12 months of vegan activism

“Drive down the highway. What billboards do you see? What institutions do you see? Almost everywhere you look you will see massive ads for McDonald's, Cracker Barrel, and any other number of establishments, all conveniently placed alongside the road. Turn on the television. What do you see? Ad after ad advertising this cheese-lovers pizza, that meat-lovers pizza, and any other number of food items injected with animal products. Go to the grocery store. What do you see? More slick packaging featuring ‘happy cows’ on idyllic pastures. Yet these ads share one commonality that goes beyond the superficial observation they all involve food; since these animal products come from factory farms and slaughterhouses, and since factory farms and slaughterhouses rely on extreme, unnecessary suffering, these ads all involve the promotion of profound, systemic animal cruelty.”

At Project Animal Freedom, we are not only committed to exposing animal agriculture; we are dedicated to abolishing it. Despite decades of activism, however, the scale of modern animal agriculture only continues to grow, driven by rising populations and increasing affluence around the globe. The moral catastrophe of modern animal agriculture therefore necessitates bold, sustained action if we are to convince billions of human animals to reduce and ideally eliminate their animal product consumption and call on world governments to ban factory farms and slaughterhouses once and for all. En route to abolishing animal agriculture across the American Midwest by 2056, we have adopted the following campaigns as part of our overarching strategic plan:

• January: Veganuary

• February: Fish-Free February

• March: Meat-Free March

• April: Meat is Ecocide

• May: Murder-Free May

• June: Genocide June

• July: Animal Freedom Day

• August: Abolish Animal Ag

• September: Slaughter-Free September

• October: Halloween is Real, Dominion Dare

• November: Nondairy November

• December: Christmas of Compassion, Vegmas

In the remainder of this blog post, I would like to explain the rationale for these campaigns, along with what these campaigns might consist in.

January: Veganuary

As part of our Veganuary campaign, we will join hundreds of animal rights organizations around the world in urging people of every background to try veganism starting in January, when hundreds of thousands if not millions of people take the plant-based plunge. January is also the month millions of people embark on their new year’s resolutions, which frequently emphasize eating healthier foods, losing weight, and exercising more often; we can appeal to all three goals by sharing information about the health advantages of a mostly or fully vegan diet, the contribution of plant-based diets to healthy weight loss, and improvement in stamina that can accompany eating more carb-rich foods.

Not only will we screen Vegan 2020, the latest edition in a five-year series produced by Plant Based News, but we will also screen The Invisible Vegan on MLK Day. As actress and filmmaker Jasmine C. Leyva writes, “The Invisible Vegan is a 90-minute independent documentary that explores the problem of unhealthy dietary patterns in the African-American community, foregrounding the health and wellness possibilities enabled by plant-based vegan diets and lifestyle choices.” We will also produce a series of upcoming blog posts, from the story of an athlete who increased her running prowess after going plant-based to the story of someone who survived a disease linked to factory farm-bred antibiotic resistance, to encourage adopting a vegan diet during the month of January.

February: Fish-Free February

So many fish are caught and killed each year, their deaths are usually measured only in tons. However, several estimates place the total number of fish who are caught and killed via fishing at roughly 2 trillion. The trillions of lives extinguished at sea is truly overwhelming with 75% of fisheries now fully exploited, over-exploited, or in collapse. Worse yet, we could see mostly fishless oceans as early as 2048 if global consumption of fish continues to rise. Unfortunately, global consumption of fish is projected to rise from 90 million tons today to 120 million tons by 2050; there is simply no sustainable way to produce this volume of fish. Even if dredging this volume of fish out of the ocean were somehow sustainable, it would still be profoundly unethical; fish are every bit as sentient as cats and dogs, and many spend their final hours in ice baths being slowly suffocated, feeling their organs rupture from the force of decompression, or, worse yet, suffering being hacked apart while still alive and fully conscious.

This February, we will unleash our inaugural #FishFreeFebruary campaign to address the unfathomable level of suffering and gruesome deaths trillions of our aquatic counterparts experience each and every year. As part of this campaign, we will protest the largest fish-producing companies in the world, travel to sites of fish exploitation, and raise awareness about the evils of the global fish trade. In addition, we will screen Blackfish, one of the most emotionally gripping vegan documentaries yet produced. This documentary tells the shocking tale of Tilikum, an orca held in captivity at SeaWorld for almost his entire life.

