Listen to Sandra’s 3 minute interview above.
Click here for full episode on BBC Radio website  (including 90 minutes of discussion. Starts at 2 hours 40 minutes)

Sandra Higgins was in conversation with Jim & Joe on BBC Radio Leicester on the Go Vegan World campaign. Although the radio show allocated 90 minutes’ airtime to discussion of the campaign billboards and caller’s understanding of veganism, the interviewer, after several attempts to interrupt Ms Higgins as she attempted to answer questions, cut her off altogether after 3 minutes.

As Ms Higgins pointed out, veganism is a human rights issue that everyone needs to know about. It is a great pity that listeners were prevented from hearing what veganism is and that the misconceptions of veganism as “less meat”, a “food campaign”, “a diet”, remained throughout the show.

As we hear in this interview, despite the positive reception afforded Go Vegan World in most of the UK, resistance and misunderstanding is as rife here as it was in rural Ireland almost two years ago. As educators attempting to tell the truth and provide accurate information, we have our work cut out for us. The barriers to truth and justice are not just from the animal exploiting industries. Those industries have been aided and abetted to great success by those who claim to work for animal rights but present a compromised version of veganism that falls far short of animal rights.

Veganism will never be about behavioural change prescribed by others like so many boxes to be ticked on a diet sheet. Veganism is the concomitant change in behaviour that follows the motivation to change how we think and feel about other animals upon receiving truthful information that challenges our speciesism. It is as much to do with how we think about and feel about other animals as our equals as it is about how we behave in order to be fair to them.