With the “Party for the Animals,” you achieved something globally unique: an animal rights party entering parliament and enjoying sustained electoral success. What do you think made this possible, and what advice would you give to movements trying to achieve something similar?
We did something politics had carefully avoided. We broke with the idea that politics exists to serve human interests first. We said something very simple. Animals are not things and we want to give a political voice to the animals.
I am sure you can imagine that the majority of the people mocked us for starting a party for animals. They made fun of us, they couldn’t believe their ears when they heard of our existence. What’s next: a party for bicycles or a party for plants? Didn’t we know we were the laughing stock of the country and we were never going to make it into parliament? But there were also people, feminists, famous authors, intellectuals and opinion leaders, who saw us as the next emancipation movement. After the liberation of slaves, women, giving rights to children, the next logical step was to consider the interests of animals seriously. To look beyond the interests of our own species.
And all these emotions of anger, hope, disbelief, sarcasm are very useful, I can assure you. It takes emotions to start a debate, to move people, to achieve social change. All other social movements were first ignored, then ridiculed, even criminalised. But in the end, they won.
Over time, reality started to confirm what we were saying. Climate breakdown, pandemics, biodiversity loss. All deeply connected to the way we treat animals. So my advice is very direct. Do not try to become acceptable. Do not adjust your message to fit the system. If you do that, you become part of the problem. Say what is true. And accept that change takes time, but once it comes, it comes fast.
What led you to become so deeply committed to protecting animals? Was there a pivotal moment, or did your conviction develop gradually over time?
I am a vegetarian. Vegan even. But that was not always the case. I actually used to enjoy eating meat. Quite a lot, to be honest.
That changed around thirty years ago. Back in my student days, in 1995, I saw a documentary on Dutch national TV called What Does the Cow Want?. There was this cow standing in a barn with a rubber plug, about ten centimetres across, in the side of her stomach. Next to her was a researcher explaining that, in meat and dairy production, the goal is to make feeding as efficient as possible. So you use as little input as you can, and get the highest possible output. That is why this cow had that plug. They could open it to see what she had eaten and how it was being digested. He actually showed it on camera. He took the lid of the plug out, reached in, pulled out some of the grass silage from her stomach, and then put the lid back in.
When I saw this, for me, that was the very limit. It exposed a logic that most of us grow up with, often without noticing it. The idea that the stronger, the more intelligent, the more powerful has the right to dominate. That because we can use animals, we are therefore entitled to use them. A kind of moralised version of survival of the fittest. But that is not ethics. That is power.
Where animals are reduced to units, and suffering becomes invisible because it is normalised. At that point, there is no neutral position anymore. You either accept that logic, or you reject it. I rejected it. Completely. And I became first vegetarian, and later vegan.
You have been a long-time advocate for animal rights and later joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. How do these two aspects of your life relate to each other? Do they feel complementary, or are there times when they come into conflict?
Before I answer that, it is important to say this. When we founded the Party for the Animals, we made a deliberate choice to establish it as a secular political party. We wanted to bring together people from different worldviews around one shared concern: the protection of animals. Because the motivation to protect animals does not depend on a philosophical or religious starting point. What matters is the recognition of their vulnerability and the responsibility to safeguard their interests and rights. For that reason, during my time as party leader, I did not bring my personal beliefs into the political arena. The focus had to remain on what unites. But since you are explicitly asking about the relationship between my beliefs and my work, I am glad to reflect on that here.
For me, there is no conflict. There is a deep coherence. Christianity is not about putting humans at the centre. It is about recognising that we are not the centre. God is. The Creator of all life. That changes everything. If creation comes from God out of love, as we read in the Bible, then humans and animals are fellow creatures. We also read in that same book that humans aren’t created to dominate but to care for, to love and to cherish creation. Animals exist in their own right, not for us. And we are not separate from nature. We are part of it. Dependent on it. Bound together in an ecosystem we did not create and cannot control.
The problem is that people have the tendency to turn any worldview or belief, whether it is a secular or a religious one, into a human-centred system. Humans place themselves at the centre, and everything else becomes secondary. I reject that. The idea that humans stand above nature and can shape it to their will, is exactly what has brought us into this polycrisis.
My belief does not soften my activism. In fact, it makes it sharper and encourages me. It makes it impossible to accept a world where compassion stops at the human species, and it appeals to my heart and soul to respect, to love and to care about life in all its forms.
