Peta's Chicken Adds

The results are in for the add competition that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, were conducting. The competition was aimed at people with advertising and/or artistic skills to produce an add addressing the plight of chickens in the world. There are some fantastic entries but don't just take my word for it, have a look yourself. LINK

Milk Gone Wild!

I'm vegan, how about you?

Work

I started working back at Govinda's Vegetarian Cafè today. For those of you in the area, or who are just curious, this is the location on Google Maps --LINK-- I was a bit worried that I'd have forgotten my recipes, or more that I may be a bit slow and not have everything ready in time, but it all ran smoothly. I cooked a Potato, Cauliflower and Zucchini vegetable curry, Mixed Vegetable Pakoras, a special Dhal (it was actually a bit of a compromise but special sounds better), A Mango Semolina Halava, Papadums and Plain White Rice. I'll be back working there tomorrow as I'm now doing Tuesdays and Wednesdays but I'm yet to know what I'll be cooking; just have to wait and see what veges are available. I would have preferred more spices to work with too but I think I went okay considering the outcome.

To Those of you who have been asking for recipes and cooking advice, I'm considering starting up a web page where I'll host my recipes and cooking advice. Probably a bit of simple food related philosophy too. When I get some time and get all this together I'll let you all know the URL.

Anyhow, back to researching this Peter Singer essay.

Kazakhstan Human Rights Abuses

I thought it was about time I pasted this on my blog. Some Vaisnava devotees in Kazakhstan have been being persucuted solely because of their religious affiliation for many years. We never seriously thought it would go this far with numerous Human Rights orginisations observing and wide spread condemnation from Europen Governments such as the British and the French.

On November 21, however, the Kazakhstan Government decided that they would 'take back' the land that these devotees have established a farm on. What's worse is that the houses were demolished while people, predominantley women and children, were still inside. All media and Human Rights observers were banned from the area and were threatened with force and violence if they did not comply. All photographic material was confiscated.

During this 'procedure' there were no officials present which is required under Kazakhstan law and no one is willing to take responsibility for the actions. Not a single police officer or demolition worker would wear their name tag or identify themselves either. The leader of the operation, the Hakim, even said to one of the Human Rights observers

'If I see you here again, I will personally crush Your eyes, even though I am the Hakim.'

I'm going to post the few videos that are available in my humble attampt to make this issue more widely known.

This is part of the demolition and police response.

There's still more if you care to look. Click HERE to see.

Fast Food Nation

I'm a fan of the book Fast Food Nation and while I live in Australia and our farming and processing practices are slightly different I just had to post this LINK for any Americans who may be reading.

Hi All

Hi all.
I won't be submitting an entry for the Philosophy Blog War this week; too much Uni work to do. To keep you all interested though have a look at THIS article about an abattoir in India.....disgusting!
Also, in America this week the Frito-Lay company unveiled a new range of crisps...vege crisps. Now I thought this wasn't such a bad idea however Frito-Lay CEO Al Carey voiced his.....um....concern. He stated 'God help us all, would you look at these flavors, weren't Sun Chips healthy enough for you, you goddamn hippie bastards?' If that wasn't enough he described his company's product to his share holders as 'some shit that's made from beets'. and furthered that with 'I hope you're all happy now that you have your precious beet chips with the recommended daily serving of fruit, or vegetables, or whatever the hell a 'beet' is'. I'm sure his share holders would have left having new found confidence in their company's new product. Here's a picture of what their delivery van will probably look like for the new product.

Prosthetic Cow!

I stumbled across this picture by Chris Kidd in the Courier Mail on Wednesday (November 1, p. 25) and wondered what was going on. Apparently in an Australian first a prosthetic leg has been fitted to a cow. I was quite pleased when I saw this thinking that we Australians are becoming more compassionate. However dear reader, I was wrong. Upon reading the article it seems that the cow was only fitted with the prosthetic leg so its owner can keep on making money off its milk and I suppose its calves. Its a shame that we treat animals as mere commodities and the owner of poor Theresa shown above would have just as easily killed her had she not been able to effectively produce more milk for his business.

