Today's New York Times contained a great editorial that hopefully will serve as a wake up call to many in the U.S. While factory farming seems cheap on the surface, hidden costs and subsidies abound.

Unfortunately, our legal and legislative systems have been used to protect corporate agricultural, especially those who deal in animal products, from having to pay the true costs of their actions. Thus, corporations can sell their products cheaply, while reaping huge profits. The NYT's editorial touches on only one of these costs, antibiotic resistance caused by the routine use of antibiotics as growth enhancers on factory farms. There is now strong evidence that this creates antibiotic resistant bacteria capable of infecting humans, increasing medical costs and worsening outcomes for all of us.

Add to this chronic diseases such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc., caused by consumption of the products, environmental damage, caused by the dumping of massive amounts of waste, grain and water shortages caused by the intensive need for these resources to operate the factory farming system, and you soon reach the conclusion that a one dollar cheeseburger should really cost about $20.

This system will not change until enough people get angry enough that they begin to vote their legislators out of office for supporting these ridiculous subsidies. It is time for all of us to organize and work to change this system.

Book Review - Farm Sanctuary : Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food

Last Friday I went to see Gene Baur speak, and while there I picked up a copy of his book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food.

The book has a loosely chronological structure that tells the story of how Farm Sanctuary came to be, while outlining the many battles they have fought through the years to bring about better treatment for animals that are caught up in the factory farming system. The tone of the book is very similar to Mr. Baur's speaking style, which is insistent without being confrontational, and factual without losing an emotional edge.

Many of us in the animal rights movement are used to those who take a hyper-rational tone, spewing fact after fact, or making step by step philosophical arguments, because we want to avoid at any cost sounding like someone who has watched Bambi too many times. Thankfully, Mr. Baur does not fall into that trap, and throughout the book we are reminded that animals are living creatures that are enough like us that it is possible to form an empathetic bond with them.

I especially enjoyed the “Profile” sections at the end of each chapter. Just like each one of us that make up the teeming mass of humanity, the profiles remind us that every animal is an individual with its own life story that can be good or bad.

The epilogue was especially heartening, and I heard the echoes of Thoreau's famous essay on Civil Disobedience in two sentences which are too good not to repeat:

Eating meat is a habit we choose, not an unwritten law to be blindly obeyed. In the face of factory farming's harsh and violent spirit, every one of us has the
power to say no and in doing so show the world there is a kinder way.

If you haven't yet read this book, I highly recommend it, even if you are a seasoned activist it will help you remember why you're in this movement.

Give Me an Inch, and I'll Take an Inch

I am probably as guilty as the next person in sometimes feeling that I don't accomplish enough in my advocacy efforts. Books, articles and other media bombard us with stories about how individual activists have changed the world through heroic efforts. Sometimes this is a good thing, as it inspires us to do more. Other times, it serves to depress us, as most of us do not have the time, energy or money to devote ourselves to activism full-time, and thus, can never accomplish those heroic feats.

Very often though, what appears to be a big jump is actually the accumulation of many small steps. When an ordinance passes, or a local school unveils a vegan friendly lunch menu, or a corporation agrees to stop testing on animals, we often view that as a discrete event and give credit to one or a few individuals. But these changes never take place in a vacuum, and we sometimes need to look at the big picture that made the change possible.

Social change almost always precedes by small steps. While we see the big changes, we often miss the details; the person who talked to his neighbor about why they should support a spay/neuter ordinance, the student who asked for a vegan lunch, or the person who stopped buying cosmetics from the corporation that tests on animals. It is these small steps that make what only appears to be the big jump possible.

People sometimes ask me how many people I expect to convert to veganism, and my standard response is, “just one.” Of course, there is always one more out there, and if we keep working on just that one, eventually we will get to everyone. To climb the mountain seems overwhelming, and it is the wrong place to focus. What most of us need to think about is what small step we can take today that will move us forward even an inch. Over time, all the inches that move will add-up. Looking back someday, we will see how that one conversation we started, that one e-mail we sent, or how that one pamphlet we handed out has moved us miles.