Translator: Géraldine Géraldine Reviewer: eric vautier
37 years ago, my sister had her first pet.
A hamster with short hair, white color and caramel
that she has quite easily called Caramel.
This pet lived with us for 2 years
like another family member.
We played with him, fed him, cared for him.
One day, at my grandmother’s,
for the first time, he wandered in the garden
and then he had to eat something he did not need.
In 48 hours, he died.
For those who have a pet,
you will easily understand the sadness we have felt.
As for another family member,
we decided to bury him.
A shoebox as a coffin.
And then, in front of this improvised burial, we gathered ourselves a little.
My parents, very serious,
aware of the solemn moment that their children lived.
And then for my sister and myself, well,
it was difficult,
it was hard to dry our tears.
And then, my grandmother and my mother wanted to do everything to console us.
And as often in these cases, they have prepared our favorite dish.
A chicken and chips, which was really succulent.
Then, a few minutes apart, I celebrated the death of two beings.
On the one hand, in the most complete sadness,
the death of my hamster named Caramel.
And then on the other side, the death of a hen I knew nothing about
and whose first name will remain forever anonymous.
Without knowing,
at the time, I lived for the first time
a cognitive dissonance experiment
who made me love, cherish an animal on one side
and who had made me eat another on the other side.
It’s only 35 years later
that I understood
the meaning, the range and the consequences of this scene.
And for me, really, it was a shock.
A very brutal shock.
A loss of landmarks.
A bit like Alice coming from an imaginary world,
I, too, fell into the burrow of the white rabbit.
A vertiginous fall in which the world I knew
was falling apart.
So, inside this burrow,
I met
a funny character.
A cow, named Kiri.
Maybe some of you have met her,
maybe during a cocktail party.
And she told me her story.
She told me how badly she bore her name.
Because, not a cow does not laugh when she inseminates herself by force.
She screams because she is raped.
A cow does not laugh when her little calf is taken from her,
just after birth, to take her milk.
She cries for hours,
for days, this child disappeared forever.
She does not laugh when she is shot.
She suffers blows on her death row.
She suffers from this piercing stem which does not stun him always.
She suffers when she runs out of blood,
sometimes still conscious.
She suffers, ultimately, from a life from which she is deprived
before the hour.
Well before the hour.
So, because this cow,
like all terrestrial and aquatic animals, is sentient,
she feels emotions:
joy, sadness.
She feels pain.
It’s not me who says it, it’s the latest discoveries in ethology.
Because this cow is an individual,
in the sense of morality, and not an object,
she has a desire to live a full life.
She has a will to reproduce
and to take care of her family, to protect her.
She has a will to die of her beautiful death
without it being programmed in advance.
Like you and me, ultimately.
Collectively, we know that this world is not really going round.
Without really understanding why, but we know it.
It’s like a kind of implant in our mind
which sometimes makes us sick.
I do not know if you see what I want to talk to you about.
But I want to talk to you about the matrix in which we live.
The carnist matrix.
A matrix that is universal, that is ubiquitous
who is with us tonight, by the way, right now,
who is in your clothes,
in your makeup,
in your shoes.
This matrix is everywhere.
As soon as you look out the window, as soon as you open your television.
This matrix is the world that is superimposed on your eyes
to hide the reality.
To hide the truth.
This
matrix
is an ideology.
It’s a world made of happy animals,
animals all smiles,
who,
always with the same smile,
give you a part of their body, their flesh, their secretions.
Because, we all know it well, in the cow as in the pig,
All is well.
These animals would commit suicide for our pleasure and with a smile?
In fact no, this Kiri cow is a pure marketing invention.
It’s a communication marketing invention,
no doubt in a deep cognitive dissonance
and whose goal is to make reality invisible
not to make us feel guilty
and to continue to accept these products.
And the industrialists know it well, they say it elsewhere.
If we made the link between the product and the animal,
any consumption would be impossible.
So this matrix is an ideology that claims that the human being
is superior to all other species,
that he can arrogate the right
on one side to love certain animals,
and on the other, to exploit and kill others.
And reciprocally depending on the cultures.
Here we love dogs,
there we will torture and scald them alive.
This is what we call speciesism.
On the contrary, antispecism
struggle for equal consideration of the interests of all species.
This ideology also kills 60 billion land animals a year.
60 billion, a dizzying number.
Many thousands of billions of aquatic animals
first and foremost fish.
