WALTER EDMUND BOND (37096013)
5/3/2018 11:08:46 AM
Veganism At The Intersection

Intersectionality. The places where all the various struggles for social justice movements intersect, and the places many feel we should all come together linking our struggles, becoming stronger together and fortifying a united front against racism, sexism, ableism and all other forms of human oppression.

But what about specieism? It seems that when intersectionality gets applied to Animal liberation that it is largely a one way road. We are to sacrifice the integrity of our movement to once again focus on human issues as the core, as the primary concern. We are called upon to stop with all this Vegan nonsense which, don’t you know, is just so elitist and privileged! we are asked to only see the suffering, torture, exploitation and death of hundreds of species, billions of lives lost and brutalized as equal to one segment of our own species not enjoying full social equality?

I don’t buy it….. Pluralistic movements often fail from lack of a definitive goal. When your dealing with large groups of people with various beliefs, ideas and points of view the more complicated you make the goal the more you alienate your own cause from the mainstream and in the case of Animal Liberation we want Veganism, concern for Animals and the Earth to be accessible to all, to be practicable by all, not just by those who we feel have right ideas or politics or views, right?

Veganism and Animal right is not a punk rock movement where we don’t want the ‘conformists’ or ‘posers’ to take ‘our thing’. It’s very good that Veganism along with concern for those outside of our species is becoming more mainstream, this is what makes it relevant and turns that stream of consciousness into eventual and long term change for Animals. Continue reading →

WALTER BOND (37096013)
1/16/2014 7:55:37 AM
The Roots Of Compassion

According to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11th edition the definition of the word “compassion” is: “Sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it”. Very well, by the definition thus given we see right off the bat that compassion is more than just a feeling, or a pretentious connection with others’ pain. It is far more than a buzzword to be bandied about in the name of a cause.

Compassion is the precursor to acting on behalf of another’s well being. Without this “desire to alleviate another’s distress” we don’t have compassion, we have sympathy. And sympathy is really more about our own feelings towards another than any serious desire to help. It’s not my intention to split hairs or play games with words. However, far too much of what we hear today when it comes to the rights, welfare and liberation of Animals and the Earth is just that, wordplay.

In reality when you go to a Vegan restaurant or wear a t-shirt with an Animal Rights message (even the ‘radical’ ones) the Animals aren’t thanking you. The Animals are in cages, behind walls, on their way to slaughter or suffering from the nefarious designs of human exploitation. The male chicks thrown into the grinders because they can’t lay eggs aren’t thanking you or me for anything. They are dying and wishing that they were living, just as we all wish to live. Continue reading →

WALTER EDMUND BOND (37096013)
2/18/2014 10:11:58 AM
Patterns Of Oppression

Whenever we the human race set about oppressing another group from within or from outside our own species the justifications we use are not only similar in design but often times exact verbatim. There is a fairly intricate pathology to how we determine the otherness of different groups. Unfortunately, it is far too complex for the scope of this slim essay. However, I would like to highlight a couple prime examples that I have come across in my years as an activist for the liberation of Animals and the Earth, as well as my experience as a political prisoner because of that fight.

I will say from the outset that what I am making are correlations of the way in which various groups are oppressed, along with the arbitrary justifications for those oppressions. But these are in no way comparisons. Animals suffer worse injustices in vastly greater numbers than any segment of humanity. The annual death toll due to war in the middle east is roughly 91,000. For people murdered by the police it’s between 500 and 1000 annually. There are currently over 2,300,000 imprisoned in the United States. This is nothing compared to the annual confinement, torture and murder of: 9,500,000,000 Chickens, 100,000,000 Pigs and 70,000,000 Animals in laboratories!

That said, one major thing we do in order to feel comfortable oppressing a group deemed as other is to infantilize them. We do this with Animals in a myriad of ways. We take domesticated Animals and baby talk to them as if they were an ‘itty bitty widdle bawby’! Even though these creatures have, in certain arenas, aptitudes that are far beyond our own. Sure your dog or cat cannot read Shakespeare but neither can you smell a foot print and tell the age of its maker. Nor can we see in the dark, fall from several stories and walk away unharmed and many other amazing aptitudes and abilities that are shared by canines and felines. Continue reading →

Walter Bond sent a letter asking us to repost this essay from June 2013.
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WALTER EDMUND BOND (37096013)
6/25/2013 2:40:01 PM
The Cruelty of Industrial Technology

There is no brutality as wicked as systematic cruelty, and systematic cruelty only becomes widespread by aid of technology. When I was a young man before and leading up to my Vegan awakening I built slaughterhouses. Industrial plumbing, welding. structural steel and machine installation were my daily routines. One of those machines was called ‘the beater’. The beater is a 10’x10′ stainless steel monster. It is one in a series of machines set in a row and dedicated night and day to the disembodying process of hogs.

After a 500 pound hog has had his or her throat cut and been hung upside down to bleed to death, he or she then gets disemboweled by a series of slaughterhouse workers evenly dispersed along the kill floor. After disembowelment is complete all organs are sent to another area of the kill floor via stainless steel trays rolling on a conveyor belt. The next part of the process is what’s called the ‘hog bath’ (which I also installed). The hog bath is a 50 foot scalding hot tubular bathtub that the hog carcasses go through mainly to slacken the skin to be peeled, salted and stacked. But before that happens, the now dead and hollow remains of a once living and feeling being must go through ‘the beater’.

The inside of the beater is similar in design to a car wash except the rollers all stand vertically and are on immobile swing arms. There are four spindles on each side and each spindle contains five, six foot metal lengths, each six inches wide and known as ‘strapping’. Every six inches on center running the length of the strapping is a bolt. Around each bolt is a large nylon rope with a loop and two knots that hang out of the strapping approximately 18 inches. When the machine is operational the spindles whirl with incredible torque and the nylon knots beat the hair of the hogs dead and softened skin.

One must always lock and tag out the electricity box while working inside the beater so that it is not possible to start it by accident while anyone is inside. Failure to do this has actually ended with workers being beaten to death while working inside the beater. Since all the strapping and bolts are made of stainless steel, impact drills cannot be used for quick assembly because stainless steel binds. What this means is that someone must individually set every single nylon rope and screw the bolts down by hand. That person was me in 1995 in Logansport, Indiana. It took me five 12 hour shifts to complete the task. Continue reading →