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Animal Visions

Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Communicating Animal Liberation–a call for help

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Anastasia in Animal Lives, Healing & Empowerment, Miscellaneous

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

activism, animal activism, animal liberation, animal rights, animal rights community, communication, veganism

Livid. Enraged. Sorrow. That’s what I felt after leaving a level IV Shambhala meditation class. Throughout the entire weekend, I found myself triggered by the director’s teachings and by comments from the other students.  I felt incredibly sensitive to comments made about animals and jokes made at their expense.  I began to feel disheartened after the teacher indicated that the Shambhala teachings are not necessarily paths of social justice.  Teachings aside, the meditation technique actually helped me to be present and see how I was being triggered.  It also helped me to see how deeply triggered I am when animals are concerned.  After class, at the reception, I was angry by the limited vegan options. I spend a lot of time in non-vegan spaces, so I have conditioned myself not to get triggered every time, but this time I couldn’t help it.  I was raw. You see, I had just received some news that left me aghast.  My father has been missing, or rather unreachable, for almost a year. He seems to have literally disappeared from the face of the Earth.  Since the bill collector can’t reach him, I’m receiving the calls and texts daily. As a consequence, I’ve been unnerved and depressed all week.  In society, we are bombarded with imagery and stories that remind us of the status quo of animal oppression, encouraging us to take heart in exploiting animals and be disaffected by their experience.  So when I encountered this again and again in the Tibetan Buddhist-influenced Shambhala Center, my heart could no longer contain it.

One thing led to another, and I let my rage pour.  And thanks to the meditation technique, I was present with it most of the time, which left me even more unnerved because I’m not used to experiencing sustained rage.  One of my acquaintances at the center tried to entice me to stay with gluten-free blueberry pie. After all, it’s gluten free! In Asheville, veganism is just another alternative healthy food lifestyle. Most of the self-identified vegans I know are driven by health consciousness.  Normally I don’t hate on this at all, but as I mentioned before, I was feeling raw and suffering from sustained rage.

“On second thought, the pie probably has some animals in it,” she said playfully.

“Of course it does,” I responded in a snide tone, “After all, I’m the only person in this building who gives a shit about animals.”

She looked taken aback and wanted to say I was wrong, but she did not say anything.  Instead, she looked away.  Meanwhile, another acquaintance who was there joined the conversation and began to sharehow he was a strict ovo-lacto vegetarian and his reasons for it and how he used to be vegan but dah-dah-dah dah-dah.  I didn’t have to say anything: the look on my face said it all.  He quickly became offended.  I became offended from the offense.  Then began the raging conflict of values about animals, eating animals, and animal rights I try so hard to avoid.  He left upset.  I left upset.  But before I left, he wanted to get me to say that eating animals is right.  He said, “You would not be here today if it weren’t for your ancestors eating animals.”

So often, I find that in these types of conversations, the other person often expects me to see where they are coming from without any effort on their part really to see where I’m coming from.  There is no mutuality, and I don’t know how to demand it without getting worked up.  My acquaintance described my rage as a stormy cloud that most people cannot endure without feeling some degree of devastation.  On the flip side of that, my joy is one of the most uplifting experiences of her life, and others have told me how I inspire them to believe they can accomplish their full potential.  I realize I have this power in interpersonal relationships.  But when it comes to animals overall, I feel incredibly powerless.  No outreach technique, no style of activism, no philosophical grounding have ameliorated this feeling.

So I ask myself, if I feel so powerless when it comes to helping animals, why do I still cling to the idea?

The answer, though not satisfying, is because I must.  I am compelled.  I long for animal liberation from the core of my being.  It is just as important to me as a race-free, class-free society, the uplifting empowerment of black women, gender equality, and queer liberation.  Why is this?  I feel like an anomaly.  I have no animal rights community.  I have been trying to nurture the possibilities and spirit of animal liberation in black and queer of color communities in which I am very active.  I try to include consideration for animals all the time, and I am even mentoring one of my sistas in transitioning to a vegan diet.  To be honest, I wouldn’t say my efforts have been in vain, but they are moving incredibly slow.  Sometimes, I question whether the potentiality is there at all or if I’m just deluding myself to hope that animal liberation can be genuinely included in communities of people aspiring for their own liberation.  When it comes to animal liberation specifically, very few of us, even within the animal rights community, seem to have this longing.  For one, what does it mean?  We don’t have a shared understanding of the term.  Perhaps it’s too big, too esoteric, too philosophical.  Yet, it’s so powerful.  I, for one, can feel some sense of what animal liberation means in my body, in my relationships with other animal bodies.  Why do I long for animal liberation?  The cynical reason is because I am tired of day after day, seeing, hearing, and sometimes even smelling the oppression of animals.  I am utterly exhausted, not enough to give up, but exhausted enough to try all of my options.  I am not content with being a witness.  Unlike the Buddhist lesson I just received today, I do not believe it is enough just to be with the suffering, the tenderness of witnessing someone’s suffering.  I believe doing something is absolutely essential.  It doesn’t have to be marching or leafleting in the streets.  It doesn’t have to be smooching politicians.  It doesn’t have to be exhausting all of my financial resources in rescuing animals from pits.  And it doesn’t have to be writing scholarly articles.  Or it could be all of those things and more.  The action may not be obvious at all.  It may be subtle, unexpected in its potency.  But it is something and it is within my capacity, my motivation, my power to do it.  Now the tricky part for me is being convinced that whatever that something I’m doing is enough.

