Question: “I follow a lot of farm animal sanctuaries, rescues, and animal advocacy pages on social media. When I'm scrolling on my feed and I see a video of an animal being abused, I tend to engage and scroll away fast, but even just a few seconds leads me to a place of deep sadness. Do you have any tips to help deal with this overwhelm?” –Sage Wilder
Dear Sage Wilder,
Years ago, during a staff meeting, a colleague happened to mention that her son was going deer hunting. Then she paused for a moment.
“Oh, dear!” she said, remembering my passion for animal protection. “Julie, you poor thing. This must be so hard for you to hear.”
I suddenly felt offended. Did she think I was somehow ignorant to the realities of our world? Did she think my fragile soul would buckle at a commonplace reference like this?
I played it off: “Oh, it’s fine. No worries!”
I was indeed shaken, but not for the reason my coworker suspected. I was unsettled because my colleague had mistaken the courage this work requires for fragility. She didn’t realize that paying close attention to animal suffering is what had prompted me to become an animal advocate in the first place.
The Russian author and philosopher Leo Tolstoy believed we all have a duty to bear witness to suffering. In a time before social media, he wrote: “When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to him who suffers, and try to help him.” This idea is the basis for the Animal Save Movement, comprised of groups around the world that bear witness to animals en route to slaughter, often offering them water or documenting their suffering.
The work of those who take bold action to bear witness to the everyday tragedies in our food system is beautiful and important. But, as someone who cares deeply about farm animals, you are already bearing witness every day. You bear witness when you walk through the grocery store flanked by neatly packaged meats, and remember that there was once a living being behind each one of them. You bear witness when you drive down a country road lined by windowless factory farms. You bear witness when you see an angler pull a fish from their home. Because you know that, as philanthropist Philip Wollen famously stated, “In their capacity to feel pain and fear, a pig is a dog is a bear is a boy.”
You do not have to saturate your life with bearing witness by including it in your social media. In fact, continual exposure to animal abuse may threaten your ability to sustain your activism. To best make change for animals, you need to protect your emotional reserves. For most people, regularly weathering spirals of deep sadness is not healthy or sustainable.
Ultimately, you will need to make a decision about whether you continue to follow the accounts that show you animal abuse, or whether you mute or unfollow them. My recommendation is that you mute most or all of the accounts that share content that triggers your sadness. There are plenty of animal advocacy accounts that highlight animal protection issues without violent imagery (such as Farm Sanctuary and Compassionate Action for Animals).
If you feel a sense of duty to more proactively bear witness to animal suffering, you have options. Some of them may take less of a toll on your heart than others. Consider making an annual visit to a farm animal sanctuary, where you can hear the rescue stories of the residents, which represent the realities of so many animals, but without the graphic visuals.
Even if you decide to reduce your exposure to explicit content featuring animal suffering, you’ll certainly still stumble across it from time to time. When this happens, I encourage you to remember that your immediate reactions described in your letter are acts of love.
First, you interact with the content—an action that raises awareness about what’s happening to animals in our food system. By liking or commenting, the content will likely be circulated to more people, including those who may not be familiar with the abuses animals face. Through your interaction, you are bringing a measure of awareness to a heartbreaking wrong.
The second action you take is to scroll away. But you are not looking away because you are unwilling to face the truth. You are looking away because you are protecting your heart from the pain of witnessing needless abuses that you cannot directly stop. This is an act of self love.
When you encounter animal abuse again, I invite you to take a moment—amidst your feelings of sadness—to recognize how you have the strength of character to meet some of the darkest corners of our world with kindness. As you sit with your sadness, acknowledge that it is deeply intertwined with the feelings of compassion and connection you have for your fellow earthlings.
Yes, you are sitting in pain. But you are also sitting in love.
You might also find it helpful to have a phrase, prayer, or mantra that you come back to in those moments when you encounter animal abuse. These lines are certainly not a remedy for your suffering or theirs, but the words may help to reframe what you're witnessing within the context of your fight for a more just world.
One that I often come back to is: “We see you. We’re sorry. We’re trying.”
Your short letter is teaming with these truths:
You see them.
You’re sorry.
You’re trying.
At its core, your question reflects your loving heart and your steadfast resistance to the abuse of animals. I hope you will guard that goodness fiercely. Your kind heart is the very fuel of successful movements for justice. As bell hooks wrote, “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” Your love is a rare magic this world desperately needs.
