S5. E6: Melanie Joy: Why We (still) Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and, Wear Cows
“The core of this problem in the world in many ways is the consciousness that we bring to the world. When we think of others in the world, or ourselves as being more or less worthy of being treated with respect, that very thinking is what drives many of the social problems we see in the world.”
- Dr. Melanie Joy
Melanie Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation, and relationships. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the best-selling, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. She is the founder of the non-profit, Beyond Carnism, dedicated to exposing and transforming carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat certain animals.
Melanie is a recipient of the Ahimsa award for her work on global nonviolence. This award was previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. She also received both the Peter Singer Prize and the Empty Cages Prize for her work developing strategies to reduce the suffering of animals.
Melanie’s TEDx talk called, Toward Rational Authentic Food Choices has received over 800,000 views.
No matter what your diet consists of, I hope that this conversation will inspire you to delve a little deeper into the systems and beliefs that quietly run the show when it comes to the psychology of what (and who) we eat.
Learn More About Melanie Joy
Learn More About Beyond Carnism
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Transcript:
Melanie: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, at the core of the problem is consciousness, the core of this problem in the world in many ways is the consciousness that we we bring to the world when we think of others in the world or ourselves as being more or less worthy of being treated with respect. That very thinking is what drives many of the social problems we see in the world.
Elizabeth: [00:00:31] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review species unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. Today's conversation is with Melanie Joy. Melanie is a Harvard educated psychologist specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation and relationships. She's the award-winning author of six books, including The Selling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. She is a recipient of the Ahimsa Award for her work on global nonviolence. This award was previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Her TEDx talk, called toward rational, authentic food choices, has received over 800000 views. Hi, Melanie, thank you so much for being here today. Let's go back and talk about your life growing up and how much of that influenced and played a role in your work and your life.
Melanie: [00:01:58] Really, like many people, I grew up with a dog who I loved, like a family member. Of course, I grew up eating meat, eggs and dairy. So I was somebody who really cared about animals like many people do, and I was also somebody who regularly ate animals like many people do. Of course, I was not a person who would ever want to contribute to animal suffering, especially when that suffering was so intensive and so completely unnecessary. Yet, for so many years in my life, I just never thought about the fact that I could pet my dog with one hand while I ate a pork chop that had once been an animal who was at least as intelligent and as sentient as my dog. I just didn't make the connection between the meat or eggs or dairy on my plate and the living being that it once was. What happened was that in nineteen eighty nine, when I was twenty three years old, I ate a hamburger that turned out to have been contaminated with Campylobacter, which is like the red meat version of Salmonella. I wound up really, really sick. I was hospitalized on intravenous antibiotics and after that experience, I just stopped eating meat. In my mind at the time, it wasn't, you know, a quote unquote ethical decision. It was like when you get really sick, you just ate the last thing you ate. You never want to touch. Yeah, I was just really disgusted by myself, so I kind of became a vegetarian by accident, you could say. Quickly thereafter, I became a vegan and. What happened was that I started researching how to cook for myself, how to shop for myself with my new diet. This research led me to information about animal agriculture and what I learned. Just it shocked and horrified me. I could not believe the extent of animal suffering. I could not even wrap my brain around it. I couldn't believe the environmental damage that was caused by animal agriculture and also human health problems that were caused by it. But of course, this was the 1980s, so there wasn't nearly as much awareness and information then as there is now. It was sufficient to really shock me. But honestly, what shocked me in some ways even more than what I was learning about the world was that nobody I talked to about what I was learning was willing to hear what I had to say. Their response would always be something like don't tell me that you'll ruin my meal or they call me a crazy, vegan hippie propagandist, and these were my dear friends, my family, my coworkers. They were people just like myself. They were rational people. They were compassionate people. They were people who cared about animals and about their impact on the world. Yet something was causing them to just stop thinking and feeling when it came to this issue of eating animals. So this was what really led me to ask this big question that I spent so many years trying to answer. What is it that causes caring people, rational, compassionate people to act in irrational and uncompassionate ways? What is it that causes people to turn away from what can only be called a global atrocity? In doing so, feeding that atrocity and perpetuating that atrocity, what's happening in the hearts and minds of people who would very likely choose to make very different choices if they weren't so resistant to the information that would help free them from this box that they seem to be in right? That's what led me to do my research on the psychology of AI research broadly, the psychology of violence and non-violence later to expand the psychology of oppression and social transformation. Specifically, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the psychology of eating animals.
