Vegan Branding to Protest Dairy Industry

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Certainly many will react very negatively, but I think it's hard to say if this will have an overall positive or negative effect. The general public is in serious denial about what goes on in industrialised meat production, so presumably one would need some very powerful medicine to make them see these inconvenient truths.

(BTW, as a spam-fighting measure the software doesn't allow new members to post links, but the link should be visible in the OP now, and Liberate is welcome to post more.)
 
It's a pity these guys didn't sit down and really study what effective animal advocates are doing these days. They're going to scar themselves for life and probably earn people's ridicule and scorn and convince very few with a stunt like this. Half a day spent spent tabling, leafleting or just talking to people about the issues in a public setting would probably yield exponentially more fruitful results with far fewer negative consequences. Why do people insist upon boxing with ghosts and bashing their heads against proverbial brick walls?
 
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Stunts like this just make veganism look ridiculous.

Branding doesn't even tie into the dairy industry in any real way - as far as I know, it has never been the practice to brand dairy cows.

If this woman and her husband can afford a half million pound house, she could be doing a lot more concrete things to help animals.
 
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ETA - sorry directed to Mlp's comment - As she is vegan hopefully she may be doing other things to help animals that didn't make the headlines and also £500K isn't that expensive for a house in England, both my parents have a property worth that amount and they aren't considered rich. Property is expensive over here.

Indian Summer said:
Certainly many will react very negatively, but I think it's hard to say if this will have an overall positive or negative effect. The general public is in serious denial about what goes on in industrialised meat production, so presumably one would need some very powerful medicine to make them see these inconvenient truths.
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Hmm, yes, agreed. I haven't really heard that much about this and I'm not sure if this is a staged act or if it is genuine, surely that might be illegal to harm someone in that way even with their consent?:confused: I agree with the woman that it may make some people type the word vegan in online and look at some of the truths behind the cattle industry. IMO I think there is a place for more "extreme" tactics and the less in your face ways of giving out information. To be honest some people think that vegans avoiding dairy is in itself extreme.:rolleyes:
 
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I recognize that property is more expensive there than in many (but probably not all) places in the U.S. Still, it takes a certain amount of income to support a $750,000 mortgage, regardless of the size or luxury of the property in question.

I guess I'm just so used to considering every purchase for myself in terms of how many cats could be spayed/neutered, how many animals fed with that amount of money.

*Shrug.* I think that there are certain segments of the AR movement that are more interested in drawing attention to themselves than in actually doing something constructive for animals, and this stunt IMO is a prime example of that. That's even the gist of her interview - it's mostly about how *difficult* this is going to be for her to do, and she's not even one of the ones being branded.

I might be less inclined to think that the stunt is mostly about drawing attention to the participants if there was any connection between branding and the dairy industry. One might as well have a branding demonstration to protest world hunger, the fur industry, or nuclear weapons - branding has as much to do with those as it does with dairy.



ETA: According to the article, it is legal.
 
mlp said:
Stunts like this just make veganism look ridiculous.
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:yes:These are my thoughts on it as well. I think it would be wonderful if this demonstration does make some people go vegan or even attempt to go vegan but I think it just makes them (and all vegans) look like crazy radical lunatics.
 
The second entry down on this blog has an interview with a founder of the movement that started the human branding: http://thethinkingvegan.com/



I agree with some of what the guy says, but disagree with a lot, including the following statement:

It’s unacceptable for anyone who consider themselves a non-speciesist vegan person to promote human rights. Can anyone imagine a partisan who fights at noon to liberate Jews from concentration camps held by Nazis, and at night to make conditions for the Nazis better? It’s a contradiction.
 
mlp said:
I recognize that property is more expensive there than in many (but probably not all) places in the U.S. Still, it takes a certain amount of income to support a $750,000 mortgage, regardless of the size or luxury of the property in question.
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The Daily Fail has a huge thing about posting property prices in all their articles. It seriously pisses me off.

Anyway, as for your point, you don't actually need a huge income for a £500k house. If you're a first time buyer then you will need a lot of money, but if they've worked themselves up the property ladder like most of us have to (if we can even get onto it), it's really not that much.
Personally, the house my family brought 14 years ago for £60k (oh how I long for the days when you could get a decent 3 bed semi-detached house for 60k. You can't even get a studio flat for that much now), it's had about 20k spent on it, and the people who brought it off us 12 years ago for £110k are now selling it for £210k and the property price boom ended a few years ago and houses are a lot cheaper now than they were 4 years ago.
And the 400k house I lived in as a child is now worth £1.2m. (Which is probably part of the reason I can't stand people judging other people on how much their house costs and why the Daily Fail's habit of posting it in articles infuriates me. )

Here, a detached 3 bedroom house in a good school area is easily around 400k now. Considering that she lives in Hampshire 500k really isn't that much for a house especially for one with a garden large enough for 3 dogs.


Anyway, as for the woman and the other people, I think they're completely and utterly nuts. She's just attention-seeking and hot branding has nothing to do with dairy cows in the UK. Actually, nothing to do with cattle in the UK at all!
Cattle, by law, have to be permanently marked with ear tags. Some farmers might also decide to freeze brand them, which doesn't sear the number into their skin, rather destroys their skin pigmentation making the brand show up in white. It's still not very nice for them, but it's not as bad as hot branding.
Hot branding of cattle has been banned in the UK since 1968. (Not because of it being painful for the cattle BTW. Hot branding can damage the meat so that's why it was banned. Like the law really gives a **** about animal welfare in this country. )
So she needs to use liquid nitrogen, rather than a blow torch, if she wants to pretend she's a cow. Or, you know, stop being a nutjob and making the rest of us look like wackos.
 
I think it's up to the people in question if they want to injure themselves to make a political statement. I know quite a few people involved in BDSM and body modification so I don't see this as particularly shocking. Consenting adults do all kinds of things to their bodies for all manner of reasons, circumcision, cosmetic surgery etc... anyone here ever watch Jackass?:p

Lots of people have a negative view of vegans as it is, so hopefully it will reach the more open-minded people who are more likely to be receptive to the AR message anyway.
 
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