The Power and Duty of Bearing Witness

Anita Krajnc, founder of the Save Movement

“When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not succumb to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer to him, as close as you can, and try to help him.”

—Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul

“One who knows the truth must bear witness of the truth to those who do not.”

—Leo Tolstoy, My Religion: What I Believe

In 2006, I returned to Toronto after three years of teaching political studies at Queen’s University in Kingston located at the point where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. I wanted to live by the lake, as that was my favorite part about the university campus, and so I found an apartment right on Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto. Soon I became aware of the existence of Quality Meat Packers, a pig slaughterhouse less than a mile away. The slaughterhouse’s jarring presence entered my consciousness a few times a year when I passed the area on a streetcar and could see the ominous gray buildings with barbed-wire fencing and a tall, round chimney in the distance. I contacted an active animal rights group in the nearby city of Hamilton and asked if they could leaflet or something, but nothing came of it.

In the fall of 2010, I adopted Mr. Bean for my elderly mother when she came to live with me. Mr. Bean, a lanky beagle and whippet mix, was a rescue from Animal Alliance of Canada’s Project Jessie. In the mornings, Mr. Bean and I would take long walks along Lake Shore Boulevard, and in the rush-hour traffic, we encountered a stream of transport trucks carrying pigs to the downtown slaughterhouse. One day, when the traffic was especially bad, we saw eight or nine transport trucks moving slowly. The pigs’ snouts poked through the portholes and their sad, scared eyes looked out, pleading for their lives. By putting me in touch with my surrounding community, Mr. Bean sparked the epiphany that led to the formation of Toronto Pig Save. Our mission was simple: to expose slaughterhouses with firsthand community witnessing in the hopes of creating a wave of vegans and, equally important, more activists and organizers locally and abroad. In retrospect, it’s surprising that when I moved near the slaughterhouse four years earlier, I never took the time to go see the pigs and stand up for them. I was already a vegan and an activist, but I rarely thought about the slaughterhouse, as life’s distractions got in the way. My activism consisted of occasionally organizing or attending events like film screenings and demonstrations; I even considered going to vegan restaurants a form of activism. My self-perception before bearing witness was that I was a fairly strong animal rights activist, but that perception crumbled when I saw the extreme extent of the pigs’ suffering and exploitation. These innocent, gentle beings had prompted a clarion call to action.

At the time, I was reading biographies by Romaine Rolland, a vegetarian pacifist and writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. He set up a vegetarian society and organized an anti-fascist league in the 1920s. He wrote biographies on Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and other exemplary individuals he considered societal role models. Each of these men had taken action in their local communities when there was an injustice, despite how busy they were in their lives and careers. I realized, as these individuals had, that there was no time to waver or pass the buck.

In Toronto Pig Save’s first year, we focused on gathering footage and holding art shows that featured artwork and photographs of pigs by local and international artists to raise awareness and funding. A small group of us snuck along the railway lines late at night and early in the morning to gather slaughterhouse footage. On our late-Sunday-night surveillance missions, we saw thousands of pigs crammed in pens, held overnight to be killed the next morning. On weekdays at 6 a.m., we could hear the agonizing human-like screams a hundred meters from the building. It sounded like an asylum. They screamed as they were electrocuted with hard-wired cattle prods, which pushed them in single file along a corridor toward the door to the carbon dioxide gas chamber.

In June 2011, PETA organized a “human meat tray” demo in front of Quality Meat Packers and the organization’s Canadian campaigner asked if Toronto Pig Save activists would join. PETA helped put the Toronto slaughterhouse on the map by garnering media awareness. To cover the event for Rabbletv—a progressive online Canadian media outlet where I volunteered—I stood at the intersection where the transport trucks turned almost a mile from the slaughterhouse. On my previous walks with Mr. Bean, I had only seen the pigs at a distance. Now, with the trucks stopping at the traffic light, I went up to the portholes. A sweet, innocent pig looked up at me with an expression of desperation and confusion. It’s hard to describe the feelings I first had when witnessing these incredible creatures. There’s an accountability that comes with bearing witness. You keenly recognize your responsibility to do everything in your power to stop this atrocity. Then and there, I made a promise to that pig that I would help organize a minimum of three vigils a week. Toronto Pig Save activists have kept this promise.

