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[activist-expressing]

Being from northern England in 2019

My little brother just left my room after this back and forth:

'My teacher was telling us about climate change today and I got a bit scared'

'Yeah? What was she saying?'

'She was telling us about alternative power and that but she was making it sound a bit scary'

'Oh, renewable energy? That's cool!'

'Aye'

He paused, and then in his little voice, and the old familiar accent and dialect that I know, speak and love, that reminds me of home and used to make me feel safe, he asked the question:

'Do you reckon we'll be areet?'

I hate having to lie, but he's just too young.

[activist-expressing]

I truly did need this.

Kind words, from a kinder friend.

The shadow of rebellion

by Connor Thomas Five minute read

Digesting raw feeling and fighting with acceptance.

Photo credits: Steven Tiller 

Heading into the unknown, I leave the life I have behind for two weeks. Accepting the state of this world and the indifferent attitudes of those around me, I hope somehow that I can make a difference. I can’t stop talking about it, can’t stop planning and acting. I know I’m doing too much and I can’t say no, because what I do will never be enough. I’m in London. I’m surrounded. High visibility jackets, apathetic faces and loud piercing sirens. Yet this is nothing, this is nothing compared to what they go through. This is our only shot at creating a better world! Keep on! Come on! KEEP ON keeping on.

You awaken.

Was it a dream or a nightmare?

Did we make progress?

Did people listen?

Why don’t people listen?

Questions like these, or of similar nature, may have cropped up in your thoughts. You might have tried to answer them. They may have made it into conversation with fellow rebels, family or friends in which a positive or negative answer was produced. They may sit unattended and repressed, occasionally causing minor earthquakes in your attitude and orientation to yourself and others. How long do we keep the unspoken feelings submerged before they breach the surface and create an unwanted tsunami of disconnection and despair?

Recently, times have been steady. The waters are calmer, yet the waves of disorder haven’t fully settled. Society feels a little strange. It takes a little bit of readjustment to come home to a house with four walls, after sleeping in a tent outside of a government building. Soon, you may have your first citizens assembly in a room rather than in a street. You may have been to, or plan to go to a debrief or welcome party soon. You may be about to do another action or begin planning one with fellow rebels. How do you feel about it?

Do you feel like you are expected to maintain happy, positive and hopeful vibes? Is there space for raw emotion to come to the surface? Are we taking time to answer questions that plague us?

These probing questions might make me look as if I am trying to play the devil’s advocate. However, I feel as if I’m checking in with our reality. I’m going to open my wounds up and tell you that after the rebellion I experienced burnout. Below I’m going suggest something that may be hard to do, though from my experience, I feel it’s essential.

As I smoulder away in my own internalised despair, I can tell that people are noticing I’m not as chirpy or happy as I once was. From their point of view I seem less hopeful. I do feel less hopeful.

What use is hopelessness and despair, I wonder. This feeling is useless I decide. Let me put it aside for a moment while I plan the next action or write the next piece!

When I had the spring of a lamb on a frosty May morning, I had no need to consider anything except what was next; like a hound awaiting his companion throwing another ball to fetch. Now I’ve been at this game of fetch a while and my legs don’t have the spring they once had. I was feeling terrified about our future, rolling around in reoccurring despair and amid depths of exhaustion. Everything felt urgent. It certainly was (and still is) a situation of urgency, and what does urgency bring with it?

Manic activity.

Within manic activity there is often something we forget about. The walks we used to go on with our companions. The books we used to love dipping in and out of. The healthy food we once had the energy to prepare. The social connections we were motivated to maintain. Over time all of these (and many more important to you) were forgotten about. Ultimately, our sense of self diminished.

I can guess that this happened to many of us prior to, during and after the rebellion. I can predict that, like myself, you struggled (or in my case, didn’t want) to admit that you were slowly losing yourself in the pursuit of doing good. Behold, the doom and gloom of the shadow I’ve shone light on here does evaporate in the candlelight of connection, inspiration and self-disclosure.

Post rebellion is a time for us to begin appreciating what we have, how far we have come and acceptance of how far we’ve got to go.

It’s time to be vulnerable. It’s time to ask for support.

