What I’m watching..

[tweetmeme source=”VeganChickie”]Well it’s that time again, time to get together a bunch of things that I’ve been reading and watching over the last couple of weeks.

First of all I want to start with a bit more Jonathan Safran Foer love, this is actually one of the more comprehensive interviews I’ve seen with him which is really excellent (go Aussies!). The one thing that did get on my nerves a little was towards the end of the interview where he says that it’s “difficult” to go vegetarian. I disagree with that, I think the hardest thing about going vegetarian is making the decision to change your lifestyle, everything else is easy! Anyway, HERE is the link!

HERE is a new PETA video with the lovely Joaquin Phoenix talking about the Exotic Skins industry (snakes, crocs etc). Just a warning it is graphic, but I do think it’s worth watching.

I know I have a lot of new readers since I did my last links post so I’ll quickly post some links to some documentaries which I think anyone new to the lifestyle or considering veganism/vegetarianism should watch:

Earthlings
Meet Your Meat

*NOTE: graphic warning goes for both of those links.

HERE is a link to a very strange story about some guy who had the idea that if he put TVs in his dairy cow shed and showed pictures of green fields all day then the cows would be happier and therefore produce more milk. Personally I think that’s just about the saddest thing I’ve heard today.

HERE is a link to The Vegan Society’s vegan manifesto which is a list of policies that they would like political parties to adopt and which includes things like: Working toward better vegan catering in hospitals and schools, funding and development of alternatives to animal medical testing, changes to the curriculum to include education about animal treatment etc. Check it out!

Read about the very sad recommendation for the addition of the beautiful Loggerhead Turtle to the endangered species list.

And HERE is a BBC News article about the controversy around the Bluefin Tuna at the moment. This whole thing is so heartbreaking and a really good illustration of how big business is chosen over animals time and time again. Infuriating!

HERE is a very enlightening article in the Washington Post about how manure is the fastest growing threat to the survival of our planet.

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas.

And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones” that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.

Read the rest HERE.

I highly recommend the Mercy For Animals Blog for anyone who is interested in animal rights, they are a really great organisation and I find their blog posts really informative and well rounded (and best of all you don’t have to wade through pages of junk like ‘world’s sexiest vegetarian’ like you do on the PETA site!!!). I particularly liked their blog post this week about their Humane Education Campaign.

Mercy for Animals have also been responsible for some pretty hard hitting billboards and advertisements recently. Read more about that campaign HERE.

I have a huge blogger crush on Elaine Vigneault aka The Eccentric Vegan. I love so much of what she has to say and constantly find myself nodding and cheering as I read her blog posts over at Vegan Soapbox. Some of my favourites from the last few weeks have been:

• The ‘Enormously Complex’ Issue of the Eco-Diet – in response to Cheri Shankar’s Can you be a meat-eating environmentalist?
• Animal Advocacy for Shy People – This blog post was bound to be a favourite of mine since I’m a shy woman trying to live as a vegan animal activist. When I started out, years ago, as a vegetarian I was always terrified of people asking me why and would avoid that conversation at all costs. These days I’m a proud vegan and very open to having that conversation and many more. I still have a way to go, but I have to say I’m making strides on the unshying of myself (yes I know that isn’t a word)!
• Making An Effort – The myths vs the facts of veganism
• Rabbits are the New Chickens – About an article in the NY Times suggesting that parents lie to their children about where meat comes from.

Also on Vegan Soapbox this fortnight: A post about some disturbing practices in the cattle industry, in particular the act of killing a dairy calf so that a “beef” calf can drink the dead calf’s milk. In some cases they tie the hide of the dead calf to the beef calf so the mother will think it’s her own baby! Ew.

HERE is an article on USA Today about Illegal and Unsafe Food Safety breeches at Slaughterhouses.

I have also been featured on another blog, talking about why I became a vegan. Sharni over at Sharnanigans is also holding a Meatless Monday challenge over there to encourage her readers to start thinking about veganism, which is quite exciting. Check that out HERE.

Okay, that’s enough for today! I would like to keep going but one of the problems with going through my ‘vegan interest’ folder to find all the things I wanted to share with you, is that it’s filled with all the delicious recipes I saw in the last fortnight and wanted to try, which is making me hungry, which means I can’t concentrate, which means I’m going to go and make some lunch! Vegan Corn Dogs anyone??

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What I’ve Been Reading – A Collection of Vegan Links

[tweetmeme source=”VeganChickie”] It’s been a while since I’ve put together a list of interesting vegan links here on the blog. Those of you who follow me on Twitter, or are a fan of the Facebook page, will have seen a couple of these videos and articles already because I’ve been posting some of the things that interest me during the week. I will probably be doing more of that in the future so be sure to become a fan or follow me if you are interested.

First of all I wanted to share this DELICIOUS looking recipe from Ross over at Vegan Eats. I think I’ll definitely be trying this recipe in the future, but in the meantime you can drool over his delicious Chocolate Peanut Fudge HERE.

HERE is a video of Jonathan Safran Foer’s segment on the Colbert Report. I’ve discovered, since watching this segment – I don’t own a TV and have never seen the Colbert Report before – that I don’t much like Colbert but JSF is great (as always) so I thought I would share.

HERE is a youtube video about raising vegan children which I found interesting.

THIS video has been doing the rounds a bit lately so a lot of you will already have seen it but I find it so heartbreaking that I just have to share it. It’s not a gory video, you don’t see any physical torture (aside from some prodding, which I admit is pretty upsetting), or a single drop of blood, but this clip really speaks volumes about just what an animal feels and how much he or she understands as they make their way to the slaughter. I think this clip would provide great clarification for anyone who doesn’t fully understand what the term ‘sentient being’ really means.

