Being at the vanguard of positive social change often means doing things that might not make much sense to an unreceptive contemporary public, but which will seem self-evident as humanity evolves over time. The Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) activists who crashed Monday’s Bernie Sanders rally in Oakland may not have been warmly received in a society steeped in what animal rights advocates call speciesism, but their message is one worth listening to if you’re someone who claims to champion the values of justice, equality, environmental stewardship and compassion.
DxE, which seeks a ban on products of violence against animals and legal personhood for all animals, believes in positive change and movement building through non-violent direct action. On Monday several members of the group braved bodily harm at the hands of the Secret Service as they crashed Sanders’ rally by jumping barricades and rushing the stage where the candidate was speaking. While some of the activists held aloft large banners reading “Animal Liberation Now” and “Animal Rights is Social Justice,” some of their colleagues managed to temporarily disrupt Sanders’ speech as Secret Service agents scrambled to restore order. One of the activists, Matt Johnson, suffered minor injuries when he was attacked by a baton-wielding Secret Service agent.
This Kossack captured this footage of the incident:
But why Sanders? The 74-year-old democratic socialist is, after all, widely viewed as the most progressive candidate, one who cares about the welfare of all creatures, two legs or four. His Senate website details numerous animal rights bills he’s sponsored. So why target the candidate who is most likely to be most sympathetic to the cause?
“Bernie is probably the most progressive candidate. He says and I believe he believes in justice and compassion for all sorts of oppressed and exploited populations,” DxE legal director Amy Halpern-Laff, who was among those arrested (she’s in the purple top in the video above), said in a phone interview. “Animals are the most marginalized population on the planet. Trump supporters are just fine with exploitation and oppression. Why would we even talk to them?”
“Sanders claims to oppose factory farming, but what he hides is that virtually all farms in the United States, including farms he supports, are essentially factory farms,” protest organizer Aidan Cook said in a press release. “What we’ve learned in the case of human oppression applies to animals too: when we see someone as an object, all sorts of horrors—notably factory farming—are not just possible but inevitable.”
“Bernie, from an animal welfare standpoint—and it’s important to distinguish animal welfare from animal rights—is the best,” Johnson, whose hand was bloodied and bruised but not broken during the incident, said in a phone interview. “What animal welfare means is that you’re trying to find the right brand of unnecessary violence. What we stand for is logical and moral consistency.”
Logical and moral consistency evade a modern culture, even among progressives, that is unable or unwilling to wrap its collective head around the concept of universal rights that transcend species. Even as the ethical, health and environmental consequences of animal agriculture—which according to opponents is responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions (more than the combined exhaust from all transportation) and 80-90 percent of all US water consumption—become more evident, it seems too many people are going out of their way to excuse their bad behavior.
For DxE, doing the right thing by non-human animals is more than a matter of saving the earth, it’s about what kind of world we want to live in.
“We stand for compassion, empathy, moral consistency and we’re on the right side of history,” asserted Johnson. “And we can feel the tide moving in our direction but actions like this historically throughout social justice movements are needed to force the issue, to force people to confront their privilege when there’s an uncomfortable reality that people are refusing to face because they don’t want to confront their privilege.”
While progressives relish the chance to confront discrimination wherever it may rear its ugly head, that passion for justice too often does not extend to creatures with more than two legs. That, say the activists, is speciesism.
“Speciesism is just as wrong as racism or sexism,” insists Halpern-Laff. “The main difference is that animals can’t speak for themselves so we’re committed to speaking for them.”
“Speciesism is the book definition of discrimination,” argues Johnson. “There’s no morally relevant criteria, you’re just saying Group A gets these rights, Group B doesn’t, just simply because they belong to those groups. It’s really unfortunate that people fall back on all the same shitty and horrific excuses people were using for every other form of discrimination throughout history.”
“That’s hypocrisy, that’s discrimination, that’s completely the opposite of progressive values,” he added.
However, Halpern-Laff says she believes the day will come when humanity will evolve to the point where it considers all animals worthy of equal protection under the law.
“If you look at the history of social justice movements, public opinion at the time of the disruptive tactics has never been an indicator of whether the tactic was effective in the long term,” she said. “People are upset, but that does not mean that it was not effective.”
It must be noted that many animal advocates vehemently disagree with DxE’s tactics. Some expressed downright embarrassment.
“I run a local vegan group with about 1800 members and I have been both a vocal critic of Direct Action Everywhere as well as one of their many victims of harassment…,” SF Vegans co-founder Mhris Carco told Heavy. “Direct Action Everywhere is abusive and destructive, both to individuals and the larger vegan/animal rights community.”
”I thought it reflected negatively on our cause,” agreed Wakako Uritani, an attorney and vegan living in San Francisco. “But on the other hand, vegans have been forced to act to get attention. We are hated because we believe in a way of life that most people don’t want to live because it’s inconvenient and out of their comfort zone.”
”I do understand how vegans have been forced to take dramatic actions to highlight the impact meat eating has on our earth and our future,” Uritani added. “Unfortunately, vegans are hated for this very reason just like Rosa Parks was hated when she refused to move to the back of that bus.”
The DxE activists arrested on Monday will not likely face any criminal charges, although Halpern-Laff called the Secret Service tactics used to subdue them “pretty thuggish.”
“We were peaceful. We may have been dramatic, but we certainly weren’t a threat to anyone and that was pretty obvious,” she said. “Nobody panicked, nobody ran. We expected to be escorted off stage and probably arrested but not to be met with violence or thuggishness.”
“Let’s keep this in perspective—what non-human animals endure every single day of their lives is far, far worse than anything that happened to any of us yesterday,” she added.
And so while many animal advocates are certainly “feeling the Bern”—he’s got a stellar 100 percent rating from the Humane Society Legislative Fund—the DxE activists, with their bold big-picture long view of the issue, remain skeptical.
“Until your revolution includes animals, it's not a revolution at all. It's just the next sordid chapter in the story of human supremacy,” DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung said in an email. “I will never support a ‘revolution’ that excludes and violently oppresses 99.99999% of the beings on this planet. Bernie Sanders, you are the 0.00001%.”
In an era when Earth-destroying corporations are legally considered people with constitutional rights but sentient, intelligent non-human animals that are crucial to our own survival are not, perhaps it is time for society to re-evaluate the meaning of personhood to promote a more sane—and dare I say humane—future for all life on Earth?