Gender equality: it’s about seeing groups of people as equal, despite our perceived differences and more importantly, despite our many years of cultural conditioning, still continuing today, which tell us women are inferior to men.

Thanks to the work of feminists who have stood up against sexism far beyond my time, and even my mother and grandmother’s times, I am in a much better position as a woman today. Firstly, something I have written has been published.  My brain is respected, considered of value, much more than perhaps the brains of women in my family generations before me. However, this is not to say the fight is over.

So, what laws have changed, in the realm of gender equality? We can vote. We can study. The vast majority of us can drive. In Australia, there’s no longer a tampon tax. We can make our own money.  We can (mostly) wear what we like, without our bodies being policed more than men’s. We have women in Government positions, where there previously were none. We are no longer the possession of men in marriage and it is against the law for a man, including a husband, to rape a woman (though our society is still certainly one that privileges the public appearance of accused men and rapists, over female victims and their protection and wellbeing). We can choose to work in any job we like, though we likely won’t be as well paid for it, and we may be systematically discouraged to do so.

It’s worth noting, the above given rights and progress is relevant to many parts of the world, but we must recognise some women face much harsher and dangerous forms of discrimination and systematic gender based violence than myself, as a white woman, in a country like Australia. It’s a work in progress, but we have more rights than the generations that have gone before. I am very grateful for that, to be alive now.

Why were women ever thought to be inferior in the first place? Why was our being different to men ever seen as a weakness?

The same question can be asked about a lot of forms of discrimination. Why? Why do we see them this way?  I want to discuss why we see animals the way we do, and the way in which feminism and veganism must be interconnected, in order for a total empowerment of women to come into fruition.

Veganism. It’s about seeing groups of beings as equal despite our perceived differences and more importantly, despite our many years of cultural conditioning today, that has led us to believe that some species’ are inferior to others.

Humans are remarkable in many ways. We communicate in an incredibly nuanced and advanced way. We have brains that can do so many absurd and brilliant things – from creating wonderful works of art to creating machines that can turn plastic bottles into clothing.

That leads me to the remarkably terrible thing about us, too. We destroy and pollute so much of what is around us. Just as we have the capacity to reverse climate change, we are the ones who caused it. Just as we can discover ways to reuse our waste, we were the ones who let the oceans be filled with it to begin with. Much of our history, much of our present actions, are filled with bloodshed, cruelty and a lack of compassion.

Animals are different. We’re yet to see a dog who can speak eight languages like some humans can.  We’re yet to see a sheep build themselves shelter.  We’re yet to see a turkey do a cryptic crossword.

They also aren’t so different. We have seen pigs count objects. We have seen cows enjoy music. We have seen fish develop a fear of things that have previously hurt them.

In the ways that matter most, we are the same. We feel. When someone is good to us, we are content. When someone gives us affection, we feel joy. When someone hurts us, we fear them. We love. We grieve. We suffer.

If we are open to the suffering, to the disadvantage, the unfairness and persecution one group of beings experiences, we are more likely to be able to extend that empathy and compassion to others. This is where the intersection between veganism and feminism comes in.

I’d like please, for you to imagine that you were forcibly impregnated. The semen of a man was put into an instrument, which was then forced into your vagina by the fist of someone. You are most likely restrained. As you can imagine, this is incredibly painful and if you were free to escape, you would.

This is the first step in the ‘working life’ of a female dairy cow – of a non-human woman. Forcible impregnation, so that a female cow can give birth to a baby.  A baby she has grown inside of her for many months.

The next step is for that baby to be separated from their mother. If the baby is a girl, she will share her mother’s fate and be introduced into the milking herd.If the baby is a boy, he will never produce milk, so is useless to the industry, and quickly killed..If a baby drinks their mother’s milk, there is not milk left for us humans to sell, to profit from, and to needlessly consume.

Mother cows are known to wail when their newborns are taken from them. Birthing fluids still hanging from them, they have been seen chasing farmers taking their babies away from them, crying out, pleading. Having never been a mother, I cannot begin to imagine such anguish, but being an empathetic human, I can feel a little of it, very deeply and painfully.

The exploitation of a woman, human or other, is a hard truth to bear.

In this instance, this is the truth of the purposeful, greed-driven exploitation of the sexual organs and anatomy of a non-human woman, a mother, a cow. This is the truth of animal sexual exploitation.

