Animal Activism

Texex91, since you're changing your order anyway, have you considered dropping the leather interior?

It's a long story, but my original MS order was cancelled when Tesla had some bone-headed requirements to murder cows and sit on their skins for certain options. I tried to meet with Elon in Austin, but he bolted after too many hours wasted with the hearing. So I sent him a FedEx; problem fixed for me, and the many others that are "quite aware" of the environmental impact of raising animals to murder for their skins and flesh.

Thus, my MS 85 is 100% Cruelty-free, with the Textile Interior, and a leatherETTE steering wheel. I avoided creating a massive amount of GHG's AND the stunning, vomit-inducing, cruelty involved with "producing" leather and animal flesh. (I've seen it, and I know.)

Please see any of these sites for details:

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...tes-half-of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html

http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/leather-industry.aspx

http://www.meat.org

Our resident Tesla race car driver also ordered her P85 with the zero-cruelty interior. Since Tesla makes that a choice, do PLEASE consider taking the high road with your order. Not only will your interior be MUCH cooler and comfortable (no back sweat!) in the Texas summer, but you're first set of tires (and possibly your second) are paid for with the savings--sounds like a win-win-win, and it is for you, the planet, and certainly the animals.

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/20537-baby-picture-of-my-Model-S-)

I ask you to please take some time over the weekend to challenge the assumptions your (and my) parents handed us. Nothing changes until people do so--and then there's one more step: taking action. The vast majority don't, as noted by Winston Churchill:

[COLOR=#212121 !important]“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.”[/COLOR]

Thanks for researching this, mulling it over, and, I hope, making the "less-cruelty" choice for your Tesla order!

Sincerely,


Mark Peters
Hurst, TX

texex91 said:

STOP THE PRESS - UPDATE 10:58AM (8/31)

Okay was tossing and turning all night wishing I had got the P85+. I finally realized that I either need to load it up or get an S85--P85 wasn't going to cut it coming from 911. Boy now I know why they give you two weeks to confirm--I confirmed yesterday, but was able to make change.

Talked to my rep (had to wait for their store to open) and CHANGE IS MADE. P85+ (and of course added Air).

Signature has new config...off to the races (pun intended) :smile:

As they say here in Texas--Go Big or Go Home.
​

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Texex91, thanks for your note, but I'm, well, there's no other word for it: flabbergasted.

You have a very clear choice sitting before you. In the next few weeks you have to decide how you're going to "vote" with your dollars. What you "vote" for is EXACTLY what Tesla will build for you; they'll make your P85 based on what you want.

You stated the following:

"And just to note, my entire net wealth is being willed to the local animal shelter to build a state-of-the-art facility. So I'm a huge animal lover and supporter--trust me."

While that's certainly a nice gesture, please allow me to be blunt: how can anyone trust you when your're currently planning to have someone murder five or six fully sentient cows, animals just like dogs and cats, by having their brains blown out, just so you can sit on their skins after they've been treated with toxic chemicals. And you're even paying extra for that.

It's not a fabric.

It is the skin of many animals.

Animals that are now dead because there was a profit to be made by murdering them and cutting them for their flesh and parts.

For you.

Please tell me you can see a Grand Canyon-size gap between what you've written, what you profess to believe, and what you actually do, your real-world actions/choices?

**Look, I know this is a "rock your world" concept. I fully understand that.**

It was for me UNTIL I toured an abattoir some decades ago and had my eyes AND mind opened. We now have the internet and all sorts of video documentation for the downstream consequences of seemingly innocuous choices. Choices that our parents, society, and almost everyone says are "okay."

But they are wrong.

Leather is NOT an innocuous choice. What I've seen is the most evil I have ever experienced/seen/smelled. It changed me forever, as it would most. (And that's why they don't have any windows . . . .)

As I asked earlier, please take some time to review some of the links I've posted, and do some searching on your own as well. Watch what happens with the click of your mouse on something as seemingly petty as a non-textile interior choice for a Model S; there are plenty of videos out there.

You can change your order at ANY time prior to delivery; your car will end up as a loaner if it's already built when you change your mind, but in the interim it's going to become quite obvious after even the smallest amount of research that, as a self-professed "animal lover and supporter," building your MS to your current specifications is not the highest moral, ethical or right choice for you, the planet, and certainly the other sentient beings with whom we share this Earth.

There won't be any financial penalty as you're making a choice for the environment and morality; Tesla will give you a "freebie" for that kind of a change (and if they don't, contact me and I'll make it happen, even if a direct appeal to Elon is required.)

