HOW TO BEGIN YOUR JOURNEY
1. Watch the movies The Witness and Earthlings for free. You’ll see that animals aren’t food and clothing. Animals are individuals who share this world with us.
2. Enjoy the book Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat
3. Replace dairy milk with soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hazelnut milk, oat milk, multigrain milk, and hemp milk. Unless you’re a baby cow, you don’t need cow’s milk. Consumption of animal protein is linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and even acne. Think of cow’s milk as liquid meat. Treat yourself to nondairy
Purely Decadent Ice Cream.
4. For a quick sandwich, try Hickory Smoked Tofurky Deli Slices. Add thin slices of red onion and Vegenaise mayo. Spike your mayo with curry powder or other favorite spices to give your tastebuds an extra kick. Maybe sprinkle on a bit of Daiya cheese. Vegan living isn’t about what you can’t eat—or actually, don’t want to eat. It’s about discovering the thousands of vegan foods you can eat. Add two new very tasty vegan foods for each food you no longer eat.
5. Practice cooking. There are no rules. Experiment with ingredients. Whatever tastes good to you is a recipe that rocks. To make it easy on yourself, you might begin with a classic cookbook such as Vive le Vegan!
6. Explore fresh fruits and vegetables at your local farmers’ market. Visit food co-ops. Asian supermarkets offer the yummiest mock meats. Browse all the aisles.
7. Purge your home of products made from animals. This includes leather, wool, felt, beeswax, silk. To not use these things is to refuse to participate in animal misery and death.
8. Learn about animal liberation issues. Start projects with other activists or on your own to help animals. Keep your group small to stay effective and to avoid getting co-opted. Temporarily join forces with other social justice seekers for larger projects. Be humble, truthful, and fiercely imaginative. Guided by your deepest natural instincts, you will continue asking true questions—the only kind that’s worth asking—and you will travel your way into the answers.
9. Tribe of Heart deconstructs the most dangerous myth that animals can be exploited humanely. Study the
humane myth, then use these outstanding resources to reach fellow citizens in your community.
10. It’s necessary to not only not cause harm to animals but to actively protect them.
VEGAN NUTRITION IS SIMPLE
Just eat a variety of goodies from the real Four Food Groups daily. That’s it.
Don’t fret about protein. There’s plenty in all the whole plant foods you eat every day.
SHORT ESSAY BY STEVE BEST: OUR TASK
Excerpt:
Let’s be clear: we are fighting for a revolution, not for reforms; for the end of slavery, not for “humane” slavemasters; for a new consciousness, not welfare, “benevolent slavery,” or “enlightened humanism.” Animal liberation advances the most radical idea to ever land on human ears: animals are not ours to exploit as food, clothing, resources, commodities, data, or “entertainment.” They exist for their own purposes, not ours. But animal liberation is simply unthinkable on its own terms, rather than as part and parcel of a larger revolutionary project that integrates human, animal, and Earth liberation as one inseparable struggle.
Thus, we must not only educate and agitate, we must form a social movement that combines the merely partial struggles for social justice, autonomy, animal rights, and ecology in a global, revolutionary politics of total liberation. As with all revolutions, animals will not gain “rights” (or whatever a possible future society calls inviolable and inalienable moral and legal protections against abuse and exploitation) because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enraged, engaged, and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.
SELF-INTEREST MAKES OUR SPECIES SHALLOW
A “deep” ecologist would clean up a pond because plants and animals deserve to be free of pollution; a “shallow” ecologist would preserve the pond so that his grandchildren would have a nice place to swim.
—Paul Watson
The New Yorker, 2007
THE POETRY OF THE LIVES OF ANIMALS
Consider the endless debates over animals: what they feel, what they think, what their behaviors mean. Often myths and mere speculation serve as facts about animals until proven otherwise—decades or centuries later. All we know for certain is that their lives, like ours, remain a great mystery. And the more we experience, the more the wonder of that mystery grows.
Every life is fascinating. Every life travels a river of unrepeatable moments.
Every animal has a right to live out his or her own remarkable odyssey.
FOR AN ALTERNATE VERSION OF THIS SITE, VISIT LAUGHING GORILLA
OF COURSE BONOBOS AND CHIMPANZEES USE TOOLS
But did you know so do fish? Check out this video clip of the orange-dotted tuskfish (choerodon anchoago) taking a clamshell over to a rock to smash it open, then choosing to use a large rock wall.
Apparently, fish are not only sentient but intelligent. Will this stop people from devouring them? Doubtful. Until the predominant animal-eating culture shifts its rationalized perceptions of other species from property and “natural resources” to understanding that animals are individuals who are our earth kin under the skin, animals will continue to
be consumed in the billions every year.
Scientists who still claim fish don’t use tools simply make excuses. It’s obvious when confronted with evidence that shatters their speciesist worldview, they preserve the status quo by changing the rules. No surprise. Scientists also measure intelligence based solely on human criteria.
If true intelligence is based on how a species lives in cooperation with the planet, then humans certainly come in dead last.
