Welcome to The Vegan Report, my name is Ryan and today's episode will be a concentrated
version of this podcast.
I have gathered some of the highlights of previous interviews in one episode just for
you.
My goal was to capture the spirit of the show, this mission I gave myself to inspire you
to take action in the animal rights struggle, to do some good.
Making this podcast also allowed me to reflect back on conversations I had, think of all
the things I learned and remember how those episodes came about.
You will find a link to all the interviews featured in this episode in the description
below.
Plus, this is a great goodbye episode.
Don't worry, the show will go on by goodbye, I simply meant I'm taking a summer break
before coming back in August with brand new episodes.
During this break, I will be recording an array of fascinating, thought-provoking and
frontier-breaking episodes.
I will be running after the unreported stories and hopefully, hopefully you will still be
here in August to listen and continue this adventure with me.
Having said that, let's now begin with our first segment of interviews going over the
theme of factory farming.
You will first hear Colin, who was a worker of this industry before becoming vegan, Kennedy,
who works for Farm Transition Academy, a non-profit helping farmers abandon animal expertise and
basically change their business model.
Then Natalie, who told her story of breaking in a farm located just an hour drive from
where I am right now.
And the great Dr. Fitzgerald, who has deeply taught and studied animal expertise.
And of course, my good friend Varun, who is following the footsteps of Dr. Fitzgerald
in one of the most hostile universities for animal rights activists.
You know, as a kid when I worked on a ranch, I had never had as much opportunity to work
in like a slaughterhouse.
But now I had to.
Now I had to do, you know, and I remember taking like a carcass evaluation course and
that course was the beginning of the week you see the animal, you as a live, you palpate,
you know, the fat on its back, you see its muscles, you see its skin, you see all this,
you give it a grade.
And then at the end of the week, they slaughter it and you have the carcass and then you have
to evaluate the carcass.
And it was very strange seeing this animal and it's just whatever.
And then the end of the week you see it's dead carcass.
And but the thing that really, really drove me kind of the very final thing was I had
been working for a dairy on a dairy farm.
I had been working with a veterinarian, a large animal veterinarian, and we were doing,
we were mostly doing animal reproduction work for cows.
But part of that, we also had to go do regular veterinary work.
And we had this dairy cow that, you know, she was very, very sweet.
She was great.
But she was down on the floor and she wasn't walking.
Legally in the United States, you can't send an animal to slaughter if it's not able to
stand up on its own weight.
So essentially you have 800 pounds, a thousand pounds of wasted money.
So we essentially, we gave it steroids, hoping that it would get up and go on living and
walking.
That didn't happen.
We came back the next day and it was still there.
And so my boss essentially had me euthanize it and euthanasia with livestock.
It's not, you know, a hundred dollars of barbiturates and chemicals and the peaceful, like quiet
thing.
You shoot it in the back of the head.
And I remember shooting it in the back of the head and it just, it really, really, it
really got to me because I was sitting there, you know, for many years saying, you know,
I wanted to help animals.
I wanted to be, I really cared about animal husbandry.
I really love these animals.
I always consider myself an animal lover.
And yet here I am doing this.
I don't want to contribute this to this anymore.
I don't want to give any more of my money to this.
Even if it's, you know, dairy cows, chickens, backyard eggs, any of it.
So from there I ended up going vegan because I just, I couldn't see myself thinking of
myself as an animal lover and still contributing in this way.
So yeah, it was, it was a very, very drastic change.
It's been certainly very interesting.
You know, when I talk to people from my past, you know, I'll talk to family and they're
kind of very taken aback, you know, and they just, they're not aggressive against it.
You know, they're not, you know, I don't get as much pushback as you would expect.
But you, but I do get a lot of the, you know, oh, I could just never do that.
I love bacon and cheese too much.
So I try and always have just an honest, genuine conversation with them.
Why do you think others who work in that industry have not jumped out of the, this nightmare,
those nightmare factories and those practices?
Why are they still doing what they're doing?
Even though they might have, you know, slaughtered innocent creatures like that cow.
Do you have any reflection on that?
Yeah.
I mean, ultimately a lot of it does.
Money makes the world go round.
I think that's a huge contributing factor.
As I mentioned earlier, you have, you know, when I was talking about people who work in
these slaughterhouses, oftentimes they are, you know, without going up and asking them
for, you know, legal documentation.
They're often migrant workers who are oftentimes illegally here with, you know, wrong information.
These are the facilities that are choosing to employ them.
The people working there are often going to, they have to make a decision.
Do I feed my family with a paycheck?
Do I get a paycheck?
Do I feed them?
Or do I work in this industry?
They're often going to choose to work in this industry because they have family at home
to feed.
They have bills to pay.
And these are the facilities where they can get jobs at.
You know, I was even talking about, you know, there was underage workers, 13 and 14 year
old workers at the plant in Nebraska that, you know, they recently came under fire.
13 and 14 year olds don't want to work a night shift at a slaughterhouse cleaning.
They need money though.
People need to pay bills.
So these kids are often forced into that type of thing.
You know, and even for a lot of the other players in the industry, you know, the regular
rancher who's just raising 20 cows, he's not working in the slaughterhouse.
It is a very, you know, meat is a very cultural thing.
Very, very ingrained in our society.
So it's very, very hard for people to give up that aspect of their life.
Even for me personally, like I think about like fish and hunting, you know, that's, I
love fishing.
I loved going out with my buddies on, you know, the canoe and we would sit out there
and fish and, you know, have a great time.
And it was just awesome.
And you know, but that is an activity like I do miss.
It's not even, it's not the eating the fish.
It's just an activity.
I admit it was so, you know, part of my culture and just part of who I am.
Even to this day, you know, I, I still, you know, I don't hunt, but I still go and I end
up, I still do like long range rifle shooting and I'll oftentimes talk with some of these
people who do hunt.
And you can tell that them going and taking their son hunting, that's a bonding experience
that they have, you know, their dad took them hunting.
So they want to take their son's hunting.
It's just a very cultural thing to them.
And it's very, very hard for them to break those habits.
But you know, as I said, it's a slow process.
You're seeing more and more people moving away from animal agriculture and eating animals
to plant-based diets, but it's going to take time.
And I do see that the, I do believe that the animal agriculture industry is going to start
shrinking significantly in the future.
