Thinking About Animals Conference
March 1-2, 2018
Join UPC President Karen Davis, PhD and an exciting group of speakers and attendees at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, March 1-2 for the Thinking About Animals Conference! The conference is free and open to the public. Learn more here: Thinking About Animals.
Talking About Animals: Our Advocacy for Better or Worse
Keynote Presentation by Karen Davis, PhD
President of United Poultry Concerns
Thursday, March 1st 6:30 - 8:30pm
Farmed animals are imprisoned in an impoverished world anthropomorphically imposed on them by our species. This dystopia – this bad world – includes physical confinement in toxic buildings, bodily confinement in deformative genetics, and rhetorical confinement in belittling concepts. Outside the animal rights community and the intimacy of their own lives, chickens and other farmed animals are unreal to almost everyone. Our task is to bring these individuals to light and life through vicarious evocations of who they are and who they are not. I give examples from various sources of how our vocabulary, our tone and our attitude inform our advocacy in two primary ways: conventionally or disruptively. The words we use – choose – about animals matter. We can’t just let the pictures do the talking.
KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the U.S. National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, she is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry and other groundbreaking books and articles examining these issues.