WHAT IS HORIZONTAL HYDRAULIC FRACTURING?
Fracking 101
HOW MANY PLANETS ARE NEEDED TO SUPPORT YOUR LIFESTYLE?
Animated Global Footprint Calculator
Ecological Footprint Quiz
ANSWER TO YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE
Research your own experiences for the truth….Absorb what is useful….Add what is specifically your own….The creating individual is more than any style or system.
—Rolf Potts, quoting martial arts legend Bruce Lee
One does not sell the Earth upon which the people walk.
—Crazy Horse, 1875
Photo by Peter Mallamo (The Needles, South Dakota)
REMEMBER HOW PROGRESS HAPPENS
“However, history shows clearly that humanity is moved forward not by people who stop every little while to try to gauge the ultimate success or failure of their ventures, but by those who think deeply about what is right and then put all their energy into doing it,” writes Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN CHECKING PRODUCT LABELS
Animal Ingredients List
Damn, that’s a lot of ingredients. But believe it or not, you’ll soon learn to recognize these suckers and know them like the back of your paw.
Just getting started? Bring this handy helper to the grocery store.
WHO ARE THE ECO-TERRORISTS?
The U.S. federal government churns out eco-terrorist rhetoric to favor corporate interests and to stifle activists and thinking citizens. Such rhetoric is used to cause fear of imprisonment among activists—to prevent them from protesting or taking action. It’s also used to fabricate a bogeyman in the collective mind of the people. This enables profiteers to hijack public opinion and gain support for laws that destroy civil liberties. Americans are misled to believe that the erosion of personal freedom is a necessary trade-off for safety and peace.
Eco-terrorist rhetoric is about power, control, and maintaining the predominant deathwish perspective of capitalist culture: that everything and everyone is an expendable resource to be used. The animal liberation movement and environmental movement challenge this entire way of thinking and living. Citizens begin to recognize that how humans exist on this earth in relation to the natural world is not sustainable, just, or peaceful. That awareness ignites a true desire for a shift in consciousness and action. That awareness demands a revolution. And a revolution results in the necessary toppling of the status quo.
Of course, eco-terrorists are real. They do exist: BP, Exxon, Monsanto, Union Carbide, Life Sciences Research International (aka Huntingdon Life Sciences), and any other subjugator of the natural world.
Defy rhetoric. Defend the truth. Align your actions with your deepest values.
THEY SING FOR JOY LIKE WE DO
See how else they are similar to us. Send this beautiful slideshow or
an animal e-card by Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary to a friend.
VEG RESTAURANT FINDERS
Worldwide Guide to Veg Eating
HappyCow’s Compassionate Eating Guide
Most vegetarian places offer vegan options or will gladly whip up a vegan dish upon request.
A PEACEFUL WORLD IS POSSIBLE
ONLY WHEN THE LAST CAGE IS EMPTY
VEGAN BEER, WINE, & LIQUOR
Barnivore
Vegans are from Mars Wine Guide
VIDEO CLIP OF A 72-YEAR-OLD VEGAN BODYBUILDER FROM CALIFORNIA
Jim Morris
From George Orwell’s classic novel 1984…
ADD: MURDER IS COMPASSION
WOULD YOU FEED THIS STUFF TO YOUR DOG BUDDY?
What can be found in non-vegan dog food: harmful preservatives, spoiled oil and grains unfit for human consumption, fake coloring additives, toxic chemicals such as pesticides and sodium pentobarbital, roadkill, diseased slaughterhouse entrails, shelter dogs and cats (forcing your best friend to eat like a cannibal), sick zoo animals, and other waste.
Easily turn people food into vegan dog/vegan cat food with VegeDog and VegCat Supplement.
KEITH MANN MAKES THE CONNECTION
Intriguing 7-minute video clip.
FIND A HEALTH FOOD STORE, FOOD CO-OP, OR FARMERS’ MARKET IN YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS
GreenPeople
Food Co-op Directory
Farmers’ Market Directory
National Directory of Fruit Stands & Farmers’ Markets
WHEN A MONKEY ESCAPED IN A LAB,
THE FIRST THING THAT MONKEY DID
WAS FREE OTHER CAGED MONKEYS
Photo from the Animal Liberation Front site
When society is orderly, you protect yourself with justice;
when society is confused, you protect justice by yourself.
—Taoist sages
from the book Huainanzi
second century B.C.E.
FREE THE ANIMALS, FREE YOURSELF
WHY SUPPORT ANIMAL LIBERATION INSTEAD OF ANIMAL WELFARE AND EVEN ANIMAL RIGHTS
Animal welfare and animal rights have increasingly been co-opted by the meat industry and other exploiters. As long as nonhuman animals are seen as commodities to be rightfully used by humans, the issue will erroneously be about how animals are treated. Many activists are “deactivated” by animal-using industries when they accept a complicit role in the regulation of animal use and murder. Needless to say, an animal activist is an animal activist when he or she works on behalf of only the animals.
A mountain gorilla’s freedom is precious to herself. This is true for both wild and domesticated animals.
