Berkeley Students Organize To Oppose Animal Testing

- CAMPAIGNS -
:: Reduction in the Amount of Animals Used ::

In 1999, both the Berkeley City Council and the ASUC passed resolutions supporting the proposal of an annual reduction of the amount of animals used in laboratories on the UC Berkeley campus. The successful proposal was introduced by BOAA and also generated wide student support; over 2,000 Berkeley students and several student organization representatives signed petitions supporting the proposal. Ours is a reasonable plan for UC Berkeley to gradually eliminate animal use while freeing up resources for modern non-animal methods: An annual five percent reduction means that UC Berkeley would reduce its animal use for the first year by just 2,000 animals, leaving 38,800 animals for experimentation. UC Berkeley would have 21 years to eliminate all animal use. Given the pace that biotechnology is progressing, two decades is enough time to fully implement non-animal methodologies such as non-invasive imaging technologies, electronic access to journals and clinical data, mathematical modeling, artificial tissues, and cultures of human tissues and cells.


:: What you can do to help ::
Write Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl, the Animal Care and Use Committee (ACUC), and the Office of Laboratory Animal Care (OLAC) and tell them you support BOAA's request that UC Berkeley immediately adopt an animal reduction policy.

Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl
Office of the Chancellor
200 California Hall #1500
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500
email: chan_ofc [at] uclink4.berkeley.edu

Dr. Richard C. Van Sluyters, Chair
Animal Care and Use Committee
201 Northwest Animal Facility (MC 7150)
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
email: rcvs [at] spectacle.berkeley.edu

Dr. Helen E. Diggs, Director
Office of Laboratory Animal Care
203 Northwest Animal Facility (MC 7150)
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
email: hdiggs [at] olac.berkeley.edu


:: Adoption of a Student Dissection Choice Policy ::
UC Berkeley does not have a formal policy allowing students to opt out of dissection and use a non-animal based method. Conscientious objectors are told they do not have to perform dissections, but they do have to observe the procedures. They are also advised to enroll in another course and/or select another major. Finding these "options" unacceptable, BOAA placed an anti-dissection initiative on the Spring 2002 ASUC election ballot—and a majority of students supported our call for humane alternatives to dissection! In light of this recent resolution and the many criticisms of animal dissection, BOAA is requesting that UC Berkeley immediately adopt the following student dissection choice policy.

1. Non-animal models must be available to students in classes using dissection.
2. The responsibility for creating exercises lies with the professor, not with the student.
3. Requiring the student to watch others dissect an animal is not an acceptable option; the student must be allowed to leave the laboratory while the dissection is taking place.
4. Students will not be penalized in any way for choosing the exercise. The exercise should require comparable time and effort and not be more difficult than the original exercise.
5. A student's choice to dissect or not to dissect shall be respected by all university staff and the student shall be treated in a nonjudgmental manner. A student must feel free to choose a non-animal model without penalty.
6. The university administration must inform all professors of every student's right to refuse to dissect without penalty.
7. All students must be informed in writing of their option to choose not to dissect at the beginning of each semester during which a dissection is scheduled.
8. Those professors who use dissection in their laboratories must verbally announce the policy to all students at the beginning of each semester and on the day of each dissection.


:: What you can do to help ::
Contact Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl and tell him you support BOAA's request that UC Berkeley immediately adopt a student dissection choice policy.

Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl
Office of the Chancellor
200 California Hall #1500
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500
email: chan_ofc [at] uclink4.berkeley.edu

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~boaa/

Do you think the UC hyenas are being mistreated? If you are opposed to the UC having the hyenas under any purposes, are you opposed to domestic pet cats and dogs and fish?

Also, are all 40,000 of those animals involved in invasive 'testing'... or aren't there more than one category of use. From my perspective, killing rats and frogs for dissection in a biology class is different from someone using big caterpillars for a physiology experiment, which is different from a group maintaining some lizards or insects that will never be killed or really interfered with.
How about just pesticidal spraying against insects and mice and rats? Doesn't this go on in cafeterias?

