LEE HALL'S SPEECH AT THE 2007 LONDON VEGAN FESTIVAL

Lee Hall’s speech at the recent London Vegan Festival, which took a hard look at the international expansion and the “Animal Compassion” rhetoric of the organic superstore Whole Foods Market, is a magnificent study in how certain sections of the animal rights movement caved in to financial interests and to self interest. In personal correspondence with the editor of the Abolitionist, Lee Hall had this to say:

“Isn’t it amazing that more progressive people have not objected that these trendy marketing ploys make as much of a mockery of ecological values and humanitarian values as they make of animal advocacy? But in a culture where at least 97% of people consume animals, and they are all potential donors to animal charities, few groups choose to risk their growth potential as the world's forests are broken for animal farms and animal feed.

People have a deep-seated habit of seeing themselves as superior to other animals, with a natural prerogative to take whatever they find on the planet. Even if people don't consciously acknowledge this. And they'll justify animal commodification and keep following along with the leaders.

What we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves. It is a tragedy of many layers.

I do think this one issue allows for a complete study of the ills of our profit-based system and how the most fundamentally important values are subverted through it.”- Lee Hall, 24/08/2007

Backstory: Whole Foods Market has just this summer opened a massive branch in Kensington, London, across from Hyde Park. The retailer is known for its organic produce; it’s also filled with an array of animal products surely matched by few other marketplaces. There’s an oyster bar selling many types of sea animals and a tapas bar selling at least as many types of land animals. There’s a section of eggs displayed loose so that the customer may take them in any combination. There, you’ll find eggs such as Gladys May’s Braddock Whites (“supporting rare breeds”); various sizes of packages for various sizes of eggs of every shape and hue: quail eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs, ostrich eggs, and rhea eggs. Walk up to the wine bar, and you’re greeted with an actual “ham on the bone” -- a pig’s whole leg on a stand, complete with hoof. The very large butcher counter has a window through which the customer can view several skinned torsos, and at the side of this is a poster on the wall of a small lamb in a field looking up at the photographer. Another wall, upstairs near the store’s graphic artist’s office, are portraits of various people with some relationship to the image which the store is projecting of itself, such as people involved in the movement against pesticides. One is a picture of Ingrid Newkirk, holding a chicken.

The London Vegan Festival offered a presentation by Lee Hall of the North American animal-rights group Friends of Animals on the question of Whole Foods Market and its new trademark concept, the Animal Compassion Foundation. This is a transcript of the presentation held in Kensington, just yards from the new London branch of Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods Market Opens in Kensington - How a US Corporation is About to Change Your Groceries. A presentation at the tenth annual London Vegan Festival (19 Aug. 2007, Kensington Town Hall, London)

Paul Gravett: Thank you, everyone, for coming to this workshop. I’d like to introduce Lee Hall, who is legal officer of Friends of Animals, which is a North American rights group that is 50 years old this year, and Lee is actually talking about Whole Foods Market, which is opening very large, department-store, whole-foods style health food shops in this country. The first one is just down the road from here, so it’s quite appropriate that this is where the workshop’s taking place. And particularly, talking about their record on animal welfare. We’ll hand it over to Lee, and end with a question-answer period, and we’ll finish at 3.50.

Lee Hall: All right, thank you so much, Paul. If you’re just coming in, there are some handouts at the side, on the table; somebody might be able to pass them out? Thanks.

Well, what’s happened is, as Paul said, I’m with the group called Friends of Animals, and what’s unique about our group vis-à-vis Whole Foods Market is that we have held demonstrations at Whole Foods Market, the largest organic retailer in the world. They have approximately 200 – very close to 200 stores; they’ve opened 18 new branches in the past year alone. So they’re opening right now at a rate of more than one a month; they’re already very well known in North America -- United States and Canada. They’re based in Texas -- Austin, Texas -- and their CEO, a person named John Mackey, is the richest organic grocer in the world.[1] In 2004 they took over Fresh & Wild, and Fresh & Wild had six outlets, and they paid -- and this is a good price -- they paid £21m for Fresh & Wild. And the reason that’s a good price is that now they’re converting them into Whole Foods Market, which is their Austin-based name, and the Kensington one that’s just down the road, I invite you to visit it, check out what’s going on there. When you get up to the butcher’s area you’ll get a five-step Animal Welfare Rating Programme. And it will tell you the five different levels of approval on various animal products you can buy in Whole Foods Market and just how much welfare there is -- what the husbandry level is that the animals are subjected to. There’s a glossary of terms in front and it’s animal-specific. [And example of the Animal Welfare Rating Programme book is held up and opened to the Poultry page.] So this one is called Poultry. And it says Abuse or Mistreatment. And here is the definition. “Any act, wilful or otherwise, that causes pain or suffering to an animal; animal cruelty.”

