Josephine DeBellis (vegan) and Franny the Pig Friend, a Dynamic Duo Transforming Our Concepts Around Animal-People

We will uncover together the endearing friendship of a young activist and a pig-person and its transformative power! Josephine DeBellis may be in high school but her achievements in the animal-people liberation front surpass many expectations for someone still in their teens.

Let’s listen to Josephine’s story on meeting Franny. “I was driving home from a sleep-away camp in Virginia and all of a sudden on the shoulder of the road, I looked to my side, I saw this little piglet in a cage. It was a really hot day out. I would say it was probably 90, 95 degrees. And it was this little metal cage. It was all bent and broken. And so, we pulled over onto the shoulder and I got her out of the cage and I instantly brought her up to the window. My mom instantly knew that I had formed a connection with her and that she was coming home with us.”

Josephine has been vegan since the age of 10, but welcoming Franny into her heart, her home and her routine, transformed her into a dedicated, genuine animal-people hero and activist. In 2019, she began advocating for animal-people via The Franny Project, with the following mandate: “Our mission is to share Franny’s story in order to cultivate compassionate action and lifestyle changes. With our social media presence, outreach events, protests, and school presentations, our impact stretches far and wide.”

These actions stand out, but the involvement and achievements of such a young person do not stop there, as Josephine also undertook to become: a promoter of The Animal Bill of Rights legislation movement, and an active member of Rose’s Law DC, and Students Opposing Speciesism (SOS) DC. Josephine spares no time and effort in her determination to spread the message of the importance of a vegan diet, of the urgent need to cancel animal-people raising.

Truly, the genuine love Franny and other pig-persons demonstrate illustrates the noble qualities inherent in animal-people. The courageous, unconditional love and devotion constantly offered by animal-people is a fact, elaborated on by our Beloved Supreme Master Ching Hai: “Loving Quality (LQ), this is an unconditional loving quality, meaning we have love for all beings. We are ready to sacrifice or help anyone who is in need be it our kin or just total strangers, be it our benefactor or even our enemy. Many animal-people have higher LQ than some humans. For example, the dogs that you have at home, they have 110% LQ, pigs, surprise, 120% LQ; ducks, 90% LQ; chickens, also 90% LQ.”