We are currently studying an unusual animal, the spotted hyena, in order to understand general mechanisms of sexual differentiation. Female spotted hyenas are more aggressive than males, dominate males in social interactions, and are somewhat larger than males. The external genitalia are highly "masculinized," i.e., the clitoris has hypertrophied to form a pseudopenis, traversed by a central urogenital canal. There is no external vagina. The female spotted hyena urinates, copulates and gives birth through her clitoris. According to our current understanding of sexual differentiation, production of such masculinized genitalia requires the influence of androgens during fetal life. Such androgens might also enhance the size and aggressiveness of female hyenas. Through the study of a breeding colony of hyenas, maintained in a large enclosure in the hills above the Berkeley Campus, we have found that the androgen androstenedione is secreted in quantity by the ovaries of female hyenas throughout life. We have recently also noted that this androgen is converted to testosterone by the placenta and passed to the developing fetus during gestation. Behavioral observations of aggression and play are compatible with the possibility that androgens are promoting the development of these behavior patterns in female hyenas.

http://psychology.berkeley.edu/directories/facultypages/glickmanresearch.html

Berkeley’s hyena colony was founded in 1985 by psychology researcher Lawrence Frank and psychology professor Steve Glickman to study the hyenas’ complex social behavior. Nestled in the Berkeley hills, 20 animals, all collected near Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve, formed the original study group. Now the colony has 35 animals, many of them second and third generation, reared at the colony. Researchers now study the hyena’s unusual hormone chemistry, finding that females dominate by virtue of traditionally male characteristics: size and the presence of testosterone.

For accurate data, healthy, active animals are essential. So, just how does one keep a hyena happy?

Staff members arrive for work at 7 a.m. every day, and their first duty is checking all the animals. At morning meetings, they discuss the animals’ health and which animals need to be moved for the day’s research activities. Looking carefully at the vet charts, one can see that hyena Tuffy’s last name is Glickman. And then there’s Rocko Glickman...and Merlin Glickman.

The hyenas are housed in 17 separate enclosures attached to sleeping rooms. To prevent hyena boredom, a variety of enrichment tools are used.

“They love pools,” says Moorhouse, pointing to a huge galvanized steel tub in one of the indoor enclosures. “I’ve seen five members of one group in their pool at the same time. It’s hard to continue your work when you are watching them play in the water.”

Other enrichment devices include blue polyethylene barrels, which the hyenas enjoy throwing around with their powerful jaws. Before the staff learned to chain the barrels to trees, the hyenas were adept at maneuvering their barrels into corners, pushing their huge bodies inside and becoming stuck.

“Tires used to be play toys, but the hyenas would shred them. I don’t know how she did it, but one day, this female had the steel belt around her body. Luckily I was able to take some clippers in, and I just put my hand through the fence and cut it off. She just stood there while I cut,” recalls Moorhouse.

Hyenas have a bad reputation for being dirty scavengers, skulking around and stealing kills from lions. While a clan will drive a lion off its kill if they sense the opportunity, this is not the norm. They are actually deadly efficient predators, capable of running down zebra and wildebeest, coordinating movements to isolate and attack their prey.

Zebra, however, are not plentiful in Berkeley and the hyenas have their meals hand-delivered. Brian Lowe, an animal technician, breaks open the ground meat and forms fist-size balls. Immediately, Dusty gulps hers down. Her next course, a chunk of pork neck bones, vanishes with a crunch.

Iris, a 4-month old cub, is the newest member of the colony. Shy, knock-kneed and very appealing, she holds her meat ball with fat baby paws. Lately, she’s been introduced to two older cubs, in what Moorhouse calls a play group. Researchers hope this play group will become a future unit.

As other colony members are fed, excited hyena voices float over the canyon. Rather than hideous giggles and whoops, they sound more like comedian Tim Allen exclaiming over his newest power tool.

Moorhouse introduces Floyd Ponce, a member of the hyena colony staff for the past two years. With a gentle voice, Ponce maneuvers Rocko to an outside pen for feeding, separating him from the more aggressive females.

“Floyd has the hyena touch,” says Moorhouse. “It’s something that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people. We’ve had hyenas take a dislike to certain individuals. If you set yourself up in an antagonistic situation with them, they don’t forget,” says Moorhouse, giving Merlin Glickman a tickle on the chin.

“People who work up here really like it,” she says. “Hyenas are very interesting and challenging to work with because you really have to have a relationship with them.”

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/0408/hyena.html

If you live in Russia's Far East and don't pay your electricity bills on time, you would be well advised to keep a close eye on your pets

The local electricity company is threatening to take them hostage in order to force consumers to pay up.

