The Man with the Plan: A Vegan Awareness Month Tribute

Donald Watson, Vegan Activist

“Honey, be careful with that orange juice, but why not have some of this chicken soup? I left out the noodles just for you.”

My grandmother’s confused. Nestled in a dimly lit dining room somewhere in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida sits my father, ex-girlfriend and myself. Grandma Helen is jogging back and forth from the kitchen with a schmorgesborg of food she’s prepared just for our visit. Somehow she missed the memo about the whole “I’m a vegan” thing. Correction: the memo was received — just read backwards.

You see, my eighty-five year old grandmother was/is under the impression that veganism (or as she pronounces it: vay-gun-ism) is some kind of twisted spin-off of the Atkins Diet. I’m not exactly sure where she got this idea, but I suspect it has something to do with a faulty hearing aid, her posse of misinformed yentes and a mahjong game that went terribly, terribly wrong.

For those who don’t know, the word vegan (actually pronounced vee-gan) is defined by Webster as: “a strict vegetarian who consumes no animal food or dairy products; also: one who abstains from using animal products.” And it just so happens to be one of the world’s fastest growing movements.

November is Vegan Awareness Month and I believe it deserves – if only for the confused Jewish grandmothers out there – a moment of a silence and a big nod to the man who started it all.

Donald Watson – a British woodworker – recognized the cruelty involved in raising animals for both meat and dairy and desired to create a movement of like-minded people who abstained from consuming all animal products – not just flesh. Watson believed that vegetarianism was “only a stepping stone between meat eating and veganism” and wanted to invent a new word that would properly define this comprehensive approach to compassionate living. But what should this motley crew of plant-eaters be called? The word “vegetarian” already existed, and “non-dairy vegetarian” just didn’t have that new word smell to it.

Watson reached out to his fellow supporters who offered suggestions like “dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivoreand beaumangeur,” but in November of 1944, Watson composed the word himself: “vegan” – a marriage of the first three and last two letters of the already established term, “vegetarian.”

Shortly after, Watson formed the Vegan Society to help spread his message of peace, and began publishing the Vegan News, a “quarterly magazine of non-dairy vegetarians.” Its circulation was humble – the first issue had a mere 25 subscribers – but its content was revolutionary and is now considered a legitimate piece of history. In the first issue, he writes:

“The unquestionable cruelty associated with the production of dairy produce has made it clear that lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh-eating and a truly humane, civilised diet, and we think, therefore, that during our life on earth we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the ‘full journey’.”

Watson spent the remainder of his life helping others make that journey, working with the Cumbrian Vegetarian Society in his home of Keswick, Cumbria. For sixty-one years, the man who christened the vegan movement saw it blossom and grow into a vibrant pack of dedicated citizens.

On November 16, 2005, Donald Watson passed away at the ripe old age of ninety-five. His longevity bewildered naysaying critics and proved that one can not only survive on a plant-based diet, but thrive with brilliance and vitality. During one of Watson’s last interviews, he took a moment to share a message with today’s vegans.

“Take the broad view of what veganism stands for,” Watson said. “Realise that you’re on to something really big, something that hadn’t been tried until sixty years ago, and something which is meeting every reasonable criticism that anyone can level against it. And this doesn’t involve weeks or months of studying diet charts or reading books by so-called experts – it means grasping a few simple facts and applying them.”

So during Vegan Awareness Month let us all remember the man who possessed the courage to stand when others remained seated, the compassion to speak for those with no voice, and the foresight and dedication to help birth a movement of peace and kindness. In loving memory of the man with the plan, I wish you all a very happy and healthy Vegan Awareness Month.

One Grain

Yesterday marked the beginning of World Vegan Month. Today, Dr. Will Tuttle is here to talk about how our food choices connect us to the rest of the world and our spirituality. Participating in Meatless Monday is the perfect opportunity to create positive change for your health and the health of our planet!

“From one grain, ten thousand.” This ancient understanding of the universal principle of generosity and abundance is at the heart of macrobiotics, veganism, ahimsa, and the spiritual teachings of the world’s religions. It points to the truth that we live in an essentially benevolent and cooperative universe, and that life is a miraculous creative exuberance flowering all around us. We have been invited to participate in this life through the giving of ourselves.

