Recentring the Animal in Advocacy
What might change if we shared stories of animal empathy and altruism; accounts that draw us closer to our animal kin rather than further away?
Do animal activists sometimes forget animals? In March, I presented a talk at the Vegan and Animal Rights Conference titled ‘Recentring Animals in Animal Advocacy.’ The title was meant to be provocative. Everyone at the conference cared passionately about animals. The talk's proposition was this, that, alongside the truth of what is happening to animals, we need to allow more space to let people know who animals are; reminding them that these are compassionate, empathetic beings in their own right and that, when laid alongside what really happens, we create the conditions for radical transformation.
For years, I stood in classrooms on behalf of a well-known charity, trying to start conversations that many adults still avoid; talking about animal rights. Some days were genuinely uplifting — when a child lingered behind to talk about ow much they loved their dog, for example. Other days were harder. I remember a session where I spent 30 minutes explaining the difficult realities of factory farming. The first question? “So, miss … why do you want us to go vegan?”
Then one day, it clicked. I was talking through an image of a mother pig confined to her crate. I turned back to the class, saw only blank faces and realised: of course this feels abstract to them. These are sweet kids but they’ve never met a pig. They’ve never watched one sprint for the sheer joy of it, or lean into a scratch behind the ears. They’ve never seen how fiercely protective a mother pig can be, or how quickly they learn. I was asking them to care about suffering without knowing the one who suffers. To be frank, how could they?
Moments like this continue to emerge. Take the excitement when Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss brown cow in Austria, showed the world she could scratch her back with a broom. Scientists were agog; those of us who have admired cows for years were less surprised (perhaps the bigger surprise was that she allowed to live to the age of 13). The most notable incident took place when a dear friend, a systems thinker, turned to me and said, with wonder in her voice, “I saw this video. Did you know that cows like to cuddle??” I paused before replying: “Yes, they do. When they feel safe.” But it was a heartbeat, when I realised that a respected colleague working to reconnect people with the natural world knew so little about one of its most significant inhabitants.
It isn’t a surprise. Few people today have contact with the animals they eat - or with the wild animals whose lands have been decimated by animal agriculture. The Guardian recently published an article on the loss of birdsong over the past 50 years. Thanks to shifting baseline syndrome, we barely noticed. But if this embedded ignorance is true, what are the implications for advocacy? Activists have become fluent in exposing cruelty. And by God, it’s necessary. Do we need to become just as skilled at reminding people who animals are?
Let’s look at what happens if they do. In January this year, a 10-year-old community dog named Orelha was tortured to death by a group of teenagers in the beach resort of Florianopolis, Brazil. His murder created a tidal wave of outrage. Brazilians took to the streets in their thousands, demanding #JustiçaPorOrelha. He inspired a float in the Rio Carnival. On news channels, pundits and journalists discussed the definition of psychopathy. Orelha’s house has become a permanent shrine.
When Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss brown cow in Austria, showed the world she could scratch her back with a broom, scientists were agog; those of us who have admired cows for years were less surprised.
Why such a response? After all, billions of animals are killed in terrible ways every day by the industries that profit from their bodies and no one seems to bat an eyelid. What sparked that wave of sorrow for Orelha - even more than the way he was slaughtered - was that he was known and loved. In Florianopolis, people had filmed him, playing with other free-roaming dogs in the waves; photobombing weddings; lying contentedly alongside sunbathers. In one video, he stares serenely out to sea, taking in the fullness of the world, as if he can’t quite believe his luck.
When we hear about animals, we often hear stories of awe and wonder. Earlier this year, a Bar-tailed Godwit - a type of migratory wading bird - made headlines when she flew 8,425 miles (13,560 km) without landing once for food, water, or rest; she was six months old. Foxes hunt hidden prey like mice under thick snow by aligning their bodies roughly to the north east, toward magnetic north; like small, furry compasses. Veronica can scratch her back with a broom. And awe is important. It reminds us how precious and extraordinary the world and her inhabitants are. But awe can also distance us by reinforcing feelings of difference. Awe places its subjects conveniently ‘over there’: being moved by a documentary about the world’s oceans rarely entails personal change. Perhaps this is why generations of nature enthusiasts have devoured David Attenborough’s spectacular films without asking questions about the animals on their plates.
What might change if we shared stories of animal empathy and altruism; accounts that draw us closer to our animal kin rather than further away? Take one example: an undercover investigator filmed a mother pig who had worked out how to open her crate. Rather than making a run for it, she released her sisters around her. That story never fails to take my breath away. For three reasons. Firstly, this act of strategic generosity would have been beyond my dogs - and they’re both as smart as whips. Secondly, time and again, animals demonstrate that they have a better instinct for what is right and what is wrong than humans do. That pig knew that she and the others shouldn’t be there. Thirdly, billions of these sensitive, empathetic animals are lowered into gas chambers every year where they endure agonising deaths.
Animals being who they are, there is no shortage of reports like those of the pig. Academic Marc Bekoff dedicates his books to hundreds of incidents of reciprocity in animals, of deep empathy and grief, equity and forgiveness. In The Emotional Lives of Animals, he describes the efforts of Echo, a beautiful matriarch elephant, and her nine-year-old daughter, Enid, to help Echo’s newborn, Ely, who couldn’t walk. Despite thirst and hunger, Echo and Enid worked tirelessly together to get the baby elephant to the safety of the water hole, tenderly nudging along his little body each time he fell, until he eventually recovered. Every mother will recognise her determination; every woman will recognise female solidarity in protection.
When scholars from the University of Chicago gave rats a choice between chocolate chips and freeing a trapped cage mate. Routinely, they chose to free the trapped mate and forego the chips - a choice I’m not sure I could make. When his elderly timber wolf was about to be euthanised, Louis Dorfman from the International Exotic Felix Sanctuary, Boyd, Texas, recalled: “As I was holding her head in my hands at the last minute, she looked deeply into my eyes and, with great effort lifted her head to lick my face one last time. I will never in my life forget that last effort: a desire to let me know I was doing the right thing and she loved me for it.” Dorfman’s memory reminds me of the times my own little dog has given me a single lick as a thank you.
Bekoff also cites a now famous whale rescue that took place off the coast of San Francisco, in 2005. A 50 foot, 50 ton female humpback whale was tangled in crab lines, making it impossible for her to swim, difficult for her to breathe. Despite extraordinary risk, divers worked tirelessly to release her. Once freed the whale started swimming in slow circles - before approaching each diver and nuzzling him. “It felt to me like [she] was thanking us,” said rescuer James Moskito. “Knowing [she] was free and that we had helped [her].”
Fellow diver Mike Menigoz added: ”You hate to anthropomorphize too much but the whale was doing little dives and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it. I don’t know for sure what it was thinking but it’s something I will always remember. It was just too cool.” In his reflection, Menigoz raises a key question in animal rights advocacy: in caring about animals, do we assign them capacities that they don’t possess? Do we, indeed, anthropomorphize? The answer: far less than previously thought. “It’s natural to attribute ‘human’ feelings to animals. Indeed, the only language the divers had to describe the whale’s actions was from the field of human emotions,” writes Bekoff. “We must decide for ourselves whether the rescuers were simply projecting feelings of gratitude on an unfeeling animal, or whether they intuitively undersood the whale’s unfamiliar emotional gestures … But hard science is confirming what our intuitions so often tell us: animals express emotions in ways we are naturally able to understand.” (p62)
If we let ourselves, he should have added. The problem isn’t anthropomorphism, argues Dr Joe Wills, lecturer in law at the University of Leicester. “It's ‘anthropodenialism’, the human tendency to ignore that we are animals and the other species are our evolutionary, biological and psychological kin. We share many capacities with the animals we exploit – our emotions, our vulnerability, our desires, our preferences, our relations of care – yet people chose to live in denial about these connections because they impugn present practices.”
Impugn - and render untenable. It’s not accidental that animal industries keep quotidian practices and those they wreck them upon behind both bars and walls, hidden from empathetic eyes. If a bacon-lover were aware that the pig they’re eating was one who could release herself from her crate and liberate her sisters; who had had every single baby taken from her; who had died in agony in a gas chamber; it might change the way the flesh sits on the tongue. Setting the reality of who animals are alongside what they endure might finally ignite a sense of urgency that becomes unignorable - as it did with Orelha.
When scholars from the University of Chicago gave rats a choice between chocolate chips and freeing a trapped cage mate, routinely, they chose to free the trapped mate and forego the chips.
And what if thanking the divers -and luxuriating in her freedom - was exactly what the whale was doing? When addressing our relationship with sentient, surely the golden rule, when in doubt, is to err on the side or compassion? If we truly grasped that degree of intelligence and joy, how might that change our concern for them? Would we stop killing whales? Stop filling their seas with poisons and plastics? Would we cut down shipping to mitigate noise pollution? End the climatic conditions that are heating their homes beyond endurance? What possibilities are we losing if we ascribe them less than they’re capable of?
Seeing animals as individuals with their own hearts, minds, and souls “transforms our actions from mere obligation into heartfelt commitment,” wrote photographer Bjorn Persson. “Protecting animals becomes not just a duty, but a reflection of our shared humanity. True change begins within. Only then can our efforts be authentic and lasting, rooted in love and understanding, guiding us toward a world where animals are cherished and safeguarded as not just animals, but fellow beings on this planet.”
Undeniably, we need new ways of thinking and talking about animals. How do I describe the deep peace I feel when I hear my older dog, drinking water; a small cherished soul taking care of herself? Or when her younger sister ‘boops’ my hand with her nose, while we’re in woodlands (leaving a dot of cold and wet on my palm), as if to say: “Look. Look where we are. Together. I love you. Come smell this with me. Come chase this with me.” How do I describe what they mean to me? Sisters, daughters, mothers (as when they tell me off for shouting in the car), friends, kin. A part of my soul; a part of me.
We are being invited to create new lexicons of compassion, new epistomologies of care, that cover the complex nuances of our relationships with animals; words (or sounds or gestures) that acknowledge their limitless enchantments, the limits of our abilities to understand them and our terrible grief for what we’ve done to them. Animals are beings of agency and intelligence. There is more going on inside those beautiful heads than we could ever imagine; connections with natural rhythms that we can only dream about. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to try - and in the trying, begin to heal fractured systems that are harming the planet.
Animal advocacy takes its cohorts into the darkest corners of the human heart. On a daily basis, activists witness, share, hear about - and try to stop - acts of unfathomable cruelty. Sharing stories of animal altruism and empathy, learning from the animals, revelling in their beauty is the happy part of this work; transforming with connection rather than outrage. Advocates are called upon to become, with humility, the interface between humans and other beings. And by doing so, we reframe the movement from one of ascetism and sacrifice to one that is joyful, driven by compassion, engaged in community, inclusive. This is not about diet or lifestyle or perfectionism or maintaining the status quo for the hell of it. This is about love.