...

We will take their nearest and dearest - their pets," says Dalenergo chief Nikolai Tkachev, whose company is owed $10m.

Some pets are too large to confiscate easily, let alone house
"And let a dad explain to his daughter why their beloved moggie was taken away."

The company would then hold the pets in detention until their owners stump up.

If they don't, it will sell them to the highest bidder.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3159182.stm

Johannesburg - The African National Congress heaped praise on author JM Coetzee on Thursday after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"The ANC hopes the recognition given to South African authors like Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer - who received the award in 1991 - will serve as an inspiration to young writers in this country and on the African continent," said ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama.

"We also hope it will encourage publishers and readers to realise the continent's vast untapped literary potential."

The Democratic Alliance hailed the award as a "huge honour" for South African literature.

"Mr Coetzee joins the best of the best with this award, most notably his compatriot Nadine Gordimer who won the award in 1991," said Sydney Opperman, MP.

"Mr Coetzee has made us all proud."

http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Local/0,6119,2-1225-1242_1424803,00.html

The Lives of Animals

J. M. Coetzee

Edited and with an introduction by Amy Gutmann
The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.
..
As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6543.html

also see

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/069107089X/ref=pd_sim_books_3/104-3105309-8292718?v=glance&s=books

Animal testing is oppressing animals and humans turning us into prison wardens. Keeping either people locked up due to a phony "drug war" or animals locked up due to pharmaceutical corporations wanting to experiment another psuedocure instead of looking at the problems in the first place..

Being anti-human means allowing Coca-cola/Pesi to peddle their diabetes causing products in schools. This is like telling children, its ok to lick that plant with the insecticides a little bit, just don't eat too much poison..

If the so-called human lovers who put down animal rights activists would instead focus their energy on preventing toxins from getting into the human body in the first place, they would save alot more human lives..

..though the pharmaceutical animal tester might lose money if people become healthy..

I believe that UCSF is where the UC medical researchers are concentrated, who would be performing the invasive experiments you're most opposed to. What I'd like to really hear about is specific researchers and what they're doing with all the mice and invertebrates described. They can't all be testing makeup and shampoo over and over and over. Didn't they test toxicity of various common substances long ago?

"What gives the ALF the right to deny innocent human beings the right to choose not to die slow, painful, hideous deaths?"

ALF is not denying human beings any rights. Human beings can choose to live healthy lives and heal themselves without subjecting animals to torture. Animal testing does not ever guarentee reduced suffering or death in humans. This is another fallacy pushed by animal research and pharmaceutical corporations. ALF is against corporations inflicting cruelty on animals..

Yes, much info about toxins comes from animal testing. Nobody is suggesting to lose this info that was obtained from animal testing. However there comes a point when the initial info is sufficient. We don't have to continue subjecting animals to poisons and toxins just to know how bad they are. Stop producing toxins and dumping them in the rivers, recycle your waste back into original elements..

--------"These programs are doomed to failure because animal tests are not the most effective way to determine whether a certain chemical is toxic to humans,"says PCRM staff scientist Nicole Cardello,M.H.S.,who has conducted an extensive review of the test plans."Instead of doing anything to protect human health or the environment, the programs will waste vast sums of taxpayer dollars and millions of animal lives."

Ms.Cardello and other PCRM researchers have gathered evidence showing that many of the chemicals slated for testing already are well-documented carcinogens,yet the EPA has failed to take any serious action against them.In fact,the agency has not banned a single toxic industrial chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act in the past ten years. --------

Above 2 paragraphs from;
http://www.all-creatures.org/aip/nl-17apr2001-a.html

Animal liberation is for the future of life. When we oppress animals we oppress the animal in ourselves. When human beings are able to recognize the value of ALL LIFE and treat ALL LIFE with respect and honor, we will have evolved to the next stage. By treating other humans and non-human animals with respect, we can overcome the strife, hatred and warfare of this era. It is understood some humans need more time to realize due to media/societal pressures. The joy of ending animal oppression can only be felt by the personal action of the individual, you need to live it to feel it..

Peace and love to ALL LIFE..

QUEER RIGHTS – ANIMAL RIGHTS Mirha-Soleil Ross does some straight talking with Claudette Vaughan.

CLAUDETTE: For readers who aren’t familiar with your work, please tell us some history about yourself and how you became an AR activist.

MIRHA-SOLEIL: I’m a transsexual videomaker, performer and a long-time prostitute and sex workers’ rights activist. I grew up in a poor neighborhood on the south shore of Montréal (French-Québec) in a francophone and mostly illiterate family. In the mid ’80s, when I was about 16 years old, I watched a TV documentary about fur that included footage of animals caught in snares and leg-hold traps. It changed my life forever. I was so traumatised by what I witnessed that the next day I ran to an anti-fur protest. That’s when I met a whole bunch of animal rights activists. I had lots of questions; they had good answers and by 6pm that same night, I had stopped eating meat, stopped wearing leather, and was eager to learn and do a whole lot more. In terms of animal rights work, some of my main contributions have included hosting for four years a weekly animal rights radio show called Animal Voices on CIUT 89.5 FM (broadcast on the web at http://www.ciut.fm). In 1997, I also developed the first-ever publicly-funded social services program for low income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in Toronto. Called MEAL-TRANS, the program included a weekly meal drop-in where we served the best vegan food in town. I coordinated the program from 1997-1999 and then passed the leadership on to another transsexual woman named Christina Strang who ran the project very well until 2002. Unfortunately she then accepted a new job at another agency and the new MEAL-TRANS staff recently started serving flesh. Another action I did was when I got elected Grand Marshal for the annual Toronto Queer Pride Parade in recognition of my work within the trans and sex workers’ communities. I decided to use that opportunity to celebrate my own favourite group of heroes: the Animal Liberation Front. I organized a contingent of activists who carried placards that highlighted ALF actions spanning two decades. So while irritating leftwing radical queer activists kept complaining about how queer pride had become too corporate, too mainstream and too apolitical, we led the parade celebrating an organisation that is identified as a domestic terrorist threat in North America! I was dressed up as The Lady of the Beasts and the 20 activists accompanying me were in army fatigues and wearing coyote masks. All along the route, while up to a million people applauded, the activists lined up in front of every McDonald’s and every leather shop, and as I screamed “Meat is Murder!” or “Leather Sucks!”, they lifted their legs and pretended to piss on the store fronts ... It was a real treat!

CLAUDETTE: The scam of animal experimentation and the vivisection community has yet to be exposed in a big way from within the gay, lesbian or transgender community. Why do you think this is?

MIRHA-SOLEIL: I think it is the overall mass-scale exploitation and abuse of animals – not just animal experimentation – that has yet to be exposed in any way within queer communities. I learnt at an early age that it was a mistake to think of queer people, even the most politicised ones, as any more “revolutionary” or more likely to care about animals than anyone else. They can be just as self-centred and self-serving as any other group around. In addition to that, the gay community has been affected by AIDS and, outside of a few exceptions, supports animal-based research and multi-national pharmaceutical companies. For as long as they can be made to believe that it can help increase treatment options for their own asses, they really won’t give a shit about anyone else, especially not animals. And then you also have a small group that refers to itself as “the leather community” – another whiny bunch who think they look tough strutting around in their expensive designer fetish gears. Don’t let me get into that one! I grew up in a family of really masculine construction workers and none of them needed a leather jock-strap to feel male. Both of my grand-mothers could knock a man down in a flash and neither ever needed anything more than one fist to assert their power as women. So the whole queer leather scene with its grotesque clowns trying to have their taste for dead skin recognised as an “oppression” is nothing short of an elaborate and sick joke to me.

CLAUDETTE: You’ve dedicated a lot of energy trying to highlight the issue of queers’ unwillingness to fight for the rights of animals. Your activism is an extraordinary accomplishment. How did you arrive there?

MIRHA-SOLEIL: I didn’t become politically active in the first place because I wanted to improve my own life circumstances, but because I cared about other animals, human and non-human. I was involved in the animal rights movement and in other types of social justice activities long before I did anything that revolved around queer or transsexual or sex worker or poverty issues. And I think that it was for me a very healthy process in terms of consciousness and development. If you care and feel revolted at the sight of a tiny mouse stuck in a glue trap in someone’s kitchen cupboard, then it won’t be hard convincing you to care about the future of humankind. And yes, I’ve tried to do my part to try to address animal issues within the queer community whenever I’ve had an opportunity. I’ll give you an example. In 2000, I was invited by two curators to create a new short video for an upcoming special screening at the Toronto International Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The video had to address the theme of “trans romance”. The attendance was going to be really great, around 750 people. So my partner Mark Karbusicky and I wondered how we could explore the topic of “trans romance” while exposing the nauseating treatment of animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and how we could make that package interesting and relevant to a young, mostly queer and trans audience. We ended up using a series of interviews with a group of sexually diverse vegans who spoke about their preference for other vegans as romantic and sexual partners. In addition to that, in the first half of the video, we used explicit images of me and Mark having sex and in the second, we used video footage of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms. It turned out to be a success! The film “G-SPrOuT!” has been shown at over 25 international queer, trans, and other independent film festivals (including the Melbourne Queer Film Festival), and we constantly have people telling us about the impact the video had on them, including many who say it made them stop eating meat. Thousands and thousands of people have seen the film, exactly the kind of people who will not watch a tape of raw footage distributed by PETA or Farm Sanctuary. So when we hear animal rights activists say they want to reach out to diverse communities, we say to them that that they need to rethink the way they present animal rights issues to these communities. You need to have different strategies and you need to have people who already have their roots within these communities do the work. And you need to empower them and put them in charge. Unfortunately, it would appear as though there isn’t much interest in learning about these kinds of successful educational tools and campaigns because we tried over and over again to get G-SPrOuT! screened at animal rights and vegetarian conferences and it was never accepted.

CLAUDETTE: Sex workers have become increasingly organised this past decade demanding reforms of laws that punish consensual commercial sex. Are you disappointed with the hypocrisy of feminist groups who have shunned the issue while still professing to work for women’s rights?

MIRHA-SOLEIL: Western feminists have conveniently treated prostitution as the ultimate symbol of male violence and of women’s economic and sexual subjugation. But for the last three decades, we’ve had in the West (and for even longer than that in so-called “third world” countries) groups and networks of prostitutes who have clearly articulated what our political needs are and what needs to be accomplished legally and culturally in order for us to work and live more safely and with more dignity. Internationally at this point, we have consensus on basic goals such as the need to have prostitution recognised as legitimate work and decriminalised. We do not believe that prostitution is inherently exploitative, degrading or hurtful. Instead we think that the various anti-prostitution laws and vicious cultural attitudes towards prostitution and prostitutes create a context within which our most fundamental human rights can be violated, a climate within which some think it is ok to harass, rape and kill us. Our analysis and positions as working prostitutes have been elaborated from years and years of daily experience of prostitution. They are not the results of abstract theorising conducted by feminist social scientists who have never turned a trick and who have spent most of their lives buried deep down within their library books. Unfortunately the animal rights community has been one social justice movement where the voices of prostitutes have been painfully absent, and this in the presence of very disparaging and hurtful attitudes and propaganda. Writers like Carol Adams, Gary Francione and Jim Mason all regurgitate old seventies misinformed radical feminist ramblings around prostitution and pornography. They make offensive and trivialising comparison between consenting adult women working in the sex trade and non-consenting animals murdered by the meat industry. And they do so without ever speaking to us. If anyone is going to start writing articles and developing theories linking meat to pornography and prostitution and the so-called objectification of women’s bodies, then I insist that we – as women and as prostitutes and as sex workers – be the first ones consulted regarding these matters!

CLAUDETTE: In your one-woman show Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thought from an Unrepentant Whore, you’ve made a connection between coyotes and prostitutes. Please tell us about that.