We may have come home to loved ones who don’t understand, housemates who think we’re crazy or best friends who think we’re amazing. I’m asking you now, to prioritise your own wellbeing for the future of the movement. Without connection, we can’t be inspired. Without inspiration to open our minds and guts, we can’t self-disclose. Without disclosure, we carry the weight of uncertainty, despair and exhaustion into our next action, interaction, and ultimately, our next thought.

Even when it feels like you’re admitting how inexcusable humanity seems (which in many cases, they really are!), it’s better to accept the reality of this world, than distort your vision of it. If we can’t accept the totality of a problem, we can’t actively begin to fix it. In hindsight, I can see my anger towards my fellow species was a useful tool to motivate me to act. Although, this anger is like a fossil fuel; you can burn it and it’ll propel you forward! Eventually though, it’ll run out, you will burn out. It’s time to get on the good stuff! So, we look for bountiful regenerative sources of fuel: broccoli, cabbage, lentils, beans, pears, beets, plant-based patties and LOVE! That LOVE full of the compassion we show towards animals, we must learn to show towards ourselves and those around us, no matter how ignorant the other seems.

When you feel anguish, desolation, sadness, hopelessness or anything that puts a black tint in your green glasses… I ask you to not be the ignorant one. Tell somebody about it. A brother, a mother, a friend or a fellow rebel (or even a therapist https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/therapy/388-findsupport), these people are here to listen.

Let’s practice:

Patience with ourselves and others.

Persistence in our self-disclosure and actions.

Acceptance of the diabolic state this world is in because of human action.

LOVE & RAGE WILL BRING ABOUT CHANGE. 💚

Photo credits: Steven Tiller

[activist-expressing]

"Get a fucking life you freaks"

Curious.

Occasionally, as a society, we are confronted with citizens who are trying their upmost to improve the lives of others, but happen to operate just beyond the bounds of our current understanding, and rather than attempting to improve our grasp of what they want to achieve, we respond with extreme aggression and hostility.

I am standing in a passageway between two shopping areas in a small city, I'm wearing a mask, I'm holding footage showing what happens to animals as standard practice in the time between birth, and the point where their bodies make contact with the consumer population as neatly deformed commodities. There is peaceful music, and smiling faces of out-reachers, everything about our street art performance is designed to draw curiosity, and invite interaction.

I've already embraced a crying man today. He watched as a mother cow, genetically mutated and agonised, attempted with all of her desperation to chase a quad bike trailer carrying her newborn child, with all the grace and beauty that she lacks. She is undone by the colossal mass and chronic illnesses that we have designed her to have.

The man watched as the newborn calf reached up from the conveyor belt to the slaughterhouse employee, and attempted to nuzzle the pair of electric prongs he held in his hand. I stood with the man, and we watched as the male calf lowered his head, only for his new friend, the slaughterhouse employee, to drive the electrified prongs into the back of the calf's skull, emitting smoke as the calf's brain, every neural pathway and memory within it, and all of the longing thoughts of his lost mother, were eviscerated in electric current. The slaughterhouse worker, himself programmed and conditioned into normalised brutality and unimaginable violence, slung his little admirer up by the rear leg, and his little throat was cut.

The man broke.

I should have been broken too, but I've seen this happen too many times to break, despite how much it admittedly still hurts. I wonder what it says about my psychological state that I have become desensitised to the extent that the most unspeakable atrocities committed to the most innocent beings imaginable, rarely surprise me.

We spend our day talking to more people like that man, we watch as many begin to unravel the layers of conditioning that they have been increasingly laden with since childhood, finally asking themselves whether violence towards innocent creatures is necessary at all.

As I stand inside our little art performance, as the world passes by, as I exist in what I hope to be a salient and persuasive silence, and as the music and faces that surround me help me to forget why I'm here, to forget the atrocities about which I will soon have to speak, a silhouette glances across my periphery.

"Get a fucking life, you freaks"

Get a life, he said. Everything about the sentence seemed ironic to me.

Despite the perspective of this piece, I want to emphasise that I don't believe that I am better than this man, I don't believe that I am more 'enlightened', and as a flawed member of society myself, I have no room to pass judgement. I'm also not here to persuade anyone, including this man that I have 'a life'. I don't want to discuss my experience because by invoking my successes and failures, all that I could hope to achieve would be to invalidate the activism and experiences of anyone who tries to bring about change, yet feels that they may not be a success by today's societal standards. I don't believe that one's personal background diminishes the solidity of the words which we utter in earnest.

