But where does the British public currently stand on factory farming? Is it wary of bold change? Is it open to reducing eating animals to make ending factory farming a possibility? We wanted to find out by running an in-depth public opinion study. Some insights support other research findings, and we also uncovered some surprising insights that could empower our movement’s campaigning…

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1. The UK public are already convinced that factory farming is wrong, regardless of whether suffering is reduced.

Our movement is already in a strong position on this issue, with the majority of the public with us. Most view factory farming as a moral issue, with a solid majority of UK adults (67%) saying factory farming is morally wrong or morally concerning. A particularly hopeful insight is that a third of UK adults (33%) say factory farming is always morally wrong. They represent the ‘unconditional’ group – people whose moral positions are more likely to persist over time and to survive counter-argument and industry pushback.

Only a small minority (14%) believe factory farming is acceptable if animal suffering is minimised, revealing that most people think animals being confined in factory farms is immoral, regardless of welfare standards. Only 3% of people think factory farming is completely acceptable. And those undecided on the morality of factory farming are also a small minority at just 17%, highlighting that most people have a moral opinion on the issue.

This is testament to how effective our movement has been in making factory farming visible and abhorrent.

2. Brits want factory farming ended – and sooner than we might think.

We found that the majority of Britons (54%) want factory farming ended. Almost a quarter (23%) want it ended as soon as possible, with another 30% wanting it phased out over a number of years.

Even 46% of heavy meat-eaters want factory farming ended or phased out, indicating that opposition to factory farming is largely seen as a moral position, not a dietary one.

The animal freedom movement is already in a much stronger position than many other freedom movements on particular issues. For example, when Freedom to Marry started campaigning for marriage equality, the majority of Americans (60%) were opposed to same-sex marriage. One respected US pollster even told campaigners: “You’ll never see gay marriage in your lifetime.” (Spoiler: They achieved nationwide marriage equality in just over a decade after that comment.) Our movement has already done the hard slog of convincing most people factory farming needs to end. Our challenge now is turning that majority support into political and legal wins.

Among those who want factory farming gone, 76% would support ending it within 15 years or less – a timeframe that’s ambitious yet still viable with enough political will. Across the whole population, that’s 41% of all UK adults already backing a 15-year end date (or sooner), even after being reminded of the industry’s own argument that such change is slow and disruptive to supply chains.

This is where there is still work to do: convincing the public about the urgency and viability of ending factory farming.

These insights highlight that a bolder ask of ending factory farming seems to be more popular than a cautious one around improving it and minimising suffering. Calling on the UK government to set a dated phase-out plan isn’t seen as radical to many people. It’s something a lot of the British public are already in support of. And many organisations, like Project Slingshot, Animal Rising and Compassion in World Farming, are already calling for an end to factory farming by 2040.

3. People know what factory farming is – but not what animals trapped in the system are experiencing.

We asked participants to describe factory farming in their own words, and the categories that regularly came up were: industrialisation, cages, confinement, no outdoor access, and animals kept in cramped, intensive conditions.

While most people understand what factory farming looks like, there seem to be important gaps in people’s mental models around what animals are experiencing inside them. There was virtually no mention of mutilations, families being separated or mental suffering. This gap is an opportunity for our movement to fill.

Mental suffering and animals’ inner lives may be our sharpest lever.

Across multiple studies some of the team at Project Phoenix were involved with, Animal Think Tank has found that highlighting psychological harm and animals’ inner lives is one of the most effective narrative interventions across different audience segments. The case we make shouldn’t only be about how many animals are confined, or how they’re confined – it’s also what effect their confinement has on them: the fear, the frustration, the depression, the denial of everything that makes a life worth living.

Communicating scale can tell people how big the problem is; communicating mental suffering – through stories of individuals – can show why it matters.

It was individual stories of mental suffering – like Tilikum and Lolita – that drove public debate about marine animals’ captivity, more than communicating facts could. And it’s a narrative strategy Animal Rising are using in their upcoming campaign, through the story of a mother pig, Luna.

4. The true scale of factory farming could be a double-edged sword.

There’s a second big gap in people’s mental models on this issue – how much of British farming is factory farming. And almost everybody underestimates it.

According to Compassion in World Farming, at least 85% of UK farmed animals are confined in factory farms (although many in the animal freedom movement think that’s a conservative figure, with the actual number much higher). Yet 96% of Britons either underestimate the scale of factory farming or have no idea.

But if people back ending factory farming while believing it’s only half the system, does that support collapse when they learn it’s the overwhelming norm? There are two concerns entangled within this.

Firstly: does the support survive the correction, or is it soft support built on people not knowing the actual scale of factory farming? We aim to test this, but we think there’s reason to believe support to end factory farming could be durable. Why? Because support:

• holds up among heavy meat-eaters who have no intention of changing their own diet;

• survives being exposed to the industry’s own case for why change is slow;

• and a third of the UK calls factory farming always morally wrong – a stance that doesn’t tend to erode when exposed to new facts.

Secondly: even if the support is genuine, does showing people the true scale make the problem feel too big to address? It’s a real risk, but there’s some evidence that can answer that. Research by Topos also found most Americans underestimate how pervasive factory farms are. They found a figure like ‘90%’ is effective because it’s high enough to break the belief that individuals can opt out through their own shopping choices, but not so high that it tips people into feeling the problem is too vast to fix. They found communicating a figure of over 90% did provoke futility, but a figure of 90% seems to communicate urgency with a sense that change is still possible.

Exposing the scale of factory farming could strengthen people’s desire for it to end, rather than weaken it (as early responses to Project Slingshot also indicate). It could help shatter the pastoral myth the industry clings to and show factory farming as the machine that it is, without driving people into a sense that “nothing can be done”. Alongside communicating the scale of the problem, we can also be communicating credible solutions that are scalable. We can be showing that not only is change beneficial, it’s possible, and there is a pathway to get there. (We plan to research this in a UK context, and will share findings once they’re available.)

5. Most Brits think UK meat consumption should be reduced or eliminated.

Even if the public want to end factory farming, are they in support of reducing meat to make it possible? Just over half (51%) thinks the UK should eat less meat: 39% say meat consumption should be reduced, and 12% that it should stop entirely.

Again, this is testament to how effective our movement has been in normalising meat reduction and plant-rich eating, particularly when up against the industry’s huge disinformation machine.

However, 39% say it should not be reduced at all, indicating our movement still has a way to go on persuading more of the public on the benefits of society reducing/stopping eating animals, how this is necessary to end factory farming, and the better future it leads to.

The research also found that six in ten meat-eating Brits are open to, or have already started, reducing eating meat.

6. Age affects how people perceive the issue and the solutions.

There was one finding from the research that particularly surprised us. Younger adults (18–24) are the most likely to support reducing meat, but the least likely to say factory farming is always morally wrong. The two priorities swap places somewhere around 40–45, with moral opposition to factory farming overtaking the appetite for eating less meat.

A lot can be read into this, and we have some hypotheses that we plan to test in the future, but the data points to an important opportunity:

Building durable moral opposition among younger people – not just dietary intention – may matter more for our movement’s long-term goals.

7. Many Brits want an end to slaughtering animals.

Over a fifth of British adults (21% ) want the slaughter of animals to end, not just factory farming phased out or reduced. This is in line with other recent UK research. That’s an encouraging base for us to build from: a fifth of the country isn’t just uneasy about how animals are farmed, but are ready for a world where killing animals for food stops entirely.

But 21% is still a minority. Most people who want factory farming ended are not (yet) calling for an end to farming animals altogether.

For many of us in the animal freedom movement, campaigning to end factory farming when animals would continue to be farmed and killed can feel like settling for far less than animals deserve. And there is a big question around how a campaign like this can be effectively communicated in a way that activates a freedom frame (that animal freedom benefits all of us) rather than a welfare frame (that it’s OK to farm and kill animals if done in an ‘ethical’ way). We will be doing research to try to answer this question, but for now, the data is clear: an ask built around ending all farming of animals wouldn’t garner majority support right now, and pushing it risks framing our movement as extreme – anti-farmer, out of step with the public – at a moment when a genuine majority is within reach on ending factory farming.

The animal freedom movement can be radical and practical at the same time.

Radical, because we’re calling for an end to factory farming – not improvements, reduction, or better monitoring. Practical, because it’s an ask the majority of the public can get behind, on a timescale institutions could viably deliver. (Particularly in a context where the effects of the climate crisis are being experienced in more countries globally.) This doesn’t mean retreating from the bigger goal of animal freedom – it means moving the moral baseline for everything that can come next, because without ending factory farming first, we stand little chance of achieving animal freedom later.

At Project Phoenix, we believe the bigger vision should never get lost along the way. The 21% who already want slaughter to end are proof that it’s not a fringe position – it can resonate deeply with the portion of the public already further along their journey, and for some it can be the nudge that shifts them further still. What is unlikely to work is broadcasting a bold freedom message to everyone at once. Farming animals is so embedded in the status quo that a call to end all of it can read as upending everyday life for people who aren’t ready yet. Mass-audience communications are likely strongest anchored on ending factory farming; the fuller vision can grow in the spaces where audiences are already more open to receiving it.

8. Having bolder demands could be more effective.

This is only one study (although it does build upon many other studies). And there is still much more to research. But we believe these findings show it could be more effective to be bolder in our demands when it comes to factory farming. The moral opposition is already there. The appetite for ending factory farming – not reducing or improving it – is already a majority. And the willingness to do it within a definite timeframe is deliverable by the institutions we already have, if enough pressure is applied.

What’s missing is partly factual – people aren’t aware of the scale or the mental suffering of animals trapped in these systems – and partly imaginative. Our movement hasn’t yet done enough work to show people what a world beyond factory farming looks like, and why moving towards animal freedom is a better way of living together, not a loss. As well as communicating a compelling vision (another area we plan to research), the animal freedom movement can be pointing more to solutions, and a credible, appealing story of transition.

Societies have made huge changes before, on issues people once believed were impossible to shift. Yes, ending factory farming will be difficult and complex, given how embedded it is in the economy and how powerful the industry is. But we can only end factory farming if we build the public pressure to end it. This study shows the UK public seems ready for a larger leap than we might imagine. Perhaps the biggest question of all is: is our movement ready for the challenge of making that leap a reality?

To fund further research that can help the UK animal freedom movement and beyond, please consider supporting us.

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You can dive into further insights in the one-page summary, the full report, read another take on the research in Björn Ólafsson’s blog, as well as hear Björn discussing the research on an Our Hen House podcast episode.

We’d love to know what you’re taking away from this research, and what you think Project Phoenix should be researching next. We’d also love to hear about relevant research you’ve read, studies you’ve been involved with, or insights you have from campaigning to end factory farming. Let’s keep this conversation going…

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Many of these campaigns have also seen AFN groups uniting with established organisations, creating pressure at both a local and national level. One of the most recent and significant wins came when Southampton Animal Action, supported by Dorset Animal Action and Portsmouth Animal Liberation, convinced Brittany Ferries to end the live export of farmed animals between Ireland and France. This win offers many lessons around local organising and collaborating with NGOs. We asked Southampton Animal Action organiser Cat Phipps to share the group’s insights. Her words are below.

What our Brittany Ferries campaign success taught us about grassroots activism

Southampton Animal Action first began campaigning against Brittany Ferries’ decision to resume live exports in June 2025, protesting at their Portsmouth location with Compassion in World Farming. Just over one year later, on 3 August 2026, Southampton Animal Action received an email from Brittany Ferries’ CEO, Christophe Mathieu, confirming he had made the decision to stop live exports for good, crediting our protests and disruptions. Over a year of campaigning resulted in a huge success!

Southampton Animal Action is a local grassroots group who don’t have paid staff or a fundraising department. Most of the time, we have a small amount of money in our bank account to cover all campaigns, raised from quiz nights and other fundraisers organised by our volunteers. However, what we do have is a group of committed, persistent people, a willingness to be creative, and the belief that local groups should never underestimate what they can achieve.

Here is what we did and some of the lessons we learnt along the way.

Don’t wait for national organisations

One of the biggest lessons from this campaign is that grassroots groups don’t have to wait for national organisations to act. That doesn’t mean national organisations aren’t important. Compassion in World Farming organised the first protest in Portsmouth and had already been engaging with Brittany Ferries prior to us. However, we did not believe Brittany Ferries would change their decision with passive and infrequent campaigning. Grassroots groups can bring something different – we live locally, could organise regular protests at short notice, and could keep the issue visible week after week. We are a decentralised group who have the freedom to create our own rules, without waiting for approval.

National organisations and grassroots groups aren’t competitors – throughout the campaign we had a WhatsApp chat with Compassion in World Farming to keep in regular contact with one another, sharing updates, discussing ideas, and making sure our efforts complemented rather than duplicated one another. While Compassion in World Farming’s philosophy is different to ours, we made sure we came together to tackle a shared goal. So, the lesson isn’t to not work with larger organisations, but instead to make sure you aren’t waiting for them to take the lead.

Campaign and escalate creatively

Every protest doesn’t have to look the same, and as the campaign developed, we mixed things up. We protested outside Brittany Ferries’ Portsmouth office alongside Portsmouth International Port, timing the protests for when Brittany Ferries ships were arriving or leaving. We organised banner drops at the port, bought an inflatable cow costume to wear during protests, spoke to local media, created reels for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, searched for conferences and events Brittany Ferries would be attending, and even started planning protests in Roscoff, France (where Christophe Mathieu and other decision-makers are based). We collaborated with other local groups, including Dorset Animal Action, to protest Brittany Ferries’ Poole location, and with activists in London to campaign against their main UK shareholder, CMA CGM. Significantly, not being located near the decision-makers in Roscoff (or the route of the live exports themselves) didn’t stop us. While we often received comments saying we should be protesting in France, we believe the campaign worked because we caused disruption in multiple locations, rather than being restricted to one place.

Some of our protests only involved two or three people, but we proceeded anyway and mixed up our tactics, because ultimately, we believe that consistency matters more than group size. In fact, anecdotally, some of the most impactful protests were with two of us, so we’d urge groups to not wait until you have “enough” people. We also made sure we had a role for everyone, and delegated tasks based on people’s strengths. I’m not a creative person, so others were in charge of creating placards and making social media reels! Some people simply wanted to turn up to a protest to hold a banner or hand out a leaflet, without talking to anyone. Others wanted a more behind-the-scenes role, such as writing a press release or putting up a poll to decide our next protest date. All roles are vital!

We also made sure we had conversations while protesting, for example with Brittany Ferries customers and port staff. Sometimes those conversations began with frustration or anger, so it was vital to de-escalate. One port worker shouted at us that our campaign wasn’t working and was also convinced that Southampton Animal Action was funded by large donors. When I explained that our campaign budget came largely from a gym-based fundraiser organised by volunteers (even letting him have a glance at our bank account) and explained the rationale behind our tactics, his demeanour softened. I don’t think I completely changed his mind that day, but he promised he would email Brittany Ferries to put pressure on them to stop. Sometimes success meant ending the conversation with mutual respect and encouraging people to take action, even if their only motivation was the chance that we might not come back! In every Southampton Animal Action meeting, we strategised and asked ourselves the same question – “What should the next step be?” – trying to be as imaginative as possible and keeping things fun (more on that below!)

Make it fun

This might be the most important lesson of all, and something that kept campaigners coming back time and time again. Campaigning can be emotionally exhausting, and we often hear about activists feeling burnt out. From the start, we also didn’t know if it was even possible to win the campaign, and there was always a question in the back of many of our minds asking if we’d still be protesting this in 5 years’ time (or longer)! If you want activists to stay activists, it must include enjoyment. You can be campaigning against something serious and often horrific, but also have fun doing it. We laughed a lot, ‘occasionally’ fell over, and went for food together. On one memorable occasion we even found ourselves continuing an entirely unplanned protest from the sea after spotting a Brittany Ferries ship while swimming at Southsea beach. The friendships we built weren’t separate from the campaign – they were part of what sustained it.

Own your message

Historically, campaigns around live exports have often focused on animal welfare. As abolitionists, we wanted to make sure our campaign also spoke about animal use and exploitation more broadly. That meant, for example, creating our own leaflets instead of reproducing existing materials. Our leaflets explained the issue, encouraged people to contact Brittany Ferries directly, and included QR codes linking to vegan recipes and information about how veganism can reduce animal suffering. We made sure every interaction reflected our own values, and we weren’t afraid to communicate our own message.

Relatedly, there were moments during this campaign when compromise was discussed. One suggestion was that Brittany Ferries could stop transporting unweaned calves while continuing to transport older animals. We were clear that this wasn’t the change we were campaigning for and that we would continue protesting.

Grassroots groups shouldn’t be afraid of making ambitious demands that are ethically right. Sometimes people will tell you to moderate your message to appear ‘reasonable’, but our experience was that being clear about our principles helped people understand exactly what we stood for.

Build relationships

One of the biggest mistakes we made early in the campaign was assuming communication with Brittany Ferries was already happening through larger organisations, like Compassion in World Farming and Four Paws. Eventually, we decided to contact Brittany Ferries directly ourselves, with an email to Christophe Mathieu and other members of the executive leadership. After sending a follow-up email a couple of weeks later (including a read receipt which indicated he had opened it!), he emailed us back, sharing his number and inviting us for a WhatsApp call, leading to a conversation which went incredibly well. You don’t have to compromise your principles to have respectful conversations with decision-makers. Throughout the campaign we tried to remember that the goal was to change a decision, which meant remaining respectful towards individuals while never losing sight of the animals, who are the true victims of this trade. Building a rapport with Christophe kept a door open that might have been closed if the conversation was based on anger.

Ultimately, the WhatsApp calls and messages, we believe, were integral to the success of the campaign. Looking back, we wish we’d made contact much sooner.

Grassroots groups are more powerful than they think

Campaigns are won because ordinary people keep showing up. If you’re part of a local group wondering whether you can really influence a large international organisation, don’t underestimate what you’re capable of. You don’t need permission to start, a huge budget, or hundreds of people. Small groups have more power than they often realise because they can do things that larger organisations can’t. Consistent, creative and collaborative grassroots campaigning can be incredibly impactful. Happy activism!

Cat Phipps, Southampton Animal Action

A year of AFN wins

In just over a year, Animal Freedom Network groups have racked up an inspiring string of local, national and international wins. Here are some of them:

Dorset Animal Action joined forces with CAFT USA to disrupt a Vogue after-party, which, after a relentless nine-month campaign by CAFT, convinced parent company Condé Nast to stop promoting fur across all their publications.

Following footage from the public showing the ‘owners’ of Bournemouth Goats dragging animals by their heads, Dorset Animal Action took action to have the company’s council licence stripped, preventing them from exhibiting animals at public events. DAA also sent out a press release, achieving both local and national media coverage (including the BBC and Daily Mail), which helped secure their win.

RAGE supported CAFT USA with a week of action against fur in London. Following these protests, banking giant Visa cut their sponsorship of Milan Fashion Week.

North East Animal Rights gained national media when they convinced a local museum to cancel an event that intended to use live birds as props.

A swift pressure campaign by Manchester Animal Rights Network, Advocacy for Pigeons and Manchester Vegan was supported by NGOs Protect the Wild and Freedom for Animals, and enabled Rio the parrot (who’d been held captive in a tank in a Manchester bar) to be transferred to the safety of a sanctuary.

You can read about more wins in the Animal Freedom Network here.

So do national NGOs and local community groups need each other to win?

As some of the wins above show, local groups can win campaigns independently. But working together can make local groups and national NGOs more effective, as the two bring complementary strengths. National organisations can offer expertise, research, media reach, and established relationships with decision-makers. Local groups can offer persistent, on-the-ground pressure, the ability to mobilise at short notice, deep local knowledge, and the freedom to escalate in ways a national organisation sometimes can’t.

The Brittany Ferries campaign worked because both were in play – Compassion in World Farming (with other NGOs) opened the first front and brought early engagement, while local groups kept the pressure visible, week after week, across multiple locations. Neither would have been as strong alone. For national organisations, collaborating with local groups can be strategic and often accelerate wins. And for local groups, working with NGOs isn’t giving up independence – it’s multiplying reach. The movements that win build both kinds of power.

If you want to join an existing AFN local group, you can find your nearest group here.

If you are already part of a local group that wants to join the Animal Freedom Network, you can reach out here.

Or if you want to start a local group and want support from the AFN, you can reach out here.

Lastly, if you want to help the Animal Freedom Network become an unstoppable mass movement for animal freedom in the UK, you can support any of the local groups directly through the links shared in this article, or you can support the wider Animal Freedom Network here. Any donations to the AFN will be put towards running bootcamps and trainings, producing resources and guides, and organising actions, events and protest convergences.

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Every day, people across the animal freedom movement are working hard to end animal factories – whether they’re factories for the research or ‘pet’ industry, hunting industry, farming industry, or the dozens of other types of factories that exploit and kill animals for profit.

Some are more vulnerable than others, making the possibility of ending them more likely in the coming years or decades. Others are so embedded in our economy and culture that it will likely take much longer than a generation to end them entirely. But regardless of the timeframe, every campaign or initiative our movement runs is doing one of three things to the system that exploits animals:

1. Weakening it

2. Leaving it unchanged, or

3. Unintentionally strengthening it.

Not all wins are equal, even when they reduce suffering in the short term. Some reforms erode the system’s capacity to keep operating. Others improve conditions inside it, but leave the system itself more defensible, and therefore better able to adapt and survive (or even thrive).

Any freedom movement can lose strategic clarity when it focuses too narrowly on one measure of success. A campaign might reduce suffering now, reduce numbers in one part of the system, win a visible concession, or communicate a strong moral horizon, yet still fail to weaken the system over time. A movement’s ability to succeed is rooted in its ability to clearly determine which wins can chip away at a system’s legitimacy, and which ones might bolster it.

People working to end mass incarceration of humans face this same tension. Organisers at Critical Resistance, who work to end the prison industrial complex (PIC), distinguish between reforms that strengthen the machinery of imprisonment, and reforms that shrink its overall reach and can grow other paths to safety and wellbeing. They’re vigilant about which reforms can help create the long-term change that’s needed and which reforms might hinder it.

Specific changes – like closing prisons, and moratoriums on prison construction and expansion – have measurably reduced how many people are confined in the PIC. Other changes – like electronic monitoring, framed as a ‘better’ alternative to prison – have actually increased the reach of the PIC rather than weakened it, trapping more people into the system through state surveillance. The same goal – reduce how many people are incarcerated – can actually have the opposite result, depending on the type of reform pursued. One shrinks the system; the other gives it a new, more palatable way to expand.

In our own movement, we’re seeing the animal factory industry use certain reforms (like the Better Chicken Commitment) as a reason to expand the system even more. Regardless of whether the BCC pledge is directly driving that expansion, or just giving an ever-growing industry a convenient excuse, it shows how easily a reform designed to reduce suffering can be used to justify breeding and killing more animals overall. And how ‘improved’ practices can unintentionally make the system easier to defend, and therefore strengthen it rather than weaken it.

Same aim, different strategies

The wins that most clearly weaken the animal factory system are often supported by a diversity of organisations from across the movement ecosystem, all campaigning on similar asks. For example:

• Banning a part of the system – like the UK’s ban on live animal exports, ‘wild’ animals in circuses, or cosmetic testing on animals.

• Limiting expansion of the system – like the work Communities Against Factory Farming are doing in the UK.

• Keeping animals out of the system – like the campaign that repeatedly blocked permits for the world’s first commercial octopus farm, keeping roughly a million octopuses a year out of that system entirely.

A diversity of strategies are needed for any freedom movement to be effective. And what makes a strategy most effective is whether it erodes the system’s ability to keep operating.

This is sometimes described in social movement strategy as the difference between ‘reformist reforms’ and ‘non-reformist reforms’ (the latter also known as ‘structural reforms’ or ‘abolitionist steps’).

A ‘reformist reform’ improves or adjusts part of a harmful system, but leaves its underlying power intact. It may reduce suffering, but it can also help the system appear more legitimate or ethical.

An ‘abolitionist step’ (AKA a ‘structural reform’ or ‘non-reformist reform’) may still be incremental, but it can help reduce the system’s reach, shift power away from the institutions causing harm, expose deeper injustice, and build movement capacity for what comes next.

Mark and Paul Engler, authors of This is an Uprising, argue that the strongest demands are both practical and visionary: they address real suffering now while expanding what the movement and the public believe should be possible next.

They urge pragmatists to think bigger, and radicals to stay practical rather than pure.

In the animal freedom movement, we often judge demands by whether they sound ‘abolitionist’ or ‘welfarist’. But that binary isn’t always useful.

Achieving a ‘welfare’ demand can reduce suffering while also weakening the system that produces it. Or it can provide false reassurance to the public, reinforce unhelpful narratives, and help the system adapt.

Achieving an ‘abolitionist’ demand can expand the horizon of what people believe is possible. Or it can be merely symbolic if it alienates key audiences, doesn’t build movement power, or doesn’t create openings for further progress.

What matters more is whether a demand, and the story it is embedded in, challenges the legitimacy of the system and points towards greater change.

The strategic test

Four questions can help answer whether a reform, campaign or demand is ‘strategic’ and likely to weaken the animal factory system, or unintentionally strengthen it:

1. Scale – Does it reduce how many animals are bred, used and killed? Does it stop expansion or keep animals out of the system entirely?

2. Legitimacy – Does it expose the violence and injustice inherent in the system? Does it make the industry harder to defend in public?

3. Story – Does it frame animals trapped in the system as complex individuals, denied dignity and freedom? Does it encourage the public to ask: “Should this be happening? And how can we move beyond it?”

4. Movement power – Does it build organised pressure that outlasts a campaign, and strengthen the movement’s ability to act again?

What story are we telling?

The third question deserves more attention than it usually gets. It’s something advocates have the most control over, yet it can be the thing we’re least intentional about.

Take the campaign to end (CO2) gas chambers. The same ask can tell different stories, depending on how it’s framed:

• “CO2 gas causes the greatest suffering” = CO2 gas is the problem; a different type of gas is the solution.

• “Gas chambers cause immense suffering” = the method is the problem; a different method is the solution.

• “Gas chambers are one of many ways this industry kills animals at an industrial scale” = the industry is the problem; gassing is the evidence.

By broadening how we frame an issue, we can influence how people understand it, and what changes they think are needed.

Is this a technical problem or a social injustice?

How we frame a reform shapes whether animal exploitation is understood as a technical problem to fix or a social injustice to end. Understood as a technical problem (i.e. the way animals are bred, confined or killed), improving the system makes sense. Understood as a social injustice (i.e. a violation of society’s values and of animals’ most basic interests), technical improvements become more complicated. They may reduce some suffering, but they also risk legitimising the system by treating it as a given: something to be managed and improved, rather than challenged and eventually ended.

Some injustices persist through becoming ‘improved’. An industry that looks like it’s ‘solving’ its own problem rarely gets asked to stop what it’s doing. A corporation celebrated for recycling the waste it produces obscures the fact that it still produces vast amounts of waste. Or a welfare label that claims to improve an industry obscures the fact that it still confines, mutilates and kills animals in their billions.

What can the decarceration movement teach us?

Both the animal factory system and the prison industrial complex (PIC) rely on a similar story: that they exist purely for the public’s benefit, and that society couldn’t function without them. And both reduce complex individuals to a category that devalues them – a ‘resource’ or a ‘risk’.

Some prison reform narratives can unintentionally reinforce the idea that some people need to be confined and controlled, and only dispute how this is done. While some abolitionist narratives can spotlight the moral horizon, yet struggle to offer credible steps towards it.

Strategic campaigning fulfils three needs: it challenges the premise of a harmful system, while supporting changes that shrink its reach and build capacity for what comes next.

That means shifting the narrative – from controlling a ‘category’ to recognising individuals. This is what makes the system harder to defend, as it changes how the public perceives people with convictions, and therefore what the public will and won’t tolerate.

Two brilliant documentaries that add to this narrative shift are 13th and The Work. Both challenge the prison industrial complex, while skilfully reinforcing a freedom narrative. The Oscar-nominated 13th traces a direct line from slavery to mass incarceration, exposing how this isn’t a neutral, colour-blind system, but one designed to oppress and control particular ‘categories’ of people.