Killing doesn’t count.

Kensington expects that this will be the largest retailer of foods -- completely, organic or not -- in London. And when it opened up, Mary McCartney, the photographer, of the famous family -- Linda’s meals by the way are now owned by Hain Celestial which is a North American organic super-corporation -- so there was Mary at the opening, and there the projected sales for one year alone is up to £40m. So remember, they took over the chain for £21m.

They’re expected to expand in Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford, moving on; the highest number I’ve seen now is that they expect to have 40 stores throughout Britain, and that number I saw in The Independent; and then they expect to go into continental Europe.

And the New York Times had an op-ed about John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market called "Capitalism With a Heart." About the heart. In the United States -- because this is what’s coming, so you might as well see what we’ve seen -- what’s going on is there’s a limited amount of fair-trade stocks. It’s not all fair-trade, including chocolate -- things that seriously need to be fair-trade, if anything does, are things like chocolate. So, the coffee is supposed to be better; it’s labelled in certain ways, hard to tell. In North America there’s a little sign called the Transfair badge and it’s not on all the coffees. So it’s hard to tell sometimes. And as far as having a heart, when John Mackey moved into Britain, in the only interview that John Mackey gave, which was to the Evening Standard, Mackey was talking about people who run little markets -- such as Portobello Market, you know, wherever people have market stalls. And Mackey said, well, no London business has a right to stay open for ever (and this is a direct quote): "Every time someone comes into a market someone, somewhere is going to get hurt but I believe in a dynamic, capitalistic economy because customers will benefit." So as for the small markets, Mackey is saying you might be displaced, but I believe in that, because, then that’s what the customers want. But Mark Husson, retail analyst of HSBC in New York, says: "The Whole Foods brand is not just a place to buy food, it's a lifestyle brand....And there's also the element where you feel like you're saving the planet because they're so green.” Continuing on: "It's very interested in profitability even though it's trying to save the planet.”

So, is Whole Foods Market green? Well, in Chicago, which, like the London branch, is huge -- I’m sure some of you have visited the London branch and know how huge it is; it’s three storeys -- so in Chicago they have a meat smokehouse, they have a waterfall running throughout the store hours; and you can find a cheese with the help of an expert, as you’re sipping a glass of wine through the aisles. It’s been called the "Disneyland of grocery stores” by its own regional marketing director Marci Frumkin -- this was in the Arizona Republic just before I left for England -- this regional marketing director was talking about the new store in Chandler, Arizona, and calling it the "Disneyland of grocery stores" and the one in Arizona has a South American meat rotisserie. Now there are many ways in which we could question how green that is: meat, South American; and if you go into the Fresh & Wild in Camden [North London], where you’ll see they’re switching over to the Whole Foods Market bags now, so it’s very clear that they are shifting over. The first four fruits, when I just looked at what was central, there were four, and the four types of fruits were from France, Italy, Mexico, and Argentina. I could not find any Redwood cheeses; I asked. The freezer was broken. This was three days ago. But they had all the regular, animal-based cheeses. They were all out; the freezers were all working for them. So I said, “Do you have any Redwood?” They did find me some vegan cheese, although they couldn’t find any Redwood. Well, I’m buying my Redwood here [at the London Vegan Festival]. And in the United States, for example in the Arizona store, you can sit down, order a burger, buy meats, have them cooked right in the store. They have butchers who will advise you on the cuts of meats and so forth, and they will work that out for you right there.