Those are, you know, not these living, breathing, sentient beings that we know them to be within
the agriculture industry.
Their lives are just completely reduced to nothing as if they are nothing more than livestock,
quote unquote.
That's where that term comes from, living stock on a shelf.
And it's such, you know, a very interesting thing when you look into it, because those
things are perpetuated and that kind of science allows farmers to continue to do the work
that they do because they're not really seen as animals with personalities as we know them
to be.
When you're looking at how these animals are treated within the animal agriculture industry,
they're taught to be no more than a number.
They're taught to be no more than a face behind a barbed wire or within a cage.
And so that autonomy, that personality is completely stripped away from each of them.
And another thing as well is that for a lot of these farmers, they are bringing these
animals into the world with forcible impregnation.
So they kind of see that as I'm bringing these animals into this world and I'm taking them
out, this is part of my job.
They have no autonomy.
So those are just little things that really do create a very upsetting implication on
the lives of these animals and on the lives of animal rights activists as well, because
their lives are just being completely erased as nothing more than a number or nothing more
than a package label.
I attend the University of Guelph.
It's the most animal agriculture heavy university I can think of.
On my first day, my first class was in animal science building and I'm like, my program's
in sociology, why on earth have I, why am I in this building?
And when it comes to funding, I guess this goes away from political more towards kind
of educational, less social level.
I'm going to be, there's more scholarships available.
There's more funding opportunities available for the animal agriculture sciences.
And these projects, they're not about the rights and justice of animals.
It's about their welfare in regards to how can we treat them as an object in the nicest
way possible?
They're essentially trying to find a way to do something inherently wrong in the most
nice compassionate way, which is a fundamental contradiction.
If you were to go, anyone were to go to the University of Guelph website right now and
look at what their graduate students are doing.
I don't think they should be harassed or anything like that.
I don't want anyone listening to this to go harass them.
I'd love for people to email them and ask the students, hey, so how do you do this to
the animal ethically with concern for the animal when you don't need to have those conversations
going?
But like there's more resources for these, for these people that essentially mess up
animals.
So, and that leads like the fourth kind of angle, like economically, this ties in with
school, but there's more money invested into big dairy, big beef, big chicken, big whatever
animal agriculture related.
The resources they have to fight this battle is a lot more than anyone like myself would
have, anyone like partners of this movement, like Animal Justice, which is one of Canada's
premier legal advocacy groups for animals, PETA, Mercy for Animals, you name it.
No one has as much resources as the big animal agriculture industries.
It's in human culture, almost in every culture in the world.
You know what?
No, I'm going to say confidently, in every culture in the human world, in history, to
mess up animals.
And I just say mess up as another way for violence.
I just, I get tired of saying the same thing, but there is.
What is it like to, to be an animal rights activist in a university devoted to serving
the animal industry?
I feel like you must feel like an anomaly in this college community.
First and foremost, I feel like a piece of shit.
I don't know how to say that more politely because if I had stayed at the University
of Windsor, I feel like I would have been doing better work just because I'm not a part
of a university that's so frankly disgusting in my mind when it comes to supporting these
kinds of things.
But at the same time, it's important that I acknowledge I am at the University of Guelph,
which is very animal agriculture heavy, but it's got to start somewhere.
If there's no one else who is focusing on ways to address animal justice, I don't think
I'm the first, though I hope I'm not the last.
And wherever they are, whichever pockets of society that you're in where you're dealing
with a very, very uphill battle, I'm not saying go for the hardest thing, but don't shy away
from that challenge as much.
It needs to happen because I've been able to raise questions and concerns and make comments
that no one else is going to think about in the sociology department at my university.
And if I wasn't there, maybe someone does, maybe someone doesn't, we don't know, but
we do know that because I am there right now, I can raise those.
But I try not to be too hard on myself there.
It is hard not to be hard on yourself, though.
But in regards to how I feel generally about it, like it sucks because a lot of my cohort,
my peers, a lot of initiatives on campus are about making sure we don't harm humans.
We don't harm people or the environment based on any arbitrary social aspect, you know,
race, gender, class, whatever it might be.
And I'm all about that.
I'm all about that.
It very rarely extends to animals.
And when it does, it's superficial, it comes in the form of animal welfare, which you're
still hurting them.
And it's just, disheartening is probably the most appropriate word.
Frustrating and disheartening.
All I knew was this was a peaceful action.
And that I was going to be driving there, you know, with a biosecurity suit and with
these people that I had met.
We had one meeting to talk about it, where we got the equipment that we needed for the
day.
And then we did it.
And yeah.
So let's talk about the details, the logistics of going there.
What happened on that fateful day?
I think I woke up at two in the morning, if you can call that waking up.
I don't even know if I slept.
I can't remember, but I woke up and I got dressed and I walked to this park.
We were also supposed to meet at Park Lafontaine at 2.30, I think in the morning.
And so we met there.
There were a number of cars already and we divided ourselves into the cars so that we
could carpool to Saint Hyacinth, or Saint Hyacinth in English, which is where the farm
was.
We didn't know where we were going, only the drivers knew where we were going.
It was still pitch black when I was walking to this park to get to the other people.
And I remember thinking to myself, what am I doing?
This is crazy.
Waking up early in the morning to do this, I have no idea what I'm walking into.
All I know is that it's a peaceful action and I feel like this is important and I'm
going to do this.
But I was scared and it felt mind boggling that I was walking into this situation.
So then we drive there, we leave at 3 a.m., we get there at 4.
And again, it's still pitch dark when we get there.
It's the middle of nowhere countryside farmland.
There are no streetlights.
It is just black.
Sorry to interject, Nathalie.
Saint-Jacent is actually the city where you can find one of the biggest vet hospitals
for farm animals in Quebec, which I find interesting that this is happening where there's this
big vet hospital and vet school to, I think, most veterinarians in Quebec who go into the
agribusiness to get their training in Saint-Jacent.
Really?
I didn't even know that.
I've never heard that before.
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, it's a strange contradiction of veterinary practice for most people that are veterinarians
because most people eat animals and then the school is in a place where they're exploiting
so many animals.
I mean, the whole society is just so contradictory, isn't it?
But that's an interesting fact I didn't know about.
Wow.
So, we arrived there in the dark and I'm sitting in the back of this car and the people that
I'm in the car with, they leave to go to another car.
I don't remember why.
So, I'm sitting there in the back and I put on my biosecurity suit and I'm given these
little booties to put on my feet.
By the way, I'm also wearing a diaper.
We're all wearing diapers because there are no bathrooms in there.
If you have to go, I did not have to use mine, but if you have to go, there's nowhere for
you to go in there.
We're going to be in there for hours.
We're going to be with the police after.
So we actually wore those just in case.
So I'm sitting in the back of this car in the middle of nowhere in the dark in a diaper,
in a biosecurity suit.
I'm alone.
Someone has just ran in the dark to the farm, ran top speed to go and check out the doors
are still unlocked if we can still go in before we all go.
And I'm just thinking like, what am I doing here?
This is crazy.
But then we're given the go-ahead that we're going to assemble.
And the first thing we want to do is we want to take a picture.
So a lot of people have seen this picture.
It's been the cover photo for our event, our court date event pages and that sort of thing.
But we're in the dark.
We're underneath the sign outside of the farm says Poor Greg across the top.
Poor Greg is the name of the farm because porc is pork in French and their name was
Grégoire.
It was a family-run farm by the Grégoires.
So anyway, we're at this farm and there's this car and their headlights are going to
be put onto us because there's no other light there.
So we take the photos.
Someone had to put their car so that the lights are shining on us and we line up and we have
some piglets in our arms.
Some dead piglets.
They're not alive.
They're dead.
And some masks, some pig masks.
They look like we're like pig face masks.
And we take the picture and then it's time to go in.
So we go towards the door.
We get there.
Our hearts are all beating fast.
Most of us, I think all of us, I don't think any of us, no, maybe most of us, almost all
of us have never done this before.
I've never gone into a farm before.
And we open the door and we walk in and it's just shocking.
It just hits you.
The smell, the atmosphere, and the eyes of all these mother pigs, these sows that are
in cages the size of their own bodies.
We were in the gestation area.
Gestation?
Or farrowing.
No, excuse me.
Farrowing area where they have their babies next to them.
And they are still in a cage the size of their body.
And then there's another cage for their babies next to them.
So they can't turn around.
They can only stand up and lie down.
But the moment you go in, these huge animals with these very human-like eyes are looking
at you and you just can't believe what you're seeing.
You just can't believe that this is legal.
They walk through the door and there they are right in your face and caged with their
babies.
Their babies are also dead, some of them in the cages, dead babies in the hallways.
The smell is just incredible.
There's no windows.
It's just dark in there.
It just feels like somewhere out of a horror film.
And it just got worse as we went on this farm.
Even though it was a local family-run farm, it had about 4,000 animals on it.
We spent the next few hours going through every single section and carefully documenting
everything that we saw.
It was just, it was very shocking.
It is definitely the worst place in the world I have ever been and will probably ever be.
I'm even trying to explain how it felt to look at these animals.
There were just so many, there was a variety of just horrible situations.
There were the faring area, the gestation area, which is where they're being impregnated
and they're in cages their own body there as well on concrete.
There was the area where they kept the males, the adult males, which was extremely filthy
and we could barely breathe in there.
We couldn't understand how animals could breathe in there.
There was the area where there were babies, babies that were too old to be with their
mothers, but not old enough to be with the adults.
They were so overcrowded and so filthy and oppressive.
Sorry, that's the word I was trying to find earlier and I couldn't find it for some reason.
It was such an oppressive, horrible place.
All these little individuals, they were all so sweet and curious and they wanted to come
up to us.
I'm sorry, I'm still like, it's hard to talk about.
It's hard to talk about it and I've been ranting for a long time now, so I think I'll
stop it.
Let me know what your next question is.
I want to now get to the activism part and how to fight this because you're making such
great points.
Every argument points to, every piece of information and study we have points to, this is a bad
idea.
This is not a smart idea.
We should abolish those institutions.
Then you have activism work around it.
First of all, would you rate the efficiency?
We talked about how social media has helped putting the pressure on them and making them
feel threatened.
But then you have people breaking in, doing sit-ins inside.
You have the animal liberation front who enters those places and liberate animals.
You have all kinds of activism around slaughterhouses.
Do you have an idea of which ones are the most efficient in terms of making an impact
and getting us near the goal of abolishing those institutions?
My thoughts are, I think the most effective are those where we can form coalitions around
the issues.
Having forces with environmentally focused organizations and individuals and knowing,
okay, there are going to be some differences.
You're not going to be dealing with a group that's entirely vegan or same thing with workers'
rights groups.
I think forming those coalitions is helpful because sometimes I think it's easy for the
general public to look away from animal focused messaging.
For all the reasons we've been talking about, people don't want to think about where their
meat comes from, where their dairy comes from, their eggs, et cetera.
It's easy for them to shut down.
But if you're making a broader argument around not just the animals but also human rights,
environmental justice, I think then you can... The effect of the message might spread
a little more widely.
I like what one of your previous guests, Robert Cheek, had to say about, it's really hard
to bring people over to your side if you're calling them names and telling them how horrible
they are.
But it helps if you can show people these connections and convince people that even
if you don't care about the animal issues, they're interconnected with so many other
issues and concerns and hit them where they live.
That's their own personal wellbeing for many people.
That's their point to all of the implications of this industry.
Also I think it helps to put it into historical context and show people this is, historically
speaking, relatively new development.
It's not like we're stuck with it.
It's not like it's part of our... It's not etched into our DNA or something.
It's a relatively new social institution and it can be changed.
It just takes people being willing to mobilize and work with other people.
I think that helps to get the message out and also fighting as hard as possible against
these legislative aims and strategies to prevent the public from gaining information about
what's going on.
I think people should have the right to know how their food is being produced.
I don't think there's anything all that controversial in that statement.
I think conveying that to people might help to make them think, okay, yeah, that's a fair
point.
I also think it can help sometimes to put yourself in a position where you can be a
model for other people and say, okay, I was once in the position that you were.
I didn't know what was going on, but now I do and here's how I live my life as a result.
I think that's important.
To be honest with you, it's something I didn't used to do as much as I do now.
It occurred to me one day, I was teaching a class and it was corporate and governmental
crime class.