While The Work goes much deeper, helping audiences emotionally connect with those confined in the prison system, framing them as people with convictions, rather than ‘convicts’.

Both have helped shape public conversation and given audiences an entry point into a difficult, and often controversial, topic.

Shifting the narrative for animal freedom

A similar narrative shift is needed for animal freedom. Some approaches risk reinforcing the narrative that the issue is how animals are treated and killed, encouraging the public to see this issue through a lens of: “How can this be done better?”. Other approaches reinforce the narrative that animals are complex and unique individuals, challenging their commodification by encouraging people to ask: “Should this be happening at all?”.

But the same campaign ask can tell different stories. A campaign focused on reducing suffering can still expose the wider system. And a campaign that names animal freedom can still fail to shift the narrative if it doesn’t connect with where audiences currently are.

How we frame animals trapped in the system changes how the public perceives them, and therefore what they will eventually stop tolerating.

Blackfish is a good example of this narrative shift in practice. Rather than focusing on tank size or living conditions, it focused on the psychological harm of those trapped in these aquatic prisons, told through the story of an individual orca – Tilikum – and his mental suffering at being separated from his family, and his resistance to his captivity. The film didn’t ask: “How should this captivity be improved?” It asked: “Should this be happening at all?”

After its release, SeaWorld lost roughly a million visitors in a year, had an 84% drop in its income, its share price fell by a third, and it ended its orca breeding programme entirely. The public no longer believed SeaWorld’s story about ‘happy, willing performers’ – and once that story splintered, the whole premise of this industry became indefensible.

The Oscar-winning film My Octopus Teacher and bestselling book The Soul of an Octopus have also helped shift the narrative about octopuses as unique individuals, and in turn helped build public pressure against farming them.

But effective framing and shifting the narrative are only part of what makes a system indefensible in the public’s eye. A structurally sound reform is the vehicle; a solid narrative strategy is the engine that drives it forward. Without the right vehicle, the most powerful engine goes nowhere.

Making systems indefensible

Both the decarceration movement and the animal freedom movement highlight that reforms are vital, but not all incremental change moves us where we need to go. Some reforms change conditions without weakening the system in the long term. Some changes might even strengthen the system’s legitimacy and make it easier to defend.

The strategic test is a filter to apply before deciding an ask or beginning a campaign. It can help assess whether the intended change would: reduce scale, expose the system, tell a compelling and motivating story, and build power that outlasts the campaign. The ultimate question it poses is:

Would this reform make the bigger fight of animal freedom easier or harder in the long term?

And that final answer should be the decider on whether to back it.

History has shown us that unjust systems rarely end because they’re improved or managed better. They end because people organise to make them impossible to defend.

We’d love to hear your insights. When you’re campaigning, what narratives are you trying to shift? What reforms do you think weaken the system’s capacity to keep operating? And what reforms might unintentionally make animal factories easier to defend? Let’s keep this conversation going…

Many of us within the animal freedom movement saw this as the unique opportunity that it was – a chance to close down the largest animal testing laboratory in Europe. And so SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) was formed. It became one of our movement’s most strategic and impactful pressure campaigns, creating a model that has since inspired other campaigns and movements, such as Palestine Action.

While many of the laboratories HLS owned remain open, SHAC did close down HLS as a company. They also saw many secondary victories along the way, including the Bank of England being forced to do something it has never done before or since – it stepped in to bail out a private company.

Despite extreme state crackdown that saw many organisers jailed for legal protest (myself included) and the subsequent crumbling of the grassroots in the years that followed due to state repression, SHAC still offers the modern animal freedom movement many lessons we can learn from.

How it started

The SHAC campaign was formed in late 1999 in response to horrific undercover footage from HLS. But it did not appear in a vacuum.

The live export campaigns of the mid-1990s radicalised a subsection of the British public, who saw cattle trucks rolling through their towns and rallied in mass action.

The energy shifted to a new front in 1996, when the BSE crisis temporarily halted live exports, and two young activists – Gregg Avery and Heather Nicholson – launched a campaign to close Consort Kennels, which bred dogs for the research industry.

Some parts of the animal freedom movement were sceptical that such an ambitious campaign could succeed. The pitch to activists was simple: For those who believe this is possible, join us. For those who don’t, we’re going to close this place anyway.

Following a relentless ten-month period of protests, liberations, and direct action, Consort Kennels did indeed close down, and all remaining dogs were rehomed.

Heather and Gregg then shifted their sights to Hillgrove cat farm, joined by activist Natasha Delagmane. Their mailing list rose to over 8000, and national protests drew over 2000 people. It took them less than two years to close Hillgrove.

To this day, no cat breeding facility has stepped in to replace them, and as a direct result, the number of cats used in British research plummeted from over 10,000 in 1995 to 350 in 2000. By 2025, that number had dropped to 82.

Natasha, Heather and Gregg moved on to a bigger and bolder target: Huntingdon Life Sciences. A multinational company, HLS was by far the largest company the animal freedom movement had taken on. But it wasn’t born from naivety or arrogance. The undercover footage captured by Channel 4 and PETA had sent HLS’s share price tumbling and their customers running. In desperation, HLS took out a £24 million loan from NatWest. All that was needed to close them down was to convince NatWest to withdraw the loan. SHAC gave itself three years to do it.

Within a year, NatWest withdrew the loan, and HLS found itself within hours of closure. But then Science Minister Lord Sainsbury stepped in, finding them a new ‘secret’ donor from the US, and providing banking through the Bank of England in a historic first for any private company. The state dug in their heels, and so did SHAC, in what became fourteen years of escalation.

The SHAC model

There were two key strategies that made SHAC such an effective model:

Firstly, SHAC made it their business to understand every cog that was needed to keep the facility open. Rather than simply shouting at the laboratory itself, we took the protest to secondary targets: customers, suppliers, shareholders, and investors who HLS needed but who didn’t need them. This was a highly effective strategy, which saw HLS become a pariah. By the end of the campaign, they had been forced to build their own crematorium, laundrette, gas supply lines, and set up their own private courier company and caterers. They had been kicked off every stock market in the world and had been forced to become a private company.

Secondly, SHAC recognised that a company – whether HLS or its collaborators – is simply a collection of individuals. Among those individuals are those making bad decisions, as well as those with the power to undo them. SHAC took the protest directly to these individuals, outside their homes, at their theatre nights, to sporting events they sponsored, and even, in one case, their swimming pools.

What went right?

While SHAC didn’t close down all of HLS’s laboratories, we did close down HLS itself. The firm never recovered from SHAC and was forced into a merger, then a complete buyout. While, in practical terms, this is a loss, it does demonstrate the power of the SHAC model. A small group of volunteers, backed by a few thousand supporters, shut down a multinational corporation. And this was done despite the waves of arrests and decades in prison of activists. And despite unprecedented government intervention. Multiple laws were amended or enacted, the government provided banking and insurance to a private company for the first (and only) time in British history, and HLS was the only company in the UK exempted from filing tax returns. Even the combined power of the US and UK governments could not save HLS. Our movement proved stronger.

More directly, SHAC did close down HLS’s Wilmslow laboratory near Liverpool within a year of its opening. That site has now been redeveloped into a non-animal laboratory.

However, focusing on this binary version of success risks falling into the same single-issue focus that SHAC is often, perhaps unfairly, accused of. Even beyond the 20% drop in support for testing on animals and the near elimination of research on cats, the ripple effect of SHAC has had a much broader impact.

Firstly, SHAC inspired a new form of activism. As a direct result of their inspiration, other activists launched and won their own campaigns. Breeders of guinea pigs, primates and rabbits were closed in the UK, and Cambridge University was forced to scrap plans for a new primate laboratory. Similar plans in Oxford were delayed by a year. In the Netherlands, another laboratory was scrapped, and a university laboratory in Chile was closed down entirely. A leading expert on the meat industry warned a conference on farming pigs in the USA that they would inevitably be next, stating: “There will be no end to this. You are in for the long twilight struggle.”

The inspiration spread beyond our movement, directly inspiring the Smash EDO campaign, which caused significant disruption and multi-million-pound losses to a weapons factory in Brighton. Palestine Action co-founder Richard Barnard has publicly stated that: “Palestine Action wouldn’t be doing what we are now without [SHAC].”

Governments began to fear that this effective campaigning model could inspire so many activists that it would be rolled out at a scale that could destabilise capitalism. The scale of SHAC's impact was not lost on the establishment. In a remarkable acknowledgement of the campaign's power, the Financial Times reported:

‘A tiny group of activists is succeeding where Karl Marx, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades failed’.

Secondly, contrary to popular opinion, SHAC saw beyond the confines of targeting a single business within a gargantuan industry. Gregg, in particular, predicted the threat of HLS being bought out by a much stronger rival. As a result, a sister campaign, called Gateway to Hell, was formed. This capitalised on the UK’s unique bottleneck as a small island. Many animals were, and continue to be, imported from abroad for experimentation in Britain. With the closure of Shamrock farm, virtually all the primates used in UK laboratories are shipped from countries such as Vietnam and Mauritius. By focusing on airlines, ports, freight forwarders, customs clearance, and a trove of other secondary targets, Gateway to Hell drove the cost of primates bred for research from £1,000 each to over £20,000, resulting in a 30% drop in the number of primates used in research. Unfortunately, the state crackdown came before the campaign could be won, but the cost of primates has remained at roughly £20,000.

Thirdly, SHAC drew on a demographic often overlooked by the animal freedom movement. Nearly half of the British public identifies as working class, and SHAC did a remarkable job of mobilising them. With this came a DIY ethos that encouraged self-determination, skilling up, and autonomy. A testament to this is that many of our movement’s current undercover investigators were involved with SHAC and the grassroots campaigns of that era. Without them and the footage they gather, it could be argued that we wouldn’t have the movement that we do today.

What went wrong?

SHAC became a victim of its own success. By challenging Big Pharma and their financiers with influence in international government, SHAC lit a fuse. Governments decided SHAC had to be shut down, and using a network of police spies, planted evidence, and state violence, they crushed the anti-vivisection movements across the US, UK, and Europe. In the UK alone, campaign organisers were collectively sentenced to over 100 years in prison.

Happening alongside the lawful SHAC campaign, the Animal Liberation Front and others caused millions in damages to HLS’s affiliates, and liberated thousands of animals from their laboratories and breeders. It’s easy to accept that these actions were inevitably going to be used to smear the organisers of SHAC. However, as we have since seen with Just Stop Oil, Defend Our Juries, and MBR Suppliers campaign, amongst others, the state cracks down when campaigns are effective, regardless of legality. After all, the law can always be changed.

The biggest mistake of SHAC was focusing entirely on the fight in front of us rather than winning the public’s hearts and minds. The reason for this oversight was simple: SHAC was entirely unfunded, with a small team of volunteers who devoted every waking moment to the campaign. With such a bold vision, we simply didn’t have time or capacity to focus on PR. Nonetheless, mobilisation remained in the thousands until the government crackdown. The main failure was that SHAC allowed the state to isolate us from the public and natural allies in the progressive left, meaning when laws were changed and activists rounded up en masse, no one spoke out in our defence. A highly intense campaign, entirely composed of volunteers, also saw a high level of burnout amongst activists. While recruitment was high, it never reached a critical mass.

That said, public support for testing on animals decreased by nearly 20% throughout the course of the campaign. This is a significant impact for a campaign that viewed shifting public opinion as secondary to its focus. SHAC campaigners regularly declared that ‘any publicity is good publicity’ as we were vilified in the press, often on a daily basis. Had there been time, energy and inclination to actively build public support, there could have been a seismic shift in public opinion on animal freedom issues.

SHAC’s largest failure, of course, was not closing down HLS’s flagship laboratories. Their facilities are now owned by Labcorp, and continue to torture and kill hundreds of animals every single day.

What could we do differently?

As SHAC fell beneath the state’s boot, campaigners across Europe took what they had learnt from SHAC and developed it. Activists in Italy had used the SHAC model to close a breeder of dogs for research, but found themselves arrested and banned from the entire province. Any attempt at a second campaign with the same strategy simply wasn’t possible. So, they adapted.

Launching the Greenhill campaign against Italy’s only other breeder of dogs for research, they maintained SHAC’s core strategy, but replaced direct action and confrontation with winning the hearts and minds of the Italian public. This secured them strong public support and mobilised 50,000 people to march with them. When they finally entered the farm and rescued the dogs, the police allowed it, and with public support, the facility was shut down.

In the UK, the Southern Animal Rights Coalition used a similar approach, closing down a military research facility that was performing deep diving experiments on goats. While they followed the SHAC model of secondary targeting and autonomous activism, the only act of direct action was the liberation of nine goats, which was supported by 99% of the local newspaper’s readership.

With both Greenhill and the goat laboratory, grassroots activists were able to lean into inside-game strategies to have the facilities closed by the state, but they remained clear that, if that failed, they would close them down themselves.

The crackdown on SHAC began in the US, with the jailing of SHAC USA activists. FBI agents then travelled north of the border, where they helped close SHAC Canada. Next, they flew to the UK to advise British police on ending the campaigns against Newchurch guinea pig farm, the toxicology laboratory Sequani, then the SHAC campaign, and finally SPEAK, the campaign to close the Oxford primate laboratory. Then, the British police officers trained by the FBI moved to Austria, where they attempted to crush what had emerged as one of the most effective movements in the world for animal freedom. Despite a series of high-profile arrests, their show trials collapsed after an undercover police officer presented evidence that the arrested had not been involved in illegal direct action. Instead, Martin Balluch, who had spent time in the UK with the Hillgrove and Consort campaigns, had taken the SHAC model and applied it to the Austrian government. As a result of an intense and highly effective campaign, which involved office occupations, liberations, and disruptive protests, they forced the passage of the 2004 Animal Welfare Act in Austria, which banned, amongst other things, the use of wild animals in circuses, the farming of animals for fur, and the keeping of birds in battery cages.

