Hope Bohanec shares 7 reasons to live vegan

Presenter: In bearing witness to events, reporters are often profoundly affected. After helping to organize complete video coverage of Eugene’s first VeganFest May 4, local peace correspondent Todd Boyle:

Todd Boyle: This actually really changed me, you know. It moved me because you know, animals are being tortured to death, and just, you know, massacred. And a person who’s not able to look at that and think about that, it changed me.

[00:00:28] Presenter: VeganFest videos appear on Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel. Here are excerpts from the first session with event organizer Hope Bohanec:

[00:00:37] Hope Bohanec: My name is Hope Bohanec. I’ve been vegan myself for 35 years. I have been working for national nonprofits, for veganism, animal rights, for my whole adult life, for 30 years, and I started my own nonprofit just in the last few years, during the pandemic, Compassionate Living, and we are the sponsor of today’s event at (Yay!) first-ever Eugene VeganFest (Whoo! Very, very exciting!)

[00:01:06] And I want to share with you seven reasons to live vegan that you may not have thought of.

[00:01:14] Our first reason is speciesism. You can think about this as another system of structural violence, right, like ones that we know: racism, sexism, homophobia. Speciesism is a collection of attitudes, ideas, beliefs that one species is dominant over the other or is more important than the other. This assumption of human superiority over basically every species on the planet of the entire animal kingdom has allowed for horrific exploitation of animals worldwide.

[00:01:48] And veganism disrupts that system of systematic violence. Veganism is a boycott, right? A boycott. That’s kind of the foundation of meat, dairy, eggs. That’s a great place to start. But there’s so much more. There’s so many places to go from there. There’s ethical veganism. There’s philosophical veganism. There’s even spiritual veganism.

[00:02:11] We could eliminate an immeasurable amount of suffering with a worldwide cultural shift to veganism. But I think what’s less apparent is that we would also be helping humans, right?

[00:02:23] This is my message. I feel that we need to, as animal advocates, really recognize that we are just another ally to the larger social justice piece, right? We are part of the social justice movement. Veganism, to me, it’s a boycott of meat, dairy, and eggs, of a very oppressive system.

[00:02:44] But it’s also larger than that. It is just another form of systematic violence, speciesism. And we should recognize that, that just treating someone cruelly, taking away their agency, killing them for profit can never be humane, can never be the way to live.

[00:03:03] So with that, we’re going to move on to our second reason for living vegan: Chickens. Chickens. So chickens are often thought of as, ‘Oh, they’re just kind of this big flock of birds that don’t have a lot of feeling, don’t have a lot going on,’ right? That couldn’t be further from the truth.

[00:03:23] Chickens are individuals with emotions, personality. They’re amazing birds.

[00:03:28] So I worked with United Poultry Concerns for almost a decade. United Poultry Concerns is a vegan nonprofit focused on chickens and turkeys and other birds that are raised for their flesh and their eggs.

[00:03:40] And Karen Davis was the executive director, and she knew chickens better than anyone on earth, and she used to say that they were cheerful birds. Like, that was their inherent nature, was cheerfulness. And I always thought that was so amazing. It’s so beautiful to say.

[00:03:54] And when I talk about separation of families—I’ll say that often when I’m talking about the horrors of animal agriculture, and you can kind of see this picture. So when a little chick in a natural situation, a wild situation, a chick will get separated from the mom hen and they’ll start peeping and freaking out like they can’t find the mom and the mom will start vocalizing and they’re trying to find each other and there’s this moment of panic and finally they’ll find each other and then they’re you know they feel secure and safe and everything’s okay, right?

[00:04:27] In modern industrial farming, the chicks are hatched in hatcheries, they’re in metal drawers, they come out into this world never knowing their mother, never getting to experience that. And you go into a hatchery and there’s this high-pitched peeping, all this really intense peeping of, you know, the thousands of chicks that have been hatched and guess what?

[00:04:49] They’re calling for their mother. They’re scared, they don’t know what’s going on, they are looking for their mother hen, and they will never find her. That will never be satisfied. They’ll never feel that sense of safety and protection. It’s horrific, what happens.

[00:05:06] The next reason for living vegan and that is: the Earth. Speaking of beings that need protection, okay, the most environmentally impactful daily choice we can make is what we eat. Eliminating animals has the most positive impact. Animal farming, animal foods are really inefficient, very wasteful. It’s an incredibly wasteful industry, it’s very resource-intensive.

