Category: Essays

Rescuing Ms. Nelly: What One Seagull Taught Me About Vegan Sociology

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

Peter J. Marina

I was meditating on Holbox beach after sunset, sitting by a wooden walkway as waves rolled in with the evening tide. Then I heard it: a seagull’s distress call. I tried to ignore it at first, to “let nature take its course.” But the second panicked cry changed everything.

I jumped into the crashing waves to find a helpless seagull surrounded by five or six raccoons moving in for the kill. She was in shock but alive. I scooped her up, held her against my chest, and ran.

“¡Ayúdame! ¡Ayúdame!” I screamed, bursting into a beach bar full of tourists. They gave vague directions to a vet clinic, probably closed. It had rained all day, and Holbox’s unpaved streets had become rivers. I ran through waist-deep floodwater, desperately searching for the clinic, taking wrong turns, hoping I wasn’t too late.

After thirty minutes, I found it: an animal rescue normally closed at that hour. By chance, they were open because a mother dog had complications giving birth. I banged on the door, screaming for help. When they opened, I handed them the seagull and emptied my entire wallet onto their table without counting. “Please, save her.”

They promised they would.

Two months later, I returned to find Ms. Nelly had spent six weeks there “on vacation,” eating, healing, resting. My money had paid for it all. Then she flew away, healthy and free.

This moment crystallizes why I became a sociologist: to understand how power determines which lives matter. Why did I run through floodwaters for one seagull when billions of animals suffer systematically every day? Because in that instant, Ms. Nelly wasn’t an abstraction. She was a terrified, sentient being whose life had inherent worth.

This is vegan sociology’s foundation: recognizing that the structures of domination exploiting humans also commodify and destroy non-human animals. At Holbox, I witnessed capitalism treating animals as resources: tourism disrupting ecosystems, fishing industries destroying habitats, strays abandoned when no longer “cute.” The sanctuary exists because our economic system creates endless animal suffering, then abandons the casualties.

But I also saw resistance. People dedicating their lives to rescuing animals who will never “produce” anything. This is Mills’ sociological imagination in action: connecting personal troubles (one injured seagull) to public issues (systemic violence against animals).

Vegan sociology extends critical analysis beyond human society. The hierarchies creating racism, sexism, and class exploitation also normalize speciesism. Walking through any city, I see dead animals everywhere: on plates, in leather, in cosmetics. People consume what advertisers conditioned them to want, rarely questioning the violence required.

But sanctuaries like Refugio Animal Holbox on this Mexican Caribbean island create spaces outside capitalist logic, where animals aren’t commodities but neighbors. Where Ms. Nelly’s recovery mattered because her life had inherent worth, not because it served human interests.

I now volunteer at that sanctuary every time I return to Holbox. I think about Ms. Nelly constantly, still out there somewhere, living free from the systems that nearly killed her. That’s the world vegan sociology imagines: one where all beings can simply live.

 

Peter J. Marina is a New Orleans native, sociologist, and criminologist, and an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology. Trained at the New School for Social Research, Marina’s scholarship focuses on urban ethnography, transgression, and social inequalities, with particular attention to human rights, policing, and communities living on society’s margins. He is the author of Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century, Down and Out in New Orleans, and several other books and articles. Marina’s thinking examines

In the Eyes of an Animal

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

By Ondine Sherman

Can gazing into the eyes of an animal change our lives? This piece emerges from my PhD research on the transformative potential of eye contact between humans and other animals, grounded in relational and ecofeminist theory. Scholarship suggests that eye contact can deepen human-animal connection, unsettle anthropocentric worldviews, and influence individuals to rethink their ethical responsibilities to animals. My qualitative research with Australian “Animal People” echoes the power of the mutual gaze.

Emmanuel Levinas argued that the Face of the Other “speaks”, and eyes possess their own language (Levinas 1961/1980: 66). Building on this, Lori Gruen notes that we may encounter animals and still not “look them in the eye”; once we do, our relationships can change (Gruen 2013: 223–31). Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka similarly encourage us to “look into the eyes of an animal, to recognise the person there – familiar, yet mysterious, an independent locus of meaning and agency” (2011: 40). These are invitations to take seriously the possibility that animals look back, and that this looking back matters ethically and politically. In this framing, eye contact is not just a visual event but an embodied, relational practice. Drawing on Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Vinciane Despret and Elisa Aaltola, such moments can be understood as practices of with-ness, attention, or attentive love. They decentre the human, effect an unselfing, and invite us into animals’ worlds, their umwelten (Despret 2004; 2008; 2016; Aaltola 2018; Murdoch 1971; Weil 2009).

To explore how animal-human eye contact may influence pro-animal values and behaviours, I spoke with twenty young Australian Animal People: those who self-identified as having animal rights values, were vegan (or aspiring to be) and engaged in animal advocacy. Participants described moments of eye contact as leading to their recognition of animals as subjects of a life and morally equal, “like people”. Their recollections were rich: the texture of a cat’s gaze, the shock of meeting a pig’s eyes, a perceived sense of being “seen” by a snail. Some encounters were highly emotive. One participant described standing in a pig factory farm and feeling “persecuted in the eyes of an animal”, suddenly seeing herself from the pig’s perspective and feeling ashamed to be human. Others highlighted animals’ expressions of consent, comfort or reluctance, learning to respect boundaries and consider animals as agents and subjects. Participants commonly used the language of equality: “no difference”, “just like another friend”, “like they were human”. One traced this back to a childhood game of peek-a-boo with a puffin, another to her dog’s gesture of empathy when she cried, and another, to snorkelling with wild fish and turtles. These moments challenged their binaries of “them and us”. In their accounts, empathy was not an abstract moral virtue but a response to a specific relational event. Sharing a common reality with an animal helped them to consider, if I do not want to suffer, neither would you.

Eye contact not only shifted perceptions, it motivated action. Participants connected animal encounters not only to their pro-animal values, but to their movements towards veganism, and commitment to advocacy.

Adding to scholarship, my research suggests that interspecies eye contact can be a powerful tool for reimagining human-animal relationships. Paying attention to these moments helps to decenter the human, dissolve hierarchies, and encourage philosophies of multispecies ethics and equality. These embodied encounters, which must take place within respectful and consensual spaces, can influence pro-animal values and behaviours and lead to a growing population of Animal People. Ultimately, this may contribute to an end to systemic animal violence and exploitation.

 

 

 

Ondine Sherman is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Voiceless, the animal protection institute, and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, specialising in sociology and Critical Animal Studies. She has published five books, including Vegan Living and the Animal Allies fiction series (Sky, Snow and Star) and is the editor of magazine, Animail (Australasian Animal Studies Association). Ondine is also a director at Thrive Philanthropy.

 

 

The Milk Mustache Is Back: Trump, RFK Jr., and the Return of White Power Milk

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

By Vasile Stănescu

When the White House posted “Make Whole Milk Great Again” beside an image of Donald Trump, it appeared to be another skirmish in an ongoing debate over dietary guidelines. In fact, it drew on a much older political tradition: the use of animal product consumption as a symbolic marker of whiteness, masculinity, and national belonging.

The phrase “Make Whole Milk Great Again” isn’t coincidental. It echoes the same cultural anxieties that, over a hundred years ago, led white working-class Americans to assert their consumption of animal products as a “privilege of white citizenship” (DuPuis, 2002). Then, as now, economic insecurity and immigration fears converged on the dinner plate.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as Chinese immigration increased, milk became weaponized. The National Dairy Council proclaimed that “people who have achieved” were those who consumed “liberal amounts of milk” (Olsen, 1920). Agricultural histories celebrated “Aryans” as “the heaviest drinkers of milk,” suggesting this “may in part account for the quick and high development of this division of human beings” (Hedrick, 1933). Even Herbert Hoover proclaimed in 1920: “The white race cannot survive without dairy products” (Riverside Daily Press, 1920, p. 2). This wasn’t fringe pseudoscience. It was mainstream dietary racism, positioning animal products, and milk in particular, as proof of white superiority (Freeman, 2013; Stănescu, 2016). Against Chinese immigrants portrayed as “effeminate rice eaters,” the right to consume animal products became defined as a right of white male citizenship. The factory farm system, emerging in the 1920s and 1930s, made meat and dairy ever more available and affordable; if eating animals equaled wealth, then cheaper animal products made people feel richer even as their real wages stagnated. Under “slaughterhouse capitalism”, animals were exploited more so that human workers could steadily be exploited more (Stănescu, 2025).

Milk’s literal whiteness also makes it a perfect vessel for white supremacist ideology: a commodity fetish embodying purity, cleanliness, and racial identity. Film directors understand this iconography. In Get Out, a white woman’s glass of milk reveals her commitment to white supremacy. As Jordan Peele explained, there’s “something kind of horrific about milk” as an image (Yamato, 2017). Like Ivory soap in the colonial era, which McClintock (1995) identified as embodying the “civilizing mission,” milk became a visual representation of the fantasy of racial whiteness itself.

Fast forward to 2017: the alt-right storms an art installation drinking milk, Richard Spencer tweets “I’m very tolerant…lactose tolerant!”, and neo-Nazis type “Heil Milk” across the internet (Freeman, 2017; Nagesh, 2017; Swerdloff, 2017). They’re drawing on contemporary academic research about lactose tolerance and race (research published in venues like The Economist and PBS) to justify the same old supremacist ideology in new scientific clothing (Cook, 2015a, 2015b; Harmon, 2018; Stănescu, 2018).

RFK Jr.’s dietary rhetoric revives these patterns. When economic anxiety rises and demographic change accelerates, we witness the same proxy battle: the reassertion of animal product consumption as a marker of white masculinity and citizenship. The alt-right’s favorite insult, “soy boy,” is simply an updated version of the 19th century’s “effeminate rice eater” (Adams, 1990/2015; Sommer, 2017; Stănescu, 2016).

The milk mustache is back. As economic instability deepens and demographic change accelerates, we can expect to see more performative acts of meat and dairy consumption. Now, as before, these are public rituals designed to assert whiteness, masculinity, and citizenship through the fantasy that animal consumption equals wealth, status, and national belonging. Understanding this history reveals that challenging animal agriculture isn’t only about animals. It’s about dismantling the systems of oppression that harm us all.