We were talking about a number of different industries and we were talking about the animal
agriculture industry.
At one point, one of my students raised his hands and said, but what's the solution?
It's not like we can all be vegan, we would die.
He really thought that.
At that moment, I realized, okay, I need to start telling my students that I'm vegan because
otherwise they really do believe these things.
Some of that is sponsored by the industry itself.
Tell people that they're going to die from protein deficiencies or that they need meat
to survive.
I think sometimes it can help to put yourself out there and say, okay, look, this is totally
feasible for you to do.
My caveat to that is be ready for people to try to discredit what you're saying because
you're taking that position, because you're vegan.
Even if you're speaking about something that's totally unrelated.
I've had that happen.
I actually just had an instance of it a couple months ago where I had to appear as an expert
witness in a court case.
It was totally unrelated to food.
One of the first things during cross-examination that was raised was, Dr. Fitzgerald, would
you agree that eating meat is wrong?
I answered it, honestly, but I thought the question has nothing to do with the case,
but the reason it was raised was to try to discredit everything else that I was saying.
I think the more that people put themselves out there and identify as healthy vegans,
I think that can help.
Like I said, just be ready because you will have people who will challenge everything
you have to say because you've made that position clear.
Covering the topic of factory farming has helped me understand better the powerful role
played by veterinarians in the exploitation of animals.
I had the chance to welcome one of the most vocal activists on this issue, Dr. Crystal
Heath.
She founded an organization called Our Honor, and they sell great merch on their website.
Mugs and t-shirts are printed with the words, my favorite veterinarians don't eat their
patients.
I think that message captures perfectly the issue.
I want you to hear from her, but first Marina Belotnikova, who is this super smart and talented
reporter working for Vox.
Look her up.
She wrote an article on Dr. Heath and veterinarians in general, and it did not go as planned.
Take a listen.
So Marina, I first heard from you, of you from Dr. Heath.
I interviewed her on episode 12 of the podcast.
Basically she's a veterinarian who spoke up about animal abuse and got this huge backlash,
and she was basically canceled.
And you wrote about her in an article called The Bitter Civil War Dividing American Veterinarians
back in January.
So as an icebreaker question, I was wondering if you could maybe reflect back on that article
and maybe share with us some details that did not make the final cut.
Yeah.
Thank you for calling out that story.
That was one of my favorite stories I worked on, and I think it's so important.
It was about how the veterinary profession and the institutions of veterinary medicine,
the American Veterinary Medical Association is the biggest one, are basically structurally
and systematically aligned with factory farming and the interests of the meat industry.
It came out of like, in early 2020, I was doing a lot of reporting on the rise of, about
the 2022 bird flu, which resulted in the mass extermination of nearly 60 million chickens
and turkeys over the course of about a year.
And I wrote about what was happening to these animals that had to be mass killed whenever
there was a bird flu outbreak detected at a factory farm.
And I wrote a lot about the rise of a method called ventilation shutdown.
You probably heard about it if you know crystal, and it's been very topical in the animal movement
the last couple of years.
But a ventilation shutdown basically means mass exterminating animals through heat stroke.
So they literally, like the factory farms literally rent industrial heaters and pump
in heat.
Sometimes steam is used in the pork industry, like pump in heat to the sheds to quickly
mass kill animals.
So you can compare it to a dog dying in a hot car.
He's literally death by heat stroke, and this takes hours for animals to die from this in
the poultry industry.
So it's like, in case it's not obvious, it's basically the most inhumane and the most excruciating
way to cull animals, despite the euphemism that you sometimes hear the industry using
and calling this a kind of euthanasia.
So I did a lot of writing and reporting on that, and through that I picked up on how
important the veterinary profession was in validating and providing a justification and
basically like a scientific and medical and moral cover for it.
And it made me, like the more and more I learned, I was like, I thought this is really interesting
and I think would be surprising to a general audience.
We associate veterinarians with our cats and dogs.
I feel like that's such an evocative association in people's minds.
And yet the veterinary profession is actually very closely connected to the institutions
that are responsible for animal torture on a massive scale.
I was just so fascinated by that and the political and intellectual history of veterinary medicine,
how it came to be that way.
And so yeah, and I decided to turn it into a story.
I was actually, so I started working at Vox last November.
Before that I had been freelancing and I pitched this story around to, so back when I was a
freelancer, I pitched this story idea to so many outlets.
I had a spreadsheet tracking everywhere where I was sending a pitch and this pitch had gone
out to literally 17 different places and I just couldn't get it picked up.
And I was so baffled because I think it's so interesting, so important.
There's so much there.
It's like, it's, obviously it's such a real story.
And it was discouraging.
And then I started my job at Vox.
In my section we write a lot about factory farming and animal rights.
And so it was a no-brainer for this veterinarian story to fit there.
So I ended up writing it for Vox.
It was published this past January of 2023 and it did, audience traffic wise, it did
very well because the headline, the Civil War, dividing veterinarians.
I think people want to read about that.
Even if they don't have a special interest in factory farming, I think that that subject
is so intriguing.
Yeah.
So I'm really happy I did it and I want to continue reporting on the veterinary profession
for sure.
So, doctor, tell me, is there a fight you want to talk about and that you're leading
with your organization and I haven't asked you about?
We are also addressing the harmful use of animals in medical school training, veterinary
school training.
People don't realize that veterinary students have to kill their patients often in veterinary
school.
The cadavers that students use to learn anatomy, they're often animals purchased from bioscience
companies, purposefully bred for that purpose.
And there's an alternative, there's humane ethical alternatives which are willed body
programs.
When our own dog, cat, horse, goat passes away, we can donate their body to veterinary school
for veterinary students to learn on.
We don't need to be purposefully breeding animals for veterinary students to learn on.
But also, there are veterinary students who have to anesthetize a healthy animal, perform
one or more surgeries on them, and then kill them before the animal is even allowed to
wake up.
And that is horrifying and against our ethics.
And students are bullied into doing this, worrying that they're going to face a failing grade,
worried that they're going to be ostracized.
And the threats are really ramping up.
I feel like the veterinary students are even more afraid now to speak up when it's very
clear.
There's no evidence against these sorts of training models when there's so many more
alternatives.
But the students are at the same time more fearful about speaking up.
