Last week was Animal Save Movement’s Global Vigil Week. Hundreds of vigils were held outside slaughterhouses and supermarkets around the world. The events were designed to bear witness to the needless killing inherent in the animal agriculture industry.
When we meet, it’s a winter dawn – a black sky over Hackney Wick, light creeping in under the edges of the far-off horizon. It’s cold – we are all wearing jackets tightly done up and warm hats. A few are lucky, they have gloves. By 6am we are almost a dozen. We keep watch – from our elevated perch we can see the road, and its lorries. We are looking for only one – it will be oversized with plastic sidings.
It’s sighted. We move quickly down the stairs and along the walkway, between the modern buildings – square and squat, they are no more than five stories high. Their exteriors are clean greys and deep browns, dark windows and receding balconies. Outside are perfectly painted parking bays. Permit holders only. This is a nice place to live if you can stay alive around here.
Toronto 2010
Canada is big, extending from the Pacific Ocean in the west to the Atlantic Ocean in the east. The bit in-between these two points is large enough to crown it the world’s second-largest country by total area. Canada is also intriguing – it has a mere population of 40 million, 90% of whom live within 100 miles of the Canadian-US border, but it kills approximately 800 million land animals a year – that is 200 times its human population. The territory is no stranger to mass killing – the Indigenous population of Canada is currently assumed to be a haunting four percent of the country’s total.
Some 25 million pigs are birthed in Canada annually, roughly 21 million will be slaughtered there, the remainder are exported and killed. Pigs are clever, demonstrating emotional intelligence and unique personality traits, and they score highly in communication, general problem solving, self and spatial awareness and time perception tests. They form complex relationships, bonding with each other and showing signs of grief when experiencing loss. Left alone, pigs will live for between 15 and 20 years. In the hands of the Canadian animal industry, they will be dead in six months, or 24 weeks.
Toronto resident Anita Krajnc is smart. She holds a PhD in political science, has been an Assistant Professor and was an aide to Charles Caccia, Canada’s former Minister of Environment. On a cool December day in 2010, Krajnc was walking her dog when she encountered a lorry transporting pigs to a nearby slaughterhouse. The experience stayed with her and shortly after she launched the Animal Save Movement (ASM), a grass roots social change movement which takes an anti-speciesist stance and is ‘against all forms of discrimination and oppression.’ ASM’s activism replaces hate with love, and embraces a belief that ending oppression permanently can only be achieved with compassion and kindness for all. Anger begets anger, violence begets violence concluded Krainic, and the cycle needed to be broken.
But don’t be fooled: ASM involves some of the most demanding work I have seen amongst activists. Why? Because their key tactic is to bear witness outside slaughterhouses.
Tolstoy, and Grieving the Ungrieved
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) was amongst other things a gambler, an estate manager, a land-dispute mediator, a teacher, and a father to 13 children. He was, of course, also a writer, and later in life, a vegetarian and pacificist. The American Quakers were inspired by him, and Mahatma Gandhi created Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg, South Africa, which served as a centre to educate activists in non-violent resistance.
Tolstoy authored two novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but perhaps his most notable non-fictional contribution was his 13,300 word essay, Bethink Yourselves. Written in 1904 (at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war), the essay suggests we are living within a larger context than just ourselves, and we should ‘bethink,’ or set aside thoughts about how we have habitually seen ourselves, and instead start asking how we might want to see ourselves. What Tolstoy was essentially saying was ask the big questions first – Where have we come from? How are we connected? What is our fate?
Tolstoy’s own bethinking began 11 years earlier. In an 1893 essay titled The First Step he describes, in graphic detail, visiting a Tula slaughterhouse as he seeks to reconcile his relationship with food. Demonstrating emotional resilience, Tolstoy bears witness to the brutal killing and bloody butchering of several animals. The episode leaves Tolstoy fully committed to a flesh-free diet (he was a lapsed vegetarian at the time) and asking: ‘But why, if the wrongfulness of animal food was known to humanity so long ago, have people not yet come to acknowledge this law?’
Without realising, Tolstoy had developed a practice of bearing witness, of holding space for the ungrieved, of sitting with another’s imminent death, of being present amongst their fear and anxiety, of being one of the last things they see and experience.
