***

Canadian author Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for his animal-themed Life of Pi. In Beatrice & Virgil, non-human animal characters again share prominence with their human counterparts. An allegory retelling one of history’s greatest atrocities, this harrowing Holocaust tale profiles humanity’s worst – in an alternate voice atypical of the customary factual accountings of events. As symbols of the oppressed, a donkey and a howler monkey stand in for the persecuted.

"Beatrice & Virgil" by Yann Martel

Henry, the main protagonist of this somewhat difficult book, is a successful writer who sets out to challenge the way historical writings have represented the Holocaust.

“My book is about representations of the Holocaust. The event is gone, we are left with stories about it. My book is about a new choice of stories. With a historical event, we not only have to bear witness, that is, tell what happened and address the needs of the ghosts. We also have to interpret and conclude, so that the needs of people TODAY, the children of ghosts, can be addressed… Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

Henry’s book, which he calls a “flip book,” is actually two books in one: the first a novel, and the second an essay. After it is rejected by his editors, he abandons writing and moves to “an unnamed great city of the world.” There, a letter finds him, from a resident in the same city who requests his assistance. With the letter is a photocopy of Gustav Flaubert’s short story, “The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator,” a barbarous tale wherein the main character finds not only redemption, but sainthood, despite having pointlessly murdered his parents as well as myriad animals. Only those portions of the text relating to the animal killings are highlighted. His curiosity piqued, Henry seeks out the letter’s author, only to discover it’s an elderly taxidermist, also named Henry, who is struggling to complete his stage-play, “A 20^th Century Shirt.” As metaphors for undesirables victimized during the Holocaust, Beatrice (the donkey) and Virgil (the howler monkey) reside on the striped shirt of his play’s title, and are its main characters.

Or is the metaphor the other way around? While animals may be standing in for Holocaust victims, for the taxidermist, who has been writing this play his whole life in an effort to find redemption, the Holocaust itself appears to be a metaphor for the extermination of animal life, which his fictional Beatrice and Virgil call “the horrors.”

And the metaphors don’t end there. Readers may recognize those names as main characters in Dante’s epic allegory of the soul seeking redemption, Divine Comedy – wherein Dante is first accompanied through Hell and Purgatory by Virgil, then, through Heaven, by Beatrice. Moreover, the “real” donkey and howler monkey exist, dead and stuffed, in the taxidermist’s shop. They are his inspiration.

The story that the taxidermist wishes to tell of the suffering of animals reaches a pinnacle in its deeply haunting description of the savage torture of Beatrice, which graphically recreates the kind of barbarity inflicted upon victims of Nazis and their collaborators. In the play, Beatrice and Virgil appear as intelligent, sentient beings fully capable of rational thought – and expression — and possessing the capacity to suffer. And they fully realize the necessity, and unlikelihood, of their story ever being told:

Beatrice: “You asked, how are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when it’s over?”

Virgil: “That’s assuming we survive.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in these complex layers of stories comes when Henry realizes, too late, that the playwriting taxidermist is, in fact, a Nazi collaborator, truly complicit in all the suffering so graphically described in his tale. In the shocking and violent climax, the stuffed animals in the shop are consumed in a fire, and Henry finds that he:

“…missed them terribly. In his mind, he saw them as they stood in the taxidermist’s workshop, Virgil so, Beatrice like this – he tried to make the pictures in his mind as clear as possible. But they faded, as memories of appearance always do. All that remained now was their story, that incomplete story of waiting and fearing and hoping and talking.”

This is a difficult, painful, and complex book. And the lessons it has to offer are not simple. Through its cross-metaphors, Beatrice & Virgil projects that the capacities for life, suffering, fear, pain and self-interest exist in both animals and humans. The misfortunes that befall Beatrice and Virgil mirror the cruelty and domination, institutionalized and otherwise, inflicted upon billions and billions of animals around the world year after year. Denied even basic dignity, animals are systemically tortured and slaughtered in more inhumane ways than the mind can cope with. Man’s capacity to inflict suffering on all living beings, especially those presenting any kind of otherness, is bounded only by his imagination.

And yet, although in many instances it is as painful to read as it is to watch undercover footage from Mercy for Animals, Beatrice and Virgil nevertheless reinforces a reality that will resonate with many. No matter the horrors inflicted upon animals, despite their pain and suffering, no matter how thoroughly their desires and natural instincts are frustrated, and despite all that is taken from them, mankind can never succeed in eradicating the fact that they are like us. And nothing we do to them will ever change that.

Perhaps most importantly, throughout Beatrice & Virgil, Martel posits why we must continue to tell stories about events like the Holocaust, and the ongoing exploitation and slaughter of the animals of our world – the ghosts of our oppression. It is the least we can do.

***

Stephen Lukas

Stephen Lukas is a Human Resources Business Consultant working for a large, international financial services company. In July 2011, after 10 years as a vegetarian, he became a vegan. Stephen runs, practices yoga, volunteers at the local SPCA, and nurtures a manic addiction to vegan baking — all while shunning Facebook. He lives just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, with his husband of 18 years, Peter, their beagle, Gracie, and their kitty, Seamus. If you drop him a line at lukas[at]accesswave.ca, he will send you a picture of his new, vegan tattoo. 

Book Illustration from "Lightfoot the Deer" (credit: Harrison Cady)

Their event, “‘Stories from the Wild’ at Central Library” will feature the classic children’s book, Lightfoot the Deer, written by Thornton W. Burgess and illustrated by Harrison Cady, which tells the story of a deer and his hunter, from the deer’s point of view. Storyteller Loretta-Lucy Miller will act as the storyteller at this event (an event which is making me wonder I should reserve a seat on the Bolt Bus — because the City of Brotherly Love is calling!). Artist Zipora Schula and dancer Lara Vracarich will be helping to lead the kiddies in the hands-on portion of the afternoon. It will take place on Saturday, February 18, from 2-4 p.m., at Story Hour Room of the Parkway Central Library Children’s Department, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103. The event is free, and it is recommended that you make reservations, by emailing publiceyephilly [at] gmail.com.

For those of you not in the Philadelphia area (and if you’re not, you should probably find yourself there sometime soon, since the new vegan hotspot, Vedge, just opened), it is pretty easy to host an event like this all by yourself. You can either use Lightfoot the Deer, or you can browse around on VegBooks for other animal-friendly books. Be sure to include pro-animal themed activities that make the young ones not only engage in artistic expression, but also begin dialogue with their friends (and with you) about why animals are our friends — not our food.

Note to self: Don't be intimidated! Read this book!

That said, I am so intrigued — and slightly intimidated — by this new book by Kim Socha, Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation. Though I haven’t read it (yet!), and it might very well be a tad too academic for the casual reader (eh-hem), I love where it’s going. All you need to do is see the book’s description to share in my excitement (and possible trepidation):

This interdisciplinary study fuses analysis of feminist literature and manifestos, radical political theory, critical vanguard studies, women’s performance art, and popular culture to argue for the animal liberation movement as successor to the liberationist visions of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, most especially the Surrealists. These vanguard groups are judiciously critiqued for their refusal to confront their own misogyny, a quandary that continues to plague animal activists, thereby disallowing for cohesion and full recognition of women’s value within a culturally marginalized cause. This volume is of interest to anyone who is concerned about the continued — indeed, escalating — violence against nonhumans. More broadly, it will interest those seeking new pathways to challenge the dominant power constructions through which oppression of humans, nonhumans, and the environment thrives.Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde ultimately poses the animal liberation movement as having serious political and cultural implications for radical social change, destruction of hierarchy and for a world without shackles and cages, much as the Surrealists envisioned.

The comprehensive book will set you back whopping $81 on Amazon (though you can also buy it used and save about ten bucks in the process, or maybe just ask your library to get you a copy). Anyone who reads it, please keep us posted on your thoughts. I’ll keep you posted, too, since Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde is most certainly on my wish list — both in terms of books I wish I could afford, and books I wish I could devour. The subject-matter of violence against non-humans, and the many correlations between women and animals, clearly is near and dear to my heart. What Socha created here looks to be a manifesto (a “womanifesto?”) — one that even unacademics, such as myself, might want to read.

"Vegans Are Cool" (and hot, apparently)

In addition to interviews with us, you’ll find interviews with Brazil-based designer Julia Harger, Australian entertainer Renata Halpin (who is “Teaching Kids to Go Green, the Musical Way“), as well as vegan activists from countries including Iran, South Africa, and Mongolia. There are also eye-opening articles written by movers and shakers from around the globe, including activist Leigh-Chantelle (who was on our podcast), dietician Amanda Benham, and environmentalists Gerard Wederburn-Bisshop and Lefkothea Pavlidis.

Though we’re clearly huge fans of using the internet to influence others to adopt a vegan diet and, what’s more, get involved with changing the world for animals, there is sometimes nothing more powerful than reading a real, live book. Plus, whip out a copy of Vegans Are Cool the next time you’re settling in for a soy latte at your favorite café, and you can bet people will take notice — especially once they see the sexy cover models, Noel Polanco (of “Noel Vegan Fitness Star“), along with the ridiculously cute pup, Bianquita.

Though I knew this before getting the book, it is clearer than ever before that vegans are, indeed, cool.

Photo at top of blog: Courtesy of Neil (photo called “Pig at sanctuary”), uploaded from Vegan Stock Photo.

***

Growing up on Long Island, I heard tales of the spooky experiments that took place on Plum Island, a livestock disease research facility off the coast. While on my family’s boat, we would pass the island, looking for the smoke that often floated up from the large buildings and the rumored animal-monsters that they created in their labs.

"Primacy" by J.E. Fishman

Perhaps this link between Long Island and animal testing was part of the inspiration for J. E. Fishman’s thriller, Primacy, which takes place, in part, in Pentalon, a fictional animal testing facility in Farmingdale, New York, not far from where I grew up on Long Island. Behind Pentalon’s walls, animals of all kinds are subjected to genetic and disease testing that causes pain, distress and, for some, death. But what if one of these animals could speak to the scientists who were subjecting them to those tests? Would those researchers reexamine the purpose of their actions? Would the whole system of animal testing break down? These are the questions that Fishman tackles.

Primacy follows the story of Liane Vinson, an animal researcher at Pentalon who is fully aware of the rules of detachment that employees must follow in order to keep themselves numb from the cruel harm they inflict on animals. However, for Liane, when it comes to a pair of twin bonobos, whom she has named and grown attached to, somehow those rules don’t matter. When one of them, Bea, who, like her twin brother, was born with unique vocal chords, suddenly begins to speak, uttering Liane’s name — Liane’s world is, naturally, turned upside down. Bea’s brother is soon subjected to a brutal laryngectomy to study his vocal chords, and it is then that Liane knows that she must save Bea from Pentalon’s clutches. Thus begins a journey that will forever change her life and her beliefs about animal sentience.

In her desperation, Liane turns to her ex-boyfriend, Corey Harrow, a member of FAULT (“Folks Against Unnecessary Lab Testing”), which is known for protesting outside of Pentalon’s gates, and torching animal testing labs. It soon becomes clear that Corey and Liane have very different goals for Bea. Liane wants to release Bea back into the wilds of Africa, while Corey wants to cultivate Bea’s language skills so that she might become a mascot for the movement, appearing on television to plead the case against the exploitation of animals. Liane sees this plan as further exploitation of Bea, and argues that what Bea would want more than anything is the chance to once again just be a bonobo, and live among her own kind in the jungle. Corey counters that no one can know what Bea truly wants, and that with his plan, she will be well cared for while still being of great use to the movement toward total animal liberation. She will be an ambassador for her kind.

In the mean time, while Liane is on the run from the Pentalon forces, and while she’s also trying to get Bea away from the animal rights activists, we are introduced to Dikembe Kasa, who lives in Congo. Grief stricken by the loss of his wife to a hemorrhagic fever, caused by her ingestion of bush meat, Dikembe sets out, with his son, to right a wrong that he committed. He believes that his decision to sell twin bonobos that he caught in the wild – thereby making him a participant in the cruel animal trade – gave him bad karma, ultimately causing the fever that killed his wife. Dikembe sets off to explore his own connection to Bea, the talking bonobo.

One of the great things about Primacy is that these characters, and their stories, create the opportunity for the author to bring up many important questions for anyone who has ever cared about an animal. For the most part, he doesn’t shy away from these issues. An example of this is Corey, who makes cogent arguments against animal testing, specifically regarding its cruelty, monetary motivations, and ineffectiveness. Dikembe’s rejection of poaching in Africa, and the portrayal of the exotic animal dealers, also send a strong conservationist message. And, most of all, Bea is portrayed as a sentient creature with a full range of emotions. Icing on the cake is that each section of the book begins with a quote relating to animal rights.

Unfortunately, however, while the animal rights activists who make up the membership of FAULT are not portrayed as the enemy, or as complete crazies, they nonetheless come across as misguided. Their stance for total liberation of animals at any cost – rather than focusing on what is best for an individual animal – is, in my experience, totally uncharacteristic of animal rights activists, who truly value each individual (as well as total liberation). This flawed portrayal is, perhaps, not surprising, since Fishman, disappointingly, is careful to assert in the epilogue that he is not an animal rights activist, while asking readers to do their own research on the subject of animal testing.

Perhaps telling of Fishman’s ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward our proper relationship with animals is the fact that the book does not adequately go there when it comes to food, and the torture of animals on factory farms. At one point in the story, Liane is eating hamburgers, and notes the irony of it, while Corey is a proud vegan. But, unlike the issues regarding animal research, these issues are never fully developed, nor in any way resolved. They are simply glossed over, leaving a wasted opportunity for interesting discussion among the book’s protagonists.