So we're going to put on some Know Your Rights trainings in the future for veterinary students.
If there's any veterinary students out there, and you feel threatened and you feel like
you can't speak up, reach out to us.
Our honor wants to write to these schools and advocate for change in curriculum that
requires less animal harm.
We're going to come out with the numbers of how many animals are killed at each school
and make a ranking of the most ethical to the least ethical veterinary schools.
And there's going to be a lot more information coming out in that area.
And that's a huge opportunity for change.
And veterinary students shouldn't feel scared.
Just know that animal law attorneys are wanting to take on some sort of case First Amendment
attorneys.
We have your back.
There's a lot you can do and a lot of animals you can save.
And some people say, oh, what's the most ethical vet school to go to?
And I encourage if you're bold, go to the worst ones.
And because you're going to save more animals by changing the curriculum at the worst schools,
you could save thousands of animals by changing the curriculum.
Whereas you're not going to save any animals if you go to school that doesn't harm animals.
So that's my philosophy.
So stay tuned and follow us on social media to hear more about that.
Why are they not suing the colleges?
Because this is a traumatizing experience.
I hear about lectures getting cancelled in colleges because they are insensitive.
And then there's this horrible situation going on at your vet school department.
If this is not a lawsuit material, then I don't know what it is.
And it's against our oath.
It's anti the three Rs.
The most welfarist basic.
This isn't even animal rights stuff we're talking about here.
This is basic adhering to the ethics of the veterinary profession.
And Gary did sue a lot of schools for this.
And sadly, there's been silence lately.
I feel like we really need to ramp that up again.
More lawsuits.
There's so much potential here for change.
I think that what Dr. Heat went through was a case of discrimination.
Discrimination for her speech, for her beliefs, for basically being vegan.
And that was one other incredible team covered by the podcast.
When the amazing Tamara Bedeck, chair of the animal rights committee for the New York National
Lawyers Guild, reached out to me and asked if I would like to partner and promote a webinar
they held on vegan discrimination, I said yes.
Right away.
I interviewed Tamara and one participant of the webinar Astrid Prevot, whose legal case
against France National School of Dietitians was pending.
Let's hear what they had to say.
You have individual discrimination cases that are moving forward because vegans are being
discriminated against at work, at school, in divorce proceedings, in detention.
Well let's give some concrete examples to listeners.
Sure.
Well, all right.
I'll start sort of sequentially with the US and Jerry Friedman's case.
So Jerry Friedman was at the time a computer, he was a computer repair person for Kaiser
Permanente, which is a very large hospital chain.
And he was working for a pharmaceutical company repairing their computers and they were very
happy with his work.
And they offered him a full-time permanent position, which he was very happy to accept
or as happy as a vegan in a pharmaceutical company could be.
But he did accept the position and then they told him that he must be vaccinated and take
the MMR vaccine.
And Jerry said, you know, this vaccine is cultured from chicken embryos and I don't
feel comfortable taking it.
Perhaps we can keep me in the computer repair shop away from anyone who might be a patient
and accommodate me that way.
And they said no and they rescinded the job offer, the full-time job offer, and they stopped
using his services as a contractor.
So they backpedaled quite a bit and he was horrified and he took them to task on it.
Jordi Casamidana's case about 20 years later or 18 years later came about because he was
working for League Against Cruel Sports.
And as an ethical vegan, he was curious as to where his pension fund was going.
So investing in a pension fund became mandatory, I think, in 2015 in the UK.
So everyone at LACS had a pension fund and he was just curious as to what he was investing
in.
He found out, much to his horror, that he was investing in tobacco, oil, and big pharma
that tested on animals.
So he raised this with his managers.
They appeared equally horrified.
They told him they would change the pension fund, but in fact they didn't.
And despite nudging them for over a year, they didn't.
And in the course of that year, he begged them to at least stop investing his own money
so that it wasn't like his own pension was contributing to animal testing.
It turns out they didn't even do that.
So he found a mechanism to change his own pension fund to something more ethical.
And he changed his own pension fund, his own monetary stream, to something more ethical.
And he told his colleagues at LACS about it.
And LACS fired him.
Astrid Prevost is an aspiring dietitian in France.
To get her dietitian's license, there was a mandatory cooking class.
I don't know why there was a mandatory cooking class, but there was.
They insisted that she use animal ingredients.
She requested to be able to substitute the animal ingredients with vegan alternatives.
She even got a doctor's note.
They said no, and that she would risk failing the cooking class and thereby not being able
to pursue her dietitian's degree unless she used animal products.
So there are other kinds of cases as well.
There are cases in detention or in hospitals where a person in detention is not getting
vegan food despite the fact that they are quite clear about what it is they eat.
We're hoping that Representative Congressman Ro Khanna opens the webinar.
We're waiting for his staff to give us the green light and let us know if he's available
for a couple of minutes on October 17.
Congressman Khanna is very involved in making sure that American servicemen and women have
plant-based and vegan options in the military.
The congressman of which state?
California.
So there are these many, many different examples where vegans are.
I'll give you a sort of divorce example.
Imagine, if you will, you have two people divorcing.
One is not vegan.
One is vegan.
The not vegan claims that the vegan is jeopardizing the health of their child and should therefore
be the parent that gets custody.
Now in some places they may or may not be laughed at because we know that it's entirely
possible to have a child that's on a vegan diet and have that child be extremely healthy.
But in some places that's quite a strong argument.
And there are some places in the world where to be vegan is to be openly vegan is to be
scared of retaliation where vegans are called terrorists.
There's a Italian politician who wants vegan parents to go to jail, go to jail, vegan parents
to go to jail because they're jeopardizing the health of their child.
So depending on where you are in the world, your discrimination is going to be different
and more or less severe.
So Astrid, my first question for you is why did you decide to be vocal about your fight?
Well, I decided to be vocal about my fight because I think it's very important for other
vegans to realize that we can fight for our rights and also that our rights defend animal
rights.
It's all linked.
So I think it's very important not to just let it go.
What I know is that discrimination against vegans really prevents people from becoming
vegans because people are afraid to be discriminated against.
Some become vegan and then they quit veganism because of the social injustice and because
they feel they are not accepted and they are mocked and they have a hard time finding food
where they live.
So yeah, I think discrimination against vegans has really like very concrete outcomes.