MIRHA-SOLEIL: In 1999, I got funding to write and produce my first full-length performance, a series of character-based and autobiographical monologues addressing anti-prostitution discourses and campaigns. I wanted to detail the way various groups like feminists, social workers and law enforcement agencies all work together to create a society within which both our work and our lives as prostitutes are devalued with often tragic consequences. I also wanted to show how the violence that is perpetrated against us ends up being used by all of them to fuel their own anti-prostitution ideologies and further their own agendas with absolutely no regard for what we – as working prostitutes – say we need in order to improve our working and living conditions. So when I started thinking about what I wanted to do, I got interested by one of the longest running prostitutes’ rights organisations in the United States. That organisation is called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and I read that the acronym COYOTE was originally picked by founder Margot Saint-James because the animal stood as a perfect metaphor for the way prostitutes were and continue to be viewed and treated in our culture: as threatening intruders, carriers of diseases, and as vermin to be eliminated. So on one hand I was intrigued by this comparison, but on the other very uncomfortable with having an entire nation of animals used once again as a metaphor so gratuitously – that is, without any proper representation or compensation. And I decided that as a prostitute and as an animal rights activist, it was my duty to try to give a little bit back to the coyotes and show people the brutal reality faced by hundreds of thousands of them every year in North America – being poisoned, shot and trapped as part of various hunting contests and “control” programs. Indirectly, I also wanted to ask some hard questions regarding our use of animals as “metaphors” for human suffering. How appropriate is it to compare our own human suffering to that of animals when most of the time, quantitatively and qualitatively, there is so much disparity between the two? I presented the show here in Toronto in 2001 and I will perform it again in September 2003 in New York as part of WOW Café’s first National Transgender Theatre Festival.

CLAUDETTE: I’ve made a connection between women and animals and here’s one example. In Australia recently a woman was brutally raped. She commented at the time that the intruder was tearing out large chunks of her flesh with his mouth, trying to mutilate her. I’m collecting files on this third aspect of rape, ie, mutilation and decapitation, and I’m convinced it all began with animal mutilation – vivisections, de-beaking, tail-docking, castration, etc. Any thoughts on the matter?

MIRHA-SOLEIL: I do believe there are some connections between cruelty to animals and violence towards some groups of humans, including women. And I do think that it can be strategically useful to point these out at specific times and as part of specific campaigns. But I am not one who is obsessively trying to “connect everything” as the eco-feminist slogan goes ... I think animal abuse, what’s happening in labs, on fur farms, in slaughterhouses, on trap lines, in live animal markets, etc, is something that in and of itself we as a society need to recognise as gruesome and unacceptable, regardless of whether or not it directly affects us as humans. For as long as we don’t acknowledge that specific form of violence for what it is and for as long as we are not deeply moved to end it, we will be morally bankrupt and yes, I believe we will continue to commit atrocities towards other humans.

CLAUDETTE: What is your vision for the continuance of the AR movement? Mine is that there must emerge a second women’s movement intrinsically linked to the AR movement. Unlike the ’60s when women were burning their bras, this time we’ll be burning our leather shoes!

MIRHA-SOLEIL: As a quick and catchy image I like it but I would love to see something more meaningful done with the skins of these animals, something that would more dramatically highlight where they came from and what they really represent, the horror and the suffering behind them. Also, I think that at least here in North America, we have already seen what people refer to as “second wave” and “third wave” feminisms, and I haven’t found these to be any more friendly towards animals. It can actually be quite the opposite. A lot of hip and young “third wave” feminists see vegetarianism as some tacky and embarrassing vestige from very problematic, old-fashioned, feminist politics. So therefore as a transsexual and as a prostitute and as someone deeply committed to fighting for animal liberation, I have become less and less inclined to rely on feminism to provide me with an appropriate framework within which to think and solve broader political issues, including animal rights. I have just seen too often how seriously feminists can fuck up and how much damage they can cause. I am extremely concerned with anyone trying to impose a single political or philosophic framework on the entire animal rights movement. I think the health and success of this movement will depend on its ability not to be dominated by one political ideology. The more we will see caring for animals and resistance to animal abuse flourish in a multitude of geographical, cultural, linguistic, religious, class and ethnic contexts, the more likely our movement is to survive, diversify, expand and be successful. The most important thing is that everywhere in the world, there are people who can recognise animal cruelty and abuse when they see it perpetrated. Whether they decide to fight it based on their feminist or religious beliefs or as part of their anti-speciesist or anti-colonial efforts is really secondary to me.

Individuals and community groups interested in obtaining copies of Mirha-Soleil Ross’s video work can contact: veganbums [at] sympatico.ca For institutional rentals and purchases, contact her distributor, V-TAPE – http://www.vtape.org. This interview first appeared in Vegan Voice magazine, “Promoting Compassion for All Beings”, PO Box 30, Nimbin NSW 2480 Australia. Phone: 02 6689 7498 Website: http://veganic.net

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/08/23/2080593