The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana writes about how Nonhuman Animals abused by humans have been rebelling against animal exploitation since it started, and vegans have joined them.
It’s not fiction.
When a few months ago I went to watch the movie “Animal Farm” (Andy Serkis’s animated movie based on the famous George Orwell’s novel), I knew that I was not watching a completely fictitious story.
In the book and movie, Snowball (who in the novel might have represented the Russian politician Leon Trotsky, persecuted by Stalin), the idealist pig on the farm who incites a revolt against the farmer, asks in a rallying speech the question, “Do you want to be food, or do you want freedom?” Consequently, the farmed animals revolt, kick out the humans, and take over the farm. Orwell’s original novel was written as a satire of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm overthrow their drunk human exploiter in the hope of creating a society based on equality and justice. However, as the pigs gradually accumulate power, the revolutionary ideals become corrupted until the new rulers become virtually indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. That is the fictional part…the revolt is not.
Nonhuman Animals have indeed rebelled against their abusers, and although they have often done it one individual at a time, sometimes they have done it in groups too. Is that surprising? It is not. Animal exploitation harms farmed animals, and all these animals — as any other animal — are sentient beings, and therefore they can distinguish between positive, neutral, and negative experiences, and act accordingly. When harmed or threatened, the “right” response to the abuse they receive is either to fight back or flee, but in captivity this natural behavioural pattern is severely restricted by fences, enclosures, or chains, so it ends up taking the form of “escaping” their bondage and servitude — either successfully managing to escape or attempting to. When we are talking about wild animals in the wild, the revolt may take the form of either successfully fleeing the attackers — so hunters and captors go home empty-handed — or directly fighting them back — in self-defence, of course.
I am sure animal revolts against humans happen constantly everywhere in the world, but they are hardly reported. Only a very few cases make it to the press because something spectacular happened that made them newsworthy. That could be a prolonged chase through urban environments, the fact that the animal was considered “dangerous” to people, the breakouts involving many individuals, or the event was very dramatic — often including shooting the rebel animals dead, or their summary execution once recaptured.
The whole thing is just read as “normal” by mainstream society, which considers itself entitled to do whatever it wants to the animals it exploits, but for us, vegans, this is another story. For us, these are examples — often very sad when recapture or death follows — of how our struggle for “animal liberation” is not only human. The victims of animal exploitation are fighting for their own freedom every day, and some individuals manage to take that fight a step further than most. This article is just an account of some of the most notorious cases, written as a homage to all fellow animal rebels who, like us, are fighting the current human Hypermasculine Patriarchal Speciesist Paradigm — as we vegans have been fighting since humanity made it the norm about 6,000 years ago (more about this later).
Wild rebels who fought back against human hunters
When a wild animal turns on a hunter, this should be considered normal, as that is what many of us would do if we had been the target instead and the hunter was close enough. No court would convict us for having acted in self-defence if we attacked the gunperson determined to kill us. Despite this, some of these defensive reactions from Nonhuman Animals make it to the press because, somehow, the hunters and the general population are surprised by fellow animals trying to defend themselves from the “supremacist” humans — and do it successfully despite all the technology at the hunter’s disposal. I guess it’s seen as a David vs Goliath story, but for the euphemistically called “game” animals, this is not an interesting tale or a game, but a matter of life and death.
The case of the unnamed elephant cow (Loxodonta Africana) who fought Theunis Botha and his hunting party in Zimbabwe in 2017 is a notorious example. Botha was leading a group near Hwange National Park when they encountered a breeding herd. When attacked, several elephants charged, one cow picked Botha up with her trunk, another hunter then shot her, and her dying body fell on him, crushing him to death. The mother elephant was trying to defend herself and her family, so she attacked the hunter with everything she had. Unfortunately, she paid with her life, and the only reason we have learnt about her story is that her lifeless body killed the hunter too.
A year later, in South Africa, a Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer caffer) also fought back. Professional trophy hunter Claude Kleynhans had just helped kill another buffalo and was preparing the body for transport when a member of the herd charged from the bushes and fatally gored him. Reports did not establish what became of the surviving buffalo, so we can only hope that this rebel returned to the herd and avoided the bullets.
