#dan mims

Flying Lotus in MmmHmm, featuring Thundercat. Directed by Special Problems. Commissioned by Warp Films. Track taken from the album 'Cosmogramma', out now.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a new law is already set to be introduced in Congress that will confine its prohibitive language to so-called "crush videos" distributed for prurient reasons. Unfortunately, depictions of dog-fighting and other forms of animal cruelty will not be covered.

I'm glad for the new law. But I'm still sickened by the Supreme Court, and by the terror and suffering their errant ruling will cause.

Talking Points Memo (TPM) is an important blog, but they have a... well, extreme... tendency to be too charitable regarding the transparency and legitimacy of the motives behind conservative acts and general whackery. This tendency usually manifests in two ways: (1) giving the benefit of the doubt in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary; and (2) asserting false equivalence. Case in point would be today's article, "Poll Begs Question: Is Extremism Mainstream?."

Setting aside the improper use of "begs the question," the article falsely equates birtherism -- a.k.a. the belief that Obama was born outside the U.S. and is therefore not a legal candidate for President -- with trutherism, the notion that President Bush and/or elements in his Administration allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur in order to justify an invasion of the Middle East. The article reports the results of a poll in which 42% of polled Republicans ascribe to birtherism, while 25% of polled Democrats ascribe to trutherism.

Reality check: The Bush years gave us forged intelligence to doctor a case for war; windfall profits and no-bid contracts for Administration friendlies like Halliburton and Blackwater; ideologically edited EPA reports to hide the reality that climate change is happening; secret corporate visits to the White House; politicization of U.S. Attorney firings and hirings; massive violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources to aid electoral efforts; embedding racists and classists into the civil rights section of the Justice Dept; politicization of the Interior Dept, which, under Bush's watch, rarely failed to champion an environment-harming industrial boondoggle; and, oh yeah, an ignored memo written a month before the 9/11 attacks entitled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

That is a partial list, and through it all, the Bush Administration and GOP-at-large did not budge one inch when it came to accepting accountability for their moral and legal crimes. And TPM wants to equate conspiracy theories about the Bush Administration with conspiracy theories directed at the virgin, entirely reasonable and far more transparent Obama Administration as though these theories both fall into the same category of "extremism?"

Background: In December 2008, an article appeared on EcoSalon.com -- one of those "green" consumerist sites -- excoriating animal advocacy group PETA for its shock campaigns. The article itself and the comments attached to it were quite one-sided and narrowly conceived, so I jumped into the fray, as did Matt Rice, Education Manager at Farm Sanctuary. Of course, the relative anonymity of our commenting kept this fact a mystery, until I asked Matt to email me, which, miraculously, he did. Several long emails later, we had learned a great deal from each other. Fast forward to August 2009, when we at HERE.am had the bright idea to start conducting interviews, and Matt graciously agreed to be our first. On a recent Monday, I commandeered a deserted conference room during my lunch break and hastily arranged a makeshift recording set up: iPhone set to speaker phone, perched above my computer's built-in speaker, and a freebie audio recording program set to "record." Phone signal from AT&T? Check (although the signal display has been known to wildly exaggerate its status). Hunched over the rig to make sure my voice would be audible, I dialed and we were off...

Dan Mims (HERE.am): This is my first interview ever. It's HERE.am's first interview ever. It's an honor and a pleasure to have you.

Matt Rice (Farm Sanctuary): Thank you.

DM: How did you get involved in animal advocacy?

MR: I've always considered myself a compassionate person, but like most people I didn't question the basic assumption that other animals are for human use. By the time I was at the University of Colorado (getting a degree in Biology and Anthropology with a minor in Chemistry), I found myself having a lot of problems with animal testing and vivisection. I was also against other kinds of cruelty to animals, such as fur farming and bull fighting. But I didn't really consider my own contribution to the cruel treatment of animals every time I sat down to eat. The first time that that was brought to my full attention was when my wife came home one day and said she was thinking about going vegan. I had been under the usual impression that you need to eat animals to be healthy and survive, but I think because it was my wife talking to me, I was able to listen respectfully and not put up the usual defenses. I decided at that time to go vegan with her, and I started reading books, and the more I learned the more I realized I was doing the right thing. The first year or so, I was very private about my veganism, and then I saw Meet Your Meat, which included undercover footage of factory farms and slaughterhouses. This was the first time I'd seen with my own eyes how animals are raised and slaughtered for food, and it was very powerful. That's when I realized that just sitting back and not participating in it myself was not enough -- this was an atrocity that needed to be confronted. So I started getting active, going to demonstrations, writing letters to the editor and to congresspeople. I eventually applied for a job at PETA as a campaign coordinator and worked there for about four years. I then applied for a job at Farm Sanctuary and have been here for about two years now.

DM: What is Farm Sanctuary's mission? How did it get started?

