Wonderfully written. Recognising how systemic inequity shapes our cultures, attitudes and behaviours is rare in the vegan movement and broadening our reach to help build bridges with others who are also challenging violent hierarchies can strengthen understanding and acceptance. Animal liberation = liberation for all oppressed beings!
This is an excellent read. Weaving together abolitionist and welfare activist’s work, with an important nod to intersectional activism too. I believe strongly in all of them too.
While I personally focus in on animal rights, that automatically includes human rights too, such as workers expected to operate inside the pig farms I’ve entered, with AWFUL conditions inside.
Thanks Jenny. You're right, it really is all connected.
It's inspiring to hear about the important work you're involved with. When we've been involved with public opinion research, we've found that talking about the psychological harm of both animals who are farmed and workers who farm and kill them really makes people stop and reflect, and consider this issue in a different way.
For me, as well as providing an informed and coherent description of the need for and role of intersectional approaches alongside specific, focussed action, reading this piece has helped me contemplate more about the history of dominance and commodification, which I privately have thought about but haven't been able to voice and discuss in order to untangle and make sense of.
Also, it has helped me make sense of how the myriad of different movements and strategies focussed on specific concerns do and can link and boost each other in a bigger way - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing - which helps deal with the vastness!
So thank you!
The consciousness and understanding about our connectivity to all life - which is a kind of ecstatic feeling - becomes a burden to carry because of how humans have and continue to betray this connectivity. I constantly struggle emotionally with this, but somehow the articulation in words in the article help resilience, so thanks again.
Thanks Jo. That's really great to hear that this article helped you make more sense of thoughts you'd been having for some time. Reading these books really helped shift and expand our thinking too. And our thoughts on this continue to evolve.
We agree - understanding connections between movements can help make the vastness feel more navigable. And that we're not alone as a movement.
Also glad this article has helped create some feeling of resilience too. That's a big part of why we write these blogs - to help make sense of things together, and we're constantly learning from what others share. So thanks for adding to this conversation.
Truly spot on. My PhD work is based in establishing a universal baseline of wellbeing domains to be used to inform policy for sustainable wellbeing, ultimately incorporating the intrinsic rights of all living beings not as a byproduct but as essential to planetary flourishing. Oppression of one is oppression of all and wellbeing is unattainable without justice for all.
1. One narrative that I have found working very well in more than 50+ meetings with senior leaders is that human consciousness is expanding - people who were considered inferior (slaves) or unequal (women) or abnormal (LGBTQ) are no longer so. The amount of change in the last 20-100 years has been huge. This is a sign that our consciousness as humanity is expanding and is now gradually including non human animals too. Everyone agrees with this.
2. I also recommend reading about the satyagraha movement of Gandhi - it has tremendous learnings for our movement and I believe adopting the principles of satyagraha will help us. Our movement is far bigger than the diet change narrative that seems to often become larger. We should not judge people based on their diets that are an outcome of many complex factors. But focus on animal sentience and how the ‘system’ has evolved to create invisible cruelty - it is a natural consequence of treating animals as a commodity in the drive for efficiency in the supply chains.
Thanks for sharing that insight around the expansion of human consciousness. That's great to hear you've found people agree with it. We've also found that narratives around social progress and human progress can be persuasive, as it communicates that progressive change is both natural and aspirational.
We've also been really inspired by reading about Gandhi's satyagraha movement too, particularly the principles of non-violence trying to transform rather than 'defeat' those who oppose us.
Thank you for this excellent and thought-provoking piece. The intersectionality between the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals and other forms of exploitation and oppression makes perfect sense. And connecting all forms is immense suffering. This gross level of global suffering -- whether of animals on farms or in slaughterhouses, persecuted wild animals, oppressed humans -- feels so overwhelming. In fact it is my belief that ALL humans are suffering but many are not aware. Not sure if this makes any sense!
I am also curious to know whether you were able to convey all that you have expressed in this article at the conference you mentioned?
