A History of New Zealand’s Animal Rights Movement

Panel 1 — “Read the stories”

They refused to accept cruelty as normal 

1890s–1940s 

In 1929, a group of people gathered at the Theosophical Hall in Queen Street, Auckland, for a meeting called “No cruelty is useful.” By the end of the evening, they had formed the Auckland branch of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. By 1933, it had incorporated as a society. That group became the forerunner of SAFE. 

This panel tells the story of the people who were asking hard questions about animals long before anyone expected them to — or wanted them to. 

Jessie Mackay was a vegetarian, feminist, and poet, born in Canterbury in 1861. She wrote about animals, about women’s rights, and about the cruelties she witnessed in everyday life. She worked in a country that defined its national identity by its meat exports. Her words — “The miseries in the world do not come to us by chance, but by a system of utterly false relations of people to one another and towards the animal creation” — could have been written yesterday. 

She wasn’t alone. Women’s rights advocates, temperance campaigners, and pacifists were all asking similar questions — not just about the political order, but about the relationship between humans and animals. The overlap was not accidental. People who questioned one injustice tended to question others. 

By the time the BUAV formed in Auckland, there was already a generation of New Zealanders who had been thinking about this for decades. Writers, pacifists, theosophists, and quiet organisers in church halls. People who refused to accept that cruelty was just the way things were. 

That refusal is what this wall is about. 

Panel 2 — “See how the movement grew”

120,000 people said this isn’t acceptable 

1970s–1980s 

In 1981, the New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society (NZAVS) launched a national petition against the LD50 test — a standard laboratory toxicity experiment that forced animals to ingest increasingly large doses of chemicals until half of the test group died. The test was routine in laboratories around the world. NZAVS wanted it banned in New Zealand. 

What happened next changed the shape of animal advocacy in Aotearoa. 

120,000 people signed, and not just established activists. Students, first-time signatories, and people who had never attended a protest but felt instinctively that this was wrong. In almost every town, large and small, someone was collecting names on a clipboard. 

That kind of scale doesn’t happen by accident. The 1970s had planted that seed. 

In 1975, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation was published, a book that gave a philosophical framework to the discomfort many people already felt about how animals were treated. It spread through universities, flat noticeboards, and second-hand bookshops. The Nambassa festival in 1979 brought together tens of thousands of New Zealanders around countercultural ideas about living differently. And Greenpeace was confronting whaling ships in the Pacific. There was an energy in the air, and the movement was starting to get momentum. 

In Aotearoa, punk culture was also part of this. Simon Cottle, NZAVS activist and zine artist, published Anti-System, a grassroots publication challenging the systems behind animal exploitation. He was photographed speaking at a Wellington World Day for Laboratory Animals rally in April 1989. The movement he was part of was not polished or institutional. It was a network of people who had found each other. 

By the late 1980s, animal advocacy in New Zealand had national reach. It had 120,000 signatures. It had a community that was not going to wait around for something to happen. 

Panel 3 — “See the campaign”

When cruelty went public, so did they 

1990s 

In 1992, the Moscow Circus arrived in New Zealand. It was a celebrated international touring act. For SAFE, it was a chance to take action. 

In every city and town the circus visited, activists were already there — leafleting, protesting, speaking to audiences before they walked through the gate. The campaign was coordinated nationally. The result: the Moscow Circus lost money everywhere it went in New Zealand. 

This wasn’t just about one circus. It was about a question: is it acceptable to use wild animals for entertainment? 

The 1990s was when that question went properly public. SAFE and local groups across Aotearoa targeted circuses directly — not through polite letters to politicians, but by showing up, making noise, and making the economics of animal entertainment difficult to sustain. The campaign worked partly because of the people who joined it: members of the public who had never been to an animal rights event but felt, on reflection, that something was wrong. 

Buddy was a chimpanzee who had been performing in New Zealand. SAFE campaigned for his release, eventually securing his transfer to a wildlife sanctuary in Africa. His story gave the campaign a face — and proof that the pressure worked. 

Through the decade, local circuses were also targeted. Each campaign built on the last. And the wider public, gradually, started to agree. Not because they’d been lectured into it, but because someone had shown them what was happening and asked them to decide. 

By the end of the 1990s, animal circuses had lost the social licence they once had. The movement had found one of its most effective tools: make cruelty visible, then let people make up their own minds. 

Panel 4 — “Watch what they found”

They went inside and saw the system 

2000s 

In 2001, a coalition of Wellington animal rights groups formed the Campaign Against Factory Farming. They produced a leaflet called Behind Closed Doors — a document laying out what was happening inside New Zealand’s factory farms: sows in farrowing crates, hens in battery cages, chickens in sheds so crowded they couldn’t spread their wings. 

The question it posed was simple: if you knew this, would you be okay with it? 

Most people, it turned out, wouldn’t. 

From 2001 onwards, activists began entering factory farms and filming what they found. The footage was hard to watch. Battery hens with feathers worn away from rubbing against cage wire. Pigs in crates so narrow they could not turn around. Animals raised in near-darkness in buildings holding tens of thousands. 

When that footage reached national television, the reaction was immediate. New Zealanders had not been prepared for what the cameras showed. And what it showed wasn’t a few farms operating badly. It was a system — legal, normalised, and massive — that most people had no idea existed. 

The industry’s response was to attack the activists who exposed them. Trespass. Theft. Sabotage. The language was chosen to shift the story away from what had been filmed, and toward the people who filmed it. 

But the footage existed. The public had seen it. 

On Easter weekend 2007, members of the Open Rescue Collective entered an Auckland battery hen farm. They rescued hens, left vegan Easter eggs for the farmer, and filmed everything. Open rescue (transparent, non-violent, deliberately public) was a statement: we will not pretend this is not happening. 

In 2009, SAFE supporters joined in protest at Parliament. The footage, the leaflets, the petitions — all of it was building toward something. 

Panel 5 — “How the ban was won” 

Live export? Gone. 

2023 

For decades, activists across Aotearoa campaigned to end the live export of animals by sea. 

The practice had been part of New Zealand’s agricultural economy for years: sheep and cattle loaded onto ships in their thousands, transported across oceans to markets in the Middle East and Asia. The journeys were long. Animals arrived exhausted, injured, sick. Many didn’t arrive at all. 

Resistance started early. In 1985, Wellington NZAVS members travelled to Timaru to support locals protesting against live exports. It was a small action — a handful of people, a long drive south — but it was the beginning of something that would not stop. 

The first major win came in 2007, when live export for slaughter was prohibited. It was a meaningful step, but it wasn’t the end. 

The industry found a way around it. Export for so-called breeding purposes continued: animals shipped overseas under a designation that offered little meaningful protection, to destinations where oversight was limited and conditions were often similar to those the slaughter ban was designed to prevent. 

SAFE and allied organisations kept the pressure on. They wrote submissions. They marched. They made sure the footage and the evidence stayed in front of politicians and the public. In 2019, SAFE supporters rallied outside Parliament to launch a new petition, calling for an end to all live export by sea. 

In April 2021, the government announced a phase-out. A two-year transition period followed. 

And finally, on 30 April 2023, the ban on live export by sea — including for breeding — came into full effect. 

It was the closing of a loop that had been open for nearly forty years. And it was won by people who understood that a partial win is not a finished win. That you keep going until the door is actually shut. 

Panel 6 — “Keep the pressure on”

Some wins stick. Others are still being fought. 

2026– 

In 2020, the New Zealand High Court ruled that farrowing crates were unlawful. 

Farrowing crates are narrow metal enclosures used to confine sows during birth and nursing. They are small enough that a sow cannot turn around. She can stand and lie down — and little else. Her piglets nurse through the bars. 

SAFE and the New Zealand Animal Law Association (NZALA) had argued that farrowing crates caused unnecessary suffering — and that under the Animal Welfare Act, unnecessary suffering was illegal. Together, they took the case to court. The court agreed. 

It was a significant moment. Not just because of what it meant for pigs, but because of what it demonstrated: that the law, used carefully and persistently, could hold an industry accountable. Years of campaigning, and a legal challenge brought by SAFE and NZALA, had worked. The court had listened. 

In December 2025, the government passed new legislation allowing farmers to continue using farrowing crates for another ten years. At the end of that period, use will be reduced — from four weeks to two weeks — but not ended. 

The court’s ruling had been undone by Parliament. 

This is the part of movement work that rarely makes the news. Wins get challenged. Legislation gets reversed. The people who built the case have to decide whether to start again. 

The people who built that case — and the organisations who brought it — haven’t stopped. The legal work continues. The public pressure continues. The question — whether it is acceptable to confine an animal this way — has not been settled by a parliamentary majority. It’s still being contested. 

Everything on this wall is history. What happens outside it is still being written. 

Every campaign across these six panels started with someone who saw something wrong and decided to speak up. They didn’t know if it would work. Some of them didn’t live to see the results of their actions. 

But you’re here now, and what happens next will be a new story. 

Decide what you will do — speak up, take action, and help write the next chapter.