vegan issues

The Solution to the Riddle

October 22nd, 2013

While browsing facebook tonight I came across this status from Anita Krajnc (head of Toronto Pig Save)

Hi everyone, if you have a YouTube channel, can you please subscribe to Toronto Pig Save’s YouTube channel? We aim to get 1,000 subscribers soon so we can qualify to broadcast on YouTube Live. Our dream is to livestream our vigils so thousands can bear witness of the pigs, cows, chickens, sheep, fish and other animals heading to Toronto’s slaughterhouses. So far, we have 353 YT subscribers… If you can help us out, please let us know. Thanks!

Wow. They want to broadcast vigils live on youtube.

It reminds me of how you’re reading a book, and you’re like, how in the world is this going to end, and then the author comes up with a mind-blowing plot climax that’s just so good, you’re like, how did they ever think of that. That is just so perfect. So brilliant.

Let me explain. The mission of Toronto Pig Save is to make slaughterhouses have glass walls.

But slaughterhouses don’t have glass walls. Will never have glass walls, because they want to keep the carnage hidden (though I heard some have windows that you can see everything through).

Who would have ever guessed, then, that in a stunning plot twist, Toronto Pig Save, a small group of people standing on a single street in Canada, would take it global suddenly, by live broadcasting transport and possibly even slaughterhouse footage on youtube.

It reminds me of an old fairy tale when the witch tells the young girl, “I will give you what you want when slaughterhouses have glass walls” or some impossible task like that.

And the girl solves it.

I remember one where a witch asked her to collect water in a sieve and she did it by using clay from the riverbed to stop up the holes.

And now the riddle of putting glass walls on slaughterhouses has been solved too.

HA.

Imagine if they put a camera in a slaughterhouse and you could tune in at any time and the slaughter was always there. The constant screaming of the pigs. The torture. The blood. The fear.

I feel like this is a big idea. Just knowing there is a livestream of slaughterhouses–that the meat industry can’t get away with it anymore–would change things.

Imagine if during the holocaust there had been a livestream in the concentration camps. Would that have changed things I wonder.

I think people will suddenly wake up to the horrible spell that has been cast on them that allows them to stare unseeingly onto the meat filled menu.

Suddenly they will have to face the truth. There will probably be a media outcry. Soon everyone will be talking about it. And I’m sure most people will not watch it, but at least the truth will be out there at last for anyone who wants to see it.

Searchable on youtube. Live.

The truth will set us free.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Toronto Pig Save on youtube and let’s make this happen.

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Earthlings on The Pale Blue Vegan Dot

October 1st, 2013

I can’t sleep.

I’ve been trying to get up early and instead it’s backfiring. I go to bed with excellent intentions…then I lie in bed awake. Then I start getting ideas and feel so invigorated I want to just leap up from my bed with a clatter like in T’was The Night Before Christmas.

So I just decided to write a little blog post.

Well today my mom gave me a present. She had gotten me a photo by Jo-Anne McArthur for Christmas. She wanted to frame it for me, so she did. And she finally gave it to me today. Thanks MOM!! U DA BOM. ? No.

Mother, I thank thee kindly.

When she handed it to me and I looked at it, I was so struck by it.

I wrote on the facebook page:

When i saw it i was so struck by how perfect it is. it is even deeper to me now than when I first saw it.

It sums up all of the deep ideas at the heart of veganism.

Veganism–there is so much controversy and hype about it– but at the heart it is about this.

We are all earthlings. I haven’t even seen earthlings but that’s brilliant.

A chimp hand and an old woman’s hand– touching, sharing this wordless connection we all feel to each other and to all life forms on earth.

Isn’t there something mystical and amazing that we all share the ability to understand eachother despite language differences or abilities.

Veganism is about this mystical truth that we are all in this together– animals too– despite war and slavery– we are the same. All of us are created equal.

(I wonder if this is what earthlings is about and I’m late to the party.)

Have you ever heard that quote by Carl Sagan about the pale blue dot? You can hear him say it in his great voice here.

“We succeeded in taking a picture of earth from deep space, and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

― Carl Sagan,

I feel Carl got the same feeling looking at that picture of the pale blue dot, that I get from looking at this picture of Jo-Anne’s.

Two species, who aren’t supposed to understand each other, but do, touch hands and share in that moment ….. the mysteries of life on this pale blue dot.

Meanwhile, the other people on the pale blue dot insist animals aren’t even conscious.

Veganism is deeper than it seems.

It is about recognizing the need for freedom and justice for all living things.

We are all earthlings on the pale blue dot, all sharing in this miracle of life.

That’s the heart of veganism, I think.

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