Action for Animals Austin

VegNews Magazine, the leading vegan magazine in the U.S., was recently caught using stock photos of meat dishes in their magazine. Their staff was careful to edit out images of meat but an anonymous tip to vegan blogger quarrygirl.com lead her to write a story accusing the magazine of passing off images of meat as being meatless.

Read the story here.

VegNews Magazine has admitted their mistake but they say their limited budget sometimes forced them to use these royalty-free stock images and to then edit out the meat portions of the pics.

I must admit that I'm disappointed about this for several reasons. I think that a vegan magazine should use vegan pics but I do understand their budget constraints. However, this story has provided vegan-bashers with a huge amount of ammunition to use against the vegan movement.

I, and I hope you, as well, will keep this mistake in prospective. No animals were injured or harmed or killed or abused because of VegNews decision to use these pictures. These were royalty-free images, meaning no money went to anyone or industry that exploits animals. The pics were used by VegNews in pursuit of promoting veganism (and animal rights), not in pursuit of animal exploitation.

It is important that we remember who are friends are in the animal rights movement and in the vegan movement. We should continue to support those who support our cause, like VegNews. Animal exploitators will use this mistake to attack the movement and fracture it. Do not let them do that. Let's stick together. I will continue to support VegNews magazine and I hope you will also.

• VegNews Magazine