Our Hen House co-founder and Executive Director Jasmin Singer came to animal rights by way of LGBT rights, and that circuitous foray into this movement has informed her activism for good. As a feminist who cannot be trusted to keep her mouth shut when she probably should (she likes to call this her “charm”), Jasmin’s brassiness, sentimentality, and keen appreciation of the interconnections between social justice movements all play a leading role in this column. Deftly exploring everything from the unsettling social implications of her recent 100-pound weight loss, to her thoughts on how to change the world for animals in an accessible, personal, and effective way, Jasmin’s column is part memoir and part advocacy manifesto.
From the moment she found out what was really happening to animals, Our Hen House co-founder Mariann Sullivan knew the world had to change. The death machine may have the power, the influence, and the money, but we have the truth – and we need to share it. In her column, animal rights law professor Mariann shares her thoughts on how to do that, whether by way of the law, by way of the power of love, or, most essentially, by way of living in harmony with that truth.
Living in our society as a vegan and animal rights advocate presents countless challenges. One of the biggest is that to combat the horrifying and seemingly endless animal exploitation around us, we have to know about it. That means educating ourselves about things we would rather never see, hear, or learn. Another is potentially navigating difficult social situations that involve food we won’t eat, people who don’t understand us or are openly hostile to us, or actual animal abuse right in front of us. In her column, Piper Hoffman writes about these and other day-to-day problems we face, and also delves into the details of some of the unthinkable cruelty that industries, governments, and individuals perpetrate upon non-human animals.
The central premise of Picturing Animals, with Dr. Keri Cronin is that the ways in which animals are represented have very real, concrete, and material implications for the ways in which they are treated. The power of visual imagery to shape dominant attitudes about animals or, conversely, to challenge common understandings about them is something that those who advocate on behalf of animals need to think critically about. This column will alternate between images from previous eras and those produced in our current times to underscore this point.
There’s a very good argument that the single most important thing you can do for animals is to provide people with great vegan food. The more people wake up to the deliciousness and healthfulness of the food vegans love to eat, the more likely they are to wake up to the suffering caused by many of the foods they are used to eating. In Thought for Food, a wide variety of top-notch vegan chefs and food writers share their ideas, their attitudes, an occasional rant, and, most importantly, some of their finest cruelty-free recipes.
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