On this show we discuss some recent news stories on veganism and animal activism that have been published in light of the Dominion Animal Liberation disruption that involved blocking streets in Melbourne and many other actions around Australia.
On 28th April 2019, more than 1000 people gathered on Melbourne's Parliament House steps to show their support for a live export ban. They were addressed by four inspirational animal rights advocates: Lyn White (Animals Australia), Ben Schultz (Animal Justice Party), Pam Ahern (Edgar's Mission) and Andy Meddick (Animal Justice Party), with Tamasin Ramsay (Animal Justice Party) as the MC [not pictured].
On this show we are joined by Kristin Leigh, founder and director of Vegan Rising, a new animal liberation and direct action group in based in Victoria. We talk about the myth of humane farming, happy meat and the method behind the April 8th coordinated disruptions across Australia, which included the Melbourne CBD shutdown.
On the 6th of April 2019, hundreds of animal advocates gathered in Melbourne for the March To Close All Slaughterhouses. People marched through the streets of Melbourne and around the iconic Queen Victoria Market which has a large ‘Meat and Fish Hall’.
We are sharing three powerful speeches from the march calling for a new world where animals are not used and abused, and where we all live and flourish together.
We hear from Damien Cole, independent candidate for Victoria's Corangamite electorate in the upcoming Federal elections. He's also a Surfrider Foundation Australia ambassador in the Fight For The Bight campaign, battling to save the extraordinary marine ecosystem of the Great Australian Bight from oil drilling. Damien explains how the near-pristine wilderness off the southern Australian coast is in peril due to our society's addiction to fossil fuels, and how the local anti-drilling campaign is winning nationwide support.
On this show we're joined Dilan Fernando to talk about his recent trip to Palestine and the work of the Palestinian Animal League. He discusses the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and how this influences and impacts animal activism.
We listen to the talk, ‘Humane Science Education: Ending the Use of Animals for Dissection’, presented by Nicole Green, Director, Animalearn and Dr. Elisabeth Ormandy - Executive Director, Animals in Science Policy Institute.
We've got a presentation from the recent Humane Education Coalition summit, delivered by Nichola Kriek from SAFE. She talks about how humane education has been successfully introduced into the NZ school curriculum. We've also got four spoken word performances, from Canada, UK, & the US.
This show features some of Bede Carmody’s talk Sustainable Activism: How to avoid becoming burnt out as an activist. You can listen to the full talk at the following link and the description on this site also has links to further resources and to listen to other talks from the conference it was recorded at: https://archive.org/details/BedeCarmody
We hear from Mark Halliday, a documentary filmmaker from Sydney about his new feature film, Vestige. The film follows some of the last remaining rhinos, protected in South Africa's Kruger National Park from the onslaught of poachers, and the people who risk their lives on a daily basis while trying to protect them.
We’re joined by Jim Kremar, environmental activist and one of the hosts of the SUWA show on 3CR, who discusses the place of animals in the environmental movement.
You can listen to the SUWA show on 3CR every Friday from 5.30-6.30pm and catch up on episodes here: https://www.3cr.org.au/suwa
Jim also recommends the following groups for those who are interested in getting involved in environmental activism:
On this show we’re joined by Greg McFarlane, the Director of Vegan Australia. He discusses the rise of veganism and the various ways Vegan Australia promote veganism, both on an individual and society-wide level. You can find out more about and support Vegan Australia at: https://www.veganaustralia.org.au/
David is the founder of Melbourne Climate Save, one of the latest groups to join the worldwide Save movement. David talks about the connection between animal agriculture and climate change, the emergency in the Amazon with the new Brazilian government now endorsing its deforestation, and ponders whether veganism is the silver bullet for the escalating climate crisis.
This episode features Jon Pawson on how his veganism fits within Maori culture and decolonisation. Jon is from the Facebook group “Māori and Pasifika Vegans”: https://www.facebook.com/groups/399648523567337/
We play two more presentations from the Animal Justice Party summit on 1080 poison that are essential listening to get your head around this baiting issue. Learn about the ins and outs of the Victorian wild dog/dingo 'management' (killing) plans which purposefully 'un'protect the dingo so they can legally be killed in Victoria, as well as more about our Australian 'lion king' dingo.
