1-516-869-0980

Note: There are ESCADA shops across the USA and around the world. Please check the ESCADA CAMPAIGN link below to search for a retail outlet in your area. Call or write to them to lodge your complaint.
http://www.war-online.org/Alert_EscadaGlobal.htm

MAXMARA:

MaxMara
813 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10065
Telephone:1.212.879.6100

MaxMara SoHo
450 West Broadway
New York, NY  10012
Telephone: 1.212.674.1340
Alternate #: 1.212.674.1817

For more info on the global MaxMara campaign visit:

http://www.maxmaracampaign.net/en/index.html

To find other MaxMara locations:

http://www.maxmaracampaign.net/en/store-locator.html

DENNIS BASSO:

Aministrative Offices:

Dennis Basso Furs
150 W. 30th St.
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 1-212-564-9560
e-mail: info@dennisbasso.com

Dennis Basso Fur Salons:

New York:
765 Madison Avenue
New York, NY  10021
Phone: 1-212-794-4500
Fax: 1-212-288-2974

Chicago:
980 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL  60611
Phone:  1-312-640-9500
Fax: 1-312-640-1216

Aspen:
The Little Nell Hotel
645 East Durant Avenue
Aspen, CO
Phone: 1-970-925-4499
Fax: 1-970-544-8146

Atlantic City:
Teh Pier at Caesars
1 Atlantic Ocean, Suite 206
Atlantic City, NJ  08401
Phone: 1-609-348-8000
Fax: 1-609-348-8011

http://war-online.org/DennisBasso_Campaign.htm

Visit the WAR Calendar for future events: http://calendar.yahoo.com/winanimalrights
Visit the WAR MySpace page:  http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights
Visit WAR on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Win-Animal-Rights/25169195791

Coming events: Mark your calendars now!

Friday, December 18th – SHAC Global Day of Action – Fortress Investment
Saturday, December 19th – Fur Protests (3:00 pm) & ASPCA Protests (6:00 pm)

“If you care about the animals and the earth: GO VEGAN & BUY CRUELTY FREE!”

For more info contact Win Animal Rights at: winanimalrights@optonline.net
Call: 646.267.9934 or visit the WAR website at: http://war-online.org

OPERATION: 12 DAYS OF XMAS ‘09

DAY 3: God Rest Ye Greedy Money Men

One of the most frustrating aspects of our work against the notorious animal abusing firm of Huntingdon Life Sciences, has been the on-again/off-again Fortress Investment Group campaign. Fortress is the company that financed Huntingdon Life Sciences (trading on the NYSE Arca as LSR) back a few years and allowed them to keep torturing and killing animals. Inside information has prompted SHAC to reinstate the campaign against Fortress. For more detailed information, click on the graphic above or go to: http://www.shac.net/action/financial/targets.html Worst case scenario, they are still financing the killing, best case scenario is that they no longer do, but must be held accountable for the close to half a million animals that have been killed by Huntingdon Life Sciences while they were fueled by Fortress funds. This Day 3 of Xmas ‘09 is dedicated to the greedy enablers at Fortress Investment Group.

God Rest Ye Greedy Money Men

(Dedicated to Fortress Investment Group)

God rest ye greedy money men

Let nothing block your way.

You funded L-S-R which rose

In an astounding way.

You raked in all the profits

While the beagle pups did pay

O tidings of profits and wealth

Profits and wealth

O tidings of profits and wealth

From England to America

This wretched company came

And unto all the animals

They brought enormous pain

How can they get away with it?

Fortress Investment is to blame

O tidings of torture and death

Torture and death

O tidings of torture and death

This evil company was broke

Their shares they took a dive

Until the greedy

Fortress scum

Gave them loans to stay alive

O Fortress, how could you knowing animals would die?

O tidings of blood and pain

Blood and pain

O tidings of blood and pain

To your homes, activists

did come to shout and shame your names

Your crazy neighbors took

offense and expressed to us their rage

We told them to take it up

with you that we were not to blame

O tidings of misdirected angst

Angst and dismay

O tidings of angst and dismay

“Fear not, then” said the men in masks

“Let nothing you affright”

“This day we come to free them all

And things will look so bright

To liberate them all is right

From Baker’s power and might.”

O weeping and whining by Cass

Whining by Cass

O weeping and whining by Cass

Now to the A-L-F & SHAC give praise

All you that profit from pain

And with true love and brotherhood

Forget this evil name -

HLS You may have lost your soul this year

But once you cut your ties

We’ll take you off the target list

You’ll no longer have to lie

Then back to tidings of comfort and wealth

FUCK H-L-S

Call in your loan,

get out of this mess.

This Friday in solidarity with the SHAC Global Week of Action, activists will gather at the world headquarters of Fortress Investment Group. In keep with the theme of the holidays, we will be out in force educating the public about the cruelty that goes on behind locked doors and razor wire fences at Huntingdon Life Science. We will also be letting folks know that Fortress Investment Group is responsible for keeping this horrible killer company in business.

When: Friday, December 18, 2009 @ 4:00 pm

Where: 1345 Avenue of the Americas, NYC

Please join us in sending a message to the management of Fortress Investment Group:

Dallas: Fortress Investment Group 5221 N. O’Connor Boulevard Suite 700 Irving, TX 75039 USA (972) 532 4300

Los Angeles: Fortress Investment Group 9595 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 900 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 USA (310) 300 3413

Frankfurt: FCF Deutschland GmbH Junghofstrasse 22 60311 Frankfurt am Main Germany (49) 69 2549 670

New York: Fortress Investment Group Fortress Capital Finance III (A) LLC 1345 Avenue of the Americas, 46th FloorNew York, NY 10105 USA (212) 798 6100

Geneva: Drawbridge (Suisse) SARL Place Longemalle 6-8 1204 Geneva Switzerland (41) 22 310 5790

Rome: FIG Italia S.r.l. FCF Consulting S.r.l. Via del Tritone 181 00187 Rome Italy (39) 06 47972548

Hong Kong: Fortress Investment Group (Hong Kong)Cheung Kong Centre Suite 4701 2 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong (852) 3658 2730

San Diego: Fortress Investment Group 750 B Street, Suite 2700San Diego, CA 92101 USA (619) 881 6910

Japan: Fortress Investment Group (Japan) GK

Roppongi Hills Keyakizaka Terrace 404 6-15-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku Tokyo 106-0032 Japan 81 3 6438 4400

San Francisco: Fortress Investment Group One Market Street Spear Tower, 35th Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 (415) 293 7965

London: Fortress Investment Group (UK) Ltd. FCF UK (A) III LIMITED 5 Savile Row London, England W1S 3PD (44) 207 290 5600

Sydney: Fortress Investment Group (Australia) PTY Ltd Level 43, AMP Centre 50 Bridge Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia (61) 2 8239 1900

Toronto: Fortress Canada Investment Corp. Bay Wellington Tower, Suite 3210 181 Bay Street, BCE Place Toronto, Ontario, M5J 2T3 Canada (416) 862 8720

Fortress’ Board of Directors

Wesley R. Edens Principal and Co-Chairman of the Board wedens@fortressinv.com

Daniel H. Mudd Chief Executive Officer and Director dmudd@fortressinv.com (this e-mail address may bounce back)

Peter L. Briger, Jr. Principal and Co-Chairman of the Board pbriger@fortressinv.com

Robert I. Kauffman Principal and Director rkauffman@fortressinv.com

Randal A. Nardone Principal and Director rnardone@fortressinv.com

Michael E. Novogratz Principal and Director mnovogratz@fortressinv.com

Dr. Richard N. Haass Director rhaass@fortressinv.com

Daniel N. Bass Chief Financial Officer dbass@fortressinv.com

Douglas L. Jacobs Director djacobs@fortressinv.com

Howard Rubin Director hrubin@fortressinv.com

Takumi Shibata Director tshibata@fortressinv.com

George W. Wellde Jr. Director gwellde@fortressinv.com

Fortress employees directly involved in the Anchor loan:

Michael Polidoro mpolidoro@fortress.com

Michael Eggenberg meggenberg@fortress.com

Scott Silvers ssilvers@fortress.com

All emails in this alert

wedens@fortressinv.com, dmudd@fortressinv.com, pbriger@fortressinv.com, pbriger@fortressinv.com, rkauffman@fortressinv.com, rnardone@fortressinv.com, mnovogratz@fortressinv.com, rhaass@fortressinv.com, dbass@fortressinv.com, djacobs@fortressinv.com, hrubin@fortressinv.com, tshibata@fortressinv.com, gwellde@fortressinv.com, mpolidoro@fortress.com, meggenberg@fortress.com, ssilvers@fortress.com ————————-

As always, please keep all correspondence with Fortress polite and educational. A picture is worth a thousand words, find pictures of Huntingdon Life Sciences cruelty here:

http://calendar.yahoo.com/winanimalrights Visit the WAR MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights Visit WAR on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Win-Animal-Rights/25169195791 Coming events: Mark your calendars now! Friday, December 18th – SHAC Global Day of Action – Fortress Investment Saturday, December 19th – Fur Protests Other HLS actions and ASPCA protests will be announced soon. “If you care about the animals and the earth: GO VEGAN & BUY CRUELTY FREE!” For more info contact Win Animal Rights at: winanimalrights@optonline.net Call: 646.267.9934 or visit the WAR website at: http://war-online.org

OPERATION: 12 DAYS OF XMAS ‘09

(naked male chick on right, naked female chick on left – no sexism here)

DAY 2: SUPPORT OUR POWs &
FIGHT REPRESSION

Our second day of Operation: 12 Days of Xmas ‘09 is dedicated to supporting our political prisoners. For an extensive list of political prisoners which includes not only animal and earth liberation prisoners but also those that have been imprisoned for social justice, anti-war and defense of civil liberties, click on the graphic above or if you are reading a text only document, click on the link here:

http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk/addresses.html

When you write to political prisoners please keep in mind that their mail is read by others and for tips about writing political prisoners check out:

http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk/resources/writing.html

In conversations with Peter Young and Keith Mann, who have both done prison time for animal liberation, we have learned how happy they were to receive letters and photos that helped them pass the time. And they both said that the thing that really made them happiest was to see reports of continuing actions for animal liberation.

Good resources for news about government repression and the “Green Scare”:

http://www.greenscare.org/

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/

ACTIONS NEEDED:

1. Send holiday cards, letters, pictures and other gifts to those serving time for animal liberation, earth liberation and other social justice causes. Contributing to a prisoner’s commissary fund is one of the best ways to support a prisoner.

2. Organize actions and events that can be dedicated to individual prisoners or groups like the SHAC 7. Make sure you let the POW know that you have dedicated an event or an action to them. Pictures of the event or action would be great. Please exercise caution and consider the legality of your event or action. If your action or event is illegal, not only will you put yourself in jeopardy, you might also endanger the prisoner. Use discretion and remember that what is legal in one place might not be in another.

3. Contribute to the support groups of those activists who are standing up to government repression, to grand juries in the USA and to any other form of governmental, judicial or law enforcement repression.

4. Support prisoner support groups:
International: http://www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk/

United States: http://www.arprisonsupport.com/

UK: http://www.vpsg.org/
5. Make a conscious effort to learn about security culture. Incorporate security culture into your life. More about this very important issue in a future action alert.

—————————————————————————————

Note about the 1st Day of Xmas. Fabian Henderson, the jerk who threw Oreo off the roof of a Brooklyn building, appeared in Kings County court today. He was brought before Judge Cassandra Mullen for sentencing, with his hands cuffed behind his back. His Attorney argued for no jail time and a sentence of community service and probation.

The Judge did not appear to be moved but she did grant an adjournement in order to give both sides the opportunity to present relevant arguments regarding the sentencing. It appears that Fabian Henderson will be spending the holidays in jail this year. His next court date is January 5, 2010.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to contact us at: centcom@war-online.org

Visit the WAR Calendar for future events: http://calendar.yahoo.com/winanimalrights
Visit the WAR MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights
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Coming events: Mark your calendars now!

Friday, December 18th – SHAC Global Day of Action – Fortress Investment
Other HLS actions and ASPCA protests will be announced soon.

“If you care about the animals and the earth: GO VEGAN & BUY CRUELTY FREE!”

For more info contact Win Animal Rights at: winanimalrights@optonline.net
Call: 646.267.9934 or visit the WAR website at: http://war-online.org

I.  The Single-Issue Vegan Model is Elitist and Fatally Flawed

Our critical analyzes have exposed radical flaws in the mainstream vegan outreach and vegan abolitionism approaches.[1] We have emphasized the real threat of global ecological crisis which they have ignored and failed to link to veganism. The scientists have warned humanity of impending crisis that will change everything on this planet, and this message has been ignored by governments, media, society in general, and the vegan communities as well. Veganism has been confined to a white upper and middle class enclave.