Still, it’s a breath of fresh air to get a chance to read compelling fiction that addresses harm to animals in a serious and largely thoughtful way. While not every character in the book ended up a vegan activist – an outcome that would have seemed ideal, even obvious, to any animal rights activist reading it – Primacy is nonetheless not only a page-turner, complete with enough violence and adventure to compel any thriller fan, but it exposes the truth about the cruel experiments that are performed on millions of animals in laboratories. It discusses the very real situation of how they are fed toxins to see how long it takes them to die, how they have their bodies cut into in order to study their organs, and how their brains are painfully attached to wires so we can study their brain waves. As an animal activist, the best part of this book, to me, is the fact that readers who would never think to pick up a book obviously focused on animal rights will be exposed to these horrors in the context of this very entertaining read.

***

A Look Inside Unlikely Friendships

Review by Samantha Rosenberg 

Fair warning – get out the tissues. Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom pretty much redefines the word “heartwarming.” Bringing together forty-seven stories about interspecies friendships from all over the world, this beautiful book – appropriate for all ages – is illustrated with amazing photographs that truly capture these hard-to-believe animal unions, often between animals who are normally identified as predator and prey.

"Unlikely Friendships" by Jennifer Holland

As set forth in her introduction, the starting point, and impetus, for this remarkable compilation by Jennifer S. Holland – a science and nature journalist and senior writer for National Geographic magazine – was the conflict in the scientific community between those who reject, and those who embrace, the idea that non-human animals have the capacity to experience emotions similar to humans. Of course, the former view has the benefit of convenience, in that it makes all the torture and confinement performed in the name of science (and appetite) easier to justify. If scientists are able to convince themselves that animals cannot feel emotional pain, the moral dilemma simply disappears. The other school of thought, which hopefully represents a growing majority, holds that emotions are inherent in all sentient beings to some degree, even if they are expressed in different ways. As summarized by evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, this position holds that “evolutionary continuity — a concept that came from Charles Darwin — stresses that there are differences in degree rather than in kind between humans and other animals. That applies to emotions. We share many bodily systems, including the limbic system, where emotions are rooted. So if we have joy or sorrow, they have it, too. It isn’t the same joy or the same sorrow. But the differences are shades of gray, not black versus white.”

Unlikely Friendships takes that abstract premise and makes it real. Mindless instinct cannot possibly account for these extraordinary relationships: A dog and a koi meet regularly at a pond to bump noses and connect on a level that makes you question the complexity of a fish’s mind; a cow tied up in a field is visited nightly for months by a wild leopard who seems to want nothing more than a snuggle and a tongue-bath; a momma dog accepts a baby squirrel into her litter; a hamster served to a snake as dinner becomes his friend instead; a lioness protectively watches over her adopted baby Oryx; and too many other remarkable stories to mention, each guaranteed to melt your heart and challenge your preconceptions about animals. Furthermore, while the photographs are stunning, the book is far more than just cute pictures. Each story, although brief, sheds light on the often tragic circumstances that brought the animals together, and into the lives of humans, who were able to witness, and document, the ways the animals related to one another. Despite their sad beginnings, these animals ultimately triumphed, finding solace, joy, and friendship.

A few of my favorite stories include “The African Elephant and the Sheep,” which is about a baby elephant named Themba, whose mother fell off a cliff when Themba was just six months old. To the surprise of the staff at the reserve, none of the other female elephants stepped up to adopt Themba. Recognizing that it was a critical time in Themba’s development of social bonds, one of the workers brought a sheep from a nearby farm, Albert, and put him into Themba’s enclosure. Why a sheep? Not only are they intelligent, but sheep have been shown to form close emotional connections with other animals. It wasn’t an instant fix – the two didn’t hit it off at first. But after a while they became inseparable, sleeping together and even eating the same food. Finally, this lonely little elephant had a friend.

Then there’s “The Bobtailed Dog and the Bobtailed Cat,” which documents a moving friendship that was born in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of thousands of animals were left to fend for themselves. The bobtailed dog of the title had been left tied up to face the storm, but had managed to break away, dragging with her the remains of her chain. Somehow, she hooked up with a bobtailed cat, and they wandered the city together for weeks. When anyone tried to approach, the dog, later named “Bobbi,” growled protectively. Nevertheless, eventually the two were rescued and taken to a shelter. There, Bobbi let out piercing barks whenever anyone tried to separate her from “Bob Cat.” Realizing that the two needed one another, rescuers caged them together. Only later did they discover that Bob Cat was totally blind! Bobbi had been using barks and bumps with her hind leg to guide Bob Cat around.

Because of the unusual pairings of species, the stories in Unlikely Friendships depict relationships that may be surprising. But anyone who has ever had an animal companion in their life, or has even just observed animals – be it through volunteering at a shelter, visiting a sanctuary, or spending time with a loved one’s pets – will agree that there is no question that they have individual personalities. Indeed, animals of all kinds experience the feel-good emotions that are depicted in this book, and – like us – they also feel sadness, depression, anxiety and grief. They also form relationships in astounding ways that we neither orchestrate nor control.

I have certainly seen that in my own home. My 11-year-old daughter and I have two cats, both feral rescues, who are alone together all day, five days a week. Yet, even after three years of living together, they can barely tolerate each other’s company. Despite the “sibling rivalry” they have, one of the cats has bonded with my daughter in a way that is almost otherworldly. Utterly protective, she perches on my daughter’s back while my daughter sleeps, follows her everywhere, shows her constant affection with unending little kitty kisses, and, whenever she thinks my daughter is hurt, immediately comes running. Who could ask for more in a companion? This kind of deep human-animal connection is relatable to so many of us. It is, after all, an unlikely friendship – but it’s also the best sort.

The fundamental lesson in Unlikely Friendships is, perhaps, that animals interact with other animals – human and non-human – on levels that are not very different from our own. Much like human relationships, motivations for animal unions may be rooted in their need for protection, comfort or companionship. But regardless of the reasons that brought them together, many of the bonds between these animals are the product of a true emotional connection that can only be classified as genuine friendship. These stories are great reminders of how alike animals and humans are. At the end of the day, we are all seeking pleasure in some form. If we’re lucky, we manage to find it in each other.

***

Samantha Rosenberg

Samantha Rosenberg is an attorney  living in Cambridge, MA, with her 11-year-old daughter and two cats. 

With that in mind, we felt that the appropriate way to start 2012 is with a review of Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body’s Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. Sharing her wisdom once again with us is guest reviewer, Carrie Forrest. This is Carrie’s second book review for Our Hen House. When she is not studying for her graduate degree in public health nutrition, and finishing the coursework to become a registered dietitian, Carrie loves to visit farmers’ markets around California’s central coast, and post healthy, plant-based recipes on her popular blog, Carrie on Vegan (which is one of our absolute favorite go-to places for healthy vegan recipes). 

In addition to taking care of ourselves, gifting books that focus on plant-based foods can be just the ticket to get our Aunt Ida to try on vegan for size. Even though the gift-giving season is officially over, the season of sharing scrumptious, nutritious vegan food is year-round. Super Immunity is yet another resource for us in terms of making headway with the health argument for veganism. Hook ‘em with health, and while they are enjoying the benefits that come from eating this way, slip them a copy of, say, Eating Animals, and you have your very own activist in the making.

And don’t miss your very own opportunity to win a copy of Super Immunity. Read on for details (and for a healthy cake recipe that you absolutely must try). 

***

Eating Your Way to Super Immunity

Review by Carrie Forrest

For a multitude of reasons, I was one of those kids who was often sick. Starting every year in late fall, I found myself battling cold after cold, missing school and going to the doctor  – only to be prescribed another round of antibiotics. Up until my early 30′s, a plane ride inevitably meant the onset of a virus upon reaching my destination.

Finally, a few years ago, I started making the connections between diet and health. The turning point in taking charge of my health destiny was discovering the Eat to Live program (and the book by the same title by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D). As many of you may already know, Dr. Fuhrman — who has been featured on Our Hen House’s podcast — is a family-practice physician who advocates a diet based on the scientific evidence that shows eating a diet rich in micronutrients from whole, plant-based foods is optimal for human health.

In late 2011, Dr. Fuhrman released a new book, Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body’s Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free, which offers more evidence showing how we can transform our immune system from weak or damaged (thanks to the Standard American Diet), to one that is of a “superhero” quality, and can ward off dangerous bacteria, viruses, and — in some cases — even cancer.

In fact, the bulk of Dr. Fuhrman’s advice in this book is about fighting cancer and building the strongest defenses possible against that risk. In Super Immunity, he cites research that “the lifetime probability of being diagnosed with an invasive cancer is 44 percent for men and 37 percent for women. However, because of the earlier median age of diagnosis for breast cancer compared with other major cancers, women have a slightly higher probability of developing cancer before the age of sixty. Currently, one in four deaths in the United States is due to cancer.”

While these statistics are scary, Dr. Fuhrman counters them with recommendations that can significantly reduce the risk of cancer development, along with reducing the risk for many of the other diet-related diseases that commonly kill Americans. In short, his immune-building advice centers around consuming a diet that is plant-based, consisting of primarily vegetables (especially green ones), fruits, beans, nuts, seeds and whole grains.

My favorite section of this book is the one entitled “Super Foods for Super Immunity” because it describes the research and mechanisms that give certain foods properties to fight both cancer and infections. The most immune-enhancing foods are cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, onions, garlic, pomegranates, berries and seeds. The point is to consume generous amounts of these foods because “phytochemicals are the fuel that run our body’s anticancer defenses.”

In the chapter regarding how to fight colds and flu, Dr. Fuhrman reviews the evidence regarding some common remedies, some of which he shows have not been proven to be effective. One example — the traditional “chicken soup” remedy has no scientific basis and, in fact, could slow the recovery process because the body has to work harder to digest animal protein. Other unproven strategies include taking vitamin C, using a humidifier, irrigating the nose, and taking echinacea. Dr. Fuhrman’s advice for when you are ill is to avoid unnecessary medications and supplements and to simply rest, reduce food intake, and let your body heal naturally.

Dr. Fuhrman’s comments on the flu vaccine are thought-provoking, too. As a future health professional, I’ve always advocated on behalf of vaccines. His point is that “the flu is not a dangerous disease in healthy individuals,” and that the evidence that the vaccine actually reduces the number of people hospitalized or missing work is shaky. Also, besides the fact that there are known risks to any vaccination — including the flu shot — the vaccine usually covers less than 10 percent of the viruses circulating. Other controversial topics he tackles include folic acid intake for pregnant women, the health benefits (or lack thereof) of coffee, pesticides in our food supply, and the safety of soy products.

In the chapter “Healthy Carbs, Fats and Proteins,” Dr. Fuhrman explains how a nutrient-rich diet contributes overall to a superior immune system. He addresses common nutritional myths that a very low-fat diet is healthiest (it’s not!), and that sea salt is not as dangerous as regular salt (it is!). As a vegan and future registered dietitian, I was fascinated by the research he presented on protein, including how animal protein increases insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in the body, which has associations with increased rates of cancer.

Overall, Super Immunity offers a wealth of information for anyone wanting to reduce his or her risk against disease. Dr. Fuhrman distills the complex, scientific research into clear suggestions for the healthiest way to proceed. He concludes the book with a section devoted to recipes, using many of the superfoods he describes.

One of my favorite all-time recipes by Dr. Fuhrman is the one for a “Healthy Chocolate Cake,” which you’ll find below. While it is intended to be consumed on special occasions, it is indeed made from health-promoting ingredients and, in fact, is absolutely delicious. I have found Dr. Fuhrman’s recipes in general to be outstanding. If you are new to this way of cooking and eating, it takes a little while to adjust to the lack of salt and oil. However, I encourage you to read his books, check out his website, and discover for yourself how what you eat can drastically change your health for the better.

And keep scrolling for your chance to win your own copy of Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body’s Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

***

Healthy Chocolate Cake (re-printed with permission from the publisher)

Serves: 12

For the Cake:

1 ¾ cups whole-wheat pastry flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 teaspoons baking soda

3 ½ cups pitted dates, divided

1 cup pineapple chunks in own juice, drained

1 banana

1 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 cup shredded raw beets

¾ cup shredded raw carrots

½ cup shredded raw zucchini

3 tablespoons natural, nonalkalized cocoa powder

½ cup currants

1 cup chopped walnuts

1 ½ cups water

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

For the Chocolate Nut Icing:

1 cup raw macadamia nuts and/or raw cashews

1 cup vanilla soy, hemp or almond milk

2/3 cup pitted dates

1/3 cup brazil nuts or hazelnuts

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Unbaked cake...

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, baking powder and baking soda in a small bowl. Set aside. In blender or food processor, puree 3 cups of the dates, pineapple, banana and applesauce. Slice remaining ½ cup dates into ¼-inch pieces. In large bowl, mix sliced dates, beets, carrots, zucchini, cocoa powder, currants, walnuts, water, vanilla and flour mixture. Add the blended mixture and mix well. Spread in a 9 x 13-inch nonstick baking pan.

Bake for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. For the icing, use a high-powered blender and combine all icing ingredients until smooth and creamy. Spread on cooled cake.

Final cake with icing. YUM!

***

The publisher has kindly agreed to send a copy to one lucky reader! To enter to win a copy, simply make a comment on this post telling us why, as an animal advocate, it is important to you to stay healthy — and what techniques you use to do so. This can also include healthy resolutions or hopes you have for the New Year. A random winner will be chosen after Monday, January 9, 2012, at midnight, EST — which is when the contest ends.

Antennae rocks my world

I, for one, am nothing short of stirred and tickled to learn about this incredibly in-depth and thought-provoking resource, and I’m already wondering how I’m going to finish my Christmahanusolstikwanzikuh shopping, when I have all of these back issues to catch up on! I know that many of you will also be titillated, since my inbox is frequently bursting with emails from you wondering how to get further involved with speaking up for animals through the arts. Well, lucky for you, Antennae is seeking submissions for publication.

