Press Release April 10, 2020

Media Advisory: Hundreds of people across 6 continents take the Animal Save Movement’s #CoronavirusConfinmentChallenge in week one week

Contact persons: Anita Krajnc, 1-416-825-6080, email: anita.krajnc@animalsavemovement.org
Shivonne Engen, tel: +47 455 77 947, email: shivonne269@gmail.com

Date: April 10th, 11 am EDT onwards live streaming on Animal Save Movement

Animal Save Movement launched the “Coronavirus Confinement Challenge” on April 3rd on six continents, with 11 hours of live streaming to raise awareness about the reality of animal farming. In this challenge, activists try to replicate the extreme confinement farmed animals face and Livestream their confinement and use hashtags #CoronavirusConfinementChallenge and #SwitchToPlantBased

Today, on Friday April 10th, Animal Save Movement will host another series of live streams on its Facebook page starting at 11 AM EDT with worldwide participation. So far, the challenge has been taken by hundreds of participants including families, children and retirees, and celebrities.

Hollywood actress Nina Bergman (@NinaBergman) went to the old LA zoo and spent all day inside their cages feeling what these innocent animals were feeling.

The Animal Save Movement has almost 1,000 chapters which normally hold vigils outside slaughterhouses. Due to lockdown, vigils are in enforced hiatus. As a result, the exploitation of animals is even more hidden than before. The Challenge is meant to remind us of the animals’ exploitation and suffering: participants are asked to challenge themselves and others and stay in a space that they created that mimics a cage or a crate. Then they stay there for a selected period of time or as long as they can, then share their story.

“Through the #CoronavirusConfinementChallenge we can shine a light on how animals are forced to spend their whole lives in isolation and confinement. By bringing the size of their cages into our own homes we will share the animals' stories through our social media platforms and inspire others to do the same. Now, more than ever, we need to stand in solidarity with the animals and find creative ways to get active online,” says Anita Krajnc, co-founder of Animal Save Movement. “We can't possibly know how non-human animals feel spending their entire lives in confinement and captivity. But we can try to experience what they go through. We are using this opportunity to learn, educate, empathize and understand,” says Actions organizer Shivonne Engen.

Background: COVID-19 is a virus that originated in Wuhan, China and it's thought to have come from a live market where animals are sold as food. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and humans. The World Health Organization have shown that other transmissions of diseases transitioned from animals to humans via animal agriculture and live markets including Marburg, Ebola, Nipah, H5N1-Bird Flu, H7N9-Bird Flu, Mad Cow disease, Monkeypox, Swine Flu, etc. - many more in the past and many yet to come if we don’t learn our lesson.

Animal Save Movement is a love-based organization, co-founded by Anita Krajnc in 2010 in Toronto and it started by holding animal vigils in front of slaughterhouses bearing witness to animals coming in on trucks, offering them water and peacefully protesting. ASM has almost 1000 chapters worldwide. Its mission is to promote a plant-based diet and make it more accessible with the aim of solving the epidemic of preventable diseases and improve the quality of life for all human and non-human animals.