More recently, the MBR Suppliers campaign, launched in 2024, aims to close a breeder of dogs for the research industry by encouraging their suppliers to join a boycott. As with the campaigns above, it’s taken the SHAC model and switched the confrontation for a more public-friendly approach. However, facing a resistant government, the campaign has returned to applying pressure to the company itself. A year after the campaign launched, MBR Acres came within four days of closing when their gas supply ran out. The British government helped them bring in reserve supplies and changed the law in an attempt to squash the boycott. But over 65 of MBR’s former suppliers have joined so far.

Similar to the MBR Suppliers campaign, in the US and in Europe, the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) has delivered decisive blows to a dying industry in recent years. With major fashion shows banning fur, as well as Vogue (and all its sister publications), and a host of top designers, it feels like only a matter of time before the farming of animals for their fur comes to an end once and for all. And activists aren’t asking governments for permission to do it.

How can we apply these lessons now?

We have a model that gives us the power to close down companies, sever sectors of industry, and change the law. It feels critical that we seize it and harness it.

The single biggest takeaway is that it’s best to build campaigns and movements that can be at least tolerated, if not supported, by the wider public. SHAC existed before social media. Even the internet and mobile phones were still in their infancy. The grassroots space was unfunded, populated by volunteers, and the concept of veganism was alien to most of the public. Their ‘any means necessary’ attitude was driven by necessity.

We live in a different world, and even as SHAC grew, that world was changing.

Of course, Austria has a unique culture, populace, and political landscape. What worked there might not work in another country, or perhaps in any other country. However, Martin Balluch has demonstrated that we can take this model and apply it to where we are and what we need.

The MBR Suppliers campaign and CAFT’s wins demonstrate that the power of pressure campaigning remains as fertile as ever. Focusing on these winnable, single-issue campaigns is great for building our skills and strength as a movement. By removing the low-hanging fruit, we change public opinion on the wider issue and clear a path for bigger fights and bigger wins. And for many in our movement, there are dreams of more. Of toppling not just fur, testing on animals, and racing of greyhounds, but pulling down the entire empire of farming animals.

And why can’t we?

How many companies supply gas to chambers used to kill pigs? How many chicken hatcheries are there? And slaughterhouses, sperm collection farms, barn builders? Any, or even all, of these could be the focus of pressure campaigns. Or what about applying meaningful public pressure to the government to secure legislative wins? Take this issue directly to our politicians and disrupt their ‘business as usual’ to make it one they can’t ignore.

Why not use both strategies?

We are at a unique moment in time. The dairy industry would collapse without government support. The majority of the public are against factory farming and many common practices used to farm animals. The welfare-washing tactics of this industry continue to be exposed. We have the potential to make the next few years a ‘before and after’ moment in history. But only if we dare to be bold, dream big, and act bigger.

What pressure campaigns have you found inspiring – either in our movement or another movement? And what strategic pressure campaigns could we launch? Share your thoughts in the comments. Let’s keep this conversation going…

To read more about the SHAC campaign, check out: Your Neighbour Kills Puppies.

Project Phoenix exists to help build the capacity for a mass movement for animal freedom. A lot of this work happens behind the scenes, so we’re excited to share exactly what we’ve been up to…

One key problem we’re trying to solve

Our movement faces many problems. An important one we’re focused on at Project Phoenix is how to mobilise animal lovers into taking action.

Most people in the UK already care about animals (or at least some animals), and being an ‘animal lover’ is an identity a lot of people are proud to hold. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve heard people say in focus groups or outreach: “I’m an animal lover” to project an “I’m a good person” identity. And as UK polling shows, being an ‘animal lover’ is a much more popular and aspirational identity (68%) than being a feminist (35%).

When animal cruelty is exposed through undercover investigations, people are often outraged and boycott it. When animals face police brutality, it often becomes national media. And when animals escape from slaughterhouses or farms, the public roots for their freedom. Yet despite widespread societal care for animals, it rarely translates into mass public action or lasting, meaningful change.

A couple of decades ago, local campaigning groups across the UK helped secure bans on farming animals for ‘fur’, hunting foxes, cosmetic testing, dolphinariums, wild animals in circuses, live exports and much more.

Organising at a community level and collaborating at a national level, they built the people power that has always been foundational to successful social movements.

Then, in the early 2000s, government crackdowns against animal activism decimated much of this grassroots capacity. Groups dissolved and networks collapsed. While public concern for animals remained – and arguably grew in this period – the organised power to act on it had disintegrated.

Today, when people see animal cruelty exposed and want to do something about it, there’s often nowhere to go. So they turn to social media to express their outrage (which remains crucial in our current digital context), but there are very few local campaigning groups to join. There are limited ways to turn that moral outrage into sustained, diverse and connected action, which can help people feel like they’re making a meaningful difference. And there’s virtually no grassroots movement infrastructure to keep public pressure going beyond short-lived news cycles.

At Project Phoenix, we see that local group void as a fundamental problem to building our movement’s collective power. So we launched the Animal Freedom Network to rebuild what has been lost, and to ensure the grassroots is even stronger and more connected than it was before.

Piloting our idea

Before Project Phoenix’s official launch in March 2025, we spent 2024 testing an important question:

Could local organising capacity actually be rebuilt, or had something fundamentally shifted over the past two decades in terms of how movements work?

One common thing we were hearing from other activists was that it was fairly easy to get people excited for a one-off event or day of action, but without ongoing support for organisers, without leadership development, and without simple systems that could help groups stay connected, momentum for ongoing campaigns often fizzled out.

So we started two local groups – Dorset Animal Action and Southampton Animal Action – and helped coordinate national campaigns. We wanted to understand what works at the community level, what works nationally, and how the two can connect.

By identifying and training organisers with a culture of skill-sharing, shared leadership and autonomy, we have created a blueprint for healthy local animal freedom communities. These groups are engaged in national campaigns, as well as launching, running, and winning their own campaigns. They have mobilised up to 50 local activists to national and international events, and helped seed and support new groups in other regions.

Our approach

Our work at Project Phoenix breaks down into three interconnected programmes, each addressing a different piece of the puzzle for making sustained organising possible at both the local and national level:

1. The Animal Freedom Network builds a national network of local campaigning groups. We identify people who want to organise locally and give them the support to actually do it – practical toolkits, mentoring, training events, and regular contact with other groups, so they’re not reinventing the wheel or feeling isolated.

In many places across the UK, dedicated campaigners are already active but often disconnected – chapters of national organisations, hunt sabs, and independent activists all doing their own thing. Through the Animal Freedom Network, we help bring these efforts together into coordinated local groups, making it easier to support one another and work towards shared goals.

2. Leadership development matters because strong groups need people willing and able to organise others, and we believe that capacity needs to be nurtured. Through the Animal Freedom Network, we provide a free resource library, run regional bootcamps, offer one-to-one coaching, and hold group calls for organisers to learn from each other. The Network encourages shared leadership, creating clear pathways for people to step into organising roles.

3. Campaign support means we seed and support carefully chosen campaigns that can build movement power. Crucially, we don’t run these campaigns centrally – we enable them. We help identify the right targets, support strategy and coordination, and develop shared materials so local groups and national organisations can act together effectively.

These campaigns serve two purposes:

• they give people who already care about particular animal issues accessible ways to move from concern to action via their local group;

• they build unity among national organisations, creating coordinated pressure that neither local groups nor national organisations could achieve on their own.

What we did in 2025

We set out to build 10 strong local groups by the end of 2025. We ended up with 20 groups in the Animal Freedom Network – 10 strong enough to run their own campaigns with multiple organisers, and another 10 at earlier stages of development. Group sizes range from 20 to 160 members.

We provided one-to-one coaching to over 20 local organisers. We created 13 practical organising guides that have been downloaded over 750 times. We ran our first bootcamp, training 40 people in core organising and campaigning skills.

We also supported national campaigns that local groups could join. Local groups have gone on to launch their own pressure campaigns against chicken hatcheries, oceanariums, and fox hunts.

It’s been an amazing first year, but there’s still a lot we’re figuring out and a lot to learn from, which is shaping how we’re thinking about the next phase…

What we’ve learnt so far

We believe the real constraint lies in infrastructure, not motivation. The UK already has thousands of animal lovers vegans and committed activists who want to act. What’s missing are the basic structures that let people organise together consistently. When there are regular meetings, shared plans, clear roles and ongoing support, people step up. They strategise together, and they keep pressure campaigns going. At this early stage of the Animal Freedom Network, movement growth depends less on persuading new people to join, and more on enabling those already committed to organise effectively.

Organiser capacity sets the speed of growth. Across every group and campaign, this proved to be the Network’s biggest limiting factor. Groups were stable and effective when responsibility was shared by multiple organisers who had access to training and peer support. Leadership didn’t emerge by chance – it developed when people could see clear pathways, had support, and weren’t carrying the load alone.

Community organising still works. When offered clear, supported routes into joint action, many want in-person connection, shared purpose, and ongoing involvement.

Campaigns work best when built on local capacity. Well-chosen national campaigns, introduced at the right time, can accelerate growth. They can provide focus, momentum, and a sense of belonging to something bigger. Campaigns can strengthen movements when they build on existing local groups. Without a solid grassroots network to power them, national campaigns can struggle to take root and sustain the pressure needed to drive real change.

Independent grassroots power is essential. Rebuilding community-led capacity does bring risks. Without care, local energy can be pulled into narrower agendas set by better-resourced national organisations. Collaboration matters, but local organising should also remain independent and bold, able to push demands that expand what’s politically possible. Without an independent grassroots base focused on animal freedom, our movement risks losing both power and vision.

What we have planned for 2026 – and beyond

By the end of this year, we’re aiming for 30 strong local groups across the Animal Freedom Network. We’ll run at least five regional bootcamps, and also provide online trainings, so geography isn’t a barrier for those not able to join in-person events. We’re planning a three-day national gathering for 200 activists focused on upskilling and learning, followed by a three-day convergence for coordinated action.

We’ll support a small number of carefully chosen campaigns – including the next phase of the For Charlie / RSPCA Assured coalition campaign – but only when local groups are ready to support.

By 2030, we’re aiming for a network of 100+ local groups across the UK, movement-wide collaboration (where local groups and national organisations work in clear, complementary ways), and major victories for animals – like measurable progress towards ending factory farming, bans on racing greyhounds and testing on animals, and a wider shift in how animals are valued in British society.

It’s ambitious, and we’re experimenting, testing, and learning as we go. Some things are working better than we expected, while other things are harder than anticipated.

But we’re certain about one thing: the UK animal freedom movement cannot achieve major wins without organised people power. Not just online petitions or one-off protests, but sustained, coordinated, community-based organising that builds power over time.

That’s why Project Phoenix exists: to help rebuild that grassroots foundation, creating the infrastructure that allows many groups, campaigns and communities to succeed together.

If you’d like to find out more about what Project Phoenix has been up to, you can read our annual report or watch our end-of-year video:

And if you’d like to join the Animal Freedom Network, you can register your group or let us know you’re interested in starting a local group, and we’ll do everything we can to support you.

Lastly, to stay informed with all the latest updates from the Animal Freedom Network, you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter here.

We’d love to hear from you. What are your thoughts and ideas about how we can rebuild the grassroots people power of our movement? What are we missing? What should we be doing differently? What’s worked (or failed) in your experience? Leave us a comment or send us a message – we’d love to hear your insights.

Those in the movement who are vegan are living proof that this call to action works, and that it can even lead people to dedicating their lives to this cause. But “Go vegan” has its limitations. It’s currently still a high-commitment ask. It can recruit deeply, but can it recruit broadly?

Recently, a growing debate within the movement has questioned whether encouraging diet change is the right primary ask, with some proposing financial 'offsetting' of animal harm as more effective. But is that really the better alternative? And what unhelpful narratives might it be reinforcing?

When can “Go vegan” backfire?

For people further ahead in their journey – already questioning society’s relationship with other animals and contemplating change – “Go vegan” is an invitation to align actions with values.

For people further back in their journey, the same message can land completely differently. It can often be heard as a demand to assume an identity they might not want, or a demand for a sudden leap they’re not yet ready to take. Instead of inviting people into our movement, it can feel like they are being called out on who they are and how they live their lives. This tends to trigger defensive psychological responses, as it’s perceived as threatening both:

1. personal autonomy

2. one's sense of being a good person.

The result? Misdirected hostility. ‘Militant vegans’ become the enemy, rather than the industrial system harming and killing animals. The people we most need to reach can disengage from the message and instead push back against its messengers – and our movement.

Has veganism reached its peak?

Various studies cite the number of vegans in the UK to be around 3–4.7%. While the number of people identifying as vegan has been increasing overall, its growth has slowed down in the last few years.

Some in the movement have responded by publicly critiquing individual change as ineffective, even declaring it a failed strategy. Others have doubled down, insisting that veganism is the only morally consistent ask and anything less is betrayal. Meanwhile, animals continue to suffer and be killed in numbers too vast to comprehend.

But what if the plateau is not a verdict on veganism, but an invitation to evolve our strategies and expand our asks?

What stage of veganism are we at?

Three complementary frameworks can help reveal veganism’s current position in UK society, and what might be needed next:

1

The Overton Window can show veganism’s journey through social acceptance: from unthinkable and radical through most of the 20th century, to increasingly acceptable in the 2010s and 2020s. Now, in 2026, veganism likely sits somewhere between acceptable and sensible, as recent research indicates that 71% of Brits see veg*nism as the most ethical diet.

2

The Innovation Adoption Curve can help explain why vegan numbers currently hover around 3–4.7%. Developed by sociologist Everett Rogers, this model maps how new ideas and behaviours spread through society along a predictable bell curve:

• Innovators (approx. 2.5% of a society) are the risk-takers who will adopt change regardless of social costs.

• Early Adopters (13.5%) are more hesitant, but will still embrace change earlier than most and go on to influence others.

• Early Majority (34%) adopt only after seeing it work for others.

• Late Majority (34%) follow due to social pressure and normalisation.

• Laggards (16%) change last, if at all, and often only when they have little choice.

Those who have gone vegan despite any social costs likely constitute most Innovators and some Early Adopters. Current vegan numbers do not necessarily represent failure; they could reflect what the adoption curve predicts at the slowest stage of a movement still in its infancy.

