Fuck Your Mustache! Fuck Movember! – by Comrade Black
Movember- the time of the year, where men try to show they have testicles by growing an ugly flap of hair over their top lip. On top of looking like a greasy douchebag-hipster, pedophile, and/or cop – you are helping to raise funds for a multi-billion dollar black hole of an industry that is notorious for cruel animal testing.
Straight up, it pisses me off to have to watch every year as well intentioned people help pave the golden road to the hell that is vivisection. The fact that these people are raising funds for a cause shows me they are probably not psychopaths, they are clearly able to have empathy for others. Now if we are to give the benefit of the doubt to these folks that the majority are unaware that the cancer industry is a cancer, that the money they raise will help torture animals for so called ‘science’, than perhaps we need to do more work in the direction of making those connections more explicit, and showing what is wrong with animals testing.
If people truly are concerned with stopping cancer, we should be encouraging people to make healthier lifestyle choices such as; quitting smoking, cutting meat, dairy, and processed foods out of their diet, as well as avoiding pharmasuiticals as much as possible (At least 50 drugs on the market cause cancer in lab animals. They are allowed because it is admitted that animal tests are not relevant.¹), and being more active. As well as working to stop the industrial pollutants and other known cancer causing agents from being produced in the first place. Fighting against industries like the Tar Sands, cell phone towers, or Monsanto’s monocropped franken-foods, is fighting against the spread of cancer (in more ways than one). Stopping corporations from dumping chemicals in our water supply, foods, and soil would do more towards stopping tumors than growing a fucking mustache. Of course that would involve actually doing work, organizing, and taking risks. Growing hair under your lips is far easier, and trendier.
Perhaps in response what those of us who care about animals could do is make this the month we dedicate to anti-vivisection work. Turn Movember into No-Vember, as in No to Vivisection! Increase our presence in the community; set up info-tables on the streets, at malls, universities, airports, or wherever. Organize demonstrations, including home demos, table at more events with explicitly anti-vivisection information, set up film screenings of Maximum Tolerated Dose², organize anti-vivisection teach ins or workshops, hand out leaflets, put up posters, graffiti, drop banners, make art, or whatever it is that you do to raise awareness. Or organize a fundraiser for anti-vivisection groups in your community. And of course for those able bodied warriors willing to truly risk their privilege there is the actions that make the most direct impact to the lives of lab animals, physically freeing them from cages under the cover of night.
There is so much more we can do than growing a patch of fucking hair.
Footnotes
1) ALF Animal Testing fact sheet:
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/Vivisection/vivisectionfacts.htm
2) Maximum Tolerated Dose is the first feature length documentary on animal testing:
http://maximumtolerateddose.org/
Resources:
Intro to Vivisection by Stop Huntington Animals Cruelty (SHAC)
http://www.shac.net/science/vivi_intro.html
Dying For A Cigarette
http://www.impactpress.com/articles/febmar02/cigs2302.html
Healing Cancer Naturally
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/why_alternatives17.html
for a more extensive list of anti-vivisection resources check out http://maximumtolerateddose.org/resources