This is not to equate the experiences of any different groups. I was sexually abused as a child. I do not pretend to completely understand the emotional trauma and anguish that comes from being attacked and raped as a grown woman. These instances are different. The emotional burdens that come from them, unique.

The purpose of my asking you to imagine yourself in the position of a female cow, is simply to exercise an extension of empathy. I know the gut wrenching trauma, anxiety, depression, complication, and deep-rooted pain that come from my experience. I do not know the exact pain, cognitions or emotions of another survivor. I do not need to know if her pain is lesser or worse than mine. All I need to know, is that there is pain. All I need to do is empathize with her.

Cows may not have the cognitive abilities of a human. They may not be able to speak in a language we can understand. They may have a lesser understanding of the exploitation involved in the industries they are entangled in. But they feel it. I know the deep primal howls of pain I made as a child. I know the torment I felt even when I did not understand what had been done to me. When I hear the crying of a cow, when I see the panic in her eyes, the frozen horror that paralyses her, that ends her attempts to kick herself free, I get it. I feel it. I do not wish any pain onto them, so I do not consume the product that brings this to them.

I extend this same empathy to hens. Just like cows, hens have their sexual organs, their anatomy as females, twisted and used against them.

An egg, just like the egg that comes from my ovaries and falls out of me in a period every month, is the reason for her exploitation. Over many decades and generations, hens have been selectively bred, so that they now ovulate almost every day of the year: about 300. In nature, chickens, like the red jungle fowl, lay between 10 to 15 per year – not so different to the 12 menstrual cycles I have in a year. I imagine my life – my body’s physical exhaustion – if I were to have my period for 300 out of the 365 days in a year.

I imagine that I was to take a one-way trip to the slaughterhouse after my body had been exploited for so long that it could not keep going. I cannot fathom such a reality, but I try. I try to imagine myself as someone who is killed at only eighteen months old, when the strain of living in my fatigued, mutated body means I can no longer continue to ‘produce’ in a way considered ‘financially viable’. I think of this, as I remember a hen, her natural life span once well over 10 years.

It is estimated that in Australia, 16 million hens are exploited in the egg industry every year. I see a hen who closed her eyes as I stroked her stomach, as she lay on the floor of a slaughterhouse truck. She was killed because she was no longer seen as profitable. Her life not treated with the value it deserved. Her body perceived as something to exploit and discard.

I mourn for her, 16 million times over.

It is estimated that in Australia, 1.6 million cows are exploited in the dairy industry. I see a cow whose panicked eyes darted past me, her head sticking out of the truck packed with bodies, as it turned down the road to the slaughterhouse. She too was killed when she no longer ‘served any financial purpose’. She too was seen as a body to exploit and discard. A  cow like her is killed at about four years old, rather than being left to enjoy her natural lifespan, of fifteen to twenty years.

I mourn for her, 1.6 million times over.

It is estimated that in Australia, 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted. That would equal to 2.46 million women. I think of a woman, a friend who everyday feels as though she is without a little part of herself, which was robbed from her. She too was seen as a body to exploit and discard.

I mourn for her, 2.46 million times over.

There is no comparing trauma. There is no competition. There is no equating pain when it is something so uniquely personal and awful. There is no discounting or undermining of suffering that does any good.

But there is empathy. There is an extension of compassion, and the non-human women in our world desperately need it from us..

Animals are sentient; feeling beings, who like us experience fear, sadness and happiness. Who give and receive love. Whatever differences they may have in the way they understand their pain, does not discount that it is there, that it is burning and raw inside of them. We need only look into the eyes of animals in these exploitative industries to see their suffering.

I know that we are different, but the same.

It does not matter what form discrimination takes. There is always an ‘othering’ involved. A way to construct an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. For our world to be one of peace: one without violence against women, human or otherwise, we must feel our pain in unison. Feel their pain as ours.  Audre Lorde said it best: “Because no woman is free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles look very different to my own.”

We have the opportunity to break these shackles, by simply refusing to consume the products that locked them on in the first place.  By choosing vegan.

Author: Emma Hakansson
Producer/Ethics Consultant at Willow Creative Co

Sources used for slaughter ages and numerical estimates

• https://www.rspca.org.au/layer-hen-faq
• https://www.aussieabattoirs.com/facts/age-slaughtered
• https://www.rspca.org.au/campaigns/dairy-cows
• https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/domestic-violence/family-domestic-sexual-violence-in-australia-2018/contents/summary

I was very happy to hear the news of changes to Victorian tenancy legislation that will allow people to share rented homes with their companion animals. While it doesn’t go far enough in my opinion, this change is long overdue and necessary to prevent humans and other animals from being at risk of homelessness.

