“I dream of peace on Earth, which won’t be achieved until our world is vegan.”
Erin Ireland. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur.
In 2011, Erin Ireland founded her bakery wholesaler, To Die For Fine Foods, almost by accident. She began baking chocolate macadamia nut banana bread as gifts for friends, who raved about the “to die for” loaves. Through social media, Ireland’s banana bread developed its own profile—getting attention from a Michelin star chef, a TV Bachelorette, the Vancouver Canucks, Dragon’s Den, and countless other local reporters. Soon, the banana bread was available in many coffee shops and restaurants, and Ireland had a small team of bakers and a driver to keep up with demand.
There was only one problem. To Die For’s banana bread wasn’t vegan—and Ireland, after watching Forks Over Knives and then Earthlings, and making the connection between the animals on her plate and her beloved dog, Effie, was becoming a passionate vegan advocate herself. Ireland worked with a local chef to come up with a scaleable solution to replace the eggs so that nobody could tell the difference: psyllium husk and agar agar. With renewed passion for the business, Ireland now supplies retailers all over Vancouver and beyond with not only banana bread, but lemon loaf, power balls, breakfast cookies, and, in the autumn, pumpkin loaf. Vancouver vegans don’t need to go out of their way to find to die for baked goods because they’re in just about every neighbourhood, and non-vegans are discovering in droves that modern vegan food is every bit as delicious as its traditional counterparts.
Every day, I wake up and think about the countless sentient animals who are being used by humans unnecessarily, against their will. My heart bleeds for these incredible creatures who are intelligent and intuitive in ways we can’t possibly understand.
With a background in broadcast journalism, Ireland also innovates as a food reporter. Ireland is familiar to many Vancouverites from her years food reporting for local media. But in a changing era of television stations and newspapers downsizing and increasingly turning to online avenues to stay afloat, Ireland has stayed ahead of the game by reinventing what it means to cover food issues. Through her website and wildly popular social media channels, Ireland reports on the best vegan restaurants, cookbooks, and companies she can find. She also shares real life tips for vegan cooking at home through her intimate Instagram stories, which feel like an encouraging friend walking you through the meal-making process. In turn, she’s offered partnership opportunities from companies whose vision aligns with her own to share sponsored content. In 2017, she was selected as one of Canon’s “One2Watch” photographers, showcasing talented photographers from across the country.
That’s not all. Ireland also organizes regular community events to inspire people to live better: Mindful Book Club, which reads books about animal rights, sustainability, consumerism, and ethics; Mindful Movie Night, screening documentaries while fundraising for various causes; and the Heartbeets Run Club, showing that athletes can be fitter and faster fuelled by plants (Ireland was a NCAA Division 1 volleyball player in college). In 2015, she delivered a masterful TEDx talk highlighting a meat bias in our food media. And in between all this, Ireland is raising her growing young family. She has many other projects percolating and we can’t wait to see what’s next from her!
Learn more about Ireland’s work and follow her on Instagram. Photos by Jo-Anne McArthur. Interview and text by Anna Pippus.
“I could never have imagined how successful animal law would be.”
Joyce Tischler. All photos by Jo-Anne McArthur except where indicated.
It’s not just because Joyce Tischler co-founded the first and only animal law organization in the United States that she has been called the mother of animal law. (Joyce founded Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) in 1979, well before animal law was a recognized field.) She’s also a mother to her own daughter and a self-described nurturer whose quintessentially female qualities of compassion and inclusivity have been credited by ALDF staffers for much of the organization’s success.
Liberty Mulkani, ALDF’s events coordinator, says when she first started with the organization, she was away from home for the first time and missing her family. Joyce would take her and her boyfriend to lunch to ensure they felt welcome, introduce them to people and teach them about the animal rights movement. Liberty says Joyce became like a second mother. And Joyce is like that with everyone who comes through the door, Liberty says. Over a decade later, Liberty is still with ALDF because of the welcoming atmosphere she says Joyce created within the organization.
But Joyce can’t be dismissed as a softie. ALDF’s executive director Stephen Wells describes Joyce as smart and no-nonsense. Indeed, it’s clear that she’s nobody’s fool, a courageous trailblazer who both forges ahead and pulls back when it feels right to her. As ALDF grew into a bigger organization needing more administration, she relinquished control to an executive director—Stephen—so she could continue to focus on what she loved best: developing the field of animal law.
Carter Dillard, ALDF’s director of litigation, echoes this praise. He credits Joyce not only for founding an organization in an unheard-of field in a male-dominated world, but for also setting her ego aside and recognizing when the organization had outgrown her. She genuinely puts the interests of the animals first, he says.
Jo-Anne from the Unbound Project team sat down with Joyce to chat about the field of animal law, how animal law fits into the broader animal rights movement, and one thing she regrets.
