From Australia:
RSPCA radicals push for vegan world
By David Nankervis
September 28, 2008 02:30am
A RADICAL push has been staged within the RSPCA to endorse vegan diets as the best way to prevent cruelty to farmed animals.
One of the supporters of the push has been elected to the board of the RSPCA SA branch and will stand for the presidency.
A motion to the taxpayer-assisted body’s annual general meeting on Wednesday called for it to adopt a range of controversial policies, including:
RECOGNISING egg, milk and chicken, pig and rabbit meat production “inflicts high levels of physical and psychological suffering on tens of millions of animals each year”.
ACKNOWLEDGING a vegetarian or vegan diet was “the most effective way to significantly reduce cruelty to animals farmed for meat, eggs and milk”.
ASKING RSPCA members to consider changing to a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Vegan diets exclude any animal product, including dairy food.
The motion was put by a “reformer” – one of a group within the RSCPA that aims to make the organisation more proactive on animal rights.
However, critics within the RSPCA have slammed the policy push as “pie in the sky” and out of touch with community values. While the motion was defeated, one of the reformers, Rosalie McDonald, was voted on to the RSPCA board and will stand for president in the ballot next week.
Ms McDonald said the motion was defeated only because it was presented at the end of a long meeting and “about half the members had left by then”.
“I voted for it because there is nothing wrong with it,” Ms McDonald, 67, said.
“They say a high fibre diet is much better for you.”
Ms McDonald, a semi-retired businesswoman who said she was not personally a vegetarian, described herself as a “reformer”.
“I feel the RSPCA management or president may represent us as . . . lunatics but with my particular background I hope they all realise I’m not a nutter,”the former teacher and local government councillor said.
The “reformer” who proposed the motion, former Animal Liberation president Peter Adamson, admitted he was branded a “food Nazi” at the meeting. But he defended the push and said the general public should consider vegetarian diets to reduce animal cruelty.
“It would be very educational for the RSPCA to encourage its members to be vegetarians and this is something I would like the general public to consider,” the former teacher, 62, said.
Ms McDonald said she wanted to become president to “reform the RSPCA to do what it is supposed to do”.
“It’s supposed to get out to the public arena and advocate the abolition of cruel practices . . . factory farming, battery hens and pork production.”
Ms McDonald also wants to increase RSPCA membership and funding.
But RSPCA member and veterinarian Andrew Carter said resolutions like the one supported by Ms McDonald “would put off middle-of-the-road people and have a negative impact on membership”.
“The message from that resolution is the RSPCA is trying to tell people what to do . . . but I don’t think becoming a vegetarian will solve problems of animal cruelty,” Dr Carter, who joined the RSPCA a year ago to represent mainstream values, said.
The motion was also attacked by former RSPCA national president Hugh Wirth who said the issue of animal food production and animal cruelty “won’t be resolved by a few people changing their dietary habits” and to think so was “pie-in-the-sky” thinking.
September 29, 2008 at 10:00 am
what is your opinion on the veganism thing. it has been talked about a lot these past few weeks in sb class here in alachua.
i have some friends who recently went to visit iskcowp and now they are vegans.
do you think it is a non-issue/personal thing…are you into it…are you without comment?
just curious, oh poet of the karela plant.
September 29, 2008 at 11:21 am
If you are serious about preaching to the kind of youth today who are socially aware enough to take to Krishna consciousness, you better be respectful of vegans and have a vegan alternative when feeding people.
I personally am not a vegan due to the pushing of the tongue, but I respect anyone who takes a principled stand against using milk from cows that will be slaughtered.
They look at us and see hypocrisy when we worship a god who protected cows and offer Him milk from cows that will be slaughtered.
Thinking it is okay because we chant some auspicious Vedic mantras and use the guru filter to take out all the karma only works with cult member doublethink, not with vegans.
I personally endorse a system of milk offsets, similar to carbon offsets, where even though we are trapped in an industrial society, if we use slaughtered cow milk, we offset it by supporting cow protection programs.
Here are a couple of things I have written on the topic:
Start Spreading the News
Stop Knocking Vegans
Veganism: Relative or Absolute
Searching my blog for for “vegan’ would reveal other posts as well.