To Pork or Not To Pork

I was really looking forward to seeing some adds appear this week in particular Australian magazines such as Marie Claire, Good Weekend, and Delicious about the Australian Pork Industry. Two magazines, The Australian Women's Weekly and Women's Day, have pledged to continue with the adds however. The adds are a unique attempt to illustrate the cruelty of the Australian Pork industry.

I’m vegan and proud of it!

This is a post for the Philosophy Blog War and you can vote for me HERE.

I’m vegan and proud of it!

I haven’t always been this way though. I used to be vegetarian and before that, when I depended on my parents for my daily meals, I ate meat and eggs. I’m often asked why I’m vegan, what on earth do I eat, and how I reconcile my views with the dominant western ideology of the necessity of meat eating.

Well, the primary reason I’m vegan is moral. I certainly know that it is not universally accepted that animals are moral agents but I believe they are. I’m certain that here in Australia our Government believes they are as cruelty to animals is against our laws. Before I became vegetarian my first job was in a chicken and pig abattoir so I know first hand the degree of cruelty and blatant torture that goes on behind closed doors. I’ve witnessed chickens being scalded and plucked alive and once I saw a chicken being eviscerated alive! I know of few people who would accept such cruelty. Animals are not just things to be exploited in any way what-so-ever just so we can have cheap meat, eggs, and milk.

Most people will respond to such a moral argument by stating that because the animal industry is so ingrained in our society, my ceasing involvement in the animal industry will have no noticeable effect on animal welfare issues. Is it a valid argument to claim that people can only be morally culpable if they commit perceptible harm? To this I have to turn to Jonathan Glover and what I’ll call ‘Glover’s Problem’. ‘Glover’s Problem’ is as follows:

Glover imagines that in a village, 100 people are about to eat lunch. Each has a bowl containing 100 beans. Suddenly, 100 hungry bandits swoop down on the village. Each bandit takes the contents of the bowl of one villager, eats it, and gallops off. Next week, the bandits plan to do it again, but one of their number is afflicted by doubts about whether it is right to steal from the poor. These doubts are set to rest by another of their number who proposes that each bandit, instead of eating the entire contents of the bowl of one villager, should take one bean from every villager's bowl. Since the loss of one bean cannot make a perceptible difference to any villager, no bandit will have harmed anyone. The bandits follow this plan, each taking a solitary bean from 100 bowls. The villagers are just as hungry as they were the previous week, but the bandits can all sleep well on their full stomachs, knowing that none of them has harmed anyone (Singer 1998:67).

Each of us, even though it may not be perceptible, is responsible for the collective damage we cause.

To this one may validly state that I am just one out of the 100 bandits so 99 beans will still exist, however, in our increasingly global society one cannot know whether one is the first bandit or the 100th bandit. Even if I was the 80th bandit the villagers would still suffer. I may go into the supermarket and decide to purchase some pork chops and rationalise that I am not committing a moral offence because the pig would have died anyway and it’s likely that my not purchasing the pork chops and instead choosing TVP will cause no difference to the supermarket’s purchasing pork chops next week. This may be correct, however we will never know how many pork chops the supermarket, or pig farm pigs, need to sell to make it viable to purchase or produce more next week, and the same for TVP. Maybe I’m the deciding customer.

The meat industry is the world’s largest environmental hazard. It is the world’s largest consumer of water and the largest consumer of fossil fuels. Using just under ten kilograms of grain protein to produce one kilogram of meat protein is absurd. If we stoped feeding grain to animals used in the production of meat and instead made bread we would have enough grain to feed every person on earth with the equivalent of seven loaves of bread per day!

It takes 50 kilograms of water to produce one kilogram of wheat while it takes up to 50,000 kilograms of water to produce one kilogram of beef! Stop complaining of a drought Australia and become vegan, the whole world will be better off for it.

As for what I eat. Well being a vegan chef I find that question quite easy and I’ll even provide a simple recipe for you all to try.