I am 100% aware you have to fight literally decades of "programming" by your parents, family, and society at large. But, just as we've overcome so many other seemingly impossible societal hurdles (blacks/indians as slaves, women as property w/no rights, seatbelts--who need 'em?, gay discrimination, etc.), we WILL make progress here as well.

As a Model S buyer you're already an early adopter so why not be a part of solution for animals and the planet too?

After you take some time to review the facts, and specifically, the consequences of your choice, you will have to agree that any other choice is simply a rationalization. Period.

Please, I beg you to sleep on this for a few days before you pull the trigger. There is NOTHING cheap, bad, uncomfortable or any other negative with the standard, cruelty-free, textile interior. I am fully engaged in this as part of my life's work because the billions of animals have no voice but for those of us that have seen and know what's going on . . . we must spread the facts on this to affect change.

It's another reason I purchased my formerly cancelled Model S; Elon did the right thing and I supported that change with a nearly $90k Model S re-order. That's a "vote" I didn't mind at all . . . .

Again, thanks for your note.

Best,


Mark

texex91 said:

Thanks for the info Mark. I like my leather and will be sticking with it. I appreciate the links and info, however I have a different opinion about all of this--but probably best suited to discuss in a different thread section of forum.

And just to note, my entire net wealth is being willed to the local animal shelter to build a state-of-the-art facility. So I'm a huge animal lover and supporter--trust me.

Thanks again and enjoy your cruelty free Tesla--I'm sure it's awesome.

Best.

Click to expand...

Moderator, I respectfully request you reconsider your move of the leather steering wheel and seats part of his order from this thread.

The OP's thread is about his MS buying experience, and his options selections. The Pano roof, Perf+, or sound options, etc., don't involved life or death.

The OP is an "animal lover and supporter."

He has been exposed to some details about his choices and been asked to not have 5 or 6 cows murdered so he can sit on their skins.

We have several weeks to see if he'll do some introspection and change his order to a cruelty-free Tesla, yet another feature where Tesla is breaking new ground and well ahead of the industry at large.

However, Tesla can only present choices; it can't pull or push customers to make the most ethical and moral and environmental choice.

Only the OP can do that.

I suspect that more than a few of us would like to see which path he takes.

Thus, keeping those posts here will be illustrative for all.

Thanks.

dsm363 said:

mod note: Posts about non-leather option moved to
non-leather seat option?

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Thank you.

My thoughts exactly.

How the skins of animals became equated with "luxury" is a marketing story for the ages.

Why people still believe that hard, sweaty, cracking/wear out much faster, interior choices are "better" is beyond me.

Thanks for your post!

ddruz said:

I just drove a loaner for a couple days that had textile seats. They were much more comfortable than my leather seats. If I had to do it over again, I would definitely go with textile now that it is available with all the other options.

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texex91 said:

Well I can certainly hear your passion about the cause and applaud it. However, cows aren't being killed for their skin, most people eat their meat--steaks--big here in Texas. I personally don't eat a lot of red meat, but I am not going to fault those that do. At the end of the day we all have causes that are near to our heart, but certainly cannot change everyone.

I do appreciate your input wish you the best on your pursuit to abolish leather in cars.

Just out of curiosity, do you post this thread to every buyer? If so, you are going to be busy in the coming months/years.

One step at a time.

Have a great Labor Day.

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Sad to see the moderator moved this thread here. This is about you and your options choices. It's especially apropos given your "love and support" for animals.

One is not an environmentalist if one is eating animals and wearing their flesh.

One cannot "love and support animals" if one is having them abused, murdered, eating them, and wearing (or sitting on) their flesh.

As to the other good points raised, they won't all fit here so I'll break up my reply into two replies.

In order:

Yes, animals are being murdered for all their parts. Doesn't make it right.

From an economics perspective, it adds a lot of their bottom line and, in the end, supports an industry that is founded on using, and abusing, animals for their parts; summary at the end of this paste.

(source: http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/leather-and-factory-farming.aspx )

*************
Most leather comes from cows raised for both beef and milk. Cows raised for beef spend most of their lives on extremely crowded feedlots. Studies have found that ranchers maximize profits by giving each steer less than 20 square feet of living space—the equivalent of putting 12 half-ton steers in a typical American bedroom!

The animals are subjected to painful procedures such as castration, branding (which causes third-degree burns), tail-docking, and dehorning—all without painkillers. They are deprived of veterinary care and exposed to the elements without any shelter. These breathing, thinking, feeling beings, who feel pain just as humans do, suffer immensely. They are also fed a steady diet of hormones to fatten them and antibiotics to keep them alive in extremely poor living conditions.