Elizabeth: [00:05:58] I've often wondered this about myself, even when I read your book 10 years ago, I was a vegetarian but not vegan, and I'd been a vegetarian since I was a kid. I knew about dairy. I knew enough. I didn't know it was the 80s. I was in high school and I knew enough. I loved animals like, absolutely love them. There was something in me that was always like, Oh, at some point I'll go vegan. I just didn't until about five years ago, where I was literally walking down the street and I was like, How am I not vegan? This makes no sense and boom, in an instant, everything changed. But what was I doing for all those years in between? Then the day I stopped everything and was full on vegan in every way including diet and lifestyle. That's when I kept having kind of these moments of how did this not happen until now? Like what's going on there?
Melanie: [00:06:54] Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, people don't change until they're ready to change. The psychiatrist who has looked at the psychology of violence and non-violence, Robert Jay Lifton, talks about how when it comes to certain types of violence, he was looking at a global scale. People often have this without knowing. On one level, we're aware of an unpleasant truth that we'd rather not know. On another level, we choose not to look at that and not to pay attention to it. So for many people, perhaps all people who grow up in these dominant animal eating cultures here, we're talking about eating animals, the culture, the society itself, socializes us to cater to the part of us that chooses not to know, that chooses not to see the truth. The system, the animal eating system that we are born into essentially increases the chances that we will not pay attention to that little truth, that little voice inside us. It increases the chances that we will not pay attention to our authentic experience. So for most people, rather than make food choices that reflect what they authentically think and feel. They make food choices that go against their caring nature, that go against their own interests, that go against the interests of others, often without even realizing what they're doing. This was really what my research uncovered when I was doing my doctoral research.
Melanie: [00:08:18] I interviewed meat eaters and vegans and vegetarians, meat cutters, butchers and people who raised and killed their own animals for food. I was hearing the same story over and over again, which was that people were uncomfortable with the idea of harming animals unnecessarily. This wasn't a matter of survival they were talking about. This was essentially a matter of choice. Not only were they uncomfortable with these decisions, at the same time, they worked to mitigate this discomfort, this psychological discomfort that they were experiencing. So they were using this psychology, essentially going through these psychological gymnastics so that they wouldn't be aware of the moral discomfort they were feeling. So let me give you some examples and I'll talk about what my research found. What I discovered is that there is an invisible belief system that I came to call casteism that conditions us to eat certain animals and harness them is essentially the opposite of veganism. Now, we tend to assume that only vegans and vegetarians follow a belief system when it comes to eating animals. But the only reason most of us learn to eat pigs but not dogs, for example, is because we do follow a belief system when it comes to eating animals. Eating animals is not a necessity, which is true for many, not not all people in the world today. Not everybody can make their food choices freely, but it's true for many people in the world today. Then it's a choice, and choices always stem from beliefs. But Carne ism is a special kind of belief system that essentially keeps itself hidden, so we don't even realize we've been born into this belief system in the first place. We feel like, you know, we learn to believe that eating animals is just a given. It's just the way things are. It's the normal way to be what we do, right? So we unquestionably participate in this system, even though it conditions us to act against our compassion and against our sense of justice or fairness and against what we ultimately want in the world, which is to be more authentic in the choices that we make. Alarmism is a violent system. It's an oppressive system. It's literally organized around extensive violence. In fact, meat cannot be procured without killing and again, dairy production causes extensive harm to animals. So the system is carneous, it really runs counter to our core moral values of compassion and of justice. Essentially, it teaches us how not to think and feel and the way that Carneism does. This is by using a set of psychological defenses. These are defense mechanisms, psychological mechanisms that essentially distort our perceptions of meat, eggs, dairy and the animals we eat.
Elizabeth: [00:11:13] How does it distort our perceptions?
