The influence that Prof Sorsenson has had on the burgeoning animal rights community in Niagara has been something special to chart. The growth of the Critical Animal Studies Department at Brock University has injected the community with a wealth of young, dedicated and critically thinking activists and also provided a campus with a slowly awakening consciousness towards animal exploitation. John would be much more humble in describing the change, but that is part of the reason for the success. John has written extensively on issues of human and non human animal oppression and frequently writes great commentary for the Mark News, which I recommend, but this interview centered specifically his latest book “About Canada: Animal Rights.” A review of this book is coming, but it is safe for me to tell you that it is the most comprehensive and up to date study of animal exploitation and oppression in Canada. If you are an activist in Canada, get a copy of the book and keep it in your back pocket at all times! Also, to prospective students who want to study these issues in University, come to Brock University in St. Catharines, minor in Critical Animal Studies and hang out with me!

This current book was released through Fernwood Publishing in their “About Canada” series. Did they approach you about the book or was this something you pitched to them? How important was it for you to work with a publisher like Fernwood?

I had met both of the publishers Errol Sharpe and Wayne Anthony when they were visiting Brock and I enjoyed chatting with them both. Errol originally raised the idea of an animal rights book. I was really excited about the possibility of working with a progressive publisher like Fernwood. They have a terrific list of titles themselves and distribute for other presses that do good books like Pluto, Monthly Review and Zed. And working with Candida Hadley as an editor was great, she was very encouraging and had many good ideas. Unlike some other presses that are only interested in apolitical animal studies, there was never any pressure to tone down the “radical” (or, we might just say, sensible and compassionate) animal rights message. Fernwood really “got” the idea that animal rights is a progressive social movement linked to other forms of human emancipation and in fact they encouraged me to stress that aspect, which I was completely happy to do. Unfortunately, many individuals and organizations who may have advanced ideas about human problems are completely blind to the significance of animal rights so it was really encouraging to get this support from Fernwood. It was great working with them.

As an activist in Canada I have always struggled to find information specific to Canada. So much of the statistics and analysis either comes from the United Kingdom or the United States. What were some of the texts and sources that you relied on heavily for Canadian based analysis? What advice to have for those looking for information specific to where they are?

Of course Charlotte Montgomery’s book Blood Relations has lots of useful information and good insights about animal rights in Canada. Organizations like Zoocheck Canada and Animal Alliance have great resources on their websites, as do the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition, Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Food Animals, Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals, Liberation BC, Global Action Network, Vancouver Humane Society and many others. Government websites like Agriculture Canada provide some statistics. There are many terrific Canadian activists who I admire very much and who’ve been working on these issues for many years. They have a great wealth of knowledge and experience and I’ve learned a lot just from talking to those people.

Although this has been a focus of study for you for a long time, was there any information or critical analysis that you came across in the research for this book that was new and shocking?

Perhaps less shock than awe. There is always some new form of atrocity that we inflict on animals. So it’s difficult not to be impressed with the levels of brutality than we can reach and their various manifestations. Although Canada isn’t the main industrial processor of animals, the scale of suffering imposed on, say, pigs or chickens in our factory farms is quite remarkable. Also remarkable is Canada’s failure to implement even those so-called “animal welfare” standards that exist in other countries. I don’t agree that achieving these modifications in the process are the goal we should aim for but certainly it’s better to inflict less pain than more pain. But because the objective is to wring as much profit out of every animal as possible, we have the various torture devices such as battery cages, gestation crates and veal crates. Those who exploit animals in the factory farming system are always going on about how much they love these animals but it’s clear that they’re just commodities. These industries are ready to let thousands of them die in a barn fire rather than invest in safety equipment because it’s just cheaper to pay the insurance.

One impressive Canadian innovation is the horse slaughter industry. This operated on a small scale (although of course significant for each individual horse who was killed) until the US banned horse slaughter in 2007. Then the business started booming here as tens of thousands of horses were shipped to Canada or Mexico to be killed. That willingness to circumvent humane legislation achieved elsewhere in order to make a profit certainly has to be recognized.

