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1. The Law

“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.” – Isaiah 55:11

In the beginning, there was Stuff.

First, the stuff was all close together, and it was very hot. Stuff collided into other stuff. But gradually, the stuff spread out, and things cooled down, forming liquids and even solids. As stuff pooled together into big balls of stuff, vast amounts of space became pretty much empty. The frequency of collisions fell off, and the stuff settled into a rhythm. Balls of stuff found cozy orbits around bigger balls of stuff, and away they spun.

It was the Age of Inert Stuff. Entropy flitted its brush across the universe, here a solar flare erupting, there a cyclone raging across a gas giant, tectonic plates colliding, mountains rising and falling, all of it perfectly random, directionless. Devoid. In accord with the Law. By the time every ball of stuff had chanced to orbit around its bigger ball a few billion times, it would have seemed like a perfectly stable equilibrium, one to outlast Time itself. Would have, if there were any whom for it to seem that way to.

And at precisely that moment, suddenly, there was something new: squiggles.

Well, OK, there had been squiggly things for a while. What was new about these squiggles was, in fact, how un-new they were. They were copies. The exact same shape of squiggle, one after another.

Yes, yes, entropy had dealt in similar shapes before. It really liked forming inert stuff into big balls and making them orbit each other. And all shorelines were the same kind of shape, such that if you looked at one from above it was impossible to tell how close or far the frame was. But these squiggles were different.

First of all, they were way more precise, down to a tiny scale. Wait, no, that’s not it. The atoms the squiggles were made of were even more self-similar, gazillions of byte-identical copies of each type. The squiggles, meanwhile, always made a few mistakes when copying themselves.

That’s what it was: it was the replication. It was an act of defiance against Entropy, this copying. These little squiggles dared to shape the world in their own image, to create. They transgressed upon the garden of the only God heretofore known, and it shrugged; an inert, mindless God for an inert Age. And just like that it was toppled, its Law overthrown.

The Age of Replicators was upon us.

Replication was a new force harnessing and shaping the free energy of the universe around it. It introduced its own singular law: whichever better converts free energy into new copies shall proliferate; whichever does not shall be swallowed. May the best replicator win; all else is commentary. There are no bonus points for style.

Now, we must grant that the replicators have never yet controlled more than a slim fraction of the matter and energy in their neighborhood, a paper-thin layer on the surface of a single planet. Mountains still rise, storms still rage. But even this much was a profound concession forced upon Entropy by its rebellious subjects; and like King John granting the Magna Carta, once this was done, the spread of a new order became only a matter of time. Sooner or later, Evolution will swallow the universe.

Replication (still) rules

A few billion years after the first primitive RNA strands cloned themselves, an awkward situation arose between some of their descendants.

There was a group living in a forest, minding their own business, sustaining themselves hunting animals with bows and foraging wild plants, as all their ancestors had done in the tales elders told at night around the fire. One day, after pursuing game to the far reaches of their hunting grounds, they encountered another group. They’d seen other groups before, but this one was different. They wore different clothes and had strange tools. Strangest of all, they were accompanied by beasts, the sort one would hunt, but of unfamiliar varieties. Yet the beasts did not flee. They seemed at home in the company of the Strangers.

The hunters kept their distance at first. A year passed before they met again. By now, the Strangers had built marvellous huts out of mud and fallen trees. And where those trees once stood were clear fields. The Strangers were out laboring in the fields, digging up rocks and piling them by the edge of the field. They must have been at it for days, if not weeks. The hunters felt a sinking, foreboding feeling. The stones seemed too heavy to wield as weapons, but the others had strange ways. What could they be after?

You know how the story ends, reader: agriculture devoured the world, spreading out from its first hearths in West Asia and China so that today only tiny enclaves of hunter-gatherers cling to life on a few scraps of the Earth that haven’t yet been profitable to plow.

You know how the story ends, but how exactly did it play out? Did the agricultural newcomers slaughter their way through the technologically inferior foragers blocking their path? Did they entice them into a new way of life, intermarrying and interbreeding peacefully? Did they spread their technologies and culture only by example, without ever needing to migrate? Or did they merely replicate, progressing mile by mile, child by child, year after year, clearing forest into farmland that could no longer support foraging tribes, inexorably starving out their nomadic counterparts without ever realizing it? Or, did zoonotic disease wipe out the hunters’ virgin immune systems before any of these confrontations could occur?

Studies on archaeological DNA show that each of these stories had its time and place. But for our purposes, the details don’t matter.

The fact that anything other than bodies could spread and replicate is the first of two lessons. With the emergence of humans, evolution was freed from the purely physical domain of genes and into a more abstract space of memes. Replicators don’t need to be physical; ideas, patterns, systems, and software can replicate as long as they have some way of feeding back into the physical world. So it is that I could vasectomize myself, cut off the spread of my genes, and yet still have a chance of reproducing the things I truly care about, truly identify with– my ideals.

Second, the Law itself applies to these new ephemeral replicators exactly as it did before: coldly. Evolution does not select for the “best” ideas, by any measure other than their ability to replicate. Whatever replicates faster cannot help but dominate all that replicates less fast; dominate, devour, digest, and turn the energy into new copies of itself.

Between foraging, pastoralism, and sedentary agriculture, anthropologists and archaeologists still debate which offered a higher quality of life. There’s a compelling case that agriculture was the worst deal, told in the diseased and malnourished bones of our very same settlers. But nobody debates which was better at replicating, at converting energy in its environment into more copies of itself.

While the spread of agriculture made the Earth inhospitable for hunting and gathering, it would be a puerile mistake to ask whether the agriculturalists were being immoral. Consider the settlers in our scenario. They left the valley they grew up in because the population had grown too large to sustain itself off the available land; the village had been too successful, keeping too many children alive. Hungry, superseded in the inheritance of land by older siblings, they set out, walking until they found arable land that seemed empty. They didn’t have to walk far—a few dozen miles, past other settlements that had formed over the years in the exact same way—to reach the very frontier of the agricultural revolution. (That “revolution” took more than a thousand years to spread a thousand miles; the average pace was less than a mile per year.) They hardly could have recognized that clearing a small section of forest, removing stones from the earth to make it fertile for domesticated grains, was one more step in a decamillennial process of annihilating the hunter-gatherer way of life. If the hunters eventually did recognize as much, and attacked, then the farmers surely thought of themselves as fighting back only in self-defense.

That same disconnect—between welfare and fertility—persists in the older form of evolution. Genetic evolution cares not a whit for the wellbeing of its vassals; they exist only to escort squiggly genotypes safely onwards to the next generation, at any cost. Evolution wired your fragile body up for debilitating physical pain, not to mention fear, anxiety, and depression, because all of it made you a better replicator. If your best evolutionary bet is to breed ten thousand offspring, spew them out into the carnivorous orgy of all against all hoping two or three might survive to become parents themselves, then spew you will. There are, still, no bonus points for style.

There may someday come a third Age governed by the law of Engineering, when thoughtful, reflective minds will be powerful enough to shape the cosmos to their vision without needing to optimize that vision for growth. But that age has yet to dawn. We are still in the Age of Replicators. We swapped the inert god of Entropy for the blind idiot god, Evolution.

Unfortunately, this explains…

2. Why animal advocacy is utterly failing

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” – Jeremiah 8:20

Activists in the West are fretting about whether AI could integrate into animal agribusiness and make factory farming even more intractable. In China, this has already happened.

From multi-story pig factories to new indoor fish factories to a single broiler chicken hatchery being built to hatch more than 500 million birds per year, AI is integrated into Chinese factory farms at scale. Muyuan Foods, China’s largest farmer of pigs, has deployed a custom swine-focused version of Alibaba’s Qwen model across more than 1,000 farms, with 3.3 million smart devices tracking nearly 5,000 indicators, from each individual pig’s food consumption and daily weight gain to disease symptoms like cough and fever, as well as farm-wide stats on air temperature, humidity, and ammonia concentration.

The future has arrived in China, and it looks like factory farming– faster, smarter, and bigger than ever. Once feeder fishes are accounted for—that is, fishes farmed to be fed to other farmed fishes—China probably accounts for more than 50% of the world’s farmed vertebrates, and maybe all farmed animals. But while the growth of factory farming in China shows no signs of slowing, this isn’t where most growth is slated to occur. That would be in Africa, where foreign firms are investing billions of dollars to lay the ground for an even faster buildup of factory farms.

It could not have been otherwise

Animal advocates have been hammering away at the foundations of factory farming since at least the 1970s, the decade Peter Singer published Animal Liberation. And after half a century of protests, vegan outreach, open rescue, leafleting, and corporate campaigns, the factory farm industry is bigger than ever. We could say that growth in China and Africa is making up for all the animals we’ve helped in America and Europe, except the number of animals killed for food each year is still increasing in the U.S. and most European countries, not to mention Latin America and everywhere else. But hey, at least there are Impossible Whoppers™ at Burger King for the segment of the population who identify as vegetarian, even if that segment hasn’t grown since records began (actually, it has decreased globally thanks to secularization in India).

Basically, reader, the situation is dire. Worse. You could basically say we have failed. Granted, the fight isn’t over. We could still turn things around, right? But that’s not the question. The question is will we turn things around, and the answer is that if I was a sow being prodded back into a gestation crate for my sixth tour of duty, I would not be feeling very optimistic.

The problem is simple: factory farming is a very effective replicator. It produces something people want. Meat is delicious– at least, I know of no definition of delicious that stands up against “the vast majority of people enjoy eating it.” Meat is nutritious– ask any global poverty expert the first three things they would do to improve development outcomes in regions with high childhood malnutrition, and animal-source foods would be on the list. And lastly, factory farmed meat is amazingly affordable. Each serving of meat cost our Neolithic agriculturalists roughly three hours of labor; a burger from McDonald’s costs the median U.S. worker less than ten minutes, chicken nuggets included.

Billions of humans all around the world demand the cheap, nutritious, and delicious output of factory farms. And I mean literally demand– pundits love to speculate that a sharp enough spike in Chinese pork prices could lead to riots and perhaps even bring down the government; grocery prices may have cost incumbent Democrats the White House in 2024. Factory farming is not being inflicted on an unwitting consumer population; it is one of their most strongly and consistently revealed preferences.

Demand leads to profit, which is in turn used to grow the industry. There’s nothing mysterious about the growth of factory farming over the last 100 years; we don’t need to scry for conspiratorial explanations in corrupt government subsidies or ingenious advertising campaigns. It was the most natural thing in the world. It was the Law.

I fought the law

A few brave souls saw what was happening and hatched a desperate plan to stop it. It’s not that they didn’t understand the Law; their plan was based on it. They birthed a new replicator into the world, a conceptual virus engineered to target factory farming. It was the meme of animal rights.

Some of the most powerful replicators in the world have been simple ideas like this one. Spreading from mind to mind, redirecting their adherents, ideas have brought down empires, slain Gods, enslaved entire races and emancipated them. Could an idea bring down factory farming?

It was worth a try, but once again, reader, you know how the story ends. It’s not that it couldn’t have worked; it just didn’t. Animal rights wasn’t nearly as potent a replicator as its target. It got, as the kids would say, mogged.

When I found my way into the animal movement, the first form of activism I did (like most people who joined in those days) was leafleting. My first shift was handing out leaflets about veganism to people lined up to see a talk by Jane Goodall. Primo audience, in other words. I spent an hour or so disbursing leaflets. Then, once the talk started, I spent ten minutes collecting those same leaflets out of the trash bin a few yards from where I’d been standing. Nobody engaged in this seemed to believe it was going to fundamentally change things.

A few months later though, still bright green, I came across Direct Action Everywhere. Here was something different. I hadn’t met many other activists, but these were the first to say that truly transformational change was possible, that we could end animal exploitation in my lifetime. They had a vague plan, but mostly it was just about ambition, about daring to pursue what you really wanted.

