Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals podcast sponsored by United Poultry concerns. I’m your host Hope Bohanec, and you can find all our shows at Hope For The Animals Podcast.org as well as UPC – online.org. I welcome questions, comments, feedback on this show you can email me at hope at UPC – online.org.
So today I want to start with an acknowledgement of the time that we’re in, the crisis we’re facing collectively, and how speciesism is really at the heart of this pandemic. And then later in the show, we’re going to be joined by United Poultry Concerns founder and president the legendary Karen Davis to discuss UPC’s 30-year anniversary, the upcoming International Respect for Chickens Day and more.
And we want to encourage you to take action for chickens for this International Respect for Chickens Day, which is May 4th. You can take action any time in May, and you can learn more by going to www.upc-online.org/respect.
And I want to start today’s episode by acknowledging that many people in our animal advocacy community have really been affected dramatically by what’s happening. I just want to acknowledge that this is really a hard time for everyone, but it’s possibly even a harder time for you. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re likely a caring and compassionate person. You are sensitive to the distress of others. And I’ve found that people who care about animals, you know, contrary to stereotypes, also care deeply about humans and the planet. And we are right now in a collective state of anxiety and uncertainty. And I think thatsensitive people feel that deeply. So please take care of yourself in whatever way you need to. This could really be a mental health crisis in the making for a lot of people. Sodo what you need to do to take care of yourself. I’m trying to do that myself and however you’ve been affected, I’m so sorry. And my heart is with you.
And even though the world has just come to a standstill, farmed animals are still being bred and confined and killed.They’re suffering in misery in egg and dairy and meat facilities, and it is forcing us as activists to get creative and to figure out ways of bringing our message into people’s homes while they’re staying safely indoors. And as a result, for me is this podcast, and I want everyone to please give me a round of applause right now for figuring this out. I am a 50-year-old technophobe who would probably be a Luddite if I wasn’t an activist. Luddite is someone who rejects technology for political reasons. But the suffering of animals overwhelms me to act and tell their stories. And their plight motivates me to be brave and rise to the challenge and frustration of technology. And I have figured out this podcast thing. Woohoo!
So, let’s get started. And I really want to talk today about speciesism. Okay, so what is speciesism? Well, like racism and sexism and homophobia, Speciesism is defined as the false belief that one species is dominant over or more important than another. It’s basically the assumption of human superiority that leads to so much exploitation of animals all over the world and in many forms. And speciesism is actually at the heart of this pandemic. It is the cause—capturing, confining, killing and eating animals. In this case, it was wildlife trafficking. We’re encroaching into wild areas and capturing the animals that we find there and confining them in filthy, tiny cages. They’re stressed. And this is a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases that jump to humans. And this is the cause of numerous epidemics. Ebola, AIDS, SARS all came from butchering and eating wild animals.
But not only eating wildlife. Also, domestic animals—the birds, cows, pigs, goats who we confine and dominate and kill and eat have also caused mass illness and outbreaks. H1N1, swine flu, bird flu. Not to mention, of course, eating these animals are major causes of death in the U.S—chronic degenerative diseases like stroke and heart disease and type two diabetes and cancer. These are just slower moving, but just as deadly diseases that come from eating animals. And I don’t want to make a blanket statement here that all viruses and all things that kill us would be eliminated by not eating animals. That’s not true, and I think that it is important for us to be scientifically accurate. For example, malaria comes from mosquitoes and lyme’s disease from ticks. But the truth is horrible enough. And according to the CDC, three out of four new novel infectious diseases come from some form of us butchering and eating animals. So, we could eliminate a huge amount of human suffering by creating a worldwide vegan ethic.
And in fact, if we had a global vegan ethic in place, we would not be experiencing the pandemic and international crisis that we’re in right now.
Veganism is a boycott of the product of animal suffering, and that’s an important message to continue. But I think we also must address the overarching cause off all the nonhuman suffering and call out speciesism. I read Time magazine, I watch 60 Minutes, NPR, and there are articles and videos on racism and sexism all the time. Now more than ever before, which is awesome. We’re exposing the ethical flaws in human culture and interaction, and that is so important. And I think now is the time that we also need mainstream media talking about speciesism. We need to uncover the injustice of treating someone cruelly, taking away their agency and killing them for profit just because they are another species.
