‘I’m not going to stop’: Vegan activist leader vows to ramp up restaurant ‘disruptions’

MELBOURNE diners were left upset recently after vegans stormed a steakhouse but the group has vowed to keep “going inside”.

THE head of a vegan activist group that stormed a Melbourne steakhouse restaurant over the weekend has vowed similar protests at least “once a month” and says chapters are springing up in Geelong, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Joanne Lee from Direct Action Everywhere, which teamed up with the Melbourne Cow Save group to protest inside the Rare Steakhouse on King Street on Saturday night, said the goal was to “force” their message onto the public.

Ms Lee said the next protest would involve “shutting down a slaughterhouse” in coming days, with between 40 to 60 people expected to take part. “What we want to do is get between the animals and the blade,” the 33-year-old said. “That involves disrupting, so going inside.”

The group — which formed last September for a disruption at a chicken festival at the Preston Food Truck Park and has protested at a Gippsland cow milking festival, inside a Melbourne food court and the Star Poultry slaughterhouse — has an estimated 30 members.

“I’ve been mentoring someone in Geelong so a Geelong group has just been established, which is awesome,” Ms Lee said. “There’s also a group just getting going in Brisbane and I’ve also been approached from Adelaide saying they want to start Direct Action up there too.”

She said her objective was to “keep our team members engaged” and “keep them going once a month”. “We’re going to be doing all sorts of things, you could see us in restaurants, in markets, at expos,” she said. “We’ll be hitting up restaurants or any sort of place that uses animals for food, clothing or entertainment.”

The group is planning more protests within days.

A protest at a Gippsland milking marathon.

The group has about 30 members and growing.

A protest at Star Poultry in response to leaked footage.

The group shut down the slaughterhouse for several hours.

“This kind of action is needed for society to change.”

According to Ms Lee, 99 per cent of the vegan activist community were “passive activism groups”. “They do outreach or rallies [such as] on the steps of the library in Melbourne,” she said.

“The thing is, if you walk past an outreach venue you can pick and choose whether you want to engage, whereas Direct Action is about disruptions, sit-ins, basically forcing the message into the public consciousness whether they’re receptive to it or not.

“It’s about forcing the issue into the public agenda and getting animals’ voices heard.”

While staff at the Rare Steakhouse described Saturday’s protest as “very upsetting”, Ms Lee said such protests were “uncomfortable” for the activists. “I know people from the outside think, ‘They’re loving this’, but it is uncomfortable,” she said.

“I have to keep going, ‘Are you okay?’, reminding them, ‘This is why we’re going.’ People think we’re unorganised and reckless but a lot of planning goes into it. It’s actually pushing us outside of our comfort zones.

“Our motive is not to stay there for that particular action and to resist [police] and refuse to leave, it’s not about that. It’s about going in, high energy, big impact, and then leaving.”

She added that much of the criticism on social media from fellow vegans was from “people trolling our page posing as vegans”. “But yeah, most certainly there were vegans that said they didn’t agree,” she said.

“What I would say is those vegans are still affected by a thing called ‘speciesism’. If you put their dog or rescue animal in the place of those animals in the slaughterhouse, they would be horrified. They feel uncomfortable [about our methods] but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach, it just means it’s outside of their comfort levels.”

Ms Lee likened the movement to social justice movements of the past. “If people didn’t break the law and push boundaries, black people would still be enslaved, women wouldn’t have the right to vote,” she said. “This kind of action is needed for society to change. It’s about creating tension.”

She said some vegans who criticised her group’s first action at the chicken festival had now adopted similar tactics. “We got torn apart for that, [but] a lot of those vegans have now purchased megaphones and they’re doing their own disruptions,” she said.

“I think it takes a while for these things to become normalised. Israel recently had an animal rights march where 30,000 people turned up. We’re not quite there yet.”

Ms Lee said she was not going to stop.

“It’s important to take our message out there,” she said. “There is a massive disconnect between where people think their food comes from [and the reality]. When you buy these products from the supermarket, their bodies are dismembered and don’t resemble the animals they came from.”

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