The Save Movement and Farmed Animal Suffering: The Advocacy Benefits of Bearing Witness as a Template for Law

• Author: Maneesha Deckha
• Position: Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria
• Pages: 77-110

e Save Movement and Farmed

Animal Suering: e Advocacy

Benets of Bearing Witness as a

Template for Law

Maneesha Deckha*

is paper critically analyzes the practices and legal regulation of the growing global

phenomenon of the Save Movement, a (human) social movement directed at bearing

witness to and raising awareness of the suering of animals brutalized in intensive

farming. Save activists typically hold vigils as animals are transported from the

warehouses in which they were raised to their deaths in a slaughterhouse. rough the

lens of feminist relational theory and critical animal legal studies, the paper considers

the benets of the Save Movement for farmed animals as well as the capacity of the

law to participate in the act of bearing witness to farmed animal suering that the

movement advocates. I argue that bearing witness is not only a productive activity for

animal advocates to engage in, but also serves as a model for how the law can respond

to animals. Put dierently, I argue that the law should strive to bear witness to animal

suering, and that this subversive and partly socially subjectifying move for animals

can occur even in the present anthropocentric legal culture where animals are legal

property and clearly non-subjects.

* Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the

University of Victoria. Her research interests include critical animal

studies, animal law, critical food studies, postcolonial theory, feminist

theory, health law, and reproductive law and policy. Her scholarship has

appeared widely has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health

Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada. She also held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society

at New York University and currently serves as Director of the Animals

& Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria as well as on

the Editorial Boards of Politics and Animals and Hypatia. She is currently

completing a book project on feminism, postcolonialism and critical

animal legal studies.

78

Deckha, e Save Movement and Farmed Animal Suf‌fering

I. INTRODUCTION

II. THE SAVE MOVEMENT: AN OVERVIEW

III. BEARING WITNESS, RESPONSE-ABILITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY

A. What is Bearing Witness and Why is it Benef‌icial?

B. Witnessing Impediments: Humanitarian Logics, Imperial Saving, and

Shallow Sentiments

IV. BEARING WITNESS TO FARMED ANIMALS: WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE

ANIMALS?

A. A Socially Subjectifying and Multispecies Embodied Cultivation of

Response-ability

1. Emotional Entanglements: “Feeling With” and Sharing

Burdens as an Ethico-Political Act

2. “Close Bodily Encounters”, Multispecies Subjectivity, and

Agentic Representations

3. e Social Signaling to Carnist Humans and Humanist

Perceptions of Trauma

V. THE SAVE MOVEMENT’S BEARING WITNESS AS A TEMPLATE FOR

LAW

VI. CONCLUSION

I. Introduction

Bearing witness to suf‌fering as a form of social and political protest

as well as personal transformation is not a new concept for social

justice movements seeking to disrupt violent orthodoxies regarding

power and subjectivity. Bearing witness, however, as a form of organized

and collective protest to animal suf‌fering is a relatively new phenomenon

and growing worldwide. e Save Movement, as it is called, comprises

animal activists who gather together in their communities to bear witness

to animals in their actual experiences of suf‌fering, typically in their last

moments before death en route toward a slaughterhouse kill f‌loor. e

suf‌fering involved generally stems from the violent uses of animals in

normative, lawful industries, most often intensive animal agriculture,

and part of the aim of the Save Movement is to raise awareness of the

79

(2019) 5 CJCCL

horrors of this now routine and legal treatment of farmed animals.1

As a form of social and political protest, the acts of bearing witness are

not meant to be socially exhibitionist, directly connected to law reform or

even always legally transgressive. Save activists are often not attempting to

rescue the animals, whose suf‌fering and lives they have come to bear witness

to, from their eventual fates. ey are also not trying to capture public

attention through graphic images, provocative displays, or conversational

exchange. e movement is also not directed at circulating petitions for

eventual distribution to legislators or policymakers (although leaf‌lets and

pamphlets might be distributed, and the public verbally engaged at an

individual level).2 Given that Save activists do not usually seek to break

the law or verbally or vividly call attention to their cause, but rather

highlight and respond in the moment to the suf‌fering inherent in practices

and industries the law deems lawful through peaceful, primarily silent,

and ref‌lective observation and connection, we can understand the Save

Movement as qualitatively dif‌ferent from traditional forms of animal

advocacy protest.3 Critical analysis of the benef‌its of the movement

through its central trope of bearing witness as well as legal responses to

such acts can help us evaluate this emerging form of animal advocacy.

In what follows, I analyze the benef‌its of bearing witness to normative

violence against farmed animals within animal advocacy and law. I argue

that bearing witness is not only a productive activity for animal advocates

to engage in, but also serves as a model for how the law can respond to

animals, namely with compassion and empathy. Put dif‌ferently, I argue

that the law should aspire to bear witness to animal suf‌fering, and that

this partly socially subjectifying move for animals can occur even in the

1. Ian Purdy & Anita Krajnc, “Face Us and Bear Witness! ‘Come Closer,

as Close as You Can…and Try to Help!’: Tolstoy, Bearing Witness, and

the Save Movement” in Atsuko Matsuoka & John Sorenson, eds, Critical

Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice (London: Rowman &

Littlef‌ield, 2018) 45 at 45; Alex Lockwood, “Bodily Encounter, Bearing

Witness, and the Engaged Activism of the Global Save Movement”

(2018) 7:1 Animal Studies Journal 104 at 107.

2. Purdy & Krajnc, supra note 1 at 48; Lockwood, supra note 1 at 107–08.

3. Lockwood, supra note 1 at 107–08.