From a secular humanist perspective, it can be argued that compassion and reason – central pillars of humanism – should lead us to understand that we have to drastically change the way we relate to and treat other, non-human animals. The Adventist tradition, however, does not provide a systematic framework for animal ethics, and its support for plant-based eating is often grounded in biblical ideas and health principles rather than in the understanding that all animals have an intrinsic moral value and should be treated accordingly. What are your thoughts on this?
I understand the argument. And I agree with the starting point. If you take compassion and reason seriously, you cannot justify the way animals are treated today.
But I do not think these pillars, as you call them, are enough to sustain moral commitment over time. We live in highly rational societies. We have access to all the knowledge we can obtain. We know what animals experience. We know the consequences of our behaviour. And still, the system continues. So, the question is not only whether we can know what is right, but whether we have a compelling reason to follow it. Compassion and reason can tell us what is right, but they do not give us a compelling reason to obey it when it asks us to give something up.
In the Adventist belief, and more broadly in the biblical worldview, this takes a different shape. There is not only an appeal to compassion and reason. There is also a clear sense of limit that does not depend on human preference. A recognition that we are not the owners of life, but part of creation and not above it.
Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Adventists saw the connection between the treatment of animals and human wellbeing. Not as a modern lifestyle choice, but as a moral and spiritual issue. Eating animals was not only harmful to animals, but also to humans themselves. Ellen White, one of the founders of the Adventist movement, wrote very explicitly about the suffering of animals. She described how they are transported, exhausted, deprived, and driven to their death so that humans can consume them, to “feast on their carcasses.” That was more than a hundred years ago, and it reads like a description of today’s industrial system.
So the idea that Adventism lacks an ethical awareness of animals is simply not correct. The foundation of that awareness can be traced back to the Bible itself. It is grounded in the conviction that God is love and that we are created to live in relationship with both our Creator and other creatures.
That introduces accountability to something beyond ourselves as a grounding for compassion and reason. The awareness that we are not free to do whatever we can do, and that we are accountable for the way we treat other living beings, even when compassion and moral norms are no longer sustained by social interaction, approval, or shared practice. For me, that changes the weight of the ethical question. It does not replace compassion or reason, but gives them a stability they cannot secure on their own.
What do you think needs to happen in the coming years to achieve meaningful progress in animal rights worldwide?
We need to recognise that our socio-economic system is the problem. Industrial animal agriculture is not slightly flawed. It is structurally violent and it is a symptom of our capitalistic society and exploitation economy. It destroys ecosystems, drives climate change, and creates conditions for new pandemics.
So the direction is very clear. We need to phase out factory farming. Not reform it. End it. We need to move to plant-based food systems. Not as a lifestyle trend, but as a political priority. And we need to stop treating animals as commodities in law. What is often called “radical” or „idealistic” is in fact the only realistic response to what we know.
What is your greatest achievement for animal rights in your political work? How did you manage to make animal‑ethical issues effective on both the political and media agenda? And what recommendations would you give to us humanists in this context?
The greatest achievement is that we changed the direction of politics without ever being the largest force in it. From the beginning, our goal was not to become powerful in the traditional sense. Our goal was influence. To shift the agenda. To force others to respond. In that sense, we have always acted like a hare in a marathon. We set the pace. Others follow.
When we started, animal suffering was politically invisible. It was treated as a private issue, not a structural injustice. We forced it into the centre of the debate. And once it is there, it does not disappear again. But it does not stay there by itself. Without constant pressure, without a political force that refuses to let go, attention shifts. Other crises take over. And animals are pushed back to the margins again, where they have always been.
So we chose a very deliberate way of working. By using the system against itself. By proposing dozens of measures through petitions the parliament votes on, based on the promises of the other parties, forcing them to choose between their words and their actions. By asking questions no one else asked. By refusing to adapt to the unwritten rules of the political game. Real political change rarely starts from the centre. It starts from those who refuse to play along.
We have been talking a lot about politics with a big P. Things like parliament, laws, and political action at the top. But there is also politics with a small p. That is about your everyday life. Where you put your money. What you eat. What kind of clothes you buy. Where you choose to work. Everything is political. Even the small choices you make every day shape the world we live in. So, if you want to change the system, do not only look at governments. Look at your own life as well. That is where politics really begins.
Marianne Thieme Dr. h.c., is a Dutch jurist, publicist and theologian. She is the co-founder and former leader of the Party for the Animals (2002–2019). She currently works as a sustainability strategist and supervisory board member, and is pursuing a PhD in theology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Further reading (in German): Read Executive Board member Christian Lührs’ commentary on the relationship between humanism and animal welfare, and the question of how far our moral responsibilities toward animals extend.
