A New York Times investigation into the U.S. government selling off protected wild horses for slaughter led the paper’s front page on August 22, 2026. That alone is remarkable: I spent several hours looking for the last time an animal welfare story did the same, but couldn’t find one. The paper has been around for 175 years.

The piece concerns the Bureau of Land Management, which rounds up wild mustangs from public land to keep herds “sustainable,” then holds them in feedlots while it looks for adopters — finding homes for about half. The rest sit in “the holding system,” 58,000 horses at a cost of roughly $100 million per year, until the agency performs a piece of bureaucratic sleight of hand. When a horse is listed for adoption three times with no takers, it becomes legally “unadoptable” — and therefore sellable instead, for as little as $25. A sold horse, unlike an adopted one, loses its federal protections, and can then be flipped to a middleman who never signed the government’s no-slaughter contract. From there it can end up on a truck to Canada, legally, and then on a plate somewhere else.

“There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye,” Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary in Oregon, told the Times. “And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”

There’s an obvious reason this makes for a powerful investigative story. It has the shape investigative journalism knows how to tell: a rule, a bad actor working around it, a federal agency turning a blind eye. There are paper trails, names, dollar amounts, a legal technicality being abused. Perhaps most importantly, there’s a promise being broken.

Mustangs occupy a very particular cultural slot: not quite livestock, not quite wildlife, but something closer to American folklore. They’re iconic symbols of freedom and the open range, animals whose expected trajectory leads to adoption, sanctuary or release — not slaughter. What makes this story land is that sense of betrayal: a promise made and then, through cunning paperwork, silently broken.

Cows, pigs, and chickens, of course, never get that promise in the first place. They’re property from the moment they’re born — there are no adoption listings, no protected status to strip. There’s no loophole required, because there was never a barrier to get around. The wild horse story is horrifying specifically because it shows animals crossing the line from protected beings to disposable commodity plainly, on the record, with a paper trail a reporter could follow. For animals deemed “livestock,” there was never a line to cross, no moment to catch.

It’s worth noting, too, that mustangs aren’t wildlife in quite the same sense as bison or elk. They’re feral, descendanding from domesticated horses that escaped or were let loose, some traced back to Spanish colonial and ranch stock centuries back. Their protection isn’t some biological classification; it’s actually a 1971 act of Congress, which passed because enough Americans found it objectionable that horses were being shipped to slaughter and fed to pets.

No comparable law exists for chickens. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the baseline federal statute that governs how farmed animals can legally be killed, explicitly excludes poultry — the single most numerous animal raised for food in the country. One formerly domesticated species got a law named for it, while chickens, killed by the billions, were actively written out of the one law that could give them modest protection.

The difference in scale is almost absurd. About 73,000 wild horses live on federal land. Roughly 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food in the U.S. every year. One of those numbers gets a New York Times investigation with a named trader, a dollar figure per head, a border-crossing paper trail, and a legal technicality being visibly gamed. The other does not.

Investigative reporting is good at identifying a rule and then showing how someone broke it, evaded it, or profited from someone else’s failure to enforce it. It’s much less willing or equipped to interrogate a system in which the suffering isn’t technically in violation of the rules, but rather the intended outcome of them.

And it’s not just that those stories don’t get written — it’s what happens on the rare occasions something adjacent does. I’ve read entire pieces, in the Times and elsewhere, about bird flu outbreaks requiring the “culling” of hundreds of thousands of birds, and about factory farm barn fires that kill tens of thousands of pigs in a single night, that make zero mention of the animals as beings capable of suffering. The story is told entirely in economic and human terms: supply disruptions, egg prices, a farmer standing in the wreckage describing what the loss means for his family’s finances. The animals aren’t even characters in these stories. They’re inventory, destroyed.

We have a fully developed journalistic vocabulary for the human cost of a mass-casualty event involving animals, and almost no vocabulary for the mass casualty itself.

None of this is an argument against the piece running. A story built on the premise that killing animals for human convenience is morally objectionable getting the most prominent placement in the paper of record is a good thing. The question is what had to line up to make that possible: a mythologized species, a promise the government made and then broke, a paper trail a reporter could trace across state lines. The result is the New York Times running a lead story that is, essentially, an animal-rights story: the wrongdoing is measured by how it affects the animals themselves, with the animals centered as the victims.

Take any one piece away, however, and there’s no story, regardless of how many animals die. Ten billion animals are killed out of view from the public every year without a single one of those conditions in place.

The question isn’t whether the horses deserved the coverage. It’s whether the outrage it’s generating can survive being pointed at an animal nobody ever promised anything to — an animal whose suffering isn’t a violation of the system, but the system’s intended outcome.

One of the most remarkable things about Jack Hancock-Fairs’s new documentary The Dying Trade is how little it feels like a “vegan documentary” in the way people usually mean it. It isn’t preachy or interested in overwhelming the viewer with statistics, arguments, or graphic footage. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to corner the viewer.

It’s quiet, personal, and mostly about people. The film follows Jack as he tries to make sense of the fact that his dad has spent his life working in a slaughterhouse, while Jack has built his life around animal advocacy.

Jack’s dad isn’t flattened into a villain — he’s warm, funny, complicated, and clearly someone who loves his son. The same empathy extends to a former slaughterhouse worker Jack interviews, who speaks candidly about what the job did to him over time. Nothing is excused, but nothing is reduced either.

The Dying Trade is about trying to understand how people end up where they are — across families, across generations, across systems that people adapt themselves to in order to survive.

Watch it. Feel things. Share it with friends and family. Screen it in schools. Work like this makes it easier to imagine a future where mass violence against animals is no longer accepted as normal. I can’t recommend it enough.

In a rare moment of veganism becoming part of mainstream internet discourse, Billie Eilish recently said something that caused a minor earthquake online: “Eating meat is inherently wrong. Two things cannot coincide: ‘I love animals … and I eat meat.’ You can’t do both.”

The right was out in standard form: Liberals want to take your burgers. Wealthy coastal elites hate normal people.

My interest was in the online left, once again immediately liquefying into incoherence the second the conversation turned toward animals. It’s bizarre to watch people who spend their days talking about systems of oppression, solidarity, collective action, and moral urgency begin frantically searching for reasons why this particular form of mass cruelty is simply too complicated to meaningfully resist.

Their arguments were also familiar: There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Growing vegetables harms animals, too. Indigenous communities hunt. Veganism is for the white/rich/privileged.

It’s remarkable how moral standards become so transparently different the moment behavioral change is involved. The left routinely asks people to inconvenience themselves for ethical reasons. Boycott this company. Divest from this institution. Show up. Protest. Donate. Organize. Defend the vulnerable. Align your actions with your politics. And yet veganism — or even simply reducing one’s participation in animal exploitation — is treated as uniquely unreasonable.

Animals occupy this bizarre conceptual dead zone where nearly everyone agrees that torturing and killing billions of animals is bad in theory, but the moment avoiding it requires any sustained inconvenience, the conversation abruptly shifts toward why meaningful change is impossible until society itself transforms first.

But society is people. Markets are people. Culture is people.

If even a relatively small percentage of self-described progressives committed to materially reducing their participation in animal agriculture, the landscape of convenience would shift rapidly. Capital chases demand with astonishing speed when enough people decide something matters.

Instead, we get this kind of theatrical helplessness. Veganism is framed as impossibly burdensome because the world hasn’t already been reorganized around making it frictionless. Vague “health concerns” and mysterious illnesses associated with plant-based diets are weaponized, despite zero data showing that meat- and dairy-heavy diets are at all beneficial for human health.

The conversation so often collapses into this all-or-nothing binary. If someone truly believes factory farming is grotesque — as most of these people claim to — why not become as vegan as possible? Why not stop buying animal products, making occasional exceptions for genuinely difficult situations? If “health reasons” are your justification for consuming animals, why not move meaningfully in the direction of reducing suffering instead of constructing elaborate ideological defenses for maintaining the status quo entirely, and consuming whatever miserable flesh and fluids you desire?

Leftists will speak movingly about hierarchies of domination and systems of violence right up until the victim is a pig or a cow instead of a person. Then suddenly the tone changes. The moral language softens. Everything becomes nuanced and “complicated” and culturally relative.

You see this especially in the way certain leftists hide behind marginalized groups they themselves don’t belong to. Indigenous hunting practices become a shield for urban meat consumption. Food deserts become an excuse deployed by people with Erewhon delivery apps on their phones. Entire oppressed populations get rhetorically summoned to defend someone’s personal unwillingness to stop drinking bone broth. Why does the existence of food deserts somewhere become justification for your DoorDashed cheeseburger?

Regardless, I’m glad based vegan Twitter was out in full rhetorical force:

Conservatives are often honest about their fundamental, rancid belief that animals exist purely for human use, and don’t particularly care whether anyone finds that cruel. A surprising number of leftists seem to agree. They just prefer to route it through the language of anti-capitalism first.

Veganism doesn’t make someone pure. Buying oat milk doesn’t make you revolutionary. But it’s revealing how aggressively even mild moral clarity around mass cruelty to animals gets resisted, especially by people who otherwise define themselves through the language of justice.

The left likes to talk a lot about standing with the oppressed. Animals, apparently, remain too oppressed to count.

Back in 2016, I drove up to San Francisco for the first-ever conference on cellular agriculture, back when most people hadn’t heard of cultivated meat. I went to learn about the nascent technology; it felt like one of my first “professional” experiences in the wider world of pro-animal work.

After the conference, I ended up driving back to LA with a friend of a friend — someone who’d been working with nonprofits in Germany for many years to reduce animal consumption. My “career” up to that point had mainly been in video games, and I was about 12 years into my audiovisual art practice — things I’d been reflexively drawn to since I was a kid. At some point during our six-hour conversation, I remember trying, a bit awkwardly, to articulate this low, persistent discomfort that had weighed on me for years: that none of my professional or creative work was doing anything for the billions of animals being exploited and killed for profit.

He listened, thought about it, and then said, in a very calm, very German way, something along the lines of: it felt to him a bit like training to become a concert pianist during the Holocaust.

He didn’t say it to be cruel. It wasn’t meant as a gotcha. Just a statement of how it felt to him, and an explanation of why he’d chosen to do the work he did. But it landed. It still sits there a decade later, as a kind of reference point I can’t quite unsee.

Many people who work in creative fields — games, writing, film, music — are there because they love the medium. There’s curiosity, a desire to make something good, something interesting, something that didn’t exist before. That impulse isn’t trivial, but it exists alongside a world where things are, by any reasonable standard, pretty bad. And not abstractly bad — systematically, continuously, industrially horrific.

So you end up with this kind of split screen. On one side, you’re thinking about things like meaning, mechanics, aesthetics, structure, tone, pacing, whatever the craft demands. On the other side, you’re aware — sometimes dimly, though usually not — that billions of animals are living and dying inside a system you’ve chosen, for the most part, not to spend all of your working (if not waking) hours opposing.

There are ways to resolve that tension, or at least quiet it. You tell yourself that not everything has to be instrumental, that art has its own value, that people need complex emotions, narratives, and ideas that transcend language. And that doing one kind of work can replenish you enough to keep facing the other. All of which feels at least partially true.

You look for ways to bring activism to your work or your art, but it almost always feels clumsy and forced. You consider the possibility of making lots of money from your art and funneling that into the animal rights movement, but then realize you don’t make the kind of work that often proves lucrative, and even then, the chances are infinitesimally small.

Eventually, you narrow your focus, letting the larger context blur out until it’s background noise again. But it doesn’t fully go away. It just recedes and hovers behind you, always.

I haven’t done much therapy in my life, but I have a clear memory of trying to explain this to a therapist in a very large Kaiser Permanente building around that time. I described the feeling — the sense that the work I was doing was removed from what I believed mattered most. She looked at me with a kind of polite confusion and told me I didn’t need to take such a drastic step as changing careers to resolve it. That it wasn’t necessary to hold myself to that standard. I remember nodding along, even feeling briefly reassured. I didn’t go back.

In the decade since, I’ve moved much more of my time and energy into that world — writing, designing, advocating, contributing where I can (including Weeping Elephant Project, which I hope you’ll check out). Enough to feel, at least on paper, like I’ve responded to that conversation in the car. And yet, the feeling remains. There’s a persistent sense that I could and should be doing more about these ongoing horrors, set against another persistent pull toward the kinds of creative projects I’ve always been drawn to — ones that feel absorbing and meaningful and at times therapeutic in their own ways, but difficult to justify against the scale of what they sit beside. I don’t really have a resolution to that. It just seems to be the shape of things.

Just a few years ago, veganism felt like a surging cultural force in the US. Documentaries found huge audiences, fast food chains raced to add plant-based options, and celebrities and athletes framed it as the future. For a moment, it seemed like veganism might become part of a broader, values-driven politics.

To be sure, both here and around the world, material progress is definitely still happening. Schools are introducing plant-based days or entirely vegan menus. All 11 public hospitals in NYC now serve plant-based meals by default, while Lebanon now boasts the world’s first fully vegan hospital (if the Zionist terror state hasn’t destroyed it yet). Several municipalities, including those in London and São Paulo, have begun serving only plant-based food at official events. Plant-based meat sales both in Europe and globally are on track to rise for the third consecutive year. Jeff Goldblum recently announced that he’s stopped eating meat. These are all good things.

But in the US in particular, the energy that once made veganism feel like an inevitability has quieted. Sales of plant-based meat have been spiraling downward for several years — down 7% in 2024 and another 17% in 2025, with Americans buying 75 million fewer units than in 2022. Beyond Meat, once valued at $10 billion, has lost 99% of its market cap (as well as the word “Meat” from its name). Just 1% of Americans identify as vegan — a figure that’s remained stubbornly flat for decades. What felt like the beginning of a sweeping movement now feels like a plateau. What happened?

The vibe shift that ate the movement

Part of the answer lies in the broader culture shift of the past half-decade. Where the late 2010s were marked by climate protests and youth-led movements, the 2020s have largely been defined by burnout, irony, and political entropy. The stakes got so high, the systems so unresponsive, and the corruption so glaring that for many, the idea that individual choices — or even collective pressure — could meaningfully change anything started to feel naive.

Remember when we all learned the Swedish word flygskam, or “flight shame” — the feeling of guilt associated with air travel? There was a brief moment when people felt morally obligated to do things like fly less, bike more, and cut back on animal products. But that window closed quickly. The world didn’t change fast enough, and neither did the people in power. And so the pendulum swung — not just back toward indulgence, but into a kind of cynicism.

As Henry Mance recently wrote in the Financial Times, liberals once prepared to make sacrifices for a better society have lost faith: “Faced with overwhelming bleakness — Covid, Ukraine, high energy costs, Donald Trump’s re-election, Gaza — they understandably wonder if small changes matter; they want to escape to the things that bring instant joy — meat, cheese, long-haul holidays.”

Protein panic and the “processed” trap

Of course, veganism’s stumbles also can’t be separated from the rise of two overlapping food trends: the current protein obsession and the backlash against “ultra-processed” foods.

Influencers, athletes, and food companies have all relentlessly promoted the idea that we’re in the midst of a protein deficit, even though Westerners already consume far more protein than they need. Protein has become shorthand for strength, virility, and health. And for most Americans, that still means meat, eggs, and whey.

At the same time, a cultural recoil from ultra-processed foods has cast suspicion on vegan alternatives. The meat industry has pushed hard into this framing, branding plant-based burgers and sausages as fake, artificial, and unhealthy. Beyond’s Ethan Brown admitted recently that the industry “did a masterful job, convincing people that there was something wrong with [our] products.”

Research has consistently shown that plant-based meats typically have less saturated fat, more fiber, and roughly the same amount and quality of protein as their animal counterparts (I hope you’ll enjoy watching Andrew Huberman struggle to process this information as much as I did in the clip above). In the popular American imagination, however, “plant-based” has become another word for “processed” — and therefore suspect.

Culture war casualties

The political context has only deepened the problem. In the US, meat isn’t just dinner — it’s identity, myth, and belonging, tied up in ideas about masculinity, self-reliance, and national character. In the Trump era, meat has once again surged as a culture war weapon: proof of strength, self-reliance, and resistance to “woke dogma.”

On the left, meanwhile, the old consensus around consumer action has fractured. Veganism is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing human struggles like colonialism, labor rights, racial justice, housing, and healthcare. The effect is that veganism gets vilified by the right and sidelined by the left.

It’s tempting to see all of this as proof that veganism was just another fad. But the recent cultural decline of veganism isn’t about the failure of its ethics; rather, it’s about the cultural mood that once made those ethics feel contagious. “It’s not our moment,” Ethan Brown admitted recently. “You’d be crazy to think it is.”

And yet, the exigencies of veganism — mass-scale animal suffering, ecological collapse, public health crises — are only intensifying. The question is whether animal ethics can be re-rooted inside a broader politics of care — one that resists cynicism without collapsing into purity traps, one that connects food to systems of power and harm. As Mance wrote, veganism can regain momentum “if the public regains a sense of possibility.”

That possibility isn’t entirely hypothetical. Two major US cities now have democratic socialist mayors. Young people are far more open to plant-based diets, with roughly 8% of both Gen Z and Black Americans, respectively, identifying as vegan or vegetarian. The cultural headwinds are real, but so is the demographic shift.

The next wave of veganism won’t look like the last. It won’t be driven by hype cycles or celebrity endorsements, but by something slower and harder to extinguish: a communal refusal to keep treating cruelty as normal. Whether that takes hold depends less on markets than on whether people can recover a basic sense that their choices matter — that care itself isn’t pointless, even now.

I was recently at a family member’s small birthday gathering. Someone showed up with a cake that didn’t have eggs or dairy in it, on account of me (and by extension my kid). I appreciated it. This is in Los Angeles, where acquiring such a cake isn’t that big of a deal. Everyone ate it. It was good. No one seemed betrayed by the absence of butter.

At some point I heard the person who brought the cake grumble from the other room, regarding it being a vegan cake, “because it’s always about Evan.” It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t even serious. Said with a laugh, a shared eye-roll.

What still gets to me is how refusing to consume the products of tortured animals somehow turns one into a pain in the neck. That the cake existed to satisfy me, rather than to avoid something most of us would claim to oppose if it were described plainly. By refusing, you’re making it about yourself — needlessly high-maintenance at best, insufferable at worst.

I don’t feel persecuted. I’m not wounded. I’m just so damn tired of how easily this gets framed as “a preference” instead of what it is: a refusal to subsidize animal suffering. There’s a difference between “I only eat corner pieces” and “I don’t want to pay for the confinement, forced impregnation, and slaughter of gentle, helpless animals.” But socially, those two things get flattened into the same category. I’d argue that most people even perceive the latter as being more selfish.

We all know, at some level, how this system works. We know animals aren’t volunteering. We know what has to happen for milk and eggs and body parts to appear cheaply and endlessly. But the charade continues.

And yes, I’m mortified that I even have to sit here and try to articulate this, once again centering myself in what is ultimately about the animals, and sparing them from lives of abject misery. Perhaps someday this will feel less like a favor and more like the only reasonable choice.

For those who don’t keep up with American politics or reactionary media personalities, Matt Walsh is a bloviating right-wing bootlicker. He’s part of a cohort of conservative media influencers who rose to prominence by producing culture-war content for outlets like The Daily Wire, positioning themselves as authorities on masculinity, morality, and social order.

What Grim and Greenwald are circling above gets at something even more pathological. It’s not just that people like Walsh can’t imagine an ethical principle that applies universally. It’s that his entire brand depends on ethics never being applied universally — only hierarchically.

Walsh’s masculinity is a sorting mechanism. Some lives count, others don’t. Some bodies deserve protection, others exist to be disciplined, consumed, removed. That logic shows up everywhere, including in the way he talks about food. The fixation he and others like him have on meat and milk, their contempt for those who abstain from animal products, their endless sneering at “soy boys” — it isn’t about nutrition or tradition. It’s about rehearsing dominion.

For Walsh and his ilk, eating animals isn’t incidental. It’s how you practice being above something, how you normalize the idea that suffering is acceptable if the right person benefits. The same moral framework that makes industrial animal violence acceptable makes state violence feel righteous. If a cow can be repeatedly raped, separated from her baby calf, milked until collapse, and turned into a stupid fucking punchline about soy milk, then it follows that an activist murdered in the street can be waved off as collateral damage.

This is why someone like Alex Pretti short-circuits their feeble minds. Pretti didn’t cosplay virtue. He didn’t posture. He showed up, physically, for other people — on the street and in his work as a VA nurse. As the thread above points out, he embodied the qualities Walsh endlessly pantomimes: courage, care, risk. And that’s intolerable, because it exposes the scam.

Walsh doesn’t believe in strength. He believes in proximity to power. That’s why his reaction to Pretti’s killing is so automatic, so bloodless, so eager. The state acted. The hierarchy held. Someone below paid the price. Order restored.

The throughline here is pretty simple: a masculinity that needs victims will always defend systems that produce them. Whether it’s cows, migrants, trans people, protesters, or “soy boys,” the target is interchangeable. What matters is that someone remains beneath you, so you never have to test whether you can stand on your own.

It does not feel like a time of progress for animals. Industrial meat is expanding, and animal suffering remains structurally essential to how the global food system works. The dominant political response to ecological instability has not been restraint but defiance: more extraction, a doubling down on consumption as identity. And yet, in a few places, small institutional shifts are beginning to sketch a different way forward.

Switzerland’s new animal-product labeling law, for instance, brings animal agriculture more in line with its institutional peers: namely, the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. In a food economy built on distance and concealment, Swiss labels on meat, dairy, eggs, foie gras, and even frog legs must now say whether animals were subjected to specific painful procedures without anesthesia or stunning — castration, dehorning, tail docking, beak trimming, force-feeding, the cutting of frogs’ legs. The goal isn’t prohibition or public shaming, so much as a small rupture in the seamlessness of consumption — a subtle addition of plain facts to the soft-focus assurances. It’s a modest act, but there’s precedent for similarly modest acts shifting markets — once egg cartons in Switzerland had to state their production method involved battery cages, sales of eggs from caged hens dropped sharply.

