Abstract
Vegan education positions itself as a non-violent alternative to education that supports direct action and that is, in principle, committed to the use of violence as a means towards liberatory ends. Vegan education is not limited to opposing the use of animals for food but targets all abuse by humans of non-humans, which it seeks to remedy by non-violent, pacifist education. The critique of vegan education problematises its fundamental pacifism and absolutist rejection of violence. Critics emphasise, further, its elitist and prescriptive stance that is out of touch with the plight of the poor in the global south. A final, related criticism highlights the logical and practical separation of vegan education from other radical and liberatory social movements.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/09/437440.html and http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/animal-liberation-front-to-vegan-death-threats/2209/ (both retrieved 20 October 2011).
- 2.
- 3.
Apparently, the quotation is to be understood in the context of Gandhi’s argument to his biographer that collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have “aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence”. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi (retrieved 1 June 2018).
- 4.
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/09/437440.html (retrieved 20 October 2011).
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Warbington Wells (2017: 159, 162) points out that biologists tend to spend more time studying the dead (and the living dead) than the living. In truth, she asserts, biology education devalues death, even though it is (by definition) the study of life. Beavington et al. (2017: 94) suggest that all biology education should be preceded by “teaching respect for all life”.
- 8.
I discuss this position in Horsthemke 2017: 136–141.
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Horsthemke, K. (2018). Vegan Education. In: Animal Rights Education. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98593-0_9
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