March: Meat-Free March

“We speak of racism being entrenched in our society. But what if [speciesism] was just as entrenched, if not more entrenched? For injustices as profound as factory farms and slaughterhouses to exist, despite defying our core values, such as justice, love, respect, and compassion for all, it takes the coordination of an entire society. It takes the moral, intellectual, and spiritual leaders; it takes the institutions of religion, education, and law; and it takes, more than anything, the participation of everyday citizens by the millions. When you realize the level of coordination at every level, from government policies that permit, protect, or even mandate animal cruelty; to the restaurants, grocery stores, and transport trucks that distribute the products of profound animal cruelty; to the mocking, marginalization, and rejection of vegetarians and vegans face at the jowls your average Joe, you realize there exists complicity at every step in the process.”

Upon closer examination, the animal industry proves to be the single most violent, unjust, and corrupt industry in the world, and complicity in supporting this vast system of animal exploitation exists at every step from farm to table. At Project Animal Freedom, we are committed to revealing the dark underbelly of animal agriculture, the horrors, injustices, and atrocities that abound for anyone who cares to look. As part of this commitment, we will launch our inaugural #MeatFreeMarch campaign this March. This campaign strives to expose the violence, injustice, and corruption inherent to the industry. During this campaign, we will not only highlight the systemic animal cruelty in conventional factory farms settings, but also rally against alternative, “humane” animal production. Our goal is to undermine the legitimacy of any and all killing, especially killing that occurs solely for personal pleasure; no amount of gustatory delight can justify murder.

April: Meat is Ecocide

The environmental consequences of animal agriculture are profound. As the Food and Agriculture Organization summarizes in their landmark 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” From ocean dead zones, climate change, and Amazon rainforest destruction to water depletion, land degradation, and species extinction, animal agriculture emerges as a key culprit. The threats posed by animal agriculture will only grow more insidious over time as ancient aquifers run dry to feed and supply drinking water to livestock, the last remaining topsoil on Earth gradually erodes away, and global herd sizes continue their perilous ascent.

At Project Animal Freedom, we will oppose the profound environmental devastation entailed by modern animal agriculture by raising awareness about the connection between animal product consumption and environmental destruction; encouraging consumers to boycott companies that contribute to ecocide, including coal companies like Peabody and animal ag companies like JBS, Cargill, and Tyson Foods; and petition world governments to issue a moratorium on the construction of new factory farms and slaughterhouses. We will also launch sub-campaigns for each of chapters, using hashtags like #MeatFreeSTL, to begin pressuring city governments to take actions that reduce total animal product consumption en route to banning the sale and consumption of animal products outright.

May: Murder-Free May

“In most other areas of our life, we can confidently declare that supporting rape, torture, and murder are wrong. But when we question our support of factory farms, we hesitate to admit that we are supporting atrocities, even though the consistent application of commonly accepted definitions leads to the inescapable conclusion that factory farms and slaughterhouses are, indeed, atrocities; to support factory farms and slaughterhouses is, therefore, to support atrocities. Yet it would seem that, if supporting rape, torture, and murder is prima facie wrong, then so, too, is supporting atrocities, including factory farms and slaughterhouses. The dilemma becomes even graver when we overcome what I call the ‘linguistic double standard,’ a barrier that encourages us to discount the rape, torture, and murder nonhuman animals endure, even when they suffer just as much if not more than humans who have endured these same crimes. But human beings are not the only ones who can be sexually violated, needlessly killed, or tortured against their will; so, too, can cows, chickens, and pigs in factory farms and slaughterhouses.”

“Meat is murder” is a phrase that has become synonymous with the modern animal rights movement. Yet vast contingents of the US population continue to scoff at this pronouncement. At Project Animal Freedom, we will work to not only expose the murder of nonhuman animals, but also reshape our social justice lexicon to be more animal-positive, from replacing “it” when referring to animals to reinstating the absent referent when we utter such phrases as “animals have their throats slit.” By altering our language to be more consonant with the demands of a pro-animal outlook, we can restore the personhood of nonhuman animals, more accurately describe the violence nonhuman animals endure, and correctly identify the aggressors who oppress them—their human captors.

June: Genocide June

“A genocide of epic proportions rages every moment of every day, on every continent, in every town. So vast and horrific the scale of this genocide, that 3,000 lives every second does it claim. Multiply the human population seven times over and you still fall drastically short of the number each year slain. In the US alone, 8.3 billion beings are smothered from existence each year. But across the world, this number swells to more than 56 billion, rising by more than 100 million heads annually. And even this figure drastically underestimates the totality of death by tens if not hundreds of billions of lives lost each year at sea, whose numbers are so great they are measured only in tons. ‘What is this genocide?’ you may ask. This, and only this, is the genocide of animalkind.”

