Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec and you can find all our shows at Hope For The Animals Podcast.org. I welcome questions, comments, feedback on this show you can email me at hope at upc – online.org.
On today’s podcast I’m going to discuss the current pandemic’s impact on our food supply, and particularly the meat industry, that has been really heavily impacted by this crisis and has been in the news pretty much daily now for quite a while. And then we’re going to have Free From Harm’s Robert Grillo talking about his book Farm To Fable, his work closing slaughterhouses in Chicago, and much more.
So, as we stretch into months, not weeks, of this coronavirus crisis, an industry that’s been hit really hard are our meat packers and slaughterhouses. Meat processing plants are now the source of numerous new Covid-19 hot spots in these rural communities. A lot of the outbreaks are coming from meat plants. There have been at this time, in about mid May 2020, over 6300 people working in this industry who have tested positive for the virus from over 100 plants and 28 states. And this is not really surprising, as the meatpacking industry is already notorious for poor working conditions. Even before this pandemic, people are crammed together tightly in these factories, much like how the animals lived that they are slaughtering and processing. Meat and poultry employees have among the highest rates already of injury and illness in all of manufacturing.
The numbers are probably even worse because they are less likely to report injuries and illness than any other type of worker. They fear repercussions from the company, possibly from immigration authorities, because many of them are undocumented and factories are criticized all the time for refusing to let their employees use the bathroom. Which would be, of course, where they could wash their hands to reduce the spread of coronavirus. So, these places are just awful to their employees already, and this crisis is just making it worse. Because so many plants are having problems, and there’s this increased demand for meat, companies have been asking for waivers to existing safety laws. And in April, the USDA, with approval from OSHA allowed poultry plants to exceed federal limits on how many birds workers can process in a minute.
The reason for these limits is not necessarily for animal welfare, but for workers safety. So, they have no problem putting people at risk in multiple ways. A worker at a Smithfield meat processing plant, when all this started, was feeling sick and had a fever and asked to go home, and they refused to let him leave. He was quoted in a newspaper article saying quote, “These people don’t care about us. If you die, they’ll just replace you tomorrow.” Sounds familiar, perhaps similar to how the animals are treated who are slaughtered andprocessed in these places.
Even though these are hotbeds of infection, governors and other officials are trying to keep them open if they can. Even with hundreds of infected workers, the governor of Iowa called in 250 National Guard members to help keep their meat plants open. The President signed an executive order stating that meat processing plants are to remain open because meat is considered essential. Meat is not essential. The millions of healthy vegans can attest to that. Don’t risk the lives of workers who can die quickly from the virus. Just so consumers can kill themselves slowly with meat. But many plants are closing because too many workers are sick.
So, what does that mean for the animals? Well, the business model makes it so that they can’t just let the animals live or shelter in place for a few months. That’s feed they can’t afford to waste. And there are millions of younger animals being bred and facilities and hatcheries that need to take their place in the cages and pens so they must kill the animals en mass.
The words that they are using to describe this process, it’s just offensive to me. You hear journalists and producers use words like “cull” and “depopulate” and “euthanize.” These are extremely sterilized words for what is really happening to these animals. United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis was recently quoted in a publication called “The Progressive Farmer,” and she said, “To euthanize means to give someone a merciful kind and peaceful death. I’m aware this term is commonplace in production agriculture, but this is not euthanasia. This is outright cruelty.”
There are numerous gruesome ways meat and egg producers will mass kill chickens, turkeys, pigs and other farmed animals. The National Pork Board published a document recently called “Covid-19 Animal Welfare Tools for Pork Producers.” And they listed numerous permitted methods for mass killing. And in these they included gunshot (just shooting the animals) manual blunt force trauma (basically beating the animals to death), electrocution, poisoning by carbon monoxide or sodium nitrate, and that all this would be in a publication titled “Animal Welfare Tools.” It just shows you the disconnect and how little true care is given to how these animals are treated and killed.
Another permitted method is ventilation shut down. Ventilation shutdown is also common for killing vast numbers of chickens at once. The company simply shuts off the building. All food and water is removed, and the ventilation system and fans are shut off so that tens of thousands of birds at a time, they suffer a prolonged death of suffocation, dehydration and heat prostration. Another horrible method to mass kill large numbers of chickens is filling the building with firefighter foam, and the birds basically suffocate and drown in chemical foam. It’s got to be a horrific death.