Science and common sense now tell us undoubtedly that non-human animals not only feel pain, but they suffer anxiety and trauma. They are profoundly emotional. They grieve, they rejoice, they love life and we have no right to take it from them. We’re so much alike. We have the same faces, the same fears, the same emotions in common. We need articles and videos and other media calling out the injustices of speciesism to root out the underlying source of most all human imposed animal suffering.
I think it’s good for us to have specific targets and to be focused on issues like closing the wet markets. In the U.S. there’s a lot of energy around that issue right now because, of course the source of the pandemic was wet markets. That’s important work that I will continue till I die. And in fact, we will be talking about the wet markets in the U. S. and around the world with Karen Davis later in the program because she has written extensively about the connection with these markets and human diseases for decades, so that is important work.
But beyond veganism, I think we need to broaden the narrative to the larger, dominant paradigm of speciesism. To transform what we do as a society, how we behave. We need to address who we are in terms of the pragmatic foundations that impel human behavior. Speciesism is one of the most prominent paradigms of violence. And we need a global awakening to dispel this myth of dominance, this illusion that we have the right to control and confine and kill and eat and take away the agency of every other animal on this planet.
Now this message can get kind of cerebral. There’s potential for the animals to get lost in philosophical rhetoric, so we certainly need to be careful of that. Their stories and their suffering should never be lost in the message. But I think that the animals can get lost in the vegan message as well, so we can’t forget to tell their stories, focus on their agony, their misery.
I also believe that the concept of speciesism is critical for taking us to the next level of ethical evolution and allowing all sentient beings on this planet to live free of human-imposed suffering and death.
I also really want to talk about the good that I see that’s happening right now in the midst of this crisis. Social distancing. It’s really an extreme form of compassion and caring for other humans. It goes beyond our own self-interest. It’s caring for others, the elderly, the health compromised. If we can tap into that global compassion and expand it out to all animals and to the earth and to the climate crisis, we could flatten the curve of suffering and destruction on this planet. And we’re talking a lot about getting back to normal. But as many of us know, normal is a nightmare for the animals on the planet. So, I’m really hoping that we will take this time of slowing down, this time of reflection, to make changes in our lifestyle and our choices and make those choices benefit the planet and the animals. And when we do go back to our lives, I hope that we do it better, that we continue this willingness to make sacrifices for others.
The one hopeful sign in a recent Nielsen study, they found that this coronavirus pandemic has caused vegan meat sales to increase by 280% compared to the spring of 2019. So that is a really hopeful sign.
And I hope that you are able to find some peace and calm in this anxiety and uncertainty. Please know that with any crisis, especially one of this historic scale, comes a collective introspection on our behavior, and this is a critical moment. It’s a moment of reflection that can be a powerful opportunity for change. Given that this crisis is so closely connected to animal exploitation, that means that it is a really important opportunity for us to reflect on our relationship to animals and to the planet and to come out of this with an ethos of compassion and care, to call out speciesism and create a worldwide vegan ethic.
So, I would now like to welcome Karen Davis. Karen is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns. UPC is the sponsor of this podcast, and we’re a national nonprofit that focuses on chickens and other birds bred and killed in our food system. UPC has a sanctuary for birds on the eastern shore of Virginia with over 150 resident birds.
Karen has been on the front lines of the animal liberation movement since the 1980s and was inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for outstanding contributions to animal liberation. Karen is the author of numerous groundbreaking books and articles about the plight and delight of chickens. And she has spent years in close proximity with chickens, rescuing them, knowing them, talking to them and generating volumes of precious information about them. I am so happy to introduce Karen Davis.
Karen 14:01
Hello.
Hope 14:02
You there, Karen?
Karen 14:03
Yes, I am. Thank you Hope. I’m right here.
Hope 14:06
Wonderful. All right, so let’s just start off. Won’t you just tell us a little about yourself? What led you to launch United Poultry Concerns 30 years ago? Of course, this year is United Poultry Concerns30-year anniversary—2020. So how did the animal advocacy leaders respond to the idea of you creating an organization for chickens and turkeys? How did this all begin?