We’re joined by vegan and frequent flyer Christian Freitag who gives tips on travelling as a vegan. Check out Christian’s Instagram ‘alwaysthen’ for travel photos.
This show features advice to help people to go vegan and stay vegan. This includes eating out, shopping for vegan products at your local supermarket, veganism beyond diet, and much more!
We’re joined by journalist Madison Griffiths who discusses animal rights as a social justice issue and connections with other issues such as feminism, mental health and media representation of marginalised groups.
On the 24th of November 2018 Victorians went to the polls to vote for their next state representatives. An Australian political party dedicated to animals, called the Animal Justice Party, fielded candidates in 43 of the 88 lower house electorates and had candidates running in each of the 8 upper house regions. It is looking very likely that one of the Animal Justice Party candidates will be elected to the upper house.
Andy of the Animal Justice Party talks about live export, including the recent live cattle export protest in Geelong and the recent incident off Portland. Caroline of Melbourne Cow Save joins Andy to explain the context of the protest at last week's professional bull riding event in Melbourne.
Zoei also gives a brief overview of the Sociology and Animals session at the ‘Precarity, Rights and Resistance’ conference by The Australian Sociological Association (TASA).
The Animal Justice Party held a summit discussing 1080 poison and we play three presentations from this informative and alarming evening. Get the toxicology facts of 1080, the legal ins and outs to help ban this cruel and environmentally destructive poison & listen to the fatal impacts it has on our dingo populations.
Hunting is a key threat to wild animal populations around the world. For the Love of Wildlife wants to reduce Australia's impact on the trade of African animals by making it illegal to import and trade their body parts in Australia. We discuss their success in getting an Australian ban on the importation and sale of lion body parts from canned hunting and their work to help elephants and rhinos.
We chat with Graeme Linsell, a Melbourne-based volunteer wildlife rescuer & carer. He talks us through what's involved in this critically important role, some of the basic principles, & how we can get trained so that we too can help save lives.
We discuss language and animals and how by design, language acts as a weapon against animals perpetuating speciesism through demeaning terms like ‘you cow’or by laundering terms that hide cruelty, for example, a 'processing plant' instead of a slaughterhouse. We also have categories of language to label species as belonging or not belonging - for example, native, pest or feral - and a species can switch category depending on our human agenda for the landscape. Speciesism means the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals.
We are joined by a local campaigner from the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses, Elio Celotto, to discuss the inherent issues with horse racing and what we can do about it. In Australia, we are days away from the Melbourne Cup, a 3200 m race where horses are often pushed to physical exhaustion or injury by being forced to race.
This show features the talkVeganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel by scholar-activist Esther Alloun. You can find more of Esther’s work at the following link: https://uow.academia.edu/EstherAlloun
We're in the studio with Doug Leith, president of Melbourne Save Animals In Laboratories (MSAIL), talking about vivisection (animal experimentation) in Australia, as well as how and why it fails to meet its claimed objectives of improved human health outcomes. Doug also talks about the work of MSAIL.
We chat with Ingrid Marker about how large bodied dogs, in particular hunting dogs trained to kill pigs, are lethal to the cassowary population who are already up against it with their disappearing habitat, roads, and fragmented landscapes.
We speak with Dr Annett Finger, Dr Nikki Kowalczyk, and Port Phillip Baykeeper Neil Blake about the colony of Little Penguins that live on a Melbourne breakwater in Port Phillip Bay. They talk about the circumstances that make this colony unique & about the important research conducted by Earthcare St Kilda. We'll also hear how a recent industrial fire in Melbourne's western suburbs may pose serious risks to the health of Port Phillip Bay & the penguin colony.
This show features a talk on the debate in the animal advocacy movement around “single issue campaigns” that focus on one particular product or form of animal exploitation, examples include anti-fur campaigns and advocating against the dog meat trade.
We speak with Darryl Jones about his book The Birds At My Table, on why we feed wild birds & why it matters. Bird feeding says a lot about us in these challenging times.
This podcast is of a recent presentation given at the University of Tasmania. "Reese will trace out a roadmap for how humanity is transitioning to the end of animal farming. The timeline has four stages: Foundation, Revolution, Stigmatization, and Follow-Through.
We are joined by animal advocates Beth Allan (pictured on the right above) and Brighde Kennedy who discuss their own experiences of dealing with sexism in the movement and some ways we can work to overcome this problem as a movement.
You can hear Beth discussing this issue at the recent Community As Activism event. The session is on Transformative Justice and #MeToo, featuring Beth as well as Jess Ison and Anne-lise Ah-fat: https://archive.org/details/MeTooTJ
FoS presenters recently gave a talk at the Students of Sustainability Conference 2018 called 'Environmental Liberation Through Animal LIberation'. We highlight some of the key points from that talk by covering the connections between animal and environmental movements, including exploring the environmental impact of animal agriculture. You can see the associated PowerPoint presentation for some references and visuals on the topic.
We’re joined by Jess Ison from the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (Oceania) who discusses the upcoming workshop-based discussion forum in Melbourne: ‘Community as Activism: Building Community within the Animal Liberation Movement and Beyond’.
Event Details:
Saturday 4 August, 1-5pm at Library at the Dock (107 Victoria Harbour Promenade, Docklands).
We have Dr Judi & Bryce Inglis in the studio, describing their work advocating for the much-misunderstood house rabbit whose welfare is largely ignored in Australia. Their organisation, Rabbit Run-Away Orphanage, is dedicated to bringing education to all levels of government as well as the public, leading to improved welfare and legal change.
We speak with Dr John McEvoy from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia, USA, about his and his colleagues' work tracking Asian elephants in Myanmar. We discuss the threat that elephants are facing from poaching and how elephant-human relationships in local areas are key to keeping the elephants safe.
Speak to a vet & they will tell you thousands of healthy cats & kittens in our urban & peri-urban areas are euthanaised by the "bucket load" throughout Australia & according to research this is NOT bringing cat populations down or improving conditions for our wildlife. What it is doing is making the job for animal health workers & rescue groups intolerable at times and creating a lot of dead cats. There is a much better way to manage these populations through trap-neuter-return (TNR) programmes & cat diversion.
We’re joined by Mark Allen who discusses his holistic approach that he has developed through many years of activism. According to his zine on holistic activism, this approach provides ‘some ideas about how we can reduce conflict among activists, create campaigns that are long lasting, reach out and connect with people who have different values to that of our own and work towards a meaningful shift in paradigm.’
We have Narelle, coordinator of the Melbourne chapter of Sea Shepherd Marine Debris Campaign, and Nicko, founder of Scab Duty, live in the studio. They're talking about the devastating impacts of rubbish, particularly plastic, on the ocean's inhabitants.
Being a highly respected psychologist and animal activist, Clare knows all there is to know about the pitfalls of how & why we get in a pickle communicating our message on behalf of animals. She also has answers to see our way through these tricky rabbit warrens of anguish in her new book called "Vystopia". Clare joins us for our fundraising radiothon show and appears at the 1.15 min mark if you want to scroll through us asking for donations!
We talk about dingos and the fact that these important apex predators are killed under wild dog 'management' plans. Who are we referencing when we use the name wild dog or dingo anyhow? It seems everyone and their dog (pardon the pun) has a story about wild dogs or dingos, however, few of us in the city really understand who we are talking about.
We’re joined by activist and academic Jess Ison who discusses her research challenging the use of prisons and other punitive measures as a way to counter animal abuse. If you’d like to look further into the issues of prisons and prison abolition, Jess recommends the book Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/2907-are-prisons-obsolete
We're in the studio with local representatives Monique Luci & Tania Milton of the global campaign to stop the dog & cat meat trade, who explain the extent of dog & cat consumption around the world including here in Australia, and why this is one of the very cruellest trades. Monique & Tania are also organisers of a march scheduled for Melbourne on Saturday 2nd June, which is the campaign's Worldwide Awareness Day.
We speak with Megan Moon, the founder and president of the Humane Education Coalition. Megan describes what humane education is, why the world needs it and what the Humane Education Coalition is doing to make humane education a prominent part of our education landscape.
Vegans Are Taking Over The World
On this show we discuss some recent news stories on veganism and animal activism that have been published in light of the Dominion Animal Liberation disruption that involved blocking streets in Melbourne and many other actions around Australia.
The articles that we discuss are: