A massive thank to the over 100 people who joined us last night for our merriest Vegmas yet, alongside our volunteers, vendors, and event sponsor, Carol House Furniture! Regardless of whether you attended, we want to thank you for supporting our mission of building a fully vegan Midwest by 2056 through a strategic, chapter-based system. We are building a movement, and you are that movement!

This week, our Worldwide Vegan Climate March reached a major milestone: over 100 people from around the world have now RSVPed to this event, representing at least 17 cities in at least five countries. Our organization not only continues to reach hundreds of thousands of people on social media, but we are now building a worldwide movement. We feel enormously proud to have reached this milestone, and we want to thank you for helping us reach this pivotal moment in our organization’s growth and development. Together, we can change the world, and together, we will!

At Project Animal Freedom, we are proud to have reinvigorated an effort in our community to ban horse carriages in and around St. Louis. We are targeting members of city council to advance this ban and collaborating with Chicago Alliance for Animals—an organization that successfully enacted a horse carriage ban in the third largest city in the US this January—to maximize our chances of success. We believe that no horse should be forced to trudge nose to tailpipe on hard, cobblestone streets brimming with stressors. You can help us build momentum for this campaign by signing our petition here.

We have synthesized a unique way to connect our member base: through Minecraft! Hobbiton, our new 1.18 Minecraft world on Realms, is 100% vegan; we do not support the breeding, raising, and slaughtering of animals, nor do we collect honey or drink milk. We also avoid destroying the land in alignment with our pro-animal conservationist perspective. If you would like to join our growing Minecraft community, featuring players from as far away as New Zealand, email us at info@projectanimalfreedom.org. After all, we vegans deserve to have some fun, too!

This Giving Tuesday, we would not only like to thank our supporters from across the country and around the world, but also underscore just how far we have come—and how far we can go—with your support. See what we have already accomplished thanks to supporters like you below.

St. Louis is home to the Ferguson protests that erupted after the murder of Michael Brown in 2014. These protests, alongside the murder of Eric Garner in New York, launched the BLM movement into the national spotlight. Read a testament from Al Gerber, a longtime St. Louis resident and former alderman, about the progress he has seen the BLM movement make in his community.

After the tragic decision to acquit Kyle Rittenhouse last week, we now, for once, have some justice for Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered by three white men while on his usual Sunday jog last February. This, however, is but a small victory in the struggle against the systemic racism BIPOC face in our country. Read more below.

Be the first to watch the highly anticipated film, “They’re Trying to Kill Us,” a new groundbreaking, pro-vegan documentary executive produced by seven-time NBA All-Star, Chris Paul, and seven-time Grammy winner, Billie Eilish! Addressing issues from food access and food deserts to nutritional and environmental racism alongside diet related diseases, racial disparities of disease, government corruption, animal cruelty, and climate change, this revolutionary documentary premieres tomorrow—and tomorrow only!—here: https://www.theyretryingtokillus.com/. What are you waiting for? Invite your friends and join the movement today!

For billions of cows, chickens, and pigs, Halloween is a daily, near inescapable reality. From forced separation and genital mutilation to throat slitting and being ground alive, these animals endure horrors, injustices, and atrocities so profound, even the goriest slasher films cannot do full justice to their many miseries. This Halloween, skip the bloodshed. Go vegan!

A massive thank you to the over 60 people who joined us for our first annual FallFest! The chili cook-off entries were phenomenal, and people wore such creative costumes, from a moon sorceress’ elegant dress to the bloody reincarnation of Chucky from Child’s Play. Thank you all for helping us celebrate our three-year anniversary in style; we can hardly wait to see you for our second annual FallFest celebration, which will be even larger and more exuberant than before!

At Project Animal Freedom, we have a simple but profound vision: thriving animal rights communities in every major metropolitan area across the Midwest. Yet of the 58 metropolitan areas across the Midwest with a population in excess of 100,000 human animals, just 15 feature a local animal rights organization. That’s just 1 in 4! If we graded our Midwestern animal rights movement by this metric, we would receive a mega-“F,” falling 34 points short of even a “D” rating. Please join us on this our three-year anniversary as we fight to revolutionize the Midwest, one city at a time!

A warm-hearted thank you to the 18 exemplary activists who joined us yesterday for our first climate strike. We hope to see you at our next one as we fight to transform St. Louis into a gateway for the Green New Deal!

We would like to thank the six spectacular activists who joined us yesterday as we tabled at the Soulard Farmer’s Market to protest the fur trade and raise awareness about the connection between animal exploitation and pandemic diseases like COVID-19! We collected several signatures for our #FurFreeSTL petition and reached roughly 200-300 passersby. But we are not going to stop there; we plan to rent a space inside the actual facility where thousands of people walk through and set up an “Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat” booth. Those pictures—and the conversations we have—will be worth a million dollars!

On Saturday, August 21st, we made Project Animal Freedom history by officially announcing our first worldwide campaign, our Worldwide Vegan Climate March! This event is modeled on the success of our first annual Vegan Climate March here in St. Louis. In the coming months, we will put together materials for activists all around the globe to use. Please join the Worldwide Vegan Climate March movement today by marking “going” to our Facebook event page, inviting your friends, and registering as an official participant here.

A massive thank you to Jake Conroy (AKA The Cranky Vegan), Shriya Swaminathan, Jeanette McDermott, the Luzynski family, and everyone else who joined us for a splendid evening with a time-tested animal rights hero at our screening of The Animal People last Wednesday! We strongly recommend you subscribe to The Cranky Vegan on YouTube and begin watching Jake's many insightful videos on animal rights news, strategy, and gossip. No one else in the animal rights movement curates content quite the same way Jake does, and you will miss so much valuable commentary if you don't start following him on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram!

Jeanette McDermott is a break-out activist in St. Louis who has an incredible knack for sharing the stories of other animal advocates. Since launching Vegan Storyteller just three months ago, she has churned out dozens of articles highlighting various vegan activists and animal rights organizations. One of her latest articles features information about Project Animal Freedom and our founder, Kyle Luzynski.

It was our enormous pleasure to host Jason Hannan, author of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial, and two of his co-authors at our latest Animal Lovers Book Club meeting. Meatsplaining explores how the animal abuse industry, similarly to the tobacco industry and fossil fuel industry, distort science, promote denialism, and forge narratives that bolster animal exploitation. Featuring entries from numerous authors and animal advocates, this book presents the perfect opportunity to explore the innovative concept of “meatsplaining” in unrivaled clarity.

Climate change imperils the world like never before, with massive droughts, deadly storms, and raging, state- and even countrywide infernos becoming the new “normal.” If we don't take bold, immediate action, these issues will only intensify, creating tens and then hundreds of millions of climate refugees, desertifying vast swaths of the American Midwest (including our home state of Missouri), and leading to the collapse of almost every ecosystem on Earth, starting with coral reefs and the world's rainforests. Should world governments continue failing to take sufficient action to prevent catastrophic climate change, the loss of life we face is simply incalculable.

This 4th of July, we boycotted fireworks. Why? Because fireworks cause enormous harm to animals, both wild and domestic, in addition to damaging the environment, aggravating asthma, and triggering PTSD. Here is the pledge over 50 people took as part of this awareness-raising campaign:

1. Refusing to purchase and shoot off fireworks

2. Sharing this pledge with others

Read more about our rationale for this campaign below.

This #TeamBuildingThursday, we would like to recognize a new recruit named Alex. Alex lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and he has agreed to help us launch our first chapter outside Missouri there. He has proven himself reliable, and he even worked to form a student organization dedicated to animal rights advocacy. While he was able to attract several club members to the events he organized, COVID-19 and his graduation put his organization-building activities on hold. Learn more about Alex and our chapter system below.