To my knowledge, the only defining difference between this man and I, causing the dichotomy between our personal sets of circumstance, is chance. Perhaps, also luck? Is either of us more lucky than the other to be entering this interaction from the perspective that we do? I live with immense happiness from the reality I experience, but also with great pain. I don't know this man, but I'd imagine that he also carries with him the joy and suffering of his own reality.

That said, there is one difference that I know of; without the annoying, self-righteous, know it all, do-gooding, relentlessly irritating and uncompromisingly difficult people like me in the society of the past, he and I would be living in a very different world to that in which we do. The limited freedoms and justices of modern day democracy that we take for granted, the human rights act, the strive for equality across genders and sexualities, the philosophy that all of humanity are born equal, and the simple concept of mitigating suffering and increasing joy, would all be distant, unreachable ideas in the minds of passive citizens living under oppression.

We all benefit from the activists, advocates, and changemakers of history, and all of those inspired people had one thing in common with eachother, and in common with me. They were all fucking irritating. Now, I'm not saying that I see myself as comparable to the giants upon whose shoulders we all stand. To the contrary, I think that if I ever begin to perceive myself as worthy of being compared to those people, then my own colossal arrogance and self aggrandisement will have prohibited this comparison from being logical.

What I am saying is that it's okay that he hates me, that's how it's supposed to work. I'm just hoping that his grandchildren and the creatures that they inhabit this planet with will think that I'm, you know, an alright bloke.

You will never read this, but if you do, my angry friend, go easy mate. Have a good day.

[activist-expressing]

"Hatred is on the menu"

Our little activist family was infiltrated and detonated.

At a meeting of vegan activists within the Tyne and Wear region, we hypothesised and fantasised about a coalition, comprised of the proven tactics of Extinction Rebellion, with the added perspective that Animal agriculture is ruthlessly destructive to the planet which we so desparately need to protect. Finally! A plant based food system was set to be jetted to the forefront of environmentalist thought; a system which is predicted to provide enough food for an extra 4 billion people, or alternatively, provide organic, sustainable food for the current population was being recognised. Talk of rewilding global rainforests, allowing western countryside to reconvert to forestland, allowing oceans to replenish, skies to cool and people of all economic classes and personal backgrounds to thrive on a vibrant diet of colour and ample nutrition, as opposed to the current norm whereby poor families are forced to fill the pockets of cheap meat retailers, responsible for the torture and exploitation of uncountable numbers of innocent creatures.

Hope was everywhere at our little meeting of 20, we hashed out the exacts, we made predictions about the vague. Animal Rebellion, a group founded by animal rights organisations and environmental organisations alike, was set to join the disruption of London.

It was a few days later that the mood changed.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7539867/Animal-Rebellion-Theyre-militant-vegan-wing-plan-stop-eating-meat-fish-dairy.html?fbclid=IwAR2ag784u1HNIuDypR1s9CABq2nfp2UV5tNHUKavgRS9yZbuGu-tr0ENpdw

Our little vegan family meeting, full of hope and aspiration for a better future and dreams of system change, momentarily desolated.

There was a reporter at our meeting.

How could we not know? How could we possibly have been unaware that there was a reporter amongst us from the daily mail? I recounted the meeting, remembering the faces that I didn't know, remembering the assumption that I made that anyone who I didn't know, must have known someone. My mistake was assuming that our little world of local advocacy was indeed, little. With the publishing of this article, it was suddenly a great deal bigger.

"The group is called Animal Rebellion and its quest to force Britons into compulsory veganism is about to become very high profile."

Compulsory veganism. How terrifyingly visceral. What a tremendous amount gutteral punch the words land with. The implication is clear, the government is here to steal your moral agency, expel your farmers, and force you to become a kombucha sipping Yogi with kale themed wallpaper and a cabinet laden with endless nutritional supplements.

The term compelled me to come to grips with how far detached a phrase can be from its meaning. It also compelled me to think back to media attacks of the past and how their smears would have transpired, seeing as our tactics of civil disobedience and non-violent disruption were largely inspired by those of the civil rights movement.

Compulsory coexistence with African Americans.

The end of segregation. It's overwhelmingly apparent how the tactics are used to detract and distract from the aspirations of different movements, focusing the mind purely on the cost to oneself, and on the incessant do-gooders here to impose such costs upon thee.