 

References

Adams, C. J. (2015). The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory (25th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1990)

Cook, J. (2015a, March 28). No use crying: The ability to digest milk may explain how Europe got rich. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2015/03/28/no-use-crying

Cook, J. (2015b, December 3). Got milk? How lactose tolerance influenced economic development. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/got-milk-lactose-tolerance-influenced-economic-development

DuPuis, E. M. (2002). Nature’s perfect food: How milk became America’s drink. New York University Press.

Freeman, A. (2013). The unbearable whiteness of milk: Food oppression and the USDA. U.C. Irvine Law Review, 3(4), 1251–1279.

Freeman, A. (2017, August 30). Milk, a symbol of neo-Nazi hate. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-83292

Harmon, A. (2018, October 17). Why white supremacists are chugging milk (and why geneticists are alarmed). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html

Hedrick, U. P. (1933). A history of agriculture in the State of New York. New York State Agricultural Society.

McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge.

Nagesh, A. (2017, February 21). Secret Nazi code kept hidden by “milk” and “vegan agenda.” Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/21/secret-nazi-code-kept-hidden-by-milk-and-vegan-agenda-6463079/

Olsen, H. P. (1920). The milk dealer. The National Journal for the City Milk Trade, 10(1).

Riverside Daily Press. (1920, February 5). XXXV(31), p. 2. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=RDP19200205.2.97

Sommer, W. (2017). How “soy boy” became the far right’s favorite new insult. Medium. https://medium.com/@willsommer/how-soy-boy-became-the-far-rights-favorite-new-insult-e2e988d365c7

Stănescu, V. (2016). The whopper virgins: Hamburgers, gender, and xenophobia. In A. Potts (Ed.), Meat culture (pp. 90–108). Brill.

Stănescu, V. (2018). ‘White power milk’: Milk, dietary racism, and the ‘alt-right.’ Animal Studies Journal, 7(2), 103–128.

Stănescu, V. (2025, October 6). Slaughterhouse capitalism. Current Affairs. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-industrial-slaughter-became-the-blueprint-for-modern-capitalism

Swerdloff, A. (2017, February 21). Got milk? Neo-Nazi trolls sure as hell do. VICE. https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/kbka39/got-milk-neo-nazi-trolls-sure-as-hell-do

Yamato, J. (2017, March 1). Jordan Peele explains Get Out’s creepy milk scene, ponders the recent link between dairy and hate. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-get-out-milk-horror-jordan-peele-allison-williams-20170301-story.html

 

Veganthropology: Defending Vegan Ethics Against Structural Speciesism

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment
Image Credit: Annibal Gouvêa Franco

By Annibal Gouvêa Franco

In late 2025, Annibal Gouvêa Franco and Ronaldo Guimarães Gouvêa published a founding manifesto [1]. In 2026, they expanded it in English as “Manifesto for Veganthropology (Vegan Anthropology)” [2], presenting Veganthropology as a normative descriptive, interspecies approach transversal to Sociocultural Anthropology.

Anthropology often operates within an implicit anthropocentric horizon. Veganthropology proposes another point of departure: antispeciesism and non exploitation become ethical framework and method, so nonhuman animals enter the scene as subjects of moral concern.

Its central analytical target is animal thingification, the institutional, practical, and discursive production of exploitable lives, commodification, and moral distance. The manifesto calls for an antispeciesist ethnography with public criteria, traceable data, and replicable procedures, open to independent audit.

This shift matters for the Social Sciences because it changes what counts as a social fact. By treating speciesism as structural, Veganthropology offers a vocabulary to analyze the institutional production of the edible, the usable, and the disposable as cultural social categories, not natural givens, and to reread power, morality, consumption, and violence through that lens. It helps explain how schools, markets, families, science, law, media, and everyday language normalize extraction, convert sentient life into property, and then present that conversion as common sense. It also expands comparative work, since speciesism can be studied alongside racism, sexism, and class domination through shared mechanisms of classification, distancing, routinization, and legitimation. Methodologically, it demands explicit positionality, so ethical commitments are declared instead of assumed.

The manifesto spatializes vegan practice across three interconnected planes: everyday life, intentional collective action, and digital territorialities. Everyday life is where veganism is lived and negotiated in routine frictions, including substitutions, refusals, avoidance strategies, and the management of commensality. Intentional collective action is where it is strategically projected toward shared goals and societal transformation, through public education, mobilizations, vigils, on the ground campaigns, denunciation practices, support networks, and mutual aid. Digital territorialities coordinate narratives and mobilization through campaigns, collaborative cartographies, and lexical disputes, bridging everyday practice and collective action.

As a program, the manifesto [2] sets four ethical foundations: justice for sentient beings; refusal of animal exploitation; recognition of ecological interdependence; and the moralization of consumption and habitus. It also defines alliance criteria: preserve animal centrality, keep an explicit abolitionist horizon, prevent agenda capture, and resist greenwashing and veganwashing.

