The latest episode of the popular mainstream Fox TV show "Bones" featured an animal rights/veg story line. Entitled "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken," it's surprisingly jam-packed with info and intelligent discussion. Centered on a murder at a poultry processing plant, footage and info on how chickens are treated were shown, including video of the debeaking of newborn chicks. It isn't all blood 'n' guts (they show those images only briefly), there is an emotional discussion between characters on the ethics of saving one pig from slaughter. Animal activists are also part of the story line. But that's enough. I won't spoil it...



I suspect the star (and a producer) of the show, Emily Deschanel, an ethical vegan, had something to do with it. Go "Bones"!

You can watch the episode on Hulu for free or click on the image above.

Writer Jonathan Safran Foer's been getting a lot of media attention lately for the just published Eating Animals, his first book-length piece of nonfiction, which is very much against the eponymous activity. I haven't read it, and I don't expect that I (or most SuperVegan readers) will learn much from it that we don't already know about what's wrong with eating animals. This is not a book written for vegans. But it's a book that vegans ought to have some understanding of.

For better or worse, an established literary novelist like Foer can get people to pay attention to what's wrong with factory farming in a way that more academic or of-the-movement authors such as Peter Singer or Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson cannot. And Foer is relatively folksy and accessible (if not artless) compared to someone like J.M. Coetzee, whose arguments in defense of animals are unapologetically over most people's heads, and who isn't about to do a bunch of press interviews.

Foer finds lots of problems with industrial animal agriculture, and with eating meat in a general ethical sense, but he does not come down against non-meat or non-food animal products. This is a book about meat. That's got a lot of vegans understandably perturbed--an influential guy sets up a strong argument for many tenets of veganism, yet fails to go there. Mainstream media may not care, but it's important for us vegans to understand why Foer isn't vegan, and how he feels about veganism.

Josh Hooten of Herbivore attended a talk by Foer last night at Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Hooten is the right kind of vegan, and he wrote a great report/defense on the talk (which he posted on Facebook, and graciously allowed me to republish here.) Here's the first and last sentences, and you can read the whole thing below.

Foer isn't an animal rights person, he is coming from outside our community and perhaps that is why he is getting the attention he's getting for his new book Eating Animals.
...
As a messenger getting people to think about this stuff for the first time, I think he's amazing.

As readers know, October was the third annual Vegan Month of Food. Started by celebrity chef Isa Chandra Moskowitz, vegan mofos everywhere posted daily blogs in celebration of our favorite subject — food! Vegan Month of Food kicked off with World Vegetarian Day and ends with a bang tomorrow at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. In addition to this sandwich of events, here is a completely subjective roundup of things that made October one mofo of a month!

In the Mainstream

Vegan for the Animals
Author Jonathan Safran Foer made a big splash with a taster from his new book Eating Animals, published as a feature article in the NY Times Magazine's Food issue. After reading Eating Animals, actress Natalie Portman went vegan and announced her reasons in her essay "Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan" for the Huffington Post (that counts as a MoFo blog, right?). Blink 182 drummer (and rehabilitated puppy-juicer) Travis Barker has once again seen the light. He says he's back to being vegetarian and "almost full blown vegan now."

Vegan for the Environment
We've been saying it all along but it looks like we may finally be arriving at a tipping point. Even mainstream sources and enviro orgs are agreeing that eating meat causes global warming and going veg reduces your carbon footprint. Omnivore's Dilemma author and foodie darling Michael Pollan stuck his foot in it by stating: "A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius." Then retracted the statement the next day. I thought it was fuzzy math to begin with (here's an interview with one of the original researchers and number crunchers), but I hope his blunder doesn't cloud the issue, which is that vegans have a substantially lighter overall effect on the environment than meat-eaters. Duh. Joining the bandwagon, the WorldWatch Institute's latest magazine asks the question, "Carnivorism and climate change: Is it worse than we thought?"

I flew into Portland on Friday to attend this year's National Animal Law Conference at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, OR. I visited the "Brooklyn of the West" to make my jeans fit tighter and attend conference sessions on issues relating to the criminal prosecution of animal cruelty, the link between domestic violence and animal abuse, the intersectionality between animal rights and human rights, and so on and so forth.

But, in honor of Vegan MoFo III, you want to hear about the food, right? For the first time in a very long time, I received a vegan meal on the plane. I stopped requesting them long ago, but my Continental Airlines frequent flyer profile still lists me as a scary, radical vegan. Much to my surprise, about an hour into the flight, a box containing a vegan soy patty with cheese on a whole wheat English muffin appeared on my tray table. It was surprisingly good. A partially frozen fruit cocktail, a Sara Lee "bagel", Smart Balance (the vegan kind) and a packet of Mrs. Dash, which I'm still not sure of its intended use, accompanied it. Continental gets thumbs up on the English muffin sandwich and for getting me to Portland on time.

My first stop in Portland was La Bonita for some of the tastiest black beans to pass through my digestive track. For only $6.95, I procured a large plate with two soft tacos, a heaping mound of rice, a liberal portion of beans and chunky guacamole. Good job, NE Portland.

Here at SuperVegan we hold a special place in our hearts for Captain Paul Watson and the Sea Shepard Conservation Society. Not only because one of our own, SuperVegan blogger and bona fide vegan pirate Tod Emko has fought right alongside Mr. Watson, but also because while you and I may be content to sip on our agave-sweetened soy lattes while debating the nuances of vegan "cheese", these ladies and gents are in the trenches fighting the good fight.

At the Edge of the World opens today in NYC at Cinema Village and will continue until September 3rd.

Those familiar with Animal Planet's, Whale Wars will be acquainted with the premise (incidentally, the finale was the most watched show in the channel's history): a determined group of eco activists attempt to disrupt a Japanese Whaling fleet in Antarctic Waters by any means necessary!

The director will be on hand for a Q&A at tonight's (Friday) shows.

Former Sanskrit professor and Freudian analyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a prolific author who has focused on animal issues in many of his books, including The Cat Who Came in From the Cold and Altruistic Armadillos to Zenlike Zebras. In his latest, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food, Masson examines factory farming, the animals who are exploited as a result and the human denial that allows it to continue.

SV: Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with SuperVegan. I was very excited to read The Face on Your Plate, especially after I saw the video of the reading you gave in San Francisco back in March.

You were raised vegetarian, started eating flesh when you became a Freudian analyst, then returned to vegetarianism while writing When Elephants Weep. You then went vegan while researching The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, a result of visiting dairy farms and egg-laying facilities. Do you think you would have gone vegan had you not seen what you did?

JMM: Well, I knew about the horrors before and did not doubt that raising animals for milk or eggs is terribly cruel and cannot be otherwise. But seeing it with my own eyes really did have an enormous impact on me.

SV: Since most people will never have the opportunity to see a slaughterhouse or an animal agriculture facility, how can we open their eyes to the horrors of the industry and that it’s within their power to change it by going vegan? Is that the goal of the book?

JMM: Yes, that is the goal of the book. I am hoping that the people who read it will become convinced that I am telling the truth and will save themselves the horror of seeing the animals suffer and simply go vegan. It really is the only logical conclusion to the information now freely available to everyone.

Usually, I love reading the Huffington Post. However, in the past week they posted a surprisingly scathing blog entry calling Sea Shepherd a terrorist group.

However, the blog made all its arguments based on many assumptions that many people seem to be making about conservation lately, so it seemed worth it to address the blog.

For the first part of this post, we will first address the main themes of the Huffington blog, for the benefit of most readers. Afterwards, we will have, for anyone who has the time or curiosity, a much longer section analyzing every other argument made in the Huffington blog, as it does address other arguments against conservation law enforcing.


The main themes

The central theme of the Huffington blog is mentioned time and time again, and put succinctly in its eighth paragraph:

"Of course the whalers, whatever you may think of their activities, are operating legally. It is Watson and the Sea Shepherds who are the criminals."

So, although we've addressed this partially in previous posts, let's cover it comprehensively here.

Here is a list of illegal activities that the whalers are performing on video, much of which was outlined by Paul Watson:

Today, after a long struggle, the European Union has finally voted to ban all seal products. This is a huge victory for the seals, and hopefully it will go a long way to ending the massacre of any more Canadian baby seals.

Even before it passed, it seems the threat of the ban already devastated the baby seal hunting industry. In 2006, seal pelts sold for $105, while this year they sold for $14 each.

The result being, Canada had a quota of 280,000 seals this year, but the sealers ultimately only bothered to slaughter 59,500. Longtime seal hunter and seal hunt advocate Jack Troake stated, "We just couldn't seal for those prices. The prices were too low."

Canada's government tried many things, including sending Inuit seal hunters to the European Parliament to plead Canada's case for them, before the EU finally voted in favor of the ban. Canada's great effort against the ban and the dramatic drop in seal pelt prices both indicate that the seal hunt will no longer be worth it post EU ban. Hopefully the permanent end of the hunt is now imminent.

From September to December 2008, the vegan conservation group Sea Shepherd waged a fight to protect the ecosystem and all the animals of the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. This blog recounts what happened in that time, serving for the group.

The post below recounts what Wolf Island was like, the island that we were on a mission to defend.

On Wolf Itself

Wolf is surrounded on all sides by high cliffs, and there's no dock, since no humans are allowed on the island. To get onto Wolf, you take a speedboat to the cliff edge, when the waves permit. Then you run off the front of the speedboat and cling to the cliff rocks as the boat speeds away. Then you hope there's enough footing to get up the cliff because no one else probably climbed that rock face before you. At the top, you'll be ripped to shreds by cactus, but it's worth braving all of that because you'll see things you'll never see anywhere else in the world.