Melanie: [00:11:15] Yeah. I'll give you very specific examples of this. It distorts our perceptions, which then disconnects us from our natural empathy for animals. So then we behave accordingly. So, for example, casteism teaches us to see farmed animals as abstractions, as lacking any individuality or any personality of their own. So we learn to believe that like a pig is a pig and all pigs are the same. We know on some level, of course, that pigs are individually. All beings, they're unique, they have their own personalities and characteristics, they're intelligent, they're sensitive individuals. Most of us would never knowingly harm a pig who was standing right in front of us. Yet we have no problem bringing home our bags of bacon, right? So we learn to see farmed animals as abstractions, or we learn to think of farmed animals as objects. So, for example, we refer to the chicken on our plate as something rather than someone. These are psychological distancing mechanisms. They prevent us from feeling the world is a comfort that we would very likely otherwise feel when confronted with meat, eggs, dairy and farmed animals. We also learn through casteism to believe in a mythology. We learn to justify eating animals by believing in this mythology that a whole set of myths all fall under what I refer to as the three ends of justification. This idea that eating animals is normal, natural and necessary, and these myths are promoted by all of the major social institutions, from the family to state medicine, nutrition, business, so on and so forth. Not surprisingly, there's the same arguments that have been used to justify violent practices throughout human history. We've learned to believe that male dominance is normal, natural and necessary. Heterosexual supremacy is normal, natural and necessary.
Elizabeth: [00:13:20] That's how the world works until the system is completely dismantled. Everyone goes along with it thinking this is just how it is with cronyism, though that's worldwide, like every culture has its own version of what is normal necessary, for instance, in the sense of things we wouldn't eat here and people eat elsewhere that we're horrified by, i.e. dogs. That's all that all plays into it. Can you talk about that?
Melanie: [00:13:46] Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, cronyism is a global phenomenon, right? So that means in mediating cultures around the world, people learn to classify a small handful of animals as edible and all the rest we learn to classify as inedible and disgusting and often even offensive to consume. So even though the type of species changes from culture to culture, the way that we think about and relate to edible versus inedible species remains consistent, right? So in the West, we tend to be disgusted by the idea of eating dogs in Hindu cultures. They're disgusted by the idea of eating cows, the type of species changes. But the way we relate to the animals we eat or don't eat remains remarkably consistent. Then you have my book that was first published in its first foreign language, was Korean, and I went to give talks in South Korea. In some places in South Korea, people do eat dogs, but they don't eat all kinds of dogs. They're terribly offended by the idea of eating a Maltese. Right. So the compartmentalization can be broken down even further. But essentially the result is the same. We learn to disconnect from our natural empathy toward those individuals, those species we've learned to classify as edible.
Elizabeth: [00:15:06] Why is it important that we understand this whole concept of cronyism to begin with?
Melanie: [00:15:10] Carneism is, first of all, that cronyism is a global phenomenon. Carneism is institutionalized. That means it's embraced and maintained by all of the major social institutions. It's really woven through the very fabric of society in some ways, you know, to shape this mentality, to shape norms, laws, beliefs, behaviors, et cetera. Because it is so widespread when we are born into this dominant system of casteism, we inevitably learn to look at the world through the lens of casteism. That means we internalize it and we internalize the psychology. We internalize these defenses. We internalize the Carnatic tendency to resist any information that challenges the mentality that we've inherited, that eating animals is the right thing to do. We resist the very information that would help free ourselves from the Carnatic box. So the first step to becoming free is awareness. These defenses lose much of their power when we become aware of them, when we recognize, Oh, this is a distorted way of thinking. Of course, if I wouldn't do this to a dog, why would I do this to a pig? We reclaim our freedom of choice without awareness. There is no free choice. Most of us have no idea that we've been born into this system that just guides our thoughts, our feelings, our preferences. Some of the most profound and impactful per. Social decisions we make in our lives and we make these decisions, these food choices, every single day, throughout the day. So awareness is a necessary step toward change and with awareness, we can start asking ourselves, what do I authentically think and feel? What kind of world and life do I want to be participating in rather than what have I been taught to think and feel?
Elizabeth: [00:17:08] Even if you have no intention of being vegan or stop eating meat, at least know that you're in this big world of conditioning and like meth in a lot of ways that what we're doing and what we're eating, this is not what has to be.
