Animal Activists are “Poor in Spirit”
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.
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.”
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