In closing, the text reads structural speciesism as a colonial continuity within the Plantationocene and calls for a teachable, researchable, accountable field. The disciplinary refusal is explicit: animals are no longer analyzable as resources.

PS: In 2026, Franco published a comic strip synthesizing the manifesto’s core ideas [3].

 

References

1 – FRANCO, A. G.; GOUVÊA, R. G. Manifesto por uma Antropologia Vegana: fundação de uma ciência social interespécies contra o especismo estrutural. Revista Sociedade Científica, 2025. DOI: 10.61411/rsc2025116718

2 – FRANCO, A. G.; GOUVÊA, R. G. Manifesto for Veganthropology (Vegan Anthropology): founding an interspecies social science against structural speciesism. Revista Sociedade Científica, 2026. DOI: 10.61411/eb2026rsc5

3 – FRANCO, A. G. Veganthropology: an ethical stance against structural speciesism (comic strip). Zenodo, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18274994

 

About the Author

Annibal Gouvêa Franco holds a Master’s degree in Design, Innovation and Sustainability (UEMG), a graduate certificate in Cultural and Social Anthropology, and is completing an undergraduate degree in Social Sciences. He researches Anthropology and Veganism, with an emphasis on Veganthropology, and is an Art teacher in the state education system (SEE/MG). Brazilian, based in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, autistic (formerly diagnosed with Asperger’s), vegan for about 20 years.

The Loneliness and Madness of Teaching Tender is the Flesh

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

By Michael D. Briscoe
Colorado State University Pueblo

 

In my course, Crime and Society in Science Fiction, I have my students read the book Tender is the Flesh by author Agustina Bazterrica (2020). The book imagines a not-so-distant future in which humans can no longer eat animals. Not content with eating only plants, they turn to eating the flesh of other humans, which they refer to as “special meat.” It is filled with graphic descriptions of the torture and slaughter of humans raised for meat—essentially our own current animal industrial complex but with humans in place of animals. Without fail, students are disgusted at the practices.

After they’ve finished reading, I ask them a simple question, “should we eat humans?” The answer is inevitably no. I ask why, and they give answers about suffering, their families, fairness, how it isn’t necessary, etc. I then ask a similarly simple question, “should we eat animals?” The mood shifts. Suddenly, the easy answers no longer flow. I point out that all the reasons they themselves have given to not eat humans apply just as well to animals.

Faced with a logical contradiction in their ethics, the students realize this must be reconciled. Then, something unexpected happens. Rather than adjusting their view on eating animals to reconcile this contradiction, they begin to rationalize eating humans. The discussion often degrades as I point out that their rationales for eating humans are the same as the antagonists in the book and the same that have been used to justify human slavery, genocide, and other atrocities.

They shrug.

It is a profoundly frustrating experience. I know both as a teacher and sociologist that I can’t lead them directly to conclusions; they must arrive at them on their own by developing their sociological imagination, questioning the unquestioned, and making the familiar strange. At the same time, I recognize that I am also working against social norms, attitudes, and beliefs about eating animals that have been socialized and deeply embedded in my students since birth. Kathryn Gillespie (2018) described the experience of repeatedly witnessing violence against animals while others remain apathetic as being “marked by profound loneliness and by feelings of madness” (p.79)—a perfect description of my post-discussion feelings. After several semesters of the same experience, I find myself questioning my own competence as a professor.

All of this has led me to think more deeply about the key question in vegan sociology: what leads people to adopt veganism? I believe that just as eating animals is not natural, but rather learned through thousands of social interactions, veganism is learned over time through multiple interactions: a documentary, a positive animal interaction, a vegan meal, and yes—a book and a question. Even though the immediate discussion may not show it, and it can feel absolutely lonely and maddening, I believe this class session helps shift students a tiny bit closer to developing their sociological imagination and questioning things they have taken for granted, including eating animals.

 

References

Bazterrica, Agustina. 2020. Tender is the Flesh. Translated by Sarah Moses. New York, NY: Scribner.

Gillespie, Kathryn. 2018. “The Loneliness and Madness of Witnessing: Reflections from a Vegan Feminist Killjoy.” Pp. 76-85 in Animaladies, edited by L. Gruen and F. Probyn-Rapsey. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

We Can Feel the Other World: The Prefigurative Emotion Culture

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

Credits: Poma, A. (2025) Llevamos un mundo nuevo en nuestros corazones. Guia para construir una cultura emocional prefigurativa. Mexico City: CEIICH-UNAM. Translated title: Translation of the title: “We carry a new world in our hearts. A guide to building a prefigurative emotional culture.”

 

By Alice Poma and Tommaso Gravante

Challenging the hegemonic (capitalist, colonialist, patriarchal, and speciesist) culture is an integral part of building a new world, and one way to do so is questioning our individual and collective emotions.

Our project focuses on the idea of a prefigurative emotion culture which would be the set of feeling rules activists consider appropriate for the new world we/they want to create. In other words, a prefigurative emotion culture is the attempt to feel the new world we aspire to, before reaching it.

Why a prefigurative emotion culture matters

A prefigurative emotion culture is not created through formulas, self-help books, coaching, or mindfulness, but collectively, through dialogue and reflection on what we should feel, and our counter hegemonic feeling rules differ from the dominant ones.

