Cruelty Free WA opened in Fremantle in late October.
They have all sorts of items, and everything is vegan.
Of course, you don't have to be vegan to shop there -- anyone looking for "humane" mousetraps (ones that enable you to move the mice without hurting them), or alternatives to leather, or toiletries and makeup that are not tested on animals and contain no animal products -- will find what they need here.
There's also a great range of chocolate, soy cheeses, sandwich slices, nutritional yeast (the best one, Engevita) and non-dairy cream too.
The shop is at 28A Queen Street, opposite the side of Myer that runs down to the multistorey car park (near where Queen Street meets High Street).
6 comments:
hello tracy and john,
i've been enjoying your blog and watching your transitions with great interest. i and my family are doing similar things here in central victoria. we do however have quite a different stance when it comes to certain foods, which i wish to speak to here if i may.
i tend to take my lead from traditional communities when it comes to food, and i read every industrialised and transported carrot, synthetic consumable or rump steak as an abuse on the landbase and on non-human nature.
growing our own food is probably the most beautifully loaded thing we can do. growing food while repairing the landbase is the most essential thing i've ever done. in our household we eat a little meat for protein and simple joy. it is always local. we occasionally catch redfin (english perch) out of the nearby lake. and whereas, i find fishing for recreation a pretty cruel endeavour, i don't when it comes to survival. i watch our chooks eat worms, fish remains or dead mice for protein and i tend to follow their lead as much as possible as they free-range over several neighbouring properties, living a life i cld only wish for in terms of carefreedom. we provide our chooks with shelter, warmth, love and protection from foxes. they in turn provide us with eggs, manure and joy. we are in a reciprocal relationship with them specific to a permaculture.
factory farms are a telling pathology of civilisation. living in some form of natural order alongside or directly with non-human nature is for me being led by nature, not human ideology or growth economics. this is why i supplement my diet with our eggs and a little local meat. ideally i wld like to get my protein just from roadkill, which attends to my relationship with anthropogenic waste. i do use roadkill in my compost as a starter, like a leaven.
i've never worked out why many vegans i meet see we carnivores as all having the same dirty moral code. it seems to speak out against one of the most sustainable human cultures ever to inhabit the earth – indigenous australians. their aquaculture, agricultures (yams in these parts) and hunting methods enabled an unprecedented permanent culture contiguous with natural systems.
one of my great problems with western veganism is that it seems to come from an inner urban disembodiment. it seems to me like a mediation, rather than an ethic that is gleaned through active biomimicry.
these are a few of my thoughts thus far. your thoughts/ comments/ critique of them might prove to be a valuable discussion.
yours in congenial anarchism,
patrick
Hi, Patrick, glad you’re enjoying the blog!
From Tracy: Lots of issues there! But not all ‘Western vegans’ are the same, of course – there are many different ways of being vegan. I don’t see it as something I have to tell others to do – for me, people have to make their own choices.
From John – typed in by Tracy (who read it back to him):
1. Indigenous Australians know what’s best for indigenous Australians, and I respect that. And land should be returned as much as possible (and more!) by those who have stolen it to indigenous Australians to enhance the ability to make those collective and individual (!) decisions.
2. ‘Traditional’ in this context is also potentially a relative term that arises out of displacement and invasiveness when applied by those outside community – ‘traditional’ becomes what is lost or an act of reclamation – either way it announces change. In post-traditional societies we can respect ‘traditional’ choices but are always working with choice rather than an absolute. The invasiveness of the ‘West’ is a coordinate in that discussion. It is also totalising – there is no way one can say traditionally ALL indigenous Australians lived one way. There are exceptions to every rule – who is to say one can’t make a vegan choice and be indigenous; vegan = respect, not disrespecting the land. Land returns/land rights, which I believe in, do not necessarily mean a new traditionalism. It is self-determining. The choices individuals or communities make about their relationship to that land and how they eat is for them to determine, not for me or anyone else to do on their behalf.
3. Products – all consumerism is lamentable. We seek to self-restrain (down the track especially) as much as possible. Those in cities can’t entirely. Cities exist. Use city space as well – but there is a path to that.
4. I publicly judge no one’s food choice, whatever I privately think. Ethics = system but not an imposition of control on others.
5. Yes re consumerism and giving up flying, car (slower process for us), objects etc as part of that.
6. Basic to veganism is the belief that animals and humans are equal – that to eat an animal is violating that equality.
7. Note that many vegan ‘products’ are produced in non-factory, low-impact ways.
thanks so much for your responses.
my emphasis on traditional cultures, esp indigenous australians, is that at a systems level they represent the basis for a 'future ecological model' for unwell, disembodied settler societies. generally speaking, indigenous systems suggest modes for relocalising resources, de-anthropocentrism, de-anthropogenicism, social connectivity and steady-state economics. things known to make people well.
settler societies make choices which become a form of imprisonment - material/ideological – things known to make people unwell.
i guess my central question here is that if traditional communities got it so right when it comes to relationships with the land and with non-human nature, and if our fellow mammals operate in a closed-cycle ecology, which is less a thing of 'equality', more a thing of non waste and life-death connectivity, then does not choice (for we settlers) seem quite trite and unnecessary? 'choice' seems to be embedded in christian-cartesian-capitalist paradigms, whereas to be instructed by the systems already found in wild nature is to arrive at many of the systems established by traditional communities.
therefore, can we rely on biomimicry alone? i've carried this wordsworth stanza with me since i was 17:
one impulse from a vernal wood
may teach you more of man
of moral evil and of good
than all the sages can.
From John, posted by Tracy
1. Surely some laws are there to be transgressed.
2. Choice in this context is not consumerist choice – it’s a matter of agency, without which there can be no liberty. Making choice and respecting the land are the key, from an anarchist, vegan, pacifist perspective.
thanks so much for your thoughts john and tracy. there's much food for thought here (pardon the pun).
I find your (from john typed in by tracy) a joke. You're still involved directly in the process of word processing, old son. What a cop-out. Pure complicity.
The Waggafish Letters are about to hit the net. Oh, but john won't be able to read them. Oh well.
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