Doing animal welfare activism everyday: questions of identity

Abstract

Animals Australia focuses on making animal welfare issues visible to consumers so as to direct consumer behaviour and invoke everyday activism, an objective integral to their ‘Make it Possible’ campaign. In this paper, we primarily explore the claimed and practised identity of everyday or mainstream animal activists. This is an identity that, whilst partially and communally elaborated and affirmed online (in the online Animals Australia community), is enacted more commonly through personal and familial everyday actions such as shopping, cooking and eating than it is through such public actions as explicitly advocating or demonstrating for better welfare standards for animals involved in factory farming. A discourse analysis was conducted of 2198 posts from October 2013 to January 2014 to analyse contributors’ accounts of their feelings (notably their gut reactions) and reasons for pledging, as well as to examine how contributors’ accounts of their everyday practices might be understood as the development of ‘a voice for these “voiceless” animals’. Overall, then, our analysis has shown supporters, participants and/or consumers who support the ‘Make it Possible’ campaign self-select into and identify themselves in terms of four overlapping frames: being vegan or vegetarian, shopping for change, personal activism and public activism and advocacy. This paper contributes to the debate concerning intersectional activism within the food activism movement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Also within this period, the extended YouTube video was viewed over 297,000 times, shared more than 3000 times, liked over 3000 times and received 877 comments, 88% supportive. Public response also extended to enough donations for television and print advertising, grass-roots outreach initiatives and to generally increase Animals Australia’s lobbying power towards ending legal exemptions that permit cruelty to animals in factory farms (also see Rodan and Mummery 2014a).

2. Studies of animal rights movement activists have found activists expressing similar feelings when viewing images of animal cruelty such as felt ‘like crying’, ‘felt sick’, etc. (see Einwohner 2002, 261).

3. As Jasper and Poulsen (1995, 494) found in their research on animal rights, individuals not affiliated with the movement can be ‘recruited because of the beliefs and feelings they already have’.

4. Such materials included – as specified by contributors – (a) documentaries, such as Four Corners (2011) ‘A Bloody Business’, Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners (2008) on caged chickens, Earthlings (2005), The End of the Line (2009) about tuna over fishing, Paul McCartney’s narration of PETA’s video Glass Walls (2009) on slaughter houses, A Kiss Before Dying (2009) and The Cove (2009) about dolphin hunting practices; (b) campaigns found on the Internet and/or YouTube including Animals Australia’s (2012) ‘Make it Possible’ campaign and video on baby calves, PETA’s videos and the website Voices for Change (http://www.peopleforglobaljustice.com/); (c) print materials such as Animals Australia’s report Live Animal Export, Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation (1975), Jeffrey Mason’s The Pig who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals (2003), Robin Cook’s novel Toxin (1998) and John Robbins Diet for New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth (1987); and (d) social media such as Facebook.

5. We have chosen not to edit posts. Any spelling, punctuation and grammatical anomalies are as quoted. Typographical errors may arguably indicate high levels of synchronous engagement on the part of posters.

6. As of 16 March 2015, the Vegan Society defines a vegan in their website as someone who eats ‘a plant-based diet avoiding all animal foods such as meat, dairy, eggs and honey – as well as products like leather and any tested on animals’.

7. Some participants in this category can be understood as being on a kind of ‘quest for purity’, a quest played out through everyday activists carefully controlling their purchase of consumables – such as clothing, make-up, types of soap as well as food products – as part of their ethical journey (Jacobsson and Lindblom 2012, 51).

8. One respondent declared: I am ‘not a vegetarian, but rarely eat meat’. Others commented that while they still eat meat, they took time to select only free range or non-factory-farmed meat.

9. Consumer activism has a long history, emerging in the eighteenth century as more commodities such as sugar and spices became available in the market. An early form of ethical shopping movement emerged when consumer activists boycotted goods produced through slavery (see Hawkins 2010, 125). Although this boycott was a tactic emerging out of the Anti-slavery movement, it was a precursor to the Fair Trade movement and the recent Ethical shopping movement (Glickman 2009; Hilton 2009).