In a society where emotions are confined to the individual sphere (and still, for some, seen as irrational), where there is no emotional education and emotions are only addressed when they become a mental health issue, it’s understandable that we find it difficult to express and work on them collectively. However, if we don’t break through these barriers, we condemn ourselves to accepting—or suffering under—the dominant emotion culture.

All efforts aimed at building an emotion culture as part of social movement activities should not be seen as tacky, superficial, or reserved for more sensitive people. Following Hochschild: “Not simply the evocation of emotion but laws governing it can become, in varying degrees, the arena of political struggle” (1979: 568).

A few examples of prefigurative feeling rules in Mexican anti-system activism

Two feeling rules of the current capitalist system are: feeling indifference toward the collective and resignation in the face of building alternatives to capitalism (Poma, 2025)[1]. Starting from here, a prefigurative feeling rule observed in different social movements is caring about the common good and wellbeing.

A second rule that is common in many forms of struggle is not to resign oneself in the face of the difficulties and triumphs of the domination system. Resignation is a mood that we made from experience; therefore, to avoid it, it’s necessary to share stories that show that it’s worth continuing the fight. It’s important to keep in mind that resignation shouldn’t be confused with the need to rest or take a break from activism.

A third prefigurative feeling rule, is the need to feel a radical and constructive hope, defined as the hope that there is still much to save, and that we can only achieve it collectively.

How can this other emotion culture be consolidated?

To consolidate a prefigurative emotion culture we need to recognize whether we have succeeded in establishing new feeling rules that we share with other groups, collectives, communities, and so on. For instance, if love for all animals is not only something that characterizes us as individuals but also something we believe we should feel—or that it’s right to feel— and that we share with other people and groups, we can consider this emotion a feeling rule. Starting from that point, we can then evoke, share, and spread it so that it becomes a feeling rule shared by more people and groups, as happens, for instance, in the LGBTQAI+ community where pride becomes a counter-hegemonic feeling rule to overcome the shame that many societies impose on those who are not heterosexual.

The best path to strengthen a prefigurative emotion culture is through empathy, which helps us accept differences (not only ideological or belief-based, but also in how we construct emotions). As Hochschild (2016) showed, imposing a rule can generate resentment in those who don’t share it.

Conclusions

Observing which emotions activists believe they should ideally feel allows us to glimpse, in a prefigurative way, the new world we aspire to, which, as the Zapatistas imagine can be “A world where everyone is who they are, without shame, without being persecuted, mutilated, imprisoned, murdered, marginalized, oppressed” (2023)[2].

 

References

Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85 (3).
Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press.
Poma, Alice (2025). Llevamos un mundo nuevo en nuestros corazones. Guía para construir una cultura emocional prefigurativa. Mexico City: CEIICH-UNAM.

Notes

[1] The Emotional Culture of Capitalism a conference by Hochschild, available here: https://fb.watch/ncgm9_COkP/

[2] https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/22/twelfth-part-fragments-fragments-of-a-letter-written-by-subcommander-insurgent-moises-sent-a-few-months-ago-to-a-geography-distant-in-space-but-close-in-thought/

An ‘Ethical’ Hegan? Masculinist Framings of Ethical Veganism

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

By Louis Arthur Gough

In their study, “Vegan Men and Hybrid Masculinity,” Greenebaum and Dexter (2018) quizzed vegan men about their understandings of masculinity, what is means to be a ‘man’ and their own identities as men who voluntarily violate a core tenant of hegemonic masculinity in Western cultures by eschewing ‘meat’ consumption. Cultural associations of ‘meat’ consumption and masculinity are well-documented, and the vegan men in Greenebaum and Dexter’s study actively rejected them in favour of a ‘hybrid masculinity’ expanded to include principles associated with femininity, such as care and compassion toward nonhuman animals. Notably, some rebranded these principles as masculine, ‘believing… that possessing strong values and sticking up for others and ‘being a hero’ for a cause [such as nonhuman animal liberation] is masculine’ (642). Such narratives exemplified what Greenebaum and Dexter identify as ‘men implicitly incorporat[ing] and reinforc[ing] certain hegemonic ideals of masculinity’ (643) into their veganism.

In this relation, Wright (2015) discusses the notion of ‘heganism’: a rejection of feminine associations of veganism in favour of ‘veganism as a masculine choice’ made by ‘real men’ – men strong enough to withstand social pressure and fearless enough to face ‘ridicule, judgement, and ostracism’; in short, men ‘so ultramasculine as to be able to be vegan and to make that [lifestyle] choice manly as well’ (125-126). In a new video on his YouTube page, animal rights activist Joey Carbstrong epitomised this form of hegemonically masculine vegan identity. Reflecting on the responses of men asked for their thoughts about the violent exploitation of farmed animals showing on public-facing screens, Carbstrong contrasts the response of one ‘big burly bloke’ – ‘actually a tough looking guy’ – who ‘had no problem with saying, like, that he thought that was bad and he understood why I was vegan’, with another man who mockingly states, ‘To be fair, I’d still eat them though’. Carbstrong labels the latter ‘one of them real cowardly, weak men who laugh at animals suffering’ – a man who ‘oozed insecurity and weakness’.

