The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana interviews Daniel Hellmann, the artist, performer, musician, filmmaker and the vegan behind the flamboyant drag cow “Soya the Cow”, who is breaking all the moulds of vegan activism.

I did not have a very good day.

I am not going to dwell on why — as this is not the place — but we all go through rough patches now and then. If you are a vegan like me, and you do vegan activism as I do, we all have experienced different forms of “burnout” that manifest in different ways. Sometimes it is the gravity of the subject matter that pushes us down. Sometimes it is the tensions intrinsic to any social movement — with people pushing in different directions and outsiders trying to mess with it. Sometimes it is simply “compassion fatigue”, a real phenomenon many activists experience. Sometimes it is, simply, the direction the wind goes — and nothing more to it.

I have been in animal protection for over 30 years, and I have been a vegan for over 25, so I am old enough to recognise these “down” patches and remember they are just temporary. They are just bumps on a very treacherous road; turbulence in a very long flight.

When you choose to be a vegan activist mainly through writing, and you are lucky enough to be able to make a living from it (I have been doing it for the last six years, becoming a freelance writer for different clients, all vegan organisations), you have to write a lot. Every day I need to be writing, and that requires a lot of concentration and a trouble-free mind. That’s not always easy to do, especially when you have a bad day.

Among the types of articles I write, I do long interviews with prominent vegans in the movement, or vegans who I think contribute to the building of the vegan world uniquely and excitingly. Last month I met one of these vegans when I participated in the International Animal Rights Conference (IARC) in Luxembourg, and I thought it would be great if I could write an interview about her. I was so impressed with what she did, how she did it, and the impact she was having on anyone else that I thought I had to interview her. The problem, though, is that she is not human. She is a cow. Not a typical cow, but a very extraordinary one. She is, in fact, a drag cow that goes by the name “Soya the Cow” and performs in all sorts of venues and situations, sending a very strong vegan message.

I could have interviewed her, but I thought it would also be very interesting to interview the Swiss Daniel Hellmann, the human being behind Soya who, from anyone in this world, knows her the best. This amazingly award-winning, talented vegan activist has channelled Soya’s existence in the form of several drag performances that are sending the vegan message in unique and extraordinary ways to all sorts of audiences who otherwise may have never been reached. Someone who has found another way to do what we do, and who does it very well.

I interviewed Daniel a couple of days ago, and before I sat down to write this article, my bad day struck me. How can I do justice to Daniel and Soya if I am not in the mood to write? How can I support such a nice and decent human being, full of warmth and talent? How can I do this?

Then I opened the folder where I saved some of the photos he sent me for this interview, and I saw her. I remembered how Daniel had shared his doubts and trepidations about his work, wondering if it really is effective. I remembered how I could read in his gentle face all the hidden struggles that we activists must endure through our work. I remembered feeling the “fighting spirit” all true artists exude in their expression, challenging the status quo and being subversive to convention. I remembered all this, and then I saw her, Soya the Cow, with horns and all, as a beam of light. As a touch of clarity; as a statement of purer truth — revealed by destroying the stereotype through amplification. A powerful being breaking conventions and cracking moulds with dramatic, exaggerated sweeps of colourful visual and auditory statements, leaving the bare truth behind, staring at us.

Soya broke my bad day and made me smile. 

If you want to know more about the queer, vegan, rebel, loving human being from Switzerland who conceived the most extraordinary Swiss cow in the world, this is the place.

Daniel’s Vegan Journey

Soya the Cow is vegan, but so is Daniel, who not only follows a plant-based diet but is an actual vegan activist who has been fighting for animal rights in multiple forms for years. The way I look at it, he is not an artist who happens to be vegan, but a vegan who happens to be an artist. He told me how he remembers the vegan journey that made him the vegan he is today (and which led to the creation of Soya):

“I grew up in Switzerland, in a Jewish family of secular, left-wing parents. So, I grew up with a lot of discourse around social justice and anti-capitalism. But we were also meat eaters. Every single meal, almost. It took me many years to connect the social justice dots with the animal justice dots. 

When I was 15, I was doing schoolwork about genetically modified feed. I visited a pig farmer, and it was the first time I actually saw the living conditions. They were so atrocious that I decided to go vegetarian. I had a few years as a young adult when I went back to eating meat — I honestly don’t even fully recall the reasons.  It just kind of slipped into my life.