From one grain spring hundreds, thousands, and millions of grains, each of which has the same potential. How do we respond to this existential exuberance of life bursting with more life? Our response depends on our food! From the early days, there have been two types of agriculture: plant and animal. Plant agriculture is essentially more feminine work, cooperating with the cycles of nature, nurturing the spontaneous growth of herb-, fruit-, nut-, and seed-bearing plants, and saving the precious seeds so they could be planted again the following season. For thousands of years, sacred rituals celebrated the miraculous abundance of the Earth, the powers of rain, sun, and green growth, the fecundity of Nature’s ever-giving and replenishing womb, and the joy of receiving a bounty of fragrant, delicious, and life-giving vegetables, fruits, and grains.

From the beginning, roughly eight to ten thousand years ago, animal agriculture was essentially men’s work and it required violence and the cruel domination of animals who always resisted as best they could to the thefts, confinements, and killings that were forced on them for their flesh, fur, and secretions. It began with wild sheep and goats and spread to cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals, and it always brought out the worst in the people who practiced it.

Universally, we feel a sense of wonder and joy upon entering a lovingly tended organic garden. It exudes beauty, magic, delight, and blessedness, and we instinctively feel grateful, humble (from humus, earth), and blessed in the presence of the gifts we receive so freely from forces that accomplish what we can never do: bring forth new life from seeds, roots, and stems.

Universally, we are repulsed by the violence and sheer horror and ugliness that are always required to kill animals for food, and at a deep cultural level, we feel ashamed of our relentless violence against animals for our meals. We cannot create life, but we can most certainly cause death, and we do so on a massive scale. It spreads to our plant agriculture. Though we could humbly cooperate with life by creating widespread networks of small-scale organic gardens, we tend instead to dominate nature violently, the way we dominate animals for food, and create the kind of pesticide-ridden, mono-cropped industrialized agriculture that is actually a manifestation of the same mentality required by thousands of years of animal agriculture.

As children, we are injected with all the stories that rationalize our violence, the no-soul, protein, taste-good, and superior-species stories that armor our feelings. As we get older, we are forced to participate in preparing the foods, cutting flesh from bone, hooking unsuspecting fish, stabbing “meat” and hardening our hearts to the cries of terrified calves and starving children, whose grain we feed instead to livestock.

We are cast out of the garden into the rat race of competition and consumerism, ashamed of ourselves. It is this low self-esteem that drives the profits of corporations enriching themselves on our insatiable craving for gadgets, drugs, and entertainment to help us forget what we know in our hearts. The choice is set before us at every meal between the garden of life or the altar of death and as we choose life and eat grains and vegetables rather than flesh, milk, and eggs, we find our joy rising, our health increasing, our spirit deepening, our mind quickening, our feelings softening, and our creativity flourishing.

We are all connected. At the core of virtually all spiritual teachings are two interdependent directives: to love a higher power (i.e., to connect authentically with the transpersonal dimension) and to love our neighbor (i.e., to treat other expressions of life with kindness and respect). In the Buddhist tradition, as but one example, these are considered to be mutually supporting, so the more authentic our meditation experience, the more we become spontaneously compassionate, and the more we practice compassion, the deeper our meditation practice will be able to bring us.

We are here to bless the world. We are each one grain who can bless ten thousand, and that is not just our potential but our joy. As we find our song and give it voice and wings, we contribute to the healing of our world and join with others in the celebration of love and beauty on this Earth. The inner teaching is generosity, humility, and gratitude: that as we give and nurture, we receive and are blessed. Mindfulness of our food choices is the key to creating not just the outer gardens of beauty, sustainability, and nourishment, but to nurturing the inner garden of our hearts. Choosing plant-based meals is the foundation of spiritual awakening, authentic generosity, humility, and ensuring the future of life on Earth—the ten thousands depending on us today. We are ALL connected.

Part II: The History of Animal Rights

Continued from Part I: The History of Animal Rights…

With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and perhaps complete annihilation.