And so yeah, I think that's also why we should fight against it because the final outcome
is that it promotes animal exploitation, even if it's not direct, but still.
Even though this podcast is in English and my reference countries are pretty much Canada
and the US, I really try my best to cover the animal rights fights going on in other
countries like France with Astrid, but also Vietnam with the inspiring Catherine, founder
of Vietnam Animal Aid and Rescue, George, founder of Lebanese Vegans, Jimena, founder
of Obstructious Microsanctuary in Columbia, and ASMR Nobility, Whispers Red, founder of
Wispouse, a sanctuary located in Serbia.
I admire them so much.
Their battle is such an uphill battle, yet here they are making breakthrough after breakthrough,
claiming victory after victory against cruelty and violence.
I live in a tourist town.
It's the same thing.
We get all these messages from people saying, I found this kitten on the side of the road.
I'm leaving tomorrow.
What can you take the kitten?
No.
Well, I mean, we can't because you're one of nine this week that have sent me that message.
I know you feel powerless and helpless and whatever, but I don't own an island to put
all these cats on.
Let's get this straight.
There is just no place for them to go.
You have to get used to the idea that you can't help everybody.
I think that's one of the worst parts of being a compassionate and empathetic person is being
able to close your eyes and say, I understand the big picture.
I'm doing everything I can on a daily basis, particularly as vegans, to eliminate my part
in exploitation, torture and murder.
That's bigger than what everybody else around here is doing.
You can't help every single individual.
There's not the resources or the homes or the space or the veterinarians.
It just isn't like that.
I can say that after 10 years running a rescue, but ultimately it is what led me to run a
rescue.
This idea of like, I'm not going to stand for this.
I won't stand for this.
I will do something.
I am somebody who can do something.
Listen, Ryan, I think that the problem resides not just in Lebanon.
So a key question to this podcast might be how are animals treated and perceived by Lebanese
people?
Sure.
Listen, Ryan, I think that the problem resides not just in Lebanon, but worldwide.
Of course, now there are countries that are more animal welfareists than others, but when
it comes to animal rights, all of us who are very far behind.
So regarding animal welfare, we have some few organizations that take care about cats
and dogs, basically pets, but they brand themselves as animal organizations, whereas they only
focus on a few cats and dogs and a few horses, which I am completely against because it gives
the impression that all other animals are okay to abuse and to gain and to eat.
The community is being educated as much as possible with Lebanese Veganism Organization
that I created years ago and others as well.
We try as much as possible to expose the horrors about animal agriculture, especially regarding
the ethical aspect of it, because we're vegan for ethics and it's all about ethics.
Of course, now we have advantages of going vegan relating to the environment and our
health, but mainly it's for ethics.
So yeah, we try as much as possible in Lebanon, especially that here the mentality is quite
like, I mean, manly in a way that, you know, you should be eating some kind of meat to
be man or something of the sort, which is completely wrong, of course, especially like
in the mountains, they still eat sometimes some raw meat with some spices, you know.
So yeah, the more we go away from the capital, Beirut, the more the idea of animal rights
and veganism becomes blurry, you know, but yeah, as much as possible, we try to raise
awareness and we're on it.
What is it like to have an animal sanctuary in Colombia?
Is veganism?
It's very hard.
I can relate with Jessica and Tracy about the fear because in Colombia cattle farming
is very important.
It's not just an industry, a powerful industry, but it was related with foreign military army
years ago.
They are very powerful.
So when you try to make a cultural transformation, people doesn't take it like, ah, that's cool.
No, it's like you want to change me.
You're crazy.
You're rebellious.
People doesn't like it.
At the beginning of the sanctuary, it was at the same time of the pandemic.
Our sanctuary was vandalized a few times.
We were always with the fear that because they, if they broke some pipes or steal some
machinery or whatever, it doesn't matter.
But we were always afraid that they may come to the or hurt the girls, the cows.
So it was difficult to deal with.
That's why I was saying before that we are just like put again ourself on our feet because
it was not just bankruptcy, but all the attacks that we had at the beginning.
Even from my husband's family, they are all cattle farmers.
And right now in Colombia, there is a debate.
In fact, tomorrow is the final debate of the Congress about bullfighting.
And our neighbor at the farm is one of the main bullfighting lawyers.
He owns, in fact, the main bullfighting ring in Bogota has his last name, Santa Maria.
So it has been difficult.
It has been a difficult path, but I think we were able to do it.
And right now we are feeling more comfortable and that's why we are planning to move to
the farm with the cattle.
So we are not depending on someone or feeling that fear.
But if we are there, I think we can feel more comfortable and safe being all the time with
the animals.
So but it's always the there are nice people, but there are always the people with the prejudice
that you're crazy and you're trying to you're a hippie.
Like they say in Colombia, you're a weed smoker like Maribuanero.
So like crazy once the sanctuary was broadcasted at the TV national news.
Some people were like insulting us or saying like ugly things.
So but I think that is part of the choice that we made trying to promote a cultural
transformation that respect and having into account animal lives.
So I think this is the price and we were we were willing to assume that and we are in
that in that in that way.
So many times I've been in a situation where they're talking about me in Serbian, assuming
that the only reason why an English person or any person would come over to Serbia to
do something with the animals is because they were trying to make money somehow.
And and then of course, I find out because the manager of the sanctuary who who the family
that live there and take care of the animals, they were very close and people don't expect
that we are that close.
So I learn everything that they've been saying in Serbian because their perception of animals
is so different to us.
And it's not that they're not good people.
It's that they have a complete indifference to animals.
They're not they're not connected to everything around them like we like we are.
It's quite difficult to explain.
And I'm still I'm still trying to figure it all out anyway.
But they're just objects to them.
The possessions.
But I would argue that this is one good reason of opening a sanctuary in Serbia because this
feeling is the default feeling of the people there.
A sanctuary is such a rebellious entity in such context.
And it's there to also teach them is there, of course, to help the dogs, the animals,
but also to teach them that compassion, to teach them to make that link with animals.
Yeah.
To set an example through action.
It's very, very difficult.
I'll be honest.
So many times I've felt like giving up because it's just not easy.
And to run a charity full stop just isn't easy at all.
But to operate in an environment like that when I'm not there all the time as well.