At the end of their short, dismal lives, cows are jam-packed into metal trucks, where, confused and terrified, they suffer from injury, weather extremes, crowded conditions, hunger, and thirst. In the winter, cows routinely arrive for slaughter frozen to the sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms in their own feces and urine, and injured or dead from the journey.

Frequently collapsing during their hellish ride, many cows arrive at the slaughterhouse unable to walk out of the back of the transport truck, so they are dragged off the truck with chains—often breaking bones when they hit the ground.

Every year, tens of millions of cows are stunned, hung upside-down, bled to death, and skinned in slaughterhouses. The federal Humane Slaughter Act stipulates that cows should be stunned by a mechanical blow to the head and rendered unconscious before they are strung up, but the high speed of the assembly lines—which often process up to 400 cows per hour—often results in improper stunning. Each year, millions of cows are skinned and dismembered while they are still kicking and crying out in terror.

Buying leather directly contributes to factory farms and slaughterhouses because skin is the most economically important byproduct of the meat industry.

**************

Specifically, here's the philosophy and environmental take on why it's wrong to support the animal skin trade.

(Source: http://www.animal-rights.com/arpage.htm )

Question 60: What is wrong with leather and how can we do without it?

Most leather goods are made from the byproducts of the slaughterhouse, and
some is purpose-made, i.e., the animal is grown and slaughtered purely for
its skin. So, by buying leather products, you will be contributing to the
profits of these establishments and augmenting the economic demand for
slaughter.
The Nov/Dec 1991 issue of the Vegetarian Journal has this to say about
leather: "Environmentally turning animal hides into leather is an energy
intensive and polluting practice. Production of leather basically involves
soaking (beamhouse), tanning, dyeing, drying, and finishing. Over 95 percent
of all leather produced in the U.S. is chrome-tanned. The effluent that must
be treated is primarily related to the beamhouse and tanning operations. The
most difficult to treat is effluent from the tanning process. All wastes
containing chromium are considered hazardous by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). Many other pollutants involved in the processing
of leather are associated with environmental and health risks. In terms of
disposal, one would think that leather products would be biodegradable, but
the primary function for a tanning agent is to stabilize the collagen or
protein fibers so that they are no longer biodegradable."
MT

texex91 said:

Well I can certainly hear your passion about the cause and applaud it. However, cows aren't being killed for their skin, most people eat their meat--steaks--big here in Texas. I personally don't eat a lot of red meat, but I am not going to fault those that do. At the end of the day we all have causes that are near to our heart, but certainly cannot change everyone.

I do appreciate your input wish you the best on your pursuit to abolish leather in cars.

Just out of curiosity, do you post this thread to every buyer? If so, you are going to be busy in the coming months/years.

One step at a time.

Have a great Labor Day.

Click to expand...

Part II of the reply, starting with this:

" . . . most people eat their meat--steaks--big here in Texas. I personally don't eat a lot of red meat, but I am not going to fault those that do."

(Please, fault those that do. They're destroying out planet, the animals, and themselves; facts below

I checked the original thread about Texex91's order last night and was surprised the moderator had moved it here, so much so that I found myself thinking about this when I awoke early this morning.

I get it.

The moderator and Texex91 wish to move this topic aside--I'm the misfit, the oddball in the room. I'm making you uncomfortable. But that's good. It means you're alive and your brain is working. But you still prefer to not contemplate the issues I raise.

But these are important issues.

It's about the lies--the lies our parents and families told us growing up, and that society at large repeat daily. But at the end of the day, they're still lies.

You won't believe me, but take a minute to learn something new to you: We do NOT need to eat meat to be strong and healthy. On the contrary, doing so actually hastens your demise and illness, and lowers your long-term quality of life in a huge way. We are not designed to be eating the flesh of other animals in the first place.

Yeah, I know. What a crazy idea. [Can we ban this nutcase from the TMC forums?]

Dr. Milton Mills graduated from Stanford Medical School. Let's review the facts here, and then look around: More than 2/3rd of us are overweight and a full third are obese. If you have Netflix, watch Forks Over Knives, to include the bonus features.

Your parents lied. My parents lied. They didn't mean to, they just didn't know. They were manipulated by the government, Big Ag, Big Pharma and Big Medicine.

