TO THE MAX!

Our popular columnist finally gets his head on the website.

The trouble with the world today is that there’s just too much black comedy for a poor boy to fit into one short column.

Quote of the Quarter: “America has no intellectual class and is rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush … Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred – religious hatred, racial hatred … One thing I have hated all my life are liars and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour – that can be lies, too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” – Gore Vidal, September 2009

Fat Facts: It had to happen. An obese American jail inmate managed to hide a gun from authorities after he was arrested because he was so overweight he could conceal it inside his rolls of fat. 500lb (227kg) George Vera, 25, hid the pistol underneath his rolls of flesh, where it remained undetected during five separate searches. Vera had been arrested by police and taken to the city jail on suspicion of bootlegging CDs. A spokesman for the Houston Police Department confirmed that procedures call for a suspect to be searched upon arrest, twice at the city jail and once more upon his transfer. Vera was then transferred to the county jail, where he was searched at least once more. It was only when he was in the shower later that day that Vera confessed to a guard that he had a weapon on him. Officers subsequently found a 9-millimetre handgun beneath his folds of flab.
• Obesity rates in the US have surged over the last year. Adult obesity rates rose in 23 of the 50 states, but fell in none. The percentage of obese and overweight children is at or above 30 per cent in 30 states. Widespread obesity is fuelling rates of chronic disease and is responsible for a large and growing chunk of domestic healthcare costs. Obesity is linked to a range of health problems, including heart disease, stroke and type-2 diabetes.
• One in six obese Australians and more than half of the overweight population wrongly believe they are a healthy weight, says a survey commissioned by the Heart Foundation. Obesity is being “normalised” by the tendency to judge ourselves against other people, not scientifically based weight guidelines. 54 per cent of survey participants were overweight or obese, up from 50 per cent last year. Cancer of the oesophagus in Australia has surged 400 per cent in 40 years, mainly due to the “obesity epidemic”.
• While we’re on the subject, a friend who just turned 50 decided to subject himself to a medical exam. His doctor sent him to have some tests done at the pathology department, where his blood was taken by an obese guy with three chins. The guy handed him three “stool sample” containers, saying he should take consecutive samples, not necessarily every day but consecutive. My friend said it wouldn’t be a problem for him as he was vegan and didn’t have any trouble with his bowels. The fat guy looked at him, adjusted his massive gut beneath his belt and said, “I’m a beef man and I don’t have any trouble either.” More than you needed to know, right?

The Animals’ Revenge: A hippopotamus killed a member of Democratic Republic of Congo government forces at Virunga National Park while he was fishing illegally on a lake with friends. He could not swim and was devoured by the hippo, who overturned the boat. Usually it’s the other way round – the military shoots at the animals. At least 18 animals including seven elephants, four hippopotamuses and a lion were killed in the park between late August and early September of this year.
• South Korean police have been investigating whether a zoo elephant threw a stone at a woman visitor. Ms Kim was visiting the zoo at the Children’s Park in Seoul when she saw an elephant picking up a stone with her trunk. After Ms Kim turned away from 35-year-old Taesani, she was hit on the back of her head by a large stone. Police found the scene of the alleged assault was out of range of security cameras.

Overpopulation, what overpopulation? Britain is experiencing a baby boom that’s contributed to the largest annual population increase in almost 50 years. The population rose by more than 400,000 last year to 61.4 million, as women had more children than at any time since 1973. Here in Australia it’s the same story, with the birthrate at its highest level in decades.

Way to go. Despite a recession that reduced global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals. The US signed weapons deals valued at $US37.8 billion ($47.8 billion) in 2008 – 68.4 per cent of international sales – up from $US25.4 billion the previous year.

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin – more even than death … Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man.” – Bertrand Russell

TO THE MAX! appears in every issue of Vegan Voice, available in selected outlets and by subscription. This extract is from our Dec 09-Feb 10 issue.

THE SHOCKING TRUTH

Controversial American vegan activist Dave Warwak talks to VV about telling children the truth, not staying silent and not being part of the problem.
Interview: SB

I'VE BEEN up to no good chatting to Dave Warwak, radical vegan “troublemaker”, about children, lies, and life on this here Earth. First, though, a little background. Warwak was an art teacher at a Wisconsin junior high school in the winter of 2006 when he discovered veganism. When he returned to school after the Christmas break, Dave was quite literally a different person. He wanted to spread what he’d learned about compassion so he bought some marshmallow peeps – yellow candy shaped like tiny chicks – for his students and for the faculty. He asked that each person personalise the peeps and keep them safe and sound for three days before returning them. Many of the children became attached to the peeps and only reluctantly gave them back to their teacher.