The aim of our action was to provoke government into making long, healthful life more accessible to the masses, to create policies and targets to transition our society into a way of sustaining ourselves which is actually feasible within the constraints of our environment, and to finally place the end of the massacre of innocent creatures within our societal reticle. Compulsory smelly hippieism for the masses was their implication.

Momentarily, I faltered. My friends were distraught, expressing the feeling of violation and distrust towards those that they coexist with, not knowing who is here to help, and who is here to use misinterpretations of our words against our own movement.

As someone who has often struggled to be confident when lacking the validation of those I care about, this hit was heavy, and it cut deep. I thought about how the people in my city would interpret the article, how my family would respond, how I would have responded if I wasn't who I am. I considered the possibility that in my efforts to make the world a better place, to protect the innocent and to overcome the insurmountable, I had gone off the deep end. I considered whether me and the people like me should be put on a shelf, out of the realms of reasonable discussion, or whether I was really the decent man, and thoughtful citizen that I will always strive to be.

Amy's words will always strike a chord within me, as she made it clear that the giants whose shoulders we had stood on had not won valiant and cinematic battles, their path had not been smooth, they did not know whether their goals were achievable at all. They doubted themselves, as did we. Amy reminded me that smears were something we knew were coming, and we are morally obligated to not be beaten down by the presence of corrupt authority, rather we are obligated to be fuelled by it, to recognise accurately that power structures raising their shields is a symbol of their recognition that our movement is sharp enough to cut.

We kept the article in the back of our minds as a propellant to drive us onwards into the fight that lay ahead.

[activist-expressing]

"Hatred is on the menu"

Our little activist family was infiltrated and detonated.

At a meeting of vegan activists within the Tyne and Wear region, we hypothesised and fantasised about a coalition, comprised of the proven tactics of Extinction Rebellion, with the added perspective that Animal agriculture is ruthlessly destructive to the planet which we so desparately need to protect. Finally! A plant based food system was set to be jetted to the forefront of environmentalist thought; a system which is predicted to provide enough food for an extra 4 billion people, or alternatively, provide organic, sustainable food for the current population was being recognised. Talk of rewilding global rainforests, allowing western countryside to reconvert to forestland, allowing oceans to replenish, skies to cool and people of all economic classes and personal backgrounds to thrive on a vibrant diet of colour and ample nutrition, as opposed to the current norm whereby poor families are forced to fill the pockets of cheap meat retailers, responsible for the torture and exploitation of uncountable numbers of innocent creatures.

Hope was everywhere at our little meeting of 20, we hashed out the exacts, we made predictions about the vague. Animal Rebellion, a group founded by animal rights organisations and environmental organisations alike, was set to join the disruption of London.

It was a few days later that the mood changed.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7539867/Animal-Rebellion-Theyre-militant-vegan-wing-plan-stop-eating-meat-fish-dairy.html?fbclid=IwAR2ag784u1HNIuDypR1s9CABq2nfp2UV5tNHUKavgRS9yZbuGu-tr0ENpdw

Our little vegan family meeting, full of hope and aspiration for a better future and dreams of system change, momentarily desolated.

There was a reporter at our meeting.

How could we not know? How could we possibly have been unaware that there was a reporter amongst us from the daily mail? I recounted the meeting, remembering the faces that I didn't know, remembering the assumption that I made that anyone who I didn't know, must have known someone. My mistake was assuming that our little world of local advocacy was indeed, little. With the publishing of this article, it was suddenly a great deal bigger.

"The group is called Animal Rebellion and its quest to force Britons into compulsory veganism is about to become very high profile."

Compulsory veganism. How terrifyingly visceral. What a tremendous amount gutteral punch the words land with. The implication is clear, the government is here to steal your moral agency, expel your farmers, and force you to become a kombucha sipping Yogi with kale themed wallpaper and a cabinet laden with endless nutritional supplements.

The term compelled me to come to grips with how far detached a phrase can be from its meaning. It also compelled me to think back to media attacks of the past and how their smears would have transpired, seeing as our tactics of civil disobedience and non-violent disruption were largely inspired by those of the civil rights movement.

Compulsory coexistence with African Americans.