Simon’s Asian Noodle Soup

• One 250 Gram packet of dried flat egg free noodles
• Five dried shitake mushrooms
• Half a cup of soy sauce
• Half a cup of mirin
• Half a handful of chopped shallots
• Two tablespoons of sugar

1. Boil the noodles until cooked, strain and rinse under cold water

2. Boil the mushrooms in half a cup of water

3. When mushrooms are softened remove from water, slice and put back in the pot with the soy sauce and mirin and cook for another five minutes

4. Add the sugar and stir well

5. Combine the cooked noodles with the sauce and sprinkle with shallots

Singer, P 1998, 'A Vegetarian Philosophy', in Griffiths, S & Wallace, J, Consuming Passions, Manchester, .pdf

We're Not Happy John!

You see, Australia is one of the countries that supports the Iraq war and I'm not ashamed to say that this is one of the reasons why I opted for dual citizenship when I became an Aussie. Our Prime Minister, John Howard, has long declared that we will leave Iraq when our 'job is done'.

Apparently, we went to Iraq to dispose of Saddam 'cause the blighter was creating a stockpile of nuclear and biological weapons to use against us. I know, isn't that a great word, us, just who is that exactly? I love Little John's alterity.

This morning, after the opposition Labor party hounded the little guy for over a week, John Howard has come out of his closet, or should we say 'walk in robe'? It'd have to be pretty large to keep all of those euphemisms and blatant lies in there! Anyhow, it would appear our job description has changed. Little John has said Australia will leave Iraq when democracy has been established. Was this our original objective? It would seem likely as there were no chemical or nuclear weapons found in Iraq.

Our Little John, it seems, has become a neo-colonialist who's aim is to take over other Nation States that the original colonialists failed in creating. Most people argue these days that Iraq was a strategic move to control oil. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, I just don't know.

What I am now certain of is that John Howard has become, always was, an ideologue. He seems convinced of the ideology of the Nation State and maintaining the Nation State, even when the Nation States in question were created by colonialists and not the citizens (a very democratic procedure indeed!).

Little John is definitely an ideologue when it comes to neo-liberal democracy. His 'coming out of the walk in robe' statement this morning shows him for all that he is. Little John wants to establish democracy in Iraq, undemocratically, for the sole purpose of getting what he, and the other neo-colonialists George Bush, Tony Blair etc. want.

Little John, stop harassing us University students for being ideologues when we mention Marx or apply the theory of orientalism to contemporary society. You are an ideologue yourself and what's worse is that your ideological actions are destroying the lives of thousands and your influence, however unfounded, is influencing millions of people who know no better.

Wake up little John! We all know your political career is drawing to an end so out with it. Come out of the closet John and let Australia know who you really are! I promise we wont treat you like Fraser.

Some reasons why I'm vegan..well, sort of

Some of you may know that for quite some time I've been vegetarian and fairly recently I've extended that to vegan. While I'm not going to go into detail here I thought that these couple of links might shed some light on it for you. Link One & Link Two.

How many dead cows does it take to save a dog?

Yesterday while visiting my local IGA supermarket there was a group of 'animal welfare' people rallying up support for a campaign to stop cruelty to dogs. The group in question are called paws. Now I'm not against animal welfare at all but these guys were raising money by having a sausage sizzle. What I fail to understand is why they see it as okay to mistreat cows, slaughter them, process them, and then capitalise off of their sale and in the same breath see it as not okay to mistreat dogs? I'm sure that those sausages weren't made of dog meat!

On a different note, I'm slipping in votes in this round of the Philosophy Blog War. Please take the couple of seconds to vote for me by clicking here. Much appreciated.

Do Trees Have Rights?

I've finally gotten around to posting my first philosophy blog war entry. I hope you all enjoy and I'm sincerely looking forward to your comments. To vote for my post click here

Do trees have rights? Do other in-animate ‘life’ forms have rights? These questions are too often over looked by predominantly ‘western’[1] post Socratic philosophers and scientists often unjustifiably and without any reason other than heritage. Ethics and Moral ‘codes’ are fashioned around a human-centric view of the cosmos and extend only so far as to include other conscious creatures that have a relative similarity with us. Arbor (1986, p336) illustrates the key foundation of ‘western’ ethics as:

[o]nly the conscious states and interests of sentient being[s] can be valuable in themselves. Other things are valuable only in so far as they bring about desired conscious states or promote these interests.

