“There is the belief that activists’ needs are secondary to the movement….. We have a collective problem, and we need an entire movement overhaul.”

“I was at home, looking out the window and saw that someone had left a box in the middle of the street,” says Daniela Romero Waldhorn when asked if it was possible to pinpoint where her animal activism began. “Immediately, cars drove by and crushed it completely. Then I realised what was in that box. That person had abandoned around five baby kittens to be run over.” Romero Waldhorn was just seven years old at the time.

Watching the dogs and cats taking their chances on the Chilean streets, knowing they were desperate for food and affection, had always broken her heart, but it was this deliberate act of cruelty that changed her. She made a personal promise to do whatever she could to help animals and began right away by feeding the strays in her neighbourhood. As a child, there was little more she could do, but this was just the beginning.

Barcelona, Spain, 30th July 2021. Environmental portrait of researcher and lecturer Daniela Romero Waldhorn. Photo by Selene Magnolia / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

A chance meeting with a vegan during her college years inspired her to become vegetarian, but also to conduct her own research into animal agriculture.

“Until then, I was not really aware of how much suffering was behind my foods.”

But with knowledge came action, and over the next few months, Romero Waldhorn gradually became vegan.

In 2004, she co-created a network of street activists, and organised her first protest against the use of animals in circuses, specifically the elephant Ramba and the other animals used by the Los Tachuelas circus in Santiago. Romero Waldhorn remembers her early years in grassroots activism with fondness. “We were a bunch of strangers, at first, who shared the dream of building a more just and compassionate world for all. That is simply beautiful. I learned a lot from their experience, their courage, and the power we can have together to transform the world.”

And yet something was troubling her. “Shouting out in protest was, somehow, liberating but I always had doubts about whether that was the best thing I, or we, collectively could do.

Unfortunately, at that time, I didn’t have access to reliable information to make better decisions.”

While her childhood pledge to help animals was born of a visceral reaction to a traumatic incident, it has been her cool-headed commitment to evidence-based activism that has guided Romero Waldhorn since. In founding a local branch of AnimaNaturalis, she was able to learn about effective campaigning from more experienced activists. Together they campaigned successfully to free more than 100 monkeys used for experimentation by the Catholic University of Chile. Later Romero Waldhorn went on to work as an undercover investigator, documenting and revealing to the world how animals are tortured in festivals and how chickens are slaughtered for their meat.

Witnessing severe suffering inevitably exacts an emotional and psychological toll, yet enduring pressure and judgment from others within the animal rights movement has also proven difficult.

“Once, I was publicly sanctioned by another activist for going to the beach. She told me it was clear that I did not care enough for animals and should have been leafleting instead.”

This personal attack was not an isolated case. Over the years, Romero Waldhorn has experienced racist, sexist, and xenophobic discrimination from within the movement. Her work has also made her – and her family – the target of dangerous threats from powerful forces outside the movement. “While the persecution that some social activists face in Chile (and other Latin American countries) is not a common experience, it exists.”

After 17 years of working in the movement, she began to experience burnout. Rather than abandon her work as an activist, she used that difficult period to examine why she and others succumb to activism exhaustion. She points to the culture of martyrdom that leads activists to impose unrealistic expectations on themselves while organisations push supporters and staff to constantly demonstrate their commitment.

“There is the belief that activists’ needs are secondary to the movement, and everything and everyone can be sacrificed for the sake of animals–notably, everyone who is not a cis-white man. We have a collective problem, and we need an entire movement overhaul.”

Daniela Romero Waldhorn works as a researcher at Rethink Priorities, a think tank “dedicated to figuring out how to make the world a better place” where she investigates the potential for helping prawns and shrimps. Photo by Selene Magnolia / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

Daniela Romero Waldhorn is studying for a PhD in social psychology to help inform a more evidence-based strategy for animal advocacy. Photo by Selene Magnolia / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

It’s possible that such a journey, seeing and experiencing all that she has, might have driven Romero Waldhorn onto a different path, but she says she remains “impact-focused and hungry for justice.” Today, she works as a researcher at Rethink Priorities, a think tank “dedicated to figuring out how to make the world a better place” where she investigates the potential for helping prawns and shrimps. It’s a strategic decision as it is estimated that these animals are killed in larger numbers for human consumption than any other. At the same time, she is studying for a PhD in social psychology to help inform a more evidence-based strategy for animal advocacy.