Karen 14:32
Well, in the 1980s, I became very interested in what was just then becoming the animal rights movement. The whole Washington DC metro area was a hotbed of activism in the mid-1980s. It was also a time whenthe animal advocacy movement was starting to pay some attention to farmed animals, which previously had been ignored, and particularly in the United States. So, I began reading a lot about animal rights. There was actually quite a lot of literature by that time, and I started attending organizational meetings and demonstrations and things that were taking place in the Washington metro area. And I did a volunteer internship at the new organization at the time called Farm Sanctuary, which was then located in Pennsylvania.
And it was my experience at Farm Sanctuary, meeting the chickens and the turkeys and the ducks and the geese. Although I loved meeting all of the animals who were brand new to me—the pigs, the sheep, the goats. I did not know these animals growing up, but I’ve had a lifelong affinity for birds. And so, when I met these birds, so-called poultry, when I met these birds and particularly the chickens, I was just so drawn to them and getting to know them in a personal way every day as a volunteer intern. I actually lived at farm sanctuary for five weeks the summer of I believe it was in 1985 or 6, I just began to feel that I would love to start an organization that would focus on the plight and the delight of birds who are considered a food source for human beings, particularly chickens and turkeys.
So, I continued my reading, including historical accounts of how cultures and societies have kept these birds, which is very unhappy story I can tell you right now. Long before factory farming per say got started in the mid 19 and 20th centuries, and I began to feel that even though I was studying to get my Ph.D. degree in English literature, which I completed in 1987. But by that time, I was really deeply immersed in the animal advocacy activities, and I began to veer away more from the idea of going out to look for work in a university or college and more about what I could do in the animal advocacy community and make it my life’s work. So, my experience at the farm sanctuary, followed by my then husband and I, Alan Kate, moving to a little house that we rented outside Washington DC in a little wooded area on a dirt road.
There I discovered that our landlady was keeping a flock of about 100 chickens for her agricultural tax break. And when I discovered these chickens by accident one June day in 1985, I started to visit them in the afternoons. I would sometimes take a book or a magazine, and I would read and they would all gather around me, and I was just very, very moved by them, and I would stroke their feathers sometimes, and they really seemed to appreciate the attention. Well, after about two weeks of that, I also noticed how huge they were. And I was just then learning about how chickensbred for the meat industry are forced to grow many times larger and faster than a normal chicken would, and these chickens exemplified that information. So, I saw how huge they became in such a short amount of time.
But one day I went down to visit them and they were gone. Andabout a day later, I walked by the little shed again, and I saw some movement inside so I carefully opened the door and I went to the back where I had seen the shadowy movement and there was a little hen who had been left behind, either on purpose or because she just had been overlooked. She was very small. She was very crippled. Her eyes were very dim and unfocused, and she looked like the saddest little creature. So I gathered her up in my arms and I took her into our kitchen and I set her carefully down on the kitchen floor on a nice little blanket, and my husband, Alan, looked at her and he said, well, we should call her Viva because she is the only one who lived.
So, she became Viva the Chicken Hen. And two things I say about her in the article that I subsequently wrote about her that appears on our home page on our website is how she was so crippled. But she wanted to be able to run, and she would go through this painstaking ordeal to walk on her wing tips. She would walk and run on her wing tips because her legs were so lame and crippled. And then she would collapse in a heap and she would be exhausted and she would wait a while. And then she wouldcommence the whole effort to be able to walk on her wing tips again. The other thing about her, well, everything I loved about her, but the other thing was how, when I would be petting her feathers and stroking her under her chin and showing her that kind of affection, she would actually purr like a little kitten. And it was clear that she was contented and happy and felt comforted. And I had no idea that a chicken purred or really, I knew so little about chickens. But my experience with Viva in particular, plus my experience at Farm Sanctuary, plus my learning about the fact that chickens are far andway, the 98 or more percent of all land animals being raised and slaughtered for food, those things came together to cause me to decide in the late 1990s that I wanted to start an organization that would be devoted to educating people on behalf of chickens, turkeys and other domesticated fowl. I wanted a new organization that would be an advocacy group for these birds.
And so, I of course debated about what to call the organization. I was going to call it Chicken Liberation America, and I had all these different names that I ran by people. And eventually I settled on United Poultry Concerns because I wanted a more corporate sounding, less obvious sounding title at the time. In particular, I wanted to be able to get some specific information from poultry industry meetings and poultry industry representatives, and I thought that having a more corporate sounding title would enable me to accomplish that goal. And I believe I turned out to be correct about that.
