Erik

About me:

I do a regular podcast on Vegan.com that provides news, recipes, and commentary. My main activist focus relates to "dismantlement" -- a branch of the animal protection movement specifically devoted to stripping animal agriculture of its key assets. Dismantlement is the theme of Part II of Meat Market.

An important part of my work relates to helping vegetarian activists hone their rhetoric in order to become more persuasive. Towards that end, I advocate the "commodity-cruelty argument." This argument is described at length in Meat Market but can be boiled down to just a few sentences. Specifically, animal products tend to be almost pure commodities. As such, only the lowest cost producers can stay in business. It turns out that the main way to bring down the costs related to raising poultry and livestock is to resort to overcrowding the animals and subjecting them to inadequate care. So what we have in the United States is an industry that systematically brutalizes nearly every single one of the ten billion farmed animals it raises each year. And on top of that, the industry consistently lies about the cruelties it inflicts upon all these animals.

I'm devoted to helping people learn to advocate effectively for farmed animals, and inspiring them to take up a variety of activist efforts. If you'd like to find out more about my work, please check out my podcast on Vegan.com.