中英文稿

2014 年的夏天， 我和一個男人面對面坐著， 用任何標準界定， 他都是我的敵人。 他叫克雷格·瓦茨 （Craig Watts）， 是一名養(yǎng)雞場的農(nóng)場主。 而我的工作則是 致力于保護養(yǎng)殖動物， 并終結(jié)工廠化養(yǎng)殖。 而一直以來， 我把清醒的每分每秒都用來 反對這個男人所支持的一切， 而現(xiàn)在，我就在他家的客廳。

在遇見我之前， 克雷格·瓦茨（Craig Watts） 一直為一個名叫 柏杜（Perdue）的公司養(yǎng)雞， 已經(jīng)長達 22 年， 這是一家全國第四大養(yǎng)雞公司。 而作為一個年輕人， 他渴望找到一種 扎根這片土地的方法， 這里是該州最貧困的縣之一。 所以當養(yǎng)雞公司 來到這個鎮(zhèn)的時候， 他覺得“夢想成真”了。 他借了 25 萬美元的貸款 來建造雞舍。 柏杜每次給他一群雛雞， 他把雛雞養(yǎng)大， 然后按批獲得報酬， 然后再一點點付清貸款， 就像按揭一樣。 但是沒過多久，雞得病了。

畢竟這是養(yǎng)殖工廠， 25000 只雞 塞滿了整個雞舍， 生活在它們自己的排泄物之上， 呼吸著充滿糞便臭味兒的空氣。 一旦有雞生病， 其中一些就會死去， 而死掉的那部分則血本無歸。 于是克雷格開始拼命償還貸款， 他意識到自己犯了一個錯誤， 但現(xiàn)階段， 他只是個簽了契約的服務(wù)方。 在我見到他的時候， 他已經(jīng)處在破產(chǎn)邊緣了， 待付款項似乎和雞的死亡、 絕望，還有疾病一樣， 永遠沒有盡頭。

現(xiàn)在要人類想出 一個特別不公平的、 骯臟、殘酷的食物系統(tǒng)， 沒有比工廠化養(yǎng)殖更糟糕的了。 每年，全世界有 800 億只養(yǎng)殖動物 被豢養(yǎng)并屠殺。 它們被塞在籠子 和倉庫中不見天日。 而這種現(xiàn)象不僅僅 存在于動物養(yǎng)殖業(yè)。 畜牧業(yè) 排放的溫室氣體 比所有飛機、火車 和汽車排放的總和還多。 而三分之一的可耕土地被用來 種植飼料喂養(yǎng)工廠的養(yǎng)殖動物， 而不是供養(yǎng)人類。 這些土地都被噴灑了 無法計量的化學(xué)物質(zhì)。 那些生態(tài)棲息地， 像亞馬遜， 也被無情地亂砍濫伐和焚燒， 以用來喂養(yǎng)和圈養(yǎng)家畜動物。

等我的 3 個孩子長大了， 很可能就沒有北極熊、 蘇門答臘大象，和紅毛猩猩了。 在我的有生之年， 鳥類、兩棲類、爬行類， 和哺乳類動物的數(shù)量已經(jīng)減半了。 而罪魁禍首 就是全球?qū)τ谌忸?、奶制?和蛋類食品的需求。 而在這一刻，對我來說， 克雷格·瓦茨就是那個惡人。

而當我坐在他家客廳的時候， 恐懼和憤怒則轉(zhuǎn)變成了 另一種情感—— 羞愧。 我始終都在指責(zé)他， 厭惡他， 我甚至希望他生病。 但我從未思考過 他經(jīng)歷的掙扎和選擇。 他會是一個潛在的盟友嗎？ 我從來沒有想過 他就和他的雞一樣 陷入了困境。

