In this month’s online meeting of the Plant-Based Book Club, we’ll discuss and critique a 40-minute YouTube video by animal rights law professor Gary Francione. The free video is here: https://youtu.be/6Kt0evaSNRI (please watch it beforehand). It really is only 40 minutes long!

Francione takes a hard-line, abolitionist approach to animal rights which not everyone (including many vegans) agree with. This particular presentation from 2019 is interesting as he is addressing a hostile audience of factory farmers and their peers in “animal science.” (Note the hard questions at the end.)

Francione is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he raises important issues we must all think about. Should we push to improve animal welfare in factory farms, or instead seek to simply abolish the farms? Should we applaud fast food restaurants like Chipotle or Burger King that offer plant-based options, or protest them for maintaining the status quo?

BIO: Gary Francione is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His books on animal rights include: Why Veganism Matters; Animal Rights; The Abolitionist Approach; and Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement.

For future meetings, if you have an idea for a book, movie, podcast episode, or other content either created by someone plant-based or covering veganism, animals, compassion, mindfulness, the environment, or another social justice movement, let me know by email or by posting in the comments below.

Find the meeting at the designated date/time at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81096480979.

Happy watching!