Lee Hall is a scholar-activist specializing in climate change politics, environmental law, animal rights philosophy, and feminist intersections. They have been active in these issues since the 1980s.

They are the author of Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (Nectar Bat Press 2006) and On Their Own Terms: Animal Liberation in the 21st Century (CreateSpace 2016). Hall’s work can also be found on their blog Vegan Place.

In this interview, Hall offers lessons from the resiliency of nature and animals, challenging the paternalism of animal advocacy that sees Nonhuman Animals as in need of control and management. Similarly, Hall also takes issue with the animal rights movement’s anthropocentric failing to critique domestication, too frequently framing it as a mutually beneficial institution and overlooking its inherent oppression. Patriarchal power relations are also present in the movement’s heavy competition over theoretical supremacy, Hall adds, and its emphasis on branding and gaining popularity. 

Hall is keen to reclaim human animality and move away from chilvary in animal advoacy: “I want to blur that boundary. I am a human primate. I’m a member of the greater animal community. […] Change begins with questioning the categories we’re living in.” Humans can adopt a symbiotic role in the larger ecostem to help others.

Hall came to vegan feminism in the 1980s with the help of a friend, Robin, who explained the philosophy outside of a rock show they were both attending. This encouraged an immediate spark in Hall who was inspired to shift to veganism. Robin took time to discuss topics and visit Hall at work during lunch to aid their transition, suggesting the importance of interpersonal connection and thoughtful discourse in adopting a vegan feminist perspective. This, they explain, “made me realize I was part of a master class.” Hall adds that feminism is an “interrogation of master classes.” “How can I call myself a feminist? […] Veganism is feminism.”

Finally, Hall is advocates a reclaiming of simple vegan living and sustainable vegan foods: “The whole ideal is that we’re going to empower simple people—that’s who we are—simple primates, and we’re going to eat simple foods, and we’re going to skip all the complexity […] that wound up oppressing other living beings.” Vegan farming, lentil production for instance, restores the earth and avoids the need for heavy fertilization and migration. “When you come into veganism, the first thing you do is you relearn how to eat. And part of that, from a feminist perspective, I think is, seeking simplicity.” Plantbased food systems “would take out a whole layer of authoritarian, technological prowess that allows these huge animal agro businesses to basically run the food systems.“ Hall concludes: “It’s vegan and its feminist to critique the global food system.”

Hall has provided additional insight from the recorded interview below, and has offered further reflections on their Patreon page.

What led you to focus on intersections of gender and species?

I’d considered myself a feminist since I was in my teens and I still do. But my feminism was pulled into a crisis in 1983, when I had to revamp my place in it. Feminism gave me an idea of the master class (and when another person explained that I was in one, I knew I needed to change my life).

Change begins, and began in me, with questioning the categories we’re in. .. we know that sexism begins in category-invention.

The stalking of other animals can only happen because animals are others. The use of other animals in labs can only take place because bioethicists respect an imaginary ethical barrier between species. It’s more like a continuum. After all, isn’t evolution the reality that one group emerges from the last?

I am conscious of my membership in the human classification, the human club. And I think it’s up to me to challenge that. I might just as well classify myself as a primate and I do. My advocacy isn’t just charity or chivalry. I am you and I struggle for you.

Historically, what do you think were the biggest barriers to vegan feminist activism?

Maybe the perceived clash in priorities and mistrust between gender expansive (queer) people on one side, and on the other side those who thought feminism should belong exclusively to those who were assigned female at birth. That was part of an internal debate that led FAR’s (Feminists for Animal Rights) energy and influence to taper off.

Our focus should be not on identifying people but on developing ecofeminism itself. Marti Kheel did that very well. I was on the FAR board (“core group”) for a time when Marti was alive. Marti was one of the few serious feminist authors to take free-living animals into account in significant ways. Few others have taken issue with the well-known environmentalists as Marti did; and when writings were put together on the eco-feminist ethic of care, Marti’s work stood out: it did not slide into paternalist attitudes about animals we have tamed, but instead focused on the integrity of bio-communities, in which animals live in their own ways.

What do you think are the major obstacles facing animal liberation today?

It’s a question about what we need to get past, to move animal liberation ahead. I’ll name three.

1. Animal liberation still needs to become a serious goal.
   To my mind, this is about recognizing what’s in advocacy that diminishes members of other living communities. I’m a life member of The Vegan Society. But I can’t feel comfortable with this. To my mind, the graphic design is closer to the stuff of agribusiness marketing than to veganism. Our preference for animals and landscapes that we’ve designed needs to be rethought.
2. Competition amongst advocates for developing theories, coining terms, gaining followers and status, even money.
   A movement with VIPs surrounded by fan clusters encouraged to insult those who do theory wrong because it’s not their brand.
3. Pessimism about whether others will care.
   While we witness the unfolding of multiple environmental crises, we could also be at the verge of a human epiphany, a collective shift. To the broader extent, social attitudes: Empire, colonialism, capitalism, military focus. The idea of the nation itself.

As an activist, what campaigns or movement achievements have you contributed to?

• Discontinuing the use of horses in tourism.
• Speakers bureau for AVS and Vegan Summerfest: Represented climate in the dialogue 20+ years.
• Deer (and the broader contexts: letting natural places and communities self-steward).
  Critiques of violent/threatening approaches to advocacy.
• On Their Own Terms: Animal Liberation in the 21st Century (Nectar Bat Press 2016) in the context of environmental crises.
• Nexus of veganism and feminism (UCLA Women’s Law Review; Ecofem.org, and calls to resist “contraception in wildlife”).
• Linking animal advocacy and the sustainability research community. Contributing author: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Springer 2022).

What do you see as important for achieving animal liberation?

• The understanding of habitat.
• Refusal to settle for benign control.
• A full-on interrogation of domestication (what Jeffrey Mason identifies as “humanity’s original sin”).

What does vegan feminism mean to you?

Vegan feminism is authentic feminism. The real thing is getting back to liberating ourselves, and others, from a master class. If we change radically, if the human primates can stop defining ourselves as a group apart and above and entitled, we just might learn co-existence. We can, today, drop our social categories, drop our master species role, and decide to become fair-minded members of the whole community of life on Earth.