The Majority groups need something different from Innovators and Early Adopters. They might agree veganism is ethical in principle, but still feel uncertain, defensive, or simply not ready. In focus groups, we’ve heard many people say they will change when others around them do. The reality is: change is scary for most people, especially when it’s entangled with identity and tradition. Most people want to fit in with their in-group rather than go against the tide, and will only change when it feels safe to do so.

3

The Spectrum of Allies shows how to reach these different groups. Developed by organiser George Lakey, this tool maps people by their current relationship to a movement, from Active Allies, to Passive Supporters, to those Neutral/conflicted, or Opposed.

It shows that movements rarely win by overpowering the ‘opposition’. They win by shifting support away from it. The goal is not ‘converting’ everyone, but moving each group one step closer.

So how do these frameworks align?

Innovators and some Early Adopters are often Active Allies: they’re more open to change, talking about it to others and even taking action. Some Early Adopters and most of the Early Majority sit among Passive Supporters: people who do not need convincing but do need an appealing invitation and normalisation. The Late Majority are often those who are Neutral/conflicted as well as some Passive Opponents, and they’ll only shift when social norms and environments do. Laggards are usually the Active Opponents, who are the least likely to change and the most vocal in their opposition.

Veganism’s position in the Overton Window maps closely onto where we are on the Innovation Adoption Curve, while the Spectrum of Allies asks: how do we invite passive allies into action and shift those who are neutral towards support?

Are we measuring the right things to understand ‘effectiveness’?

While vegan adoption may have slowed in recent years, some studies indicate meat reduction has increased by about 17%. In fact, some countries have already passed ‘peak meat’ consumption (like Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland). And even in other countries where meat consumption has been going up due to population growth, it has also been going down per capita.

In the UK, veganism has shifted from unheard of and unthinkable to mainstream and acceptable. Most restaurants now have multiple vegan options, or even entire vegan menus. While veganism is more likely to be positively referenced in media, TV and films, supported by celebrities, and is no longer the automatic butt of jokes.

For those of us who have been vegan for over a decade, the change is stark. Organisations like Veganuary have been instrumental in shifting that landscape. They offer invitations, not demands – creating community, offering practical support, and normalising what once felt radical. Veganuary frames veganism as a month-long experiment rather than a lifelong identity shift, lowering the barrier to entry while still opening the door to deeper change. It’s no overstatement to say our movement (and the wider culture) wouldn’t be where it is today without organisations like them.

So could this normalisation be creating the conditions necessary for the Early and Late Majority to eventually make the shift? If only current vegan numbers are examined, the profound cultural transformation that has been achieved – which may be essential for reaching those next waves of adoption – gets missed.

What these numbers also miss is veganism’s role in building movement culture. Vegan communities create the spaces, norms and shared identity that can turn individual concern into sustained collective action – scaffolding that is invisible to metrics but essential to any movement’s survival.

What can we learn from movements that shifted behaviour at scale?

If direct individual change messaging has limitations, what can we learn from movements that successfully shifted individual behaviour at scale? The tobacco control movement offers some helpful insights.

Within just a matter of decades, smoking went from doctor-endorsed advertisements to widespread stigma and restriction. What proved effective? The stigma focused not on individual smokers, but on the tobacco industry’s deceit.

The more recent Truth campaign brilliantly reframed choosing not to smoke as an empowered boycott of a harmful industry, aligning with young people’s identity and values, rather than reinforcing the common frame of smoking as something ‘bad’ to give up.

The campaign’s goal was to shift smoking from being seen as an individual choice to a collective burden imposed by deceptive corporations.

Yet tobacco control only offers our movement a partial blueprint. Quitting smoking does not threaten cultural identity the way changing diet does. It’s not woven into family gatherings, holiday celebrations, or how people express love and care. But it does suggest an approach worth pursuing: framing the industry as the ‘villain’ rather than individuals. When a movement centres industry accountability, it stops positioning advocates as a threat to people’s agency or ‘good person’ identity. Instead, it exposes how everyone was lied to, and refusing to buy into those lies becomes empowerment rather than sacrifice.

Individual change vs systemic change?

Individual change and systemic change are two of the key strategies our movement is focused on. Rather than working in opposition, they’re often complementary.

Individual change is effective for people further along in their journey, already asking: “What can I do?”. It changes demand, withdrawing financial support from Big Animal Ag, and creating market demand for alternatives. It can also act as a gateway into sustained activism. Many of the movement’s most committed organisers, campaigners and leaders first entered through personal change. Veganism can reshape identity, values and willingness to act, building the organiser base movements need.

Systemic change alters the context society lives in, changing supply. When advocacy pushes for plant-based defaults in institutions, a ban on factory farming advertising, or shifts in subsidies away from farming animals, it changes the environment shaping everyone’s choices. When schools serve plant-based meals, children grow up in a different food culture. Systemic change doesn’t only respond to current sentiment; it shapes the context for future generations.

Should people be offsetting meat?

Some have suggested a third path: donating to ‘offset’ meat consumption in order to reach those further back in their journey. But should the comparison to carbon offsetting give our movement pause? That strategy has largely allowed corporations to continue harmful practices while placing the onus on individuals to pay, without building public pressure for systemic change.

Yes, offsetting could fund important work and attract people who might not otherwise engage. If framed carefully – as a starting point rather than an endpoint, and paired with education about industry harm and pathways to deeper action – it might reach audiences further back in their journey who aren’t yet ready for diet change.

But important questions should be considered. A key one: would we ever suggest offsetting harm if the victims were human? Offsetting only works as a concept when people accept that the harm can continue. And yes, most of society does already accept this – which is exactly why adopting offsetting as a strategy risks cementing the very belief we need to shift. It could reinforce the most entrenched narrative our movement is up against: that farming and killing animals is acceptable as long as they’re treated ‘well’. This is precisely the narrative that allows welfare-washing to flourish and factory farming to continue.

It also risks treating the problem as one of mathematics rather than justice – as if freedom and life are something to be traded rather than rights that should be protected. Perhaps we need to ask: is offsetting a capitalist solution to a problem capitalism created – one that commodifies animal lives while leaving the fundamental exploitation intact? And how does it shape what kind of relationship our movement builds with the public, how we frame both the problem and solution, and ultimately what vision we’re communicating?

When the public-facing story becomes “keep eating meat, just pay to cancel it out”, industry responsibility is obscured and other animals’ desire for freedom is erased. The question shifts from how we stop harm to how we can comfortably live with it.

Cultural shifts that lead to lasting social change tend to come from expanding the circle of people who see themselves as part of the story in a meaningful way. A movement built mainly on transactions rather than participation may raise funds, but it is less likely to generate the shared identity and sustained pressure needed to transform culture and confront entrenched industries.

Individual change strategies have not yet built the movement power needed, as we’re still in the Early Adoption phase. But at Project Phoenix, we don’t believe the solution is replacing them with financial transactions that risk normalising the very system we’re trying to dismantle. We believe the solution is building a movement ecosystem where personal change, systemic advocacy and strategic funding work together by telling a more powerful story – one that centres animal freedom.

Veganism remains a powerful and necessary ask. It represents living in a way that causes the least harm possible. Offsetting could raise needed funds and reach new audiences, but only if strategically framed as a bridge towards deeper change and action, not as an endpoint. Without that framing and without keeping animal freedom as our north star, we risk losing the heart, soul and moral clarity that makes our movement what it is.

Do we need a portfolio of strategies?

Successful movements do not rely on a single theory of change. They operate as ecosystems, using multiple approaches at once.

Personal transformation can build a base of committed allies. Mass protest and community organising can generate momentum and public attention. Inside-game tactics can translate pressure into policy and institutional change. Creating alternatives can demonstrate what is possible. And structure organising can build the leadership and infrastructure that sustains everything else. These approaches are interdependent – movements need all of them.

At Project Phoenix, we believe our movement should continue inviting people to embrace, or at least try, veganism, while recognising this ask is most effective for those further ahead in their journey and already contemplating change. For different people, veganism may need to be framed differently: such as a collective action rather than an individual one, an aspirational identity, or a refusal to support violence. We may even need to avoid the word ‘vegan’ for some audiences.

For broader audiences, centring industry accountability might be more effective. This shifts attention away from any sense of individual moral judgement and towards the systems directly causing harm, without absolving anyone of responsibility.

Alongside this, sharing journey stories and highlighting social proof helps people see that change is possible, it’s already happening, and it can benefit all of us.

Meeting people where they are – whether it’s through reduction, incremental reforms, single issue campaigns they already care about, or other meaningful entry points – can create pathways into deeper engagement and may reduce recidivism by allowing people to move forward at their own pace without triggering resistance.

This is not about diluting our message. It’s about matching our asks to audience readiness, values and identities – and building an ecosystem that can turn concern into sustained action and pressure.

We are playing the long game

The modern animal freedom movement is still in its infancy. Social change takes time, and while it never feels swift enough, that doesn’t mean particular tactics should be abandoned (unless they cause harm).

Does the slowing in vegan numbers mean individual change is ineffective? Or does it mean the movement has reached most of those predisposed to innovation and early adoption, and the next phase requires different messages, different strategies and persistence?

Encouraging signs are everywhere: meat reduction is increasing, cultural acceptance of veganism is growing, infrastructure is expanding. The context is shifting in favour of animal freedom, and organisations like Veganuary and The Vegan Society have been instrumental in making that happen.

At Project Phoenix, we believe the movement doesn’t need to choose between individual change, systemic change or strategic funding. It needs all of it: a portfolio of strategies grounded in research that recognises different audiences need different approaches. It needs a movement ecosystem that can meet people across their entire journey – from first questions to lifelong commitment. And it needs a recognition that social change is messy, non-linear, and requires diverse tactics working together, rather than undermining each other.

A slowing in vegan adoption is not a sign of failure; it’s an invitation to evolve. How our movement responds now will determine whether veganism stalls or breaks through to achieve the mainstream adoption needed for animal freedom.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Leave a comment or send us a message. Let’s keep this conversation going…

“That’s nice you can focus on animal rights in the UK. Here in the US, we need to work on improving human rights first.”

Most of us have likely heard some version of this: that animal freedom needs to wait in line. But when it comes from people working in social justice, it can feel particularly disheartening – because they would never tell feminists to wait until racism is defeated, or climate activists to pause until poverty is eliminated. Yet somehow, animal freedom is forced to the bottom of the social justice hierarchy – if it’s considered justice work at all.

What struck us wasn’t the dismissal itself. We understand zero-sum thinking – the belief that attention to one issue will detract from another – and that for many people, just the mention of ‘animal freedom’ triggers cognitive dissonance – the uneasy feeling that your actions might contradict your beliefs.

What really struck us was that even as people work to dismantle harmful hierarchies in society, hierarchies can still get unconsciously reproduced in social justice spaces.

Within our own movement, we’re grappling with something similar. Some advocates argue our movement should focus exclusively on ‘animals first’ – that being ‘intersectional’ dilutes our message when billions of animals are killed every year. Others believe we should work in solidarity with other movements, because all oppressions are interconnected.

Both perspectives are understandable and raise valid concerns.

But what if the debate itself reveals how deeply we’ve all internalised the very framework we’re trying to dismantle?

How did we get here?

When people think of influential texts in the animal movement, certain names come to mind, including: Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

These works are important and have shaped many of us. They provide powerful ethical arguments, yet they do not fully address a different kind of question: How did billions of humans come to accept the systematic domination and killing of other animals as natural, inevitable, even divinely ordained?

At Project Phoenix, we believe feminist perspectives have been offering deeper answers to this question for decades – yet they remain under-read, even within our own movement.

Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat reveals how patriarchal logic commodifies both women’s bodies and animals as meat. Lori Gruen’s Entangled Empathy shows how animal oppression is bound up with other forms of domination. Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden connects animal liberation with disability justice, showing how ideas of ‘productivity’ and ‘usefulness’ devalue both humans and other animals. Through decades of work, pattrice jones has similarly shown that animal liberation is inseparable from feminist, anti-racist and queer struggles.

Another writer that has expanded our thinking at Project Phoenix, and also deserves far wider recognition, is Jim Mason, particularly his books An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature and Madness: Lessons From My Family Farm.

Through archaeological, anthropological and historical research, Mason reveals how the domination of our animal cousins created the blueprint for every form of oppression humans have inflicted on each other. His work raises a fundamental question:

Is our movement pushing for animal freedom alone, or for a deeper transformation of how humans understand our place in the world?

How it all began

Mason’s research reveals that for 99% of our species’ existence, humans lived as foragers, seeing other animals as kin – ancestors, teachers, spirit-powers. Women held high status. There was no concept of nature as separate, no hierarchy with humans (and men) at the top.

Then came settled agriculture 10,000 years ago, and with it, the control it required.

Other animals shifted from ‘gods’ to ‘goods’; from beings to be honoured to resources to be owned.

Animals became the first form of capital – the Latin ‘capita’ literally means ‘head of cattle’. With their domestication came early forms of human slavery. In ancient Sumeria, the same word was used for castrated male slaves as castrated farmed animals. The techniques of ‘animal husbandry’ – breaking, taming, breeding – became the model for controlling women’s bodies and sexuality.

The same logic that justified animal domination was later weaponised by colonisers, who described Indigenous people as ‘beasts’ and ‘brutes’ requiring white ‘shepherds’. People with darker skin, different customs and unfarmed land were viewed as ‘closer to nature’ and therefore inferior.

Mason and many feminist thinkers suggest that speciesism, sexism, racism and ableism didn’t develop in isolation. They emerged together through shared tactics of domination: creating hierarchies, denying agency, claiming a ‘natural order’.

Understanding these shared patterns isn’t about comparing different struggles; it’s about recognising how oppressive systems reinforce each other, and why dismantling one requires challenging the underlying framework beneath all.

What does this mean for our movement?

This explains why animal freedom remains marginal, even as evidence of the scale and impact of animal exploitation continues to grow. The obstacle is not a lack of facts about animal suffering; it’s the underlying worldview – and the systems built upon it – that frames how people interpret those facts and consider which lives matter.

But worldviews can shift, and they often do when dominant narratives are challenged and replaced by other narratives. And this happens through the stories and messages we repeatedly tell and hear.

