I was joined in the Lunch Room today by the founders of The Vegan Initiative, Evan and Jesse Stormo and Adam Roufberg, to discuss their organization and their petition to create a national holiday to recognize the exploitation of animals. Be sure to check out and sign their Animal Day Petition.

We spoke with Dr. Will Tuttle, author of the World Peace Diet - the quintessential book on veganism which explores all aspects of veganism including: the nature of our indoctrination into a culture of denial and disconnect wrt to the massive brutality perpetrated against animals, the health aspects of a vegan diet, the effects of factory farms on the environment, the sentience of non-human animals etc.

I conducted an interview with Professor Gary Steiner on his recent NYTimes Op Ed piece Animal, Vegetable, Miserable and other works regarding the sentience of animals and the predominant anthropocentric view of the human animal which discounts the self-worth of others.

Jesse, Evan, and Adam played some live sounds behind the interview with Professor Steiner.

Original Article from NY Times >>

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.