And in the interest of shameless self-promotion (’tis the season, right?), I wanted to point out a few pieces that Our Hen House has created for our Art of the Animal series, focusing on some of the same creative activists that Antennae is also shedding light on. Last year, we made a video about visual artist Jonathan Horowitz, and his “Go Vegan” exhibit. Two weeks ago, we featured Peter Singer on our 100th podcast episode (which is also available, as always, on iTunes). And, in what is perhaps the video I am most proud of, a couple days ago we brought you our newest installment of the Art of the Animal video series, this time featuring one of our heroes, Sue Coe. Our Art of the Animal series, which is hardly as academic as Antennae (I’m not sure anything I’ve ever written can be described as such), features artists who speak up for animals through their art form, and you can you learn more by browsing that section of our website.

The problem is, of course, how do you get people who haven’t yet seen the light to read some of that literature so it can enlighten them? Well, one idea that I love is to make some books about animals part of a reading series. Here in New York, one of our favorite reading series, Free Range Nonfiction (I know, I know, the name is a bit offputting but, I promise, they’re not talking about “humane” eggs, they’re talking about a free-wheeling approach to nonfiction) is having a special animal night featuring the works of Alison Espach, Alison Smith, and Hannah Tinti (Disclaimer: I am not yet familiar with any of these authors, but my curiosity is definitely piqued.) Not everyone who runs Free Range is vegan (or even vegetarian), which is one of the great things about the fact that animals have made it on to the agenda for the evening, and that Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary will be the beneficiary of the night’s proceeds.

With a few tweaks, this kind of program can be replicated anywhere. Free Range features authors reading from their own works, but if that’s too hard to pull off where you are, think about doing a reading with, maybe, one author reading his or her own work (or work-in-progress), and then a few really good readers reading from the works of some of the classics. Black Beauty is one that springs to mind. (If it’s a copyrighted work and you intend to read a long excerpt and you want to be very cautious, you might want to get permission, which should not be hard to do). Maybe your local library would be willing to sponsor the event.

Of course, in addition to a formal reading series, if you’re part of a reading group, you can always recommend a book that changed your heart about animal issues. Maybe it’ll change a few more.

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Book Review: Healthy Eating, Healthy World by J. Morris Hicks

Review by Carrie Forrest

Unless you were lucky enough to be raised in a vegan household, your decision to stop eating animals probably came from many different influences. I know that I have a shelf full of books that I gathered along my road, and because of my career change to the field of nutrition several years ago, many of them focus on the health benefits of a plant-based diet. From Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s groundbreaking Eat to Live to Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, there are nuggets of information in all of them that intrigue, inspire and challenge my thinking.

Sometimes, however, I wish that there were a book that compiled all of the “information nuggets” in one place. Good thing that J. Morris Hicks’ new book, Healthy Eating, Healthy World: Unleashing the Power of Plant-Based Nutrition (BenBella Books, 2011), came along. This book ably summarizes the information from the foremost experts in the field of plant-based living, and, in doing so, makes the case that what we eat is the most important choice we can make for the future of our health, for the animals, and for our planet.

The book is organized into three sections: health reasons for following a plant-based diet, how what we eat affects animals and the environment, and ideas for how to take action. The first is undoubtedly my favorite. Hicks starts out by listing some startling statistics, including that “there are more than 1.5 billion overweight adults in the world; at least 500 million of them are obese.” Considering that obesity is associated with so many other health conditions like heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes and even cancer, it’s about time we thought carefully about changing our eating habits.

After discussing how we got to be such a sick population, Hicks profiles some of the experts, including the aforementioned Drs. Campbell (who also wrote the book’s foreward) and Fuhrman, as well as Drs. Neal Barnard, Caldwell Esselstyn and Dean Ornish. He then weaves the incredible results from their research into an undeniable argument that a whole foods, plant-based diet is the ideal approach for human health. This summary is the highlight of this book for me and earns it a spot on my list of resources for people interested in taking charge of their health.

Following this important distillation of the research supporting a plant-based diet, Hicks goes on to explain the specific impact that our diet can have on our health, including preventing or reversing disease, and then concludes this section by answering the question “Why Not Plant-Based?” with information refuting the common arguments against veganism, including the myth that plant-based diets are deficient in protein or calcium. New vegans, as well as seasoned vegans looking for a few more sound bites, will surely appreciate Hicks’ clear and concise way of disseminating information and dissecting facts.

The second section,“What You Eat Affects Far More Than Just Your Health” is the most thorough comparison I have found of the impacts of the Standard American Diet (SAD) to that of a plant-based diet. Hicks uses vivid descriptions to make his point. For instance, after noting that farmed animals in the U.S. produce 130 times as much waste as humans, he calculates that it works out to 9,000 pounds — or the equivalent of nine pickup trucks overflowing with animal waste — per human per year. Gross!

In terms of water, I never knew that it takes twenty times more water per calorie to produce meat than to grow plant-based foods. And, if you love wildlife like I do, consider the United Nations’ statement that “The livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it is a major driver of deforestation, land degradation, pollution, climate change, overfishing, sedimentation of coastal areas, and facilitation of invasions by alien species.”

The following chapters in this section address in similar fashion how the issues of worldwide hunger and animal suffering can be resolved by the elimination of animal foods. The chapter entitled “Hell on Earth” describes the fate of chickens, cows, pigs and fish in the modern day factory farm. Hicks presents the issue of animal suffering in the same evidence-based method that he uses throughout the book, with just enough detail to make his point. He ends this chapter with a frank discussion on the moral issues involved in eating animals, reminding us that we can end this type of animal suffering with our food choices, and quoting Leonardo da Vinci who said over 500 years ago that “The time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”

Whether you are just learning about the many reasons to consume a plant-based diet, or you are already well-versed (and well-fed) in that area, you probably know what it’s like to be overwhelmed with information, and wondering what to do next. The last section of Healthy Eating, Healthy World is devoted to offering some solutions. Hicks understands how difficult it can be to change our way of eating and reviews some of the common pitfalls. He presents a “4-Leaf Program” which is a loose way of measuring the switch to a plant-based diet. This section is the only part of the book that fell short for me because I felt it wasn’t specific enough. Some recipes or suggested eating plans would have rounded out the book, providing readers with even more specific tools for adopting a healthy vegan diet. Perhaps there is a market for a sequel. Healthy Eating, Healthy World Cookbook, maybe?

All in all, Healthy Eating, Healthy World does an outstanding job of addressing the question of why we should eat a plant-based diet. The tone is casual yet very informative. As a future health professional, I will recommend this book not only as a primer for those just beginning their journey to health, but also for people who need a reminder of the importance of our food choices. For those of us who have been been vegan for some time, it also might also act as the perfect stocking stuffer for the veg-curious in our lives. Its non-threatening tone is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Healthy Eating, Healthy World concludes with a great quote from Mahatma Gandhi that is truly one to live by: “You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

The publisher of Healthy Eating, Healthy World has kindly agreed to send a copy to one lucky reader! To enter to win a copy, simply make a comment on this post telling us your favorite way to advocate the health benefits of veganism to the veg-curious in your lives. That might be your favorite book or film on the subject, or perhaps you have a go-to talking point that you find particularly compelling. A random winner will be chosen after Thursday, November 24, at midnight, EST — which is when the contest ends.

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Carrie Forrest

Carrie Forrest is a graduate student in public health nutrition, the author of the blog Carrie on Vegan, and an Our Hen House fan. Through her writings, step-by-step photo guides and recipes, Carrie inspires readers of her blog to prepare whole-food, simple recipes that are low in added fats, sugars and salt, yet are 100% delicious.

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Book Review: Stories Rabbits Tell by Susan E. Davis and Margo DeMello

Review by Laura Yasinitsky

As a child, I had a rabbit whom I loved to death. Cotton Tail taught me a lot about being a pet parent, possibly even instilling in me the core value I carry to this day – my deep love and respect for animals. Now, as an adult, as I learn more about animal behavior, I realize that there were so many things I did wrong when it came to caring for my beloved bunny. I can only imagine what would have been different if I had had access to the knowledge provided in Stories Rabbits Tell by Susan E. Davis and Margo DeMello (Lantern Books, 2003).

"Stories Rabbits Tell" by Susan E. Davis and Margo DeMello

Widely renowned as the definitive work on this charming creature, this valuable resource is not only dense with information, but it’s truly fascinating, evoking the energy and curiosity of a jumping bunny. This monumental piece of nonfiction contains a wealth of information about what still remains one of my favorite animals. Bottom line – Stories Rabbits Tell is a must read for any animal lover.

In part one, “Pests, Pets, and Profits,” Davis and DeMello cover the biological and historical development of the domestic rabbit, and share delightful tales from “owners” of house rabbits. Although a bit dry, the history section is incredibly resource-intensive and ferociously thorough. It is particularly interesting to understand how human interference played such an intricate part in their sociological development. On the other hand, the stories of house rabbits and their interactions with their humans, including funny anecdotes and affecting tales of rescue, bring a lighter note.

This is a nice segue to part two of Stories Rabbits Tell, entitled “Witches, Whores, and Tricksters,” which deftly explores rabbits as symbols and icons, examining the meanings bestowed upon them in different human cultures. Tales of rabbits abound in human history, from widely known ancient fables such as “The Tortoise and the Hare” to modern day characters like Bugs Bunny. Other noteworthy rabbit icons that the book explores include Peter Rabbit, Roger Rabbit, and even the Playboy Bunny. As a society, it turns out that we are much more hare-obsessed than we may have realized. The exploration of the frequent association of rabbits with women, and the substitution of children by rabbits in storybooks, is especially thought provoking.

I found part three, “Hopping Dollars,” to be the most painful section of the book. Focusing on rabbits as revenue, this part includes descriptions of our use of rabbits as fur, meat, and vivisection subjects. The levels and depth of exploitation of these animals touches every human endeavor, from their use as military training subjects, to cosmetics testing victims, to greyhound racing bait, to magician props.

Perhaps not surprising, it seems that humankind just doesn’t know where to stop when it comes to our apathy toward the needs of our furry friends. Stories Rabbits Tell made that point loud and clear. Though not included in the book, rabbits were even recently used as stage props by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which made the incredibly wrong-headed decision to skin fresh-killed rabbits onstage during a production of As You Like It, a decision that was nixed when the production reached New York.

Although sometimes difficult to bear, Stories Rabbits Tell is, nevertheless, always incredibly informative – and almost excruciatingly detailed. It truly burrows deeply into the spellbinding world of rabbits and their place in a human-ruled world. Indeed, it’s long past time a light was shown on this incredibly intriguing earthling. Although rabbits have somehow landed in the blind spot of humanity, they are, in fact, everywhere – on our laps, our plates, our TVs, and in our closets. I finished this book fascinated, informed, and, most excitingly, keen to adopt a homeless rabbit. I have a feeling that Cotton Tail would approve.

For anyone doing any type of research on rabbit history or welfare, Stories Rabbits Tell is an invaluable and necessary resource. For any animal lover, it is a wonderful tool to help educate and expand your understanding of these adorable, and surprisingly deep, critters.

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Laura Yasinitsky

Laura Yasinitsky is a writer, waitress, and animal lover based in New York City. She appeared on Comedy Central’s Open-Mic Fight and writes for US Weekly’s ”Fashion Police.” You can read her daily musings on Twitter @LaraYaz and get her opinions on everything else at http://larayaz.blogspot.com. She is a proud vegan and cat mommy. 

I’m loving this book already.

Out of Breath (Ashland Creek Press, 2011) leaves many questions open, keeping readers on the hook until the second volume in the planned trilogy — which I would read even without the unresolved issues because the first book is such good fun. Not that it is a light read — a tragic death haunts our heroine, Kat, who believes she could have prevented it. Her pursuers may catch up to her at any time. She is penniless. Plus, could it be that the idyllic little town is full of…dum dum dum…vampires?

In this young adult novel, author Blair Richmond weaves together the seemingly incompatible themes of vampirism (in other words, killing and consuming sentient beings) and veganism (not doing that) in a tale that explores the moral implications of what we eat and how we treat the environment along with the more traditional literary themes of romance, friendship, and the inescapability of one’s past. All this in a compulsively readable story that includes scenes ripped from my life:

I hadn’t noticed when we walked in that this is a steakhouse. I can see on the menu that there is seafood, too. But as I scan the menu looking for a vegan option, or even something vegetarian, I see nothing. Nothing but the house salad and a couple of side dishes.It’s actually not a problem to order a salad, with a side of roasted potatoes or Swiss chard, but of course even the vegetables are probably slathered in butter. … But what gets me is that no one ever thinks about the fact that vegans like to eat good food, too, that we don’t just eat lettuce and hemp granola.

To that I say amen. She’ll be hungry again before she even leaves the table. I am reminded that I am blessed to live in the age of Veganomicon and in the glorious city of Blossom, Candle 79, Red Bamboo, and a horde of other yummy restaurants that would never leave me eating a dry salad with a side of salad. At least Kat has the local food co-op, which keeps her fed and keeps kind generous vegan guy employed.

"Out of Breath" by Blair Richmond

For all its charms, Out of Breath is a bit predictable. But knowing what would happen never stopped me from tearing through the book until it did happen, and how it happened was always a surprise.

Fittingly, this tale of blood and the supernatural (and don’t forget the tasty love triangle) will celebrate its debut on Halloween. Visit the publisher’s blog all day on October 31 to sign up for book giveaways, join a Q&A with Richmond, and read the latest reviews. If you need another reason to buy this book, for the rest of the month until midnight on Halloween, Out of Breath is available for just $2.99 on Kindle.

Learn more about reviewer Piper Hoffman. 

But here’s a contest that’s worth taking a chance on. In honor of their 500th review, VegBooks (a blog we’ve previously confessed to having a love affair with, and one whose founder, Jessica Almy, has been interviewed on our podcast) is encouraging readers to submit their very own book review. In case you haven’t heard us sing the praises of VegBooks, they are a site that reviews kids’ media from a vegan perspective. (I sure hope my 16-month-old niece is reading this!)

The submitted reviews will be evaluated to make sure they fit the style and so forth (check out recent reviews for ideas of what they like to feature). According to the press release, “The winner will receive three vegan-friendly kids’ books and VegBooks will spotlight the winning book review on its site.”