The uplifting reason is because I want to live in a world where it is the norm, not the exception, for living beings to live in dignity and freedom.  Often, however, when I try to communicate this uplifting vision to people who are not awakened to animals beyond material resources, playthings, and cultural/religious symbols, the message is lost.  Animals are not included and it gets interpreted as a New Age, apolitical thing.  After having this failed communication tonight, I want to explore how I can be a better communicator when it comes to animals.  I want to be able to handle any kind of conversation with an awakened heart, with stability, and with sheer confidence.  So far, I get thrown off my seat every time I talk about animals or anything moderately related to animals (veganism included).  Rather than the topic be an argument of ethics and values about animals, I want to aim every conversation as an opportunity to expand and deepen the possibilities of animal liberation.

Is anyone willing to help me with this challenge?

 

Register for the Sistah Vegan Conference: “Embodied and Critical Perspectives on Veganism by Black Women”

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

≈ Leave a comment

Check out the first annual Sistah Vegan Conference. I will be presenting on white supremacy and patriarchy concerning the struggle for animal rights, particularly how forces of racism and sexism directly harm animals. Dr. Breeze Harper is still looking for submissions so please visit Sistah Vegan Project for more information.

Sistah Vegan

(Tentative Presentation and Discussion Line-Up)

Please note that anyone can register as an audience member to learn about the critical and embodied perspectives of women of color vegans. One need not identify as a woman of color

Click on Book to purchase a signed copy

1st Annual Sistah Vegan Conference

“Embodied and Critical Perspectives on Veganism by Black Women and Allies”

September 14, 2013

Location: Web Conference Using Anymeeting.com. This means the location is on the Internet, accessible by computer or telephone. 

Time: 10:00am-6:00pm PST (USA)

Early Bird Registration Fee: $35.00 until August 15, 2013. After August 15, it will be $45.00

Click here to register

——————— 

Introduction: How Veganism is a Critical Entry Point to Discuss Social, Animal, and Environmental Justice Issues for Black Women and Allies.
Speaker: TBD
Length: 10 minutes

In this introduction to kick off the conference, the speaker will introduce how the concept of veganism can shed light on critical issues…

View original post 2,123 more words

Recalling the Animal Rights Conference 2013

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous, Transforming Social Structures

≈ 11 Comments

The Animal Rights Conference 2013.  Like last year, it took me a week to commit my thoughts to print.  While the conference overall was not as lively and tense as last year’s (and many of the people involved in that tension last year were not present this year), the conference still brought with it the burden of racism, marginalization, misogyny/sexism, and homophobia.  This recollection will try to capture my full experience and impressions of the conference, not just the shit that is frustrating and tiring to deal with. Continue reading →

CFP: Critical Animal Geographies

25 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

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For all you academic, scholarly lovers out there: If you have any on-going or new work in the realm of animal geographies, please consider submitting to this anthology in the making. Continue reading →

Crying a River for Animal Life

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Anastasia in Animal Lives, Healing & Empowerment, Miscellaneous

≈ 8 Comments

I haven’t been on facebook or any social media for ages. I signed on for the first time in months and perused one of my friends’ walls and saw Mali the Elephant holding her tail.  The tag reads “She’s so lonely. She holds her own tail…”

I didn’t just feel like crying–I cried. I couldn’t help it. I can relate to being lonely. I can feel that deep sadness when all you have is yourself and that’s all you can rely upon because you have no support from the environment in which you live. I so get that, and it pains me. Regardless of whether or not this particular image is propaganda, it speaks the truth, and it touches me bone deep.

