Overcoming Ethical Invisibility: A Praxis
As Dr. Melanie Joy argues in her landmark book, "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows," carnism, alongside all the needless suffering, violence, death, harm, and environmental devastation it entails, thrives in darkness; it is only by overcoming the invisibility of the system, by exposing the truth behind meat, eggs, and dairy, that we can question, destabilize, and ultimately overcome this irrational, violent ideology. Project Animal Freedom is dedicated to eroding the barriers our society has erected to "invisibilize" the animals who are victimized by the billions in modern factory farms and slaughterhouses, a commitment we enact every single day as we strive to promote this “crazy, vegan life.”
By regularly hosting advocacy events, distributing thousands of leaflets, and redoubling our investment into laptop pay-per-views and virtual reality screenings, we strive always to make the invisible visible, to raise awareness about the profound, unnecessary suffering entailed by modern animal agriculture. And it is by exposing the violence that we address the root cause: ignorance. Ignorance provides the sickly grace by which we continue to enjoy animal products despite their suffering-laden history. Ignorance provides the nearly impenetrable armor by which we shield ourselves from the despicable cruelty of our actions. And ignorance provides the key mechanism by which we numb our feelings, distort our thoughts, and betray our core values of justice, love, respect, compassion, mercy, kindness, and nonviolence toward all, nonhumans included. Only by transforming a marginal awareness into a dire urgency can we rouse our fellow brothers and sisters from their millennia-long carnistic slumber.
More than just ignorance, we strive to overcome the moral blindness maintained by our speciesist prejudices. For millennia, humankind has aggrandized itself before the rest of animalkind, imagining that our supposedly interminable superiority justifies the needless abuse, torture, and slaughter of innocent nonhuman animals who just wanted to live. Project Animal Freedom challenges this millennia-long history of prejudice, arguing that we should instead respect, genuinely respect, our nonhuman animal compatriots with whom we share this planet and our brief, infinitely precious lives. We advance a staunch abolitionist message—that all animals deserve to live safe, happy, and free from needless harm, exploitation, and oppression, whether cat, dog, cow, chicken, pig, human, or rat. Yet we also embrace the flexibility to encourage everyone everywhere to transition toward a healthy, plant-based lifestyle in pursuit of a vegan utopia. In advancing the cause of animal justice while overcoming its greatest impediments, we strive to not only correct millennia of mistreatment, but also transform the underlying ideologies that permit, justify, and even glorify animal cruelty.
Because of the profound impact of modern animal agriculture on our ailing environment, we also promote environmental justice as a cornerstone of our activism. As the United Nations concludes in their seminal 2008 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” modern animal agriculture “emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” concluding that the environmental impact of the livestock industry should be addressed with urgency. This same report concludes that, even by the most conservative estimates, the livestock sector produces more greenhouse gas emissions than every car, truck, plane, train, and every mode of transportation on Earth combined. Studies consistently find that vegetarian and vegan diets reduce diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70%, in addition to consuming only a fraction of the land, water, and energy. Recognizing the profound impacts of modern animal agriculture on our environment, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recently published an even more dire report, concluding that if we hope to reliably feed 9.3 billion people by 2050, 95% of all food calories should come from plants; translated into meaningful, everyday terms, if we were to eat 21 meals a week, 20 of them should be vegan. By consistently emphasizing the environmental devastation inherent to modern animal agriculture, we not only save thousands of lives every year from untold misery, but we also address one of the most profound, yet overlooked causes of environmental devastation: our predilection for animal products.
Through our exceptional activism as the leading voice for animal rights in our community, we strive to overcome not only ignorance and speciesism, but also the apathy that condemns many a compassionate person to inaction in the face of evil. We strive to relentlessly grow our movement by hosting ample community-building events, inspiring as many St. Louisans to embrace veganism as possible, and mobilizing hundreds of vegans at our dozens of outreach events every year. Armed with our new laptops, VR headsets, and other equipment, we have the potential to rouse more people to action than ever before, overcoming the apathy that, in the wake of an increasingly acute awareness of animal suffering and planetary destruction, can propel thousands of people to action, in turn building the vegan world we all strive so desperately to realize. Through your support for all the requested items, we can not only propel our organization to the next level, but also do exponentially more for the animals, our planet, and human wellbeing, transforming St. Louis into one of our nation’s first-ever Compassionate Cities, Project Animal Freedom's personal answer to the rallying cry for a more just, compassionate, environmentally sustainable world.