Another method is gassing the birds with carbon dioxide poisoning. These mass killings cause serious waste problems on the farm—what do they do with all the bodies? Many of them end up in landfills. There are blast furnaces that incinerated millions of bodies and cause air pollution issues. Some of them are just buried on the farm. They have these huge burial pits where they just bury all the bodies and that pollutes the groundwater with blood and other waste. In articles that I’ve been reading about all this, the farmers use words like “tragic choices” and “gut-wrenching decisions” and “devastating last resorts.” But what are they so heartbroken about? Remember, these animals were destined for a gruesome slaughter anyway. Those distressed and devastated emotions from the industry are because they won’t be making a profit on their bodies.
Mass killing is not isolated to this crisis, depopulating, culling, this happens fairly regularly if there’s an outbreak of an infectious disease in a flock and to keep it from spreading millions of spent hens from the eggindustry are gassed to death all the time. When a hen is what the industry considers “spent” because her egg laying quantity has declined or she’s getting so sick from the terrible conditions she asked a live in, then she is sent to slaughter, and that is at about 1.5, maybe 2 years old, when she could live 10 to 12 years, because they have so little commercial value.
Many producers don’t even send the spent laying hens to the slaughterhouse, and they’ll just kill entire buildings on site with CO2 gas because it’s cheap and easy. They put the birds and containers like metal boxes, barrels, sealed dumpsters, and then they pump in the gas. The birds on the top burn and suffocate to death from the freezing CO2. But some on the bottom don’t die, and they’re frightened and freaked out from all this, and the workers have to whack them with boards or stomp on them to kill them all. It’s sickening and brutal.
So, the tragedy for the producers is economic, not ethical. I want to read a quote from an article in the National Review that I found written by Matthew Scully on this issue. Matthew Scully wrote an animal rights book called Dominion, and he wrote in this article, “Sometimes failures in the system reveal the essence of the whole. Abnormal circumstances can clarify problems that pass for normal. The livestock farmers themselves, forced by their own mania for consolidation and hyper efficiency, have made one harsh choice after another. Yet if somehow it troubles them in their culling labors to treat millions of living creatures as nothing, bulldozed away like so much piled up trash, then now’s a good moment for all of us to notice that the system is just as merciless when it’s working to perfection.”
The animal agriculture industry is utterly cruel to animals, callous to workers, harmful to the environment and damaging to human health. This makes it the least essential industry in the United States and in the world. And I would argue the most immoral. Meat, dairy and eggs are not essential. I have personally lived without them for 30 years, and I am healthy and thriving. They’re not essential to me. They’re not essential to you.
What is essential is that we wake up to the fact that we have created this mess because of our exploitation and eating of animals. The meat industry is failing, its supply chain is brittle, its products are ethically and environmentally compromised. The horrors of the slaughterhouse for workers and animals are grossly exposed. It’s a messy, disgusting, horrifying business. Let’s close the slaughterhouses now to protect the workers, but keep them closed to protect us all. All the animals, humans, the planet, all of us—shut them down.
Okay, well, there is some good news out of all this. With a sporadic supply of meat, that means that meat prices will increase. And meanwhile, plant-based meat sales are through the roof. Beyond Meat and Impossible Food, both plants based up and coming meat companies, I’m hearing about them in the news all the time. Now they’re increasing sales. They’re increasing supply, dropping prices, giving away plant-based food to food banks. Beyond Meat sales were up 85% just from mid-March, and there’s been a 500% increase in sales of Impossible Burgers.
Impossible Burgers were mostly available in restaurants, but they were planning to roll out in grocery stores this year anyway. They were only in about 50 grocery stores nationwide at the beginning of this year. They have just increased that to 2700 grocery stores in April alone, and they plan to have products in more than 10,000 stores by the end of the year. So, this was really great timing for them.
So, we could really see with this pandemic an acceleration of the transition to plant-based meats that was already trending. So, perhaps a silver lining and all this could be more healthy and increase ethical consumer habits. And that would be a truly wonderful thing for the animals and for all of us to come out of this crisis.
So, we’re going to switch focus now and bring in our special guest who is Robert Grillo. We’re so happy to have him. He is an activist, author and speaker. He’s the founder and director of Free from Harm, a nonprofit dedicated to helping end animal exploitation. He was a communications professional for over 20 years and worked on some of the largest food industry accounts where he got behind-the-scenes perspectives and information on food branding and marketing. He has written a book called Farm To Fable, The Fictions of Our Animal Consuming Culture, as well as numerous articles and additions to other books, and he is one of the contributing authors to the book that I’m editing called the Humane Hoax Anthology. So, I am thrilled to welcome Robert Grillo.