The former man, on the other hand, supposedly ‘oozed strength’ and ‘was very sure of himself, a very secure man [who] would probably wipe the floor with that other bloke’. ‘I would encourage men to be more like that bloke’, Carbstrong continues, ‘and it doesn’t mean you have to be, like, physically strong; it’s all about not being afraid to stand up for what you believe in, and don’t give a fuck about what your mates think’. Of himself, Carbstrong says, ‘I don’t give a fuck to tell someone I’m vegan and I care about these little animals – I don’t actually fucking care what you think, and that’s more strength than… laughing… like [you] can’t control yourself around your friends and make fun of, like, literal cruelty and suffering’. Carbstrong concludes the video with: ‘Because people talk a lot about masculinity and I don’t see much of it, eh’.

Now, I can certainly relate to the deep sense of frustration Carbstrong clearly feels in response to the harrowing plight of nonhuman animals being mocked by the public; I value his capacity to connect with working-class audiences on these issues, and his framing of veganism undoubtably resonates with a specific demographic of (largely male) vegans who too understand themselves to be ‘animal defenders’ – e.g., Anonymous for the Voiceless activists. However, by presenting himself as ‘strong’ for ‘not giv[ing] a fuck’ about what others think about his ethical concern for ‘little animals’, Carbstrong is performing ‘veganism-as-machismo’ (Jones 2021). As Jones (ibid.) discusses – echoing Greenebaum and Dexter (2018) – rather than challenging hegemonic masculinity, such performances merely expand what can be considered hegemonically masculine. Carbstrong repackages care and compassion for nonhuman animals as an individualistic ‘emotional stoicism’, ‘bravery’ and ‘strength’, and in doing so manages to hold on to his ‘dominance as [a] hegemonic [man] in patriarchal culture’ (Greenebaum & Dexter 2018, 637) whilst being vegan. Masculinist framings of veganism – or, heganism – often downplay the ethical components of the lifestyle/philosophy, emphasising physical strength, athleticism and individual health ‘gains’ instead (Greenebaum & Dexter 2018; Jones 2021; Wright 2015). Carbstrong exemplifies the ethical hegan.

Perhaps the most offensive part of Carbstrong’s video is his talk of violence: ‘[he]’ – the man who ‘had no problem with saying… that he thought [nonhuman animal exploitation] was bad’, despite not being vegan himself – ‘would probably wipe the floor with that other bloke’. Israel’s oxymoronic claims of a (genocidal) ‘vegan army’ (Vegans for Palestine 2025; see also Zein 2025) notwithstanding, the connections between veganism/vegetarianism and pacifism run deep, as do the connections between ‘meat’ consumption and war (Adams 2024). Sadly, Carbstrong’s need to assert his masculinity through talk of violent domination over ‘weak men’ both redirects his audience’s attention away from human-directed nonhuman animal suffering and perpetuates one of the key components of the ideology that justifies it in the first place: a ‘might-makes-right’, patriarchal dominance over feminised bodies (Adams 2024).

Whilst Carbstrong talks of dominating ‘weak’ – non-masculine, i.e., feminised – men, he ostensibly does so in ‘defence’ of nonhuman animals. The latter is also problematic. Framing nonhuman animals as passive beings in need of human defence – as opposed to agents of their own resistance against oppression, which we must support and with whom we should stand in solidarity (Colling et al. 2014) – produces an anthropocentric and paternalistic narrative of human-animal relations that infantilises nonhumans and centres (delusions of) human heroism – contributing to what Trenkova (2020) calls a ‘toxic human savior complex’. Such framings correspond with hyper-rational conceptions of veganism, which I have moaned about in a previous post. Ultimately, by attempting to distance themselves from – and/or appropriate into hegemonically masculine narratives and identities – the supposedly feminine, hegans of any persuasion perpetuate sexism and, in turn, anthropocentric speciesism (Wrenn 2022).

 

References

Adams, C. J., 2024. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. Bloomsbury Revelations 35th Anniversary Edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Colling, S., Parson, S. & Arrigoni, A., 2014. Until All Are Free: Total Liberation through Revolutionary Decolonization, Groundless Solidarity, and a Relationship Framework. Counterpoints, Volume 448, pp. 51-73.

Greenebaum, J. & Dexter, B., 2018. Vegan Men and Hybrid Masculinity. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(6), pp. 637-648.

Jones, R., 2021. A Recipe for Heganism? Masculinity, Meat-Avoidance and the Cookbook. Sociální Studia, 18(2), pp. 105-121.

Trenkova, L., 2020. Conversations With Activists: Why Should LGBTQIA+ and Vegan Communities Work Together to Fight Intersecting Oppressions?. In: J. Feliz Brueck & Z. McNeill, eds. Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression. s.l: Sanctuary Publishers, pp. 313-317.

Vegans for Palestine, 2025. Rejecting Isr@el’s Genocidal “Vegan Revolution”. Vegans for Palestine Podcasts, ep. 4.