When announcing the new laws, Premier Daniel Andrews himself, referred to companion animals as “family”. I took a moment to acknowledge this progressive compassionate reform. I was genuinely excited and wanted to celebrate what is a great change.

But it wasn’t long though before I was thinking of the absolute hypocrisy of it all. Of course, I know these laws are protecting humans rather than companion animals. After all the law is recognising their worth to us, not their inherent value and fundamental rights, as we certainly wouldn’t continue to kill hundreds of thousands of homeless animals every year in pounds and shelters if it were truly about protecting “them”, but still I can’t help but think…

What about the animals who die terrifying deaths at slaughterhouses to satiate our desire for flesh? What about the animals suffering in laboratories at the hands of scientists devoid of empathy, or those who are dragged from their ocean homes and suffocated? What about them? Why don’t they deserve protection, why are they not considered family?

The answer lies I guess, in our selfish perspective of the world. We see the “other” as either a resource, a challenge, or something to give us pleasure. Companion animals give us pleasure and we want that pleasure protected.

I started to wonder; are we as a species capable of framing our ethics, beyond what is important to us? I have no doubt we are, but while our current culture dictates otherwise we continue to fail miserably.

So, I think we need a new culture, a cultural revolution if you will.

A culture that is guided by our morality rather than a morality that is guided by our culture.

Imagine that for a moment. Decisions based on understanding and a desire to be compassionate rather than on what’s gone before, and what’s in it for me. No more, this is how it’s always been done, but rather, does this hurt someone? Is my enjoyment of this at the expense of another?

I agree with Daniel Andrews, companion animals are family, but I see all Earthlings as family, and as such want them all to live free from exploitation and harm. I want them to live their lives autonomously, as nature intended and I believe recognising others as family, is the key to a peaceful, and fairer world.

So today I do celebrate the increased protection of companion animals and their guardians but I’ll hold out for the revolution.

For the compassionate revolution that will make family of us all.

Author: Felicity Andersen
Director of Blackwood Fields Animal Sanctuary and Radio Host Animal Nation

This piece was originally written for OCR FM’s radio show Animal Nation – For Compassion’s Sake segment

A Life with Horses

I sit at my desk, watching 6 sheep graze contentedly in the paddock below where I once ran horses I trained for other riders and competed on. My mind drifts back further, my thoughts deepening, considering the myriad of ways I have used animals over the last 5 decades.

I loved animals, or so I honestly believed.

I ‘owned’ many of them – that’s how I saw it.

I ate a lot of them, cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other animals from the sea.

But, of course, the idea of eating horses, dogs or cats or any other animal I saw as cuddly or cute was simply objectionable.

And as for eggs and milk… well, the animal just gives them anyway don’t they?

I rode and trained horses professionally for most of my adult life, most of my 33-year career in Victoria Police in fact.

I was a horse mad, pony club attending kid who grew up with the desire to have a life with horses and a farm of my own.

At 20 I joined VicPol for one reason and one reason only, I simply could not think of a better job with horses! I joined because I wanted to be a Mountie.

At 22 I achieved my wish and there I remained for nearly 3 decades: riding, training, and teaching. I trained and rode hundreds of horses over those years. More horses than I can recall.

One day, returning from the football with a colleague who happened to have a farming background, we pulled up next to a truckload of big-eyed calves. Brown and white, black and white, jersey coloured babies… all eyes and ears and innocence.

“Oh!! My god! Look at them, Harry! So beautiful!” I almost squealed in delight at the sight of them. I was instantly intoxicated by their sweetness and soft furry coats. Oh how I wanted to cuddle them all!

Harry, my colleague, ducked his head and looked across me to the semi idling beside us.

“Do you eat veal?”

I was confused. “Ummm, yeah, sometimes… Why?”

“That’s your veal,” he grunted as he returned his eyes to the road ahead.

“What? What do you mean? I don’t understand” I said, genuinely confused.

“Veal is meat from calves,” he said bluntly.

“But they are just babies” I cried, looking from those small, sweet faces to Harry’s and back again… still confused, scrambling to make sense of what he’d just told me.

He gestured toward the truck with his head without taking his eyes from the traffic lights, waiting for them to change…

“Yeah, the meats more tender. Really tender when they are that age.”

I sat then, reality hitting home, looking into those liquid eyes that looked back at me until the lights changed and we pulled away, leaving those babies to their certain fate.