10. When consumers ‘deliberately’ purchase particular products or ‘a company’s or country’s products’ to support particular ‘policies’, this is termed a ‘buycott’ (Hawkins 2010, 124). In the case of eggs, for instance, within Australia, currently there are Internet websites and individual consumers advocating buycotts within major supermarkets by promoting the purchase of free-range eggs [see also the opposition to GMO foods in European supermarkets (Kurzer and Cooper 2007)].

11. Such a view assumes, as Shaw, Newholm and Dickinson (2006, 1051) outline, that ‘Consumers can be seen as creating the societies of which they are a part by their purchases just as they may influence their environments by their votes in political elections’. Such a view is not new, with Anwar Fazaz, President of the International Organisation of Consumer Unions, noting back in 1986 that: ‘The act of buying is a vote for an economic and social model, for a particular way of producing goods. We are concerned with the quality of goods and the satisfactions we derive from them. But we cannot ignore the conditions under which products are made – the environmental impact and working conditions. We are linked to them and therefore have a responsibility for them’ (cited in Dickinson and Carsky 2005, 25).

12. For animal rights activists and the animal welfare movement, animals are seen as the ‘ultimate victim’ because they are ‘innocent, voiceless, and defenceless’ (Pallotta 2005, 91).

13. Johnston, Laraña and Gusfield (1994, 12) claim there are three distinct dimensions of identity that stand out as central participation in social movements: (1) individual identity; (2) collective identity; and (3) public identity.

14. Within the public domain, the animal welfare movement and academe, there have been expressions of scepticism as to whether ethical consumerism has the capacity to bring about long-lasting change. Levinson (2001) has questioned whether animal activists/consumers will drop their ethical concerns about the politics behind products when the private economy slumps, and when other preferences entice everyday activists in a different direction. Littler (2011, 27) has wondered whether ethical consumption is ultimately ineffective because it is ‘used by a minority as a panacea for middle-class guilt’ or because it stresses individualistic action over collective solidarity; and whether ethical consumerism is simply too entangled in consumer capitalism to achieve any radical purchase. And Heath and Potter (2004) have asked whether ethical consumption will merely be subsumed into the further creation of a problematic consumer society. Our proposal is that the identification and embedding of everyday actions into everyday life are itself productive of the merging of individual, collective and public identities.

15. Surveys conducted by The Animals’ Agenda (March/April 1985, 10) – described as the animal movements’ ‘most prominent periodical’ – found: ‘In organization after organization polled, [women] rarely dipped below 70 percent of the total membership, and several outfits showed a female participatory rate nearing 100 percent’ (cited in Jasper and Poulsen 1995, 502).

16. Gaarder (2011, 58) has named this explanation for women’s higher levels of animal advocacy ‘“empathy based on shared inequities”: The idea that women identify with the oppression of animals based on similar experiences of objectification, subordination, and abuse’. Such experiences, she goes on to clarify, have been identified by women activists as: ‘physical and sexual violence; lack of voice or political power; being neglected or ignored; being controlled; and being viewed as objects or property’ (62).

17. Health concerns have been formulated not only with regard to consumers of factory-farmed animal products, but for workers in factory farms, those who live near such farms, as well as the broader human community. Identified concerns for human health from factory farming include in particular: (a) the loss of effective antibiotics (the widespread use of antibiotics in factory farming has led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria presenting not only the human gut but in wild animals) (Akhtar 2012; Anomaly 2015); (b) the deleterious effects of factory farming on air, water and biodiversity as well as their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (Steinfeld et al. 2006), with consequent negative impacts on the health of human communities (Akhtar 2012; Donham et al. 2007; Greger and Koneswaran 2010; Ilea 2009; Radon et al. 2007).

18. For many animal rights activists, taking the strongest ethical view is the only stance that counts. Pallotta (2005, 84) argues that for many animal rights activists, being ‘morally consistent’ is of great concern. She cites one activist, Amber, for instance, who argues that ‘if you’re into the animal rights movement and you’re not vegan, you’re a total hypocrite’ (83).