So, in reference to the genocide, we can talk about a zoocide.
This ideology, it destroys our environment
for profit, and to maximize that profit,
it ravages all the forests of our planet.
To turn them into pastures,
to transform them into vegetable crops.
These same plant cultures which, for the most part,
are going to feed the animals
that we are going to eat in a third time.
And here you understand
the energy aberration and the ecological aberration of this system.
And that’s without counting that this private system
thousands of species from their natural habitat.
Which accelerates their disappearance.
And that deprives, on the other hand, 1.5 billion human beings –
it’s not that it deprives them but that it
reduces them to malnutrition and undernutrition.
And that is not counting the depletion of freshwater resources.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 liters of water
are needed to produce 1 kg of meat,
following the animal considered.
15,000 liters of water, 1 kg of meat.
A Frenchman who buys an average of 85 kg of meat a year
can all by itself, through its consumption,
fill an olympic pool.
50 meters long, 2 meters deep.
And he will still have plenty of water to shower.
Finally, this matrix, this ideology,
it affects your health.
WHO says excessive consumption of meat
increases the possibilities of cardiovascular diseases,
cancers of the colon, prostate, type II diabetes
to name only the main ones.
So, we can still continue to take blue pills,
continue to have sweet dreams,
think what we want to think,
to think that all this is not true, that animals are happy, well treated,
that it’s good for health, that it has no impact on the environment.
However, you can also choose to take a red pill.
So, be careful! because there is no turning back
and the white rabbit terrier
is a real gulf where horror never ends
and it will be your daily life.
Warning ! I only offer you the truth, nothing more.
The red pill is …
make visible the invisible.
This pill puts windows in breeding sheds,
it opens the doors of slaughterhouses.
For 35 years,
three times a day on my plate,
I have consumed products of animal origin.
Because, sincerely, I was convinced
that it guaranteed me to be in good health,
it gave me energy, strength.
Because it was a good moment,
of conviviality
between friends.
Or just because the time of a meal,
I felt the taste pleasures and that was really good.
For 35 years, I have never questioned
traditions, social practices,
the beliefs that led me to eat dead animals.
Still today, I wonder how
I could not realize earlier than this simple plate,
this simple act of eating, was originally
of a system of violence
unprecedented, insane.
For 35 years, the carnist matrix
did everything to convince me that it was normal, natural, necessary
to eat meat, to eat animal products.
So today, I know.
I do not eat land animals anymore,
nor aquatic animals, I am a vegetarian.
I do not eat eggs, milk or honey, I’m a vegan.
I do not buy leather or wool anymore.
I refuse all “entertainment” involving animals, such as zoos
circuses, aquariums, dolphinariums
and, even worse, bullfights.
I am vegan.
So knowing does not give me in any way the right to judge anyone,
to judge you.
I was a carnist.
Tonight again, I’m wearing these shoes that are made from cowhide
I bought before my transition to veganism.
And, if I continue to wear these shoes,
is that every day,
they remind me
the lie in which I lived,
and that I can not ask others
to make their transition from the moment I made mine.
So these shoes and the animal to whom we took the life to make them
are my anti-intolerance weapon.
Knowing does not allow me to judge.
On the other hand, knowing obliges me to speak
to no longer collaborate with this carnist matrix.
Knowledge makes us responsible.
And if I did not speak, I would feel guilty.
I do not wish to be found guilty,
so I decided to join the resistance.
This resistance that is everywhere in the world is organized.
Scientists, doctors, nutritionists, philosophers,
sociologists, activists, activists of course,
but also politicians, celebrities.
All over the world, these women and men have made the choice
to go to a vegetal diet
and humane consumption of animals.
Everywhere, these women and men
make their voices heard,
distribute red pills to make the invisible visible,
often face a powerful carnist matrix,
rich and sometimes violent.
So, it is said that a revolutionary idea has three stages before being adopted,
that it is at first considered ridiculous, and then dangerous
and then only in a third time, it is considered obvious.
Thirty years ago, vegetarians were often laughed at.
30 years ago, the only vegetarian restaurant in Paris
was spitting regularly on his window.
Today vegetarianism, and veganism more generally,
is no longer a ridiculous idea.
Today, meat lobbies are coming to our schools
to tattoo on our children’s brains
slogans a little cynical, type “the ox is the egg”.
Parliamentarians sponsored a commission of inquiry,
asked for a commission of inquiry,
on animal movements considered dangerous in the same way
than terrorist cells.