I went home that night and told my boyfriend. He was equally incredulous that our occasional pub meal was, in fact, the flesh of baby cows. We knew we would never eat it again and I never did.

As I sit here now I am grateful to that taciturn middle-aged man giving me some cold truth that afternoon but how I wish he’d also told me why they were on that truck in the first place. That he’d also asked me if I drank milk, ate cheese, yoghurt, ice cream, and butter. He knew the answer to that one I have no doubt. Of course he did. Perhaps he thought I’d had enough of a reality check for one day.

The Awakening

I was in my early 20’s when that conversation took place. It would take another 26 years until I was prompted to look into the reality of my other choices regarding animals and what I found there, hidden in clear sight, shocked me to my core and would eventually alter the course and substance of my life

In May 2011, I watched a 4 Corners story that pried the lid off the brutal truth of the Live Export of Australian cattle to Indonesia. That expose led me to the Animals Australia website and my education really began. When I learned that 700,000 5-day-old calves a year were slaughtered as wastage from the Dairy industry I simply did not believe it. I mean, how could anyone do that! They were babies! And then that conversation with Harry all those years before came back to me.

But it took an angry diatribe from a third-generation dairy farmer’s daughter at a friend’s wedding to tell me that indeed, babies or not, my liking for cheese put those babies on the slaughterhouse truck just as surely as the dairy farmer who bred them had. My beef cattle farming boyfriend at the time gave me no sympathy “What did you expect!”

The drive home from the wedding was silent and hurtful.

More months and more investigation into the many ways we exploit and harm animals went by with animal products featuring less and less prominently on my personal menu, until 2 weeks after my 50th birthday I realised that caring was all well and good, but only by aligning my actions with that caring would I ever make sense of a situation that made no sense at all.

I can’t love animals yet ignore the plight of billions of them simply because I liked the taste of them.

New Life

I went vegan in August 2012. I cleaned out every animal product in my kitchen and gave them all to a friend with a big family. It felt good and it felt right. A weight lifted, one I didn’t realise had been weighing on me. But what to eat? I knew no vegans or vegetarians.

I quickly came to realise that replacing a piece of animal flesh with an IGA Veggie Burger would soon become disheartening and so I turned to the internet and began a deep dive into the wonderful world of plant-based and vegan recipes. Who could have known that a life without animal products could be so rich and varied and delicious! I wasn’t a very interested or talented cook as an omnivore but I was very interested in health and sports so I had eaten what I felt at the time to be a “healthy diet”. I soon came to realise I’d been duped. Along with just about everyone else in reach of industry marketing and government backing.

I really enjoyed the food I was making but what I struggled with most was the role I was playing in my workplace. While I was unable to ride at that time due to ongoing issues with a back injury I was training other trainers from the ground and not liking a lot of what I was seeing now that I watched with new understanding. The veil had been lifted. There was no going back.

I decided to take off backpacking overseas for a year. I rented my property to friends and backpacked around the world alone on a tight budget with no expectations or firm plans aside from having entered a 250km ultra marathon in Costa Rica in Feb 2014. The Coastal Challenge was my first major event as a vegan athlete and also ended up becoming the first of many ultradistance adventures fundraising for animal rights groups and sanctuaries.

That year, 2013 into Feb 2014, opened my heart and mind even further – the things I saw, the people and animals I met and the injustice I witnessed when man and beast are not valued as equally entitled to the compassion and respect we would afford others. I found the Facebook page of Animal Liberation Victoria while I was travelling and joined up, telling them who I was and that I wanted to do activism with them when I returned.

Founder Patty Mark later told me she cried when staff told her that a cop had joined their ranks and wanted to help. I still fundraise and do some activism with ALV today.

I knew I needed to do something more aligned with my values. I wrote to all the clubs I coached at privately and told them that I now saw how we treat horses in a different light and as such could no longer in good conscience teach for them.

I wondered how that would go down at committee meetings. I didn’t receive a response from any of them.

When Worlds Collide

I’d been a cop on a horse since I was 22 and knew little else than teaching and training horses and riders. I no longer wanted to do that. It was my sole income stream. I had financial commitments for my elderly mum and a mortgage for myself. I had no partner to fall back on. I knew I would have to re-train in some way.

In late March 2014, home and back at work just 3 weeks, I attended Duck Season opening with ALV. I was illegally on the water at dawn rescuing ducks on the outskirts of Geelong all too aware I was breaking the law and more than a fine if caught my job would be in jeopardy.

