Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and you are listening to The Vegan Report.
Today, we are starting the new year strong, discussing the undercover reporting of Unparalleled
Suffering.
Unparalleled Suffering is a photographer, filmmaker and writer whose footage of animal
abuse is widely spread.
Your favorite vegan influencer, farm sanctuary or animal rights organization has most likely
used his content at one point or another, since it is top notch quality and freely available
for non-commercial use on unparalleledsuffering.org.
Let me add two things before we get to the episode.
First, we are protecting his identity.
You will not know his name, which I don't know by the way, or see his picture.
Being anonymous is essential to his work and I highly, highly respect that.
And secondly, in this conversation we talked about slaughterhouses and Unparalleled Suffering
forgot to mention something he investigated called custom slaughterhouses.
Now you need to hear the crazy stories he shared about those.
You will find them in the bonus episode I published at the same time as this episode.
I felt like we should start the conversation by talking about the anonymity aspect of Unparalleled
Suffering because you erase your presence from your initiative, from your project, from
your platform.
Why is it important to be absent, not to put your name out there?
Is it hard to keep that anonymous and undercover and to erase your presence?
Yeah, so I have to be anonymous as much as possible.
It's pretty much impossible in this day and age to be absolutely perfect about it 24-7.
Mistakes happen here and there.
But I try to control it as best as I can.
And well, I do a lot of undercover work, not all the time.
It's not like my full-time jobs per se.
So it was full-time as possible for several years in a row.
But yeah, if people were to know my identity, there's a lot of stuff that I've covered
in the past and intend to cover in the future that would just be absolutely impossible as
far as even gaining access and getting permission to do certain things.
So sometimes I could document something where I don't really have to have any kind of one-on-one
conversation with someone and nobody has to hear my name or interact with me in any way.
And in that kind of scenario, for example, if I just decided to attend a livestock auction,
it doesn't really matter as much.
But for when I document certain things, such as a very small family farm, for example,
where I'm talking to the owner of the operation and I'm getting access to record very intimate
things such as them killing animals and chopping up their body, if they were to know who I
was, I would never be able to get permission to even be on their property to begin with.
And not only that, but in certain cases, they would probably put something out there online,
whether it was Facebook or Instagram or some kind of message board or chat, whatever else.
Oh, hey, there's this guy.
His name is blah, blah, blah.
He looks like blah, blah, blah.
He might try to come and record what you're doing and put it on his blah, blah, blah page.
So that's just one example.
But yeah, it's not worth taking the risk.
It is very possible that even up to this day, I could be more transparent about who I am
in terms of my name and what I look like and just things I do in my life, how people on
their Instagram story, for example, just post random things that they're doing.
It is possible that I could live that way and still be able to get away with a lot of
this kind of stuff.
But to me, it's just not worth the risk.
And was there a second part to your question too that I didn't answer?
I think the second part was about how do you go about it to erase your identity?
Okay, yeah.
I pretty much covered that, right?
Yes.
And maybe you should not go into the details of all that you do to cover up who you are.
How do you feel about that, you know, being undercover?
Because my first reaction when I heard your answer was, oh, this sounds exciting.
This is like being a spy, but for a good cause.
But do you feel sometimes stressed by having to do that?
Yeah, to me, it's almost like a form of repression.
And I try to be as free as possible of a person and, you know, not really be suppressing in
any ways that unless it's something that I absolutely have to suppress, which this would
be an example of that.
But it's just the way you got to play the game.
There's a lot of what I've done up to this day and will continue to do.
You just can't do by being honest.
Now when I do try to, when I do interact with some animal exploiters, I do try to integrate
as much honesty as possible, but you know, there's a fine line to that.
And hold on one sec, I kind of lost my train of thought, but it'll come back in a sec.
Can you can you just say your question one more time and then I can get my train of thought
back?
Yes.
So I was thinking how, you know, it was exciting.
And then I was also wondering if it could be stressful at times.
So the exciting part of it for sure is when I get to accomplish my goals, because some
of this stuff is really difficult, you know, to figure out, you know, to form a game plan,
to execute, and then obviously the emotional toll and so forth.
But yeah, when I was a lot younger, I don't really do this anymore.
But when I was a lot younger, I used to be kind of a big prankster.
I would trick a lot of people.
I mean, humans, humans generally are pretty gullible beings.
And I would trick people all the time, be like, oh, gotcha.
And yeah, at some point in time, I stopped doing that.
And now I use those skills I have to, to act and to trick others for a good cause for animal
rights.
Back in the day, I could just make up a prank spontaneously and just go through with it
and accomplish what I was after.
But with this kind of thing, there's a whole lot of work that has to go into it.
It's a lot less being spontaneous and it's a lot more building things up, building up,
you know, stories and more tangible things and, you know, developing alternative personalities
and so forth.
And yeah, it's a lot.
Of course, I'm not going to get into the details of that, but it's almost a whole another job
in itself.
But it is exciting to be able to pull things off in the way that I do and be able to show
certain angles of what humans are doing to animals that nobody else is really covering
or really has covered in the past.
So it is nice to be able to, you know, provide unique forms of activism to the world.
To do that in order to build this story about yourself that is convincing and in order to
create relationships with the people you want to cover who are usually animal abusers, you
need to look at them, you know, through more than this two dimensional view we often see
represented online of animal abusers, like farmers are those horrible monsters who this
and that.
I understand the feeling behind it, but I also see that those people are more than what
they do and that this psychologically, humanly, it's more complex than I guess the best, the
person who put it best would be Dr. Crystal Heath.
Maybe you know her and she mentioned how animal abusers are basically brainwashed by a cult,
like cult members, and we need to see them like this.
So how do you perceive animal abusers, those farmers that you meet?
Do you feel that way that they are those monsters or do you tend more towards, you know, they're
more like brainwashed cult members?
For me it's more of an individual to individual basis.
I don't think you can paint animal abusers and animal killers, etc. with a broad brush.
