ASI Diary Archives
Looking Back
As we scatter to our chosen sanctuaries and haunts in this holiday season, I take a moment to express my appreciation on behalf of all of us at Animals and Society Institute for your support in 2009.
If I had to select one achievement of the animal protection movement in this year and the decade whose end it marks, it would be the coming to political age of the factory farm issue.
In 2002, Donna Maurer (Vegetarianism: Movement or Moment) provided an analysis and, really, a poor prognosis for future progress on the issue of vegetarianism and production of animal-based food. Her thesis was that the emphasis on converting individuals to vegetarianism is a strategic error and that it is more effective to create a social movement dedicated to broad cultural change in "ideas, values, and attitudes." I believe that in the years since the publication of that book, we have begun to achieve just that.
I will not review here the campaigns and resultant legislative gains that successfully have established the issue of factory farming as a viable political agenda and begun the process of its disassembly as a means of production of food. But I do pause to recognize three people who have spearheaded that effort: Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary for his prescient recognition that rescue of an individual animal is a powerful symbol of a rotten institution, factory farming; Wayne Pacelle and Paul Shapiro, both of the Humane Society of the United States, for their effective development and use of initiatives at the state level as a tactic.
Less recognition has been given to the significant role being played by popular writers, such as
- Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals, 2009) a noted novelist who, on the occasion of becoming a father, investigated and provided a journalistic account of what foods he (and we) should put on the table.
- Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma, 2006), a journalist, described the dilemma faced by omnivores (burden of choice of what to eat for a species evolved to eat most anything) when confronted with the realities of factory farming.
- Matthew Scully (Dominion, 2002), a conservative political speech writer, framed his critique of factory farming in Judeo-Christian biblical terms.
- Joseph D'Lacey (Meat, 2008), a novelist in the genre of Stephen King, creates a carnist dystopia in which factory farming is sanctified while its horrors are exposed in a religious ideology that venerates cattle and blurs the distinction between bovines and humans.
As many of us in the animal protection movement work for change through activist campaigns and, as does ASI, on developing research in support of change, these popular fiction writers and journalists, operating in a cultural space someplace in the middle, are revving up the motor of the cultural change to which we all have dedicated ourselves.
Posted by Ken Shapiro on December 24, 2009 at 02:10 pm
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