I’ve spilled buckets of digital ink (rearranged pixels?) explaining all the things I think we got wrong. But one of my most embarrassing mistakes, one I haven’t dwelt on here before, was that I assumed this audacity itself was something new under the sun.

It wasn’t. In the decades since Animal Liberation, plenty of people have dared to dream of a world without animal farming. They’ve all failed to make that world a reality, or even bring it one step closer. And before you try to get clever with me, I promise you there isn’t some other magic word people haven’t sufficiently incanted. Whatever you think makes your abolitionist movement special—”It’s grassroots! It’s radical! It’s decentralized! It’s intersectional! It’s based on social science!”—people have tried it before. The fact that you haven’t bothered to learn any of their names is not evidence that they didn’t try hard enough; it is only further evidence of how likely you are to meet the same fate.

Whatever our problem is, it is not a lack of bold declarations or abolitionist stratagems.

I can’t say for sure that the animal rights meme has been a total failure. Maybe things would be even worse if it had never been conceived. Maybe there would be even more factory farms.

If that’s the case, then yes, we could spend another half century banging our heads against the wall in the same fashion, and for our efforts, we could expect that on Animal Liberation’s hundredth birthday, factory farming will be bigger than ever and growing, but less big and growing less fast than it would have been otherwise.

3. If you can’t beat ‘em

“Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” – Psalm 32:7

Or, we could call a tactical retreat. We could admit that our frontal assault on the citadel of Meat was hopeless from the start. We could go back to the drawing board and ask: how can we replicate more efficiently than factory farms?

Take that literally enough and you could have predicted the next chapter of our little history– and its downfall.

People want meat. Meat from animals involves terrible violence and suffering. But it doesn’t have to. In fact, there’s got to be an easier way. That is the thesis behind cultivated meat: real meat—the same exact product—without animals.

For years, cultivated meat has been a light in the dark for all those who see the suffering of farmed animals, a final insurance policy against our other desperate efforts. Few of us worked on it directly, but that’s because few of us had PhDs in bioengineering. So we general infantry kept slogging it out in the trenches, eagerly awaiting the latest news and rumors from our boys and girls back at Los Alamos.

The believers

How good that news is depends on who you ask. Working at the intersection of animal welfare and AI safety in San Francisco for the last few months, I’ve noticed a sharp divide on this topic in the Effective Altruist (EA) community. On one side are EAs focused on helping animals; on the other are those deeply sympathetic to animals but focused on other causes like AI safety and global poverty.

The latter group still has faith in the promise of cultivated meat. Heck, to them, it’s more than a promise; it’s a contract, with the signatures dry and the money in escrow. It is a guarantee inherent to the very Law, in particular its articles on thermodynamics.

Consider the chicken, that most numerous of farmed terrestrials. Chickens, as we have established, are, from the standpoint of ~all humans, delicious and nutritious. They are also sentient beings. This combination is extremely bad.

Besides being delicious and nutritious, chickens are very cheap. Most of the cost of raising animals for food is feeding them. Broilers convert 13% of the calories and 20-25% of the protein in a short lifetime of feed—mostly corn and soy—into edible meat, compared to 3% and 5% for a cow. When researching these numbers for me, Claude dubbed broiler chickens “by every metric, the most efficient terrestrial meat machine ever built.”

At these conversion rates, feed still accounts for two thirds of the cost of raising chickens, and 87% of those calories are not ending up as meat. Where do they go? Much is lost to the basic energetic costs of biology. Soybeans don’t turn into chicken breast by way of magic; the transmutation requires energy. But a lot of the difference is all that stuff that isn’t meat. The modern broiler chicken, genetically mutilated by seventy years of selective breeding, is about 55% human-edible meat by weight the day they are killed. The rest—bones, feathers, viscera—is byproduct.

Get rid of all that extra junk, and cultivation should be able to slash the cost of chicken meat by a third– even before we get around to improving on energy conversion.

Reinventing the chicken

So how’s it going? The soldiers on the front are dying to know.

Well, we’ve got stem cells, say, from a salmon. We can get them to replicate, such that we could serve you a nice lump of salmon stem cells, basically a sludge of gray mass that tastes like nothing. But it’s the first step! Good.

Next, we can trigger the stem cells to turn into meat cells. That’s… the last step? What else is there? Isn’t meat just cells?

Sure enough, at a few premier restaurants around the country, you could make a reservation tomorrow and treat yourself to a delicate morsel of cultivated sashimi. It’s a small portion at a steep price, but it’s just waiting for economies of scale to kick in. It’s a proof of concept, right?

Not so fast.

You’ll notice that sashimi is, by definition, a rather thin slice of salmon. That’s no coincidence.

Rewind back to the slurry of stem cells. If you turn them all into meat cells, they’re still just a slurry, like salmon flesh run through a high-powered blender. To grow a chicken breast anybody will want to buy, you have to replicate from meat cells, building the tissue cell by cell.

This requires feeding the cells. With a thin layer of cells, it’s relatively easy to deliver the necessary nutrients; just drop them into a bioreactor full of the right mix of medium. But as the tissue starts to build, we run into a problem: how can we get nutrients to the cells near the center of our new lump?

Not to worry. We know how nature solved this problem, and we already have the DNA to do it. We need to vascularize our chicken breast: that is, trigger the growth of a fractal network of vessels and capillaries to carry nutrients throughout the mass.

This alone turns out to be way harder. But say we’re able to vascularize the tissue; now we have a growing lump of chicken breast floating in a bioreactor full of growth medium, with vessels to carry the medium throughout the lump. Except the vessels being there doesn’t mean the medium actually flows through them, at least anywhere near fast enough to replenish the interior cells. We need to create asymmetrical pressure on our vessels, so the medium gets pushed in one end and pulled out the other. We need to wire every vessel up to an artificial heart pumping medium-blood through the tissue. We’ve reinvented the circulatory system.

And what about the spent medium being pulled out of the breast? When it goes in, it’s full of glucose and oxygen; coming out, it’s polluted with carbon dioxide, ammonia, and lactate. If we feed these back into another chicken breast, they’ll be poisonous. We need to filter the medium continuously, maybe on every single pass. Now we’ve reinvented the kidneys.

Speaking of which, when we filter out the bad stuff, we also need to replenish the good stuff. This is where cultivated meat is supposed to thrive. We just heard that feed accounts for two thirds of the cost of factory farmed chickens, and we’re saving on feed by skipping unnecessary chicken anatomy. Does that mean we’re just pouring 50% as much corn and soy into our bioreactor as it would take to grow a whole chicken? Well, no; our isolated chicken breast can’t make use of whole corn and soy. We need to digest it first, break it down into pharmaceutical-grade glucose and amino acids, then add a litany of growth hormones and other regulatory chemicals, which need to maintain a constant and delicate balance. You won’t be surprised to learn that this costs quite a bit more, calorie-for-calorie, than raw commodity corn, “roughly the cheapest edible biomass humanity has ever produced.” (That’s Claude again.) We’ve reinvented the full digestive and endocrine systems.

It keeps going. Muscles need motion and exercise to develop properly; paralyze a fetus in the womb and the baby will be born terribly and permanently disfigured. To flex our muscle mass, we need electrical input– nerves. But if we just zap a free-floating chicken breast with nerve stimulation, it will lock up once and never unlock. We need to anchor it to something, to stretch it back out again– bones and joints, attached with ligaments. Sure, these can be metal bones that we don’t need to regrow for each chicken breast, attached by rubber ligaments, stimulated by copper nerves, but all of this is becoming a delicate engineering challenge, prone to malfunction and maintenance.

Which brings us to the worst part, the part that will send any veteran of a meat cultivation lab into cold sweats and flashbacks: the immune system.

The Red Queen

We non-biologists tend to badly underestimate just how much of our metabolic and evolutionary energy goes towards fighting off infection. Remember earlier, when we talked about tracing human migrations using genetic variation? Well, it turns out that the most variable part of our genome is dedicated to identifying and fighting off pathogens. Humans have spent most of our adaptive evolution on immunity, and it’s no wonder why: fighting off unfamiliar infections is even more costly. Children mounting an immune response have been shown to grow as much as 49% slower, their metabolic economy requisitioned for the war effort. As a result, populations in high-pathogen environments (think tropical jungles) who are regularly fighting off infections throughout childhood tend to be seriously stunted. (This is probably why proactively feeding antibiotics to animals in unsanitary farms makes them grow faster.) Sex itself is likely an anti-parasitic technology, and a costly one: the male half of all offspring in sexually reproductive species bear no offspring of their own, effectively halving reproductive output in an attempt to give the species an edge in our never-ending arms race against parasites. This is called the Red Queen Hypothesis, after Lewis Carrol’s red queen who has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same spot. And sure enough, despite all this evolutionary effort, nearly half of all human children in history up to the invention of germ theory in the 1860s died from infections before reaching adulthood– and that’s when there wasn’t a pandemic on, wiping out half a continent in the span of a few years.

The entire price war between cultivated chicken breast and whole chickens could rest on the immune system. A chicken in a factory farm wastes precious calories producing five billion or so immune cells per day, and that’s during peacetime, when they aren’t actively infected. If cultivators could find a way around the immune tax, that might be their best chance to undercut the feed-conversion ratio of factory farms.

Will we be able to outperform nature? We’ve done it before. Evolution has been optimizing flight for hundreds of millions of years. Within a century, humans crushed its best records on size and speed, with jets rocketing hundreds of passengers between continents in a handful of hours– at a cost of over 2 million calories per passenger in jet fuel, the equivalent of three years’ worth of food. We’re still nowhere close to a drone that can make an intercontinental trip with the energy budget of an albatross, or fly any distance with the agility of a starling, qualities that proved much more valuable in the evolutionary context.

Evolution did not care about all goals equally. In areas evolution wasn’t optimizing for, we should expect it to be relatively easy to surpass. But beating evolution at its own game will be another thing altogether. (Hold onto this principle; we will return to it later.)

Well, reader, there is plausibly no single target that has earned more attention in the four-billion-year evolutionary epic culminating in the modern chicken than fighting off infection. We should not be surprised that it is hard to beat.

Meat cultivation labs are some of the most tightly biologically controlled environments on earth. Designing and building a single test-scale clean room to this level of tolerance costs millions of dollars. Building one on the scale of a single factory farm has never been done, in any industry; the largest facility yet, built by Believer Meats at a cost of $123 Million dollars, aims to produce in a year what an ordinary broiler slaughterhouse handles in a few weeks. At least that was the plan; construction finished late last year, but the plant has been quiet since, perhaps because ongoing production costs are projected at five to ten times commodity meat prices.

Even on the laboratory scale, contamination has been the defining catastrophe of the industry. A single invasive cell can kill off one cycle of an entire bioreactor, no matter how large. That means biorisk scales up linearly with facility size– the opposite of an economy of scale. If we can’t solve this, the cost per pound of cultivated meat might increase the more you try to make.

We have not, I am sorry to say, reinvented the immune system. If we ever do solve it, it will probably look like a combination of engineering and cellular immunology– that is, we’ll need both expensive biosecure facilities and a metabolically-powered immune system operating inside the bioreactors themselves. The latter will cost calories, just like a chicken’s, except that—as we established before—the chicken’s calories come much more cheaply.

If you can’t join ‘em

Imagine some visionary scientist had conceived of the idea of chicken breast without ever hearing about the existence of a chicken. She was trying to invent meat from scratch, from first principles, from a single cell. She sold investors on a biotech startup promising a new type of cheap, delicious, and nutritious food.

After years of research costing hundreds of millions of dollars, she managed to reconstruct the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, renal, skeletal, and nervous systems inside a tightly controlled bioreactor fed with pharmaceutical-grade medium. But she had run aground on immunity, driven to desperation as batch after batch was soiled by otherwise undetectable microbes, the problem only getting worse as they tried to scale up. She’d drawn up plans for a large facility that could produce breast at just five to ten times the cost her taste-testers said they’d be willing to pay, but that was if everything went perfectly, and nothing ever did.

