Is Climate Change Really the Issue?

Let’s talk about plants. No, not the stuff the Beyond Burger is made out of – plants, as in “a thing put among someone’s belongings to incriminate or compromise them.”

In the lane of all that is anti-ag (aka the United Kingdom) two animal rights activists installed a plant which was a hand sanitizer dispenser full of fake blood outside of restaurants and butcher shops. When a customer left either one of those locations and used what they thought was a hand sanitizing station, they were met with palms stained by fake blood.

Now, there’s more to the story here than some fake blood.

I’ve read multiple articles on this topic and seen the first-hand — or should I say, red hand? — social media posts from people who were actually there and experiencing this act of protest. The hand sanitizer dispenser clearly talks about meat consumption and climate change, heck, the dispensers even read “you’ve been caught red handed.” However, the average person wouldn’t ever think they’d have red goo all over their hands instead of clear, traditional hand sanitizer.

I’ve also scoured the @handsanitiser Twitter account for any and all information about the stunts. In a poll done by Plant Based News, 59 percent of voters thought the protest was brilliant while 41 percent thought it was a terrible idea.

Another interesting aspect of this stunt I found on social media was that 80 different news outlets covered this act of protest which reached 498 million online readers and garnered 11,000 shares on social media…as of October 4. It’s safe to say Gaby and Jane, the two protesters, had their voices herd.

Although I find the act itself deceiving and the media attention nauseating, what intrigued me the most about this stunt was the reasoning behind it…

According to the news source Metro, “Gaby and Jane, a recently-converted vegan and vegetarian, told Metro.co.uk, ‘We thought that if the government aren’t going to take the climate crisis seriously and the role that the consumption of meat plays in this, then we would have to get the general public to take notice.”

Hmmm…climate crisis…tugging on the old “animal welfare” heart strings…how do those two things correlate?

As I’ve said before, when I started observing anti-ags four years ago climate was barely even on the radar of most vegans. Maybe, just maybe, this recent blaming of climate change on animal ag is from the popularization of vegan driven documentaries or the rise of alternative protein sources like Beyond Beef and Impossible Meat. But I personally believe it’s because the anti-ags couldn’t get the job done on the animal welfare argument alone.

Think about it, consuming animal protein was dubbed as “normal” in the early 2000’s, at that point the push to go vegan or vegetarian to save the animals had been happening for decades.

I whole heartedly believe animal ag and climate change became an issue when anti-ags realized people cared more about the planet than they did animals. Read that again, because I know it sounds bogus, but it’s true.

People are willing to put the needs of their habitat; the place they live; the place their grandchildren will grow up over their want to consume animal protein — but they weren’t willing to do it to “save the animals.”

That’s why when vegan protestors pull stunts like this it confuses me because they mask the issue as climate change when in reality it’s an issue of animal welfare.

The two people who placed these dispensers around the UK, they knew the explanation needed to be climate change for people to really think about their actions. That’s why the dispensers were covered in climate statistics and not animal death rates.

There’s many things I take away from this act of protest, but what I think the idea of finding animal-ag’s hook is the biggest thing for me.

Climate change is the animal rights activists’ hook, it’s what they KNOW will speak to people. So what is ours?

Think about it…and let me and all the other agvocates know when you figure it out.