So the extent of industrial exploitation, involving millions of animals, is overwhelming but at the other end of the spectrum are the individual abusers, those who deliberately torture animals for their own peculiar pleasure, as in the notorious case of the cat “Kensington,” or those who go out to shoot animals in the woods for entertainment. I guess one thing that did surprise me was to browse through various websites that promote hunting in Canada and to see so many people proudly posing with some animal they’d just killed. It’s hard to fathom that delight in taking another’s life.

And of course there are our special forms of entertainment, such as the Calgary Stampede or the animal circuses or Marineland. These spectacles of domination testify to the backwardness and savagery of our culture.

A lot of people have a had time dealing with these images and numbers on a daily basis, let alone compiling it all for a full length book. Was the process for this book agonizing or did it give you a better perspective?

Of course any decent person would be disturbed to confront these images and the numbers of animals harmed and killed. But sitting around feeling sad won’t achieve anything. I do find the material painful but obviously it’s much more painful for the animals who have to actually endure it. I think it’s important for people to see the images in films such as Earthlings and then to use their outrage to try to stop this abuse and exploitation.

As a Professor who has helped grow the field of Critical Animal Studies in Canada, I am wondering if you get a lot of responses from Canadian students where they ardently believe that Canada is ahead of other countries in the world in regards to how we treat animals? I remember a specific example from when the undercover Conklin Dairy Farm was released I had a someone respond with, “This is why I am glad I live in Canada.”

Canada hasn’t achieved the same scale of animal exploitation as in the United States but the basic processes are the same in any country. In the book I mention a few cases of gratuitous cruelty inflicted on animals at slaughterhouses and in the foie gras industry. These have been exposed by groups such as Global Action Network and the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition who have released undercover video of what happens in these places. These are brutal industries and it’s no surprise that they encourage the most savage tendencies that human are capable of expressing.

In a recent interview you said, “We should remember that an end to the formal institution of slavery would have seemed impossible not so long ago.” It is clear you are using an abolitionist framework with your book. Where do you see abolitionist theory in Canada? Is there an intellectual and activist community or are we lagging behind?

It’s disappointing that so many animal groups in Canada let themselves to a welfarist perspective. Some of them won’t even use the word “vegetarian” in their campaigns, even when people working in those organizations may be vegetarians themselves. And there are other groups that might limit their activism to one particular species while remaining perfectly happy to see other types of animals consigned to lives of agony and premature death because we’ve designated them as “food animals.”

But, as I said, there are also many long-time Canadian animal activists who do have a broader and more sophisticated analysis. I hope that the conferences I’ve organized at Brock University provide an opportunity for these activists to encourage more collaboration and community. Maybe they can also encourage those welfarist groups to be a bit more progressive in their campaigns.

Teaching in the Niagara Region there is a definite historical mark left by the anti-slavery abolitionist community of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Do you think that this movement should invest more time in understanding that history?

Yes, of course, it’s always valuable to learn from other movements for emancipation and social justice. I think it has to be handled the right way. In the US, many African-Americans were offended by PETA’s campaign that attempted to show analogies between the enslavement of humans and of nonhuman animals. PETA should have done a better job of working with African-American activists to use that powerful analogy in a way that would have gained more sympathy and support rather than alienating people. There are a number of prominent African-Americans who have a long history in the civil rights movement and who do see these connections with animal exploitation. When I teach a course on racism at Brock I always draw the analogy with speciesism and try to show how these ideologies of oppression are intertwined and mutually-supporting.

The Critical Animal Studies Dept at Brock will be hosting the 10th Annual Critical Animal Studies Conference in March 2011. What can people expect from the conference? What has it been like to watch this conference grow?

When I’ve organized these conferences in past years I was gratified to hear people say that they enjoyed them and found them useful and exciting. I think it’s important to encourage activists and animal protection organizations to attend and participate as well rather than just having a bunch of academics give papers. There’s a tendency in the new academic field of what’s called Animal Studies to produce obscure, apolitical papers that don’t have anything to do with animal rights and that’s what I’m hoping to avoid. I’d like to see lots of activists and organizations participating so that we can keep the focus on the situation of actual animals. At the same time, I hope that some academics can also present papers that provide some interesting analyses and insights. It’s also good to have this event as something that can show there’s a community of interest in these issues. I’m happy to be collaborating with the Institute for Critical Animal Studies on this conference for their tenth anniversary. And it’s nice to have a crowd of people all enjoying vegan meals together.