Forget Strategy, Advocate Veganism

On May 30, 2011, ABC TV’s Four Corners aired ‘A Bloody Business’ showing some of the horrors of Australia’s live export trade to Indonesia.  The program caused outrage among the Australian public.  Within two days 200,000 people signed a petition to ban live export.  Within a week, the Australian Government put a temporary suspension on live export trade to Indonesia.

If you’ve never taken the time to research the export of live animals, please take a moment to do so.  Millions of animals die during transit, many millions more suffer longer by surviving the journey, only to be slaughtered at the end of it.  Imagine what it would take to transport thousands of animals from Australia to Indonesia- an approximate distance of 1,739 miles.  Now imagine if the transporting folks care if those animals (that are going to be killed) are comfortable, scared, thirsty, or if they need to go to the bathroom.

This video illustrates the strangeness, the illogicality of single-issue campaigning, and questions why we aren’t unifying under a clear and consistent message of veganism.  It also, for me, demonstrates why I cringe when I hear people saying that vegans must be pragmatic about animal advocacy- as if advocating veganism is holding the movement back instead of empowering people to move forward.

I want to make it clear that I am not advocating that we should not work to end these atrocities.  I am saying that we need to work at ending them by saying, “killing animals is wrong” not, “it’s wrong to kill them like that- we should kill them like this.”

From the video:

Because if you are humane, you would not kill…What we’re really telling the world is, we should not be killing animals.  And nobody is doing that.  Because there’s too much strategy, right?  Strategy is what is destroying the planet.  Strategy means we manipulate information to create an outcome, and if you do that, you corrupt the journey.  If you know that no kill is the stance today, and you say anything other than no kill, you are deliberately manipulating to create a gain, but then that just plays the game.  So the game continues.

If you have a spare 20 minutes, you should watch this video.

http://youtu.be/PgBWoLFTE9Y