Wrenn, C. L., 2022. Heganism is Sexist. [Online] [Accessed: 11/09/2025].

Wright, L., 2015. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Zein, D., 2025. Can Social Sciences Contribute to a Decolonial and Intersectional Veganism? The Animal Liberation Movement in Times of Genocide. [Online] [Accessed: 11/09/2025].

Can Social Sciences Contribute to a Decolonial and Intersectional Veganism? The Animal Liberation Movement in Times of Genocide

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

Photo Credit: B. de los Arcos

 

By Dalia Zein

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP), Tampere University, dalia.zein@tuni.fi

 

In the summer of 2025, the International Animal Rights Conference (IARC) organizing committee issued a statement prior to its upcoming conference in September 2025, responding to calls for its boycott. The statement refuted claims at their attempt to silence Palestinian voices, explaining that the reason why they refrained from posting images of animal rights activists wearing keffiyehs at their 2024 event on their social media platform was:

based on the fact that, in Germany, [the organizing team is located in Germany and Luxembourg]  keffiyehs have at times been used by individuals or groups advocating the destruction of Israel. We want to stress that we do not believe everyone wearing a keffiyeh holds such views; rather, we were concerned about the symbol being misinterpreted.

 (IARC, 2025)

The committee, mentioning in the statement their opposition to the ongoing violence and oppression in Gaza carried out by the Israeli government, refrained from using the terminology of genocide or settler-colonial violence.

Focusing solely on the critique of the mass slaughter of trillions of aquatic animals and billions of land animals yearly while ignoring the extreme violence and erasure that Palestinians, and Gazans especially, continue to be subjected to by the Israeli settler colonial state, is not an isolated incident.  The case of IARC rather points to the failure of the mainstream vegan movement to uphold its values of equality, compassion, and liberation beyond non-human animals.

Why do most vegan organizations continue to be silent about the genocide? One of the answers to this question can be found in Vegans for Palestine’s advocacy, a group that was founded shortly after the beginning of the ongoing genocide in Gaza by Palestinian vegans, as well as allies from the region and beyond, such as Iran and Lebanon. Vegans for Palestine supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, drawing parallels between the importance of boycotting animal products and Israeli products, as well as the boycotting of vegan companies that are complicit in genocide. Most importantly, the group explores the systemic reasons behind why vegan mainstream spaces have been largely quiet face-to-face with Israeli war crimes, calling out the predominant lack of reflection on the whiteness of vegan mainstream spaces, and their failure to hold Israel’s vegan-washing accountable. Attempting to appeal to ‘liberal Western values’ especially among younger generations, Israel has been attempting to brand itself for over a decade as the vegan and LGBT capital of the region, going as far as investing in vegan meals and leather boots for the Israeli Defense Forces, reinforcing their self-portrayal as ‘the most moral army in the world’. As Dalal from Vegans for Palestine pointed out, “veganism  for Israel is a moral shield instead of a moral compass” (Vegans For Palestine 2025).

The reluctance of (most) animal liberation activists to talk about intersecting issues (in fear of decentering the animal cause) misses the complex interlocking of these oppressions. If animals are at the center of factory farming exploitation, this violence does not exist in a vacuum. I contend that the social sciences can act as a platform where strategies of the animal liberation movement can be unpacked and reconsidered, leading to a more direct engagement with intersectional and decolonial thought. If working collectively against Israel’s vegan washing, calling for the end of the genocide, and the dismantling of a settler colonial state is one of the most pressing matters at the moment, veganism must always be situated within how other systems of subjugation normalize oppression. Animal exploitation is just as normalized as the objectification of women’s bodies (Adams, 2015), and workers, often migrants or refugees with no prospects for alternative livelihoods, face violent working conditions in factory farms, farms that take over and destroy ecosystems and indigenous farming and culinary traditions. By centering conversations around how speciesism is reinforced by patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist domination, we do not abandon animal liberation but rather grasp a more nuanced vision of what it takes for this liberation to happen.

References

Adams, Carol J. 2015. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Anv edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

IARC. 2025. “Statement Regarding the Accusation of Silencing the Free Gaza Protests.” International Animal Rights Conference 2025. Accessed on August 18, 2025.

Vegans For Palestine. 2025. Vegans for Palestine Podcast – Episode 04 – Rejecting Isr@el’s Genocidal “Vegan Revolution.” Accessed on August 18, 2025.

Resources for Supporting Vegan Initiatives in Gaza

 

 

Joining the Dots on Residues of Harm: Rethinking the ‘Quiet’ Greyhound

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment
Ex-racing greyhound, Pingu, resting ‘calmly’ on a makeshift bed following veterinary treatment for a fractured leg. His wide fixed stare and erect ear suggest his inner distress. Photo credit: Kerry Herbert

 

By Kerry Herbert

“Do greyhounds make great pets?” This is the question I am most often asked when people discover my deep interest in these dogs, whose lives have been my focus over a decade of scholarly activism and doctoral research.

My answer: It’s complicated. And quite probably, it isn’t the right question.

In this blog, I argue we should continue re-imagining the future lives of the US’s most commodified dog (Rice, 2018) but the way we do this requires radical re-thinking.

