Vicky is Managing Director of The Humane League UK . She trained as a vet and worked in the animal agriculture industry before leaving to focus on campaigning for non-human animals.
In these Sentientist Conversations, we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Full show notes and links here.
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We discuss:
- Feeling an early affinity with animals, volunteering at animal sanctuaries at 10 years old, always wanting to be a vet
- Training as a vet, seeing the reality of animal farming & feeling helpless. How vets are caught up in the machinery of the industry
- How broken animal agriculture is & how much suffering is caused
- Leaving to advocate for animals, with CIFW then Humane League UK
- Driving institutional change. Working with companies to reduce the animal suffering they cause at scale
- The relief of meeting others that take sentience & suffering seriously
- Questioning then leaving Christianity as a teenager & the death of a close family member as a turning point
- Finding comfort in naturalism. “We have our time & then it passes”
- Naturalistic wonder, awe, meaning & a sense of connection, enhanced through a silent meditation retreat (vs. “spirituality”)
- Suffering/flourishing of others as the foundation of morality
- Meditation as a practice of focusing on our own sentient experience and feeling gratitude
- Relativism & supernatural ethics are arbitrary vs. grounding ethics in a naturalistic understanding of sentience
- Going vegetarian (despite challenges from parents re: nutrition)
- The shock of watching an artificial insemination unit operate
- Fighting cognitive dissonance on the way to going vegan + how much it helps to have others around you to help ease the transition
- Visiting Ghana as an eye opener re: global development & the history of colonialism
- Considering the ethical impacts of our personal consumption
- Cognitive dissonance as a way of protecting ourselves given the scale of suffering. Avoiding burn-out
- The Diving Bell & the Butterfly
- Taking the perspective of others, rather than just imposing your own assumptions
- Wild-animal suffering & flourishing. Nature programmes as “snuff movies”
- Categorising an animal as “farmed” or “wild” doesn’t reduce the animals’ experience of its own suffering
- Red vs. grey squirrels
- Not knowing how to help doesn’t warrant excluding beings from our moral circle
- Culling as the default for human intervention in the wild
- Ending animal farming as an obvious win-win-win
- Important problems are often the easiest (e.g. end animal farming)
- Animal farming change is happening fast now (e.g. ending cages) & consumer consciousness is shifting
- Veganism getting less “weird”, approaching a tipping point?
- Concern for species is mostly about human interests
- Economic & social drivers slowing change
- “Lesser developed countries” leap-frogging past the mistakes made by “more developed countries” on both climate & animal agriculture, because of more compassionate values and more radical innovation
- While you’re participating in something, it’s hard to think clearly about its ethics
- Freeing our latent morality!
- A more socialist future?