In 1998, Jo-Anne McArthur was in Ecuador when she saw a monkey chained to a windowsill. He had been trained to pick tourists’ pockets. Around her stood onlookers who found it incredibly amusing. However, McArthur found herself reaching for her camera; not to capture the spectacle, but to capture something else. She wished to capture the degradation she witnessed.
The impulse behind the photograph planted the seed of what would grow to be one of the most significant animal photojournalism projects in the world.
Jo- Anne McArthur turns 50 this December. With that, it seems appropriate to spotlight one of her notable projects.
Who She Is
Jo-Anne McArthur is a Canadian photojournalist, animal rights activist, and author born in 1976. Her work has been published in National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Canadian Geographic, and dozens of other major outlets. Her images have been used by hundreds of organisations, publishers, and academics working across animal advocacy, policy, and education.
In 2013, she was the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary that followed her as she documented the plight of exploited animals around the world and advocated for their moral rights. The film brought her work to a wider audience and established her, in the eyes of many, as one of the most important voices at the intersection of photojournalism and animal rights, with her undeniable ability to capture a subject’s essence; a subject who is typically not considered.
She has spent her career entering spaces most people never see and bringing back images of what happens there. It is painstaking and emotionally demanding work. This observably has not stopped her.
What We Animals Is
We Animals may have started as one person with an urge to capture a significant moment, but it has developed into something far larger.
Drawn from thousands of photographs and videos taken over fifteen years, the project illustrates and investigates other animals used by humans, be it for food, fashion, entertainment, research, or in ways that the general public genuinely couldn’t have even imagined. It also documents a positive alternative, like rescued animals spending their remaining years in sanctuaries after surviving systems that were never designed with their interests in mind. It documents plant-based alternatives that are available or in development. The full spectrum of the human-animal relationship is displayed through the vessel of serious photojournalism.
In 2019, We Animals became a nonprofit organisation. McArthur built the infrastructure to match its ambition.
What It Has Become
Today, We Animals is a global operation.
More than 120 international photojournalists contribute to the project, covering animal industries across more than 80 countries. The archive contains over 40,000 pieces of media; everything from farrowing crates in pig farming to wildlife exploitation, laboratory animals, and the sanctuaries that exist to combat some of what those systems have done.
The scale matters. It means that when an organisation needs images of a specific practice in a specific country, this evidence exists. It is common for someone who is unaware of what happens to animals to insist that such horrors don’t exist in the country they’re from, but this site demonstrates how widespread practices are adopted. It means industries which have historically operated behind closed doors have had the door kicked open visually and verifiably.
Practices like farrowing crates, which confine sows in spaces too small to turn around, are shown not as isolated incidents in one farm in one country, but as the global standard they are.
According to the 2025 annual report, more than 50,500 visuals were downloaded from the We Animals stock platform last year alone, generating 6.2 million social impressions, with collaboration from countless NGOs and media outlets telling animal stories they would not otherwise have the visual language to guide the description.
Why It Matters
Industries that profit from animal use probably prefer to operate out of sight: visibility is uncomfortable. It requires the observer to assess what they are seeing, to feel something about it, to sit with the gap between what they believe about animals and what is being done to them.
McArthur’s work helps close that distance. It shows you a face, or often a crowd of faces. It shows individuals who are no longer here as a result of the moral crime that became the footage. Many people don’t get the chance to make a connection or have this knowledge.
The monkey on the windowsill in Ecuador in 1998 was entertaining a crowd that hadn’t stopped to ask what it cost them. McArthur considered this question. Ever since, she has used her camera to ask very simple yet powerful questions about our relationship to other animals.
50 Years
As an organisation, Vegan FTA has utilised the documented work of We Animals to help others connect to feeling beings of a different species, and would like to wish Jo-Anne McArthur a wonderful Birthday. The animals you have spent your career making visible are grateful, even if they will never know what you did.