In any case, I did ask some people, some leaders in the animal advocacy movement at the time in the late 1980’s what they thought about my starting an organization focusing on chickens and turkeys, and I got two distinctly different answers. One group of people said that this type of organization would never succeed because as one person said to me, “We can’t even get people to care about whales. How are we ever going to get people to care about chickens?” And then the other group of people said,“You should do it and you should do it now, don’t wait. Do it now.”
I was going to start this organization regardless of what kind of advice I received because I had already made up my mind. But I was very interested in the responses that I received. And when I started United Poultry Concerns officially in 1990 my attitude toward those who said to me that a new organization focusing on chickens and turkeys would never fly was that you know, the whole idea of animal advocacy is to try to use your skills and abilities to persuade people to care about these birds.People who think they don’t care or who never even gave a chicken or a turkey a second thought at all, to discover that when the information about these birds is presented to them in a moving and informative way, that we could get their attention because that assumes that people have the capacity to care about animals once they are presented with the message in the right way.
So, I operated then and continue to do so to this day on the basis of the belief that most people do have a sympathetic nerve and are capable of caring about chickens and other animals, they may feel initially that they will never care about. And I have found that that’s true. So, I did start United Poultry Concerns in 1990 and I never looked back.
Hope 24:33
I think thatis just wonderful. I love hearing Viva’s story and Happy Anniversary to United Poultry Concerns. How wonderful that there has been 30 years of this fantastic advocacy for chickens and other birds.
So, I want to ask, what have you learned from your research andyour personal experience with chickens and turkeys that can help people to better understand and appreciate these birds? And can you also talk about the wet markets where live animals are sold and killed? You’ve been writing about these markets for years. They’re now really in the forefront of people’s minds with the connection to the coronavirus right now that originated from a wet market. So, can you talk a little about those things?
Karen 25:28
Well, one thing I can say, is that having been engaged with chickens and turkeys on a daily basis since the mid-1980s, I have come to know them about as well as one can get to know the members of another species of animal. And, it doesn’t take a rocket science to discover within a few days pretty much what chickens like. First of all, they like to be active. They like to run. They like to walk. They like to jump up on tree branches and other kinds of perches. They like to be busy. They’re very, very vibrant birds. They want to run around the yard. They love it. When you throw out almost any kind of treat for them, they will come running. And they’re all excited and cheerful and happy about almost everything. And one thing I just discovered about chickens very quickly was how cheerful they really are. I mean, they seem to be happy in just about any type of weather, including snow or rain. But certainly, they love sunshine.
Speaking of sunshine, they love to take sun baths, and they will flop down on the ground, and they will spread out one wing on one side and soak up the sun that way, and then they’ll turn their body around, and then they’ll soak up that side of their body and they raise their feathers from their body so that the sunlight will soak into their skin. And they need that sunlight for vitamin D3. So, it’s a blissful experience for them, and they totally enjoy that sunlight. And they will seek out the sunlight on cold winter days when the days are short. But they will follow the sun in the yard, andit also is part of their hygiene practice.
The other thing that chickens particularly love to do is to take dust baths. And for a chicken and a turkey, a dust bath is comparable to a water bath for human beings. There are some types of birds, like starlings, who I watch take both dirt baths and sparrows. Also, they take both dirt baths and water baths in puddles and things. But chickens and turkeys take dust baths, and what they will do is they will sink down into the ground and they will make a bowl shape with the dirt and they will scratch with their claws. And they will use their beaks to get the earth to fly up in all directions and to settle into their skin. And those earthy particles actually helped to remove debris that has built up in their skin. And it’s kind of like when we scrub our own skin or when we vigorously comb our own hair that we are sloughing off old skin cells and getting rid of any type of debris that has lodged there. And we’re cleaning our body.
And so to keep chickens with such earthy pleasures and such a very earthy locked up in cages or in confinement facilities, where they are deprived of sunlight, where they are deprived of Earth in which to sunbathe and on which to take a dust bath and simply to run around because their feet, their legs, their whole anatomy and physiology are all designed to be on the earth itself, not to be standing on metal or on wires or bars or anything else, all of which causes them a great deal of pain and can lead to lameness and all kinds of problems.
Well, most of us are now familiar with what we have come to call factory farming, where you have many thousands of birds locked up in a confinement facility. If they’re being bred for the meat industry, they can’t even move there. So, they grow so fast and so large in just a few short weeks as a result of the artificial breeding they’ve been subjected to. And pretty soon they’re just beak to beak because they’ve grown so fast that their skeletal system can’t keep up with the growth of their muscles. And they go to slaughter, basically crippled in almost every case.And then the hens bred for the egg industry are a smaller type of hen, they are a smaller type of chicken.
All of their brothers are destroyed by being ground up alive at birth or asphyxiated with carbon dioxide or actually electrocuted. But the hens who are used for egg production, the majority in this country and worldwide are in battery cages, they’re in little tiny cages that are stacked up high and are in a building farther than the eye can see. Not only because these buildings are so long, 600 feet long sometimes and because the air is so dense with contaminants that there’s always a haze in the air. So that also makes it more difficult to see to the very end of these long, long, long, long buildings, which are nothing but a universe of cages filled with tortured hens.
Even these so-called cage free operations, while they’re less completely cruel than the battery cage, the birds are still very, very crowded. They’re really deprived of things to do. I will read poultry industry literature, which still has articles about how is it the chickens will peck at each other in the cage free operation, or even why do they peck each other? Why can they be driven to peck each other in the cage? It’s because chickens evolved their beaks and their claws and their whole body to forage in the soil, that is, they dig in the soil in order to find their food. So that’s the purpose of their beak, and to explore the environment, so they have a beak for a specific purpose and that is to survive and to thrive by finding food with their beak. And then they scratch the soil to be able to unearth well, it could be earthworms, it could be micro nutrients that could be little kinds of bugs that are in the soil. But they have these bodily structures for a purpose that they evolved in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. And so, when they are put in an environment like a cage or a confinement facility with nothing but machines running and nothing to do with their energies and with the patterns of behavior that defined them as chickens, then they become restless. They become bored, and they start pecking at whatever they can peck at because everything they are surrounded by except for each other, is either metal or mash.
And mash will never satisfy a chicken’s desire to eat, because chicken’s beaks and chickens themselves are designed to pull and peck at things and yank leaves and yank at grass and so on. So they have all these inborn needs that despite all the breeding that has been done to them for specific agribusiness traits, has in no way changed the fundamental nature of the chicken or the turkey for that matter and even cage-free operations, which I visited personally several times, are just very barren places.
The chickens cannot fulfill their nature and have the kind of life they would choose to have in any of these kinds of places. When we turn to the wet markets, the so-called wet markets which are live poultry markets, live bird markets. There we see a way of keeping chickens, of slaughtering chickens, that has gone on for many, many centuries in Asian countries. And in Hispanic cultures, in Jewish cultures and so on. And we have, you know, we have our own types of these markets just in regular farming going back, traditional farming going back to the earlier centuries before factory farming actually took hold in the 20th century.
So, what you see is that you have the birds treated with no respect and no compassion, and, just handled very, very ruthlessly, very harshly. Stuffed into cages. The cage environment is smaller in a market, but the principal and the experience of the birds is basically the same and the workers, it’s basically the same. The birds are grabbed out of the cages when a customer wants to buy them, and they are held upside down by their feet, which is how the poultry industry holds them also. And they are often weighed being held upside down that way. And in nature, chickens are not ever upside down. Nor are turkeys. So just being held head down like that is itself a completely unnatural experience for them.
So, then they have their throats sliced and they can be crying and everything else and the workers just throw them into what are called killing cones or killing holes where the chickens slowly bleed out from their throats and they can often be flopping around and you can hear their voices crying. There’s quite a lot of video of this type of operation. In fact, we just posted a brand new one today called Disregarded, which we urge people to go to our website and look at.
So, the wet markets are on a smaller scale than the traditional factory farm operations. But the principle of cruel treatment, treating the life and feelings and body of a bird with complete disrespect, wounding them, hurting them, treating them like objects is exactly the same. So, when people think that all of the problems in farming go back to 20th century factory farming, this really is a misunderstanding of the history of animal farming. Because even reading 18th and 17th century literature about, for example, how turkey’s in English households, the kind of English households that we see represented in Jane Austen’s books and Jane Austen movies. We don’t see in those movies what they call the piggery –on the estate where all the pigs are kept who were slaughtered right there. We don’t see these kitchens where they have these cages full of chickens and ducks and turkeys as well.