The book review should be 350 words or less (that’s short — you can do it!) and must be submitted by October 24 to vegbooks[at]gmail.com. See the full rules for more deets.

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Book Review: Most Good, Least Harm

Review by Lisa Rimmert

Millions of people throughout the world have no access to clean water. Forests are being cleared at staggering rates. Billions of animals are killed for food every year. In the face of these seemingly insurmountable problems, what can one person do?

"Most Good, Least Harm" by Zoe Weil

In Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and a Meaningful Life (Atria Books, 2009), author and humane educator, Zoe Weil (who can be heard on Our Hen House’s 30th podcast episode), offers a simple principle called MOGO, or “most good,” in an attempt to answer this question. Fully aware that the world and its inhabitants face many dire problems that are both overwhelming and complex, Weil nevertheless sets forth a guiding principle for each person to use in searching for solutions that are anything but complicated. MOGO means that when people make decisions based on what will do the most good and least harm — to other people, to animals, and to the environment — we make positive impacts on the world around us, and, as an added bonus, on our own spirits. In just over 200 easy-to-digest pages, Weil explains this simple principle, citing compelling examples and insightful ideas for MOGO activities that can change the world for the environment, animals, and, I suspect, for everyone who reads it.

The first section of the book, “Looking Inward,” provides an in-depth look at what it means to live a MOGO life. Respecting the differing priorities and lifestyles of her readers, Weil offers a broad definition of MOGO and seven key actions that one can take to find it. Then, she encourages readers to decide for ourselves which issues we find most important, and what specific changes we wish to make.

The first key, “Live Your Epitaph,” was the one I personally found most valuable. Weil suggests that we imagine our ideal epitaph — what we want said and remembered about us when we’re gone, and, fundamentally, what we wish to leave behind. This exercise is incredibly valuable because it can help guide each of us, in a very individual way, to the best version of MOGO-living geared to our unique personalities and talents.

The book’s second section, “Choosing Outward,” gives readers some general information they need to get started, including four areas for considering change, and 10 principles for MOGO life. Perhaps most notably, that includes the need to “eat for life,” calling for readers to “as much as possible, choose plant-based foods. . . .” Certainly, when it comes to doing the most good and least harm, that one should be a no-brainer. Too often it’s not, though, and it’s refreshing that Weil includes that message.

Zoe Weil

It is in the third and final part that Weil gets down to the nitty-gritty, offering very hands-on tools and resources to help us begin our own MOGO journey. Here, we find a questionnaire to assist us in our brainstorming MOGO ideas, an action plan where we can record specific goals, as well as facts, statistics, and recommended resources relevant to living a MOGO life.These resources are broken into categories based on the social justice, environmental, or other ethical issues.

There are, of course, many suggested websites and books for further investigation into animal rights, including The HSUS and PETA, GoVeg.com, and the book, Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer. This section also includes well-known resources dealing with other issues relevant to living more consciously, including Freecycle.org, HumaneEducation.org, and Meetup. These tools are incredibly valuable for the MOGO beginner who is just starting to figure out how and why her or his individual choices make such a profound impact, and what she or he can do to change the the shape of things.

The majority of the websites and books listed are ones many of us  may not have heard of yet, but are definitely worthy of our attention. Some of my favorites include Newdream.org, which belongs to the Center for a New American Dream, and focuses on helping people to change the world by reducing and shifting their consumption; and Yes! Magazine, which contains uplifting stories that center around solutions to the world’s environmental and social justice issues. Whether you’re a MOGO beginner or an already-committed activist, you’ll find a variety of very useful resources in Weil’s extensive list.

While presenting an abundance of sometimes disturbing information, the book manages to inspire without setting unreasonable goals or pressuring novice advocates. Moreover, while written for the average person, Most Good, Least Harm is equally valuable for the more seasoned advocate. While vegans and animal rights activists may already be aware of many problems and injustices, there are always issues about which we are relatively naïve. For example, when it comes to buying humane and ethical products, I admit that my knowledge has been somewhat limited. I know, of course, about brands like Seventh Generation and Dr. Bronner’s, but when it comes to items like toothbrushes, an example from the book’s chapter on products, I wasn’t sure which product created the least harm. Most Good, Least Harm provided resources for me — and will do the same for you — to make better and more informed decisions. In this case, Weil offers the website Responsibleshopper.org, which enables people to enter the name or brand of a product and find out if the company that produces it is good, bad, or somewhere in between.

While many of us are already doing our part to create positive change, Most Good, Least Harm might help us see that, in our quest to change the world, there’s always a new way in that might be worthy of exploring.

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If you’re in NYC, don’t miss an all-day MOGO workshop that Zoe herself will be leading on October 29. The very next day, join Zoe and the Institute for Humane Education for Envisioning the Future Crystal Ball NYC.

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Animals talk with us. A purr, a tail wag, and a lick on the nose speak as clearly as any words. We take our communication with animals so much for granted that we don’t always realize when it is happening. But we can’t take the resulting intimacy and affection for granted, especially when a beloved companion animal dies.

Unsaid (Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2011), a new novel by attorney and animal advocate Neil Abramson, plumbs the depths of relationships between human and non-human animals, and does so much more: it challenges the legal treatment of non-human animals as human property; explores the ethical questions raised by vivisection and by euthanizing companion animals; illustrates the similarities between humans and other animals; and draws tears over and over. Have tissues handy.

Unsaid by Neil Abramson

Helena, a veterinarian who has just died, narrates Unsaid, chronicling the reactions to her death of her grieving husband and her houseful of rescued animals. Her husband David, a corporate lawyer not particularly close with Helena’s menagerie, works through his grief by building relationships with her animals and carrying on her work protecting chimpanzees from torturous vivisection.

If the love that Abramson’s human and non-human characters have for each other is the heart of this novel, its mind is an exploration and critique of the consequences of animals’ status as property under the law. For the most part the law does not consider their wellbeing and does not allow lawsuits intended to protect them from suffering. Like a chair or a car, the relevant legal question regarding non-human animals is which human owns them, not how that human treats them.

The real-life results of that body of law is the profound suffering of an unthinkable number of animals. Unsaid focuses on animals used in research, many of whom live their entire lives locked in small cages, suffer repeated invasive and unnecessary surgeries, are deliberately sickened with diseases including HIV and cancer, and get no treatment for pain. The book also touches on the cruelty some people inflict on their companion animals and the prolonged terror, pain, and deaths of animals hit by drivers who blithely continue on their way.

Though upsetting, this book is also refreshing. Rarely does a novel acknowledge our bonds with and savage treatment of the billions of nonhuman animals under our control, let alone make that subject its unifying theme. Unsaid is not without faults: the dialogue is sometimes stilted, and some lengthy expositions of animals’ plight read more like political advocacy than like a novel. But these weaknesses are easily outweighed by the number of people who will learn about the need for legal rights for animals precisely because the information is presented in the popular format of a novel and not the niche medium of a screed. Abramson’s novel is both a good read and an eye-opener.

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Book Review: “Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet” by Jack Norris & Virginia Messina

Review by Piper Hoffman

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet (Da Capo Press/Lifelong Books, 2011), by Jack Norris, RD and Virginia Messina, MPH, RD, is a densely-packed treasure chest of nutritional information for vegans and those who feed them. From the minutiae of the benefits of individual vitamins, to the bigger picture issues like low-carb diets, and that old chestnut, “how do you get enough protein?,” Norris and Messina have the answers and the empirical data to back them up.

"Vegan for Life"

Bring a pen when you dive into this book. I wound up with a list of supplements I should take, arrows next to all the recipes I’d like my chef/husband to try out, and slips of paper marking information I did not know, yet am determined to reread until it I know it well. For instance: did you know that excess sodium is linked to calcium loss? But iodine is necessary for the thyroid, and table salt is the major source of iodine for American vegans (non-vegans also get iodine from fish and dairy products). This leaves some vegans who don’t add salt to their food vulnerable to iodine deficiency. To make matters even more complicated, sea salt, which many cookbooks prefer over table salt, is an undependable source of iodine, and the salt added to processed food usually has no iodine at all. Suddenly I’m wondering whether I’m getting enough table salt – and then whether I’m getting enough calcium.

The beauty of this and other dilemmas Vegan for Life examines is the very fact that this book is raising and examining vegan-specific nutritional concerns. There is no sugar-coating here: Norris and Messina do not believe that veganism is nutritionally perfect (though they find it much healthier than eating animal products) and strongly recommend that vegans take certain supplements. They have examined a whole lot of science, explain which of it is most reliable, and admit that for many questions, science does not yet have answers. Through it all, their priority is to help people become – and stay – vegan and healthy.

The book is marketed for both veteran vegans and people considering becoming vegan, and it has vital information for both. But for people who are not yet vegan, I offer one caveat: read this book backwards. Not like holding it up to a mirror, of course; just start with the last chapter, then read the chapter before that, and then the one before that. It is the last one, Chapter 16, that answers the fundamental question (and is titled), “why vegan”? It is a condensed, vivid, and relentless depiction of the lives of animals raised for food. If you haven’t already, it will have you swearing off meat, eggs, and dairy. Chapter 16 illustrates that the welfare of non-human animals is the authors’ primary motivation for advocating veganism.

Chapter 15 tackles the safety of eating soy. Treat Chapters 9-14 like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” section. They delve into special nutritional needs like pregnancy and breast-feeding; vegan kids; eating vegan over age 50; veganism and diabetes; sports nutrition; and more. Pick the parts that are relevant to you and you will gain confidence that not only is a vegan diet healthy for you, whatever your special circumstances, it is also healthier for you than any alternative.

Chapter 8 is the most fun. It offers tips for transitioning to a vegan diet, easy meal ideas (how about chili beans with veggie burger crumbles served over rice with steamed carrots?), and paeans to the virtues of beans (sauté onion, garlic, white beans, and – wait for it – dried figs, season with basil and rosemary) and frozen vegetables (all the nutrition with less of the prep work!).

By this point in the book, new and potential vegans have a foundation and motivation for the work of learning about nutrition. Chapter 7 sets forth a Vegan Food Guide, followed by an almanac of what and how much to eat to get necessary nutrients. This chapter provides both a summary of the sources of nutrients and an overview for meal-planning, showing that it can actually be fairly easy to plan and prepare a healthy vegan diet. Fold over the corners and break out the highlighter: you’ll be going back to this chapter often.

Now the reader knows the moral imperative for eating a vegan diet and has been provided with ample evidence that it is healthy, weeks’ worth of easy recipes and shopping tips, and a food guide that wraps it all up in one page. Now it is time to tackle Chapters 1-6, which painstakingly analyze the vegan sources of nine individual nutrients, advising which supplements you should take, which nutrients you will get enough of without even thinking about them, why you should eat fats and carbs (and which ones), and what scientific studies have revealed. Some surprises (at least for me): sometimes eating calcium doesn’t mean getting the benefits of calcium; some sources of Vitamin D are vegan and some aren’t; and drinking coffee or tea with a meal impedes iron absorption.

Without the grounding and summaries provided in Chapters 7-16, the volume and detail of the information packed into Chapters 1-6 can seem overwhelming. As a long-time and (I thought) well-informed vegan, I was surprised by the amount and importance of the information I didn’t know, and spurred to action by the possibility that I am not getting enough of certain nutrients (in large part because my version of “vegan” is less focused on vegetables than on peanut butter, chocolate, cookies, muffins – in short, sugar with a generous helping of fat). If I were not yet a committed vegan, I might have been scared off from the task of eating healthfully, which is why I recommend that newbies start at the back of the book. By the time they get to Chapters 1-6, they will feel like I do: I have some work to do, but I am eager to do it because the benefits I will reap from applying the information in this book to my eating will improve my health for a lifetime.

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Book Review: The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

Review by Kaitlyn Zafonte

When one thinks of talking elephants, something of the Disney variety probably comes to mind. But Barbara Gowdy’s harrowing tale of elephants’ struggle to survive in a habitat continuously destroyed by human invaders does not invoke any thoughts of the Dumbo variety. The White Bone is a grueling, heart-wrenching account of the natural world fighting against the onset of environmental change and human interference.

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

The story itself is an old one told through new eyes. Our protagonist is Mud, a young female elephant coming of age in a changing landscape. Mud, who is entering adulthood, is hesitant to embrace the pseudo-matriarchal structure of her herd. While it is the females who ostensibly direct the families, they must remain submissive to the roaming males and their sexual desires. As Mud attracts the attention of Tall Time, a unique young male with the special gift of reading omens and signs, the story vacillates between Mud’s maturation, her hesitance to accept her impregnation by Tall Time, and her family’s attempt to survive a severe drought. Meanwhile, there is the impending threat of violent death at the hands of humans seeking valuable ivory from the elephant tusks. As the novel progresses, Gowdy introduces the concept of the titular White Bone, a remnant of a baby elephant’s rib that, if found, will point the struggling survivors to safety. Thus, Mud’s bildungsroman transforms into a quest narrative as the elephants journey in search of peace.

Gowdy’s skill as a writer allows her to create characters for whom we care deeply, and, as we hear the story told from the animals’ perspective, we vividly experience the pain they endure. Reminiscent of the well known Watership Down (see the Our Hen House review), Gowdy creates her own elephant lexicon, and it is through this language that we gain access to the innermost thoughts of the elephants and the way in which they view their surroundings. Readers may be skeptical; however, the new vocabulary is indeed used with a natural rhythm. Within the matter of only a few chapters, I easily comprehended even the more metaphorical of Gowdy’s terms. For instance, “away vision” refers to a prophesy of a distant place in the present moment, and “third eye” is defined as the visionary capacity of certain mind-reading elephants. Some of the terminology is more straightforward, such as “flow-stick” (snake) and “jaw-long” (crocodile), managing to ground the novel in a very visceral way in the African landscape.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The White Bone is Gowdy’s perceptive commentary, made, of course, through the elephants, on the nature of humanity. Gowdy’s elephants maintain that the earth was a peaceful place before the Descent, when humans (“hindleggers”) began to populate elephant territory. Pre-human earth is reminiscent of Eden before the fall. However, in Gowdy’s novel, it is not the humans who are led to sin. It is the humans who cause the fall, encompassing all that is sinful themselves. This is an intricately painted history with many facets and complexities. Gowdy writes:

The emergence of humans did not, as is widely assumed, initiate a time of darkness. On the contrary, in the first generations following the Descent, The Domain was a glorious place and this is partly because humans back then were nothing like today’s breed. They ate flesh, yes, and they were unrepentant and wrathful, but they killed only to eat…There weren’t any massacres or mutilations.

