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Save witness company

My name is Amy Jean Davis, I am the founder and executive director of LA Animal Save. LA Animal Save is a part of a global network of groups. We are actually the largest Animal Save group in the whole world. Los Angeles has so many amazing activists who come down every week to bear witness to the pigs. It's just the right thing to do and I'm grateful to have this position of running the group and just bearing witness with everyone. Part of why we have such a great partnership with the slaughterhouse and with the police department the Save Movement is love-based, we're there to bear witness, it's not an angry protest, we don't engage with conflict with anyone. Why I became an organizer with the Save Movement, they had asked me if I would organize a group. Luckily some awesome people from Toronto Pig Save and the Save Movement saw my online activism, and also had seen that I was a finalist on American Idol a few years prior and they invited me to that pig vigil which eventually lead me to organizing LA Animal Save. At a vigil, the whole point is to bear witness to the animals. Our immediate mission is to have as many groups as possible at as many slaughterhouses as possible so that at these places of violence there are people out there speaking up for the animals and bearing witness to them. So we are there to give them water, try to relieve their thirst for a moment, we give them love, and we see them for the individuals that they are. Just because these animals are moments away from their death, doesn't mean that they should be ignored, that we should turn away from them. At first, with LA Animal Save it was just me and my partner Shaun Monson, who is the filmmaker behind Earthlings and Unity, and he co-produced Dominion, and he helped me a ton. He was helping me every week, and so Shaun has been there from the beginning helping me every step of the way, and so, in the beginning it was really just he and I. Today, we have a handful of people that handle not just the pig vigils but we also do monthly fur vigils, we do bi-weekly chicken vigils and also bi-weekly cow vigils. At our vigils, we actually sometimes get to save some lives. We're there for the animals and so if that means talking with the workers, talking with the owners, and asking for them, we get them. Most of those chickens live at Love Always Sanctuary, which is a sanctuary right here in LA. The vigils are very important for the overall animal rights movement because this is where you actually get to see who we are fighting for, who we are speaking out for, and the least that we can do is to bear witness to them and speak about them to other people. We have over 900 groups now, you guys are a part of the largest Save group on the planet so, you know, just be proud of yourself for coming down here, being willing to be at a slaughterhouse to bear witness to this cruelty and to make a statement for the world that we want to shift away from this institutionalized violence into a world that is built upon compassion and peace and get rid of the oppression and injustices. We're here tonight as part of that, to tell people, eat plants, choose to live by loving instead of by killing because if you sit down to eat no matter what other causes you're fighting for, don't add to the violence by eating animals. I've never been here before, it took my mom and I a second to like build up our confidence to come here and build up our strength, but I could not be happier to be here. Everybody coming together for like their shared just love of animals and knowing that this is wrong and that this needs to end, this needs to stop. It's heartbreaking, especially when the empty trucks pull out of the slaughterhouse. I mean there's, you don't even want to think about what's happening next, but it's just letting them know that they are loved, and they didn't leave this earth not being loved, and that they got their last taste of water, and they just they were surrounded by smiles, and I think that that's all anybody can ask for in their last moments and I wish they could have so much more of that but just being able to give them this little bit is so important. It just, I knew it all existed but I think every person needs to really see it but as I was mentioning I think the thing that hit me the most was, the tears were flowing on my kids the minute they first saw the first truck, the most impactful thing for me was when the truck went in and then came back out empty and I realized that's it, I mean, that's it. So I just kind of put hands on each one that I could reach, my kids had the water bottles. It's just really hard. It's really hard. And as a 56-year-old woman, to think that I ate those animals for forty-something years, it's just, I wish I could take it back. I'm so proud I raised a daughter who can't wait to have a vegan child that will never touch meat so at least I can know that my legacy is good, and my son is going to go out and advocate for animals with his career so I did good as a mom but I still am embarrassed and ashamed for all the animals that I ate, and I wish I could take it back. So this is my way of paying them back. The thing that made me vegan was the dairy industry and what happens with the dairy industry, what happens with these mothers, and I couldn't be a part of that. These animals are raised, forcibly impregnated, bear their young nine months later, the babies are taken away and killed, and she's milked, and she's re-inseminated, and she has another baby, you know, nine months later. These dairy cows, once they become spent and go to the slaughterhouse, most of them are still pregnant. The farmers aren't taking the time to figure out and calculate which of these females, which of these mothers are gonna be going to slaughter at some point so that I should not re-impregnate them now. And so, if you ever can get to one of these slaughterhouses and see when they dump the insides of the animals that's not gonna go off to like, you know, the meat market, you'll see fetuses on every level of the spectrum of development from, you know, little tiny ones that you can see with your eyes still, all the way to a fully-formed baby that was days from being born. To participate in that kind of violation of a mother, once I learned that I was like if I'm doing this in any way because of cruelty towards animals, I can't have dairy in my diet either. There's no right way to do the wrong thing, and the dairy industry and the egg industry are almost more violent than just the general meat industry and more people need to know that. A wild chicken would lay less than 2 dozen eggs in a year, and now she's laying up to 300. So many egg-laying hens die from egg binding, where their body tries to produce an egg and it doesn't get fully formed so it doesn't come out, and then the body starts developing another egg, and that gets crammed up behind the one that didn't come out, and she becomes completely impacted with eggs, and she dies. Around 18 months, 24 months of age, she's gonna decline in her egg production so much so that she's no longer profitable for the farmer so he's gonna send her off to slaughter, and then just get another round of hens to take their place. If you want to actually not partake in any of that violence, there's no animal product you can consume, period. The pigs that we actually see are these 4 to 6-month-old babies. These animals come mostly from factory farms. In America, animal products are factory farmed, 95-99 percent of them come from factory farms. These pigs come from terrible, unnatural conditions. The abuse of them actually starts before they're even born. These mother pigs live in what's called a gestation crate, and it's so small that she can never turn around. Essentially they're living on mostly slatted concrete. After about three weeks, the piglets will be taken from her, she'll be re-inseminated and spend the next four months in the gestation crate, and then to the farrowing crate to give birth, and it just goes on and on for around two and a half years, and then she'll be sent to slaughter. Living in crowded, filthy warehouses, with no direct sunlight and nothing to root around in. Living amongst the dead, these animals are diseased and dying, and it's just, it's absolute terror from before they're born, all the way up until they lose consciousness in the slaughterhouse. They are driven inside the gate into these places where they're going to die a violent, fear-filled death They're not idiots, they smell the death, it's everywhere in the air, even when they're outside the slaughterhouse waiting. And we all get to walk back to our cars and drive home to our beds at night. Kill workout but not animals. My name is Franco Carlotto. This is my son, Dexter, and I went vegan four years ago. I'm actually a fitness expert, and I used to compete in fitness so I, the moment I looked into it, and I always loved animals, it was just so obvious to do it because I just cannot stand behind it anymore, and he went vegan 2 and a half years ago, and yeah, it's just life is so much more peaceful, beautiful. More people are gonna come to the vigils, more people will be inspired to stop eating animals, more people will be inspired to become activists. And for the greater movement, the greater global movement, I see so many people joining us that we're able to change government policies, change food systems, and get away from this institutionalized violence against the most vulnerable beings on the planet, and not just individual change but system change, and it's going to happen so quick, it's going to become so weird and gross to continue to eat animals. So that's what I see, I see a vegan world in the future, in our future, our very near future.