Page 24 - Black Velvet Magazine Issue 107

BV107 pg22-27 Alissa White-Gluz Interview.qxp_BV107 pg24 30/11/2022 20:13 Page 3

BlackVelvetMagazine.Com - 24

spire you. How did your mother become vege-
tarian? Was she also into animal rights from a
young age?
Alissa: She’s amazing. She’s actually celebrat-
ing 52 years of being veg. I think this month
she celebrated 52 years, so… she’s vegan now
and she has been for years. She went vegetar-
ian, yeah, 52 years ago, and, in her case, it was
a similar thing, but in a different decade, so…
For me, I just made the connection for dairy
and eggs, and, for her, she came from a big
family with lots of siblings and her mom was
preparing… preparing is a euphemism… her
mom was killing a lobster. For her, it was see-
ing the living lobster being boiled alive and
hearing the sound that happens. That was the
moment for her where she was like, ‘Hang on,
I’m not doing this anymore’. So, it was a lot
more difficult for her, in the late sixties, to be
doing this, ‘cause vegetarianism wasn’t very
popular at that point. She was the only one in
her big family to be a vegetarian, so she really
paved the way for myself and a lot of other
people.

Black Velvet: Your new album is called ‘De-
ceivers’ and you have a song called ‘Deceiver,
Deceiver’. Do you think we are deceived when
it comes to animal abuse? For example, in the
meat and dairy industry, how the industries
don’t let us see what happens to animals or in-
side slaughterhouses?
Alissa: Oh yeah. I mean, there are a lot of peo-
ple that don’t know that cows only make milk
when they have a baby. They think that cows
just make milk. They don’t realise it’s the exact
same process as with any other mammal
where the cow has to get pregnant, give birth
and then start producing milk, the same way
as human females do. There are people that
think that animals aren’t sentient. They think
that animals just roll around and become food
and they’re happy with it. There are so many
people that have no idea what’s going on.
Sometimes they just don’t know and some-
times they’re wilfully ignorant because they
don’t want to have to change what they are
doing to contribute to that. So, we’re ab-
solutely being deceived. We’re being told, ‘Oh,
this is a grass-fed animal, so that makes it ok,’
or ‘Oh, this is a free-range animal, so that
makes it ok,’ not realising that has nothing to
do with the wellbeing of the animal, they’re still
being kept alive for a very short amount of
time in extremely dangerous, uncomfortable
conditions and then slaughtered when they’re
still babies. So, it’s an absolute deception.
Even the price point on it is a deception, be-
cause the only reason it’s so artificially afford-
able is because it’s subsidised with tax
dollars, so it’s really an amazing deception
that everyone has fallen for, and the very few
people, the very small percentage of the global
human population that actually realise this, are
vegan.

Black Velvet: In ‘Handshake With Hell’ you
sing, ‘Come along to the killing grounds, It's
execution day’. Have you ever been anywhere
near a slaughterhouse or done a vigil? What
do you think of vigils where activists stop the
trucks of animals and give them a drink of
water before they go into the slaughterhouse?
Alissa: Yeah, oh my god. I haven’t attended
one – I’ve been invited to a few of them in
Toronto and L.A. The timing never worked out
where I was actually in that city on the day of
the vigil. I have to say, I will attend, but this is

ARCH ENEMY