The human-animal boundary and social movement strategies : a study of the animal rights movement in the Netherlands and the United States

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The human-animal boundary

and social movement strategies

A s t u d y o f t h e a n i m a l r i g h t s m o v e m e n t

i n t h e N e t h e r l a n d s a n d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s

Master’s thesis in Sociology, Cultural Sociology track

Joost Leuven

Jleuven@gmail.com

Student number: 10061606

University of Amsterdam

Supervised by dr. D. Weenink

Second reader: dr. C. Bröer

28

th

July 2014

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1 The importance of species: symbolic boundaries and the

animal rights movement

In 2009 I read an article on paleoanthropology, Taxonomic revolutions and the animal-human

boundary (2001). In the article, author Matt Cartmill gave an overview of the different ways

in which taxonomists have tried to classify organisms, describing a historical shift from descriptive classification, in which taxa are sets of organisms defined by essential observable properties (such ‘all hoofed mammals’ or ‘all birds that can’t fly’), to historical classifications, in which taxa are defined by their causal historical (evolutionary) continuity, meaning that organisms are grouped into groups with a common evolutionary ancestor. Cartmill discusses what this change in classification means for the study of humanity’s ape-ancestors and he mentions the difficulty of maintaining the idea of a fixed human-animal boundary. Cartmill ends his article with the conclusion that ‘species’ and other taxa should not be seen as natural kinds, with fixed clear boundaries that exist in reality, but as manmade (social) constructs that we use to make sense of the world.

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a somewhat similar point about the socially constructed nature of the human-animal distinction in his best-selling book on evolutionary biology The

Selfish Gene (1989). In The Selfish Gene he argues that it is not the struggle for the survival of

the species that triggers and drives evolution through natural selection, as is commonly thought, but instead the survival of individual ‘selfish’ genes. People, he claims, often over-estimate the importance of the ‘species’ in biological processes and this is one of the biggest misunderstandings within contemporary biology. In the first chapter, Dawkins devotes a closing paragraph to a discussion of the apparent social implications of the human-animal distinction and the weight that we give to the species concept within (Western) society:

‘The feeling that members of one’s own species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep. Killing people outside war is the most seriously regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however. Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and – according to recent experimental evidence – may even be capable of learning a form of human language.’ (Dawkins 1989: p. 10)

An organism’s species fundamentally determines how we relate to it and interact with it and the decision to view an organism of a certain species as a pet, a pest, as food or as a person, has very fundamental implications for that organism’s wellbeing. Furthermore, this symbolic

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boundary not only has a huge impact on how those categorised as ‘animals’ are treated, but also on how we as ‘human beings’ perceive ourselves. The species boundary often plays a large role in the search for our own identity. Struggling to understand reality, we often define ourselves as that which the other animals are not, as Joan Dunayer (2001: p. 19-20, 37) notes in False categories: how we define ‘us’ and ‘them’. We often attribute to animals a lack of positive characteristics such as ‘refinement’, ‘abstract reasoning and intelligence’ and ‘compassion’, precisely because we view those characteristics as being important in ourselves and as being the essence of what it means to be ‘human’. That is also why calling someone an animal or a beast is usually considered to be anything but a compliment. Franklin (1999) makes a somewhat similar point when he writes:

‘Typically, humans establish what it is to be properly human in contradistinction to animals, and particularly through the establishment of normative behaviour.’ (Franklin 1999: p. 12)

Franklin argues that because animals are extremely similar to us, while also being distinctly different, people look at what differentiates us from nonhuman animals when they try to define what it is to be properly human (Franklin 1999: p. 9).

These different properties of the human-animal symbolic boundary make it an important social distinction in our daily lives. It is therefore understandable that the study of the social aspects of the species boundary have not been limited to the sideline comments of evolutionary biologists, but have also been the focus of research for social scientists in a whole range of disciplines, such as media studies (e.g. Jonathan Burt’s Animals in Film (2002)), political philosophy (e.g. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis: a political

theory of animal rights (2010)) and sociology (e.g. Roger Yates’ The social construction of human beings and other animals in human-nonhuman relations. Welfarism and Rights: A Contemporary Sociological Analysis (2004)).

Interest in the human-animal distinction has not been limited to the academic field however. The contemporary animal rights movement can be defined as a social movement that focuses its attention especially on the human-animal distinction, trying to challenge both the distinction itself as the norms and behaviour that follow from it, as Lindblom and Jacobson (2014) argue in their sociological analysis of contemporary animal rights activism:

‘In striving for social change, social movement activists challenge mainstream society both by the message they convey and the unconventional methods they use. Animal rights activists are a case in point; by ascribing rights to animals parallel to human beings, they fundamentally question the dominant worldview as well as common behavioural codes. For instance, where others may enjoy a delicious meal, these activists see a murder committed and experience disgust even at the thought of ingesting animal-flesh. By extension, activists are often perceived by their surroundings as norm-transgressors or lawbreakers and – more generally – as “outsiders” or deviants.’ (Lindblom & Jacobsson 2013: p. 133)

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Lindblom and Jacobson believe that social movement activists can and should be seen as ‘entrepreneurial deviants’, who consciously choose to either confront or conform to different symbolic boundaries (Lindblon & Jacobsson 2013: p. 136). In the case of animal rights activists, the focus lies on the human-animal boundary specifically, they argue. Social movement scholars, like Cherry (2010) and Lindblom and Jacobsson (2014), have looked at both the goals of the animal rights movement and the different ways activists relate to the human-animal distinction: trying to either challenge and dismantle old boundaries or creating new ones. They have identified different ways in which activists try to cross or blur the conceptual distinction between humans and animals, often physically using their own bodies to highlight the arbitrary nature of boundaries. They do so, for example, by dressing up as animals during their protests and performing small plays in which they themselves undergo the abuses that animals have to endure. There still is much disagreement though about how this deviance management takes form, in what ways the human-animal boundary is challenged and how often this is actually done.

One of the most central questions in the study of social movements is the question why some movements succeed while others fail. In this regard, the animal rights movement is also an interesting case, as there is much controversy and debate within and outside of the movement about whether the contemporary animal rights movement is succeeding or failing. While public interest in and concern for animals seems to have increased in the last few decades, as shown quite simply by the increase in the number of people who donate to animal rights and welfare organisations (Vroege Vogels 2009) and the many welfare regulations that have reformed the way animals are being kept (Singer 2012), the amount of animals that are held in captivity and killed still steadily grows each year as well (Donaldson & Kymlicka 2011: p. 2).

