Rebellion and Queer Sweetness Manifesto


 anarchistnews.org
Feb 12, 2025



From Rebellion and Queer Sweetness

January 7, 2025

INTRO: PURPOSE

Attempts at reenvisioning our future as a place of solidarity, mutual aid, equity and degrowth require questioning existing power structures. Addressing social inequities is at the very heart of criticising authoritian structures and without it, we can never enable egalitarian and equitable relationships that are key to any anarchist vision.

In Zagreb we as anarchists see the need to explictly approach one of these systems of inequity and domination: the patriarchy. As an established system of domination, it continues to contribute to the marginalisation, exploitation and violent repercussions against us who do not obey the strictly defined, submissive roles surrounding the figure of the dominant cis-male. Even in our anarchist collectives and communities, these power strukctures are reproduced and too often go unchallenged and unquestioned. This enables violence and further subjugation/marginalisation/domination and poses a direct obstacle to our visions.

WHO ARE WE?

We are an autonomous, self organized group of queer anarcho feminists that want to create a safe space for adressing the problems of opression and fight against all forms of discrimination based on gender and sexuality.

We are anarchists because we are against any kind of domination and exploitation and we want to create a free society in which such domination and explotiation will be abolished.

Our group was formed as a response to the present state of patriarchal society and tolerance to physical and sexual violence to women and queer persons in our society. This is also visible in our circles and there is a need to raise awareness and condemn this kind of behaviour starting from our spaces and groups and spread our principles in wider society.

We are based in Zagreb but we come from different parts of the world, “countries” and cultures. Also, we have different experiencies and ways to be involved in activism and we want to share different ways to fight against the patriarchal system and talk about methods that could be different depending on our previous experience and background, to get more cultural diverse knowledge about how to act, or what strategies we can use.
​​​​
GOALS/AIMS

Specifically addressing anarcha-queer-feminist topics within and outside of anarchist organisations in Zagreb, including examining existing structures and projects claiming to be anarchist from an anarcha-queer-feminist angle, and so identify places where development of inclusivity is still needed

Building a support network and places to share experiences with patriarchial violence so that these can be properly adressed, called out and places free – as far as possible – from such violence can be created

Educating – through our own organizing, by embodiying the values and world we want to create and through more direct knowledge sharing efforts we aim to encourage a cognitive shift in how we perceive the world and dismantle all forms of domination – the state, gender, hetero- and cis-sexism, marriage and the nuclear family and so on

WHO DO WE WELCOME TO JOIN OUR STRUGGLE?

We support trans and cis women, trans men, genderqueer, two-spirit and non-binary people, intersex people, queer people, people of all races and ethnicities, people on the move, sex workers, undocumented and criminalised people, people with different physical abilities, neurodivergent persons, people of all beliefs (as long as they don’t clash with our values), and many more who are marginalised and oppressed by the current system. Those of you who share our values, listed below, please reach out and let’s turn our fury into a constructive aim to change this doom and gloom world in which we live!

Ultimately we wish for cis-men to fight alongside us, seeing as we all suffer under the patriarchy. However, the same patriarchial domination schemes are bound to be repeated; even in anarchist circles we see how male voices are heard and received more and how they often take the leading role. Confirming this, some of the reactions to the forming of this group reflect the common misunderstanding that excluding the dominant group from marginalised self-organisation is somehow “discrimination” (as if you would invite the bosses to the initial stages of workers unionising). But many of the aforementioned behavioural patterns are best eliminated by simply not allowing cis-men into the group, at least while we are gathering our bearings and establishing a healthy group dynamic.

That said, we do offer help to anyone and everyone that comes in peace and solidarity.

This paragraph, along with the rest of the manifesto, was written at the very beginning of our coming together. Now, a year into our organizing, we have decided to reevaluate again and have determined this decision has expired. While this has been a continued conversation throughout the year, alongside discussing our rejection of identity politics, we are aware we made it consciously, mostly out of pragmatic reasons – it was simply easier than having to engage in transformative processes when the group is still young and on bambi legs. We have collaborated with cis-men in actions and our educational efforts, but have kept the core organizing closed to them. We now feel more confident in our non-hierarchical, caring structure and think we are ready to deal with any machism and patriarchal behaviours that might come our way and are excited to open up the space for participation by cis-men. We do however ask that everybody – but especially cis men – focus on acting without dominating spaces, listening and reflecting their behaviours – so we ask for the discrete presence of cis male comrades who want to learn.

