The body keeps the cause

I was thinking about the extremes of embodiment in the movement this month – the immersive performance of a woman immobilizing herself in a farrowing crate for 21 days and the marchers marking 207 miles in kinesthetic solidarity. And then an activist lost her bodily expression during an assault captured for all to see.

WTAF? Let’s start there.

PETA staffers working to end extreme cruelty to sheep used for wool crashed a runway show. The activists used their bodies and voices and held signs.

Caught on camera, Steven Kolb, CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, violently grabbed Andrija Barak. He put his hands over her mouth and nose. He silenced her voice. He wrestled her to the ground and locked her between his legs. The entire time no one intervened.

The CEO forced the activist in the way wool shearers force lambs. Ironically, his crime demonstrated the horrors Andrija was trying to communicate better than she ever could. Her body was exploited by the body politic of the fashion industry.

Here’s how things went down after that. In short, PETA said it was going to file a police report and pursue criminal charges. Andrija may or may not have gone to an urgent care facility after the assault. Kolb was put on leave. PETA met with lawyers and decided not to press charges but to seek a meeting with Kolb instead. Kolb resigned his post.

I said, hey PETA, was it the activist’s choice not to file charges after she was assaulted? Can/does she want to do that separately?

I mean, I am not a fan of humans, and I choose animals over people every day, but an injustice is an injustice. PETA has a duty to the human species as well. By not pressing charges, and intending instead to show Kolb (even though he has resigned) videos of how sheep are mistreated for the use of their wool, the organization is saying it’s OK to physically harm another person. That is not OK.

"We are willing to drop everything if we reach an understanding that benefits the animals," Moira Colley, PETA’s senior director of media relations, said.

I understand the preference for negotiation and constructive engagement over litigation, but you cannot ignore the physical abuse of a human woman. Period. And while we are at it, shame! Shame on everyone in that room who stood by, filmed and offered not one hand of help.

I wanted to know if Andrija, the victim staffer, had any input in the decision not to press charges. Moira didn’t answer my question, and she said Andrija was traveling and unavailable for interviews.

“PETA’s activists were protesting the act of shearers kicking sheep and have no desire to kick a man when he is down,” Moira told me.

Since when does PETA not take the opportunity to kick oppressors to the curb?

And what does this movement ask activists to physically endure, anyway? What responsibility does it have to those people when they are harmed while doing it?

Because what is left to give when words fail?

Failing at keyboard lobbying, some of us are feeling desperate and stuck. We need to get out and do something. We want to get bigger, louder or bolder. We want attention, because we need people to listen and to join us. To change.

We want to take away the suffering animals endure at the hands of humans. If we can’t take the pain away, can we take it on? If we inflict self-harm, will the animals feel how sorry we are? Will it remove any guilt? Will we find comfort in that for ourselves? These are our internal struggles, fucked up as they may sound.

But if we make an outward display of how much we are willing to sacrifice, if we can prove our commitment, will other people finally pay attention and be persuaded?

When Michelle Farnham, 28, of Animal Rising put herself in a farrowing crate to demonstrate a cycle in the life of Luna, a mama pig representing all the pigs used for breeding and trapped in the industrial animal agriculture system, I knew the physical challenges coming to her.

For 20 years I stood over a body on a table, offering up the practice of therapeutic bodywork and massage, playing at the technical techniques of manual manipulation and the guesswork of intuitive feel. My mantra was always “be in your body.” And as a personal trainer, I was all about “activate this muscle,” “connect the movement to your breath,” yadda, yadda, yadda. After two decades, I’d touched enough bodies to last a lifetime, but I never stopped reading them.

Michelle used her body as the site of witness and of bridge-building, connecting human and nonhuman experiences.

In the moments that she was successful, she transformed spectators into empathetic witnesses and extended the movement’s message beyond rhetoric and into a lived experience.

In her immobilization, she was doing something. Her embodiment of a mother pig in a crate – eating, sleeping, defecating – created a non-verbal, visceral representation of suffering that words and statistics don’t convey. It translated abstract principles into sensory experience. Her display in busy Trafalgar Square in London was performance art as protest.

Michelle said many times that her voluntary confinement and finite struggle were unlike Luna’s unending fate. That she would emerge, however wobbly and muscle-wasted, after 21 days. Twenty-one is symbolic, by the way. It’s the day a mother’s babies are taken away from her in the crate. That’s today, as I am now writing.

I thought briefly about my own experience of involuntary “confinement,” pregnant at 17 and facing a premature birth halfway through my term. I was hospitalized and then sent home on strict bedrest in order to avoid losing my son. We went full term and he was perfect, but I remember being infuriated by that confinement and terrified by the alternative, of which there was none.

Back to Michelle: Did her spectacle of personal sacrifice and endurance communicate urgency and seriousness? One goal was to secure Luna’s release from enslavement at Red Court Farm in Suffolk. That’s a factory farm Michelle had investigated and where Luna would be re-inseminated and returned to a crate for the third time in her young life. More than 20,000 people signed the petition for Luna’s release to a sanctuary, but that has not happened yet.

Another goal was to share the horrors of life as pigs in the food system, particularly mothers and babies. The long game was to advance Animal Rising’s mission to end industrial agriculture in the UK by 2040.

A social movement, like the fight for animal rights, is a sustained, collective challenge to power.

My minor in college was sociology, though I don’t recall why. The sociologist Charles Tilly said that because social movements lack access, they have to show that they matter, and they do that through demonstrating worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.

The “motion” in the movement is a thing in itself. Marches are movements in the literal sense, bodies moving through space, bodies in alliance. It's kinesthetic solidarity!

Marathon marches are endurance activism that’s accompanied by fatigue, exhaustion, bloody blisters, chafing, and all manner of physical strain.

When they woke up to rain, March to Abolish Animal Testing co-founder Ella Magers said something like, “We walk rain or shine, because these dogs have never seen rain or shine.”

Co-founder Gretchen Primack described their walk along the canal as “embarrassingly beautiful,” and I glimpsed the very early autumnal tint.

Someone described Jane, Ella’s beagle pup rescued from Ridglan this year, bounding down the path with the marchers, enjoying all her senses and freedom. That made me think of the marchers alongside her who are facing decades in jail for this spring’s pair of attempted open rescues to save Jane and 2,000 of her family at Ridglan Farms.

The 207-mile distance emphasizes the labor, resilience, and sustained effort that’s required. It reinforces the embodiment of the movement through bodily performance. They have agency, and their physical experience communicates and enacts the ethos of their activism.

I thought about the early marches I’d been on. The irony of the March of Dimes walkathon, navigating roads of the town I’d only ever seen from the car window. It felt empowering, families moving toward something. I didn’t know at the time we were raising money for animal testing.

Then a massive No Nukes march through Central Park and the streets of New York. Life-sized puppets, costumes, dancing, music, such an array of characters absolutely mind-blowing to a kid from the country. Riding on top of someone's shoulders. The whole world moving down the street. At the time, it was more party than existential threat.

Oh, how I want to be on the path with Ella and Gretchen and Jane and all the others converging Saturday on Marshall BioResources, the mega-breeder of animals for testing. They move, they hurt, they trauma-bond, they share and spread hope. They strengthen convictions. And knowledge: every night they give presentations and a call to action. And unlike Michelle who – although she had 24-7 support and spoke with strangers about factory farming until she had no voice left – was alone in her action, the marchers are in a pack, the pack is growing, and the message is getting out.

Yesterday there was a possibly great message from D.C., actually. I don’t like RFK Jr., head of HHS, and I don’t trust him. Flanked by Lara Trump and Lauree Simmons of Big Dog Rescue, and USDA Sec. Brooke Rollins, RFK announced federal plans to accelerate human-based research and reduce our reliance on animal testing. About time.

And about that timing: as MAAT marchers enter Syracuse today and step nearer to the Gates of Hell that is Marshall, it’s kind of like when RFK, President Trump, and Lara and Lauree swooped in to buy the freedom of Ridglan’s hostages. Swooped after activists fought with their bodies on the ground.

But we’ll take it. And we’ll take the government’s move in the right direction, hoping for the fundamental shift the talking heads are talking about.

Anyway, moving on, as our marchers are.

As long as we are not silenced, as in the literal assault of PETA’s Andrija Barak last week – her mouth and nose covered by a man’s hands and her body confined between his legs – we can choose to use our bodies, the greatest tools we have, in whatever way we think will make the change we want for animals.

Justice for Andrija. Justice for sheep and all animals farmed for their “materials.” Justice for Luna and all animals farmed for “food.” Gratitude and admiration for Michelle. Power to the marchers and hope for what may come.