The end of segregation. It's overwhelmingly apparent how the tactics are used to detract and distract from the aspirations of different movements, focusing the mind purely on the cost to oneself, and on the incessant do-gooders here to impose such costs upon thee.

The aim of our action was to provoke government into making long, healthful life more accessible to the masses, to create policies and targets to transition our society into a way of sustaining ourselves which is actually feasible within the constraints of our environment, and to finally place the end of the massacre of innocent creatures within our societal reticle. Compulsory smelly hippieism for the masses was their implication.

Momentarily, I faltered. My friends were distraught, expressing the feeling of violation and distrust towards those that they coexist with, not knowing who is here to help, and who is here to use misinterpretations of our words against our own movement.

As someone who has often struggled to be confident when lacking the validation of those I care about, this hit was heavy, and it cut deep. I thought about how the people in my city would interpret the article, how my family would respond, how I would have responded if I wasn't who I am. I considered the possibility that in my efforts to make the world a better place, to protect the innocent and to overcome the insurmountable, I had gone off the deep end. I considered whether me and the people like me should be put on a shelf, out of the realms of reasonable discussion, or whether I was really the decent man, and thoughtful citizen that I will always strive to be.

Amy's words will always strike a chord within me, as she made it clear that the giants whose shoulders we had stood on had not won valiant and cinematic battles, their path had not been smooth, they did not know whether their goals were achievable at all. They doubted themselves, as did we. Amy reminded me that smears were something we knew were coming, and we are morally obligated to not be beaten down by the presence of corrupt authority, rather we are obligated to be fuelled by it, to recognise accurately that power structures raising their shields is a symbol of their recognition that our movement is sharp enough to cut.

We kept the article in the back of our minds as a propellant to drive us onwards into the fight that lay ahead.

[activist-expressing]

Inspired is the right description ✌️🌱

A fantastic write-up of our save vigil at Tulip meats by a fiercely compelling friend of mine.

Manchester Pig Save

by Connor Thomas

At 4am on a dark & crisp summers morning, the soft gentle chill of the air through my open window carries the sweet songs of the early rising winged creatures. A beautiful start to a day that we had all not been looking forward to. I make a hearty wholesome Tupperware box of porridge for each of us. It’s full of bursting blueberries and zingy ginger, a hug in a bowl for the journey down. Ben arrives at 5:05 and is greeted with an energetic loving smile by all three of the hounds I share a house with. We head to Dale’s house, pick him up and finally set off for Ashton Under Lyme on the outskirts of Manchester.

We give ourselves a small pep talk on the way down, as we drive through parts of the Peak District and witness spectacular sights of low hanging intense clouds on endless rolling hills. As we grow closer to our destination, a grey mist cushions Ben’s Mini through the higher hills. In this bubble of misty thought, we rattle our brains and remind ourselves of why we put ourselves in the spectators’ seat of such immense suffering and how we are going to devour a gigantic hearty breakfast after the vigil. Self-care and the scrupulous planning of it is so important!

We pull up on a terrace parallel to the slaughterhouse. As we take our first step out the car, I feel a sharp chill; this is a re-occurring sensation I’ve found in my own personal experiences of visiting slaughterhouse areas, even on summer mornings. To our right is a high cemented wall around 9ft high with barbed wire. To our left is the ordinary world, a simple terrace that reminds me of the old family house I previously lived in. I wonder if kids still play street football like I used to at home when I was a bairn. If so, are they aware of what happens behind these high walls?

I’ve been holding a pee for a few hours now and the moment we arrive, I quickly say hello to a few of the welcoming faces in high visibility vests before I dart along the riverside to find a secluded spot to relieve myself. Behind the woods, I hear the first sound. It is piercing. It is 8:30 in the morning and we have gone from harmonious birds to deep and fiercely terrified squeals. It is their call for help, for relief. The sound is awful, like a baby screaming in pain. You know you can’t turn your back; you must address that cry for help to alleviate the sound that we ever so naturally respond to. What shocks me most is how hard it is to tell if the cry was human or non-human. The intensity of the orchestra of screams touches every millimetre of my physical structure and I just desperately wait for a crescendo to come and end it all.

It never does. It continues.