Melanie: [00:17:23] Well, you're right, and it gives us a sense like an ability to make a choice. Most people, when they do become aware, they do change their choices or they change the way they relate to the system. This doesn't mean that they go vegan overnight. Many people don't. They transition more slowly, but it does mean that they adopt a very different attitude towards eating animals and towards themselves. Many people commit to increasing their awareness and naturally, with that increase in awareness, their consumption patterns start to shift.
Elizabeth: [00:17:57] Even though I say when I went vegan, it was like a moment, right? And I was completely transformed. The next day I was fully vegan, but it was more likely a series of little awakenings and finally, there were enough of them where I woke up in a sense and really saw it. I had read your book, I had read a lot of books, and so it just still kind of astonishes me that it took me that long, but which also gives me great, great empathy for people who don't get it at all.
Melanie: [00:18:27] Yeah. I mean, and understanding carneism can help us appreciate how good people can participate in harmful practices, this doesn't necessarily make them bad people, right? It's that the problem is not the individual per say. The problem is the system we've been born into. People don't change unless they're ready and able to change, and you have to have a certain amount of privilege to be able to change. First of all, you have to be able to make your food choices freely. If you're on a limited income and you're raising children on your own and you have no time and you, you can't afford to make your food choices freely and make healthful food choices, then you're not in a position to make the kinds of changes that somebody who's in a more privileged situation can make. So I think it's useful to really think about veganism and cronyism on a spectrum, right? It's not where we're at on that spectrum. That's as important in some ways as where we're heading. I always encourage people to, not necessarily go vegan, but to try to be as vegan as possible. This means like whenever you sit down to a meal, ask yourself how vegan can this meal be each week? How vegan can this week be? Nobody can be more vegan than what's possible for them? Most people are willing to commit to being as vegan as possible and doing what's possible. Frankly, if everyone in the world were as vegan as possible, the world would become vegan pretty quickly.
Elizabeth: [00:19:56] It absolutely would, and it would be a much kinder place. That's such a better way to put it, going vegan as possible and so much less scary and less threatening to so many people. It changes the whole conversation because there's been for so long this whole vegan, non vegan divide and how tricky that is. I think a little bit of that not so much in individual relationships may be, but in a bigger societal way. It's starting to melt a little because the world's become so much more OK with vegans in the past five years.
Melanie: [00:20:29] Absolutely, absolutely. Different places in the world are at different sorts of levels of development when it comes to vegans and veganism, right? Talking about these issues with people in positions of leadership in the vegan movement, with people working in the mainstream media who are not vegan everywhere I've been, I've heard and witnessed the same thing, which is that veganism is really exploding and the vegan movement is really growing quite rapidly. That's really, really exciting to see.
Elizabeth: [00:20:57] Since you talked to so many people in so many places, do you kind of get the same response no matter where you are?
Melanie: [00:21:06] I do. I mean, this is what I've learned is that we do care. Most people very much care about their impact on others and on other animals and really do want to live, a quote unquote moral life, like a life that they feel good about living. I'm not using my words. I'm using words that people have shared with me. So that gives me a lot of hope. Many people care about the truth and they do not want to be, you know, nobody wants to be a puppet on the strings of a system that's conditioning them to act against their own interests and to act against their integrity.
Elizabeth: [00:21:44] When you say it's kind of embedded. Every layer of society in the sense that you can you can literally do anything you want to a farmed animal in terms of torture suffering. They're not really protected. It's very, very little. Whereas if you did the same thing to a dog or a cat, you'd go to jail and now you go to jail for five years if you did certain things.
Melanie: [00:22:05] That's right. I mean to be fair, there are plenty of dogs and cats who are not protected if they're in laboratories, for example, or it's hard to enforce those laws. However, the fact that we even have the laws in the first place is a reflection of exactly what you're talking about, which is this compartmentalization in our minds of these are animals who we've decided have moral worth that are deserving of our caring and our protection. All of the other animals exist essentially to serve us, literally to serve us, they have no protection under the law. Even the Animal Welfare Act that is supposed to offer some semblance of protection to some farmed animals doesn't cover the vast majority of farmed animals, which are birds and fish and even the ones who are covered. Essentially, they live lives of abject misery and and what one could only call torture.