The story our movement most often tells focuses on suffering: factory farm conditions, welfare standards breached, numbers killed. All of this is crucial and needs to be communicated. And, as these writers argue, we also need stories that help people understand the interconnection of all oppression – not as abstract theory, but as lived reality. We need stories that communicate what we’ve lost as a species: our deep connection with other humans, other animals, with the rest of nature, and with our shared home. The sense of belonging that sustained humans for 200,000 years – before agriculture taught us that separation and domination were ‘normal, natural, necessary and nice’.

People are still feeling this deep loss of belonging, even if they cannot name it. Many are hungry for reconnection, even as mainstream culture tells us that domination and separation is the only possible relationship with the more-than-human world.

A deeper story

The work of narrative change is never easy – it’s complex and can take decades. Our work is all the harder because we’re up against powerful industries and systems that constantly reinforce their narratives, as well as further entrench harmful worldviews: capitalism, patriarchy, extraction over reciprocity. And, of course, animal exploitation is embedded in global capitalism, subsidised by governments, protected by law, defended by massive lobbying operations.

Many movements recognise that we need campaigns that can reduce suffering now alongside longer term narrative work that can shift the worldview enabling that harm. If we focus only on immediate harm reduction, we risk addressing symptoms without challenging root causes. If we focus only on long-term narrative change, individuals continue to suffer while we wait for public consciousness to shift. Movements need both strategies, working in tandem. Yet long-term narrative change can often get overlooked and undervalued.

Fortunately, many movements are already engaged in this deeper work. Doughnut Economics, Stories for Life and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance are reimagining economic systems in service to life rather than endless growth.

Indigenous scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Four Arrows speak of returning to reciprocity with the living world. Climate activists increasingly frame their work not only as environmental protection but as recognising our interbeing with all life.

These movements echo what Mason, Adams, Gruen, Taylor and jones have been saying for decades: to weaken the harmful story of separation and strengthen a story of reconnection, we need a compelling story that explains how we got here and where we might go.

Just as short-term ‘welfare’ and long-term ‘abolition’ strategies can work together, so too can ‘animals first’ and ‘intersectional’ approaches.

The question is how we can follow different approaches and strategies in ways that strengthen rather than undermine each other. And ultimately how we can tell a deeper, more inspiring story that people can see themselves in: not just a world with less suffering, but with more connection.

Solidarity as strategy

Some within our movement have questioned whether addressing the intersectionality of our issue dilutes our focus. This concern is understandable. The scale and level of animal suffering is incomprehensible. Animals cannot directly advocate for themselves. And if we don’t focus on this issue, who will?

Yet there is growing evidence that solidarity can strengthen our work rather than weaken it.

Consider Animal Rebellion’s decision to collaborate with Extinction Rebellion, despite Extinction Rebellion not focusing on a plant-based food system as part of the wider climate solution. Some animal advocates objected, yet this collaboration helped shift environmental narratives about the impact of farming animals. It elevated animal issues within climate conversations in ways that isolated advocacy might have struggled to achieve. It also encouraged many animal advocates to engage more deeply with entangled environmental issues.

Solidarity has made countless other movements stronger. The unlikely support of lesbian and gay activists for UK miners in the 1980s led to the miners’ union backing LGBTQ+ rights in the Labour party – accelerating legal gains for both.

When Black communities and environmental groups joined forces in the US, they created the environmental justice movement, exposing how pollution and toxic dumping target marginalised communities. At Standing Rock, Indigenous water protectors reframed climate action around responsibility – giving the climate movement a clearer moral vision.

These alliances didn’t dilute anyone’s message – they built power, broadened reach, and connected struggles against shared systems of domination.

As pattrice jones argues, solidarity across movements is not just morally right – it’s strategically necessary. We cannot change the narrative about animal freedom as a legitimate freedom struggle by remaining isolated. But we can help change it by showing up in diverse social justice spaces, by having difficult yet respectful conversations, by listening deeply, by bridging seeming divides, and by deepening connections with other movements – however unlikely those connections might seem.

What are we pushing for?

So what is our movement really pushing for? Not only vital legal protections for other animals. Not only an end to factory farming. We’re working to dismantle a 10,000-year-old story that says domination is natural, that some lives matter less than others, that we exist separate from and superior to the rest of the living world.

We’re here to help humanity remember what we knew for 200,000 years: that we are connected with our animal cousins and the rest of nature. This isn’t romanticism or nostalgia. It’s acknowledging what the science of ecology, evolutionary biology, and even neuroscience now confirm: we are interdependent with all life. Our wellbeing is inseparable.

Some might dismiss this approach as too soft, too sentimental, too ‘feminine’. But that reaction reveals a key part of the problem: we’ve been taught to see connection as weakness and emotional distance as strength; to dismiss care as naïve and utilitarian logic as rational. These binaries are part of the same system that ranks humans over other animals, men over women, reason over emotion, culture over nature.

Dismantling and rebalancing these binaries isn’t ‘soft’ work – it’s the hardest, most essential work in building a different kind of society.

Yes, all this is complex, vast and largely unknown. But perhaps a necessary step is helping people see that animal freedom and human freedom aren’t separate struggles – they’re both built on the violent fiction that some beings exist for the benefit of others.

Until we can pull back the curtain on this human-made hierarchy, help people understand its origins and costs, and offer a different path forward, society – and even social justice movements – will inevitably keep reproducing it.

This doesn’t mean every animal advocate must work intersectionally, or that every action needs to address multiple oppressions. It means recognising that the framework keeping other animals at the bottom of the hierarchy is the same one keeping marginalised humans there too.

We need every approach, every strategy, every role in our movement. We need people focused on immediate harm reduction, and people building towards long-term narrative change. We need people working within systems, and people imagining beyond them. We need people focused solely on animal issues, and others focused on building cross-movement solidarity. This is what a diverse and healthy movement ecosystem looks like.

What matters is whether we can stay grounded to a deeper truth and a bigger story: That animal freedom is part of a shared freedom, and that freedom is about reconnecting with who we really are and how we all belong.

Believing human freedom must be addressed before animal freedom, or that animal freedom can only be discussed in isolation, unintentionally reinforces the same hierarchy all social justice movements are trying to dismantle. Perhaps the deepest act of resistance is refusing to reproduce it.

How do you see animal freedom fitting into broader social justice work? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Leave a comment or send us a message. Let’s keep this conversation going…

When we look at how far society still is from animal freedom, it can feel that progress for farmed animals is only possible through smaller steps – a new corporate policy, cage-free eggs, slower-growing chickens, larger sheds, more natural light…

Each step counts. Every improvement eases suffering, and every life made a little less painful matters. But a question has been growing louder in our movement:

Are we losing our boldness by asking for too little?

If our dream is a world where every being can live freely, should welfare be the centre of our movement’s story? Are we spending too much energy making exploitation a little less cruel? And are we unintentionally playing into the hands of an industry that wants us focused on bigger cages rather than freedom itself?

This is not a criticism of those working for welfare reforms. Those campaigns are vital for the animals trapped in the system today, and can lead to bigger reforms. But if welfare becomes our ceiling rather than a stepping stone to freedom, do we risk losing sight of what our movement is here to do – end the system, not reform it?

Perhaps we need to ask an even harder question:

By focusing on welfare as the most ‘realistic’ route to freedom, could we be slowing our progress?

What can we learn from the anti-slavery movement?

If animal freedom sounds too bold for where society is right now, history has something to teach us.

In Britain and America, early anti-slavery campaigners were often white reformers – sincere and devout, yet cautious. They focused on improving the ‘welfare’ of enslaved people, campaigning for shorter ‘working’ hours, better conditions on slave ships, policing the slave trade, and gradual change. They sought to ease suffering within the system rather than dismantle it entirely, and tried to persuade abolitionists – who fought to end slavery outright – to take a more gradual, ‘realistic’ path.

Many abolitionists refused to be swayed. They held firm in their belief that ending slavery was the only possible outcome. They weren’t here to push for better slavery – they were here for freedom.

If the movement to end slavery had made welfare the only focus of its story, abolition might never have been achieved. The moral argument that won was not that slavery should be ‘kinder’, but that no person should ever be owned.

That truth gained force when formerly enslaved Black people were able to start sharing their stories publicly. Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet rejected the idea that slavery could be made ‘ethical’. They demanded freedom, not gradual reform.

Abolition succeeded because it united survivor stories, moral clarity, political pressure and direct action. It shifted what society believed was possible.

The same moral truth applies to our movement. Fellow animals do not want bigger cages or ‘kinder’ killings – they want freedom. If we make welfare the limit of our ambition and the entire focus of our story, do we risk defending the very system they need us to end?

From welfare to freedom

Our movement, like others before it, contains a range of strategies and approaches.

• ‘Old welfare’ organisations worked to make the farming of animals ‘kinder’, with some promoting their continued exploitation.

• ‘New welfare’ groups focus on corporate campaigns and incremental reforms as a way to gradually phase out factory farming.

• ‘Abolitionist’ groups – sanctuaries, grassroots networks and direct action organisations – demand an end to exploitation itself.

Each strategy has a place in the movement ecosystem. Welfare reforms can reduce immediate suffering in the short term, while abolitionists keep the vision of freedom alive and expand what society believes is possible.

But when welfare becomes the main story of our movement, the public can start to see cruelty (not exploitation) as the problem, and kindness (not freedom) as the solution.

Our challenge is not to choose between these approaches, but to ensure they reinforce each other – that reforms bring us closer to ending exploitation rather than normalising it in a different form.

When it comes to other issues of animal exploitation – ‘fur’ farms, hunting foxes, dolphinariums or ‘wild’ animals used in circuses – our movement did not only push for welfare reforms. We demanded an end to these exploitations – and in the UK, we won.

Those bans, of course, did not start out popular. But years of campaigning made the harm impossible to ignore, framed it as a violation of our values, centred freedom in the story and, over time, public support grew. If our movement had chosen to make these forms of exploitation ‘kinder’, they might still be happening today.

When a lot of our movement’s energy goes into improving life trapped inside the system, rather than challenging the system itself, do we risk reinforcing the idea that farming animals is acceptable if it’s done ‘the right way’? Instead of asking whether it’s right to own, confine and kill anyone, do we unintentionally encourage people to see animal exploitation as something to improve, rather than end?

Lately, our movement has seen efforts to redirect the fire and creativity of grassroots energy into corporate cage-free campaigns. After years of hard work and investment, it’s understandable that some feel these approaches need fresh energy. But when bolder tactics are used for smaller goals, are we at risk of shrinking our ambition, narrowing our story, and losing sight of our larger purpose? The power of grassroots action lies not only in winning specific changes, but in expanding the horizon of what people believe is possible.

That’s not to say we abandon system reforms. We can still aim for strategic wins that are milestones on the way to freedom. Whether it’s stopping new factory farms being built, working to end factory farming, or making public meals plant-based as the norm, each step can ease harm now, change the context and make the next big ask even easier.

The industry playbook

History shows that when harmful industries feel threatened, they rarely confront movements head-on. They adapt, rebrand and reframe to protect their interests, while weakening those who challenge them.

When pressure from the environmental movement and the public grew, Big Oil struck back, subtly and strategically. The concept of the ‘carbon footprint’ was promoted by BP’s PR firm Ogilvy & Mather in the early 2000s. The campaign reframed ‘climate change’ (another carefully chosen PR phrase) from a systemic crisis to personal responsibility, strategically shifting blame from corporations to individuals.

The same industry strategy now targets the animal movement. As public concern for animals has grown, Big Agribusiness has adapted by changing its story more than its practices. It calls itself a ‘leader in animal welfare’, sells ‘free-range’ and ‘high-welfare’ products, and brands factory farming as ‘sustainable’. It use its PR machine to mock plant-based foods as ‘unhealthy’ and ‘extreme’, preaches ‘balance’, and centres ‘personal choice’ to deflect industry scrutiny.

It’s the same playbook: shift blame, neutralise critique, co-opt movement language.

PR executive Ronald Duchin outlined this strategy back in 1991 in a speech to the US ‘meat’ industry. As James LaVeck documented in his article Invasion of the Movement Snatchers, Duchin advised corporations to:

• Marginalise ‘radicals’ by branding them as ‘extremists’ – so others stop listening to them. Ever wondered where the labels ‘militant vegan’ or ‘animal rights extremist’ came from? Industry PR…

• Convert ‘idealists’ into ‘realists’ – convince them that staying true to their values will block progress.

• Distract ‘opportunists’ with small wins – so they stop pushing for real change.

Two decades ago, LaVeck warned that the animal movement was being drawn into this trap. He foresaw what would happen if advocates began endorsing ‘kinder’ products instead of questioning animal use itself:

“When we switch from asking people to eliminate or reduce their consumption of animal products, to publicly endorsing ‘humane’ animal products, are we not, in effect, calling off our own boycott?”

By celebrating new ‘higher welfare’ labels or corporate pledges, is our movement unintentionally helping Big Agribusiness appear progressive – even as the number of animals it confines and kills continues to grow? When our advocacy no longer questions the system itself or centres animal freedom, do we risk reinforcing the very story the industry is pushing?

Keeping freedom in sight

It’s easy to see how our movement got here. The scale of suffering feels urgent and overwhelming. Reducing it is vital. But easing suffering is not the same as ending exploitation.

Human slavery abolitionists understood this. They fought for ‘wedge’ reforms that made slavery harder to defend, while never losing sight of freedom as the main goal. They didn’t measure success by whether enslaved people had slightly better lives, but by whether they were closer to being free.

This can be our movement’s lesson also. We can fight to improve other animals’ lives today while still staying focused on their future freedom.

Welfare and abolition are not enemies – they can be steps on the same road. But to reach our intended destination, freedom should always be at the centre of our movement’s story.

If we frame the problem only as an issue of welfare, we invite ‘kinder’ exploitation as the solution. If we frame it as a denial of freedom, we can open the door to greater change.

Shifting the window of possibility

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘meet people where they’re at’. It has wisdom – but also limitations. As communication strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio says:

The political right has been strategic in making unpopular ideas seem like common sense by using the same method over and over: repeat a clear story, line up media and think tanks to echo it, pilot it, then lock it into law and expand.

Privatisation was sold by the political right as ‘choice’ and ‘efficiency’, even though it moved public services into corporate hands and weakened worker unions. ‘Right to Buy’ looked like a win for council tenants, when it was really a move to cut social housing. Inheritance tax was reframed as ‘death tax’, making taxes on wealthy estates harder to defend.