我們促膝長談了好幾個小時， 從中午到下午， 然后到黃昏，再到夜幕降臨， 他突然提議： “好，你準備好去看那些雞了嗎？” 所以在夜色籠罩下， 我們走向一棟很長的灰色房子。 他打開了門， 我們走了進去， 一股強烈的刺鼻氣味 立刻撲面而來， 我渾身肌肉緊繃， 一邊咳嗽一邊流淚。 身體的不適反應(yīng) 讓我無所適從， 以至于我一開始 都無暇顧及周圍的景象， 但當我回過神來， 面前的景象 讓我不禁潸然淚下。 上萬只新孵出的小雞 身處昏暗的倉庫里， 無處可去、無所事事。

在接下來的幾個月， 我多次返回， 和電影制片人 雷根·霍奇 （Raegan Hodge）一起， 去記錄，去理解， 并與克雷格建立信任。 我和他一起去往倉庫， 看他撿起已死去 和垂死掙扎的小雞， 有些雞腿有問題， 有的呼吸困難， 還有的不能正常走路。 我們把所有這些 都記錄在了影片里。 然后我們決定要做些什么， 我們第一次見面的時候 應(yīng)該都沒想過會這么做。 我們決定公開這部影片。 這對我們雙方來說 風(fēng)險都很高。 因為他有可能會失去收入， 失去家和土地， 而他的鄰居們會嫉恨他。 而我所在的組織可能會被起訴， 這甚至?xí)蔀?讓他失去一切的根源， 但我們義無反顧地這么做了。

《紐約時報》報導(dǎo)了這件事， 而且在 24 小時之內(nèi)， 就有 100 萬人 看過了我們的視頻。 這段視頻很快就火了起來， 突然間，我們就有了 這么一個全球性平臺 討論工廠化養(yǎng)殖。 而和克雷格一起工作的經(jīng)歷 讓我開始思考: 周圍還有多少似乎不太可能 成為盟友的人？ 如果越過敵我線， 還有其他什么進展 和經(jīng)驗可以學(xué)習(xí)嗎？

我學(xué)到的第一條經(jīng)驗就是， 要走出舒適圈。 只和與我們有相同看法的人交談， 是不會讓我們得到解決方案的。 我們必須愿意去涉足他人的領(lǐng)域。 因為通常情況下， “敵人”才有能力去解決 我們想要解決的問題。 在我的案例中， 我不掌管哪怕一只飼養(yǎng)雞。 權(quán)利都在養(yǎng)雞人 和肉類企業(yè)手中。 所以如果我想要解決問題， 就需要涉足他們的領(lǐng)域。

在我和克雷格 一起工作了幾年之后， 我又做了一件我未曾意料的事。 我和一個更大的， 所謂的“敵人”坐在了一起： 吉姆·珀杜（Jim Perdue） 本人。 在視頻里被我當作惡人的那個男人。 經(jīng)過又一次 令人坐臥不安的艱難對話后， 柏杜提出了家禽業(yè)有史以來的 第一個動物關(guān)愛政策。 他們同意去做 在視頻中我們指責(zé)他們 沒有做到的一些事項， 像是在倉庫里安裝窗戶等， 并支付這筆投入。 那是我人生的重要一課。

第二條經(jīng)驗是， 當我們坐下來和敵人 交涉的時候， 要記住，我們面前的也是人， 而且他和我們之間的共同點 要比我們愿意承認的還多。

而我是在被邀請 參觀一家大型家禽企業(yè)總部時 領(lǐng)悟到這一點的。 這也是我所在的機構(gòu) 首次被邀請， 我們也是第一個 被他們邀請參觀的組織。 當我們經(jīng)過走廊的時候， 真的有人從隔間里伸出頭來偷看， 看看動物權(quán)利活動家 到底長什么樣， 然后我們往前走—— 我就長這樣，我不知道 他們想象的是什么樣。