Elizabeth: [00:22:57] Yeah. In your TED talk, I watched it again this morning. It's brilliant. Somehow, you got away with showing two minutes of factory farm footage. That is really it's hard to watch, but almost a million people have watched this. It's powerful.
Melanie: [00:23:15] Now, in a moment, I'm going to show a two minute video of animal factories, which can be difficult to watch. So I want to remind you that my intention is simply to raise awareness so I have to make the invisible visible. I've selected material that I think is sufficient to inform you without traumatizing you. But if it's too difficult to watch, just close your eyes and plug your ears. Piglets are castrated by workers who cut into their skin and rip out their testicles. Next, the workers chop off their tails once pigs have reached market weight, they are sent to slaughter at the slaughterhouse. Pigs are knocked in the head with a steel rod, hung upside down and have their throats slit. Improper stunning condemns many pigs to having their throats slit while they are fully conscious and suffering.
Melanie: [00:24:52] Yeah, and thank you for your kind words to your point about the challenge essentially of getting people to bear witness to what's actually happening. There's this implicit contract between producer and consumer. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. We don't tell us and we don't ask and we don't want to know because it's easier to live with that knowing without knowing and to choose not to pay attention to the part of us that does know it's easier to turn away. At the same time, it's painful to see the suffering. Many people turn away from the suffering of animals because they care. I mean, that's the great irony. We turn away because we care. Often vegans feel like they sort of need to hit people over the head with the truth and like, just share like like minute after minute after minute of this, like bloody torture. That's an excuse, the expression. But that's often overkill. Some people never need to see it. They just need to know the truth intellectually. For other people, they do need to witness some of the reality of what's happening to the animals. It is in that moment where they actually see the pain that their heart becomes open. It's not just their mind, but their heart also becomes open. Those are moments of transformation. It's a delicate balance, though, because if we make people unintentional witnesses, often vegans will shock people, especially new vegans, especially because they've woken up.
Melanie: [00:25:42] They see it, and it's just so traumatizing and they can't believe it. They say, Oh my God, I want you to see what I see. If everybody could see what I see. We would stop this horror. There's probably some truth in that. At the same time, if we make people unintentional witnesses, that in itself is a form of emotional violence and it can really traumatize people and shut them down. So really, the challenge is inviting people to bear witness to the truth, giving them permission to say no, making sure you get their consent. So they enter into this willingly and not showing any more than you need to. It doesn't take much 30 seconds right? A minute, right? Two minutes. Maybe that's all people really need to see. It's the way I describe it. For people who were non vegans who struggle to understand why vegans can seem so insistent and can come across with this such such a level of intensity sometimes and such anger sometimes try to imagine that you wake up one day and somebody tells you, by the way, did you know that all of the meat, eggs and dairy in the world is actually from dogs and cats? I'm going to take you on a tour of the factories in which these individuals are turned into meat, eggs and dairy, and they take you on this tour and you just you hear puppies that you see puppies being torn from their mothers and you hear screaming hissing cats and kittens, and you see them literally being dismembered alive, being skinned and boiled alive. You just witness the torture and you're so horrified. Then you go home to your family and you try to tell them what you've just seen and they tell you that you're overreacting or you're making a big deal out of nothing or you're exaggerating and you say, No, no, no, I've seen this trust me. Oh, and they tell you there are laws protecting them. Don't worry, this is the way it's meant to be. Don't worry. The more they resist, the more you feel like you have to amp it up because you're just not getting through to them. Finally, they say, Stop trying to control me. You made your choices. I'll make mine. But in your heart of hearts, this isn't about your personal choice as your personal freedom, right? This is about you having been profoundly conditioned by a system that has hijacked your consciousness that's coercing you into acting against your better judgment in many ways. But you can't say that because you start to come across as, quote unquote preachy, right? So, there's an understandable urgency that many vegans feel when they're trying to raise the message.
Elizabeth: [00:28:16] Yeah, well, you talk about how cronyism is similar to racism, sexism and why this is important to understand.
