The Urgency of Action

On Becoming an Activist

It was during college that I became an activist. Someone I hardly knew was sitting at my table during dinner at the caf, and mentioned offhand how sad she was that the rats she had been experimenting on for her lab now had to be killed given the semester was basically over.

“How will they kill them?” I asked.

”Decapitation,” she said.

“Can’t you adopt them out?”

“Well, no, not really.” I expressed my disapproval, she echoed it, and that was the end of the matter.

Or so I thought. A few days later, I get a text from that same woman. She had gotten my number from a mutual friend, she said, and was wondering if I could meet her that night outside of the science building. I knew exactly what I was in for, so I didn’t ask any questions. She met me by the darkened back entrance holding a shoe box rattling with activity.

“There are two rats in here and I can’t take them with me because I live in a sorority and I have a roommate and all of them would be totally freaked out and I even know what they would do.”

I said I’d taken them. Then I asked if she had given them names.

“No, I couldn’t. They said I couldn’t.”

When I was in the privacy of my dorm room, I opened the box. In it were two male albino rats, paralyzed with fear, staring straight up at me. Gregor and Shaftesbury, as I was later to call them.

I had no experience with rats, and they no experience living with (as opposed to being tormented by) a human, so the learning curve was steep at first. I did not know, for instance, what or how to feed them. I had no money to buy them pellets at a pet store (nor the car to drive there with), so I ended up having to smuggle them into the dining hall, hidden in my sweater or messenger bag. I’d drop them an assortment of different food, and I’d learn what they’d like based on whether or not they’d crawl over and devour it. What they liked best, it turns out, was to lick (or sometimes suck) the peanut butter off my finger casually inserted into their lurking space. Only my most devoted friends tolerated any of this. And even with them, it was always tenuous.

Thinking back, I was impressed by their ingenuity. Every night while I was sleeping, they’d rearrange the random items I had furnished their plastic tub with into a makeshift staircase in order to escape. Then they’d somehow make it into my bed. I’d feel them crawling over my body, dribbling urine, looking for a warm crevice to nestle themselves into—perhaps under my armpit, between my thighs, or along my neck. The other thing that impressed me was this: that despite enduring months of torture by one of my species, they still found it in their hearts to consider me suitable to cuddle with.

The next semester, I reached out to the woman who had given me Gregor and Shaftesbury. How many do you think we could rehome before anyone would take notice or care? I asked her. I had found homes for them.

Perhaps this seems odd. I admit that I had no sense of strategy then, did not consider the possibility of, for instance, pressuring the faculty into not using rats in the first place, or at least not making it mandatory for students to torture them for a grade. A covert rescue operation seemed the only and obvious solution. If the rats are caged to be killed, then what you must do is set them free. I do not think like this anymore, and sometimes that saddens me. It is honest and brave, even if not prudent.

In any case, the sorority girl agreed to pass along a few, and I began to distribute these rat refugees (as I called them) to the broader student community.

Inevitably, this campaign of mine was short lived. It was only a week or so in that I was discovered by the campus police. A student on my floor had offered me a brownie, and while I hardly smoked weed then (and had never done edibles), I also was not the sort of person to turn down a novel experience, especially when free. Within an hour, I was baked, basically ‘cabbage’ as they used to say. And, in my stupor, I foolishly left both the door of the cage and the door to my room open, and rats began pouring out in the halls.

When the cops stormed into my room, I remember that I was staring blankly into a TV that was broadcasting a totally blue screen with the words ‘no signal’ written in the corner. I was already dimly aware of how much I had fucked up, and yet had not been able for the life of me assemble a plan to make it all better.

“I cannot believe it is you,” said one of the officers who I happened to have a good relationship with.

“I cannot believe it is you,” he said again, louder, getting angrier.

The rest is a blur, but I remember still being stoned, crawling on the floors goading and chasing the scared rats around the floor behind furniture and into rooms and under clothes as one or two of the cops towered over me, supervising my progress. While I was able to keep Gregor and Shaftesbury (they now lived under my bed), the operation itself was over. I was upset at myself for the mistake; it was a mistake that cost lives.

But, overall, I did learn something from this experience. I learned that if one truly believes that the wanton cruelty that is inflicted upon animals to be one of the greatest imaginable evils, then you will not simply remain content to talk about it. You will act, and you will act because you must. No number of uttered words can stand in for that requirement. What it is specifically that you end up doing is not so important by contrast. Strategy comes second, comes later, comes only after you have committed yourself by your conduct to be an agent for animals.

The reason such a lesson is worth harping on is because we live in a context which has allowed “talkers to look like doers,” to use the words of Peter Young (39). I have seen this among activists, yes, but it is especially common among academics who make a career out of voicing the right opinions and publishing them widely. “The people who talk the loudest are the ones doing the least,” Young says (69). What is ultimately missing here is the “urgency, which is the elevated level of empathy where you actually see the world through the eyes of the victims, the animals” (68).

Works Cited

Young, Peter. Liberate. Warcry, 2019.