 I've always said that like bearing witness to the pigs inside the truck is there's no other activism that you can do like it. There's nothing else that really gives you that insight and it's a lot different to seeing pictures and video it just fills you with emotion. When you have that emotion you can really, if you learn how to harness it and generate it, it really turns you into a much more productive and motivated activist. Oh, babies. So in here we've got a gas chamber slaughterhouse so they blow up pigs into pit filled with CO2 gas to stun them and it's incredibly cruel and aversive and causes them pain and fear and distress. They do it because they can kill more pigs in a short amount of time and it's a horrifying place. So what are we here to advocate for? Are we here to advocate for a less painful death? Are we here to advocate for animal rights and animal liberation? The fact that they are in pain and suffering is bad, I don't want that to happen to animals but this happens because animals don't have rights basically so the industry will say well we'll look for a better method of slaughter if you don't like this one. They believe that this is the most humane method for slaughtering pigs so the other methods have issues as well but they'll just say well maybe we'll make it less painful, we'll find some different gas but obviously that doesn't solve the issue. Animals are still going to be chopped up and eaten and for them they want to live they won't want to die. I wanted to sort of get involved with less. Oh great, it's absolutely fine if you wanted to grab a sign and you can just show it to the cars as they will pass if you wanted to get involved and when the first truck comes, just grab your phone out and bear witness to the pigs and take some photographs of them. If anyone has noticed recently I had a bit of a shift in my activism actually. I realised something really fundamentally and I felt like it was less effective to be talking about all the cruelty that happened. People can obviously speak about cruelty and I'm not saying not to but I think fundamentally if you're a vegan you believe that even if you're not cruel to an animal you shouldn't exploit them and kill them. I think that's the principle idea is that we shouldn't be violating the rights of animals and because I think what tended to happen is that when I was speaking about like a lot of the suffering and the cruelty people were just in their mind think well we can do it better you know and I think that's where people tend to go and they go well maybe if I buy this label here there's less suffering and that's if that's what you care about then you know that that's what we should strive towards and I think that if we really want to change the conversation for animals we really have to be talking about the reason that they're being caused to human inflicted suffering to begin with is because they don't have fundamental rights because you can never do these horrible cruelties to these animals in these in a systematic way if they had fundamental rights. Talking are you? What are you saying? You're saying your animal rights campaigner. So what would you say to people who would call our approach to extreme? I think that decapitating animals for a sandwich is what's extreme I don't think asking for basic rights for animals is extreme I mean unless they believe that asking for basic rights for humans is extreme if they think one is not extreme and the other is extreme I'd ask them to name the difference the morally significant difference between us and animals because you have to focus on what we share in common which is sentience and if we're concerned with sentience and concerned with us being conscious animals share that property with us so what happens to the animals matters to them as well so otherwise you have a direct contradiction if you expect basic rights for us and not for animals. I think most vegans are rights based because they don't believe that humane slaughter is a thing you know even if you took away the pain and yadda yadda you don't think humane murder is a thing veganism is an animal rights movement if you look back in history you'll see that the founders those who coined the first definition they all had rights in their rhetoric Leslie Cross who helped come up with the definition said this will be similar to the movement that liberated the slaves and that's a rights based movement basically and veganism was coined by Donald Watson in the wake of the Holocaust the mindset was that you can't have true peace without stopping the violence towards animals Donald Watson actually has a story about a free range farm that he grew up on like a real homestead farm and him hearing a pig be slaughtered it stayed with him now that doesn't sound like a utilitarian to me that sounds like a pretty high welfare farm and a pig's been killed most vegans agree that it's wrong to violate animal rights if it doesn't cause them suffering anyway I just think it's this philosophical crowd that sometimes get sort of into that world but I think we have to be careful as vegans and activists not to fuel that fire and say it's all about suffering or it's all about this and yeah Do you think we'd like to achieve the vegan world we all want if we focus on system change above and vision change? I don't think people really understand what a vegan world looks like it means that animals are not being exploited at all the goal of animal rights is a much more attainable goal you need advocacy, you need to change the minds of people you need to get them on board you can't necessarily have systems it would be great if you could just switch the system but in order to have policy change you need to have like from the grassroots support once you get enough people on board and they don't have to be practicing vegans to do this they just have to agree with it in their mind then they work together you can't have a vegan world without system change if people can just buy it from the shops and it's not illegal I don't even think you can have a vegan world with system change unless we have some kind of crazy revolution all across the world at once even in the next 100 years you're still going to get people who violate animal rights look at human rights there's human rights encoded into law we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights people still murder people still violate human rights it's not a shield to stop people from violating animal rights if we change the system people will still be doing what they do just underground it will be illegal that's the point we think of vegan world, vegan world really what we should be thinking of is animal rights that's what we need so that if someone cuts a chicken's head off and eats them they go to prison it's a deterrent and that's what we have for us we have a real strong basis for human rights already it's based off of inherent dignity and they say like the inherent dignity we're all born with it's not based on gender or race, nationality or cognition or anything that we use to discriminate or animals that species we discriminate they're not smart like us but human rights aren't based off of that they're fundamental and they're universal so thinking about animal rights really it's not necessarily about the cruelty that happened that's animal welfare obviously and you can still, I think it's great to talk about it still but just remember the fundamental principle is that we don't want them to have their rights violated and you can do that without causing them any suffering education is massive like I remember learning about Gandhi and Martin Luther King at school and the power of like one person to make a massive change on earth and things like this and learning about racism in school civil rights movement and things like that little kids they're usually anti-speciesist you know they come into the world and they love everyone usually you don't know that a dog is different to a pig you don't think like that it's society gets a hold of your mindset so that's the root of the problem if your mind is strong enough to oppose the social norm once you wake up there's no real going back but what we have is like people half waking up you know we're half waking up we're going yeah cruelty is wrong but is eating animals wrong is killing animals wrong you know like I know cruelty is wrong obviously cruelty is wrong you don't have to advocate that cruelty is wrong most people are against cruelty most people are against factory farms animal oppression is institutional speciesism systemic speciesism it's in education systems it's in like the laws don't protect animals like it's really entwined into the system the animals are here for us like speciesism things like that like they're below us so therefore we can do what we want to them that's the same mindset it's that mindset of the oppressor like there's not much difference between those people are different to us and they don't matter as much and we think that they're rats or they're animals or they're you look at history it's all animal rhetoric to groups of people they're rats or they're dogs or they're vermin and that always precedes some horrible atrocity to humans lowering them down to animals and if animals weren't down like that to begin with you couldn't lower humans to the status of animals because animals would be protected you couldn't do that and because we look at animals like scum we just lower humans down to the status of animal scum and then in a human oppressor's mind it justifies doing these horrible atrocities to them because they've seen humans as animals dehumanize them you know if we kind of humanized animals a little because they're sentient like us they're like us they're animals like us activists change the world especially social change like this it has to come from activists I think that we need eyes out the front of slaughterhouses continuously it motivates activists to talk about advocacy really we can do it we can get animal rights