Continuing in our efforts to reform the English language and extend pre-existing notions to nonhuman animals as a strict matter of justice, we will embrace the following word to express their heart-chilling subjugation and mass slaughter by humankind: genocide. Genocide is a powerful word used to describe many of humankind’s worst atrocities against one another. Yet it has yet to be properly extended to all animalkind. Once we recognize the startling commonalities between historical genocides, from the Aremenian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, and our ongoing enslavement of animalkind, we can begin the process for reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reparations to nonhuman animals. As part of our #GenocideJune campaign, we will explore past human-against-human genocides, then construct and disseminate an education campaign calling for various progressives organizations to recognize the largest, longest-running mass killing of innocents in all history while taking meaningful action to end it.

July: Animal Freedom Day

In our tradition of veganizing Christmas with Vegmas and Easter with Vegster, we would like to rechristen the July 4th holiday as our annual Animal Freedom Day. Each Animal Freedom Day, we will celebrate the accomplishments of our collective movement for animal liberation while calling for every animal to be freed from their chains, pens, and other implements of oppression. Our goal is to subvert the narrative on July 4th from one of American freedom, including the ability to freely oppress other species and cultures around the globe, to one of animal freedom, demanding the liberation of all animals, no matter their species. Whichever week July 4th falls on shall henceforth be referred to as Animal Freedom Week, featuring speakers, protests, and disruptions to further our end goal of complete and total animal liberation.

August: Abolish Animal Ag

In the past, we have called for defunding the police, the US military, and animal ag. All three entities are united by the underlying theme of violence. But rather than infringe on the growing movement to #DefundThePolice, we have chosen to clarify our message; not only do we want to defund animal ag, we want to abolish it altogether. Hence, our inaugural #AbolishAnimalAg campaign this August. Through this campaign, we strive to boldly proclaim our mission to eliminate the use, abuse, and exploitation of nonhuman animals in both industrial and small-scale settings; there can be no ethical killing if, all the while, a human captor plans to deprive a nonhuman animal of their most cherished possession—their very lives—no matter how “humane” their former treatment, a point we explore in greater depth in this article. We will launch a large-scale social media campaign to popularize the #AbolishAnimalAg hashtag until it becomes a self-sustaining, perpetual campaign, similarly to how the hashtag #CancelAnimalAg has ignited activist circles across the world.

September: Slaughter-Free September

“When the paragons of intellectual, moral, and spiritual excellence have failed you by knowingly and willingly supporting atrocities through the most threadbare of rationalizations (or, even more revealing yet, the absence of rationalizations), and when the overwhelming majority of human society engages in the same inconsistent, irrational, and profoundly harmful behavior (what else could you call the utter annihilation of billions upon billions of lives every year in factory farms and slaughterhouses at the hands of our appetite?), you cannot help but feel we live in a Hitlerian society.”

Slaughter is the greatest act of violence and the worst source of inhumanity. Yet few people realize that American slaughterhouses informed the design of concentration camps during the Jewish Holocaust. Worse yet, many of our most illumined thinkers continue to thoughtlessly support or even promote animal slaughter. As part of our #SlaughterFreeSeptember campaign, we will not only connect the nonhuman animal Holocaust to the barbarity of the Jewish Holocaust, but also expose the profound violence core to the slaughtering enterprise. We will visit slaughterhouses, and we will bear witness to the agony of the animals transported to these vile institutions, providing comfort where possible. We will also fight to ban the last few remaining slaughterhouses in St. Louis and other chapter cities until all major urban areas across the Midwest are slaughter-free, serving our ultimate goal of eradicating these foul institutions forevermore.

October: Halloween is Real, Dominion Dare

For billions upon billions of cows, chickens, and pigs, Halloween is a daily, near inescapable reality. From forced separation and tail docking to genital mutilation and throat slittling, these animals daily endure horrors, injustices, and atrocities so profound, our language can hardly accommodate their excesses.

