It was a program that had been “breathing down my neck” for some time, said Nerea Pérez de las Heras at one point during the conversation on the podcast We Will Get Better. Because, for women committed to the fight for equality, information and awareness about the reality of other animals is as urgent as it is essential.
On an “especially sensitive” date due to the Christmas holidays – the “biggest peak of stress” of the entire year for those of us who question the prevailing consumerism – it is important to remember, as Inés and Nerea said, that we live “cannibalized” by time and “When they take away your time, they take away your reflection and push you into a consumption behind which there is no head.”
To contribute this reflection, each guest spoke about their area of activism.
The work of Veganuary is to “inspire and accompany” those who want to try veganism during the month of January, providing free of charge all the necessary resources to make it a good experience.
In parallel, INTERCIDS has been working since 2016 sharing the perspectives of professionals who work in the field of law and justice, with the aim of identifying “where we can improve the laws that apply to animals to better protect them” and, also, equally a priority , to ensure that these laws are applied in practice. Important legislative advances have been possible thanks to the work of INTERCIDS legal operators for animals.
And from this blog, El Caballo de Nietzsche, we are dedicated to informing, analyzing and reflecting on the situation of non-human animals from the performance of ethical journalism that focuses on their lives and on the “systemic abuses and violence” those who are subjected. We offer information about all this and propose alternatives.
Some data provided by Amanda Romero drew powerful attention. For example, a beef burger consumes the water equivalent to two months of showers: “We turn off the tap when we brush our teeth, but then we throw it all down the toilet by eating a hamburger.” Nerea, still perplexed, added more: a vegan person saves about 4,164 liters of water every day. Because that whole process, Amanda responded – from growing cereals to feed animals for consumption (which is one of the main causes of deforestation) to breeding, fattening, managing waste, transporting, killing, processing, packaging – is highly demanding. in resources and highly inefficient, since, on a global scale, 83% of the arable land available on the planet is dedicated in one way or another to livestock, either grazing or growing cereals for feed, and only contributes 18% of calories.
“How is your body?” Inés asked Nerea. “Well, I’m dying with remorse,” responded his partner, pointing out without hesitation the feeling of “guilt” as the origin of that rejection with which many people react to veganism, because deep down “they know” that they should advance in that address.
In the legal aspect there has been progress, explained María González Lacabex, beyond the media-driven state animal protection law. Along with the most visible animal law, referring to the animals with which we live, there is a whole set, “complex, profuse, very technical”, of regulations that come from the international, European, state, regional or municipal level that regulate, for example , how they are raised, fattened, transported, how they are killed, with what techniques, all those animals that we do not see, those that are “brought to life to be exploited.”
The regulations are advancing, María said, but at INTERCIDS there are two fundamental concerns: on the one hand, achieving the normalized application of all these laws; on the other, the current risk of regression, the existence of a “front opposed to continuing to advance in animal protection.”
As an example, Ruth Toledano referred to the intention of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to recover the bulled bull, an “aberration” that was at the time eradicated in the region because of its cruelty (“if cruelty can be measured”) is “horrible”: the bull has balls of flammable material on the horns that are set on fire and that “fall down his body, down his face, while he desperately tries to free yourself from that torture.”
“You will understand that we are getting a little radical,” said Ruth, who had previously explained what anti-speciesism means. Just as feminism is the fight against discrimination based on sex or gender, and we understand racism as discrimination based on race, anti-speciesism is being against discrimination and violence that, due to belonging to a different species, , other animals suffer that also feel, suffer, want to live, in a system that is “carnistic”, as he defined it. Melanie Joyin which we see it as “normal” to love dogs, eat pigs and dress with cows. A mechanism in which we do not see the animal behind the slices, as the thinker Carol J. Adams warns when speaking of the “absent referent.” As with micro-machismo or micro-racism, when consuming animal products we do not see the suffering hidden behind the walls of farms, slaughterhouses, laboratories…
Ruth also spoke about the transversality of feminism and animalism, that the suffragettes were mostly vegetarians and pioneers in the defense of animal rights, because the exploitation of animals is a form of domination and objectification of bodies. of other individuals, the same thing that machismo and patriarchy have done with the bodies of women and with dissident bodies, different like those of those lambs, barely babies, that will end up on many family tables these days.
The meat industries are gigantic, which is why Amanda Romero put on the table the notion of transition, a concept that we already have integrated into other areas, such as energy. “We will have to make a food transition, a protein transition,” and those industries will have to continue feeding the planet. It is not about them disappearing, but about feeding us in a different way, with less impact on the environment and eradicating the suffering of hundreds of billions of animals that we bring to life to be exploited and that barely survive a few. months before reaching our plates.
“We know,” stated Nerea when presenting the barometer data, according to which 91% of people in Spain consider it important to protect the well-being of “farm” animals, 66% demand more information about the conditions to which are raised, 8 out of 10 are concerned about the protection of animals and 92% believe specific legislation is necessary. “We know,” Amanda Romero pointed out, but “we normalize what we grow up with.”
For this reason, María González Lacabex pointed out, it is important to take steps that bring our actions closer to what we think, because this “exercise of coherence” not only has a direct individual impact, but also on the evolution of the laws. It is about reducing the “dissociation” between what we want abstractly and our daily actions, recovering that empathy with which we are born and from which little by little the gear in which we live separates us.
Women as committed to equality and social justice as Inés Hernand and Nerea Pérez de las Heras could not finish this program without calling on the “best girls” who see and listen to them to support their commitment to sign up for Veganuary to try the veganism in the month of January 2025 and “beyond”, as Amanda invited; to gain coherence in what we consider ethical, as Ruth said, and to push with our individual actions to advance the laws and their effective application, as María claimed. The commitment is clear: We will come out better.
Source: www.eldiario.es
