ARCO's Abolitionists - A Vegan Forum

I am curious to learn about various forms of vegan education about which you are aware, either as a participant or as an observer of the efforts of others.

Thanks.

GLF

Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary runs sanctuary tours on most weekends, weather permitting. PPS has also put up a Go Vegan billboard on the main road in downtown Denver leading to the National Western Stock Show which is seen by hundreds of people daily for a month. Last year it ran for 3 months, I believe.

It seems worthwhile to educate people on Internet forums and blogs, especially if you don't have a nearby abolitionist organization to volunteer with. The creative side of this is maintaining the high ground by not getting sucked into insults and flame wars. It is very much to the advantage of the opposition to drag us down into an ad hom fest so they don't have to face the arguments. Of course, avoiding the ad hom fest is not always easy to do, thus the need to be “creative” by finding ways to keep the discussion on topic and interesting.

Gary L. Francione wrote:I am curious to learn about various forms of vegan education about which you are aware, either as a participant or as an observer of the efforts of others.

Thanks.

GLF

With the Boston Vegan Association we are, as you know, working on a pamphlet we hope will be suitable for vegan education.

Additionally, we are planning the following over the next few months:

A vegan feed-in. We will be giving away hundreds of sack lunches filled with vegan sandwiches, some sort of side like Tings, and a guide to vegan restaurants in the Boston area. We will have a locally-based vegan "ice cream" company serving up ice cream for those who want to try that as well. In addition to getting over myths about what constitutes vegan food (granted this is not exactly the height of health food here), we will also plan to hand out our new pamphlets.

On this note, we're also doing a vegan wine & Sheese tasting at a local shop that does themed Saturday afternoons. I pitched them on the idea of a vegan wine tasting, and they went for it. They have been looking to get more vegan wines in, so we give them a good excuse. These tastings are open to the public, so we will be there with our BVA t-shirts, literature, and vegan wine, Sheese & crackers to pave the way and enlighten people we might not otherwise reach.

A movie screening. We'd like to screen the new, non-welfarist version of Peaceable Kingdom, if it's available in time, but we may end up with Earthlings. I'm conflicted on this. The film starts out with a sort of abolitionist overview, then spends a lot of time cataloguing the various forms of human cruelty toward animals. While these are all shocking and eye-opening, they are numbing and ultimately off-putting. I'm sure it's no accident that PETA's Meet Your Meat video is as short as it is. (Don't worry: we won't be showing any PETA videos, though it does point to the need for an effective abolitionist AR movie... If anyone knows of a better movie advocating veganism, please tell me)

There is some discussion of screening the opening of the film and the section on animals used for food, and calling it an "excerpt" rather than screening the whole thing. We could make available copies of the DVD for anyone who wants to watch the rest of it, but would otherwise spend the balance of our time on Q&A and possibly on sharing some sort of vegan goods (ideally provided by a local restaurant). Of course, on way to help encourage attendance is to offer food.

Vegan culinary arts. As part of my program of increasing the accessibility and the adoption of veganism, I have kick-started a program to offer vegan cooking (and uncooking, even baking) classes in the area at an affordable price. We'll have literature on hand for people that want to go beyond the food and get more into the

I write a lot of letters, leave lots of comments on articles and so forth. I try to find a balance. One could easily lose a lot of time on this stuff, so I try to focus on situations where I might have the most impact. Somebody needs to wade into some of these and present the abolitionist viewpoint, though, because otherwise it's just a bunch of animal users and animal welfarists duking it out, in an endless cycle of "missing the point."

Of course, I also blog on some of this stuff, too. Lately I have been doing less blogging, because my site used to be driven by the cycle of endless welfarist stories and "victories" that kept me spinning my wheels. As I started getting clearer about the implementation of abolitionist principles in my work, I found myself posting less and less. That said, I still post when inspiration strikes, and I have brought a number of people along with me on this journey.

I am happy to have not only inspired several (known) individuals to go vegan, but to have others inform me that they have come to see the wisdom of the abolitionist approach as well.

Speaking of which, I have recently been working to improve the education of our membership at the BVA, myself included. We should have a 6-week class going by March 8th. Participants will be guided through the abolitionist approach to animal rights and how it relates to veganism and, thus, our advocacy. We're already moving along with our public speaking program, so the combination of theory and public speaking skills will hopefully go some way toward increasing the number of articulate abolitionist speakers and educators.

All right, that's what comes to mind here at an hour at which I really meant to be asleep. There are, of course, welfarist forms of of vegan education out there, but I'm not sure if you were looking to hear back on all types of vegan education, or only education that wasn't predicated solely on reducing suffering.

Looking forward to other responses.

Excellent, AF.

Wow, animalfriendly, that's what I call creative!! The wine & Sheese is an especially fun one: people love going to wine & cheese receptions, and I'm sure the pleasure of getting a bit tipsy or simply enjoying new wines (as well as new cheese) is sure to open most people's minds! How incredible that you got a place to sponsor it! And you already have your own paraphernalia, too!

The feed-in and culinary arts are also sure to be hits; again, it sounds like a lot of superb organization that went into getting these ideas implemented.