Melanie: [00:28:24] Essentially, all of the various isms when we look at racism, sexism, classism, species and so on and so forth. These all reflect, most importantly, the systems are structured. Similarly, all of these systems are systems of oppression, although the experience of each set of victims of violent or oppressive systems will always be unique. The systems themselves are structurally similar. Most importantly, they all reflect the very same mentality. This mentality is based on the belief in a hierarchy of moral worth. That means it's a belief that certain individuals or groups are more worthy of moral consideration of being treated with respect than others. This meant how? It's organized around the same defense mechanisms that I talk about in why we love dogs, eat pigs and wear cows. It makes us feel defensive whenever we are challenged to think differently about the victims of these systems and about our participation in these systems. So really, it's important to be aware of this mentality because if we're not aware of it, who is oppressing whom may change. But the process of oppression and the mentality that drives oppression stays the same. So we basically just trade one set of victims for another. We start protecting dogs. Maybe we'll start protecting pigs, but leave other animals behind. We protect one group of humans and then another group of humans ends up being oppressed at the end of the day. At the core of the problem is consciousness. The core of this problem in the world in many ways is the consciousness that we bring to the world when we think of others in the world or ourselves as being more or less worthy of being treated with respect. That, very thinking, is what drives many of the social problems we see in the world.
Elizabeth: [00:30:26] You're in front of a lot of people and you talk to a lot of people when people kind of maybe just get it for the first time when they hear you or they saw your TED talk or they read one of your books. What do you tell them in terms of how they can start? Where to start?
Melanie: [00:30:43] Well, I would say, I mean, as we talked about earlier, awareness is key. At Karnezis Talk, we have a lot of information for helping people build awareness. We have short articles. We've got really short videos. Course, there's my book. So awareness is key. Committing to being as vegan as possible is a great first step, and I always encourage people to try to become vegan allies and a vegan ally is a supporter of veganism. Of course, the vegans, even though they're not fully vegan themselves yet. Vegan Ally is a person who has committed to being as vegan as possible who's not yet vegan, but who is using their influence to assist in the transformation of carnism. So we often come at this issue with the assumption that either you're vegan and you're part of the solution or you're not vegan and you're part of the problem. This prevents ninety nine percent of the global population from supporting a cause that really needs all the help it can get. Some of the people who have done the most to promote veganism and to transform carnism are not vegan. They're journalists who cover our work, for example, and get it in front of millions of people. So use your influence, however you can. Some of the people who donate to my organization, they're not vegan, but they want to help us promote these ideas and help create a more compassionate world. So when somebody is a vegan ally, that simply means that they are committed to helping to be a part of the solution.
Elizabeth: [00:32:14] So it's been 10 years since Why We Love Dogs first came out, and your publisher just released the 10th Anniversary Edition. Did they bring out another edition because of where the world is right now in terms of transition and veganism? Or is that just my bubble?
Melanie: [00:32:30] There is this transition. There has been this transition happening for sure. I mean, there's more awareness now than there has been in the past. We know today, for example, that just in just one day more farmed animals are killed than the total number of people killed in all wars throughout history. We have this information. More and more people are aware of it. More and more people are aware of the fact that the U.N. has pointed out that animal agriculture is one of the most significant contributors to some of the most serious environmental problems facing the world today. Not the least of which is climate change. We also are more aware of the fact that there's a growing body of literature demonstrating the dangers of an animal based diet and the benefits of a plant based one. Now we also are more aware that animal agriculture, specifically factory farms and wet markets, are leading drivers of pandemics and threats to public health. In the past decade, awareness of veganism has grown, as has the availability of an acceptability of plant based or vegan foods. So I think it's the combination of more awareness and the fact that it's easier for many people to access vegan options that have made people more morally uncomfortable with the idea of eating animals. It's harder to justify this behavior and more receptive to information about veganism.
Elizabeth: [00:33:58] That's awesome. Melanie, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for all the work that you do.
Melanie: [00:34:05] Thank you, Beth. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for doing this and having this great podcast. I'm so glad you're raising awareness the way you do.
Elizabeth: [00:34:11] Thank you. To learn more about Melanie and about carnism, go to her website, it's Carnism. We will have links to Melanie's work and her books on our website. Speciesunite.com We are on Facebook and Instagram @Speciesunite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate and review species. Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we are unpatriotic. It's Patriot Species Unite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana, Poky, Gabriela Sibyl SKA and Ana Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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