It is clear that existing vegan models  have reached an impasse and are fatally flawed in design and concept, and that a radical new vision is needed to rescue the importance of the vegan message for global crisis and situate it in its full social and ecological context.

We introduce here a radical new model, vision, and approach, which we are calling “deep vegan outreach.” We have major projects underway, such as involve producing a “social cookbook” which emphasizes the crucial role veganism can play in healing the earth and will be a vehicle for reaching communities hitherto ignored by the vegan movement (see below).

We are at a world-historical crossroads, where we choose breakdown or breakthrough, collapse or sustainability.  All progressive movements must move this issue to the forefront of attention, recognize a common threat, and integrate veganism into human, animal, and environmental issues.

The movement either takes a giant leap here and now, or it continues to degenerate into irrelevance and marginality. We refuse to allow this to happen.  We cannot let dogma, complacency, a narrow single-issue worldview, and elitism to thwart out potential any longer.

We urge everyone to recognize that we hold one of the most important keys to the future, and that we must adopt new visions, models, and tactics.

We need you to join this new effort and help develop a holistic vision for the 21^st and a world in crisis. We need your help to promote a comprehensive vegan outreach approach that includes all people and cultures.

We have exciting new ideas and strategies available to kick start a new movement. The initial response to our request for contributions has been enthusiastic and overwhelming and we welcome everyone’s continued input and support.

II. General Principles of Deep Vegan Outreach

1) Crisis-oriented: recognizes the severity of ecological crisis and heeds the warnings of world scientists and policy experts.

2) Pro-active: with a sense of urgency lacking in the complacent vegan community, this approach works to forestall an imminent ecological crisis and emphasizes the importance of a vegan paradigm shift for the entire planet.

3) Extensive outreach: unlike the dominant model, deep veganism engages people beyond affluent and privileged white communities. This approach addresses:

• Economically-disadvantaged individuals and families, and racially and ethnically diverse populations.
• Developing nations shifting to a meat-based diet; above all, we emphasize the crisis implications of the shift to meat consumption in China and India — the world’s most populous nations — the enormous implications of which have been completely overlooked by the vegan community.
• Eminent scientists and governmental bodies such as the United Nation (UN) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which sending out a wakeup call to the world and whom we hope to persuade to emphasize the global need for a vegan diet ethic. Build bridges and alliances with social and environmental movements, as we emphasize commonalities of oppression and the crucial importance of veganism and animal liberation for ecological sustainability, human survival, and moral-spiritual growth.

III. Immediate Projects and Short Term Goals

1) Engage the existing vegan community: spread awareness of the need for deep vegan outreach and a global ecovegan movement; build new webpages, social media profiles, and so on.

2) Production of “The Social Cookbook: Recipes for Renewal”: gather recipes; emphasize world cuisines, ethnic diversity, and affordability of vegan food; write a comprehensive introduction; publish and distribute.

3) Letter Writing Campaign: outreach efforts to major climate scientists (e.g., James Hansen) and policy experts to encourage them to emphasize veganism as crucial for avoiding runaway ecological crisis and renewing the earth and all its inhabitants.

4) Building Racial and Ethnic Diversity: taking steps to move veganism from its current marginalized status in its limited appeal to privileged whites to a diverse and inclusive social movement.

Dr. Steven Best

Camille Marino

source: http://negotiationisover.com/?p=4522

OPERATION: 12 DAYS OF XMAS ‘09
In Defense of Pit Bulls

PIT BULLS:
MALIGNED, DEMONIZED & PERSECUTED

This year’s Operation: 12 Days of Xmas kicks off on a very serious note. On December 15, 2009, Win Animal Rights will be represented in the Kings County courtroom where Fabian Henderson will be sentenced for the crime of abusing a young female pit bull named Oreo.  Fabian Henderson beat her and threw her off the roof of a 6 story building. As the result of a plea deal, Henderson was to get off without any jail time. He missed his sentencing hearing and as a result, he may now receive jail time. We will see on Tuesday if Oreo will get any justice from the courts.

Meanwhile, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), after using Oreo shamelessly for fundraising, finished the job that Fabian Henderson started, by sentencing Oreo to death by lethal injection on November 13, 2009.  Ed Sayres, CEO of the “A” and Victoria Wells, the uncertified behaviorist, who had Oreo killed will not be facing a judge for their crimes. Instead they are planning to execute another pit bull.

Tonight, that pit bull awaits death in a cage at the “A”. His name is Max. He will be fed a last meal of “premium kibble” (whatever that is) and tomorrow he will die at the hands of the ASPCA, which has the audacity to refer to itself as a No Kill Shelter.

The root of the problem is twofold.  We have an unskilled, uncertified “animal behaviorist”, Victoria Wells.  Whistleblowers at the “A” report that she has substance abuse issues.  It is clear from pictures and videos that she has problems dealing with certain types of dogs.  And we have a CEO that is arrogant and insensitive not only to the plight of the animals, but also to his own staff, as he bullies and blackmails them into submission.  His response to questions or criticism is that if a staffer does not agree with a decision, they are free to leave their job at the ASPCA. Not to mention his utter disregard for the animal advocacy constituency.

And on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 3:00 PM, this dastardly duo will claim yet another victim: Max.

If we allow animal protection organizations to kill pit bulls with impugnity, their blood would be just as much on our hands as it is on theirs.  If we allow organizations to operate behind a shroud of indifference, then we are as much to blame as they are.

ACTIONS NEEDED:

1.  PLEASE ASK THE ASPCA TO RECONSIDER THEIR DECISION TO KILL MAX

(remember we only have until 3:00 pm on Tuesday, December 15, 2009)

2.  You can sign the petition calling for Ed Sayres’ resignation here:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/demand-resignation-of-aspca-pres-ed-sayre

3.  Contact Ed Sayres & Victoria Wells:

Mr. Ed Sayres
President & CEO
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)
424 E. 92nd St
New York, NY 10128-6804

e-mail:  esayres@aspca.org

Telephone:  1-212-876-7700 Ext. 4603

His secretary, Christine is at:  1-212-876-7700 ext. 4600

Victoria Wells
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)
424 E. 92nd St
New York, NY 10128-6804

e-mail:  vwells@aspca.org
victoria@wellsanimalservices.com

Telephone:  1-212-876-7700 Ext. 4422

4.  Plan to join our protests and candlelight vigils. Protests will be held this week at the ASPCA and at the homes of the decision makers of the ASPCA. Please look for announcements later in the week.

We leave you with two poems and a video that resonated with us.  We dedicate this day to Oreo and to Max and all other pit bulls, pit bull mixes and the many breeds that are mistaken for pit bulls.

——————————————————————————————

American Pit Bull Terriers

Their love is like no other; their heart is pure as gold.
Yet while going on a friendly walk, they’re faced with stares of cold.
They’re so very close to human, in how they act and what they do.
Unless you’ve known their devoted love, it’s impossible to explain to you.
They are greatly more MISUNDERSTOOD than any other breed.
We tend to punish this loyal dog, instead of mankind’s deeds.
They are always and forever clowns, with a wish for center stage.
Yet while displaying this sense of humor, most people disengage.
They, oh, so want to make new friends, and run and jump and play.
yet when they happily approach, most people shy away.
Often I’ve seen children poke, or hop on for a ride.
And when I felt they might get mad, they’ve only beamed with pride.
I’ve seen these children yank and pull, with nary a reaction.
Yet media’s not interested, unless they’ve put someone in traction.
They love to snuggle up real close, to give lots of loves and kisses.
Yet they suffer more than any, from unfair prejudices.
What animal do I speak of, whose love is so unique?
If you’ve truly known one, you know of whom I speak.
There is no creature on this earth who will ever make you merrier.
The animal I do speak of, it’s the American Pit Bull Terrier.

by: Patty Letawsky

A PIT BULL’S RIGHT  BE

I went for a walk the other day,
to clear my head, when along the way.
I came upon a sight to sorry to see,
a beaten pit bull looking up at me.

She had been fought, and lost my guess,
Thrown away like all the rest.
In her eyes, I saw a love so deep,
a deep hardened anger into my soul did creep.

I put the anger aside, and bent down to hold,
this beautiful creature, so lonely and cold.
I knew she was dying, she knew it too,
and she would die in my arms, me saying I love you.

We sat for awhile, looking into each other’s eyes,
and no one could hear our sad, sad cries.
With her last little strength, she licked my face,
and then went away with a beautiful grace.

I walked away a different soul,
Anger and hatred would take their toll.
I was so lost in anger and grief,
my life was being stolen, by an invisible thief.

I looked for a purpose, and soon I did see,
I had to fight, for a pit bulls right to be.
Pit bulls are loyal, loving, honest, and true,
and sweet pit bulls, I’ll always be fighting for you.

by: C. Hamilton

SAVE OUR BELOVED BREED

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91MvpSWsW3Y

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to contact us at:centcom@war-online.org

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Description

Come the The Wingnut on Saturday February 20th a 6pm to eat some awesome vegan spaghetti dinner and donate money to the legal defense fund for the AETA 4, who were arrested last year at this time. Please bring some money to donate to the AETA 4 legal defense fund, and then enjoy a delicious dinner with friends and new friends. Maybe musical entertainment too? (contact me musicians!)

Who are the AETA 4?- On February 19-20, 2009, Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope, and Adriana Stumpo, were arrested by the FBI and charged with violating the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. They are now facing a maximum of ten years in prison for their alleged crimes, which include attending demonstrations and other First-Amendment protected activity. They will need your support as they face a long trial process to prove their innocence.

On February 19th and 20th, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Adriana Stumpo, 23; Nathan Pope, 26; Joseph Buddenberg, 25; and Maryam Khajavi, 20 – 4 people it described as “terrorists”. Their “terrorism” apparently consisted of writing with chalk on a sidewalk, wearing bandanas while protesting, and distributing flyers about animal research at UCSC. No, seriously.

The background of this farce includes years of expansion of police power under the rhetoric of combating a “terrorism” which has come to focus, not on Al-Qaeda or abortion clinic bombers, but on scapegoats connected to protests against war, the destruction of the earth and animal life, and other affects of modern capitalist civilization. In particular there has also been a heated campaign over the past few years against experimentation on live animals in the University of California system which has seen sabotage as well as demonstrations against vivisectors. (The state response has already seen federal, local and UC police raid the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley as well as a private residence in Santa Cruz to steal computers and literature, and the FBI forcibly acquiring DNA samples. And if you think these kinds of powers will be used only against anti-vivisection activists, think again.)

But Nathan, Adriana, Maryam and Joseph are not charged with any destructive acts. They are the first people to be charged under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2007, which basically makes bothering anyone who does anything with animals an act of “terrorism”. The lengths to which the U.S government has gone to construct this spectacle are, indeed, spectacular – setting up surveillance cameras in a coffee shop, tracking the legal use of public internet terminals, even DNA testing bandanas while the same government says it doesn’t have the money to help states use DNA testing in death penalty cases, possibly exonerating innocent people on death row! But there is money for DNA testing of activists’ bandanas?!

On the one hand, it is the construction of a bogeyman or public enemy as the justification for expanding police control over every aspect of life. It also recuperates the prestige of police power which has so far been embarrassingly unable to bring any suspects or evidence in the cases of the sabotage and arson – presumably causing some unease to the scientists and administrators of UC as well as their partners in the pharmaceutical industry. It was just time to arrest someone, no matter who – more visible activists are simply the easiest to strike at, regardless of their activities, much like the Haymarket martyrs. The fact that Kinko’s as well as local business Cafe Pergolesi cooperated extensively with the police in this case shows how the business of cops and courts goes hand in hand with the business of business as usual. We can expect that as the economic depression continues to provoke dissatisfaction with the social order, we can see a mounting number of “terrorists”, animal lovers or no, facing crushing punishments for daring to step out of line in any way. Of course, the mainstream press has heavily implied, along with the police, that these 4 people are “guilty until proven innocent” of the other recent acts against animal research in California.

As far as the UC and its patrons in Big Pharma, the media has parroted their claims as well that experimentation on non-human animals is beneficial and necessary for human health. Unasked is the question, what is making us sick anyway? Is poisoning and dissecting defenceless captives of whatever species really a rational and helpful response when the sources of disease come from the structures of modern society itself, like our food system and the lousy choices it offers, our sedentary and/or overstressed lifestyles, the excesses of western medicine itself (for instance, antibiotic resistant germs), and the profusion of chemicals, radiation and the like throughout our water, air, soil and food? Isn’t it possible that – coming to the “other hand” – the cops, the bureaucrats, the scientists, they all know that this is a shameful, horrific, and crazy business, but can’t possibly admit such a thing. So the specter of violence and cruelty must be projected instead onto those standing up to the ones actually responsible, in order to assuage their lying guilt.