Most of our vigils were held on a traffic island we dubbed “Pig Island” about a kilometer from the slaughterhouse. The early morning vigils lasted three hours. We would alert thousands of drivers and passersby with our banners and placards, do vegan outreach, and point at the trucks, inviting them to join us and bear witness. We’d hope for a red light when the transport trucks came, giving us the chance to come right up to the portholes and see the pigs. It’s the first time they had sunlight on their faces. At times, there would be trucks with pigs too despondent and frightened to approach us. More often, they’d come to us and nuzzle our fingers, greeting us with curious grunts. The most heart-wrenching instances were when they looked out with imploring eyes, as if to ask what was happening and wondering if we would be the ones to free them.

The regular vigils rejuvenated animal rights activism in Toronto and helped create many new activists and community organizers. Quality Meat Packers killed 6,000 pigs a day; 30,000 a week; 120,000 a month; and more than a million innocent pigs a year. Each day thirty transport trucks carrying two hundred pigs each traveled along the city’s busy throughways, passing the Liberty Village condo development and then a dog park before entering the facility. It was hard to see the trucks and not be upset. But it took a grassroots group and regular vigils to make people pay attention and galvanize the animal rights community in the city. In April 2014, Quality Meat Packers went bankrupt. We had to wonder about the impact our vigils had on their business over the course of the few years we gathered there. After they closed, Toronto Pig Save moved its vigil location to Fearmans Pork Inc., a slaughterhouse in nearby Burlington. Earlier, we had also committed to holding weekly vigils to bear witness to the cows and chickens at Toronto’s three slaughterhouses in the northwest part of the city.

The Save Movement defines the strategy of bearing witness as the moral duty and obligation of society to collectively bear witness and recognize the individuality of every animal, their desire and right to live a natural life, and our corresponding duty to help them. Toronto Pig Save developed an easily reproducible blueprint for communities to hold regular vigils at local slaughterhouses and put a face to the billions of individual farmed animals being killed in the animal-exploitation industry. Toronto Pig Save’s commitment to organize three vigils each week was informed by historic community organizing approaches used by other social movements, which emphasized the importance of holding regular, intensive, on-the-ground actions using a love-based approach.

The strategy of bearing witness has been used to great effect by social movements for centuries, from the Quakers challenging slavery to Greenpeace setting sail for ground zero to protest nuclear tests in Alaska in the early 1970s and in the South Pacific during the 1980s. It’s essential for the animal rights movement to be present in the face of the most egregious exploitation and injustice against farmed animals; bearing witness enables people to strongly empathize with their incredibly unjust and cruel plight. The Save Movement draws on the philosophies and practices of nonviolent approaches developed by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., community organizer Saul Alinsky, United Farm Workers cofounder Cesar Chavez, and environmental justice campaigner Lois Gibbs. The concept of bearing witness creates the opportunity to get closest to the animal standpoint, which generates the most empathy, compassion, and action. We absorb a small fraction of the animals’ pain and learn a tiny bit of their story, which we share with others to help them wake up to this reality.

Leo Tolstoy said that only by having a firsthand presence can you approach knowing their truth. He bore witness as part of his research for an introductory essay to Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet—a book about famous vegetarians in history. He wanted to see with his own eyes the reality of what happened to animals at slaughterhouses. Tolstoy’s influential essay “The First Step” became the “bible” of the fledgling animal rights movement in Russia and elsewhere in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Bearing witness puts an end to the distancing effect in supermarkets, where slabs of meat do not have expressive eyes. When we see the fearful, pleading, curious, and affectionate faces at the vigils, it prompts us to want to help and share their stories. What would we want if we were in those trucks? In his book On Life and Essays on Religion, Tolstoy wrote, “A person knows the life of other beings only through observation and only so does she know of their existence. She knows of the life of other beings only when she wishes to think of it.” Imagery is key to existence. When the imagery of observing animal suffering is imprinted on one’s mind, it becomes a part of one’s soul.

We need to change the cultural norm so that looking the other way is seen as an unacceptable response. Bearing witness acts as a living testimony to other creatures’ suffering, which changes people in profound ways. Many non-vegan vigil-goers begin to transition to a nonviolent vegan diet once they see fearful, suffering animals trapped in trucks. Equally important, people who have never done activism before attending a vigil suddenly find it important to commit to being activists and organizers. Many begin to dedicate their life to organizing for social change.

