Vegan activists have been seen hijacking another supermarket in New Zealand, blocking off the store’s meat section with a human barricade.
This comes after the same group lined up along the meat section in St Lukes Countdown supermarket in Auckland, holding signs reading ‘stop eating animals’ and ‘it’s not food, it’s violence’.
Last weekend, the activists – dressed in black with their mouths taped shut – held signs and flowers at the Countdown supermarket in Hamilton (September 21/22).
Check out the video of the silent protest below:
In the footage, you can see supermarket staff telling the protesters to leave, or they’ll call the police.
Shoppers on the other hand can be seen either taking flowers from the group, or straight-up ignoring them and picking up items, like steak and sausages, from the meat section anyway.
Published on Anna Rippon’s YouTube account, the organiser of the protests, the caption for the video reads:
We are here to peacefully mourn for the victims of the ‘meat trade’ that lay resting in the chiller department of this supermarket.
We could not stop them from being born to be slaughtered and eaten so now we are here to pay our respects in the only place that we have access to their dead bodies.
We who stand here in mourning know that we do not need to eat the flesh of other beings to survive. We bring with us a song of hope and change for the future that lays ahead.
Anna Rippon/YouTubeAs the group marched slowly out of the store, they could be heard singing ‘give life a chance’.
At the September 15 protest in Auckland, some customers didn’t take to the group too kindly – one person told them to ‘get out of [his] face’.
Check out the video of the earlier event below:
In the video, the customer can be heard shouting:
I’m disgusted you guys are even here in my supermarket when I’m buying my food. You disgust me.
Another shopper swore at the group, saying: ‘Take your camera off me, I’m doing my fucking shopping. I’m doing my shopping, unless you’re going to pay for my shopping you can fuck off.’
Rippon said the vegans were protesting ‘for the victims who don’t get seen or heard behind closed doors’, though when confronted by an employee she admitted the activists didn’t have permission to be in the store.
Delta Wolfepine/YouTubeAccording to the New Zealand Herald, the police had to be called when the protesters refused to leave.
In a statement regarding the earlier protest, a Countdown spokesperson said:
As a supermarket we work hard to provide our vegan and vegetarian customers with good quality and affordable options in our stores, and we are also deeply committed to good animal welfare practices throughout our supply chain.
We reserve the right to ask anyone undertaking protest action to leave our stores, however on this occasion this request was ignored several times.
The police were called to support our team and the protesters left shortly afterwards.
Another protest organiser, Deno Stokes, argued those who sell meat are more extreme than those who protest for the animals.
As reported by the New Zealand Herald, Stokes said:
I think that the way those animal parts have been put in the supermarket is far more extreme than what we’re doing, we’re not doing any damage to anything, we’re just standing with a sign.
There is a lot that goes on before that which isn’t the nicest thing to know. For instance, when [the animals] leave the farm they don’t get fed or watered because they want their stomachs to be empty when they slaughter them.
Countdown supermarket have not commented on this weekend’s latest protest.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.