Today we’re ending our series with Karen Dawn, author of Thanking the Monkey and founder of DawnWatch. Karen’s devotion to improving the lives of animals and the planet is awesome!  Enjoy!

Ecorazzi: Karen Dawn, here we are again back at another wonderful animal event together. Why are you here tonight celebrating Farm Sanctuary?

Karen Dawn: You mean why do I love them enough to fly all the way across the country for this? They just do everything right. They don’t preach – they teach without preaching. They’re full of love and respect for animals and other people. Oh and they’re fun ! They know how to throw a great party.

E: Agreed! So what’s been going on in the world of Karen Dawn lately?

KD: Well , I guess my biggest news is that the Washington Post just listed Thanking the Monkey as one of its “Best Books of 2008.” I am so thrilled. Gosh, I would be thrilled even if wasn’t my book, thrilled just that a new animals rights book made that list.

And here in New York I just did a reading at East West bookstore which felt lovely. I’m so excited they’re stocking my book because of course Barnes and Nobles and all those place stock it, but East West is a spiritual bookstore that I love to support . I’m so happy Thanking the Monkey is there now.

E: That’s great!

KD: Oh and did you see the LA Times piece?

E: No!

KD: I have to send it to you!! On Thanksgiving Day there was a huge photo of me setting the dining room table with two turkeys hanging out and watching. I rescued the turkeys – Bruce and Emily. They’re named after Bruce Greenwood and Emily Deschanel who are going to do a reading with me next Sunday ( December 14th ) at Animal Acres , and then help me retire their little rescue turkey namesakes. I am excited because it is Bruce Greenwood’s first ever animal event! He read my book and seemed seriously impacted by it — changed some of his eating habits — and agreed to the public reading.

E: Didn’t I just see Greenwood as Captain Pike in a trailer for the new Star Trek movie?

KD: Yes! It is coming out next year, directed by JJ Abrams, and they are already showing trailers. It is going to be so cool. Bruce has done a lot of great work in wonderful films but it will be fun to see him in that kind of, you know, blockbuster. And, besides being a ridiculously talented actor , he is also a skilled carpenter ! And lucky for me he is my neighbor. He put up a beautiful turkey coop at my house for my new feathered family members in a matter of hours.

E: Who knew! And of course we are madly in love with Emily Deschanel here at Ecorazzi…plus she’s totally my Facebook bud!

KD: Emily is just lovely. I remember when a friend of mine met her they called her “a solid citizen” which is not usually what you call a gorgeous Hollywood gal — but with Emily it just fits. She is as down to earth as her Bones character — but a lot more charming! I am glad people will get to see that for themselves at the reading, and see her wonderful commitment to the animals.

E: Awesome! Well I’m sure all of our readers in Cali will stop by Animal Acres this Sunday to say hello! Let’s chat again very soon!

To find out all the details about Karen’s Thanking the Monkey event at Animal Acres, visit ThankingTheMonkey.com! A big, big thank you to Karen Dawn and Farm Sanctuary for making this interview possible! Don’t forget to check back tomorrow when we have a brand new exclusive celebrity interview!

Farm Sanctuary is kind of like that gift that keeps on giving. I mean seriously, how can you not leave these guys?! As the nations leading animal rescue organization, Farm Sanctuary strives to see a world where the violence that animal agriculture inflicts upon people, animals and the environment has ended, and where instead we exercise values of compassion.

Last night Ecorazzi had the honor of attending the organizations Winter Wonderland for the Animals event and catching up with a few of our favorite Hollywood do-gooders. The evening was held at the beautiful Art Directors Club in midtown Manhattan and was jam packed with New York’s most compassionate crowd. 

Upon arrival we made our way to the press area and said hello to Corey and Susie Feldman, Jennifer Coolidge, Daniella Sea and many more. Of course the evening wouldn’t be complete without a little face time with Alison Becker, Loretta Swit, Chloe Jo Berman, Victoria Moran, Karen Dawn and Joshua Katcher. We also spotted Ally Sheedy, Tatum O’Neal, Peter and Mary Max and Princess Superstar! 