As part of our #HalloweenIsReal campaign, we want to remind carnists that horrors untold lurk behind each carton of eggs, glass of milk, and bite of flesh they consume, whatever its label. We want to rouse these carnists from their millennia-long slumber, to awaken them from the Matrix that is carnism. For carnism is a lie, “and not just any lie, but one carefully crafted, finely tuned, expertly executed, and deliberately designed with the express purpose of assuring you that wrong [is] right, that bad [is] good, and that violence [is] love; a lie powerful enough to manipulate you into taking part in horrific and barbaric acts that you would otherwise find appalling; powerful enough to wash blood from your hands, to alter your perspective so severely that murder appears mundane, and compassion appears extreme.”

At Project Animal Freedom, we want all carnists to become uncomfortably aware of the Matrix that is carnism, the artificial reality of happy cows, idyllic farms, and pristine pastures the animal abuse industry wishes so desperately to project. We want our fellow carnists to become uncomfortably aware of the superficial constructs that obscure the reality of animal agriculture. We want them to finally see the cruelty behind the food they once enjoyed without qualm, without hesitation, without thought, to convince our bacon-loving, cheese-addicted friends, family members, and colleagues to finally take the plant-based plunge, just as we so bravely already have.

Each October, we will screen perhaps the single most powerful animal rights documentary ever produced, Dominion, in a variety of formats, from online gatherings to on-the-streets projection onto nearby buildings. Our #DominionDare campaign, an extension of our overarching #HalloweenIsReal campaign, presents one the most fertile opportunities to promote a fully vegan lifestyle consonant with our core values of justice, love, respect, and compassion for all.

November: Nondairy November

Unfortunately, there exists no ethical way to cheaply and sustainably produce dairy; even the most pristine of dairy farms still rips mothers apart from their newborn babies, exploits grieving mothers for their milk, and sends both mother and child alike to an early grave, with newborns given anywhere from 24 hours to 24 weeks to live on veal farms. Many grieving mother cows collapse from sheer exhaustion, heartbreak, and backbreaking milk production regimens at the still very young, tender age of just 4-5 years; free from such rape, torture, and exploitation, a mother cow could easily live well into her 20’s with the peace, joy, and contentment that so often radiates from watching your children not only grow up, but also thrive.

As part of our #NondairyNovember campaign at Project Animal Freedom, we will prompt vegans to take the following five actions to help us end the cruelty inherent to the modern dairy industry once and for all:

• Encourage nonvegan friends, family members, and colleagues to explore dairy-free alternatives to conventional dairy

• Post regularly about the horrors, injustices, and atrocities behind the modern dairy industry while sharing information about delicious dairy-free alternatives

• Organize peaceful, lawful protests, demonstrations, and candlelight vigils to raise awareness about the cruelty inherent to modern dairy farms and slaughter plants

• Invite your friends, family members, and colleagues to join our #NondairyNovember campaign

• Donate to support our innovative vegan outreach initiatives, from our #NondairyNovember campaign to our upcoming #FishFreeFebruary campaign, via this link

Through these actions, we hope to not only spur the mass exodus away from dairy products onward, but drag the dairy industry to its much-deserved, long-overdue grave.

December: Christmas Of Compassion, Vegmas

“In most other areas of our life, we can confidently declare that supporting rape, torture, and murder are wrong. But when we question our support of factory farms, we hesitate to admit that we are supporting atrocities, even though the consistent application of commonly accepted definitions leads to the inescapable conclusion that factory farms and slaughterhouses are, indeed, atrocities; to support factory farms and slaughterhouses is, therefore, to support atrocities. Yet it would seem that, if supporting rape, torture, and murder is prima facie wrong, then so, too, is supporting atrocities, including factory farms and slaughterhouses. The dilemma becomes even graver when overcome what I call the ‘linguistic double standard,’ a barrier that encourages us to discount the rape, torture, and murder nonhuman animals endure, even when they suffer just as much if not more than humans who have endured these same crimes. But human beings are not the only ones who can be sexually violated, needlessly killed, or tortured against their will; so, too, can cows, chickens, and pigs in factory farms and slaughterhouses.”

As part of our #Vegmas campaign, we aspire to not only raise awareness about the atrocities inherent to modern animal agriculture, but also to thereby inspire both vegans and nonvegans alike to expand their palette, try new foods, and find delicious plant-based products that cause only a fraction of the harm the modern animal industry causes. After all, how can we celebrate peace on Earth when the turkey or ham centerpiece on our table is the result of profound violence and incalculable suffering? Each Vegmas, we will not only celebrate a compassionate Christmas, but host annual Vegmas dinners in all our chapter cities with the hope of attracting as many nonvegans as possible and raising the funds we need to sustain our next year of activism; the animals are counting on us, and we owe them more than we can ever give.