This has been the reason for a large debate among social scientists, political philosophers and animal rights activists about the strategy of the animal rights movement. Some, like Ingrid Newkirk, the president of the American animal rights organisation PETA, argue that the movement should adopt a less extreme ‘reformist’, also known as ‘welfarist’ or ‘protectionist’, strategy. This strategy is a more compromising and moderate strategy that promotes small welfare reforms in the way that animals are kept. She argues that the opposite, a more ‘purist’, ‘absolutist’ and ‘principled’ strategy is too extreme, too divisive and is to blame for the movement’s lack of success (Newkirk 1992):

‘‘Absolute purists should be living in a cave,’ says Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). ‘Anybody who witnesses the suffering of animals and has a glimmer of hope of reducing that suffering can’t take the position that it’s all or nothing. We have to be pragmatic. Screw the principle.’’ (Times Magazine 2010)

Others, like Gary Francione, a jurist and professor of law at Rutger’s University, argue exactly the opposite, believing that the movement should adopt a more purist strategy, which rejects small welfare reforms and promotes the idea that what animals really need is empty

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cages, instead of bigger ones (Regan 2004). Activists should, according to this vision, focus more on directly advocating the abolishment of animal husbandry, instead of trying to make it more humane (Francione 1996). They refer to this position as an ‘abolitionist’ strategy, and they blame a reformist strategy for the movement’s lack of more far-reaching success, arguing that small successes in welfare regulation only postpone the complete abolishment of all animal husbandry (Francione & Regan 1992). This debate is, as Francione & Garner (2010) explain, not merely a theoretical debate and a side-show, but lies at the heart of the modern animal rights movement and the outcome of it has very real and practical consequences for the movement as a whole:

‘The theoretical debate between the abolitionist approach and protectionist approach – the latter of which Francione calls ‘new welfarism’ – is not merely an academic one. The practical strategy of animal advocates must necessarily be informed by theory, and their political, legal and social campaigns will be determined by whether they seek ultimately to abolish exploitation or to regulate it and whether they believe that regulation will lead to abolition. The debate between abolition and regulation is at the center of modern animal advocacy.’ (Gary Francione & Robert Garner 2010: pp. xi – xii)

Yet there still exists much disagreement and a lack of clarity within this debate. There is disagreement about the current state and development of the movement’s strategy. Also, not much is known about how the movement’s strategy relates to the boundary challenging: is there a connection between the extent to which animal rights organisations try to challenge the human-animal symbolic boundary and their choice for a more abolitionist or reformist strategy?

By doing both quantitative and qualitative (mixed methods) analyses of press releases of different animals rights organisations in both the Netherlands and the United States, this thesis will study the development of both the strategy of these organisations and the ways in which they, in their press releases, address and try to shift symbolic boundaries in recent years. The following chapter, Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework, will give an overview of the existing literature on the animal rights movement and symbolic boundaries, and provides a larger theoretical and sociological context, leading to the specific research questions for this thesis. The third chapter, Chapter 3: Methods and Approach, will discuss more in depth the way data will be gathered and analysed, as well as important issues such as the reliability and validity of the results. The fourth chapter, Chapter 4: Press releases, movement strategy and symbolic

boundaries, presents the results of the qualitative analyses and discusses how these can be

linked to the existing theory. The fifth chapter, Chapter 5: Reformist strategy and the

human-animal boundary, will present the same but now for the quantitative analyses. In the

conclusion, the results of both the analyses will be brought together and there will be a reflection on the results of the research and what they mean for the research questions and possibilities for further research. The thesis will end with a summary.

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2 Theoretical framework

The aim of this chapter is to provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for this thesis and to present an overview of the relevant literature. The chapter is divided in four parts. The first part will place the appearance of the animal rights movement in the 1970s and the changing attitudes towards animals in a larger historical and sociological context. The second part discusses the ‘abolitionist vs. reformist’ debate within the contemporary animal rights movement and defines important concepts related to that debate. The third part of this chapter reviews the literature on symbolic boundaries and discusses the relation between the strategy of animal rights organisations and the extent to which organisations try to dismantle symbolic boundaries. The fourth and last part of the chapter will provide a summary, a conclusion and present the research questions that will guide the qualitative and quantitative research.

2.1 Changing attitudes towards the human-animal boundary

2.1.1 The human-animal boundary

The attitudes within (Western) society towards animals have historically been subject to a lot of change. Ryder (1986) explores the history of ‘humankind’s changing attitudes towards the other animals’ (p. 2), and he argues that this history is by and large a story of a gradual change in outlook towards animals that is becoming more compassionate and concerned for their wellbeing. Ryder pinpoints the start of this change during the Age of Enlightenment, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, when authors such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau started to question the morality of the way animals were treated and they attacked the practices of meat-eating and animal vivisection (Ryder 1986: pp. 56-57). A few decades later, in 1823, the British jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham would plea in favour of valuing the interests of animals and humans equally, arguing that the species boundary was just as morally irrelevant as the boundary between the different human races:

‘The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. [...] The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?’ (Bentham 1823: p. 122)

Gradually the subject of cruelty to animals became of interest to a widening circle, also outside of aristocracy (Ryder 1986: p. 72), and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century saw the emergence of the first animal protection legislation (Bargheers 2006: p. 30). This process of a growing moral concern for animals further accelerated in the 1970s with the

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rise of the animal rights movement as a new social movement among the other rights movements of the period, such as second-wave feminism (Pinker 2011: p. 455, Ryder 1986: p. 3).

Norbert Elias (1939) noticed a historical decline in violence in Europe. He attributed this to a ‘civilizing process’, a socio-psychological change that started in the 11th or 12th and matured in the 17th and 18th century, in which the ways people control their impulses changed. One consequence of this civilizing process was that people increasingly started to control their impulses and started to take other people’s thoughts and feelings more into consideration. Elias argued that this civilizing process was caused by the historical changes within Western society:

‘It has been shown how, through specific figurational pressures, centrifugal tendencies, the mechanisms of feudalization, are slowly neutralized and how, step by step, a more stable central organization, a firmer monopolization of physical force, are established. The peculiar stability of the apparatus of mental self-restraint which emerges as a decisive trait built into the habits of every ‘civilized’ human being, stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force and the growing stability of the central organs of society.’ (Elias 1939: p. 502)

Through slow changes in the political situation in Europe, namely the amalgamation of small kingdoms into larger states and the creation of the modern nation state with its monopoly of violence, a social structure and stability was created that required people to have large social networks and form larger interdependencies with a bigger division of labour. With these increasingly complex social connections came more social constraint, forcing people to differentiate their behaviour and inhibit their impulses, subjecting individuals to a process of refinement that makes them less inclined to violence. It is by these social changes, that people, according to Elias, began inhibiting their behaviour and became more ‘civilized’ and sensitive to the feelings of others, including the feelings and experiences of nonhuman animals.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), Steven Pinker comes to a similar conclusion as Ryder, as he, inspired by the work of Norbert Elias, tries to disprove the notion that ‘the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history’ and he argues that over the past millennia society as a whole has steadily become less violent, with a decline in murder rates, torture, war and violence against racial minorities, children, women, homosexuals and nonhuman animals. Pinker believes Elias’ civilizing process to be a part of a larger process of people becoming more empathic and sensitive, causing a decline in violence. This process, he believes, cumulated in the rise of many small ‘right revolutions’ during the postwar period in the 20th century, one of them being ‘the growing conviction that animals should not be subjected to unjustifiable pain, injury, and death.’ (p. 456). Pinker writes the following on the growing concern for animals and the appearance of the animal rights movement:

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‘The recognition of animal interests was taken forward by human advocates on their behalf, who were moved by empathy, reason, and the inspiration of the other Rights Revolutions. Progress has been uneven, and certainly the animals themselves, if they could be asked, would not allow us to congratulate ourselves just yet. But the trends are real, and they are touching every aspect of our relationship with our fellow animals.' (Pinker 2011: p. 456)

Citing data that shows a decline in the percentage of American households with hunters, a rise of the number of vegetarians in the US and the UK and a decline in the number of animals harmed during and for the production of motion pictures in the American film industry, he argues that since the birth of the new animal rights movement in the 1970s, inspired by other emancipation movements such as the women’s rights movement, violence towards animals has declined.

2.1.2 The animal rights movement

From the 1970s the concept of speciesism played a large part in the growth of the animal rights movement as it was used heavily by different animal rights groups and authors who tried to popularize the movement and its ideas (Ryder 2010, Singer 1975: p. 20). The word

speciesism, coined by Richard Ryder in the 70s, refers to morally unjustified discrimination,

analogous to words like sexism or racism. In the case of speciesism it refers to discrimination on the basis of a being’s species (Ryder 2010). The concept was useful for activists who tried to attract the attention to animal welfare issues, by drawing a parallel between animal suffering and human suffering, thus challenging the symbolic boundaries that fundamentally separate animals from human beings. The term appeared prominently in Peter Singer’s bestseller Animal Liberation (1975), in which he, similar to Bentham in the 19th century, argued in favour of granting animals and human beings equal consideration of interests, irrespective of their species, and the concept was later also used by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his classic The Selfish Gene (1989: p. 10). The animal rights movement’s central goal has been defined as ‘a struggle against speciesism’ (Ryder 1986: p. 1) and as ‘trying to dismantle the human-animal boundary’ (Cherry 2010: p. 458). Since its inception, the movement has gained support and, similar to other movements of the era, many grassroots organisations within the movement have grown in size and have professionalised (Wrenn 2013: p. 179).

Authors like Ryder (1986), Wrenn (2013) and Kymlicka and Donaldson (2010) seem to disagree with the analysis of Pinker (2011) who sees a decreasing level of violence towards animals in the past century. Ryder (1986) argues that the twentieth century has seen an increase in people’s awareness and concern for animals, but also an increase in the level of exploitation:

‘The twentieth century has been a remarkable period of anti-speciesist enlightenment, but, paradoxically, it also has been an era of worsening exploitation and encroachment. While the human population explosion has made ever-greater demands

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upon habitat, and expanding worldwide industry has destroyed wildlife with pollution, science and agricultural technology have devised new means of oppression and justified all by results.’ (Ryder 1986: p. 5)

Wrenn (2013: p. 196) also points out that in spite of an increase in the attention to animal welfare issues and animal welfare legislation, ‘processes of globalization have led to dramatic increases in nonhuman animal exploitation’ and Donaldson and Kymlicka (2010), after discussing how the amount of meat consumption in 2012 has tripled since the 1980s, give the following diagnosis:

‘These global trends are truly catastrophic, dwarfing the modest victories achieved through animal welfare reforms, and there is no sign these trends will change. […] The animal advocacy movement has nibbled at the edges of this system of animal exploitation, but the system itself endures, and indeed, expands and deepens all the time, with remarkably little public discussion.’ (Donaldson & Kymlicka 2010: p. 2)

They conclude that despite signs that ‘the concerns of the animal advocacy movement have increasingly taken root in public consciousness, and not just in the United States, but also in Europe, where animal welfare legislation is more advanced’ (p. 2), violence against animals continues relatively unabated. This seems to contradict Elias’ theory that as Western society has become more ‘civilized’, violence against animals declined and that more ‘civilized’ societies are less violent towards animals than less ‘civilized’ societies. It seems necessary to make a distinction between a proliferation of reforms that increase the living standards of animals on the one hand and a growth in size of the number of animals that are being kept and killed on the other hand.

Joanne Swabe (1997) makes a similar point in her doctoral thesis when she writes the following, remarking upon the increasing rationalisation of the ways in which human beings use animals:

‘Throughout the course of history, humankind has found increasingly more and effective ways of exploiting domesticated animals to service its needs and requirements. As the millennium approaches, this tradition looks set to continue with a vengeance as we persist in our improvement of old, and development of new, ways in which animals can be manipulated and used to fulfil human desires. […] Yet whilst our sensibilities towards and critique of such standard animal exploitation have clearly grown in recent decades – this being illustrated by an increasingly vocal animal rights movement – rather than decreasing our dependence upon animal resources, we instead appear to be set to intensify and diversify our exploitation yet further still as we enter into the twenty-first century.’ (Swabe 1997: p. 169-170)

While people show more consideration for the interests of animals and started to care more for their wellbeing, the ways in which animals are being kept have also increased in scale and intensity. Adrian Franklin (1999) identifies these two contradictory developments too in his

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book, where he investigates the historical development of human-animal relations. Just like Pinker and Elias, he observes a trend of people becoming more compassionate towards animals, which he links partly to the refinement of the culture of pet keeping, which not only brought people closer to animals, but also allowed them to be observed better and seen in a different light (Franklin 1999: p. 14). At the same time though there is a parallel development in which animals were still used for leisure and consumed for human pleasure and an industrialization of these practices:

‘Throughout the Western world, meat eating was a key register of social progress. […] The production of meat became subject to the same process of rationalization as any other commodity production under Fordist conditions. Factory production concentrated meat production in smaller spaces; controlled feed, water and temperature efficiently, enabled the health of the animals to be monitored easily; and cut down on inefficiencies resulting from ‘unnecessary’ animal movement. This particularly affected the rearing of pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks, but eggs and veal production and some beef and dairy techniques were rationalized along similar principles. The slaughtering, butchering and packing of meat was also rationalized and spatially concentrated.’ (Franklin 1999: p. 40)

It is debatable how to interpret and evaluate these two contradictory twin processes of increased concern for the fair treatment of animals on the one hand and a rationalization of the rearing of animals on the other hand. In any case, the lack of big, unquestionable success in fundamentally changing the conditions for animals has caused a debate among scholars outside and within the animal rights movement about the effectiveness of the animal rights movement’s strategy (Donaldson & Kymlicka 2010: p. 2).

2.2 The strategy of the animal rights movement

2.2.1 The animal rights debate: abolition or regulation?

Cherry (2010: p. 466) identifies a specific debate about the movement’s strategy as one of the most prominent debates within the contemporary animal rights movement, both in the United States and in Europe. The topic of this debate is ‘whether to use reformist measures to achieve animal liberation, or to instead stick to abolition as the main goal and strategy’ (Cherry 2010: p. 466-467). In the debate a dichotomy of two opposing factions, each with their own strategy, is presented: an abolitionist strategy and a reformist strategy.

Proponents of the reformist strategy are said to advocate welfare regulations, like implementing bigger cages or more humane ways of slaughter, and they believe that promoting more humane, animal friendly measures not only increase animal welfare today but that it will also lead to incremental change and thus eventually will result in total animal liberation in the future (Visak 2011: p. 14). This reformist strategy is referred to as a

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‘protectionist strategy’ by Robert Garner (Francione & Garner 2010: pp. xi – xii), but is most commonly referred to as a ‘welfarist strategy’ or ‘new welfarist strategy’ (Francione 1996: p. 32-38, Donaldson & Kymlicka 2010: p. 3), because it shows a concern with animal welfare and strives for a reduction of stress and pain by avoiding unnecessarily painful or stressful treatment (Visak 2011: p. 12).

In her doctoral thesis Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in utilitarian ethics (2011) Tatjana Visak writes the following on some Dutch animal rights organisations that she has identified as using such a welfarist strategy:

‘For instance, the yearly flyer of Varkens in Nood (Pigs in Peril) starts with ‘Don’t eat meat from factory farms at Christmas’. […] [T]he Party for the Animals agitates against intensive animal production, but not explicitly against animal production as such. In the same vein, the folder of Pigs in Peril does not say: ‘Don’t eat meat at Christmas.’ The organization condemns ‘abuses’ in slaughterhouses, such as poor anesthetization, rather than slaughterhouses as such.’ (Visak 2011: p. 9-13)

Organisations using the welfarist strategy, according to Visak (2011), tend to accept animal husbandry as a given and choose to oppose intensive animal husbandry rather than animals production as a strategic choice (Visak 2011: p. 14).

Critics of such a strategy argue, as Donaldson & Kymlicka (2010: p. 2) explain, that:

‘[…] the so-called victories of the animal advocacy movement – such as [welfare reforms] - are in fact strategic failures. At best, they can distract attention from the underlying system of animal exploitation, and at worst, they provide citizens with a way to soothe their moral anxieties, providing false reassurance that things are getting better, when in fact they are getting worse.’ (Donaldson & Kymlicka 2010: p. 2)

Instead they propose a more extreme and controversial ‘abolitionist’ strategy, one that more blatantly defies and challenges mainstream social and cultural norms by clearly and unequivocally advocating the abolishment of all animal use and animal ownership, striving, as they say, for ‘empty cages’ rather than ‘bigger cages’ (Lindblom & Jacobsson 2014: p. 133, Francione 1996: p.3, Regan 2004: p. 10, Visak 2011: p. 4).

In the debate about which strategy is best there exists much disagreement about what strategy was used by the movement in the past, is used currently and how much difference there is between Europe and the United States. Ryder and Singer (Singer 2012, and cited in Francione & Garner 2010) believe that the strategy of the movement in Europe has been more reformist, while the American movement has adopted a more abolitionist strategy. Reviewing Francione’s and Garner’s book The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? (2010) in which they debate the ethics underlying the two strategies, Ryder states the following:

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‘Francione’s [abolitionist] and Garner’s [reformist] positions correspond approximately with the dominant ethics underlying the American political campaigns and the British/European ones, respectively, raising the unresolved question as to which has proved the most effective.’ (Ryder, cited in Francione & Garter 2010: backcover)

Donaldson & Kymlicka (2010: p. 2) also seem to have this impression, when they argue that the advocacy for animal welfare regulations has been more advanced in Europe than in the United States. Gary Francione seems to disagree with these notions and he argues that the movement as a whole started out abolitionist, but is slowly becoming more reformist, both in Europe and the U.S. (Francione 1996: p. 3). He observed activists groups and argued that while they’ve professionalized, both in the United States and in Europe, they’ve become bound to organizational maintenance and are now largely hesitant to present any meaningful challenge to exploitive industries (Wrenn 2013: p. 178). Part of the aim of this thesis is to study whether it is possible to identify (developments in) the different strategies animal rights organisations use. Can a clear distinction between these two strategies be made or are things in reality more complex and less clear, possibly because organisations use both strategies or completely different strategies altogether? To answer questions about (the development of) these strategies, it is important to have a clear definition of what makes a strategy ‘abolitionist’ or ‘welfarist’ though.