After all that celebrity chatting we were STARVING and so we headed on over to the beautiful array of all vegan nosh, provided by some of New York’s hottest restaurants. Truthfully, everything we tasted was out of this world, but a few of our personal favorites were Dr. Cow’s all raw vegan cheese (order this right now, it will change your life), Candle 79’s Seitan Chimichurri and Lula’s Peanut-Butter Fudge Ice Cream! A-FRIGIN-MAZING!!!

The evening closed with a lively auction to help raise money for all of Farm Sancutary’s important work and a speech by co-founder, Gene Baur! Oh and we have some GREAT news!! Staring next Monday, Ecorazzi will be bringing you six full days of Farm Sanctuary Exclusive interviews with the parties hottest stars! That’s what I’m talking about! So make sure you check back next week to see why Hollywood can’t get enough of this wonderful organization, and visit FarmSanctuary.org to find out how YOU can get involved!

photo credit: Andrew Ford

As Ecorazzi previously reported, this year we chose to spend our precious World Vegan Day sampling delicious veggie food and hanging out with a few well-known veggies at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival . It was our first time at the festival and I’ll tell you this: we most certainly WEREN’T disappointed.

A highlight of the day was a talk by celebrated author and friend of Ecorazzi, Karen Dawn, who discussed her book Thanking The Monkey and signed autographs in the lobby after – if you don’t have a copy make sure you pick one up! We also said hello to Josh Hooten, founder of Herbivore Clothing Clothing, who will be featured in our upcoming segment Ecorazzi Home Movie: Parrish Goes To Portland.

If you’re a regular reader, you might remember that earlier this month I attended Farm Sanctuary’s Party for the Pigs and met one my all time favorite “actorvists”, Persia White. I was so impressed by Persia’s supreme awesomeness that I gave her my coveted vegan pin that I often sport at these kinds of events. While I was more than happy to share my bling, my threads have been looking a bit bare lately. Luckily for me, Snooty Jewelry owner Jeanine Taylor – a talented vegan jewelry designer – was at the festival and hooked me up with a brand new recycled VEGAN pin that is sure to impress all!

If you missed the festival this year, NO WORRIES! The Boston Vegetarian Society holds the food fest each year and you only have to wait another 363 for the next one (sigh). To find out more about what’s going on up in MASS, visit the Boston Vegetarian Society’s website! Happy eating!

Earlier this month Ecorazzi went apples and bananas celebrating World Vegetarian Day – the meat-free holiday that kicks off Vegetarian Awareness Month. Well October is coming to an end and World Vegan Day (Nov. 1) is just around the corner! And how will WE celebrate the vegan holiday this year? One clue: pahk the cah in Havad Yahd (see also: park the car in Harvard Yard).

Yep, you’ve got it right! This year Ecorazzi will celebrate the vegtastic holiday at the 13th Annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. Besides tasty treats, the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival will also welcome some great speakers – including friend of Ecorazzi and Thanking The Monkey author, Karen Dawn!

With free admission, parking and food sampling, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t see ALL of you in Boston this Saturday! So find a carpool, take a bus or hop on the train and get down to the Reggie Lewis Athletic Center this Saturday, November 1, 2008 from 10 AM – 6 PM for the best World Vegan Day celebration ever!!!

For more information, visit BostonVeg.org/FoodFest!

Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, is pictured here speaking at a Thanking The Monkey book signing party this past weekend at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Last month, Ecorazzi spotlighted Thanking The Monkey’s author, Karen Dawn, and most recently chatted it up with Peter Singer at Dawn’s Birthday/World Vegetarian Day party in NYC! Don’t forget to check out Karen’s site along with 11 other favorites on the first edition of Ecorazzi’s Veg Blog Round-Up: News From Around Web!