So, yes in 30 years, veganism
went from a ridiculous idea to a dangerous one,
dangerous because it calls into question financial and economic interests
and policies that are immense.
This is a first victory for the resistance.
Tomorrow, I do not know when,
but this idea will become obvious.
The world will be vegan.
The carnist matrix will be defeated.
The breeders will have reconverted.
They will live decently, without subsidies,
a job that will make them really happy.
The most irreducible among us will continue to eat meat,
meat without meat,
because technological progress will allow it very soon.
But on the other hand, our children,
our children are likely to look at us with big eyes completely amazed
when we tell them
only by tradition, by belief, by social practice,
we dug some pipes in the ducks’ throats
to make their liver fat.
That we removed babies to their mom to take their milk.
That we have planted swords in the skull of bulls, for game.
That we whipped elephants to make them fit on a balloon
because it amused us.
Because we imprisoned orcas
in a pool, just for our pleasure to see them jump in the air
or because we have suffocated
in plastic bags or crushed live male chicks
because we knew they would not give eggs.
All this,
I could go on for a long time, beyond comprehension.
Which humans can we be considering in this way?
How will our children see us?
Really like human beings or rather like monsters?
There is still a chance to tell them we did not know
is not enough for them to believe us.
It will be all the less necessary for them to forgive us.
So, I forgave myself my past mistakes.
I am at peace today with myself, I am at peace with animals.
I reduce my ecological impact on the planet.
And like the gorilla or the elephant, I have no deficiency
by not eating animals.
For an antispecial world that advocates peace between species,
who advocates peace with the Earth, our only home,
Today I am at war with the carnist ideology.
So my resistance, it goes through my consumption, of course,
but also my activism, my proposals
and probably a little bit by being here tonight.
It’s not an easy question, but Christmas is coming.
And maybe this is the right time to approach this subject serenely
and wonder if we, we wish to celebrate, celebrate
around corpses of animals whose lives have only been violence and suffering.
This is clearly an issue that is not easy.
It’s a global question of knowing
what relationship we wish to have with animals.
It’s a question of law, of morals,
and I think it’s also a matter of justice.
So, tonight, I hope I made you want to ask you the question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
37 years ago, my sister had her first pet.
A hamster with short hair, white color and caramel
that she has quite easily called Caramel.
This pet lived with us for 2 years
like another family member.
We played with him, fed him, cared for him.
One day, at my grandmother’s,
for the first time, he wandered in the garden
and then he had to eat something he did not need.
In 48 hours, he died.
For those who have a pet,
you will easily understand the sadness we have felt.
As for another family member,
we decided to bury him.
A shoebox as a coffin.
And then, in front of this improvised burial, we gathered ourselves a little.
My parents, very serious,
aware of the solemn moment that their children lived.
And then for my sister and myself, well,
it was difficult,
it was hard to dry our tears.
And then, my grandmother and my mother wanted to do everything to console us.
And as often in these cases, they have prepared our favorite dish.
A chicken and chips, which was really succulent.
Then, a few minutes apart, I celebrated the death of two beings.
On the one hand, in the most complete sadness,
the death of my hamster named Caramel.
And then on the other side, the death of a hen I knew nothing about
and whose first name will remain forever anonymous.
Without knowing,
at the time, I lived for the first time
a cognitive dissonance experiment
who made me love, cherish an animal on one side
and who had made me eat another on the other side.
It’s only 35 years later
that I understood
the meaning, the range and the consequences of this scene.
And for me, really, it was a shock.
A very brutal shock.
A loss of landmarks.
A bit like Alice coming from an imaginary world,
I, too, fell into the burrow of the white rabbit.
A vertiginous fall in which the world I knew
was falling apart.
So, inside this burrow,
I met
a funny character.
A cow, named Kiri.
Maybe some of you have met her,
maybe during a cocktail party.
And she told me her story.
She told me how badly she bore her name.
Because, not a cow does not laugh when she inseminates herself by force.
She screams because she is raped.
A cow does not laugh when her little calf is taken from her,
just after birth, to take her milk.
She cries for hours,
for days, this child disappeared forever.
She does not laugh when she is shot.
She suffers blows on her death row.
She suffers from this piercing stem which does not stun him always.
She suffers when she runs out of blood,
sometimes still conscious.
She suffers, ultimately, from a life from which she is deprived
before the hour.
Well before the hour.
So, because this cow,
like all terrestrial and aquatic animals, is sentient,
she feels emotions:
joy, sadness.
She feels pain.
It’s not me who says it, it’s the latest discoveries in ethology.
Because this cow is an individual,
in the sense of morality, and not an object,
she has a desire to live a full life.
She has a will to reproduce
and to take care of her family, to protect her.
She has a will to die of her beautiful death
without it being programmed in advance.
Like you and me, ultimately.
Collectively, we know that this world is not really going round.
Without really understanding why, but we know it.
It’s like a kind of implant in our mind
which sometimes makes us sick.
I do not know if you see what I want to talk to you about.
But I want to talk to you about the matrix in which we live.
The carnist matrix.
A matrix that is universal, that is ubiquitous
who is with us tonight, by the way, right now,
who is in your clothes,
in your makeup,
in your shoes.
This matrix is everywhere.
As soon as you look out the window, as soon as you open your television.
This matrix is the world that is superimposed on your eyes
to hide the reality.
To hide the truth.
This
matrix
is an ideology.
It’s a world made of happy animals,
animals all smiles,
who,
always with the same smile,
give you a part of their body, their flesh, their secretions.
Because, we all know it well, in the cow as in the pig,
All is well.
These animals would commit suicide for our pleasure and with a smile?
In fact no, this Kiri cow is a pure marketing invention.
It’s a communication marketing invention,
no doubt in a deep cognitive dissonance
and whose goal is to make reality invisible
not to make us feel guilty
and to continue to accept these products.
And the industrialists know it well, they say it elsewhere.
If we made the link between the product and the animal,
any consumption would be impossible.
So this matrix is an ideology that claims that the human being
is superior to all other species,
that he can arrogate the right
on one side to love certain animals,
and on the other, to exploit and kill others.
And reciprocally depending on the cultures.
Here we love dogs,
there we will torture and scald them alive.
This is what we call speciesism.
On the contrary, antispecism
struggle for equal consideration of the interests of all species.
This ideology also kills 60 billion land animals a year.
60 billion, a dizzying number.
Many thousands of billions of aquatic animals
first and foremost fish.
So, in reference to the genocide, we can talk about a zoocide.
This ideology, it destroys our environment
for profit, and to maximize that profit,
it ravages all the forests of our planet.
To turn them into pastures,
to transform them into vegetable crops.
These same plant cultures which, for the most part,
are going to feed the animals
that we are going to eat in a third time.
And here you understand
the energy aberration and the ecological aberration of this system.
And that’s without counting that this private system
thousands of species from their natural habitat.
Which accelerates their disappearance.
And that deprives, on the other hand, 1.5 billion human beings –
it’s not that it deprives them but that it
reduces them to malnutrition and undernutrition.
And that is not counting the depletion of freshwater resources.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 liters of water
are needed to produce 1 kg of meat,
following the animal considered.
15,000 liters of water, 1 kg of meat.
A Frenchman who buys an average of 85 kg of meat a year
can all by itself, through its consumption,
fill an olympic pool.
50 meters long, 2 meters deep.
And he will still have plenty of water to shower.
Finally, this matrix, this ideology,
it affects your health.
WHO says excessive consumption of meat
increases the possibilities of cardiovascular diseases,
cancers of the colon, prostate, type II diabetes
to name only the main ones.
So, we can still continue to take blue pills,
continue to have sweet dreams,
think what we want to think,
to think that all this is not true, that animals are happy, well treated,
that it’s good for health, that it has no impact on the environment.
However, you can also choose to take a red pill.
So, be careful! because there is no turning back
and the white rabbit terrier
is a real gulf where horror never ends
and it will be your daily life.
Warning ! I only offer you the truth, nothing more.
The red pill is …
make visible the invisible.
This pill puts windows in breeding sheds,
it opens the doors of slaughterhouses.
For 35 years,
three times a day on my plate,
I have consumed products of animal origin.
Because, sincerely, I was convinced
that it guaranteed me to be in good health,
it gave me energy, strength.
Because it was a good moment,
of conviviality
between friends.
Or just because the time of a meal,
I felt the taste pleasures and that was really good.
For 35 years, I have never questioned
traditions, social practices,
the beliefs that led me to eat dead animals.
Still today, I wonder how
I could not realize earlier than this simple plate,
this simple act of eating, was originally
of a system of violence
unprecedented, insane.
For 35 years, the carnist matrix
did everything to convince me that it was normal, natural, necessary
to eat meat, to eat animal products.
So today, I know.
I do not eat land animals anymore,
nor aquatic animals, I am a vegetarian.
I do not eat eggs, milk or honey, I’m a vegan.
I do not buy leather or wool anymore.
I refuse all “entertainment” involving animals, such as zoos
circuses, aquariums, dolphinariums
and, even worse, bullfights.
I am vegan.
So knowing does not give me in any way the right to judge anyone,
to judge you.
I was a carnist.
Tonight again, I’m wearing these shoes that are made from cowhide
I bought before my transition to veganism.
And, if I continue to wear these shoes,
is that every day,
they remind me
the lie in which I lived,
and that I can not ask others
to make their transition from the moment I made mine.
So these shoes and the animal to whom we took the life to make them
are my anti-intolerance weapon.
Knowing does not allow me to judge.
On the other hand, knowing obliges me to speak
to no longer collaborate with this carnist matrix.
Knowledge makes us responsible.
And if I did not speak, I would feel guilty.
I do not wish to be found guilty,
so I decided to join the resistance.
This resistance that is everywhere in the world is organized.
Scientists, doctors, nutritionists, philosophers,
sociologists, activists, activists of course,
but also politicians, celebrities.
All over the world, these women and men have made the choice
to go to a vegetal diet
and humane consumption of animals.
Everywhere, these women and men
make their voices heard,
distribute red pills to make the invisible visible,
often face a powerful carnist matrix,
rich and sometimes violent.
So, it is said that a revolutionary idea has three stages before being adopted,
that it is at first considered ridiculous, and then dangerous
and then only in a third time, it is considered obvious.
Thirty years ago, vegetarians were often laughed at.
30 years ago, the only vegetarian restaurant in Paris
was spitting regularly on his window.
Today vegetarianism, and veganism more generally,
is no longer a ridiculous idea.
Today, meat lobbies are coming to our schools
to tattoo on our children’s brains
slogans a little cynical, type “the ox is the egg”.
Parliamentarians sponsored a commission of inquiry,
asked for a commission of inquiry,
on animal movements considered dangerous in the same way
than terrorist cells.
So, yes in 30 years, veganism
went from a ridiculous idea to a dangerous one,
dangerous because it calls into question financial and economic interests
and policies that are immense.
This is a first victory for the resistance.
Tomorrow, I do not know when,
but this idea will become obvious.
The world will be vegan.
The carnist matrix will be defeated.
The breeders will have reconverted.
They will live decently, without subsidies,
a job that will make them really happy.
The most irreducible among us will continue to eat meat,
meat without meat,
because technological progress will allow it very soon.
But on the other hand, our children,
our children are likely to look at us with big eyes completely amazed
when we tell them
only by tradition, by belief, by social practice,
we dug some pipes in the ducks’ throats
to make their liver fat.
That we removed babies to their mom to take their milk.
That we have planted swords in the skull of bulls, for game.
That we whipped elephants to make them fit on a balloon
because it amused us.
Because we imprisoned orcas
in a pool, just for our pleasure to see them jump in the air
or because we have suffocated
in plastic bags or crushed live male chicks
because we knew they would not give eggs.
All this,
I could go on for a long time, beyond comprehension.
Which humans can we be considering in this way?
How will our children see us?
Really like human beings or rather like monsters?
There is still a chance to tell them we did not know
is not enough for them to believe us.
It will be all the less necessary for them to forgive us.
So, I forgave myself my past mistakes.
I am at peace today with myself, I am at peace with animals.
I reduce my ecological impact on the planet.
And like the gorilla or the elephant, I have no deficiency
by not eating animals.
For an antispecial world that advocates peace between species,
who advocates peace with the Earth, our only home,
Today I am at war with the carnist ideology.
So my resistance, it goes through my consumption, of course,
but also my activism, my proposals
and probably a little bit by being here tonight.
It’s not an easy question, but Christmas is coming.
And maybe this is the right time to approach this subject serenely
and wonder if we, we wish to celebrate, celebrate
around corpses of animals whose lives have only been violence and suffering.
This is clearly an issue that is not easy.
It’s a global question of knowing
what relationship we wish to have with animals.
It’s a question of law, of morals,
and I think it’s also a matter of justice.
So, tonight, I hope I made you want to ask you the question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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