vegoftheweek

Farm Sanctuary Gala 2004

Dan Piraro is a cartoonist and comedian best known for his website, Bizarro.com, where he often incorporates his vegan and animal rights beliefs into his works.

His thoughts on hunting:
Well, I certainly think that if there are degrees of cruelty, and you can argue philosophically about that, I think that hunting is far less cruel than raising an animal uncomfortably in a cage with a lot of others (animals). It’s certainly kinder than factory farming to let an animal live its life in the wild, unmolested, until a bullet strikes it dead. I know that I would prefer a life like that rather than a life in prison until I was killed for someone’s food. I would prefer a free life until I was killed for someone’s food. To me there’s a huge moral dilemma. Hunting in our culture quite frankly is killing for fun, whether you eat it or not. If you pass a grocery store on your way to hunt, you’re killing for fun, not killing for necessity. I think killing for fun is certainly a no brainer. It’s sort of difficult to justify in my mind.
I went hunting with my dad (years ago). It’s interesting, my dad is a terrific person, not a vegetarian, but he’s a terrific person, still alive. He and I are very close. He had these very strict ideas about how animals should be treated and he taught them to me as a kid. You never kill anything that you’re not going to eat. And you never kill more than you can eat. He was very strict about that. He took me bird hunting and I remember one time when he caught me trying to shoot a sparrow in the backyard with a Bebe gun. He came down on me so hard. Took the gun away from me and gave me a big lecture, “You do not kill things just for fun.”
…It’s just wrong to kill things for fun. You can’t justify that. If I was an Eskimo, maybe, and there were no grocery stores. ..

An example of one of his cartoons that illustrates his beliefs:
It’s a laboratory with a scientist mixing stuff up. And behind him are cages of all sorts of animals. And the monkey says through the cage, “Hey, Einstein. How about working on a cure for insensitivity to other species.” To me that concept says it all, because that’s really what it’s about. It’s about something being not enough like us to care. We see this in society all over the place: There are people who think that foreigners are not enough like us to care what happens to them. Or people of another race are “not enough like me” to care what happens to them. It’s about the circle of compassion. I extend my circle of compassion to any sentient being. Anything that knows it’s alive, in my mind, has the same philosophical rights to an unmolested life as I do or you do. That cartoon to me kind of says that very thing.

On the vegan tattoos on his body:
(There’s) a little group of cartoon birds (on my arm) and then underneath that it says fly. And that to me is just the idea of letting animals be who they are. And then on my arm I have a banner that says vegan…And on my other arm I have a monkey’s head and he has a little banner that crosses and curls underneath his head that says “liberation,” which to me is just about the liberation of the slavery of animals.
My wife has a little small square battery cage with a chicken flying out of it. And then it says vegan next to that. And she has a full size spider monkey with a broken chain and it says, “liberation.” And she has a rooster with a bunch of baby chicks all around him with a banner across that says “unlucky.”
That tattoo is really interesting. In restaurants and bars, if a guy ever wants to start up a conversation with the pretty blond he says, “Oh, those are interesting tattoos. What does that “unlucky” mean?” And 45 minutes later, they’re sorry they ever asked. She launches into an entire story about what happens to male chicks in egg factories. The male chicks are all killed at birth because they’re not going to be egg layers.

Learn how Dan survives when wife Ashley Lou isn’t around to cook after the break… (more…)