[00:05:29] Just having billions of farmed animals alive, no matter how they’re raised, it still uses tons of resources. Water causes pollution, climate disruption, deforestation, water waste pollution, all of that, biodiversity loss.

[00:05:43] What can we do about it? Well, the industry has a solution for you. They’re like, ‘Oh, well, hey, why don’t you try sustainable this or carbon-neutral that, right?; All these labels. We’re seeing lots of sustainable labels on animal products.

[00:05:57] So, let’s say someone says, ‘I want to really green my diet. I want to eat more ecologically. I’m going to eat all organic. I’m going to eat organic meat and organic dairy.’

Okay. Well, you’re doing a little bit. You’ve dropped your impact by 8%. That’s something.

But let’s say that same person says, ‘I really want to eat more ecologically. I want to really help the planet with my diet. I’m going to go vegan.’ And now we’re not even talking about organic anymore. Ah, you’ve reduced your impact by 87%. Wow! Now we’re talking, right?

[00:06:35] You can take it all the way and go to organic vegan, and you’ve dropped down to 94% reduction of impact in your diet.

[00:06:42] Actually though, interestingly, for some of the labels, it can be even worse. ‘Grass-fed beef,’ we are learning now that 50% to 60% more greenhouse gas emissions are coming from grass-fed beef production than from conventional farming. What? What? Why are people buying this label? They think it’s more environmental.

[00:07:03] ‘Regenerative grazing.’ This is the new buzzword for, ‘Let’s continue to eat beef.’ It doesn’t hold water scientifically and again, I have a lot in my books about this.

[00:07:13] So the next reason for living vegan that you may not have thought of is: fish. Fish are the forgotten food animal, truly the forgotten food animal.

[00:07:23] The number of fish killed each year far exceeds the number of people who have ever existed on earth. . Wow. Every year, it’s staggering. It’s an estimated 100 billion farm fish are killed globally every year, and about another 3 trillion fish are killed in the wild.

[00:07:42] It’s going into an animal’s home, and killing them. So oftentimes, when we’re talking about fish, though, even as vegans and as animal rights people, we’re often talking about the environmental impact. I don’t want to talk about that. That’s huge, and there’s a lot about that. And I encourage you to watch the film “Seaspiracy‘ to get a big dose of that.

[00:08:02] But what I want to talk about is the fish themselves. We’re learning so much. We have been under this very false impression, that fish are somehow simple or unfeeling or primitive or unintelligent. Science is debunking that as we speak.

[00:08:22] Fish are individuals with awareness and emotion. They have really deep memories and they will even if they have an encounter with a predator and get hurt and escape, they will avoid that area for a very long time.

[00:08:36] They respond to dangerous situations the same way as any other animal. Their breathing gets faster. They release distress pheromones. They show signs of panic. They may flee or freeze. They will even, after a traumatic experience, some of them will stop eating.

[00:08:52] They’re communicative, they’re social, they can solve puzzles. They also play. And play is considered to be very intelligent, a very intelligent thing to engage in, for youth and adults of a species.

[00:09:06] And fish actually engage in every kind of scientific play that has been documented. They engage in object play, solitary play, play within their own species, play with other species. They’re very communicative, wide range of acoustic sounds. They talk to each other for various reasons.

[00:09:24] Researchers have even observed fish singing. They just don’t have any other word for it. A group of fish that will actually make noise together for no apparent reason, for pleasure, right? They sing.

[00:09:38] There was a study done. There were two plates of food given to animals. They did this on several species of monkeys as well as fish. The two plates of food, there was same food, same amount of food on both plates.

[00:09:51] The only difference is if they start eating on the blue plate, the red plate gets taken away. But if they start eating on the red plate, then the blue plate stays, okay. It’s a trial and error puzzle that they gave to numerous species.

[00:10:04] They gave this to capuchin monkeys, orangutans, and chimpanzee, as well as several species of fish. Guess who figured it out faster? The fish! Every species of fish figured it out in half the time, half the time of the monkeys. And actually chimpanzees never did quite figure it out.

[00:10:23] The reason I say this is it just kind of flips what we think we know on its head.

[00:10:29] Our fifth reason for living vegan and that is: the ‘humane hoax.’ What is the humane hoax? The quick definition is the new labeling and marketing of animal products that convey a false sense that there is some improvement in the industry when none exist, either environmentally or ethically, and you know some people call it humanewashing, greenwashing.