So I mean, for example, I do think that I do concur with Crystal Heath when it comes
for some.
I do think some are, you know, just really brainwashed and they've had things normalized
to them since they were probably infants and they can't see these things for what they
truly are.
But I think other people just decide to embrace becoming animal abusers on their own.
I mean, for example, the last thing that, not the very last thing, but one of the last
things that I documented was turkeys being killed on a small farm back in November, just
shortly before Thanksgiving.
And I asked the farmer, did you grow up on a farm?
And a lot of the time, actually, probably most of the time people say yes, but sometimes
that's not the case.
And yeah, this guy just decided to embrace it on his own.
I don't know what his upbringing was like, but I know he didn't grow up on a farm.
So he decided to, you know, build a farm on his own and have chickens and pigs and cows
and turkeys and so forth.
And yeah, just learn all this from zero.
And he, I was able to, you know, I was able to connect with him, not from an organic perspective
of who I truly am, but you know, I acted like, you know, factory farming is the big, that's
the real monster.
And you know, this kind of thing is, this is the right way to do things.
And I talked about how, you know, what he was doing was pretty much truly pasture raise
and what's normally labeled pasture raise, like when you buy something at a grocery store
is a total lie.
And which there was a little bit of truth to that.
I mean, his turkeys were for most of their life, most of their short life, actually living
on pasture.
Whereas when you buy something at a grocery store and it says pasture raise, that's actually
not even how it truly is.
But yeah, I mean, if I were to all of a sudden be like, you know, this is not cool, you don't
need to be doing this to animals and so forth.
You know, things could have gone really differently and he could have got really violent with
me potentially.
But yeah, I think for humans when it comes to everything, whether it's how we treat animals,
how we treat other humans, how we treat the planet, et cetera, there's just like a wide
variety of humans and, you know, different causes to their behavior.
So yeah, I think there's actually a growing trend now to just growing your own food.
And for some people, they consider breeding animals and fanning them up and then killing
them akin to, you know, growing plants from putting seeds in the ground.
So yeah, I don't know.
I've definitely interacted with a wide variety of people and some are far worse than others.
But the one thing that I think almost all of us share in common is we know right from
wrong.
And so I think a lot of people who do these types of things to animals, somewhere deep
down, I think a lot of them do know that what they're doing is wrong and unnecessary.
But they just don't care enough to change, especially since wider society approves of
what they're doing.
And not only just approves, but I think animal farmers are some of the most respected people
in society.
So whereas vegans and animal rights activists were on the opposite end of that.
So yeah, hopefully, hopefully that was a decent answer to that question.
Yes.
And I get the same impression.
So what how do you deal with the situation where things go wrong?
Where your cover is blown up, where you get those violent reactions?
How do you deal with that?
Well, there haven't been that many times when my cover has been blown.
And in fact, usually it's been something that I've done on purpose.
For example, I documented a religious animal sacrifice in New York City for a number of
years called Kapouros.
And the first two years I did that, I was completely undercover.
And I'm totally willing to say on your podcast what my whole cover story was, because this
was a one time thing.
It's not something I'm ever going to use again.
So I don't mind sharing it.
But yeah, I was I was gaining access to there's there's all kinds of locations all throughout
the city where people openly torture chickens.
They'll pick up the Cornish Cross chickens.
They're the overly grown white ones that people tend to eat for their flesh that are usually
killed when they're only 42 days old.
I would estimate for Kapouros, most of the chickens that they're using for the Cornish
Cross are generally probably anywhere from three to five weeks old.
And they they'll in the vast majority of cases, they will first off, the chickens are kept
in crates for days and days at a time without any food or water.
They're not protected from from the weather, whether it's sometimes because this usually
happens in September, September or October.
So sometimes when Kapouros occurs, it's extremely hot outside.
Other times it's extremely cold outside and also the rain, too.
But anyway, these these chickens just just live in such degrading conditions.
Actually even worse than where they're coming from the industrial farms and where they're
coming from.
But now they're packed even tighter and they have no protection.
Whereas when they're living in those giant warehouses, they at least have some protection
from the weather.
But yeah, all of a sudden, when they do finally get to exit the crates, they're they're they're
pulled up by their wings and they're swung around a minimum of two times, which is the
the harshest way you can possibly hold a chicken.
And and then after that, they're they get killed at a certain point, sometimes right
afterwards.
And sometimes there's a delay.
And also, I should say, when they're living in those those tightly packed crates with
other chickens, they're usually living amongst not only dead, but also decaying chickens.
So it's a complete horror show.
But anyway, when I decided to go there and document this, I didn't want to just doc.
I didn't want to just take photos and videos of what was happening.
I wanted to actually have conversations with people that were involved with this.
And I wanted to go all over the city because they have so many locations where they do
this.
And so I was telling people that I was writing a book about freedom of religion.
And I said that this would be this is the basically my case study.
This is what I'm going to use to illustrate, you know, this is what I use for the theme
of my book, the caporos, the caporos ritual.
And I never told anyone that I was for what they were doing, but I also never told anyone
that I was against what they were doing.
I said I'm neutral about it.
I also told them that I'm Jewish because this is a Jewish thing.
Most Jewish dominations don't practice this.
It's just the the the Orthodox and the ultra Orthodox.
Actually, not even Orthodox.
It's just the ultra Orthodox, I believe, who do this.
And I identified as a reform Jew, which, by the way, is partially true.
I mean, that is how I grew up.
So back to what I was saying in the beginning of the podcast, where I try to be as honest
with people as possible.
So that is like a form of honesty that I was sharing.
But yeah, anyway, when I told people when I told people my cover story, they were perfectly
willing to let me not not all of them, but most of them were perfectly willing to let
me document what they were doing.
And if they if they weren't comfortable with it, I would say, oh, yeah, no problem.
And I would just not I would I would just not point my camera at them.
And I would just leave them alone.
I would stop talking to them.
I'll say I wanted to keep talking to me.
And yeah, I gained a lot of access.
I also I also told them that I was not just going to be documenting what they were doing,
but I was also going to be documenting the protesters because there was a very strong,
very big opposition to Kapouros at the time.
That is not true nowadays.
But at the time, there was a lot of vocal opposition.
And they would tell me things about the Kapouros or about yeah, about the Kapouros protesters
that were completely untrue.
They would make up blanket statements such as every every female who protested has had
an abortion and they would say all kinds of crazy stuff.
So anyway, I kept that up for two years.
It was amazing as far as the access that I gained.
And then, you know, once I once I had all that documentation, I still wanted to go to
the I still wanted to return to New York City on an annual basis and record what was happening.
But because I had ample documentation already, I no longer felt it was necessary to to remain
undercover, especially since this is just this is even though it's a big thing, it's
a small world.
It's a small bubble that I was accessing.
This is Kapouros, whereas animal farming is like a vast thing.
So the animal farming, I got to keep that cover going for pretty much my whole life.
This it didn't matter as much.
Plus, this can also be documented whether you have permission to or not, because a lot
of this takes place on public streets and sidewalks.
But yeah, so once I so year three when I went, I was openly against what they were doing.
I was I was, you know, criticizing them openly.
I was asking people to hold the chickens in a better way.
And yeah, that's almost like a welfare perspective.
But where it is a welfare perspective, but you're not going to change most 99.9 percent
of these people, you're not going to change their mind.
So at least if you can get someone to hold a chicken in a way that doesn't cause harm.
I mean, you still are harming the chicken with what you're doing, but you're going
to cause them significantly less harm if you hold them from like, you know, with their
wings pinned to their body the way they're supposed to be.
And you hold you put your hands underneath.
That's going to cause drastically less suffering than holding them by up by their wings and
swinging them around.
So yeah, I would do that.
Of course, I would try to get people to, you know, stop doing this and give me their chicken
so I could help get that chicken to a sanctuary, which I did have a little bit of luck with
a couple of chickens, but it wasn't someone necessarily just trying to be nice.
It was one woman.
I just walked away with her chicken because she actually let me show her how to hold the
chicken.
I was like, well, I'm going to show her how to hold the chicken and then I'm going to
walk away with the chicken.
The worst case scenario, I just have to give the chicken back.
Best case scenario, this chicken gets to go to a sanctuary.
So yeah, I walked away with the chicken and she didn't try to chase me or, you know, or
get anyone else to go after me.
So that was a good story.
And then there was another woman who she was she was actively doing the ritual swinging
a chicken around and she saw me taking photos of her or video for that matter.
And she asked me not to do that.
And I said to her, the only way I'm going to stop recording you doing this is if you
if you put that chicken down and give them to me so I can take them, get them to a sanctuary.
Now being honest, I don't know if that's actually how I worded it.
But basically I told her that if I will stop recording if you give me the chicken and she
did.
So that chicken got to go to a sanctuary.
I have no idea what happened to them.
I was never not able to I wasn't able to find out those details.
But anyway, yeah, that was an example of being being going from undercover to not undercover,
having my cover blown.
And there were several there were several people that that noticed that like, wait,
what the hell?
That's not who I thought that was.
There was one guy I can't remember what his name was or exactly what he was all about.
But I remember we had some long conversations about Kapouros.
And yeah, of course, he had totally bought into my cover story.
I always I saw him those first two years.
So we had long conversations those first two years.
And he was around me when I was documenting stuff.
And then and then the next the next year, he sees me being openly opposed to this.
And he's like, what's going on?
And I I I told him, like, you know, after seeing this numerous times, I actually feel
now that it's completely wrong.
And this is just pure evil.
You don't need to be doing this.
You can't you can't transfer your sins to a chicken, because that's what they that's
what the people say.
They say when you when you swing the chicken and you're reciting this prayer that you're
reading on your cell phone, that your sins are going into this chicken.
And you know, you've been absolved of all all sins and now you get the fresh start and
now you can commit sins for the next year.
And then you can do this again with the chickens again.
So anyway, I was just telling him how I thought this was ridiculous.
And he was telling me that I'm mansplaining, but in a Jewish sense, like I'm Jewish Jewish
planning or something.
It was so ridiculous.
But the people there I have to this day, I haven't I hadn't I haven't been physically
injured by any of them, but they can be very dangerous.
I have been in some very hostile, very scary situations with some of these people.
They are used to getting away with whatever they want, partially because the cops let
them get away with whatever they want, typically.
But yeah, besides that, there haven't been too many other there haven't been many other
situations I can really think of where my cover has been blown.
I've always been able to maintain that very well.
With that being said, I would like to say that a lot of people who have given me access
to to to cover their their form of animal abuse have asked me if I'm a Pete if I'm a
if I'm with PETA.
And I say I'm not PETA has never hired me to do anything.
So it is true.
But it's just really funny to me because I can't remember when PETA started.
I think it was the 70s or the 80s.
But obviously, they've been around for a long time.
And since their inception, tons of other organizations have popped up.
And obviously, there's like a lot of people just doing their own individual thing like
me.
So it's just funny that because you say no, you're not you're not affiliated with PETA
that, OK, you're you're you're safe.
You're safe for me to let into the space.
So it's amazing that people still haven't like caught on to like how broad the animal
protection movement, if you want to call it, that really is.
So sorry, I was like a really long answer to your question.
But it was all very interesting.
So thank you.
Before we pressed the recording and started the recording of the episode, we were talking
about independent media and the importance of being independent in covering issues.
And you are, you know, an independent journalist.
I know you describe yourself as a photograph, but I do see you as a journalist and a quality
journalist.
So why is it important to be independent?
And what are the struggles of being independent in this line of work?
I'd say it's important to be independent because I don't think for for the vast majority
of the kind of work that I've done so far, I don't think I really need other people,
you know, telling me about telling me how I should go about things.
