Animal Rights
Earthling Ed: From YouTube Activist to Global Animal Rights Leader (Part 1) | Ep 001 | SoFlo Vegans Podcast
In the very first episode of the SoFlo Vegans Podcast, founder Sean Russell sits down with UK grassroots animal rights activist Earthling Ed for part one of a two-part conversation, covering his path from a quiet, "passive" vegan to one of the movement's most recognized voices on YouTube and on the streets of London.
Topics Covered
- Why Ed started his YouTube channel in January 2016 after deciding that staying silent was itself a form of complicity
- Why he waited five months after launching the channel before doing in-person street activism, and what finally pushed him to try it
- The truck-crash story that made him go vegetarian: a BBC News report on 1,500 chickens killed when a slaughter-bound truck crashed on a UK motorway
- How his partner talked him into watching Earthlings, and how that documentary moved him from vegetarian to vegan
- The "calm and empathetic" communication style Ed says works better than confrontation when talking to non-vegans
- Recommended resources: Earthlings, Cowspiracy, What the Health, Forks Over Knives, Dr. Michael Greger's How Not to Die, and Gary Francione's The Morality of Eating Animals
- A childhood memory of mocking a vegetarian classmate that Ed now sees as an early, ignored seed of change
About the Guest
Earthling Ed (Ed Winters) is a UK-based grassroots animal rights activist and co-director of the London animal rights organization Surge. He built one of the vegan movement's most-watched YouTube channels starting in 2016 and helped launch the Official Animal Rights March.
On this episode
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