| (no subject) |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|12:46 pm] |
" And yes I have all of the usual objections to miseducation
Of children forced into tax-exempt institutions and taught to externalise blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right or wrong"
- Tim Minchin, White Wine In The Sun
Check out the latest billboards from the Athiest Bus Campaign here that look at religion and children. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|02:03 am] |
My, my, there have been some interesting news stories of late...
Most people I know wouldn't intentionally eat an endangered species. But that's what's happening to several major species of fish. Take the Flapper Skate. They are set to become the first species that human's have driven to extinction due to over-fishing. This is due to an 80 year old mistake in identification of the flapper skate and the blue skate as one species. They were also considered to be critically endangered. The headlines for this story are quite interesting- blaming the identification error for the problem rather than, you know, catching and killing them.
Tuna (aka the endangered species you can buy in a tin in your supermarket) have been having a hard time as well. Last month the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna reduced the global quota by 20% in 2010 which is good news, but it still remains to be seen if quota's will be exceeded. The International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna met this week and despite Atlantic Bluefin Tuna being endangered, the fishing quota's were dropped to an offical quota of 13,500 tonnes for 2010. There is a history of overfishing and illegal fishing and some reports suggested that a drop to 8,000 would be needed if not an outright ban, it's bad news. There is a push to have Atlantic Bluefin Tuna listed at the CITES meeting next March.
Overfishing has other ramifications. As gannet parents have to travel for a longer time to feed, their young are often left alone. This makes them easy prey to pelicans, who also have had their food supply reduced by human activity. Check out the video here to see what happens (it's from the rather excellent BBC series Life).
According to Animals Australia, 60 Minutes will be showing an expose on the way pigs are treated in Australian piggeries at 6:30pm this Sunday. Animals Australia are also running a new tv ad on intensive farming. Should be be interesting viewing.
The manager of a cattle station in the Northern Territory has expressed remorse about shooting an animal and said "It is not really a trophy or something you would brag about. It makes you feel sick." Of course this is because he shot a vulnerable pygmy hippo that had escaped from a zoo. Had he shot a species he was trying to kill that would have been totaly different.
Some good news in the form that Selfridges will no longer be selling foie gras. Of course this doesn't stop Gordon Ramsey from being a wanker by promoting it.
And finally, I'm glad that I rarely use make-up and what I do use is of the vegan variety after reading this article on people being killed for cosmetic fat. Seems they were onto something in Fight Club. |
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| World Vegan Day |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|09:58 am] |
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Happy World Vegan day to everyone :) |
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| Relief effort for animals |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|07:13 pm] |
The Animal Protection Society of Samoa have updated their facebook page with some information about the impact of this weeks earthquakes and tsunami on animals. They have visited the south side of the island to assess the situation. Many animals that were restrained have died, though there were many dogs and cats seen with minor injuries but belive that there are other animals that they weren't able to reach due to the landscape.
The World Society for the Protection of Animals is co-ordinating a disaster response team in the area with support from the New Zealand Department Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) and Auckland and Wellington SPCAs. They expect to arrive tomorrow further information can be found here.
You can donate to the WSPA relief effort here (specify that you want your donation to go to the disaster relief fund) and to the Auckland SPCA here.
You'll be helping the wonderful dogs of the Pacific islands like Rex in my icon :) And that's a good thing.
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| Fabulous! |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|11:00 pm] |
Due to the large number of queer, queer-friendly, vegetarian, vegan and tollerant omni's who are on my friends page and because I spent last Sunday serving up lovely vegan food en masse at Pride Fair Day, I thought some of you might be interested in this article:
What Vegans Can Learn from the Gay Right's Movements Successes
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 26th, 2009|04:21 pm] |
An interesting article on activism. Chances are if you are reading my lj you are already tollerant to "those damn preachy vegans", but still worth a read.
So. When a vegan is talking to a meat-eater about these issues, he or she is not "preaching", "trying to convert", or any such thing. We're not telling you what to eat. We're telling you what you're eating.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-solomon/who-you-callin-vegangelic_b_290582.html |
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| Heeeeey Guacamole! |
[Sep. 18th, 2009|10:45 am] |
I love Mexican food and our house seems to have an influx of avocados. This means guacamole!
The choppy mashy bit
Take 5 medium sized avocados and mash them up.
Then take a tomato and chop it finely.
Also chop a small onion (either brown or red) up finely. More finely than the tomato.
Take three large cloves of garlic and either chop really, really fine or mince them. If you don't like garlic as much as me, use less.
The mixy bit
Take the tomato, garlic, onion and avocado and mix them all together.
Squeeze over the juice from half a lemon.
Add salt and cracked pepper to taste.
The eaty bit
Serve with corn chips for a party. You can get funky organic blue corn chips with look really pretty and taste pretty good too. You can also add them to tacos, nachos or burritos. Or you can just do what I do which spread it on corn thins and eat as a snack.
Ole!
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| Such a alot of taste... |
[Sep. 13th, 2009|03:04 pm] |
Damn you![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) new_perestroika </b></a></div> for telling me that BBQ Shapes were vegan. I had them for the first time in over 11 years (probably longer) last night.
And they were gooooood!
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 9th, 2009|09:35 am] |
Dear Govinda's Hare Krishna Restaraunt in Northbridge,
I know you aren't a vegan place to eat, but even though you charge me the same amount for lunch even though the halava and custard is never vegan I've generally found you an ok vegetarian alternative in Northbridge and certainly a better option to alot of the guild food at uni.
I know in the past your staff have lied about the vegan-ness food you serve, and even though I once ended up in hospital as a result of the catering you provided that I was told was vegan, I had put that aside as a miscommunication issue with the individual involved, rather than an inherent part of your business strategy.
I know that you talk about how sacred cows are even though you still continue to pay for the rape and murder of them and continue to promote this as being ok to the general public. This will always annoy me, but I'd rather have more vegetarian options available in a place than none.
I also resent the fact you complain when other groups offer vegan catering at the same event as you. Heaven forbid there be competition and variety in the options Perth's growing vegetarian and vegan community has at events. Heaven forbid that they force you to clean up your act and improve your customer service and food quality.
Yesterday I popped by your Northbridge restaraunt and asked about what was on the lunch menu and what was vegan. I was told that the curry was, except for the large chunks of whey/cheese in there. But that was okay because you can pick it out and it would be vegan. Because as we all know if there were big hunks of corpse in there and you picked it out it would be okay for your followers.
This attitude is nothing short of disgusting and does a disservice to the vegetarian and vegan community and I'm choosing to warn others about your crappy attitudes to others out there.
Love,
Vegetus |
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| Chickens |
[Sep. 7th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
I've written elseware about the fate of male chicks as a by product of the egg industry. Last week Mercy For Animals released new footage from the world's largest egg-laying breed hatchery in Iowa showing live chicks being thrown into a mincer. A write up of their investigation can be found here. Crushing, mincing and gassing of male chicks are all standard throughout the commercial egg industry in the UK, US and Australia.
Currently before the ACT Legislative Assembly there is a bill to ban caged egg production systems in the ACT from January 2011 and require all eggs from caged systems to be sold with explicit signage about the conditions they were produced in.
Details of the bill are here and with a greater explanation here.
If you are in the ACT I urge you to write to your MLA so that this bill gets through.
A great site on the issues around egg production in Australia by Animals Australia can be found here. Also Free Range Canberra and Animal Liberation ACT have been involved in the ACT campaign.
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| On defining rights vs welfare |
[Aug. 24th, 2009|11:18 pm] |
It's come up lately that many people out there don't seem to know the difference between animal rights and animal welfare (and I'm getting sick of non-vegans telling me that they support animal rights*). Here's a quick summary, which I do encourage comment and elaboration on, because I know there are some damn clever people who read this who will have many more interesting ideas to add.
Animal Rights (sometimes called Animal Liberation): The belief that non-human animals have the right to exist and live for their own means, and for their own reasons. Non-human animals are not property that humans can (ab)use as they see fit. This is generally based on sentience.
Animal Welfare: The belief that it's ok for humans to use non-human animals, as long as it's done in a "humane" or "compassionate" manner where suffering to the individual is minimised. Welfare can be measured and is often seen in terms of physical welfare, mental welfare and if the individual has the chance to express "natural" behaviours.
Rights vs Welfare: AR and AW are fundimentally different, one regulates animal abuse, the other seeks to elliminate it. There are many suitations in our modern society where welfare and rights clash (eg happy meat**) and in some issues where the push for welfare is more common than the push for rights within the animal protection movement (eg a whole bunch of companion animal issues). Some people hold rights as the ideal, but still think that there is benefit to also work for welfare measures in the short term. Some people take an abolutionist view, where they believe working for welfare measures hinders the goal of reaching animal liberation.
You cannot be for animal rights if you aren't vegan. It's like being for pacifism, except when you kill people on occassion. If you are going out and killing someone because you like the way they taste (or pay someone else to do your dirty work) you cannot wish to give them rights because you still see them as something (rather than someone) that you can own and use for your own means.
* I'd just like to add that whilst you cannot support animal rights without being vegan, you can be vegan without supporting animal rights
** "happy meat" is the term given to free range/organic/humane/non intensively farmed animal flesh products due to the idea that animals are "happy" before they are killed and butchered. For more information on this I suggest looking at humanemyth.org
EDIT: I repeated the first two paragraphs accidently when first posted (oops!), so have now changed that :) Thanks to alias_sqbr for pointing it out.
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| Cake Competition in Melbourne |
[Aug. 21st, 2009|12:33 pm] |
Apparently the Barricade Anarchist Bookshop (62 St Georges Road, Northcote) is holding a Vegan Cake Competition tomorrow (22nd August).
It all kicks off at 3pm with cakes for sale and prizes for best dressed and most scrumptious cakes.
Contact info@barricade.org.au for more information.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|08:50 pm] |
I am amused by all the ranting about how the latest Triple J's Hottest 100 of all time doesn't have an exactly 52/48 ratio of female artists to male artists.
I was going to write a big rant about how vegetarians are *totally* under represented on a radio station popularity poll. But then I looked at the artists listed and realised we aren't. If you assume that vegetarians make up 5% of the population (which is optimistic) there are more than 5 listings of songs where the artist (or in the case of bands, most of the band members) don't eat animals. And I mean real vegetarians none of this pesci-flexi-tarian crap.
Clearly this means that everyone thinks that vegetarians are disproportionately better than meat eaters at music! And even the marketing of musicians is such that vegetarians are especially advantaged!
Or I could just be realistic and go...
"Hey this is a radio station poll, not the federal election. In the grand scheme of things does it really matter who wins? There are better places to fight the good fight on issues.
And you know what some meat eaters sing good songs, some vegetarians sing good songs. Some songs are to my taste. Some songs are not to my taste. Triple J listeners who could be bothered to vote in this are not the defining voice on what is good or bad in music."
Now lets turn on the music and eat a piece of vegan chocolate cake! |
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