Genesis Butler is a 13-year-old animal rights activist and ethical vegan from California. She has earned many awards for her activism, went to Rome to ask the Pope to go vegan for Lent and starred in the Disney+ original Marvel’s Superhero Project.
She stopped eating animals right before she turned four years old: “I asked my mom where she got my chicken nuggets from. She told me they came from animals, and they had to be killed for our food.”
Two years later, she also stopped drinking milk: “I went vegan when I was six because I saw my mom nursing my little sister and I knew the milk I drank didn’t come from her, so I asked her where she got my milk from. When she told me the milk came from mother cows, I told her I never wanted to drink milk again if it meant calves could stay with their mothers and keep their milk.”
She thinks her natural love for animals comes from being Native American: “My mom is part Apache and we both have always felt really connected to the earth.”
Vision for healing the planet
It didn’t stop there for Genesis. Since becoming vegan, she has also started activating other people to promote animal rights. For example, she gave a speech at the world-famous online platform TEDx about her vision for healing the planet.
“The curator for TEDx contacted me and asked me to apply. Once I found out I was one of the ten speakers chosen out of hundreds of people, I was really excited because I knew my message would reach a lot of people, and I knew it was going to help the animals,” Genesis says about her talk.
Her TEDx episode has been viewed more than 100,000 times.
Last year, Genesis received a very special message from Disney. They wanted to follow her for their new series Marvel’s Hero Project, that focuses on kids who do extraordinary things for their community. In the Disney+ original, we get a glimpse of the world of Genesis and her enormous love and commitment to animals.
After the episode aired, she’s gotten so many positive messages: “I get messages from kids and adults who tell me they are going vegan. I also have been getting messages from vegans who say they are going to be activists now after seeing my episode.”
“I thought it would get bad reviews just because people like to say negative things about vegans, but they didn’t. I am so glad people saw my episode as something positive,” she adds.
When she was a little girl, she told her mom she was here for a reason: “To help animals because once animals are gone from this planet, then humans will be next. This is why I talk about the environment and veganism every chance I get because the only way we can have a bright future on this planet is by not exploiting and killing animals.”
The Marvel superhero wants to become a veterinarian to take care of animals and run her own animal sanctuary one day.
Genesis works with the animal advocacy group Social Compassion in Legislation to help get laws passed that save the lives of animals. She also just became the lead organizer of Youth Climate Save, which is part of the Climate Save Movement.
The Marvel’s Hero Project featuring Genesis is available on Disney+.
