There was no death this time, no human death. Nevertheless, this same week, like weeks before and weeks to come, 45,000 pigs would still die, deprived of water, in the cruelest of conditions at a slaughterhouse in Burlington.
And we did have, at this vigil of May 25, 2026 a stunning, gut-punching coincidence that haunts me still. We were standing only fifty feet from the spot where animal rights activist Regan Russell had been struck down by a transport truck of pigs, her body broken in two from the impact and dragged in pieces into the yard she despised.
As I stood there now, almost six years later, another transport truck full of pigs without water to drink, in the blazingly hot weather, slammed on the brakes before me on the street, but not before flattening part of a small red car in the neighbouring lane. This was almost on the very spot where Regan had been, in the eyes of many, murdered on June 20, 2020.
When the driver had radioed in about the protesters near his truck, he had been told not to move until help arrived. He disobeyed, he killed Regan, and he is still driving his truck, after paying the minimum fine of $2,000 with a charge of careless driving causing death. He’d escaped criminal charges and faced no maximum $50,000 fine, no two years in jail.
But, after all, this is Ontario, home of the Ford government’s Bill 156 that would criminalize whistle-blowers who expose the horrific treatment of farmed animals. This is Ontario where the humane are prosecuted and the worth of life, and anything else, is measured only in dollar signs. This is Ontario where we so often find people asking, “What makes Doug Ford a Doug Ford?”
I was at the vigil last week in part to meet a dear friend, Dr, Alka Chandna who now works at PETA as vice president of laboratory investigation. I’d first met Alka maybe forty years ago, at the University of Western Ontario, when she’d invited me to do a reading from my newest book of animal rights poetry before her main speaker, Ingrid Newkirk, the founder and director of PETA, did her presentation When I later drove Ingrid back to her hotel, we began a conversation that intermittently still goes on today.
My co-presenter the next time I read for Alka’s group was Regan Russell, whose talk that night was on the Circle of Concern – how, as we progressed through banning slavery and promoting women’s rights, we were now moving toward enlightened compassion in our treatment of animals. I’ve always admired how both Alka and Regan were so courageous and unstoppable in promoting the ways of kindness.
When I connected with Alka at this vigil, I was then asked by its organizers to read a poem I had written about Regan and, as I began, I had something of a flashback. When Regan was killed in 2000, a number of appropriate events were held afterwards, for which I wrote maybe a dozen poems in tribute and remembrance.
As may be expected, I found the reading of words about a dead friend I loved to be a painful and difficult experience, one that filled me with sadness, one that compelled me to struggle to carry on. I had to stop several times to control my emotions.
We often ask how people can be so cruel as they are, how they can torture, how they can so easily maim and kill. We don’t ask as often enough how we ourselves can remain silent and even unmoved as they take delight in the suffering of other lives. We certainly don’t dare ask why it is taken for granted that the living need become dead meat for their dinner plates.
Such people, we know well, don’t go away. Such people live and breathe by their cruelties. Or by avoiding any acknowledgement of the horrors they allow each day. Such people, so casually it seems, determine the fate of the world. Ask any citizen from a country subjected to genocide while the world looks on. Ask any woman who trusts no one to whom she can report a rape.
That is why individuals like Regan and Alka, two of many, know that they must bring their call to compassion among us, whatever the personal price they may have to pay. They need to expose the cheerful commercial touting hot dogs for what it really is in our culture of death – a horrible lie that helps to destroy whatever humanity we have left within us.
THE KILLING OF REGAN, AN ACTIVIST
By James Strecker for my friend Regan Russell
We fused our watches to noon one day and
had a vegan lunch, long overdue. I held no
hope for self-revering man. Uh huh, you agreed.
You spoke, I nodded yes, I spoke, you finished
my sentences. We were often, each one, amen
to the other. You said I had been so kind when
you were lost and down. I felt protected by you
when the fire burned us out of home.
Mention animals, we were both one spirit, fueled
alive. Our silences trusted each other. Now I reach
for the phone to call you, now I put the phone down.
You brought water to the pigs one day and, for this
deed of mercy, the system got even. Your body was
dragged in pieces to the slaughterhouse you condemned.
We know our government bows low to protect their
butcher masters. We know our government makes laws
to close our eyes. We know that too many of our
humankind grin wide to cause unpunished pain.
We need no science to prove a pig can feel.
The pig squeals in pain, the pig’s eye pleads for mercy
of you, so listen, dammit, and see.
We already have meat, and the world is polluted.
We already have meat, and we are dying from it.
A goon government would bid us eat more meat.
Who knows the intention of one who drove a truck
that day you were killed, where greed calls the shots
and makes greedy dollars from killing brutally
You saw in pigs not dollars and coins of commerce, but
the sacred soul our system, unfit, claims for yourself.
And how is humankind even worthy of the pigs who have
died, still die, for mankind’s butchered dinner? If man
kills animals, why should man, so inhuman, not also die?
Yes, Regan, you are stronger, dead, than any killer’s
willful knife. Your death leaves a wounded emptiness
behind, your death is too cold, too soon before we are
hopeless and old. We feel your loss deeper than pain.
Yet look how many rush to stand with you.
Your deeds, your ideals, now flow through us like life’s
blood itself. You gave your body and your will to the
wounded and abused. You caressed their breathing, in and
out, and they replied with the gentlest sounds of trust.
A wounded bird or pig or cat – or any animal – was a
dearest friend in need, and you walked your own path to save
the helpless from the murdering species we always will be.
Who willed this cruel, unspeakable irony? You are killed, yet
you have won this round, where murdering men with their
killing toys will always be boys, and courts cover up the kill.
You were martyred, yes, but your cause of mercy is now spoken
around this world – benign as caress and turbulent with love
– a paradigm of human, whenever a human is worthy to live.