We ARE not carnivores, nor are we omnivores; eating like we are is the reason we have Big Ag, Big Pharma and Big Medicine:

http://www.adaptt.org/Mills The Comparative Anatomy of Eating1.pdf

Start with the trailer:

http://www.forksoverknives.com/about/

Looking for a good laugh? Bill Maher has this whole thing down in about four minutes:

http://www.tinyurl.com/forksover

As for addressing all the buyers, I can't. Not yet.

First, I've had to coordinate with Tesla to advise them that in the next few weeks/months, this was going to get bigger. When Tesla's survival was still in question was NOT a time to throw this on their plate. I think we can agree now that Tesla's going to survive?

Second, now that Tesla has gotten into "short-term survival assured," it was a question of their ability to ramp up production of vegan Teslas. As far as I know, every vegan steering wheel is still being made by hand at their Design Center in SoCal. That's a slow process that needs to be fixed as I'd hate to have some future buyer capitulate and go with the default "animal skin wheel" just because of a backlog at Tesla's Design Center.

Third, no idea or societal advance becomes the new mores overnight. Sadly, most people can't be exposed to new information, new ideas and concepts, and then just wake up "enlightened" the next day. It just doesn't work that way. (And the older we get, the worse this problem becomes!)

When the facts about slavery became better known and public discussion ensued, there was a "first patriarch" that decided that this wrong would stop with him, and he decreed that his family would release their slaves. There was a "first patriarch" in every state, in every county, and in every town. But it took time for it to happen and for the word to spread. And it still took decades, and a civil war, and a few more decades, before things got better . . . .

Texex91, you live in Austin so you'll be far from the first to have a vegan Tesla in Austin. But you may be in the first 100.

And, yes, you're a subject for this discussion because of your options agony/discussion/selection, because you live here in Texas, and because you love animals. It's all in alignment and, eventually, you're highly likely to come around to challenging all those decades of lies and deceit. Frankly, it's probably inevitable. You're obviously smart given the resources it takes to buy and support a history of Porsches and a now a Model S.

As you do your research into your choice of a cruelty-free, vegan vs. non-vegan Tesla, the questions become clear:

Are you both smart AND introspective?

Smart AND open to seeing things in new way?

Smart AND ethical?

Smart AND moral?

I know this is an uphill challenge as the lies, the false stories, were placed (and well nurtured) in your head as a child by people you respected and loved. Same for me.

But the truth is just that.

Tesla is a new brand. They get it. They now offer a choice between more, or less, evil. Please make the right choice.

You'll end up with an extra four-figures in your bank account. You'll be more comfortable in the Texas heat, especially with a black Model S. And you'll be doing the right thing.

As a fellow animal lover and supporter I look forward to seeing how you progress in this evolution towards a less cruel life.

"One step at a time."

Indeed.

Please take your first step with an email to Shaun Phillips at Tesla ([email protected]); tell him, "Mark sent me. I'd like to change my order to a 100% Cruelty-Free, Vegan Model S instead . . . "

Thanks, from me, from the animals, and from the environment.

- - - Updated - - -

NigelM said:

We'll generally forgive the occasional rant but this forum is not the place to be heckling people about the options they choose.

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This is hardly a rant. Nor is it heckling.

It's a well researched and well supported discussion of why the OP, an "animal lover and supporter," would be in conflict with his beliefs IF he pays to have 5 or 6 sentient animals murdered so that their skins can be treated with toxic chemicals, so he can sit on them.

He, and other buyers, will benefit from the extra four-figures left in his/their bank accounts.

The planet will avoid that much more chemical waste and tons of GHG's that are some 30+ times WORSE than CO2.

The replacement cows (to make up for the ones that were murdered), won't be born into a life of suffering and abuse.

See the previous post for more details.

If you feel like this is heckling, or that this entire thread makes you uncomfortable, then I'm pleased that you're alive and, at least subconsciously, thinking about these things.

Again: please review the links posted and do some more thinking.

Thanks for your input.

NigelM said:

Mod Note: And some further posts went here - Animal-Activism

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And that's sad, Nigel.

As a moderator you hold additional responsibility; you're the gate keeper.

I'd strongly encourage you to review the material I posted. Watch the links. Be well informed before you decide.

**Take a few days to let that new information simmer.**

Then ask yourself if you're part of the problem, or part of the solution.

Banishing these important discussions about Tesla's options, the ones that involve life and death, to some back alley of the forum is your choice. But, sadly, I believe you make that choice based on the beliefs and the choices grounded in the lies told to you as well.

Please reconsider and place the discussion where it belongs--here, with Texex91's evolution over the next few weeks.

Thanks.