Something occurs to me. What if within all the screams, the slaughterhouse workers also cry out for help? They work with unnatural non-human tools - a far cry from the sharpened stone on a long stick, the tools used by our ancestors in times of food urgency. Nowadays we demand workers to use tools such as carousels that rotate through pits of carbon dioxide, flamethrowers so hot they burn every hair from their skin, huge harsh knives that cut through dense twitching protective flesh and penetrating bolt guns that fracture skulls and periodically miss, leaving animals to meet the sharp blade fully aware of their feelings, fellow friends and their unforgiving fate. Do you think this sounds violent? If yes, what does this violence do to the mind of the human holding the tool? Do they ever get caught in these machines or have they become machines themselves?

After ten long minutes, I walk back to the front of the gate. I am told there has already been six trucks enter the yard since the early hours. I can see the backs of the trucks which have the name of the location the pigs have travelled from. Each and every one of them has an obnoxious picture of a happy pig looking out at the drivers who follow the trucks on their long journeys. This is a comforting image to those who have never witnessed the inside of a farm, truck, slaughterhouse or probably even something I had smiled at when I used to eat bacon and sausage. Long journeys they certainly were; each individual had travelled without water or food, packed so tightly that many of them could not lie down at the same time. It took between one to four hours to reach the pigs’ final destination, while the drivers would return within the week with another hot box of snouts.

I look left. The Manchester Pig Save banner is now out of sight, blocked by a colossal three-story high trailer, fitted with small rectangular mesh slats on each level. This sight was a shock to the mind; I had seen trucks like this on videos of American and Canadian pig saves and I had never imagined it happened in the UK on this scale. Now my nostrils are twitching, something doesn’t smell good. This nose filling scent that feels so permanent. Intensified by the heat of many bodies packed so closely together; similar to that of when you’re very ill for days, you feel you need to keep cosy and the minute you lift those covers, you smell the fever inspired body odour arise from the warm depths of your quilt. It is a smell much worse than one can describe with words. Imagine faeces from your toes, up your legs and smothered on your belly as the truck comes to a sudden halt. Your friend accidently crashes their arse into your face. Now with every breath you inhale your fellow beings’ gruesome shit scent. You have no way of getting it off your nose. This confined space is abhorrently different to the woodland you are so used to stewarding, a place where you get to enact your instinct of keeping your toilet far from your sleeping quarters and much further from your snout.

“You use all of your senses when bearing witness at a vigil”. This is what I once heard Alex Lockwood talk about on a podcast about bearing witness. To me this is key, this is reality. It’s not a video filmed by someone else, neither is it your minds ability to use what it thinks is the ‘best guess’ and imagine what the experience would be like. Ask anyone who has been to a Save Movement vigil; their words can describe it so well, yet they’ll all tell you, “you must experience it for yourself”.

Back to the gates. This first truck I see is lively. The pigs look out from their confined space with searching eyes that are focused curiously on our high visibility vests, voices and video devices. At Tulip meats, the Manchester Pig Save group have an agreement that they can spend five minutes with the animals before they enter the facility. This helps us a lot and we bring pop up stools with us so we can peer into the lowest slat that usually sits around head height - this is how we gather the footage that we want to share with people. It’s also how we get to see the individuals for who they are within their confinement. It is smallest act we can do, to share their story and show them love.

The horn of the truck blares and my body suddenly becomes tense. I feel a hollowness within this stressed structure. I feel like a strong wind could blow into me and fill this empty space to such a volume that I just blow away into the grey sky, like a balloon left unattended by a distracted child. I look around at the people I’m bearing witness with. Some are in tears; others are looking deeply into their own minds and emotions. I look for a cue from Ben or Dale to see if they would want to talk about that first truck full of curious snouts. We come together and check if we’re all alright, embracing each other in a tight heartfelt three-way hug.

As we let go and share our experience within our trio, I see a car swinging in. A mother dressed in a nurse’s uniform dropping off three young men. They head into the facility for another regular day of processing. I wonder which area they work in as this plant is huge! Do they work with the tall gas cylinders that fuel the screams? How about the kill floor a real life house of horror containing the carousel of pain that spins continuously, turning life into death? The ‘process’ in this plant takes inquisitive trusting pigs and transforms them into a commodity through a process that not many people would be willing to do or witness themselves. I, along with every activist within the non-violent Save Movement have only compassion for these people. It didn’t start like that for me though. I think of how angry I was attending my first save. I blamed the workers. I now realise that this is the wrong orientation to have. If you’re feeling stuck in this rut, remember it’s not the people we are fighting, it’s the oppressive system that Melanie Joy coins as “Carnism”. Workers, animals and our planet are all under the oppression of this powerful ideology.