I've been pretty successful in a sense thus far with, you know, completing my missions
and trying to being able to do what I'm striving to do.
I don't think anyone, you know, needs to have any control over me unless I am doing something
for another organization.
If they're hiring me to do something for them, then yeah, I mean, if they need me to, you
know, do something specific or go about something in a different way, then yeah, there's room
for discussing that.
But I like to one of the things that helps keep me going and continuing to do this work
is getting to basically be my own boss and not coming into conflict and friction and
tension with other people trying to trying to interfere with what I'm doing.
And yeah, I see a lot with animal rights and other causes that people get heavily opinionated
and they think they know what's the best way.
They think they know what's right.
And I don't claim to know what's the best way or know what's right or what's most effective
or impactful or persuasive.
I honestly have no idea.
And I think more of us should admit that we don't have any idea because this is a very
experimental kind of thing that we're doing.
I think a lot of the parallels that people bring up, well, this worked on the civil rights
movement, so you got to do it this way.
I don't think a lot of that applies to animal rights.
I mean, trying to gain progress for humans is a vastly different undertaking than trying
to gain progress for animals.
I mean, humans are animals, of course, but we look, we, or at least most of us, most
of wider society looks at animals through a completely different lens.
And although we can look at history and what's worked for certain causes and try to apply
that to our own struggles that we're dealing with to accomplish progress for animals, we
can try these things, but it doesn't mean that it's going to work.
We have to really think out of the box and get really experimental and stop acting like
we know what's best.
All of us are in a constant state of learning, or if we're not, we're stagnant and we need
to get back to the process of trying to learn.
So I think there's a lot of trial and error.
I've made plenty of mistakes.
I have had people try to tell me things in the past that I discarded and didn't take
seriously that in hindsight I should have taken more seriously, especially as it relates
to burnout and not being so tireless and pushing myself so hard and not getting sidetracked
from other important things in my life, such as being present in my relationship and so
forth.
But when I'm wrong about something, I admit it and I try to be better in the future.
As far as the struggles for being independent, I would say one is definitely the money.
If my work was under a broader organization, I'm assuming I would be getting paid for that,
and that would help me to stay afloat in general life aside from activism and it would also
help me to continue my activism work.
So with being independent, there's not much money in it.
I do have a Patreon, which did get near or even cross $800 a month back in 2019, I believe.
And then it kind of dwindled from there.
And right now it's just a little over $200, which I am grateful for.
I don't want to sound like I don't want people to get the wrong impression and think I'm
a brat and be like, oh, I'm only getting this much.
I'm grateful for any donation I get.
Obviously people don't have to donate to me and there's all kinds of great things out
there to donate.
So I'm very appreciative to everyone who donates.
But $200 can't carry you very far.
And when I give things to activists and when I do things for some organizations, I don't
actually even charge anything.
It's just like if you want to give me something, you can.
Here's the link to my donation page, but I don't ask for anything specific numbers wise
or tell anyone you have to give me anything.
And also sometimes I go a really long time without even helping any activists or organizations
out because I don't get any kind of requests for a long time.
And I think a lot of people even to this day still don't know about me and what I do.
And with my day job, my current day job, it just doesn't pay very much money.
Stress management is extremely important to me, keeping as low a stress as life as I practically
can.
So with that being said, when I had to do my last job search, I was looking for a job
that wouldn't cause me immense stress and something that would align with my values
and my interests.
And I did find such a job, but for one, it's not full time work, which I'm not necessarily
complaining about.
And two, it just doesn't pay very well.
But I'm still grateful that I have a job like that because I've never had that experience
with a job before.
So yeah, now I'm in a stage of trying to start something new, which I can't get into the
personal details of that, but something new that could potentially earn me a decent amount
of money and that is not going to be a passion of mine, but is related to my interests.
And that will definitely help me have more income than I can distribute to my animal
rights pursuits.
So I'm very much looking forward to that when that day comes, when I have more financial
freedom to get back to doing more activism more regularly.
And there's one more thing I wanted to say about that.
What was that?
Oh, yes.
So I am also working on developing the portfolio on my website and it's probably technically
good enough right now, but there's still so much more I can add and show the broader depth
of my work.
So once it gets to a point where I'm more pleased, I am going to start applying to more
organizations to be undercover investigators for them because I haven't done that in a
while, like really put my name out there and apply to different places.
So hopefully after I do that, I will have more organizations contacting me and wanting
to hire me for certain things and being able to just trust my judgment and know that they
don't really have to give me many directions.
Just tell me what you want and I'll go try to do it for you.
And I will add the link in the episodes notes of your Patreon and please also visit the
website.
The website is wonderful.
I think it's unparalleled suffering that org.
Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
And the pictures, I haven't said that yet, but the pictures you take are just professional
quality level, just wonderful.
I'm not a photographer, not even amateur photographer, but they're truly beautiful to look at even
though the subject of the photography is a hard soul crushing one.
Yeah, I know.
I know exactly what you mean.
I feel the same, not trying to be self-boasting or anything, but I also get that feedback
from a lot of people like, oh, this is such a beautiful picture, but I don't mean it that
way.
I mean, it's a really good picture, but it's absolutely horrific what the picture and that's
exactly what I'm trying to go for.
I want the emotion.
I want to hit people with as much emotion as possible from the photographs and thought.
I want my photographs to be thought provoking and I also want people to be able to grasp
like the quality because I do try to do as high quality as possible.
It's not just like, oh, this is happening.
Let me take a picture of it.
I try to frame everything in a way and capture everything in a way as high quality as I can
possibly think of.
When I'm at shoots, there's tons of stuff going through my head for how I can best capture
this.
Also right now, most of my websites just photographs, but I have tons and tons of video of stuff
too.
I'm just trying to do one thing at a time.
I'm just going to get all the photos on the website first and then I'll start posting
more videos on there.
I want to get a little bit more experimental too with the kinds of things that I do.
I would like to start doing street interviews, not in the kind of like earthling it and Joey
Carpster on fashion, which I don't mean that it's an insult to them.
I think they do pretty good work, but mine, you won't obviously see me in the videos and
I'm going to try to have conversations with people and ask them kinds of things that you
don't hear in these other kinds of street interview videos because those videos kind
of get a little bit redundant.
I think they're good for people who aren't vegan and they're hearing these things for
the first time, but as a vegan who's already had these conversations with people and heard
other people have them a million times, I'm trying to come up with angles that pretty
much haven't been discussed yet.
So that'll be hopefully a new thing that I start doing kind of soon.
Or even people who, like you mentioned earthling it, he's never talking to religious leaders,
like the ones, the Jewish ultra-orthodox ones in New York.
So I want to hear them answer your questions.
So that would be a new angle for a starter.
Yeah.
And I think that's a great idea.
I actually did send earthling Ed a direct message many years ago and I told him he should
come out to Kapurus because not just to do like what you were just talking about, but
also to get his own little documentation and just let people know that this is happening
because he has, I have a very small platform.
He has a massive one.
I also sent a direct message to James Aspie many years ago too when he was more involved
with animal rights activism and I told him he should come out to Kapurus.
Not saying, oh, you better come out because you have a big following.
This is your moral responsibility.
But he had a lot of flexibility for where he went and what he did with his time.
So I wanted to make both of these gentlemen aware of something good that they could do
with their time.
And also I think that would also be really important to have conversations with people
like that, the ultra-orthodox and heredity population in New York City and elsewhere
possibly because they are a very growing, very large growing segment of the population.
They breed like crazy.
They pretty much try to have as many kids as possible and they've overtaken many parts
in New York City.
Some streets that used to have zero of them are now, now they're living in every single
house or just about every house.
And yeah, they're one of the most hardcore brainwashing segments of society that we have.
Their brainwashing is absolutely brutal.
And I think, and it's very hard to, not even just the adults, but even the children, even
by the time they're only like seven or eight years old or already severely brainwashed.
So it's really hard to penetrate them with facts about animals and diet and so forth.
But to me, I think it's worth having the conversation if you can and putting it out there for people
to see.
Plus it makes, I think it can sharpen our perspectives because I don't think people understand the
complexity of like changing the world for animals.
I mean, we're up against so much and if you're paying attention, you kind of see that what
we're up against is just the complexity of it is basically limitless.
Because as you learn more, you'll continue to have a broader perspective and you see
that these changes that we're after are just beyond difficult.
Difficult is a minuscule understatement for the reality that we're actually presented
with here.
And let me add an argument for talking to religious leaders.
Most people on this planet will not listen to you.
They will listen to their rabbi.
They will listen to their imam.
They will listen to their priest.
Those religious leaders are the ones who give their moral stamp of approval on certain practices
and beliefs.
And veganism is not part of the stamp approved ideologies out there.
So better get them convinced so they can give their approval and spread the word on their
own.
Then address some random person on the street or some college kids who have no power and
no influence on anyone.
Yeah, I think that's an absolutely brilliant point because it's so hard to change anyone,
humans are generally speaking very stuck in their ways and very concrete with their thinking.
But if you are able to influence someone to change for the better, of course that's a
great thing, but in most cases that's not going to lead to much broader change.
It might literally just be that one person.
As a religious leader, like you pointed out, that could have a huge ripple effect.
Because as you said, people listen to those people and change their ways according to
the way their leaders change their ways in many cases.
That actually makes me think back about this whole Kapouros that I was talking about a
little bit ago.
I've never deliberately tried to engage with any of these leaders about Kapouros and why
it makes no sense and it's cruel and also the fact that there's an alternative to it.
If you are going to do the Kapouros custom, you don't have to swing a live animal around
and kill them.
There's an alternative form where you can actually swing money or coins around and donate
that to the poor.
It's seen as just as valid for the custom.
When I'm talking to people at Kapouros, I don't know who I'm talking to.
I may have talked to some religious leaders, but I typically don't ask them about their
background.
In 2018, I believe it was, or it might have been 2019, I released a short documentary
called Robin Rescued from the Dead.
It's a story about this chicken who, when I was documenting Kapouros, I was near the
trash bags because the Kapouros people tell you that the chickens get donated to the poor.
In most cases, this isn't true.
They actually just get thrown in garbage bags and get hauled to landfills.
I was at the location where they have the most Kapouros use in killing.
I was there where it was just like the aftermath.
There's bodies on the ground, then most of the bodies are concealed in these garbage
bags.
There's just a huge amount of garbage bags full of chickens.
I was just standing by the garbage bags waiting for a trash truck, waiting for the sanitation
department to pull up and load them into the truck to take them to the landfill.
I noticed movement in one of the bags right beside me.
There was clearly a chicken in there that wasn't dead.
I notified a nearby activist who was standing just feet away from me.
I was recording.
She opened the bag and she pulls out this pathetic looking chicken with a cut to their
throat but they had missed the main artery.
The chicken was still alive.
At the time, I didn't have any hope for the chicken.
I thought they were going to die within minutes.
They were in that sealed garbage bag full of dead bodies for a half hour at bare minimum.
Long story short, the chicken did end up going with a sanctuary owner, getting some emergency
care and some emergency surgeries.
They did survive.
They're even still alive to this day.
For one, that was two minutes before the trash truck arrived.
They would have probably ended up dying by getting crushed in the trash truck.
That's one huge thing.
I don't know how this happened but a rabbi at one of these, they call it a Chabad, that's
what they call the synagogue setting for the ultra orthodox, he saw my documentary and
he reached out, I believe, to the sanctuary owner, Vanessa Dawson, who has a sanctuary
called Penelpy's Place.
She's who took in this chicken named Robin.
She reached out and the rabbi said, I'm going to tell my whole congregation to not use chickens
anymore for Kampouros.