Free Mali the Elephant

Often, I feel so helpless in the face of this real suffering. So many of us doing this work feel helpless. I fool my way out of it when I put on my theorist, philosopher, systems thinker hat–which for any of you who follow my blog know that I have a great affinity for philosophical thinking. Continue reading →

Recalling the Animal Rights Conference 2012

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous, Transforming Social Structures

≈ 3 Comments

So much to say about the conference, so many words.  This year’s conference was my first attendance, and it exceeded and confirmed expectations all at once.  The conference contained for me some insight, some inspiration, some passion, some racism.  It took me a full week to recap my experience into words I could share on this blog.  Many others I have since befriended have written on the conference as well.  See Katie’s AR Conference recap for a different perspective.

Voices of the Movement

Not surprising, the dominant voices at the conference came from the large farm animal advocacy organizations.  Probably because the organizers FARM are among these organizations. Probably because major voices in the AR movement have prioritized farm animal advocacy above all others since they are the most regularly and extensively exploited and killed land animals in the US.  Nevertheless, I found Continue reading →

The next mass extinction, unless…

23 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

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Tags

animal exploitation, biodiversity, climate change, CO2, coral reefs, dead zones, habitat destruction, habitat loss, habitat: space and place, marine ecosystems, mass extinction, oceans, overfishing, pollution, social change, whaling

From Think Global Green: An example of coral death by bleaching. As reefs fail, so do other marine ecosystems, leading to the mass extinctions occuring around the world in a single human generation.

It pains me to be the purveyor of bad news, but if we don’t stop the destructive cycle we’re on, we’re going to make Earth history by being the shortest lived species before facing extinction, killing many many other species as we go.  Two days ago, Reuters published an article on yahoo sharing the findings of a study by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).  In a nutshell: “Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean.”   We’ve heard this warning before.  In fact, we’ve been hearing it from researchers, scientists, and activists all over the world for the last decade.  And now it seems that grim future prophesied is upon us. Continue reading →

Dear Readers

22 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

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Dear readers:

To all of those who have taken the time to peruse my blog, I sincerely give thanks.  It has been a while since I have posted anything.  The reason is simple:  I lost my vision.  Ironic that in my quest for finding vision regarding animals in society that I would lose my vision for this blog completely.  How this happened was correlated to losing sight of what I wanted for life in general.  You could say I had a crisis and went AWOL from cyberspace.

After three months of inactivity in the blogosphere, I have returned with not so much a vision as an idea for how Animal Visions can sustain.  For one, I’m writing what I need to write and not what I should write.  I say this because in the months before, I posted in an effort to act like a journalist and before that I tried to be a scholar.  Neither persona worked, and so I am relinquishing all expectation henceforth and am doing what I should have done in the first place, which is write from where I am.

Additionally, I fell into a funk of bitter commentary on animal news that was either incredibly offensive or incredibly depressing.  I could only take so much of that before I just didn’t want to write anymore.  No more of that, either.

Finally, I didn’t know who I was writing for, even after maintaining the blog for over a year.  So I’ve decided to make matters simple and write what I need to say.  If you knew me personally, you’d know that this conclusion is a milestone for me.  What I need to say will not always follow the form of the way I have posted in the past.  Some of it may be fiction (because, after all, I am a fiction writer!).  Hopefully, current readers will appreciate that and join the conversation.

I appreciate all the comments and views the blog has received so far.  To whoever is reading, I give my warmest gratitude and look forward to seeing more of you in the future.

Sincerely,

Anastasia

An Open Letter to a Raccoon Mother

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

≈ 4 Comments

Dear Raccoon,

I call you Raccoon Mother because you were a mother once and I don’t know how else to identify you. You suckled babies at your breasts and maybe witnessed them grow up to maturity. But when I met you, you were alone. Alone and helpless. Helpless and crippled. You bled. You lay still. You could not stand. Your fur was saturated from the rain. And ticks held tight to your skin like barnacles on a rock. Continue reading →

Dr. Herzog Tells a Story on the Human Condition

08 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Anastasia in Miscellaneous

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Tags

animal abuse, animal cruelty, human condition, meat, vegetarianism

Another expert has been proclaimed in order to reinforce the ultimate story that has given European civilized humans purpose and value since the dawn of their existence!  This time, it is Dr. Hal Herzog, a psychologist at Western Carolina University and an expert on “human-animal interactions,” who presents us with segmented regiments of the human condition as it interacts with animals.  “We” are put into perspective using the ancient rational knowledge of utilitarian ethics and reductionist science; of course, “we” are the average white human in western civilization extrapolated to humans everywhere.  Here is what he had to say. Continue reading →

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