OUR VALUES

– anti-authoritarianism – we consciously strive to call out both formal and informal forms of centralised power

– care – we notice patterns of the patriarchal neoliberal economy – such as competition and aggressive communication and behaviour – being perpetuated in social relations within and outside our groups. Instead, we want active care and camaraderie as the basis of our social relations and communities

– eco-feminism – recognizing that the patriarchal culture and capitalist economy subjugate and exploit women and other marginalized groups much in the same way as they do with nature is critical in connecting (and better understanding) these struggles, making us more aware of repeating patterns of domination and more thorough and tactical in dismantling these systems of opression (which makes us stronger and more aware of problems in our society)

– anti-speciesism – we vouch to respect and care for all living beings, regardless of their proximity to the human condition

– anti-colonialism and anti-racism – bearing in mind our privilege, we are actively trying to unlearn colonial and white supremacist biases and fight cultural domination. we see specific forms of racism and xenophobia occuring in our regional context (anti-roma sentiments, violence against refugees..) which we vouch to help dismantle, and in turn aid the free movement of people

– anti-nationalism and anti-fascism – recognizing the violent history (and present) of the Balkan region and still unreconciled ethnic tensions, we believe that explicitly fighting against nationalist movements is central in building a better community

– anti-capitalism – instead of allowing patriarchial neoliberal capitalism to undermine the entirety of our social relations and watch how commodification of all aspects of life takes place (this includes homonormative consumerism and pink capitalism!!), we are actively working on the basis of mutual aid, solidarity economy, sharing practices and ‘everyone according to their ability, everyone according to their needs’. we can’t have constant economic growth, but we can have more of what really matters.

– intersectionalism – all forms of marginalization and violence – racism, sexism, heteronormativity, amatonormativity, transphobia and transmisogyny, ableism, sizeism, nationalism, classism – work in sync to keep up the opressive structures of domination; we cannot ignore any of these if we want to achieve equity and peace

– anti-assimilationism – we refuse to have our identities and expressions subdued and molded in order to be more palatable and ‘better tolerated’ within the current society and strive to create spaces of plurality where we operate, work, look and feel in divergent ways

– bodily autonomy – we refuse to have our experiences and decisions regarding our bodies goverened and strictly controlled by the state and instead opt to fight to have a bigger agency in regards to reproductive and sexual health, gender affirming care, mental healthcare and more

– anarcha-queer-feminism

HOW DO WE OPERATE?

– prefiguration – we believe the way to create a new world is to take steps to create it and live the life we want to live. we want our actions and way of organising to reflect the future society we would like to live in

– local response – we share our concerns in the groups and circles where we are active to raise awareness about problematic situations and persons and create a safer space for the affected persons, we organize within the local context to address and aid in specific needs of our communities and create bonds with other groups that share our values and work towards the same goals but that may fight on different fronts

– anti-authoritarian, holistic approach to living and organising – we want to work on strengthening our bodily, mental, emotional, interpersonal and other instincts and to engage both practically and theoretically

– a horizontal, non-hierarchical organizing structure operating in a participative way, on a consensus basis – any ideas or concerns you might have are welcome!

Through our growth, we plan to organize different workshops and campaigns; you’ll be more than welcome to use every one of those, or just one – whatever you need.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH?

vrrrane@riseup.net <3

We Have Two Paths


 anarchistnews.org
Feb 15, 2025


From Organise! Magazine

he following is a transcript of the speech given by Marion Koshy of Space City Anarchist Organisation at the Houston Organizing Fair on the 8th of February 2025.

I was at a show a few ago, and a couple of folks were giving speeches. After the first couple speeches, a comrade told me that these speeches were amazing, but they made her feel so hopeless. I think an important part of speeches like these is that it shouldn't be just to agitate and educate the folks that we're trying to get up and act, but to inspire them to organize. So I just want to say that, that every single one of you has the ability to act now towards a better future. The Biden Presidency have been nothing but badly negotiated peace. There are literal armed Nazis with swastika flags marching in the streets, an emboldened Trump administration hell-bent on cutting our rights, the Zionist entity continues to oppress the Palestinian people, and slowly, our planet continues to heat up. So now, we have two paths, Path A, and Path B.

Path A

Path A goes something like this. You wake up without power, covered in sweat. Hurricane whatever knocked out our shitty power grid. You turn on your phone, and with the last bits of power left, you doom scroll through the apocalypse. Watch as every job is automated out, egotistical technocrats push AI into the economy, destroying our creative output, and our already dreadful work turns into overt slavery. Christian fundamentalist cults conspire together to create a theocracy, their coffers flooded by ghoulish oil barons that want to erase any aspect of queerness in our society. Nazi march in our street once again, attacking political dissidents, and marginalized communities in their path. Government services fail, privatized by the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Meanwhile, we gamble our futures away in the political system, and we continue to bark without teeth. We work endlessly as landlords and bosses extract our very lifeblood and turn it into profit. And maybe in the next election the bad guy is finally voted out, people go back to brunch. But climate change, fascism, and poverty only worsen, and with a gasp, we go silently into oblivion.

I know I said that I'd try to not make people hopeless, but bear with me here. There is also Path B.

Path B.

You wake up, and take a breath. The world is burning outside your window, but you know that the only way out is through. You and your comrades join together somewhere, whether its a park, someone's apartment, a library, a resource centre. Different communities, different people from all walks of life who have been marginalized one way or another meet together, determined to make things better however they can. In struggle, they find a passionate way of living that allows them to take back their lives. A diverse range of talents, skill sets and wills join together to build a movement. Everything for everyone, everything a tool, everything a weapon. Workers in essential utilities, tired of incompetent administrators and bosses, take over their workplace and start distributing their labour for free. Autonomous supply lines break strangleholds as people realize hallowed words: "ALL HELD IN COMMON". We learn skills lost to the ages, and through repeated skill shares, skirmishes, and bookclubs, people find courage to break through.

We live in a time of upheaval. It is no secret that the system that we live under is not sustainable. A system in which every 10 years, there's an economic crisis is not a system that we can live under. We wake up, do the same routine over and over again, while out of touch politicians gamble with peoples lives. Pay check to pay check, month to month, our collective stress is what hangs over our heads. Our labour is what keeps this world alive, it is what makes this world go around, but in the end, we don't feel apart of it. We're packed into suburbs, dreary offices, with jobs that ensure that there is no free time for what we want.

We want a more dignified future. A future where we can determine our own destiny. All you have to do is think, "If I had the ability to do so. what would I be doing?". You are not alone. Through our collective alienation, our suffering, our loneliness, is where lies our solidarity with each other. You may think that you are powerless, but I promise you: you all have the pieces to build something together, a life in common, a life where you can determine your own future. The age old question of "Shall we only hope for heaven when we're dead?" is only answered with the realization that the Only Way Out Is Through.

To begin, we must find each other. We are born into a world of demoralization, isolation, defeat, but we're capable of living differently. Take stock of what you have, who your friends are, what your skills are, your capacities, your connections. You have the ingredients to build a life in common.

We do not live in isolated struggles or context, we must participate in social struggles around us. You'll find that other like minded people, who are tired of how this world works are also fighting. We have the ability to directly act against our oppression. We can engage in blockades, fight against fascism and the state, organize a food or clothing drive, build a community garden. We can have a little audacity to do change in our communities. We must have audacity to demand a better world for ourselves.

In order to build, we must cast away oppressions such as class, gender, race, nations, capitalism and other authoritarian implements that seek to destroy our autonomy. We must develop structures to help build a better world, building on small term gains that over time, build into a larger movement for liberation.

It is important, now especially, to start organizing. We are living in the aftermath of an election that has put an administration that is bent on destroying the futures of black, brown, trans and disabled people. It is clear that elections don't work in keeping our communities safe from creeping fascism. Politicians don't have the answers to what is impacting our daily lives. The only solution to them is to show up to elections and put your vote in the ballot box. Elections don't stop hate crimes, homeless people freezing to death, climate disaster, or people who have been abandoned by the system.

It is intimidating to face oppression or injustice, but you are not alone. No politician, no saviour is coming to stop suffering, it is up to us, regular people, to organize and to save ourselves.

You can get involved, even if you think you don't have the skills. Showing up is already half the battle completed. I started out taking notes at meetings and handing out water to renters on strike.

So if you want to do something, but don't know where to start, feel free to approach the SCAO table, and talk to us about organizing. We have a Thursday distro that feeds our un-housed neighbours, we operate a free store that gives out goods for free, and we do direct action against local Nazis.■

Marion Koshy
Marion Koshy (they/them) is an anarchist and anti-fascist organiser based out of Houston, Texas. In their spare time, they raise chickens, garden, and participate in the furry fandom.

SPECIESISM

A polar bear was spotted on the shores of Iceland for the first time in 8 years. It was shot dead by police.

While the bears are a protected species in Iceland and it's forbidden to kill one at sea, they can be killed if they pose a threat to humans or livestock.




September 23, 2024 /

A rare polar bear that was spotted outside a cottage in a remote village in Iceland was shot by police after being considered a threat, authorities said Friday.

The bear was killed Thursday afternoon in the northwest of Iceland after police consulted the Environment Agency, which declined to have the animal relocated, Westfjords Police Chief Helgi Jensson told The Associated Press.

"It's not something we like to do," Jensson said. "In this case, as you can see in the picture, the bear was very close to a summer house. There was an old woman in there."

The owner, who was alone, was frightened and locked herself upstairs as the bear rummaged through her garbage, Jensson said. She contacted her daughter in Reykjavik, the nation's capital, by satellite link, and called for help.

"She stayed there," Jensson said, adding that other summer residents in the area had gone home. "She knew the danger."

This handout photo shows a polar bear that was shot by the police after being considered a threat to people nearby, authorities said, in Westfjords, Iceland, Thursday Sept. 19, 2024. INGVAR JAKOBSSON / AP

Polar bears are not native to Iceland but occasionally come ashore after traveling on ice floes from Greenland, according to Anna Sveinsdóttir, director of scientific collections at the Icelandic Institute of Natural History. Many icebergs have been spotted off the north coast in the last few weeks.

Although attacks by polar bears on humans are extremely rare, a study in Wildlife Society Bulletin in 2017 said the loss of sea ice from global warming has led more hungry bears to land, putting them in a greater chance of conflicts with humans and leading to a greater risk to both.

In 2021, scientists in Norway found polar bears were inbreeding as the species fights to survive. A study found that on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, polar bear populations have seen a 10% loss in their genetic diversity from 1995 to 2016.

A 2020 study found that the melting sea ice is starving polar bears and that within the century, polar bears could be extinct. Declining genetic diversity increases the risk of extinction.

Of 73 documented attacks by polar bears from 1870 to 2014 in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and United States - which killed 20 people and injured 63 - 15 occurred in the final five years of that period.

More recently, a pair of polar bears attacked and killed a worker last month at a remote government radar site in the Canadian Arctic. In 2023, a polar bear emerged from a snow squall and killed a woman and her young son in in Wales, Alaska, just below the Arctic Circle.

The bear shot on Thursday was the first one seen in the country since 2016. Sightings are relatively rare with only 600 recorded in Iceland since the ninth century.

While the bears are a protected species in Iceland and it's forbidden to kill one at sea, they can be killed if they pose a threat to humans or livestock.

After two bears arrived in 2008, a debate over killing the threatened species led the environment minister to appoint a task force to study the issue, the institute said. The task force concluded that killing vagrant bears was the most appropriate response.

The group said the nonnative species posed a threat to people and animals, and the cost of returning them to Greenland, about 300 kilometers (180 miles) away, was exorbitant. It also found there was a healthy bear population in east Greenland where any bear was likely to have come from.

The young bear, which weighed between 150 and 200 kilograms (300 to 400 pounds), will be taken to the institute to study. Scientists took samples from the bear Friday.

They will be checking for parasites and infections and evaluating its physical condition, such as the health of its organs and percentage of body fat, Sveinsdóttir said. The pelt and skull may be preserved for the institute's collection.

A Coast Guard helicopter surveyed the area where the bear was found to look for others but didn't find any, police said.

After the shot bear was taken away, the woman who reported it decided to stay longer in the village, Jensson said.

Animal Activists are “Poor in Spirit”

by Jon Hochschartner

 September 10, 2024
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Photo by Suzanne Tucker

In the first beatitude, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The analogous blessing from the Sermon on the Plain, in the Gospel of Luke, is more straightforward. Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” The text from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew is a little ambiguous.

Commentators frequently interpret ‘poor in spirit’ to mean those who have a humble attitude toward God. It implies an openness to the divine will and presence. Only by working to empty ourselves of selfish desires do we leave room for God to fill the space. Similarly, this emptying allows us to recognize the divine presence in others.When we’re poor in spirit, we can sense God telling us it’s wrong to kill animals and cause them to suffer. When we’re poor in spirit, we can see the divine presence in all, including other creatures, no matter how different they look on the outside. Finally, when we’re poor in spirit, God gives us the energy to pursue animal liberation.

Syl Ko is a writer known for highlighting the ways in which race, species and gender are interconnected. Along with her sibling, she wrote the book Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Ko studied philosophy at San Francisco State University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Like many of the activists and scholars I highlight here, Ko didn’t employ spiritual language to describe her adoption of an animal-rights perspective, but it certainly could be described that way, with a sufficiently perennialist and panentheistic theology. Ko’s anti-speciesist insight was possible because of her openness to the divine will.

Ko was perhaps six or seven when she realized chicken bones were bones formerly inside animals’ bodies. “I remember the whole night I was just really hard on myself that I never made the connection,” Ko said in an interview with McGill Daily. “Then I started to hide the meat from our meals in my shoes, and I would go flush it down the toilet.“

Steven Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies and the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. His work frequently provides justification for the Animal Liberation Front and seeks to link the nonhuman movement with the broader left. He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Best explicitly described his conversion to animal-rights consciousness in religious terms. “I experienced something sacred within the bowels of the profane,” he wrote on his blog. “I was in Chicago, driving about 2 am, half-drunk and goddamn hungry. I pulled into a White Castle fast food restaurant and ordered a double cheeseburger.”

Best was usually content with a single cheeseburger. There was something about the two cheese slices and two meat patties that seemed so excessive, gross, and steeped in violence that he felt nauseated. For the first time in his life, Best made the connection between the food in his hands and the body of a living animal.

“I spit the vile flesh out of my mouth in utter revulsion,” he said. “I stumbled around in a dietary no-man’s-land for two months, not knowing what to eat, not wanting this consciousness but unable to shake it.” Thankfully, Best met some vegetarians who reassured him and steered the future animal-rights scholar in the right direction.

Ingrid Newkirk is the cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She is the most influential nonhuman activist of her generation. Besides running PETA, she is the author of a number of books, including Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries About Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion.

As many in the nonhuman movement are, Newkirk is an atheist. However, when we enlarge our concept of the God to include all goodness, we can argue the value she saw in our fellow creatures was the divine presence. Newkirk began to accept the implications of this value and it led to a profound shift in her thinking.

“As an animal cruelty officer, I went to a farm in Maryland, and they had abandoned all the animals,” Newkirk told WWTW. “All the animals were dead except one pig. I gave him water and put him in the truck to go to the vet. And on the way home, I thought, I wonder what I will have to eat for dinner tonight.”

Newkirk realized she had frozen pork chops at home. Suddenly, she connected the dots, thinking about the pig who she was bringing to the veterinarian. The contradiction of prosecuting people for animal cruelty while she continued to eat meat was too much for Newkirk to bear. She became a vegetarian.

Faraz Harsini is a scientist at the Good Food Institute, where he researches cultivated meat. Additionally, he is the founder of Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, which seeks to bring nonhuman advocacy to different academic settings. Farsini has collaborated with groups like PETA, Humane Society of the United States and others.

Like a great number of those I discuss here, he became vegetarian first and then vegan. Farsini made the initial change after someone accused him of hypocrisy. Instead of staying defensive or cynical, Harsini recognized and responded to the call of God, or, to put it in secular terms, the call of conscience.

For Harsini, the initial change resulted from a disagreement, in which he opposed buying a fish as part of Persian New Year celebrations. “It’s a tradition to keep live goldfish in water tanks, symbolizing life and freedom,” he said in an interview with Farm Animal Rights Movement. “Ironically, many fish suffer and die during this process.”

Harsini’s friend told him it made no sense to be advocating for this fish while he was eating other fish. The comment initially upset Harsini, but it got the scientist thinking and eventually led him to an anti-speciesist perspective. For many, who aren’t so poor in spirit, this wouldn’t have been possible.

Leah Garcés is the president of Mercy for Animals. Previously, she oversaw campaigns in 14 countries at the World Society for the Protection of Animals and launched Compassion in World Farming in the United States. She’s written a couple books, including Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry.

She became vegetarian, as people frequently do, when she became aware of the inconsistency in her feelings toward animals and her diet. When we love our fellow creatures, as Garcés does, we love God, who is present in all. This is one of my favorite aspects of a panentheism. Fighting nonhuman exploitation becomes a religious duty.

“I grew up in the swamps of Florida, watching wild ducks raise their young in my mom’s flower beds,” Garcés recounted to Planetary Press. “I grew up with the conviction that these ducks, and all animals, have rich inner lives and could experience joy, love, and families, just like us.”

Garcés was deeply upset when she saw a documentary about factory farming as a teenager. Despite her affection for animals, Garcés realized she was complicit in their abuse. Rather than suppressing these negative feelings, Garcés chose to dedicate her life to protecting God’s creatures.

Ronnie Lee is the founder of the Animal Liberation Front, who, in recent years, has changed his focus to vegan education and electoral work. The Green Party of England and Wales has been Lee’s vehicle in politics. He hosts an online news show, called Slash the Banner, with his wife, Louise Ryan.

Having spent many hours interviewing Lee, I know he’d never describe his transition to vegetarianism as spirituality inspired. However, it can be interpreted that way with a broad definition of God. The divine isn’t an old man in the sky. That’s a metaphor which can serve a practical purpose, but is also limiting.

Lee’s sister was dating a vegetarian, who opposed killing animals. This simple rationale was a profound challenge to Lee. As he said in one of our conversations: “I spent about three nights staying awake thinking about this, and it playing on my mind, and me trying to find some excuse to carry on eating meat.” Ultimately, he listened to God.

Corey Lee Wrenn is the author of a number of books about animal rights. These include Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony. She is also the founder of Vegan Feminist Network and a co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists.

As a teenager, Wrenn was poor in spirit, so when she was confronted with the violence of our food system, she became a vegetarian. “I was watching a cooking program with my mom,” Wrenn said on the Sentientism podcast. “The guy went to a butcher shop in the program. There were pigs heads hanging from chains. That was the moment.”

The imagery made a connection for her in a visceral way. The meat she ate came from a once living animal. Surely Wrenn knew this before, but the cooking program made it more difficult to avoid. Wrenn announced she wouldn’t consume flesh again. Her mother was skeptical, but Wrenn stuck to the pledge.

Paul Shapiro is the the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. He is CEO of Better Meat Co. and host of the Business for Good podcast. Previously, he founded Compassion Over Killing, now Animal Outlook, and served as a vice president at HSUS.

At an early age, Shapiro recognized what we might term a divine spark in our fellow creatures. “I basically figured that we don’t have to eat animals,” Shapiro said on the Cultivated Meat and Future Food podcast. “And so if I had my choice between committing violence against them or not, I would really rather just live and let live.”

Priya Sawhney is a co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere. As part of her activism, she has disrupted events featuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sawhney has been arrested a number of times and faced a variety of felony charges. She seems indomitable.

In an interview on the YouTube channel RenaissanceMarieAustin, Sawhney explained she had long been sympathetic to the suffering of animals. It upset her to see others treat God’s creatures with such callousness and disrespect. The reality of industrial agriculture came as a great shock.

“I grew up India where I saw a lot of stray dogs,” Sawhney said. “I really didn’t like it when I saw people bullying them, throwing rocks at them, you know, just treating them like they’re not living beings. To me, that was the worst thing that was happening. Then I started learning, ‘Oh wow, there’s factory farming.’”

Andrew Linzey is an Anglican priest and theologian. He is the author of many books making a Christian case for nonhuman rights. These include Animal Theology. Linzey is the founder and director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the editor of the Journal for Animal Ethics.

While I have to translate the motivations of most of the activists and scholars I write about here into spiritual language, he is very clear about the religious motivations of his concern for nonhumans. From Linzey’s description, it sounded as if his Christian identity came first.

“When I was in my teens I had a series of intensely religious experiences,” he told Satya magazine. “They deepened my sense of God as the creator of all things. And they also deepened my sensitivity towards creation itself so that concern for God’s creatures and animal rights followed from that.”

Carol J. Adams has written a long list of titles, most famously The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. It has been translated into German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish, Spanish, and French. In the 1970s, she helped launched a hotline for battered women in upstate New York.

Adams traced her vegetarianism to the killing of a horse, one she adored, after her first year at Yale Divinity School. Because Adams was poor in spirit, she was able to sense God telling us it’s wrong to eat animals. Most people dismiss these troubling intuitions. It’s to Adams’ credit she didn’t.

“I returned home,” she recounted to Nervy Girl. “As I was unpacking I heard a furious knocking at the door. Our neighbor greeted me as I opened the door. He exclaimed, ‘Someone has just shot your pony!’ I ran, with my neighbor, up to the back pasture behind our barn, and found the dead body of the pony I had loved.”

That evening, Adams was eating a hamburger, when she stopped mid-bite. The incongruity was too much. She was mourning one animal, while eating another. Adams couldn’t summon a defense of her ethical favoritism and so she became a vegetarian. Like Saint Paul in Damascus, the scales were falling from her eyes.

Christopher ‘Soul’ Eubanks is the founder of APEX Advocacy, which seeks to increase the numbers of people of color who participate in animal activism. He has volunteered with a variety of groups, including the Humane League, Anonymous the Voiceless, PETA, the Animal Save Movement, Mercy for Animals and others.

Eubank’s embrace of an anti-speciesist consciousness seemed to be the result of following the divine will wherever it led him, reflecting a humble attitude toward God. We should all aspire to this. Of course, that doesn’t mean we abandon reason and judgement, which help guide our inchoate sentiment.

“When I saw animals suffering, I thought about all the injustices that I saw happening to Black and brown people,” Eubanks told the Humane League. “I didn’t feel it was morally consistent for me to advocate against one form of oppression while contributing to another form of oppression.”

Sue Coe is a political artist and illustrator whose work frequently includes animal-liberation themes. Her pieces have been collected in a series of books, such as Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation. She received the Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award from the Southern Graphics Council International.

Growing up in England in the aftermath of World War II, near bombed-out ruins and a slaughterhouse, Coe came to see the divine — whatever she might have called the concept — in all, including our fellow creatures. That insight has informed her work throughout what is now a long, accomplished career.

“Art always has to go beyond human health, human drama, and human issues,” Coe said in an interview with Artforum. “As a child, I was forced to see the correlation between war, violence, and fascism, and animal cruelty and abuse. Once I figured that connection out, so early on, I realized that the Other is always at risk.”

Wayne Hsiung is the co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere. Since then, he’s launched a nonprofit called The Simple Heart Initiative, which seeks to expand the movement for open rescue. Hsiung also maintains a popular animal-rights blog and podcast, which share The Simple Heart name.

The activist told the YouTube channel VeganLinked he became vegan after his childhood dog died. This was prompted by feelings of guilt about the ways he and his family had not heeded the call of conscience or what might be called the will of God in their treatment of the animal.

“She lived in the laundry room for the first couple years of her life,” Hsiung said. “We didn’t have any experience raising animals, so my parents thought it was appropriate to hit a dog. That’s the way we disciplined her. It was not cool. We stopped eventually when we figured out this is a member of our family. This is not some sort of toy.”

More than that, though, Hsiung felt guilty about not visiting the dog when she was sick. He was studying for graduate school and ultimately didn’t see the animal before she passed. Hsiung resolved to do something important in her honor, and for him that was finally going vegan, after being vegetarian for some time.

Karen Davis was the founder of United Poultry Concerns, a group which seeks to address the treatment of domestic fowl. As part of her work, she ran a chicken sanctuary in Virginia. Davis was also the author of several books, including The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tail: A Case for Comparing Atrocities.

“I grew up in a meat-eating household in Pennsylvania,” she told the Eugene Veg Education Network. “Although I have always loved animals and hated animal cruelty, I ate animal products so unthinkingly that, while arguing at the dinner table with my father about hunting, it would be over a plate of dead animals.”

Ultimately, her inspiration for giving up meat came from a religious source. Davis read a famous essay by Leo Tolstoy called The First Step, in which the Christian pacifist recounted his visits to Moscow slaughterhouses and argued for vegetarianism. The article was originally a preface to someone else’s book.

Josh Harper was a member of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, a global pressure campaign which sought to close a notorious vivisection firm. Like some of those I mention here, he served time in prison for his activism. Among other things, Harper is now a volunteer archivist of movement history.

In various outlets, he’s mentioned the influence of hardcore music in his adoption of veganism. For many campaigners of his generation, this politicized scene was deeply formative. Fundamentally, however, his decision came down to a desire not to harm other creatures, who we could say bear the imprint of God.

“I went vegan because I can’t stand the idea that someone would needlessly suffer and be confined so that I can eat or dress myself,” Harper told Vegan Skate Blog. “Its very simply the right thing to do.” I believe most people know, deep down, it’s the right thing to do, but they’re not poor enough in spirit to follow the intuition.

lauren Ornelas is founder of the Food Empowerment Project, a food justice non-profit that promotes veganism. As a teenager, she started the first high school nonhuman liberation group in Texas. In a similar, trailblazing fashion, Ornelas was the first woman of color inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame.

Ornelas’ dietary journey wasn’t linear. However, in recognizing the moral worth of other creatures, she recognized their shared divine origin. “I went vegetarian as I didn’t want to contribute to the suffering of non-human animals or be responsible for separating them,” Ornelas explained to Authority Magazine.

Alex Hershaft is a Holocaust survivor and the co-founder of Farm Animal Rights Movement. He organized national non-human liberation conferences, World Day for Farmed Animals and other initiatives. Hershaft served on the boards of a number of organizations, including Jewish Veg and the American Humanist Association.

Perhaps he would use different language to describe the experience, but I believe, from a religious perspective, Hershaft came to see God was present in other beings, like God was present in humans. This realization, which came after a visit to a slaughterhouse in the 1970s, completely reordered his life.

“I suddenly came across piles of hearts, lungs, heads, hooves, and discarded body parts,” he said in a FARM interview. “Very quickly, I made the association with the piles of body parts I saw in Auschwitz, the use of cattle cars to transport people to the gas chambers, [and] the crowding in wood containers of the victims.”

Angela Davis is primarily recognized as a socialist, feminist and anti-racist, but she’s also made clear her leftist sympathies cross the species barrier. Davis, of course, is a world-famous intellectual, best known for her autobiography or maybe the later title Women, Race and Class. She was a longtime member of Communist Party USA.

“Most people don’t think about the fact that they’re eating animals,” Davis said in an interview with Grace Lee Boggs, explaining her veganism. “When they’re eating a steak or eating chicken, most people don’t think about the tremendous suffering that those animals endure simply to become food products to be consumed by human beings.”

The vocabulary of Marxism is very dissimilar to the vocabulary of religion. Still, using an expansive understanding of the divine, I think we can say, in following her ideals through the unfamiliar territory of anti-speciesism, Davis is following the path God has laid before her. She’s remarkably poor in spirit.

Tom Regan was a philosopher specializing in nonhuman ethics. His most influential book was The Case for Animal Rights, which was inspired by Immanuel Kant. Regan was also a cofounder of the Culture and Animals Foundation, a nonprofit that continues to support artistic and intellectual work which benefits other creatures.

He had accepted the merits of vegetarianism on an abstract level, but it wasn’t until the death of a beloved dog, Gleco, that Regan and his wife changed their personal habits. The couple seemed to generalize the inherent value or divine spark they recognized in their companion to creatures humanity typically exploits.

“I often say that reason can lead the will to water but only emotion can make it drink,” he explained in a statement quoted by the Vegetarian Resource Group. “We saw the animals we ate in the same way that we saw Gleco. Well, when the mind and heart are on the same page, that sealed the deal for us.”

Jane Velez-Mitchell is a former network television anchor who left the mainstream media and founded UnchainedTV, a non-profit which produces videos dedicated to animal liberatation and veganism. Among other honors, she has received a Compassionate Leadership Award from Mercy for Animals.

Velez-Mitchell was a vegetarian when she interviewed Howard Lyman, a fourth generation cattle rancher turned animal advocate, who compared milk to liquid meat. Velez-Mitchell was newly sober and wanted to put her deepest principles — or, to use the spiritual language, the will of God — into practice. So she became vegan.

“I wrote a book about what I call my three miracles: getting sober, coming out as gay, and going vegan,” Velez-Mitchell told VegNews. “When you get sober, you get clarity. I realized I couldn’t lie to myself about my sexual orientation. And then I started realizing that my behavior wasn’t in alignment with my values. I began thinking about factory farming.”

Marc Bekoff is a biologist, ethologist and behavioral ecologist. He is the author of a long list of titles, including The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow and Empathy — and Why They Matter. Bekoff is a cofounder of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“My vegan journey probably started when I was about two or three years old,” he said to Vegan FTA, recounting stories his mother told him. “She said that I could feel the joy, pain, anxiety, or stress of an animal when I was very young.” Empathy is a spiritual endeavor, as it involves one being recognizing the shared divinity in another.

Nicoal Sheen is a former spokeswoman for the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office. She is now a certified yoga instructor and the author of a number of texts, including a zine of vegan recipes, called Do No Harm, Eat No Crap. Sheen became vegetarian in high school after watching the PETA short Meet Your Meat.

“I had always considered myself an ‘animal lover,’ yet I was oblivious to how I actively contributed to the pain and suffering of other animals,” she said in an interview with Meatless Movement. The future spokeswoman was able to process this new information in a productive way because she was poor in spirit.

Christopher Sebastian is a journalist and lecturer on nonhuman rights. He writes about food, politics, media, pop culture, and animals. Sebastian teaches in the School of Journalism, Media, and Visual Arts at Anglo-American University in Prague. He became vegan after reading the book Skinny Bitch.

Sebastian was riveted as the bestseller pivoted away from a discussion of diet into a conversation about the exploitation of God’s creatures. “That was so much more emotionally arresting, and, of course, unexpected for me, that it was just an immediate shift as soon as I put the book down,” he said to Vegan FTA.

Jo-Anne McCarthur is a photojournalist and animal-liberation activist. She was the subject of a documentary, called The Ghosts in Our Machine. Her photographs documenting the treatment of nonhumans have been collected in a number of books, including We Animals. McCarthur runs a media agency that shares the same name.