A common dictum in a community organizing approach is “Everyone is a leader.” I used to teach a university course in social movement strategies and tactics at Queen’s University and was keen to apply the principles learned from other social movements and community organizing approaches to the Save Movement. Many people have asked how we keep people motivated to bear witness when it is so painful on a personal level to witness the brutalities faced by animals going to slaughterhouses. It’s a paradox, which is aptly captured in a dictum by Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Indian prophet: “But my heart has grown much, much larger, and I have learnt to feel [the suffering of others]. Believe me I feel it very sadly!” The idea is that being present in the face of injustice makes you stronger, sacrifice is part of social change movements, and participation in creating change adds a meaningful element to one’s life. Before the weekly vigils, I was depressed because I felt helpless. Now, I and so many other activists feel stronger and more determined than ever, as we see the movement growing exponentially and have a stronger sense of the enormous scale of the problem and what needs to be done.

Attending the animal vigils creates a strong sense of connection. People often speak of their Save community as vegan family and say that they found their tribe when they joined us. I felt this in my most important moments. When my beloved mother passed away on July 15, 2012, more than half of the people who attended her vegan funeral were members of Toronto Pig Save, people I had met in the previous year and a half.

Bearing witness is the most powerful experience I’ve ever had in the animal rights movement. It is the duty to be present at the darkest sites of injustice and to let others know of this injustice. In bearing witness, you follow your conscience, thus recognizing a higher “natural” law than any legalized violence against animals. We open ourselves up to understanding their experience, because if we were in that situation it would be the exact same for us. This stems from the understanding that we are all interconnected. When you are outside a slaughterhouse, it weighs you down and can make you feel sick. But it is also empowering to hold a slaughterhouse vigil as a community, as bearing witness together touches the collective spirit. You replace what was unseen and ignored—which is what enables animal exploitation and suffering—with light and active campaigns to organize for change. The more of us that shine a light on the darkness and try to help, the sooner we will achieve our aims of animal liberation.

On June 22, 2015, an incident occurred that changed the course of the Save Movement by putting the act of bearing witness into the media and public eye in a way that went beyond the social media videos and photos shared by activists attending vigils. I, along with three other activists, were participating in one of Toronto Pig Save’s weekly vigils across the street from Fearmans Pork, Inc., in Burlington. When a truck stopped at the red light, we could see the pigs panting and foaming at the mouth. It was a scorching hot day. I went up to the side of the truck to give water to an eagerly thirsty pig, who immediately came up to me and reached her snout out of the truck’s porthole to suck the water from my bottle.

Suddenly, the truck driver jumped out of his cab and shouted “Don’t give them water!”

My response was, “Show some compassion.” He demanded that I stop and so I quoted Matthew in chapter 25 of the Bible, “Jesus said if they are thirsty, give them water.” I was following my conscience and believed the Golden Rule to be a universal and unbreakable tenet.

The driver shouted back, “They aren’t human, you dumb frickin’ broad!” He yelled again to stop giving the pigs water, but I put the bottle back against the porthole and the same desperate pig approached for more water. The thirst of this individual was what mattered to me, not the driver’s callous request. Then, he yelled that he’d hit the bottle out of my hand if I didn’t stop, but I said that this action would constitute assault. He said that he was going to call the police, but then he hopped into his truck and drove off.

Two months later, a constable showed up at my door, and I was notified of a criminal mischief charge—interference with property—for giving water to thirsty pigs, a charge that carried a potential sentence of ten years in prison and a $5,000 fine. This charge was shocking, as giving water to pigs at the vigils was a small act of mercy and something that we had been doing for two years and often in the presence of police, who expressed concern for our safety and on occasion empathized with our small acts of mercy.

The Save Movement gained worldwide attention through the Pig Trial with the help of my two vegan defense lawyers, James Silver and Gary Grill, and a group of animal rights organizations supporting Toronto Pig Save, including PETA, Animal Justice, and Direct Action Everywhere. My lawyers were able to put animal agriculture on trial by focusing on the ethics, animal suffering, and devastating environmental and health effects of animal agriculture. We also put forth ethical concepts, such as: pigs are not “stuff” or property, pigs deserve personhood, and giving water to thirsty animals is a universal law that transcends time and cultures.

The case resonated with the public, because people understood that my gesture in offering water to a suffering pig on a sweltering day was simply an extension of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and it sparked the social media hashtag “Compassion is not a crime.” When compassion is treated as a crime, it can create a historic moment in a social movement helping to further educate and mobilize people around issues of injustice. One historical example was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which set a six-month prison term and a fine of $1,000 for anyone giving food to a runaway slave. Harriet Beecher Stowe was so incensed, she responded by writing her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As the second-bestselling book of the nineteenth century (following the Bible) it helped raise consciousness for the abolition of slavery. A second historic example of criminalizing compassion was the Russian government’s attempt to stop Tolstoy and his family from engaging in famine relief in Russia in 1892 by trying to make it illegal to set up soup kitchens for the hungry. In the same way that the hungry should not be denied food, thirsty animals should not be denied water. The Golden Rule applies to all living beings, as stated by Tolstoy in A Calendar of Wisdom: “We should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on each other. And we all know this, if we do not deaden the voice of our conscience inside us.” When animals are legal “things” in the law, their basic inalienable rights and fundamental interests—their pains, their lives, and their freedom—are invisible to civil law. Since animals suffer the same as we human animals, they deserve equal consideration of their interests and needs.

Almost two years later, on May 4, 2017, Judge David Harris dismissed my charge of criminal mischief—interference with property—because I didn’t stop the truck or prevent those pigs from being slaughtered. While the judge recognized that compassion is not a crime, it was extremely disappointing that he missed an opportunity to move the law forward in regard to nonhuman animals as persons. He referred to the pigs as being property under the law. Is a sentient being, such as a pig, no different than a toaster? (To amplify the insanity and injustice, nonliving entities like corporations have legal personhood standing in the courts.)

The global media coverage of the Pig Trial put the plight of the pigs into the public eye and helped spark major worldwide growth for the Save Movement. When the confrontation with the truck driver took place in the summer of 2015, there were about thirty-five Save chapters in five countries. Riding the wave of international attention and financial support, the Save Movement was able to focus on a growth strategy by sending organizers to table at VegFests, hold slaughterhouse vigils in new areas, and organize new Save chapters. In 2018, nineteen Save Organizing Tours in North America, South America, and Europe took place. By September 2019, there were nearly seven hundred Animal Save chapters in seventy countries.

Given the power of bearing witness and its impact on changing hearts and minds, it is imperative to continue growing the Save Movement, making the moral duty to bear witness a new cultural norm. The sense of urgency also arises from the multiple issues resulting from animal agriculture, such as catastrophic climate change, world hunger, and threats to public health. Therefore, in 2018 the Save Movement was restructured and three sub-movements were created: the Animal Save Movement (which aims to hold a vigil at every slaughterhouse in the world), the Climate Save Movement (whose mission is to build a grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis by ending animal agriculture, reforesting the Earth, and phasing out fossil fuels), and the Health Save Movement (which promotes veganism to prevent and reverse diseases related to animals products and food justice programs). The Save Movement is now addressing a wide range of issues, developing intersectional campaigns, and forming broad-based coalitions and alliances.

After first starting to bear witness with Mr. Bean in 2010, being an organizer quickly became of upmost importance to me. I have been an animal rights activist since the early 1990s, but only since I joined with others to collectively bear witness at slaughterhouses has my level of commitment increased to the point of it being the number one priority for the rest of my life. I’ve learned the importance of being an organizer and the need to recruit millions of animal rights organizers worldwide. During the civil rights movement, Eric Mann estimates that there were tens of thousands of organizers and hundreds of thousands of activists working for equality. Gandhi said, “Social change will occur not in some “dim and distant future” but “within a measurable time, the measure being the measure of the effort we put forth.”

I’ve also learned how important it is to constantly work on the love-based philosophy in community organizing. The challenges we face to save animals and the planet are so immense and urgent, it is easy to fall into the trap of getting angry and feel rage against not only the system, but the humans participating in this evil. It’s important to reread works by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other practitioners of love-based organizing and communication. Tolstoy liked to quote the Bible’s passage, “I came not to judge, but to save.” He advocated returning love for hate and to kindly point out to the oppressor what is wrong and to organize the public in “noncooperation with evil” campaigns, such as boycotts and direct action, including nonviolent civil disobedience.

Every social justice movement in history has succeeded when enough people stand up. To witness suffering animals changes everything. By bearing witness to egregious animal injustice and helping to create a new cultural norm where people see it as their duty to not look away, we discover the unity of life. By combining bearing witness with love-based community organizing, we quicken the pace of achieving social, earth, and animal justice.