On October 1st, we here at Ecorazzi celebrated World Vegetarian Day – an annual herbivore holiday that officially kicks off Vegetarian Awareness Month. And because we believe in always partying like rock stars, to continue our celebration throughout the month, Ecorazzi will be chatting with some of the world’s most influential vegetarian actors, musicians and writers in a new Vegetarian Awareness Month celebrity interview series. Today we kick off our new feature with words by renowned author Peter Singer.

Peter Singer is a legend in the animal rights world. In 1975, Singer published Animal Liberation – a book widely considered to be the textbook for the animal rights movement. I recently had the chance to chat with the author at Karen Dawn’s Thanking The Moneky book signing/World Vegetarian Party (a full post on that will be coming shortly).

I feel like I’m interviewing a hero. I mean you published Animal Liberation in 1975 and essentially revolutionized the way people think about animals in regards to ethics. How did you get started in this field?

It was a combination of things. I was studying philosophy and I was interested in ethics and interested in ethics in a way that makes a difference to the world. And I happened to meet somebody who was a vegetarian and he was a vegetarian because of his concern about animals — which was pretty unusual then. I mean you had people who were vegetarian because they thought it was good for their health or if they believed in reincarnation, but he just straightforwardly thought that what we do to animals to turn them into meat isn’t right. And I never really thought about that. There wasn’t much discussed at the time. So I put it together with the ethics I was doing and tried to see how you would justify treating animals the way we do, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t justify it. And that was a bit of a shock because I was eating meat all my life up to that point. But I thought having realized that, I needed to not only make the change myself, but to get other people to see this. It was obvious this was a major issue that nobody was seeing – we were just blind to it. So that’s why I wrote the book.

Since 1975 the animal rights/ vegetarian world has most certainly grown and changed. If you had to look back and compare, what would you say is the biggest change you’ve witnessed?

Well there are huge changes. There are changes in people’s understanding of the issue. The term “animal rights advocate” doesn’t anymore get sort of baffled looks or, “Are you crazy?”, or something like that. It’s known that there are people – including fairly sensible people – who think that animals ought not be treated the way they are and want to see radical changes, so that’s a big difference. There’s obviously a lot more vegetarian and especially a lot more vegan food around. Again the word vegan was not known or understood in the seventies at all. There was a tiny British vegan society, but you never met a vegan. There was nowhere vegans could go and eat or anything like that. So that’s really changed dramatically. But also I think we’re starting to see bigger breakthroughs into the mainstream on things like factory farming. You know Europe is already seeing that. Europe has already passed laws to change the nature of the way we treat factory hens and pregnant sows and so on. And we’re going see on November fourth whether California goes along with Proposition 2. I mean that’s going be huge. If that passes, that will be the most significant thing politically that has happened to animals in the history of the United States, I would say. So we’ll see if we’ve got to that point and if we can actually persuade a majority of Americans – a majority of Californians anyway – that the way we’re treating animals in factory farms is just plain wrong.

I want to talk for a second about speciesism. It’s a concept that many people aren’t familiar with and one that you seem to base your work on. Talk to me a little about speciesism and what that means to you.

Well I think the idea of speciesism is really crucial if we’re really going to see this issue as something that is in someway analogous with racism or sexism, which is what I would argue it is. I would argue that in all of these cases we have one group that has more power than the other group — whether that’s blacks or women or animals — and not only makes use of that other group for it’s own purposes, but actually convinces itself that it’s right to do so. And that — because they’re part of the other race, sex or species — it’s okay for us to use them in these ways. So I think speciesism, like racism, is a prejudice against those other beings – in this case who aren’t members of our species. This means we don’t take their interests seriously or give their interests the right that we would if they were human beings. I mean a lot of people say, “Well it’s not because they’re not a member of our species, but because they’re not as rational as us or self-conscious or able to act technically or whatever.” But the real test of speciesism is when you compare human beings at the same mental level to a non-human animal. It’s controversial to do because when you’re talking about humans with brain damage or other disabilities people don’t like comparing humans to animals. But realistically you have to say that there are humans that can not do the things that chimpanzees or even dogs or pigs can do. And yet we would never think of experimenting on them the way we think about experimenting on pigs or dogs — and of course not raising them for food. So we have to ask: what is the difference between them? What is supposed to be the moral difference? And I think really it just comes down to the idea that well, humans are special. And I think that’s the core as to why we’re able to exploit animals in the way we do.

