An
Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and
Each Other
by Jim Mason
Some think human society seems to be steadily going insane. They note the
ridiculous hatreds that keep us nearly constantly at war with each other.
They see we are fouling our global nest, wiping out much of the planet's
life and making life more and more miserable for ourselves. I don't think
we are going insane; I think we have just not learned to look deeply enough
into the causes of our current social and environmental problems...
Rage
by Jim Mason
There is a cooling relief in finding the source of years of anger. My
anger, I am learning, goes back to those childhood years when I was being
indoctrinated about animals — how they were put here to serve us,
how they feel nothing. I was lied to back then, and something in me has
known it and fought it ever since...
Animal
Factories
by Jim Mason
Americans, at least, have a tremendous appetite for meat, dairy products
and eggs. They have little appetite, however, for information on the
lives of the animals that produce what they eat. Perhaps they sense something.
Do they sense that beyond the mountain of steaks, hamburgers, sausages,
cold cuts, ice cream, milkshakes, cheeses, pizzas, pastries, souffles
and omelets consumed each year lies a whole mountain range of animal
suffering and death? ...
The
Animal Question: The Key to Coming to Terms With Nature
by Jim Mason, Animal Experimentation: Health, Environment, Law, Ethics Conference
I have chosen to talk to you about the importance of The Animal Question. If you are wondering, the Animal Question is not: “Honey, should we have steak or chicken?” The Animal Question is shorthand for all of those difficult questions about our views of and our uses of animals. The Animal Question is huge; it underlies all of the discussions that will be held here today...
Domestication and Kinship: Animal Rights Conference 2003 Keynote Speech
by Jim Mason
What Karen Davis has told you about, what has been done to chickens’ bodies,
is the result of a long relationship with animals — that is, slavery. We use
the word “the domestication process” … that’s the word you probably heard in
high school or college biology — the domestication of animals. Well, that’s
a euphemism for what, really, was the subjugation of animals...
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Little
Boy Blue Wakes Up
by Jim Mason
Not long ago, I stayed at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, for the summer
doing chores, finishing up a book (An Unnatural Order), and teaching staff and
interns how to research and investigate animal agribusiness. When the work was
done, sometimes I would loaf in one of the barns just to be with the critters
— just as I did as a boy back on the family farm in Missouri nearly a half a
century ago...
No
Compromise: An
Interview with Jim Mason
It is the worldview of the human supremacist: The view or belief held by
one species, Homo sapiens sapiens, that it has a divine right — a God-given
license — to use animals and everything else in the living world for its own
benefit. This worldview is strongest in Western traditions, but it has spread
to Russia, China, Japan and most of the rest of the world...
Why
Animals Matter
by Jim Mason
For over 150 years now, leading Western thinkers have been pondering The Nature
Question; i.e., What is to be our place in nature? Most of them have questioned
our Western tradition of seeing ourselves as masters over nature. A good many
have written about our “alienation from nature” — our sense of being above
and separate from the rest of the living world — as a basic cause of much human
misery...
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