Twenty minutes pass, another truck indicates its intended route into the plant. We approach the right-hand side of the truck, set up our stools to give us the extra foot we need to peer in and this time we bear witness to something different. These pigs don’t look at us; they don’t even seem to know whether we exist or if they themselves exist. All we can see are either wide scattered eyes or closed eyes along with heavy breathing, like zombies from an apocalypse film. This trailer is filled with misery. There are scratches, wounds, blood and shit all over the pigs. Most of them seem to have deformities on their bodies, they simply look either unconscious or completely unhappy and unnatural. I jot in my notebook that they seem to have no perception of anything but their own bodies, crashing around and pushing each other with their heads held low. Are they aware of what is coming, or have they come from one of the 85% of UK standard intensive pig farms? The epitome of ultimate despair.

As this truck leaves, I spot the driver hosing down the now empty insides of the trailer in the cleaning section. He departs after switching his now wet and faeces covered t-shirt. Just as he leaves, we see two other trucks flashing their indicators in the direction of the slaughterhouse gates. The first smaller truck of the two standing at two stories high drives straight in as the security must clear the busy road for the next truck, which is huge. I approach the second truck. I look up from my position at the side of the truck and see four levels of this ginormous structure. I then glance through more mesh and witness a mixture of lifeless looking bodies and frantic searching eyes in this first level.

I think of my dear friend Lesley, who has been to a vigil here before. She told me to talk, sing and vibrate with love towards these creatures who have probably never known this feeling before. Suddenly I feel a state of shock and find myself gazing into a pair of blue eyes that are looking directly back at me. Connected by this glance, I feel the urge to sing words to this individual and that’s exactly what I do. The ever so slight sense of embarrassment you may feel singing to a pig in the back of a slaughter truck suddenly disappears. Along with everything else except those blue curious eyes. It is a moment in which you realise that you are giving this pig a comfort it has never known in its life before.

The horn blares.

My chest is tight.

It’s not raining Connor.

Those are your tears.

As this truck pulls into the yard, my emotions overwhelm me due to this connection with the eyes of the individual. Those eyes I will be able to recall in every animal I meet. What the fuck can I do? I walk through the crowd of activists, straight to the riverside as the waterfall of emotions floods from my eyes. Frustration gets the better of me and I can feel the heat of anger arising. As this heat arises within me, I feel the cool calming hand of Dale on my right shoulder. Followed by Ben’s to my left. My eyes begin to dry up as we take a stroll through the thin line of woodland that surrounds the tall slaughterhouse walls.

Another six or seven trucks have come in the time we are present.

Now the worst part of a vigil is upon us. Here comes the abrupt return to reality on the other side of the wall. We came closer when you were in pain. We stayed with you when you were afraid. We wish we could watch over you, all through the night. Remember that every day, we’ll never give up the fight.

We walk from the back and head to the front. We gather our things and leave at 12:30. We’re heading straight to Manchester to fill up on some tasty delights at a rainbow beauty of a café named: Boho Utopia! We fill ourselves up on a full English breakfast and a mega chocolate, peanut butter & banana cake milkshake. We’re heading home now. What a day.

I can only try again from my own experience to describe the sensory circus that occurs when you walk to the back of the slaughterhouse. These words come to me at that moment in time, you may have a different experience:

Screams. Terror. Pain. Dominance. Burning. Crying. Witnessing. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Damage. Violence. History. Shock. Fire. Anger. Rage. Suffering.

The afore list of words is the dark side to describe the reality of a vigil. I’m going to share a different list of words now, under the title of; ‘How you feel when you talk to people who stand side by side with you at The Save Movement’.

Inspired. Committed. Fulfilled. Hopeful. Happy. Fair. Joyous. Connected. Warm. Calm. Loved. Empathetic. Caring. Truthful.

I want you to add to this list, your own words that come to mind when you think of an animal vigil. Let us tell everyone why bearing witness is one of the greatest things you can do in your life! You can simply think of these in your head or share them on Facebook, Instagram or under this Tumblr post. I’ll get you started with a few easy ones:

Tea. Cake. Coffee.

[activist-expressing]

Activist expressing. Okay, sounds broody and a little self-interested, but expressing what?

As a vegan activist, I am confined to a self-imposed box, a restrictive corner of society whereby only a fringe segment of global populations currently agree with my way of living, a slightly larger segment view the vegan perspective as reasonable, and the rest won't acknowledge that an alternative view to the seemingly smooth-sailing status quo even exists. As a species, we dwell in our own correctness, and rarely do we take the time to correctly analyse our views from the ground up, to truly evaluate our own bias outside of seeking further confirmation of long held preconceptions.

I am no better, there are undoubtedly aspects of life where I am wrong, and I will likely continue to be wrong, however there is one part of the life experience saga of Dale whereby I am proud to have overcome a preconception which was instilled and reinforced in my cognition roughly 341000 times. Three times a day, 7 days a week, for 18 years, I was conditioned into the mindset of carnism.

'Carnism is the invisible belief system, or ideology, that conditions people to eat certain animals. Carnism is essentially the opposite of veganism, as “carn” means “flesh” or “of the flesh” and “ism” refers to a belief system'

Carnism is the learned behaviour of eating animal products. It is not a noticeable part of the average human experience to those that are unaware of it, just as religion, to children that know only of religious society and have never experienced any alternative would be unconscious to the possibility that any alternative could exist. Only once we become aware of conditioning can we begin to deprogram.

Carnism is self-perpetuating; under the influence of carnism, we will go to great lengths to crush any alternative perspective to our preconception. We will often declare our morality to be completely different to our actual beliefs. To defend carnism, we may state that plant life is just as important as the life of a conscious, sentient animal, we may claim that we are apex predators with ravenous carnivorous instincts, we may claim that morality is entirely subjective, and that nobody is within the realms of moral judgement because morals are self-defined by personal creed.

None of these are true, many are empirically, demonstrably untrue, and not one is a sincerely held belief. Never would we morally compare inanimate plant life to living, seeing, thinking, feeling, experiencing, perceiving, interpreting, questioning, sentient beings, apart from when faced with a vegan. Never would we claim to share any physical traits, or to have a shared morality with wild lions, enthralled in the midst of the Darwinian battlefield that is nature and survival, except when confronted with the presence of a vegan. Never would we claim that society is amoral or unjudging, or claim a child murderer, a sex trafficker, or an animal abuser to be beyond the bounds of moral judgement until we are jolted into the uncomfortable, relentless self-awareness of someone who takes an ethical stand against practices in which we willingly, and joyfully participate.

Our psychology is wired to prioritise the confirmation of our own beliefs over hunting the actual truth. Truth is not subjective, nor is it personalised to each of us. Truth is complex, it encapsulates us all and we interpret it in our own ways to varying levels of accuracy, but the truth is iron-clad, unmoving, and absolute.

The truth of carnism is that it is flawed, dangerous, and corrupt. The truth is that humans- as detailed by the American Dietetic Association- do not need animal products to survive and thrive. The truth is that animal agriculture as an industry, is one of the largest known contributors to the obliteration of our planet's welfare and future prospects. The truth is that carnism is a belief system which does the work of the animal agricultural industry for them, market specialists release ads confirming our own biases with minimal effort or evidence, we shun opposition to the marketing, we commit the marketing to memory in case we need to deflect vegan objections to the marketing, culture and tradition reinforces the perspective that marketing gives us which is that 'we consume animal products, there will be no questions'.

Veganism, the counter to carnism, is the perspective which begs a simple question:

If we know that we are able to live out our entire lives, as healthy, happy, fulfilled individuals, without causing intentional harm, and whilst causing minimal unintentional harm to the creatures that coinhabit this planet alongside us, then how can we continue to morally justify the commodification, exploitation, systematic abuse and massacre of our planetary neighbours?

How do we still continue to consider ourselves a civilised and rational society when we behave in a way which, when evaluated objectively, given the unnecessity of our doing so, is unquestionably barbaric, and is literally designed to cause harm to other creatures at the most colossal and proficient rate possible?

My subscription to a vegan belief system puts me in a currently limited segment of the population, confining me as 'off limits' in the public discussion to large swaths of humanity, however I am not alone.

This blog is a diary of my experiences fighting for change, rebelling against carnism within, and to an extent without of the law.