Animal rights activists meant to disturb your weekend
Were you annoyed by animal rights activists at some point over the past few days? Were you made to wait in traffic as 1,000 of them marched through downtown Toronto on Saturday, or blockaded intersections in Burlington on Sunday, making you late for brunch?
Were you perturbed by their loud chants and disturbing banners as you shopped at the Eaton Centre, or as they locked down Maple Leaf Foods? Or maybe you were frightened by the hundreds of non-violent protesters who showed up at your house(if you are CEO of Fearman’s Pork, Michael Latifi, owner of a multimillion dollar estate on the Bridal Path, since dubbed, “The Palace that Dead Pigs Built”).
If you are annoyed with animal rights activists right now, after having your weekend or Monday morning disrupted, then they — we — have succeeded.
Last Saturday, I attended Toronto’s first ever Animal Liberation Conference, held at the University of Toronto. I ran a workshop to help animal advocates get more active in the media.
The next day, I joined the Official Animal Rights March, an annual event, which also took place that day in London, England, San Diego and Orlando, Auckland, N.Z., Cologne, Germany, and likely some other places. And then I went home.
The real activists though, they stayed. They were just getting started.
As Star columnist Thomas Walkom noted in his column last week, Toronto animal activists are now taking a page from environmental activists, particularly Extinction Rebellion out of the U.K., engaging in non-violent civil disobedience and disruption.
The very point is to interrupt public life, your everyday doings, the norm, to bring your attention to the 800 million farmed animals, three million fur bearing animals and countless marine animals slaughtered unnecessarily in Canada each year.
“Disruption causes the public to notice animal victims and question the status quo. It forces the public to choose: which side are you on?” explains Toronto activist Anita Krajnc, who made headlines in 2015 after she was criminally charged for offering water to thirsty pigs on their way to slaughter. She was eventually acquitted, in the precedent setting case.
“Organizers at Extinction Rebellion and now Direct Action Everywhere and the Animal Save Movement are studying Mark and Paul Engler’s book, This is an Uprising, in their hopes of replicating lessons from Gandhi and the Civil Rights Movement,” Krajnc says.
“For Gandhi, employing the right tools for social change was a science. Mass disruption, self-sacrifice involving mass civil disobedience, and escalation can create trigger events and moments of whirlwind that shift activism and public opinion to the levels needed to succeed.”
And that’s just what the animals and our planet need. As we learn more of the sentience of non-human animals, their capacity to experience intense fear and pain, as well as the inherent cruelties within Canadian animal agricultural systems and the harmful impact of animal agriculture upon the environment, a shift is certainly necessary, now.
Activist groups are ready to make that happen, growing more educated, more desperate, more organized, and bigger.
So perhaps stop being annoyed, and instead consider what the animals are enduring, as they are bred, farmed, shipped and bled to death.
And expect activists to continue putting a damper on your days, until you decide: What side are you on?