Next Dave took the personalised peeps and put them in a mural in the school’s hallway. On the first day he took some peeps, dismembered them and put their heads on plaques painted on the walls as if they were hunters’ trophies. The next day he put a few peeps in cages as if they were in a zoo. On the third day he put some of the peeps between slices of bread. Others were left crushed as roadkill. The point of the peeps was clear: animals, like the peeps, should be cared for, not jailed, eaten and killed. The school instructed him to stop what he was doing, which he did.

Then Dave noticed some “milk moustache” posters had gone up in the school, so he bought copies of John Robbins’s book The Food Revolution and gave them to his students. They discussed what was done to animals to make them into food and Dave suggested that the only way animals could avoid this fate was for humans to go vegan. Soon parents, wondering why their children would no longer eat meat, began calling the principal. Dave was asked to stop teaching veganism. He then demanded that the school cafeteria go vegan and also asked the district attorney to look into child endangerment by the school for serving the children meat and dairy. To cut to the chase, Dave was fired.

Almost two years to the day, I’m hearing this amazing tale direct from the man himself.
I tell Dave he must have been through hell (because, as you can imagine, there’s a lot more to the story). I ask him if, on reflection, he thinks he might have been asking for trouble by carrying out such a shocking idea in a conservative hunting and fishing state like Wisconsin. “Yes and no,” he says. “It depends on how you want to look at success. What happened created so much press and so much awareness about such serious issues. Really, I think the solution to most of the world’s problems is humane education and vegan lunches in school. If I’d done it in New York or California maybe it wouldn’t have made a big splash and maybe it just would’ve gone unnoticed.”

I tell him that it seems to have happened very quickly, from him going vegan to being embroiled in a major battle for the hearts and minds of his students. “I didn’t even know what a vegan was,” he says. “At 43 years old I had never heard the word. What happened was I self-actualised. I looked in the mirror and I thought, ‘Why should I feel bad about anything? I’m healthy and fit, I’m relatively young, what’s the problem in the world?’ And then I realised just from sitting down and thinking about everything … well, I just looked at things different, and I realised I was the problem in the world. You know, I was a fishing guide for 30 years, teaching people how to kill. I was totally desensitised to it. That’s how I was raised. But when I self-actualised, I realised I had to change what I was doing.”

Dave says the idea to go vegan came out of the blue. He remembers learning about self-actualisation in psychology class at college but never thought anything of it. “I never really understood it and when it happened to me I didn’t know what was happening. It really was during a 24-hour period where it was like the blinders were taken off and I saw society how it actually was. And one of the things I saw was myself. And I looked down at my plate and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing?’ I realised that this was once an animal, you know, for the first time in my life.”

I ask Dave if he had expected to lose his job over the peep project or if he genuinely believed he would win people over. “Well, when I did the peep lesson it was really in response to a need from my students. I was doing a graphic arts class, sixth grade, and several of the boys were being mean to animals on the computer. We started talking – we had a good relationship – and they told me exactly what they got up to after school. They would go down to the river and stick these bowie knives right through the centre of frogs’ bodies and then pin ‘em in the dirt and watch the frogs wriggle in intense pain. You can’t even imagine the kind of nightmare it would be, pinned on a knife like that. And then they laugh for an hour and they watch the thing die. And then they go home and they crush beetles and have a conversation about who can kill the most beetles. That’s what they told me.

“So, as a teacher, if I know this is going on I have to do something about it. I went to the principal and he asked if I’d talked to the parents and I said yeah, I talked to the dad and it turns out that he sits in the backyard with his son and a BB gun and they shoot everything that moves. So he’s OK with it. And the principal says, well, in that case there’s nothing we can do. And so I go and speak to the school psychologist and the social worker and they’re all telling me, just do what my boss tells me to do. Drop it. That’s when I went out and I got the peeps. I was addressing the needs of the children, it wasn’t to teach the adults anything. It was just an honest attempt at educating the kids about what I thought was one of the most important things in the world, and that is reverence for life. And why not bring that into an art classroom? And when the rest of the school saw how much fun my sixth grade class was having, they wanted to participate. That’s why the principal and the teachers all had their own peeps, that’s why the whole school felt attached to them. They didn’t eat the peep, they took care of it.

