Peace on Earth: will we ever have it? With Peter Singer and Gary Francione discussing Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”

This season of peace and goodwill, in our special Christmas show, we ask whether there will ever be peace on Earth. Steven Pinker, author of “Better Angels of Our Nature”, says that human violence has decreased over the centuries, in some respects including violence to other animals. We talk to Professors Peter Singer and Gary Francione. more

Veganism in Politics: The British Parliament Debates World Vegan Day

At the end of our last episode, Kerry McCarthy MP said she’d asked for a debate in Parliament to mark World Vegan Day.

She was successful, and at the end of business on November 1st the House of Commons debated veganism. I was watching from the gallery.

In this episode, concluding our series of three about veganism in politics, we give our account of the debate. We explain what’s going on, who everyone is, and tell you which of the MPs who spoke against is officially the least sexy Member of Parliament. more

The Pledge statistics – Do vegans thrive in adversity?

In our podcast about the vegan pledge we talked about reasons that people did or didn’t decide to remain vegan after the vegan pledge including the tricky issue of biased respondent samples. The followup questionnaire was given after a month of the vegan pledge and people who fell off the vegan wagon were unlikely to make it to that meeting. In this blog I’m going to talk about how reasons that people cite for going vegan might influence whether they are choose to continue after the pledge and the paradoxical effect of unsupportive friends and relatives.… more