And then the kitchen maids are grabbing these birds out of these cages, and they’re putting them on a table and they’re cutting their throats.The poet Alexander Pope described in one of his poems the constant sound of the cries of expiring animals in the kitchens of these estates. And then another practice in England was flogging, flogging pigs, for example, and setting dogs on bulls so that their flesh would be more tender and also slowly heating to death birds such as chickens and geese in front of the fireplace. So when you look back at history and you really delve into how farmed animals have been treated through the ages by all cultures, you find what it was in the attitude and behavior of all people that lead inevitably to the practices that we now identify as factory farming.
What defines factory farming really and distinguishes It is the huge scale, the huge numbers, the billions and billions of animals, and keeping many thousands of chickens, for example, in a single building and also the use of antibiotics, of course. And until the 20th century, there were no antibiotics, but when antibiotics came into use in order to keep enough birds from getting so sick that they could not be sent to market in a profitable way. So, antibiotics became a kind of Godsend initially for the animal industries. Until, of course, now we have antibiotic resistance, both in the animals themselves and in human beings whereby the antibiotics are no longer as effective as they used to be. And this is largely because of the fact that 80% of all antibiotics that are used are used in animal farming.
So, when we get to know chickens and turkeys and ducks, of course, and guinea fowl and others when we get to know who they are, what they like to do, what defines them as a particular type of creature, then when we see their sad faces and the fear and lusterless in their eyes, and all of which you can read when you look at them and you can see their misery, you begin to understand the quality and the intensity of the misery they’re experiencing. Because they’re suffering isn’t just suffering. It’s unnatural suffering, its suffering that they would never encounter in the natural world. Yes, they might be preyed upon by various predators, but there is nothing like chronic daily misery being inflicted upon these birds or other animals as human beings do in all segments of farming.
Hope 40:09
Yeah, that’s so powerful Karen and I thought it was really wonderful when you harken back to days of old—people like to idealize the pastoral past, idealizing farming of the past. And I think that the humane labelling that we’re seeing, they’re trying to kind of bring us to the idea that we’re going to go back to thismore humane farming that has never been humane. And I think that you really illustrated that well, that there’s nothing to go back to. We’ve got to get rid of animal farming altogetherto be able liberate these to animals.
Karen 41:00
So, let me just mention one other practice that goes back that these so-called humane farms use now harking back to so-called old-fashioned farming methods. Okay, nowadays, in factory farming, the way of loosening feathers so that the feathers of the birds can be plucked out more easily is to subject them to agonizing paralytic electric shocks. Anybody who’s ever been in a standard slaughter plant, sees these birds in a situation that looks like a giant dry-cleaning establishment with just spirals and spirals of birds. And they are dragged through electrified water, which paralyzes the muscles of their feather follicles so that their feathers will pop out more easily after their they’ve been scaldedalive. And then they’re dead.
Well, this is simply the modern version of taking a knife, the old-fashioned knife and either putting it through the roof of the bird’s mouth into their brain and scrambling their brain so that they become paralyzed, their nervous system becomes paralyzed and they’re still there, still alive. They’re still fully conscious, or else like actually sticking a knife through the eye into their brain.This is just one example of a standard practice that is being done today by the so-called do-it-yourself farmers and humane farmers that lookback to methods, old-fashioned methods of regular farmers dispatching their birds.
And so once again, we see that when you actually take a close look at the history of animal farming, poultry farming in particular, you see that everything that’s being done in factory farms is just in extension of what people in all societies have been doing to these poor birds and other animals since time immemorial ever since farming animal farming began back, what, 10,000 years ago or so?
Hope 43:03
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so let’s switch gears a little bit. And I really want to ask you about the current surge of interest in animal-free foods. Seeing now advertisements for the Nugg, which is a plant-based chicken nugget. There’s an increase of interest in sales of plant-based foods, and I wanted to see if you share the optimism that plant-based chicken could actually replace factory farm chicken to the extent of sparing large numbers of chickens from ever being born. Because that is the goal, of course, so that we can reduce the suffering.