Then I became vegetarian again, in my early 20s. I always had this identity of never wanting to harm an animal. But I was not always acting coherently with that self-image.

In the meantime, I developed my professional career; I became an artist. I was working a lot on topics of sex worker rights. Who can control whose body, and who has the possibility to give consent or not? When do we respect someone’s physical and sexual autonomy, and when do we not? How is that interrelated with power, with desires, etc. And I found it was full of hypocrisies. For me, these questions expanded to the questions of other bodies: animal bodies. I’m a gay man, so how does the queer community speak so much about these things like consent, sexual freedom, but we fully deny them to animals?

My focus artistically first shifted into that field, and I decided to make a show about meat in 2016, ‘Requiem for a Piece of Meat’, premiering in 2017. I was interested in the absence of human death, at least in our public life, whereas animal death was omnipresent. I was interested in this contradiction. 

While preparing that theatre project, I was reading a lot. I was also visiting farms, for example, where they shoot the animals on the farm. I witnessed these things with the aim of fully diving into this domain. While researching, I found this book by Hilal Sezgin. She’s a German philosopher who also runs a sanctuary with a lot of elderly sheep. I read her book in German called ‘Artgerecht ist nur die Freiheit’ (translating as keeping an animal appropriately to the species, something like that). But it says the only way to do that is freedom. While reading that book, I learned that cow’s milk is mother’s milk. It was so funny, sitting in a big bed in Berlin learning this for the first time. I remember my bedroom; I read that, and I was like, ‘What?’ It’s a typical story, but for me, it was such a shock. I had thought that I was standing on the right side for being a vegetarian, and suddenly I was discovering that it was still the wrong side. 

So, I decided to go vegan the same day. I had a few days of failure because I had such a heavy addiction to cheese, but the decision was made then. It took me a few weeks to fully adapt to it. That was 2016, so it’s been 10 years now. 

But the journey, I would say, continued, because one thing was my inner learning, and then the other was how do I incorporate that as an artist, as a citizen, as a human being participating in society? So, in a way, it was just the beginning of another whole big journey.”

Daniel’s Professional Journey

Daniel’s career as an artist is truly remarkably long and successful, considering his relatively young age. This is what we can read in his biography: 

“Since 2012, Hellmann has been creating interdisciplinary works in changing collaborations within his association 3art3. His pieces intricately weave together performance, language, music and movement. Hellmann’s work investigates the body, bodily relationships and desire, while questioning social norms related to sexuality, human rights and animal rights. His performances have received several awards, including the June Johnson Dance Prize (2015), and have been invited to major platforms such as Sélection Suisse en Avignon (2015, Traumboy), Swiss Selection Edinburgh (2019, Traumboy & Traumgirl), and Swiss Dance Days (2019, Requiem for a Piece of Meat). Since 2018, Hellmann has been performing as his artistic alter ego Soya the Cow – a vegan drag cow. As Soya, he has created the solo Dear Human Animals (2020), the music album Purple Grass (2021), and several music videos. Through Soya the Cow, Hellmann increasingly explores photography and film. In 2022, he created the solo exhibition Planet Moo, shown at the Goethe Institutes in Seattle, Houston, Kansas City, and later in Geneva. The exhibition presents masks, costumes, photo and video works, and artistically explores the connections between food, agricultural systems and the climate crisis. In 2023, Hellmann’s work as Soya the Cow led to residencies in Taiwan and Brazil and earned him a cultural award from the City of Zurich. Since 2024, Soya has also been the “House Cow” Artist-in-Residence at Tanzhaus Zurich. That same year, the video podcast series The Meltdown and the new music theatre piece Queere Tiere were premiered — the latter was shortlisted among the year’s outstanding theatre works by the Swiss Theatre Meeting. From 2018 to 2021, Hellmann curated the performing arts programme of La Fête du Slip — an interdisciplinary festival on gender and sexualities in Lausanne. In 2024 and 2026, he conceived and curated the biennial Arten Festival — a cross-species, cross-disciplinary weekend festival at Hof Narr animal sanctuary, featuring artworks created with, for, or alongside the animals living there — in the goat barn, between fruit trees or on the manure pile.” In 2025, he also received a Swiss Performing Arts Award.

Let’s find out how some of this happened in his own words:

“The neighbourhood I grew up in was the most socially mixed neighbourhood in Zurich. Back then, in the 90s, half of the population were supporters of Switzerland’s national-conservative right, and half of them were migrants, a lot of them from former Yugoslavian countries, but also Turkey, Italy, and Spain. It was very conflictual. I was this Jewish, queer, intellectual kid having to run home to not get beaten up every day. And I didn’t fit in; I had no friends.