In Britain, there’s not enough organic food to go round. And of course, organic is not the same thing as vegan. But Sainsbury's is actually paying farmers to create organic cheeses, because they don’t have enough organics so they’re actually paying for these conversions so they’ll have enough in two years because that’s how long it takes then farms to convert. So here comes Whole Foods Market. In a place where, how are you going to find the organic foods unless you search outside Britain? And in North America they’re coming up with what are being called now organic superfarms. And the question is whether these huge corporations that produce on their organic farms are really producing according to the old standards, or whether something’s being diluted here. And if you walk into your local markets, which are now struggling for existence because of this huge corporation -- well, let’s say in part because of this huge corporation; they still can make it, in little pockets, but there is competition to get customers who are now going to Whole Foods Market, and I noticed that when you ask the proprietors for a certain type of, let’s say, soya milk, and they only have some sugary-sweet sort of not very good soya milk, and you ask why, and they may say they can only get what distributed through what’s already been accepted by this big corporation. “But don’t put be on the record for saying that!” This is what you’ll be told; the proprietor may say, “I don’t really want to talk about that, but, yes, we can’t get what we used to get.” So for example, in a natural food market where I live, there was a petition taken up for a certain sort of biscuits, because they weren’t selling them, because they weren’t being accepted by John Mackey for Whole Foods Market so they fell out of distribution.

Whole Foods Market in the United States owns fish processing plants. This is a quote from the Whole Foods website: "Seafood is really something special at Whole Foods Market."

Now they have a term, “mission and core culture” -- that’s a term being bandied about; they have a “mission and core culture” that supports local agriculture. But before their opening, the Observer ran quite an article on them, and this was in 2006, last year, from the Observer: "Mackey loves British cheese so much that you can eat Neal's Yard cheddar in the cafe of his Union Square [New York] store. Stand by for the wonderful Humboldt Fog goat's cheese from northern California." How is that part of supporting local agriculture?

Are they compassionate? Well, they have a foundation now, and one of the articles on a business blog I just read calls it a non-profit foundation. The Animal Compassion Foundation. And they have come up with this five-step animal-welfare rating guides; you can pick these up. I only took one. I couldn’t take photographs either. So I grabbed one. I felt like a real infiltrator over there, because I didn’t have a shopping cart; I’m thinking they’re going to kick me out of here. But you can get one; they’re hanging at the tremendous big butcher counter. And they tell you just how humanely your chicken or your sheep, your lamb, or your beef cattle or your pigs were raised. And they do have a five- level coding so for example, of course, just to get to “Whole Foods Market Benchmark” level, there’s no abuse or mistreatment, but killing doesn’t count, and it goes up to the second one where you get outdoor access, and then, if you go to the third one, it’s a certain amount of vegetative cover on the ground along with your outdoor access, and there’s no teeth-clipping or tail-docking -- that’s for the pig -- and if you go up to level four, it’s “Animal-Centered” and that’s “no nose-ringing of sows or detusking of boars.” And “piglets from the same litter remain together for life.” Then there’s the “Animal-Centered Gold Standard.” On-farm, humane slaughter required.

Paul: So that implies that the rest of them don’t have to have humane slaughter.

Lee: Well, theirs do, it’s just on what level; but the rest of them don’t have to have on-farm humane slaughter.

Paul: I see; so they could be transported elsewhere and slaughtered -- so-called humanely.

Lee: Well, but you know what, you’re right; I’m looking for “humane slaughter” and --

Paul: Well, they would argue, wouldn’t they, that that’s the law anyway, that all animals are slaughtered humanely.

Lee: You make a very good point, Paul, because that’s only on the Gold Standard; the rest doesn’t even use the “humane slaughter” term.

So, how compassionate is Whole Foods Market? John Mackey donates up to a half-million pounds a year to animal-welfare groups.[2] At the same time, Whole Foods Market, according to The Independent, gives £5m a year in low-interest loans to help small, local farmers and producers of humanely reared meat, dairy, and poultry providers. I wouldn’t say these words if they weren’t in the paper; what’s humanely reared meat? Is it an animal, or what? So you see, for a half of a million that goes to the animal-protection organizations -- who, I guess, would be the people supporting this stuff -- there’s a lot of money going into the organic production, just as Sainsbury’s does, of animal packages. So they’ve got an Animal Welfare page on their website and it says: “We are working with our knowledgeable and passionate meat and poultry providers.." And what are they doing? Going around and giving workshops, and doing a form of animal testing. Because in these standards, there is a certain amount of days or weeks until these animals have to be weaned, for example, so they have to work with animal scientists to find out the difference in weaning animals, what’s the sort of welfare difference. And how do they gauge these things? Well, in North America, where they came out with this idea, when it was unveiled in January 2005, they were quite clear that those who would be assessing it would be the producers. And of course, they can tell how many animals aren’t killed in birth an so forth; this husbandry idea does promote the production of more lucrative products, so you would say the producer would be in the best position to know, and most animal producers -- animal ranchers, farmers -- will say, we’re in the position to know how well the animals are doing.

Lobsters became an interesting example of a situation in which they were actually going to cut out animals from being stocked. Because people were complaining, you know, live lobsters. And they said, all right, until we can be sure they can be transported humanely, we won’t do it. At first, they vacillated. They said, well, maybe we can come up with this idea; it was called lobster condos. Maybe we can come up with this good-looking living situation that will keep them away from children who could tap on the glass, and looks rather naturalistic. And so they came up with this idea of these nice-looking penthouses for the lobsters. But that didn’t work out very well, and there was still the question of transporting them to the store. So they said no, we’re not going to stock them any more. And some of the animal-protection groups said, isn’t that great; but if you read carefully it said until they could figure out they could be transported humanely. So what did that leave open? They were going to figure it out when they were in a lucrative market. Lobsters are expensive; they’re not a high-profit animal to sell. When they opened in a store in Maine -- a lot of tourists go to Maine to eat Maine lobsters -- lo and behold! They could have humane transport of lobsters. And if you read about the way they were devising this in Maine, how humane are these little slips, upright, so that the lobsters’ claws are on top, and the lobster’s tail is on the bottom, these little drop slots? If you read about why these things were invented, you find out that for lobster salespeople, they like the look of lobsters when they don’t have the antennae bitten off by their crate-mates. So they transport them sticking up, vertically. So if you want to think about when they tell you they are going to have some compassionate idea, this is what you may well get.

Question from attendee in the front of the room: Are they living, or --

Lee: Yeah, they’re live. They now purport to transport them humanely, because that’s what the promise was: Once they could transport them humanely they would sell live lobsters. And they never discontinued the dead ones, the frozen crabs and lobsters were always there.

When you’re looking at the animal scientists, and this began in Canada, the universities at Guelph and Laval, where they started working with animal scientists. The particular field they work in is applied ethology. And what they do is measure responses to various stimuli, when you do various things to animals. This is a form of animal testing, and I would say it’s an invasive form of animal testing.

Look at Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia on the Internet that anyone can contribute to, and they’re talking about the phenomenon known as debeaking. And debeaking is what you do to chickens who are crowded together in stressful circumstances, so they won’t peck each other, sometimes to death. And of course ruin the flesh, you know. Disability can be an ethical plus according to ethologists, because they have figured out that a blind chicken -- there’s a strain of White Leghorn chickens who are normally blind -- they found out that the blind chickens don’t peck each other, and they also lay more eggs. Because of less stress. Chickens are very visual, and they get excited and they react. Blind chickens don’t peck each other to death or ruin the flesh of the other chickens. So this idea came up in animal welfare science that deliberately breeding, modifying chickens to make them blind would be an animal-welfare plus.[3] So this is the kind of thing you hear people talking about when they talk about promoting animal welfare. And don’t think that this kind of thing isn’t also being supported by people who consider themselves animal advocates. Because it is. I’ll give you an example. Salon.com, an Internet magazine, they had an interview with Peter Singer -- everybody knows Peter Singer, writer of Animal Liberation back in the 70s, is known as an animal-welfare advocate -- and one of the questions was, because birds are now a big thing in questions of animal husbandry, they said to Peter, what if you could breed a bird without any wings, so they wouldn’t have to worry about not stretching them? Because the concern is how big the cages are, and they don’t have to stretch them if they don’t have them. So what do you think about that, if we could breed wingless birds. And Peter Singer said I think that would be an improvement. You’d have to make sure to eliminate any sort of phantom pain. They also ask Singer well what if you could breed -- bring into existence -- brainless chickens? Because then they couldn’t sense the pain at all. And Singer says I think that would be an improvement. So the difference between animal-protection advocacy and the multinational animal-selling movement is not necessarily so far as one might think. Yes --

Attendee in back of the room: Peter Singer isn’t seen in most cases as an animal-rights campaigner --

Lee: Right --

Attendee in back of the room: So if you view it in that context, what you were saying, I think all of us would agree with here, I think it’s going to happen no matter what, you would prefer the bird not to have a brain, or not to have wings, and he’s also saying he would continue to eat meat if it was grown in vitro, so if you consider it in that context, that it’s a very limited context in which he provides those answers --

Lee: Okay, we’ll get more into this. But yes, Peter Singer --

Attendee in front of the room: -- is not a vegan.

Lee: No, Peter Singer’s not a vegan. But you’re right; it’s not an animal-rights perspective. So if you look at Wikipedia, under debeaking, it says, about blindness, “This method is far superior to any other method of controlling feather picking.”

Now back to the business blog where they’re talking about Whole Foods Market, and this Animal Compassion Foundation, and what exactly they do. Dr. Frances Flower [British Research Associate with the Animal Compassion Foundation] is a person who experiments with cows’ weaning ages. And they had Dr. Flower visiting a dairy farm in Texas. And this farmer was writing into the business blog. This is where I saw this called a non-profit subsidiary of Whole Foods Market. And the person is talking about “my British White cattle” there, and it’s obvious how interested this farmer is, because someone from Whole Foods Market is interested in the “beauty and their docile nature” of “my friendly British White cattle.” And at the end they’re talking about Frances Flower and these wonderful, remarkable experiments Dr. Flower does, and the rancher says: “You may find that a T-Bone steak from a grass fed steer isn't going to hurt your cholesterol and will provide you with a plethora of beneficial anti-oxidants.” So here’s a person promoting this as both a welfare and a health benefit.

Now, this came to a head. They were thinking about doing this at the very beginning in North America in late 2003. And it all came to a head in January 2005 when it was unveiled, and then through 2006, and finally, in October 2006, there was a big meeting in New York City. So it’s been going at this point for close to two years, and what has been going on? What are the various opinions in the animal-advocacy community in North America? They called it the Humane Meat Discussion, late 2006, it was run by Satya magazine which is no longer in existence. And they were talking about -- well, we were there, Friends of Animals were there to talk about the idea of co-opting “compassion” in the term Animal Compassion Foundation and selling meat multinationally. And we talked about how it got going. In January 2005 when they announced in the papers that they’d hired this Animal Compassion Foundation director, Anne Malleau, and they came out with these posters, silhouettes of cows and pigs and chickens, and the idea that they would have their Global 5% Day, the first fundraising day where five percent of their global receipts from this Tuesday in January 2005 would go into this foundation. By the way the very first one raised over £285,000 and it’s gone up quite a bit since then. We felt that this was a form of meat promotion. And on the day that they said we’ve hired Anne Malleau as the director, their stocks rose up to a record high.[4] This going to show that the idea of selling animals’ bodies, and basing it on this humane charity type of idea was extremely popular with the public. Whole Foods Market gained off of it. And when they were opening Kensington [London], they had these great big billboards, some of you might have seen them in Kensington High Street -- they were enormous -- and they were talking about the Global 5% Day as a form of social responsibility. So they were getting people who are interested in social justice, who are, perhaps, potential vegans, thinking that there’s something charitable about going to this new place that’s about to open. So it’s part of the advertising. What we did on that first Global 5% Day was held vigils. We went out to the various Whole Foods Markets and we held up signs that said: “Humane Meat? Whole Foods Myth.” John Mackey heard we were going to protest, of course. It became a big deal. And the CEO said in a letter, Dear Priscilla -- the president of our group -- “…What matters most is the quality of life while we (and farm animals) are alive.” Something like Singer would say. And Priscilla wrote back on the 20th of January 2005: “No, John. What matters most here is that we have the ability to decide whether to keep bringing other animals into existence simply to be sold as food, while using up land and water resources that could be left to animals who really could have full, free lives.”

Then, on January 24th we’re one day before the grand opening of the Global 5% Day, where people are going to shop and five percent of the global receipts are going to go into the Animal Compassion Foundation, we see a letter from Peter Singer. This is on the letterhead of Animal Rights International, so you see the term “animal rights” and this is signed by Peter Singer. [See handout, attached.] And it says, to John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, “Dear John: The undersigned animal welfare, animal protection, and animal rights organizations would like to express their appreciation and support for the pioneering initiative being taken by Whole Foods Market in setting Farm Animal Compassionate Standards. We hope and expect these standards will improve the lives of millions of animals.” Signed -- and you’ll see the Humane Society of the United States, which is the world’s richest animal-protection organization in existence, is there. So are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Viva USA, Vegan Outreach. And this was in response to what we had done; in fact, when Satya interviewed Peter Singer, the interviewer said, Peter, it’s like you’re giving the middle finger to Priscilla Feral, to Friends of Animals, and Peter said, yes, I am giving the finger to Friends of Animals. And that’s on the Web too.

Some of these people have been in there from the beginning when this first started out. They had concocted this with Whole Foods Market. It wasn’t just that Whole Foods Market did this on its own. They sat together at a table. One of the people there was from Viva USA. That particular person, named Lauren Ornelas -- and this is no secret -- was at the New York meeting in October 2006. So here’s the person who sat down at the table, who brought other animal advocates there, to sit down, groups that had supported Whole Foods Market’s move more than a year in advance. By the way, I wrote notes at the New York meeting; they’ve never been contested; I put them up on the Satya forum and can send them in full to anyone who e-mails me. And Lauren said -- I’m paraphrasing now -- yes, it was difficult to get all the animal organizations to sit down at the table and behave themselves. And Lauren Ornelas is talking to us, saying, you should be happy that John Mackey is now vegan.

And we said, wait, it’s been in the public news that John Mackey eats free-range eggs. And it’s also been in the public news that John Mackey likes goat cheese. But seems that you’re saying because John Mackey is conflating the free-range movement with the vegan movement that you’re trying to redefine something here.

And Lauren Ornelas said there’s a question about eggs if they’re free-range.

And we said no, there’s not. Since 1944, there’s been a definition. The Vegan Society has it on their website. Donald Watson and the other people who opened the Vegan Society were very clear. It’s unequivocal. And no, that doesn’t fit. But even if it did, let’s take an analogy: “I don’t use the sex slaves, I don’t use the prostitutes; I just sell them.” What do you call that? And it was quiet at that point.

Attendee in front of the room: Can I just -- I just got back from four weeks in your wonderful country, and there I found a lot of use of the phrase “pure vegetarian” where I would have used vegan. Meaning no use of animal products --

Lee: Hmmm.

Attendee in front of the room: -- rather than the word “vegan”; and could it be that they’ve confused vegetarian and vegan? Because some vegetarians do eat eggs.

Lee: What you’re bringing up, what you’re leading me to think when you speak about this, is that we need to be serious about the use of the word vegan --

Attendee in front of the room: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Lee: And that we use it, and that we don’t allow it to be diluted. When you hear somebody saying Mackey is a vegan you’re talking about someone who eats eggs, who loves goat cheese -- I mean, it’s obvious; you can’t walk into one of the places in the United States without seeing the goat cheese -- and says, well the goats are humanely treated; that’s conflating something else. I don’t know if it’s vegetarianism, Patricia -- I’m not to call you Pat --

Attendee in front of the room: You can call me anything except Pat.

Lee: So, Patricia, I don’t know if it’s conflating vegetarianism with veganism, or, on the other hand, and I think this really might be the key here: It’s conflating the free-range movement with veganism, which is really quite disturbing. The Evening Standard said, and this is recent, now: “Mackey, a vegan, founded the £3billion-a-year business in a garage in Texas in 1978.” This is in England.

In the United States, Rocky Mountain News (July 2007): “Mackey remains a vegetarian, and in 2003, he adopted an even stricter diet by becoming a vegan -- avoiding animal products of any kind--” Now that definition would have been correct.

Patricia: Yes.

Lee: “… after researching factory farming.” Mackey, who is not a vegan, conflates the free-range movement with veganism. And another group at the New York meeting was -- they’re not really well-known here, but they’re very well known in the rescue movement in North America -- Farm Sanctuary, another signatory to Singer’s letter. So the person who leads that group was there in New York, and said, “You have to understand business.” This was repeated several times. Well, one thing we said back to Gene Bauston [currently known as Gene Baur], we said we know that business as usual is easier and it’s easy to promote this sort of thing, but nobody said animal rights is easy to achieve. We’re saying, rather, that it needs the strength of a movement to advance it.

Now, supporting family farms, we could say that’s a way of supporting business, family values; a lot of conservative things. Right now, Ben and Jerry’s, the U.S. ice cream company -- I see it’s in Whole Foods Market here -- it’s ice cream, it’s actual dairy ice cream -- and the big push is to get them to use cage-free eggs. I don’t know why eggs are used in ice cream, but apparently they are, and this big move in the animal-protection field is to get them to stop using the normal, battery eggs and to start using the cage-free eggs, and that passes for a campaign. You’re spending at least twice, sometimes as much as four times as much for those eggs. You’re spending money to have farmers offer expensive eggs. That fits in with some conservative business ideas.

We get to the end of this meeting in New York, and Cat Clyne, who was the editor of Satya magazine, ended it by quoting Singer, who has been talking about how it didn’t really work out with that book I wrote in the 70s in the way that I wanted it to, and “I think you have to start thinking about other tactics that will lead not necessarily to a vegan world but to a world without factory farming.”