The elephants’ insights about human nature shed light not only on their own relationship with humans, but much more broadly on the state of our current environmental — particularly agricultural — problems, and serve as a haunting condemnation of the devastation of factory farming. Once excess and greed became rampant, humans were “[s]oon slaughtering whole families. After devouring the flesh of their kills, they were burning the hides and pulverizing the bones and tusks. They seemed bent on annihilation.”

This description of human behavior is certainly not limited to distant places with fantastically talking animals. Couldn’t the same be said about the chickens pumped with antibiotics and growth hormones so that their breasts become so large they can no longer walk? Or canned hunts where wild animals are trapped on an enclosed plot of land so that a gun-wielding human can easily track and shoot them without effort? And that is what truly makes The White Bone so compelling. Although the novel could very easily be dismissed as mere fantasy, an undeniably truthful thread runs through it that grounds it in our everyday reality. Using fantasy as a vehicle to convey these important issues, Gowdy reminds us of a basic reality. From fantasy springs cold, hard fact: humans have lost control and no longer eat (or kill) for sustenance and survival, but for the sheer act of consumption.

Honestly, there were times when I had difficulty reading portions of the book, because, as I am sure is true of many readers of Our Hen House, I struggle with images of brutality towards animals. And Gowdy does not shy away from violent depictions. As with many things that pertain to animals, however, it is sometimes necessary to familiarize oneself with brutality and inhumanity in order to become educated and move forward, armed with new insight and knowledge. The White Bone will certainly stick with me for these reasons. Yet it is not necessary to be an animal advocate to appreciate this truly memorable reading experience, which allows the reader to empathize with the elephants’ plights in the same way that one would feel for a human character. In fact, what The White Bone demonstrates is the complexities inherent within and between species, and the urgent need to return to a simpler and more humane way of interacting with each other.

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Kaitlyn Zafonte

Kaitlyn Zafonte is a vegan living and writing in New York City.  She has an MA in English & American Literature from Fordham University and helped run an animal welfare group on her undergrad campus where she worked closely with Farm Sanctuary. 

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Book Review: Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide for Caring for Self While Caring for Others

Review by Lisa Rimmert

"Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others" by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky

As an animal rights activist, I have had the pleasure of witnessing many unforgettable and inspiring events. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of fulfillment that comes with finding a home for an abandoned animal, helping to pass a law that is beneficial to animals, or inspiring a friend to adopt a vegan lifestyle. I have had many such moments, and I treasure every one.

Along with the good though, we, as activists, also bear witness to the bad. Having chosen to open our eyes to the cruelty involved in factory farming and other industries that exploit animals, we now maintain — whether we like it or not — a constant awareness of the suffering these animals endure. For many of us, this awareness can cause us to sometimes feel overwhelmed or inadequate. It can be easy, even for the most well-adjusted activists, to internalize the suffering of others, allowing those negative feelings to overpower the positive ones.

In Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide for Caring for Self While Caring for Others, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky addresses these issues that novice and seasoned activists alike know all too well, and provides readers with tips for avoiding the negative effects of exposure to trauma. While the book is intended for anyone who is regularly exposed to trauma, Lipsky makes an effort to include individuals who work with suffering animals, and notes in the introduction that while many experts in trauma tend to solely focus on those who work with people, it is important to also include others, like “veterinarians, animal rescue workers, biologists, and ecologists.”

Lipsky adds credibility by telling her personal story, from her extensive exposure to trauma as an emergency room social worker, to her realization that this grueling work had changed her in a way with which she wasn’t comfortable. She goes on to explain the definition of “trauma exposure response,” which is the change or changes that take place when a person is exposed to trauma or suffering.

After an introduction to the concepts – which is saved from its inherently dry nature by the injection of quotes, comics, real-world examples, and activist profiles – Lipsky describes the warning signs of trauma exposure response. One is fear. She gives as an example animal control officers whose fear led to prejudice against certain breeds of dogs, which subsequently evolved into stereotypes of certain races and socioeconomic classes. Lipsky asserts that it is not the fear itself that is bad, but rather, not having a handle on it — or not even being aware of it. Other warning signs of trauma exposure response include minimizing one’s own problems (“Who am I to complain about my trivial problems?”), guilt (“How can I spend time on myself when I should be devoting it all to the animals?”), and a sense that one can never do enough (“I only handed out 500 leaflets; I should have tried harder to reach more people.”).

The most engaging parts of the book were the final chapters, covering various ways to practice trauma stewardship. “Trauma stewardship” is the term Lipsky uses to describe the overall practice of caring for oneself in order to remain effective at — and avoid negative effects of — caring for others. Drawing from Eastern religions and other spiritual ideas, Lipsky emphasizes the importance of being centered in oneself and living in the moment. Throughout this section, readers will find applicable advice and helpful activities for approaching their work with a new perspective. Lipsky outlines five “directions” – north, east, south, west, and center. Each represents an important aspect of trauma stewardship: creating space for inquiry, choosing our focus, building compassion and community, finding balance, and centering ourselves. With a chapter for each direction, readers receive a detailed look at each one, along with profiles of people who are shining examples of trauma stewardship, and practical ideas for how to begin your own journey.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide for Caring for Self While Caring for Others is without question a worthwhile read for any activist. As Lipsky states, “This book is written for anyone who is doing work with an intention to make the world more sustainable and hopeful — all in all, a better place — and who, through this work, is exposed to the hardship, pain, crisis, trauma, or suffering of other living beings or the planet itself.” For me, Trauma Stewardship served as a reminder that life — as well as activism — is what we make of it, and that the only way to effectively advocate and care for animals is to first care for ourselves.

***

Lisa Rimmert

Lisa Rimmert has been an animal lover since birth and an activist for about nine years. She has dabbled in many forms of activism, including lobbying, attending protests, and tabling at community events. She authored a column called “Animal Matters” for The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina, and is currently the coordinator for Farm Sanctuary’s St. Louis Walk for Farm Animals. By day, Lisa works in marketing and communications. She is working to obtain a master’s degree in public relations, in hopes of becoming a more effective communicator and advocate, and to do her part to improve the world for people and animals alike.

That’s why I was so thrilled with a project of one animal activist, A. Shamalatha, in Bangalore, India. A vibrant vegan and animal activist, who has been instrumental in a program to get all the street dogs in her locality spayed and neutered, Shamalatha remained frustrated by the blatant abuse she witnessed, which went on in spite of the laws prohibiting it. As she notes, “According to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, you can’t beat up animals. But most people are unaware of these rules. Even if you go to a police station with a complaint, they seem unaware of these rules.” Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

Chutki

In response to this quandary, Shamalatha had the brilliant idea of writing a picture book setting forth a play, which not only tells the story of a puppy who runs away from a dog catcher, but also conveys the rules and regulations covering people’s legal obligations to animals, including not only street dogs, but “monkey charmers and load bearing animals.” The book, Chutki’s Experiences, now has its own website, and Shamalatha is selling copies of the book there, and is also donating copies of the book to schools and animal welfare organizations.

Here’s an excerpt of the dialog between a young girl who has befriended Chutki and her mother:

Daughter: Mom, this puppy is so cute! Shall we take her home?

Mother: Oh, no! We’ll buy some foreign breed, like a Dobermann or a Great Dane.

Daughter: What’s wrong with this puppy, Mom? This puppy is cuter than all those Bull Dogs, Dobermanns and Great Danes. This is so affectionate. Look at the way it is wagging its tail! The other day I heard an announcement on the TV asking people to adopt an Indian street dog.

Mother: Don’t want a street dog, Baby!

Daughter: Mom, so what if it is a street dog? My teacher keeps saying that all living things can feel pain and pleasure, just as we human beings do. This street puppy will also feel happy if we take her home, won’t she?

Pretty good stuff, right? Perhaps the best news of all — Shamalatha is now working on a book about poultry farms in India — “to spread awareness on the importance of vegetarianism and veganism.”

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Book Review: Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel

Review by Jena Mazzio

"Half Brother" by Kenneth Oppel

Ben and Zan are loving brothers, of a sort. Ben Tomlin is a 13-year-old boy, growing up in Canada in 1973 and experiencing everything that life as a 13-year-old boy entails: teenage angst, getting into trouble, rebelling, noticing girls and learning life’s hard lessons.

Zan is an infant chimp, literally pulled from his mother’s breast at just eight days of age. Born in a research facility, he is now being raised as part of a human family – Ben’s family – for a university experiment on primates and language, which Ben’s father is leading.

In Half Brother, a novel for young adults told through the eyes of Ben, author Kenneth Oppel gives readers a vivid and intimate glimpse into the Tomlins’ family dynamics and, more importantly, reminds us of the perils, for both humans and animals, of thoughtless anthropomorphism and animal exploitation.

The Tomlins’ experiment, typical of many actually performed in the 1970s, aims to discover if, indeed, another species can be taught to understand and communicate in human language. From the very first day Zan is with their family, Ben’s parents are straightforward with him about what the experiment is to entail. His father stresses the importance of Zan being brought up to believe that he, too, is a human. Zan wears clothes, eats at the table with the Tomlins, and plays with Ben’s toys, as any human child would. The Tomlins teach Zan how to communicate using American Sign Language; ‘Up’, ‘Drink’, ‘Give’, ‘More’, ‘Eat’, ‘You’, and ‘Me’ becomes Zan’s vocabulary, and, before long, he is regularly signing to get what he desires.

Ben understands the experiment. However, he is increasingly baffled by the stark contrast between his father’s and his mother’s interactions with Zan. His father, opposed to even giving Zan a name, takes a very methodological approach. He never deviates from the guidelines of the experiment, and has little patience for anyone or anything that challenges his ideas of how the experiment should be carried out. His mother, on the other hand, is more nurturing. She recognizes that Zan’s needs extend beyond what is offered by the strict confines of the experiment and tries to be a mother figure for Zan, while at the same time not compromising the experiment. Ben’s struggle with this dichotomy and with his own growing feelings for Zan become one of the central themes of the book.

As Zan grows in both size and strength, and the experiment becomes more difficult to maintain safely, Project Zan begins to spiral out of control. At this point, Ben finds an ally in Peter, one of the student research assistants working on the project. Like Ben, Peter sees Zan for what he truly is – a living being with real needs and emotions. With Peter, Ben attempts to find a way out of what has become a tragic trap for Zan.

Half Brother takes the reader on an emotional journey that follows Ben’s developing relationship with an animal. From a starting point of selfishness and a total lack of compassion and understanding, Ben ultimately experiences a deep change of heart. It was beautiful and inspiring to watch Ben’s cold reaction to the baby chimp he referred to as his ‘freaky little brother’ turn into a very loving relationship with Zan.

At times, Half Brother had me literally laughing out loud, a few scenes brought tears to my eyes, and still other parts had me questioning the way in which I treat my own companion animals. It is intended as a young adult read; however, the themes of compassion and exploitation that are woven into the plot transcend age boundaries. Ben’s struggles throughout the story are ones we can all relate to, and the love and compassion he maintains for Zan can inspire us all to act on behalf of those who are voiceless.

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Jena Mazzio

Jena Mazzio is a newly-turned ethical vegan. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and rescue animals — a cat and two dogs. Jena is currently having a blast discovering and writing about the many vegan products available today, on her blog, Vegans Have Taste Buds, Too!

Vegan/Animal Rights Book Swap for Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary

However, miraculously, I think I might’ve found a compromise to my “problem,” something that will at the very least rotate the books with which I cannot part, allowing me to still have my share, but spread the wealth a bit. Here in NYC, there is an upcoming Vegan/Animal Rights Book Swap that is being organized by NYC activist superstars, Jamie Hagen and Olivia Lane. The Facebook invite for the event is titillating:

“Calling all veggies and friends of animals with dusty, crowded book shelves! Please join us for an evening swap of inspiring vegan cookbooks, theory books, how-to dvds, and all other media related to vegetarianism and animal rights. This event is open to all whether you are a hardcore vegan with a dozen books (and tattoos) or a veg-curious passerby.”

While I clearly fall within that tattooed hardcore vegan category, when it comes to this event, and animal activism in general, I could care less about people like me. It’s the “veg-curious passerby” that has my tofu in a scramble. Even as I gaze at my overstuffed animal rights bookshelves, and my egg-replacer caked vegan cookbook section of the apartment (yes, they have a section), I am intrigued by the idea of spreading these compelling words that everyone really must read.

So I’ll go to that swap. And I’ll bring some of my treasured books. And yes, I’ll cry a little in the process, but perhaps I’ll swap them out for some I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t yet acquired. Or maybe I’ll just donate them, for nothing in exchange, and hope that whoever gets my treasures finds their own vegan enlightenment, and goes out to change the world for animals.

This event is brilliant, really. The remaining books will be donated to the Housing Works Bookstore (so I can have visitation rights). And there will even be a raffle that will benefit the fine work of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. They will also have Lula’s Sweet Apothecary on hand, so you can have your cake batter vegan ice cream and eat it too.

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"Ethics and Animals: An Introduction" by Lori Gruen

If you believe it is wrong to hold animals captive in zoos, is it justifiable to hold domesticated animals captive in our homes as pets?

Would you save a human child from a lion? Would you save a gazelle? Is there a non-speciesist reason to save the child and not the gazelle?

If experimenting on 100 non-human animals would save 1,000 humans from suffering and death, is the experiment ethical?