HERE is a new blog, especially created as a resource for Western Australians but it’s a great blog for vegan product reviews and recipes as well so I think you’ll find it interesting no matter where you live.

Shannon over at Diary of a Vegan always has so many interesting articles, I really recommend heading over and checking her out. My two favourites during the last few weeks have been:

Heal Yourself, Heal the Planet, A Little Guide to Transformation
Eating Raw on the Run

Mercy for Animals have an article on their blog about the decline of animals being killed for food in the USA. Which is a wonderful and really encouraging trend. Let’s hope that trend continues! Below is a graphic of some of those statistics which can also be found in the article linked above:

CBS News this week had an article discussing the overuse of antibiotics in animals and the effects on humans, read the article and watch the video HERE.

HERE is an ABC news article about a dairy worker who was suspended from work after hitting a cow with a wrench. How disgusting that this kind of behaviour is only enough for a suspension, it really illustrates the way that these animals are viewed by the people who run these companies.

There is a bit of a misconception out there that in order to be vegan you have to be wealthy, which I don’t think is true. Of course there are vegan food items that are expensive, but that is true of any diet. In my case, meat items were always the most expensive items in my grocery basket when I was an omnivore and later, when I was a vegetarian, dairy products always took the biggest chunk out of our food budget, as a vegan there are weeks that I spend a lot of money of specialty items like agave nectar or dark chocolate covered goji berries, but the majority of my grocery list consists of beans, grains and vegetables and I find that I spend less than ever on my weekly shop. In that spirit: HERE is an article entitled “How To Eat Vegan Cheaply”.

Also on Vegan Soapbox is an article about the standard industry practice of cutting off cow’s tails without painkillers. **Warning, there is a graphic video attached to this article, but it doesn’t start automatically so you don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to.

And, a piece that discusses the flaws in the omnivore’s claim that it’s natural to eat other animals: We Are Not Lions.

Gary L. Francione writes about Violence in his blog.

Normally I don’t post links about celebrity veganism or vegetarianism but I really liked THIS article about Ginnifer Goodwin and her decision to go vegan so I thought I would include it this week.

I’ve always been a little baffled when speaking to “vegetarians” who still eat fish (pretendatarians?), I was never quite able to understand how they were able to justify taking the life of a fish but not the life of a cow. Maybe some of them would change their mind about eating seafood if they read THIS article about farmed salmon. It’s a VERY informative read, I’d highly recommend you all read it. In the article he talks about a documentary called “Farmed Salmon Exposed”, HERE is that documentary on YouTube. **Warning the video is graphic

As a bit of a contrast to the unhappy animals you’ve seen in a lot of these links and videos I thought I’d share THIS link which is a collection of some smiley happy animals. I have to put a disclaimer here because I feel a bit weird about sharing this link since some of the photos included are of animals in captivity (zoos etc) which I personally don’t agree with, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of what happy, clean, well treated animals look like so I’m including it. The pictures at the end of this post are from that video.

Well that’s it for this week, I’ll leave you with another happy herbie video because there is nothing like some herbie love to cheer you up. Herbie the rescued steer plays with a tree branch.

What I’ve been reading

[tweetmeme source=”VeganChickie”]I thought I might take a bit of a break from the recipes today to share with you some of the sites and info I’ve been reading in the last week or so. Over the last few weeks I’ve started to realise that it’s not enough simply to not participate in the culture of cruelty, sometimes it’s just as important to provide people with information so that they can make an informed choice about their eating habits, SO, in that spirit I thought I would do a weekly or fortnightly post with some interesting links, blogs etc.

The Hidden Lives of Cows: A website about the dairy industry in New Zealand

Some Thoughts on Vegan Education: By Gary L. Francione

This video was the “light-bulb moment” for my husband, who has always been a very avid meat eater, he always picked on me for my tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but then he saw this video and he hasn’t eaten meat since. (not graphic or violent!)

An interview with the very fabulous Jonathan Safran Foer on Ellen

A children’s book about veganism and factory farming: Why We Don’t Eat Animals

Abolitionist Approach FAQs

Of course there is the documentary “Earthlings” which I highly recommend, even though I’m still having nightmares after forcing myself to watch it. I know it’s hard to watch, but as I said to a friend of mine the other day who said she just couldn’t watch it, closing my eyes doesn’t make the cruelty any less true. If you aren’t able to watch it, imagine how it must be to live it.

Here is a Thanksgiving Ad by Peta, in light of the fact that it is Thanksgiving. I have a lot of issues with Peta and a lot of their approaches to vegan education – in particular the way they exploit women – but I do quite like the simplicity and sincerity of this advertisement so I thought I would include it.

And you all know by now that I think everyone (in the world!) should read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, even if you have no interest in veganism, it is still such an important read, please read it!

Okay that’s it for this week. I’ll come back next week with anything interesting I find between now and then!

PS: Just a note, I will not link anything graphic without a warning either before or directly after the link, I am VERY sensitive about that kind of thing so I wouldn’t ambush anyone that way, however, some of the sites I’m linking to may have graphic pictures in their headers or sidebars, linking to various things around their sites, so tread carefully if you are likely to be easily offended.

**NOTE: This post was supposed to be posted yesterday, but due to technical difficulties didn’t go through until today, which explains the Thanksgiving theme 🙂