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…

What he wouldn’t mind eating over and over again:
When she (Ashley Lou, his wife) leaves town, she’ll basically make a gigantic pot of veggie chili with beans and tempeh or seitan or something in it. I’ll eat oatmeal for breakfast and I’ll have chili for lunch or dinner for however long she’s out of town. I don’t really care. It could be months. I just love that stuff so much.

On being stuck in food monotony:
I’ve been lucky. My wife is a terrific cook. When we met, she was not a great cook…Once we moved in together and got married, she began to experiment. And she invents all kinds of fantastic stuff. I’m so lucky. I eat a wider variety of things now than I did before I stopped eating meat. As a bachelor, I was really in a rut. I was eating the same crap day in and day out. All my 10 favorite stuff.
One really great source is the McDougall cookbook by John McDougall. She reads his books and adds to his recipes, fools around with the ingredients a little and she comes up with this really incredible stuff.

What he’s eaten for the week:
She made some kind of a crazy soup. It was some kind of a Thai coconut. She started out with a recipe for one of those Thai coconut lemongrass soups. She ended up adding a lot of different vegetables, cut up carrots and potatoes and beans and stuff, like green beans. And then threw in a few other spices and then cooked it a long time until it got thick. It really looks more like a potato stew or something. I don’t know how she arrived at this, but we were both just blown away by how good it was. And then a few days ago, we had enchiladas-ate those for a couple of days.
She made this other interesting thing: Starts with a miso soup with a few veggies in it. And then she boils some of those really thin Asian noodles. Throws that in there. Then you get this hot steaming bowl of miso soup and veggies. And then she puts a big lump of sauerkraut on top of that and you mix it up. Sauerkraut on miso soup. It’s very simple but unbelievably good!

Tofu or Tempeh:
I prefer tempeh. I’m not crazy about the gooey texture of tofu. Not one of my favorite things.
Soy Milk or Rice Milk:
I like both. I probably don’t have a preference there.
Risotto or Couscous:
Couscous. I love couscous! Couscous with some steamed veggies and a little bit of Bragg’s (Liquid Aminos). That’s a good meal right there.

On his reasons for going veg:
Three years before that I became interested in nutrition issues. I had read a few things, some were correct, some were not. Based on that I had given up red meat, not religiously, but I had given it up. I was never much of a fish eater, so that wasn’t a problem. I gave up eating pork because I had read that pigs were badly treated, although I really didn’t know how, and they were as smart as dogs. So I thought, “Oh, that’s not good.” So I stopped eating pig products of any kind. Then I started dating (Ashley Lou) who was an animal rights activist. I started learning the way she thought about things-reading the literature that she had around her apartment and stuff and within just a few months I had basically stopped eating everything except poultry. And she asked me if I would like to go up to Farm Sanctuary in Upstate New York on a weekend and I said sure.
Just one trip to Farm Sanctuary and meeting the animals and seeing that they were much more affectionate and individual and sentient than I assumed they were and going back to the cabin and reading these pamphlets about the truth about dairy…and it just all changed. The switch flipped in my head and that was it. I’ve never had a bite of anything since.

On vegetarians dating/marrying non-vegetarians:
I know a lot of people have that issue. They’re still married to or hooked up with meat eaters. I don’t know how they do it. I’m not sure how they deal with it. I’m not sure that I could as strongly as I feel about it now. I would give a woman a chance in a relationship, but not for very long. I wouldn’t move in with someone. I would date somebody for a few months and see if they were moving in my direction. It’s not just health; it’s an ethical thing for me. When you’re on that side of the fence, it’s a lot harder to accept in someone else.