Thanks for your comment. It really does feel very overwhelming, and your point about how all humans are suffering but many of us are not aware really resonates with us too. Many feminist thinkers (including the incredible Jim Mason) believe there is centuries of inherited grief about our severance from our animal cousins and the rest of nature. We've lost our connection with our extended family and our only home is under threat. No wonder our species feels increasingly alone, depressed and like we don't belong. We've lost a sense of who we really are and our place in this world. This is the bigger work of all social justice movements. And it's inspiring to see how other movements are starting to tell different chapters of this deeper story.
No, unfortunately we couldn't respond with this level of detail, as the conversation quickly moved on. But we did manage to say that there are many organisations in the US, and globally, who are focused on animal freedom, and that many are communicating how animal freedom intersects with other human freedoms.
Not only have we lost our connection with our animal cousins, but we have caused and continue to cause them immense suffering. It is this suffering that so many feel deeply once they discover the truth and take responsibility for it. But the suffering of billions of animals every second of every day MUST impact every human, whether or not they believe that 'God' created nonhuman animals for us to exploit, whether they still believe that nonhuman animals don't have emotions or feel pain, or whether they claim not to care. This colossal suffering of the nonhuman animals we exploit is indescribable. I've felt it so much in recent months and am having trouble putting it into words.
100%. There are no words that can begin to describe the depth of all this suffering. The knowledge of what's happening and the empathy of feeling someone's pain, multiplied by billions of individuals.
I think you're right, I think most humans do feel that impact to some degree, and the only way to cope is to numb themselves to it rather than really feel it.
Are you familiar with The Empathy Project and Bel Jacobs? A lot of her work is both visionary and rooted in grief, and how to begin to process and heal it. https://www.theempathyproject.co.uk/
Yes, I think that's why there's so much resistance to understanding what is happening with our treatment of animals. It's easier to stay in denial than deal with the grief.
When I first became vegan, I gave myself a few days to just sit with the grief. I think even as vegans and animal advocates, we have to numb ourselves somewhat.
Or perhaps it's not about numbing, or at least not only about numbing, and more about going from empathy to compassion.
There's an amazing book called "Against Empathy" and the author explains the difference between empathy and compassion. If I recall correctly, empathy is feeling into what others are feeling. Compassion is more a sense of benevolence and love towards others. (And, crucially, I can feel compassion for the animals that are suffering, for animal advocates who are feeling heart-broken, and for omnivores who don't want to face what it's happening, all at the same time.)
We can feel compassion for everyone and everything without getting tired or drained, but empathy is an extremely finite resource.
If I recall directly, they also tested this with monks. One was able to feel compassion for hours at a time, without any negative impact on him. When he switched to empathy, he quickly felt drained.
It's been a while since I read this, but I think the book also mentioned that compassion often makes people more effective than empathy. Like, you don't want a surgeon who's empathic with you (and might get teary-eyed in the process), you want someone who has compassion for what you are going through, while being focused on the task at hand.
It's my understanding that empathy is the ability to relate to how someone else feels. While one can have sympathy in recognizing another's suffering, a sadist could recognize it and take pleasure in their suffering. In contrast to suffering, it's my understanding that compassion is the process of acting the sympathy that one has for another's suffering by actually trying to do something to alleviate or eliminate it. So I believe that empathy is neutral, sympathy is positive, and compassion is admirable.
Great read - I'm pleased I caught this one today. Reading Mason's book was quite eye-opening to me and I have used it to introduce this concept to others. I'll be speaking at a feminist site about 'Women and Animals' and looking forward to sharing some of these perspectives.
I understand using AI to proofread. I just edit professionally so I can spot it anywhere now. I'd rather the messy human mistakes at this point. A tell tale sign is, "this isn't. This is." That sentence structure is repeated throughout and just sounds very unnatural.
Thanks for clarifying, Anna. One of our team also used to work as an editor and proofreader for 15 years, so is a self-proclaimed perfectionist who probably does over-polish our blogs more than is needed! :) And 3 of our team are published writers, so we take the writing we publish pretty seriously.
Interestingly, we searched for examples of 'This isn't xx' or 'This is xx' but only found 2 instances in what is a fairly long blog. But we know that different styles of writing can jar with different people, and take on board that messy human mistakes might not actually be a 'negative' compared to trying to over-finesse writing that then looks too polished. So thanks for the feedback (we're always open to feedback!) and for reading the blog.
This is well argued but it it's sad to see the AI writing style take over. I really can't trust you're accurately representing the authors cited when it's not written by a human. Interesting how the other commenters didn't notice. To me it's very apparent, and just makes me inclined to stop reading.
Hi Anna. Our blogs are written by our (very human!) team. For transparency, we use AI to fact-check and proofread before publishing, and sometimes to help condense if a blog has become too long. We spend a lot of time discussing, planning, writing and revising these as a team (hence why we only publish blogs every month and not more frequently), so we're disappointed to hear you feel they've been written by AI. All the books mentioned have been read by at least one member of our team, often multiple members and multiple times. Are you able to clarify what makes you think this has been written by AI and give examples?
I was briefly wondering about that, too. Maybe because the blog post was long and high-quality, or maybe because we have all become so cynical and just assume everything is written by AI... completely forgetting that writing, including long and high-quality writing existed long before AI. (I certainly do this, sometimes.)
I think people who not just wonder in their heads but ask creators if something is AI sometimes tend to jump to conclusions... in one app, someone accused a creator of using AI for voice-over, which wasn't the case at all (and the creator naturally wasn't very happy about the assumption). So in part, I think it would behoove all of us to simply ask creators about AI usage instead of jumping to conclusions.
I wonder if you might like to add a short disclaimer at the end, something like: "This blog post was written by our very human team. We only use Ai to fact-check and proofread before publishing. We spend a lot of time discussing, planning, writing and revising these as a team (hence why we only publish blogs every month and not more frequently)."
I've decided to not have any AI support in my writing going forward (other than any AI that might be baked into pure proofreading) and added a disclaimer about that to my new blog posts. Even then, someone I know asked if I really wrote all of that without AI.
Wonderfully written. Recognising how systemic inequity shapes our cultures, attitudes and behaviours is rare in the vegan movement and broadening our reach to help build bridges with others who are also challenging violent hierarchies can strengthen understanding and acceptance. Animal liberation = liberation for all oppressed beings!
Thanks Emma. Yes, we completely agree.
This is an excellent read. Weaving together abolitionist and welfare activist’s work, with an important nod to intersectional activism too. I believe strongly in all of them too.
While I personally focus in on animal rights, that automatically includes human rights too, such as workers expected to operate inside the pig farms I’ve entered, with AWFUL conditions inside.
It really is all connected.
Thanks Jenny. You're right, it really is all connected.
It's inspiring to hear about the important work you're involved with. When we've been involved with public opinion research, we've found that talking about the psychological harm of both animals who are farmed and workers who farm and kill them really makes people stop and reflect, and consider this issue in a different way.
Thanks for deepening the conversation.
For me, as well as providing an informed and coherent description of the need for and role of intersectional approaches alongside specific, focussed action, reading this piece has helped me contemplate more about the history of dominance and commodification, which I privately have thought about but haven't been able to voice and discuss in order to untangle and make sense of.
Also, it has helped me make sense of how the myriad of different movements and strategies focussed on specific concerns do and can link and boost each other in a bigger way - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing - which helps deal with the vastness!
So thank you!
The consciousness and understanding about our connectivity to all life - which is a kind of ecstatic feeling - becomes a burden to carry because of how humans have and continue to betray this connectivity. I constantly struggle emotionally with this, but somehow the articulation in words in the article help resilience, so thanks again.
Thanks Jo. That's really great to hear that this article helped you make more sense of thoughts you'd been having for some time. Reading these books really helped shift and expand our thinking too. And our thoughts on this continue to evolve.
We agree - understanding connections between movements can help make the vastness feel more navigable. And that we're not alone as a movement.
Also glad this article has helped create some feeling of resilience too. That's a big part of why we write these blogs - to help make sense of things together, and we're constantly learning from what others share. So thanks for adding to this conversation.
Thank you for these wise reflections and the vital work you are doing! Very illuminating and inspiring
Thanks so much, Beth.
Truly spot on. My PhD work is based in establishing a universal baseline of wellbeing domains to be used to inform policy for sustainable wellbeing, ultimately incorporating the intrinsic rights of all living beings not as a byproduct but as essential to planetary flourishing. Oppression of one is oppression of all and wellbeing is unattainable without justice for all.
Thanks for sharing, Jessica, that sounds really interesting - and needed!
Very well written. I have thoughts to offer:
1. One narrative that I have found working very well in more than 50+ meetings with senior leaders is that human consciousness is expanding - people who were considered inferior (slaves) or unequal (women) or abnormal (LGBTQ) are no longer so. The amount of change in the last 20-100 years has been huge. This is a sign that our consciousness as humanity is expanding and is now gradually including non human animals too. Everyone agrees with this.
2. I also recommend reading about the satyagraha movement of Gandhi - it has tremendous learnings for our movement and I believe adopting the principles of satyagraha will help us. Our movement is far bigger than the diet change narrative that seems to often become larger. We should not judge people based on their diets that are an outcome of many complex factors. But focus on animal sentience and how the ‘system’ has evolved to create invisible cruelty - it is a natural consequence of treating animals as a commodity in the drive for efficiency in the supply chains.
Hi Parag
Thanks for sharing that insight around the expansion of human consciousness. That's great to hear you've found people agree with it. We've also found that narratives around social progress and human progress can be persuasive, as it communicates that progressive change is both natural and aspirational.
We've also been really inspired by reading about Gandhi's satyagraha movement too, particularly the principles of non-violence trying to transform rather than 'defeat' those who oppose us.
Thanks for adding to the conversation.
Thank you for this excellent and thought-provoking piece. The intersectionality between the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals and other forms of exploitation and oppression makes perfect sense. And connecting all forms is immense suffering. This gross level of global suffering -- whether of animals on farms or in slaughterhouses, persecuted wild animals, oppressed humans -- feels so overwhelming. In fact it is my belief that ALL humans are suffering but many are not aware. Not sure if this makes any sense!
I am also curious to know whether you were able to convey all that you have expressed in this article at the conference you mentioned?
Thanks for your comment. It really does feel very overwhelming, and your point about how all humans are suffering but many of us are not aware really resonates with us too. Many feminist thinkers (including the incredible Jim Mason) believe there is centuries of inherited grief about our severance from our animal cousins and the rest of nature. We've lost our connection with our extended family and our only home is under threat. No wonder our species feels increasingly alone, depressed and like we don't belong. We've lost a sense of who we really are and our place in this world. This is the bigger work of all social justice movements. And it's inspiring to see how other movements are starting to tell different chapters of this deeper story.
No, unfortunately we couldn't respond with this level of detail, as the conversation quickly moved on. But we did manage to say that there are many organisations in the US, and globally, who are focused on animal freedom, and that many are communicating how animal freedom intersects with other human freedoms.
Not only have we lost our connection with our animal cousins, but we have caused and continue to cause them immense suffering. It is this suffering that so many feel deeply once they discover the truth and take responsibility for it. But the suffering of billions of animals every second of every day MUST impact every human, whether or not they believe that 'God' created nonhuman animals for us to exploit, whether they still believe that nonhuman animals don't have emotions or feel pain, or whether they claim not to care. This colossal suffering of the nonhuman animals we exploit is indescribable. I've felt it so much in recent months and am having trouble putting it into words.
100%. There are no words that can begin to describe the depth of all this suffering. The knowledge of what's happening and the empathy of feeling someone's pain, multiplied by billions of individuals.
I think you're right, I think most humans do feel that impact to some degree, and the only way to cope is to numb themselves to it rather than really feel it.
Are you familiar with The Empathy Project and Bel Jacobs? A lot of her work is both visionary and rooted in grief, and how to begin to process and heal it. https://www.theempathyproject.co.uk/
Thank you. Yes, I learned of The Empathy Project very recently and have been meaning to check it out! 🙏🏻
Yes, I think that's why there's so much resistance to understanding what is happening with our treatment of animals. It's easier to stay in denial than deal with the grief.
When I first became vegan, I gave myself a few days to just sit with the grief. I think even as vegans and animal advocates, we have to numb ourselves somewhat.
Or perhaps it's not about numbing, or at least not only about numbing, and more about going from empathy to compassion.
There's an amazing book called "Against Empathy" and the author explains the difference between empathy and compassion. If I recall correctly, empathy is feeling into what others are feeling. Compassion is more a sense of benevolence and love towards others. (And, crucially, I can feel compassion for the animals that are suffering, for animal advocates who are feeling heart-broken, and for omnivores who don't want to face what it's happening, all at the same time.)