If you believe it is wrong to eat eggs from hens locked in battery cages, is it ethical to eat eggs laid by hens who enjoy free-roaming, natural, species-appropriate lifestyles?

Wesleyan philosophy professor Lori Gruen’s new book, Ethics and Animals: An Introduction, offers readers the tools to answer such questions in intellectually and ethically coherent ways. Ethics introduces readers to the many ways humans use animals, and to the schools of ethical thought that we can use to evaluate the morality of this use. As a vegan and animal advocate, I have struggled with some of the questions that Gruen analyzes; her rigorous approach doesn’t always yield iron-clad answers, but it is does offer thought-provoking guidelines.

Gruen opens with a chapter dismantling the myth of “Human Exceptionalism,” the belief that humans are somehow unique among and therefore superior to all other fauna. She takes on many arguments that exceptionalists have used to distinguish humans from all other animals, including tool use, language use, self-awareness, and morality, by describing one empirical study after another proving that none of these traits is unique to humans. “Human exceptionalism, as an ethical position, is untenable,” she concludes.

Gruen then turns to the schools and tools of ethical thought that we can use to evaluate whether humans are justified in treating other animals differently from ourselves. She writes in clear, accessible language about the elements of each philosophy and the differences among them. Still, the subject matter is complex, and her discussion sometimes falls prey to a hazard common to introductory books: because she has room only to skim the surface of each school of philosophy, her explanations occasionally raise more questions than they answer. Even so, they provide a valuable overview of the range of philosophical thought applicable to the relations between humans and other species.

Ethics draws the line of moral consideration around beings whose “lives can go better or worse for them.” These are “sentient beings who have interests and well-beings. They can be harmed when their interests are thwarted and their wellness is undermined,” and therefore are entitled to moral consideration. Gruen introduces four major approaches to evaluating how humans as “moral agents” should or must treat beings entitled to moral consideration: utilitarianism, rights views, feminist ethics, and the capabilities approach. The first two are represented by names familiar to animal advocates: Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is probably the seminal utilitarian work on human treatment of animals (and was an important catalyst in my move from vegetarianism to veganism), and Tom Regan is a leading proponent of animal rights. The feminist ethicists Gruen discusses include Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams, and the work of Martha Nussbaum, the inimitable jack-of-all-scholarly trades, introduces the capabilities approach (full disclosure: as an undergraduate at Brown University I studied with Professor Nussbaum and believe that she is among the greatest thinkers of our time; the fact that she has turned her attention to the moral entitlements of non-human animals is a coup).

Gruen’s goal in Ethics is to “draw on the resources of these frameworks in discussing the ethical claims animals make on us in a variety of contexts.” She discusses each of those contexts in detail, concisely but powerfully conveying the horror of each form of human exploitation of animals and then applying the tools of ethical analysis to each one. Animal advocates may be frustrated that she does not conclude each discussion with an unqualified denunciation of the gruesome practices she describes, but she never fails to grant animals moral consideration.

The question of using non-human animals for food is a good example. After describing factory farming with gut-wrenching specifics, she asks whether vegetarianism is “ethically required,” and concludes only that “ethical justifications for killing [animals] for food, when it is not necessary to eat them, . . . remain questionable.” But she asserts that non-human animals unequivocally “warrant ethical attention,” and finds killing them for food “questionable” only if they receive that ethical attention and humans “significant[ly] reorient [their thinking about and treatment of] other animals.” The implication is that so long as the overwhelming number of animals raised for food continue to receive no ethical attention, killing them for food is unjustifiable. Though some activists may prefer a stronger condemnation of eating animals, Gruen’s measured and thoughtful consideration of competing views and interests lends her arguments a certain weight that could help shift mainstream debates towards the conclusions that activists favor.

The other contexts of animal use that Gruen analyzes include experimentation (“As long as animal interests are not taken into account and experimenters are unmotivated to change, it seems ethically reasonable to oppose animal experimentation”), captivity (“There may be no ethical way to rectify the wrong we have done” by taking animals into captivity, but given that we are holding animals captive, we are obligated “to attend more carefully and systematically to” their needs), and animals in the wild (the conflicts that arise between humans and wild animals prove too ethically and pragmatically difficult to admit of a single facile prescription).

The last chapter is perhaps the most interesting for animal advocates as it addresses the competing approaches to activism. Gruen explains the divide between “welfarists” and “liberationists” and the schism among liberationists around pragmatism versus abolition. Gruen herself appears to be what she would call a pragmatic liberationist, criticizing “[a]bsolutist commitments and demands for purity” as “not just strategically ineffectual, but [possibly] self-defeating,” and denouncing welfarists as “more or less committed speciesists.”

Illustrating the approaches to activism with descriptions and evaluations of actual campaigns, Gruen keeps this chapter practical. She closes by cautioning that animal activists may “want so much to be righteous [and] believe so deeply in their righteousness, that they think whatever they do must be righteous.” To avoid this pitfall, Gruen offers activists a guide to subjecting our ideologies to rigorous intellectual analysis, which can only make us more persuasive and effective in our struggles on behalf of non-human animals.

For me, Ethics was a useful though difficult book to read. Gruen’s descriptions of humans’ use and abuse of other animals can be heart-breaking, especially when she brings the statistics to life through stories of individuals. But it is these appalling facts that make otherwise academic debates among ethicists urgent and relevant. Gruen makes ethical arguments matter, even in situations that seem morally clear.

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Piper Hoffman

Piper Hoffman is a writer and attorney living in Brooklyn with her husband, two cats, and occasional foster kittens. She has a B.A. magna cum laude from Brown University and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. Piper has professional experience with the laws related to animal rights, employment, poverty, homelessness, women’s rights, and being childfree. She blogs at piperhoffman.com and her writing has been published by Salon, Forbes Woman, and others.

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I admit it. For most of my life, I had a love affair with dairy. Every birthday had to include a Carvel ice cream cake. Cookies just weren’t the same if they weren’t accompanied by a tall glass of milk. Pizza? Extra cheese, please. If asked, I would certainly have said that milk was healthy and necessary for strong bones, information that I had gotten from celebrities with milk mustaches, as well as from health teachers in school. Americans have been told for years that “milk does a body good.” Well, it turns out that none of it is true, and, thankfully, I finally realized that several years ago when I saw the light and went vegan.

If Mom only knew...

Since you read the Our Hen House blog, you are probably already at least somewhat aware of the hideous cruelties inherent in milk production. And, of course, in addition to the animal rights issues, milk can wreak absolute havoc on our health. If you need proof, you need to read Joseph Keon’s eye-opening new book, Whitewash: The Disturbing Truth About Cow’s Milk and Your Health, which busts through the misconceptions surrounding dairy, and lays bare its dangerous effects on the human body.

Keon starts by addressing the source of the myths about dairy’s healthfulness. The first problem is that the nutritional guidelines provided to Americans (including school children) about what they should be eating, are made up by government agencies that have been corrupted by special interest lobbies. But government isn’t the only problem. The corporate-owned media discourages stories that might go against their advertisers, deterring reporters from exposing the negative aspects of animal agriculture. If that weren’t enough, some states even have so-called “food disparagement laws” that prevent people from criticizing certain perishable food commodities. Remember when Oprah was sued by the cattle industry for telling the truth about mad cow disease?

Whitewash goes on to explain how our taxes are also used to strengthen the dairy industry. As a person who objects to milk on ethical grounds, that one really gets my rescued goat! The United States government subsidizes the milk industry with up to $2.5 billion in tax breaks every year. All the surplus milk from that subsidized production ends up as a required carton of milk that is given to every child participating in the national school lunch program. With the government, media, and schools all telling us that it is important to consume dairy products for good health, how could one not be misinformed? Perhaps if Whitewash were required reading by students, faculty, and parents, things would be looking up. But alas, this information is all kept under wraps, to say the least.

In addition to the brainwashing, there is also the unfortunate problem of addiction. Research has shown that cow’s milk contains components identical to narcotic opiates. These compounds are thought to function as a way to get calves to become addicted to milk so that they will drink enough to double their birth weight in 47 days. The presence of this addictive compound in milk points to what should be an obvious fact: Cow’s milk is made for calves, not humans.

That this is so is also abundantly clear from the detrimental effects of dairy on human health. Keon spends over 100 pages chronicling the myriad of health problems that can be linked to dairy consumption, including everything from acne and headaches, to diabetes, learning disorders and autism. Perhaps the most shocking is osteoporosis. Yes, osteoporosis. While most people think that preventing osteoporosis is the very reason they should be drinking milk, and while the government and the dairy industry continue to claim that milk contains calcium that builds strong bones, there is compelling evidence that shows quite the opposite effect. Keon references The China Study author Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s extensive research, which shows that the higher the meat and dairy consumption in a population, the higher the rate of osteoporosis. Campbell says,  “The correlation between animal protein [intake] and fracture rates in different societies is as strong as that between lung cancer and smoking.”

What kind of cruelty lurks in this container?

Although Keon focuses on the health reasons to jettison dairy, I was happy to see that he also highlighted the ethical and environmental reasons for doing so. The average dairy cow does not live her life grazing in pastures on rolling hills, but in a factory farm where she is continually impregnated and has her calves taken away from her so that her milk can be harvested by machines and sold to consumers instead of nourishing her baby. Her calf is either subjected to her mother’s same cruel fate of becoming a dairy cow, or if the calf is a boy, he is imprisoned in a veal crate and slaughtered while still a baby.

In addition to heartbreak and physical pain for the cows, factory farms also cause substantial environmental damage. Land is cleared to grow corn and soy to feed dairy cows. These cows produce an enormous amount of manure and methane gas that leeches into the water supply and is responsible a staggering percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. It was refreshing to see Keon going there, especially when this truly inconvenient truth is so rarely approached.

After reading about all the negative aspects of dairy, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to continue consuming it. For those who want to go dairy-free, Keon provides an informative and accessible chapter on how to get your calcium and other nutritional needs from plant-based sources, which, I can testify, is both easy and scrumptious. The book also includes a long list of other useful resources to explore – making Whitewash an even more important tool for animal advocates who want to reach our milk-guzzling friends and family. As we continue to arm ourselves with more and more facts about why animal products are cruel, unsustainable, and unhealthy, we will effectively be breeding new vegans. And that’s a hobby I very much enjoy.

While I personally gave up dairy for ethical reasons, I have experienced significant health benefits from doing so. The intestinal issues I had been suffering from for almost 10 years suddenly went away, my skin grew clearer and my eyes brighter. I no longer have any question that giving up dairy is essential for the animals, the environment and our health. And as I’m well aware, there is a delicious alternative to every kind of dairy product you can imagine. Nowadays, I’d take some vegan soft serve (Lula’s Sweet Apothecary is my fave) over pus-laden dairy any day.

In a clear and convincing manner, Whitewash outlines all the reasons to dump dairy. My suggestion? Read the book, and have a gallon or three of vegan soy ice cream waiting for you in the freezer for when you’re done. Something tells me you won’t be craving milk anymore.

Book Review: “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”

by Sangamithra Iyer

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld

In 1893, a young Indian lawyer arrived on the shores of South Africa. He didn’t know then that he would stay for over twenty years, during which he would be confronted with injustices that would force him to continually challenge not only the law, but also himself. Nor did he know that what he learned in South Africa he would later adapt to a struggle for independence and equity in his home country. The opening pages of Joseph Lelyveld’s book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, provide a portrait of this activist as a young man:

“He wants his life to matter, but he’s not sure where or how; in that sense, like most twenty-three-year-olds, he’s vulnerable and unfinished. He’s looking for something—a career, a sanctified way of life, preferably both—on which to fasten.”

Despite what the title may suggest, Great Soul is not hagiography, documenting the life of a saint, but rather a well-examined account of the making of an activist. In a recent talk at the Asia Society in New York, Lelyveld was asked what gave him the nerve to choose Gandhi as his subject, when the Mahatma is such a big figure and the literature on him is already so vast. “There’s a Sanskrit word for it,” Lelyveld joked. “Chutzpah.”

Indeed there is a certain amount of chutzpah required to re-examine a well examined life, but Great Soul succeeds in tracking Gandhi’s work in South Africa and analyzing how it shaped the man who would become a national and moral leader in India. It is well researched and artfully guided by Lelyveld, who spent decades studying Gandhi’s life and letters, tracing his footsteps on both continents. What I appreciated about the book is its intimate portrayal of a very human, flawed and conflicted Gandhi — a man trying to find his way to change the world.

My interest in Gandhi is multifold. My grandfather was an engineer working for the British in Burma when he responded to Gandhi’s call for activists in the struggle for independence. He rid himself of worldly possessions and started a Gandhian ashram in a rural village in south India, where my father was born. I was always fascinated by Gandhi’s connection of the personal to the political and inspired by his example to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” In Great Soul, I found an account of Gandhi’s life that wasn’t simplified or glorified, but instead addressed the complexity of the activist and his work.

While Gandhi’s thoughts on vegetarianism and animal related issues are barely and only peripherally touched upon in Great Soul — (see Gandhi’s Autobiography and Tristram Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution for more on these topics) — Lelyveld’s documentation of Gandhi’s social justice work provides valuable insight and perspective to animal activists.

Indeed, in the Bloodless Revolution, Stuart notes that “vegetarianism was Gandhi’s first political cause; many of his earliest writings were articles in the journals of the Vegetarian Society [of London] and correspondences about his new vegetarian ‘mission.’” He never abandoned this seminal cause (and in fact was continually refining it), but he connected it to other efforts that eventually led to his role in Indian independence.

The Power of the Pen

When Gandhi moved to South Africa, his first activist deed was a letter to the editor. It was after he had been ordered by a judge to remove his turban in a courtroom in Durban, and the local newspaper published an article about the situation titled “An Unwelcome Visitor.” Lelyveld writes that “Gandhi immediately shot off a letter to the newspaper, the first of dozens he’d write to deflect or deflate white sentiments.” After his next racial assault, when he was ejected from a train’s first-class compartment because a white passenger did not want to be in the same area as a “coolie,” Gandhi sent telegrams to the general manager of the railway station raising enough of a ruckus to reboard the train in first class. (Later in his life in India, he would voluntarily only travel third class in solidarity with the masses).

