While the pandemic has been a challenge for everyone in the agriculture industry throughout the country as they attempt to keep to feed the U.S., animal activists don’t appear to have been overly impacted. Hannah Thompson-Weeman, Vice President at the Animal Ag Alliance, says attacks on agriculture during the pandemic just keep on coming.
“Sometimes people will ask us, you know, has activism kind of gone away because of the pandemic and restrictions on travel and gathering, and maybe, they’re not hearing as much about it because there are so many other things going on in the world. But unfortunately, that is not the case,” Thompson-Weeman said.
If anything, the pandemic has made animal activists more dangerous. She explained that they’ve seen more “on the ground” activism efforts. “We have actually seen probably more instances of on the ground type of activism in the past year and a half despite restrictions on gatherings and traveling for a few different reasons,” she said. For example, one of the biggest issues the alliance is encountering is activists trespassing on farms and packing plants.
Thompson-Weeman said that a lot of activists saw the pandemic as an opportunity because the world started to look a lot different and they wanted to latch on to the sense of change in order to push their agenda.