Robert 14:53
Well, thank you Hope, it’s so good to catch up with you. It’s been so long.
Hope 14:58
Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you on Robert. I am so glad to talk to you. And, you know, you and I have a special bond in that we are two of the only authors who have written books about the Humane Hoax. And just for those who may not know the term that the humane hoax refers to, it’s a host of different labels that we’re seeing getting more and more popular now on animal products like “cage-free” and “certified humane” and “organic” and also, greenwashing labels, making things seem more environmentally friendly than they actually are. With labels like “sustainable” and “free-range” and “grass-fed.” And I know you wrote your book Farm To Fable on this subject, the human hoax, and I love the title, by the way. I’ve always been jealous of the title of your book Farm To Fable. It’s a great title. And I just wondered, what inspired you to write your book?
Robert 16:03
So, what preceded the book was having worked in the ad agency world and particularly with food industry accounts, because Chicago is number one, it’s like a center for advertising, and number two, it’s where a lot of the big food industry giants and the big players are like Kraft Foods. So, I started freelancing when I was in my twenties, and I started working in ad agencies where they were working on things like Happy Meal Boxes and Kraft Food Packages. You know, all that kind of crap. And I just found myself working out this stuff. And of course, at the time, I didn’t think anything of it. It was just kind of like normal, right? But now, when I look back on that, it’s just such a surreal shift, to look back on that and see what’s really behind that. Like, for example, on a happy meal box.
What are they really doing there? They’re trying to make animal products look like something fun, like on old MacDonald’s farm that a kid would go to like a petting zoo and all these happy farm animals on the cover and what’s inside? The body parts of animals that led miserable lives. So, it’s just such a surreal thing to look back on that time. But that was kind of my catalyst.
I felt like I had a natural, organic kind of understanding of how brands market the myth. The humane myth and so many other myths that I felt like a book about the humane myth was just a natural extension of what my experience was. Having worked behind the scenes with some of the best minds who make the bigbucks, the six figure salaries to come up with these incredibly idiotic fantasies, but they work.
So, yesterday for example, I just like to use anecdotes when I talk about this stuff because there’s so many cases of it. Like just yesterday I was speaking to a reporter and he was doing a story about a slaughterhouse whose license had been suspended and one of the questions he had for me was, “Well, aren’t these smaller places better like, aren’t things more humane? And aren’t they, you know, fresher” and this and that. And I said, Oh, no, absolutely not. I said, first of all, the birds, and this is a bird slaughterhouse that we’re talking about, these birds come from the same farms that the large-scale birds come from. The eggs are hatched at the same hatcheries. The industrial scale hatcheries where the same, big industrial farms purchased their stock from.
So, I explained to him what life is like for a chicken that ends up in a slaughterhouse at six weeks old. And how they come from the hatchery, it delivers the product, they dump the chicks onto a warehouse floor, as many as they could pack in. And then automatic feeders and waterers are basically the only thing they see. Those that can get to water get to water and those that can’t don’t get to eat or drink.
And there’s no human interaction until after six weeks, you know, a catcher comes in and catches the birds in the middle of the night and stuffs them into crates and hauls them off to slaughter. You know, I told him, I said, watch our video because what we show is the delivery of the birds to the slaughterhouse, which is horrendous from that point to the actual slaughter. And I said, look, see for yourself. The bird doesn’t care whether it’s a large-scale or a small-scale operation. They don’t know any difference. They only know it’s just horrendous. It would be anywhere.
Just because something is on a smaller scale, it doesn’t mean much in terms of like, is it better? And people like to use that word “better.” That’s a very nebulous kind of word, because what do they mean by better? Better for the animal? Better for the environment? Neither is true. So, yeah, I set him straight. Watch our video of footage that we’ve compiled of these local places that market themselves.
Hope 21:22
Yeah, I remember when you came out here to California and visited us here in Northern California and you went to a small-scale farm here. I believe it was a dairy farm. And you wrote about what you saw there. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? I remember that being a really powerful and poignant article that you wrote.
