People motivated by Animal Rights Activism from all over the world congregated at UC Berkeley for the Animal Liberation Conference at the beginning of summer of 2019. This was my first time attending an event focused solely on Animal Rights.
I met people of all races, genders, backgrounds who all had the same objective: eliminate the suffering and death of animals caused by humans.
There were all kinds of workshops, ranging from introductory to advanced-level content. Topics included peaceful protests, independent investigations, animal sanctuaries, and more. All the skills learned were immediately applicable to any level of experience.
We made trips into San Francisco to engage the public, where we mobilized into small teams with Anonymous for the Voiceless and showed video documentaries of animal suffering happening across a variety of common industries.
Then we rallied in full force for the Animal Liberation March the next day, which ended with a ceremony of Path to Personhood at San Francisco City Hall.
The conference featured many notable guest speakers, such as Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, Pulitzer price-winning journalist Glenn Grenwald, Sentient Media co-founder Grant Lingel, and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung.
The event climaxed with a planned operation to rescue animals and vigil to bear witness at a duck farm in Petaluma. An initial team implemented the main operations and protests from inside. The rest of us arrived separately and progressed in unison toward the site, yielding roses in our hands that represented our support of Rose’s Law. We congregated across from the duck farm on the public road as peaceful observers.
I walked away the Animal Liberation Conference in awe.
The biggest lesson for me was that there is a proactive way of helping animals, instead of a passive approach of reducing or eliminating one’s own consumption of animal products, and that there is an active community doing the same.
Animal Liberation is beautiful!
