Animal Aid – Protecting Animal-People for Over Four Decades, Part 2 of 2

Today, we’ll learn about the ways in which Animal Aid chooses its campaigns and the challenges they face in lobbying governments on behalf of the animal-people.

“(At) Animal Aid, we do like to work with other groups and organizations who align with our own ethics, because then we can work together and really try and speed things up to make things better for animals. For example, our recent Snares Campaign, where we worked with Lush, was also a collaboration with the brilliant Hunt Investigations Team as well as the National Anti Snaring Campaign.” Fleur tells us that it’s especially important to reach young people. “Our target audience is actually anybody who is open to living a life without cruelty, anybody who cares about animals and wants to live with compassion.”

“One of the biggest challenges that we face as an animal rights interest group, shall we say, is that there is so much power in the political lobbying from the meat and the dairy industry. We see it time and time again. We've seen it in a recent move towards plant-based milks, for example. The dairy industry got absolutely terrified, and started trying to do everything they could to ruin the reputation or damage the ability of plant-based milks to succeed, for example, saying that they can't call it milk, or they can't use the adjective ‘creamy’ to describe the taste.”

“However, we are still seeing that our governments are being incredibly inconsistent. There's a lot of lip service being paid. There are some moves to do the right thing; don't get me wrong. But it needs to be across the board. You can't be saying: ‘We need to fight climate change’ on the one hand, and then giving a million pounds to the milk industry to shore up this damaging, unhealthy and unethical industry, that we know is very carbon-heavy, also. I mean the links between climate change and animal farming are incredibly well known. So what we do need from our governments is a consistent approach. They need to do what they say they're going to do, and they need to stop trying to get the last bit of money out of whether it's the oil industry, the meat industry, the dairy industry. We know that oil needs to stay in the ground, and we know that we need to move all of us towards a vegan lifestyle.”