September 29, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Regarding vegetarianism vs. veganism, man is the only species that drinks the milk of another species. All other species drink the milk of the mothers of their own species until they are weaned. Cow’s milk is the perfect food–IF you’re a baby calf!
To mass produce cow’s milk on a large scale via factory farming, cows have to be kept continually pregnant, giving birth, and lactating. The cows are genetically bred to produce excess cow’s milk for humans. Male cows (bulls) are useless to the dairy industry, so they become veal. By supporting the dairy industry, one indirectly supports cow killing.
The karmis, especially, exactly, are ready to find fault with us in this regard: do we love all animals, or only some animals (e.g., cows) and not others? And if we really do love the cows, why do we contribute to their death and suffering just to drink their milk?
Can children be raised without cow’s milk? YES! Half the world’s population (blacks and Asians in particular) are lactose intolerant, and can’t digest milk after infancy. Dr. Michael Klaper has written books on vegan nutrition, pregnancy, and childbirth.
Establishing Krishna conscious farm communities is a solution to the problem of animal cruelty, but again, Srila Prabhupada’s teachings on nonviolence would carry greater weight if we went vegan.
One of the first books I read on the subject of vegetarianism while in college was A Vegetarian Sourcebook by Keith Akers (1983). Describing the environmental damage caused by raising animals for food: topsoil erosion, deforestization, loss of groundwater, etc. as well as the economic inefficiency and waste of energy and resources in raising animals for food in an age of exploding human population growth, Keith Akers foreshadowed John Robbins’ Diet for a New America (1987), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
In A Vegetarian Sourcebook, Keith Akers writes:
“Using grasslands for livestock agriculture creates great environmental problems, which greatly limit its usefulness. Grazing systems require ten times more land than feedlot agriculture, in which animals are simply given feed grown on cropland. Grazing systems have to be extensive in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of overgrazing–which renders a piece of land unsuitable for any purpose.
“Overgrazing and the consequent soil erosion are extremely serious problems worldwide. By the most conservative estimates, 60% of all U.S. rangelands are overgrazed, with billions of tons of soil lost each year. Overgrazing has also been the greatest cause of man-made deserts.
“Even if we grant grazing a role in a resource-efficient, ecologically stable agriculture, milk should be the end result, not beef. Milk provides over 50% of the protein and nearly four times the calories of beef, per unit of forage resources from grazing.
“‘When only forage is available, then egg, broiler and pork production are eliminated and only milk, beef, and lamb production are viable systems,’ state David and Marcia Pimentel, scientists and authors of Food, Energy and Society. ‘Of these three, milk production is the most efficient.’
“An ecologically stable, resource-efficient system of grazing animals for human food could not be anything faintly resembling today’s livestock agriculture. It would be a smaller, decentralized, less intensive system of animal husbandry devoted to milk production.”
This is what the Vedas say as well: an acre of land, a cow and a bull, and you’re all set! The Vedas also warn that when a population is sinful, their land becomes a desert…and overgrazing does lead to topsoil erosion, which in turn leads to desertification. So it may be possible to have animal agriculture (devoted solely to milk production) on a small scale–like the Amish. And this is what Srila Prabhupada wanted for ISKCON! Rural farm communities.
Following Srila Prabhupada, devotees tend to preach vegetarianism in the same context as cow protection, establishing rural farm communities, the four regs, 16 rounds, rising early, worshipping the Deities, offering sattvic foodstuffs to the Deities, kirtana, studying scripture, yoga, meditation, astrology, Ayurveda, etc…Sermonizing in the mood of Gandhi or Tolstoy; the mode of goodness.
Animal activists, on the other hand, are into demonstrations, leafleting, circulating petitions, boycotting, writing letters and e-mails to heads of corporations and elected officials, political debate, etc…This is all in the mode of passion. But we share common ground when it comes to educating the public about compassion for animals.
September 30, 2008 at 7:55 am
Thank you for the detailed comment.
Hopefully over time more of this will enter the ISKCON social paradigm.