Humanity’s longest war: The war against animals

A podcast bringing you thought provoking deep dives across a wide variety of subjects from one of the authors of Think Like a Vegan: What everyone can learn from vegan ethics.

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Dr Stacy Banwell discusses her book, The War Against Nonhuman Animals: A Non-Speciesist Understanding of Gendered Reproductive Violence. I began exploring the entanglement of war and animals in season two of my podcast when Josh Milburn and Sara van Goozen were my guests. Stacy takes the analysis of war and animals along the logical continuum, putting our actions within the context of International Humanitarian Law, the Geneva Convention and the additional protocols. She does so in an astonishing way – she’s at once clinical in her analysis, devastating in her straightforward telling of facts and incredibly sensitive to the real and lived experiences of people and animals.

Stacy is an associate professor of Criminology at the University of Greenwich in the UK. She has made two remarkable animations on why the war against animals is a crisis for humans too and one on gendered wars and gender-based violence. She has a long list of publications in addition to the book discussed in this episode, and many focussed on gender violence whether during war or armed conflict or otherwise, including The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence, Sex and Crime, and the monograph Gender and the Violence(s) of War and Armed Conflict: More dangerous to be a woman?

During her talk, Stacy mentions numbers of animals killed in the animal agribusiness in the UK and I think it’s important to note here the global numbers of land animals killed for meat in 2022 (as published in 2023 at Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, ‘Meat and Dairy Production – Meat and Seafood Production & Consumption’, Our World in Data, first published in August 2017, last revision in December 2023 https://ourworldindata.org/…/animals-slaughtered-for-meat):
• 75.21 billion chickens
• 3.19 billion ducks
• 1.49 billion pigs
• 637.27 million sheep
• 515.23 million turkeys
• 504.14 million goats
• 308.64 million cattle

And saying “I don’t eat meat” doesn’t get you out of this racket. These numbers exclude dairy cows and egg-laying chickens because these become other products, food or otherwise, when they’re slaughtered. They’re not usually destined for meat like steaks or parts such as leg or breast, but more for burgers or nuggets and other food products. Marine life is excluded from the numbers because there is no accurate way of measuring it (find the reasons in my book, Think Like A Vegan)

TW: discussion of gendered and reproductive violenceWebsite/SocialsStacy Banwell
https://www.vegansociety.com/get-involved/research/who-we-are/stacy-banwell
https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/las/stacy-banwell

Animations:
Why is the war against nonhuman animals a crisis for humans too?
https://youtu.be/pQCnJqeP0sQ?feature=shared
Gendered wars and gender-based violence: Who ‘is dangerous’, who is ‘in danger’?
https://youtu.be/6Hq14VEwgWo?feature=shared

Emi Leese

https://emilialeese.substack.com
http://thinklikeavegan.com
http://emilialeese.com
@emi.leese or @thinklikeavegan, Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads

Credits

Host: Emilia A. Leese
Guest: Stacy Banwell
Production & Engineering: Jim Moore of Bloody Vegans Productions; https://www.bloodyvegansproductions.com
Graphics: Catherine Dorrell https://www.messyvegancook.com

MusicOpening theme: “Flashbacks” by Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business
Interlude: “Jin Regret” by Matthew Gerstenberger; Seismicity on Soundcloud https://on.soundcloud.com/3Pf8g
Closing theme: “Tear Things Up” by Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business

This podcast is part of iROAR, the Animals Podcasting Network https://iroarpod.com