[00:10:54] To produce a profitable product, the well-being of the animal will have to be compromised in some fundamental ways, no matter how humane an operation wants to be. To be profitable in this current market, they they have to do certain things, cruelties like mutilations of their bodies, separation of families, slaughter at a very young age.

[00:11:18] This is a new one we’re seeing now. ‘Responsibly raised and unconditionally loved.’ So this one just really, I just have to point this out. So responsibly, what does it mean? What does it mean? Ethically, environmentally, what are they talking about? It’s sufficiently vague that it can be whatever you’re worried about. ‘What are you worried about? Oh, we got you covered.’

[00:11:37] Responsibly raised. Unconditionally loved. Okay. Now we’re getting into some weird cognitive dissonance areas. What are we looking at here? We’re looking at a burrito. We’re not talking about the burrito was unconditionally loved. Oh, you mean it was the animal that’s cut up inside the burrito that was unconditionally loved? What? I mean, whoa, it’s just very bizarre.

[00:12:05] Why do people seek these humane labels? It’s because they care. They care about animals. And that, I feel, is really the hopeful part, right? These labels wouldn’t sell if people didn’t care. So that’s great. I love that.

[00:12:19] And I also feel that the logical progression of buying these humane labels, caring about the animals, wanting them to be humane, we’re going to get to the point where we realize that you cannot commodify and kill someone and it be humane. There’s no right way to do the wrong thing. You can’t do it.

[00:12:38] We will get there. I have faith in the human race that we will get there. However, we can’t be complacent about it because guess what? The industry is lying with their labels and their lovely websites and all of the marketing. So we have to speak out about the truth of this industry.

[00:12:56] The sixth reason for living vegan, and that is: pandemics. We all know about pandemics now, right? The COVID pandemic. We had two different kind of competing vying sources right of the pandemic but either one of them were from speciesist attitudes for speciesist reasons: If it came from the lab, that’s experimenting on animals; if it came from the wet market, we’re encroaching on wild areas and confining and killing animals.

[00:13:25] So. According to the Center for Disease Control, three out of four novel infectious diseases come from human -animal contact, and that contact is always humans confining and butchering and eating animals, right?

[00:13:40] So much of our diseases that we face as humans come from our human -animal contact, Okay. So we could really preempt and eliminate that next pandemic. Let’s preempt it. let’s not have the next one come, right? Let’s stop farming animals. It could save so many lives, human lives.

[00:14:05] The last reason for living vegan and that is ahimsa, nonviolence. It’s a Sanskrit term. Himsa means harm, ‘ah‘ negates it; nonviolence, nonharming. But really you could look at ahimsa as kind of a presence of dynamic compassion, right? Active dynamic compassion, being compassionate in all that we do, being nonviolent in every way, our words, our deeds, our thoughts even.

[00:14:36] Different veganisms, right? There’s the whole food plant-based, nutrition-based vegans, they’re in the next room. We’ve got, you know, the ethical vegans, the philosophical vegans. Well, there’s also spiritual vegans. And I don’t think a lot of people go into it because of this reason, but it evolves, right? It evolves as a vegan. You start seeing the connections and feeling that this, ‘Wow, it’s kind of an expression of your spirituality.’

[00:15:05] That’s happened for me. My husband and I have gone deep into studying Hinduism, Jainism, and the Jains are amazing. I love studying and hearing about the Jains. They put ahimsa at the highest, above everything.

[00:15:19] It’s living a nonviolent life. And even though I’ve dedicated myself to veganism for over 30 years, I have always felt that just vegan, it’s not enough. I really believe that we need a fundamental consciousness shift as a society, and ahimsa paramo dharma basically means that ahimsa, nonviolence, is the highest principle. The ethical imperative, right? If when faced with any situation, find the nonviolent path.

[00:15:53] It’s just beautiful, really beautiful. And boy, we need some nonviolence right now, right? But we need some kindness right now, really bad. So yeah. So, my husband and I do an online circle. We call it the Ahimsa Living Circle and we talk about these kinds of things, spiritual veganism and the dharma traditions. And it’s every second Saturday of the month.

[00:16:15] And I encourage you to be inspired by ahimsa, To live every minute of your life considering nonviolence and the nonviolent path and not just meditating on it, but taking action. We have to take action. How can our actions bring harmony to a world out of balance? And I think that being vegan is the best way to start.

[00:16:38] Presenter: Hope Bohanec speaks at Eugene’s first VeganFest, held May 4 at the Lane Events Center. For more, see Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel and keep listening to KEPW 97.3, resistance radio for Springfield, Eugene and the Upper Willamette.