So, so the family that we're very close to that are managing the place and with the animals
24 seven.
I mean, they've got the greatest hearts.
They're such beautiful people.
But we've even, you know, we've still had to have the conversations about and set the
policies on exactly how they take care of the animals because they've grown up with
no money at all.
They've never been able to afford to to neuter an animal or to keep them, you know, in the
conditions that we've got them in.
They've never been able to afford anything like that.
So it's not there.
It's not the one thing that they think of straight away.
I took over some heaters for our living space for the dogs back in January.
And it took me a while to convince them that they need to actually put them on for more
often than more often than they were because they were thinking, well, it's going to cost
a fortune.
And I said, well, yes, but the dogs will freeze.
And they love the dogs.
You know, it's hard.
It's hard for me to explain because they love the dogs, but they've never lived in a situation
where they could afford to heat the dogs and their default position is, but we can't afford
it.
So you know, we still have to have these conversations where we decide exactly how we're going to
do things and then make sure they're done.
And then we're dealing with the public and the people that just think, oh, you know,
there's a sanctuary there.
We'll just, we'll just dump the dogs outside the gate.
We'll dump the puppies outside the gate or not even that.
They just leave them on the road further up.
And the locals who we went to pick up a dog.
This guy wants to get rid of his, his pointer.
He was about eight years old and he's, he's in the local village and we went to see him.
And normally they would take that dog and they would just dump them by a busy road.
So you know, he didn't, he didn't do that.
He contacted us.
So that was a good thing.
But he wants to get rid of him because he's eight years old.
He's had enough of him.
He couldn't, he said he couldn't afford to feed him anymore.
His wife was in hospital, fair enough.
But when we went round there, this dog was in such terrible condition, kept in a tiny
little cage and that didn't need to, that didn't need to happen.
Regardless of whether he had money or not, he didn't need to do that because he had a
courtyard that the dog could have been in.
But he, he thought, he thought that it was fine that the dog was in the cage and he had
lots of cats around.
And and of course, and whenever I'm around cats, like I can't stop touching them and
I'm standing there and these cats are coming towards me.
And so I'm like, you know, chatting with the cats and, and I picked up one cat and I'm
cuddling this cat and, and the guy just turned to me, said, I'll take the cat.
I said, what do you mean?
Just take it.
Because he wanted us to take the dog.
So he was in his mind, he was being nice to me.
Just have what you want as long as you take the dog.
But I said, I said, no, this is the cat.
This is your cat's home.
And all of these cats here, they're your cat's family.
I'm not going to take them.
Why would I, you know, it was just in his mind, he was being kind.
But in mine, obviously I'm like, you can't do that.
You can't just give away the cat just like that.
Not even knowing where the cat's going to go or what environment they're going to be
living in or, you know, it was just, I've come across these situations that are really
strange often when I, when I go there.
And and it's heartbreaking really.
I mean, that's definitely nowhere near the worst situation that there is over there.
That's that's very tame.
But it's just a small example.
But the way that some people treat animals out there is absolutely disgusting.
It's absolutely heartbreaking.
And yeah.
Finally, talking about uphill battles, let's get political.
This podcast has not shied away from being political.
I welcomed the amazing address and the so very kind Michelle, two vegans identifying
as conservatives.
I also welcomed Liz White, leader of the Animal Protection Party of Canada, Miles Trafigen,
a researcher who wants us to demolish the southern border wall, and Dr. Vlasak, who
defends the illegal actions of the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front.
So basically people from everywhere on the political spectrum.
So take a listen.
I'm wondering why did you choose to appear as guests on this podcast, because it can
be a bit intimidating to talk publicly about your position.
So I'm curious, what made you want to become guests on on the vegan world?
Would you like me to go first?
Sure.
Okay.
So I saw your Reddit and I was like, oh, because you know, there's just this huge political
divide.
And I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna take a chance.
I'm gonna put it out there, because maybe we can find something that will give us that
common ground that will bring us all together.
There's actually more conservative vegans than you can even begin to imagine.
I'm part of a conservative vegan Facebook group.
For a small group, there's only 1500.
But that's 1500 people strong, you know, and I feel like that's just in Florida.
Maybe there's more.
And so I love that you opened this up.
And I think it's a great thing.
Yeah, similar.
Anytime there's some discussion about veganism and right wing politics or just politics in
general, I do like to chime in.
I like to remind people that vegans don't all fit into one box politically.
Gary Yourofsky, if you're familiar, he has a very famous speech that's a lot of people's
first introduction to veganism.
All right.
Good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Gary Yourofsky.
Please take a moment and jot down my email address and my website in case you want to
contact me later on.
Today, we're going to talk about the world's forgotten victims, animals, and the world's
oldest and strongest addiction, meat.
And he at the start of his speech, he's saying, you don't have to change anything.
You don't have to give up your friend group, your religious beliefs, your political beliefs,
just leave animals alone.
I am not trying to take you away from your religion.
No religion mandates meat eating.
The golden rule states do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
Animals qualify as others and thou shalt not kill.
The four most important yet most ignored words in all religious teachings.
There's not an asterisk next to that commandment saying, unless you walk on all fours, have
fur, feathers, horns, beaks, or gills.
You can keep your friends, your politics, and your patriotism, still watch your favorite
TV shows and listen to your favorite music, even if it's Ted Nugent.
So I like to remind people that you don't have to abandon these beliefs or change who
you are really.
It's all about just kind of aligning your actions with your beliefs.
And a lot of us believe that animal abuse is bad.
So regardless of what you believe politically, economically, religiously, you can live in
a way that leaves animals alone.
So I definitely want to highlight that.
And so I'm grateful for the opportunity.
The most common thing that people say to me when I talk about the political parties, they
hate politics.
They don't like politicians.
They don't trust them.
They don't want to have anything to do with them.
They're going to turn their back on democracy and walk away.
And I say to them, that is a huge mistake.
Because like it or not, if we really want things to change for animals in Canada, we
have to do the politics.
And it's the politicians.
They're the gatekeepers of all the legislation.
They decide who lives, who dies, when they die, in what manner, is it cruel, how they're
sold, what's done with them.
All of that is political.
And until we address that, there is no way that we are going to change the landscape
with regard to how we treat animals, particularly food animals, which of course, accounts for
the largest number.