We can feel compassion for everyone and everything without getting tired or drained, but empathy is an extremely finite resource.
If I recall directly, they also tested this with monks. One was able to feel compassion for hours at a time, without any negative impact on him. When he switched to empathy, he quickly felt drained.
It's been a while since I read this, but I think the book also mentioned that compassion often makes people more effective than empathy. Like, you don't want a surgeon who's empathic with you (and might get teary-eyed in the process), you want someone who has compassion for what you are going through, while being focused on the task at hand.
Thanks, Louise, for sharing that. We really resonate with that definition.
You’re very welcome.
It's my understanding that empathy is the ability to relate to how someone else feels. While one can have sympathy in recognizing another's suffering, a sadist could recognize it and take pleasure in their suffering. In contrast to suffering, it's my understanding that compassion is the process of acting the sympathy that one has for another's suffering by actually trying to do something to alleviate or eliminate it. So I believe that empathy is neutral, sympathy is positive, and compassion is admirable.
Beyond Belief on rnbc adio 4 today (16th Dec) was an interesting listen linked to this topic
Thanks Jo. We'll look out for that when it's available online
Great read - I'm pleased I caught this one today. Reading Mason's book was quite eye-opening to me and I have used it to introduce this concept to others. I'll be speaking at a feminist site about 'Women and Animals' and looking forward to sharing some of these perspectives.
We need to burn that root and all these branches labeled in -ism burn with it.
Yes, absolutely we need to tackle the root cause, not just the 'branches'.
I understand using AI to proofread. I just edit professionally so I can spot it anywhere now. I'd rather the messy human mistakes at this point. A tell tale sign is, "this isn't. This is." That sentence structure is repeated throughout and just sounds very unnatural.
Thanks for clarifying, Anna. One of our team also used to work as an editor and proofreader for 15 years, so is a self-proclaimed perfectionist who probably does over-polish our blogs more than is needed! :) And 3 of our team are published writers, so we take the writing we publish pretty seriously.
Interestingly, we searched for examples of 'This isn't xx' or 'This is xx' but only found 2 instances in what is a fairly long blog. But we know that different styles of writing can jar with different people, and take on board that messy human mistakes might not actually be a 'negative' compared to trying to over-finesse writing that then looks too polished. So thanks for the feedback (we're always open to feedback!) and for reading the blog.
This is well argued but it it's sad to see the AI writing style take over. I really can't trust you're accurately representing the authors cited when it's not written by a human. Interesting how the other commenters didn't notice. To me it's very apparent, and just makes me inclined to stop reading.
Hi Anna. Our blogs are written by our (very human!) team. For transparency, we use AI to fact-check and proofread before publishing, and sometimes to help condense if a blog has become too long. We spend a lot of time discussing, planning, writing and revising these as a team (hence why we only publish blogs every month and not more frequently), so we're disappointed to hear you feel they've been written by AI. All the books mentioned have been read by at least one member of our team, often multiple members and multiple times. Are you able to clarify what makes you think this has been written by AI and give examples?
I was briefly wondering about that, too. Maybe because the blog post was long and high-quality, or maybe because we have all become so cynical and just assume everything is written by AI... completely forgetting that writing, including long and high-quality writing existed long before AI. (I certainly do this, sometimes.)
I think people who not just wonder in their heads but ask creators if something is AI sometimes tend to jump to conclusions... in one app, someone accused a creator of using AI for voice-over, which wasn't the case at all (and the creator naturally wasn't very happy about the assumption). So in part, I think it would behoove all of us to simply ask creators about AI usage instead of jumping to conclusions.
I wonder if you might like to add a short disclaimer at the end, something like: "This blog post was written by our very human team. We only use Ai to fact-check and proofread before publishing. We spend a lot of time discussing, planning, writing and revising these as a team (hence why we only publish blogs every month and not more frequently)."
I've decided to not have any AI support in my writing going forward (other than any AI that might be baked into pure proofreading) and added a disclaimer about that to my new blog posts. Even then, someone I know asked if I really wrote all of that without AI.