On Goodall and Hummus (i.e. More Things Overheard)

In a Huffington Post interview with Marianne Schnall today, Dr. Jane Goodall displayed a disappointing and marked lack of consistency in her view of whether nonhuman animals exist solely for human use and pleasure. To defend her own choice to use nonhuman animals, Dr. Goodall fell back on that old familiar excuse that veganism is "just too hard". When asked about the hypocrisy of calling one species 'pet', while calling another 'pest' (in this case, with reference to hamsters kept in cages vs. mice killed in traps), she responded:

And you get the white coated scientist who has a dog at home who's part of the family who understands ever word I say - but then he goes and puts on his white coat and does unspeakable things to dogs in the name of science. There's a real schizophrenia. Yes, we are very peculiar [laughs].

Then, after describing the health benefits she experienced when she chose to stop eating meat, she was asked about going vegan and responded:

Well, I can't go vegan because travelling like I do, I really, really don't think I could. You know, it's really difficult. And I stay with people - we had a vegan staying us one time, and it's very difficult. Three hundred days on the road - you go to North Korea - it's jolly hard to be vegetarian much less a vegan [laughs]. But I do my best. And if people would think about intensive farming - if they would think of the damage to the environment of growing all this corn or raising all these cattle. If they would think about the torture of the animals on the intensive farms. And then if they would realize about the antibiotics getting out into the environment, the bacteria building up resistance and the superbugs that we are breeding, more people would become vegetarians.

So she has no difficulty promoting vegetarianism for the environment, for one's health and because of "the torture of the animals on the intensive farms" -- but veganism (i.e. refraining from using animals and their products altogether) is off her radar because it's "very difficult". Considering that as recently as 2007, Goodall was asserting that some cases of vivisection could be justifiable, and that vegetarianism is "not necessarily an option that everyone has to adopt" ("Goodall on Vivisection and Vegetarianism", from Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach), her own schizophrenia today isn't all that surprising. There were bits in the rest of her interview that I also found disconcerting. For instance, a) she presented what she called "good zoos" as perhaps being a better place for primates to be than in the wild where they still experience "fear" and "pain", yet b) states later that chimpanzees or the "voice of the natural world" would, if given the opportunity, tell us to bug off and stop interfering and then c) asserts that humans need to get involved--that we "have to go in and manage very often". The one thing that is clear from the interview is that Dr. Jane Goodall thinks that some animals are ours to use--just not the specific ones that she doesn't want us to use.

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I found an interesting looking recipe for hummus this morning that uses ginger and heaps of fresh mint to flavour it. The filler in the article that leads up to the recipe, however, left me with a (yep--here I go) bad taste in my mouth.

Because they don’t eat dairy products or meat, vegans can have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet. Combining grains and legumes can be a good source of protein. This hummous can be made with a whole grain to ensure for maximum protein intake.

Vegans do not have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet and the whole protein combining theory has been discredited. Why, oh why do people not take 10-15 minutes to do a little bit of background research before perpetuating misinformation? The folks at the University of Victoria's independent paper The Martlet should know better!