Now I’m assuming that you yourself are vegetarian. Are you vegan as well?

Well I’ve been vegetarian for 35 years. I hesitate to call myself vegan because I’m not really strict about it. If I’m traveling and there isn’t vegan food around, I’ll eat vegetarian. I sometimes think that the purity of the thing is not the be all and end all of it. The thing you want to do is make an impact on others, to not support animal exploitation. And if on a few occasions there are some things that have some animal products in it, you shouldn’t feel that you’ve somehow done something dreadful. You’ve got to do what you can and to influence other people, and if you appear too fanatical or too purist you could quite possibly just turn people off.

We’d like to thank Peter for his time and his words. If you haven’t already, make sure to pick up a copy of Animal Liberation or any other of the fantastic books written by Mr. Singer. He will open your eyes. I PROMISE!

photo credit: picture taken by Derek Goodwin at the Farm Sanctuary.

Ya’ll, I come bearing such news for you this morning! So last night, in celebration of World Vegetarian Day, I spent the evening drinking Drunken Monkey’s and hanging out with some of the coolest kids around at Karen Dawn’s birthday/ book-signing party (stay tuned for a full post about that later today, including great pictures and an exclusive interview with world renowned author Peter Singer).

Anyway, Chloe Jo (Ecorazzi’s new bff) and I were chatting, and she told me that last week at the Proposition 2 benefit in LA, Ellen DeGeneres officially came out as a full-fledged vegan. You guys, I FREAKED OUT! First, because veganism is like the most amazing thing ever and having heavy hitters on our team is so important. And second, because HOW IN THE WOLRD DID I NOT KNOW THAT???!!!!!

Some of you might remember that even before Ellen’s vegan wedding, Ecorazzi predicted that Ellen was mere moments away from taking the veg pledge, and now it looks like she’s finally gone and done it. So what inspired this balls to the wall move? None other than a super awesome book called Skinny Bitch by another one of Ecorazzi’s bff’s, Rory Freedman. If you ask me, Skinny Bitch has totally revolutionized the vegan movement and we all owe Rory a great big standing ovation! Go buy this book right now!

Now I know there’s some drama because Ellen is the new face of Procter & Gamble’ CoverGirl– a horrific company that still tests heavily on animals – but this may not actually be such a bad thing. Just think, if Ellen has the selling power to make the company big bucks, perhaps she might also have the clout to finally convince P&G to ditch their medieval methods of animal abuse and join the ranks of progressive companies who test their products in a more responsible manor. She’s definitely contributed to major political reform before!

So Dear Ellen, on behalf of all the vegans and vegetarians out there, WELCOME TO THE CLUB! I look forward to covering all of the many wonderful things I know you’ll do for the movement. You rock my frigin socks, lady!

In just two weeks the world’s largest and oldest animal rights conference will be held in our nations capitol, and trust me you don’t want to miss it! Like every year, the conference line-up boasts a slew of incredible speakers, including author Karen Dawn (who Ecorazzi will spotlight later this month) Saurabh Dalal from the International Vegetarian Union, Mike Hudak from the Sierra Club (our charity of the month) and that famous face you no doubtably feel strongly about one way or the other…Heather Mills. (For the record I’m on Team Heather.)

The conference will feature 90 speakers from 60 animal protection groups in 9 countries, presentations on whale wars and effects of global warming, celebrity & activist awards and about a bazillion other really exciting activities. Also…did I mention I’d be there! 

That’s right! On August 16th and 17th I’ll be bringing you the latest in green gossip from Washington D.C as I peruse the show with my fancy, schmancy press pass. So get a group of your coolest friends together and carpool on over to the Hilton Mark Center sometime between August 14th-18th to join in on all the fun! To learn more or purchase tickets visit arconference.org. See ya at the show! 