In South Africa, Gandhi needed a platform, so he launched his own weekly newspaper, Indian Opinion. In need of a name for his nonviolent movement, because he felt “passive resistance” indicated a certain weakness, he held a contest in Indian Opinion. Through that process, the name satyagraha — truth force — was coined.

As is the case with all independent media, funding became a concern. Inspired by reading John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi “found an answer to his immediate practical problem: he could save his paper by moving it to a self-sustaining rural settlement,” Lelyveld writes. “Workers on the farm were expected to double as pressmen and simultaneously feed themselves. Hand labor, thereafter, would be the reflexive Gandhian answer to various problems from colonial exploitation to rural underemployment and poverty.”

As a result, for Gandhi, the publication was not only a pulpit but became a way to show how he was practicing what he preached. A compilation of his columns from Indian Opinion would later become his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Upon his return to India, Gandhi started another publication, Young India, and later while in prison, distributed The Harijan, a weekly newsletter aimed at getting rid of the caste system.

Coalition Building

Gandhi was not a single-issue advocate. His views and philosophies were ever evolving but he understood the connections between all his causes, even when few others did. Lelyveld analyzes Gandhi’s work on his “four pillars” for swaraj (self-rule): Hindu Muslim unity, eradication of untouchability, revitalization of self-sustaining rural villages, and ahimsa, nonviolence. When I think about my grandfather’s work in the Freedom Movement, what it entailed was spinning cotton, providing water and sanitation to rural villages and fighting for caste equality. These tasks epitomized Gandhi’s pillars in function and in form.

Pyarelal, one of Gandhi’s biographers, documented one of his epiphanies in South Africa that ultimately led to the four pillars:

“The truth burst upon his heart with the force of the revelation that so long as India allowed a section of her people to be treated as pariahs, so long must her sons be prepared to be treated as pariahs abroad.”

In India, Gandhi expanded his thinking further: “Only at that time can non-cooperation with an enemy nation become a possibility, when full cooperation between ourselves has been achieved.”

Working towards these goals had its challenges, and Gandhi was subject to a fair amount of criticism. He needed to fight untouchability in Hinduism yet still maintain a Hindu base for the independence movement and build that base without alienating Muslims in the process. Lelyveld poses the questions Gandhi faced:

“Could he simultaneously lead a struggle for independence and a struggle for social justice if that meant taking on orthodox high-caste Hindus, which would inevitably strain and possibly splinter his movement?… Granted that Gandhi did much to make the practice of untouchability disreputable among modernizing Indians, what exactly was he prepared to do for the untouchables themselves besides preach to their oppressors?”

As he struggled with these issues and his approach to addressing them, one thing Gandhi was sure of was nonviolence:

“I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, “even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”

Gandhi’s ruminations on building bridges within and between movements and defining tactics and strategies must surely echo and resonate among animal activists today. They remind us that every movement for change has had strong dissension within its ranks and that without constant care and thoughtful leadership, could easily be torn apart.

On Despair:

Despite the many challenges facing him and India, Gandhi once said he was “not a quick despairer.” But there were moments when Gandhi realized, that despite his efforts, the four pillars to which he devoted his life were crumbling. Lelyveld writes about a very lonely and disappointed Gandhi when violence erupted around him:

“For India’s prophet of unity, nonviolence, and peace, these events—the overture for a year and a half of mass mayhem, murder, forced migration, property loss on a vast scale, extensive ethnic cleansing—provided ample reason for despair, enough to bring his whole life into question. Or so he seemed to feel at his lowest ebb. But if he was shaken, he clung ever more fervently to his core value of ahimsa, on which much of India seemed to have given up.”

Lelyveld captures the personal struggle Gandhi faced, committing himself to a life of activism. In 1921, Gandhi thought independence could be achieved in one year. And when independence came in 1947, it was heartbreaking. Gandhi witnessed the partition of his homeland, what he referred to as “vivisection.”

“The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world,” Lelyveld explains. And yet, Gandhi non-violently soldiered on. He veered at the end of his life, Lelyveld observes “between dark despair and irrepressible hope.”

Satyagraha Now

Lelyveld points out that in South Africa today, “the vegetarian restaurant, steps away [from Gandhi’s law office] is long gone; hard by the place it stood, perhaps exactly on the spot, a McDonald’s now does a fairly brisk nonvegetarian trade.” And in India, Lelyveld writes, “The combination of piety and disregard [for Gandhi]—hardly unique to India—lasted as a cultural reflex surviving the explosion of India’s first nuclear bomb.”

When President Obama traveled to India last fall, he paid his respects to Gandhi’s memorial, but arrived with an economic agenda offering American meat, dairy and arms to the emerging superpower. Globalization, urbanization and modernization have shaped an India that is far removed from Gandhi’s vision of self-sustaining villages. Religious conflict and social inequality still plague India today.

What we may see now almost anywhere is not too dissimilar to what Gandhi discovered when he returned to India in 1915 and what ultimately drove his work. “I see around me on the surface nothing but hypocrisy, humbug and degradation, and yet underneath it, I trace a divinity.” We may be witnessing the erosion of Gandhian principles, but also their reincarnation. Perhaps it is in the nonviolent resistance movements in the Middle East, undercover investigations exposing the truth about how animals are treated, DIY efforts of self-sufficiency, or any time individuals realize that change begins with them, we find a trace of the Mahatma.

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Sangamithra Iyer is an Associate for Brighter Green and the former Assistant Editor of Satya Magazine.

Sangamithra Iyer

Even if you don’t think you need a primer, I love the idea of purchasing this Guide as a gift for the curious and/or burgeoning vegans in our lives, from that co-worker who enjoyed the vegan cupcake you baked and then eagerly took that “Why Vegan?” brochure that you strategically placed beside it (good job!), to your Aunt Ida, who was told by her doctor that she needs to cut out meat. To purchase the Kindle edition of The Ultimate Vegan Guide as a gift (for less than a dollar), just click the “Give as a Gift” button in the upper right corner of the Kindle edition’s page on Amazon (be sure you know the email account associated with your friend’s Kindle). Or, spring for the paperback, which is only $8.95, making it the perfect stocking stuffer for the Christmas in July party that you’re planning for next month… or maybe that’s just me.

As an avid reader of Erik Marcus’ blog, I can say without question that even though I haven’t (yet!) read the Guide, the man knows his shit, and has a remarkably clear — not to mention accessible and frequently witty — way of communicating. His goal in this second edition is to make the book as cheap as possible so that the advice it offers can do its part in changing the world. Sounds to me like something to support, especially given the potential impact it carries.

Lucky kids (and grown-ups) will enjoy "Lucky Pigs"

Activist and author Susan Rooker was, like many of us, moved beyond words by this story. Or maybe not exactly beyond words, since she was so touched that she created a children’s book about it. In retrospect, it seems like the story of Nikki is actually a children’s book begging to be written. Entitled Lucky Pigs, Susan took it upon herself to self-publish it through Ahava Press, and make it available via Etsy (for just $13.95).

Here’s Susan’s sweet description of Lucky Pigs:

Listen as Nikki retells her piglets’ favorite bedtime story. It is the story of how she escaped a factory farm, give birth to piglets on a “mound of dry ground” and how they came to live in peace at Farm Sanctuary, Watkins Glen, NY.

More and more of us are becoming aware of from where our food comes and how the animals involved are treated. This story can open discussions for older children or can be read as a simpler story for younger children.

In the end, Nikki does not know if her piglets believe that the story she tells is true. She doesn’t mind. She knows they will live long and happy at Farm Sanctuary.

If you’re like me and you like immediate gratification, you absolutely must check out the short video below that Susan put together, where you actually get to experience the book in its entirety. (You might need to pause it throughout in order to read the full text on each page, unless I’m just an incredibly slow reader.)

I’m such a huge fan of Susan Rooker for taking the passion she felt (we all felt!) for this story and producing this extremely creative project out of it. It’s just bursting with beautiful illustrations and a story that will make you cry, and will give you and the kids in your life warm fuzzies. It’s available on eBay too, in the kid’s book section of course, allowing Nikki’s story of survival to reach beyond just the animal rights community. I maintain that Lucky Pigs is exactly the kind of thing that has the potential to reach children (and hopefully their parents, too) with messages of compassion for all the earth’s inhabitants.

Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know by Paul Waldau

Animal Rights is a part of Oxford’s “What Everyone Needs to Know” series, and purports to be a concise one-volume introduction to the philosophy and practice of animal rights. As a short book — only around 200 pages — the book is not really able to go into depth on many topics, but instead provides a great introduction to the subject for those who are just starting their explorations into the world of animal rights. For the seasoned activist or academic, the book might feel less weighty, but certain sections serve as useful resources from which anyone can benefit.

“The Animals Themselves,” the first chapter of the book, is also its longest. For the beginning activist, it’s a useful summary of the way animals are treated in our society and an account of what science tells us about animals, their consciousness and their behavior. For the seasoned activist, it might be a section to skim rather than read thoroughly. Though the sections on science and philosophy are interesting — for example, Waldau’s account of the origins and uses of scientific categorizations for animals — the sections on the way animals are treated are perhaps redundant for some activists. Unlike many other accounts, however, Waldau’s scholarship is evident even here — rather than simply list a series of statistics, he draws on numerous sources to give an extremely well-rounded overview of the way animals are treated, and includes more international perspectives than many similar accounts.

It is the middle sections of the book that are truly useful to everyone, from the starting activist to the activist who has been in the struggle for animal liberation for decades. Unlike many authors, Waldau gives equal time to philosophy, politics, the arts, the law, and science — no area of human culture is alien to his examination of animal rights. Waldau’s great success here is in historicizing the animal rights movement — in revealing it to be a deep-rooted human concern that is not new or radical, but embedded in the history of human culture. Anyone can learn from Waldau’s impressively wide view of animal rights. Personally, though I already knew a good deal about philosophy, the law, and politics as they relate to animal issues, Waldau’s account of animals in the education system was totally new to me, and the sections on science were useful for brushing up my knowledge. I didn’t know much about the history and controversies surrounding the “dissection choice” in high school science courses, for example, and I doubt many people are aware of the Journal of Comparative Psychology’s 1993 study on the “Personalities of Octopuses,” the “first-ever documentation of personality in invertebrates” (171).

The final sections of the book are perfect for those who are involved in or interested in becoming involved in animal rights activism on the ground. “Major Figures and Organizations in the Animal Rights Movement” is a convenient resource for anyone who needs short (and extremely neutral) profiles of the major figures and groups in the movement. “The Future of Animals Rights” brings to the fore certain arguments that are mostly implicit in the rest of the book, providing a vision of a world in which humans might “find healthy ways for individuals in local places, and our species as a whole, to coexist with the citizens of the more-than-human world within which we and our children will always live” (199). Waldau’s personal approach to animal rights seems deeply democratic, in the sense that he views all beings as a part of a worldwide community with responsibilities toward each other as neighbors, rather than as othered beings we are free to treat as we like. Animal rights, therefore, seems less of a radical departure and more of an extension of an ethical system we already have in place.

Waldau’s neutrality when it comes to specific approaches to animal rights and specific figures and organizations is admirable, and useful for a book of this nature, but it’s also one of the book’s only weaknesses. This is not the sort of book that will inflame your sense of urgency and cause you to go out and protest after feverishly turning the last few pages — it’s a scholarly introduction. It’s not the right book to give to your aunt to try and convince her to join you at your protest of the local KFC. It’s a book for someone who approaches these issues intellectually, and who will be convinced or strengthened by long views of ethical problems, filled with citations to other works and with references to history. Even the structure of the book, separated as it is into questions that Waldau then answers in short sections, is more like an academic dialogue than a manifesto. Still, this is the perfect book for its niche — a short but masterful summary of animal rights as a concept, philosophy, and movement. In that sense, it is indeed “what everyone needs to know.”

Reading the animal rights timeline in the back of Waldau’s book, I was struck by how a longer view of history allowed one to see just how tenuous the line between human and animal was, and still is. Indeed, the separation between non-human animals and humans has never been clear, and we pretend that it is at our peril.

In his Timaeus, Plato described both non-human animals and women as “failed men.” This idea would go mostly unchallenged for many centuries. In 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft published her classic proto-feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Thomas Taylor responded with his biting parody of Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Beasts. Taylor’s book parodied the idea that women have “intrinsic and real dignity and worth” by extending that concept to other animals — perhaps one of the earliest examples of the “slippery slope” argument so favored today by those who link marriage equality for LGBT people to the danger of humans marrying iguanas. If there really is a slippery slope from rights for one marginalized and oppressed group to another, then by all means, let us slip down it as quickly as possible — the only thing we’re slipping towards is justice.

This is from the description of the event:

In this second Changemaking presentation, Our Hen House’s Jasmin Singer will speak from personal experience in the blogosphere – including the use of blogging to create social change. She will also tell you how she became a freelance writer – and how you can too… Most importantly, you will leave knowing how to take the first steps in using your written voice to raise awareness and compassion.

Held at NYC’s Mercy for Animals headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the event was packed with a roomful of writer-activists, both established and budding. It was a dense seventy-five minute workshop that covered the following categories: the importance of writing for animal rights; finding your voice; networking; letters to the editor; op-eds; writing to other media; writing to your legislators; blogging; magazine articles; fiction; non-fiction; getting an agent; and finding (and being) a mentor. I hope that by the end of the workshop, attendees felt equipped to take their written activism a step further — whether by writing one letter to the editor every week, or by working on that great American novel that focuses on animal issues. As a bonus, author John Yunker (The Tourist Trail) provided in-depth knowledge about writing fiction as a means of social change.

