11 minute read
'VEGAN F.T.A' by Jackie Norman
I was told recently by an animal rights advocate of rather mature years that ‘You can’t call yourself an activist unless you’ve been arrested’. Once upon a time I would have agreed with that.
The first encounter with animal rights activism I remember was as a youngster growing up in the UK. My dad was out for his usual Sunday afternoon walk in the forest when he was knocked to the ground and beaten by a woman with a stick. It turned out she mistakenly thought my dad was part of the hunt she and a group had turned up to protest against. Luckily the only part of Dad which was injured was his pride, but it made the papers and from then on, I thought all activists were like that – angry, violent and ‘extreme’, and to a kid like me, a bit scary. It never occurred to me that those people had shown up because they cared, because they didn’t want innocent animals to be pursued, hurt and killed by a bunch of entitled humans purely for ‘sport’, and they were willing to do anything to stop it. Four decades on however, I know just how it feels to care that much. I also have a very different view of what – and who - an activist is.
We often hear people refer to their transition to veganism as a journey, and mine has most definitely been that. I went vegetarian at the age of 13 in the eighties, after being given a brochure at school. I can still picture it now, it said ‘SCREAM’ in big letters. My mum just about had heart failure; for one thing I was a fussy eater who didn’t like vegetables and I’d been intolerant to dairy since birth! But somehow I survived and went through my school years doing projects and presentations on various forms of animal exploitation, from seal clubbing to the Draize test. It was important to me, I couldn’t believe the cruelty and I really wanted people to know what went on behind closed doors so they could boycott it too. I had no idea what I was doing back then was a form of activism. I just wanted people to stop hurting animals.
In 1992 I hadn’t long finished my A-levels when my life took a very different turn. After a whirlwind fling with a Kiwi barman, I ran off to the other side of the world to start a new life in New Zealand. He came from a family of dairy farmers and milking cows was all he’d really known so we got a live-in job on one of the local farms. The first few months were idyllic. I thought it was the most wholesome thing to be doing with my life, out there in the fresh air all day. The farm was huge, with two herds of dairy cows. Ironically I’d always been terrified of cows growing up, but now being among them so closely each day, I could see what gentle giants they were. They all had such different personalities, they had best friends. They were the most peaceful animals I had ever come across. I enjoyed milking the cows, was proud of it in fact. ‘If my friends back home could see me now!’ I used to think. I gave the cows names and would sing to them merrily as we went through the laborious hours of milking twice a day. I did feel sorry for them, trudging miles to the cow shed every day in all weathers. I thought their lives were really boring too, same routine, day in, day out. But I was still vegetarian and at least milking cows wasn’t hurting them, so I thought. It wasn’t the same as the beef animals up in the hills who got rounded up from time to time and sent to slaughter. There was no death involved in milking cows. So I thought. Then I experienced my first calving season.
‘New to New Zealand and to farm life; 1992’
The things I witnessed, the things I was a part of during my farming years still keep me awake at night. I became tied to the industry by marriage and it took me two decades to finally be free of both. I would love to say it was my farming experience which led me to become vegan but the blinkers stayed on for a few more years. The catalyst was actually a social media post from a vegan friend. She had been vegan for 25 years and was always posting animal rights content on her Facebook. Usually I would scroll hastily past. I didn’t want to see or hear about awful things being done to animals, I didn’t want to think about that stuff or feel sad! Lovely as she was, I seriously thought about unfollowing her so I didn’t have to engage with it. On August 7th 2017 however, she shared a post, asking for people to sign a petition to ban pig farrowing crates. I figured I could at least do that and clicked into the petition to sign it. I couldn’t believe what was happening to pigs in my own country, in ‘clean, green’ New Zealand! How did I not know about this? It was horrific, cruel and unnecessary. I vowed I would never contribute to animal exploitation again and went vegan right there on the spot.
“I used to milk 220 cows by myself”
Like many new vegans I threw myself into watching documentaries and joining Facebook groups so I could interact with other likeminded people. It was in one of these groups I confessed to my previous life as a dairy farmer. I expected to be villified but instead I was told my knowledge was a hugely valuable. I was put in touch with an activist called Jessica Strathdee, who had also recently ‘come out’ in national media as a former farm worker who went vegan. ‘You have to use your voice’, she urged me, and connected me with the animal rights organisation, SAFE. They convinced me to record a video, talking about the part I used to play in separating newborn calves from their mothers. Knowing the farming community, I was terrified of the potential backlash – not least because I was living in a small rural town at
'Newly vegan in farming country: 2017'
the time - so I asked for my face to be blanked out and my voice to be distorted. As I feared, there were death threats and threats of graphic violence made against me. That was enough to make me shrink away from the spotlight, but around the same time I also developed a chronic illness, and the effects of that were really starting to take hold.