“I was kind of shocked that they reacted the way they did because I was very upfront with them about the lesson and I gave them handouts explaining what I was trying to do. But they didn’t take the time to read and think about the invitation. They were so indoctrinated they didn’t make the connection. I said, I’m here to show what we do with animals. I was upfront with everything. What they saw with their own eyes was very powerful, so they overreacted. The teachers filed a petition behind my back to remove the show, and these were people I’d worked with some 10 years. You know, people were ignoring me, treating me like I was from outer space, a leper. I’d been getting nothing but praise from everyone for my teaching for years. All of a sudden I’m the antichrist. Yeah, it shocked me and then when my principal flipped out too, it shocked me even more but I was still compliant. I took down my art show with the peeps and I didn’t do anything more with animals. And that’s when I lost respect for myself. And I had to do something with the milk moustache posters, otherwise I would be part of the problem.”

I’m curious to know if Dave was ever threatened with violence by anyone in the community. “Well actually,” he says, “I was beat up by some guys in hoods. I couldn’t identify them. This was in my hometown, some 35 miles away from Fox River Grove where I worked, which was, you know, the community that was mad at me. But it was in my hometown that I was jumped in the middle of the night and my face was mashed into the ground. I was told to drop it otherwise they were gonna come back and do worse. But it didn’t stop me. You can’t let stuff like that … It’s not really worthy even talking about stuff like that.”

THE GREAT PRETENDER

Chrissie Hynde comes over all mealy-mouthed and timid (nah, just kidding).

IN 1978 rock legend Chrissie Hynde formed The Pretenders. With her trademark dark fringe, outspoken views and “anti-fashion” look, she’s remained the epitome of cool and set many a guy and girl’s heart racing for the past three decades. Nowadays she uses her celebrity platform to campaign for animal rights in her role as PETA spokeswoman, even going so far as to get herself arrested for the cause. She spoke with Katrina Fox.

When did you first become vegetarian?
In 1969, when I was 17. I had never met a vegetarian.

So what led you to it?
I follow an Indian Vedic philosophy in which the cow is a sacred animal. If you kill a cow, you will come back as a cow for as many lifetimes as the cow has hairs on her body. That’s a lot of suffering.

You said in an interview in 2004 that you are “not interested in gender issues”. What did you mean?
I have never thought in terms of female, gay, Jewish and so on. I think in terms of meat eater and non-meat eater – that’s how I see the world. So I can’t feature gender issues but that’s how I see things. What I say is, “I won’t eat you if you don’t eat me”, “I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me” – to me, that’s a nice fair way of getting through the world.

Are you disappointed that more musicians aren’t vegetarian, if not vegan?
I got into the game in the late ’70s and being a product of the ’60s I thought by now everyone in music would be more conscious than other people because we were cooler and living outside the box and in rock bands. I assumed all the hippies from the late ’60s … I thought everyone in music would be vegetarians. Not so. It’s real disappointing when I walk into a recording studio and some idiot walks in and says, “I’m going out to Burger King, does anyone want anything?” and I’m sitting there thinking, “yeah, I want you to fuck off”. But he’s our tape op, so I’m like, “Who are you people?” What I’ve noticed – and I’ve been in this rock band for almost 30 years – is that all my mates are on the outside, marginal elements of society because straight people and wealthy people are not very interesting. See, because I have a hippy mentality, straight to me doesn’t mean “not gay”, being straight means the Establishment. That’s why I don’t get into the gender thing.

As a celebrity, you get to stand up on a platform and speak about a good cause. How do you feel about that?
The unfortunate part is people look to celebrities for their answers because, dare I say, there are no spiritual leaders. So they think that idiots, because they’re on a magazine cover, might have some insight on how to live your life when really the only person who can live your life for you is you. People are natural born followers and imitators so they’ll imitate someone else doing something because they think that person must be cooler than they are. But our only real thing is our own self-realisation, which is a very personal path that everyone is on. On the other hand, when I was a cocktail waitress no one cared what I thought about things. So I can see the beauty of having the platform, but whether I want it or not is something else.

MRS BEASLEY AND ME

Monique Steinhardt talks to VV about ‘that dear Dr Barnard’ and how he made
her a vegan. Interview: SB

MONIQUE STEINHARDT is 77 years old and a new vegan. Here’s how it happened. In early December of last year, Monique was listening to her usual classical FM radio station when she found herself riveted by the voice of vegan doctor Neal Barnard talking about his book The Reverse Diabetes Diet. In an interview with presenter Margaret Throsby, Dr Barnard laid out the facts about how a low-fat vegan diet can prevent and reverse diabetes, as well as other chronic disease.

Monique wanted to know more. Recently she had been experiencing a tingling in her lower legs and had been having attacks of dizziness for years. Many times she could not get up from her chair and had to crawl across the floor just to answer the phone. Her GP wanted her examined by a specialist to check that it wasn’t an indication of angina. Monique did a bit of detective work and tracked down Vegan Voice. I picked up the phone and the first thing Monique asked me was whether I could help her change to a vegan diet.

