Surge in 2020 Part 2: July to December
In Part 2 of our 2020 round-up, Media and Education Coordinator Andrew Gough looks at the last six months of the year, arguably one of the most eventful for Surge with a distinct change of gears for the team. Don’t forget to read Part 1.
In the midst of a pandemic, which all but put an end to street activism, and buoyed by the response to our Milk this is Your Moment campaign that received endorsements from scientists, politicians, academics, leading campaign groups and of course our many supporters, the second half of 2020 was characterised by a move away from traditional activism and towards content creation and a ramping up of videos tackling important issues such as swine flu and regenerative agriculture.
Not if, but when
Something Dr Michael Greger said to us really struck home - that it is not a case of if the next pandemic will strike, but when. And so a series of videos was born, developing the work started by our videos on antibiotic resistance and our seminal white paper on animal exploitation and zoonotic diseases.
In How 2020 could be about to get a lot worse, we tackled the looming threat posed by swine flu and how a recent UN report had identified animal farming as a major contributor to the emergence of new zoonotic diseases.
This was followed by Spanish flu: what humanity ignored from the biggest pandemic in modern history, which centred around bird flu, a strain of which caused the 1918 pandemic and was thought to have originated in a chicken farm in the US. What relevance has this to today? H1N1 hasn’t gone away, nor have the myriad of subtypes of avian flu, anyone of which could mutate at any time to be more transmissible from human to human.
Dismantle Dairy Phase 2: St Helen’s Farm
Surge works with independent investigators who regularly send us the most harrowing footage imaginable. Many of you will remember the first phase of Dismantle Dairy, where we released footage from a number of cow dairy farms across the country.
For Phase 2, we focused on goat milk production, specifically from a farm that supplied the well-known St Helen’s Farm brand. Workers at Far Marsh Farm were seen subjecting goats in their care to horrendous abuse. The resulting scandal reached as far as Norway, home of parent group Kavli, and rallied support from thousands of people and high profile campaigners and personalities including Joaquin Phoenix, Moby, Rooney Mara and Leona Lewis.
This campaign must have been one of the most far-reaching and high profile ones we’ve ever released, with local, national, international and industry press coverage including the Independent who broke the story, the Daily Mail and BBC News. St Helen’s was forced to respond, going as far as to remove its social media in the aftermath of the scandal.
A round-up of other videos in 2020
This look back at 2020 would probably go to several more parts if we described every video we released. Suffice to say, we ramped up the video production to weekly, tackling important and wide-ranging issues both topical and informative.
Several categories or series were born, such as School of Thought, which looked at fish consumption in three respects; Surge Exposes for all our investigations; and Veganism, explained, which covered more broad topics like why vegans don’t eat honey. Here’s a quick list of all the videos not already mentioned elsewhere or in Part 1.
Why a cheeseburger can cost less than fruit - agricultural subsidies.
The heartbreaking truth we hide from our children - a duck farm expose.
Is there actually an ethical reason to not eat fish? - School of Thought series, part 1 (ethics).
What eating fish does to the planet, explained - School of Thought, part 2 (environment).
Miley Cyrus quits veganism - School of Thought, part 2 (health).
The most important video that you'll see on your behaviour (cognitive dissonance, explained)
Not just videos, but articles too
To complement our video content, we began developing the Surge blog as a publishing platform for more in-depth articles. And so the Surge website’s ‘The Latest’ section came to be, a place where we now post at least one article a week written either by one of the team or by a growing list of guest and regular contributors.
Contributors include campaigners from Animal Justice Project and Freedom for Animals; Abigail Penny, executive director of Animal Equality UK; the team at Moving Animals; and true grassroots activists from the ground-breaking Scrap Factory Farming campaign.
Our regular contributors now include Dr Alex Lockwood and his articles on media bias and masculinity; Jackie Norman from Vegan FTA, our resident expert on dairy farming or rather breaking free from it; and Alex J O’Connor AKA Cosmic Skeptic, a friend of Surge and vegan/philosophical influencer.
Our biggest EVER announcement - the Surge Sanctuary
Last, but by no means least, the ray of sunshine at the end of a very bleak year. It needs no explanation, other than to say that the launch of the Surge Sanctuary was the realisation of a years-long dream for the Surge team.
Here is the announcement video:
Summing up 2020: a year of transformation
What can be said of 2020? For the wider world, it was a year of unprecedented challenges that we’ll no doubt hope to put behind us. For Surge, it was nothing short of transformative, driven by necessity and optimism.
First a series of storms, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, put a hold on almost all street activism associated with Surge, meaning that we had to find different ways to campaign, and different ways to get information out there. The answer we came up with was a focus on content, specifically videos, articles and social media graphics.
So what of 2021? Will we see a return to street activism, protests and demonstrations? It’s still so hard to say. The UK has gone into a third, and hopefully, last, national lockdown lasting until at least March as vaccinations are rolled out.
We’ve enjoyed going back to what we always did best - creating compelling and shareable content that gets incredible responses and that we know helps fellow vegans inform non-vegan friends and family. The engagement on our content has increased exponentially, making us think that Surge Media is the way to go. But we shall see, and we’ll also be bringing you a lot more from the Surge Sanctuary in the way of stories about the non-human individuals we like to call our residents.
Needless to say, Surge is a small but dynamic team, able to react and respond and release hard-hitting, high-quality content aimed at a contemporary audience. We’ll be developing many ideas in the coming months, so 2021 is looking to be another incredible year for the team.
As always, we have you, the supporters at home, to thank for all this. We can’t do this without your help, without you watching, reading and sharing our content.
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