Tag: Vegan Sociology

What Britain’s First Guinea Pig Farm Tells Us About Environmental Politics

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

Ryan Bogle

Pembrokeshire is a mostly rural, tourist hotspot in the United Kingdom that shows Wales (and the world) at its most stunning. The county features Britain’s smallest city, St. David’s, and longest trail, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path National Trail. Shockingly, it will also soon feature Britain’s first guinea pig farm.

In June 2026, the Planning Committee of Pembrokeshire County Council approved an ‘eco-friendly home to live off-grid’ (Sinclair, 2026) involving the breeding of guinea pigs for meat consumption. Supporting planning documents and speeches by the applicant outlined the guinea pigs’ purpose as a lower-carbon alternative to the consumption of typically-purchased flesh. Furthermore, in this so-called ‘farm’, the guinea pigs would be “larger than the pet variety […] similar to rabbits in terms of meat production”: an urgent ethical problem for vegan sociology.

The ease of species substitution in the guinea pig farm and the redistribution of exploitation and suffering from larger livestock to guinea pigs (rather, turbo guinea pigs), establishes a concerning precedent for reallocating the right to life based on the carbon consequences of its maintenance. More widely, this precedent demonstrates how social movements can fall into neoliberal logics that de-centre sentient life as a collective and consequently reduce environmental thinking solely to the individual, and human, sphere.

Traïni & Throssell (2012) understand the ‘conversion process that led [people] to adopt a diet in accordance with their convictions’ (Ibid: 4) as a transition from having a principle into ‘the notion of career’ (Ibid: 2). In other words, the extent to which these planning applicants are proposing to live according to their convictions makes the commitment as central to their existence as a career. If, as it seems, this guinea pig farm proposal reflects environmental conviction yet nonetheless allows animal consumption, it follows that any environmental conviction or social movement that allows for utilitarian comforts (i.e. animal consumption) cannot provide any logical threshold that disqualifies someone from being morally or environmentally ‘sustainable’, regardless of moral or environmental consequences. As vegan sociologists, therefore, it is our role to both challenge the politics of ‘sustainable living’ as well as dietary environmentalism as part of our opposition to epistemological frameworks that punish animal life.

By arguing for a remodelling of social theory that decenters individualism, both intra- and inter-species, vegan sociology can reap the benefits of a field that bridges theoretical and intellectual discovery with our ethical commitments. We have the opportunity to re-shape how sociology understands human-non-human relations, and occupy the space of a ‘sustainable re-crafting of food practice’ (Twine, 2018: 169), both in terms of moral and environmental sustainability. Detailing the logical inconsistencies and shortfalls within environmental veganism and utilitarian politics creates the space for establishing new frameworks for understanding human relations with the more-than-human world, and the undoing of a social model that reduces the value of the lives of cows, guinea pigs, and humans solely to the carbon footprint of our existence.

 

References

Sinclair, B. (2026). Guinea pigs to be bred for food by off-grid family after council approval. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8r218rxjgpo

Traïni, C., & Throssell, K. (2012). Between disgust and moral indignation: The socio-genesis of an activist practice. Revue Française de Science Politique (English Edition), 62(4), 1–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/revfranscipoleng.62.4.1

Twine, R. (2018). Materially constituting a sustainable food transition: The case of vegan eating practice. Sociology, 52(1), 166–181. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26558693

 

Ryan Bogle is an independent researcher of vegan sociology, with a wider focus on social movements and their relationships with corporations. Ryan has a BA in Human, Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an M. Phil in Identities and Cultures of Europe from Trinity College Dublin. 

 

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

How Vegan Sociology Informs Empathetic Peer Review

Corey Wrenn, PhDLeave a comment

On March 8th, 2021, the International Association of Vegan Sociologists collaborated with the Canadian Sociological Association and the British Sociological Association to present a panel on the peer-review process. Panelists included Dr. Corey Wrenn (University of Kent), Dr. Matthew Cole (Open University) and Dr. Rochelle Stevenson (Thompson Rivers University)

Although we originally intended this webinar to train our student editorial board for our Student Journal of Vegan Sociology, we quickly realized that this sort of training is generally lacking for many graduate students and early career sociologists. Vegan sociology is uniquely positioned to unpack the politics of peer-review. Many vegan sociologists are informed by a deep empathy for others and a dedication to compassionate communication. These ethics of care may be lacking in mainstream sociological discourses, perhaps a result of sociology’s empirical, objective, and masculine legacy.

In this webinar, the panelists emphasize that peer-review should be a collaborative effort. It should be seen as an opportunity to develop our growing field in an authentic, and mutually-beneficial way. In fields like vegan sociology, the research has important practical implications for highly oppressed populations. Therefore, it is important to also hold authors up to standard. Research must be sound to be most useful to other animals and to bring credibility to our field.

 

Tips for effective peer-review:

  • Consider your qualifications before committing
  • Commit to a reasonably quick turnaround
  • Recuse yourself if there are conflicts of interest
  • Assess the author’s command over the literature, counterarguments, methodology
  • Do not overwhelm the author with too many demands at once
  • Offer criticisms only when you have read carefully
  • Offer solutions
  • Highlight the strengths of the paper
  • Recap the core argument
  • Check your feelings; make sure you are feeling positive and well-rested
  • Be warm and respectful
  • Be kind, but also be rigorous
  • For every limitation, find a strength
  • Imagine yourself as the recipient
  • Commit between 1-3 hours for review