We had a long conversation during which Monique informed me that she used to be a vegetarian until her doctor advised her to add some red meat to her usual (huge) plate of steamed vegies for lunch. The doctor insisted red meat was needed for iron. Monique reluctantly added the meat but told me her doctor would have been horrified at the small quantities. Then, when Monique heard Dr Barnard say that iron could be easily obtained on a plant-based diet, she decided to investigate. That’s when she called VV. “Why haven’t we been made aware that we can do without meat?” she asked me. “Why isn’t it common knowledge?”

Why indeed.

Monique went shopping the next day for soy milk, tofu and tempeh. I told her that if she didn’t like them she didn’t have to eat them and that there were many alternatives. “Yes, that lovely Dr Barnard said there was plenty of protein in plant foods,” she told me.
She then chose to swap her usual breakfast cereal for organic wheat biscuits and rolled oats, replaced cow’s milk with soy and swapped her animal margarine for Nuttelex (I warned her to be sparing with it as it was still high in fat and she should eat low fat for maximum benefit).

Monique’s previous diet was very simple and fairly healthy, so she was not a difficult person to convince. (Dr Barnard had already done that.) She loved fruit and veggies and did not want to eat meat or dairy. Easy. She told me she had always adored animals and could not bear the thought of them being hurt. “That’s been my worry all my life,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been a vegetarian for many years.”

You can read the rest of these interviews in the Mar-May 09 issue of Vegan Voice.

STAND AND DELIVER

Melanie Joy’s book Strategic Action for Animals is all about being the best activists we can possibly be. In this extract, the author explains how to provide an emotional safety net when talking to meat eaters.

I ONCE overheard a conversation between a vegan and a curious meat eater at a dinner party. The meat eater, a man in his thirties, approached the vegan, a woman around the same age. The meat eater wanted to know how and why the vegan had stopped eating meat. The vegan, ideally poised to advocate, spent the next ten minutes rattling off all the reasons people shouldn’t eat animals, angrily pointing out how much suffering was caused by meat eaters who “just didn’t care” and proudly describing how much effort she put in to avoiding everything that contained animal products, including her clothing and shampoo. Of course, the meat eater was no longer curious, and worse, I later overheard him talking to someone about “those crazy vegans” and their “righteous self-denial”. It’s doubtless that any spark of openness to veganism the meat eater may have had was snuffed out that night. Why would he want to join a subculture made up of angry, self-centred and deprived individuals?

Another example had a more positive outcome. A young female student of mine who was a vegan peace activist used to sit next to a young man who was involved in human rights but hadn’t made the connection between human and nonhuman exploitation. The vegan often talked to the meat eater about human rights movements in which they were both active, and eventually started sharing her experience with animal rights. She was always careful to listen to the young man’s questions about veganism, responding mostly by sharing her own experience (“For me, it was about making the connection between violence toward humans and violence toward animals…”) and how she had been able to make the lifestyle change in a way that felt comfortable and empowering. Knowing that the man would feel uncomfortable coming to terms with his participation in animal exploitation, the vegan always validated his feelings by sharing how she, like many others, had also participated in practices that harmed animals because of a lack of awareness and the massive social pressure to maintain the status quo. Eventually the man became a supporter of animal rights due largely – if not entirely – to the fact that his first exposure to the issue was presented in a supportive, compassionate and empowering manner by a person whose actions reflected these values.

My student was following the example of Mahatma Gandhi, who understood the most important principle of strategic advocacy: true change must begin with oneself. Though social transformation is never the result of the efforts of a single individual, great leaders can mobilise millions. And great leaders are, among other things, great advocates. Gandhi was able to wage a large-scale revolution for the first time in human history without picking up a single weapon.

Expectations and advocacy
Whether your advocacy is effective or not depends largely on your expectations. Typically, people get what they expect, rather than what they want – from others and themselves – in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. One’s expectations may not even be expressed consciously, but one way or another, they do get communicated, and others will often raise or lower themselves to meet these expectations. Consider how an underachieving student can rise to the top of the class simply because the teacher believes in her. Organisational scholars refer to this phenomenon as expectancy theory.

In terms of animal advocacy, many vegan advocates, for instance, sincerely want others to stop eating meat, but at the same time expect that the average person is too selfish or apathetic to truly change. They therefore resort to shaming and blaming. If you don’t believe that others are sensitive and conscientious enough to change their behaviours, you will inevitably use forceful or manipulative tactics in an attempt to make them change. The antidote is to align your expectations with your desires and goals, so that what you expect is the same as what you want.

Read the rest of this extract in the June-August 09 issue of Vegan Voice.