An Article Series from All-Creatures.org

Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

Making the Invisible Visible

From Kim Stallwood
December 2024

If the movement successfully and honestly frames animal rights as part of a progressive agenda of social justice and not as a competition among human interests, I believe our chances for success will be that much greater.

If only our relations with animals were more like this and less dependent upon the slaughterhouse.

It’s a sign of the ongoing development of the animal rights movement that we can no longer justify any action—no matter how ill-conceived, unstrategic, or self-defeating it might be—because it’s ‘for the animals’.

Through our efforts to educate people and raise their awareness about the animal industrial complex, through our work to influence legislators and the passing of popular referenda around the world, and through an ever-increasing array of plant-based products that allow people to move to a diet that is increasingly being recognised as one that is best for the environment, the animals, and our health, the animal advocacy movement as a whole no longer needs to be defensive or feel that it has to fight its corner in order to be heard.

Our task now is to maintain and enhance our credibility as reliable witnesses and documenters of the awful conditions for animals in circuses, zoos, factory farms, research laboratories, and wherever else they’re used. By making visible what’s invisible, by focusing relentlessly on the conditions for animals and not our own self-aggrandisement or self-righteous indignation, and by being professional in our communications, strategic knowhow, and presentation to the general public, we’ll be more likely to pass laws that implement and enforce effective regulations protecting animals from harm and banning behaviours that hurt them.

Further, if the movement successfully and honestly frames animal rights as part of a progressive agenda of social justice and not as a competition among human interests, I believe our chances for success will be that much greater.

Armed with truth, fortified with compassion, and committed to nonviolence, we can leave the Misanthropic Bunker and show the general public, proudly and without embarrassment, that they too share the Magical Connection, one that their everyday actions and society’s institutionalised contempt for animals hides from them to their detriment. We can illustrate, without exaggeration or fudging the facts, the truth that the violence we inflict on animals shares the same root cause as the devastation we cause to the environment and the misery we visit on our own kind—that the complex of ideologies (philosophical, political, and spiritual) that frame marginalised people, including women and children, animals and nature, as only resources for our instrumental use, has led only to more violence and alienation from our families, other species, our planetary home, and ourselves.

But first we must stop the violence: in ourselves, in our language, in our actions. Violence never prevents violence; it ultimately only leads to more, reshaping and compounding the problem, which re-emerges at a later date invariably requiring yet more violence to ‘solve’ it. Unless we do this, then our goals won’t be achieved. This is why nonviolence is a key value for animal rights.

Adapted from Growl: Life Lessons, Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate by Kim Stallwood. Published by Lantern Publishing & Media.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: December 9, 2024
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