SAFE Auckland has been on a consciousness-raising mission in the last couple of weeks, participating in the Splore music festival, the K-Road drumming carnival, and the International Cultural Festival.  Splore is a bi-annual music festival located in a beautiful national park only an hour's drive out of Auckland. SAFE had a stall complete with fairy lights at the 3-day event selling merchandise, talking to people and spreading the word about the LovePigs campaign.
"The thing that strikes me the more time I spend on stalls is the number of people who are surprised to learn about the way we treat pigs," says Auckland campaign assistant Eliot Pryor. "This is the true worth of doing a stall, I think, to get the information out there." Central Auckland's K-Road celebrated the Chinese Year of the Rat by inviting businesses to participate in drumming along the street. SAFE jumped at the chance with the help of Baque Virando, a percussion group that plays a Brazilian-styled rhythm called Maracatu - many thanks to them. They were keen to support SAFE and have some fun along the way, dressing as rats to suit the occasion. Volunteers handed out cruelty-free shopping guides. The event was featured on TV3's Sunrise breakfast show with an interview with Eliot dressed as a rat. Eliot was also interviewed for a promotional video about K-Road. Nice one!  SAFE Auckland also attended the International Cultural Festival which celebrates cultural diversity through a day of food stalls, performances and a very popular soccer tournament. People were very generous with donations with significant interest in SAFE's campaign to ban the sow crate. People from different ethnicities could also share what the situation was like in their own country.
Many thanks to our fabulous volunteers who supported each event: Matt, Peng, Tamsyng, Vivian, Sarah, Yasmina and Dawn.
24 February 2008
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