#Vegansky: Bluesky for Vegans and Animal Advocates (+ More Positive News)
Finally, a social media network for us! Plus, exciting news from Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and the world's largest airline!
Hi friend,
Another week, another round of positive vegan and animal advocacy news for you! I’m super-excited about this edition, for reasons you shall soon find out.
🎉 A strong vegan community emerges on Bluesky 🎉
If you aren’t yet on Bluesky, I highly recommend joining!
Bluesky is an up-and-coming social media platform, similar to Twitter (but without all the things that suck about Twitter — i.e. bots, ads, and Elon Musk).
We have a vibrant vegan/animal advocate community on Bluesky. I only joined last Tuesday, and already have over 600 new connections, most of them vegans, vegan allies and animal advocates. You can connect with me here.
Yesterday, I created a new Bluesky account for The International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics (
on Substack). In under 24 hours, we are already up to 54 subscribers!What makes Bluesky so powerful for the vegan and animal advocacy community? I think it’s the following features:
Huge growth: Due to people leaving Twitter (#xodus, haha!), Bluesky is in an exponential growth phase.
Great search function: The search function works really well, if you want to look for vegan or animal rights/animal advocacy content.
Strong blocking features: In general, the discourse on Bluesky is respectful. I’m coming up on 200 posts, and haven’t even received a negative comment so far. That said, there’s a strong blocking feature, and even lists you can subscribe to in order to automatically block trolls (this one).
Starter packs: Bluesky allows you to create starter packs, which is essentially a list of accounts (and feeds, if you like) centered on a specific topic. There are now a bunch of vegan and animal advocacy focused starter packs available. These allow you to follow a bunch of vegans with one click. Many of these follow you back, so you can quickly build connections.
Want to join us?
I already created 3 vegan and animal advocacy starter packs:
➡️ Starter pack 1
➡️ Starter pack 2
➡️ Starter pack 3
Send me a message on Bluesky if you want to be added to my starter pack. 🤗
💡 Find more vegan, animal rights and animal advocacy starter packs.
💡 Search for vegan, animal rights, and animal advocacy content.
Want to grow your vegan or animal advocacy account?
Here are the steps I followed to quickly grow my and ICARE’s account:
Create an account over at bsky.app.
Make sure to fill out your profile. Include words people might look for, such as vegan, animal rights, or animal advocate (depending on what you focus on).
Search for relevant words on Bluesky, then follow accounts and like/comment/share posts you find.
Create a starter pack for your particular niche (for instance, I created an Animal Rights Law starter pack for ICARE). Your account will be included in the starter pack, and you need to include at least 7 other accounts.
Continue to interact with people.
That’s it! Enjoy!
🎉 More positive news for animals and the people who care about them 🎉
🇵🇰 Pakistan’s first animal law committee at an official bar association
Animal law advocates in Pakistan have made history!
Altamush Saaed has been appointed as the Founder and Chair of Pakistan’s first ever duly notified and accredited Animal Law Committee at an official Bar Association, the Lahore High Court Bar Association of Pakistan.
The Animal Law Committee accreditation documents were handed over to them by Senior Supreme Court Advocate and the President of the Lahore High Court Bar Association, Asad Manzoor Butt.
But wait, there’s more good vegan news from Pakistan and Altamush! The country’s first International Animal and Environmental Rights Conference will be taking place at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Lahore, Pakistan on 18-19 January. You can register to attend or speak here.
Altamush also teaches Pakistan’s first Animal Law Advocacy Course and is Founding Managing Partner at Environmental and Animal Rights Consultants (EARC), Pakistan’s first dedicated Animal and Environmental law and policy firm. EARC offers pro-bono animal and environmental legal aid around Pakistan.
You can watch an uplifting interview with Altamush Saeed and Sentientism’s Jamie Woodhouse here:
All this shows how much of a difference a single person can make in our movement. Let's use this as inspiration for our own efforts, and work on creating more firsts (or seconds, or thirds)!
And, if you are inspired by Altamush’s success and interested in gaining expertise in Animal Rights Law: over at ICARE, we are starting our course “Contemporary Issues in Animal Rights Law” in January 2025.
We still have two spots available. You can find out more here and register for the course here. 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe’s vegan movement takes root
Speaking of first conferences:
The Veg Hub Zimbabwe recently held its first annual National Vegan Indaba, a symposium bringing together various stakeholders to build a unified vegan movement.
Interestingly (and in contrast with the vegan movement in countries such as the United States and Germany), their symposium emphasized self-sufficiency, growing one’s own vegetables, and community-supported agriculture.
This is a great reminder that animal advocates around the world can all learn from, and be inspired by each other`. It’s wonderful that this is truly a global movement. We all come from our unique cultural viewpoint, and yet share a profound understanding: animals deserve our compassion.
✈️ The world’s largest airline now offers vegan creamer option
Thanks to PETA campaigning and public support, American Airlines (the world’s largest airline by daily flights) now has a vegan creamer option on its in-flight menu! They started offering it just this month — I think it’s a perfect way to celebrate World Vegan Day on November 1.
Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, and United Airlines are already offering oat milk creamer, so this is quickly becoming mainstream.
You can take action here to ask Southwest Airlines to follow suit.
🤗 How you can help animals
It feels great to read through positive news. What’s even better is to contribute to them!
Remember, the whole animal advocacy movement is still in its early phase, and we can use all hands on deck. That means that your contribution is uniquely valuable and important at this time.
This is true regardless of where you are on the journey of changing your personal diet!
You don’t have to be a full-fledged vegan before starting your animal advocacy journey. I have been wanting to reduce animal suffering since I was a child, long before I ever heard about veganism. Dr. Melanie Joy, a prominent leader in the movement, advises everyone to “be as vegan as possible.”
Similarly, Hive, a huge online community of Animal Advocates (see point No. 4 below) has the following guidelines for joining: “While the majority of members work/volunteer at animal advocacy organizations and self-identify as vegan/vegetarian, we do not exclude people who are at a different stage in their career or a different point in their diet journey. We welcome anyone who has a sincere desire to be more effective in helping non-human animals.”
Here’s how you can be a part of the solution:
You can donate to an organization that effectively advocates for animals, such as the Animal Charity Evaluators. (I have donated to them before and had a great experience). You can find out more about effective animal welfare donations here.
You can volunteer for animals. If you don’t have a lot of time, the Humane League’s Fast Action Network might be a good choice, as it allows you to contribute when you can (for instance, while waiting in a queue). If you have more time, you can find a lot of volunteering opportunities here.
If you are not yet a vegan, you can become a vegan ally (see this YouTube video for an explanation) and support the cause by reducing your consumption of animal products. If you want support in becoming more vegan, there are many vegan challenges, such as this one.
If you would like community, you can join Hive Newsletter’s Slack channel and connect with 3000+ animal advocates. I recently joined and it’s amazing! My only regret is that I didn’t join earlier. :)
Warmly,
Louise
P.S.: I started a positive vegan/animal advocacy newsletter because I believe most of us could benefit a lot from reading about all the good things that are happening in this place. For me personally, it helps me stay motivated and hopeful, and I suspect the same is true for many other people.
Our movement has an incredibly ambitious goal, and we won’t get there within weeks or months. So, it’s important to keep the faith.
If you know people who want to reduce the suffering of animals, could you please share this newsletter with them? Anything helps: sharing it on Social Media or elsewhere, liking this post, commenting, emailing it to a friend, etc.
Thank you!