She became vegan while interning at Farm Sanctuary. “I found myself in a pasture brushing my new friend Arbuckle,” McCarthur wrote in a Medium post, reminiscing about an elderly steer. “The only non-vegan thing I had with me at the sanctuary was a pair of boots. Leather boots. And I was wearing them that day.”

The photographer realized she didn’t want to wear clothes made of creatures like Arbuckle. McCarthur decided to abstain from animal products going forward. She recounted feeling at peace, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally and ethically. One might add spiritually, which is roughly synonymous with those terms.

Bruce Friedrich is co-founder of the Good Food Institute, which is leading the effort to accelerate the development of cultivated meat. Previously, he worked for PETA and Farm Sanctuary. Outside of the animal movement, Friedrich spent a few months in prison for damaging a fighter jet as part of an anti-war action.

He was another whose anti-speciesism was inspired by a religious source. Friedrich was first vegan for human-rights and environmental reasons, then he read one of Linzey’s books, specifically Christianity and the Rights of Animals. Friedrich was running a Catholic Worker hospitality house at the time.

“It changed my life,” he wrote in National Catholic Reporter, recalling the title’s impact. “As a result of my prayer over Linzey’s work and conversations with my spiritual director at St. Aloysius Catholic church, my focus turned to animal protection…  By any measure, what happens to farmed animals today is anti-Christian.”

Nirva Patel is the executive director of the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. She was a producer of the documentary Game Changers, about vegan athletes, and serves on the board of Farm Sanctuary. Patel was also influenced by her faith. In her case, that’s Jainism.

“Growing up in a Jain community, I always had that sense for suffering and for animals,” she told Young Jains of America. “I did consume dairy, ghee, milk, and cheese… It’s a common oversight to recognize the violence limited to the meat industry, but there is an egregious amount of cruelty just in the dairy industry.”

Peter Singer is the most influential anti-speciesist philosopher alive. He’s the author of a number books on a range of subjects, but the most important, for our purposes, is Animal Liberation. It’s a title that is often credited with rejuvenating the nonhuman-rights movement and inspiring multiple generations of activists.

Singer began to take vegetarianism seriously after a discussion with Richard Keshen, a fellow graduate student at Oxford, who abstained from meat for moral reasons. “Within a week or two, I said to my wife, who was here with me, ‘I think we have to change our diet,’” Singer recounted in an interview with Sung Hee Kim.

Of course, many people are convinced of the merits of vegetarianism, but that doesn’t lead them to actually change their habits. Singer did, because he was poor in spirit. The rest, as they say, is history. Despite the limitations of his utilitarian view, the philosopher helped millions consider animals in a more favorable light.

Genesis Butler is an animal-rights activist and one of the youngest people to ever give a TEDx talk. She has worked with Farm Sanctuary, HSUS, Mercy for Animals and other organizations to spread her compassionate message. She’s currently an ambassador for Earth Day’s Foodprints for the Future.

Butler became vegan at an early age. “I started to ask a lot of questions, like where my food was coming from, and my mom finally told me how we had to eat animals and kill them for my food,” she said on the All About Change podcast. “That really devastated me, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to eat this again,’ so then I went vegan.”

Young kids, who aren’t burdened by decades of speciesist socialization, often have an easier time seeing the divine presence in animals. I imagine this wasn’t exactly what Jesus had in mind when he said we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. Still, I don’t think it could be too far off.

Kim Stallwood has held a variety of positions in the professional animal movement. For instance, he’s a former national director of PETA and executive editor of Animals’ Agenda. Stallwood wrote a memoir, called Growl: Life Lessons, Hard Truths, and Bold Strategies from an Animal Advocate.

He gave up meat after getting in an argument with a vegetarian friend about his summer job at a slaughterhouse. “Eventually, I realised that what I had been responsible for was wrong,” Stallwood recalled to Vegan FTA. Inspired by a friend, he listened to his quiet, innermost voice — what we might call the voice of God.

Melanie Joy is a social psychologist and author. She’s written a number of books, including Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. Joy is also the founder of the nonprofit group Beyond Carnism. She is a recipient of the Ahimsa Award, the Peter Singer Prize and the Empty Cages Prize.

Joy initially became vegetarian for health-related reasons. She ate a burger contaminated with campylobacter that made her so sick she couldn’t imagine consuming flesh again. Then she started learning about the suffering of our fellow creatures on farms and the other costs of animal agriculture.

“But what shocked me in some ways even more than what I was learning was that nobody I talked to was willing to hear what I had to say,” Joy told Vox. “I mean, the response was almost always something like, ‘Don’t tell me that, you’ll ruin my meal.’” This reaction fascinated her and became a focus of her research.

There’s a psychological explanation for it, but, as I’ve tried to show here, I believe there is a spiritual answer as well. Those who avoid such distressing information are not yet poor enough in spirit, the quality Jesus praised in the first Beatitude. We should all cultivate an openness to God’s will and the divine spark in animals.

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Jon Hochschartner is the author of a number of books about animal-rights history, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter, Ingrid Newkirk, and Puppy Killer, Leave Town. He blogs at SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com.