Compassion Over Killing (COK), a non-profit animal rights group, is sponsoring a tour entitled "Beyond The Lies” this summer to spread awareness across the country of cruelty to farm animals who suffer abuse and are killed. The goal of the tour is to raise awareness and to encourage and inspire people to go vegan and boycott eating meat.

The tour kicked off in California in June and is expected to continue the rest of this summer and fall; including on the final cross-country Vans Warped Tour. More dates will be announced.

Preventing the volatile mistreatment of farm animals

COK has launched a pay-per-view video campaign to stop the malpractice of killing these farm animals. Along with the tour, they are bringing powerful video outreach to 36 cities nationwide. They have released a video documentary on their “Beyond The Lies” website and are paying one dollar per view for people to watch the video—which includes footage of rescued animals living in sanctuaries and displays how these animals are cared for, allowing them the freedom to be themselves.

I spoke with Radish, the Project Manager of the “Beyond The Lies” program, and he explained what the program’s mission is.

“We’re trying to raise awareness about the animal agriculture industry which is breeding and killing animals,” Radish said.

Compassion Over Killing was founded in 1995—“Beyond The Lies” came out earlier this year so it’s a fairly new program from COK. There are two tours happening—one is the cross-country Vans Warped Tour which is the oldest cross-country music festival in the U.S. (we follow around all their event locations and set up there) and the other is “Beyond The Lies” in California; so during the summer we always do music festivals and street fairs and during the fall and spring semesters we’ll visit college campuses.”

Radish also explained why the animal agriculture industry is hazardous to workers and talked about the impact of the pay-per-view campaign tactic.

“We have conversations after everyone watches the video so we get to see just how impactful this video is; pay-per-view outreach has been around for a while. According to a study that came out a few years ago when we were first testing this tactic; out of everyone that responded over 80 percent said that they had consumed less animal products after watching the video.

We collect everyone’s email addresses and there’s follow-up communications that tell us how effective our video is for people who want to go vegan."

"We also provide the resources for people who want to make that switch. The reason we’re raising awareness is because it affects so many others, between how many animals are being raised and killed, the people and the workers that have to be in these type of conditions as this industry has one of the highest industry worker turnover rates and worker injury rates than any other industry, and also the health aspect of it; a lot of people are becoming aware because there’s been so much information out there that it’s a lot healthier to go vegan and eat plants compared to meat.”

Radish also confirmed that the idea of the pay-per-view tactic evolved from a local DC grassroots activist who started doing it years ago and wanted to get people to watch a particular video without bypassing it.

The method stuck and now it’s widely used.

Exposing the lies regarding animal cruelty

COK wants to expose the lies about animal cruelty. Radish said that people don’t realize how inhumane the animal agriculture industry really is.

“These industries have spent billions of dollars in lobbying to make sure this information never goes public. Because it really affects people to see where their food is coming from—they want to keep doing “business as usual” but in order to do that the public can’t handle this kind of stuff.”

The truth always comes out, especially with the internet. Radish said the industry itself has changed so much, and that some are investing in plant-based, meat-like products and healthier alternatives because that’s where they know the money is going.
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