Fortunately, the same playbook can be used for freedom too, as history has shown us. Abolitionists were dismissed as radicals for demanding an end to slavery. Suffragettes were ridiculed for believing women should have the right to vote and a voice in public life. LGBTQ+ advocates were told to wait for equality until society was ‘ready’. Yet each movement refused to retreat or soften their demands. They repeated a clear story with moral conviction, they organised around it, reshaped what the world believed was possible, and then changed the law.

Welfare reforms are crucial for reducing suffering in the short-term, but they do not shift the Overton window – the boundary of what society considers acceptable. That boundary only moves when people push beyond what is comfortable.

Movements that win do not mirror public opinion. They expand moral imagination. They show people what freedom looks like – before most believe it’s even possible.

Hope is courage

It’s easy to feel that freedom lies far in the future and that the best hope for our lifetime is to try to reduce harm. But hope is more than a feeling – it’s a choice. It’s the decision to act as though change is possible, and within reach.

Whether our work focuses on incremental reform or systemic transformation, what can unite us is the belief that a different world can be built.

Because if we don’t believe we can win animal freedom, we will never build the movement that can achieve it.

Movements are ecosystems. They need many roles working in tandem: reformers, radicals, pragmatists and dreamers.

But balance is everything. If most voices say “slow down”, the movement stalls. If we lose our vision of freedom, we lose our soul.

At Project Phoenix, our place in the ecosystem is clear. We’re here to say “let’s be bold”, and to build grassroots power for animal freedom – not as a distant dream, but as an achievable reality.

Reducing suffering for those trapped in the system is necessary. But our movement’s story does not end there. At its heart is freedom – a world where no one can be owned, confined or killed. A world where freedom belongs to everyone, no matter who we are or what we look like. That is the world our movement is pushing for, and the future we are all here to build.

If you’d like to join the Animal Freedom Network, or volunteer to help strengthen and grow it, we’d love to hear from you.

Our entire purpose at Project Phoenix is to help change that.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we believe in the power of ordinary people acting together. With the right conditions, a mass movement for animal freedom can grow. One that includes vegans and non-vegans, long-time activists and first-time campaigners, pensioners and children – all united by a shared desire to make things better for our animal cousins.

Here’s the six-step approach we’re experimenting with…

1. Start with what moves people

Most people don’t start taking action for a cause they believe in by thinking about policy or systems. It starts with something personal, something that stirs emotion. A beagle in a lab. A fox hunt in local woods. A factory farm investigation showing cruelty. These moments spark a feeling: this isn’t right.

That’s where our movement can start too. Campaigns around issues people already care about are both strategic and connecting. They meet people where they are, and offer a clear way to act alongside others who care.

Once people take that first step, most keep going. They begin to ask questions, explore connections and see the bigger picture.

Our task is to spark that first step – and build a movement ready to welcome people as they take it.

2. Support people to grow into activists

Change doesn’t happen because someone tells us what to think. It happens when we feel part of something. When we take action together, when we feel seen, valued and included.

We’ve seen it many times: someone turns up to a protest against testing on dogs, then stays for a social afterwards. They meet new friends, start learning more, then join a campaign. Slowly, the pieces come together. They move from feeling isolated to feeling part of something bigger. They move from caring about one issue to seeing the wider system. And often, they move from non-vegan to vegan – not because they feel pressured to, but because it feels like the natural next step.

This pattern is common in other movements too. Research on the anti-abortion movement in the US found something striking: that most activists didn’t enter the movement because they already held strong anti-abortion views. In fact, almost a quarter identified as pro-choice before getting involved. It was through participation, through doing things with others, that their beliefs shifted over time.

Belonging came first. Conviction followed.

At Project Phoenix, we think this is key. Instead of waiting for people to fully align before they join, we can create spaces where anyone who cares can get involved, and trust that transformation will follow.

3. Build local groups with roots

Real, lasting movements grow from the ground up.

That’s why community-led groups are at the heart of our work – not just as a tactic, but as a philosophy. Local groups bring people together. They build trust, create belonging and offer practical ways to get involved. They can respond quickly to local issues and develop leadership in places national organisations often can’t reach.

In our pilot groups in Dorset and Southampton, we’ve seen this model unite previously fragmented efforts, launch new campaigns and foster collaboration. People learn by doing, build strategy and become organisers in their own right.

Each group is different, but all share the belief that change starts locally, and everyone has a role to play.

4. Link grassroots action to national campaigns

National campaigns often have research, media attention and policy influence behind them. But too often they struggle to break through – not because the message isn’t strong, but because the grassroots power isn’t there to amplify it.

We believe a strong local group network could change that.

Imagine if, when a campaign launches – against factory farming, racing greyhounds or testing on animals – dozens of local groups are ready to mobilise, speak to the media and keep up pressure over time. That’s the kind of coordination our movement needs.

Through the Animal Freedom Network, Project Phoenix is focused on building the trust, goals and infrastructure to make this possible.

5. Prepare for trigger events

There are moments when the public is paying attention. A calf rammed repeatedly by police. A shocking exposé of an RSPCA Assured farm. A whale stranded in a salmon pen. These ‘trigger events’ can become turning points – but only if we’re ready.

Too often, we’re not. Without coordination and presence on the ground, moments that could spark change become fleeting news stories.

By building a connected grassroots network, we can change that – we can mobilise quickly, support communities, shape the public conversation, and show the world that a powerful, compassionate movement exists.

6. Enable a movement that multiplies

We want people to feel confident taking initiative, for leadership to be shared, and for local groups to grow without needing permission from anyone.

In Dorset, one group’s energy has rippled outwards – developing new organisers, supporting new groups, inspiring fresh actions and drawing more people in.

This is the kind of movement we’re aiming for: one that spreads because people feel ownership of it, and because every group helps spark the next.

A work in progress

Project Phoenix is not a single-issue organisation, but we do believe in focus. We use accessible, winnable campaigns that can open doors, build connection and draw people into a broader movement for animal freedom.

It’s early days and we’re learning as we go. Some things will work, others won’t. We’ll adapt and keep trying, because we believe when ordinary people come together around shared values, real change becomes possible.

The care people already feel for fellow animals can become a force for freedom – if we can turn it into collective power.

If this resonates with you, please reach out.

It’s going to take all of us.

These groups organised within their communities, choosing the issues, campaigns and tactics that mattered most to them. They connected animal rights with wider struggles for justice and used a diversity of methods to confront oppression. Together, they formed a grassroots base that drove the movement forward.

The power of this base was incredible. For those of us newer to the movement, it can be hard to imagine just how powerful it was. Here are just some highlights that showcased what our movement achieved:

In 1993, after years of campaigning, the UK’s last dolphinarium closed its doors. The closure followed the attempted liberation of Rocky the dolphin from Marineland in Morecambe, an event that inspired communities nationwide to escalate pressure on the industry. Public attention surged, Born Free launched its Into the Blue initiative, and Rocky was eventually released back into the wild. This victory marked the beginning of the end for dolphinariums in the UK.

A few years later, the ‘fur’ industry collapsed. Local groups had exposed farms, liberated animals, organised boycotts, and sustained public pressure until demand for ‘fur’ plummeted. When the Labour government offered a compensation deal – proposed by Compassion in World Farming – for ‘fur’ farmers to exit the industry, most leapt at the chance. Within a decade, farming animals for ‘fur’ had ended in the UK.

This same grassroots energy eroded public support for using ‘wild’ animals in circuses, live animal exports, and cosmetic testing on animals. Community organising created the public pressure and political conditions that made each of these bans possible. Again and again, local action drove national change.

This was power built from the ground up – people in towns and cities across the country acting locally and winning nationally. Every significant step forward in the history of our movement has been achieved through these local groups: highlighting issues to the public, mobilising action around the problem, and creating the conditions required for NGOs to secure legislative change.

In the early 2000s, amid a government crackdown following the high-profile SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) campaign, this network collapsed. Since then, a new movement emerged that is larger and more coordinated, yet often organised from the top down. Beneath the incredible activism currently taking place, a void remains. We have been building a movement without the foundations that allow us to build power, grow capacity, and become the mass movement fellow animals need us to be.

Project Phoenix was launched to change this. In September 2024, we helped seed Dorset Animal Action – a modernised community-based group that is a coalition of all animal freedom activists in the area, with the capacity to collaborate, scale, and organise. The group has grown to 160 members, filled coaches for national protests, and hosted the world’s largest National Animal Rights Day event. The model is spreading to other towns, forming the beginnings of the Animal Freedom Network.

Project Phoenix are offering tools to help this grassroots network reach its full potential:

• we’ve created a range of how-to guides (on forming groups, organising protests, fundraising, outreach, legal rights, governance and more – all available on our website, with video tutorials to follow);

• our first southern regional bootcamp for training and skill-sharing takes place in October 2025;

• this will be followed by two more regional bootcamps in spring and summer 2026 (in the north and the Midlands);

• and our first national gathering and convergence will be held in autumn 2026 – a week of skill-sharing, training, and practical action.

These free events are designed to empower and inspire existing organisers as well as the public. As our network and capacity grow, the Animal Freedom Network will be launching a news service to report on the breadth of activism taking place across local groups and share upcoming opportunities to take part in. This will allow people to engage with issues and campaigns that resonate with them, while showcasing to the public the scale and vitality of the animal freedom movement.

Project Phoenix’s goal is to rebuild the grassroots base to 300 active groups and sustain it. If every town in the UK sent 50 people to a national protest, over 50,000 people would fill the streets – enough to transform what is possible for fellow animals.

That future depends on us rebuilding the foundation of the movement to keep on winning.

If you want to be a part of that (whether it’s skills you have to offer, or you want to set up a group in you local community), please reach out to us.

Bell didn’t believe that racial equality was achieved through moral arguments alone. He believed that legal victories – like the desegregation of schools, buses and lunch counters – came about not because America suddenly grew a conscience, but because the global embarrassment of segregation was hurting the country’s image during the Cold War.

Boycotts also deprived segregated businesses and services of vital revenue. In Montgomery, Black people made up the majority of bus riders. Their refusal to use the city buses for over a year drastically reduced the transit system’s income. This affected downtown businesses, which saw fewer customers overall. This kind of pressure motivated business owners to lobby city officials and political leaders to end segregation – not out of moral concern, but economic necessity.

In other words, the US ended segregation not because it was wrong, but because it was inconvenient.

To many, that might sound cynical. But Bell saw himself as a realist. He believed racism was deeply embedded in American life – not because it couldn’t be challenged, but because it wouldn’t be dismantled by good arguments alone. Instead, real change would only come when justice aligned with interest.

And this idea doesn’t just apply to racial justice. It’s shaped how many other movements have won...

When justice becomes everyone’s business

Take the Freedom to Marry campaign in the US. In the early days, the movement talked about ‘gay rights’. But it struggled to gain traction with people who didn’t see themselves reflected in that cause. That changed when the movement shifted to a message of ‘marriage equality’ – and of love, family and the universal desire to belong.

It stopped being about a ‘special interest’ and became about everyone. Suddenly, it was the father who wanted to walk his lesbian daughter down the aisle. The grandmother who wanted to dance at her gay grandson’s wedding. The straight best friend who wanted their friend’s love to be celebrated too.

This wasn’t just about equality. It was about love. It was about shared joy. It was about family. An issue that previously saw polling opposition year after year began to see a U-turn in public sentiment once people understood this was an issue that also affected them.

The same goes for women’s equality and the campaign for legal abortion in Ireland. Together For Yes activists moved the conversation away from ‘individual choice’ and towards compassion, care and the idea that someone you love – your sister, daughter, partner, friend – might one day need an abortion. Framed like this, reproductive freedom wasn’t just about individual women who might need an abortion – it was about society.

Some scholars who subscribe to the theory of Interest Convergence argue that the rise in anti-racism after Black Lives Matter protests isn’t due to a change in public morality so much as it has suddenly become popular, political and even profitable to be shown to be anti-racist. Because instead of America decrying human rights abuses across the globe, suddenly the globe was protesting human rights abuses in America, negatively affecting its global standing.

Lessons from the SHAC campaign

The SHAC campaign (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty) offers a powerful example of interest convergence in action. While rooted in fierce moral opposition to the violence inflicted on individuals inside Huntingdon Life Sciences (Europe’s biggest facility that tests on and kills other animals), the campaign also made that violence deeply inconvenient for companies connected to it.

By targeting not just the lab itself but its suppliers, clients, insurers and even financial backers, SHAC turned testing on animals from a hidden injustice into a reputational and economic liability. They mobilised public sympathy through hard-hitting storytelling, but they also shifted the terrain of the fight – making silence and complicity costly. In doing so, they showed how strategic disruption can make justice impossible to ignore.

This strategy is continuing to be used to great effect in our movement. One recent example is the online group MBR Suppliers, a pilot campaign by Project Phoenix that calls on customers and suppliers of MBR Acres (a facility that breeds beagle puppies for testing) to boycott it. More than 30 companies have joined the boycott since it started a year ago. You can stay up to date with the group’s progress, as well as join their strategic online actions here.

What does this mean for animal freedom?

It’s hard to hear, but vital to say: moral arguments alone won’t be enough to win animal freedom. Especially when exploiting other animals is so embedded in the economy.

Most of us in the movement wish that showing people the violence, the cruelty and the resistance of our animal cousins would be enough. That people and politicians would look, see the truth, and bring about change. But decades of experience – and a wealth of social movement research – tell us otherwise.

Unfortunately, most people don’t change their minds or change their actions just because something is wrong. They change when they see how that wrong also hurts them. When they see how a better world for others is also a better world for them. They change when a ‘side issue’ suddenly feels personal.

As a society, we’ve been taught to believe that eating/wearing/hunting other animals is a matter of personal choice. That it doesn’t affect anyone else. But this lie has made it easier for people to disconnect, to justify and to look away.

As a movement, we can show that this issue is not just about fellow animals. It’s about all of us. It’s about all of our best interests, our health, our shared joy, our communities, our future... It’s about creating a world we want the next generation to inherit: a world where we’re taught that the best interests of everyone should be considered – no matter our race, gender, sexuality, ability or species. Not a world where children are taught that domination is normal or that violence is necessary.

The cost of looking away

Animal oppression has changed ourselves and the world for the worse. It devalues life and devastates ecosystems. It fuels pandemics, poisons rivers and pushes families – both human and other animal – into crisis. It cuts us off from fellow animals we might otherwise know, love and care for. It trains us to numb ourselves to pain and pretend it doesn’t exist. It turns acts of love – like the desire to protect others – into awkward exceptions, not the rule.

And perhaps, most cruelly, it makes humans believe we’re free, when in fact we’re not. We’ve been lied to – sold a story that farming animals (and testing on them, confining them in zoos and aquariums, hunting them for fun etc.) is necessary, natural, normal and even nice. That it’s a tradition, a culture, a way of life.

As a movement, we can communicate how we can honour our past without being held hostage by it. That we don’t need to lose our cultures. We just need to evolve them (as cultures naturally always do).

Where our interests meet

There are powerful intersections where the interests of humans and other animals converge, and as a movement, we have a wealth to choose from. Here are just a handful we might want to draw from in our communications, depending on the issue:

• Love/Joy: Most humans love other animals. We love seeing them play, living free and being themselves, and hate to see them suffering. We’re wired for empathy – we get happiness from others’ happiness. Most of us want a world where cruelty is behind us and all beings can thrive.

• Freedom: We should all have the freedom to be ourselves, to live freely and in line with our values. Taking away the freedom of other animals takes away from what it means to be human/be our authentic selves.

• Community: A kinder world for other animals makes life better for all of us. Ending violence helps build safer, more compassionate communities. It means creating a society that values care, fairness and connection – the kind of place most of us want to live in.

• Truth: Most people care about the truth and none of us want to be lied to. But powerful industries go to great lengths to hide the reality of how other animals are farmed and killed. Corporate greed is holding us back as a society, keeping us from living in line with our values. We deserve honesty, not spin.

• Health (individual and public): Diets centred on plants can help reduce heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. They also reduce the chances of future pandemics by cutting the risk of zoonotic diseases. What’s good for other animals is good for human health too.

• Mental health: Farming and killing animals takes a toll on people too. Many workers suffer from PTSD, depression and trauma from the violence they’re exposed to every day. A more compassionate food system protects everyone’s wellbeing – not just other animals’.

• Climate: Farming animals is one of the biggest drivers of climate breakdown. Reducing it is one of the most powerful ways we can protect our planet, our communities, and future generations.

• Responsibility: When we learn what’s happening to other animals, many of us feel the need to act. Taking responsibility for the world we help create is a sign of strength, not a burden. We can choose to support kindness over cruelty by boycotting violent industries.

• Financial: Farming animals is propped up by billions in public subsidies, while we’re left to cover the costs of pollution, illness and climate damage. That money could be used to support healthier food, greener jobs and thriving communities. A plant-based transition would benefit the public, not just corporate profits.

• Livelihoods: Many farmers feel trapped in a corporate system that forces them to treat farmed animals as products, not individuals. Switching to plant-based farming would let them put their skills to good use, earn a fair living, and grow food that is kinder to animals, the land and local communities – breathing new life into rural economies built on care instead of killing.

• Justice: If we care about fairness – for women, for people of colour, for future generations – then deep down, we already care about the freedom of other animals. Injustice always works the same way: it separates us, treats some lives as worth less, and uses power to control. Standing up for what's right means standing with our animal cousins too.

• Legacy: Most of us want to leave the world better than we found it – a place where our children and grandchildren can thrive. Protecting other animals and restoring the natural world is part of that legacy. It’s about choosing compassion over destruction, and being remembered for doing what’s right.

While these intersections won’t be persuasive to everyone, each one has the potential to resonate with a particular segment of the ‘persuadable middle’.

What this means for our movement

It doesn’t mean we stop centring fellow animals; it means we broaden the circle. We can make it clear that animal freedom isn’t a fringe issue – it’s a central one. It touches everything and everyone.

As a movement, we can ask:

• What are the leverage points where people’s values already overlap with the world we want to build?

• How do we make animal freedom a cause that feels personal, urgent and beneficial to everyone?

• What stories can we tell and what futures can we paint that make people want to support our cause and even take action?

The reality is, most people are already with us. Most people love other animals. Most people hate cruelty. Most people want to live in a kind world. They’ve just been taught that these things are incompatible.

It’s our job to show that they’re not.

Project Phoenix is working with community organisers and activists to build a broad-based movement that helps the ‘persuadable middle’ see that animal freedom is an issue that affects all of us, and taking some form of action means living in line with our values.

Please reach out to us if you’d like to get involved: hello@project-phoenix.org.uk

A Shared Goal, Different Tactics

The campaign began in June 2024 when Animal Rising launched a bold investigation into 37 RSPCA Assured farms, revealing systemic and heartbreaking levels of suffering. But when the media coverage fell short, it felt like a critical opportunity for our movement was slipping away. At Project Phoenix, we decided to send an open letter to the RSPCA, co-signed by pro-animal organisations, public figures and experts. The idea was simple but powerful: take the momentum of Animal Rising’s investigation and use it to build unity and pressure from all corners of the movement. This is something we’d been thinking about for quite a while at Project Phoenix: how can our movement respond to opportunities and trigger events, and how can different groups work in synergy around shared goals? This campaign felt like a great way to pilot a collaborative response, so we were all in.

We called the campaign For Charlie, named after a piglet rescued by investigators, from an RSPCA Assured farm. We centred her story – from a life of suffering on an RSPCA Assured farm to safety and freedom in a sanctuary – to contrast the nightmare that farmed animals have to endure with the dream of a better future. This allowed us to move beyond a welfare frame and speak to something deeper: the right of all animals to live free and with dignity.

The Strategy Behind the Scenes

For Charlie’s approach complemented Animal Rising’s. While their work exposed systemic cruelty, ours sought to open dialogue. We framed ourselves as friends and allies of the RSPCA, acknowledging their bold legacy while urging them to show leadership once more – by dropping the scheme and actively promoting a transition to a plant-based future.

We produced a short film by BAFTA-winning director Alex Lockwood, combining emotive storytelling of Charlie’s journey to freedom, with powerful insider testimony from Jane Tredgett, a former RSPCA board member, and Dr Alice Brough, a former industry pig vet. Over 2000 emails were sent by members of the public to the RSPCA CEO and board members from our website, asking them to drop the scheme and promote a plant-based future. To encourage narrative unity, we developed a communications guide that all open letter signatories could draw from.

We organised and facilitated regular meetings with 20+ individuals and organisations from across the movement and the so-called ‘welfare/rights’ divide, to coordinate and build relationships. Our first few meetings were spent deciding on a shared goal that the RSPCA could conceivably meet and that would satisfy our concerns. After much discussion and debate, we agreed that the ask should shift from Animal Rising’s demand to drop the scheme outright to asking the RSPCA to dissociate from the scheme. The dual message – disassociate from the scheme and promote a plant-based transition – was central. Without the second, the first risked being symbolic only.

This shift in ask from ‘drop’ to ‘dissociate’ was subtle but important. It recognised the need of the RSPCA (and other welfare-oriented organisations in the movement who felt dropping the scheme would be harmful) to continue improving welfare for farmed animals trapped in this cruel system. Dissociating from the scheme and removing the RSPCA’s trusted brand from it, rather than dropping it altogether, would enable the welfare scheme to stay in place without undermining the strategies of others in the movement to drastically reduce the consumption of farmed animals.

At its heart, the For Charlie campaign aimed to challenge the RSPCA’s legitimisation of farming and killing animals, and expose the reality behind their misleading marketing of RSPCA Assured farms as bucolic, family farms. As part of this approach, we introduced the concept of ‘welfare-washing’ into the public lexicon. Like the environmental movement’s coining of ‘greenwashing’, we knew that if we were to challenge this deception effectively, we first needed to name what was happening.

As a term, welfare-washing was quickly picked up by the media…

Through our many conversations with diverse individuals and organisations in the movement, we found that everyone who signed the open letter (and many who didn’t) agreed that the RSPCA – as the oldest, most trusted animal charity in the world – promoting the farming and consumption of animals is deeply problematic. It not only maintains a harmful status quo, it holds us back from making meaningful progress. This needed as many of us as possible to call upon the RSPCA to transform and lead the way towards a kinder, more sustainable plant-based future.

Outcomes

For Charlie secured significant mass media coverage and even led to Sir Brian May resigning as an RSPCA Vice President, signing our open letter, citing the For Charlie campaign in his resignation and posting our film on his Instagram page to his 3.4 million followers. This became the top story on the BBC homepage and sparked a public conversation on the truth behind the farming of animals.

The combined efforts of everyone – especially Animal Rising’s farm and slaughterhouse investigations, along with Animal Rising activists’ outreach at local RSPCA branches, Animal Justice Project’s investigations, GenV’s welfare-washing ad campaign on the London Underground, and We The Free’s all day outreach event in Leicester, which showed the For Charlie film to hundreds of members of the public via a huge screen – ultimately led to the very public resignation of Chris Packham and Caroline Lucas, President and Vice President of the RSPCA respectively. For several days, the reasons behind their resignation was all over UK mass media, with Chris and Caroline clearly stating that the RSPCA was misleading the public and legitimising cruelty. This shows how multiple tactics can work together to apply pressure from all sides.

The campaign shifted the RSPCA’s messaging in a more progressive direction. RSPCA CEO Chris Sherwood started talking about working with the animal protection movement to reduce the number of animals consumed and “radically reduce the number of animals who are farmed” for the first time after the open letter came out. Chris Sherwood also resigned (although it is unclear whether this was due to the collective campaign).

Polling conducted by Animal Think Tank revealed that the campaign, which pushed for systemic change, also inspired individual change in participants who were exposed to a 50-second clip from the For Charlie video. This shows that when groups with different theories of change (whether it be systemic or individual change) work together, we can still achieve multiple desired outcomes.

Lessons in Coalition Work

Was this coalition campaign perfect? No. We had to move fast, and we often wished we’d had more time to plan. We had to work hard, ask for help across our networks, send so many emails and make so many phone calls just to get a handful of A-list celebrities (such as Ricky Gervais, Joanna Lumley and Bryan Adams) to sign the open letter on an issue that was not straightforward.

Coalition work is also tough. It requires trust, communication and patience. Conflicts and disagreements over strategy, ideology, tactics and next steps will inevitably happen. That’s why relationships matter most. The trust we built, and the ‘network weaver’ role we played, helped us navigate differing strategies, expectations and needs.

We had anticipated that the campaign would be a broadly unifying force, given the depth of feeling so many organisations and activists share about the net harm caused by the RSPCA Assured scheme. However, some individuals and organisations from the more professionalised NGO space disagreed, believing that dropping the scheme could ultimately result in greater animal suffering. The campaign also faced accusations of promoting infighting. In hindsight, collectively agreeing on the most strategic demand from the outset, before the Animal Rising investigation went live, would have significantly reduced this criticism. But hindsight is always 20/20, and we didn’t plan on running a coordinated campaign until after the investigations dropped. And, importantly, we don’t accept the accusation of infighting. Healthy movement ecosystems need creative conflict to evolve and transform. This campaign played out along a longstanding ideological divide within our movement: between those focused on improving welfare and reducing suffering (the ‘reformer’ role focused on incremental change in Bill Moyer’s typology of social movement roles), and those committed to ending the farming of animals altogether (the ‘rebel’ role focused on more radical systemic change).

This divide is not unique to the animal movement and both these roles, played effectively, are necessary for success. And while fighting and criticising each other publically can be a distraction or even harmful, well-managed creative conflict can lead to improved effectiveness in the way we play our roles, new insights, and transformation of both parties, if they are open to it. Through this campaign, several options were identified that furthers both strategies of incremental and radical change. One option is mandatory labelling of animal ‘products’ according to methods of production, which we’ve included in our proposal to the RSPCA. And we’d like to think there’s been an increase in understanding of strategies on both sides of the so-called welfare/rights divide.

There were also challenges around public perception. Even though For Charlie positioned itself differently from more confrontational groups, and we weren’t always necessarily aligned with the actions of every group involved (although we respect and recognise that a diversity of tactics is necessary) the RSPCA saw all our actions as one. This eventually affected our ability to meet with the RSPCA, who were originally open to meeting, and then changed their mind and refused to meet us while others were still targeting them.

The narrative around the campaign was nuanced and hard to explain simply. It was too easy to fall into the welfare frame and not keep conversations centred on a freedom frame. The message change of ‘drop’ to ‘dissociate’ from the scheme was also hard to disseminate, as ‘drop’ is much more catchy than ‘dissociate’, and we didn’t go with a dissociate message from the start. Much of the media coverage focused only on the first demand of dropping the scheme and omitted the crucial second demand of promoting a plant-based transition.

Impact

For Project Phoenix, the most important success wasn’t the media impact or the public conversation it prompted. It was the groundwork we laid for future collaboration. We created space for organisations and individuals with different approaches to find common ground, build trust and act together in a coordinated and unified way. We also learned just how much invisible work it takes to bring people together to work towards a common goal. Some have suggested to us that all it takes to bring people together is an inspiring goal. We have learned that’s not the case. If only it were that easy!

What Comes Next

Having taken the decision to collectively pull back over the past few months to comply with the RSPCA’s request that organisations stop targeting them before they’d be willing to meet with us, we will soon be reaching out to the RSPCA for a meeting to discuss our proposal. Depending on their reply and whether or not we feel there is a chance for meaningful dialogue, the groups and individuals involved in For Charlie will explore ways to continue with our campaign to ask the RSPCA to be true to its brand of being ‘for every kind’, and stand up for the freedom of all fellow animals.

More broadly, at Project Phoenix, we want to go further. Rather than building ad-hoc coalitions, we’re investing in well-connected networks that can support many coalitions to emerge organically. A thriving movement requires deep roots – shared values, trusted relationships, open communication – so that when opportunities arise, we’re ready.

This campaign has given us a glimpse of that. Now we build on it.

If you're interested in joining current or future collaborations or learning more about Project Phoenix, get in touch. The more connected we are, the more unstoppable we become.