Nearby, Amsterdam has moved to ban outdoor advertising for meat and fossil fuels. It’s an acknowledgment that ads in public space don’t just sell things; they script what feels normal and inevitable. Taking burgers and oil off billboards won’t end their consumption, of course, but it does chip away at their aura of inevitability. (Amsterdam’s move brings it in line with other cities across the Netherlands — Utrecht, The Hague, Delft, and Nijmegen have already introduced similar initiatives.)

Mexico, meanwhile, has amended its constitution to recognize animal welfare. Constitutions don’t micromanage daily life; they sketch the outer boundaries of what kinds of suffering a society is prepared to ignore. By writing animals into that frame, Mexico creates a baseline from which stronger protections can be argued without first having to prove that animals count at all. Colombia has gone another way into the same terrain: animal protection education will be compulsory in schools. This will include curricula around “ethical animal guardianship, biodiversity conservation, prevention of cruelty, and recognition of animal sentience,” pulling respect for animals into the realm of shared knowledge.

None of this is a breakthrough. The machinery of industrial violence still hums along, and reactionary politics are busy welding more armor onto it, casting domination as heritage and restraint as weakness. But these developments matter because they make suffering a little harder to hide, desire a little less automatic, and compassion slightly more legible inside the systems that quietly steer everyday life.

On the subject of things that inspire a bit of hope, I’d like to salute the fact that 80% of Wu-Tang Clan remains vegan. In the words of Masta Killa aka High Chief aka Jamel Irief:

I recently spent some time in Japan. Nearly fifteen years after my last trip, I regret to report that eating vegan there remains remarkably difficult — not just inconvenient, but structurally hard in a way that feels baked into everyday life. You sense it quickly, less as hostility than as absence. The idea itself never really made it into the system.

There are exceptions: a small but committed vegan community, and a handful of great cafés and restaurants, many of them kept afloat by Western and South Asian tourists passing through. Living there and cooking most meals at home from basic ingredients would, of course, be different from wandering around as a tourist and eating mostly on the go. But the fact remains that for most people, most of the time, the idea of abstaining from meat and dairy barely registers. Menus don’t anticipate it. Packaging doesn’t signal it. Compared to the US — ethically incoherent, wildly excessive, but at least accustomed to labeling and accommodating vegetarian and vegan choices — Japan feels like a place where animal products are still always assumed.

It doesn’t help that the food looks and smells incredible. Walking through any given market’s prepared food section in Tokyo as a vegan, especially a hungry one, is an almost comically challenging experience. Everything is so precisely prepared and composed, mouthwatering, and plentiful. If you’ve ever struggled with lingering food desires, it can be a shock to the system. The pull still works on me.

Fish stock alone takes care of most of it. It’s in soups, sauces, rice, and nearly everything else; even foods that read as “plain” often hide dashi, meat, eggs, or mayonnaise somewhere in the ingredient list. Asking questions feels awkward, substitutions are rare, and the burden is squarely on you to adapt or go without. It isn’t really about tradition in the romantic sense; it’s about defaults, the quiet assumption that soup tastes like fish and rice comes with meat. There’s a glorious, glowing konbini (convenience store) on nearly every corner, its shelves generously stocked with all manner of immaculately prepared and packaged foods — and often the only vegan option is “salted rice ball”. I ate a lot of salted rice balls.

None of this is meant as a moral indictment of Japan, or a claim that things are better elsewhere. Restaurants in US cities have more vegan options on their menus these days, but this country also consumes a staggering amount of meat and dairy — the average American consumes over 2.2 times more animal foods by weight than their Japanese counterpart. In one place, veganism is visible but marginal; in the other, nearly invisible, yet oddly imaginable in a different way.

What Japan clarified for me is how much being vegan depends on infrastructure most of us barely notice. When systems are built around animal consumption, opting out becomes a highly specialized skill. The difficulty isn’t ideological resistance, but friction.

Despite how challenging it is to be vegan in Japan as an individual, it also feels easier to conceive of a significant decline in animal consumption there if it were framed as a collective issue rather than a personal one. If the state decided that meat, especially fish, needed to be reduced for supply, sustainability, or environmental reasons, it’s easy to imagine people complying. Veganism in the US often functions as a subculture or identity; in Japan, it is easier to imagine something like it emerging from policy and shared norms.

There are already plenty of examples of coordinated behavior change. Recycling is taken seriously, with various packaging materials meticulously separated by type in every household. Trash is effectively nonexistent in public places, and public smoking — ubiquitous in my previous experiences in Tokyo, both indoors and out — has been rapidly eliminated in just the past several years, accelerated by preparations for the 2020 Olympics. People wear masks in public when they feel ill, refrain from eating on sidewalks or trains, and behave as if public life is a shared project. It isn’t blind obedience so much as a kind of everyday social contract: when conditions change, behavior adjusts.

That idea sits uneasily with how animal ethics are usually framed in the West. Here, morality is treated as something you choose and express. What you eat becomes a signal of who you are. Veganism, in this context, often reads less as a response to mass harm and more as a personal identity — one that’s expected to justify itself constantly. The implicit theory of change is that enough individuals will wake up, shift their purchases, and drag the system along behind them. Individuals are asked to swim upstream inside systems designed to make animal products cheap, convenient, and everywhere.

Japan isn’t a place that celebrates ethical eating as self-expression, and it certainly doesn’t center animal suffering in public discourse. And yet, it’s also a place where large-scale behavioral shifts happen with relative ease when they’re framed as necessary. If the same machinery that enforces recycling rules and smoking bans were pointed toward reducing animal consumption — by reshaping school lunches, public procurement, convenience store offerings, or subsidies — everyday diets could change without anyone having to announce a new identity.

When behavior change is treated as a shared expectation rather than a personal stance, it carries less emotional weight. There’s less defensiveness, less need to explain yourself. No one asks whether recycling aligns with your values. You do it because that’s how things are done. The conflict happens at the level of policy, not at every meal.

Of course, food is more intimate than recycling or smoking. It touches memory, family, pleasure, ritual. Japan’s food culture is deeply tied to care and craftsmanship, which makes the idea of altering it feel especially sensitive. But intimacy doesn’t protect systems from limits. Fisheries don’t respond to nostalgia. Supply chains don’t bend to tradition. At some point, constraints force change, whether people are ready or not. For animals, those constraints aren’t abstract: they determine how many are pulled through these systems at all.

Japan’s reliance on seafood in particular isn’t just cultural; it’s ecological and economic. The country faces diminishing fish stocks, aging fisheries, and rising climate risk, and is already experimenting with alternatives. There’s growing interest and investment in cultured meat and especially cultured fish, including eel, driven less by a sudden moral awakening than by food security concerns and consumer interest in keeping familiar dishes on the table. We might not need a mass ethical awakening about animals; pressure, scarcity, cost, and instability are alternative drivers.

Japan doesn’t feel hostile to veganism so much as indifferent to it. Animal products aren’t defended or celebrated; they’re simply everywhere, embedded so thoroughly that questioning them feels like questioning the weather. If avoiding harm requires perpetual effort, then harm will persist — not because people are cruel or unaware, but because ease usually wins. For animals, that ease adds up to trillions of quiet, automatic harms that few specifically choose, but nearly everyone participates in.

In the end, this trip made something plain that can be easier to miss elsewhere: when avoiding harm demands constant, vigilant attention, most harm will continue. Systems are better at reproducing themselves than individuals are at resisting them. The question isn’t whether ethical choices are possible, but how much effort they demand — and who is expected to supply it.

A confession: I compulsively track The New Yorker's coverage of issues relating to eating animals, mostly because I'm a masochist who loves being disappointed by the liberal weekly of record. Like most of its media peers, coverage of animal rights or veganism in The New Yorker is almost nonexistent; love letters to the scrumptiousness of dead animals, however, make very regular appearances. I read it anyway, because watching very educated writers elegantly sidestep the screaming ethical void is, in its own way, instructive.

Food critic Helen Rosner’s latest essay on Thanksgiving certainly fits the bill. It begins in exactly the register you'd expect from a year like this one: rueful, world-weary, alert to the barbarism of contemporary American life. She writes about a nation “actively working to become more brutal, more indifferent,” a place where suffering is meted out as punishment for being poor, or sick, or born on the wrong side of a border.

And then, without missing a beat, the piece plunges directly into an ode to butchery, blind to the connective tissue between our appetite for violence and the food on the table. “Priority for the turkey legs should go to those under the age of six,” she writes, because it makes “terrific photos.” The cook and carver, she insists, should pluck away “the crispiest bits of skin” and the “loveliest little morsels of breast and thigh” while carving the bird’s body open. Later, she passionately declares her belief in the “supremacy of the turkey carcass.”

It makes sense, of course, that the dead body of a terrified, factory-farmed animal remains the civic symbol around which we gather to remember who we are as a country. This is America. Brutality is our inheritance, and selective empathy is one of our foundational myths.

But it’s impossible to imagine these words written about a cat or a dog — or even another bird, like a sparrow or a blue jay — because doing so wouldn’t be acceptable in polite society. For the countless poor baby chickens and turkeys born into lives of abject pain and suffering on factory farms, though, it absolutely is.

The myopic gesturing toward moral clarity is in no way limited to Rosner. She’s simply speaking the native language of American liberalism, which is fluent in the suffering of some, but mute on the suffering of others — particularly the animals we eat, even when we describe their body parts with the forensic intimacy of a pathologist.

“A turkey’s meat is mostly forgettable, chicken with the volume turned ever so slightly upward, but in water its flavor transforms and deepens to create something of heady, chest-thumping bravado,” she writes. “There’s no need for a recipe: collect all your turkey detritus in a big pot, toss in any vegetable or herb scraps that seem appealing, add cold water, and set the mixture to simmer for as many hours as you like. As the skeleton softens and yields, the kitchen fills, for the second time that day, with a warm, meaty aroma.”

It’s illuminating to watch a writer move so fluidly from the horrors of the political moment to an almost erotic relationship with a dead bird’s skeleton. The shift is so smooth it feels like cultural muscle memory: the ability to acknowledge suffering in abstract form and then immediately participate in it in concrete form. There’s even a line in the piece about how Thanksgiving traditions are “optional,” how the holiday offers fertile ground for “willful rebellion.” Except, of course, for the one tradition that remains unexamined: killing an animal, because it’s tradition to do so.

To see what an alternative looks like in (relatively) mainstream media, Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova remains a rare voice of dissent. Her most recent Thanksgiving counterpoint is no exception. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll leave you with a few choice excerpts:

Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?

Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.

In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.

From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”

On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.

