Vegan Animal Rights Group Refuses To Promote Veganism

The night of Tuesday 23 April 2013 will forever be remembered as one of the most disgraceful nights in the history of the animal advocacy movement in Queensland, if not Australia.

It was the night that an alleged vegan animal rights group, aggressively ejected two individuals for wanting to promote veganism and to help other animals.

The shameful series of events took place at the screening of the movie Maximum Tolerated Dose on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

The public screening was a collaboration between Animal Liberation Queensland and the Facebook group Coast To Coast Animal Friends, two organisations that a reasonable person would think would be interested in promoting veganism and educating others on where to buy products that haven’t been tested on or contain animal products.Yet this wasn’t what happened.

Read more

Raising Awareness By Raising Your Voice and Placards, Or So They Say

Regular readers of this site will know that over the past few weeks, I have been discussing the alleged effectiveness of noisy, placard waving protests at increasing awareness to the plight of other animals.

In a previous piece, I compared these protests to union picket lines and how they are intimidating to the worker who is crossing the line, and portrayed as extreme by the media.

March 2013 saw two totally different ‘placard’ protests on take place on Queensland’s Gold Coast, with both protesting the treatment of exotic animals in circuses. The first one was held by relatively new, Coast To Coast Animal Friends on the 10th, and the second by the more established Animal Liberation Queensland, two weeks later on Sunday March 24.

Both protests were allegedly planned to increase awareness of the plight of exotic animals in circuses, though actually did very little of that. I still stand by my belief that these events are for the sole purpose of raising awareness of the respective groups, and nothing else. Allowing them to claim that they are doing something to improve the plight of animal x, y, or z whilst accomplishing very little.

In the weeks since the protests were held there has been virtually no information published by either group as to why they are against the way that exotic animals are treated in circuses, save for the congratulatory posting of photos, and reliving their own self indulgent moments.

Read more