PETA Global 2017 Issue 1

Q & A

Sue Coe Artist and Author of The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto

“ The minimum we owe animals is to go vegan.

fundraisers, and I can be useful. Being part of a community is imperative. One night, I was tearing my hair out with sorrow as I heard a cow had escaped a slaughterhouse and was recaptured and returned. It was midnight, and I sent an e-mail to a friend who rescues animals. He e-mailed back within a few seconds with these words: “I am outside the slaughterhouse right now.” I knewwith absolute certainty he

generally waffle over the cheese, and now there is the perfect tasty nonviolent substitute. Refuse to participate in the violence of breeding others just to murder them. ” IEN: Do you think attitudes are changing? SC: Yes, animal rights is now a global movement gaining in strength. There is curiosity about how to go vegan and there is the science that backs up going vegan for human health and [the] health of the planet. There is science to prove nonhuman animals are persons with all the dreams and imaginings and awareness of our own species. Animal activists will never give up.

Ingrid E. Newkirk: Why publish a book that is nearly all pictures? Susan Coe: My idea is to communicate something terrible, then something joyous, without words. The animals liberate themselves and find a vegan world, and it’s all told in a small book so you can keep it in your pocket and use when needed. IEN: How do you cope with cruelty to animals? SC: The enormity of the animal holocaust cannot be fully comprehended by most humans, only partially glimpsed. We are trying to see the world from the animals’ point of view, and we can be traumatized as well as trivialized and mocked ¬– just as animals are trivialized and mocked. It’s a trick to keep that frail thread between wanting justice for animals and believing in the human ability to change. Every social justice movement in history felt despair, frustration, and hopelessness. What was a utopian dream, dreamt by visionaries and revolutionaries, slowly emerged from the fog to become real. IEN: Is it hard to sleep when you know what’s going on? SC: I am lucky because making art is my therapy. I can help animals by making prints to sell for different

would rescue Freddie, who is now living at a sanctuary. I dedicated my book to Freddie, the cowwho made himself visible and escaped the slaughterhouse twice. IEN: What steps would you like people to take? SC: The minimum we owe animals is to go vegan. Refuse to participate in the violence of breeding others just to murder them. Walk away from it forever. Our real birthday is the day we all go vegan. SC: It’s easy for me not to be waffly because I live in between two “dairy” farms. I can see the replacement heifers every day by the highway, their tiny bodies lying on the snow and ice. They are chained next to their plastic kennels, row after row of them. I can hear the mothers crying for their calves who have been torn away. They will never know a warm lick from their mothers, or the scent of fresh meadows. They are bred to replace their mothers, like machines, every four years, over and over, and the male baby calves are just thrown away as a useless byproduct … all because humans like the “taste” of cheese? Well-meaning people, where animal cruelty is not in their face, IEN: How can someone become vegan who might be waffling about it?

The Animals� Vegan Manifesto is available for purchase at PETACatalog.com.

J Watch upcoming issues for more from Sue!

8 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS