Ed Winters | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | British |
| Other names | Earthling Ed, Edward Gaunt [1] [2] [3] |
| Years active | 2016 – present |
| Known for | Animal Rights Advocacy & Viral Speeches |
| Movement | Animal Rights & Veganism |
| Website | www |
Ed Winters is a British animal rights activist, filmmaker and lecturer. Winters is known for his book This Is Vegan Propaganda: (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You), published in 2022, [4] after building a following on YouTube and Instagram. [5]
Winters turned vegetarian in May 2014 after coming across a news article [6] about a chicken truck crashing near Manchester. [7] Upon reading that many of the birds had died, he reflected on their suffering and desire to live without pain. [7] He then became vegan in 2015 [8] after watching the documentary Earthlings . [9] [7]
Winters started his YouTube channel in 2016, alongside co-founding the animal rights group Surge. [8] [10] His Earthling Ed channel brought him to fame with videos of him having friendly talks about veganism with non-vegan passerbys. [5]
He has co-lectured about animal rights activism as a Media and Design Fellow at Harvard University. [11] [12]
Winters has given speeches in one-third of U.K. universities in 2018 and 2019 [13] and across college campuses in America. [14] Winters has appeared on live television such as on This Morning [15] debating the ethical and environmental arguments for veganism. In September 2018 he opened an non-profit vegan restaurant in London called Unity Diner. [16] [17] In 2021, Winters co-founded another vegan restaurant, the No Catch Co., in Brighton. [18]
Winters was also one of the guests at the 2018 Montreal Vegan Festival. [19]
In early 2019 he gave two TEDx talks. [20]
In March 2019, Winters, along with 200 other activists of the animal rights campaign group Meat the Victims, stormed a pig farm in Laughterton, Lincolnshire and videotaped the happenings, which received national coverage. [21]
In 2019, he toured the United States and gave vegan lectures at Cornell, Harvard, [11] Brown, Columbia, Yale, and Rutgers Universities. [5] In his talk at the Cornell University on "The Ethics of Pet Ownership", he argued that the concept of having animals as pets is unnatural because viewing animals as "pets" and ourselves as "owners" instills a sense of property and devalues the lives of the pet animals. [22]
After Priestlands School in Lymington, Hampshire presented its students with piglets to teach them how to "fatten up pigs for slaughter", and dismissed concerns, Winters launched a campaign which reached 37,000 signatures within days of its launch. [23]
In March 2020, Winters posted an image on his Instagram account stating that "COVID-19 started because we eat animals" and "would not exist if the world was vegan". [24] The post was discussed by PolitiFact [25] and USA Today and was censored by Facebook as "partly false". [24] The Guardian published an article by Laura Spinney on 28 March 2020 titled "Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?" which mentioned the censorship of Winter's post and concluded, "But the claims are also partly true. Though the links they draw are too simplistic, the evidence is now strong that the way meat is produced – and not just in China – contributed to Covid-19." [26] Spinney also recalled [26] a scientific controversy on whether domesticated horses may have played a larger role than poultry as intermediate hosts for poultry flu at some point in human history, as suggested by Worobey. [27]
Winters wrote and co-produced the 2022 animated short film Milk, which focused on the dairy industry. The film was the 2023 People's Voice Winner in the Video—Animation category at the 2023 Webby Awards. [28]
Ed Winters has authored two books published in 2022 and 2023, namely
This is Vegan Propaganda was reviewed as being a "digressive but well-researched introduction to veganism" by Freddie Hayward of the New Statesman. [4] In 2025, both books appeared in the suggested reading for Veganuary published by Hertfordshire Council. [33]
In 2016, Surge co-founded The Official Animal Rights March, [34] which grew from 2,500 participants in London in 2016 to 10,000 in 2017. [35] [36] The events also took place in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Bucharest [37] in what the activists described as "a consolidated global effort to make the vegan voice heard." [35] In 2019, the number of activists rose to tens of thousands, who marched in 42 cities around the world, including Cologne and Berlin in Germany. [38] In Cologne, around 1,000 activists conducted the event, marching 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) [38] and conducting 'die-ins' and fake blood protests. [39] In London, around 12,000 activists participated in the march, up from 10,000 in 2017 and 2018. [36]
Under Winter's co-directorship, Surge conducted anti-fur demonstrations at the London catwalk events attracting more than 250 people in September 2017, a rise from 120 the previous catwalk season and 25 in September 2016. [40] The protest included petitions and a video with Lucy Watson calling on the BFC to ban fur. [41] In 2017, Winters gathered anti-fur campaigners for protests including animal rights activists covering in fake blood, wearing costume, and bearing signs outside of 180 Strand. [41] [42] Winters and fellow activists called upon the British Fashion Council (BFC) to ban all fur from London Fashion Week. [41] The London Fashion Week eventually went fur-free in 2018. [43] [44]
Surge brought to light cruelties in United Kingdom's dairy farms after taking footage of them, which according to Winters "shows not only a flagrant violation of the safety of these animals, but points to the wider systemic issues found throughout the whole dairy industry." [45] [46] In 2017 he also produced the documentary Land of Hope and Glory (2017) , considered to be a UK equivalent of the US Earthlings documentary. [47] [48] Land of Hope and Glory contained undercover footage of violence to animals at a RSPCA Assured farm, [45] to which the RSPCA responded. [49]