On the explosive growth of the field of animal law:
“I could never have imagined how successful animal law would be. If we’d done this 50 years earlier, we might have failed miserably. But the time was right, following the 1960s and 70s, the rise of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, farm workers, the environmental movement—all of those came before us, and so our society was really ready for the animal rights movement and animal law. There’s a culture in the legal field of being open to new, creative, controversial ideas. If you look at the history of social movements in this country, lawyers have always been a part of it. I’m fascinated by social movements and the interplay between a social movement and what’s done outside the courtroom and how that influences what happens in the courtroom because it’s really a close connection.
We can’t get good law until society is ready for that law to happen. The law and how society works are so closely connected. It’s hard to see which comes first.
It’s a chicken and egg thing. With animal law, we’ve had to be conscious of that interplay between society and the legal field.
Joyce Tischler
Joyce Tischler
On working together and playing the long game:
No matter what you’re doing—whether you’re a photographer, or a lawyer, or a demonstrator, or an academic—nobody is working alone. We ARE part of a greater whole, and it all works together, and we need to be respectful of that. We need to understand that this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. What we’re doing will create change and we might not live to see it, or a lot of it! If you were an abolitionist in the 1700s, you were dealing with a system that was so entrenched that it wasn’t going to end in your lifetime. Did you keep working? Of course you keep working! We have to think about the long term.
On influencing the next generation of influencers:
“By moving law into the mainstream we can create allies. If you teach animal law at the law school level, you get to people who are going to graduate and go into large law firms, become judges, become prosecutors, become legislators. So if you get ‘em in law school they’ll go out into the world and create change, and that’s been far more successful than we realized when we started doing this.
We are mainstreaming animal law into our own field so that when next generation is in court they won’t get laughed at.
We were laughed at in the old days! You can do so much when you mainstream. And you might say, yeah but you’re compromising… We’re lawyers. It’s a conservative field, but you can get so much done through it.”
Joyce Tischler
On the gendered hierarchy in the U.S. animal protection movement:
“To be crass, when the money starts to show up, the men start to show up. If you look at the leaders of the organizations (including mine!) they are well paid, in positions of power. Men are more comfortable with power than women tend to be. Women tend to be the workers, men tend to be the people who tell the workers what to do. That’s such an ingrained part of culture. I think it has to do with where the money is and where the power is, and men tend to be better at grabbing that than women, and that’s what’s happening and it’s sad, it’s unfortunate.”
On trying to get farmed animal protected and the role of the consumer:
“When we’re dealing with the biggest single issue, which is farmed animals, consumers are our biggest ally. It’s appalling and shocking that there are no—or very, very few—laws to protect farmed animals.
What do you do when you don’t have laws? It’s like being an actor with no script. You’ve got to figure out a way to get those animals protected and you’re bending yourself into pretzel shapes.
The kinds of cases that we take are consumer protection, labelling, environmental laws, clean water and clean air legislation—they don’t protect animals directly. It’s bizarre! So we have to look to consumers—they are setting the stage for what laws we will get or what case law we can possibly come up with.”
On what she’d do differently and the value of tenacity:
“I would say to my 25 year old self, get the fuck out of your way and just do the work.
Stop thinking you can’t do it, and set aside your “I’m not good enough” crap. That stuff just got in my way.
When I would just stop worrying about whether what I was doing was good enough, whether I was doing the right thing, whether I was getting enough done, whether I was smart enough, tall enough, male enough… when I just set that aside and just did the work, it got done. You don’t have to be the most brilliant lawyer. You don’t have to be the one who went to Harvard. Just do it. Just get out there, pick your project or pick your focus, dig in. … tenacity is a fabulous quality. I’ve learned that by being tenacious, and by just building, building, building, I could be good enough. We women tend to hold ourselves back and I regret that.”
Image courtesy of Joyce Tischler.
On how to become an animal lawyer:
“Learn about animal law as much as you can, read as much as you can, and seep yourself in what the issues are, then decide what you want to do. What calls to you most? What’s your passion? Is it farmed animals? Is it wildlife? Or are you a generalist? I’m a generalist. And then figure out, okay, how am I going to make this my career? There are very few groups and very few jobs working directly in animal law. So understand that it’s going to be tough.
You’re going to have to be tenacious, you’re going to have to be an entrepreneur, you’re going to have to be creative.
Maybe you work at an agency or you start your own. Or, think outside the box. Maybe you go and work at a county level where you can do all the animal work—and there’s lots, if you look for it. Take all animal cruelty cases. Or if you really have a strong stomach, maybe go work for the USDA—the belly of the beast—and try to make change from within. Wow, that would be hard to do! I couldn’t do it.
On a Mission of Kindness and Compassion Towards All Animals
Karyn Boswell with Penny and Teddy.
Karyn Boswell didn’t set out to become a leading voice on horse protection. She didn’t even set out to start a horse sanctuary, Penny Lane Farm Sanctuary. Instead, the former federal government analyst became a mother and moved to the country—coincidentally, just down the road from a feedlot, where horses no longer of use in human industries were routinely held between auction and slaughter.
A lifelong vegetarian (she’s now vegan) and one-time veterinary clinic employee, Karyn hadn’t even known that horses were killed for meat, let alone that approximately 80,000 horses endure a horrifying slaughter each year in Canada. The first horse she rescued and the namesake for her sanctuary, Penny Lane, was found with an auction number glued to her hip. Then, Penny didn’t have a name, and her past was unknown—irrelevant to her owner, who bought her at auction only to turn a profit by selling her for meat.
Karyn and Penny
Karyn and Penny
Karyn and Penny
We met Karyn, her family and her team of dedicated volunteers on a hot summer’s day at Penny Lane, just east of Canada’s capital, Ottawa. Karyn introduced us to each resident, sharing with us their harrowing stories, and how they’ve adjusted to sanctuary life. It was brilliant to photograph her interacting with Penny and Teddy in the lower paddock. Her look of unbridled (pun!) happiness while spending time with her equine friends was a joy to photograph.
Nobody rides on the horses at Karyn’s sanctuary. She says:
It’s important to me that nobody rides any of the horses at Penny Lane because they are not here to serve a purpose or to entertain—they are simply allowed to live their own lives, free to just be. All of the horses have had tough pasts, full of instability and uncertainty. Cowboy, for instance, was severely tortured and abused. He was in vet care for months and was then put up for adoption by the Windsor Humane Society. Sadly, no one wanted him because he could not be ridden—he was regarded as “useless”. He is not a toy that can be tossed aside when no longer useful. I want him to know he never has to entertain anyone. He can live in peace at the sanctuary, protected for life. I think it’s important to show people that you can establish an amazing relationship with a horse built on trust without riding them.
It’s not just 12 horses who are lucky enough to call Penny Lane home. Two goats rescued by the Montreal SPCA from a situation of severe neglect and two turkeys once destined to be Thanksgiving dinner now form their own unlikely flock of four. The turkeys, Michelle and Belle, are curious, intelligent, and alert. Though shy at first, it didn’t take them long to warm up to their human companions—or become bonded to each other. Now, they serve as ambassadors for sanctuary visitors, gently reminding people that turkeys are individuals, not a fleeting meal.
Karyn Boswell with her family and some of the staff and volunteers at Penny Lane Sanctuary.
After meeting Karyn, we got the sense that she was a supporter of many sanctuaries, animal rescue efforts and outreach. When asked about this, she replied:
A large part of my mission with Penny Lane Farm Sanctuary is to promote kindness and compassion towards all animals in order to raise awareness. I believe it is very important to support other organizations and efforts involved in animal rights that are working hard to make a difference – whether it be in the form of a sanctuary or vegan-based business. Being involved so deeply with the horses has truly opened my eyes to just how badly society mistreats and misunderstands them. They are still classified as “livestock”, which subjects them to the same horrific abuses that farm animals endure. I have made a point of digging into specific industries which rely on horses for pure monetary gain (discarding them like trash when no longer profitable). Some examples include the racing industry, slaughter industry (and live export of draft horses to Japan for meat consumption), caleche industry, and PMU farms out West. I support the tireless efforts of organizations such as the Canadian Horse Defense Coalition and the Anti-Caleche Defense Coalition, that work hard to bring these issues to light.
Karyn and her team open their doors to visitors a few times a year. Details are on their website: www.pennylanesanctuary.com
Thank you Karyn from everyone at Unbound for your tireless and inspiring work on behalf of animals.
There was only one problem. To Die For’s banana bread wasn’t vegan—and Ireland, after watching Forks Over Knives and then Earthlings, and making the connection between the animals on her plate and her beloved dog, Effie, was becoming a passionate vegan advocate herself. Ireland worked with a local chef to come up with a scaleable solution to replace the eggs so that nobody could tell the difference: psyllium husk and agar agar. With renewed passion for the business, Ireland now supplies retailers all over Vancouver and beyond with not only banana bread, but lemon loaf, power balls, breakfast cookies, and, in the autumn, pumpkin loaf. Vancouver vegans don’t need to go out of their way to find to die for baked goods because they’re in just about every neighbourhood, and non-vegans are discovering in droves that modern vegan food is every bit as delicious as its traditional counterparts. 
That’s not all. Ireland also organizes regular community events to inspire people to live better: Mindful Book Club, which reads books about animal rights, sustainability, consumerism, and ethics; Mindful Movie Night, screening documentaries while fundraising for various causes; and the Heartbeets Run Club, showing that athletes can be fitter and faster fuelled by plants (Ireland was a NCAA Division 1 volleyball player in college). In 2015, she delivered a masterful TEDx talk highlighting a meat bias in our food media. And in between all this, Ireland is raising her growing young family. She has many other projects percolating and we can’t wait to see what’s next from her!