Whilst greyhounds have endured circa 100 years of oppressive utilitarian entanglements with humans, public rejection of the mass killings of unwanted racing dogs has created a perfect storm. Populations of homeless greyhounds, whose “redemptive capital” renders them “too valuable to be killable” (McKee, 2015; 40) are increasingly repurposed for the ‘pet’ market. Routinely described as calm, gentle and low maintenance companions, these greyhound mythologies have simply transformed imaginations of greyhounds from commodities into caricatures. Harms perpetrated through commercial racing’s commodity circuits are widely discussed (Knight, 2018; Stevens et al, 2021; Arcari, 2023), yet comparatively little critique connects how these residues of harm materially manifest as greyhounds attempt to navigate their post-racing ‘pet’ worlds.

An extract from my fieldwork diary following a first adoption meet reflects my attempts to grapple with these inequities:

Jimmy quietly trotted out, following close to my leg in that slightly robotic way so many ex-race dogs seem to do, adapting his own locomotion to track my trajectory, a strategy which perhaps he has learnt will result in the least amount of tension to his neck. A party of adults waited; four women and one man. Jimmy headed straight for the man and stopped directly before him. This reminded me how ex-racers often gravitate toward men or avoid them entirely. There rarely seems to be a middle ground. On this occasion, Jimmy didn’t exactly greet the man; rather he positioned himself to be greeted, although I’m not sure this distinction was noted by the humans. For as soon as Jimmy was close enough to touch, all five humans were visibly enveloped by the emotional swell of the moment. I observed, with intrigue, as Jimmy remained still and compliant, the gentle ‘cheek puff’ his only indicator of discontent. I lost count of how many hands were touching him.

My work attempts to better understand these relational encounters including the ways they are shaped by histories of coercion and control. In respect of greyhounds whom we may perceive as compliant (like Jimmy in the above extract) or calm (like Pingu, pictured above), I urge reconsideration of the ‘quiet’ greyhound, and the language we use to describe them. By repositioning essentialised traits like calmness, gentleness and quietness as shadows of a malevolent past, I call on activists, advocates and rescuers to collaborate in re-imagining greyhounds.

Returning to our starting point, if “Do greyhounds make great pets?” is perhaps not the right question, what is?

Maybe we could begin by asking: “How can we better represent caring for damaged life?”

References
Arcari, P. (2023). Slow violence against animals: Unseen spectacles in racing and at zoos. Geoforum, 144, pp.1-14.
Knight, A. (2018). Injuries in racing greyhounds. Technical Report. UK: Greyt Exploitations.
McKee, T., V., S. (2015). ‘The cost of a second chance. Life, death, and redemption among prison inmates and Thoroughbred ex-racehorses in Bluegrass Kentucky’, in Lopez, P. J. and Gillespie, K. A. Eds.  Economies of Death. Routledge.
Rice, S. (2018). ‘Educational Experiences in Prison: Greyhounds and Humans Teaching and Learning Together.’ In Rice, S., Rud, A.G. Eds. The Educational Significance of Human and Non-Human Interactions. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Stevens, E. G., Baker, T. & Lewis, N. (2021). Dealing with sentient surplus: A moral economy of greyhound rehoming. EPE: Nature and Space, 0 (0), pp.1-19.

How is Veganism Promoted on Social Media?

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

 

Chris Till

Social media has become central to many people’s everyday communication, education, and self-expression. Such platforms are undeniably significant in informing and shaping many prominent issues. We launched the Beyond Meat & Memes project to explore how the promotion of veganism functions online. In particular, we focused on Instagram and TikTok to better understand how the combination of text, image, and video work together. We explored the strategies, narratives, and messages which were most prominent during Veganuary 2024.

We found three main discourses. The first discourse displayed “animals are subjects”. This was articulated in many different contexts including through simple messages presented in an image macro format (a box split horizontally with two images, one stacked on the other and text at the top and bottom of the box) urging the reader to eat beans (presenting an image of legumes) not beings (an image of some calves). This discourse was also presented through more subtle challenges to speciesism such as in a video of a human being stroking a cow who is purring like a cat.

A second discourse construed “veganism as care”. This set of posts often represented people caring for non-human animals or rescuing them from being farmed, abused, or slaughtered. Non-human animals were frequently personified in this set through being referred to by name, attributed personalities, and given narratives (e.g. of their escape from abuse). They were also often framed as children such as being visually represented cradled in a carer’s arms.

The final discourse represented “veganism as vibrant”. Many of the posts representative of this discourse were food and recipe sharing posts or instruction videos. These show vegan food as colourful, diverse, and delicious with the subjects of videos having fun preparing and enjoying the food. This discourse was also present across other genres of posts (including some which also contributed to the discourses above) with a bright, colourful (often saturated) aesthetic being common.

The findings from Beyond Meat & Memes were much more extensive than it has been possible to represent here. For instance, we looked in detail at the kinds of subjectivities constructed for both human and non-human animals, rhetorical strategies, and specific uses of the affordances of the platforms. You can read more about the project on our website and publications from the project will be coming soon.