MR: Farm Sanctuary envisions a world in which cruelty to farm animals has ended, where instead we exercise values based in compassion. We started off in 1986 as a grassroots all-volunteer organization originally funded by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead Concerts, out of the same Volkswagen van that was used to rescue animals at stockyards and farms. Our founder, Gene Baur, wanted to find out for himself how animals were being raised and treated, so he started visiting stockyards and farms. When he went to Lancaster Stockyard in PA, he went around back and found what the industry refers to as a "dead pile" -- where dead or dying animals are discarded like trash. Since he'd never seen anything like that before, he decided to take a picture of it. I guess the click of the camera made one of the sheep on this dead pile raise her head, and he realized she was still alive. He rushed her to a veterinarian thinking she would need to be euthanized. She was given water and a vitamin shot, and within 30 minutes she was up walking around. She was fine, she'd just been dehydrated and passed out, so she was thrown on this dead pile to rot with the other carcasses. Which is common. So he took her home and he named her Hilda, and he tracked down the farm that Hilda came from as well as the truck driver who admitted to abandoning her on the dead pile. He went to press charges for cruelty to animals, which is when he found out that there were no laws to protect Hilda or other farm animals from this type of abuse -- because dead piles are considered "normal industry practice," and almost everything the industry does is considered "normal industry practice." Therefore almost everything the industry does is excluded from welfare laws. Farm Sanctuary was founded to try to change that, to push for legislation that offers at least some protection for farm animals and to educate the public about the plight of these animals.

DM: And there were some recent victories, right? Bill 1520 in California, Prop. 204 in Arizona --

MR: There have been a lot of victories over the years and we've started to build even further on those successes. Farm Sanctuary has been a big part of legislation to ban the most abusive practices on factory farms -- gestation crates for pigs, veal crates for calves, and battery cages for chickens. Proposition 2 passed last year with one of the highest positive votes in the history of California ballot initiatives -- overwhelmingly, the public supported a ban on these abusive practices. A number of other states have banned such practices -- Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Florida -- and Farm Sanctuary has been at the forefront of those legal battles.

DM: Would you say that Farm Sanctuary "believes in" incrementalism -- taking the steps that you can while you can and changing the status quo that way? As opposed to other organizations that might be more, shall we say, "revolutionary"?

MR: Well, we are a vegan organization, an abolitionist organization. We don't believe that other animals should be used by humans for any reason. They are beings with their own lives and deserve to be left alone. However, the world that we live in right now does not see things that way.

DM: I see, so we're talking more about tactics here, rather than ideals. What are your thoughts on effective advocacy? You've been on the front lines for a while now, particularly in dealing with media, so what is your advice for fellow advocates? In your experience, what works and what doesn't?

MR: My best advice is to follow your strengths. Whatever you're good at, do that. But there are some general tips that I think anybody can make use of. The first thing is to be an advocate. Speak up. One of my favorite ways to get active is by leafleting. A lot of people dismiss that, and it can be frustrating to stand outside for an hour handing out 200 leaflets, only to see a dozen leaflets in the trash can down the street. That can be disheartening. But if you stand out there for an hour and hand out 200 leaflets, at least a few dozen people have read that, and if you can get even one individual to adopt a vegan lifestyle, you've saved 100 animals every year. There's no better way for an individual to make a difference. Of course, there are less effective ways to go about advocacy. At Farm Sanctuary in particular, we advocate a gentle approach. We don't want to alienate people or make them feel like the enemy. Almost everybody out there, including most vegans, were raised eating meat and using animal products. It was only after we found out the way these animals are treated that we decided to make changes in our own lives. So we give people the benefit of the doubt, and we assume that they do consider themselves to be compassionate people but just don't have all the information that we have.

DM: You know, we should have spoken years ago. I spent years pissing people off.

MR: I did the same thing myself. There are a lot of things that we animal advocates do wrong, in terms of effectiveness. For example, a lot of times vegans won't eat with meat-eaters. What that says to non-vegans is that vegans are either self-righteous or deprived, and nobody wants to join that club. It doesn't make anyone else want to become vegan.

DM: I think that's a good point. In a private conversation, it's often more about winning hearts than about winning minds, at least at first. On the other hand, if you're in a situation like a publicized debate, it becomes much more important to win minds. What's funny to me about this is that in addition to all the other responsibilities vegans and advocates take on, we also have to manage the emotions of others.

MR: Just being a vegan, you are in other people's eyes a representative for all vegans. It puts a lot of pressure on us, because the way that we represent ourselves to others is the way they're going to view the entire movement. So it's in our best interests but also the animals' best interests that we pay attention to how we come across to others. Be polite. It's never effective to be mean or rude or angry with other people, even if they seem to deserve it. There's all too many times when you come across somebody who's upset with you just because you're vegan and you've thereby challenged their core belief system. So they'll start being angry or rude to you, and it's really tempting to reply with a snappy comeback. But I think it's more effective to not respond in kind, to respond with compassion and understanding and politeness. At the least, it's not gonna hurt. You might not change their mind, but at the very least it's not gonna hurt. And all the people around you who heard that conversation are gonna have a much better opinion of you than if you were to respond in a rude way.

DM: I do think it depends on the situation though. For example, Obama trying to deal with Republicans -- being polite isn't working so well.

