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Transcript of Josh Harper’s ARZone Live Guest Chat

10 December 2011

5pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

If you’re like me while on vacation, you turn off the smartphone, avoid watching all that dreary news coverage or reading depressing newspapers, and instead grab a juicy paperback novel (Grisham? Kellerman?) to enjoy under a palapa near the gorgeous blue of Caribbean waters. Work? Forget about it. Guilt? What’s that? Saving the environment? Maybe next trip.

What would you…

In a recent very interesting Facebook discussion, Tim Gier wrote (in part, and perhaps it is unfair to extract this out - but I'm gonna anyway!), “I don’t accept that the property status of other animals necessarily entails harm towards them.” 

[I began to write a response to Tim’s observation for the FB discussion - but then realised that I was writing a blog entry, so that is why I have decided to post it here instead. In addition, I have not written a blog entry for a while,…

Being vegan is difficult, and if it is going to mean anything, and result in anything, then it must be difficult.…

Ordinarily, those who are concerned about animal ethics or animal welfare would instead ask, “Does culling justify hunting?”—In other words, “Does the need to curtail overpopulation in a species justify killing them (even from helicopters!) in large numbers to ensure their own survival and that of their prey?” This is a fair question, and one that requires careful consideration by conservation biologists.

However, if the political propaganda of hunting lobbyists (and of course gun…

There is no doubt that the gun culture is replete with euphemisms. Terms such as “sport”, “harvest”, “game”, and “livestock” grace the rhetoric of those who want to subdue animals and gather trophies of victory and dominance with impunity. 

To ask if hunting is analogous to either a sport or a harvest is often to evoke passionate debate between animal lovers and “arms-bearing” traditionalists. Certainly, an argument can be made for the taking of “livestock” in the wild by hunters…

"I am not suggesting that we abandon our desire to conserve other species, but rather that we develop a system of values which would accommodate the interests of all animals, not just those to which we choose to give preference in our own particular decade or century.



The reasons for shooting bison and shooting feral sheep are similar in that both species were targeted for eradication because they violated our idea of what a particular landscape should look like, and our preference…

Transcript of Dylan Powell’s ARZone Live Guest Chat

19 November 2011

5pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

Introduction: My Grassroots Activism

New blog post by ARRNT; a vegan abolitionist group in North Texas!  Taken from here:

https://arrnt.wordpress.com/

Hello there ARRNT and fellow supporters!  I’d like to take a moment and speak with you about what you can do, as individuals, to benefit other animals today!  Activist groups should be encouraged because of the camraderie and cooperation they bring, but it is, of course, always still important to realize…

Built-in Fairness Meters

The more biologists and psychologists delve into understanding innate behavioral drives, the more they find that we humans seem to be hard-wired to be highly sensitive to fairness in social interactions. Interestingly, this universal taboo against unfairness in human relationships is also…

Many years ago, my brother in law was diagnosed with bone cancer. As he was laying on the operating table waiting to be put under for a mid thigh amputation, he tried selling the surgeon his financial services. Today, he's still just as passionate about what he does. I was always envious that he'd found his purpose ... he had a raison d'etre ... something that lit him up and kept him interested day after day after day. Not all that long ago, I realized *this* is my raison…

Transcript of Prof. Steve Garlick’s ARZone Guest Chat

5 November 2011

6pm US Eastern Time

10pm UK Time…

When we were just youngsters, our parents helped most of us learn the difference between right and wrong. We learned that what was “right” was generally in accord with morality, justice, law, propriety, and the common good, for example. On the other hand, our parents taught us that what was “wrong” was generally about immorality, injustice, illegality, impropriety, and the common bad (to coin a new phrase).

As we were growing up, our thought processes were maturing, and we…

Originally published ThisDishisVeg.com

November 2, 2011

There are many reasons one would choose to go vegan—and many justifications in opposition.  Often, the argument for each "side" involves discussions of…

Originally published at This Dish is Veg

September 8, 2011

Meat-eating environmentalists and the Tooth Fairy have more in common that you’d think.  Eating animal products, whether from a factory farm or “local, free-range” has an undeniably destructive effect on the Earth, and it is…

Originally Published on This Dish is Veg

August 26, 2011

In a twist of audacity, the fur industry has committed misdirection worthy of Houdini—fooling many a stalwart environmentalist and vegan into becoming walking advertisements for their…

Originally published at This Dish is Veg

September 12, 2011

Transcript of ARZone Workshop 8

Are You Too Vegan or Are You Vegan Enough?

29 October 2011

6pm US Eastern Time…