“Educate, Investigate, Liberate”

You may know Jose Valle of the International Organization for the Abolition of Animal Slavery, AnimalEquality. He recently wrote me:

We are an abolitionist group and our approach is "Educate, Investigate & Liberate". We are currently doing an investigation on pig farms in Spain, including intensive and extensive/free-range farms (tho extensive ones are scarce since intensive ones are the majority in the industry). Nothing like this has ever done here and we are showing the first images of Spanish farms -we have previously done an investigation on Spanish slaughterhouses www.mataderos.info), so we want to get media & society attention about it and give them a vegan message.

People here tend to think that this kind of things only happen in other countries or that is something from the past, and showing them images of the same farms they are buying their flesh from, has a bigger impact than using images from USA or other places (the closer to their plates the better since it's harder then for them to avoid the responsability). The idea is not to focus on conditions -though they are unavoidably visible- but on exploitation itself. We don't advocate "happy meat" but veganism.

You can see some of the images from the investigation at:

http://flickr.com/gp/igualdadanimal/5Ky7p8

Let me warn you before you see them that they are very graphic and explicit.

(The images aren't yet made public and can only be seen through that specific link)

We already have many static images but we need to film some more farms on video and recover some of the best footage from a broken hard drive. So, I thought you could be interested in helping us to raise the funds. We have calculated that we need about 3.600 euros to finish the investigation and face its costs.

We have asked openly for donations already but few people are willing to help.

Thanks a lot.

There's a donate button on the homepage of AnimalEquality right at the bottom of the "Pig Farms" panel. Showing people what goes on at "free-range" farms, for me, has always been a powerful part of my vegan advocacy efforts because that's always the fall-back position of the person I'm speaking with. (As far as I'm concerned, Peaceable Kingdom can't be released soon enough.) I wholeheartedly support the mission of AnimalEquality/IgualdadAnimal.

And for those who wonder about their thoughts on PeTA, read this.