The cross-currents of intercultural dialog have always served to help people question the official story of their culture, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, we saw this happen in the striking rebirth of vegetarianism and animal protection, inspired to a great degree by the rediscovery of Eastern thought in Europe and North America. With the translation of ancient Buddhist and Jain sutras, as well as the Upanishads, Vedas, Tao Te Ching, and other Indian and Chinese texts, as well as the discovery of vast populations thriving on essentially plant-based diets, more people in the West began to question the routine violence toward animals that characterized their culture. The word vegetarian was coined in 1850 to replace the old word Pythagorean, and experimenting with and promoting vegetarianism became popular with many influential writers such as Shelley, Byron, Shaw, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Alcott, Besant, Blavatsky, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, among others. There was also a Christian strand as well, with several church leaders such as William Cowherd in England and his protégé in America, William Metcalfe, advocating compassion for animals, with some, like Ellen White of the Seventh Day Adventists and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Unity School of Christianity advocating a the main tenets of veganism forty years before the word was invented. They were aided in this by the pioneering work of early vegetarian proponents like Graham, Post, and Kellogg who raised consciousness about the health benefits of plant-based eating, as well as the animal cruelty involved, and also by the efforts of the first animal protection societies such as the RSPCA, ASPCA, and the Humane Society.

In 1944 Donald Watson in England strengthened the foundation for the modern animal rights movement by coining the word vegan and founding the Vegan Society in London, directly challenging the official story and the underlying core of our culture. He defined veganism as “a philosophy and way of life which seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.” Thus the vegan movement was born as a continuing manifestation of the ancient and universal wisdom teaching of ahimsa, and is at the heart of today’s animal rights movement.

In the decades since, there have been many books and studies written, many organizations and periodicals founded, many documentaries filmed and websites created as part of humanity’s effort to reduce our violence toward animals. Veganism and animal rights issues are becoming increasingly mainstream as a result of all these efforts, and the momentum continues to build in spite of enormous resistance by all the institutions in our culture, and in spite of the difficulties in responding to pervasive cultural hostility and the complexity of the issues involved. For example, it is increasingly clear today that our violence toward animals is a primary driving force behind environmental devastation, physical and psychological illness, war, hunger, inequity, and social violence, besides being ethically wrong. Groups and individuals align themselves with and promote the animal rights agenda for varying combinations of these factors, depending on their predilections, and so there are a number of competing perspectives.

We live at a time of immense and growing crisis that gives us unprecedented opportunities. The old complacency is being stripped away by the multidimensional crisis facing our culture. More and more people are realizing that the only viable future for humanity is a vegan future. Rather than negotiating with the suppliers of animal cruelty, we can see from the wisdom of those who have gone before us that the real power we have is in reducing the demand for animal foods and products by raising consciousness and educating and encouraging people to reduce and eliminate animal-sourced foods and products. Thankfully, we see this happening today with the proliferation of both secular national, international, regional, and grass-roots groups and efforts to spread vegan ideals and practices, and also, increasingly, religious and spiritual groups and efforts that are similarly doing this.

This is the way forward. The idea of ahimsa and the idea of veganism are so powerful because they resonate with the core of our true nature as beings of love, awareness, creativity, sensitivity, and compassion. Donald Watson and the other sages that have gone before us have planted a seed deep into the core of the obsolete story that has mired and encrusted our culture and that threatens to destroy all life on this planet. As we each water that seed and plant our own seeds, a new garden of compassion will grow that will inevitably break the bonds of violence that enslave all of us. People will realize that as we have enslaved animals, we have enslaved ourselves.

Part I: The History of Animal Rights

Good Meatless Morning! Today, Dr. Will Tuttle is here to give us an in-depth look at the origins of animal rights. Part II is coming up tomorrow!

At its core, the animal rights movement is about questioning the official story of our culture at the deepest level. This is why animal rights is so threatening to the existing power structure. Essentially, the animal rights movement is about vegan living as minimizing our cruelty to animals, and when we trace it all back, we find that our movement has ancient roots in questioning the official story of this culture.

According to anthropologists, around 8 to 10 thousand years ago, in what is today Iraq, people for the first time began the practice of herding — owning and confining animals for food – first it was wild sheep and goats, and around 2,000 years later, cows, and eventually other animals. This was, I believe, the last major revolution that our culture experienced, and it changed our culture, and us who are born into this culture, in a fundamental way. For the first time, beings were reduced to mere property commodities, rather than being mysterious, autonomous, and respected cohabitants of the Earth with us. This changed the essential orientation of the culture, and a wealthy elite emerged that owned livestock as their wealth, the first large-scale wars evolved, and indeed, the first word for war that we know of is the old Sanskrit word “gavyaa,” which means “the desire for more cattle.” Capitalism (from the Latin “capita,” meaning “head” as in head of cattle and sheep) emerged with warfare as profitable for the wealthy livestock-owning elite, along with the ownership of humans as slaves—often people vanquished in war—and the systematic reduction in the status of women, who by the arrival of the historic period, roughly three thousand years ago, were bought and sold as chattel property. The reduction of wild animals to the status of pests because they could threaten the herders’ capital, and the development of science as a method of dominating animals and nature followed, as did the arising of a new and different role model for boys of the macho male herder, tough, disconnected, and capable of extreme violence and cruelty toward both animals and rival herders. This bellicose culture spread gradually and relentlessly throughout the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to Europe, and to the Americas and is still spreading, and we are born into this culture, which has the same basic attitudes, behaviors and practices to this day.

Shortly after the beginning of the historic period, roughly 2,500 years ago, we have the first cases of prominent and respected people urging compassion to animals and what we would call today veganism. In India, two contemporaries, Mahavir, a significant teacher in the Jain tradition, and Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, both preached and practiced a meatless diet, and required their students to observe strict codes of conduct that prohibited them from owning animals, harming animals, and eating animals. Both traditions, the Jain tradition in particular, claim that they go back much further than 2,500 years; that the practice of nonviolence that they enjoin is an unbroken teaching extending back centuries earlier into pre-history.

These are the first animal rights activists that we are certain of today, and the basis of their activism was the teaching and understanding of ahimsa. Ahimsa is the doctrine and consciousness of non-violence: that violence toward other sentient beings is not only unethical, and brings suffering to them, but that it also inevitably brings suffering and bondage to the perpetrator and society as well. It is very interesting that both of these traditions are essentially spiritual traditions, and they focus not so much on animal welfare, but on what we would call today animal rights and animal liberation. Ahimsa is the essence of veganism, which is the commitment to minimize cruelty and exploitation by not interfering with animals at all, or as little as possible, and allowing them sovereignty in their lives in nature.

It’s important to understand that owning animals as property to be killed and eaten is the hidden and defining core of our culture, and that all of us were, and are, routinely indoctrinated into the mentality of domination, exclusion, reductionism, elitism, and disconnectedness required by the food practices of this culture. The spiritual sages of India, with their propagation of ahimsa, rejected and boycotted the core of cruelty of our herding culture 2,500 years ago, and were the earliest vegans we know of, consciously attempting to minimize their violence to animals, and to spreading this to others. This powerful time in our cultural evolution, called the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, saw similar ethical giants emerging simultaneously or shortly thereafter: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Socrates in the Mediterranean, Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tzu & Chuang-tzu in China, Isaiah and the later prophets in the Levant. All emphasized compassion for animals, the rejection of animal sacrifices, and the fact that violence toward animals boomerangs as violence toward humans. As we sow, we will reap. These ideas spread through spiritual teachers and philosophers over the centuries, and by the beginning of the Christian era, for example, Buddhist monks had established centers as far away as England in the West, China in the East, and Africa in the South, and brought ahimsa and veganism with them. I am using the word veganism here explicitly because unlike the word vegetarian, the word vegan stipulates that the underlying motivation is to minimize violence to sentient beings.

With all the cross-pollination of ideas in the ancient world, it is not surprising that many of the ancient historians record that Jesus and his disciples were well-known abstainers from animal flesh, and it is documented that the early Christian fathers were vegetarians and most likely vegans. A few centuries later, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, the practice of compassion to animals by Christians was viciously suppressed, with Constantine’s soldiers reputedly torturing to death anyone who refused to eat meat. This attitude continued in the centuries that followed after the fall of Rome, with vegetarian Christians in Europe in the medieval period, such as the Cathars and the Bogomils, being suppressed and eventually exterminated by the church. There were other strands and individuals promoting nonviolence toward animals in the ancient world going into the medieval as well, in the neo-Platonist, hermetic, Sufi, Judaic, and Christian traditions.

With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and perhaps complete annihilation.

Come back tomorrow for Part II: The History of Animal Rights…