I then joined a boys’ choir, and this was the first place where I had friends. I felt that I was not such a total weirdo. I had a very positive association with singing and music that I learned from when I was seven in that choir. 

On the other side, I was always very interested in political, social, and philosophical topics. For a very long time, it always felt a bit like there were two different paths for me. Me as a musician and me as a political being.

I first studied philosophy for two years; I was very interested in ethical questions around life and death, like euthanasia and abortion rights. I thought they were so essential. But then I decided to drop it and study singing. It felt like there was a path for my heart and my soul, and the path of the political being who I am. Now I feel I found this perfect blending spot, but it took me a long time.

I went to the music academy, and I started singing opera. I loved the emotional worlds of the music, but the context felt too bourgeois and too elitist to me. It was a repertoire of deceased white male composers, and the plots were often sexist. So, towards the end of my studies, I felt the clear need to do something else.

I had this urge not to just be a voice inside of somebody else’s artistic work, but to create my own work. That’s why, in 2011, I signed up for a master’s program for theatre makers in Bern. It was performance art, very interdisciplinary. It was not about doing Shakespeare and Goethe projects but really creating our own artistic worlds. I loved it; I felt that, finally, my paths came together.

I finished my second master’s in theatre and performance art, and then I immediately started making my own projects and doing collaborations with other artists.

Quite quickly, I was getting recognition from the art funding institutions. I had a lot of drive, a lot of visions and bold ideas for a beginner. Between 2014 and 2015, I did a series about sex work topics. These were basically two projects that started to tour internationally. I got more international recognition with them. Then, 2017 was a key year, with ‘Requiem for a Piece of Meat.’ It was a big group project with five musicians, four dancers and me, but I realised that I couldn’t bring along my team to my ideas. I had done all this research and learning. I had become vegan, and I had such a clear political standpoint, but not my dancers, not my musicians. I felt very disappointed. How could I make art that would convince the audience to change their diets, if I couldn’t even convince my own team? 

I had to realise that the art world, which had been my resonance chamber for many years, didn’t share my values. I also had to accept that I had spent so much energy and funds on making art, and in the end, it didn’t really benefit any animal. The show didn’t really make a difference for the animals. It was about them. But not really for them. This started a whole crisis: How do I work? For whom? Who do I want to be?  And that’s when Soya the Cow was born, basically out of despair.”

Soya the Cow, the First Vegan Drag Cow

Soya the Cow is the alter ego of Daniel. She does not always look the same. Her horns and clothes change. Her makeup varies. Her legs sometimes have platform shoes, sometimes not. However, no matter how different she looks, you can always tell you are seeing Soya, not different characters. Soya the Cow was created by Daniel, and he embodies her when he performs inside her, dancing in a dramatic drag style, singing with a very mellow lower voice, and playing the keyboard beautifully, but she has become a real being in her own right. She exists not only as a drag act, but as a creature. A creature created by Daniel but now living both outside and inside him. Here is what Daniel has to say about her birth:

“She was created by luck. I did not know how to continue. It was a crisis with my own work, but also a crisis with my relationship to the context that allowed me to exist, such as applying for funds, making a theatre piece, touring the piece, etc.

I was also so disconnected from what the actual animal rights activists were doing on the ground, but I was lucky to have a scholarship for an artist residency in San Francisco. There, I was meeting DxE activists, and I was reading their 40-year pathway to animal liberation. It was new for me to see that some people were doing so much more than just being vegan or creating discourse about animal rights. They were strategising, campaigning, rescuing animals out of their oppressive systems.

I was also seeing a lot of drag artists, drag queens, drag kings, and drag monsters. There was a very broad drag scene in San Francisco. And it was Trump’s first presidency, so there was a lot of fire and rage. I was seeing these drag artists perform with so much passion, but also, I could see that they could get away with naming things in a very direct way.

I thought, ‘I could be a drag cow!’ It just popped up as an idea. I wanted to have the same boldness to speak about the things that I wanted to speak about. Usually nobody wants to hear an artist telling them what to do. Nobody wants the moralising lecture, but if you are in drag…people somehow love to get yelled at and insulted by drag queens. This was the beginning of 2018, and it’s been a wild ride ever since.

