BE FAIR BE VEGAN ST JOHN'S, NL
AUGUST 2018
BE FAIR BE VEGAN LAUNCHES IN ST JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND
Starting on August 1st, St John's has become the seventh city to host the BeFairBeVegan billboards, challenging both residents and summer visitors to rethink their consumer choices and consider the consequences of using animal-based products.
Set to run for four weeks, the ads combine stark, beautiful, black and white photographs with thought-provoking observations of fellow animals' personalities, inner lives, and experiences.
In August of 2016, BeFairBeVegan created a stir in the animal advocacy world, by releasing a powerful series of uncompromisingly vegan advertisements throughout New York City, including a stunning moving billboard in the middle of Times Square, one of the highest profile locations in the world.
The provocative message elicited responses from celebrities such as actor and Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix, who praised the campaign in AlterNet: “In addressing our speciesist attitudes toward other animals, BeFairBeVegan encourages us to consider that our core similarities are far deeper than our surface differences. Now, more than ever, the world needs to hear this message.”
Featuring both static and moving billboards as well as transit ads, static street posters and street furniture, the BeFairBeVegan campaign aims to introduce viewers to the faces and feelings of the animals we use for food, clothing, research and entertainment, while inviting passers-by to consider the circumstances of the victims of the animal industry and see them for who they are: sentient beings who value their lives.
Since its launch in 2016, the campaign has gone live in Tasmania, Connecticut, Cleveland, and most recently Melbourne Australia, where the ads appeared on national TV after they were refused by the government-owned Yarra Trams, sparking a debate around the subject of censorship. BeFairBeVegan goes live in St John's at the same time as returning to Connecticut for a second run, and launching for the first time in Seattle, WA.
Combining striking visuals with surprisingly simple, honest observations, BeFairBeVegan challenges viewers to examine our prejudices, inviting us to see what is both unexpected and obvious. The faces looking out from these billboards dare us to acknowledge what we usually choose to ignore: the inner lives of the animals we subjugate through our consumer choices, despite the immeasurable anguish we cause, and despite the increasing evidence that doing so is unnecessary.
As stated by Joanna Lucas, the campaign’s creator: “Our use of products extracted from the bodies of others is not about necessity, but about fulfilling desires as trivial as taste, habit, profit, or convenience. At a deeper level, it seems to be more about the daily affirmation of our delusion of supremacy."
BeFairBeVegan aims to help people recognize that the victims of our bigotry are complex individuals who are not willing participants in this situation. We reduce them to consumable goods, and as a result, they end their lives in bewilderment and terror at our hands, whether in free-range/cage-free/organic facilities, in the dairy, egg, and wool industries, or in all other branches of the animal trade.
As consumers, we have the power to take back control, and demand an end to the use of animals as commodities and resources. These billions upon billions of sentient beings are victims of the most widespread and socially accepted injustice of all time. Considered by law to be nothing more than chattel property, they are subjected to unthinkable yet legal forms of barbaric cruelty in the name of profit, convenience or pleasure.
Not only is animal agriculture also holding hostage the natural world and its inhabitants, as well as sabotaging the health of our society, BeFairBeVegan maintains that its very existence is a violation of the most basic rights of the individuals it enslaves.