2.2.2 Defining abolitionism and welfarism

Those definitions are still subject of an ongoing debate however. For example, Francione (1996), Dunayer (2004, 2007) and Donaldson & Kymlicka (2011) each present slightly different interpretations of an ‘abolitionist approach’ and each have slightly different ideas of what a ‘pure’ abolitionist strategy is or ought to be.

Francione’s approach (Francione & Garner 2010: p. 75-79) for example, is centered around what he calls ‘single issue campaigns’, focussing on specific problems within the animal production sector, like issues with the animals’ transportation or inhumane ways of slaughter or castration. Francione condemns all such ‘single issue’ campaigns and argues that ‘abolitionist’ campaigns are campaigns that only tackle the ‘general issue’ of the current moral status of animals as human property and the absence of fundamental rights.

‘We need to recognize that as long as we are using animals and killing them for food or for other purposes, we *cannot* accord them ‘compassionate’ and ‘respectful’ treatment. You don’t ‘respect’ that which you treat as a thing.’(Francione 2014)

He believes campaigns shouldn’t highlight specific cruelties within institutions that use animals and try to make them more ‘compassionate’. He argues a ‘pure’ abolitionist strategy should instead focus on the general issue of using animals as property. Both Dunayer (2004, 2007) and Donaldson & Kymlicka (2011) disagree with Francione on this issue. Dunayer

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(2004) for example presents an alternative interpretation of what an abolitionist approach should look like. Dunayer believes that Francione’s perspective is much too complex, that the single-general issue distinction is too difficult to make, and she argues that ‘real’ abolitionist campaigns do not only focus on the ‘general issue’, but may also focus on ‘single issues’. She defines an abolitionist campaign not in terms of ‘general’ or ‘single issue’, but as a campaign that doesn’t in any way endorse the exploitation and property status of animals or leaves them in a situation of abuse (Dunayer 2004: p.70).

Because of these differences in opinion on what ‘abolitionist’ in essence means, some defining it as really broad and others as really narrow, it would be less practical to try to choose one definition and try to strictly label press releases as either abolitionist or welfarist. It would be better to approach it less essentialist and treat the strategy of the movement more as a variable, looking at how often pubic statements address topics that can be said to be more abolitionist or more welfarist. This also leaves room for other strategies and press releases not addressing either issue.

Although the mentioned authors disagree on when certain campaigns are ‘abolitionist enough’ to be rightfully called ‘abolitionist’, they do generally agree on what topics and issues are important in an abolitionist approach and what issues and topics in a reformist approach. Based on the literature reviewed in this chapter, it is possible to say that certain topics like 1) addressing the need for welfare reforms within animal husbandry or 2) advocating improved regulations that would make the treatment of animals more humane, can be considered more welfarist. On the other hand, topics such as 1) fundamentally changing the moral status of animals or 2) banning certain animal-using practices, can be considered more abolitionist. Articles that address these latter topics can thus be said to be either more or less abolitionist.

2.3 Shifting symbolic boundaries & the animal rights movement

2.3.1 Boundary shifting and the human-animal boundary

Lamont and Molnar (2002) analyse how the concept of boundaries has been used recently in a range of different academic fields, ranging from anthropology to political science and sociology. They say the following on symbolic boundaries:

‘Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality. Examining them allows us to capture the dynamic dimensions of social relations, as groups compete in the production, diffusion and institutionalization of alternative systems and principles of classification.’ (Lamont & Molnar 2002: p. 168)

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Symbolic boundaries play a large role in creating, maintaining, contesting and dissolving institutionalized social differences and are often used to separate groups of people and generate feelings of group membership and identity. For example, Franklin (1999: p. 3, 14, 32-33) writes about how the human-animal boundary is sometimes used to make a distinction between ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people. It is used to define what it is to be properly human. In this perspective, to be properly human or ‘humane’ means to have a compassionate attitude towards animals. Those individuals who lack such an attitude and don’t show compassion are not considered to be properly human at all and are in a way seen as more beastly and animalistic than the animals that are their victims.

Social movement scholars have mostly focussed on the efforts of activists to create and maintain these collective identities and symbolic boundaries than on their attempts to dismantle them (Cherry 2010: p. 454). In A Deviance Perspective on Social Movements: The

Case of Animal Rights Activism (2013) Lindblom and Jacobsson however put forward a

perspective on social movements and activists that is focused on their attempts to dismantle symbolic boundaries. They present activists as ‘entrepreneurial deviants’, who challenge existing social norms and partake in what Lindblom and Jacobsson call ‘deviance-management’: performing behaviour in which they consciously confront or conform to certain social norms. One prominent way animal rights activist challenge social norms is by challenging symbolic boundaries. Cherry (2010) has identified a few ways in which animal rights activists try to ‘dismantle’ dominant symbolic boundaries, a process that has also been called ‘boundary shifting’ (Wimmer 2008).

By ascribing rights to animals parallel to human rights, animal rights activists fundamentally question the dominant worldview. Similarly to immigrants and ethnic minorities who seek to overcome ethnic symbolic boundaries, animal rights activists seek to dismantle the symbolic boundaries between humans and animals (Cherry 2010: p.455 & p. 458). Cherry demonstrates how animal rights activists use two primary strategies of boundary work to dismantle the human-animal boundary, namely 1) through the blurring of the human-animal boundary and 2) by crossing the human-animal boundary.

Cherry argues that symbolic boundaries can be either ‘bright’ or ‘blurry’, meaning that they are clear or ambiguous. Once a boundary is blurred and too ambiguous it can no longer function as a means for categorization:

‘With its historic stability and wide-reaching nature, the human-animal boundary is a ‘bright’ boundary that animal rights activists seek to blur. A blurred boundary no longer serves as a means for categorization or social organisation; what the boundary distinguishes becomes indeterminate and it becomes difficult or impossible to locate individuals with respect to the boundary.’ (Cherry 2010: p. 459)

Animal rights activists try to blur the human-animal boundary by applying what Cherry calls either ‘universalizing’ or ‘focussing’ strategies. By focussing attention on the boundary itself, activists attempt to highlight the boundary’s arbitrary and socially constructed nature (Cherry

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2010: p. 460). According to Cherry activists often use phrases such as “human and nonhuman animals”, instead of the more common phrase “humans and animals”, to draw attention to the human-animal boundary, make the implicit explicit, and challenge the validity of the boundary. One author who has written extensively about this use of language is Joan Dunayer. In her work she argues that activists should use this type of ‘non-speciesist language’ to dismantle the symbolic boundary more often than is currently being done (Dunayer 2000, 2001, 2003, 2007). Universalizing strategies are strategies that either try to make a comparison between the suffering of humans and the suffering of animals or equating the struggle of the animal rights movement with the struggles of other emancipation movements (Cherry 2010: p. 461). An example of this would be the use of the concept of ‘speciesism’, which ‘emphasizes the socially constructed hierarchies between humans and animals that activists critique’ (Cherry 2010: p. 465).

The second strategy that activists use to try to dismantle the human-animal boundary, according to Cherry, is to cross them, physically, discursively and iconographically:

‘Ethnic studies scholars claim that if boundary crossings happen widely, consistently, and in the same direction, this ‘endogenous shift’ will change the original boundary. […] As a new social movement seeking cultural change, animal rights activists symbolically cross the human-animal boundary with a goal of shifting or dismantling the boundary altogether.’ (Cherry 2010: p. 468)

To dismantle the human-animal boundary, activists would in their protests use human bodies as animal bodies or substitute companion animals for farm animals. Cherry (2010: p. 469) gives the example of activists wearing animal costumes during protests. Other examples are activists performing small plays in which one activists takes on the role of a scientists pretending to perform painful experiments on another activists dressed up as a lab animal. Activists would also in their communication substitute one type of animals for another, to further highlight the arbitrary nature of the species symbolic boundary. Cherry (2010: p. 470) gives the example of activists crossing the symbolic boundary iconographically. She discusses a t-shirt of the animal rights organisation Compassion Over Killing, “with the image of a dog on a plate and the question, ‘why not? You eat other animals, don’t you?’”

In summary, Cherry (2010) identified two strategies of boundary work that activists used to shift the human-animal boundary, namely boundary crossing and boundary blurring. The first strategy is focussing on the boundary and highlighting the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of the boundary, so as to blur the human-animal boundary. The second strategy is to cross the boundary symbolically, for example by using a human body as an animal body. Both of these boundary challenging strategies that Cherry describes attempt to dismantle the human-animal boundary altogether. Success in dismantling the human-animal boundary would mean, for the activists, the expansion of the word ‘animal’ to include both human and nonhuman animals and the disappearance of hierarchical differentiation between humans, who are seen as superior, and animals, who are seen as inferior (Cherry 2010: p. 459).

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However, scholars disagree about the extent to which animal rights activists actively try to shift these symbolic boundaries. As stated, Cherry (2010) gives multiple examples from interviews and participant observations from both America and France, while Yates (2010: p. 17) argues that in general animal advocates have not started challenging these boundaries systematically. The aim of this study is also to answer the question to what extent these types of boundary challenging are taking place and in what manner: is there much variety in how animal rights organisations try to challenge the symbolic boundaries or do they focus on just one type of boundary challenging (crossing or blurring) and ignore other possibilities?

2.3.2 Symbolic boundaries and movement strategy

In their study, Lindblom & Jacobsson (2013) discuss how animal rights activists develop specific strategies for managing deviance and they argue that activists and organisations try to find a balance between confronting and conforming to social norms:

‘[F]or sustainable deviance-management, social movements have to strike a balance between the strategies of passing and confronting. On the one hand, too much focus on passing renders activists into social conformists where their cause, sooner or later, becomes insignificant or vanishes. […] On the other hand, a sole orientation towards confronting the beliefs and conventions of mainstream society also creates difficulties since it may lead to social marginalization.’ (Lindblom & Jacobsson 2013: p. 147)

Based on these ideas, one could imagine animal rights organisations trying to compensate for a more ‘passing’ reformist strategy by using more instances of norm confronting language that challenges the human-animal symbolic boundary. In the same vein, animal rights organisations who address more controversial ‘confronting’ abolitionist topics, could try to compensate for it by using more moderate and conforming language that doesn’t challenge the dominant symbolic boundaries as much. On the other hand though, it might seem more plausible that animal rights organisations pick language that fits their chosen strategy best. This would mean that animal rights organisations with a moderate reformist agenda, might also be moderate in their attempts to dismantle symbolic boundaries, not wanting to confront social norms too much.

Given the lack of empirical research conducted in this area, the how and what of this relationship can’t be easily derived from prior work and should therefore be treated as an empirical question. One might put forward the following conceptual scheme, showing the relationships between het movement’s strategies and shifting symbolic boundaries:

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This scheme shows the different strategies and the different ways symbolic boundaries are challenged, and how organizations would manage their deviance, by choosing a strategy and showing that there might me some relation between some strategies and ways in which boundaries are being blurred or crossed.

2.4 Research questions

This chapter reviewed the relevant literature and theory of other researchers on the topics of human-animal relations, (the strategy of) the animal rights movement and symbolic boundaries.

In the first part the appearance of the animal rights movement was placed in a larger historical context, based on the work of Richard Rider, Norbert Elias and Steven Pinker, who all identify a growing awareness for the interests of animals. The second part focussed on the debate about the strategy of the contemporary animal rights movement, grounded on the publications of authors such as Gary Francione, Tatjana Visak, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. It became evident that not only there is a heated debate about what strategy the movement should use in the future, but also that there is much disagreement about the past and current state of the movement’s strategy. In the third part of this chapter, the literature on symbolic boundaries was explored and the ways in which animal rights activists try to dismantle the human-animal boundary, discussing the publications of authors such as Elizabeth Cherry, Joan Dunayer, Corey Wrenn, Michele Lamont and Virag Molnar. Here too scholars are in disagreement about the extent to which such boundary shifting behaviour is actually taking place and in what ways.

Given the big ideological disagreements within the movement, one could question whether one should continue to describe all of these organisations as being part of one social movement, instead of just a group of activist organisations that are oriented towards roughly the same goal. Some authors have indeed provocatively tried to argue that there is no real animal rights movement at all (Francione 1996: p.3). However, such views remain highly controversial within the field and the literature shows that there are, despite the differences, also large and important similarities between the different organisations, not only in their

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goal, namely the emancipation of the nonhuman animal, but also in the strategy and methods they use. Therefore it seems correct, at least for now, to continue to speak of these organisations as belonging to one larger animal rights movement.