Excitingly, we experimented with live-streaming the workshop, and I can now say that I’m officially obsessed with live-streaming. Though, admittedly, the video, which is recorded with a web cam, doesn’t end up looking professionally produced, it is absolutely simple (and free) to live-stream, as we learned last night, and opens up the workshop to those who are eager to attend but can’t be there in person. If you get yourself a free subscription to Live Stream, which is what we used (as opposed to their expensive paid subscription), then the only two drawbacks are that commercials pop up from time to time, and only 50 people are allowed to view the video live. Still, it’s a great place to start, and you can access the video afterwards, which is a huge plus.

I am happy to share with you some of the handouts from the “Writing for Animal Rights” workshop, as well as the video recording of the workshop itself. Here are the handouts (in PDF form):

• OUTLINE_Writing for Animal Rights(a full summary of the workshop divided by subject; all you really need)
• JOHN_YUNKER_Interview (a Q&A on fiction-writing from author of The Tourist Trail, John Yunker)
• Exercise_for_Workshop (an interactive brainstorming exercise for attendees)
• Successful_Pitching_Tips (successful pitching tips from the managing editor of VegNews Magazine)

And here is the video of the presentation itself (which you can also view here):

The next Changemaking series will occur in June (date TBD but email Eddie at eddieg[at]mercyforanimals.org to stay looped in). The topic will be “Animal Law for the Non-Lawyer,” and it will be presented by my partner in crime, animal rights law professor (and Our Hen House co-founder) Mariann Sullivan.

An Introduction to Animals and the Law by Joan E. Schaffner

The entire notion of animal law is somewhat odd, considering the nature of most arguments against granting animals moral consideration in the first place. The usual argument against improving the legal status of animals says that, since non-human animals cannot respect human moral laws and boundaries, they are not able to be subjects of moral consideration within such laws. Strange, then, that humans have actually been perfectly willing to enfold animals within our legal framework, even though they have frequently done so ineptly and ineffectively.

The reason for this odd contradiction is laid out in Schaffner’s first chapter, “Animals and the Law: The Basics,” which should be required reading for any activist who needs a primer on the legal status of animals and the root bases and biases of animal law. As Schaffner explains, there are two possible strands of animal law in play today – laws that attempt to safeguard the rights and interests of animals (animal protection laws) and laws that safeguard human interests in, and uses for, animals (practically all other laws regarding animals). Animals thus lack a consistent status under the law, sometimes appearing as things unworthy of any consideration, sometimes as very valuable things, and only rarely as entities with their own interests, depending on the human use of the animal species or even individual animal in question. Schaffner writes, “Currently, the law criminalizes deliberate individual acts of gratuitous cruelty towards most animals, yet allows and even supports institutionalized cruelty of animals. Because the law is drafted by humans and for humans it virtually always favors human interests over the interests of all other species” (3).

The (grain) meat of Schaffner’s book is in its middle chapters, which give a fact-filled and tremendously useful overview of basic animal law in four areas: anti-cruelty law, animal welfare law, animal control and management, and animals and the constitution. This information is very useful for any activist wishing to engage in the legislative side of animal advocacy, especially activists in the United States (Schaffner does devote some time to discussing animal law in other countries, but this is largely to compare it to American animal law). These sections of the book also give support to Schaffner’s central thesis, that animal law in its current state is arbitrary and contradictory, and more concerned with safeguarding the human use of animals than the interests and well-being of the animals themselves. Take the notion of “accepted agricultural practices,” for example – if a practice of animal agriculture is traditional or “accepted” by a majority in the industry, it is legal, regardless of its cruelty. The fact that many animal industries are given the power to self-regulate as “experts” on the treatment of animals (and even when this is not the case, the fact that most government agencies responsible for determining animal law are actually focused on improving the profits of animal industries rather than protecting the animals), should dispel any illusions on the part of American citizens that the government has animals’ interests in mind. Schaffner’s case studies are also engrossing, allowing readers to see how animal law plays out in concrete cases, and often in comparison to similar cases overseas (the United States usually comes out badly in these comparisons: American animal law is almost uniformly worse for the animals than its counterparts in the UK and Western Europe).

Although the central four chapters are the heart of the book, and worth a read for any advocate – even if all you get out of it is the Alice in Wonderland-esque vertigo that comes from reading legal documents that are almost nonsensical in their definitions of what is and isn’t an animal worthy of moral concern – the first and final chapters are the most significant for animal activism at large. As I mentioned above, the first chapter gives an overview of the central problems in current animal law. The final chapter, meanwhile, describes what the parameters would be of “a legal regime that is non-speciesist, treats animals as subjects, and approaches and protects their independent, individual, and inherent interests” (172).

For activists, this chapter is highly important for providing a vision of a legislative regime worth fighting for, and the arguments we need to make to obtain it. Schaffner describes a handful of approaches to altering the legal regime in a way that is beneficial to animals, based on varying moral and philosophical views. Though there is disagreement amongst animal advocates on what proper animal law would look like, and the methods we should take to get there, it is important for activists to keep in mind that the goal, at least in general terms, of all proponents of animal protection is a legal regime that actually considers animal interests to be valuable. The central change that would need to occur for this to happen is a shift in thinking of animals as subjects rather than objects, as sentient beings rather than mere resources for human use. While some animal rights activists often criticize them, even the welfarist approaches Schaffner describes here attempt to contribute to this shift.

By detailing the inconsistencies and absurdities of animal law as it is currently practiced, Schaffner has provided activists with a valuable tool for engaging in legislative advocacy. As a source of information, a critique of current law, and – most importantly – a manifesto for a future world in which animal law protects the interests of animals rather than the interests of humans in using animals, An Introduction to Animals and the Law is a vital resource for anyone who wants to change the world for animals and lives within a nation of laws – in other words, everyone reading this review.

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Order An Introduction to Animals and the Law

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Book Review: Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica

by Jennifer Parrucci

I have a slight obsession with penguins. My small apartment is littered with penguin books, penguin knick-knacks, penguin documentaries, and penguin art work. One of my fondest dreams is to take a trip to South Africa to see penguins in their natural habitat, littering the beaches and braying like donkeys at each other. So, when I heard about Fen Montaigne’s new book, Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica, I was more than eager to delve into it.

"Fraser's Penguins" by Fen Montaigne

Montaigne spent five months in 2005-2006 in the Antarctic with scientist Bill Fraser, who has studied Adélie penguins for 30 years. While much of his research has been to document the fascinating behaviors of these extraordinary animals, sadly, some of his most significant discoveries, and the ones that were of special interest to Montaigne, were his observations about global warming trends. The Antarctic has warmed at a faster rate than any place else on the planet, and Fraser’s beloved penguins have been profoundly affected.

The insidious cycle works something like this: Rapidly increasing temperatures within the Antarctic region have decreased the amount of sea ice, leading to an increased amount of snowfall. Among other things, the snow lingering on the Adélies’ nesting grounds well into spring causes a delay in the hatching of chicks. This delay means that chicks no longer hatch during peak krill season and this slight difference leads, in turn, to parents having to work harder to properly nourish the chicks to a healthy weight. Lighter chicks tend to have a lower survival rate. As a result of this series of catastrophes, Fraser has seen the penguin population decrease to an alarming degree.

While, except for the penguins themselves, this series of small tragedies may seem small in its implications, of course nothing could be further from the truth. Montaigne writes:

Should mankind continue to emit ever-larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to temperature increases of 2° to 5° C (3.6° F to 9° F) in the next century, then global warming will no longer be gnawing at the edges of Antarctica. It will be taking large bites, bringing about changes that could destabilize the ice shelves, the ice sheets, and the sea ice that define the continent and support the tens of millions of penguins, seabirds, seals, and other creatures whose life histories have evolved inside the unique world of the Antarctic Convergence. Such disruption would be felt far beyond the bounds of the Southern Ocean as it leads to a significant rise in sea levels worldwide and alters the global climate system.

Though the book confirms the idea that this warming has been caused by man and modern civilization, I was disappointed about the lack of discussion about the greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal food production. Organizations such as Brighter Green, the documentary Meat the Truth, and even a United Nation’s report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow have concluded that animal agribusiness is a major contributor, if not the top contributor, to global climate change.

While the science of climate change is the core of this book and the facts set forth are compelling (and frightening), there is much joy to be had here as well, because of Montaigne’s intimate portraits of the penguins themselves — especially their interactions with one another. Like so many others, I have always found these waddling, tuxedo-clad birds to be unbelievably endearing. But these are no cartoon figures. The social dynamics within the colonies are especially fascinating. Adélie penguin pairs form strong bonds. If both survive the harsh winter season, they will generally reunite each year to mate. Sometimes, however, this doesn’t work out perfectly, and if a female finds her former partner with someone new, the result can be jealous fights.

It’s hard not to see human motivations and behavior mirrored in these love triangles. Through his astute observations of these and other interactions amongst the penguins Fraser has studied for so long, Montaigne illuminates complex and deeply moving relationships. As we watch these birds work together (and sometimes clash) while trying to survive in one of the harshest climates on the planet, we see glimpses of ourselves, and, perhaps, come to empathize with the plight of these magnificent creatures living on the edge of our fragile world.

Along with the endearing stories, I must warn that there are some parts of the book that the more sensitive reader may find upsetting. There is a history of Antarctic exploration that highlights the seal and whaling industries that were prevalent in the region. Hearing about the great numbers of seals, whales, and even penguins that were killed can be hard to stomach. In addition, there is a chapter called “Predators” that the squeamish may want to skim over.

Fraser’s Penguins gives the reader a glimpse into the majesty of the Antarctic and the tragedy of its decline. Montaigne’s depiction of the region will certainly cause the reader to empathize with the Adélies, and hopefully it will inspire them to take actions to ease their impact on our planet.

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Editor’s Note: For a fictional tale about penguin research, which also gives a great deal of information about these fascinating animals, we also suggest you read The Tourist Trail by John Yunker.

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Much of human existence can be summed up as the pursuit of power. Whether it’s the power to change the world, to make someone laugh or make someone cry, no one has ever gotten anything done without it. And it is the dynamics of power, for better or (mostly) for worse that have defined relations between humanity and animals on our planet. In Dave Egger’s The Wild Things, a novel based on Maurice Sendak’s enduring 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are and Spike Jonze’s 2009 film of the same name, a young boy named Max learns exactly how much power he can have. He also learns when to stop. There is, perhaps, a lesson to be learned from Max about what our relationship with real “wild things” could be, if we learned the appropriate limits of power.

"The Wild Things" (Faux) "Fur" Edition by Dave Eggers

In case we forgot, it’s not easy being a kid. Max is on the bottom. Everyone else looks down to him, wants to teach him something or give him an order. His older sister is way too cool for him now; she’d rather be giggling with boys who are chewing tobacco. His mom is dating a mushy-faced and fake nice guy who Max can’t stand. His dad lives in the city in a small apartment, and when he has a girl over, which is all too often, there is no room for Max. But tonight, Max is feeling more alive than usual; once he slips into his wolf suit, his ferocity is uncontainable. He can’t help it that he drenches his sister’s room in buckets of water (she deserves it) or that he bites his mom (it’s what wild things do). He doesn’t belong in this house anyway. So he leaves, and sails a long journey to an island where he can finally be himself — he is where the wild things are.

This is an island inhabited only by wild things, like Max. Together they can be wild! Destroy things, set fire to the forest! No rules, no homework, no saying you’re sorry. And, most surprising, Max finds it is easy for him to become ruler. All he has to do is say a few things they’ve never heard before and suddenly they’ve made him king! Just by being the only human on an island of wild things, without even trying, he becomes the most powerful living thing there. But soon Max learns that even wild things have hearts. And in the end, it’s even lonelier at the top than it is at the bottom.

This story takes on a new dimension when the child-like wild beasts of Max’s private island are seen as the wild things of our real world. Animals, wild and domesticated, occupy a place in our society where virtually any human, even one at the bottom of the human totem pole, can become their king. Like loyal dogs, the wild things completely trust Max’s intentions. And in the child-like intoxication of his power, Max is a dictator. Though his violence is not malevolent, the wild things are hurt: bruised, broken, battered. Max, in his wolf suit, slowly begins to realize that he may look like a wild thing on the outside, but he is a human within. That humanity has given him power, but it also bestows responsibility.

As with many humans who deal with animals, Max sets out to dominate these creatures without grasping the consequences of his actions. However, because of his child-like sensitivity, he decides to stop when he realizes these beasts are more like him than he initially thought. It is the wild things’ personalities — Eggers writes their voices in a way that often reminded me of what  thoughtful dogs would say if they could talk — that convinces Max of their ability to think and feel. His conscience stops him from going too far. As Max learns, the wild things are not only to be emulated and admired for their wildness, but also respected — and even feared — for what they are capable of. Wild things are to be honored — at a distance.

"Where the Wild Things Are" Movie (2009)

It is hard not to take away the message that people who harm animals are trying to empower the shrunken child within them; it is an instant dose of absolute power. But just as childishness can contribute to these sad, abusive tendencies, maintaining a child’s awed perspective of an animal’s power may be our best chance at keeping them safe. We need to work at maintaining Max’s ability to both identify with and fear the beasts at the same time.

Although The Wild Things can be understood as a rich allegory about the relationship between humanity and animals, it feels like a high-energy adventure, and you will feel like a high-energy child as you read. Eggers writes effortlessly — his prose simple and conversational, immediately accessible and intensely vivid. The hopefulness, the fervent enthusiasm and the palpable loneliness of not understanding our complex and punishing universe resonate in unexpected ways. It’s as if childhood memories and floating emotions from years ago flash back in an instant, and Max’s feelings and the reader’s become one.

In Max’s universe, where the punished wants to become the punisher, where out-of-control creatures may seem to be looking for a leader to tell them what to do, everything feels strangely familiar. Because we are lucky to live on this planet with so many powerful creatures — earth is where the wild things are. Let’s hope we can all learn the lessons that Max learned.

Painting at top of blog: “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak