2.01 Sophie Beth
Sophie is an animal activist and has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights and well-being of animals. Sophie has rescued numerous animals from factory farms and sheds, providing them with a safe and loving environment. Through her activism, she aims to raise awareness about the cruelty of the animal agriculture industry and inspire others to adopt a vegan lifestyle.
You can find Sophie on Instagram.
0:00:10 Sophie: My first significant connection with an animal would have to be my bunny rabbit, who I got for my birthday when I was ten, and he died when I was 17. I’m 30 now, and I still think about him every single day. I still miss him. He was the little love of my life. I grew up with him, and even though he’s an animal and he can’t speak English, to me, he was the person that I confided in through a lot of difficult times. He was just my absolute best friend. And yeah, he’s definitely left a mark on my heart.
And if I can actually add in a second animal, if that’s okay, is my mouse Lily. I had her in my early years of being vegan and she got very sick. And everyone sort of was saying to me, ‘Oh, she’s just a little mouse, why don’t you just get her put down?’ Because I spent maybe $800 getting her treatment in four days at the vets. And everyone just thought, for a little mouse, that’s crazy.
And it really taught me that it really doesn’t matter how small someone is, and it really doesn’t matter how long they have to live, one to two years for a mouse, she actually ended up living till she was three, which is incredible. But it just really taught me how people value animals, or not value animals, I should say. And I just think it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re a butterfly and you’ve only got a couple of weeks to live, you’re still so worthy of love and care and the best life that you can have. And she really instilled that in me.
0:02:30 Adam Walsh: What was the experience you had which led you to becoming an animal activist?
0:02:35 Sophie: I was vegan for, I think, about three or so years already, and I had learnt all about what happens to the animals in the animal agriculture industry. I was vegetarian on and off my whole life and then went vegan in my early twenty s and I just felt like it wasn’t enough. I just felt like I had to help other people make that change. And my beautiful friend Leah, she is an activist and she encouraged me to reach out to my local Cube Of Truth. And that’s sort of where I got started and it’s been history ever since.
0:03:18 Adam Walsh: So we’ve seen the documentaries and the footage of the animals which are housed in these massive sheds and we’ve heard their sounds, but from watching a documentary, we can’t really know what it’s like to personally be inside one of these places. Are you able to describe what we can’t experience from watching a documentary? Like what it smells like and how you’d have felt being there?
0:03:46 Sophie: Obviously, as most vegans have watched so much footage for years. And stepping inside my first farm for the first time was so surreal because it didn’t matter how much footage I had watched, nothing could compare to actually being there in real life. I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is actually happening. I’ve seen all the videos, but I’m here and it’s actually real.’
When you first step inside a shed or a slaughterhouse, I personally kind of go numb and I don’t really register everything that I’ve experienced until later on after I’ve left and some weeks have passed.
But the one thing that definitely can register in the moment is the smell. It is one of the most putrid smells that you could think of. Just the ammonia, all of their feces that they’re living in. It is really hot in these sheds. You just can see broken and sick and dead animals all around you. It’s pretty surreal. It honestly feels like a nightmare and, yeah, it definitely is not a pleasant place to be.
0:05:15 Adam Walsh: And you rescue some animals from these sheds. How does it feel to leave some animals behind, knowing what’s going to happen to them?
0:05:28 Sophie: I feel very guilty leaving animals behind. It’s something that I think about constantly. We can only take so many. It depends on how many homes we have available. I think the most I’ve taken in one night was, I could be wrong, but possibly over 100. That’s only been able to happen once. Usually it’s just a very small handful.
When I’m walking through Coles or Woolworths and I see all the flesh that’s being sold, I look at those body parts and in my head I’m thinking, ‘Those are there because I didn’t take those ones that night. There’s body parts here because I wasn’t able to rescue all of them.’
And I kind of almost blame myself. So it’s a horrible feeling. And every time I leave the shed, I leave saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ I say, ‘I promise you I am doing everything that I can to change the world for you. And I’m so sorry that I can’t take you all. But I will be back, and I always promise I will be back.’
And I do eventually go back. It’s not as frequent as I would hope because there’s so many of them and we can only take so many, but it’s a very heavy feeling not being able to save all of them.
0:07:13 Adam Walsh: How do you look after your mental health when you feel all this guilt around leaving them behind, even though it’s obviously not your fault that they’re there in the first place, how do you manage that in between the positive experiences that you have?
0:07:28 Sophie: To be honest, probably not very healthily. I kind of just try to push those feelings down and not think about it and not process it. I feel like if I were to really sit with those emotions, it would just be too much. But I do have a mental health routine that I have been doing recently. I’ve also taken a bit of a break from doing that kind of work, just for a few months because I was experiencing some PTSD symptoms. It was really disrupting my sleep.
I’m starting to feel a lot better. I exercise every day. I meditate, only for five minutes, but I make sure I meditate every day. I really am trying to be much more aware of my mental health this year because I kind of just went too hard last year.
0:08:30 Adam Walsh: That’s good. You found something that works. Even if you do keep going back and forth, you know, that you can come back to something that, you know works for you. That’s really important.
0:08:38 Sophie: I think it’s just really important that I learn to take breaks. I think that that is the only thing that’s going to sustain the type of work that I do.
0:08:51 Adam Walsh: So we call it liberation or open rescue, but others will call it stealing. Where do you define the line between rescue and theft?
0:09:02 Sophie: So if I was to get caught rescuing, say, a pig or a chicken tonight, I would most likely be charged with theft of stock. And they’re not stock, they’re not products. They’re individuals. They’re sentient. For me, there is no line. It’s rescue. It’s not stealing. And if I was going in and rescuing puppies or cats or children, I would be a hero. But because I’m taking something that makes someone money… taking someone, sorry, not something, that is viewed as a commodity, it’s a crime to liberate them. So, yeah, it is not theft in my eyes whatsoever.