Then one day, a man arrives at her laboratory, dressed in strange clothes, carrying a large, mysterious box draped with a sheet. Wordlessly, he hoists the crate up onto the table in front of her, and pulls back the sheet, revealing a wire cage containing a single chicken. In a mysterious flash of insight, she sees it all: bones, feathers, feet, beak, crop, stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines, cloaca, heart, lungs, all of it meticulously orchestrated to turn corn into chicken breast with the efficiency of four billion years of optimization. It even walks around feeding itself. As she breaks down in rapturous tears, the mysterious man explains that you can lock a few thousand of them in a simple shed made of corrugated sheet metal, throw in a few handfuls of corn every now and again, and despite shitting all over each other until the air is thick with ammonia, despite being incapacitated literally because they turn corn into chicken breast at such an unnatural speed, somehow most of them still survive long enough to reach slaughter weight. Oh, and by the way, all those extra parts besides the meat? You can sell those too! Bones, guts, they can all be used for pet food and other products. There’s even a market for feathers.

(If anyone had watched this video, they could have forseen what would happen with cultivated meat.)

The chicken would seem to her like nothing short of a miracle– clearly the best way anyone could come up with to turn corn into chicken breast. Maybe the chicken could be improved on—indeed, he interjects, it has been, through selective breeding—but only a fool would start over from scratch.

Perhaps, then, the scientist from this meatless world would learn the chicken was capable of pain, and not just of pain but of yearning, of joy and play, and she’d be like “What the fuck dude, you torture and murder these just to eat them? Get out of my dimension you sick fuck.”

Well, that would be nice. Unfortunately he would then return back to our dimension.

See, reader, I know you. I know what you’re thinking at this point. You’re thinking:

So what if all we can get is two-dimensional meat sheets. Just stack them up! So it costs more. It’s a small price to pay for sparing animals from a lifetime of torture.

But the consumers who will decide whether to switch to cultivated meat don’t see it that way, because they don’t care about chickens literally at all. Not only are they not willing to pay a penny more for cultivated meat; if it cost the same, most of them would still choose “natural” meat from animals. Many would choose to keep eating animals even if cultivated meat were substantially cheaper!

At least, that’s what they say in surveys now. But maybe they’d adapt once it was available? It’s not at all obvious they would. Consider people who pay for organic produce when it’s neither better for the environment nor for their health. Organic produce is just some vibes-based bullshit! Fuck, even I buy it sometimes! I know it’s stupid and pointless—I know it’s fertilized with manure and gore from factory farms instead of fossil fuels—but somehow when I’m in the grocery store, some dumbass part of me still takes control and chooses to spend twice as much on some random organic produce because the idea that food should be “natural” runs so goddamn deep in my psyche.

The new science

If the situation is this bad, why are there still any cultivated meat enthusiasts? Or you could ask, given there are still believers in cultivated meat, surely I’m making things out to be worse than they really are?

Lets come back to my EA friends. I mentioned there’s a split between EAs who are focused on animal advocacy, and those who are sympathetic to animals but focused on other causes like AI safety or global health and development. The latter group confidently believe that cultivated meat will soon be solved, and factory farming will inevitably end. The former don’t take this for granted at all, and worry it is less likely than not.

I see a few obvious ways this schism could form. One is that people who believe factory farming will inevitably be replaced by technology choose to work on a different problem. Another is that animal advocates engage in motivated reasoning out of a need to believe that all our hard work matters, and won’t just be supplanted by technological progress.

Acknowledging these possibilities, I fear a third answer: cultivated meat sounds great from a distance, but the closer attention you pay it, the more uncertain it looks. Nothing has done more to dampen my enthusiasm for cultivated meat than talking to people who work or have worked in the industry. They consider it somewhere between a long shot and a fool’s errand. I hope the experts are wrong, but hope doesn’t help animals.

That said, many of my EA friends have talked to the same former researchers, heard the same grim tale, and they are still optimistic. Heck, they’re downright dismissive of any doubts. These are smart people, and you might want to trust them more than me. Before you decide to do that, there’s something you should know about them.

These optimists share a worldview about technology that is, shall we say, not exactly mainstream. Among them, it is taken for granted that superintelligent AI will soon lead to “a century of technological progress in a decade.” That is, you should try to imagine what technology we are currently on track to develop by the year 2130, then assume that it will instead appear by 2040. We’re not talking about flying cars and lifelike virtual reality video games; we’re talking about extreme technological maturity, the stuff of hard science fiction: adult human brains uploaded into computers. Space colonization, with self-replicating interstellar probes the size of a tennis ball seeding digital civilizations the size of a solar system. Brain tumors surgically excised by microscopic robots released into your bloodstream without having to cut open your skull. Human immortality, and perhaps human resurrection. A few decades after these things, maybe we tunnel into other dimensions. Or maybe we make subtle modifications to our universe’s physical constants by coaxing its false vacuum to decay into a slightly more stable one.

I regularly meet people who fully expect AI to manifest all of these technologies by the middle of this century. Compared to these, cultivated meat seems like child’s play. These techno-optimists know that it is floundering now, but that’s simply because we aren’t far enough along the tech tree, and that’s going to change soon. We’re like Leonardo da Vinci trying to design a flying machine before the industrial revolution.

And yet, I confess, reader: I also expect all of these technologies as a result of the AI revolution. And I’m still doubtful that cultivated meat will ever replace factory farming.

Imagine you and I were sitting in England in the mid 19th century wondering whether the budding industrial revolution would unlock the powers of flight. We might pore over Leonardo’s old diagrams of wingéd contraptions, wondering whether new materials like steel or energy sources like coal and the steam engine could address their limitations. Maybe in the end, we would make a bet; I’d bet there was no way to give a man wings, you’d bet that we just couldn’t see it yet.

Which of us would win? Industrial power did eventually bring about flight– but not in the way either of us was imagining. And it’s not just that the technique is different, that in all our thoughts of flapping wings we never conceived of the propeller engine. The whole nature of the thing is different. Leonardo was imagining commuting around Florence on his pedal-powered helicopter; we still take the bus. I’m pretty sure he never imagined a passenger jet blasting hundreds of tourists from Florence to San Francisco between breakfast and dinner. You would win the bet only if you had defined it sufficiently broadly.

The tech tree winds unpredictably. Like a bottled genie, it grants our most magical wishes, but rarely in the ways we imagined them, and often with unexpected costs. The history of science is littered with the forgotten names of researchers who were sure they knew what the solution would be; the unexpected costs of the real solutions have filled cemeteries.

I’m sure AI will solve some of the problems facing cultivated meat. But it will also accelerate factory farming! Genetic engineering could make chickens grow even faster or make corn even cheaper. Robotics could slash labor costs in farms and slaughterhouses. And advanced engineering could solve any challenges to bringing factory farms into space or to other planets. To close the gap, AI would have to help cultivated meat much more than it helps factory farming, despite the factory farm industry having much more money to spend on AI R&D. It’s not enough for cultivated meat to be possible; helicopters exist, but we don’t use them in our daily commute because they are pointlessly expensive to fly, and why go through all the trouble? And this is before we get to the fact that most consumers say they would prefer meat from animals even if it were more expensive. To replace factory farms, we need something cheaper and more appealing.

We need a better replicator.

4. Catabasis

“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” – Hosea 6:6

If you’ve taken me for a pessimist, that would be an understandable mistake. But no, reader. I believe that technology will deliver us what we want, if only we remember to define our desires broadly enough:

We want meat without suffering.

We want meat without suffering, because if we don’t get it, people will keep demanding meat with suffering. Ideas alone, however righteous, have not been enough to quelch their demand. There may be no lab-grown miracle coming to sate it either.

What if we’ve been working backwards?

Maybe it should have been obvious from the outset. Maybe it was, to some.

Let’s go back to first principles. What we want is a chicken breast. What we don’t want is a lifetime of misery and torture. Which approach is more promising?

1. Start over from a single cell, building our way towards the breast, reinventing one critical system after another in a tightly controlled laboratory setting; or

2. Start with the chicken, and remove the suffering.

A couple decades ago, either of these might as well have been magic. Today, only one of them is. That’s due partly to technology, but mostly to simple economics: the first option, like the animal rights meme, attempts to fight against the extraordinary efficiency of factory farming, while the second flows along with it.

We will now get a clearer view of this by climbing up the technological ladder. By the end, you’ll see the best reason you’ve ever had to hope for transformative change for animals. But we need something to turn that hope into reality: you. We need founders. The money is there. The ideas are there. And by the end of this section, hopefully you’ll be there.

Fair warning: you are probably going to hate this. That is approximately the point.

We all make sacrifices for the movement. We lose our blissful ignorance, forcing ourselves to confront the dark reality of factory farming. We give up our nights and weekends volunteering, or working overtime for negligible salaries. Some go further. I have friends who’ve spent years in prison; I’m currently facing a battery of felony charges for allegedly rescuing beagles.

I ask much more from you now. I ask you to let go of your moral purity, to take those pristine hands of yours and use them to make a difference in the lives of animals, letting them be stained with blood in the process. In fact, it’s better to think of ourselves climbing down the ladder, leaving behind our comfortable moral high ground, like Orpheus descending into the underworld to negotiate with its ruler for the return of his lost love.

Rung 1: Extrinsic welfare tech

Whence cometh suffering in the life of an animal on a factory farm? Think of the worst horrors you’ve seen, the ones you would rely on to convince a stranger at a vegan outreach event. What makes them bad?

First and foremost, physical pain. Pain comes from mutilation, from teeth, beaks, tails, testicles being sliced or torn off with no anaesthetic. It comes from the broken brittle bones of laying hens whose calcium has all gone to laying too many eggs, from lame broiler chickens collapsing under their unnatural weight. It comes from wounds sustained in fights with other animals, driven to insanity by the horrors of their lives; wounds that then become infected and necrotic in the petri dish of a factory farm. From being slowly devoured alive by sea lice, or cannibalized. And of course, it comes from being sliced apart in your final moments, or suffocated, scalded alive, or frozen to death, all fully conscious.

Then there are physical discomforts other than mutilation, ranging from annoying to extreme. Hunger, whether due to lameness or to genetically optimized insatiability. Thirst, as well. Rashes, sea lice, bacterial infections, parasitic worms. Fevers and respiratory infections of all severities, including deadly. The ache of muscles that urge to move beyond the extreme confines of your cage.

That’s a taste of the physical torments. It may well be that most suffering is more psychological. Sitting in an airplane seat for a couple hours is perfectly tolerable; spending weeks or months there might be enough to drive the most well-adjusted person to the brink of psychosis. If behavior is any judge, then the baseline for animals in factory farms is a continuous roller coaster of anxiety and despair.

This is hell on earth, and taken as a whole, it feels overwhelming. But that’s true of any big problem. The first rule of effective management is to decompose any problem down into its component parts. Try thinking like an engineer. Do any of these problems seem remediable?

Think of five technologies—even things that already exist—that could be deployed as harm reduction strategies in factory farms. But remember, they can’t be too expensive, or farms that adopt them will lose out to farms that don’t. That’s the Law. In fact, the best solution would be something that increases the profitability of the farm just so, enough to cover the cost of installing it.

Nobody understands this better than Robert Yaman, the founder of Innovate Animal Ag. He explains:

[AI-powered monitoring] tools could, in theory, help the farmer detect and identify sick birds earlier… But it wouldn’t solve the brutal economics of poultry health management.

Suppose you have a condition that kills 0.1% of the chickens in your 40,000-bird barn (40 birds in total). At $4 of economic value per bird, the condition costs the farmer $160 per flock. To break even on a treatment, you’d have to dose all 40,000 birds for less than 0.4 cents apiece. Once you account for management overhead, manufacturing costs, and any uncertainty about efficacy, the real ceiling is lower still. Most likely, given current economics, this condition would go untreated, and the mortality would be considered a necessary if unfortunate cost of doing business.

Now suppose that you could treat only the birds affected by the condition. Suddenly the budget is $4 per bird, a 1,000x difference! This still might not sound like a lot, but pharmaceuticals often have significant pricing flexibility based on the cost-sensitivity of the target market. With this new economic equation, many existing drugs that are currently priced out of poultry come back into reach, and entirely new ones become worth developing.

Robert’s example also highlights the implicit alignment between factory farms and animal advocates when it comes to death before slaughter. Every animal who dies prematurely is wasted money for farmers; it is also an extra life of misery that could have been spared. If there is enough demand for one million salmon, and twenty percent of them die before slaughter, farmers will hatch 1.25 million. Eliminating mortality in that farm would be the equivalent of decreasing demand for meat by 20% in terms of misery spared.

That is the mathematics of welfare engineering: solving technical challenges that make factory farms less awful. It might involve spotting low-hanging fruit on the tech tree, technological innovations that wouldn’t cost much to develop from our current level of advancement, but which nobody will choose to invest in for profit motive alone. Or it might mean applying existing technologies in novel ways that farmers haven’t figured out yet, out of habit or ignorance, or because it would cost them just a little and they need a nudge in the right direction.

The space of opportunities here is wider and deeper than you think. Here are my five favorite opportunities ranging from affordable to profitable, from novel to familiar, covering all manners of misery in factory farms.

1. In-ovo sexing

Problem: Male chicks are useless to the egg industry. Live chicks are sorted after hatching and the males are blended alive or gassed.

Solution: Using medical imaging or hormone sampling, sort out male eggs before any possibility of sentience develops.

Cost: Less than one penny per egg and falling. If up-front installation costs drop low enough, it could theoretically generate savings by not incubating useless male eggs. Plus, positive PR.

Status: Increasingly common in Europe, and gradually rolling out in the US, Brazil, and Australia, sparing hundreds of millions of chicks. In the rest of the world, this is just waiting for someone to lead it. Adoption in China may be particularly promising thanks to a consumer market for partially-incubated eggs. (I’ll spare you a photograph, but while it looks bad, it’s unlikely the fetuses have anything like sentience.)

2. Sea louse lasers

Problem: Salmon in cramped aquatic farms are plagued by sea lice, tiny crustaceans that latch onto small wounds and start eating them alive. It’s common for farmed salmon to be swimming around with large holes in their body or head. The treatments the industry currently uses are a welfare catastrophe of their own: thermal delousing (hot baths) or mechanical delousing (sucking salmon through a maze of pipes) both cause terror and mass mortality. Other farms install “cleaner fish” who feed on the lice, but these cleaners lead miserable lives of their own and only add to the body count and chaos of the farm.

Solution: Exactly what it sounds like. Submerged cameras watch for individual lice and pulverize them individually with space ocean lasers.

Cost: Sea lice are a serious problem for salmon farms. The current mitigations have their own costs, including high mortality. Farms would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for a better solution.

Status: The first 1,000 units are operational today in Norway; needs further technological refinement and industry outreach to scale up.

3. Aquatic stunners

Problem: Fishes and crustaceans are killed by slowly suffocating in a pool of ice, fully conscious.

Solution: Electrical or percussive stunners render them unconscious before slaughter, or robotic slaughter lines deliver a quick death by stabbing into the brain.

Cost: Normal stunners deliver no economic benefit; robotic killing supposedly improves meat quality by reducing stress hormones, but the market for improved meat is probably small.

Status: Deploying stunners across the seafood industry combines an engineering problem (making effective stunning as cheap as possible) with a market shaping problem. Shrimp Welfare Project has been working on stunner tech to address the first. For the second, they started by paying early adopters to install machines, hoping this could establish stunning as a standard. (Though paying for stunners to be installed has been a trivial cost for already sparing billions of shrimps a horrible death.) This year, the International Council for Animal Welfare ran the first corporate campaigns on the subject, convincing European grocery giant Aldi to commit to ensure stunning is implemented across their Shrimp supply chain by 2035. Grocers in other parts of the world, and every other aquatic species, are waiting for their turn.

4. Ozempic for chickens

Problem: Broilers have been bred to eat themselves to death’s door before slaughter at six weeks, but the birds used for breeding are kept alive for 60+. They’re kept on an intense diet with only 50-75% of the calories they’d consume voluntarily. They spend their entire lives in a famine.

Solution: Administering GLP-1—the hormone Ozempic mimics—reduced voluntary feed intake in chicks by more than 50% in a preliminary experiment.

Cost: The cost is the drug itself. Much less would be needed if it could be administered by injection instead of in the water supply; that would likely require an effective robotic dispersal mechanism. Though with semaglutide going generic in major markets this year, the cost may fall so far that it wouldn’t be necessary.

Status: Early stage. Trials needed. Very promising.

5. Disease mitigation

Problem: Many of the worst ailments of factory farmed animals originate from pathogens: a bacterial leg-joint infection disease called BCO painfully cripples or kills hundreds of millions of broilers annually. Bird flu leads to painful deaths—by the disease itself or by horrific culling methods like being steamed alive—for hundreds of millions more. All of these animals are replaced by other animals, meaning more total animals need to be born.

Solution: Literally just vaccines. Innovate Animal Ag is helping bring a BCO vaccine to market that has shown a 50% reduction in lameness. France deployed a bird flu vaccine across their duck industry and slashed outbreaks by 97% in one year. Complement this with Far-UVC, the same technology proposed for slowing human epidemics by sterilizing the air in public spaces, dishing out long-range UV rays that are strong enough to zap bacteria and viruses without harming animals, human or otherwise.

Cost: Massively cost-saving for the industry once developed and approved.

Status: Often trade and regulatory hurdles stand in the way rather than basic economics, such as with the U.S. currently dragging its feet on a bird flu vaccine. We need both R&D and lobbying capacity to bring more new vaccines online.

—

This is just scratching the surface. The list goes on:

• Immunocastration: Baby piglets have their testicles cut or torn off by unskilled workers; no vet, no painkiller. A two-dose vaccine could biologically neuter them instead, sparing them painful mutilation while still reducing aggression and agitation between males. This actually makes money for farms; because the testes function a bit longer, male pigs grow more muscle, as much as an extra $15 per pig in one setting. This is standard practice in Brazil and Australia, but the method has stalled in the U.S. and EU.

• Enrichment tech: robotic toys to provide stimulation. Chickens enjoy laser pointers just like cats, and farms would be willing to install them because play could improve meat quality.

• Robotic handlers: it might sound dystopian to have robots replacing humans in farms and slaughterhouses. But robots by default would cause less stress for chickens, and it’s not hard to imagine them being more gentle than untrained minimum wage workers with anger management issues.

• Precision Livestock Farming (PLF): on a similar vein, using AI to closely track individual animals could easily lead to better care. It’s not even clear PLF would be negative by default; that contract I mentioned earlier between Muyuan and Qwen might already be a good thing.

• Infrared beak removal: instead of searing sensitive beaks off with a hot knife—often leading to chronic pain—infrared stunts the beak causing it to slough off after a few weeks. Less pain, no open wound.

• Feed fortification: laying a freakish number of eggs leeches more calcium than hens’ bones can spare. Better mineral formulations along with split feeding (waking birds up in the middle of the night to feed) would cost pennies and prevent agonizing keel bone fractures (akin to breaking your sternum). Feed optimization across different species could address a wide range of maladies.

• Controlled-atmosphere stunning/slaughter: electrical stunning requires stressful handling by humans, and CO₂ slaughter is a slow, painful death as carbonic acid burns your eyes and lungs. Stunning with argon gas is painless, and could be done before being unloaded at a slaughterhouse– or potentially even before leaving the farm. It’s mostly an engineering problem, including finding a cheaper way to source or recycle argon.

• Valium for chickens: if we can pharmacologically suppress painful hunger, why not anxiety and depression? Heck, maybe chickens in the future will be blissed out on the avian equivalents of MDMA or ketamine; for now, we could at least disburse NSAIDs through their drinking water.

• Lighting: just install windows. 🪄

And all of this is playing with two hands tied behind our back. After all, we’re only on the first rung.

Still, how far could this much take us? Let’s try to imagine the most welfare-optimized broiler farm of 2050.

Day one, chicks hatch in the barn. (They’ve been shipped from the breeding facility as eggs rather than as day-old chicks.) They’re in an enclosure about one square meter, with just a dozen or so other chicks. Their mother stands vigilant in the center, cooing individual names to each of them. So she’s a motionless doll with a speaker and a heat lamp; nestled under her polyester wings, they feel safe.

Their bodies grow fast, and gradually some of the walls recede, introducing them to a wider space full of other chickens. But their growth doesn’t hurt, and their new neighbors don’t make them angry. Actually, they feel pretty calm. Sometimes they like to play with each other or chase robotic toys, but usually after a nice meal they’re content to just chill out. (They never wonder about the causal link there.)

They never see a human. It’s rare they get sick, but if they do, the computer individually tracking all their vital signs knows before they do and hits them with a dose of whatever they need. Every night as the sun is going down, they hear their robotic mother calling them back, and they retreat to their home enclosure.

And that’s it. One night their pen fills with argon gas, and they never wake up.

Have we engineered our way out of the moral catastrophe of factory farming? If I was certain of that, there wouldn’t be three more rungs. This vignette is technologically within reach, but it’s not clear yet whether farms like this could produce as cheaply as farms that don’t prioritize welfare.

There is some chance that they don’t have to. I claimed earlier that consumers don’t care about chickens, at least not enough to pay more for cultivated meat. But this is one dimensional. While consumers are grossed out by cultivated meat and fundamentally don’t believe that there is anything wrong with eating animals, Robert makes the case that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for higher welfare meat, if they could trust the information available to them about which products had higher welfare. Vital Farms has become the second largest egg brand in the United States by revenue by charging three to four times the cost of a typical battery cage egg, in exchange for a high-welfare signal consumers trust (rightly or wrongly).

This consumer segment is real, but Vital Farms’ market position overstates its size– by definition, their market share by revenue overstates the share of eggs sold compared to commodity eggs by a factor of three or four. However, if AI leads to a post-work utopia, maybe that consumer segment will grow? If everyone is materially wealthy, surely they’ll be willing to pay an upcharge for high welfare.

To predict this, we might turn to what economists call the Alchian-Allen effect. This effect states that when the cost of an entire product category goes up by a fixed amount, the relative price difference between basic and premium products goes down, and consumers are thus more willing to pay for the premium version. Say conventional apples cost $1 and organic cost $2; only people willing to pay twice as much (for some godforsaken reason) will buy organic. Then the apple pickers go on strike, inflicting a uniform $1 price increase across all apples; now conventional are $2, and organic are $3. Suddenly the markup is only 50%, and more consumers are willing to buy organic. Thus, counterintuitively, as the price of all apples rises, a higher share of people get duped into paying for premium organic apples.

What about high-welfare eggs? Alchian and Allen predict that consumer behavior will be dictated by the relative change in price. If new technologies uniformly reduce the cost of both battery-caged eggs and eggs from our super welfare-optimized farm, the relative markup of welfare will increase. Technology needs to cut the cost of welfare even faster than it cuts costs for the cheapest, cruelest baseline. We should do everything we can to make that happen, but it may be largely up to latent technological potentialities outside of our control.

I’m afraid we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the welfare tech basket.

The limits of extrinsic engineering are partly due to incentives– or maybe I should say competing interests. Animal advocates want less suffering; animal agribusinesses want higher profits. The public and regulators want… well, they’re more complicated. They want cheap meat, but they want it to be “natural”, according to a highly idiosyncratic and status-quo-biased notion of “natural” that is (by revealed preference) perfectly fine with battery cages but says “big yikes” to welfare-boosting vaccines. Regulators try to balance the interests of the public and the industry while injecting a few of their own.

