Hanging Dead Pigs & Barging Into Bistros: These Montreal Vegans Are Out For (Plant-Based) Blood
No animals were harmed in the making of this article.
DxE Montréal activists hold a demonstration inside restaurant Bouillon Bilk.
Bloated pig bodies swinging from overpasses might be unsightly and even disturbing, but that's the point, according to an animal rights organization that claimed responsibility for hanging the pig carcasses recently recovered by the SPVM.
The organization Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) Montréal primarily advocates for "the right to rescue:" the idea that animals suffering in factory farming environments deserve to be freed from those conditions by any willing human. According to them, hanging the pigs was an action toward that goal.
In a Facebook post, DxE wrote, presumably in the voice of one of their dead pigs, "Take my slaughtered and ravaged body and show the world what they do to us." When asked how they came into possession of three dead pigs, DxE shared that they were recovered from garbage containers "on the farms around Montreal."
Despite this visible action, DxE Montréal claims not to be ramping up their demonstrations in recent months, emphasizing that they've been consistently active since 2019. Previous demonstrations include breaking into a Quebec pig farm to film the conditions in order to raise awareness and encourage the media to shed light on what happens inside mass animal farms.
The activists involved in the break-in were convicted of breaking and entering but not convicted on their one charge of mischief, according to CTV News.
This mischief-less crime was among the first of DxE's actions, taking place in late 2019. The organization referred to activists who entered the farm as "whistleblowers" in a conversation with MTL Blog. Their sentencing is anticipated to take place in April of 2023.
Since then, DxE has gotten busy entering and disrupting restaurants like Bouillon Bilk, where a video posted to DxE's Facebook page on March 5 shows activists yelling into megaphones as diners awkwardly continue their meals.
One activist holds a sign whose contents are difficult to make out in the video as another yells about the torturous and inhumane conditions of slaughterhouses and other mass animal consumption processes that ultimately lead to the meals on the beleaguered diners' plates.