Karen 43:47
First of all, the only hope that these birds and other farmed animals have is for people to stop eating them, so that’s the only hope they have. So long as people keep eating animals, they’re going to keep being treated horribly. And when we realize that about what two billion more people are going to be on the earth by 2050 and already right now it’s not just seven billion, it’s seven point eight billion human beings on the planet now, and that number is expanding. So, the only hope that these animals have is that people, for whatever reason, will stop eating them or certainly drastically reduce their consumption, preferably eliminate the use of bringing animals into the world for food at all.
So, I am very encouraged by the surge of interest in alternatives, delicious alternatives to animal products that resemble animal products. I do not believe that we should shun products that have names that resemble the names of animal products or that have a texture or a flavor that resembles animal products. We want to do whatever it takes to get the mainstream, average people who go into the supermarket or who go into a restaurant. We want them to want to buy, to want to eat, to want to drink, of the products that are delicious and that resemble the animal products that they like already or did like but that have no animals in them. There’s no animal there.
So right now, I think we are very fortunate to see what we as an animal rights movement, are largely responsible for, and that is constantly harping on how important it to let people know, letting entrepreneurs know, letting companies know how much we want to see these vegan ice creams and animal-free chicken and animal-free milk products. And it really is exciting to go into even a supermarket like we have down here in rural Virginia, and to see that there is a whole line of Gardein chicken products. There are vegan Morningstar chicken patties. There are vegan sausages. There are Litelife deli slices. There is a whole range of milks, plant-based milks.
We’re seeing something that 20 years ago was a dream, and now it’s a dream come true. But here’s what needs to happen. I believe I’m not an economist, so I only know what the food analysts say and what I see in our stores is evidence of what I hope is going to become more and more true. Prices have to come down for these chicken alternative products, these vegan animal-free chicken and other animal products. They have to be competitive with the prices that people are willing to pay for animal products. And it’s very easy to get a package of dead chicken wings or chicken legs or chicken gizzards and everything else at a very inexpensive price compared to what are still relatively high prices for the Gardeins versions and the Morning Star Farm versions and some of the other new animal free company products. So, everything depends really on demand because prices go down when demand goes up.
That’s why it is so important for animal advocates to do everything we can to grow the vegan economy, not only to buy these products ourselves, these vegan hot dogs and all of these wonderful products, but also to get other people to buy these products, to want to try these products. Because if more and more people are going to buy these products, the companies will scramble to make them because for all the things that are wrong with the capitalist society, it appears that one thing that we have going for us, and what the animals have going for them is that it’s based on supply and demand. I mean, yes, we can talk about the government subsidies that taxpayers pay for. All of that is part of this capitalist economy, which isn’t strictly capitalist from that standpoint.
But the thing is, if companies like Tyson and Perdue andFoster Farms, big companies and all these companies, if they see that, wow, these vegan animal-free products are flying off the shelves, and these plant-based milks are really starting to sell and they see they can make a profit. That’s what they want. They want profit. So, we have our work cut out for us as far as being the helpers of those who need that nudge.That is, an economic of profit-making nudge to want to invest more and more into a plant-based, animal-free food sector because they will make what we will buy, what they can sell. And when we start buying these products like crazy,when people start doing that, then the price goes down. The demand goes up and then you see things get cheaper and cheaper. That’s not just true of food, that’s true across the board you know, new products start very expensive, and then they become more popular. And as they become more popular and there are more sales of those products, down go the prices. Pretty soon they’re very, very cheap and competitive.
The companies themselves that raise pigs for pork and the cattle industry and all of the egg industry, the dairy industry, the way they’re kind of framing the interest in plant based foods that they’re seeing among consumers these days is that this will be another niche in the total availability of foods available to people. In other words, they don’t necessarily see plant-based products as taking away from the purchase and consumption of animal products.
Hope 50:29
Supplemental, like supplemental.
Karen 50:33
They see it a supplemental. So again, we have to see how these things are going to be played out economically. But we know what our job is. Our job is to get people weaned from animal products, to be disgusted by animal products because of the cruelty that animals are put through in order to create these totally needless products.
To understand that all of these foodborne illnesses, like campylobacter and salmonella and so many others and now the flu viruses that also are transmittable from chickens and pigs to human beings, there are many types of flu viruses that our transmittable to humans from these birds and from pigs, and now we have the coronavirus.
