What Animal Rights Activists are Saying About Ag: 2022

The Animal Agriculture Alliance works hard to safeguard the future of animal agriculture and its value to society by monitoring the activity of animal rights extremists. Several groups recently convened annual conferences and events this summer, discussing new tactics and strategies they plan to use against animal agriculture to rally around their missions of “total animal liberation.” While animal rights proponents make up an incredibly small percentage of our population, they are loud and aggressive and can mislead consumers about the animal agriculture community’s commitment to animal welfare, sustainability, and other key topics.

So far this year, three conferences have been hosted – the Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) conference, Rancher Advocacy Program’s (RAP) 4th Annual RAP Online Summit and the Farmed Animal Conference E-Summit (FACES). Key topics at these events included sustainability, public health, legislation and animal welfare. It can be hard to hear comments coming from those opposed to animal agriculture, but it is important to monitor their activity and stay vigilant in whatever tactics may be coming next.

The 2022 HSUS TAFA Conference was held in Washington, DC on July 16-17 and largely focused on the Big Cat Safety Act, however other sessions focused on legislative updates, specifically California’s Proposition 12, and campaigns targeting investor corporations. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:

• “It is really a great idea to learn about your local elected officials, figure out who they are, establish relationships with them because it is often a little bit easier to pass legislation at the local level sometimes than it can be at the state or the federal level.”

• “Break through and garner attention on Capitol Hill. A compelling ‘undercover investigation’ and resulting media coverage can make all the difference.”

• “We buy shares in all the major publicly traded food companies in the country. As shareholders, we get a lot of power.”

• “Corporate campaigns are also efficient in that they are speedy. They are great ways to cause rapid sweeping change across an industry.”

• “According to the pork industry, once a pork chop hits the shelves in California, whatever cruelty that went into producing it is over. They say that for Californians, there is no such thing as a difference between an inhumanely raised and inhumanely created pork chop and a humanely created pork chop. Try telling that to the hundreds of thousands of Californians that voted for Prop 12.”

At the RAP Summit, held virtually on July 30, animal rights extremists and “reformed” farmers and ranchers came together to discuss converting livestock farms to plant-based alternatives. The conference focused on the “plant-based” agenda, as they hope to grow this vegan movement and end the “oppression” of the meat and dairy industry. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:

• “Animal agriculture is absolutely destroying our planet. It is a leading cause of global warming, habitat destruction, wildlife extinction, human world hunger and preventable human disease, antibiotic resistance.”

• “Animals are just a prehistoric technology that we've been using for thousands of years as the only way we know how to make meat and milk and fish and so forth.”

• “In order to hit the tipping point, the plant-based tipping point, we have to make plant-based foods cheaper than even the heavily subsidized meat and dairy products.”

• “I believe that animal agriculture is a house of cards and if you could just take people of color and remove them and make it politically incorrect to eat meat or dairy - and that in the global majority, lactose intolerance is almost universal - we could collapse the system.”

• “I am absolutely just blown away by the fact that cows and pigs are not even indigenous to the Americas. The first cow came to the Americas on Columbus's second voyage. The first pig came to the Americas in 1539 on the voyage of a Spanish conquistador. How do we get this message out to communities of color that we don't want to support our own oppression?”

• “What we're doing is trying to reach non-vegan eyeballs. And so, we try to attract them with fun and interesting compelling cooking shows, music videos, documentaries, talk shows, etc.”

The FACES conference, hosted virtually on September 16-19, has replaced the annual Animal Rights National, typically hosted by the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM). At this year’s FACES conference, the following key messages were shared by speakers:

• “Through our undercover investigations work, in which our investigators put themselves on the front lines, we expose the truth of conditions and cruelty that animals are forced to endure on farms across the country”

• “Animal agriculture is this goliath that is ravaging this planet and dragging down everyone who inhabits it in the process.”

• “It’s super important, especially educating people why it’s so important to change to a plant-based diet because that’s one of the easiest ways that you can help fight climate change.”

• “Our movement, it’s like a movement of walking trauma survivors right now, understandably because we’ve developed a traumatic response from basically being awake to the fact that we live in a mass traumatic event which is carnism. You know, this is an atrocity.”

As members of the animal agriculture community, these quotes can be frustrating to hear. I want to remind everyone of their responsibility to speak up and be an informed voice for animal agriculture and sharing our story. We need to come together to share positive messaging and bust some of these myths surrounding the pork community. Connect with the Alliance to learn more about our resources and opportunities for positive communication!