Many of the wild animal rebels have died without anybody knowing how they tried to fight back against trophy hunters, but to no avail because the hunters shot them from far away — and then ridiculously claiming that was a brave act. In 2022, as part of a smuggling investigation, Spanish police seized more than a thousand hunting trophies, hundreds of them belonging to protected species such as tigers, elephants, snow leopards, white rhinoceroses, and polar bears (many of whom probably tried to fight back). Agents found on 10th April 2022 a private collection of more than 1090 stuffed animals estimated at €29 million ($32 million) at a 50,000-square-meter industrial warehouse in Bétera, near Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast. Among the desecrated bodies were the remains of 405 animals belonging to protected species, including the African scimitar oryx, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature declared extinct in the wild in 2000.
In 2020, a hunter in Oregon was tracking an elk (Cervus canadiensis) he had wounded with a bow. When he finally approached the injured animal in the dense brush, the male elk turned and used his antlers to gore the hunter directly in the neck, killing him on the spot. Though the elk was eventually tracked down and killed, he chose to fight back with the last of his strength, refusing to go quietly.
Resistance from wild animals is often more passive and strategic. Research on female elk in Alberta, Canada, found that, as they aged, they became progressively better at avoiding hunters, moving less, using steeper ground and seeking forest cover. By about nine years old, some had become almost invulnerable to human hunters. This is obviously learning by experience and transmitting this knowledge to further generations by reading the behaviour of armed humans, but it can also be seen as a successful evasion of clever Nonhuman Animals, giving the symbolic finger to the hunting community in an act of rebellion. Their rebellion leaves no dramatic photograph, precisely because it works.
Wild rebels who escaped captivity
Some wild rebels do not fight back but challenge their abusers by cunningly escaping captivity. They inspect the architecture of their prison, wait for a small failure in human vigilance, and leave, leaving the humans stunned. Few did this more elegantly than Inky, a common New Zealand octopus (Macroctopus maorum) kept at the National Aquarium in Napier. In 2016, after a lid was left slightly open, he climbed out of his tank at night, crossed the floor and squeezed into a narrow drainpipe leading to the Pacific. Staff followed the wet trail in the morning, but Inky was gone for good. Luckily, as far as we know, he was never recaptured. We cannot know how long he lived afterwards, but he reached the sea under his own power, which is about as happy an ending as any captive wild animal has written for himself.
Other rebel escapes were persistent rather than permanent. Ken Allen, a Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) at San Diego Zoo, repeatedly climbed out of an enclosure believed to be escape-proof during the 1980s. He generally walked around the zoo without harming visitors, sometimes pausing to look at other animals. Keepers watched him, disguised themselves as tourists and even hired rock climbers to identify every usable handhold. Ken Allen kept finding weaknesses, but he was always returned to captivity. Unfortunately, he died at the zoo in 2000 after developing lymphoma, so his victories were brief — but they were victories, nonetheless.
Then there was Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl (Bubo bubo) who escaped Central Park Zoo in 2023 through a hole in the mesh of his prison. Having lived in captivity for 13 years, he learnt to hunt rats and pigeons and evaded attempts to catch him. For more than a year, he chose his own perches over Manhattan, but his freedom ended sadly in February 2024, when he struck a building and died. The zoo’s postmortem examination also found a severe pigeon-borne virus and four anticoagulant rodenticides in his body, showing the lethal hazards humans have built into the urban world that make wild animal rebel escapees vulnerable.
On 30th June 2026, over 100 long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) broke out of an enclosure at the Lopburi Municipality Animal Nursery in Pho Kao Ton subdistrict, Mueang Lopburi district, in central Thailand, while staff managed to prevent more than 1,000 other primates from following them. Lopburi, which is famous for its annual Monkey Buffet festival that included giving fruits and vegetables to the local monkey population, was formerly home to a large number of free-roaming long-tailed macaques, but in 2024 the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation ordered around 2,500 of them to be rounded up and placed into large enclosures, following multiple incidents in which hungry macaques had become aggressive in their search for food. The brave monkeys rebelled en masse against this decision.
