vegansaurus!

Celebrate the everyday with Meat Week, the festival for people with too much time on their hands  »

Want to hear something that’s just so cool? There’s a group dedicated to creating a “Meat Week” in cities throughout the country! How clever is that?! OMG such a great idea. Wait, can we also have a White History Month and a Straight Pride Parade?! Bros, reality check: American culture has beat you to Meat Week! But we just call it, “this week,” or occasionally, “next week” and sometimes, “last week.” Get it? Every week is Meat Week here in the U.S. of A.

I read their website so you don’t have to—and oh my god do you owe me. Suffering through their writing was like having someone vomit stupidity directly into my brain. For real, don’t read it; it will make you dumber. I will break it down for you instead: Meat Week was started by a Floridian fanboy and -girl who took time off from whatever role-playing game I’ve never heard of to eat BBQ for a week. Somehow I doubt this is really anything new; I’m sure they ate plenty of BBQ before this, they just wanted to add a “festivus” element to make their redundant evening plans a little more exciting. Mission accomplished, pals!

This is like those people who were protesting smoke-free bars. In my youth, I enjoyed an indoor cigarette here and there but to actually spend your energy protesting that? With all the problems and injustice in the world, that is the what really gets you off the couch? For shame, people. Seriously, that’s pathetic. It’s as pathetic as using your resources, energy and skills to organize a “Meat Week” when everyone and his mom is already eating more meat than the world can sustain. Americans eat about twice the global average of meat a day while the meat industry continues to destroy the planet. This is an example of the “FUCK YOU WORLD” attitude that makes everyone hate the United States. For real, everyone thinks Americans are gluttonous, mindless, smug douchebags and things like a Meat Week are exactly why.

I’ve got a great idea: let’s have an Fossil-Fuel Week! We could do it right after Bike-to-Work Week. All we have to do is get millions of people to drive their cars everywhere all the time, spend a ton on industrialized heating and cooling systems, personally use as much electricity and power as possible and let’s cover the country in factory farms. OMG WAIT HOLD THE PHONE! OK, OK, well how about a petroleum slip-n-slide?! Oh, right.

Fifty horses going to slaughter if they can’t be rehomed!?  »

Brock at SFist alerts us to this SUPER DUPER sad Craigslist ad from the Free section (don’t put animals in the free section, assholes!) (oh, wait, it’s been flagged, that’s probably why!). Anyway, here’s what the ad looked like:
I’ve put a call into the number listed (440/ 463-4288) and uh, let’s see what we can do. This is ridiculous and so freaking sad. UGH. If you can think of any way to help, please do!!

UPDATE: The person’s voicemail is full and they’re not picking up but I also heard from a reliable source that all the horses were successfully re-homed?? I’ll post if I learn more and please let us know if you hear anything!

HOT GIRL-ON-VEGETABLE ACTION! Great move, Peta!  »

We are getting some bad press these day. First it’s “bacon turns vegetarians into uncontrollable meat-eating machines!” and now it’s “literally fucking produce.” Will no one think of the children? Or the people with self-respect?

There is NOTHING RIGHT with Peta’s “2011 Super Bowl ad,” which is described as “outtakes from last year’s ad’s casting video.” Every goddamn thing about it is offensive, from the disembodied male voice directing the ladies in bikinis to the roughly 1 billion “this looks like a penis!” jokes to the one shirtless dude who has clearly not spent his entire adult-bodied life working out like a fucking fiend acting all hapless, like we needed the extra pandering.

What a joke. What a disgrace. Peta, WHAT THE FUCK. This does not make anyone want to “go veg,” it makes them either want to puke, masturbate, or masturbate and then puke from the shame of having gotten off to some softcore porn masquerading as an anti-animal-cruelty video. Your “skins” campaigns, full of photos of naked attention-hungry omnivores who show up everywhere else in leather and silk? Whatever the hell the women in lettuce bikinis are supposed to represent? The Worst. Why are you such hypocrites? As Deceiver puts it, “How is exhorting young women to get it on with gourds in any way ethical treatment? Are pretty young things not animals as well? Or are there exceptions in the vegan manifesto about how living creatures aren’t to be exploited for our entertainment?”

Honestly! Your non-sexually explicit arms do good work (well, mostly), Peta, but you’re always going to be “those nuts who throw paint on people and take a lot of naked-chick photos” if you don’t cut this out. We vegans and animal-rights activists are SO TIRED of our association with you, it’s SO EMBARRASSING—worse than a dozen birther relatives addicted to Facebook, because at least you can hide those people and deny their “add relative” requests; we can’t hide from your well earned, terrible reputation.

Again, what are “hott chix in bikinis literally fellating zucchini” doing for the animal-rights movement? “I love vegetables so much I actually fuck them” is not the same as “I abstain from all animal products”—why do bunny-eating omnivores understand that better than you, ostensibly strict vegans?

Fire your public relations team. Fire everyone involved in any of your clothes-free ad campaigns. Hire some people with talent* and the good sense not to do anything like this ever again, who won’t make you look like such gross hypocrites. Unless you really all are gross, Dov Charney/Terry Richardson-style exploitative creeps, in which case, just shut the fuck up and leave the talking to the rest of us adults.

*Hints: our Megan Rascal is an advertising genius! (And I am editorially talented and very strict!)

[link to video at HuffPo via Deceiver, which is sometimes super-irksome about veganism but does make an excellent “stop being hypocritical” point. Photo by Yum! via Fruit Porn]

The meat industry is terrifying, and it knows it!  »

According to Gene Baur’s blog,* some of the most-read articles of 2010 on MeatingPlace.com are the following:

“Bomb found in employee locker at Hormel plant”
“Man dies after fall at Cargill beef plant”
“Worker killed at Wis. beef plant”
“Worker loses legs in meat grinder accident”

The violence, you guys, the violence! Obviously the meat industry is violence, but the workers are subjected to horrific conditions and are any of them even unionized? Not from what I can tell. Obviously we’re socialist lunatics over here and believe very strongly in the power of unions and The Worker, but for real, if you want safer meat, omnivores, you want the people in charge of the animals you’re eating—as in, from kill to cuts—to be physically able to follow Food Safety and Inspection Services guidelines. But of course, unionized workers have to be paid a decent wage and provided with safe working conditions, both of which items cost money, and how are you gonna get your $5 Meat Lover’s pizza if the people working the sausage grinders aren’t at risk of losing their limbs?

The most infuriating part is that the white-collar workers in the meat industry knows this; they write about these issues themselves and apparently read all about it—but they refuse to do anything about it. Lobbyists fight against safety regulations, corporations refuse to spend any money to care for their workers beyond the bare minimum; we’ve read our generation’s The Jungle and ignored its warnings. Everyone has. And now look what we’ve got: the industry knows it’s corrupt and disgusting, and it apparently doesn’t care.

*We’d link to them, but there’s a ridiculously involved registration process to access hardly anything on Meating Place, and your Vegansaurus neither wanted to invent an elaborate false identity, nor share so many personal details with “an online meat industry site,” so we’re trusting our hero Gene Baur on this.

[photo by Lachlan Hardy]

They’re burying live pigs in South Korea  »

Seriously: 1.4 MILLION of them. Because everyone wants their cheap meat more than they want to pay for the vaccinations to keep the animals alive long enough to slaughter and eat them. I don’t really want to write much more on this because pretty soon it’ll be impossible for me to see the computer screen through my tears but I think everyone should know. I hope everyone who order their $5 Meat Lover’s pizza tonight knows that they are responsible for this.

I don’t really pray or believe in god or anything like that but I think tonight I’ll observe a moment of silence for these pigs. Afterwards, I’ll take some time to think about how I can be a better activist for all animals. Maybe everyone can do the same and we can come up with some really excellent ways to help animals? I can’t think of anything else to do. Oh wait, Marji let’s us know we can contact the South Korean Minister of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and the South Korea’s American Embassy so please do that, too.

I’m sorry, pigs.

[pigs in Bodhgaya, India by mikeemesser]

Religious festivals provide new and fun ways to torture Australian sheep!  »

Because Australian sheep don’t suffer enough (see mulesing), Australian farmers ship them live to the “Middle East”* so they can be brutalized and then killed for Eid al Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. For this year’s festival, Animals Australia investigators were onsite in Kuwait and Bahrain to document the cruelty, and caught some really effed shit. Shipping live animals is awful all on its own, but then once they get there, these sheep are sold on the street and chained to cars and whatnot to bring home to “sacrifice.” The picture above is one of many shocking photos; here we have sheep being forced into the trunk of a car to transport to someone’s home to be killed. Seriously, this picture makes me ill.

The Jerusalem Post has a really great article on Muslim vegetarians and how they view the holiday. It seems people question whether one can be Muslim and be vegetarian but the Post writes, “Liberal clerics, such as American scholar Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, point to Islamic oral traditions to justify vegetarianism. ‘Traditionally Muslims were semi-vegetarians,’ Yusuf claimed in religious audio tape. ‘Umar [the second Muslim Caliph] said: “Beware of meat, because it has an addiction like the addiction of wine”.’” And Muslims are generally pretty down on wine.

In a bit of good news, it looks like vegetarians aren’t the only people skipping the sacrifice; according to the article, some meat-loving people are forgoing the sacrifice for purely economic reasons—meat is expensive and prices have gone up. Still, they say 800,000 sheep were shipped from Australia this year for the festival. If they really want sheep, can’t someone raise them closer to Kuwait or something? And if they really want to sacrifice sheep, can’t they treat them with some decency before they kill them? If an animal is being murdered for you, you could at least be grateful.

*I don’t think we call it that anymore? I couldn’t find a definite preferred term. [Ed. The term has become pretty firmly entrenched, even in the area itself. Maybe West Asia as a substitute?]