The screening will certainly be extremely effective. If it is Earthlings, I think you would do well to do the excerpt idea. The whole thing would be just absolutely overwhelming, and I suspect people would have to walk out, missing out on the discussion afterwards. I think I only saw the vivisection part and was completely undone for some time afterwards.

I'm absolutely in awe of all you've managed to do. Props to you!

btw, we would love to see your pamphlet!!

Thanks for the kind words. I am trying, and I am constantly trying to hone my focus, too.

I am eager to see what other creative ideas are suggested, as I think we should always strive to improve how effective we are.

I'm taking the liberty of pasting two quotes from Jose Vallee of Igualdad Animal:

Hi,

our group Igualdad Animal / Animal Equality gave a talk with the following title: "Abolitionism: from theory to practice in Spanish speaking countries" explaining our principles and how do they applied in our activism, you can see the note at:
http://www.vegancampaigns.org.uk/festiv ... Animal.htm

and here is a photo of the talk:
http://www.igualdadanimal.org/files/pas ... val_02.jpg

We had a big banner with our claim "Animal Equality" in the hall and a small stall (next to the Vegan Runners one) where we offered our leaflets and sell Introduction to Animal Rights by Gary L. Francione and Speciesism by Joan Dunayer.

I can answer to your initial question "What else do abolitionists do?" with my own work and what does my group do. You can take a look at some of our actions at: http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-de-imagenes (there are several galleries with hundreds of photos inside those general categories)
and you can access to a full list of past activities at: http://www.igualdadanimal.org/actividades/anteriores

In short, we have 3 stalls a week in Madrid, the biggest city of Spain (that's about 120 stalls during 2007) where we promote veganism and explain animal rights to the people. During 2007, we also did 3 protests every week about different areas. We think animal rights is not something that should be promoted on a big demo once every 3 months but to be promoted on a daily basis, we need to take this debate and the animal rights message to the streets. We are increasing our activity this year, we want to double the number of actions, so we are doing 2 protests every friday and saturday and one more on Sundays, so every Friday we have 2 protests and one stall in the same city promoting veganism and abolition, thats 3 stalls and 5 protests every week of the year just in Madrid. We are also working in other Spanish cities like Sevilla and Barcelona, and in other countries like Peru and Venezuela (we will soon start in Colombia too).

We also give talks (19 in 2007), have done an open rescue of six pigs and I can tell you that we have helped dozens of people to become vegan and activists. Our demos have appeared on several national tv channels, newspapers and radios with an abolitionist message, we have been interviewed by some of the most important media who reflected quite accurately our claims.

We have done 14 screenings of films during the past year and given away more than 150.000 leaflets and more than 6.000 films for free.

We have done an activist workshop to educate our activists and to critically think about animal rights and the several issues that it may arise or relate with, and we will start doing it every 2 weeks. In our workshops we explain the basic theory and our position on several different subjects, ranging from more abstract ones to how to properly do a stall or behave under different situations, your legal rights as an activist, and so on.

We have translated some articles and interviews that help people to think about human / non-human relations and what we do about them, we have published several websites, gave some vegan cooking courses, aired some of our own videos, etc.

We are currently working in a campaign about the use (not treatment) of nh animals for clothing (not just "fur") as well as several other projects I can't yet explain.

I think other forum users have given some good ideas of what can we "else" do for animals within abolitionism, so I'll refrain to repeat it.

Please, excuse any error I may commit in English since it's not my mother tongue.
_________________
Animal Equality
Igualdad Animal
Animal Rights Day

One of the activities I forget to comment is when our group in Peru gave on December 29th a vegan dinner for over 300 children (including soymilk chocolate, yumm!) as you can see at:

http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-d ... re-2007/01
http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-d ... re-2007/02

Activists preparing the dinner:
http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-d ... re-2007/06
http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-d ... re-2007/03

We also had a show to entertain the children without non-human animals being exploited
http://www.igualdadanimal.org/galeria-d ... re-2007/04

I think this was a nice way to help both human and non-human animals.

Erik just posted on another thread about another thing he's doing through the Boston Vegan Association. An Abolitionism study group! Creative, Vegan, and Education, all three!

Tell us more?

panthera wrote:Erik just posted on another thread about another thing he's doing through the Boston Vegan Association. An Abolitionism study group! Creative, Vegan, and Education, all three!

Tell us more?

Um, it's Eric, btw.

We meet six times, with assigned reading in advance of each meeting, and discussion questions to guide the conversation. We start off looking at Singer, Regan and Francione's discussions of animal equality, proceed through examining the defects of welfarism, then rely on Francione's work to arrive at a methodology for advocacy.

AnimalFriendly wrote:... to arrive at a methodology for advocacy.

whith my french organisation, we will soon go in the street and speak about animal rights/veganism under an abolitionist approach (of course), I was thinking of THE best template/squeleton to advocace it: all the differents step to convince people and not to let them the opportunity to contest some part of the discussion. I think this is very very important for a grassroot organisation, it gives a unique and clear message from militants.
Is it possible to share this methodology?