AR Story Ideas

A short time after going vegan, I came up with several ideas for animal-rights themed fiction projects, and wrote large chunks of two of them in a feverish burst of creativity. One is a comic book script that I may actually draw someday. The working title is "Free Range: A Bird's Eye View of Christmas," and it's about a group of supposedly free range turkeys who escape from a slaughterhouse and make a cross country journey in the dead of winter. It's sort of like Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey, but with turkeys. And a slaughterhouse.

There are many things I love about my rough story idea, including the main turkey character, who is literally guided by the voice of the Great Mother Turkey Goddess who whispers to her of a mysterious place called Sanctuary. What holds me back from committing myself to it is that I don't know how to incorporate a truly vegan, abolitionist message into a story like that. I can imagine that it might win some sympathy for turkeys, but I'm not sure how to incorporate the notion that it's not just wrong to murder turkeys for Christmas dinner, but that it's wrong to kill and exploit animals, period.

One of the other ideas I had, one which will never see the light of day, was a dark fantasy set in a dystopian near-future where all the cows have vanished from the face of the earth and the dairy industry, rather than giving up on itself, begins using disadvantaged women as milk machines instead. The main character in the story is the head of an ad agency who gets to design the marketing campaign to sell the wondrous health benefits of "human dairy." And, because he's good at his job, he of course succeeds in convincing the public to buy it.

I had written large chunks of that story before I realized that simply role-reversing human and animal victims doesn't actually challenge the paradigm. People always talk about how it's terrible for human beings to be treated "like cattle," but that doesn't even come close to questioning why cows should be treated like cattle. So that one got shelved, too.

That's when I realized that incorporating an animal rights message into a story that isn't necessarily about animal rights, per se, might be a more powerful approach. That's what I'm working on now, and I'll talk about some of those ideas in the next blog.