Would you like a flower? – I'd love a flower.
There you go, have a flower. – What is the purpose of this flower?
It's just to bring a little bit of hope because this place is a place of death.
With greater focus on humanity's impact on the planet, our view of other animals is changing.
Badgers aren't bringing the end of civilisation. Badgers aren't creating climate change.
Our relationship to animals is a very strange and baffling thing, isn't it?
It is.
My darling, I love you.
Parliament is debating flagship animal welfare bills.
The idea that animals have rights,
which are in some way akin to human rights is much more problematic.
To what extent are we projecting our own feelings on the pigs?
Well, what does that matter?
Veganism is on the rise.
We're doing this to try and save animals. We're doing this to try and save people.
Do you agree with this?
Everyone's got the right to eat what they like I think.
While the pandemic has exposed
just how problematic our impact can be.
The closer our relationship becomes, we are more likely
rather than less likely, to have future pandemics.
It's about how do we co-exist in this world?
It is in this climate that animal rights activists have sensed an opportunity to grow what has
traditionally been a fringe cause.
There's 3,000 pigs that get slaughtered here every day.
The animals that get killed here get lowered into gas chambers and it's a horrible violent death.
You'll hear for yourselves, it's a horrific thing.
They’re really clever animals, pigs – they’re brighter than dogs.
Brighter than some humans, I hear.
Here at Manchester Pig Save, activists are raising awareness by memorialising the lives lost to the pork industry.
You know they're not going to be here anymore, they're going to have a traumatic death.
It was a really strange atmosphere because it was very quiet and very ...
It was sort of ... – Yeah, totally.
I'm sorry. – Be brave. Be brave.
Is it in any way beneficial for the pigs?
I would say that's the first time you've had someone who's unconditionally shown that animal love.
They're trying to interact, they're trying to come to you.
Once you've been confronted with suffering,
it changes you.
But that's you, not the pigs.
We can't help those pigs, what we can do is,
we can help the next generation of pigs.
If you look at these slavery, civil rights movements,
all those people who protested didn't change something at that point.
Legislation and action came years or decades later.
Every injustice can last a long time, but it can't last forever.
The activists invite me down to the side of the slaughterhouse, where the vigil reaches a crescendo of agony.
Some people don't like to go down here.
No, I've heard it's not pleasant.
No, it's not very pleasant at all, especially for the pigs.
I know it doesn't stop them from dying, but I just feel,
as I have to be there.
So what's going on behind that wall is, pigs are being lowered into gas chambers.
You can hear the hitting up the gas and then that's when the frenzy starts, that's when
you can hear the pigs fighting for their lives. It's different from what, you know ... normal pig language.
Does take its toll sometimes, just the act of being here and listening to the scream.
Bearing witness certainly felt uncomfortable, but I did not feel the depth of emotion so visible in the activists.
If we did what we did to those pigs or farm animals
to any other species, there'd be an outrage.
You know, if we treated dogs like that or cats like that,
everybody loves animals, they just have a disconnect with the five that we put on our plate.
Have you noticed a change since the pandemic about how
our relationships with animals are being looked at? – It's made us look at everything that we do.
People said they'd like things to get back to normal.
It's normal what brought us here.
Mers, Sars, the Ebola virus, the coronavirus, Aids, most of these diseases
are where we've transgressed into where animals live and reside, so if we carry on down this route,
it's inevitable what our destiny is going to be.
There's some animal welfare bills going through
parliament at the moment, do you hold out any hope that they will really impact on this world?
We're not here for welfare, we didn't look at better ways to keep slaves, we just said slavery
is wrong, you know, homophobia is wrong ...
Is there a better way to be homophobic? No.
We say there's a black and white and this is an injustice, these are beings, so all we ask is for moral consistency.
A key component of the history of animal rights activism is the gathering of undercover and closed
circuit footage which activists argue exposes the reality of our treatment of animals that its
perpetrators would prefer remains hidden.
I think it makes sense for one of us to be parked here.
A 25-year veteran of the movement, Jay Tiernan is the spokesperson for the Animal Liberation Front.
What do you call yourself when you're doing this sort of thing? I mean, what is
this particular type of activism?
I don't know, it's difficult. – Should we make up a name now?
It's kind of citizen journalism, isn't it?
Yeah.
OK, so tripod. – Check.
Laser pointer, trail cam, black tack.
Use tons of this stuff to just get cameras into the right position.
And at night time, when you're going into an area where you think there might be people about,
this is the most advanced night vision, it's used by the American military.
Nikon P900, for long-range work. Great bit of kit.
We need to just walk across this field to that point there.
Lead on.
So fox hunters create an artificial home for foxes, they encourage them to live there,
so that then on a day's hunting, they can flush them out and they've got some sport.
In 2005, with the ban on fox hunting, there can be no reason whatsoever to have an artificial earth here
that was only built two years ago.
What would you say is the value in doing the work that you do?
People have started to use social media in a way to try to change the world and I think I'm just
another one of those people, trying.
But you've been doing it since long before the days of social media.
In the 90s, I was more of a hands-on kind of direct action, standing on a roof of a lab,
or something like that.
And how do you think it's changed to today? Because, you know, the ALF
was synonymous with sort of bombing Debenhams in the 80s ...
I can't say, wholeheartedly,
I agree with everything that the Animal Liberation Front has ever done.
There could suddenly be a huge resurgence in,
people who go, 'oh hold on a second, the planet's dying, we know why,
what we're gonna do about it?'
Well, let's start using force because being peaceful didn't work.
There's loads of people would go, 'oh my God, that's terrible, that's terrible', it's like, well, it's been done
tonnes of times in the past by Baader-Meinhof, all sorts of other groups you can think of. Targeted.
Do you see that coming back?
I think it's always a possibility, yeah.
Somewhere in this next 50 metres, there's somewhere where
I've got to go in.
Oh, here we are.
On the other side of this tree line, is private land ... – Yes.
For me trespass is completely ... that's just a joke as far as I'm concerned.
Farewell, my friends.
Jay is returning to change the memory card and battery on a surveillance camera he installed last week.
Hoping to catch illegal activity that he can provide to news outlets and the police.
So I've got to climb a tree so I won't be able to talk to you for a minute
because I'll be focused on my tree climbing, all right? – Okey dok.
I'll be like, four or five minutes. – OK.
Fancy seeing you here.
Despite recording hours of footage, Jay has found no evidence of illegal activity.
Is this an occupational hazard? – Oh, God, yeah there's loads of occupational hazards.
In the face of such setbacks, I wanted to understand why Jay was so motivated to expose
animal cruelty.
There's people going, 'oh my chickens have been killed, so good for the hunt,
killing those dastardly foxes'.
What, those dastardly foxes that are being fed by the hunt over there?
So they've got some sport?
It's proper sick when you think about it.
It seems like it's sort of quite an emotional thing for you.
Yeah, it is, I've been doing this a long time.
I grew up a single child around lots and lots of dogs and I thought of those as
individuals, they struck me as all having their own unique personalities.
They are, in my mind, just other individuals who deserve to be left alone and to live their own life.
But is leaving animals alone really the answer? In a world with precious little true wilderness left.
Our vast impact on the planet has heralded the rise of climate activism
with different motivations but allied goals it has significantly buoyed the animal rights movement.
Hiya, good morning.
Can we call it that?
Bridging these two worlds is Animal Rebellion.
A group led by young people using attention-grabbing techniques to keep the subject
in the public discourse.
Why have you brought me to an industrialist state on the outside of Scunthorpe?
So the factory is the only factory in the UK that produces burgers for McDonald's.
They produce 3 million burgers a day our goal today is to shut it down.
What do they symbolise for you?
The food system was very different before companies like
McDonald's came into play and they symbolise like the entire animal agriculture industry.
By targeting them, we're trying to send a message that all these corporations need to change.
What do you plan to do when you're up there? – Hang about.
Just hang about? – Yeah, yeah.
Nothing more dramatic than that?
Honestly, I’m looking forward to getting some sleep.
It's what? A protest?
You don't know what the protest is about?
What do you think?
Something to do with McDonald's, innit?
I’ve worked for about two years, never seen anything like this here before.
First time for everything though, isn’t there?
We're hoping that we'll mobilise lots more people to come down.
I think with this kind of set-up,
we could last 30 to 48 hours.
Because you're hard to move? – Very hard to move, yeah.
And also, yeah, got some people on the roof.
The reality is this is only a very temporary
disruption to what is a massive global supply chain.
I feel like, you know,
change can be frustratingly slow.
We're always aiming to shift the conversation and to do that,
we kind of follow the long history of social change and, you know, one of the kind of key
pillars of that is causing disruption.
Is there a worry that you will alienate as many people as you attract?
I think like whether or not this gets the same level of tension of the last one we did,
or whether or not people commenting about and hating it like, you know, that's all starting
the conversation which is so desperately needed to have.
We need to keep going, keeping on trying,
keeping on trying new things and getting bigger.
We've got mainstream media coverage on LBC already,
Surge, they've written an article about what we're doing, we have social media engagement at like 7.41am.
Some people have an emphasis on animal rights and that's the primary thing, but the environmental
side is perhaps not as strong.
It's not just about our food, it's about how we see this world
as being an interconnected net of co-existing species of which humans are just one of those.
Animal Rebellion certainly knows how to create a scene but could this really force the fundamental
change that the activists demand?
What has this new younger generation of activists brought to the movement?
They have a sense of urgency because they know that their future is in jeopardy because
all the scientific evidence does show quite clearly that if we carry on the way we're going,
we're not going to be here for very long and I think all the things that are happening at
the moment, the police bill, the trespass bill, this sort of tightening of the state,
I think it's because we're closer than we think and I think that there
are more people who are listening and more people who are being aware.
Everybody's got a right to protest and whatever, like.
We might not all agree with what everyone protests, but ...
Do you agree with this?
I eat meat and whatever so, I've just come here to take a few photographs ...
I'm just interested to see whether this might have an impact on your belief, you know?
No, it won't affect me at all.
Not everyone who are taking part in this action is vegan, I don't think, but
the reason that they're here is because they believe that the way that we treat
and relate to animals is wrong and they want to be part of changing that, regardless of their
own kind of personal actions and I think that's really beautiful, really powerful.
This friendly face of vegan activism may well be on the right side of history.
With the climate crisis causing fundamental problems for all life on Earth,
animal rights and human rights are no longer so far apart.