There was a law that was enacted in 2005 called the Real ID Act of 2005.
And that sounds fairly benign.
Okay, we're all supposed to carry identification.
But there was a clause in that law that said that the Secretary of Homeland Security has
the authority and power to waive all laws for the construction of border barriers.
And this includes the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the
Rivers and Protection Act, the Wilderness Act, Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle protection.
And the list goes on to about 70 different laws that they have the authority to waive.
And so because of this, we were not able to do environmental studies to try to assess
the impact of the border wall on wildlife, on water, on the ecosystem.
So they essentially can just do what they want to do.
And that's exactly what they did is they don't really have to notify anybody except to put
it in the US Federal Register saying, we're going to build a border wall here, and we
are waiving all of these laws.
And that is a very scary thing.
And it set a horrible precedent around the world because this is the erosion of democracy.
How can an unelected politically appointed official, which is who the Secretary of Homeland
Security is, how do they have the authority to waive laws that both houses of Congress
have passed and whatever sitting president signed them into law, and then it withstood
decades of judicial review and challenges at the Supreme Court?
How does that person have the power to do that?
Unchecked power.
This is something that people should be scared of because it's starting to proliferate around
the world.
There are now nearly 70 countries in the world that have border walls.
And they are following the same playbook where in Poland and Belarus, they built a border
wall two years ago, a 200 kilometer long border wall between Poland and Belarus right through
the Białowice Unesco Biosphere Reserve.
So there's bison there, there's wolves, brown bears, and they waived all the laws to construct
that.
In Slovenia, they're putting up border barriers.
And once again, they did the same thing saying that, oh, in order to put these up, we need
to bypass all the laws.
And unfortunately, that's something that I believe that the United States exported to
a lot of places who are taking advantage of this autocratic power that really should not
exist in a true functioning democracy.
Do you believe that our governmental institutions have been captured by the agriculture industry?
Well, absolutely.
Not only the huge amount of subsidies that are delivered by the government to animal
agriculture, heavily subsidized industries such as the meat and dairy industries, as
one example, make it very clear that the government is in collusion with the animal agriculture
industry.
And to no surprise, these are the wealthy corporations that deliver suitcases full of
cash to our government people every year.
So of course, they're going to get what they want, which is the subsidization of their
industry.
And of course, people in government are just like everybody else, they're a new word to
the violence they're used to and brainwashed by these industries into thinking that animal
abuse is completely acceptable, normal, and the usual way of doing business.
And of course, none of that's true.
Yeah.
And that gives the feeling that the game is rigged.
And most certainly after what's happening right now in Canada with the ag-gag laws at
the federal level and how many obstacles we're putting in the way of vegan activists, it
feels like the gold past is moving and that we're playing against such strong forces.
So yes, civil disobedience is one answer against this issue.
And I think that's the part that makes people anxious.
It's breaking the law.
What would you say about that?
First of all, point of clarification, at least here in the States, we use civil disobedience
in a different way.
Civil disobedience to the best of my knowledge, at least as applied here, implies breaking
the law but doing so openly and accepting the consequences.
So for instance, if you were to chain yourself in front of a first or something as a statement
and obviously break the law, but fully expect to be arrested and accept those consequences,
we would call that civil disobedience.
What the underground animal liberation movement is doing, such as the ALF, is by our definition
not really civil disobedience.
These are people that are breaking the law and getting away with it for the most part
so that they can be out there to do it again.
And breaking the law to help animals is certainly justifiable, is certainly commendable.
We support it 100%.
We have supported it for more than 20 years.
So yeah, that just is a matter of difference in terminology, though we don't use that term
civil disobedience for what the ALF and other organizations are doing.
And I'm sorry, your original question again?
Yes, I just wanted you to comment on that part of breaking the law.
And I guess this is what people are anxious about.
If you look at every single struggle for liberation, both historically and concurrently in any
movement, whether it was against apartheid in South Africa, whether it was for civil
rights here in North America, various anti-colonialist efforts in places like Algeria and other
places, all of those struggles for liberation included an underground component.
And it's necessary in all of these struggles because power is not going to give up their
dominance just when you ask them nicely to do so.
They have to be persuaded by a variety of different means and not just illegal means,
but a variety of different means, but including illegal direct action, what we call direct
action.
And so I don't think the struggle for animal liberation is any different than these other
struggles unless you're a speciesist and you think that animals don't count nearly as much
as humans, which we believe that animals are just as important as humans.
And so the animal liberation struggle, it's just like all these other liberation struggles
throughout time.
And it will require a component that involves breaking the law.
Each of those other struggles has mostly included the use of real violence.
One could argue in self-defense, again, perfectly justifiable in my mind.
In our mind, certainly justifiable to use violence to protect yourself if someone's
trying to kill you.
You have a right to defend yourself.
And animals are being murdered by the millions every day and they have a right to defend
themselves.
And if they can't defend them, then we have the right to defend them.
Just like if your child is being abused, you have a right to defend your child.
Well, we have a right to defend animals when they're being abused.
And even though that particular strategy hasn't been widely used in the struggle for animal
liberation, it would certainly be justifiable if it was ever used.
Thank you everyone for listening.
Please don't hesitate to reach out.
I want to hear from you.
You can message me on Instagram at veganreportpodcast or leave a review.
Make yourself known.
This is as much your podcast as it is mine.
And when I know that you are enjoying this show, that you are getting something out of
this, it just gives me the energy to keep going.
Thank you so much for your support.
I wish you a great summer or winter, I guess, if you're listening from the Southern hemisphere.
And as always, thank you for caring.
But I like to tell all every vegan that's listening or at home, you have to be a voice
for the animals every single day.
It's not enough just to be vegan.
And I think a lot of us say, well, I'm vegan, so I'm saving X amount of number of animals.
But that's all you're saving.
You need to save more.
And those are the kinds of people that are who are content to share recipes and talk
about restaurant offerings and hey, that's all fine.
But please make have to take the next step.
Because the animals, as Nicole said, desperately need us.
And we feel that if you think back in our history, every great social justice movement
has started in the streets with protests, whether it's gender rights, sexual orientation,
civil rights, obviously, right down the line.
So animal rights is no different.
You have to voice your outrage.
You have to let the average person know there's something wrong here.