0:10:04 Adam Walsh: Yeah, I think that’s what I find quite hard when even at the moment in Victoria [Australia], we’re talking, or the government is talking about including some definition of sentience with animals, and I know they’ve already done it in the ACT. But this is the bit that I can’t get my head around because there’s huge disconnect between the scientific reality and the law, that it doesn’t seem to be a fact until we recognize it in law or don’t recognize it in law, like you said.
0:10:39 Sophie: Absolutely, yeah. The sentience is a huge part of it and I really hope that we can get somewhere with that, with recognising that.
0:10:48 Adam Walsh: Chickens in particular are grown, sorry, are bred to grow quite quickly and to grow quite large, and we know this leads to broken bones under the weight of their bodies. How do the birds that you rescue adapt to these challenges when they’re given the space to roam and to be themselves? Do they still experience the same health issues?
0:11:14 Sophie: Ultimately, at the end, their lives are still going to be short and they will most likely end up dying from a heart attack. Yeah, they will ultimately still be affected by the way that they have been bred.
But we rescued some broiler chickens at around two weeks old, so we got them out early and then we went back at around the six week mark, just before they’re about to get slaughtered, and we took another one. And watching them grow side by side has been very interesting because the one that we took at two weeks is much smaller than the six week old one. Even though they both have fully grown now, so far, their health is fine. They don’t seem to be experiencing anything at the moment, but it will only be a matter of time before they do, unfortunately, pass away.
We’ve had roosters that have lived, I think, two years from those kinds of sheds, which is amazing. But unfortunately, it doesn’t matter at what age we rescue them, they will unfortunately not have a very long and healthy life.
0:12:39 Adam Walsh: Right, so the food that they’re given, even in between the two and six weeks, does affect their growth rate a little bit, but mostly it’s the selective breeding for them to grow quicker.
0:12:51 Sophie: Once we take them out of the sheds, they are given much healthier food. They have a lot of room to run around compared to in the sheds [where] they can barely move. So I think that’s definitely why the one at two weeks is a lot smaller. We were able to get it out of that environment pretty early on. But, yeah, because of the selective breeding, they will still have a very short life.
0:13:19 Adam Walsh: So the meat and livestock industries often claim that there are a lot of standards and regulations when raising animals for meat and dairy and that animal welfare is a priority for them. On the spectrum of how you have seen animals kept in these industries, what are the so-called better ones like?
0:13:43 Sophie: So I guess people would say the better ones are the RSPCA approved ones, but they’re not any better. In fact, a lot of free range places are actually worse than caged. The free range hens have a lot more diseases, I find they actually peck at each other a lot more, and they’re all just living in their own feces.
And with the broiler chickens [bred for meat], [at] the RSPCA approved places they are given, well, I think [egg-laying] hens as well, they’re given these little plastic chains to play with. They’re not in cages so people think, ‘Oh, they’ve got space to walk around’, but there’s so many of them in the free range shed that they still can’t move around. They’re still jam packed next to each other. So, yeah, even the better places are no better and, in fact, sometimes have been worse.
0:14:51 Adam Walsh: Right. And when we say free range, that doesn’t necessarily mean, like, we’ve been trained to understand it, as running about in a paddock that’s still free range, but within a shed.
0:15:03 Sophie: Yeah, I don’t even know if they get outside of that shed. So the places I’ve been to free range just means they’re inside a shed, but there’s no cage. It doesn’t mean they’re in a field. Which is very, very… it’s all a huge marketing ploy.
0:15:29 Adam Walsh: I have to admit, even when you said ‘free range’, the first image that comes into my head is chickens in a field, and I know very well that’s not where they are, but even when we know the truth, so to speak, we still fall back in this anchor that we’ve been taught.
0:15:47 Sophie: When I was growing up, during the times that I was vegetarian, I was eating free ranged eggs, thinking that it was all good. They were all in this happy field in the sun, but that’s just not the case.
0:16:01 Adam Walsh: Have you had any positive experiences with animal farmers?
0:16:05 Sophie: I’ve only really spoken to maybe one in person at an outreach event. It wasn’t positive in the sense that we got anywhere with that conversation; He’s still going to be exploiting his cows that he has, he was a dairy farmer. But it was positive in the sense that it was a respectful conversation and it didn’t get aggressive or violent or anything. But no, I haven’t really had too much to do directly with any animal farmers as of yet.
I guess I went to one of the 'Meat The Victims’, and that was a very negative experience. The farmer was not happy, but we were on his property, so. But that’s pretty much the only other time I can think of that I’ve interacted with a farmer.
0:16:56 Adam Walsh: Do you find the street outreach part of it, like you said, you had at least a respectful conversation with a farmer, do you find with the general public it’s similar, or do they push back quite a lot?
0:17:11 Sophie: I feel like the conversations I have with people during outreach are usually quite respectful. I honestly can’t remember any conversations that have really gone bad. Outreaching people on the Internet is a completely different thing that’s often extremely emotionally taxing. I feel like I never really get anywhere, and they can get quite nasty, I guess, because they’re behind their keyboards. But, yeah, I don’t do too much outreach these days because of all the other work that I’m doing, it’s made it very hard to have the energy to talk to people and convince them. But I’m really trying to force myself to get back out there and do it just a little bit.
0:18:07 Adam Walsh: What are you hoping, ultimately, that your activism achieves?
0:18:12 Sophie: I’m hoping that my activism just wakes more and more people up to the truth of what’s happening and makes more and more people go vegan. I just hope that it is getting us a step closer every day to a kinder world for animals. I want total animal liberation. That’s my goal.
Transcribed with Deciphr.AI