In any event, we are for total solidarity with the accused.

Green Is The New Red has made several excellent posts lately on the subject of this latest manifestation of the witch hunts.

How We Can Help:

Donations are still needed to help cover the legal fees.

If you’d like to donate to the AETA 4 Defense Fund, you can send check or money order to:

The AETA Defense Fund

PO Box 99162

Emeryville, CA 94662

Or through PayPal by sending donation to support@aeta4.org

All funds go towards the costly legal battle of the AETA4 defendants.

From Will Potter’s blog, Green is the New Red

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/aeta-4-protesters-higher-sentences-than-cross-burners/2240/

Four animal rights activists are facing charges under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for chanting, demonstrating with masks covering their faces, and chalking defamatory slogans on the sidewalk. If convicted, the “AETA 4,”—Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope, and Adriana Stumpo—could be sentenced to 5-10 years in prison.

The AETA 4 case is a startling example of how federal terrorism laws are being used to create new crimes targeting political activists, and astronomically increase sentences for existing crimes. For instance, Marie Mason was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison for setting fire to empty buildings and taking precautions to not harm anyone.

Meanwhile, during a Congressional hearing on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the Justice Department proclaimed “we are apolitical in this.” But this is anything but apolitical. Animal rights activists could receive 5-10 years in prison, as terrorists, for not harming anyone or attempting to harm anyone. Meanwhile, take a look at what some others are facing for much more serious crimes:

* Burning at a cross at the home of an African-American man, close to his home, while his family is inside: 3.5 years.
* Threatening president-elect Obama with statements including, “I’m going to assassinate the new president of the United States of America. PS you have 48 hours to stop it from happening”: four years probation.
* Setting fire to a hotel with people inside: 1 year.
* Police officer rapes a girl in juvenile custody: 8 months.
* Assaulting black men on election night because Obama was elected president: about 5 years.
* Enron exec guilty of $7 million in wire fraud and securities fraud: 16 months.
* Possessing child pornography: 4 years.
* Tying up a black student and taunting him with racial epithets as part of a high school graduation party: six months.
* Mailing anthrax threats to the IRS: one year.
* “Using the Internet to threaten to destroy buildings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by fire or explosives”: one year.
* Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth kills a construction worker while driving drunk: 30 days.
* Threatening to bomb an Air Force base: one year.
* Drunken man drives over his brother during an argument: 1.5 years.
* Scheming to defraud an insurance company through arson: 2 years.
* Mailing anthrax threats to an assistant U.S. attorney: up to 5 years.
* Manufacturing and selling home-made explosive devices: 5 years probation
* Sending 65 anthrax hoax letters: four years.
* Dumping nearly 13 million gallons of untreated liquid waste: 15 months.
* Threatening to bomb the Oklahoma city federal building: up to 5 years.
* Setting a dog on fire and burning 50 percent of his body: 45 days.

According to the government, high sentences for animal rights activists are intended as a deterrent, they are intended to send a message.

What kind of message do you think this sends?

Note: Funds are needed for the AETA 4 legal defense. Please make a contribution. You can go to Paypal.com and send a donation to support@aeta4.org.

The Quotes Of  The Week

The quotes below by animal abusers should remove any remaining doubt among our dear readers that direct action is an extremely effective tactic in stopping the exploitation, torture and murder of sentient non-human animals:

“It [action by animal liberationists] is changing the kind of work people will do in the future,” he says. “If students come to me interested in primate research, I would tell them to think about other things.” –Dario Ringach, UCLA Vivisector who quit killing non-human primates in his laboratory in 2006 when his colleagues were attacked by the ALF

“The issue he [Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis] was mostly concerned about was that he really did not want to attract controversy from the violent elements of various animal rights groups. He did not want to put OSU in that spotlight and so unnecessarily distract from or interfere with current research.” – OSU Vice-President for Research and Technology Transfer Stephen McKeever, to Science Magazine when explaining why Hargis had canceled OSU plans to kill baboons with Anthrax.

—————————————————————————————

source: http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/index.htm

Miller (left) poses with “Bambi,” one of the props that he and activists Anthony Marr (right)–the most hated anti-hunting activist in North America–and Anthony Damiano used in a campaign Miller spear-headed against a deer cull as they gathered in Kansas City to found the Global Ant-Hunting Coalition, of which all three are board members.

An interview with Jason Miller exploring radical dissent and animal liberation

By Frank Joseph Smecker, 11/3/09

Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of the radical blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, is a tenacious forty-something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly an autodidact, but he has also studied liberal arts and philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

An accomplished and prolific essayist on social and political issues, his writings have appeared on hundreds of alternative media websites over the last few years. He is also a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office and the founder of Bite Club of KC, a grassroots animal rights activist group.

Miller and Damiano….

Frank Joseph Smecker: You founded Thomas Paine’s Corner in March of 2005 as an act of commitment to “ending the unnecessary suffering of oppressed and exploited sentient beings and to the total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth.” Can you explain, in further depth, the content managed on the site and its relationship to the direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior?

Jason Miller: Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC) exists as a platform from which our editors, writers, and I can educate, promote, persuade, convince, criticize, and help evoke profound social change. TPC also helps amplify the press releases of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office by simulposting many of them. These anonymous communiqués from underground activists demonstrate TPC’s support for the “direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior,” as the NAALPO press releases deliver the communiqués in a format that both informs the world of the action and explains why the activists did what they did.

I do tend to focus heavily on animal liberation issues with the pieces I publish on TPC, but our content includes a wide array of human and Earth liberation essays, polemics, articles, rants, critiques, and poems as well. As you noted in your question, my editors and I promote Steve Best’s concept of total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth. You can get a much better idea of what this entails by visiting the Total Liberation section of TPC at http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/total-liberation/.

FJS: Evidently, you’re a proponent of animal liberation; can you explain why animals need liberation, what animal liberation entails and, its alliance to the total liberation of all sentient beings on the planet?

JM: This question goes to the heart of my unwavering dedication to the animal rights movement. Our species annihilates 50 billion nonhuman animals per annum—10 billion in the US alone…

FJS: That’s incredible…

JM: I know…

FJS: In a really horrific sense…

JM: I know. Nearly defenseless against humans, the most dangerous and destructive species ever to stalk the planet, nonhuman animals suffer egregious exploitation. Circuses, rodeos, vivisection labs, factory farms, zoos, puppy mills, public and private areas where hunting and fishing are permitted, and numerous other entities and places objectify living, sentient beings, using and abusing them as they see fit to derive profits and pleasure. It is morally abhorrent that our species subjugates, tortures, and wantonly massacres millions upon millions of individuals from other species day after day—and we could readily live without the benefits that we derive from these heinous acts or we could attain those benefits in other ways.

Animal liberation naturally aligns with other liberation movements because the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals occur to such a broad extent and because humans are able to perpetrate these reprehensible acts so readily—due to the defenselessness of the animals and because law, culture and society endorse, condone, and promote these abject cruelties. Slavery, exploitation, and oppression of humans trace their roots to the objectification and subjugation of nonhuman animals that began some 12,000 years ago when we started “domesticating” them. Many of the tools (i.e. shackles and branding) we used to enslave people are still in use today for enslaving “farm” animals. To learn far more about the undeniable parallels between human and nonhuman animal exploitation and enslavement, I highly recommend Marjorie Spiegel’s book entitled “The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery.”

If we are to break the chains of economic tyranny, patriarchy, racism, classism, imperialism, and other forms of human oppression, we need to get to the root of dominionism and liberate nonhuman animals—allowing them to live free of human-inflicted enslavement, torture, and death.

FJS: It’s been said that in order to exploit someone you must first silence them. This can be done by stripping one of their subjecthood and objectifying them as a resource to be used and managed. Can you talk about how science and industry objectify nonhuman animals and the rest of the animate world? And what are the implications of this?

JM: Science and industry don’t have to objectify nonhuman animals or nature. Our sociocultural indoctrination has already done that for the vivisectors, factory farmers, and their ilk. As a species, we have created layer upon layer of myths, falsehoods, delusions, and dogmas to convince ourselves of our superiority and separateness. Blinded by hubris and deluded by profound narcissism, we’ve convinced ourselves that we are little demigods, endowed with the right to plunder, exploit, consume, pollute, torture, and kill with virtual impunity.

FJS: Define speciesism.

JM: Speciesism is the deeply flawed belief that the human species is superior to all other species. Like racism, the more powerfully embedded such a belief is in society, the more immense the suffering of those individuals deemed “inferior.” The widespread prevalence of speciesism in our dominant culture gives morally stunted people a ‘license to torture and kill’ nonhuman animals.

FJS: So why protect animals? I mean, I know why, but many attempt to excuse speciesist behavior with this benighted question.

JM: Right. Why not protect animals? Or another question: Why protect Homo sapiens, a species of animal that’s destroying the planet? Rhetoricals of course…..

We need to protect nonhuman animals for several reasons:

1. They are sentient—they have central nervous systems and feel pain, just as we do. We have no right to enslave, torture, or slaughter them.

2. Many species of nonhuman animals are far more intelligent, emotionally developed, and socially complex than most people realize. They deserve the opportunity to live free of human-inflicted subjugation, suffering, or death.

3. Our species has triggered the Sixth Great Extinction and it is our responsibility to mitigate it to the extent we’re able.

4. Contrary to our delusions, we are not separate and distinct from nature. Despite the numerous artificial barriers we’ve created, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re part and parcel of the web of existence, or life if you will, on this planet. Each individual, each herd, each flock, and particularly each entire species that we annihilate or eradicate further disrupts the ecological balance that we’ve already adversely impacted in significant ways.

FJS: You’re vegan, is this correct?

JM: I am a vegan.

FJS: Why veganism?

JM: My reasoning is relatively simple. I do not objectify nonhuman animals. I view them as individuals and sentient beings with rich emotional, social and intellectual lives, each bearing the basic rights to exist free from human exploitation, subjugation, torture, and murder. Eating rotting animal flesh, which is what “meat” actually is, is as abhorrent to me as cannibalism would be to most of the “meat” eating world.

FJS: I have a great recipe for a tofu potpie; would you like me to share it with you?

JM: Sure. Veganism is an integral part of my spiritual beliefs, so I generally eat to live and could subsist on nearly anything that gave me the nutrients I need. BUT, I’m certainly not one to turn down an offer of good vegan food.

FJS: Alright, here we go:

- First, make your piecrust; pre-bake the bottom layer of the crust for 10 minutes on 450˚ F.
- Then, cube the tofu and fry it in olive oil until it gets nice and crispy. Add some nutritional yeast, flaky not powdered (and some garlic/onion powder for some flavor).
- Cut up one onion and sauté it. Add chopped celery and carrots and peas respectively. Add some tamari (optional), garlic, etc.
- Next you want to make the gravy. This gravy kicks ass, btw. What you need to do is toast ½ cup of nutritional yeast and ½ cup of flour in a skillet on medium high until you can smell it – but don’t let it burn! Add some olive oil until absorbs all of the flour/yeast and continue to toast. Slowly add water – a little at a time until you reach your desired consistency (keep heating to thicken, add water, etc.). Add tamari and a dash or two of hot sauce (I prefer Frank’s Red Hot Sauce) and other spices.
- Now, put the cubed and crispy tofu over the bottom of the crust. Next, add the layer of sautéed veggies then the gravy, allowing the gravy to settle over everything. Then add the crust-lid, i.e. the top crust.
- Last, bake the pie for 30 minutes at 350˚ F or until the top crust begins to brown.

JM: Thanks.

FJS: My pleasure – let me know how it comes out.

Sorry to jump tracks there; at any rate, where do you believe our desire to protect and defend the wild comes from?

Miller recently innovated “tactile activism” in a campaign he and hundreds of his allies waged against a deer “cull” in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park).

JM: I think that answer would be different for each person. My desire to protect and defend the wild (and nonhuman animals in general) stems from my hair-trigger sensitivity to injustice, the empathy and compassion I developed through the course of my personal struggles, and from the realization that our species is inextricably connected with the rest of nature.

FJS: Personally, I support any movement working toward stopping the destruction of the planet, by any means necessary. Not only are you an advocate for direct-action needed to stop the injustices and cruelty perpetrated by those in power, but you propound and support militant direct-action. Can you explain why?

JM: Our species is waging a war on the Earth and nonhuman animals. We need to defend them by any means necessary. Whether an individual engages in militant direct action (MDA) or not, if a person is seriously dedicated to total liberation, they must at least support MDA and those who engage in it.

FJS: The U.S. has singled out the A.L.F. and E.L.F. as domestic terrorist groups. Why do you believe this is so? What is your response to this?

JM: The corporate state complex of the US has targeted underground militant direct action groups that fight for nonhuman animal and environmental justice as terrorists for two principal reasons. One is that their actions are effective. Secondly, groups like the A.L.F. represent an existential threat to the predominating cultural meme of dominionism and to the precious profits of the corporate state complex. So of course they label them as terrorists and attempt to neutralize them with state repression.

My response is that those exploiting the Earth and nonhuman animals are the true terrorists and groups like the A.L.F. and the E.L.F. are freedom fighters.

FJS: Can you talk about the comparative qualities and aspects between modern-day liberation movements and historic factions such as the abolitionists of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the freedom fighters, Nazi resistance groups, and other estimable groups who risked much to put an end to oppression and violent exploitation?

JM: Modern day liberation movements are fighting with the same sense of moral purpose and employing some of the same underground, militant tactics as Abolitionists and Nazi resistance groups. Sometimes force and violence are necessary to defend and free the innocent from powerful, malevolent people.

FJS: Why do you believe so many radicals, leftists, progressives et al. overlook the importance of Animal and Earth Liberation?

JM: Unfortunately, many radicals and leftists—people who would be nearly ideal allies for animal and Earth liberationists—are hardened humanists. Their anthropocentrism inflicts them with a human-centric myopia that prevents them from recognizing that defending nonhuman animals, the Earth and oppressed humans are struggles that we need to integrate. Many leftists take the position that we need to focus on human suffering and exploitation first and then focus our efforts on animal rights and environmental justice. Why pick and choose which sociopathic tendencies of our species we work to eradicate? We need to go after speciesism and dominionism as tenaciously as we do racism, classism, and patriarchy.

FJS: You’re a pretty radical thinker – which is great to be. Were you always so radically inclined? Or was there a specific catalyst for your change of perspective; was it a sudden epiphany? For me, the transition from being a “good little capitalist” to a radical writer and thinker, recognizing the atrocious imbalances intrinsic within the dominant culture’s power complex, was a painful experience. Was this the case for you?

JM: No, as in no I’ve not always been “radically inclined.” My indoctrination into our planet-murdering capitalist socioeconomic and cultural paradigm was pretty thorough. I spent my first 26 or so years on this planet as an allegiance pledging, money-driven, relatively narcissistic, speciesist, meat-eating, property-worshipping, anthropocentric, NFL obsessed “good citizen” of the American Empire. I didn’t flee to my position “far from the maddening crowd.” I walked at a very slow pace. My evolution to anarcho-veganism was gradual; there was no epiphany. It was painful though in that the catalyst was my self-inflicted descent into spiritual, emotional, social, and financial hell. Yet hitting rock bottom was the best thing that could’ve happened, as my intense soul-searching, tenacious struggle to pull myself back from the brink of self-annihilation, and loss of nearly everything and everyone in my life enabled me to shatter the shackles of the dominant culture. I reconstructed my worldview from scratch—and it bears little resemblance to that of my inculcation.

FJS: Are you ever castigated as an extremist?

JM: I’m often castigated as an extremist.

FJS: What’s your response to this?

JM: My response to this gross mischaracterization is that our planet and animal murdering system is extreme, as are its ardent proponents and its recalcitrant, unrepentant enablers and participants.

FJS: It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by today’s atrocities and I really like what Derrick Jensen has to say about this, which is: “We’re so fucked. But life is so good.” What makes you most happy? How do you remain grounded despite a surfeit of calamitous problems we face in these times?

JM: Following my conscience, fighting for my core beliefs, and being with nonhuman animals and with people who share my worldview are sources of great happiness for me. I stay grounded by knowing my purpose in life (which is defending nonhuman animals and the Earth as a polemicist, thinker, publisher, and activist) and fulfilling it.

FJS: Who have you been influenced by?

JM: My influences are far too numerous to name without writing a book. As an autodidact and one who is addicted to reading, many people have mentored me in the abstract—through the pages of their books, but I also have forged my eclectic and holistic worldview with the help of a number of excellent mentors, teachers, and allies. Dr. Steve Best, a leading theorist of the animal liberation movement whom I met several years ago, was my most recent mentor and remains a very close ally and confidante.

FJS: As a writer, I often wonder how significant of a role we (writers) all have in the struggle for emancipating the planet from the fetters of a dominating culture. Can you talk about the importance the role of the writer plays in influencing effective activism?

JM: I’m a bit biased on this topic because I’m a writer too. However, I also engage in on-the-ground activism, so that adds a bit of objectivity to my response. Emancipating the planet and its other sentient inhabitants is a revolutionary undertaking. Polemicists, propagandists, theorists, and philosophers, who are writers of course, have been essential participants in every major revolution and social movement in history. Thomas Paine catalyzed the American Revolution with his widely-read pamphlet, Common Sense. Without Marx, Lenin would’ve had no philosophy on which to base his praxis. William Lloyd Garrison was instrumental in both the Abolition and Women’s Suffrage Movements. There are myriad other examples.

FJS: What role do corporations play in the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants? What role does the state play in all of this?

JM: The corporate-state complex bears nearly all the responsibility for the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants. While it’s important for individuals to evolve towards anarchist, vegan, and anti-capitalist worldviews and ways of being, the system and its most unrepentant and malevolent overlords are our enemy. Most people have years of indoctrination to overcome in order to evolve, but many can change and join us. Nearly every individual is a potential ally. We need to work to educate and convert individuals while assailing the corporate-state complex, an entity which utilizes pernicious propaganda and hollow materialistic incentives to lure most people to act as accomplices in its profit-seeking, murderous agenda.

FJS: How does the notion of an industrial collapse impact your strategies regarding the defense of the wild?

JM: Actually, I hadn’t really considered industrial collapse as I’ve waged this prolonged and intense battle to protect the deer in Shawnee Mission Park (which is well-chronicled at Bite Club of KC http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/). My line of thinking is that as long as industrial civilization is extant in its present form, I want to do what I can to defend as much of the wild and as many nonhuman animals as I can from its metastatic toxicity.

FJS: What do you believe the future holds for dissidents and direct-activists confronting the corporatist-statist union?

JM: I suspect the future for dissidents and direct-activists will become increasingly challenging as we confront the corporatist-state complex. As the existing socioeconomic paradigm (unsustainable, unjust and unstable as it is) continues to wobble and deteriorate, governments will become increasingly repressive, even in so-called liberal democracies like the US and the UK. Applying tools like the Patriot Act, the AETA, the FBI, grand juries, and massive deployments of well-armed law enforcement personnel (i.e. at the G-20 in Pittsburgh), the corporate-state complex has put serious constraints on dissent. The Green Scare has paralyzed many activists with fear. Nevertheless, we need to persist.

Frank Joseph Smecker, TPC’s Editor of Radical Earth Defense, is a social-worker and writer from Vermont who has an ardent and committed passion to work in defense of everything wild. Mostly an autodidact, he is also currently in school matriculating toward a degree in psychology. He is an accomplished writer; his essays, interviews and articles, decrying the atrocities of industrial civilization and capitalism, have appeared in many publications. He is also a blog writer for the Vermont Commons Journal (for Independence from Empire).

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Aren’t humans amazing Animals? They kill wildlife – birds, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice and foxes by the million in order to protect their domestic animals and their feed.

Then they kill domestic animals by the billion and eat them. This in turn kills people by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative – and fatal – - health conditions like heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and cancer.

So then humans spend billions of dollars torturing and killing millions of more animals to look for cures for these diseases.

Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals.

Meanwhile, few people recognize the absurdity of humans, who kill so easily and violently, and once a year send out cards praying for “Peace on Earth.”

~ Revised from Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm by C. David Coates

by Dr. Steven Best

The “animal rights movement,” such as it is, poses a fundamental evolutionary challenge to human beings in the midst of severe social and ecological crises. Can we recognize that the animal question is central to the human question? Can we grasp how the exploitation of nonhuman animals is implicated in every aspect of mental, social, and ecological breakdown? Can we illuminate and eliminate the corrupt constellation of overlapping oppressions that constitute the sickness and bungled experiment we call “civilization”? Can we become truly enlightened and overcome one of the last remaining prejudices, a sanctioned system of murder, a legally-validated police-protected form of enslavement, an ongoing holocaust? Can humans reorganize their economic institutions, retool their technologies, and reconstruct their cultural traditions apart from visceral violence and socially-secured  sadism? Can they construct new sensibilities, values, worldviews, and identities?

Animal liberation is an assault on human identity  alienated  from the natural world and complex with vanity and arrogance.   It demands that humans relinquish their sense of superiority over nonhumans  and smash the compasses of anthropocentrisim and speciesismAnimal liberation provokes people to realize that power demands responsibility and that might is not right.  , It places an unprecedented burden on humanity to act altruistically and no longer exploit their fellow beings.  Animal liberation calls people back to an integral consciousness and relation to their teeming natural surroundings such as their early ancestors enjoyed before symbolic thinking, technological culture, agriculture, and the emergence of hierarchical ideologies and institutions.

By expanding the definition and boundaries of moral subjects and community, animal liberationists challenge hierarchical thinking of all kinds (racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ablism, and statism). Above all, it dismisses the speciesist mindset that humanity is apart from, rather than a part of, the natural world and evolutionary processes.  In a masterful example of question begging and circular reasoning – animals are deemed inferior to humans because they are not humans (i.e., they lack allegedly unique human qualities such as reasoning, language, and symbolic and technological cultures). Distorted conceptions of human beings as demigods who command a planet that exists solely for its interests and benefits must be replaced with the far more humble and holistic notion that humans belong to, and are dependent upon, vast networks of organic and inorganic relationships.

Let’s be clear: we are fighting for a revolution, not for reforms, for the end of slavery, not for “humane” slavemasters, for a new consciosuenss, not “enlightened humanism”. Animal rights advances the most radical idea to ever land on human ears: animals are not ours to exploit as food, clothing, resources, commodities, data, or “entertainment.” They exist for their own purposes, not ours. But animal liberation is simply unthinkable on its own terns, rather than as part and parcel of a larger revolutionary project that integrates human, animal, and Earth liberation as one inseparable struggle.

Thus, we must not only educate and agitate, we must form a social movement that combines the merely partial struggles for social justice, autonomy, animal rights, and ecology in a global, revolutionary politics of total liberation. As with all revolutions, animals will not gain “rights” (or whatever a possible future society calls inviolable and inalienable moral and legal protections against abuse and exploitation) because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.

Animal liberation requires that people transcend the complacent boundaries of humanism – however “radical” and “progressive” – to effect a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, one that moves the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Humans must not only change their views toward one another, a massive undertaking in itself, they must  also recognize that the species boundaries separating human from nonhuman animals are as arbitrary as those of race and sex. Animal liberation is possible only as total liberation that is advanced as part and parcel of a radical social movement and realizes moral learning processes in the institutional networks of a truly democratic post-capitalist society.

Animal liberation expands on classic humanist values such as rights, democracy, equality, justice, and peace, as it broadens inclusivity, expands moral value and legal protection, and deepens community. In taking the quantum jump beyond humanism, animal liberation does not “trivialize” human rights (as bioethicist Arthur Kaplan claims), but rather  frees the universal and progressive aspects of rights from the ignorance, bias, prejudice, and discrimination of “rational” and “enlightened” human beings. Humanism is nothing but a tribalism writ large, applying to the artificially created chasm between “Us” and “Them,” between human and nonhuman animals, a conceptual dualism that underpins the vicious and violent system of species apartheid.

As difficult, bloody, and tenacious the battle to win gains in human rights and equality has been throughout modern Western history, we must recognize that every justice struggle to the present has been relatively easy. Now it gets hard.

The patterns of history cannot be changed by the vain hopes of pacifists who believe that Divine intervention or moral magic will make animal liberation – which threatens human psychological, social, and economic structures in profound ways – will be achieved peacefully, without shedding a drop of blood, through reason, compassion, and persuasion. Far more plausibly, especially as social and ecological crises heat up to fever pitch, we are headed for a profound, lengthy, and likely violent war – a war of human against nonhuman animals, of liberationists against exploiters, and of the corporate-state complex against militants and dissenters of any kind.

The struggle to end human supremacy is the most difficult liberation battle of all because speciesism is virtually primordial and universal. Speciesism was arguably the first form of hierarchical domination and a key model and blueprint for slavery, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ablism, and fascism. Speciesist cultures have grown in scale and degree throughout human history and its poisonous roots of human supremacism have spread throughout the globe.

Power, domination, violence, and extermination are not dynamics limited to Western culture or the modern world, as if there were a utopian past or radical alternative to recover. While wary  of biological reductionism, it is nevertheless evident that power pathologies are deeply embedded in the long social and biological history of humans, and our ancient Australopithecine and primate ancestors. As appalled the “monster” in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), the history of humanity is a tale of violence, warfare, genocide, destruction, such that a war of extermination was first unleashed, quite likely, on a fellow human species, Homo neanderthalensis. Then, after a 15,000 year long pogrom designed to eliminate Neanderthals, humans hunted large mammals (megafauna) into extinction on every continent they roamed.

Humans slaughtered remaining hunting and gathering tribes, waged wider warfare against one another, enslaved captive populations, and from Romans and Mayans to Christians and the US, they blanketed the Earth with invading armies whose numbers rose from thousands to millions to billions, exceeding ecological limits the entire way and paying the price with every crash and collapse.

Fueled by greed, bloodlust, cruelty, orgies of killing, and insatiable appetites for power, the Roman, Greek, Mayan empires are but variations on the global Human Empire – the tyrannical reign of Homo rapiens – such that one species on a path of runaway growth and expansion has colonized a fecund planet capable of generating tens of millions of species.

The pathologies of power and are not limited to Western societies or to the modern world, such that there is some significant utopian past or cultural alternative to recover. While social institutions such as capitalism magnify the worst aspects of human behavior, a violent dominator complex is not wholly accidental to the human species itself, which, but for rare exceptions, is a violent, destructive, and imperialist animal. Human beings have  proven incapable of learning from past disasters, and unable to relinquish their arrogance and delusions.

Animal liberation is the most difficult battle we  have ever fought because it requires widespread agreement to abandon the privileges of power and what people widely perceive to be their hard-won or  God-given rights to exploit nonhuman animals and the entire Earth for their purposes.

To change these attitudes, and the systems they inform, is to change the very nerve center of human consciousness and existence.

That is our task no more and no less.

Dr. Steven Best is NIO’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation.  Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Dr. Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under frequent fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to Russia to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

source: http://negotiationisover.com/?p=4495

Courts » Six months in jail recommended for man who released 600 mink.Courts » Six months in jail recommended for man who released 600 mink.

A federal judge is deciding whether prosecutors broke a bargain of asking for only six months of jail time in an animal rights activism case.

William James Viehl agreed to plead guilty to releasing 600 mink from the McMullin Fur Farm in South Jordan on Aug. 19, 2008, and spray-painting a barn with ALF (for Animal Liberation Front) and “We are watching.” In exchange, prosecutors said they’d recommend he do six months in jail.

On Nov. 12, Judge Dee Benson said he was planning to give Viehl two years or more in jail.

On Friday, Viehl’s defense attorney Heather Harris argued that while prosecutors did say they recommended six months, their presentation before the judge was much more condemning than a six-month sentence would justify. Prosecutors presented a slide show of other victims of animal rights activists and told Benson that while Viehl was being charged with a property crime, “that does not quite capture the offense that was committed by Mr. Viehl.”

Harris said that when the government agrees to a plea deal, they have to advocate for it in front of the judge.

“I don’t think this is what happened in this case,” said Harris, who has petitioned to have a judge other than Benson sentence her client.

Benson, who heard the arguments Friday, said that while he usually is lenient on first-time offenders such as Viehl, he had decided to sentence the 23-year-old Clearfield man to two years or more before the prosecution had the ability to persuade him in court. Benson said he based his decision on the testimony of the mink farm owner. But, he added, the arguments Friday did not center around when he made his decision, but rather if the prosecution upheld their bargain to support a six-month sentence.

“It’s like if you and I went to The Cheesecake Factory,” he told John Huber, an assistant U.S. attorney on Friday. “And you said the pasta, the cheesecake, everything is delicious, but then you said ‘You should just have a cup of tomato soup.’ The recommendation would be inconsistent with the buildup.”

Benson said he needs to read similar cases and do more research before he makes his decision.

smcfarland@sltrib.com

source:  http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13981411

Miller (left) poses with “Bambi,” one of the props that he and activists Anthony Marr (right)–the most hated anti-hunting activist in North America–and Anthony Damiano used in a campaign Miller spear-headed against a deer cull as they gathered in Kansas City to found the Global Ant-Hunting Coalition, of which all three are board members.

An interview with Jason Miller exploring radical dissent and animal liberation

11/3/09

By Frank Joseph Smecker

Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of the radical blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, is a tenacious forty-something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly an autodidact, but he has also studied liberal arts and philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

An accomplished and prolific essayist on social and political issues, his writings have appeared on hundreds of alternative media websites over the last few years. He is also a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office and the founder of Bite Club of KC, a grassroots animal rights activist group.

Miller and Damiano….

Frank Joseph Smecker: You founded Thomas Paine’s Corner in March of 2005 as an act of commitment to “ending the unnecessary suffering of oppressed and exploited sentient beings and to the total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth.” Can you explain, in further depth, the content managed on the site and its relationship to the direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior?

Jason Miller: Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC) exists as a platform from which our editors, writers, and I can educate, promote, persuade, convince, criticize, and help evoke profound social change. TPC also helps amplify the press releases of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office by simulposting many of them. These anonymous communiqués from underground activists demonstrate TPC’s support for the “direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior,” as the NAALPO press releases deliver the communiqués in a format that both informs the world of the action and explains why the activists did what they did.

I do tend to focus heavily on animal liberation issues with the pieces I publish on TPC, but our content includes a wide array of human and Earth liberation essays, polemics, articles, rants, critiques, and poems as well. As you noted in your question, my editors and I promote Steve Best’s concept of total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth. You can get a much better idea of what this entails by visiting the Total Liberation section of TPC at http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/total-liberation/.

FJS: Evidently, you’re a proponent of animal liberation; can you explain why animals need liberation, what animal liberation entails and, its alliance to the total liberation of all sentient beings on the planet?

JM: This question goes to the heart of my unwavering dedication to the animal rights movement. Our species annihilates 50 billion nonhuman animals per annum—10 billion in the US alone…

FJS: That’s incredible…

JM: I know…

FJS: In a really horrific sense…

JM: I know. Nearly defenseless against humans, the most dangerous and destructive species ever to stalk the planet, nonhuman animals suffer egregious exploitation. Circuses, rodeos, vivisection labs, factory farms, zoos, puppy mills, public and private areas where hunting and fishing are permitted, and numerous other entities and places objectify living, sentient beings, using and abusing them as they see fit to derive profits and pleasure. It is morally abhorrent that our species subjugates, tortures, and wantonly massacres millions upon millions of individuals from other species day after day—and we could readily live without the benefits that we derive from these heinous acts or we could attain those benefits in other ways.

Animal liberation naturally aligns with other liberation movements because the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals occur to such a broad extent and because humans are able to perpetrate these reprehensible acts so readily—due to the defenselessness of the animals and because law, culture and society endorse, condone, and promote these abject cruelties. Slavery, exploitation, and oppression of humans trace their roots to the objectification and subjugation of nonhuman animals that began some 12,000 years ago when we started “domesticating” them. Many of the tools (i.e. shackles and branding) we used to enslave people are still in use today for enslaving “farm” animals. To learn far more about the undeniable parallels between human and nonhuman animal exploitation and enslavement, I highly recommend Marjorie Spiegel’s book entitled “The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery.”

If we are to break the chains of economic tyranny, patriarchy, racism, classism, imperialism, and other forms of human oppression, we need to get to the root of dominionism and liberate nonhuman animals—allowing them to live free of human-inflicted enslavement, torture, and death.

FJS: It’s been said that in order to exploit someone you must first silence them. This can be done by stripping one of their subjecthood and objectifying them as a resource to be used and managed. Can you talk about how science and industry objectify nonhuman animals and the rest of the animate world? And what are the implications of this?

JM: Science and industry don’t have to objectify nonhuman animals or nature. Our sociocultural indoctrination has already done that for the vivisectors, factory farmers, and their ilk. As a species, we have created layer upon layer of myths, falsehoods, delusions, and dogmas to convince ourselves of our superiority and separateness. Blinded by hubris and deluded by profound narcissism, we’ve convinced ourselves that we are little demigods, endowed with the right to plunder, exploit, consume, pollute, torture, and kill with virtual impunity.

FJS: Define speciesism.

JM: Speciesism is the deeply flawed belief that the human species is superior to all other species. Like racism, the more powerfully embedded such a belief is in society, the more immense the suffering of those individuals deemed “inferior.” The widespread prevalence of speciesism in our dominant culture gives morally stunted people a ‘license to torture and kill’ nonhuman animals.

FJS: So why protect animals? I mean, I know why, but many attempt to excuse speciesist behavior with this benighted question.

JM: Right. Why not protect animals? Or another question: Why protect Homo sapiens, a species of animal that’s destroying the planet? Rhetoricals of course…..

We need to protect nonhuman animals for several reasons:

1. They are sentient—they have central nervous systems and feel pain, just as we do. We have no right to enslave, torture, or slaughter them.

2. Many species of nonhuman animals are far more intelligent, emotionally developed, and socially complex than most people realize. They deserve the opportunity to live free of human-inflicted subjugation, suffering, or death.

3. Our species has triggered the Sixth Great Extinction and it is our responsibility to mitigate it to the extent we’re able.

4. Contrary to our delusions, we are not separate and distinct from nature. Despite the numerous artificial barriers we’ve created, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re part and parcel of the web of existence, or life if you will, on this planet. Each individual, each herd, each flock, and particularly each entire species that we annihilate or eradicate further disrupts the ecological balance that we’ve already adversely impacted in significant ways.

FJS: You’re vegan, is this correct?

JM: I am a vegan.

FJS: Why veganism?

JM: My reasoning is relatively simple. I do not objectify nonhuman animals. I view them as individuals and sentient beings with rich emotional, social and intellectual lives, each bearing the basic rights to exist free from human exploitation, subjugation, torture, and murder. Eating rotting animal flesh, which is what “meat” actually is, is as abhorrent to me as cannibalism would be to most of the “meat” eating world.

FJS: I have a great recipe for a tofu potpie; would you like me to share it with you?

JM: Sure. Veganism is an integral part of my spiritual beliefs, so I generally eat to live and could subsist on nearly anything that gave me the nutrients I need. BUT, I’m certainly not one to turn down an offer of good vegan food.

FJS: Alright, here we go:

- First, make your piecrust; pre-bake the bottom layer of the crust for 10 minutes on 450˚ F.
- Then, cube the tofu and fry it in olive oil until it gets nice and crispy. Add some nutritional yeast, flaky not powdered (and some garlic/onion powder for some flavor).
- Cut up one onion and sauté it. Add chopped celery and carrots and peas respectively. Add some tamari (optional), garlic, etc.
- Next you want to make the gravy. This gravy kicks ass, btw. What you need to do is toast ½ cup of nutritional yeast and ½ cup of flour in a skillet on medium high until you can smell it – but don’t let it burn! Add some olive oil until absorbs all of the flour/yeast and continue to toast. Slowly add water – a little at a time until you reach your desired consistency (keep heating to thicken, add water, etc.). Add tamari and a dash or two of hot sauce (I prefer Frank’s Red Hot Sauce) and other spices.
- Now, put the cubed and crispy tofu over the bottom of the crust. Next, add the layer of sautéed veggies then the gravy, allowing the gravy to settle over everything. Then add the crust-lid, i.e. the top crust.
- Last, bake the pie for 30 minutes at 350˚ F or until the top crust begins to brown.

JM: Thanks.

FJS: My pleasure – let me know how it comes out.

Sorry to jump tracks there; at any rate, where do you believe our desire to protect and defend the wild comes from?

Miller recently innovated “tactile activism” in a campaign he and hundreds of his allies waged against a deer “cull” in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park).

JM: I think that answer would be different for each person. My desire to protect and defend the wild (and nonhuman animals in general) stems from my hair-trigger sensitivity to injustice, the empathy and compassion I developed through the course of my personal struggles, and from the realization that our species is inextricably connected with the rest of nature.

FJS: Personally, I support any movement working toward stopping the destruction of the planet, by any means necessary. Not only are you an advocate for direct-action needed to stop the injustices and cruelty perpetrated by those in power, but you propound and support militant direct-action. Can you explain why?

JM: Our species is waging a war on the Earth and nonhuman animals. We need to defend them by any means necessary. Whether an individual engages in militant direct action (MDA) or not, if a person is seriously dedicated to total liberation, they must at least support MDA and those who engage in it.

FJS: The U.S. has singled out the A.L.F. and E.L.F. as domestic terrorist groups. Why do you believe this is so? What is your response to this?

JM: The corporate state complex of the US has targeted underground militant direct action groups that fight for nonhuman animal and environmental justice as terrorists for two principal reasons. One is that their actions are effective. Secondly, groups like the A.L.F. represent an existential threat to the predominating cultural meme of dominionism and to the precious profits of the corporate state complex. So of course they label them as terrorists and attempt to neutralize them with state repression.

My response is that those exploiting the Earth and nonhuman animals are the true terrorists and groups like the A.L.F. and the E.L.F. are freedom fighters.

FJS: Can you talk about the comparative qualities and aspects between modern-day liberation movements and historic factions such as the abolitionists of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the freedom fighters, Nazi resistance groups, and other estimable groups who risked much to put an end to oppression and violent exploitation?

JM: Modern day liberation movements are fighting with the same sense of moral purpose and employing some of the same underground, militant tactics as Abolitionists and Nazi resistance groups. Sometimes force and violence are necessary to defend and free the innocent from powerful, malevolent people.

FJS: Why do you believe so many radicals, leftists, progressives et al. overlook the importance of Animal and Earth Liberation?

JM: Unfortunately, many radicals and leftists—people who would be nearly ideal allies for animal and Earth liberationists—are hardened humanists. Their anthropocentrism inflicts them with a human-centric myopia that prevents them from recognizing that defending nonhuman animals, the Earth and oppressed humans are struggles that we need to integrate. Many leftists take the position that we need to focus on human suffering and exploitation first and then focus our efforts on animal rights and environmental justice. Why pick and choose which sociopathic tendencies of our species we work to eradicate? We need to go after speciesism and dominionism as tenaciously as we do racism, classism, and patriarchy.

FJS: You’re a pretty radical thinker – which is great to be. Were you always so radically inclined? Or was there a specific catalyst for your change of perspective; was it a sudden epiphany? For me, the transition from being a “good little capitalist” to a radical writer and thinker, recognizing the atrocious imbalances intrinsic within the dominant culture’s power complex, was a painful experience. Was this the case for you?

JM: No, as in no I’ve not always been “radically inclined.” My indoctrination into our planet-murdering capitalist socioeconomic and cultural paradigm was pretty thorough. I spent my first 26 or so years on this planet as an allegiance pledging, money-driven, relatively narcissistic, speciesist, meat-eating, property-worshipping, anthropocentric, NFL obsessed “good citizen” of the American Empire. I didn’t flee to my position “far from the maddening crowd.” I walked at a very slow pace. My evolution to anarcho-veganism was gradual; there was no epiphany. It was painful though in that the catalyst was my self-inflicted descent into spiritual, emotional, social, and financial hell. Yet hitting rock bottom was the best thing that could’ve happened, as my intense soul-searching, tenacious struggle to pull myself back from the brink of self-annihilation, and loss of nearly everything and everyone in my life enabled me to shatter the shackles of the dominant culture. I reconstructed my worldview from scratch—and it bears little resemblance to that of my inculcation.

FJS: Are you ever castigated as an extremist?

JM: I’m often castigated as an extremist.

FJS: What’s your response to this?

JM: My response to this gross mischaracterization is that our planet and animal murdering system is extreme, as are its ardent proponents and its recalcitrant, unrepentant enablers and participants.

FJS: It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by today’s atrocities and I really like what Derrick Jensen has to say about this, which is: “We’re so fucked. But life is so good.” What makes you most happy? How do you remain grounded despite a surfeit of calamitous problems we face in these times?

JM: Following my conscience, fighting for my core beliefs, and being with nonhuman animals and with people who share my worldview are sources of great happiness for me. I stay grounded by knowing my purpose in life (which is defending nonhuman animals and the Earth as a polemicist, thinker, publisher, and activist) and fulfilling it.

FJS: Who have you been influenced by?

JM: My influences are far too numerous to name without writing a book. As an autodidact and one who is addicted to reading, many people have mentored me in the abstract—through the pages of their books, but I also have forged my eclectic and holistic worldview with the help of a number of excellent mentors, teachers, and allies. Dr. Steve Best, a leading theorist of the animal liberation movement whom I met several years ago, was my most recent mentor and remains a very close ally and confidante.

FJS: As a writer, I often wonder how significant of a role we (writers) all have in the struggle for emancipating the planet from the fetters of a dominating culture. Can you talk about the importance the role of the writer plays in influencing effective activism?

JM: I’m a bit biased on this topic because I’m a writer too. However, I also engage in on-the-ground activism, so that adds a bit of objectivity to my response. Emancipating the planet and its other sentient inhabitants is a revolutionary undertaking. Polemicists, propagandists, theorists, and philosophers, who are writers of course, have been essential participants in every major revolution and social movement in history. Thomas Paine catalyzed the American Revolution with his widely-read pamphlet, Common Sense. Without Marx, Lenin would’ve had no philosophy on which to base his praxis. William Lloyd Garrison was instrumental in both the Abolition and Women’s Suffrage Movements. There are myriad other examples.

FJS: What role do corporations play in the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants? What role does the state play in all of this?

JM: The corporate-state complex bears nearly all the responsibility for the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants. While it’s important for individuals to evolve towards anarchist, vegan, and anti-capitalist worldviews and ways of being, the system and its most unrepentant and malevolent overlords are our enemy. Most people have years of indoctrination to overcome in order to evolve, but many can change and join us. Nearly every individual is a potential ally. We need to work to educate and convert individuals while assailing the corporate-state complex, an entity which utilizes pernicious propaganda and hollow materialistic incentives to lure most people to act as accomplices in its profit-seeking, murderous agenda.

FJS: How does the notion of an industrial collapse impact your strategies regarding the defense of the wild?

JM: Actually, I hadn’t really considered industrial collapse as I’ve waged this prolonged and intense battle to protect the deer in Shawnee Mission Park (which is well-chronicled at Bite Club of KC http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/). My line of thinking is that as long as industrial civilization is extant in its present form, I want to do what I can to defend as much of the wild and as many nonhuman animals as I can from its metastatic toxicity.

FJS: What do you believe the future holds for dissidents and direct-activists confronting the corporatist-statist union?

JM: I suspect the future for dissidents and direct-activists will become increasingly challenging as we confront the corporatist-state complex. As the existing socioeconomic paradigm (unsustainable, unjust and unstable as it is) continues to wobble and deteriorate, governments will become increasingly repressive, even in so-called liberal democracies like the US and the UK. Applying tools like the Patriot Act, the AETA, the FBI, grand juries, and massive deployments of well-armed law enforcement personnel (i.e. at the G-20 in Pittsburgh), the corporate-state complex has put serious constraints on dissent. The Green Scare has paralyzed many activists with fear. Nevertheless, we need to persist.

Frank Joseph Smecker, TPC’s Editor of Radical Earth Defense, is a social-worker and writer from Vermont who has an ardent and committed passion to work in defense of everything wild. Mostly an autodidact, he is also currently in school matriculating toward a degree in psychology. He is an accomplished writer; his essays, interviews and articles, decrying the atrocities of industrial civilization and capitalism, have appeared in many publications. He is also a blog writer for the Vermont Commons Journal (for Independence from Empire).

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Miller (left) poses with “Bambi,” one of the props that he and activists Anthony Marr (right)–the most hated anti-hunting activist in North America–and Anthony Damiano used in a campaign Miller spear-headed against a deer cull as they gathered in Kansas City to found the Global Ant-Hunting Coalition, of which all three are board members.

An interview with Jason Miller exploring radical dissent and animal liberation

11/3/09

By Frank Joseph Smecker

Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of the radical blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, is a tenacious forty-something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly an autodidact, but he has also studied liberal arts and philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

An accomplished and prolific essayist on social and political issues, his writings have appeared on hundreds of alternative media websites over the last few years. He is also a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office and the founder of Bite Club of KC, a grassroots animal rights activist group.

Miller and Damiano….

Frank Joseph Smecker: You founded Thomas Paine’s Corner in March of 2005 as an act of commitment to “ending the unnecessary suffering of oppressed and exploited sentient beings and to the total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth.” Can you explain, in further depth, the content managed on the site and its relationship to the direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior?

Jason Miller: Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC) exists as a platform from which our editors, writers, and I can educate, promote, persuade, convince, criticize, and help evoke profound social change. TPC also helps amplify the press releases of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office by simulposting many of them. These anonymous communiqués from underground activists demonstrate TPC’s support for the “direct action that is needed to halt the dominant culture’s destructive behavior,” as the NAALPO press releases deliver the communiqués in a format that both informs the world of the action and explains why the activists did what they did.

I do tend to focus heavily on animal liberation issues with the pieces I publish on TPC, but our content includes a wide array of human and Earth liberation essays, polemics, articles, rants, critiques, and poems as well. As you noted in your question, my editors and I promote Steve Best’s concept of total liberation of human animals, nonhuman animals, and the Earth. You can get a much better idea of what this entails by visiting the Total Liberation section of TPC at http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/total-liberation/.

FJS: Evidently, you’re a proponent of animal liberation; can you explain why animals need liberation, what animal liberation entails and, its alliance to the total liberation of all sentient beings on the planet?

JM: This question goes to the heart of my unwavering dedication to the animal rights movement. Our species annihilates 50 billion nonhuman animals per annum—10 billion in the US alone…

FJS: That’s incredible…

JM: I know…

FJS: In a really horrific sense…

JM: I know. Nearly defenseless against humans, the most dangerous and destructive species ever to stalk the planet, nonhuman animals suffer egregious exploitation. Circuses, rodeos, vivisection labs, factory farms, zoos, puppy mills, public and private areas where hunting and fishing are permitted, and numerous other entities and places objectify living, sentient beings, using and abusing them as they see fit to derive profits and pleasure. It is morally abhorrent that our species subjugates, tortures, and wantonly massacres millions upon millions of individuals from other species day after day—and we could readily live without the benefits that we derive from these heinous acts or we could attain those benefits in other ways.

Animal liberation naturally aligns with other liberation movements because the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals occur to such a broad extent and because humans are able to perpetrate these reprehensible acts so readily—due to the defenselessness of the animals and because law, culture and society endorse, condone, and promote these abject cruelties. Slavery, exploitation, and oppression of humans trace their roots to the objectification and subjugation of nonhuman animals that began some 12,000 years ago when we started “domesticating” them. Many of the tools (i.e. shackles and branding) we used to enslave people are still in use today for enslaving “farm” animals. To learn far more about the undeniable parallels between human and nonhuman animal exploitation and enslavement, I highly recommend Marjorie Spiegel’s book entitled “The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery.”

If we are to break the chains of economic tyranny, patriarchy, racism, classism, imperialism, and other forms of human oppression, we need to get to the root of dominionism and liberate nonhuman animals—allowing them to live free of human-inflicted enslavement, torture, and death.

FJS: It’s been said that in order to exploit someone you must first silence them. This can be done by stripping one of their subjecthood and objectifying them as a resource to be used and managed. Can you talk about how science and industry objectify nonhuman animals and the rest of the animate world? And what are the implications of this?

JM: Science and industry don’t have to objectify nonhuman animals or nature. Our sociocultural indoctrination has already done that for the vivisectors, factory farmers, and their ilk. As a species, we have created layer upon layer of myths, falsehoods, delusions, and dogmas to convince ourselves of our superiority and separateness. Blinded by hubris and deluded by profound narcissism, we’ve convinced ourselves that we are little demigods, endowed with the right to plunder, exploit, consume, pollute, torture, and kill with virtual impunity.

FJS: Define speciesism.

JM: Speciesism is the deeply flawed belief that the human species is superior to all other species. Like racism, the more powerfully embedded such a belief is in society, the more immense the suffering of those individuals deemed “inferior.” The widespread prevalence of speciesism in our dominant culture gives morally stunted people a ‘license to torture and kill’ nonhuman animals.

FJS: So why protect animals? I mean, I know why, but many attempt to excuse speciesist behavior with this benighted question.

JM: Right. Why not protect animals? Or another question: Why protect Homo sapiens, a species of animal that’s destroying the planet? Rhetoricals of course…..

We need to protect nonhuman animals for several reasons:

1. They are sentient—they have central nervous systems and feel pain, just as we do. We have no right to enslave, torture, or slaughter them.

2. Many species of nonhuman animals are far more intelligent, emotionally developed, and socially complex than most people realize. They deserve the opportunity to live free of human-inflicted subjugation, suffering, or death.

3. Our species has triggered the Sixth Great Extinction and it is our responsibility to mitigate it to the extent we’re able.

4. Contrary to our delusions, we are not separate and distinct from nature. Despite the numerous artificial barriers we’ve created, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re part and parcel of the web of existence, or life if you will, on this planet. Each individual, each herd, each flock, and particularly each entire species that we annihilate or eradicate further disrupts the ecological balance that we’ve already adversely impacted in significant ways.

FJS: You’re vegan, is this correct?

JM: I am a vegan.

FJS: Why veganism?

JM: My reasoning is relatively simple. I do not objectify nonhuman animals. I view them as individuals and sentient beings with rich emotional, social and intellectual lives, each bearing the basic rights to exist free from human exploitation, subjugation, torture, and murder. Eating rotting animal flesh, which is what “meat” actually is, is as abhorrent to me as cannibalism would be to most of the “meat” eating world.

FJS: I have a great recipe for a tofu potpie; would you like me to share it with you?

JM: Sure. Veganism is an integral part of my spiritual beliefs, so I generally eat to live and could subsist on nearly anything that gave me the nutrients I need. BUT, I’m certainly not one to turn down an offer of good vegan food.

FJS: Alright, here we go:

- First, make your piecrust; pre-bake the bottom layer of the crust for 10 minutes on 450˚ F.
- Then, cube the tofu and fry it in olive oil until it gets nice and crispy. Add some nutritional yeast, flaky not powdered (and some garlic/onion powder for some flavor).
- Cut up one onion and sauté it. Add chopped celery and carrots and peas respectively. Add some tamari (optional), garlic, etc.
- Next you want to make the gravy. This gravy kicks ass, btw. What you need to do is toast ½ cup of nutritional yeast and ½ cup of flour in a skillet on medium high until you can smell it – but don’t let it burn! Add some olive oil until absorbs all of the flour/yeast and continue to toast. Slowly add water – a little at a time until you reach your desired consistency (keep heating to thicken, add water, etc.). Add tamari and a dash or two of hot sauce (I prefer Frank’s Red Hot Sauce) and other spices.
- Now, put the cubed and crispy tofu over the bottom of the crust. Next, add the layer of sautéed veggies then the gravy, allowing the gravy to settle over everything. Then add the crust-lid, i.e. the top crust.
- Last, bake the pie for 30 minutes at 350˚ F or until the top crust begins to brown.

JM: Thanks.

FJS: My pleasure – let me know how it comes out.

Sorry to jump tracks there; at any rate, where do you believe our desire to protect and defend the wild comes from?

Miller recently innovated “tactile activism” in a campaign he and hundreds of his allies waged against a deer “cull” in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park).

JM: I think that answer would be different for each person. My desire to protect and defend the wild (and nonhuman animals in general) stems from my hair-trigger sensitivity to injustice, the empathy and compassion I developed through the course of my personal struggles, and from the realization that our species is inextricably connected with the rest of nature.

FJS: Personally, I support any movement working toward stopping the destruction of the planet, by any means necessary. Not only are you an advocate for direct-action needed to stop the injustices and cruelty perpetrated by those in power, but you propound and support militant direct-action. Can you explain why?

JM: Our species is waging a war on the Earth and nonhuman animals. We need to defend them by any means necessary. Whether an individual engages in militant direct action (MDA) or not, if a person is seriously dedicated to total liberation, they must at least support MDA and those who engage in it.

FJS: The U.S. has singled out the A.L.F. and E.L.F. as domestic terrorist groups. Why do you believe this is so? What is your response to this?

JM: The corporate state complex of the US has targeted underground militant direct action groups that fight for nonhuman animal and environmental justice as terrorists for two principal reasons. One is that their actions are effective. Secondly, groups like the A.L.F. represent an existential threat to the predominating cultural meme of dominionism and to the precious profits of the corporate state complex. So of course they label them as terrorists and attempt to neutralize them with state repression.

My response is that those exploiting the Earth and nonhuman animals are the true terrorists and groups like the A.L.F. and the E.L.F. are freedom fighters.

FJS: Can you talk about the comparative qualities and aspects between modern-day liberation movements and historic factions such as the abolitionists of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the freedom fighters, Nazi resistance groups, and other estimable groups who risked much to put an end to oppression and violent exploitation?

JM: Modern day liberation movements are fighting with the same sense of moral purpose and employing some of the same underground, militant tactics as Abolitionists and Nazi resistance groups. Sometimes force and violence are necessary to defend and free the innocent from powerful, malevolent people.

FJS: Why do you believe so many radicals, leftists, progressives et al. overlook the importance of Animal and Earth Liberation?

JM: Unfortunately, many radicals and leftists—people who would be nearly ideal allies for animal and Earth liberationists—are hardened humanists. Their anthropocentrism inflicts them with a human-centric myopia that prevents them from recognizing that defending nonhuman animals, the Earth and oppressed humans are struggles that we need to integrate. Many leftists take the position that we need to focus on human suffering and exploitation first and then focus our efforts on animal rights and environmental justice. Why pick and choose which sociopathic tendencies of our species we work to eradicate? We need to go after speciesism and dominionism as tenaciously as we do racism, classism, and patriarchy.

FJS: You’re a pretty radical thinker – which is great to be. Were you always so radically inclined? Or was there a specific catalyst for your change of perspective; was it a sudden epiphany? For me, the transition from being a “good little capitalist” to a radical writer and thinker, recognizing the atrocious imbalances intrinsic within the dominant culture’s power complex, was a painful experience. Was this the case for you?

JM: No, as in no I’ve not always been “radically inclined.” My indoctrination into our planet-murdering capitalist socioeconomic and cultural paradigm was pretty thorough. I spent my first 26 or so years on this planet as an allegiance pledging, money-driven, relatively narcissistic, speciesist, meat-eating, property-worshipping, anthropocentric, NFL obsessed “good citizen” of the American Empire. I didn’t flee to my position “far from the maddening crowd.” I walked at a very slow pace. My evolution to anarcho-veganism was gradual; there was no epiphany. It was painful though in that the catalyst was my self-inflicted descent into spiritual, emotional, social, and financial hell. Yet hitting rock bottom was the best thing that could’ve happened, as my intense soul-searching, tenacious struggle to pull myself back from the brink of self-annihilation, and loss of nearly everything and everyone in my life enabled me to shatter the shackles of the dominant culture. I reconstructed my worldview from scratch—and it bears little resemblance to that of my inculcation.

FJS: Are you ever castigated as an extremist?

JM: I’m often castigated as an extremist.

FJS: What’s your response to this?

JM: My response to this gross mischaracterization is that our planet and animal murdering system is extreme, as are its ardent proponents and its recalcitrant, unrepentant enablers and participants.

FJS: It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by today’s atrocities and I really like what Derrick Jensen has to say about this, which is: “We’re so fucked. But life is so good.” What makes you most happy? How do you remain grounded despite a surfeit of calamitous problems we face in these times?

JM: Following my conscience, fighting for my core beliefs, and being with nonhuman animals and with people who share my worldview are sources of great happiness for me. I stay grounded by knowing my purpose in life (which is defending nonhuman animals and the Earth as a polemicist, thinker, publisher, and activist) and fulfilling it.

FJS: Who have you been influenced by?

JM: My influences are far too numerous to name without writing a book. As an autodidact and one who is addicted to reading, many people have mentored me in the abstract—through the pages of their books, but I also have forged my eclectic and holistic worldview with the help of a number of excellent mentors, teachers, and allies. Dr. Steve Best, a leading theorist of the animal liberation movement whom I met several years ago, was my most recent mentor and remains a very close ally and confidante.

FJS: As a writer, I often wonder how significant of a role we (writers) all have in the struggle for emancipating the planet from the fetters of a dominating culture. Can you talk about the importance the role of the writer plays in influencing effective activism?

JM: I’m a bit biased on this topic because I’m a writer too. However, I also engage in on-the-ground activism, so that adds a bit of objectivity to my response. Emancipating the planet and its other sentient inhabitants is a revolutionary undertaking. Polemicists, propagandists, theorists, and philosophers, who are writers of course, have been essential participants in every major revolution and social movement in history. Thomas Paine catalyzed the American Revolution with his widely-read pamphlet, Common Sense. Without Marx, Lenin would’ve had no philosophy on which to base his praxis. William Lloyd Garrison was instrumental in both the Abolition and Women’s Suffrage Movements. There are myriad other examples.

FJS: What role do corporations play in the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants? What role does the state play in all of this?

JM: The corporate-state complex bears nearly all the responsibility for the exploitation and destruction of the world and its inhabitants. While it’s important for individuals to evolve towards anarchist, vegan, and anti-capitalist worldviews and ways of being, the system and its most unrepentant and malevolent overlords are our enemy. Most people have years of indoctrination to overcome in order to evolve, but many can change and join us. Nearly every individual is a potential ally. We need to work to educate and convert individuals while assailing the corporate-state complex, an entity which utilizes pernicious propaganda and hollow materialistic incentives to lure most people to act as accomplices in its profit-seeking, murderous agenda.

FJS: How does the notion of an industrial collapse impact your strategies regarding the defense of the wild?

JM: Actually, I hadn’t really considered industrial collapse as I’ve waged this prolonged and intense battle to protect the deer in Shawnee Mission Park (which is well-chronicled at Bite Club of KC http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/). My line of thinking is that as long as industrial civilization is extant in its present form, I want to do what I can to defend as much of the wild and as many nonhuman animals as I can from its metastatic toxicity.

FJS: What do you believe the future holds for dissidents and direct-activists confronting the corporatist-statist union?

JM: I suspect the future for dissidents and direct-activists will become increasingly challenging as we confront the corporatist-state complex. As the existing socioeconomic paradigm (unsustainable, unjust and unstable as it is) continues to wobble and deteriorate, governments will become increasingly repressive, even in so-called liberal democracies like the US and the UK. Applying tools like the Patriot Act, the AETA, the FBI, grand juries, and massive deployments of well-armed law enforcement personnel (i.e. at the G-20 in Pittsburgh), the corporate-state complex has put serious constraints on dissent. The Green Scare has paralyzed many activists with fear. Nevertheless, we need to persist.

Frank Joseph Smecker, TPC’s Editor of Radical Earth Defense, is a social-worker and writer from Vermont who has an ardent and committed passion to work in defense of everything wild. Mostly an autodidact, he is also currently in school matriculating toward a degree in psychology. He is an accomplished writer; his essays, interviews and articles, decrying the atrocities of industrial civilization and capitalism, have appeared in many publications. He is also a blog writer for the Vermont Commons Journal (for Independence from Empire).

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Every vegan has his or her own reasons for choosing to embrace the veg lifestyle. Take me to Candle 79 and I’ll make time to tell you mine.

I recently came across a fascinating group, Living Opposed to Violence and Exploitation (LOVE), that runs a website, blog, and community to “promote veganism as a response to speciesism and a means to ending oppression.” 

I love their message and I greatly admire their commitment to ethical veganism and to strategies of educating people about the issue in a positive, respectful way. This is activism at its best.

From the group’s About Us:

“LOVE is neither an animal welfare group nor an animal rights group, but something new: an anti-oppression collective. We oppose animal use, not because the animals are suffering, and not because of a theory of rights, but because we believe it is wrong to use any being without their free consent. Because of this, we oppose the oppression of animals and human animals alike and seek the liberation of all.”

The site has nifty resources such as:  Vegan on a Budget and Questions Frequently Asked by Non-Vegans, plus, a well-written and provocative blog.

I’m so happy to supplement my knowledge of vegan issues with thoughtful sites such as LOVE, and I hope you explore around and gain some insight, too!

Earth goddess image by by alicepopkorn on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license. Buttons available on Compassionate Cooks.

AN animal rights activist jailed for his part in a terror campaign against companies connected to Huntington Life Sciences (HLS) has had his lifetime ban on protesting overturned.

The case was described by QC, James Wood, as a matter of the “constitutional” right to “protest and participate in free debate”.

Gavin Medd-Hall, 46, of Selwood Road, Croydon, compiled information on targets whose details were posted on the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) website – including a Cambridge businessman.

They were later targeted by “fanatics” who caused over £12 million damage to victims’ homes and businesses during the six-year reign of terror.

Medd-Hall was jailed for eight years at Winchester Crown Court on July 30 last year for conspiracy to blackmail. He was also handed an indefinite Asbo, as were three others, banning them from taking part in any animal rights protest, or contributing to a website dedicated to such a protest for the rest of their lives.

On Friday, all four challenged the Asbos before Lord Justice Elias, Mr Justice Griffith Williams and Judge Elgan Edwards, sitting at London’s Criminal Appeal Court, claiming they flew in the face of both their Human Rights and rights of peaceful protest under domestic law.

Lord Justice Elias upheld the cases against the other three but allowed the appeal of Medd-Hall, saying: “In his case it was not necessary to impose such an order. He doesn’t fall into the same fanatical category as the others.”

source: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_news_crier/displayarticle.asp?id=469264

There are scores of movies that involve some kind of animal who ends up being the hero of the film. I’m not talking about Teen Wolf because the Wolf didn’t even make the winning shot. I’m referring to movies like Beethoven, Homeward Bound, Lassie, Flipper, Babe, Air Bud (the original), Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch (personal favorite), and innumerable other Air Bud movies. After all these years, millions of dollars in production costs, and animal actors/actresses, the European Union now recognizes animals as sentient beings. Well, maybe Air Bud didn’t have much sway in the decision, but who’s to say…

As of December 1st 2009, the Lisbon Treaty officially distinguished farm animals as sentient beings (link). In other words, they have a legal status acknowledging that they can feel pain, suffering, and are conscious. This is a wonderful step in the direction of ethical animal treatment. This has been a breakthrough that has been a long time coming. Compassion in World Farming has been pushing for this as early as 1991. Through hard work and great effort, we are realizing the compassion we should have on the other inhabitants of this earth.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” (Emphasis added)

The animals that sentient recognition is really helping are those that are inhumanely treated before becoming food.  The sentient beings in Europe are just as conscious as the animals in the U.S. Hopefully, we will be able to move in the same direction in proving our capacity for compassion reaches beyond the sphere of the human species.

A man who raided a South Jordan mink farm says a prosecutor’s statements during an aborted sentencing hearing amount to a breach of his plea agreement.

As a remedy, William James Viehl asked U.S. District Judge Dee Benson on Thursday to remove himself from his case and reassign it to another judge for the purpose of sentencing.

Viehl, 23, was expected to be sentenced Nov. 12 to six months in prison for damaging and interfering with animal enterprises during a September raid on the McMullin mink farm in South Jordan. Such a sentence is consistent with the low end of the federal sentencing guidelines, which the U.S. Attorney’s Office had agreed to recommend in exchange for Viehl’s guilty plea.

During the sentencing hearing, however, prosecutor John Huber told Benson that although Viehl’s actions were classified as a property crime by the sentencing guidelines, the impact of his misconduct was much more sinister than simple vandalism.

“The crime itself was designed to intimidate and inspire fear in the victims,” Huber said.

Investigators believe Viehl and Alex Hall, 21, released as many as 650 minks in the raid and also vandalized a number of buildings on the property with phrases such as “No More Mink, No More Murder” and “ALF: We Are Watching.”

“As you fashion your sentence today,” Huber told Benson, “the corollary is that your sentencing decision will have a much broader impact than just on Mr. Viehl. … Everyone is listening to what you’re doing.”

Benson seemed to be swayed by the argument, saying that the case involved “too much threat and terror.”

“I can’t be as lenient as six months. I’m inclined to go … to two years, maybe more,” the judge said. “This sentence has got to be a deterrent, a message sent to other people.”

Defense attorney Heather Harris, in a motion filed Thursday, seized on Huber’s statements as evidence of the breach of her client’s plea agreement. She said the prosecutor “violated the plea agreement at almost the very outset by complaining about the (sentencing) guidelines.”

“The government’s presentation was not merely restating facts,” Harris wrote, “but was characterizing Mr. Viehl’s conduct and the effects of it.”

Harris added that Huber’s repeated warnings that “people are watching” what kind of sentence Viehl received also constituted a “continued breach of the agreement.”

“The only conceivable purpose for the government’s presentation was to indirectly encourage the court to impose a sentence other than what the government agreed to recommend,” Harris wrote. “The effect of its presentation was the equivalent of winking and nodding while uttering the phrase ‘low-end recommendation.’ ”

A new sentencing hearing scheduled for Dec. 11 is likely to be rescheduled in light of Harris’ request for reassignment of the case. A hearing on her request has not been scheduled.

source: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705349476/Mink-vandal-says-feds-broke-deal.html

On the 11th within a Kunming Panlong District neighborhood, the four kittens of an adopted stray cat were abused to death. According to the family that adopted the stray cat, on the morning of the 11th when they heard the cat’s tragic cries, they rushed downstairs to discover this stray cat’s four kittens abused to death, and even placed in front of the mother cat. The kittens’ bodies were covered with bullet holes, with blood all over. One of the kittens had its neck tied with a rope and elongated, its chest cut open, heart exposed, while the other three kittens’ heads were stepped on. According to this journalist’s observation, the bullet holes on the kitten’s bodies were caused by a metal toy gun. It is reckoned that during the night of the 10th, someone used a toy gun to beat the kitten black and blue, so that it was unable to escape, before continuing to abuse/mutilate it to death, and intentionally put them beside the mother cat.

The KDS post did not include the year and month: 2006 April.

These NetEase & Xinhua news articles includes some more information:

The poor mother cat kept licking the kittens, hoping it would revive the kittens. Crying, the women who adopted the cat were unable to speak, hoping that the cat abuser can be found.

source: http://www.chinasmack.com/pictures/kittens-found-abused-dead-mother-kunming/

Good job Madeline!

By Rick Bogle

12/2/09

Simulposted with Primate Freedom

You may have read about Oklahoma State University canceling planned anthrax experiments on baboons after Madeleine Pickens apparently threatened to cancel her and her husband’s $5 million donation to the university’s vet school. (Anthrax study rejected by OSU: Euthanasia of primates may be to blame for decision to cancel veterinary school project. NewsOK November 30, 2009.)

Please contact Madeleine Pickens and OSU President Burns Hargis and thank them for sparing our primate friends from torture and death:

http://www.madeleinepickens.com/contact/

osupres@okstate.edu

Good job Madeline and Burns! Pickens is better known for her work on behalf of wild horses.

Unsurprisingly, the vivisection community has been unnerved by this. Paul Browne, of ProTest, commented on The Scientist:

… When university administrators go over the heads of university review boards and stop a project without consulting the investigators involved or members of the relevant ethics and safety committees something is clearly wrong, and when it looks as if the administration is acting under pressure from a wealthy donor it is time for us to stand up for academic freedom.

Today the issue is anthrax research in baboons, but what might it be tomorrow? Can any funder trust the OSU administration any more?

Over at ScienceBlogs, DrugMonkey (aka, Michael A. Taffe) said:

This, my friends, is the start of the slippery slope. OSU has put the bit in Ms. Pickens’ teeth and given her (and whatever ARA extremist groups have their claws into her) free rein to bring down any and all of OSU’s ongoing programs she objects to. Unchecked, this is going to end up with the complete dissolution of the baboon research ERV mentioned.

The blogger mentioned above by Taffe, also at ScienceBlogs, the anonymous ERV, [maybe that’s why she feels comfortable throwing around the profanity?] who claims to be a graduate student at OSU,launched into an ad hominem attack on Pickens:

That horribly disfigured woman, Madeleine Pickens? That poor dumb thing married to some rich guy? Rich guy gives money to OSU, so people listen to the stupid blonde who mutilated herself a-la Michael Jackson with ‘animal free’ (**WINK!!**) plastic surgery/botox/hair dye/make-up? Oh, Im sure she had nothing to do with this. **WINK!!**

But none of these deep thinkers have addressed the issue of using baboons or other monkeys in studies like these. All they can do is fan the flames of fear that have erupted in a few vivisectors’ guts because of a potential future loss of income. All they can do is claim that Ms. Pickens has had plastic surgery. Is it any wonder that genuinely hard questions about human biology and health are so rarely answered by scientists of this ilk?

DrugMonkey (aka, Michael A. Taffe) made the doped-up claim that because Ms. Picken’s husband kills quail, that she is a hypocrite if she voices any concern for other animals. The drugs he is probably stealing and secretly consuming must have really kicked in as he was writing, because he then claims that the Pickenses are terrorists. Wow. That sounds like good shit Mike.

It is well past time for the NIH to provide an equally weighty counter to the intimidation of the ARA terrorists. Because that’s what this is. A University president fearing “controversial” research has been terrorized by the extremist fringe into deciding that the best path is simply to give in.

Rick Bogle taught in a public elementary school for eight years after serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, West Africa. After learning details of experiments occurring in U.S. laboratories, he gave up his teaching career in 1997 and began working full time to call attention to the government-sponsored abuse of animals.

Rick is knowledgeable on all issues surrounding the use of animals in science, but is particularly well-informed about the use of monkeys. Rick says, “Science has shown repeatedly and convincingly that other animals have minds and emotions so like our own that their joy and suffering is essentially indistinguishable from our own joy and suffering. People are waking up to the implications of this fact; a revolution has begun.

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at  http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC athttp://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

source: http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/panties-bunched-up-by-baboons/

No matter where you stand on cloning, we here at SupermarketGuru.com can predict that the majority of consumers want foods that come from cloning to be labeled as such. The long awaited Country of Origin Labeling Law (COOL) went into effect this year. After years of debate, now producers of fresh meats, many fruits and vegetables, and assorted other products are required to state clearly on packages where the food originates. Consumers have said it over and over. They want to know where their food comes from.

It all began when the world was introduced to Dolly, the cloned sheep, back in 1996. Acceptance of this kind of genetic manipulation has been slow. However, at Pollard Farms in Enid, Oklahoma, producing cows with genetically balanced traits is the goal, and the reason there are 22 clones of some of the most superior livestock in the world.

In 2008, the FDA gave the green light on selling food from clones, and Japan as well as the European Union have since done the same. And even though the FDA stated that these products are indistiguishable form their non-clone counterparts, for some consumers and for some major food companies, it is an issue of ethics or food safety. However, with much attention being paid to the need for food production to increase rapidly to keep up with the population, and if cloning for food becomes a part of the solution, some may reconsider their opinions.

The pros to cloning are that farmers can produce bigger cows and larger amounts of milk in addition to producing healthier animals that can resist diseases. These animals also yield more meat and milk with less feed, resulting in a smaller environmental footprint. Less feed, means less fertilizer, and less diesel.

But despite the pros, a recent survey conducted by the International Food Information Council found that half of Americans view animal cloning as “not very favorable” or “not at all favorable.” The survey also found that about half of Americans are unlikely to buy meat, milk or eggs coming from cloned animals, even if the FDA says it is safe.

Cloning could prove to be a safe and effective method of feeding the growing population and increasing sustainability. But it may also take a while for consumers to trust products from cloned animals. In the meantime, consumers feel they have the right to know where their foods come from and how they are produced.

source: http://www.supermarketguru.com/index.cfm/go/sg.viewArticle/articleId/885

In a recent interview with Larry King, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain quipped that it was OK for humans to kill and eat animals because we’ve been designed to chase down “smaller and stupider creatures.” Never mind that cows and pigs, two animals that are slaughtered by the millions for food, are most certainly bigger than we are. It was the “stupider” remark that caught my attention, and not just for Bourdain’s obvious grammatical shortcomings.

I think many of us feel that animals are dumb; that animals lack the intelligence we humans seem to have so abundantly. I believe this looking down on animals plays a big part in what allows us to treat them in the most heinous ways — from factory farms to fur farms to laboratories to circuses. We believe that because animals can’t write a book, compose a symphony, or do algebra that we’re so much better than them.

What a load of bullshit.

Did you know, for example, that pigeons can fly thousands of miles to find the same roosting spot with no navigational difficulties? Some species of birds, like the Arctic Tern, make a 25,000-mile round-trip journey every year. Many species use built-in ferromagnets to detect their orientation with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. Can you do that?

Dolphins have a very distinct language that scientists now refer to as “dolphinese” which humans can’t decipher. For all our human knowledge, we have no idea how to understand what should be, according to Bourdain, a “stupider” means of communication.

Salmon are born in rivers, but swim thousands of miles to the ocean only to return to the exact same spot upstream to die.

Elephants communicate with each other subsonically, using low rumbles that can travel for miles underground. They also mourn their dead and have been seen cradling the bones of family members that have passed on.

Butterflies are now thought to have the equivalent of a GPS system in their antennae.

Pigs have the mental capacity of a four year-old human child and have beat humans in memory games.

So, perhaps animals are not stupid. Perhaps it’s we who are stupid for not recognizing the amazing things animals can do, many of which we can’t do ourselves. Perhaps it’s we who are dumb for not being able to circumnavigate the globe without instruments as albatross do, or find our way home across thousands of miles of ocean as Blue Whales do.

Maybe humans can actually learn a thing or two from these “stupid” animals. How about we start with this: animals don’t create trash. Animals don’t build nuclear weapons to annihilate each other. Animals don’t conjure up religions and then kill each other in the name of their Gods. Animals with white fur don’t discriminate against animals with fur of a different hue or color. Animals only take what they need. Animals are self-cleaning and don’t waste water — my cat has NEVER had a bath yet he’d smell better than any human who didn’t shower. Animals don’t gay bash homosexual animals. Animals don’t screw over other animals for financial gain a la Bernie Madoff. Animals don’t breed other animals to be prettier, fatter, or tastier. Animals don’t systematically torture and abuse and kill billions of other animals (or each other) the way humans do. Animals don’t commit Holocausts, they don’t factory farm, and they don’t ethnically cleanse each other. Animals don’t cheat. Animals don’t front. Animals are their authentic selves.

Yes, humans can do some amazing things: we can cure diseases, we can build skyscrapers, we can figure out how to travel into space. But only human arrogance would suggest that we’re better or smarter than animals. The animals of the world evolved to be just as they are. They exist for their own reasons. Only an idiot would call them stupid.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-solomon/animals-are-stupid_b_336049.html