On June 19th, Regan Russell, a member of Toronto Pig Save, was killed while she was defending animals. She was hit by an animal exploitation industry transport truck while she was outside a slaughterhouse west of Toronto. Toronto Pig Save regularly films the plight of animals exploited for food and provides water to animals being taken to slaughterhouses. This is what Regan was doing when she was killed.
Regan, 65, was a long-time animal activist who got involved in the late 1970s and has been active ever since, especially in shedding light on what animals suffer when they are exploited for food production. Her death comes just two days after Ontario passed legislation that raised fines for trespassing on animal farms and at food-processing facilities, and made it illegal to obstruct trucks carrying animals.
Events in Regan’s memory have taken place in different places all around the world, and Toronto Pig Save will hold a memorial tomorrow.
We at Animal Ethics want to express our deepest condolences to her family and friends, and our gratitude to Regan for a life dedicated to defending animals.
Regan has a place in our memories, as do others who have been killed in the defense of animals. They include Jill Phipps, also run over by a truck while protesting against the live export of animals from Britain in 1995; Stuart Fairlie, murdered allegedly by farmers while trying to investigate and rescue abused horses in Australia in 1989; Mike Hill, killed in the UK while they were trying to sabotage a hunt in 1991, and Tom Worby, who was also killed while sabotaging a hunt in 1993. Most people don’t know about them, but their lives and deaths are a part of the history of animal activism.
You can watch a memorial video including footage of recent events vindicating the work of Regan here:
This is a video of Regan hours before she was killed while the group of activists she was with was filming animals in trucks and giving them water: