In Their Own Words: Animal Activists Speak Out at 2023 Conferences
The Animal Agriculture Alliance works diligently to safeguard the future of animal agriculture and its value to society by monitoring the activity of animal rights extremists. Several of these extremist groups convened this past year for their annual conferences, discussing new tactics and strategies they plan to use against animal agriculture to rally around their missions of “total animal liberation.” While animal rights supporters 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 – Direct Action Everywhere’s (DXE) Animal Liberation Conference (ALC), Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) conference, and the Animal and Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit. 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 2023 DXE ALC was held in Berkeley, Calif., on June 9-14 and largely focused on DXE’s “Right to Rescue” campaign and recent thefts of animals from farms, however other sessions focused on strategy, specifically how to build a pressure campaign and how to align with fellow extremists. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:
• “When we acknowledge that animals are individuals who deserve compassion, justice, and rescue, we inherently negate the idea that they are just objects to be bought and used, sold, and killed. These two perspectives, property and persons are intentioned with each other and with this campaign, we can bring this tension to the surface.”
• “Rescue is our moral duty to stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed.”
• “We are turning the criminal justice system on its head.”
• “Press can get charges dropped for activists and give you insider information.”
• “Taking your target, whether that is a company or an industry or a sector, figuring out what the Achilles heels are of those sectors of those industries, of those corporations, and putting pressure on those weight points to shift them to get them to do what you want or get them to just stop doing whatever they are doing.”
• “Goals might be something like stopping a slaughterhouse from being built, getting a company to drop fur, getting an animal relocated to a sanctuary from a zoo, and the corresponding visions to these goals are a world without slaughterhouses, a world where animals are not exploited for fur, and a world where zoos have been shut down.”
• “We most abolish animal ag to prevent the next pandemic.”
The Animal and Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit took place in Los Angeles, Calif., on July 27-30. This event was launched by ProVeg International and was billed as an opportunity to “explore and learn the latest knowledge, diversity of thought, and tools to effectively increase your individual and collective impact on systemic food system change.” The following key messages were shared by speakers:
• “One of the key strengths is mass protests because they can really create the conditions for transformation across the whole ecology, and really push the issue out into the public spotlight.”
• “There are also scientists that are using AI to decode animal language so that one day maybe they can advocate for themselves.”
• “We want to find any evidence that leads to more opposition to animal farming as a whole.”
• “This is a normalized atrocity in our in our food system. They [chickens] are kept in windowless houses, trapped in cages and crates raised their babies are taken away.”
• “When it comes to this cutthroat billion-dollar companies [Tyson, Smithfield, etc.], those are the entities that deserve no mercy. And if you want to ring the alarm on them, ring it.”
• “The court's decision, it's, you know, it not only upheld proposition 12 and laws like it like Josh pointed out, but it essentially gave a judicial green light so that we can keep working in the legislatures to free animals from suffering and extreme confinement.”
At the HSUS TAFA Conference, held August 5-6 in Springfield, Ill., animal rights extremists came together to discuss lobbying and current political efforts in the animal rights space, specifically concerning the fur community. The conference focused on advocacy and the importance of building relationships with lawmakers. Here are a few quotes shared by speakers:
• “You might be surprised, but the time is going to come when you’re going to need to get everybody together to get that point for the animals.”
• “State by state, scorecards have been rolling out on a state-by-state basis, which literally hold legislators accountable for the votes they take or don’t take for animal welfare.”
• “We really had to focus on public safety, threats of danger to people, and elderly when we’re talking about people who are abusing animals.”
• “Smaller cities and towns or local lawmakers are probably not going to have staff. We can get into bigger, midsize cities, larger cities as well as your state legislatures they will often have staff and it’s really important to not undervalue the staff. Staff are there to support the lawmaker, but their job is to also go deep and to really kind of understand these issues and to help the lawmaker understand the issues and why they are important and might be important to the community. So, meeting with a staff person is a really great opportunity to pull someone else onto the team. They can be an internal advocate.”
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.
Read More:
Animal Rights Extremist Connections and Tactics Updated in New Reports
Activists Continue to 'Storm the Courts'
