Animals should be recognized as the true leaders of the Animal Liberation Movement

Short interview with pattrice jones.

Next week, May, 17, 9th International animal futures conference, ANIMAL FUTURES 2024 (Re)visioning animal advocacy: strategies, dilemmas and directions, takes place. This conference critically examines the current state and possible futures of the animal advocacy and vegan movements and veganism in various parts of the world, asking where these movements are headed.

Pattrice jones is a cofounder of VINE Sanctuary, an LGBTQ-led refuge for farmed animals. Best understood as a multispecies community co-created by its nonhuman members, VINE works for social and environmental justice as well as animal liberation.

First book I read, written by you, pattrice, was “Aftershock”. How did you get the idea to write this book? And how do you take care of yourself these days? I mean – how do you manage with all this cruelty towards animals existing in the world?

My graduate training was in clinical psychology. One night, after a conference, I and other activists were talking about one of our comrades, who seemed depressed. We all agreed that animal rights activists needed more tools to help them cope with the stress and grief associated with witnessing and thinking about violence so continuously. One of the people who was part of the conversation was an editor of a magazine. Knowing my background, she asked me to write an article sharing tips for coping with the emotional challenges of animal activism.

Many activists found this article to be helpful. So, the publisher at Lantern Books asked me to expand it into a book. I wrote it very quickly, and I find it to be extremely imperfect. Still, so many activists have told me that it has helped them, so I am glad to have written it.

How do I manage? With the help of my friends, human and otherwise. Those of us who run sanctuaries must cope with so many additional stressors, such as making life-or-death decisions and witnessing so much death. You can find VINE Sanctuary’s tips for dealing with death here.

A few quick tips: Experience and express, rather than denying and repressing, your feelings. Talk with people. Use art, music, or dance to express things you can’t put into words. Attend to your physical health, so that your body will be better able to handle the physical stress of strong emotions. Respect your own animal rights! You would condemn anyone who denied another animal food, water, or sleep. Don’t deny yourself those things!

For me personally, tuning into the larger-than-human world is the key. Every day, I make time to walk outside with nothing on my mind, just paying attention to whatever I hear and see — birds, rocks, lichen — and remembering that I can count on trees, and all of the underground fungi and animals that make trees possible, to produce the oxygen I need.

How did you get an idea to found a VINE Sanctuary book club? Can you name for example, 5 very important books for the animal rights movement – anyone who wants to be an activist – should try to read?

The purpose of the VINE Book Club is to bring animal advocates and animal studies scholars into conversation with each other and with the authors of books that can inform their work. Sometimes, we read books the illuminate the connections between the exploitation of animals and other forms of oppression. Sometimes we read books about animals themselves. Always, we have conversations that stimulate our imaginations and improve our analyses of the problems we are trying to solve.

Five books I would recommend would be:

Ethics and Animals by ecofeminist philosopher Lori Gruen is the basic primer on animal ethics that we at VINE Sanctuary recommend. Lori’s book Entangled Empathy was written for activists and also includes very useful recommendations.
The Oxen at the Intersection by pattrice jones (that’s me) offers an easy-to-understand case study of a failed effort to rescue two cows, showing how factors like sexism, ableism, and racism made it harder for vegans to advocate for those two animals and suggesting practical steps for avoiding such difficulties. Of course, I hope that people with read my new book, Bird’s-Eye Views, but The Oxen at the Intersection is a short and engaging book written especially for activists.
Antiracism in Animal Advocacy collects essays by numerous animal advocates of color. Luckily, you can read some of those essays online here.
The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams is a classic text that no animal advocate should skip. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, offers a diverse array of essays that further explore the connections between feminism and animal liberation
[Fill-in-the-blank] For which animals do you advocate? Cows? Frogs? Chimpanzees? What would they want you to do on their behalf? To know that, you have to know something about them. Read a book that will help you understand them, so that you can take their viewpoints into account when deciding what you will do.

I also have some general recommendations: First, read widely and adventurously. Expose yourself to a wide variety of facts and ideas. Let your curiosity take you in unexpected directions, because you never know when you will learn something that you didn’t know you needed to know. If you want to change human behavior, you have to understand people, so read fiction with many different kinds of protagonists, written by a wide variety of authors, to help develop your empathy.

Your presentation at the Conference is about future humans. Who are they? How to Become Activists Other Animals Need Us to Be? I personally think this is a core question (and answer) in a Movement today.

Future humans are the people we will need to become in order to make animal liberation a reality. Because humans are a kind of animal whose thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shaped by social and environmental circumstances, we all have a lot of changing to do in order to become the people other animals need us to be.

All harms done to animals by people are done by humans in social and environmental circumstances that have shaped their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. All animal advocates also are humans in circumstances that have shaped their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Unless they have worked very hard to unlearn speciesist assumptions, animal advocates are just as likely as other people to unthinkingly perpetrate human supremacy.

Hubris, heroism, narrow focus, lack of respect for diversity, and other features of human supremacy all have hampered animal advocacy and inadvertently harmed the very animals who we vegans hope to help. But, it is possible to become different!

Animals themselves — who should be recognized as the only true leaders of the animal liberation movement — can show us the way. In my presentation, I will draw upon my 20+ years of sanctuary work and animal advocacy to share some of the lessons I have learned from other animals. I’ll also share a few of my own practical tips for countering internalized human supremacy, thinking ecologically, and improving one’s own relationships within the larger-than-human world.