Publications
A Collection of Articles on Vegan Living, Animal Welfare,
and a Kinder World
Age of the Broiler Chicken
Substack
The chicken industry is emblematic of the Anthropocene not just because of its physical remnants, the giant bones it will leave scattered across the earth for future civilizations to decode, but because, in its exploitation of living beings and the environment, in its profit-driven degradation of life, it reveals the anthropocentric worldview that spawned the Anthropocene…
Why I’m an Animal Rights Activist When There is So Much Human Suffering…
Before I was an animal rights activist, I was a budding human rights activist. While in law school, I helped victims of domestic violence obtain personal protection orders. I studied human rights and refugee law, participated in an asylum clinic, spent all my summer legal internships working with refugee organizations and focused primarily on helping women who were victims of gender-based persecution and violence such as honor crimes, forced genital mutilation, sex-trafficking, and rape…
I grew up in a house with so many animals my friends has asthma attacks when they came over. I remember a teary-eyed, five-year-old me complaining repeatedly and exasperatedly to my mom that I had Humphrey (our big black lab) hair in my underwear again!…
Can We Love Animals & Eat Them, Too?
The Diet of Immortality
We are all going to die. Paleo eaters, vegans, junk food junkies, gourmands, raw foodies alike, we are all going to die. No matter what we eat or how much we exercise or how many days a week we juice our organic vegetables, we are going to die. Hard as it is to believe, death is certain…
Kali, One of the Georgia Girls, Died.
It was so fast. She seemed fine on Thursday. But Friday morning at breakfast something was clearly wrong. She didn’t want to eat and seemed a bit stunned. I brought her inside and put her in a kennel. About an hour later maybe she layed a normal looking egg. I was grateful and thought she would be ok…
(Photo credit: Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash)
Earth Day Every Day
We often think of days as being good or bad, but the truth of our experience is generally much more accurately measured in moments. Yesterday I had many hard moments. I wanted to tell myself I was “having a bad day.” Sick kids (I run an animal sanctuary. So, when I say kids I’m referring to chickens rescued from the meat industry). Exhaustion. Frustration. Feelings of wanting to run away from my life, from the problems of the world. But too, interwoven throughout the day were these literally breathtaking moments…
American Samsara
Like many friends I’ve talked to in the last few months and especially the last few days, the news had me in tears this morning before I’d finished my first cup of coffee. The state of our country, once a bastion of democracy for the world to admire, now on the brink of tumbling under neo-Nazi domestic terrorists, is more terrifying for many of us than 9/11, because the threat comes from within and is so widespread and seemingly entrenched in all levels of society…
Can Covid Kill the Factory Farm?
Factory farms, aka Confined Animal Feeding Operations, (CAFO’s), are where over 90 percent of our meat and dairy come from. It’s no surprise these facilities are now one of the leading reservoirs of Covid spread, given their basic business model of cramming as many beings as possible into as small a space as possible, be they the animals we kill, or the workers who process those animals. As the news began to emerge that Covid was spreading quickly in these plants, corporate owners like Tyson and Smithfield chose to keep running, despite knowing that their workers were getting sick and dying…
A Plea That We Not Return To Normal
Our world has changed dramatically in the last couple months. It has spoken to us in a way most of us didn’t know it was capable. Our lives have been turned upside down by nature herself. Most people are suffering hardships from which many will never overcome. As of this writing, the U.S. approaches 40,000 deaths, and approximately 164,000 have been killed by the disease worldwide. Social distancing has clearly helped mitigate the reach of the virus itself, but the ramifications of social distancing and the economic shutdown have left millions of people without work… We’re all separated from family and friends, and missing many of the normal routines of our lives…
COVID-19 - We Can Be Heroes
According to Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey is always the same. At some point, the hero retreats from the world, and after some kind of dark night of the soul, comes to a great insight, the most profound universal truth, that of “unity in multiplicity.” Covid 19 is trying to make heroes out of us all. The question is will we rise to the call. Through this pandemic, nature has given us the opportunity for collective awakening. It is a great equalizer, affecting us all equally regardless of nationality, race, religion, or economic class, and shows us how tangibly connected we all are in ways unseen…
Defeating Trump with Intersectional Veganism
I wrote an article a while back in which I sought to explain why I’m an animal rights activist in a world with so much human suffering,.. I believed that we as a society…shared some basic moral values in regard to humans. I argued that certain basic human rights are generally accepted by the moral community of nations…While, I argued, there have always been moral outliers like psychopaths, terrorists, and dictators, outside of these exceptions, I believed we shared some universal values that apply to human beings…. We agree on these values, right? Um, no. As we’ve all witnessed with this election, apparently not.
The Bystander Effect: What The Murder of Kitty Genovese Can Teach Us About How We Eat
On March 13, 1964, a 28 year old woman known as Kitty Genovese was stabbed and killed outside of her New York City apartment building. A story appearing in the New York Times in the weeks following the incident reported that 37 people had witnessed the attack, looking out the windows of their own apartments into the courtyard where the attack occurred. Not one, the article reported, had done anything to stop it. After Genovese was initially stabbed, her attacker fled. But he returned to rape her and inflict the fatal stab wounds….
“Vegans Are So Extreme” Or “What Could Possibly Be Wrong With Eggs And Dairy? Part II.
In Part I of this post, we talked about all the not so obvious but very real reasons why eating eggs supports cruelty. The story behind dairy is much the same. If we believe the ads we see on TV, dairy cows spend their days lazily grazing in green pastures, socializing with their friends, and soaking up the sunshine. Farmers will also often tell us city folk who don’t know any better things like “dairy cows need to be milked.”…Most of us are so disconnected from the source of our food that we probably never think of the origins of our lattes or ice-cream cones or cheese pizzas. But if we do, we might very well have an image not too far from the happy cows in the ads. So what could be wrong with dairy?
“Vegans Are So Extreme” Or “What Could Possibly Be Wrong With Eggs And Dairy?” Part I.
Most people can understand why an animal lover might give up eating meat. We all realize that an animal has to die for a piece of meat to end up on the table. But what nobody would ever know, without doing a lot of questioning and connecting all the dots, is that animals will just as inevitably be slaughtered in order to put milk and eggs on the table. What’s even more counter-intuitive is that the animals of the egg and dairy industries will probably suffer a lot more than those raised solely for their meat…