I enjoy a lot of things: really good margaritas, paid vacation time, that noise bubble wrap makes when it’s popped, but none of those compare to how much I love the annual Farm Sanctuary Gala. In case you’re late to the party, Farm Sanctuary was started in 1986 with the rescue of Hilda, a “downer” cow left for dead in a stockpile. Today they are considered to be the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization and work tirelessly to expose and stop cruel practices in the food animal industry. After over 20 successful years they now have 2 fully running sanctuaries in New York and California that are home to hundreds of animals, tons of staff and plenty of curious visitors.

Each year the organization holds a ritzy, celebrity-packed gala to help raise money for their many noble causes. Two yeas ago, before my Ecorazzi days, I volunteered at the event and was truly inspired by a room full of like-minded people all coming together to celebrate those that are so rarely even thought about. This year I got to attend with a full access, fancy-pancy press pass and pick the brains of those very famous VIP’s I once so fondly cooed over.

I arrived at 4:30, signed in and was told I had “full-access” to the event. Score! After getting my photographer Andrew Ford set up on the red carpet I headed inside for some investigative work (and perhaps a little appetizer munching). The space was pure elegance with beautifully decorated tables, a silent auction area and, of course, the second floor VIP loft. I started slowly and perused some of the items on the silent auction tables. There were signed photographs, paintings, jewelry and plenty of eager volunteers to help answer any questions I might have.

Next I headed upstairs to the VIP lounge where I had the chance to speak with Melissa Rivers (a regular Ecorazzi reader), Emily Deschanel, Rory Freedman, Dennis Kucinich, Swoosie Kurtz, Kevin Nealon, Victoria Moran, Ally Sheedy, Loretta Swit, Russell Simmons and Farm Sanctuary president and co-founder Gene Baur. The celebs were kind, well-spoken and all agreed on one thing: Farm Sanctuary is pretty damn incredible. FYI — throughout the week Ecorazzi will feature The Farm Sanctuary Gala Interviews, a series of exclusive one on ones with the many celebrity guests in attendance.

After celeb-time, the ceremony began with host Heather Mills admitting that she wanted to “convert all the meat-eaters in the house.” Awesome! The dinner came a bit later and was partially designed by Mills herself. Now even though I had “full-access”, I didn’t have “full-access” to dinner!! However, you better believe those years of waiting tables taught me a thing or two about getting on the good side of servers. I quickly befriended a waiter and made sure I got a plate of vegan lasagna with bechamel sauce. Sadly, I must admit that I was far from impressed. The plate appeared rather sloppy, adversely juxtaposing the elegance of the evening, and the overly sweet bechamel sauce left much to be desired. Luckily I filled up on delicious appetizers like fresh guacamole, vegan chicken and green tomato soup.

The ceremony continued with awards given to many, including Karen Dawn for her outstanding activism and the Jivamukti Yoga School for their leadership in compassionate living. As the evening began to wind down Susie Essman got on stage and auctioned off a few pretty incredible gifts — my favorite being a portrait sitting with world-renown painter Peter Max. The ceremony closed with a twilight reception and a musical performance by Grammy Award winner Shawn Colvin.

As I chowed down on my out of the this world vegan brownie cheesecake, care of Vegan Treats, I looked around the room at a group of people who were all spending their time and money on a cause they truly believed in and I felt so proud to be among them. It was getting late and my feet were tired so I headed for the exit and was offered a remarkably heavy gift-bag with enough vegan products to last me for the next month!

A big thanks to the folks at Farm Sanctuary for pulling off such a lovely event and for inviting your beloved Ecorazzi team to take part in the festivities. If you’d like to visit the farm or learn how you can get involved, visit FarmSanctuary.org. Also, don’t forget to check Ecorazzi all week long for the Farm Sanctuary Gala exclusive interviews!

Photo Credit: Andrew Ford