So you see the shift: Peter in the seventies, bringing in utilitarianism. All this is not surprising from the utilitarian philosophy, although one could argue that it doesn’t even suit utilitarianism. When you think about it, the vegan abolitionist movement began in 1944 when Watson said -- and it wasn’t about factory farming; it couldn’t have been, in 1944, about factory farming. What did Watson see, on the family farm? Watson saw free-range chickens! Watson saw free-range pigs! And the question was, why should they be treated so sweetly, and why I should look forward to seeing them so much, and this be my favourite uncle, and this place be a place where I love to go, and I find out that I’m visiting Death Row! That’s what angered Watson: the pig dying at the end, the very end, on the farm! This was Level Five, the Whole Foods Gold Standard: This was being “humanely killed” on the farm, by the uncle. And that’s exactly what the vegan movement started to challenge in 1944, when it was founded. Watson was unequivocal.

I haven’t taken a poll, but this is a vegan festival, so I doubt I’m in the minority in this room. But in the room in New York, there were the 17 groups in the majority, with us as the dissent. And we were told that it’s hard being an activist. You have to feel like you’re accomplishing something. So if we can get something, then we should take it. In E magazine, the environmental magazine, I think I read that by opting out completely of using animal products, you spare 2,400 animals in your lifetime. You do refrain from use of over 300 animals a year, so in any case, there’s a good number of animals you spare over a lifetime, and I think that it’s true that over 24 years of being vegan -- and by the way, I’m a vegan today because I met the person co-facilitating this festival, Robin Lane, 24 years ago, and I was persuaded on the spot, and I think of every day, of what I’ve done, and there’s no way somebody can tell me that I don’t know, that I can’t feel, that I’m not accomplishing something every day. And when I saw people walk past the stall today, “Oh, yeah, I was here last year, and I did it! I became a vegan. I’m so glad I’m here. Can I have one of your Vegan Starter Guides so I can give it to somebody else?” They were crediting this festival, run by Alison and Robin. We can’t measure how much they’ve done, but it’s certainly measurable. There’s a lot of animals who weren’t eaten because of what they’ve done over the past ten years, and everything like this that’s been done since 1944, is what we at Friends of Animals are trying to further. I recently became a life member of the Vegan Organic Network. When you’re talking about what we can do, and you’ve got all these activists going to get laws so there won’t be a certain small measurement in the size of pig crates -- we could do that, or we could support vegan organic growing, farming. We could support the growth of the vegan movement. And the conclusion we’ve come to is that veganism is direct action that you do every day. Oh, and this is a controversial issue that we’ve become involved in, the direct action issue. And there’s loads of people who, in North America, will argue, and say we have to be very aggressive, very assertive. And my question is, are you being aggressive, are you being assertive with the movement? And typically the answer is no, they’re not taking on and challenging the animal-advocacy community itself, and challenging the animal-advocacy community itself to become no-nonsense and plain-speaking as Donald Watson was in 1944. If we need to be assertive about anything right now, if we’re serious about the idea that a true peace movement, that truly respecting the Earth, that truly respecting the biocommunities starts with us, then for heaven’s sake, we’re the natural leaders right now. People who can offer understanding that animal agribusiness is a major contributor if not the major contributor to global warming. It’s not just meat, flesh. It’s also dairy. It’s the whole animal agribusiness thing. And opting out is the single best thing we can do. We should be leaders right now. The papers and the politicians should be asking our advice; we shouldn’t be in shenanigans with Whole Foods Market, figuring out how we can take up more pasture per person. And when we’re thinking about the various advocacy movements in other countries, now there’s China, the third biggest milk producer in the world, after the United States and India. So not only are we looking at this expansion of dairy products, which is going to be tremendous, but also, how are we as role models? As activists? How are other people seeing what we are doing wherever we are? And are they saying, oh, that’s activism? To promote more pasture?

Vegan festivals are in Bristol now, they’re in Sweden. In the United States, you just came to one, Patricia; the North American Vegetarian Society had an all-vegan festival and conference, and it seems Australia will be coming next. So I would say that abolitionism does work. Now if people will stop trying to interrupt it.

Paul: Thank you, Lee. [Applause.] Maybe just a couple of questions. We have to leave by four o’clock so in about ten minutes. I think the guy in the back had his hand up.

Lee: Yes.

Attendee in back row: I wholly appreciate your point of view and it’s great that we have the forum and are discussing it. I’m a staunch supporter of Farm Sanctuary, and I’m a little concerned about your point of view, as it sounds to me that veganism has to be a movement where everyone wants to achieve the same thing. And if you don’t, it’s considered that it’s defeating the vegan movement. Where my own personal view is that, for instance, Peter Singer probably wanted the individuals in the 20th century to accomplish more for animal rights on a global level, because he’s of the view that, well, we’re in a world where people eat meat, people abuse animals; what can we do to alleviate the suffering even on a minute scale, because even on a minute scale, if you times it by billions of animals that are being slaughtered, it really is a lot. I mean, with his latest book that’s come out, in the last six months, even people who have never been vegetarian are learning about where their food comes from, and they’re putting a face to the slice of meat on the plate and where the butcher is. So, whilst you don’t support the Whole Foods issue, people are going to buy meat anyway, whether it’s from Tesco, from Morrison’s; isn’t it better to provide an alternative? None of us would eat it, but at least it’s there, it’s available --

Lee: Well, my concern is that if they can appreciate that on the moral level, on an ethical level, that we may be missing an opportunity to talk with them at a deeper moral level.

Attendee: Don’t you think it’s incremental? I mean, I don’t think --

Lee: I think veganism is incremental; we do it one step -- one person at a time.

Attendee: Right, so isn’t the first thing to get people thinking about where their food comes from?

Lee: Yes, but I think promoting veganism does that. The idea that we do not need to eat it. We’re unnecessarily doing all this damage to other animals, to ourselves, and to the planet.

Attendee: Right. Most humans prefer not to think about it. For instance, in Australia, where I’m from, you see animals on the roads; you see triple-deckers and the sheeps’ heads sticking out.

Patricia: You can see that here. You can see it where I live.

Attendee from Australia: Well, in central London --

Patricia: You don’t see cattle trucks in central London, but you get on the A1 [cross-talk]; that, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is a London-centric attitude, that you can give the impression that if you buy it organic then it’s okay.

Attendee from Australia: No, I’m not saying that; I’m saying the way you get people thinking isn’t by confronting them.

Patricia: You don’t convert people to veganism by saying it’s okay to eat meat.

Attendee from Australia: I totally disagree, because I have converted people to vegetarianism incrementally.

Patricia: I’ve converted people to veganism, from eating meat one day to being vegan the next day. Not intending to; just by talking to them. And then I found out later, next time I’ve seen them -- it might have been a few months later -- that they’ve been vegan, from what I said. But I never said, oh, well, if it’s organic it’s okay.

Attendee from Australia: I’m not saying that. It’s the better of two evils. [Cross-talk.] I totally believe in animal rights; you shouldn’t be directing anger at me. We live in a world where people eat meat. We can’t change that, no matter how much campaigning we --

A third attendee: We can try. [Cross-talk]

Attendee from Australia: I was outside Selfridges yesterday, and my girlfriend was wearing a duck suit, trying to convince people not to buy foie gras. The reaction I got from people was “I don’t give an F where it came from, the more harm that was involved, the better.” So when you meet those kind of people, tell me how you’re going to convert them to veganism.

Lee: We might need to go outside the door -- [Laughter] because I think we’re being --

Robin Lane: We’ve got another talk in here at four o’clock. I know you’d like to carry on; it’s a really interesting subject. But we’ve got our Animals Count presentation here in about three minutes, so -- I’m sure that Lee would like to continue talking with you outside then.

Lee: Certainly would.

NOTES

1 For further information see “Passionate Meat and Poultry Providers, Coming to a Town Near You” – Arkangel (Spring 2007); and John Alridge, “Peace, Love and Profit - Meet the World's Richest Organic Grocer” - The Observer (29 Jan. 2006). For other references or questions on this article, or to track any references whose links may expire, contact leehall@friendsofanimals.org.

2 “Peace, Love and Profit - Meet the World's Richest Organic Grocer” - The Observer (see above).

3 For a reference see Patricia Dickenson, “Blind Chickens Lay More Eggs” - Guelph Mercury (Ontario, Canada; 22 Jun. 2007), quoting Assistant Professor Gregoy Bedecarrats at the University of Guelph as calling manipulated lighting a “management tool.”

4 This was noted by Paul Tharp, "Whole Foods Kills Them Softly" - NYPost.com (19 Jan. 2005).