Robert 21:46
Yeah. Thank you. That was an experience that I just will be forever kind of embedded in my mind. And I just have such a vivid memory of it, of the whole thing. And so Tom and I were driving on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. We were just kind of stopping, you know here and there, to hike out to the ocean. And then we noticed that there were these small dairy operations spotted throughout the landscape there, and we were like, wow, that’s really messed up for one thing. Because, this is such a pristine wilderness or it’s supposed to be, that’s what they touted it as. And yet why are these dairy farms there? Just because they have a history of being here for, like, 150 or 200 years we’re supposed to respect that is part of the tradition of the landscape. I mean, this is an ecosystem that has evolved over millions of years. Your human tradition doesn’t count as part of what’s natural in that landscape. It’s just kind of ridiculous, or it was ridiculous to us when we were out there.
So, anyway, we found one dairy farm that was just right at the side of the road. And so I just told Tom to pull over, and I decided to get out, look around, and the owner was there. He was on his tractor and I approached him and he was really nice. He was younger. He was probably in his thirties. He said that he had been in this business, his family business, for several generations and he was carrying it on. And, he showed me around. He showed me the calf hutches and it was just really sad, really kind of disturbing situation there, because each calf was different. One would be really terrified and crouched in a corner. Another one would be like bellowing, you know, like making their call out the little back window and just like looking really anxious. Another one just was coming up to us and, like wanting to nurse so, like, sucking on your hand. So, each one was different in how they responded. But it was all very sad.
Hope 24:12
And they had been taken from their mothers and were in these calf hutches, so that they’re completely separated from their moms.
Robert 24:22
That’s right. These little white plastic hutches. They were back four or five rows of twenty. It was a small operation. And so, yeah, these are the females that would be taken from their mothers right away and placed in these hutches. And that’s their existence for whatever, 3 to 4 months until they’re old enough to impregnate.
So, we went through the hutches and I looked at each calf and could tell what a sad existence it was for them. And then he took me around to where the mother cows were cordoned off into this really small area. They were there waiting to be milked because there is a milking parlor right there. Contrary to what most people think. You know these cows, they’re not out on pasture getting a lot of good exercise and then getting grass and all that. They’re up to their ankles and knees in waste and dirt and mud and just standing there for hours waiting to be milked. And they looked to be in pretty terrible shape, too. And there was one calf that was on the other side of this enclosure that they were in. There was a little male calf and there were two females trying to reach out to him. He was probably just born and Ernest, the owner, explained to me that this calf was a male that would be sent off to slaughter.
And I said, so how does that work? He says, well, I never leave this farm. I never see where they go. I know they go to slaughter; the truck comes to pick them up, and I never see them again. So, that was really interesting to me because a lot of people, while farmers, kind of give us this perception of themselves asbeing kind of omniscience about animals and about farming. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of them only see parts of the process. And in this case, Ernest never sees the violence that happens to the calf after they leave his farm on the truck hauls.
So, then he kind of went into, like how he does his own AI, which is artificial insemination. And he was really proud of it. That was kind of the gross, disgusting part that I found out just how, like, how proud he was of saving money and not having to hire someone to do it, and that he could do it himself. And the way he explained it to is really disturbing. You have to use AI on them sometimes several times to make sure thatthey’re actually going to be pregnant. And sometimes it takes several tries. And he described how they forcibly impregnate them through their rectum. And it was really gross to hear that whole thing and the way he described it as being like, so normal. Without any concern for the animals.
Hope 27:55
And just to clarify. So, they do insert their arm into the cow’s rectum all the way up to their armpit, basically, and then with another device, I think they call it the insemination gun, a metal device goes into their vagina, and that’s where the sperm goes. The sperm’s not going into the rectum. But they do insert their arm into the rectum because they manipulate the insides of the cow, the tubes and stuff, to make it more viable for her to accept the sperm. Pretty disgusting. It just sounds like a horrible process for the poor cow.
Robert 28:38
Yeah, the fact that, you know, they didn’t get it right or that it gets botched, that it has to be done several times. Also, really kind of makes you think, oh, this is all do-it-yourself farming here. You know, it’s almost like what I’ve heard about people in Backyard Chicken Forum saying. Oh, yeah, you know how to get rid of a backed-up egg is you force your thumb up the rectum of a chicken. This is bad, bad, dangerous advice that you get from backyard chicken keepers.
That’s what it kind of reminded me of. Like this guy didn’t really know what he was doing, but he was saving money by not having a professional come in. I’m not suggesting that there’s a good way to do it. However, the AI people that actually do this probably do it once, and it’s done. In his case, he said he had to do it several times sometimes.
Hope 29:35
So, I know that you have some birds who you have rescued and that you’ve lived with. And I’ve met some of these wonderful creatures at your house, and I wondered if you could tell me some of the stories of your feathered friend companions that you have rescued and what that’s meant to your life.