Bearing witness is burdensome because you repeatedly experience the pain of grief and loss, and you do so in the public gaze. The process is a holistic sensation involving cognitive, emotional, and physiological sensations. These intra-body wounds linger as reminders that the lives of those lost mattered – and continue to matter.
“We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist.”
The Politics of Sight
Accessing slaughterhouses today is a challenge. Unlike in Tolstoy’s time, you won’t be invited in. Anything more improvised will be met by overzealous private security guards, razor wire, CCTV, and ironically, possibly even patrol dogs.
Bearing witness in 2025 usually means occupying public space by the slaughterhouse entrance. These facilities are well gated, causing vehicles to temporarily stop when entering, briefly allowing activists proximity with the animals. It’s an awkward experience – the animals are tightly packed, visible only through small slits. They are confused and frightened. Regularly, they have defecated on each other. Some, like chickens, may have body parts trapped in between the holding trays. There is an air of hopelessness inside the lorries.
Bearing witness, or vigils as they are commonly referred to, rarely directly saves animal lives, but it does something else – it enacts the politics of sight. In 2013, political scientist, researcher, and author Tim Pachirat published a book, the writing of which was less taxing than its research. Pachirat worked for half a year at a Nebraska slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day, one every twelve seconds. The infamous statistic was used as the book’s title.
Pachirat’s account of the inner workings of the slaughterhouse floor is highly detailed, but he also describes the efforts to conceal and compartmentalise the wrongs of these places, to make the buildings and practices unseen. To counter this, Pachirat advocates ‘acts aimed at bringing attention to practices hidden from public view.’ By revealing the injustices and abuses Pachirat suggests ‘people will become motivated to resist’ them.
With so much of animal agriculture kept from public view, and obscured by fraudulent language and deceitful advertising, the politics of sight serves as a critical function in animal activism. Recognising this, ASM leverages its 300 chapters across two dozen countries to regularly hold public vigils and make the invisible visible.
Bearing Witness in Hackney Wick
The rectangular patch of land sandwiched between Beachy Road and Monier Road in east London is unusual. Unlike the surrounding buildings, polished and new, this space consists of a rundown courtyard and several dilapidated low-level sheds. Milling around inside are men. Few speak to each other. A wide metal gate stands guard, while the perimeter is marked out by a graffitied brick wall topped with shards of broken glass and menacing razor wire. From behind the walls, tall, corrugated iron sheets extend upwards – an afterthought, clumsily added to block out prying eyes. It is clear – you are not welcome here.
The Kedassia slaughterhouse in Hackney Wick isn’t sign-posted. Google doesn’t reveal much about it apart from a couple of protests here in 2016 and 2022. Nothing is said of the 5,000 chickens that are killed here each day. This is a kosher facility and stunning is forbidden. Instead, a cut is made to the neck of the chicken, and it bleeds to death while conscious. It is cruel and sadistic.
On this cold morning, I am with East London Chicken Save (ELCS), a group who know Kedassia well, having held a dozen vigils here. Once the lorry is spotted, we make our way down from our vantage point to the slaughterhouse entrance. The lorry is idling on the roadside waiting to be cleared into the courtyard. The heavy plastic sidings are rolled up exposing tray upon tray stuffed with chickens. They are packed so tightly they are unable to move. Your stomach tightens as you instinctively realise this is wicked and wrong. You make eye contact, and as they hold your gaze your mouth dries. Next your cognitive abilities become impaired, your thinking suspended, unable to process or rationalise what you are seeing. Then there is the overwhelming feeling of dread, of what’s next. This is the labour of bearing witness.
Elric, from ELCS, confirms “it is a full truck, that’s 5,000 chickens, and they are in the usual bad condition; they have faeces all over them, some can’t stand up, others display raw featherless patches. They’re all young.” Elric suspects they are five to six weeks old – or between 35 and 42 days – which is the common age of a broiler chicken when it is slaughtered.
I ask Elric if all 5,000 chickens will be dead by the end of the day.
“On a couple of occasions, after the lorry has left, I’ve hung around. It was a good two hours before they started taking the chickens out of the crates to be slaughtered. The actual slaughtering process is hidden away, but I presume they kill all 5,000 in a day. After all, there will be another lorry delivering another 5,000 chickens tomorrow.”
Elric and the others document the moment, bringing into plain sight what was concealed before. The lorry drives into the yard and the gates swing shut – but now you know what happens behind them, and of the lives lost to this place’s brutality.
— ©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