Based on the body of literature, it can be concluded that there exists a definite need for further research that aims to clarify the state of the animal rights movement’s strategy, how (much) it tries to defy symbolic boundaries through boundary blurring or crossing and, especially, how those two issues relate to one another. The aim of this thesis is to do just that by analysing press releases of animal rights organisation and answering the following research questions:

1) In what manner has the strategy of animal rights organisations developed in the past 15 years and in what ways have organisations started to address more abolitionist topics or more reformist topics?

2) In what ways have animal rights organisations tried to challenge symbolic boundaries (e.g. by attempting to blur the human-animal boundary or attempting to cross it, possibly by using their own bodies) and how has this developed in the past 15 years?

3) Is there a relation between the type of strategies – more reformist or more abolitionist – these organisations employ and the way or the extent to which they try to cross or blur these symbolic boundaries?

4) Is there a difference between Europe and the United States in strategy and/or language that challenges symbolic boundaries?

The approach that will be taken to answer these research questions and the methods that will be used will be further discussed in the next chapter.

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3 Methods and approach

To answer the research questions, qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted on about sixty press releases, dating from 2001 to 2014, from a selected group of both American and Dutch animal rights organisations. This chapter will discuss the methods used in this research and explain the approach followed.

The chapter is divided in three main parts. The first part of the chapter will discuss the data collection and the decisions that were made on how to collect data and from what sources and what those decisions mean for the eventual analysis. The second part will discuss the analyses, both qualitative and quantitative, the different variables that will be analysed and the advantages and disadvantages of the chosen approach. The third part of this chapter is dedicated to discussing the criteria of reliability and validity. The chapter ends with a summary.

3.1 Data collection

3.1.1 The press releases

Between 70 and 80 press releases were initially gathered for analysis. It was chosen to only look at press releases on the websites of the animal rights organisations themselves and not at press releases or news articles published on other news websites or news databases like Lexis Nexis. The advantage of this approach is that the data is not preselected by news media deciding to publish it or not.

This choice of data sources meant however that the records are incomplete, as not all animal rights organisations have a website with a complete record of press releases from the last 14 years. Based on these requirements, six animal rights organisations were chosen for analysis. (The next sub-section will elaborate on the choice of organisations.) Of each of these organisations between ten and 15 articles were gathered randomly. This was done by using an online random number generator and assigning numbers to all the individual press releases in the organisation’s online archive. In most cases, where the archive stretched back more than a couple of years, the press releases covered multiple pages (an example of this can be seen on figure 3.1, a screenshot of the website of Wakker Dier).

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Figure 3.1 Screenshot from the website of Wakker Dier showing the 45th page of press releases

In those cases, articles were chosen randomly in two steps: first randomly selecting a page, than randomly selecting an article. In a few instances this procedure was changed. Some animal rights organisations choose to release multiple press releases about one event at the same time or one day after another, altering only a few words or updating some minor detail. An example of this can be seen in figure 3.2, in which the American organisation PETA has released two articles, with one being almost exactly the same as the other, except for small changes like in the title in which they’ve added the geographical location of Portland.

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Figure 3.2 Comparison between two press releases from PETA

In the randomized selection of articles, this occurred only once, namely in an article by

Wakker Dier. In that instance, the second article was skipped and another was randomly

selected. In a few cases, the random selection of articles resulted in a lack of articles from certain years. This was the case with the selection of articles from Compassion Over Killing and from Wakker Dier. To attain a better coverage of articles from all time periods, a random selection of articles was taken from the missing years. Given this way of data gathering, it will be impossible to make statements on the amount of press releases organisations release each year and whether that is decrease or increasing. Since this research is more focussed on the content of press releases throughout the years and how this changes instead of the amount of content released, this is not seen as a major problem.

3.1.2 The animal rights organisations

To answer the research questions that try to compare European and American animal rights organisations, the sample is divided equally between the two countries. Two countries of origin were considered for the European cases, namely France and the Netherlands. Because Cherry (2010) contains a comparison between American and French activists, choosing French press releases might have allowed for a more direct comparison between her findings and mine. However, in the end Dutch organisations were chosen because an in depth study of this kind, looking at movement strategy and symbolic boundaries had not been done yet for Dutch cases, although authors have referenced Dutch organisations, such as Visak (2011: p. 9-13) and Francione (2009).

The selection of organisations was intended to have a broad coverage of both large organisations as well as more grassroots oriented activist groups in both the Netherlands and US. Wakker Dier and PETA are both large organisations and in the literature, they are

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compared to one another in both size and strategy. Francione (2009) for example describes

Wakker Dier as ‘Europe’s PETA counterpart’. This makes them appropriate organisations for

comparative research, looking at the differences between the Netherlands and the United States. The HSUS is a similar big American organisation and was chosen as another American organisation. The Dutch Dierenbescherming would also have been included in the research, but the lack of an online archive of press releases made that impossible. Instead, it was chosen to look at the press releases of the Dutch political party Partij voor de Dieren (‘Party for the animals’). As an animal rights organisation, they form a unique Dutch and European case, since they are not a regular animal rights organisation, but a political party with seats in parliament as well.

For the smaller organisations, the Dutch activist group Bite Back was selected. Data was also gathered for a seventh activist group, the Dutch Anti Dierproeven Coalitie. Even though they only have an archive dating back two years, data from this organisation was gathered as their press releases feature photo’s of protests quite prominently, making it potentially an interesting body of data for additional analysis. In the end though, due to time constraints, this data was not included in the analysis.

Other smaller organisations like Varkens in Nood, Stichting Dier & Recht and Ongehoord, were also considered, but lacked a similar archive. Compassion Over Killing is an American grassroots organisation that was chosen, since it too had a large archive and is also one of the organisations studied by Cherry (2010).

Table 3.1 shows the animal rights organisations that were chosen, in alphabetical order, grouped per country of origin and table 3.2 shows the number of articles that were gathered per organisation per time period. In Appendix 8.4 a list is given of all the press releases that were analysed.