但是當我們走進會議室， 有一名主管正坐在那兒。 他雙臂交叉， 看起來并不想見到我。 我打開筆記本電腦， 屏幕背景亮了起來， 是我 3 個孩子的照片。 我女兒明顯看起來 和兒子們不一樣。 當他看到照片的時候 就松開了交叉的手臂， 歪了歪頭，探身問道： “他們都是你的孩子嗎？” 我說：“是啊。 我剛辦完 領(lǐng)養(yǎng)女兒的手續(xù)回來——” 然后我就在這個正式會議上 閑扯了半天。 他叫停了我，說道： “我也領(lǐng)養(yǎng)了兩個孩子?！?在接下來的 20 分鐘里， 我們就只是在聊這個話題。 聊領(lǐng)養(yǎng)孩子和怎么當一個家長， 而在那些時刻， 我們?nèi)煌浟?自己在那張桌子前 所代表的身份。 而橫亙在我們之間的墻 轟然倒塌， 一座連接之橋拔地而起， 讓我們跨越了分歧。 我們和那家企業(yè)之間 有了巨大的進展， 這都要歸功于我們之間 所建立的情感連接。

最后一條我想要分享的經(jīng)驗， 就是當我們和所謂的“敵人” 坐到一起的時候， 需要尋找一個雙贏結(jié)果。 與克雷格·瓦茨這樣的養(yǎng)殖人 持有的“我要把他們 趕出養(yǎng)殖業(yè)”的看法不同， 我開始思考要怎么樣 幫他們成為不一樣的農(nóng)民， 像是種植麻類植物或者菌類。 而我之后遇到的一個農(nóng)民 剛好就是這么做的。 他和我一起拍攝了紀實影片， 我們又找到《紐約時報》， 但他又更進了一步。 他退出了養(yǎng)雞業(yè)， 然后卻發(fā)現(xiàn) 那些又大又長的灰色倉庫 也能是種植其他作物的 完美場所。

就是大麻，各位。

這是一個對環(huán)境有益、 留住土地的方式， 可以解決生活開支， 是一個素食和動物權(quán)利活動家 以及一個養(yǎng)雞人力所能及的。

比起思考， 怎么讓這些 大型肉類企業(yè)停止經(jīng)營， 我更應(yīng)該思考 怎么幫他們實現(xiàn)業(yè)務(wù)轉(zhuǎn)型。 不是通過宰殺動物 來獲取蛋白質(zhì)， 而是從植物獲取。 而且無論你相信與否， 這些大企業(yè)正在往那個方向探索。 嘉吉（Cargill）公司、泰森（Tyson）食品 和柏杜農(nóng)場正在把植物蛋白 添加到他們的供應(yīng)鏈之中。 而柏杜本人也說過： “我們是一家提供 優(yōu)質(zhì)蛋白質(zhì)的公司， 但并沒有聲稱必須來自動物?！?而在我的家鄉(xiāng)亞特蘭大， 肯德基和 Beyond Meat 公司合作 推出了植食雞塊的一日試營業(yè)。 群眾的反應(yīng)簡直太瘋狂， 等待的隊伍一直排到角落， 各個方向交通嚴重堵塞。 你們可能會以為他們 在免費發(fā)放碧昂斯演唱會的門票。 人們已經(jīng)準備好面對轉(zhuǎn)變。

我們需要建立一個 能容納所有人的巨型平臺。 從工廠養(yǎng)雞人， 到大型肉類企業(yè)， 再到動物權(quán)利活動家。 而這些經(jīng)驗教訓(xùn) 可以應(yīng)用到各個方面， 不管是和前任、鄰居， 還是和配偶、家人間的矛盾。 又或者是某個有關(guān) 嚴重剝削和壓迫的問題， 諸如工業(yè)化養(yǎng)殖、 厭女癥、種族歧視，或氣候變化。 這個世界上大大小小的難題， 都不是通過打敗對手得到解決的， 而是要通過共同尋找 實現(xiàn)雙贏的途徑。 這就需要我們 不把自己和對方放在對立面， 并意識到我們都屬于同一邊， 我們所有人要 共同對抗一個不公平的系統(tǒng)。 這很困難， 很麻煩，很棘手。 但至關(guān)重要。 而且這可能是 建立富有同理心的 食品系統(tǒng)的唯一方式， 一個從雞到養(yǎng)雞人， 到巨型肉類企業(yè)， 再到我們所有人， 都值得擁有的系統(tǒng)。

謝謝。

In the summer of 2014, I found myself sitting across from a man who, by every definition, was my enemy. His name was Craig Watts, and he's a chicken factory farmer. My career is devoted to protecting farmed animals and ending factory farming. And up until this point in my life, I had spent every waking moment standing up against everything this man stood for, and now, I was in his living room.

The day I met Craig Watts he had been raising chickens for 22 years for a company called Perdue, the fourth largest chicken company in the entire country. And as a young man, he had yearned for this way to stay on the land in one of the poorest counties in the state. So when the chicken industry came to town, he thought, "This is a dream come true." He took a quarter of a million dollar loan out, and he built these chicken houses. Perdue would give him a flock, he'd raise them, and each flock he'd get paid, and then he'd pay off in small increments that loan, like a mortgage. But pretty soon, the chickens got sick.

It's a factory farm, after all, there are 25,000 chickens that are stuffed wall-to-wall, living on their own feces, breathing ammonia-laden air. And when chickens get sick, some of them die. And you don't get paid for dead chickens, and Craig started to struggle to pay off his loan, he realized he made a mistake, but he was all but an indentured servant at this stage. When I met him, he was at a breaking point. The payments seemed never-ending. As did the death, despair and illness of his chickens.

Now, if we humans tried to think of some super unjust, unfair, filthy and cruel food system, we could not have thought of anything worse than factory farming. Eighty billion farmed animals around the world annually are raised and slaughtered. They're stuffed in cages and warehouses never to see the light of day. And that's not just a problem for those farmed animals. Animal agriculture, it accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the planes, trains and automobiles put together. And one third of our arable land is used to grow feed to feed factory-farmed animals, rather than ourselves. And all that land is sprayed with immeasurable chemicals. And ecologically important habitats, like the Amazon, are cut down and are burnt, all so we can feed and house farmed animals.

By the time my three kids grow up, there's very unlikely to be polar bears, Sumatran elephants, orangutans. In my lifetime, the number of birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals has halved. And the main culprit is our global appetite for meat, dairy and eggs. And for me, up until this point, the villain was Craig Watts.

And as I sat there in his living room, my fear and my anger turned into something else. Shame. My whole life I had spent blaming him, hating him, I even wished him ill. I had never once thought about his struggle, his choices. Could he be a potential ally? I never had thought he feels as trapped as the chickens.

So we had been sitting there for hours and the midday turned into afternoon, turned into dusk, turned into darkness, and he suddenly said, "OK, are you ready to see the chickens?" So under the cover of darkness, we walked towards one of these long, gray houses. And he swung open the door and we stepped inside, and we were hit with this overpowering smell and every muscle in my body tensed up and I coughed and my eyes teared. I was too overwhelmed by my own physical discomfort, I didn't even look around at first, but when I did, what I saw brought me to tears. Tens of thousands of newly hatched chicks in this darkened warehouse with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Over the next few months, I returned many times, with filmmaker Raegan Hodge, to record, to understand, to build trust with Craig. And I walked his houses with him as he picked up dead and dying birds, birds with messed-up legs and trouble breathing and difficulty walking. And all of this we caught on film. And then we decided to do something I don't think either he or I ever expected to do when we first met. We decided to release that footage. And that was really risky for both of us. It was risky for him because he could lose his income, his home, his land, his neighbors hating him. And I could risk getting my organization sued, or being the reason that he would lose everything, but we had to do it anyway.

"The New York Times" broke the story and within 24 hours, a million people had seen our video. It went viral by every definition, and suddenly we had this global platform for talking about factory farming. And working with Craig got me thinking. What other unlikely allies are out there? What other progress, what other lessons can I learn if I cross those enemy lines?

The first lesson I learned is that we have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Only talking to people who agree with us, it's not going to get us to the solution. We have to be willing to enter other people's space. Because quite often, the enemy has the power to change the problem that we're trying to solve. In my case, I'm not in charge of a single chicken. The farmer is and so are the meat companies. So I need to enter their space if I want to solve the problem.

And a couple of years after working with Craig, I did something again I never expected to do. I sat down with an even bigger so-called enemy: Jim Perdue himself. The man I had made the villain of my viral video. And again, through difficult conversations and being uncomfortable, Perdue came out with the first animal care policy of any poultry company. In it, they agreed to do some of the things we had criticized them for not doing in the viral video, like put windows into houses. And pay for them. And that was a really important lesson for me.

The second lesson is that when we sit down to negotiate with the enemy, we need to remember, there's a human being in front of us that very likely has more in common with us than we care to admit.

And I learned this firsthand when I was invited to visit at a major poultry company's headquarters. And it was the first time that my organization had been invited, and any organization had been invited, to visit with them. And as we walked through the corridor, there were literally people who were peeking our from the cubicles to get a quick look at what does an animal rights activist look like, and we walked -- I look like this, so I don't know what they were expecting.

But as we walked into the boardroom, there was an executive who was in charge, sitting there. And his arms were crossed and he did not want me to be there. And I flipped open my laptop, and my background photo came up, and it was a picture of my three kids. My daughter clearly looks different than my sons. And when he saw that photo he uncrossed his arms and he tilted his head and he leaned forward and he said, "Are those your kids?" And I said, "Yeah. I just got back from adopting my daughter -- " And I babbled on way too much for a professional meeting. And he stopped me and he said, "I have two adopted kids." And for the next 20 minutes, we just talked about that. We talked about adoption and being a parent and in those moments, we forgot who we were supposed to be at that table. And the walls came down, and a bridge was built and we crossed this divide. And more progress was made with that company because of that human connection that we made.

My last lesson for you is that when we sit down with the so-called enemy, we need to look for the win-win. Instead of going in with farmers like Craig Watts and thinking, "I need to put them out of farming," I started to think how can I help them be different kinds of farmers, like, growing hemp or mushrooms. And a farmer I later worked with did exactly that. He did do the exposé with me and filmed, and we went with "The New York Times" again, but he went beyond that. He quit chicken factory farming, and it turns out that those big, long, gray warehouses are the perfect environment for growing something else.

That's hemp, people, that's hemp.

Here is an environmentally friendly way to stay on the land, to pay the bills, that a vegan animal rights activist and a chicken farmer can get behind.

And instead of thinking, how can I get these big meat companies out of business, I started thinking, how can I help them evolve into a different kind of business. One where the protein doesn't come from slaughtered animals, but rather, plants. And believe it or not, these big companies are starting to move their ships in that direction. Cargill and Tyson and Perdue are adding plant-based proteins into their supply chain. And Perdue himself said that, "Our company is a premium protein company, and nothing about that says that it has to come from animals." And in my own home town of Atlanta, KFC did a one-day trial with Beyond Meat, for plant-based chicken nuggets. And it was insane, there were lines wrapped around the corner, there was traffic stopped in all directions, you would think they were giving out free Beyoncé tickets. People are ready for this shift.

We need to build a big tent that everyone can get under. From the chicken factory farmer, to the mega meat company, to the animal rights activist. And these lessons, they can apply to many causes, whether it be with a problem with an ex, a neighbor or an in-law. Or with some of the biggest problems of exploitation and oppression, like factory farming, or misogyny or racism or climate change. The world's smallest and biggest problems, they won't be solved by beating down our enemies but by finding these win-win pathways together. It does require us to let go of that idea of us versus them and realize there's only one us, all of us, against an unjust system. And it is difficult, and messy, and uncomfortable. But it is critical. And maybe the only way to build that compassionate food system that we all, from the chicken to the chicken farmer to the mega meat company, to all of us, deserve.

Thank you.