Changemakers: Jennifer Dutton on Family, Progress, and the Power of Tiny Tugs

In this intimate conversation, Jennifer shares her remarkable journey from “diehard meathead” to animal advocate, her experiences as a vegan parent in agriculture-heavy New Zealand, and why she believes even the smallest actions can help shift the course of history for animals. Just as tiny tugboats can guide massive ships to harbor, she explains, dedicated advocates working together can transform our food system into one that treats animals with the respect they deserve.

What was your journey into becoming an advocate for animals? Where did you start—and where have you found yourself today?

It started by chance. I was irked to hear about veganism from someone I knew, so I started investigating ethical veganism with the intent to prove it wrong. I was quite happy being a dog-patting, pig-eating person and I wanted to validate my own behavior. I was researching to disprove and instead I wound up convincing myself. My partner and I went on a learning binge, then pulled a huge u-turn in our lives, switching from diehard meatheads to meat-free vegans in August 2014.

This was a change of mammoth proportions for us, especially considering my upbringing. I’d had a happy, poster-worthy Kiwi childhood of summers on the boat fishing, spring days for lamb docking, school holidays on the dairy farm. My husband and I served Canterbury lamb and Akaroa salmon at our wedding. Between us, we had only one vegetarian friend (and thought she was a bit kooky for it!). We ate animals, rode animals, shot animals, wore animals, and purchased bred animals. The full bingo card of exploitation. So I knew switching my fishing rod to a protest placard was going to make some waves.

We were closeted vegans for many months before we fessed up to our families, prepared with blood test results to evidence no death-by-chickpeas was on the cards. Now more than a decade on, it’s all very normal. We treasure our busy wee life in a small coastal New Zealand town, with our two scrumptious vegan children and rescue cat.

Tell us a little bit about how you came to be a part of SAFE, and then later Animals Aotearoa.

It was unsettling to suddenly see the world so differently once my eyes were opened to systemic animal suffering on such a truly terrifying scale. At the time of this life-altering learning, I was working in film and TV production and had come from a background in journalism. I realized that my individual changes weren’t enough for me, I felt called to do more. I quit film, got a job coordinating events for a humanitarian organization and searched for my opportunity to be part of change for animals. I googled who the local agitators in animal advocacy were in New Zealand and that’s how I found SAFE. The timing was right and I was lucky to join their campaigns team.

At that time SAFE was working on a major cruelty expose of our country’s mega dairy industry, which was making global news. Local news personalities called us domestic terrorists, all sorts of threats and horrifying materials were sent to the office. Being from a dairy family myself, it was very intense to have seemingly ‘swapped sides,’ and certainly made for some interesting conversations.

These charged chats really impressed on me how necessary it is to work the issue from both ends; individual change, and systemic, together. Taking problematic issues and behaviors away from one person’s responsibility to mitigate, and instead reorganizing the environment around them in favor of animals. We began working in this way at SAFE on cage-free egg policy, culminating in securing nationwide coverage of supermarkets and other big banners. That was a major step and a huge win.

I took a break from my career to be working in the home for a few years as I had children. They are now 3 and 6 and I’ve returned to the professional workforce part-time, joining the team at Animals Aotearoa. We are focusing on advancing the Better Chicken Commitment in Australasia.

What have you personally gotten from being part of the Open Wing Alliance? How was the OWA Global Summit in 2018 in Prague for you?

Attending the Open Wing Alliance Global Summit in 2018 was a real good-time headline for me. Against the odds, I will say.

At that time I was pregnant with my first child and suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, which is a type of intense pregnancy sickness I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I vomited my way through Prague, off bridges, out of taxis, including into a rubbish bin while at our OWA group protest outside Starbucks. But even that didn’t take the shine off what was a brilliant, buoying experience of united pragmatists. Imperfect progress is progress.

As a young child I loved the cartoon ‘Captain Planet and The Planeteers’. The conference felt like that; “with our powers combined” effective, fierce energy. It was so encouraging to gather, skill share, strategize, and solidify shared visions.