Robert 29:58
Yeah, I would love to. In 2009 was the first flock of adopted chickens that I rescued from a school hatching project. I had no experience back then and I just decided very impulsively that I was going to adopt some. There was actually a flock of 19 and I chose 3 of them.
Hope 30:24
And just really quick, what is a chick hatching project? Explain that.
Robert 30:30
Oh, yeah, sure. These schools purchased eggs from a hatchery and put them in an incubator, and they set them up. But oftentimes there’s no supervision. There’s no really good guidance for how teachers oradministrators need to care for these chicks. And they’re in a classroom and often times the results are poor because again you have, do-it-yourselfers, people that never ever cared for animals before. They don’t really understand. They’re not given good direction. And so a lot of these birds, some of them die. Some of them have deformities, you know, just not good.
A friend of Tom’s is a school teacher in the Chicago public school system. And he was trying to help a teacher adopt out 19 of these chicks. And so that’s how I came to adopt the three. I raised them into adulthood. And I had no idea what I was doing at the time I adopted them. I didn’t even think long term. I wasn’t thinking like, oh, here’s birds that could live 10 years or 8 or 10 years. I was just taking it one day at a time.
But I ended up keeping them throughout their lives. And I had a little rooster named Ricardo and Doris and Danita. They’re all passed now, but that was my first experience raising chickens. And, it was three of them. And then I adopted a few more to add to the flock. I adopted Sweet Pea and I adopted Sandy because she was a hen that nobody wanted because she wasn’t laying any eggs. So, I adopted her. And so I had five. At one time, I had five at the same time.
And it’s really a gift to do this because if you give them a safe, loving home and you’re really good at, just sitting back and observing them and interacting with them. It’s really a gift because you realize that each one has their own very unique personality and the way they interact with you. It’s really special. It’s really fascinating, and also, how they interact with each other and how they interact with what’s going on in their environment, like with other wildlife, with squirrels, with birds, and just seeing how they respond to things. Very rich lives that they lead.
I’ve also, in the last 10 to 12 years rescued guinea fowl, quail, a turkey and ducks. Ducks that are raised for meat. And some of our rescues have come from slaughterhouses, they escaped from local slaughterhouses. It’s interesting because those are breeds that are literally bred to live 6 to 7 weeks. And then they reach basically a point where they would consider them ready to slaughter.
And then to see them live beyond that and how their bodies have been engineered to get so large they really develop problems. I was just talking to Rihanna, she’s a woman I know who has a sanctuary, and she actually has a Cornish, which the industry calls “broiler” chickens. She has three of those, and one of them is three years old. She’s had them for three years. And I just marveled at that because she’s been able to maintain their health, the health of birds that were really only intended to live a matter of weeks before they would develop serious problems with their legs or their heart. You know, we had three of the same breeds that had heart failure within weeks after we rescued them and they were very calm. They were very well taken care of. They were in calm environments, but they didn’t make it.
So, the amazing thing about those birds that came from slaughterhouses is you’d think they would be terrified, and they just wouldn’t want any human interaction at all. And yet the opposite was true. They were so affectionate within just an hour or two of being rescued. They were ready to curl up by your foot or your lap. They were just so sweet.
Hope 35:04
That’s awesome. So, I know that you have started a campaign called Slaughter Free Cities and Slaughter Free Chicago, and I’m curious as to what that is all about and how that got started. Tell us about your campaign, Slaughter Free Cities.
Robert 35:23
Yeah, sure. So, Slaughter Free Chicago I started in late 2018. Slaughter Free Cities is a more recentdevelopment, really, just responding to the fact that once Slaughter Free Chicago got off the ground, several other activists from different cities approached us wanting to start a chapter in their city. And that’s what our hope was from the very beginning was that our campaign would inspire other cities to take on the same kind of campaign and see if they could do it in their city and that it would spread.
Hope 35:59
What is it of all about? What do you do?
Robert 36:02
Well, just as the name suggests we seek to end slaughter in our city. And so to me, it made sense to start in Chicago because Chicago once promoted itself as the slaughter capital of the world. This is where industrialized slaughter took hold at the turn of the twenty first century.
And so a few wealthy industrialists, a few families, they made fortunes, huge fortunes off of countless workers and animals by creating the Stockyards, the Chicago Stockyards, which was at the time the largest meatpacking and slaughter complex in the world.