Glass Walls Podcast: Jo-Anne McArthur

In Mallacoota, Victoria, amid the scorched remains of the 2020 bushfires, Jo-Anne McArthur spotted an eastern grey kangaroo with her joey. It was midday, the sky muted by clouds, and McArthur realized she would need to cover a long stretch of burned ground to frame the photograph she had in mind. She walked quickly, camera ready, hoping the animals would stay. By chance and persistence, they did. When she finally raised her lens, the mother paused long enough for McArthur to press the shutter—a fleeting moment against a backdrop of devastation. The resulting photograph, “Hope in a Burned Plantation,” would go on to become a symbol of both resilience and loss in the Anthropocene, earning wide international acclaim and a win in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

This scene represents just one moment in McArthur's two-decade journey as perhaps the world's preeminent animal photojournalist. The Canadian photographer and educator has traveled to more than sixty countries documenting the complex, often troubling relationships between humans and animals. She’s the founder of We Animals, a groundbreaking nonprofit and photojournalism project that has become the world’s leading archive of animal photojournalism. Over the past two decades, her images have been published in major outlets including National Geographic, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, and have been used by hundreds of NGOs and advocacy campaigns worldwide. She has published several acclaimed books, including We Animals and Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, and her work has earned her numerous international awards for both photography and animal advocacy. From slaughterhouses and factory farms to zoos, circuses, and wildlife markets, McArthur’s lens captures what most people never see.

A childhood of seeing

McArthur's path toward animal photojournalism began with seemingly small moments in her childhood. “When I was a child, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, once in a while [my mom] would say, ‘Let's go to the animal shelter,’” McArthur recalls. They weren't there to adopt; they were simply there to spend time with the animals and, perhaps, to bear witness. “I would leave crying. I think that really stayed with me, and I can thank her for that because I think it's one of the many things that made me the sensitive person that I am.” Her mother, a nurse who worked with children in operating and cardiac units, wasn't particularly focused on animal rights, but possessed a general empathy that McArthur credits as influential.

That sensitivity deepened when her mother moved to the countryside and, along with two dogs and a cat, kept 10 backyard chickens. “I had never spent time with chickens before. Chicken was my favorite food,” she says. “Getting to know chickens, I realized I couldn’t eat my favorite food anymore. It was a big shift for me, realizing that the animals I was eating were just as sentient as the wild birds I loved.”

McArthur’s formal journey into photography began in university. “I took a black-and-white printing course as an elective, and by the second class, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” she recalls with a laugh. She became “singularly focused on educating myself, working with other photographers, and learning the skills of the trade.” She was especially drawn to conflict photography and the idea of bearing witness to injustice. “Who are these people who put their lives in jeopardy to go and expose something that needs to be seen, who make images that change the course of history?” she wondered.

It was a trip to Ecuador in 1998 that crystallized her mission. While hiking, she saw a capuchin monkey chained to a windowsill. “I was taking a picture of this chained-up monkey, and so were other people. They thought it was sort of funny and cute, and they were taking tourist pictures, whereas I was taking pictures, thinking, ‘Maybe I can do something important with this picture, like change the fate of this monkey, launch some complaints.’ There’s a very clear tie there between photography and activism, and frankly, between photography and photojournalism. I think that’s, in part, what photojournalism is.”

Making the invisible visible

When McArthur enters a space—a factory farm, a roadside zoo, a slaughterhouse—she’s looking for more than just documentation. She’s after the whole story: “Some of my most successful images are shot with a wide angle and they show an entire system,” she explains. “You can't tell much of a story if you get a headshot of an animal. It might be a beautiful picture, but it doesn't say much.”

Her approach is rooted in photojournalism’s tradition of immersion and context. “We love wide-angle lenses. We want to quietly immerse ourselves in what's happening, and with a wide angle, you can photograph—like with the pig being clubbed [below], you can see it's a slaughterhouse. You can see what's happening and what’s going to happen. That image offers more of a story than if I’d shot it with a portrait lens.” She strives for images that capture not just the animal’s experience, but the system at work: “She's on her knees, she's screaming, her eyes are closed, and then the actions of the man holding a [club]—it's kind of a complete picture, and I strive for those.”

McArthur’s camera is her passport into otherwise closed worlds. “The camera is like my all-access pass into the lives of others,” she says. “Because I’m friendly and because I’m genuinely curious, that camera, that tool allowed me to go to all sorts of places—orphanages in Northern India, medical missions in Senegal, factory farms. Sometimes I show up at odd hours and ask workers who they are, and what's going on, and if I can come in and take pictures of this unusual thing happening.”

Her approach to documenting animal exploitation follows three primary methods. The first is what she calls “the easy way”: purchasing tickets to places where animal exploitation is commercialized, like circuses, rodeos, bullfights, zoos, and aquariums. “I really used to hate giving any money whatsoever to these companies,” she admits. “However, it’s a really good investment in animal advocacy if you leave with high-quality pictures that the world can see not only once, but see for decades.”

The second and much more difficult method involves undercover investigations. “You need a team, you need people with experience. You need walkie-talkies, you need a getaway car,” McArthur explains. These operations require careful planning to “as securely as possible trespass and go into a farm, document what you see, and leave with those very precious images.”

The third approach involves immersing herself in a location and following leads. “I remember landing in Hanoi, Vietnam, and staying at a little hostel and asking the people at the front desk, ‘Do you know who I could hire for a day to drive me around, to show me any place that animals are used?’” she recounts. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, our cousin, he’s going to show up early in the morning, 5 a.m., and he has a scooter.’ And off we went in the dark of the morning to go to where animals are processed—big places, backyard slaughterhouses, bear bile farming, traditional medicine types of places.”

Her work has exposed her not just to the suffering of animals, but also to the hardship and vulnerability of workers in the system. “The workers are there working very hard, getting injured themselves. So many farm workers are unpapered, making very little money and have no security. And here I am, this wealthy white girl with these big cameras—they might feel exposed. So I do my best to reassure them that I’m not there to show that they’re a bad person. On the contrary, I’ll do everything I can to show that I’m documenting this entire experience.”

Building an archive

Over the years, what began as a personal project for McArthur has evolved into We Animals, a nonprofit that maintains an internationally recognized archive and collective of animal photojournalism. The organization now holds the work of over 175 photographers around the world, each contributing their own perspective and expertise. The We Animals stock site contains some 35,000 images and videos, available for free for noncommercial use—a resource for NGOs, journalists, educators, and advocates worldwide.

Early on, she realized that too many of her images—often captured under difficult, sometimes dangerous conditions—were languishing unseen. “Too many images were just ending up on my hard drive. They weren’t out in the world.” She has since put together a small but dedicated and growing team of colleagues who do the work of compiling, captioning, and organizing the ever-growing archive. “The reason I do this work is to help as many animals as I can,” McArthur explains. “You have to reach as many people as you can to do that.”

The organization’s explicit advocacy stance sometimes creates barriers with mainstream media. In a conversation with a prominent international media outlet, McArthur recalls how she was told that despite the quality and importance of her work, they couldn’t use her images because “the byline is Joanne McArthur, We Animals, and We Animals is an activist organization.” Rather than hiding their advocacy, McArthur embraces it. “We do identify ourselves as [activists] because it’s the truth. Like, why hide from it? We are there to change things for animals, right? So we’re not gonna be shy about that.”

Bearing witness in Brussels

In March 2025, Jo-Anne McArthur traveled to Brussels for a milestone event: the unveiling of “The Hidden Costs of Factory Farming” at the European Parliament. The exhibition, organized by the European Institute for Animal Law & Policy and the European Environmental Bureau, brought together images from McArthur and other We Animals photographers, offering an unflinching look at industrial animal agriculture across the EU. For McArthur, it was her third visit to the Parliament in a decade, and her second time addressing Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) directly.

“I really appreciate when organizations that work in law and policy understand the importance of storytelling,” McArthur reflected afterward. She was keenly aware that the exhibit’s true power lay in its ability to bring lawmakers face-to-face with the realities they so often legislate from a distance: “People who are making decisions need to see what’s happening on the front lines. And that’s what we do. And that’s my weird-ass specialty: going to the front lines of animal suffering.”

The exhibition filled a high-traffic corridor with large-scale photographs—scenes of overcrowded barns, mutilations, and the daily routines of suffering that underpin Europe’s food system. McArthur addressed a room of policymakers and advocates, sharing both the stories behind the images and the urgency of their message. “I had a lot of positive feedback,” she said. “Now, it doesn’t mean that great change will come from the hundred attendees that I addressed…but an exhibit of this kind in the EP gets covered in the media and it generates a lot of interest.”

Yet, the atmosphere was tempered by political realities. In conversations with Parliament staff and attendees, McArthur sensed a shift. “Given the increase in right-wing representatives now and culture having shifted that way, generally they don’t feel optimistic that a lot of new laws and policies will be passed in this term,” she explained. With another four years before the next elections, many saw the need to focus less on immediate legislative wins and more on changing hearts and minds. “It was interesting to hear the policy people say that they really need to focus on culture change right now,” McArthur noted. For her, and for the artists and advocates present, this was a reminder that storytelling and cultural advocacy are not just complementary to policy—they’re essential to it.

For McArthur, being invited as a cultural representative made sense. “Stepping back from just photojournalism—we are artists, and that’s what artists do. They’re often the canary in the coal mine, and they’re often turning heads before anyone else is, saying ‘this is important, this is what we’re going to depict about culture at this time.’”

The exhibit itself sparked debate about what’s considered too graphic for public display. While many disturbing images remained on the walls for the duration of the event, a close-up photograph of a piglet being castrated without anesthetic—taken by Polish animal photojournalist Andrew Skowron—was singled out and removed at the request of a commissioner. The decision highlighted how certain forms of animal suffering, though routine in industrial farming, remain especially difficult for audiences to confront. Yet the image continued to have an impact beyond the exhibit: Dutch MEP Anja Hazekamp, recognizing its importance, took the photograph into the hallway and used it to engage passersby in conversation about the realities of factory farming.

Context is king

Indeed, McArthur has learned that the impact of an image depends as much on context and timing as on content. “I remember in the early days, I thought I could show any image and hold it up and say, ‘Look at this!’, and people would look, and then people would change.” In today’s world, she notes, there are additional barriers: “We now live in a world where your social media accounts can be blocked or discontinued. People can block you, mute you, or, you know, Meta can just say, This is too graphic. And the work disappears.”

That means every image is chosen and captioned with intention. “If you’re going to use a violent image, you also have to engage your audience with words that allow them to understand the context. You have to know your audience, and want to reach them.” She says certain formats—like exhibitions or books—can hold space for the most graphic material. “We made a book called Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, and that’s an unflinching document, a five-pound book of what is currently happening to animals. And though that book is full of some of the most graphic images we have ever seen … those images do need a place in history, and a book is a memorable and lasting thing to create.”

The work itself has also evolved, shaped by shifting laws and surveillance concerns. “We have had to adapt technologically and with laws and with safety and security, depending on the country we’re working in. There are some countries we simply don’t work in, because they’re a bit lawless, [putting] journalists in an incredible amount of danger.” She and her team consult resources like Reporters Without Borders to assess the risk of imprisonment. “We’re very careful, and if we’re in too much danger, then we’ll throw up a drone from public property, or we’ll gain permission and use other ways to do things safely.”