To me, there are significant parallels in shifting the behemoth that is commercial agriculture, and piloting major cruise lines. Altering the course of a giant container ship is slow and cumbersome. It is heavy and hard and takes so long. But have you ever watched closely at port, when the really big boats come in? In the right conditions, tiny tugs can move even the most mammoth of ships. If we are the tugs, as well as agitating on the bridge to pull the wheel, we will change the course of agricultural history. It is not inevitable that the world continues to abuse animals en masse in the most abhorrent ways. We will change the narrative. And we know that, because we only need to look behind us to see the ways in which we already have, and with no signs of slowing down. The Summit was such a fantastic rallying call of all hands to the wheel.

It’s meaningful to me that my daughter was with me, in a way, at that first 2018 OWA Summit. When she was still a secret, she rode along with me to tour some of New Zealand’s largest egg production facilities, causing me to reactively vomit when the intense wave of ammonia hit as we stepped into the battery cage shed. She came with me to protest against new mega factory farms as a giant moon of my belly. And now, a few years on, she sits in the trolley as I point out to her the signage in the supermarket about how there are no more whole cage eggs on the shelves. We did that, together.

Would you be willing to share your experiences with vegan parenting?

Sure! Parenting is a tall order in general, I think. And vegan parenting in a country so deeply dedicated to agriculture is another level of challenge. But I’m thrilled we’ve found a wee veg community who we can share holidays and special occasions with, alert each other to new lunch box products, and share shipping costs on specialty groceries. My children have their own mini library of vegan kids books. The gentle advocate character, Fern, from classic kids book ‘Charlotte’s Web’ has a special place in my daughters heart. I also write a quarterly column about plant-based parenting in a domestic Vegan & Plant Based Living magazine, exploring topics from attending omni birthday parties to nut-free kindergarten lunch boxes.

Recently I reflected on a decade of veganism for my husband and I. Will our children one day look back and feel triumphant that their parents and childhood were exclusively vegan, or deeply embarrassed? Will it be an origin story for us as cult-like villains, or will it be a point of pride, their parents saw the writing on the wall early, before it was the cool done thing? Regardless of which lens they will look through, they’ll at least know it was motivated by kindness, justice, and non-violence. They’ll know their Dad and I grew up believing and living one way, and then we changed together. That we did the best we could for them, for animals, for society, for the planet, with what we knew. I think those are notions that age well, no matter the detail.

Embracing a committed vegan life with children isn’t always easy. It often isn’t convenient. At times it’s more expensive. It’s a lot of work to smooth over the food logistics, socially. Perhaps this is saying the quiet parts out loud, that veganism isn't all a thriving green glow.

But discipline makes us stronger. A good stiff backbone grows with load. Being unrelentingly vegan in a carnist society keeps our compassion muscles firing and I'm so proud we are teaching our kids their kindness and caring is a strength to be tended. Use it, or lose it, as the saying goes.

This is difficult work. What keeps you going? What gives you hope?

The gloomy feelings are so real! I’m very lucky to have one fail-proof comeback that always saves me from the doom-spiral: whenever I feel the sense of despair closing in, I think about the future conversations I’ll have with my children, as teenagers and young adults. I think about how mortified they’ll be to learn about what was business as usual in how society treated farmed animals. My daughter is going to be outraged that when she was born, the vast majority of all eggs produced in her home country came from hens trapped in horrid cages. For her to learn that we locked them in wire boxes, packed into an industrial warehouse, giving the hens less space to live on than an ipad, never letting them feel sunlight or grass, just metal and the stench of ammonia… she’s going to be disgusted. And rightly so.

And I know the particular disgust she will feel. Isn’t this a universal experience, in some way? I was horrified to look back on my own childhood and think of the plastic. Single use plastics were in everything, and on everything. The bin each week for landfill was so full. I hardly even knew the word ‘recycling’! Not because my parents were uncaring, selfish people. Not at all: they just didn’t know. On either an individual level or at a societal level, the education and structures were not yet in place to support everyone in doing better. And now they do know, and so now they do better.

*This* will be *that*. If my generation has to be part of the shameful ‘before’ in the know better / do better dichotomy with how we treat farmed animals, I’ll take that. My son and daughter will know their mother didn’t accept the status quo on terrible cruelty to animals, and organized with so many other determined, brave people to be part of creating a new normal.

If life is a relay race, I want to make a clean, strong pass to my kids. When their time comes to run alone as adults, I want to hand them the baton that is people power, with a mandate to change things for the better.