Trip to Boston to help farm animals
This fall break six William & Mary students (four of which are in Students for Animals) went up to Boston, Massachusetts to volunteer for Citizens for Farm Animals. They wanted to propose a question onto the 2016 ballot in Massachusetts that would ban the use of confinement crates for veal, pigs, and chicken in farms throughout the state and also ban the sale of products in Massachusetts that came from out of state farms that use these practices. In six weeks, the organization had a goal of collecting 95,000 signatures, and they wanted to collect 5,000 in just that weekend we were there.
It took us 13 hours to drive straight from Williamsburg to Boston because of the traffic, so we did not arrive until 3 am. We gathered signatures in front of different grocery stores for about 6 hours every day for three days. We all had our different shpiels. Mine was: “quick signature for animals?” and then when they looked intrigued, I would explain what our proposal was and why it was important such as the fact that in confinement cages these animals could not turn around. Usually at that point, people would stop and sign. The only thing that made me feel better about harassing/asking every person who walked by to come over was because we only needed them to write their names and addresses. Although everyone was way more positive than I thought they would be. The best part was that a lot of people perked up when they heard me mention something about animals, and most of the times also ended up signing.
One of our SFA members, Paige, collecting signatures from two Massachussets residents.
It was also fun staying in the volunteer house with 20 other people, despite the fact that there was only one shower, who were also passionate about farm animal treatment, and I didn’t have to explain to anyone about the fact that I was vegan. We had some delicious meals such as the best vegan mac n’ cheese I had ever had, and a few of us went to a nearby vegan bakery, FoMu, and had DELICIOUS ice cream.
Vegan peanut butter ice cream from FoMu!
We decided that instead of driving the entire length of the trip on Tuesday, we would leave Monday afternoon and spend the night in New York City. It was great to get a little bit of break to just hang out, and we also ended up eating dinner at my favorite vegan restaurant.
Peacefood Cafe in NYC.
Despite the 13 hour drives and the hours on end of repeating the same exact thing to get people to sign, this is a trip I would 100% do again because I had an amazing time with great people, and I really felt like we made an impact for this proposed legislature. Personally I got 300 signatures, which I was really happy about, and the whole team got 5,700 which was far over our goal!!
Signed petitions from one day on the left side of table.
