12: "As a vet I felt helpless" - Vicky Bond, Managing Director of Humane League UK - Sentientist Conversations

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.

This conversation is also available here on our Sentientism YouTube Channel. Why not subscribe there too?

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?