On 30th January 2023, officials sedated and captured a tiger (Panthera tigris) who was found walking through Edenvale, a residential area in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is believed that he was kept privately as an “exotic pet” and somehow escaped from captivity.
Honshu, a seven-year-old male Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), escaped from Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, near Aviemore, Scotland, on 28th January 2024, but after five days roaming in the Highlands, he was found, shot with a tranquillizer, and recaptured.
Three chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were shot dead after they escaped from their enclosure in Furuvik Zoo in Sweden and tried to find freedom before being killed on Wednesday 14th December 2022. Four other chimpanzees also escaped, and one was injured after being shot. Despite the zoo being closed for the season, so members of the public were not present, the zoo decided to try to kill the apes because they concluded they could not recapture them alive.
In December 2022, Leo, Renas, and Amani, three lions who tried to escape from their enclosure inside a base of Sudan’s paramilitary forces, were shot dead. The lions had recently been sold by the Sudan Animal Rescue Center, south of the capital Khartoum, to a private farm owned by the powerful paramilitary force of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and located in Omdurman, a suburb northwest of Khartoum.
In 2022, a chimpanzee was shot dead by zoo officials after escaping from its enclosure at the Attica Zoological Park in Athens, Greece. According to the zoo, the chimpanzee, who was a 27-year-old male, escaped his cage, leaving eight chimpanzees behind, got over an electric fence, and then went to the zoo’s parking lot, where he was finally killed. The zoo was privately owned and had been criticised in the past regarding the welfare of its animals, especially in reference to the dolphins it kept captive. Two jaguars (Panthera onca) were killed at the same zoo in 2018 after escaping their cages.
In 2024, two Camels (Camelus dromedarius) named Sampson and Artie tried to escape from the “petting zoo” of Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio, US, making families of visitors run for their safety as the animals galloped down the midway. A few days later, a herd of goats from the zoo also got loose after becoming frightened and ran through the park.
On 12th November 2023, social media saw a surge of videos of a lion (Panthera leo) walking around the seaside town of Ladispoli, Italy, for about six hours before he was sedated and taken into captivity again so the circus from which he escaped could continue exploiting him.
There are also Nonhuman Rebels against the vivisection industry. On 6th November 2024, 43 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) escaped from Alpha Genesis Research Center in Castle Hall Road, South Carolina, US. In 2016, 19 monkeys escaped from the same company’s facilities and were returned to Alpha Genesis after six hours. In 2022, three monkeys who escaped from a road crash in the US state of Pennsylvania on their way to being used in experiments in a vivisection lab were killed. One hundred long-tailed macaques — also known as crab-eating macaques — were being transported from New York to the lab in Florida when the accident took place. The crash happened on 21st January 2022 near the community of Danville, Pennsylvania.
In 2022, a baboon (Papio anubis) kept captive by a veterinary farm in the University of Murcia, southern Spain, escaped and was found trying to cross the motorway of the Agridulce urbanisation. A neighbour of Guadeloupe was the first to raise the alarm about a primate on the loose. Agents of the Local and National Police of Murcia and the Civil Guard, as well as members of Civil Protection, were put on alert to apprehend the animal. The Centre of Animal Protection of Murcia confirmed that the monkey was eventually anesthetised by a vet using a dart shot with a rifle. He was then taken back to the university, where it is not clear which type of research he was forced to endure.
Wild animals who fought back their captors
Captivity does not make a wild animal domesticated, and “training” does not amount to consent, just coercion. When animals used in circuses and marine parks fight their handlers, the industry often treats the event as an inexplicable lapse, but the captivity itself (the confinement, forced performances, painful training, separation and constant control) is the ignored explanation.
One of the most publicised and tragic cases of this type of animal rebellion happened in Honolulu, Hawaii, US, in 1994. The African elephant Tyke (Loxodonta africana) killed her trainer, injured another handler and escaped from a circus arena. She ran through the city for about half an hour. Police then surrounded her and killed her in a barrage of gunfire (she was shot 87 times!). Tyke had escaped during earlier performances, and evidence gathered around her case described violent handling by humans. Originally from Mozambique, Tyke was 20 years old when she was killed and had been forced to perform in arenas by the company Circus International. Several lawsuits were filed against Circus International, owner John Cuneo Jr., and other parties, which were settled out of court. According to Tyrone Taylor, one of the people who “trained” her (who was interviewed in the documentary film “Tyke the Elephant Outlaw”), Tyke had been involved in three incidents before the attack in 1994. She had escaped from performances in Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Canada, which shows how unhappy she was with her forced servitude and how irresponsible the circus trainers were.
When forced to perform tricks under threat of punishment, many wild animals reach a breaking point and strike back against their oppressors. The orca Tilikum was captured near Iceland when he was about two years old and spent the rest of his life in marine parks. He was involved in three human deaths, including that of trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010. After his death, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited SeaWorld for exposing trainers to recognised hazards while working in close contact with orcas. Tilikum’s name became known worldwide after the documentary Blackfish (2013) revealed his life of suffering. Years of confinement and lack of autonomy led to severe psychological distress. Tilikum remained captive until he died from a bacterial lung infection in 2017.
In 2007, a Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) named Tatiana scaled the 12-foot walls and 20-foot moat of her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and then attacked three men who had reportedly been harassing and provoking her, killing one. She was then shot dead by police officers.
In another tragic incident of circus abuse, an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) named Kelly turned on her handlers during a performance in Melbourne, Florida, in 1992. Carrying children on her back, she suddenly stopped listening to the bullhook, walked out of the arena, and threw off her burdens. Police opened fire and shot her dozens of times until she collapsed dead in the parking lot.
In 2016, a tiger was shot dead by police in Germany after reportedly attacking a keeper and escaping from a privately run facility near Leipzig. The tiger’s captor was Carmen Zander, a private trainer who kept several big cats at an industrial site and offered “educational” public interactions, including close encounters and petting sessions.
In October 2003, during a live performance at the Mirage, the tiger Montecore, who had been forced to perform in Siegfried & Roy’s Las Vegas stage show, seized Roy Horn by the neck and dragged him offstage, causing a stroke from blood loss and effectively ending the act. A longtime animal handler later said Horn made a handling error that startled the cat. Unusually for these cases, the tiger was not shot as a result of the attack, but died in 2014.
In February 2009, Travis, a 14-year-old chimp kept as a private “pet” in Stamford, Connecticut, US, attacked the friend of the person who kept him captive when she came to help coax him back inside, tearing off her hands, nose, lips, and eyelids. Police shot him at the scene.
Farmed rebels who escaped farms but did not make it
Farmed animals also try to escape the farms that keep them captive. For them, recapture often means that their original death sentence is simply restored. Nevertheless, their escapes — however brief — make visible individuals whom the animal agriculture industry had reduced to stock numbers, and whose execution would render them anonymous.
In February 2017, an unnamed bull escaped from a slaughterhouse and ran through the Jamaica area in Queens, New York City, while police cars followed him. Officers eventually shot him with tranquilliser darts. A sanctuary was reportedly ready to take him, but he died soon after capture. Local animal advocates held a candlelit vigil outside the slaughterhouse.
In October 2025, a Highland bull escaped from the holding area of the Isle of Man’s meat plant. Roads were closed, and nearby people were moved away. Police found him in a field and shot him dead, saying that he posed a danger to the public.
On 5th July 2024, a herd of 45 cows escaped from their confinement in a field and stampeded through Ripon, a town in North Yorkshire, UK, before their bid for freedom was dashed and they were recaptured. Several residents recorded the cows running through the streets and people’s gardens.
Similarly, on the 6th of September 2025, a group of 60 cows who had wandered from a neighbouring animal farm stirred disorder in St James’ Court, Harpur Hill, near Buxton, Derbyshire, UK, after escaping and invading a housing estate early in the morning. No injuries to residents or animals were reported, but the event did not end well because the cows, having been returned to the farmer, ended up being killed in a slaughterhouse when the farmer could no longer extract profit from their exploitation.
In 2021, 19 pigs were found running free on the M62 in Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. The pigs got on the lanes between junctions 12 and 11, according to the North West Motorway Police, which said that the pigs had escaped from a nearby farm.
On 22nd September 2024, eight bulls escaped from their pen during a rodeo event at the Emerald Square Mall in Attleboro, about 40 miles south of Boston, Massachusetts, US. Eventually, they were all caught and returned to the place where they were routinely abused for entertainment purposes, but the last one was caught in North Attleboro after being on the loose for more than a day.
In 2006, a cow from a Missouri riverside meatpacking plant jumped a gate, ran through streets, dodged a train and a semi-truck, and swam the icy Missouri River before being cornered near the riverbank. Tranquilliser darts failed to bring her down. Plant workers eventually walked her into a trailer using metal panels, and she was returned to the slaughterhouse where she was executed.
In 2022, six pigs jumped from the moving vehicle to escape their incoming death. Footage of the incident circulated widely, but reporting on their fate is limited.
On 24th April 2024, seven horses ridden by British Household Cavalry soldiers tried to escape their riders in Belgravia, London, UK, and four threw off their riders and ran through the city. Two of the horses sustained serious injuries after colliding with vehicles, and they were operated on. The horses of the Household Cavalry are forced to be ridden by the Army on the noisy streets of London to get them used to heavy traffic and loud noises, such as gun salutes and military bands. In this incident, one of the soldiers was thrown from his horse on Buckingham Palace Road before one of the escaping horses hit a taxi waiting outside the Clermont Hotel. A bus was also hit by the horses running, trying to escape the city in vain.
Sometimes the escapes are successful, but years later the rebels or their descendants are punished. In early February 2025, a group of feral pigs (believed to include hybrids between wild boar and domestic pigs) were spotted on the loose near Uath Lochans in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) said that the animals had all been captured and killed because their existence was considered illegal, and they did not want to give the animals to a sanctuary. The Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) said the pigs were “relatively domesticated”, considered non-native species, and appeared to have been abandoned and illegally released (although they might have escaped their captors instead).
In 2018, a cow in Poland escaped by ramming through a metal fence on her way to a slaughterhouse truck. She swam across Lake Nysa to an uninhabited island, where she lived independently for weeks. She charged at farmers and police who tried to catch her. After her bold stand became a national news story, local politicians intervened to ensure she would be sent to a sanctuary rather than killed, though she sadly died of heart failure during her capture process.
Farmed rebels who escaped slaughter and ended up in a sanctuary
There are also happy endings in the stories of farmed animal rebels. Sometimes the public refuses to let the story end at the slaughterhouse, or vegans and animal rights activists help the animal rebels to find refuge. These are rare cases, but they are very inspirational because they show that, sometimes, the rebels win.
In 1995, Emily, a Holstein cow, jumped a gate at a slaughterhouse in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. She remained free for around forty days, surviving a snowy winter while local people fed her and helped conceal her. Meg and Lewis Randa eventually bought her for one dollar and took her to the Peace Abbey, where she lived for another seven years. Emily died of cancer in 2003, not by the slaughterhouse’s schedule. A bronze statue now marks her grave.
Britain had its own famous pig rebels in 1998. Butch and Sundance, the Tamworth Two, squeezed through a fence while being unloaded at an abattoir in Malmesbury, swam across the River Avon and hid in dense vegetation for more than a week. They were recaptured, but the enormous public response made killing them commercially awkward. A newspaper bought them, and they were taken to a rare-breeds centre, where both lived into old age.
In 2016, a young cow named Freddie broke out of a Queens slaughterhouse in New York, US, and led police through the streets before being caught. At first, it appeared that he would be returned to be killed. Instead, Skylands Animal Sanctuary secured his release and took him to New Jersey.
In 2026, Mississippi the chicken was found in the middle of the night alone, sitting on a cold concrete floor inside an Australian slaughterhouse. Somehow, she had escaped the slaughter line that day. A compassionate human took her in and cared for her until she found her way to Liberation Sanctuary in Australia.
Mootilda the cow ran roughly three miles after escaping an Arizona slaughterhouse in 2025 but was caught and taken back. Sanctuary founder Aimee Takaha saw the footage, contacted the people involved and was given twenty-four hours to raise $2,500. Donors supplied the money, and Mootilda went to Aimee’s Farm Animal Sanctuary to end the rest of her life in peace.
On the 7th of June 2025, a young bull who had been seen running through the streets of Birmingham, England, was safely rehomed at Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Norfolk, following a dramatic escape that drew widespread public attention. A black Dexter bull named Liam was spotted by startled passers-by in the Digbeth area, near New Bond Street, shortly before 9:30 am on the 6th of June. The bull, believed to be around two years old, was reportedly fleeing from an abattoir when he found himself navigating busy city roads, at times darting through traffic and even being stopped by a truck as he neared a roundabout on Golden Hillock Road. Quick-thinking Birmingham City Council street cleaning crews, together with West Midlands Police, managed to safely contain Liam until he could be checked by an animal welfare team and transferred to police care. He was later safely rehomed at the Hillside Animal Sanctuary.
In 2025, a cow named Olive finally found refuge at Farm Sanctuary in New York, US, after months on the run from the dairy industry. Olive’s story began in July 2024, when she made a daring escape from a New York dairy farm. Like countless other cows, she was destined to endure a life of forced pregnancies, perpetual milking, and the inevitable separation from her calves. But Olive, driven by an innate desire for freedom, defied her fate and disappeared into the forest. For six weeks, Farm Sanctuary’s rescue team tracked Olive, their mission growing more urgent when reports surfaced that she might be pregnant. This concern turned to heartbreak when, upon finding Olive, they discovered she had already given birth. Tragically, her newborn calf was found in dire condition, suffering from untreatable musculoskeletal and joint abnormalities. In pain and with no chance of recovery, he had to be euthanised. Despite the trauma she endured, Olive found safety at Farm Sanctuary.
On 12th June 2024, staff at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in High Falls, New York, US, were alerted to a sheep who had been running loose in a local neighbourhood for days, with thick, heavy wool still hanging off him — which posed a great risk considering the deadly heatwave the country was going through. It turned out that he escaped a slaughterhouse and ran for days, and then he was caught by the USPCA, who held him in a neighbourhood yard so the sanctuary staff could come to get him.
In 2023, Stewie, a black Angus male calf who escaped a truck transporting him from a Pennsylvania farm to a slaughterhouse at Saba Live Poultry in Canarsie, Brooklyn, ended up at a New Jersey animal sanctuary. The calf ran for a long time through the streets until slaughterhouse employees and workers at a nearby pizza shop tried to catch him. However, Mike Stura, the owner of Skylands Animal Sanctuary and a vegan animal rights advocate, found out about him and managed to persuade those who were keeping the calf to release him. Skylands is currently the forever home of over 400 animals living together on 232 acres of pasture. Other new housemates of Stewie were Freddie, the other slaughterhouse escapee mentioned who made headlines after bolting from a cage in Queens, and Brianna, who jumped from a transport truck as it sped down Route 80 near Paterson, New Jersey.
In January 2018, a Dutch cow called Hermien escaped a slaughterhouse and took refuge in a forest near Lettele for six weeks. Locals rallied to save her by crowdfunding for her care at a cow sanctuary.
In 2011, German animal activists used a bull to lure and recapture a runaway cow named Yvonne, which was facing a hunter’s bullet in Bavaria after escaping from a farm near the town of Muhldorf. After her escape, Yvonne was bought by animal-rights activist Michael Aufhauser, who intended to capture her and transport her to his animal sanctuary, a former farm in Deggendorf, Bavaria. On 1st September 2011, Yvonne was captured in Unteralmsham, near Stefanskirchen, and taken to the Gut Aiderbichl animal sanctuary. She was euthanised at the age of 14 in September 2019 at the sanctuary.
In 2020, a sheep named Baarack was discovered roaming wild in a forest in Victoria, Australia, carrying over 35 kilograms of overgrown wool. He had escaped a farm years earlier as a lamb and managed to survive predators and harsh weather on his own terms. Rescuers from Edgar’s Mission took him in, sheared his oppressive fleece, and granted him a permanent home at their sanctuary.
The Vegan and Nonhuman Animal Rebellion
These Nonhuman Animal rebels, who were either martyred or ended up in sanctuaries living as happy lives as they could get — considering their traumas, deformities, and ailments — are an inspiration to all the vegan animal rights rebels who are building the vegan world of the future and fighting for animal liberation. That’s because we can relate. Not only because we sympathise with the oppressed, but because we are rebels ourselves. The vegan movement itself was driven by idealistic rebels who challenged the speciesist status quo of the time, well before the term vegan had been coined.
In fact, this “resistance” composed of ethical vegans, animal rights activists, and the rebellious Nonhuman Animals has been happening for the last 6,000 years in most parts of the planet where humans inhabit. This multi-speciesist alliance has been challenging the current Hypermasculine Patriarchal Speciesist Paradigm (a term I expanded from the “Hyper-Masculine Paradigm” the vegan geographer Bill Hatcher uses in his book The Red Planet), which, if we analyse the evolution of animal domestication and the spreading of key cultural traits (such as type of religion, language, and politics), we can pinpoint its origins to Western Asia around 6,000 years ago.
Around that time, two major cultural groups that have been named the Kurgans and the Semites (both terms not necessarily used by all archaeologists today) started to flourish and spread, the former from the Caspian-Pontic Steppes in the area above the Caspian and Black Seas, and the latter from similar terrain, but further south, toward the Levant area. These major umbrella groups — which, over the years, developed into many other better-known ethnic groups — share so many key features that I lump them together under the term Semi-Kurgans. These are those who perfected and spread the current Hypermasculine Patriarchal Speciesist Paradigm we are still under, and therefore are responsible for the level of widespread animal exploitation and speciesism we see today.
These features include coming from pastoral seasonally-nomad societies who lived in arid grasslands; exploiting domestic animals for work and not only food (cows and horses in the case of the Kurgans, horses and camels in the cases of the Semites); keeping domestic animals for food and fibre (mainly cows for the Kurgans and sheeps/goats for the Semites); drinking milk (and having mutations that allow them to digest it as adults) and eating dairy products and eggs; eating a lot of meat from domesticated animals; constantly invading their neighbours seeking new pastures; conquering or assimilating others imposing their worldview; often waging wars; living in patriarchal supremacist societies; having a dominant aggressive warrior culture; using metal weapons (initially from bronze); using wheeled vehicles to expand and migrate; and believing in a “Sky Father” God who lives in the Sky.
All this will sound very familiar to you, because we are still living under the paradigm they created, but before they turned up, humanity was very different. Homo sapiens sapiens has existed for about 300,000 years, but only in the last 6,000 we lived under this speciesist paradigm so centrally based in animal exploitation. Even when the agricultural revolution started about 11,000 years ago, we remained mostly a plant-centric species (characteristic of the entire Order of Primates we belong to, and even our Hominid ancestry, despite a period of a million years where our ancestors experimented with eating more meat that ended badly, with most of them becoming extinct). A better term for it should have been the “plant-based agricultural revolution” that was ruined with the advent of the Semi-Kurgans who, due to their technology (mainly bronze, wheels, and the use of horses as transport), spread faster than any other ethnic group before them, imposing their violent way of living on others.
We know quite a lot about the first Kurgans, the Yamnaya culture, but very little about the first Semites. However, we can trace their expansion because of the evolution of language (the former spoke the proto-Indo-European language, which explains why we find similarities in most languages in Eurasia, from Portuguese to Hindu languages, while the latter spoke the proto-Semitic language, the basis of the Semitic languages today, which include Arabic and Hebrew). Now genetics has confirmed all this.
The Yamnaya were the first Kurgans, but then they developed into other groups, such as the Sintashta, the Andronovo, the Scythians, the Aryans, and much later into the Greeks, the Persians, the Mongols, the Romans, the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, the Chinese, etc.
The first Semites developed into the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, and later the Hebrews, the Arabs, the Egyptians, etc. However, their “style” and worldview were so similar, that, when they both arrived at the same locations (like in ancient Greece, which uses a Semitic numeric system but a Kurgan-based language), the establishment of the new paradigm consolidated faster.
Much later, the transcontinental colonisers (like the French, British, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch) who imposed the Semi-Kurgan paradigm on most of the Africans, Americans, South-East Asians, and Oceanic people, can be confidently described as Semi-Kurgans, as they had equal influences from both cultures (for instance, the Spanish language is a mix of Indo-European influences from the Kurgans and Semitic influences from the Arabs; their main Christian religion comes from the Semites; their horse-riding tradition from the Kurgans but the most widespread horse breeds from the Arabs, etc.).
However, in most places where the Semi-Kurgans spread their social, political, commercial, and religious “franchise”, there would be people from the previous cultures who did not like it. There would be people who resisted their assimilation. These rebelled against the Semi-Kurgan model. As the Semi-Kurgans were all about being aggressive, eating lots of meat, exploiting animals, and believing in a single Father-God in the Sky, those rebels who resisted them were all about the opposite: opposing violence, rejecting meat, opposing the exploitation of others, and not following patriarchal monotheistic religions. I believe these rebels were the first “vegans”, millennia before the word was coined in England in 1944 by the founders of the Vegan Society.
For six millennia, the Semi-Kurgans, in whatever ethnic group they manifested themselves, have been “running the show”, but there have always been rebels who resisted them and tried to mobilise people into creating a movement which could challenge this recent “unnatural” paradigm (evolutionarily and culturally speaking), transforming isolated actions of rebellion into a fully-fledged revolution that would eventually get rid of the speciesist model (what we vegans call “The Vegan World”).
For instance, in the ancient Kingdom of Magadha (in today’s north India), the Shamanic monks (which included Mahavira, the 24th teacher of the Jain Religion, and Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism) were anti-establishment monks preaching against the established Vedic religions that were brought from the North by the Aryans (one of the classical Kurgans descended from the Yamnaya). Or Lao-Tzu, one of the founders of Taoism, reacting against the establishment’s socio-political system of Confucianism in China, which was trying to go back to the old days of the Shang dynasty (the one that got the bronze and horses from the newly arriving Kurgans from the West). Or the Essenes, the vegetarian Jewish sect from the 2nd century BCE reacting against the established Semitic religion of Judaism (from which the Nazarenes might have developed, one of them possibly being Jesus of Nazareth). Or Pythagoras, creating his own vegetarian religion, challenging the speciesist meat-eating Greek Orthodoxy. Or the fully vegan (by today’s standards) Syrian poet of the 11th century Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri, challenging the Islamic Empire from within. Or, naturally, Donald Watson, Sally Shrigley, Fay K. Henderson, Dorthy Morgan, and the rest of founders of the Vegan Society who met in the Attic Club in London in 1944, and decided to leave the Vegetarian Society and create a new one which could become the ultimate peace movement and finally challenge (through a truly universal and secular socio-political movement) the violent paradigm they directly experienced under the grim reality of the war between two Semi-Kurgan factions they were being dragged in (and they, as true rebels, rebelled against this not only by rejecting speciesism excluding all animal products, but also by becoming objectors of conscience and pacifists).
The Nonhuman Animals who rebel within the circumstances of their lives and the opportunities presented to them, and the vegans through history who also rebel within the circumstances of their lives and cultures, are fighting the same oppressors’ systems. They are fighting the Hypermasculine Patriarchal Speciesist Paradigm created and spread by the Semi-Kurgans (and their ideological descendants) in the last 6,000 years, trying to liberate all sentient beings trapped in it. We are all resisting where we can, when we can, and how we can, united by a kinship and sense of purpose. We are the “Resistance”, building rebellions from revolts.
Inky, Ken Allen, Flaco, Honshu, Leo, Renas, Amani, Sampson, Artie, Tyke, Tilikum, Tatiana, Kelly, Montecore, Travis, Emily, Butch, Sundance, Freddie, Mississippi, Mootilda, Liam, Olive, Stewie, Brianna, Hermien, Yvonne, Baarack, and countless Nonhuman Animal rebels whose existence has not been forgotten are just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-species revolution I, and my fellow vegans, are proud to have joined. One that has been taking millennia to develop, and which will eventually return humanity to where it should ecologically, biologically, culturally, and philosophically belong.
The Vegan Revolution is not fiction.
