Vegan activists test free speech limits with campus displays

Lifeline Campaign and Croydon Vegan Outreach shared in a demonstration outside King’s College London on Saturday the 6^th of October.

Two lines of activists held placards and screens showing videos of live vivisections, a common practice in animal testing.

The Animal Justice Project began the Lifeline Campaign to raise awareness of the line drawn by people between animals.

This campaign hopes to show the arbitrary nature of the choice made by meat-eaters to eat chicken or lamb but not rabbit or horse.

The Lifeline Campaign hopes to take this point further by expressing the idea of speciesism, which they characterise as similar to racism or sexism.

This idea states that it is through unjust prejudice that we treat different animal species as inferior to us and seek to end ‘the exclusion of all nonhuman animals from the rights, freedoms and protections afforded to humans’.

Giant pro-vegan campaign posters have been put up around universities across all major UK cities.

However, unlike the College, several universities refused to put up posters, even those of a non-graphic nature because it might ‘divide some opinion’.

A reason that some students might feel ‘alienated’ could be religious – also a major factor regarding opinion around issues such as the King’s Libertarian Society’s upcoming debate on abortion.