Opening words for the conference – Animal advocacy against a grain.

Good morning to everyone from Hiiumaa, island of the west cost of Estonia.  Proud to remind that Estonian Animal Rights Movement is going to be 17 years old in August. Our movement here is young because we lived 50 years under totalitarian reizime and recently –four hundred and seventyseven days ago – we were reminded that independence or liberty is not obvious in any part of the world. Even more important thing to remember is that we live globally in anthropocentric society and for other species it could be war situation every day. During developing our movement here, we have picked most of the times the strategy to cooperate with almost everyone possible. So, we have tried to cooperate with civil society, politicians, parliament, media, educational system, environmental organisations, climate activists, you name it. So, activists have infiltrated everywhere, even to academia as we see today. It means that during these years we have reached one milestone – animal rights are in public discussions and they stay there

As we see that animals have been mentioned more and more in critical discussions – using animals is one of the biggest reasons for climate changes, extinction of species is sometimes mentioned even bigger threat for planet compared to climate change, we have to remind one thing for ourselves. We can’t forget and it is sometimes so easy to forget – that we are fighting for persons not species. That every animal has their own world and if they suffer they suffer themselves, not species, and if the animal dies, their world dies with them.

I want to thank all the presenters who are going to talk during today and tomorrow, Ronnie is right, we need more vegan education, Claire Parkinson is right, we need to tell more stories, Martina is right, we need more direct action, we need more empathy, reading and writing, demonstrations and lobbing, everything what is possible to do. Reading the submissions and talking to many participants for media I got new hope that change of the system is somehow possible.

 I wanna thank European Association for Critical Animal Studies, Estonian Vegan Society, my fellow activists in Loomus, our dreamteam for organising the conference and the pre-conference events, so Saara, Jesper, Anu, Anny, Farištamo and others. Critical or not, conference or not, one way or another we have a global ultimate goal – Animal liberation.