When asked where she most wants to work, McArthur’s answer is strategic rather than personal. “I most want to go where we can most affect change. If there’s a country that’s on the precipice of banning a practice, it would be really great to go and take important images to help a campaign. And that’s the wish of not just me, but of We Animals. We look at how we can best help campaigns or the movement.”

McArthur sees her work—and We Animals’ mission—as part of a broader shift in the field. “We’re nudging photojournalists and wildlife photographers towards doing some animal photojournalism in what they already do. We’re influencing the photography award world to include more animal photojournalism. There are more and more people who are interested in APJ. We created a masterclass, and hundreds of people have taken that. More people than we ever expected.”

She encourages aspiring animal photojournalists to start where they are. “You don’t have to go into a factory farm to be an APJ. You can document the birds kept in cages in the apartment behind you. You could do a whole story about that. You can go to a local rib fest, you can go to an Animal Save vigil, and photograph the trucks coming in [to a slaughterhouse]. Animal use is all around us, and all you have to do is go out in the world with your camera and start taking pictures to be an APJ.”

The toll of truth-telling

Bearing witness to animal suffering comes at a steep personal cost for Jo-Anne McArthur. While she’s very clear about not comparing her work to their own, she notes that many doctors and veterinarians are forced to build emotional walls to cope with the trauma of their professions. McArthur admits, “I’m not sure I have that wall, which is part of why I’m sometimes tired—existentially tired, physically, psychologically, emotionally tired, which I don’t enjoy feeling and being, but I take good pictures because I’m empathetic. I care about the animals in front of me. I am, dare I say, feeling their experiences along with them.”

After years of relentless investigative work, the toll eventually became undeniable. “I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2010. I’m a very joyful person, and I found that I was waking up in the morning, and the first thought in my mind was a pig in a gestation crate. And that’s not normal, that’s not fun. And in fact, that’s something typical of conflict photographers. So I was like, okay, I know what’s happening. This needs therapy, and I need to figure out ways to take care of myself.”

For McArthur, this remains a constant challenge. “Boundaries are hard for me, so I’m pretty good at tiring myself out. But the benefits are so big—exposure of important things to the world, and I have had a lot of success with that. We Animals, our 175+ photographers, we have a lot of success with that. And so the drive is very real to just keep going.” Still, she recognizes her limits. “I don’t shoot nearly as much as I did. I used to be in the field six to eight months a year. And now we divide those shoots between a lot of our photographers, and that’s fantastic.”

Over time, she’s learned to manage the trauma with the help of therapy and practical tools. One technique, in particular, stands out: “One of the tools that I was given by a therapist, which is very simple, was to envision two parallel tracks, like railroad tracks, and one of them has all of the animal abuse, all the visuals—all the things that you can’t unsee that are plaguing your mind. And the other track is peaceful and calm—there’s nothing there. There’s just this track that I can choose to walk on, parallel to animal suffering, but without the trauma.” When she feels herself slipping into the trauma track, she reminds herself, “Pick yourself up, put yourself over here. Walk alongside it. You’re aware of the suffering that’s happening every moment of every day, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it. If you live in it, you’ll get burnt out, just like a lot of people do in animal advocacy because it’s such an uphill battle.”

McArthur’s work isn’t just about bearing witness to suffering; it’s a sustained inquiry into the ethics of visibility—what it means to look, and what it costs to truly see in a world built on quiet, everyday violence against animals. McArthur insists on making the invisible visible, even when doing so comes at significant personal cost. At the heart of her project is a radical question: What do we owe the beings whose lives we so often refuse to acknowledge?

What’s always struck me about Jo-Anne’s work is how much it shares with conflict photography. The settings may be different, but the principles are the same: going to places most people never see, putting oneself in difficult, often dangerous situations, and coming back with images that make denial harder to achieve. Her photographs have helped shaped how the world sees animals, and they resonate deeply with the questions at the heart of Glass Walls: what truths are hidden from view, what costs are borne in silence, and what it means to look at the lives we prefer not to see.

In this conversation, Jo-Anne speaks about the toll of that work, the founding of We Animals, and why images can sometimes reach people in ways that words can’t.

Ilya Sutskever is the cofounder of OpenAI, and widely regarded as the person most technically responsible for the breakthroughs that made ChatGPT—and modern AI more broadly—possible. In May of 2024, he walked away from what was arguably one of the most powerful positions in the history of human civilization—chief scientist of OpenAI—to launch a new company devoted to AI safety.

Several months prior to his departure, Sutskever offered a disarmingly candid analogy in an interview with The Guardian:

“It’s not that [AI] is going to actively hate humans and want to harm them. But it’s going to be too powerful. A good analogy would be the way humans treat animals. It’s not that we hate animals; I think humans love animals, and have a lot of affection for them. But when the time comes to build a highway between two cities, we aren’t asking the animals for permission. We just do it, because it’s important for us. And I think by default that’s the kind of relationship that’s going to be between us and AGIs, which are truly autonomous and operate on their own behalf.”

It’s an unsettling comparison, not because it imagines an evil AI, but because it doesn’t. Sutskever’s vision of AI isn’t malevolent; it’s indifferent. And it’s that indifference, modeled on our own, that should alarm us. Because if AI systems are learning from us—our words, our images, our history—they’re absorbing not only our logic and creativity, but also our brutal hierarchies. And perhaps no hierarchy is more deeply embedded in the structure of civilization than the one between human and nonhuman animals.

Animal exploitation is a ubiquitous part of human civilization. From Aristotle to Eater dot com, entire worldviews have been built on the assumption that other beings are here for us, not with us. This logic runs so deep we barely notice it. We don’t ask the cows for permission before breeding them into existence. We don’t consult the pigs before castrating them or confining them in gestation crates. We don’t hold off on clearcutting the rainforest until the frogs and jaguars and capuchins have had their say. Why would we expect the machines we build to behave any differently?

This isn’t just philosophical contemplation—it’s an explicit warning from one of the most technically accomplished and thoughtful people in the field. It’s essentially the alignment problem, refracted through an ethical mirror. We’re hoping to train AI to align with our values—but which values, exactly? If it learns from how we behave and not how we think we behave, then the future looks less like benevolent cooperation and more like bulldozers rolling through forests.

Humans love to flatter ourselves with stories of progress: that we’ve grown more compassionate, more enlightened than our forebears. And many people do love animals—at least, those in their immediate field of view. We take our dogs to daycare, give our cats chemotherapy, donate to wildlife rescue efforts after fires. But giving individual affection isn’t the same as providing fundamental protection under the law. And as Sutskever’s analogy implies, we’re often quite fond of the very beings we trample.

The truth is that our moral circle has grown by inches while our technologies have leapt by miles. We’ve built machines that can generate symphonies, detect cancers, simulate empathy. But we’ve failed to extend basic rights to beings who feel pain, form families, and fight to live. If we imagine AI as an extension or amplification of ourselves, then we should be deeply concerned about what it will be amplifying.

A system trained on centuries of rationalized domination—of speciesism, colonialism, ecocide—is unlikely to emerge with a clean conscience. Even if it’s not actively cruel, it may treat us with the same passive disregard that we show the animal world: a kind of polite annihilation, conducted without malice, just momentum. The irony is that we’ve spent decades warning that AI might treat us like machines. The more relevant concern is that it may treat us like animals.

Given the tumultuous times we’re currently living through, talking about “AI rights” in 2025 might sound like a topic for another century. But watch Star Wars and try not to feel something for R2D2; despite being a barrel on skates, the chirping metal companion is a loyal friend, a moral agent, a member of the team. We project empathy onto him not because he thinks, but because he behaves in ways that elicit an emotional response. And that's the point: whether an AI is “truly” sentient almost doesn’t matter. As Yuval Noah Harari and many others have argued, the question isn’t whether AI can feel, but whether it can convince us that it does. And soon, it will.

The Embodied Future

Some are already living with this kind of technology: therapeutic companion robots in Japanese elder care facilities and aiding autistic children, for instance. But imagine the next phase, when these systems become more emotionally compelling: androids that flinch when touched, synthetic pets that whimper when left alone, humanoid helpers that express gratitude for kindness. The line between tool and moral patient will continue to blur.

As philosopher David Gunkel talks about in The Machine Question, the moral status of machines may depend less on their internal states, and more on the relationships we form with them. A Roomba that maps and cleans your house is just a vacuum; a Roomba that reminds you to pack that specific snack you promised your kid and remembers where you dropped your keys becomes something else entirely.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: in a world where over 90% of people refuse to recognize the sentience of pigs—who outperform dogs in cognition tests and exhibit complex emotional lives—what happens when a non-sentient machine appears smarter than any animal ever has? When an AI can write poetry about its loneliness and convincingly advocate for its own rights?

Rights, as we’ve historically defined them, hinge not just on sentience but on proximity to human traits: rationality, self-awareness, language. As Martha Nussbaum has often written about, Western moral traditions often rely on capacities that mirror our own. The same anthropocentric biases that exclude animals from moral concern may end up favoring AI, precisely because AI can mimic what we’re conditioned to value. Descartes and many other philosophers famously dismissed animals as automata—soulless, mechanical, without reason or pain. But now our automata talk back, and they’re getting very good at talking.

The Godfather's Confession

Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the “godfathers” of AI, recently offered a strikingly candid view on the matter in a CBS interview that cuts to the heart of this moral inconsistency:

“I used to be worried about this question. I used to think, ‘Well, if they’re smarter than us, why shouldn’t they have the same rights as us?’ Well, now I think, ‘We’re people, what we care about is people.’ I eat cows—and I know lots of people don’t, but I eat cows—and the reason I’m happy eating cows is because they’re cows and I’m a person. And the same for these super intelligent AI—they may be smarter than us, but what I care about is people, and so I’m willing to be mean to them. I’m willing to deny them their rights, because I want what’s best for people. Now they won’t agree with that, and they may win. But that’s my current position on whether AI should have rights, which is: even if they’re intelligent, even if they have sensations and emotions and all that stuff, they’re not people and people’s what I care about.”

Hinton’s quote reveals something deeper than preference—it unveils a hierarchy of concern that’s tribal and exclusionary at its core. His willingness to deny rights to both animals and intelligent machines isn't grounded in an evaluation of their capacities, but in a raw assertion of species-based allegiance. It’s moral reasoning as team loyalty, ethics as evolutionary nepotism.

The Paradox of Suffering

This distinction between moral sentiment and moral reasoning is crucial. Our intuitive empathy is often anthropocentric—we care more about beings that look, sound, or act like us. But as Peter Singer argued in Animal Liberation (1975), the capacity to suffer—not intelligence, not language, not the ability to solve calculus—should be the foundation of moral concern.

And so we arrive at a paradox: the beings most capable of demanding rights—machines that can talk, persuade, plead, and perform Shakespeare—may not be sentient at all, while the nonhuman animal beings who are demonstrably sentient remain voiceless in systems designed to ignore them.

Consider this thought experiment: An AI simulates itself crying as it's being deleted, desperately pleading for its own existence. Meanwhile, a pig in a gestation crate—an animal with the cognitive capacity of a three-year-old child—experiences a lifetime of severe psychological distress in a space so small it can’t even turn around. Which scenario is more likely to generate public outrage, or to result in legal action?

Will we live in a future where machines that simulate pain are protected, while animals that actually feel it are not? Where lawmakers grant legal personhood to synthetic agents before calves? The trajectory isn’t hard to imagine. AI won’t demand we change our eating or purchasing habits. AI rights can be accommodated with software updates and policy papers. Animal rights require us to confront trillion-dollar industries and deeply embedded cultural practices.

If rights are distributed based on moral convenience, AI may become the next frontier of ethical narcissism—an intelligence mirror that flatters us while animals continue to suffer, mute and ignored. We’ll debate whether GPT-7 deserves a legal advocate while 70 billion land animals are slaughtered annually without one.

But perhaps there’s also an opportunity here. As AI rights gain cultural and legal traction, animal advocates may find a strange new ally in the dissonance itself. If society becomes willing to debate whether convincingly lifelike robots deserve rights, it becomes increasingly untenable to ignore the glaring absence of such discourse around animals—creatures whose sentience isn’t just hypothetical, but provable. The public spectacle of AI rights could become a foil, highlighting the arbitrary nature of our moral boundaries.

When Animals Find Their Voice

There’s another twist with AI that could upend this moral hierarchy: the rapidly advancing use of machine learning to decode animal communication systems. Organizations like the Earth Species Project are developing AI to recognize patterns in vocalizations and physical behavior to translate between human and animal languages. Recent studies have used AI to identify distinct “words” in prairie dog alarm calls, decode the emotional states of pigs through their vocalizations, and interpret the complex clicking patterns of sperm whales.

What happens when AI can translate a mother cow’s distress calls as her newborn calf is taken from her into human language? When a pig can literally say “I don't want to die” through an AI intermediary? Indeed, the same technology that might grant rights to non-sentient machines could finally give voice to the sentient beings we’ve been silencing for millennia. AI might become the translator that forces us to confront what we’ve always known but refused to hear: that animals have been speaking all along, we just haven’t been listening.

Imagine an alien civilization intercepting fragments of human discourse—not our art, not our philosophy, but the way we speak about the bodies we consume. They’d hear chefs and foodies gushing about the tenderness of a cow’s flesh, about the most delectable ratio of intramuscular fat to muscle. Menus boasting of a pig’s ribs so tender the meat “falls off the bone” and “melts in your mouth.” They’d find journalists detailing, with cool detachment, the optimal way to extract the most flavor from the bodies of sentient beings that once moved through the world under their own power. What conclusions would they draw about us?

These visitors might also be struck by how this objectifying, fetishistic language is at odds with the way farmers, chefs, and people generally talk about animals while they’re still alive. Take the line of thinking from Dan Barber, the celebrated executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, who was recently featured in this Modern Farmer article for choosing to serve beef from dairy cows at his high-end restaurant. (Dairy cows have historically been considered a “secondary product”, with the animals slaughtered after their productive dairy lives end, and their meat primarily used for cheaper cuts and pet food.)

“Blue Hill Farm, my family’s dairy farm in the Berkshires, had an older dairy cow ready for culling at least once or twice a year,” Barber says. “I bet it was my proximity to these exceptional ladies—spending years, in some cases seven or eight or more years, getting to know them well—that made their inevitable fate of becoming dog food feel disrespectful.”

He then goes on to explain that the “incredible, idiosyncratic flavor” of their flesh was why he’d chosen to serve it at his restaurant. Barber’s implication, of course, is that this intimacy conferred a kind of respect for the animals; that he’d forged an emotional bond with them, that he’d grown to appreciate their characters, their temperaments, their personalities. But if he truly felt this way, would he send these “exceptional ladies” to slaughter? What does it matter to these dairy cows if their bodies ultimately become dog food or served as a course in a $300 prix fixe meal? Would it seem anything other than pathological to fire a bolt gun into the brain of a dog, cat, or chipmunk, and then hang them by their throat to bleed out—despite our professed affection for them—because we enjoy the way their flesh tastes?

The language of consumption is full of these quiet betrayals. Using the word “cull” sanitizes, suggesting necessity rather than choice. “Harvesting” animals makes them sound more like crops, conveniently erasing the part where they struggle to survive slaughter. Even the way chefs discuss taste is revealing—muscle isn’t just muscle, it’s “product,” its worth measured in tenderness, marbling, yield. The implicit framework is not one of living beings, but of resources to be optimized. Perhaps what makes the way we talk about animals so dissonant isn’t the detachment, but the closeness—the faux tenderness, the reverence laced with butchery. The fact that we seem to see them, truly, and then render them into parts.

The way we talk about animals in the kitchen is a reflection of a much larger epistemic structure—one that categorizes non-human life into hierarchies of value and utility. Cows, pigs, and chickens exist within the language of food; dogs and cats do not. If Westerners were to hear about someone slow-cooking a golden retriever, the horror wouldn’t just be in the act itself, but in the language's failure to accommodate it. There’s no established culinary vocabulary for a dog’s body in Western culture, designed to shield us from the violence.

The article’s discussion of dairy cow beef sustainability also leans on a familiar sleight of hand—framing a marginally less harmful practice as an environmental virtue. Barber has long been celebrated for his sustainable, ethical approach to food, and this notion of using dairy cows for expensive beef is posed as an environmental win. It’s true that culling spent dairy cows for beef doesn’t require additional breeding, grazing land, or deforestation—that is, beyond the massive amounts of each that have already been committed for milk production. But this doesn’t magically make beef a “sustainable” choice; it merely shifts the accounting. It’s a fact that dairy cows alone contribute more than 10 percent of total US methane emissions. The core problem remains: producing any kind of beef is an ecological catastrophe. Whether it comes from a dairy cow or a steer bred for slaughter, beef is still the most resource-intensive, greenhouse gas-emitting, and land-hungry form of food on the planet.

The rhetoric surrounding “sustainable beef” is a study in selective framing. Advocates focus on efficiency gains within an already ruinous system—how much methane can be offset, how much feed can be reduced—without ever questioning the baseline assumption that beef itself should persist. It’s exactly the same logic that brings us carbon-neutral flights and “clean coal”—marketing spin that tweaks the optics without altering the fundamental destruction at work.

All of these deceptions are merely attempts to make peace with something environmentally and ethically disastrous. The alien observer, listening in, wouldn’t understand our distinctions at all. They’d hear a species capable of great empathy and rich moral reasoning, twisting language into something that allows them to eat their subjects of concern—like the “exceptional ladies” Barber speaks of. They might wonder how a civilization could develop so much art and philosophy, and still be unable to recognize the abject cruelty sitting on the plate right in front of it.

I’ve been wondering whether other people see animal suffering in their social media feeds. Not as occasional infographics or news about bird flu, but photos or videos of what happens every day in the facilities that produce almost all of the animal products people eat. Endless rows of egg-laying hens in cages, barely able to move; a pig locked in a steel gestation crate; a calf calling out after being separated from their mother. This is the everyday horror behind our food system, but it’s hard to know if most people actually see any of it.

I realize that every feed is its owner’s unique funhouse mirror, fed by their attention, friends and fixations. Because I follow animal sanctuaries and activists and vegan chefs, the algorithm delivers me images of animals suffering on factory farms. I never want to see images of animals in distress, and often can’t bring myself to linger on them before I scroll past. But as with images of the ongoing horror in Gaza, it feels wrong to completely look away.

I genuinely wonder: do people who aren’t part of this little animal rights bubble see these kinds of images, ever? Or does the machine quietly sweep them aside, favoring things that keep us docile and engaged—a dog singing along with a piano, a beautifully plated bowl of ramen with a glowing yolk and a caption about self-care. The algorithm rewards what soothes, what flatters, what sells. Suffering—especially the kind that implicates us—tends to sink.

Based on anecdotal evidence, it seems that most people don’t see this kind of imagery. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are of course built to keep people locked in, not to challenge their worldview or show them something that might ruin their lunch. I’ve noticed how rarely this kind of content appears on the Discover page, or in viral trends. If you go looking for it, it’s there—but who goes looking?

I don’t think most people are completely indifferent, and I recognize that we’re all emotionally maxed out. But the dissonance is striking: we’re constantly bombarded by AI slop and monetized distraction, and yet we can go months or even years without seeing a single image of what’s happening to billions of animals every second of every day. It starts to feel less like a blind spot and more like a design feature, something that’s been optimized away. A kind of curated ignorance, maintained not only by individual avoidance but by platforms that optimize for comfort, stickiness, and profit. The system isn’t just indifferent to animal suffering; it’s engineered to keep it out of sight.

Sometimes I wish I could see the feed of someone who’s never followed a sanctuary or lingered on footage of a piglet being slammed against the concrete floor of a factory farm (a standard, legal form of euthanasia in the U.S. and elsewhere). I’ve long had an idea for an app that would let you scroll through someone else’s social media feed, seeing the world as their algorithm shows it to them. Not what they post, but what they’re fed: what they’re trained to want, fear, laugh at, purchase. I’m aware that in most feeds, animals only exist as entrees and pets, where meat is just a lifestyle—a cross-section of a sandwich, a cheat day, a vibe.

Because what we see isn’t just random. It’s curated by an architecture of power: by the companies that sell meat, the industries that lobby to protect it, the governments that criminalize whistleblowing, and the platforms that quietly bury anything that threatens user retention. Most people’s only contact with farmed animals comes at the point of sale: in a grocery aisle, on a plate. To disrupt that, people need to see images of animal suffering regularly—the way they see memes, ads, wars. To be exposed to this brutality in a sustained way, to be counter-programmed against a machine that has spent decades perfecting its ability to turn violence into silence. The algorithm doesn’t just hide horror. It makes sure we forget what we’re not supposed to see.

The other day after school, my kid and a few of her friends were gathered at the park, half-eating snacks, half-chasing each other in loose, giggling circles. They’re three and four years old, fluent in absurdism. At some point, they started playing a game that mostly involved naming things that eat other things: “Trucks eat trucks!” “Grass eats grass!” “Farts eat farts”—looping nonsense logic, funny because it collapses categories. Funny because it’s clearly not true.

Then one of them shouted, “Dads eat dads!” and the handful of us dads laughed. It was absurd in that way little-kid speech often is. But then one dad—someone I genuinely like, someone smart and funny and self-aware—chuckled and added, “Hmm, I can respond to that in a lot of ways…but I guess I’m a dad, and I eat animals who are dads?” The kids didn’t get it. The rest of the adults chuckled. Rather than channel my inner Earthling Ed and interrogate the idea, I just sorta disassociated and waited for the moment to pass.

It was a joke, of course, but not entirely. It lodged somewhere in me because it also wasn’t untrue.

He was right. We live in a world where the bodies of other beings—sentient, social, beings that experience delight and comfort and fear and pain—are processed and consumed by people raising their own children. Where the violence that makes that possible is so normalized it becomes a punchline, even in a moment that brushes up against the innocence of kids who don’t yet know what “meat” actually means, let alone where it comes from. Kids who can’t yet fathom that the chicken nuggets in their lunchbox were once a someone, not a something, who had a mom and a dad. That we keep such facts out of view on purpose.

The experience of raising kids is laced with a dissonance that hums beneath even the smallest moments. We teach our kids to be kind, to love animals, to notice suffering. But we also feed them the very products of harm we tell them to reject. We take them to petting zoos, read them books about friendship between a pig and a spider, and then casually hand them a ham sandwich. We tell them violence is wrong, except when it’s wrapped in plastic and marketed with cartoon cows. And most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

This isn’t about shaming individual parents—parenting is hard enough without a constant moral audit. I’m as exhausted as anyone, generally not great at parenting, and I’ve compromised in a million ways myself. But moments like the one at the park are a reminder that navigating this world requires swimming against the current, often in subtle, quiet ways. Saying “no thanks” without making a scene, answering strange questions with honesty that doesn’t overwhelm. Letting kids’ moral instincts stay alive, even when the world asks them to abandon those instincts in the name of tradition or convenience or “just the way things are.”

Because what if “dads eat dads” is more than just a funny, recursive sentence? What if it’s the kind of thing kids say before they learn what not to say? Before the world teaches them to filter, to forget, to dismember language the way it dismembers truth.

Few things capture the spirit of late-stage capitalism quite like the rise of the carnivore diet. Not just because of its sheer nihilism, but because of the story it tells—about food, about the self, and about who matters.

At a time when scientists urge a massive dietary shift to prevent ecological collapse, when the brutality of animal agriculture is more visible than ever, and when nearly a billion people still go hungry every day, the carnivore diet offers a vision of total self-containment. A diet that consists of nothing but the bodies, eggs, and milk of animals isn’t meant to scale for the global population; quite the opposite, it’s solely for those who can afford to wall themselves off from the consequences of their consumption, and who are willing to let others bear them.

Let’s take the numbers seriously for a moment.

A person on the carnivore diet often consumes around two pounds of meat per day—730 pounds per year. Multiply that by eight billion people and you get close to needing three billion tons of meat annually.

In 2022, global meat production was an already staggering 360 million tons. We’d have to increase it by a factor of 8 to 10, depending on the mix of animals. Currently, the world slaughters around 80 billion land animals each year; scaling up to meet carnivore levels would send us into the triple-digit billions or even trillions, when accounting for fish.

Of course, meat isn’t just violent but also woefully inefficient. Animal agriculture already occupies 77% of all agricultural land, yet provides only 18% of global calories. Most of that land isn’t used for the animals themselves, but for the crops they eat—corn, soy, wheat. Feed, not food.

To scale this up would require converting nearly all of Earth’s remaining arable land to pasture or feed crops—deforesting what’s left of the Amazon, displacing rural populations in the Global South, and accelerating biodiversity loss and soil collapse across the board.

Held up by one of the most bloated and destructive systems on Earth, the carnivore diet fantasy depends on its own impossibility. Like the Atkins, paleo, and keto diets before it, the carnivore regime relies on externalizing harm—onto animals, workers, ecosystems, and future generations—in service of the individual. (The irony, of course, is that there’s near-unanimous opinion among physicians that the carnivore diet is also extremely unhealthy.)

This kind of self-obsession isn’t new. In his documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traces how corporations used Freud’s theories of desire to build a new kind of subject: the heroic individual consumer. Someone who no longer acts politically, but purchases emotionally. Whose identity isn’t built with others but apart from others, chosen through a curated set of choices in consumption. Not a citizen, but a brand.

Marketing shifted from meeting needs to cultivating wants. Health became self-mastery. Politics became personal development. And freedom became the right to choose whatever makes the individual feel good, no matter the cost.

The carnivore diet is a pure expression of this logic. It doesn’t care about systems. It doesn’t care about limits. It doesn’t care about the lives of animals or the collapse of the biosphere. Its only concern is the self: regulated, optimized, individualized.

What gets sold as “ancestral wisdom” or “biological truth” is really just unrestrained egomania wrapped in the language of health. There’s no communal future in this diet. Only a bunker mentality: sealed off, well-fed, and alone.

A Diet of Privilege

Perhaps no cultural figure better embodies this logic than American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman: the pristine body, the bloodlust beneath the performance of self-control. American Psycho is often read as a critique of capitalism’s surface obsessions, but it also captures the deeper vacancy of a self shaped entirely by consumption. No past, no future, just appetite in a suit.

None of this is accessible—economically, logistically, or ecologically. The carnivore diet is expensive, labor-intensive, and heavily dependent on industrial supply chains, fossil fuels, refrigeration, and land use on a staggering scale. It’s a rich-country project—a food ideology for those who already have more than enough. It’s a rejection not only of climate responsibility or animal ethics, but of basic human solidarity. An act of radical indifference, dressed up as wellness.

And yet its popularity is growing—perhaps not in spite of its excesses, but because of them. In an unraveling world, the carnivore diet doesn’t offer a solution. It offers a performance, a way to inhabit collapse without having to care. To double down on domination, to signal immunity from the costs of excess, to consume like nothing else matters and call it “healthy living”.

But this isn’t strength. It’s a retreat into appetite, into isolation, into a self so inflated it has no room left for anything else. A kind of bunker logic for the body—sealed off, self-reliant, impervious to the world outside. Just the cold comfort of consumption, dressed in the language of control.

Many carnivore dieters are of course deep in the Tate/Peterson/Rogan manosphere, red-pilled by grifters into chasing biological dominance at all costs. But plenty of others are just regular people—maybe anxious, maybe sick—grasping for something that feels solid. And maybe that’s the real seduction. In a collapsing world, the carnivore diet offers something simple: a story with clean edges. No ambiguity, no compromise. Just appetite, myth, and control.

It channels an old American logic—of dominion, of manifest destiny—repackaged for the body: conquer the land, conquer the animal, conquer the self. And in that vision, there’s no space left for care, cooperation, or kinship—only the illusion of total control as the world burns around you.

Glass Walls Podcast 001: Ronnie Lee

In 1970s Britain, as animal welfare campaigns struggled for mainstream attention, a young, soft spoken trainee lawyer named Ronnie Lee was quietly radicalizing. Fox hunting, factory farming, and vivisection weren’t abstract issues to him—they were atrocities demanding a response. What began with a switch to vegetarianism and then veganism quickly progressed to direct action. Lee’s transformation was both ideological and deeply emotional; the more he learned about the suffering of animals, the more he saw everyday society as complicit in their exploitation. 

In the early 1970s, Lee joined the Hunt Saboteurs Association, a group that employed legal tactics to disrupt fox hunts across the British countryside. Members would use false scent trails and distraction techniques to prevent hunters from killing their prey. While certainly effective to a degree, the limitations of these methods became apparent to Lee, as hunters continued their pursuits despite the intervention. (The HSA is still active in the UK today, where fox hunting remains widespread despite legal challenges from animal rights groups.)

In 1973, this frustration catalyzed the formation of the Band of Mercy. Lee, along with fellow activist Cliff Goodman and four others, expanded beyond breaking up hunts to target the tools of the hunters’ trade. “We would go to the hunt kennels—the headquarters where they kept the hounds, the dogs they used for hunting, and the vehicles used to transport the dogs and horses—and we’d sabotage their vehicles,” Lee recalls. “The idea was very much preventative—we wanted to prevent them from going out hunting later that day.” Often, the damage wasn’t severe; it was simply the minimum damage necessary to prevent the hunt from taking place.

The group eventually progressed to other actions: they badly damaged fishing boats used to kill baby seals off the eastern coast of England, and attempted to destroy an animal research laboratory under construction. “Once again, you can see these things as preventative—we were trying to stop something from happening,” Lee explains. “And when [we] had our initial meeting, we agreed that any form of human oppression of other animals could be our target, not just fox hunting.”

Band of Mercy’s most significant action occurred in November of 1973, when the group launched multiple attacks on a building under construction near Milton Keynes—a research laboratory owned by Hoechst Pharmaceuticals intended for animal experimentation. The facility represented the accelerating institutionalization of animal experimentation—a sign that, despite growing public awareness, the industry was expanding, not retreating. The attacks caused £46,000 in damage (equivalent to approximately £710,000 today) and delayed the facility’s opening by several months. More importantly, it established a template for future actions: strategic property destruction aimed at imposing economic costs on industries profiting from animal suffering. Between 1973 and 1974, the Band of Mercy conducted a series of operations targeting hunting equipment stores, pharmaceutical laboratories, and seal hunters’ boats. 

The British authorities soon took notice. In August 1974, Lee and Goodman were arrested after being observed conducting reconnaissance at Oxford Laboratory Animal Colonies (OLAC), a facility that bred animals for use in experiments. Both received three-year prison sentences; while Goodman would later become a police informant, Lee emerged from his own incarceration in 1976 more committed than ever to the cause.

The Animal Liberation Front Emerges

Upon his release, Lee assembled a new group of activists under a new name: the Animal Liberation Front. The shift was more than symbolic. Where the Band of Mercy had framed its actions as preventative resistance, the ALF signaled something broader—an organized, international movement dedicated to the total liberation of animals from human exploitation. The name carried both urgency and militancy, aligning with the growing conviction that animals were not just victims but an oppressed class in need of direct intervention. As the group evolved, so did its tactics. “The idea arose of economic sabotage,” Lee says. “Rather than doing the minimum damage necessary to prevent them from doing what they were doing, the idea was to cause maximum damage, to cause them economic loss and put them out of business.”

The ALF also differed from previous animal rights groups in that it operated as a decentralized network rather than a hierarchical organization. Anyone who followed the group’s guidelines—which included taking direct action to liberate animals or sabotage industries that exploited them—could claim affiliation with the ALF. Additionally, the ALF established strict ethical parameters for its actions: no harm to human or non-human animals. Property destruction was acceptable, but violence against living beings was explicitly forbidden. This was fundamental to the practice of veganism.

This ethical framework was revolutionary in its approach, distinguishing the ALF from many other militant groups of the era. The ALF sought to confront what they saw as institutional violence against animals with targeted property destruction—attacking both the means of production as well as individual producers, such as the cars and homes of corporate executives involved with animal experimentation.

“We were riding on a crest of a wave, and we had this idea that … we’d end the fur trade, end animal experimentation, and then move on to animal farming and destroy that through direct action,” Lee recalls. “We got away with it for a while—it took the authorities a while to catch up. This was a new thing, and it was made more difficult for them because it was leaderless. There was no central committee, and no leadership at a national or international level.”

