Animal Voices

Too often we see the mainstream framing of black veganism or indigenous veganism as an assimilation into white veganism. Veganism is painted as a white person thing, when it isn’t and never has been. That is why creating spaces for the narratives of black vegans to grow and flourish is extremely important. I hope with this interview, our listeners reflect on their role in dismantling racism in animal rights by centering and celebrating POC who are in the movement.

We talk to Aph about why she decided to create such a celebratory project and why centering black vegans is an important process in dismantling white supremacist discourses pervading the animal rights

With capitalism co-opting ideas so quickly (the idea of intersectionality for example) and depoliticizing our movements, finding different frameworks for looking at anti-oppression work is crucial. Can we find ways to genuinely dismantle the racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and speciesism? Understanding the erasure of black and and brown bodies in veganism is one way to do that work.

Aph also is constantly creating and building for tomorrow. She is known for making fictional comedy web-series that tackle social justice issues.Tales from the Kraka Tower satirizes diversity in academia [and features a vegan black character], and Black Feminist Blogger highlights the massive amount of invisible labor in blogging.

Check out Black Vegans Rock

or download an mp3 of the show.

In February 2015 we interviewed No New Animal Lab about their campaign to stop the expansion of the University of Washington’s research lab while pressuring the private construction firm, SKANSKA into terminating their contract with the university.

U of W has been a long time animal research facility, using thousands of animals as research tools. Activists, students and federal authorities have all been concerned with these practices, especially when in 2014, the USDA, which enforces the law governing the proper treatment of animals in laboratories, cited Washington, the Oregon Health & Science University, and the University of California-Davis for failing to care properly for the animals. In April of 2014, the USDA found that the majority of monkeys at Oregon were suffering abnormal hair loss, potentially caused by psychological factors. In a November 2014 report, the USDA reprimanded Washington officials for the deaths of three infant monkeys, who were attacked by older male primates. Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! says an additional four monkeys have died since 2012, according to documents they obtained through a public record request.

The facilities at U of W currently have room for 650 primates, but the new building will allow for 280 more and hundreds of other species.

Please consider supporting No No Animal Lab and NYC Animal Defense League. By doing so you are helping with legal costs and supporting grassroots animal advocacy.

or download an mp3 of the show.

Our current age called the Anthropocene – climate change, super-diverse societies, and other expressions that are occurring at such magnitude – “change” permeates our contemporary societies, public opinion and our scientific and political imagination. For thousands of years most species, including homosapiens have been migrating. Nowadays, it happens so much faster and it’s causes are often a result of climate change, war, and a cumulation of political decisions that seem like a domino effect.

In current public discourse these cumulative effects are not taken into account and the plight of immigrants, migrant workers and refugees are misunderstood and scapegoated as a burden to receiving countries.

As much as the concepts of immigrants are socially constructed and there is a false dichotomy between citizen/non-citizen, it is important to look at how human mobility has shaped identity and our environments.

Cristóbal Pizarro does this work finding the connections between human mobility, place and biodiversity, and how birds can help immigrants adapt to change.

screen print called “Birds Over the Cityscape” by Erik Ruin & Jesse Purcell justseeds.org

In our interview with Cristóbal we discuss how he began seeing the connections in his own life. Through understanding the different historical processes of colonization as a Latin American – the formation of nation states and national identity, and the erasure of Indigenous culture – he felt disconnected from his bicultural memory. By actively remembering meant finding meaningful connections. The key to healing for Cristóbal was learning more about himself and birds.

His work is therefore grounded in emancipatory tools that subvert the colonial and scientific objective paradigms of academia. Often this means that biodiversity and immigration isn’t really researched together and there are huge conceptual gaps that need to be bridged.

Etching called “Pájaro en Mano” by Fernando Martí justseeds.org

Considering this, we talk about the damaging rhetoric that paints animals/plants/humans as “invasive”, such as immigrants and urban dwellers and how building radical narratives means highlighting the beauty in movement and sociality between species. For example, how humans have coevolved alongside Crows and that pigeons have become ties to home for Italian and Turkish immigrants in New York and Berlin, at the same time that they are a means of socialization with new immigrants in their neighbourhoods.

The lives of birds are often overlooked, and even our relationships with animals can be complicated. Take the high-tech domesticated fowl we consume who originated from Asia and claim that eating their bodies are “natural” to us. There is also undesired guests or invasive species (e.g., European starling and Monk Parakeet), or ignored cosmopolitan urban dwellers that occur in everyday life in cities around the world like Pigeons and Gulls.

Cristóbal says that since we are living in the Anthropocene, this means that we need to achieve a forceful understanding of our connectedness and interdependency with nature. “Such an understanding does not grant humans political laissez-faire towards the nonhuman world; instead, it emphasizes our shared responsibility to care for others and for ourselves”. Ultimately this leads to a framework of action.

photo of Cristóbal Pizarro co-producing nature

[Cristóbal Pizarro is a Chilean PhD Candidate in Social and Environmental sustainability at the University of Waterloo. He has a broad interdisciplinary training in veterinarian sciences, ecology, conservation and environmental philosophy. He is also passionate about birds, in their full biological extent and social expressions, including bird interactions with humans in culture and everyday life. In his research in Canada, Cristóbal study immigrants-bird relationships as proxies of social dimensions of the Anthropocene, including the link between human mobility, biodiversity and place]

Listen right now

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Bif Naked, Canadian singer-songwriter, writer and motivational speaker has been quite active in speaking out against poverty.

Partnering with Vancouver Raise the Rates, she recently participated in The Welfare Food Challenge, which aims to demonstrate the reality of living on $610 of social assistance a month.

She wanted to get involved to raise awareness about the plight of our poor, to promote understanding, and to educate the public to dispel the myths about welfare and welfare recipients. The idea is to encourage change and to try to get the attention of those with power to make those changes: your provincial government.

Having been on welfare earlier in her life, the reality is that in today’s society, folks on welfare right now in B.C cannot afford shelter. Doing the math, it is impossible to live a healthy life after shelter, transportation, personal hygiene, clothing, household supplies, and bills are paid for. The math doesn’t add up when there is $21 per week left for food. Talk about food insecurity.

Bif learned that being outspoken in the public about poverty meant seeing what our society believes about poor people.

“I was shocked. In fact, the more questions I asked, the more I discovered that people generally are classist and racist. People can’t relate to it because they haven’t experienced it. Our country has a lot of prejudice and hate towards the poor.”

A recent article laid out the facts that income inequality is killing thousands of Canadians each year. This is class war. There is no denying that anti-poor sentiments are misinforming how neoliberal politicians allocate money to provincial housing and food initiatives.

The report that the Toronto Star article cites came to the conclusion that if all Canadians were as healthy as the top 20 per cent of income earners, there would be approximately 40,000 fewer deaths each year. The report also calculates the relative rate of mortality, comparing the likelihood of death between someone in the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians and one of the wealthiest 20 per cent of Canadians. Overall, this figure is 1.67 for men and 1.52 for women, indicating that a poor male has a 67 per cent greater chance of dying each year and a poor woman has a 52 per cent greater chance than their wealthy counterparts.

We also chat about how practicing martial arts, supporting survivors of domestic abuse, straight edge, and veganism are all connected for her.

Anti-poverty groups in Canada to check out:

Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

or download an mp3 of the show.

It’s scary to put yourself out there, and the world isn’t that welcoming to bright eyed anti-capitalist creatives, but there are safe spaces you can find yourself in with the help of good folks. It’s a huge privilege to be able to travel without restrictions and have your voice heard as an artist. It’s important that those with a mic realize that they are in a position of power to add to the conversation of liberation.

For myself, as a travelling musician, it takes a little bit of social capital, some $, white skin, cis passing privilege. I want so badly for art and music to be accessible to the poor, working class, poc, queers, trans and disabled folks, not just to be participants, but to be directly involved in. I also a huge privilege to have freedom of movement and I constantly think of the stories of refugees, migrants, immigrants (whatever you want to call folks moving for different reasons), prisoners who have limited choices in dictating their own lives.

As artists, musicians, we have a mic and folks listening to what we say. Let’s use that power to talk about these things and to create safe(r) spaces for marginalized folks to also share their stories.

Jared Paul has been reflecting on this for some time with sharing his stories on stage as a spoken word poet and hiphop artist. We talk about becoming radicalized through art, growing up working class and advice for folks navigating DIY creative communities. We also mention how DIY  (do it yourself) ethics doesn’t mean going it alone, like neoliberal individualism teaches us, but it’s more about doing it together with the help from people who care.

We also talk to Jared about his personal projects like Class War Chef and how veganism and classism are connected. People often dismiss veganism, sometimes rightfully so, as bourgeois. We feel the need to have a sharp analysis of vegan consumerism, because the nature of capitalism always co-opts popular attitudes/behaviours, but sanitizes the political possibilities. That requires folks supporting each other in educating and challenging our communities in food politics, white supremacy, and classism.

check out Jared’s hiphop album that was just released on Black Box Tapes called Get My Ghost.

Listen right now [audio https://animalvoices.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/jaredpaularchiveready.mp3]

or download an mp3 of the show.