I’ve now been doing work with Soya for years. I’ve been putting my artistic and activist energy mostly into Soya the Cow as a character. And she has become such a huge part of my life, opening incredible opportunities as an artist, but also as an activist, working with animal sanctuaries, working with NGOs, and also being able to give back to a movement that has given me so much. I’m collaborating with other activists, artists, and just keeping on doing things.

My whole take with Soya is that, as much as the categorisation between female and male is limiting us (and we think of it as clear, identifiable, and normal), it’s the same with the human-animal divide. We divide the world into humans and non-humans, as if a fox and a spider were in the same category apart from humans. I love to blur these boundaries, in a playful way, and hopefully in a smart way. 

I’m still in doubt about it all. Sometimes, I also wonder if I could put my energy in a different way to make a bigger contribution. But for right now, it’s just an absolute blessing. I can use my voice and sing songs. For me, the music is very central, because it allows me to get through all these barriers that other humans usually have put up to not connect with the pain, the loss, and the violence we all have inflicted on the animal world. Using music and the voice, combined with storytelling, is a powerful way to try to find the little cracks in the armour.”

The Vegan Activist, Soya the Cow 

Soya the Cow has been doing lots of activism all over. It’s one of the most original forms of vegan outreach and protest I have seen. Daniel explains:

“The first thing I started doing was writing songs from the perspective of a cow. Finally I had a reason to sing. I knew I could touch people with my voice, people who hate to hear these topics, but then they hear the song, and they listen. 

I worked on a theatre piece called ‘Dear Human Animals’. It was about all these defence mechanisms people have and me as an activist and performer trying to break them. In the first part of the show, I used facts and knowledge to show them that what we do is not okay. The second one was with emotions and music. And the third one was a kind of sci-fi narration where I took them into the future, showing how the world could be transformed into a beautiful vegan utopia. And then I had them walk out to a horrible situation, showing pigs on a farm. I wanted them to witness and feel the pig’s reality. And I asked them to leave whenever they did not want to see these images any more. All along, I was playing a very sad, repetitive song until the last person had gone, leaving behind the pigs in their misery. No applause. Because nothing had changed for the pigs.

And then we had the COVID-19 pandemic, and everything was cancelled. It was a hard hit for the animal rights movement. Before the lockdown, I had been quite involved with Animal Rebellion for a while. But once public life and performing came to a halt, I looked for a different way to do something for the animals. So, during COVID, I was working and living at the animal sanctuary Hof Narr in Switzerland for six months. I wanted to actually know the animals, not just speak about them. To get away from having to refer to them as ‘the animals’ but being able instead to tell the story of my relationship with Levi, who is a turkey, or Sämmy, who is a goat with a disability. 

Also, during the lockdown, I developed the practice of going on city walks with audiences, since performing indoors was not allowed. These walks, which I call “Try Walking in My Hooves”, are a mix of a guided tour and a performance ritual, where we look at the presence of animal bodies, living or not living, real or represented, in our urban space. We usually start in a park, or next to a river, and look at the dogs (and maybe some insects or some birds), and I give them some interesting facts about these animals. The humans are not allowed to speak as we walk through the city like a herd. Later we will pass bookshops for children where every book has little elephants and little tigers, and I’ll speak about all these contradictions in human-animal relationships. We will see leather in cars, we see meat in restaurants, etc. It’s a way to show them how omnipresent animals are, mostly dead, and how omnipresent also are these kinds of stylised, cute animals. It’s a very emotional performance. I’ve done it in 30 cities, including Hong Kong and San Francisco. 

In 2024, I did a show that is called ‘Queere Tiere’ (English: ‘Queer Animals’), which is a mix of theatre, drag show and musical about queer animal sexualities. It’s about gay swans and hermaphroditic worms. Or sex changes and group sex happening in the marine world. It’s quite mind-blowing, but all based on scientific studies. We wrote a song about a transgender chimpanzee, whose name is Donna, a documented case of a primate who was born with ‘female’ genitalia but is socialised as a male. This project was a very beautiful way for me to stay in the animal world, while also getting a little moment of relief, where I was not focused only on the violence and abuse animals experience through humans.

I also love being part of protests. I think that gatherings of like-minded people — animal rights protests, vigils, etc. — often have a different function than just communicating to mainstream society. They’re almost like performances for ourselves where we build collective strength and resilience. Sometimes, I support these protests by performing, or by just showing up, especially in Switzerland, where the animal rights community knows me well by now. It’s also a way to thank them.

I’m a grassroots person. I believe that grassroots activism and empowering every individual to find their best ways to contribute is the key. I dream of having a big animal drag family one day. You know, the old grandmother, the cow drag, and then I might have a drag daughter who is a turkey and another one who is a llama or a fish.”

Soya the Cow, the Film Performer

Soya the Cow not only performs in events or on the street. She is also the star of several films, as Daniel explains:

“I had this collaboration with a Brazilian artist, which started with the research I did on the impact of soy monocultures in Brazil, serving usually as feed for animals in Europe or China. What is the impact on local communities, animal communities or indigenous communities? That became a documentary. She became my drag sister. Her name is Uhura Bqueer, and her drag is inspired by the jaguar. She’s a black Afro-indigenous trans woman, and I am this Jewish, white, gay man. I’m the cow, she’s the jaguar. The cows stand for the violence of the colonial project. The colonisers brought cows to South America, and they are still used today to grab land and transform territories. It was very important for me to have this self-reflection on the colonial aspects of the global food systems. We have a 25-minute film titled ‘De-Domestication‘. We just won a prize at the Activists Without Borders Festival in Reading, UK. And we also have a photography project that was part of an art biennale in the Azores.

I did another film in 2024. It was one project that popped up in my life without looking for it.  I did my show ‘Dear Human Animals’ in Amsterdam, and after that, a woman approached me, and she told me, ‘Thank you so much for everything you say. I also love cows. I’m a cow linguist.’ Her name is Leonie Cornips, and she studies cow communication, mostly cows among themselves, but also cows with humans. During a field study, she met a young bull, a calf, and when she found out that he was supposed to be slaughtered, she rescued him. Later, it turned out that Piet is intersex, not clearly male or female. And she said, ‘Piet, in a way, is a queer cow, and you are a queer cow, and I would love for you to meet.’ So, we developed this project where we staged this encounter between the two of us. It was filmed by The Transketeers, a collective of trans filmmakers based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and Louis van der Hengel, a performance studies scholar. The title was ‘Piet & Soya – A Queer Interspecies Encounter’. We also later published an article about it in the Humanimalia journal. It was incredible. We were lying next to each other, almost on top of each other, imitating each other a bit, looking together in one direction. 

I could form such incredible animal friendships through my work. I got married to a bull in Italy, in the Capra Libera Tutti sanctuary.  His name is Ferruccio. This was also a whole performance piece where I went on dates with cows, and at the end of a very special week I had spent with the cows, we performed a camp drag wedding with an audience, a white dress, and a cow-friendly vegan cake. 

These kinds of performances are meant to show that love can have so many different forms beyond the institution of marriage — which can be beautiful too. The drag wedding with Ferruccio was there to declare my love to Ferruccio, and to all cows who are survivors of the industry. And if you love someone, you don’t eat or kill them.

There is another level of our existence, which I really hope we can connect to more. It is about being present with our bodies under the sun, and on the earth, and drinking water, and cuddling with somebody. There is so much about it that we need to relearn: to spend time just being without consuming, without destroying, without having to accumulate experiences or wealth. We can just exist with each other and enjoy each other’s presence. I feel our animal friends are such incredible teachers of that.”

Soya the Cow is a fascinating creature. You can’t stop looking at her, because there is something powerful in what she represents. Like all ethical vegans, she is a rebel, subverting the current Hypermasculine Patriarchal Speciesist Paradigm by just showing you, in your face, that cows are somebodies, that they do not consent to what we do to them, that they do not want to be part of animal agriculture or human food. But she tells you all that with the gentlest voice and loving disposition. It disarms you completely. It demolishes all the barriers we carry every day with us. It draws the attention we hardly give to anyone these days. It makes you listen, and listen carefully. 

Daniel is such a good performer, his voice is so pleasant, his singing so beautiful, and his songs are so poignant that, when combined with the larger-than-life Soya the Cow, this not only shatters the boundaries of gender and species, but also the boundaries of vegans and non-vegans, and even the boundaries of vegan activism itself. When I experienced Soya the Cow singing live at the International Animal Rights Conference, captivating the entire audience, I realised how many layers of boundaries had been cut through. So many cages, so many walls, so many fences, so many shells…and when they all fall, you can see her. You can actually see her and listen to what she has to say.

Writing about Soya and Daniel has made my day.