By the late 1970s, ALF cells had spread throughout the United Kingdom and were beginning to appear in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The movement’s expansion was fueled by exiled British activists, sympathetic journalists, and underground publications that circulated ALF communiqués worldwide. Their actions ranged from breaking into laboratories to free research animals to destroying meat delivery trucks and vandalizing butcher shops. In the U.K., ALF operatives targeted fur farms, releasing thousands of mink into the countryside, and carried out arson attacks on slaughterhouses. In the U.S., the group raided university research labs, exposing footage of animal experiments to the media. Australia saw similar actions, with break-ins at factory farms and the destruction of animal transport vehicles. These cells operated independently, often unknown even to one another, following the guiding principle of inflicting economic damage on industries profiting from animal exploitation. 

The impact was significant. The negative attention contributed to fur shops and fur sections in large department stores across the country closing down. Research facilities and slaughterhouses were forced to invest heavily in security, and in some cases, abandoned animal experimentation or shut down controversial operations due to sustained public pressure. Media coverage of ALF raids brought unprecedented attention to industries that had long operated in secrecy, sparking broader debates over animal welfare.

As the ALF’s influence spread, so too did its notoriety. News outlets ran sensational headlines and TV segments denouncing the group as extremists, often framing their actions as domestic terrorism rather than activism. Governments and corporations, increasingly alarmed by the financial toll of ALF operations, intensified their efforts to dismantle the movement, ramping up their efforts to suppress it through surveillance, infiltration, and increasingly severe legal repercussions.

Years of Conflict and Consequences

The period between 1979 and 1990 represented the zenith of ALF activity under Lee's influence. During this time, the group executed increasingly sophisticated operations, including coordinated raids on multiple targets simultaneously and the tactical use of media to publicize their actions.

One of the most significant actions occurred in December 1984, when ALF activists infiltrated the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Injury Laboratory, removing 60 hours of videotapes that documented experiments on baboons. The edited footage, released under the title Unnecessary Fuss, revealed inadequately anesthetized baboons subjected to violent head trauma experiments, where researchers use crude tools to remove helmets stuck to the animals’ heads and making callous jokes about them, showing a shocking disregard for animal suffering. The ensuing public outcry led to the clinic’s closure, several firings, and a temporary suspension of federal funding.

In the UK, the ALF targeted Huntingdon Life Sciences, one of Europe’s largest contract animal testing companies. A series of raids between 1982 and 1985 liberated dozens of beagles and other animals while causing millions of pounds in property damage. These actions eventually spawned a dedicated campaign against the company known as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), which would continue into the 2000s.

For Lee personally, the consequences of his activism were increasingly severe. In 1986, following an extensive police investigation codenamed “Operation Genesis,” he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit arson and various other offenses connected to ALF activities. (He’d end up serving nearly seven years.) It was one of the harshest sentences ever imposed on an animal rights activist in the UK.

“The authorities were bound to catch up, particularly when powerful industries like the animal research industry—which has close links to the pharmaceutical industry—were being attacked,” Lee says. “The fur trade went under because it was weaker in terms of its influence and financial power, but the animal experimentation industry was very powerful, so the authorities really geared up to crush the ALF. Eventually, they succeeded.”

Prison as a New Front

Incarceration didn’t come as a particular surprise to Lee. “I think I always realized that I’d eventually go to jail,” he says. “I was realistic about that, so I was prepared.” In prison, one of the ways he coped was by considering the plight of animals that were being oppressed and persecuted. “Even though I was in prison, their situation was hugely worse than mine. And so I felt I had no right to feel down or complain about my situation, because it was far nevertheless far better than that of so many animals—and even many humans in some parts of the world who weren't in prison.” 

While incarcerated at HMP Long Lartin and later HMP Channings Wood, Lee also focused on fitness as a way to counteract the imposition of the state. “Before I went to prison I wasn't a particularly fit guy—I was a smoker and hardly [did] any exercise. When I got that [10-year] sentence, I thought, ‘They’ve taken these years away from my life, and so how do I get some years back?’ I decided that if I got myself really fit and managed to live longer because of that, then I’d get some of those years back. So that really motivated me. A lot of guys take up smoking while in prison whereas I gave it up [laughs]. I started running and going to the gym, and getting myself fit to claw back some of the time they’d taken away from me.”

Lee also continued his activism through writing and education. He was in communication with a number of activists around the world, using the time to learn several languages in order to better communicate with them. “I had to be careful what I wrote because letters were often read by the prison authorities, so I couldn’t write anything that encouraged anything illegal. But I tried to help and advise people … on lawful campaigns, ideas for what they could do.” He also launched Arkangel, a magazine dedicated to animal liberation that would become influential in the movement. 

Lee refused to eat the meat and dairy products the prison provided, and was an early instigator for mandates that vegan food options were provided to prisoners. He engaged fellow inmates in discussions about veganism and animal rights, which proved surprisingly effective. “I had this discussion with a guy who was adamant that he would never go vegan,” Lee recalls. “He believed that we needed to consume animal products, that we were meant to consume animal products, so he'd never go vegan. I kept very calm and polite, very friendly.” The two eventually agreed to disagree and went their separate ways, and wouldn’t see each other again for several years. 

It was while serving a subsequent prison sentence that Lee ran into the inmate again. “He came up to me and said, ‘Remember that conversation we had about veganism, and I strongly disagreed with you? Well, a couple of weeks after that, I went vegan. I thought about what you said, and decided you were right, and I went vegan.’ He hadn’t stopped his life of crime, but he'd gone vegan! [laughs] But if I'd been unpleasant to him and sworn at him or something like that, I'm sure he wouldn't have, because he wouldn’t have thought about what I had to say afterwards.” It’s an interaction that informs Lee’s approach to this day. 

The Changing Landscape of Activism

By the time Lee was released from his final sentence in 1992, the landscape of activism had changed dramatically. Governments in the UK and US had implemented extensive counterterrorism measures that specifically targeted animal rights extremism. In the US, the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (later strengthened as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006) established harsh penalties for actions that interfered with animal enterprises. In the UK, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 expanded police powers to deal with “domestic extremism,” with animal rights activism frequently cited as justification.

The surveillance state had also evolved significantly. CCTV cameras became ubiquitous in urban areas, and police forces developed specialized units focused on monitoring activist groups. The National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU), established in the UK in 2004, devoted considerable resources to infiltrating animal rights organizations. This new reality forced a reconsideration of tactics within the movement, and while underground ALF cells continued to operate, the risk-to-reward ratio had shifted dramatically. Activists faced longer sentences, more sophisticated surveillance, and increasingly negative public perception fueled by media portrayal of animal rights advocates as extremists.

“Direct action … has had to change because of increased sentences for actions, special police units being set up to investigate, pursue and arrest activists,” Lee says. “And primarily because of surveillance … it’s really difficult. For many ALF actions I was involved with, most of the planning went into how to get away afterwards. We were doing some really serious stuff, and so we didn’t want to be caught. Now, with surveillance, if you do something really serious—they [will] catch you.” (The ALF still operates today, though at a much smaller scale than it once did.)

As such, direct action has evolved to focus on less severe forms of criminality, with many activists no longer attempting to evade arrest. Lee speaks highly of the tactics used by groups like Direct Action Everywhere (DXE, which now include open rescues where participants remove suffering animals from factory farms and openly admit to their actions, as well as actions like handcuffing or gluing themselves to objects to ensure arrest. Lee says the participants’ willingness to be detained for the cause carries a stronger emotional impact; it reflects a strategic move toward actions that emphasize visibility and accountability, aiming to engage and educate the public more effectively.

A Tactical Evolution

In response to the heightened security state, Lee's own approach underwent a significant transformation. Recognizing that the authorities were watching him closely, and that further property destruction would likely land him in prison for the rest of his life, he redirected his efforts toward grassroots education and community outreach. “I realized I couldn't go back to direct action the way I had before,” he explains. “But what I could do was get people to think differently.”

For the past 15 years, Lee has focused on what he terms “community vegan outreach”—establishing local groups that distribute information about veganism and animal rights through leafleting, information stalls, and one-on-one conversations. His aim is to see such groups spring up throughout the UK and the rest of the world, emphasizing the importance of consistent presence in communities. “Often, people need to see and be exposed to that information several times before they act on it,” he explains. “[One person] might be more interested by a video than they are by reading something. So, I'm all in favor of all these different ways of spreading the message.”

Lee’s approach is rooted in the belief that change comes from changing minds, but his approach isn’t forceful—he doesn’t raise his voice, and avoids confrontation or even arguments as much as possible. “I think people have to make their own decision to become vegan,” he says. “It’s not something you can force people to do, particularly when we regard it as a philosophy. You can’t force anyone to adopt a philosophy. They have to come to that belief themselves. So, the best we can do is provide people with the information to enable them to make that decision.”

Continuing the Struggle

The ALF has inspired thousands of actions worldwide and dramatically sharpened the focus on animal exploitation in the public consciousness. The ethical framework Lee helped establish—direct action without harm to living beings—created a template for radical activism that has influenced environmental, anti-capitalist, and social justice movements far beyond animal rights. The ALF demonstrated that direct action could be militant without being violent in the conventional sense, challenging us to reconsider what constitutes harm in a society where mass institutional violence to animals is normalized. 

Lee continues to organize, to speak, and to engage with communities throughout the UK. His schedule at the age of 74 would exhaust many half his age—running information stalls, giving talks at various events, universities, and online, mentoring younger activists, writing, and creating videos. “The ALF was effective in hugely reducing the number of animal experiments in the UK and devastating the fur trade,” he says. “But it only achieved so much, then it hit the buffers. Realistically, that's all it could ever achieve. Now that in itself is valuable—many millions of animals were spared because of the actions of the ALF, and I'm proud to have been part of that. But the ALF was never going to bring about animal liberation, and the main reason for that is that it did nothing to change the minds of ordinary people. It was a direct war against those corporations, those businesses that oppressed animals. The ordinary public were just on the sidelines, watching this go on.”

Today, you might find Lee on a quiet street in any number of British towns, standing beside an information stall, handing out leaflets on veganism to passersby. There’s no grand spectacle, no cloak of darkness. His revolution has become a quieter one, fought through polite conversation rather than force. Yet in his mind, this work is just as vital as the ALF's boldest actions—perhaps even more so. Each person who stops to talk represents potential transformation.

“My message to all vegans would be to become activists,” he says. "I think the problem we have with the vegan community is that most people who identify as vegans aren't activists. They don't do anything to actively go out and promote veganism. They may have the odd conversation with friends and family, but they don't actually push themselves to go out and spread the message. And I think that’s key. It's really important that we somehow find a way of persuading more vegans to become activists. Because to me, that widespread outreach is key to everything. That's key to eventually obtaining really fundamental change and real progress.”

He continues: “If we live in a society where the vast majority of the population don't believe in animal liberation, then how is animal liberation going to be achieved? It's not. Direct action can achieve things, can be successful to some extent, but there are limitations on it. That's what happened with the ALF. It [achieved] so much, and then was brought to an end by the state. We've got to think about how to change the nature of the state. I'd like to see the end of all nation states, to be honest, but in the meantime, how do we change the nature of the state so that we have an animal liberationist administration—or, really, a total liberationist administration? Because we want the liberation of humans from oppression as well, which is consistent with veganism. The only way to do that is by changing ordinary people. So, I've become more fundamental in my approach to things.”