This week’s show – only a few days late, I might add, thank you very much – covers some familiar ground, like the Vibram Five Fingers shoes stuff, (I didn’t warn last time that some models contained kangaroo leather, which sparks a whole other line of discussion,) that weird Nicolas Cage story from yesterday, and then it gets a little odd, like “what kind of activism smurf are you?” odd. We wrap things up with a call for help – do you have brick tofu in your area?
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Hey Jason,
So many thoughts on this footware dilemma—seems a variation of one I’ve certainly thought a lot about.
If I had to select one emergency or catastrophe with animals, it would seem to me to be birds used in meat and egg production. In severity and especially in numbers, my understanding is that everything else pales in comparison. It is also a category unlike, let’s say, primates used by the US Air Force in radiation experiments, in that the poultry and egg industries are particularly vulnerable to actionable consumer boycats. Er, boycotts.
Writing by Mark Penn shows, I think, that there is such a boycott, and it is effective. Penn is the CEO of public relations giant Burson Marsteller and author of the 2007 book Microtrends. In the chapter titled “Vegan Children,” he notes that “if the Veggie Child trend is sustained through adulthood, the [meat] industry’s future could be at risk.” This striking comment made by a person of Penn’s stature galvanizes my morale, as well as provides an easy refutation to the assertion we’ve all heard: individual veg*nism is pointless. Clearly not, if our efforts have caught the attention of this influential business expert.
Mainstream footwear corporations are in a somewhat different category than the animal food industry. If vegans represent (say) some maximum of 5% of their customer base, then I question how even organized and dedicated behaviour here can provide enough of a signal to them to operate one way or another.
Of course I do what I can as a consumer to avoid conspicuous sources of animal exploitation in products and services. However, if I discovered after it was too late that some shoes I had purchased and begun to wear did contain animal ingredients, I would almost certainly still continue using them. I don’t see how it would help animals to do otherwise.
One objection to this philosophy and behaviour might be that it opens one up to charges of hypocrisy. However, I would happily respond to such by saying that I do what I can, with the limited time I have, when shopping for shoes, to selecting from those that are free of animal products; but sometimes I make a mistake. (Yet if ethical perfection is impossible, I find that no reason or excuse not to pluck low-hanging ethical fruit with my boycott of meat, dairy, and eggs.)
Matt Ball of Vegan Outreach argues that we best help animals by growing the size of our movement, rather than putting too much effort into personal vegan refinement. Excessive animal product research, I believe, is off-putting to potential converts, and has, I suspect, only diminishing ethical returns anyway. I think we are more likely to grow the movement if we are imperfect in our veganism—even self-consciously so!
Thanks Jason. And I’m glad your shoes turned out as they did.