This statement assumes that one can do whatever one desires to anything that is not classified as a ‘sentient’ being as long as it causes no direct or indirect harm to the interests of other sentient beings. Is this an ethical position to hold? Can I go out and mutilate any non-sentient being I desire? Well, it depends on who I am and how I identify myself with my world.

In Japan there is a long tradition of an art known as Bonsai. Arbor (1986, p336) uses this as an example to argue that mutilating a tree is ethically wrong. He presents a conditional proposition that gave rise to Bonsai; if trees are deformed by natural forces then trees can be deformed by un-natural forces. Arbor then presents an analogous argument stating that if trees are deformed by natural forces and it’s okay to extend that to deforming trees by un-natural forces then it follows that if humans are deformed by natural forces (birth defects, genetic illnesses etc.) then it should likewise be okay to deform humans by un-natural forces. This would be opposed by most and this opposition would rightly sit with the above mentioned definition of ethics. Does this make it right though? There is an air of a bourgeoisie, colonial, or even chauvinistic character in this definition. Let us look at another example.

There is much dispute over whether it is ethically correct to expose certain animals, such as apes, to laboratory tests for the benefit of humans. The most fundamental ethical claim put forward by those conducting these tests is that the creatures, while certainly being sentient, have no conception, or at least a very limited conception, of their future well being. They live in the here and now and that causing suffering to them is not upsetting the definition given above because their interests are not being inhibited. Remember, the claim is that they have a limited conception or none at all of their future so they therefore have no self interest. Can we extend this claim then to other sentient beings such as humans? When a human child is born it cannot identify itself with this world nor have an interest in its future. It can be argued, however, that the child will develop these characteristics with age. Sometimes, however, humans are born with, or develop, mental disorders where they cannot identify with their surroundings or with themselves and they have no conception of their interests or their future. Can, in this instance, humans be subjected to the sort of treatment that laboratory animals endure? Most people will argue that no matter what, humans cannot be tortured or undergo laboratory tests such as grafting an ear of another species on her back. Some will even state that euthanasia is ethically wrong in such a case. What is the basis for such an argument? Treating these humans in this way would certainly fit with the definition of ethics given above but most still object. This is obviously a case of 'humanism', stating that being human is the characteristic that provides us our ethical liberties and not something that makes us human.

How does this example of comparing lab animals with humans of similar mental capacities, whether right or wrong, relate to whether trees have rights you may ask? Well, the fact that trees seem to be outside the scope of ‘western’ ethics is an ideological distinction. The fact that the ethics we have in ‘western’ society derives from a post Socratic weltanschauung, by definition, cannot be thought of as universally relevant. Because some may think, according to their ideological heritage, that trees have no rights does not mean that all people think that trees have no rights. In traditional Indigenous Australian philosophy even rocks and other inanimate objects have rights; traditional Indigenous Australians act ‘ethically’ towards such objects. What makes someone human, makes them alive, makes them ethically valuable, is the same as what makes a tree a tree or a rock a rock; some inanimate objects and places are even considered more important than humans. I can just imagine a ‘western’ scientist saying we can torture humans but we mustn’t even look at that rock. What seems absurd to us may be undeniably true to others.

Do trees have rights? I think so. But my reason for this position is that my ideological position is different from the generic ‘western’ model presented above. It is the dominant ‘western’ scientific ideology that reduces ethical nature, the nature of life, to sentience, to consciousness. I believe that there is a uniting force, an anima if you will, that is common in all life; in humans, in animals, and in trees. The ethical rights I give myself and to other humans I extend to all that shares what I share. If you declare that the definition of ethics given above is what you believe then that is fine, however, please remember the heritage of that position and the validity of other ethical view points as well. After all, ‘western’ thought, including science, can be argued to be just another social construction.

References

Arbor, JL 1986, ‘Animal Chauvinism, Plant-Regarding Ethics and the Torture of Trees’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, no. 5, pp. 335-339.

---

[1] I’m not overly happy with the term ‘western’, I may have used ‘northern’ or something similar to describe the ideological system adhered to by the group in question, however, ‘western’ remains the most widely understood term in classifying this ideological system.