Bearing Witness to Babies before and after Motherhood

Amy Jean Davis, founder of Los Angeles Animal Save

Before I read The Answer, the law of attraction seemed like pseudo-science, but I learned in this book how our reticular activating system (RAS) judges each of the 400 billion pieces of sensory data per second as relevant or irrelevant to our reality, and then prompts us to notice more of what is relevant. So, I began envisioning the future I wanted as if it were already real, and my life changed dramatically. I see how what I think about all the time attracts more of the same.

A couple of years after I read The Answer, I learned that humans don’t need animal products for nutrition whatsoever, and that everything we do need is available from plants. I had already been vegan for a few years, but I was what is known as a Personal Choice Vegan—a vegan who considers what they eat to be a personal choice and doesn’t bring up the subject of veganism unless asked. Once I learned that there was zero necessity to eat animals, and that the consumption of animal products was linked to various illnesses, I couldn’t understand why anyone would eat them. This is when I became a social media activist, using Facebook and Twitter to spread vegan information. An activist group called Toronto Pig Save reached out to me about coming to a vigil for pigs and thought that if I attended, a media outlet or two might come out to the vigil because of my American Idol credential (I was a top-24 finalist in season 7). I thought to myself, I should do this to help the animals. Even though I didn’t really know what bearing witness meant or what the experience would be like, I agreed and headed to Toronto.

I still remember the moment I first looked inside a transport truck full of baby pigs. Their skin was colored so softly and delicately, and they were looking at me with wide, terrified blue eyes. They looked like big pink dogs, crammed on top of one another, scared and confused. It felt like lightning hitting the center of my chest, as if my heart might burst from the sadness and helplessness I felt all at once. At the same time, it was very surreal. To meet these victims face-to-face; to smell them; to hear their raspy breathing; to see the red marks on their skin; to have my eyes burned from ammonia; and to be standing there on the median in the road, free to walk back to my vehicle and drive home to a soft, cool bed without someone dragging me to a gas chamber. It’s a moment I will never forget.

About a year later I founded Los Angeles Animal Save. The Toronto activists had asked if I wanted to start a group in LA before, but the notion of being an activist was still a new layer of who I was becoming, and the thought of being an organizer was intimidating. Once I started the group in December of 2016, I immediately knew I should have started right when I came home from first bearing witness in Toronto. Some say that bearing witness is an obligation, and I completely agree. Additionally, I feel that organizing is an obligation for me.

At the Farmer John slaughterhouse, next to downtown Los Angeles, around seven thousand pigs are killed a day. The exterior of the massive building is covered in murals of happy pigs laying in mud and under trees; one pig is even wearing an LA Dodgers hat. On the back of one of the structures there are painted pigs flying into the sky with little wings they’ve sprouted. These are the pigs who have been electrocuted, their throats slit, and the life drained from their bodies. To say these murals are disturbing is an understatement.

Working with the local police department, activists stand in front of the slaughterhouse gate to bear witness as trucks arrive. Because we have pedestrian right-of-way on the sidewalk, the truck drivers are legally required to stop. An officer informs the drivers that a demonstration is in process, which allows us to approach each truck to give the pigs water and love for a few minutes. The pigs inside the trucks are anywhere from four to six months old, the same age as my daughter at the time of writing this. Yet these innocent babies spend a mere three weeks with their mother as she lay on the hard-slatted ground in a farrowing crate until the farmers move them to a “nursery.” Farrowing crates (where mother pigs are kept) and gestation crates (where pregnant pigs are kept) are so narrow that these animals cannot turn around. Father pigs live in boar crates, on concrete or slats, and are taken out a couple times a week to have their semen harvested. The agony these animals endure cannot be described. One undercover investigation witnessed a boar who fell sick and wasn’t able to stand up. Due to a leak in a pipe over his crate, the skin on the underside of his body began to rot.

As a new mother, my world has become full of perhaps the strongest kind of love—a mother’s love for her child—and it has also become more terrifying. Animal rights activists are deeply aware of the egregious cruelty committed against animals, but to know firsthand how a mother feels for her baby while knowing that billions of mothers are forced to stand helplessly by while their children are taken from them is a crippling thought. The thought of someone taking my baby away, for any reason, causes a knot in my stomach and immediate tears in my eyes. Then, considering a baby’s experience—just wanting her mother, but getting the rough hands of workers taking her to her death instead—how can this be the world I live in? How is it that I live among human beings who pay for this kind of violence? Human beings who are familiar with love, yet deny it to 70 billion sentient, scared beings each year, reserving it for whichever animals their culture has taught them are acceptable to love? These human beings are members of my own family, whom I watch dote on their dogs and cats, then turn around and sink their teeth into the mutilated bodies of animals who are every bit as sentient.

Every Sunday night I watch truckloads of innocent baby pigs crammed together in their own feces, urine, blood, and vomit be driven through the slaughterhouse gate. I see their eyes as they look around timidly. They must be wondering, what’s next? Where are we going? Unfortunately for them their fate is a violent one, carried out by humans who are also victims of the system. Cruelty against animals is intimately linked to cruelty against humans, yet in this country and in most countries in the world, societies stand on a foundation of institutionalized violence and oppression against the most vulnerable—human and animal alike. We employ the poor and undocumented to work in factory farms and slaughterhouses and pay them meager wages to commit atrocities to animals who did nothing but be born of a particular species. Had they been born a dog or a cat, their chances of ending up in the loving home of a family are higher. Instead they are born in windowless sheds, have their testicles removed without anesthesia, and their heads slammed into the ground if they don’t grow big enough, fast enough.

I will continue to utilize the law of attraction to envision a world where humans engage in compassionate behavior instead of vile actions and apathetic indifference. And I know so many others envisioning that same world. This vision is in the spaces between attending a vigil or protest or a legislative hearing hoping that elected representatives will vote on the side of the animals. It is in the spaces between where instead of getting lost in the deep sadness of recognizing our current level of consciousness, I choose to empower myself by recruiting my subconscious brain to keep me as powerful of a peace creator as possible. I was an activist before I was a mother, but now that I am a mother, I have a new kind of motivation that fuels my activism. All babies are innocent and deserve to be protected.