And they actually had a tourist destination. Believe it or not, you could go to a tourist office in Chicago and you would find postcards of the stockyards. Hundreds of thousands of visitors went to the stockyards and actually saw the whole process. It was the basis for Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. His work is so important to us because he provided a completely different perspective on the slaughterhouse industryinstead of glorifying it as the backbone of the Chicago economy.
He got hired undercover to work in the Stockyards, and he wrote a book about his experience of being a worker inside of this place for several weeks, and The Jungle really changed the world’s view of this industry in a way that was fundamental, I think, and it still resonates today.
There are young people who I know that are, you know, 18 – 20 and they know the book. They know Upton Sinclair. They know about his legacy. And so we’ve kind of seized on that because we feel it’s the basis for his work. What we’re doing is kind of bringing his vision to a logical conclusion by ending slaughter. We’re ending this horrible thing. Not something to be proud of. Like the history books actually portray the Stockyards. No, it was a horrible, horrible existence for workers and for animals and for the environment. That’s the reality that we project. And we say, no this isn’t something for us to be proud of.
Let’s close the chapter on this history and let’s start a new era of a slaughter-free city in the place where slaughter actually first took hold on an industrial level. And so that’s kind of it. In a nutshell.
Hope 38:57
So, how many slaughterhouses are there in Chicago right now?
Robert 39:00
Well, we helped close three of them, and we have two large animal slaughterhouses and then we have about ten storefront type bird slaughterhouses left. And we think that several of those are in legal jeopardy. We have a lawsuit against one of them and a second one on its way. And if we win that first case, which we think we have a very good chance of winning, that will set a legal precedent which could then reverberate and really affect the others. Because the city can no longer use its incorrect argument about zoning, that these places can remain open and continue operating as a slaughterhouse.
It gets a little bit into the legalese, in the minutia. But the bottom line is, there the city’s argument in allowing them to continue and slaughter when they’re not legally zoned for that. If we win this first case, we should be able to shut down the rest of them.
Hope 40:14
Great. Yeah, I was thinking, though, that you might have to have a Slaughter Free Counties organization as well, because most large-scale slaughterhouses are not really in cities so much, they put them in rural areason purpose to hide them from large populations of people. So, it’s unfortunate that a lot of them aren’t in a prominent location as Chicago, but we’ll get to them.
Robert 40:48
Yeah, I mean, the idea is you start somewhere. Like Martin Luther King Junior’s model for activism was you start in the place where the injustice is really the greatest of the great. So, like in Selma, it was not a large city, right? But it was the epicenter of the civil rights movement, because Martin Luther King chose this as having symbolic importance. And I think when you choose a place that has symbolic importance, like Chicago does for slaughter, then there’s a good chance of that story reverberating.
So, our hope is that, for instance, if we have success here, we are having more success. But if we continue to have the success that we want, which is completely closing all of them, we do think that that will inspire people in other counties like you said, counties and towns, and it will go to places that it’s not now and spread that way. So, that’s our hope.
Hope 41:47
So, if somebody was interested in possibly getting involved in either your campaign or starting their own, where would they go to get information?
Robert 41:58
So, our website is at SlaughterFreeChicago.com. And for those who are interested in looking into setting up a chapter, if they’re in another city or town, we are working hard on a chapter set-up guide, and we have something that is usable and we think useful to people just to get started. So, we would ask someone to send us an email from our website and let us know that they might be interested in setting up a chapter and that we would then schedule a call with them to kind of help them get started. If someone’s just interested in the campaign to join it and to kind of keep up to date on what’s going on, they can join our campaign from that website as well, and they can get periodic updates.
Hope 42:46
That’s great, Robert. Wonderful work. It’s just fantastic. I’m so glad you guys are out there doing that. And I just wondered if you had any final thoughts as we have to wrap up?
Robert 42:59
Yeah. well, Free From Harm is still going strong on. It’s always been kind of digital. It’s about our digital presence on the web on the Internet and social media. So we’re doing publishing work once a week and doing lots of activity and social media. So, follow us on all those platforms and sign up if you want, but Free From Harm is still going strong.
Hope 43:33
Wonderful. I’m so glad to hear it. And I’m glad you’re going strong. Thank you so much for being a guest on the Hope for the Animals Podcast. We so much appreciate you being here, Robert. Thank you so much.
Robert 43:48
Oh, thank you. Hope it’s great to catch up with you.
Hope 43:55
And I want to thank everyone out there for listening, and you can sign up to get notifications of future shows by going to Hope For The Animals Podcast.org. And if you’d like to support this podcast, please consider making a donation to UPC – online.org.