I’d been bedridden for seven months and was recovering from major surgery the day I saw a small advertisement pop up on Facebook from Vegan FTA, asking for volunteer writers. To say I’d been feeling depressed and useless up until then was an understatement. Recording the video for SAFE months earlier had also stirred up enormous grief and unrest in me. Thinking back, recalling those days and the procedures – the kidnapping and killing of innocent babies, the grief of their mothers, exploiting their bodies and reproductive systems and robbing them of nourishment I now realised was meant solely for their babies... the horrific reality of what I had truly been a part of hit me like a hammer and was very hard to live with. I asked Jessica how on earth she managed to cope with the guilt and she told me, ‘I truly believe we were put on this earth for a purpose. We have experienced this for a reason and we are the ones who can share our truth, for the animals’. I realised I had a lot of truth to share, and in Vegan FTA I had found a global platform with a big voice.
'With husband and Vegan FTA co-host, Gareth'
I didn’t know it at the time but Vegan FTA actually came about as a result of chronic illness. Our founder, Sarah Johnson suffers from a rare and debilitating condition which leaves her largely housebound. A passionate activist, she was heartbroken when she became ill and felt she still needed to do something to help the animals. So she asked her programmer partner Mike Hansen to build her a website and she started a Facebook page. Sarah figured that if she couldn’t get out and do activism herself, she would share the work of others who were out there making a difference. Funnily enough, with today’s virtual world and working remotely from home, we had been working together almost two years before we confided in one another that we both had chronic illnesses! In 2019, my husband Gareth also came on board as a filmmaker and editor and we became a busy team of three.
Thumbnail from Jackie's talk ('Effective Strategies for Vegan Activism') during VegfestUK Summerfest Online 2020, available on YouTube
Through writing I had found a comfortable form of activism, but my biggest challenge was yet to come. In 2020 I joined Katrina Fox’s new network for women leaders in the vegan movement – VIVAS. Becoming part of this amazing community was literally life changing for me. When Katrina heard about my dairying background, she encouraged me to be a speaker at the VegFestUK Summerfest Online event. She told me I could provide some valuable tips on how vegans can communicate more effectively with farmers, having been on both sides of the fence. She definitely had a point there – lack of insight and understanding of the industry was a huge problem. My years as a farm worker, and more recently living as a vegan in the Southland farming community had stood me in good stead and here was an opportunity to put what I had learned to good use. This time however there was no face blurring or voice distortion. Once again I was terrified – but this was too important an issue to be fearful. All those months I was stuck in bed I had watched Earthling Ed and other activists like him out on the streets, talking with strangers and opening their eyes. If they could put themselves out there and talk about the plight of dairy cows and calves without spending years in the industry, what was my excuse for not doing so? I did the talk, which was both traumatic and cathartic. I held my breath and prepared for the backlash, but there was none. What I got instead, were emails and messages from people who said they were so horrified at what they heard, they had ditched dairy products completely, or made the switch from vegetarian to vegan. I can’t tell you how good that felt. I may not have been able to change my past, but at least I could play a part in helping to change the future.
That same year, many people and organisations were forced to pivot and diversify and it was through this challenging period that Vegan FTA really found its focus as a nonprofit organisation. We saw people struggling all over the world as vegans for the animals. Lockdowns had caused them to lose their support networks, their social circles, their tribe. Unable to participate in protests, vigils and other forms of their usual activism was leaving them feeling helpless and distraught at not feeling they were doing enough to help the animals. At Vegan FTA however, we were unfazed. With both Sarah and I frequently housebound or bedbound, we were totally accustomed to not being able to do any of these things! We knew there were countless other ways people could be active in the movement, and so our merry trio began working to demonstrate and inspire with as many forms of activism as we knew.
At the time of writing, Vegan FTA has over 730,000 followers around the world. We provide a positive hub for activism with two main focuses - one, to create more vegans and two, to encourage those who are already vegan to be more active in the movement. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of an activist is ‘a person who works to achieve political or social change, especially as a member of an organisation with particular aims’. It doesn’t stipulate getting arrested as a requirement, or hitting people with sticks for that matter. Each and every one of us can be an activist, we can all make a difference in some way. There is a form of activism to suit everyone, no matter how limited, cautious or time poor they may be. We are living proof you can be an effective voice for the animals without even leaving your house.