That is in the grand scheme of things, even in the grand scheme of things just for Kampouros,
set aside everything else, that is just a little drop in the bucket.
But it's still, if that really did happen, if he really, I know he said those things,
I know that email really happened, but if he really did follow through, because sometimes
people say things and then they end up not having the courage to actually do these things
and there was no follow up with the guy as far as I know, but as long as he had the courage
to actually tell his congregation to not use chickens anymore and he maybe explained why,
then that's a really good impact that would have happened for my little documentary and
not just my documentary, but all the things that led up to the documentary being made.
What a beautiful story.
Thank you for sharing that truly.
I guess from all the stories out there, the ones of animals and the footage of them escaping,
going against the odds, just jumping out of the truck or finding their way out of the
ranch, those are the most touching to me because what are the chances of getting out of this
machine of death and still here you are safe and finding your way to humans who don't want
to kill you, who don't want to torture you or eat you and who actually want to care for
you.
Yeah, I'm always in awe of those stories.
I think they're the best out there.
I totally agree.
Not just that, but also another thing that's really powerful is what happens afterwards,
the transformation, the healing, because they come to these sanctuaries with so much damage,
physical damage, psychological damage, maybe personality issues because they have trust
issues and they still see humans as the enemy.
And then they see after a certain time that they're safe, they get enough care to heal
physically and many of them have, they display behavior that's indicative of PTSD, trauma,
and then you see them change.
And for me, I don't have much of that, I don't really have that experience because I don't
have a sanctuary, but I've heard it from other sanctuary owners, whether it's hearing these
stories in person or seeing their social media posts or listening to podcasts like yours.
And it's just absolutely amazing to see the radical change that animals can go through
with our help and in turn that can help heal us as well in varying degrees.
And like that chicken that I just mentioned, Robin, he clearly suffered, he clearly had
major PTSD and he had some behavior issues when he first came to the sanctuary, like
incessant pecking, for example, which is no fun for the person taking care of them.
But after a certain number of days or maybe it was like a week or two weeks tops, I don't
even think it took two weeks or maybe not even a whole week.
The chicken, Robin clearly knew that he was in a good place and he was safe and loved
and nothing like that was ever going to happen to him again.
So yeah, very, very moving stuff.
And that's something that I care about a lot incorporating into my work too, showing sanctuary
as a contrast, sanctuary, liberation, rescue, love as a contrast to the animal exploitation
and abuse and killing because it's good to show how animals can be in different environments
and how we can have different relationships with them.
And it doesn't have to be the way it's always been.
We are flooded with choices on a daily basis.
I can be a radically different person tomorrow if I wanted to and so can everyone else.
We have the freedom to do that.
So yeah, I think anyway, sorry, I forget where that was going, but I think I said enough
in regards to that.
Well it's beautifully said and I'm happy because in preparation for this interview, I thought
what topics need to be covered.
And I found this section in your website where you list your focuses.
So basically what you want to, what your line of work is about.
And we covered lots of items on that list.
So the first one would be the humane myth.
And then the second one, state and country fairs, rodeos and other abusive entertainment
events is another one.
Zoos and aquariums.
Now aquariums is a tricky one.
And I did an episode on with the sanctuary owner behind Friends of Phillips.
And we discussed how it is much harder to develop a bond with aquatic life or even feel
compassion for their suffering.
And I get that all the time and all vegans get it too.
You don't even eat fish.
Fish should be the exception because they don't have feelings.
It's just a fish.
And it's already hard with land animals.
So the level of difficulty to just create that bond with or that connection with marine
life is just tremendously harder.
So how do you try to create that through your work?
Yeah, well, I'm all about promoting the potential to have bonds with animals like pigs and chickens
and cows and so forth.
Land animals who we can relate to more.
I've never, at least as far as I remember, I've never done anything to promote having
bonds with aquatic animals, even though I know that it is possible in some circumstances.
Only not all circumstances.
But for me, it's more about just treating them fairly and compassionately and leaving
them alone.
And I think our circle of justice and fairness should include other animals, including aquatic
animals, whether there's the potential for bond or not.
So yeah, I've documented a lot of fish being sold in stores.
I've documented aquariums.
I've documented some fishing, nothing that comes close to commercial fishing.
But I've documented a lot of these youth fishing derbies where young children and sometimes
young teenagers are brought there and taught to fight if they don't already know, which
in many cases they don't already know how to pull these creatures out of the water and
let them suffocate and so forth.
And sometimes it is harder to capture the suffering of aquatic animals than it is for
animals like chickens and pigs.
But it can be done.
I've definitely done it many, many times over.
And I think it's not difficult to point out the wrongdoing of this.
Because we know that these things are unnecessary.
We don't need to take animals out of their wild habitats and ship them in a truck and
put them in a tiny little fish tank and use them as a decoration in our house or something
that's fun to look at every now and then.
We don't need to have hatcheries where we breed fish and then we release them into a
lake for people to trick with a worm or something on the end of the hook and then pull out of
where they're able to actually live.
So for me it's just about justice and fairness and preventing suffering and embracing change
for the better.
It's not about promoting a bond.
So I know with the one person you mentioned where you're talking about aquariums, I know
they have, I'm not very familiar with the work that they do, but I do know that they
have an aquatic sanctuary where they have rescued animals such as beta fishes and so
forth.
And I'm sure they do have as much of a bond as you possibly can have with a creature like
that.
So I think it's important for them to carry out that kind of work and show that perspective.
But that's not what I do personally.
I just try to point out the clear, obvious, blatant wrongdoing that humans are engaging
in and just basically requesting an end to this.
Yes.
Let me go through the rest of the list.
Slaughterhouses and rendering plants.
Now I never set foot in a slaughterhouse.
I did visit a dairy farm, a dairy factory farm once, but never a slaughterhouse.
What is it like?
I don't have a general opinion about what it's like in a slaughterhouse.
I've had a lot of different experiences.
I've also just done some documenting outside of slaughterhouses where I've never seen what
the inside looks like.
I've never been in a major slaughterhouse, you know, like a Tyson slaughterhouse or anything
like that.
I've been in much smaller ones.
And I've even been to things where animals are not even killed and some of those things
are even worse than some of the slaughterhouses I've been to, like a pig wrestling event
that I went to once in Wisconsin.
That was the worst energy I've ever experienced.
The darkest energy I've ever experienced, like more so than any slaughterhouse I've been
in.
But yeah, I mean, they're obviously really depressing places and the animals are always
kept in horrendous conditions.
Just like when I've seen animals killed on farms, the animals are always killed in front
of each other.
So they can always see what's coming.
They can smell it.
They can hear it too.
There was only one slaughterhouse I've ever been to where I saw how it was operated and
the owner did make a deliberate effort to shield the animals from the other animals
being killed before them.
With that being said, I haven't returned to that place, although I would like to in 2025
as soon as possible.
So I don't know if that's still how it is.
I know the place was under construction at the time.
It was under construction, but they were still killing animals.
So I don't know if anything's changed there.
But I certainly wouldn't call it humane by any means, but I did at least appreciate the
effort of that guy to not expose the animals to how the animals were being killed before
them.
That should be a no-brainer.
Not that I approve of slaughterhouses even existing, but if they are going to exist,
that's how they should all operate.
Humans whether it's a small farm or a small slaughterhouse or a big slaughterhouse, it's
really just always about convenience and efficiency for the humans.
It does detract from the convenience factor to not just let all the animals be killed
in front of each other.
But yeah, I mean, generally you see and you hear a lot of panic and terror in the animals.
Sometimes you see them trying to face the other way to not see what's going on.
You see a lot of huddling together, screaming, definitely a lot of fighting, fighting to
get free, trying to escape the cage or the enclosure, whatever they're in.
Generally fight to their last breath.
What I've seen in most cases is always just ultimate disregard.
It's never about trying to minimize the pain for the animals and trying to make things
as quick as possible.
There is one slaughterhouse in Stockton, California that anyone could see.
It's not open to the public per se where you can walk in, but they don't shield themselves
from public view.
They shackle the animals right next to the sidewalk.
You can't see the actual killing because the chickens start in that first room and then
they're led into another room and that's where the killing is going on.
They do have that blocked off.
But you can see enough from the sidewalk to see what these chickens are going through.
There were a couple of times I went there with my previous partner and we asked if we
could just have a chicken and the specific worker both times just handed us a chicken.
I know of other people, I've heard of someone else who lives out there in California.
I don't live in California.
I've heard of someone who lives out there in California and goes there from time to
time and they get a chicken as well.
I don't necessarily say it's an act of compassion for the worker to do that.
It's nice that they did that.
They don't have to do that.
There was no pressure.
It wasn't like, give us a chicken or else I'm going to put your face all over the internet.
We didn't do anything like that.
We just simply said can we have a chicken and he did it.
Most slaughterhouses, I don't think you would have any such luck.
That was a good experience.
I've had a sanctuary.
Once again, not trying to humane wash the place.
As far as transparency, generally the ones where they're the most transparent with letting
you see everything, including the killing, are the halal slaughterhouses.
I've had several halal slaughterhouses.
I did have to use a cover story.
I didn't say I was vegan.
With that being said, one of the halal slaughterhouses I went to, a vegan left the person a bad review
on Google reviews.
This vegan never actually visited the sanctuary.
There's a misconception out there that halal slaughter is worse than non-halal slaughter,
but I think it's all equally as bad.
Pretty much.
The slaughterhouse owner replied back to this guy's comment and said you can come visit
the slaughterhouse.
I'll let you see everything.
He was totally honest.
I even talked to the guy afterwards.
Sometimes there's a popular thing where farmers pretend that you can come out to their farm
and they're trying to sound like they know that what they're doing is good and they're
okay with you seeing it, but it's really a gotcha kind of thing.
It's not for real.
This guy actually was for real.
Whoever this vegan person was, they never actually took the person up on their offer.
One experience I want to talk about at a slaughterhouse, I pulled up to a slaughterhouse in Minnesota
where they kill, it's 100% just chickens who have come from egg farms.
I think all or most of these chickens have lived their whole life in cages.
Chickens of that sort typically all come with broken bones.
They're just really fragile.
They're mangled and everything.
When you pull up to the slaughterhouse, it's on a public street.
It's in a very small town.
It's kind of similar in the way that I was just talking about the one in Stockton where
you can see them shackling from the sidewalk.
This has that feature too where you can see the chickens being shackled from the sidewalk.
These guys are way rougher with the chickens.
They would grab more chickens at a time, way more violently and shackle them more violently.
When they noticed me with my camera, they actually closed the door whereas the one in
Stockton doesn't do that.
Anyway, I put my drone in the air and they had a big rendering truck in the parking lot
and it's just really neatly organized.
It's a long trailer and it's very organized by body parts.
It's like a big mountain of this one body part, then the next body part, then the next.
Much to my surprise, as far as I know, I'm the first and only person still to this day
to ever document this, there were actually live chickens in the rendering truck on top
of the vast mountains of body parts.
Some were dead.
There were some whole chickens with feathers and everything that were dead, but there were
some that were still moving.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of thinking I was recording and I wasn't recording, but
then I realized I wasn't actually recording and I started recording.
I still did get a little bit of footage of some of these live chickens moving around
in there.
I got a knock on the window from a woman who was the wife of the person who owned the slaughterhouse
and she was freaking out at me.
There's a lot of dark things happening at slaughterhouses that have still to this day
never been documented that we have absolutely no idea about.
That's why I'm a very strong proponent of doing investigations on slaughterhouses that
way too, like with drones.
Of course, a lot of the document that I'm doing, I'm not undercover.
This is an example.
I'm not going in and up, oh, I want to write a nice story about you for the paper.
Do you mind if I get some drone shots?
I'm just pulling up and I'm just putting a drone in there.
I don't give a shit what they think about me or how much they get pissed off.
And also, I found out afterwards, because I didn't even look this place up before I
went there, I just saw, oh, there's this place here.
I'm going to go see what they're up to, see what they're up to, the best of my ability.
And then I looked them up after that day and I found out that the Humane Society of the
United States had an actual investigator working in there several years before I went.
And it was one of the most disgusting undercover investigation videos I've ever seen.
They had a higher than average rate of boiling birds alive.
And it was a great investigation that the HSUS did, but it hasn't led to any change
at all.
And then PETA put something out about them like a year or two after I went there.
And this was in relation to thousands of birds freezing in the trucks in the middle of the
winter.
So this place is just getting away with so much stuff.
And no matter what comes out about them, they don't change their ways.
They don't get penalized or anything.
And yeah, it's just really sad.
Yeah, I've had a lot of very different experiences at different kinds of slaughterhouses.
The ones that I've been invited in, people have generally been very friendly to me.
And the ones when I show up uninvited and try to record with my drone or stand on a
sidewalk, there's a lot of hostility.
I had one slaughterhouse owner try to follow me home once.
He was driving behind me for a while and then I wasn't going to let him follow me all the
way.
So I got out of my car at a stop sign and I just went up to him and I was like recording
with my cell phone.
And then all these other cars are behind him and they're getting all aggravated and honking
and stuff.
And he finally turns around.
So yeah, vast variety of experiences, but nothing to this day that's been way too bad
besides just visuals that I've had to take in.
And that's truly fascinating.
And going back to that point about being independent, you said you were the first getting that footage.
And that's the thing.
When you don't control people, when you give them a level of independence, they do first.
They come up with original ideas and they enact original methods of getting that footage
or things like that.
So that's another argument for being independent.
And to complete that list, just as a reference for people to visit the website, religious
animal sacrifice, we covered that in depth, fishing derbies, animal rights, and farmed
animal sanctuaries, of course.
So I highly recommend people to go and visit your website.
It's truly wonderful.
You get a real good sense of your level of professionalism and what it looks like to
do honest, inquisitive, and independent reporting work.
So yes.
Congratulations.
Thank you very much.
I want to say wonderful work.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I really appreciate that.
And we didn't talk about it at all, but the fairs that I've been to to document, I've
documented tons and tons of fairs, county and state fairs.
And those are things that you don't have to get permission to go in and document.
They're open to the public.
You only have to be undercover in the sense that you act at least neutral or like you're
okay with what's going on.
Because if you act like you're against it, then you're going to get ejected from the
fair.
But yeah, anyone can go see those things.
Anyone can go document them.
Some of those things are free to enter.
Some you have to pay a little bit of money.
And I would put fairs, whether the county fairs or state fairs, I would put both those
towards the top of the worst things I've ever seen.
The level of abuse and violence at these places is ineffable.
There's no words for it.
It's just truly unbelievable.
For example, next month in Pennsylvania, the PA Farm Show is coming around the corner and
they have the, they call it the calf corner.
They bring in 16, at least that's what they did in 2024, they bring in 16 pregnant cows
who have been destined to produce babies in front of an audience at this fair.
And they straight up lie to the public about, because they take the babies away from the
moms within 20 to 30 minutes, which is what they do on the actual farms too, except on
the actual farms, sometimes the calves don't even have 20 or 30 minutes.
Sometimes it's immediate if someone's around when the birth takes place.
But yeah, they take the babies away and they lie to the public about how the mothers have
no maternal instincts and how the baby's better with us and that if the baby was left with
the mom, the mom might kill the baby or injure the baby and the lies just go on and on and
on.
And the dairy industry knows that more people are finding out now how dairy works.
It used to be the case that no one knew, not nobody, but mostly nobody knew that you had
impregnate a cow against her will so that she would have a baby.
Then what would follow is they would produce milk.
So now that there's a lot more people like us telling the public that this is how dairy
works, they have to level up their transparency and let people know that that's how it works
too.
But they have to humane wash it and act like it's all done kindly, benevolently, and it's
for the cow's own good to take them away from their mother.
And this is becoming a popular thing at fairs.
It's not happening at the majority of fairs, but it's happening at a lot of them all over
the country.
It's completely disturbing.
So that's just one example.
And then the 4-H and FFA shows and the list goes on and on and on.
But if anyone's listening to this and they're interested in documenting any atrocities happening
to animals, I would definitely encourage them to start with things like fairs.
Because most of us live near fairs.
They're very accessible and there's a wide variety of things happening to animals at
these places.
Most fairs have never really been covered from an animal rights perspective because
there's too many of them and there's not enough vegans or vegans who are documenting things.
And not that documenting something means that something's going to change, but it's still
good to put something out there and raise awareness about injustices that are taking
place in our backyards.
Yes, and I will personally take those words to heart.
I know in summer there are a few rodeo fairs around where I live.
So yes, I will definitely be thinking about what you just said and maybe listen back to
this episode to give me some courage to go and try to document.
And also, what do they call them?
Tips, I think.
If people have some information, insider information, or they want to make you aware of some particularly
atrocious things going on somewhere, how can they reach you?
How can they message you?
They could send me either a direct message on my Instagram, which is unparalleled underscore
suffering.
I do have a Facebook that you can technically message me on as well, but I rarely ever engage
with my Facebook.
I can go months in a row without even sharing anything to my Facebook.
I've almost completely lost interest in that app, which is nothing recent.
This has been going on for years.
Sometimes I question if I should even still have it.
So that's one way.
And then you can also email me at photographer at unparalleled suffering.org.
And again, please refer to the episode's notes for all of that.
And thank you.
Thank you again for all your great work.
Thank you for having taken the time to meet with me and answer my questions.
This was really appreciated.
Thank you for the opportunity.
And it's an honor to be featured on my favorite vegan podcast to date.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans, you know, let's encourage
more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.