So, we need to show that the contamination and the cruelty are linked— that the cruelty, the misery that these animals endure and being raised and slaughtered for food has an effect on our health. Because when you have animals being miserable because they’re living in filthy squalid conditions then that translates into what we put into our mouths. And what happens to us, as far as our health is concerned. You know, Type 2 diabetes is really a dietary disease that is not necessary at all for us to have. And we just need to kind of put together this package of the animals, our health, and the environmental issues, and also just wonderful that we have this great creative ability to make these animal-like products out of pure plant proteins.
Hope 52:13
Yes, absolutely. And it’s all connected. Well put. We need to wrap up here. But I did want to ask you about International Respect for Chickens Day. In 2005 I believe was the year that UPC launched International Respect for Chickens. Day. Tell us about that and include also what you’re doing this year given, of coursethat we can’t have public gatherings. It’s all got to be virtual and online. So, let us know what’s happening with that and also how people listening to this podcast can help chickens and other farmed animals and take action for International Respect for Chickens Day.
Karen 52:54
Well, thank you, Hope.One thing that we do every year, that is I and local Washington D.C activists, that we’re not going to be able to do this year is to have our annual International Respect for Chickens Day leafleting and educating and advocacy at the White House. We’ve been doing this every year foralmost two decades. And of course, we can’t do that this year. But what we are going to be doing this year is first of all, we’re doing this podcast.
I’ve also done a couple of other shows that were going to be putting on the Internet, and we have wonderful bus ads, bus banners, running in Minneapolis in May. We’ve done this in other cities in previous years where the bus has a huge message like, “life can be beautiful, go vegan.” And we have cards inside the buses or in some cases, the metro transit cars. But this year, we changed the language of our bus posters, our bus banners, to say,“Kindness is contagious. Wash your hands of animal suffering.Live vegan.” So, we attempt to use language which already resonates with people from the whole pandemic, the coronavirus discussions and help to sort of reframe the coronavirus language to fit our message, which is “Kindness is contagious. Wash your hands of animals suffering.” So, we’re doing that.
And see what happens every year for International Respect for Chicken Day which, by the way, we expand to the entire month of May, which we call International Respect for Chickens’ Month. And we ask activists to do something, to perform an ACTION in capital letters on behalf of chickens on or around May 4th or any time in the month of May. And of course, by extension, we say make every day respect for chicken’s day. But to do something, whether it’s leafleting on a busy street corner or holding a vegan potluck or giving a talk, maybe to a local church group, just things that they can fit into their daily schedule. Writing a letter to the editor of their local newspaper, which many people have done over the years, including in May.
We see this year as having some challenges to it, but also preventing or presenting opportunities for people to find new and interesting ways to reach out to people, to reach out to the public, on behalf of chickens, to help people to learn to appreciate the delight of chickens, and also to understand the plight of chickens and to want to do something to help them. And, of course, we want to help people to care enough about chickens to want to rescue them from their plates. We talk about rescuing animals and chickens and other animals by adopting chickens into our sanctuaries. That’s certainly a huge conventional kind of rescue. But we want people to think of rescuing as, and our work of rescue is also, rescuing chickens and other animals from people’s plates and putting chickens in people’s hearts instead of on the dinner table.
Hope 56:40
Yeah, that’s wonderful.
I know for myself, I’m really bummed that we won’t be unfurling our West Coast International Respect for Chickens Day banner. But we are adapting, and we are creating new content. And part of that is this podcast. So International Respect for Chickens Day was an inspiration for this podcast that will continue and bring more wonderful information out to the world.
So that’s all the time that we have. And I just want to thank you so much Karen Davis, for all your knowledge, all your incredible insight. It’s just been a wonderful, wonderful time talking to you. And I want to thank everyone out there for listening, and you can sign up to get notifications of future shows by going to Hope For The Animals Podcast.org. And I welcome questions and comments and feedback about the show. You can email me at hope at UPC – online.org, and I really hope that this episode was an inspiration to you to live vegan if you aren’t already. And if you are vegan, act for the animals. Take action for International Respect for Chickens Day and the animals, they need us now more than ever. So please stay safe, stay sane and thank you for your compassion.