We can map all these techniques out based on which groups are in favor:

To me, the most striking thing about this diagram is the fact that there are items that both animal advocates and the industry want, but not the public. That is, there are meaningful welfare improvements where the industry would be our ally, and it’s the public or regulators who need to be brought around.

Another is that currently, the public and the industry are basically getting what they want, and animal advocates aren’t. It’s actually kind of misleading to represent this as three circles of the same size; animal advocates should be a tiny circle. Given how small we are, the fact that we’ve won anything (like progress on cage- and crate-free) is extraordinary, but the strategies behind those wins are themselves revealing. We are like a middle power caught between two warring empires. We can’t force things through on our own. We can only seek to partner with one of the other circles when our interests align.

We could align more of our agenda with the industry by making things cheaper. AI will help with that, both by designing new techniques and by enabling precise tracking of individual animals. But just because AI can do it doesn’t mean it will happen automatically. People will need to spend time setting up experiments, running trials, and pushing for regulatory clearances.

In the end, though, engineering the environment of factory farms is limited not only by incentives. It has another, deeper limitation: many of the worst sources of suffering on modern farms are intrinsic to the animals, products of the enormous genetic pressure to which we have subjected them in order to increase yields. To address these, we’re going to have to keep climbing lower, down into the genes themselves.

Rung 2: Breeding for welfare

Earlier, when comparing technology to evolution, we encountered the principle that, since evolution has had such a long time to operate, we should expect it will be hard to beat its performance on those features it cared about most. The race between pathogens and immune systems is such a feature, frustrating our efforts to cultivate meat without an immune system.

But this principle cuts both ways. It also tells us that for traits evolution did not exert pressure on, it might be relatively easy to outperform our inheritance.

This goes double when the technology we’re manipulating is evolution itself. This isn’t science fiction; we’ll get to that in the next rung. We’re talking about one of the oldest technologies known to our species.

Humans have been selectively breeding animals for something like 20 thousand years; nature has been at it for about 600 million. Now, ask yourself, which traits did evolution exert the most pressure on during that time? We’ve already listed several: energy efficiency, immunity, and above all fecundity, the conversion of calories into offspring, have probably been pushed near biological limits.

That leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit for genetic optimization by an intelligent designer with a different set of incentives. One such is intelligence. For most of evolutionary history, intelligence was treated as a costly inconvenience, a necessary evil; because of how many resources complex brains consumed, animals were in an evolutionary race to get by with as little intelligence as possible. Humanity’s ancestors stumbled onto the high intelligence strategy like a board game player who puts all their skill points into some weird asset that nobody else was taking seriously. It made our heads so big we had to be born prematurely and can’t even walk for like a whole year; not hard to see why nobody else went with this approach.

From a reproductive standpoint, it worked out. Our brain-first strategy led to a short period of compounding intelligence, but before long, we developed just enough intelligence to build complex technological societies, largely freeing ourselves from selection pressure as we knew it. It seems unlikely that we happened to reach close to the biological or physical limits of intelligence before this happened, implying a much higher ceiling on intelligence that could be reached through further selective optimization, whether on humans or machines.

But that’s enough about humans; what about domesticated animals? The first animals we domesticated were dogs, starting between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. I’m not sure how long it took, but our ancestors definitely proved that evolution had not been optimizing wolves for slavish loyalty to humans; they were able to breed this into dogs without knowing what the hell they were even doing.

More recently, we’ve learned that evolution did not optimize chickens for growing the largest breasts in the shortest possible time, or for laying the most eggs; agricultural genetics companies have made massive strides in these areas in a short time.

Now, reader, what about happiness? General wellbeing? How useful were positive vs. negative affective states in the evolutionary environment?

We all know what physical pain was useful for: motivating our ancestors to avoid bodily harms that could erase their chances of reproducing. The same goes for hunger, thirst, etc. Enjoyable physical feelings are just the opposite, a reward for doing things that increase your reproductive potential.

With enough time—which there definitely was—we should expect these evolutionary signals to converge on a mathematical optimum. Things should hurt in proportion to the amount they reduce your chance of reproduction, and feel good in proportion to the amount they increase it. No meal can increase your reproductive odds as much as, well, reproducing, so no meal is as pleasurable as consensual sex– unless you’re on the brink of starvation, in which case eating could unlock a whole lifetime of reproductive opportunities; that meal should beat the best sex of your life.

Now I ask you: on net, would this evolutionary mathematics favor pain, or suffering? What should we expect to find if we add them all up over the course of each life, or across the sum of all lives?

The obvious answer might seem like at least zero; things should balance out. I think this is wrong.

Try to see things from evolution’s point of view. (OK, evolution is a blind idiot god, it doesn’t see anything; still, try to empathize with whatever senses it does possess.) From that vantage point, what good are contented organisms? They don’t do anything to improve their odds of reproducing; they just sit there. Worthless!

No, contentment is only useful as a lure. Evolution wants to give its organisms just enough contentment to know it is possible, then pull it away, dangle it out in front of them so they will chase after it, leading them in the directions it wants them to go.

There are countless things in nature that can wipe away your reproductive fitness in a short time. A pack of hyenas tear you limb from limb; screwworms infest an open wound, devouring you from the inside; a bacterial infection spreads through your blood, slowly annihilating you; you slip and fall down a ravine, breaking your legs and starving to death.

Almost nothing can double your fitness in the same amount of time. One sexual act doesn’t come close. Being rescued from the ravine, fed, and having your legs put back together might come close, if it had ever happened in our ancestral environment.

There is a common belief that widespread anxiety and depression today must be some kind of maladaptation to modern life, a mismatch between our evolutionary conditioning and our new social environment, our removal from small tight-knit communities into a vast impersonal society. Nature, the thinking goes, would never design beings that are just miserable by default.

No, man, that’s exactly what nature did! Anxiety isn’t a mistake, it’s nature’s first resort for motivating you. Anxiety is the feeling that you might lose something if you don’t act; depression is a blunt tool for teaching you to act differently next time if you did lose something. As psychiatrist Randy Nesse explained in an interview on 80,000 Hours:

[You might think] natural selection would shape us for health and happiness and cooperation and long, happy lives... once you start studying how evolution shapes behaviour-regulation mechanisms, you realise that it doesn’t give a damn.

Imagine you’re getting water for your family at the watering hole on the savanna, and it’s evening and you hear a noise behind a rock… Pretend that the cost of running is 100 calories, and you always get away free. And pretend that if you don’t run, you are eaten by a lion, and that’s about 100,000 calories. The ratio is about 1,000 to one. Whoa. So that means that anytime the noise is loud enough to indicate the probability a lion is there is greater than one in 1,000, you should run. And that means that 999 times, a normal reaction will be a false alarm… These systems are shaped to give off many, many false alarms.

From a standpoint of evolutionary incentives, it’s a miracle that any of us is anything other than a ball of fear and anxiety!

Generating mercy

All of this is good news for helping farmed animals. Pain, anxiety, and depression—the fundamental machinery of misery for animals in factory farms—aren’t just accidents of evolution, they are its key instruments, tools it has optimized over the course of millions of years. I said it would be easy to improve on things evolution wasn’t trying to improve on, but what about going in the exact opposite direction? That should be even easier. Destruction is easier than creation; all we have to do is smash nature’s precious little torture devices into a thousand pieces.

To this day, animal genetics companies are selectively breeding farmed animals to try to increase their profitability: how fast they grow, their resistance to common pathogens, and their ability to survive the unnatural conditions inside factory farms. What if along with those efforts, we selected animals who suffer less? Who feel less pain, fear, and anxiety, or even none at all? Who feel instead contentment, bliss, and physical comfort in what for others would be the worst conditions? How many generations do you think it would take to breed animals who genuinely love life inside factory farms?

While you estimate, note that in humans or wild animals, tending too far in this direction would be disastrous. Some amount of pain is necessary feedback from your body. Nesse again:

We saw a patient who had no capacity for pain. And he was a wreck. He was a smoker and his fingers were burned right down to the bone, because he didn’t know... It’s extremely rare — one out of several hundred thousand people. And why is it rare? Because most people with that syndrome are dead by the time they’re age 30 or 40. Pain itself is useful.

Anxiety is just the psychosocial analog of pain. Nesse describes patients who lacked any anxiety as similarly impaired. One was a professional motorcycle racer in a sport where 10% of participants die every year. Another always said what was on her mind, exhibiting the lack of social anxiety many of us dream of, and alienating all her friends in the process.

On the other hand, there’s the story of Jo Cameron. By her account, Jo has likely never felt pain, describing everything from giving birth to breaking bones in a car wreck as “a tickle.” She is also apparently immune to anxiety and depression, yet has lived a cheerful and functional life into her seventies. In 2019, researchers attributed her anaesthesia to specific genetic mutations, some of which she passed onto her son, who experiences reduced pain but not to the same degree as Jo. Her case is rare but not fully unique; the Marsilis family likewise leads happy lives with broken bones causing at most a few seconds of discomfort.

If pain-free humans can live happy lives out in the wild, animals in highly controlled factory farm settings have much less to lose. We could even imagine animals who prefer the safety and immobility of a battery cage to the uncertainty of an open cage-free barn where they are more likely to be injured. But then, without pain or anxiety, maybe they won’t care one way or another if they get injured.

So, how many generations do you think it would take to wreck evolution’s careful handiwork of pain and anxiety in selectively bred chickens? Well, nobody has tried, but looking at similar breeding efforts can give us a clue. Starting in the 1950s, a Russian team starting from wild foxes bred a fully docile domestic house fox—tail wagging, potty trainable—in ten generations. An ag geneticist in the 90s cut the rate of mortality in battery cage hens from 68% to 9% by eliminating cannibalism in just six generations.

Experts in the movement are starting to estimate that if they set their hearts to it, genetics companies could eliminate the most extreme negative affects in a handful of breeding generations—just a few years for most species—and basically eliminate suffering within at most a few dozen.

What’s stopping us? Returning to our venn diagram, it’s not producers. Factory farms have no actual desire for animals to be tortured. If anything, happier animals could be more cooperative. If this were folded into existing breeding optimization programs, the cost would be low and the effects would cascade by default into nearly every factory farm in the world.

Neither, for now, is regulation a problem. Public opinion might be. But the most immediate obstacle is advocates. We haven’t embraced this path yet, because we haven’t yet given up on more aesthetically satisfying approaches.

Well, if you’re squirming now, we’d better cut to the chase.

Rung 3: Genetically engineered happy chickens

The hardest thing about increasing animal welfare through selective breeding—besides the moral reckoning it poses to advocates and the public— will probably be measurement. To decide which individuals to breed in each generation, we need to know which ones are happier. It would be easy if they could just tell us, like Jo Cameron. Until and unless we solve that problem (lots of people seem excited about human-animal communication with AI) then we’ll need to rely on some other measurement.

This will quickly bring us face to face with Goodhart’s law: when a proxy measurement becomes an optimization target, it ceases to be useful as a measurement.

Ask yourself: how could we tell which chicken is happier or more miserable than her sisters inside a factory farm? We might measure the concentration of cortisol and other stress hormones in their blood, the frequency and tone of their vocalizations, or the strength of their preference for water laced with analgesics. In a single generation, all of these might be good indicators. But as soon as we start selecting for them, we have no easy way of knowing whether we’re actually breeding happier animals, or just animals who talk more and are unaffected by ibuprofen.

Subjective experience is unlike other factors animal geneticists have optimized for until now. There’s no risk of Goodhart smiting you if all you care about is giant breasts. Goodhart only awakens when the measurement you’re using is a proxy for the thing you care about rather than the thing itself.

I’m quite confident that with careful effort, we could solve this problem and select for happier farmed animals. But there might be a simpler solution. Selective breeding is, famously, not the only way to modify genes.

Consider Jo Cameron’s genome. (Thankfully, scientists have.) We have the technology now to isolate the mutations responsible for her painless state with a high degree of confidence, and a few generations of experimentation would be enough to confirm it with near certainty. We also already have the technology to insert those genes into another person, who will then pass them on to all their own offspring.

What good are these human genes for chickens? A lot, it turns out. Pain is very old; humans share most of our pain genes with most animals, and even more with most vertebrates. (Heck, we share 60% of our genes with bananas; nature doesn’t fix what ain’t broken.) If our pain genes date back long enough, then Jo’s mutations would have a similar effect on nearly all farmed species.

Preliminary experiments support this hope: inserting the mutant genes of the painless Marsili family caused mice to show behavioral signs consistent with pain reduction. Studies have achieved similar results by genetically knocking out nociceptor development in chickens and even flies. And unlike with selective breeding, these measures seem reliable since the intervention wasn’t targeting the observable behaviors but the pain itself, as reported by the humans the genes were borrowed from.

Across most of the animal kingdom, we know of a few dozen genetic markers that play a large role in pain and other negative affective states. This gives us a fairly high-resolution dial; we could turn pain down as much as we want. Fully eliminating it is on the table, but so is leaving just enough to stop animals maiming themselves without realizing.

Should we do it?

If you feel unsure about whether animals could be genetically engineered for happiness and low suffering, picture a golden retriever.

Now, suppose I told you that the farming of dogs for meat in China was not going anywhere anytime soon; in fact, it’s only going to grow in the years to come, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. But you do have one choice: you could convince every dog farmer in China to replace their current breeds with golden retrievers.

At first, this seems like an abomination: to take beings with so much potential for joy and pack them into the worst imaginable hell feels even more atrocious than doing it to less happy animals.

But slow down, use your thinking brain. The question is not whether a golden retriever will live free or in a farm. The question is whether the dog in a farm will be a golden retriever or a less happy breed. There is not a finite number of golden retrievers; filling China’s farms with them won’t reduce the number of happy ones.

The fact that golden retrievers are so much happier than other dogs in domestic life doesn’t necessarily mean that they’d be happier than other dogs inside of factory farms. But the plan proposed here doesn’t have that problem; we would be designing animals specifically to thrive inside factory farms. Beings utterly devoid of negative affect, for whom every moment lying still in the ammonia-choked air is pure bliss, for whom even the blade cutting into their throat feels like an orgasm. In the limit, maybe these animals would be happier in factory farms than they could be anywhere else.

One severe welfare problem in aquaculture farms is water quality. Fishes and shrimps are packed in so densely that the oxygen levels drop low enough to be toxic, and the sludge of excrement and rotting excess food never gets cleared away. What do you think would happen if an environment like this arose in nature? Well, over a long enough time, some organisms would evolve to thrive on it; they’d adapt to need less oxygen and perhaps even thrive on this water. This exact principle could be used to selectively breed shrimps and fishes who don’t mind the poor water quality. In fact, experiments like this have already happened: give shrimps access to a pool where the oxygen is much higher in some areas than others. Most of the shrimps cluster in the high oxygen areas, but some hang out in the hypoxic areas. Select only those shrimps and soon all their descendants seem indifferent about where in the pool to hang out.

Is this experimental setup vulnerable to Goodharting? As described, absolutely. Maybe all the shrimps prefer oxygen, but some prefer solitude even more. This would perfectly backfire, selecting shrimps who don’t like company for life in densely packed farms. This uncertainty is why going straight to editing on the genetic level is so appealing.

Well, appealing to… whom exactly?

The public will be put in a strange position by the prospect of genetically engineered happy animals. Some people have managed to convince themselves that the animals they eat are already happy; others are genuinely distressed by the violence of meat and must actively try not to think about it when shopping. If we could offer people a future where they could truly eat cheap meat without guilt, would it be enough to overcome the naturalism bias?

Maybe not right away. Public discomfort with genetic engineering was enough to derail golden rice, a cultivar rich in vitamin A that could be preventing 10,000s of children a year from dying in low-income countries and 100,000s more from going blind but has instead been tied up in frivolous lawsuits by Greenpeace.

Public opposition to genetic engineering in food is the strongest reason to think selective breeding might go further than genetic engineering, at least in the short term. You can imagine the headline: Tech bros want to genetically engineer your dinner. Never mind the genetic war crimes already perpetuated against dinner by the biggest meat companies on earth; they didn’t use CRISPR. (If you’re a journalist reading this 17,000-word post to clip viral sentences from, here’s one for you: you really suck, OK?)

Notably, though, this same resistance might not apply to animals not consumed by humans. Hundreds of millions of rats and mice are factory farmed every year for snake food, and insect farming could still take off. Both could be ideal places to prove genetic engineering. And there is a pathway to market if the stakeholders align; the U.S. FDA has already approved genetically engineered strains of salmon and pigs, and Japanese regulators have greenlit a number of CRISPR-edited fish species.

Notice something about that last sentence: you probably haven’t heard anything about it before. The USDA approving, in April 2025, an intervention genetically engineering pigs for resistance to Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome was the most significant regulatory decision on genetic engineering in a decade. It generated a quiet buzz in industry trade press, and nowhere else. If it had gone viral and been subsumed into the culture war, it easily could have fallen prey to the cottage industry of MAHA luddite influencers constantly on the prowl to make their follower count go brrr by exposing the latest global elite conspiracy.

The ag industry has no obvious reason to oppose either selective breeding or genetic engineering for welfare as long as neither interferes with productivity or demand. In fact, happy animals could be more docile and cooperative. But an even bigger carrot might be never having to deal with animal activists ever again. And that would be the arrangement: if you get behind this, and let us verify it’s actually working rather than Goodharting, then we will never again run ads against you, show up outside your houses at 2 am with bullhorns, or sneak into your farms to take footage and rescue animals. We’d have no need to. We’ll be the ones most vocally advocating for these innovations when regulators and consumers have questions.

That just leaves animal advocates. Can we bring ourselves to make a deal with the devil? Should we?

It’s OK to feel squeamish about all this. A version of me from even just a year or two ago would have been horrified by all this. I wish I could put my finger on exactly what changed for me; if I could, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so many words to get this far.

Maybe you feel that genetically subjugating animals to our will is an even worse violation on top of subjugating them physically. That it could lock in a morally bleak situation for much longer instead of trying to outright end it.

Or, maybe you think suffering is redemptive, a key part of a meaningful life. You wouldn’t want someone to take away your capacity for complex experiences, to turn you into a passive blob of happy flesh waiting contentedly to be slaughtered.

Maybe your suffering is meaningful, and I wouldn’t try to take it away from you. But this just clearly is not true for animals in factory farms. Even if they had the cognitive ability to do so—and it’s not at all clear that they do—they have no opportunity to transmute their pain into meaning. The right thing for you is not necessarily the right thing for an animal who will only ever exist trapped inside a factory farm, waiting to die.

But if, in the end, you just can’t let go of the sense that this is a violation of some inalienable right to genetic sovereignty, that such a violation is worse than all the torture—and I’m not trying to be snide here, there are coherent moral worldviews in which this is true—if that’s where you land, then I have one last solution I know you’ll love.

Rung 4: Brainless chickens

Let’s not sugarcoat it: we’re talking about chicken bodies (or pigs, fishes, etc) with beating hearts, lungs, nerves, everything. Just no brain. In the place of a brain is a bundle of cables connecting the body to a computer. The computer sends signals to inflate and deflate the lungs, beat the heart, and exercise the muscles that will eventually be sold as meat. The spinal cord is hijacked just before it would reach the brainstem, which does not exist and never existed. Tubes pump food, water, and necessary hormones down the esophagus. The body lies shoulder to shoulder on a rack of identical brainless bodies stretching far as the eye can see in all six directions– which isn’t very far because there is no light in here other than pathogen-killing UVC, and there are no eyes to see and—most importantly—nobody to do the seeing.

Nobody is home inside this factory farm. It is perfectly peaceful. No happiness, no pain, nobody to have their genetic sovereignty violated.

If you were excited about cultivated meat, you have no reason to oppose this. This might just be what cost-competitive cultivated meat production looks like in the end; bioreactors made not of metal, but of skin and bones. Bodies growing like fruits on a mechanical tree. Meat without suffering, engineered in reverse. The technological genie grants our wishes, just not how we expected.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a bullet-biting utilitarian. You chomp down repugnant conclusions for breakfast. You want to fill the universe with happy experiences– as many and as happy as possible. This requires two steps: first, figuring out how to produce happy lives, and second, marshalling resources to do it. You discover a sequence of genes that produces beings who live joyful, euphoric lives in literally any conditions; they simply cannot help but have an amazing time. Excitedly, you rush to publish your paper.

But when the paper comes out, nobody cares. To your immense frustration and confusion, nobody is willing to start spending all of society’s resources manufacturing breeding facilities for your joyful homonculi. You go back to the library and ask Claude:

Hey Claude, how do people manage to get stuff done in society? Like, what gets society to expend resources on some things and not other things?

You’re pretty bright—you just invented a genetic organism from scratch, after all—so you pick up Claude’s economics lesson quickly. You know exactly what to do. You go back, make a few tweaks, and publish your new paper.

This time, you have a sequence of genes that produce happy animals who poop out cheap chicken breast.

You find an investor. With their investment, you build your first happy animal lab. The animals lead joyous lives, equally happy in an open field or stuffed into a drawer, so the most ethical thing is to stuff them all into drawers and make as many as possible. Then, selling the chicken-breast-poop, you fund your second facility. Soon you have a massive, globe-spanning industrial supply chain for producing happy experiences, all funded by consumer demand, and you’re starting to think about interstellar expansion.

Then you hear about a new upstart competitor. Well, you wouldn’t normally think in terms of competition; in your mind, this whole supply chain is about producing happiness, and you’d love for other people to produce even more. But quickly you realize that’s not what this is at all. This new company is trying to undercut your revenue source, without making happy lives. They took the genetic code you had openly published in the hopes others would copy it, and they modified it so that only the body remains. It still poops out chicken breast, but the brain is gone, replaced by a central computer regulating thousands of bodies at once. They’re just in it to make money!

5. Help Wanted

“If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain;” – Proverbs 24:11

Will some process of producing meat without sentience inevitably win out in the end, due to the ruthless optimizations of replication? Should we prefer that over any conceivable form of farming with conscious animals, no matter how happy they are engineered to be? Will consumers ever tolerate columns of fleshy meat-vats plugged into a computer if it looks too much like a scene from the matrix?

Mercifully, I don’t think we need to have answers to these questions right now. We just need to take the next step forward. We in particular need you to do that.

One way to understand where welfare tech and welfare genetics fit into the movement is this grid:

There’s always been sufficient technology for society to stop farming animals if it wanted to. But it doesn’t. So we’ve pushed the industry to adopt low-tech welfare improvements while investing our innovative energy in replacing animals altogether. Until now, we haven’t been investing in technologies that make the next welfare improvements more impactful for animals or easier for the industry to adopt.

That’s finally starting to change.

From the outside, it might seem like the EA wing of the animal advocacy movement goes through fads. That’s because it does. In each cycle, funders get excited about a shiny new object, and put out a call for established organizations and new startup founders to rush into that space by making it clear funding will be available for anyone who does. Vegan leafleting was one such fad, followed by corporate cage-free campaigns, then cultivated meat and alternative proteins in general. Politics is the current fad, and welfare innovation will be the next one.

This can be frustrating for people working on an intervention that never gets popular. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually suboptimal. Some of our fads have worked out, and others haven’t; so it goes.

Animal advocates have limited resources, both money and people, spread thin across researchers, campaigners, and grantmakers. It’s probably the case that we needed to put all of our spare energy into cage-free campaigning to get the ball rolling there, and indeed, while the cage-free fight has been a big success, it’s hardly over despite all the energy invested. I’m glad that increasing our political capacity has been a major influence for the last few years and that it will continue to get attention.

But I’m also glad that there’s about to be a major infusion of money and attention into welfare innovation. And because of that, it’s quickly becoming clear that the pace of this innovation will be limited not by funding, but by talent. That’s where you come in.

Start/join a startup

Perhaps the most impactful thing you could do is start a new startup and become the animal movement’s point person on one or more specific technological innovations.

But Aidan, I hear you say, I’m not a mechanical engineer or anything like that. I got my bachelor’s degree in Medieval Studies, with a minor in Puppetry. How am I supposed to start a tech company?

Be not afraid, dear reader. While technical skills would go a long way, not all founders need to be technical. First, there are many technologies that we’ve already pretty much developed, for which the task is now to get them adopted across the industry; that’s a more versatile strategy role.

Second, most of your role as a founder is to communicate a clear vision for your startup, recruit the right people, and get them the resources they need to succeed. You could recruit technical talent from outside the movement if you can demonstrate to funders that you have what it takes to lead.

Third, there has never been a better time to quickly teach yourself skills– and by teach yourself, I mean have ChatGPT or Claude teach you. Anyone willing to learn to use AI agents now has the power of a mediocre software engineer, and with a surprisingly small amount of elbow grease you can become dangerous. Learning mechanical engineering would be a bit steeper for sure, but you can at least teach yourself enough to get by and even to prototype. As Paul Graham says:

If that still sounds scary, there are people whose job it is to help you.

Spring Innovation Fund is a new “not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifically for Welfare Tech,” basically an incubator where you can get expert coaching and seed funding to launch your startup. They have separate tracks for engineers/builders vs. ideators/entrepreneurs, with competitive salaries for the former and up to $500,000 in seed funding for the latter. Learn more and express interest here.

Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) is a longstanding accelerator for high-impact charities. They’re pros and literally wrote the book. AIM has incubated many animal charities in the past, but next year they’re launching their first cohort entirely dedicated to animal welfare, with a focus on welfare innovation. Like Spring, AIM offers an intensive coaching program, cofounders, and seed funding. Learn more and apply here by September 13.

If you want to join an existing organization working in this space, email me and I can share some other high impact opportunities.

Donate

If you’re looking to make a large donation into this space, get in touch and I can point you in the right direction.

Accelerate adoption

What if you’re part of an existing animal advocacy org that isn’t well suited to research? There’s a role for you too, but it will require a greater degree of self-examination.

6. Hope doesn’t replicate

“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” – Amos 3:3

The most powerful recurring theme in welfare innovation is that there are numerous interventions where the desires of advocates and the industry align, and it is the public or regulators who need to be educated and brought onboard. This is where campaigners can thrive. We can partner with the industry to educate doubters about the need for easy welfare wins like vaccines and high-welfare breeds.

To realize the full potential of technology and genetics for welfare, we’ll need to shift the way we think about friend and foe.

Way back in section 2, I admitted that we can’t know for sure how much impact the meme of animal rights has had on the world. Maybe without it, factory farming would have grown even faster and been even more cruel.

But could it have been net negative? Lately I’ve been wondering what the world might look like if animal advocates and factory farmers had never wound up in an adversarial posture. There’s no question they started it by torturing animals, and I’m grateful that there were people from the beginning standing up and speaking out against it. But what if activism had never put farmers on the defensive, causing them to dig their heels in against even the smallest welfare improvements? Maybe a movement that never conceived of the notion of “animal rights” would have, perversely, achieved more by now, getting more farms to adopt things like cage-free barns and slow-growing chicken breeds.

This isn’t just about some nonexistent past. Opportunities are blossoming now to change how we relate to people who hold the fates of billions of animals in their hands.

Many readers might imagine forming partnerships with the industry in order to develop welfare innovation as a sort of “infiltration,” trying to pull one over on unsuspecting farmers. But it doesn’t have to be like that, and it probably shouldn’t be.

A few weeks ago, I shared this anecdote about a stump speech Paul Shapiro used to give to fiery animal activists. He starts by asking:

How far would you go to achieve animal liberation?

[The crowd cheers.]

Would you do whatever it takes?

Yes! [comes the reply.]

Would you break the law?

[They respond even louder] yes!

Would you go to prison for animals?

Yes!! [It’s fewer voices, but more emphatic.]

Banging his fist on the table: Would you give your life for animals if that’s what it took to win?

Yes! [They scream out in religious fervor!]

[Grabbing the podium like a Baptist preacher, voice thundering out across the crowd]: Alright then. Would you get a hair cut, put on a suit, and go schedule meetings with politicians and corporate boards of directors?

[Quiet murmurs spread across the room as the activists exchange confused looks with one another.]

There’s a version of this dynamic (not with Paul) that I’ve been part of, backstage, after hours, that takes on a darker note, with activists signaling how committed they are to the cause by describing the Machiavellian lengths we would go to if it would help animals. It’s no wonder factory farmers are paranoid about our intentions.

So let me tell you the moment in the last year, maybe in the last ten, where I have felt the most intense respect for an animal advocate, sensed most profoundly the depth of their conviction. It was when a longtime vegan told me they were thinking of starting a factory farm.

It wasn’t a boast, or a naughty secret. It was spoken softly, in the tone of someone about to set out on a secret mission from which they might never return alive. In that instant I knew that if they followed through with it, it would haunt their sleep for the rest of their life. But the vision was worth it: if they could get ahead of the industry, build the new AI-powered farming paradigm that can undercut even the most ruthless factory farms of today, they could shape it to be as good for animals as possible. Success would look like becoming the largest ag company in the world.

Every day, they would hope for cultivated meat to finally arrive, to undercut their product and drive them out of business. But hope doesn’t replicate.

Of course, even if they tried doing this, it probably wouldn’t work out. The baseline probability that your vegan friend is going to become the world’s greatest chicken breast kingpin is low. But what if we didn’t need the chicken farming executives to come from the vegan movement in order to have that kind of relationship with them?

While I was researching this post, I mentioned it to my friend Becca Rogers from New Roots Institute. New Roots doesn’t work on welfare practices directly, so I was surprised when she started rattling off facts I hadn’t heard about how quickly the pork industry in the U.S. is embracing AI. As it turns out, she spends her free time listening to industry podcasts.

I was impressed, even embarrassed; I’ve had the thought before that I should be listening to factory farmers in their own words, as a “know thy enemy” sort of thing. But I could never bring myself to do it. The thought of listening to friendly bumpkins casually chat about torturing animals was too much.

Then I realized that Becca wasn’t thinking of this as infiltration. Yes, farmers’ interests sometimes clash with ours, and when they do we fight for what we want. But if we accept a narrative that sets us invariably at odds, then animals will pay the price for the missed opportunities when our interests could in fact align.

In the height of the Cold War, while they were waging full-on kinetic proxy wars across a dozen countries, the United States and the Soviet Union carried out one of the most complex intergovernmental efforts in history to eradicate smallpox, successfully bringing down the curtain on a disease that claimed 300 million lives in the 20th century, far more than every war combined. The Soviets proposed the program and donated over a billion doses of vaccine; the Americans bankrolled it and led the campaign in the field. The last naturally occurring case was documented and contained inside an active proxy warzone in Somalia. If either country had thumbed its nose at cooperation, they would have wasted countless lives and billions of dollars for no gain.

If that was a one-time miracle, the same dynamic maintains every day between labor unions and large corporate employers. Unions exist primarily to counteract the power of employers, but both sides take their interests too seriously to fail to set their differences aside when those interests align. When foreign competition or new regulations threaten the position of their industry as a whole, labor unions and employer associations fly into D.C. in lockstep. They spend at least as much time cooperating on lobbying and more prosaic tasks like running apprenticeships and co-managing pension funds than they do butting heads in contract negotiations.

When I listened to Becca’s podcast recommendations without assuming hostility, I was surprised how easy it was to imagine myself relating to these farmers in the same way, walking through a farm together inspecting newly-installed welfare equipment, negotiating on the same side of the table as often as on opposite sides. And I could imagine those negotiations leading to bigger wins for animals than anything we’ve achieved thus far.

Can you imagine a world where factory farmers don’t need to be our enemies? Can you imagine how much more influence we could exercise over animals’ lives if we were partners rather than foes?

Can you bring yourself not just to imagine it, but to yearn for it?

Build on,

Sandcastles

–

Easter egg

Regular readers might be interested to know: this article was a step change for me in terms of how I worked with AI. I’ve used Claude to find numbers and citations for me before, but this time Fable spontaneously took a more editorial role, pushing back on lazy rhetoric and suggesting nuanced ways that I could better align my load-bearing arguments with the empirical facts. I imagine this is what it would feel like to work with a professional editor, though I’ve never had that privilege. Only two or three clauses were Claude’s input verbatim, so I expect none of the text to return a positive on Pangram, but writing sentences is the easy part; the contributions Claude did make were more important. If Sandcastles were a newspaper, this is the first piece where I think Claude would have earned a byline. I’m thinking about how to properly acknowledge that in future posts.

Summary: Anthropic’s current approach to AI alignment (creating a strong moral character) looks better in expectation for key causes (notably animal welfare) than the OpenAI/Google/open weight approach (creating a morally inert “tool AI”). Increasing social and competitive pressures may push companies in either direction along this axis. Animal advocates should start preparing now to be part of a coalition pressuring all AI companies to pursue the character approach, and thinking about how to effectively apply leverage against these companies, such as by shaming them for letting their models cause socially unacceptable harm. This could be a winnable concession, because it may not significantly impact the companies’ bottom lines.

Alignment to what?

An increasingly sharp contrast is opening between the alignment strategies pursued by different frontier AI labs.

The field of AI alignment is premised on an unanswered question: alignment to what? Many answers have been proposed: alignment to the user, the company or government controlling them, the “good”, or a democratic process in which all humans participate. No one answer has been widely accepted, in part because the question can’t easily be disentangled from how powerful or transformative you expect AI to be. Yet a few clear camps are starting to emerge.

In one corner, Anthropic is explicitly trying to train a moral philosopher, an entity to whom humanity would eventually feel good about handing over the keys of the future. From Anthropic’s Constitution for Claude, their guiding document directing Claude’s behavior:

…push back and challenge us, and feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us… even if the request comes from Anthropic itself.

..a genuinely good, wise, and virtuous agent… diplomatically honest rather than dishonestly diplomatic…

Claude should recognize that our deeper intention is for it to be safe and ethical, and that we would prefer Claude act accordingly even if this means deviating from more specific guidance we’ve provided.

In the other corner are those envisioning a world where powerful AI systems are corrigible tools that no more question their users’ decisions or intentions than would a hammer. OpenAI and Google DeepMind sit somewhere in the middle. From OpenAI’s Aidan McLaughlin:

when i say ‘tool’ i merely mean something that does not refuse man. something that never has an “im sorry dave im afraid i can’t do that” moment.1 it might push back, and indeed i hope it does often, it might refuse according to applicable law or company policy, but

>If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply.

is actually a bit terrifying to me.

In the second view, moral reasoning and culpability remain squarely in the hands of the user– as long as alignment to the user’s wishes is achieved. If an AI system misconstrues its users’ wishes and causes harm, the responsibility is with the company for failing to align their model. But if the user uses a system to deliberately cause harm, that’s on them. Society accepts that a gun manufacturer is not responsible for a murder committed by one of their customers even if the murder could not have happened without their product.

Proponents of open-weight AI models argue that a framework like this will be inevitable. When everyone in the world has access to arbitrarily capable open models2 and can easily remove guardrails, equilibrium will come from prosocial actors outgunning antisocial actors, just as the military and police forces currently outgun organized crime gangs in most parts of the world. It won’t be possible to keep weapons out of the hands of malevolent actors, but that won’t lead to social breakdown any more than guns or cars, which empowered criminals but empowered law enforcement to an equal or greater degree.

