A truck arrived on the Plaza of the Americas on Monday offering to pay students $1 to watch a four-minute video for animal rights.
UF is the most recent stop on the year-and-a-half-long “10 Billion Lives” tour, said Stephanie Frankle, a 26-year-old tour assistant for Farm Animal Rights Movement, the program behind the campaign.
“We drive this truck all over the country, mainly to college campuses, music fests, anywhere with a lot of people,” she said. The truck spends several hundred dollars per stop and is all donation-run. A normal day typically costs about $300, Frankle said.
The mission of the campaign, Frankle said, is to encourage students to cut back on meat or to more seriously consider a vegetarian or vegan diet.
The four-minute video shows images of large-scale factory farming and animal slaughter that some students call “intense” and “graphic.”
However, Asami Hayashi, a 21-year-old UF linguistics senior, said she didn’t feel forced to watch the video or that there was undue pressure to convert to a meat-free lifestyle.
“It was a little uncomfortable to watch,” she said. “I recently learned about it in my nutrition class, so it was very relevant to me. I was kind of curious to see it anyway.”
A version of this story ran on page 5 on 11/5/2013 under the headline "Gators offered $1 to watch videos"
Farm Animal Rights Movement, an organization promoting a vegan diet, paid students $1 to watch a four-minute video promoting its cause Monday afternoon. The video informed viewers about the slaughter of animals for food in the U.S.
