Coronavirus Confinement Challenge - Launch
Date and time of launch: April 3, 2020, 10AM EDT
Contact person: Anita Krajnc, tel: 1-416-825-6080, email: anita.krajnc@animalsavemovement.org
Shivonne Engen, tel: +47 455 77 947, email: shivonne269@gmail.com
Link to challenge launch ent: https://cutt.ly/OtU0LqV
With people spending their days in quarantine due to the Coronavirus outbreak, it is just a matter of time until a new challenge floods our social media feeds. Activists will try to replicate the extreme confinement farmed animals face and Livestream their confinement and use hashtags #CoronavirusConfinementChallenge and #SwitchToPlantBased
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. “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.
The #CoronavirusConfinementChallenge is coming live online, with over a quarter of a million followers, on Friday, April 3 on 5 different continents. The Challenge will run for the duration of the lockdown. Many well-known names will get challenged to participate.
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many of us are advised not to leave our homes and we have already begun to notice how uncomfortable this can be. For more than 70 billion land animals who are killed for food every year worldwide, being crammed together with little space in pens, crates or cages this is their only life experience. As they are bred into existence purely to be exploited for their flesh, milk, eggs or any other parts, the reality of being kept in filthy farms and trucks differs greatly from what most consumers envision when they buy animal products,” says Shivonne Engen, who is launching the campaign on the Animal Save Movement’s Facebook page.
The Challenge itself seems simple: challenge yourself and others and stay in a space that you created that mimics a cage or a crate. Then stay there for a selected period of time or as long as you can, then share your story using #CoronavirusConfinementChallenge ”How long can you last? How does it make you feel? Would you put your companion animal in the same conditions?” - are just some of the questions animal rights advocates from the Animal Save Movement have for us.
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 happened 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.