Today we’d like to introduce you to Greg Muren.
Greg, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I think that one unusual aspect of my story of becoming a farmed animal advocate is that I actually had no intent at all to do it until I was almost thirty. I loved animals growing up, like most people, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about our food system or, really, about social justice at all.
When I went to law school, I thought I would end up writing patents or doing tax law — jobs that have a reputation for being fairly pleasant and having regular hours. But during my first year of law school, I had a bit of a crisis. I was learning about how law is, in part, supposed to serve as a path for recognition for those whose voices and interests otherwise wouldn’t be recognized. And it was inspiring in a lot of ways: I was reading cases where some of the societies most disenfranchised were taking on very powerful people and companies, and — at least sometimes — they were winning.
But one thought that this raised in my mind was: What happens when you don’t have the law? What happens when that formal structure that recognizes your rights and intrinsic value just doesn’t exist? And that brought me to think about the nine billion farmed animals in our country, who, for the most part, are viewed by the law simply as property. To me, that just seemed fundamentally wrong: we know that these animals have social lives and feel pain, and yet, legally, we’re basically going to treat them like a soda can.
So, after that, I decided that I wanted to devote my career to pushing toward a place where animals are recognized by society and by the law as deserving of recognition. That brought me to Compassion Over Killing, where I’ve been working for the last year.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think that for me the fundamental struggle of being a lawyer for farmed animals is that, generally, the job of lawyers is to navigate legal interests, and farmed animals just don’t have any legal interests to navigate. When I watch a baby pig get castrated without anesthetic, or when I see hens crammed in cages with less space than a sheet of paper, those things seem terrible to me, but the avenues for arguing that they are illegal because of how they harm animals are very limited.
Instead, we have to try to be creative in our work. For instance, when the dairy industry had a “Herd Retirement Program” in which it paid farmers to kill more than 500,000 young cows to raise the price of milk, there weren’t any laws that effectively protected those cows. But there are laws that protect consumers against industries colluding to raise prices, and COK came up with the initial idea for a lawsuit on that basis that ultimately settled and got $52 million for consumers — and put the industry on notice that programs like Herd Retirement could get them in legal trouble.
But even though I think that was a great victory, there is something inherently tragic about arguing that the lives and experiences of animals should matter because a bunch of people had to pay more for milk. I think that we’re doing good work to try to shift the lens so that farmed animals are viewed on their own terms, and we’ve had some significant victories in that regard — probably most particularly the criminalization last year of the relatively common industry practice of inserting plastic rods through the noses of male breeder chickens to limit their access to food. But it can still be depressing to see these animals that, at least in my opinion, the law should be protecting, and to know that their interests generally are not recognized.
Please tell us about Compassion Over Killing.
Compassion Over Killing works to prevent animal abuse, focusing particularly on cruelty to animals in agriculture and promoting vegan eating. The primary thing that drew me to COK is that we are one of the very few groups that regularly do undercover investigations of farms and slaughterhouses in America. One of the animal agriculture industry’s great strengths is that, in general, it gets to decide what the public sees: because it has no obligation to show people how animals are raised or killed, it has both the incentive and opportunity not to show anything that the public would respond to negatively. Undercover investigations are really the only way that this information can get out there, and I’m very thankful for the organization and for our brave undercover investigators for the work that they do.
One obstacle that we face with these investigations is simply convincing people to watch them. In a recent study, about a third of participants chose to just look at a blank screen instead of at an informative (and non-graphic) screenshot demonstrating how pigs are raised. Given this tendency, it is difficult to just post a video on the internet — even with substantial media coverage — and expect people who are resistant to sit down and watch it for two minutes. So we’re launching a new campaign that I’m really excited about, called Beyond The Lies, that travels to concerts, college campuses, and festivals and pays people a dollar to watch a video showing investigative footage containing standard practices in animal agriculture.
These investigations and the outreach that accompanies them fit more broadly, I think, within COK’s aim of trying to get consumers to recognize the real, lived experiences of animals that are raised as commodities. Our efforts in false advertising — perhaps most particularly when we sued United Egg Producers over the fact that it called its certification program “Animal Care Certified” — also fit into this same bucket. To me, this kind of work is very attractive because, ultimately, I believe that if the public really knows what is happening to farmed animals, they will be responsive and habits will change.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I’m very close with my sister, who is five years younger than me, and many of my most positive childhood memories are times that she and I spent together — reading Harry Potter, making fun of each other, and annoying our parents. (Not that much has changed, to be honest.)
I think that a lot of my social learning came from her — we shared a room for a fair bit of time and that was helpful for me, as a very introverted kid, to become comfortable being around other people and to be able to let loose and have fun a little bit.
Contact Info:
- Website: cok.net
- Instagram: compassion_over_killing
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CompassionOverKilling/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TryVeg
Image Credit:
Craig Seeman
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