The next day I marched with ALV proudly carrying an Animal Liberation banner with another ALV member in a march against the Abbott Government…ironically at the back of the march directly in front of 8 of my colleagues. I gave them a cheery wave. I had never felt as sure that I was on the right side of justice as I was that weekend standing with other activists opposing government endorsed practices and policies. I can only imagine what some of my colleagues were saying to each other as they watched me that day!

The next morning, Monday, I turned up reluctantly to the Police Academy in Glen Waverley to commence a 5-day Semi-Automatic Firearm course. I had been dreading returning to operational duties and getting back on a horse to carry out duties that I knew would no longer be aligned with my sense of justice but I felt I had no other choice.

I wasn’t to know as I sat down at a desk to be briefed on what would occur over that 5 days that I would be walking out of that building within 4 hours, never to return as a serving member.

Sometimes our heart takes over. I read once in a book “The Power Of Now” by Eckhart Tolle; “If there is an apparent conflict between the mind and body, thought will be the lie and emotion the truth. Maybe not the absolute truth of who we are but the relative truth of our state of mind at that time.”

I stood in a line with other police to my left and right, learning to “rack” this new firearm, my head was full of thoughts of not belonging, of not wanting to be there, or enforce laws I no longer had faith in. I struggled to regain focus on what the instructor was saying. I stood there, willing myself to listen but our body, our emotions, will not be denied when the truth is clear to us. Tears welled up, growing fatter and heavier, then sliding down my face as I struggled to regain composure without drawing attention to myself.

But my heart won out that day… And it must be said, has not failed me since.

The Beet Retreat

I will not pretend the transition away from a 33-year career was an easy one. It was one of the hardest journeys of my life. There was the shame at letting colleagues down, there was the shame at not coping very well with that shame. There was fear of the unknown, insecurity of my abilities to reinvent myself and to pay my bills and meet my responsibilities to others.

And who was I now I was not a cop?

I described this painful time to a force appointed psychologist that I felt I was shedding my skin but I was still caught in it. Would I actually resign? Could I? Should I?

By chance, I decided to use one room here as an Air BNB. Simply because I missed other travellers and seekers. And I needed the money and distraction.

Over the course of the next months, I found that welcoming new visitors into my home and life was a highlight and salvation to my still troubled soul. Toward the end of the year, a friend of many years pointed out to me, “Maybe you could do this?” The idea of running my own business had never occurred to me. My first thought was no, I couldn’t! But I was soon won over by the idea of truly aligning all my passions through this purpose of providing others with a glimpse into a vegan world that was both welcoming and beautiful to all, no matter how they viewed animals at that time.

I came to know it as my “Gentle Advocacy” and I still do today.

The Beet Retreat has continued to grow organically since it’s low key beginnings in Easter 2014. I have simply responded to what my guests and visitors have asked for and what felt in alignment with my own values, interests, and talents.

I was 51 when I opened the doors and am 56 now in September 2018. I felt I had no skills beyond horse riding and teaching back then. I had no understanding of the value of soft skills: communication, empathy, enthusiasm, hospitality, kindness and a desire to serve.

The Beet Retreat has now welcomed 100’s of guests and cooking class participants. I run several whole food vegan cooking classes a month, host retreats, take guided hikes, I also have a book percolating inside me…

So many visitors have gone vegan or plant-based after an experience here… more still are well on their way or simply now understand the why behind much of what has changed the lives of people like me and others who will read these words.

This place is a work in progress always, as I am, as the movement is. None of us holds all the answers but we have the questions. It’s the questions that hold the power to initiate great change. Until we are prepared to examine, to question long-held beliefs, we will remain stuck.

Going vegan is simply the biggest single action any person can take on that journey to releasing themselves and others from oppression and injustice. It is not the be all and end all but without it all else will fail.

Not all of us are in a position to make huge career changes or even small ones but we all have so much more power to change than we realise.

I have long quoted who I believe was Theodore Roosevelt “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” It guided me as I travelled the world as a new vegan. It guided me as I stumbled along setting up my small business, never really sure if what I was doing was the “right way” to do things. And it guides me now in everything I do.

Just do what moves you. What feels right in your body. In your heart. Be smart, yes. Be courageous when you can. But be kind too. Not just to those who agree with us but to those who may agree with us tomorrow. Know we can be both. Always.

Author: Jan Saunders
Owner and Host at The Beet Retreat