Activist, researcher, and lecturer Daniela Romero Waldhorn. Photo by Selene Magnolia / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

This self-described “crazy cat lady who still believes deeply in human compassion” has found her role and her mission. Her twin strategy–helping the largest number of animals, while identifying the root causes of speciesism and potential ways to overcome it–is already an enormous contribution to the movement. And yet, perhaps, there is something else.

Romero Waldhorn has found her peace. She makes time to dance cumbia, walk in wild places, spend time with loved ones, and, yes, go to the beach. Her example of how we can each remain effective and committed while protecting ourselves from burnout might just be her greatest gift of all.

Interview and story by Kate Fowler. Photos by Selene Magnolia.

“When I came to the knowledge that animals were conscious, with the same level of awareness as us, it kinda shattered my whole reality… Now I’m a vegan, an animal and human rights activist. ”

About six years ago, Gwenna Hunter found her calling as an activist. At that time, she was living in Los Angeles and working as a recruiter for IT personnel, some of whom were being employed by military contractors around the globe. Hunter remembers her moment of clarity, initially communicated to her in a dream: “I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m contributing to the world. I might be on the wrong team here,’” she says. “I was just about me: traveling, buying shoes, and living what I thought was a fulfilling life.” While she had always been acutely aware of her own spiritual journey and persistent search for meaning, she didn’t expect her change of direction to be so dramatic. “When I came to the knowledge that animals were conscious, with the same level of awareness as us, it kinda shattered my whole reality,” she says.  She also credits the particularly eye-opening experience of watching Erin Janus’ five-minute “Dairy is Scary” video with pushing her to eliminate animal products from her life.

“Now I’m a vegan, an animal and human rights activist. I’m out here coordinating events. You could have never told me this would be my life,” she says, laughing.

Gwenna Hunter stands outside a meat packing plant in silent protest during a cow vigil. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

This slaughterhouse in Pico Rivera kills an estimated 1,200 cattle every week. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

Hunter finds herself at the intersection of two liberation movements in the United States, and specifically Los Angeles: the liberation and empowerment of Black lives, and helping others to include all sentient creatures within their circle of empathy, primarily through the elimination of animal products from their diets.

Hunter’s work is intersectional, and she speaks to a broad range of people and communities across LA, especially within the city’s Black and brown neighborhoods. As the vegan food aid coordinator and project lead for the LA chapter of Vegan Outreach, she helps distribute fresh meals and groceries throughout greater Los Angeles. She also works directly with a host of local organizations including Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, Black Women for Wellness, Black Women Farmers of LA and LGBT Center South to extend Vegan Outreach’s distribution network of plant-based meals and groceries. She does additional outreach and education through the LA chapter of The Animal Save Movement, called Los Angeles Health Save in collaboration with a social justice organization called Downtown Crenshaw. She has even started two groups – Vegans for Black Lives Matter (2020) and Vegans of LA (2015) – to foster continuing dialogue. (Both groups have existed entirely online since the beginning of the pandemic.)

Hunter’s primary goal through this work is to help more people discover veganism, particularly those in underserved communities. By steering clear of shame tactics and instead introducing someone to a way of eating (and thinking) that considers both their stomach and their heart, she employs the same empathy that initially drew her to this work.

Gwenna Hunter packs fresh local produce into bags at a vegan aid program in Los Angeles with Vegan Outreach. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

Gwenna Hunter, Avaion Ruth, and Kim King with Vegan Outreach stand in front of roughly 100 bags of fresh local produce given to local communities impacted by the COVID-19 crisis in Los Angeles. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

Fresh produce! Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

“In regard to animal suffering, I always try to get people to feel something,” she says. “So if you know what it’s like to suffer, and you can stand in that place, at that moment, you don’t want anyone else to feel that either. I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t know what it feels like to suffer, in some form.”

She uses this approach to help others make empathetic connections across race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and — in the case of veganism — species. “When someone is in that place of tenderness and thinking about their own suffering, I might inform them that a cow is pregnant for nine months, just like a human woman. And that when we take her male child for veal, that’s her son.” She consciously uses terms like “son” and “daughter” to describe animals and their relationships, to help people make connections to their own lives. “I don’t do any shaming; I did that once when I first became vegan, and it didn’t end well,” she says with a laugh.

“I came into this because of love and compassion, that’s how I want other people to experience it.”

Gwenna Hunter tries to capture images and video of the cow holding area that are waiting for slaughter at a beef packing plant in Pico Rivera. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

Hunter is likewise careful not to conflate animals’ emotional lives with those of humans, instead finding their common ground by applying her intuitive logic that non-human animals experience emotions like distress, pain, contentment and excitement. Why, then, would we choose not to believe that fundamental aspects of the meat and dairy industries cause them to suffer? She says she might explain to someone how artificially inseminating a female cow and taking her calf is robbing her most natural, deeply-felt instincts, and that a mother will often cry for her missing young for weeks. Why wouldn’t we believe that that mother is in distress?

“Lately I’ve started calling animals our brothers and sisters,” Hunter says. “We’ve been programmed from an early age to eat our brothers and sisters. It’s insane, and it’s no different from the blueprint we’ve used for enslaving other humans: ‘Oh, they don’t feel pain’; ‘they’re not fully human.’ It’s textbook exploitation, and we’ve just gotta be stronger and smarter. We’ve gotta help wake each other up.”

Her work aims to connect dots without creating false equivalencies, and to provide support by showing people alternatives. “I learned the hard way to never approach these conversations from the animal rights point-of-view,” she says. “If you’re not vegan yet, it’s gonna sound very weird to you to hear about animal rights— especially in the Black community, where maybe you got harassed by the police yesterday.” She says that when she talks about animal issues, she often doesn’t use the words themselves. “I talk about animals from the perspective of the blueprint for oppression — the blueprint of what slavery looks like, and how this is the same blueprint being used all over the world to exploit different marginalized groups, people and species.” Hunter also concedes that animal concerns simply may not be everyone’s window into veganism, particularly in the Black community, where more localized, personal issues like health, diet and chronic disease are often of more immediate concern. She continually works to include the ecological argument for veganism in her ongoing outreach, and believes she’s at her most effective when she can combine these different components.

Gwenna Hunter, founder of Vegans of LA, a group “celebrating urban vegan pop culture.” She is also a coordinator of community engagement and events for Greater Los Angeles at Vegan Outreach. Photo by Nikki Ritcher / #unboundproject / We Animals Media.

These days, Hunter finds inspiration everywhere, not least from the fact that African Americans are the fastest growing vegan demographic in the United States (in 2016, the Pew Research Center found that 8% of African-American adults identified as vegan, compared with 3% of American adults overall). In addition to being deeply involved in the social justice uprisings of the past year, she says the pandemic has given her a deeper awareness of the need to maintain her own mental health, and has become more proactive about her own well-being. “I know people who are stimulated by drama, but I need to be in a place of joy,” she says of her work, which can be emotionally and physically grueling.

“Even though I know the darkness of this horror movie — what we’re really trying to do here is get people to stop eating dead bodies — when I can find a way to do this joyfully, I can go for a long time and put out good work.”

She’s humble, resourceful and knows how to play to her strengths. “I’m no scholar and I’m terrible at memorizing statistics, but I feel like I’m an expert at being a person,” she says with a laugh. “I’m pretty good when it comes to love and compassion. So I can’t go wrong when I talk about those things.”

Photos by Nikki Ritcher. Interview and story by Evan Shamoon.