Preface: My good friend Regan Russell and I used to do public presentations. Regan would discuss issues related to animals and I would read my poems on animal rights. We were planning to do more. Regan was killed on June 19 and I wrote the following article the next day. I would like to write a few poems as well, but I just can’t right now.
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We’re lucky how, from time to time, we hear human decency spoken from the heart of an inspiring individual. We’re doubly fortunate when this merciful nobility of character we hear becomes fuel for a challenging journey of spiritual maturity in ourselves. We now echo another’s decency in our own deeds, we bring potent kindness to the world – we can finally, clearly, demonstrate we matter.
Regan Russell, who was killed by a truck stuffed with terrified pigs outside Fearman’s slaughterhouse in Burlington a few weeks ago, knew well that her compassionate beliefs and her challenging vision were a guidebook for how we might live more humanely in this world. She truly embodied her ideals and couldn’t help but make an ethical mark on us. She is dead, but her values live even more fervently than before.
Regan embodied her concern for animals, including humans, and often carried a sign outside Fearman’s which read “If you were in this truck, we would be here for you too.” At the same time, she – and we – had to acknowledge the paradox that too many in our carnivorous culture she would save were enthusiastically sadistic and deliberately indifferent to the suffering of others.
While Regan showed respect for all lives, including the lives of her critics, many dismissed as lunacy the words and actions of this outspoken woman who dared to stand up for the value of life. They answered her compassion with a hatred – yes, hatred – that animal rights activists know too well. Some made patronizing and sexist digs at her. Some, often male, spit at her, and threatened violence.
We live, after all, in a collapsing – and insecure – macho culture of smug and willful stupidity, a violent culture that holds knives too eagerly in hacking sacred sentient lives into dead chunks of flesh, a culture in which capitalistic greed calls the shots and makes profit from suffering and murder. We cannot escape this same culture where men and women also spout platitudes about accepting the world as it is, play at being decent folks, and imagine themselves spiritual or some other virtue du jour.
Regan, however, was challenging the rest of us to justify our actual presence in this world, to explore our values if indeed we had any that were really our own, and to discard our unthinking acceptance of murder done in our name. She was asking us to find out why so many tend to be cruel, why we allow the utterly horrid conditions of slaughterhouses to remain, why we glorify eating the corpses of those who lived and now, after unbelievably painful lives, are dead on our behalf. She was asking us to prove we are even worthy of those who die for our dinners.
Regan was also asking why we tolerate the Ford government’s newly-passed Bill 156, with the suffering of living beings on farms and in slaughterhouses kept suspiciously secret and free of unbiased investigation. She was asking why Ford would make it illegal for animal advocates to have access to abused animals. She might also have inquired why, in Ford’s Ontario, widely-criticized misogynistic policies prevail.
Regan no doubt knew too well that it’s impossible to influence such a government with humanitarian arguments to protect beaten women and abused children, let alone with photos of the desperation in the eyes of brutally tortured pigs who were bred for death.
I first met Regan Russell over four decades ago at an anti-fur demonstration in Gore Park, and we soon became friends. We often paired up as guest speakers on animals and ethics at universities. I would do a reading from my book of animal rights poetry and Regan would explain the “circles of concern” that reflected societal development from slavery to women’s rights to the rights of animals.
Regan always challenged her audience to raise the bar in being human. She certainly challenged my students at Sheridan College, and won them with her impeccable logic, her irresistible dedication, and, no doubt, her model’s good looks.
If you say you are a worth anything as a human being, she stated, you must bring your humanity to all living beings and respect the intrinsic worth in them that you claim for yourself. Your ethical values must be genuinely altruistic, you must not harm any living being, you must stop the cruelties you now passively support.
Regan vigorously advocated compassion with a unique passion that was distinctly her own. She was momentum incarnate, a compelling dynamo who gave all she had on behalf of animals. She put her kindness on the line and stood her ground with it. Something inside us sang with meaning and purpose when Regan was around. Our self-centred values could now do good for all lives.
It’s hard to explain why one feels a bond with another human being. I once helped Regan survive a rough time in her life and, years later, she and her partner Mark Powell helped us though the aftermath of our house fire, so the gratitude felt on both sides was palpable. But also, I felt connected to something essential to being alive when we talked.
I will never forget the instinctive caring, the enthusiasm, the humility, the need to understand, that I could sense in Regan’s voice as she spoke of animals. I will never forget the sharing of something very intimate and ineffable that is usually kept close to one’s heart. I felt equally open with Regan these times when we discussed our love for animals and, as a result, two friends each felt a grateful deep love for the other.
It sometimes comes to be, through a shared love for animals, that one human being is able to trust and even feel hope through the decency of another. I’m so glad that my friend Regan felt trust and strength many times with those who loved her deeply and shared her compassion.
I’m so glad that Regan’s will to kindness grew even stronger before she, this woman who valued other lives above her own, was run down in the cruelest of ironies by a truck at Fearman’s slaughterhouse. It’s a place of death where 10,000 pigs are slaughtered indifferently each day.
Regan was there with Toronto Pig Save to show pigs, crammed into the truck, their first act of mercy. She was there to give a few pigs a brief drink of water, before they were soon methodically slaughtered and cut into pieces.
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James Strecker of Hamilton is a writer, poet, human development consultant, and author or editor of thirty books. His latest book is “Who Is Not an Animal? Poems on Animal Lives and Rights 1984 -2018