MR: That's true. Different situations call for different tactics. Never stand there and be berated. It's best to find a way to excuse yourself and tell them you'd be happy to talk to them once they've calmed down. On the other end of that, vegans are often too quiet. A lot of them feel like they don't know enough about the issues to speak intelligently, and they're embarrassed. But I say you should never be embarrassed to say you care about animals. Sometimes people feel like they need to have a degree in nutrition, or that they need to have studied animal rights theory for years to have a conversation with somebody about veganism.

DM: And generally, you can call the other side's bluff, since they almost certainly haven't given it much thought.

MR: [laughing] True. But even so, if you think about it, we have a very simple and powerful argument to make. Most people agree that it's wrong to cause needless suffering. The millions of healthy vegans out there, and the American Dietetic Association as well as others, have all proved that it's possible to be healthy without consuming any animal products whatsoever. Therefore, the suffering borne by animals during the production of these products is needless suffering. So, if you already believe it's wrong to cause needless suffering, an animal-free diet is just an application of that idea.

DM: Are there any thinkers or philosophers that you like in particular? Especially ones that we haven't heard about?

MR: Hmm, that's a good question. There are two people who have been very influential in my evolution as an animal advocate. One is Ingrid Newkirk [Co-founder and President of PETA]. She has a way of understanding the world that is absolutely brilliant. She has a handle on a wide breadth of issues and I truly think that if people who disagree with her had a chance to speak with her, they would likely come around to her way of thinking. She is a tireless advocate. When I worked at PETA, she was always there first thing in the morning, even when we would do local doghouse deliveries, bringing doghouses to people who couldn't afford them and wouldn't let their dogs inside their house. I would arrive at 4:30 in the morning and she would be there. Another person who has inspired me a lot is Bruce Friedrich [V.P. of Policy and Government Affairs for PETA]. He's the one who "tempered" my activism. In my early days, I was outraged by the way animals were being treated and I wanted everyone to be outraged too. I felt like if I could just tell them what was happening everyone would come around. He's the one who showed me that simply treating someone with dignity and respect can be more effective than trying to win a debate or change their mind right away. Bruce recently wrote a book with Matt Ball of Vegan Outreach, called The Animal Activist's Handbook: Maximizing Our Positive Impact in Today's World, and I highly recommend it.

DM: What other books would you recommend?

MR: I think every animal advocate should read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, which is one of the first books I read on the subject. Another older book I recommend is Food Revolution by John Robbins. I think it lays out the animal welfare and environmental arguments in terms that anyone can understand. A more recent book would be Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food by Gene Baur [Founder and President of Farm Sanctuary]. It's hard to put down because it tells the long history of Farm Sanctuary, which involves lots of adventures -- daring rescues and that kind of thing -- but it also talks about the animals themselves, as individuals. I think that's really important for people to think about. Numbers mean very little to most people. You might say to them that 10 billion farm animals are killed for food every year in this country alone, but it can be hard to understand what that means. When you talk about an animal you actually know, an individual, it resonates a lot more with people. And I've really seen that up close at Farm Sanctuary. When people come here and stand eye-to-eye with a cow and rub a pig's belly and they get to know these animals and hear their stories of rescue and survival, it resonates much more powerfully.

DM: I only have one more question, and I only ask because HERE.am is a music site as well. What's your favorite band, and what do you listen to when you want to get fired up?

MR: [laughing] I have eclectic tastes -- different days I go for different things. But one of my consistently favorite bands is Tool. I like the heavier sound.

DM: That is one of my favorite bands too, just so you know.

MR: I know the band members in Tool don't necessarily share our perspective on animal issues, but the music itself is inspiring.

DM: Definitely. Unfortunately, I think we have to stop now -- it seems someone wants to take the conference room. It was great speaking with you finally -- when will you be in New York next?

MR: I'll be coming there during Farm Sanctuary's annual Walk for Farm Animals on October 4th. It's one of Farm Sanctuary's biggest fundraisers and we expect about 400 people walking that day in New York City on behalf of farm animals -- should be a very good time.

DM: And I'll be one of them! Thanks again Matt for your time and the great stories and words of wisdom today.

HERE @ The Yolk, July 11th, 2009

What a great night. (Find the video embed code here.)

A surprise review of our venue and show this past weekend was just posted at PaperMag.com. Thanks to Nell Alk and Gilbert Ng for writing and snapping photos, respectively. You guys rock!

Some highlights:

About HERE: "...precise percussion partnered with tight guitar strumming... impressed everyone within earshot... There’s no denying their skill." About The Yolk: "This past Saturday the Mims [brothers] held another one of their quasi-famous shindigs, a gathering of open-minded kids willing to donate $5 at the door and be surprised by the line-up... Attendees climbed four flights of stairs and walked through the red-tint-lighted entryway to find themselves in the midst of an experimental monsoon of music... an eye-opening experience, an audible exhibit... I can’t wait for the next installment." About Samantha's Confectionery: "I’ve met Sam herself and, let me tell you, she’s got it going on. She’s the best vegan baker in New York." Be sure to check out Nell's other writings for Paper Magazine, Interview Magazine, Deli Magazine, and Zink Magazine, among others!