Table 3.1 Animal Rights Organisations

Dutch organisations American Organisations

Anti Dierproeven Coalitie Compassion Over Killing

Bite Back HSUS (Humane Society of the United States) Partij voor de Dieren PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of

Animals Wakker Dier

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Table 3.2 Overview of organisations and primary documents

Organisation 2001 - 2005 2006 - 2010 2011 - 2014 Total time period covered by news archive Anti Dierproeven Coalitie 0 0 11 2013-2014 Bite Back 4 3 3 2002-2013 Compassion Over Killing 0 4 6 2009-2014 HSUS (Humane Society of the United States)

0 5 5 2006-2014

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals 4 4 3 2002-2014 Partij voor de Dieren 4 3 4 2002-2013 Wakker Dier 4 3 4 2001-2014 Total 16 22 36 2001-2014

3.2 Data analysis

3.2.1 Qualitative and quantitative analysis

The data will be analysed in two ways. Quantitative analyses will follow up on qualitative analyses. The qualitative part will be done through Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) using the computer program Atlas.ti. The quantitative analysis will be done using a statistical software package known as Stata.

At the start of the qualitative analysis, a selection of 10 articles from the whole body of primary documents will be taken and analysed, covering all the selected time periods. Based on that initial explorative inductive analysis and based on the existing theory, a code list will be formulated and the main themes will be identified, which will be used to analyse the then remaining articles. This will be done to allow for important and relevant inductive findings. Next, all of the articles will be analysed using the code list, one by one, in detail, focussing on the vocabulary used, topics addressed and statements that tell something about the organisation’s strategy or address the human-animal boundary. Each time an article addresses a certain, for example, reformist topic, this will be labelled accordingly. If an article addresses the same topic multiple times in different paragraphs, the same label will be given multiple times.

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Based on the results of the qualitative analysis, each of the primary documents will be inserted in a Stata data file, each as an individual case. The choice of the specific variables that will recorded partly depends on the results of the qualitative analysis, but in any case will contain variables dealing with the year of publication of the press release, the number of times the press release addresses abolitionist topics, the number of times welfarist topics are addressed and the extent to which symbolic boundaries were challenged. For example, when a press release contains no abolitionist statements the release will be given the value of 0 for the abolitionist variable, whereas if it contains one such statement it will get a value 1 and if it contains more abolitionist statements it will get a 2 or higher value. The same will be true for reformist statements and the corresponding welfarist variable. Using these variables, regression analyses will be run to answer the different research questions. The codes that were given to each of the 63 analysed primary documents were copied to a Microsoft Excel-sheet. For each of the variables that was expected to be analysed quantitatively, it was recorded how many times a particular press release contained a specific code. The Excel-sheet was then imported, through IBM’s SPSS, to StataCorp’s Stata. Figure 3.3 shows a screenshot of the Excel sheet.

Figure 3.3 Excel sheet

For the first regression analysis, a binary variable will be used as a dependent variable that corresponds to whether or not a press release contains a statement that challenges the human-animal boundary; this includes cases of boundary blurring and cases of boundary crossing. If a press release contained no such statements it was assigned value 0 and if a press release contains one or more of such statements it was assigned value 1. For the second logistic regression, a binary variable was used that corresponds to the question of whether or not a press release addresses at least once a reformist topic (addressing the need for tighter regulations within the animal using industry and advocating for reforms that make the animal husbandry more humane), as described in detail in the previous chapter. If a press release

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contained no such statements, it was coded as 0 and if a press release contained at least one such statement it was coded 1. Addressing a reformist topic will be the independent variable for the first regression analysis and country of origin, the specific organisation and year of publication will function as control variables. Country will be used as a binary variable, with the value of 0 given to Dutch press releases and 1 to American press releases. The variable for organisations is a representation of the organisation the press releases belongs too and consists of 5 dummy variables, with PETA being the reference category. The second regression analysis has publication year as the primary independent variable, with values ranging from the year 2001 to 2014 and has country of origin and organisation as control variables. Table 3.3 below shows all the descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation and range) for the dependent and independent variables. Appendix 8.2 contains the syntax file of the regression analyses.

Table 3.3 Descriptive statistics for dependent and independent variables.

Percentage Mean S.D. Range

Presence of statements that challenge the human-animal boundary through blurring or crossing

61.9% - - 0-1

Presence of statements addressing

reformist topics 30.1% - - 0-1 Presence of statements addressing

abolitionist topics 49.2% - - 0-1 Year of publication - 2008.762 3.859 2001-2014 US is country of origin 49.2% - - 0-1

Biteback 15.8% - - 0-1

Partij voor de Dieren 17.4% - - 0-1

Wakker Dier 17.4% - - 0-1

Compassion Over Killing 17.4% - - 0-1 Humane Society of the United States 15.8% - - 0-1

PETA 17.4% - - 0-1

To check for multicollinearity in the data the variance inflation factor was calculated. Multicollinearity is the phenomenon that occurs when different independent variables influence one another. The largest variance inflation factor (VIF) was 3.01, which means that problems resulting from multicollinearity were negligible.

3.2.2 Advantages and disadvantages of this approach

There are two considerable advantages to this approach. The first is that it uses data that is freely available, unlike for example interviews or survey data, which makes it easy to gather and analyse. The second advantage is that it uses press releases from a body of data that isn’t filtered by other media, instead showing the topics that the organisations themselves wish to address and in exactly the ways in which they want to address them.

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Press releases are of primary importance for animal rights organisations in spreading their message, as the amount of people that can be reached with an article about a protest or event is many times larger than the amount of people they can reach with the protest itself. This is especially true nowadays with the rise of the internet, when they no longer solely depend on newspapers anymore, as they can use social media to bring the press releases under people’s attention. This is also exactly what many of the organisations studied in this research do, using popular social media such as Twitter and Facebook to spread the articles that were gathered for analysis. An example of this can be seen in figure 3.4, which is a screenshot from the social media website Twitter, showing a ‘tweet’ by the Dutch organisation Partij voor de

Dieren, in which they link to a page on their own website with a press release titled Actie tegen landbouwgif metam-natrium in Limburg en Noord-Brabant.

Figure 3.4 A tweet on Twitter

Another example of this can be seen in figure 3.5, which shows a post on the Facebook page belonging to Compassion Over Killing, in which they post a summary of the press release and a link to the complete press release which also includes a YouTube video on the same topic,

The human-animal boundary and social movement strategies : a study of the animal rights movement in the Netherlands and the United States