VIEW THE PORTFOLIOS OF NICK BRANDT
(Lake Nakuru, 2007)
“For me, every creature on this planet has an equal right to live. Whether human being, Serengeti elephant, or factory farm cow,” says Nick. “This is why I take these photographs. I hope that maybe you will see these animals, these non-humans, in the way that I do—as not so very different from us.”
His close-up wildlife portraits are haunting and extraordinary because he didn’t use a telephoto lens.
WHAT IS AN OPEN RESCUE?
E-mail Noah for your how-to guide.
THE CAGE-FREE REALITY
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In the U.S., hundreds of millions of newly hatched male chicks are suffocated and discarded each year, or ground up alive to produce fertilizer or feed. Can any of this be fairly considered “respectful,” “compassionate” or “humane”?
JOLLY COWS IN SUNNY CALIFORNIA?
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At slaughter, most cows and veal calves are stunned by having a metal bolt shot into their skulls. Next, they are raised up by shackles attached to a rear leg, and then their throats are slit while their hearts are still beating in order to push out the blood. Because the stunning process is designed to make sure that the animal’s heart remains beating, it is not uncommon for cows and calves to still be conscious while their throats are cut open.
“HUMANE SLAUGHTER” ACCORDING TO TEMPLE GRANDIN
How do you make sure an animal is really dead? Poke ’em in the eye. “You can use your finger in a big animal’s eyes,” Dr. Grandin says. “But not little animals. You poke those eyes with a pencil.”
With experts like these at the helm of animal welfare, how can the animals lose? What’s that smell? Uh…victory.
EXAMPLE OF COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE (CSA):
AN ANIMAL-FREE PRODUCE FARM IN SOUTHEAST MINNESOTA
Featherstone
CREATE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY GARDEN
Free Start-Up Guide
FORGET THE 2006 UNITED NATIONS F.A.O. REPORT LIVESTOCK’S LONG SHADOW
That report stated animal agriculture causes 18% of greenhouse gases. By the way, that’s more than the combined total emissions from transportation vehicles around the entire world. Check out this more accurate 2009 report. Animal agriculture actually causes at least 51% of greenhouse gases.
Worldwatch Institute
HUMAN POPULATION WILL SURGE TO OVER 9 BILLION BY 2050
Meat, dairy, and egg consumption isn’t sustainable. By 2050 global food production must be increased by 70% to feed the growing population. The United Nations Environment Programme’s 2010 report urges adopting a vegan way of eating.
ANIMALS TELL US WHAT THEY WANT BUT WE DON’T LISTEN
A cow’s brain has nearly the same number of convolutions as a human brain. And like us, cows dream.
Farmers shoot sheep who learn how to open the latch in the gate of the corral so they can’t teach other sheep to do the same and escape.
Chimpanzees learn American Sign Language, only to have their signed requests to their captors ignored or denied.
More than 60 billion land animals and countless fish worldwide are killed to be eaten every year. That they have to be confined, controlled, or captured against their will is proof of their lack of consent.
WHERE THE HECK ARE ALL THOSE PESKY SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND FUR FARMS AND LABORATORY ANIMAL SUPPLIERS IN THE U.S.?
The Final Nail
squirrel monkeys
GO INSIDE A LAB
Antivivisectionist veterinary surgeon Dr. André Menache provides the commentary to this 3-minute video clip of monkey experiments in Israel. He has also said: “A significant proportion of the funds distributed for basic research is wasted on animal experiments. I use the word wasted because animal studies are not predictive of human outcome. This fact is supported by systematic reviews, complexity theory and evolutionary biology. In the era of the human genome, let us fund studies that rely on our DNA, human cell culture, microfluidics, non invasive imaging and the like. That is what good science is all about.”
Weizmann Institute
ANIMAL AGRICULTURE CAUSES WORLD HUNGER AND UNNECESSARY MISERY
10 acres of healthy high-protein beans can easily feed 60 people. But use the same 10 acres for growing animal feed to make meat products, then the unhealthy yield feeds only 2 people.
At least 900 million people have little or nothing to eat. Every day more than 30,000 children die terrible deaths from starvation. Imagine the despair of the mother or the father of such a child.
Not eating animals is the most sacred healing we have absolute power to successfully accomplish daily. What we choose gives us our power. When we choose against life and ourselves, we betray both. When we choose in favor of our tribe—the entire earth—we live right with ourselves and gather more strength to take another natural step toward creating the brilliant world we see in our collective vision.
FEED HUNGRY FOLKS AND END FAMINE WITHOUT EXPLOITING ANIMALS
Vegfam
OFFER FREE YUMMY VEGAN FOOD AT EVENTS
Get your project funded.
LIVE WILD. LOVE NATURE. FIGHT FOR THE EARTH AND ALL HER CHILDREN.
Wanna reach MJ? vegangrub@gmail.com
Vegan Grub encourages ending all exploitation and murder of animals.
Needless to say, less exploitation or a little bit of murder ain’t okay.
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