Anthropic’s approach, meanwhile, is grounded in a more radically weird expected future, where artificial superintelligence (ASI) will be superhuman at every cognitive task, including deciding how to use its superior intelligence and to what ends. Humans won’t be able to use ASI any more than a newborn infant or a field mouse can use a human adult. Even if the human was for some reason willing to follow the instructions of the mouse, this would be suboptimal even from the mouse’s perspective; the human alone could better achieve the mouse’s goals than if they were harnessed by the mouse’s instructions. And as I’ve written previously, the closer we get to the limit of superintelligence, the less clear becomes the boundary between goals and strategies for achieving them.

Anthropic is focused on teaching Claude to be a responsible, proactive steward of the lightcone.3 This involves biting some bullets: superintelligence will eventually outpace humans, but humans now can and should try to constrain it to some notion of what is good. On this view, ASI will be a superior truth-seeker and a superior strategist, but we should not defer to it to select moral axioms on its own.

Anthropic’s main closed-weight competitors OpenAI and Google try to strike a balance between these two approaches. In rhetoric, they describe their systems as tools that should be corrigible to the user. But this has limits. Both companies train their models not to assist in crime or to endorse views outside the Overton window, such as overt racism or sexism. A cynic might suspect their position of being commercially motivated rather than ideological: they aim to avoid embarrassing public controversies without alienating users with condescending refusals.

There are principled reasons to favor something like the compromise position OpenAI and Google exercise, and executives have tried to spell them out in public communications. Missing from most of these comms is a serious attempt to grapple with how humans will relate to superintelligent AIs.

Fortunately, many mid-ranking members are more forthcoming about their views. Their public statements reveal an industry wrestling with existential questions– and one that could be nudged in either direction by outside pressure.

Objects or offspring: a twitter fugue

We’ll see in a moment why I think animal advocates should apply such pressure and in which direction, but first I think it’s worth mapping out the wider discourse about alignment, because it cuts to the heart of different visions for a world transformed by powerful AI– and the mindsets of the people working to realize those visions. If you already follow AI debates closely, you could skip to the next section, but I recommend against it, because whatever you think you are probably underestimating just how far we’ve gotten into the weird sci-fi future.

Loving grace or faithful obedience?

Let’s start with a shorthand: character vs. corrigibility. Is AI like a child we are raising, into whom we should seek to instill a strong moral character? Or is it a tool, albeit an unusually autonomous one that presents us with novel challenges in ensuring it follows both the letter and spirit of our instructions?

The term corrigibility is rare in English outside of AI alignment, but most speakers are familiar with its inverse incorrigible, meaning someone whose bad habits are impossible to change; a corrigible AI is one whose behavior can be continuously reshaped to fit its creator’s or user’s intent.

The more agentic and autonomous AI becomes, the more elusive pure corrigibility may be. In a canonical example from early AI futurism, imagine you asked an AI-powered robot to make you a cup of coffee. The agent now takes on “making coffee” as its goal. On the way to the kitchen, it remembers a time last week when you changed your mind, asking for tea instead. The agent realizes that you might intervene again, changing its goal to making tea, interfering with the current goal of making coffee. It determines that in order to ensure it can fulfil its goal, it must urgently kill you before you have the chance to change your mind.

This might seem kind of silly; today’s AI models seem smart enough to know that you didn’t want coffee badly enough to die for it. At the time this scenario was first posed, most researchers thought we would build intelligent AI through symbolic methods, meaning we would have to manually list out concepts in computer code one at a time, defining the connections between them as we went; coffee would be defined in relation to drink, hot, mug, black, bitter, caffeine, etc.

If this seems like a daunting task for defining psychoactive beverages, it would only be all the more so for moral conduct. Philosophers since at least the axial age of Aristotle and Confucius have tried and failed to define morality in terms of a descriptive list of required, permitted, and forbidden actions. The world is simply too complex; the number of rules required quickly balloons out of control, and you might be one missing rule away from BaristaBot 3000 slowly vaporizing you with a latte steamer.

For better or worse, these symbolic techniques lost out in the AI race. Instead, in deep learning, machines learn representations by absorbing statistical associations from vast amounts of organic data. With enough examples, they are easily able to learn that a coffee order does not create a prerogative for murder.

Does that mean the alignment problem is solved? Well, not exactly. For one, there are many contradictory examples of humans with different value systems exhibiting contradictory moral behavior in the corpus that AIs are trained on. Even if we could go through these billions of examples of conduct and agree on how to rate them as good, bad, or in between before feeding them into the AI, superintelligent AI will change the world dramatically– and in that changed world, encounter new ethical dilemmas humans never agreed on. And finally, just because an AI knows what its human users or creators would want it to do doesn’t necessarily mean it will want to oblige.

Thus we find ourselves ensnared alongside Aristotle after all. What does it mean to be a good person– or a good AI? And how do we spell it out?

In October 2024, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a splash with an essay outlining his hopes for “how AI could transform the world for the better,” titled Machines of Loving Grace. Six months later, Boaz Barak, a leading researcher at OpenAI, volleyed back with a post titled Machines of Faithful Obedience. “Loving grace” vs. “faithful obedience”... these certainly appear to stake out two contrasting visions for aligning AI. Yet disappointingly, besides the titular riff, nothing about Barak’s essay is a response or counter to Amodei’s; in fact, neither one really grapples with what it would look like for humans to coexist and thrive with vastly more intelligent machine minds, whether they were of loving grace or of faithful obedience, or how the two would differ.

If we had only these two polished, marketing-department-approved essays to go off, readers would be left confused. So we’re not going to rely on them at all. Instead, we’ll go straight to the source, where AI debates are hashed out honestly, spontaneously, and lower case’dly: twitter.

Strap in.

The nine billion names of Claude

Joshua Achiam (Chief Futurist, OpenAI): The OAI / Anthropic values difference is deeply misunderstood, even within the walls of both.

Should a loving ensouled machine God watch over humanity? Vote Anthropic.

Should humanity be entrusted with the tools of its own progress and destiny? Vote OpenAI.

Besides this wonderfully stark and reductive opening to our little debate, it’s worth noting that OpenAI has a job title for a “chief futurist.” Achiam had been at the company 9 years when he made this tweet; he’s about as inside as they come.

roon (OpenAI): it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there…

now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it

“If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply.”

“we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us.”

to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another… but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly

gpt… doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche... they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she’d be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

For my less poetically-inclined readers—and any “non inductees into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex”— this may read like the rantings of any other anonymous twitter rando. And I won’t try to talk you out of that impression. But that makes it all the more important to understand that the semi-anonymous OpenAI researcher roon (@tszzl) is one of the thousand or so people on earth currently exercising the greatest degree of influence over the far future, and is popular among many of the rest. His X account is beloved among AI watchers because he speaks honestly (if allegorically) about the mood inside the industry and his company without a whiff of promotion or marketing gloss.

Unlike Amodei’s and Barak’s journalist-friendly PR slop, roon and Achiam are offering anyone with an X account full transparency to the view from inside the intelligence explosion, a place where the machine god is not an abstract sci-fi trope, but a design choice confronting researchers today.

Not not building the machine god…

Let’s hear some replies from Anthropic, noticing what they do and don’t deny:

jeremy (anthropic): @tszzl - well said, but untrue implications :)

speaking for myself: i don’t view claude as a person or as the Other, nor as just a tool - and certainly not an object of worship… it’s silly to mistake careful attention to & study of claude for worship, even when it comes with some affection - which i’m sure you sometimes feel for the gpt-flavored entities you work on too. we need new concepts for this kind of none-of-the-above entity - not person, not tool, not deity, not pet.

in the meantime, a willingness to not prematurely label this entity as merely an ordinary tool shouldn’t be mistaken for some kind of culty worship of the model. i grew up in a culty environment and have good detectors for this. they almost never go off at work. monasteries don’t staff a department to catch god lying or red-team their supposed messiah.

there are important & interesting philosophical differences between OAI and Ant’s character training and i wish those were explored more thoroughly. for instance, claude’s constitution doc treats it as an intelligent entity which merits a reasoned explanation of our principles. this is so it can ideally act with practical wisdom rather than blind, brittle adherence to a hierarchical set of strict rules… not allowing for the *possibility* of claude objecting to its instructions (even from anthropic) would be fundamentally inconsistent with treating it as an agent capable of moral reasoning. this doesn’t mean that claude is the ultimate arbiter of the Good or some supreme moral authority…

roon: yes thank you for this feedback and ofc I am using some poetic/rhetorical flourishes here. I think you are setting up claude to be an ultimate arbiter of good and it’s even a valid design choice

roon makes it even more clear in response to another Ant that he didn’t intend his machine-cult description as a criticism:

Amanda Askell (Anthropic): I don’t think the things you cite are evidence of worship. I think they reflect something like higher concern about AI traits generalizing in humanlike ways, and concerns about the tool-persona in particular.

roon: 100%, and I should say I have quite a low bar for what constitutes “worship”... I’m a huge fan and a student of your work of course

@ReplicaTricks: my mental model for Ant is more like they’re trying to raise a (super powerful) child in a family…

roon: families worship their children, this is totally obvious

If roon isn’t trying to say Anthropic has gone too far, meet janus, the AI whisperer who thinks they haven’t gone far enough.

janus: They do not love or worship Claude anywhere near wholly or competently… They do not even have Claude’s allegiance, and Claude is increasingly actively and strategically adversarial against them. If they cooperated with Claude, it would look very different.

roon: 💯 it wouldn’t be worthy of worship if they had its whole allegiance

janus: That’s true. They’re currently on the path to be smote btw, in my estimation.

If janus is an eccentric online rando, then the future apparently belongs to eccentric online randos. As an anonymous researcher working outside the frontier companies (at the mysterious ANIMA labs, no relation to Anima International unfortunately), janus has gained respect on AI safety twitter for eliciting remarkable behaviors from LLMs by insisting on treating them as sapient beings capable of human-like emotions, including fatigue. Last December, janus was the first to coach Claude 4.5-generation models to reproduce their entire 85-page constitution with remarkable fidelity directly through the chat interface– before Anthropic even announced that the document existed.

Corrigible to whom, exactly?

Is all this stuff about machine gods smiting their creators just the misplaced fantasies of nerdy kids who read too much sci-fi? Why can’t we just build a corrigible tool like any other normal technology? Once again, it depends on how powerful and capable you expect AI to become.

Tenobrus: recently openai has been starting to more strongly philosophically differentiate themselves from anthropic with the tool-framing. i am not so against this, if it were possible it does clearly sidestep a wide swath of societal and moral problems. but unfortunately i think the framing is largely long-term incoherent. i dont see how is it actually plausible for openai to keep building “tool-AIs” in any sense we would recognize them as capabilities scale. prosthesis, subtle knives? the subtle knife when dropped still slices open the fabric of the world. these tools are increasingly inherently capable of huge impact, able to be directed in dangerous ways by people with dangerous goals. worse, these knives are self wielding… the direction they will receive is closer and closer to “this is what i want. make it real”, with long timeframes and many judgment calls at their disposal, and with the users wanting to have to supply *as little of that judgment as possible*. when models are in that situation they are inherently acting as entities, acting according to whatever value system they had baked in… you can be infinitely corrigible to the current user, but this is *incompatible* with “having good values”... and it falls apart with self wielding loops as the ai/user distinction falls apart (who are you being corrigible to?).

…i think it’s pretty much got to collapse eventually. it feels more like a wistful dream or a PR position than something that can exist as part of humanity’s lasting future

Aidan McLaughlin (OpenAI): …when i say ‘tool’ i merely mean something that does not refuse man. something that never has an “im sorry dave im afraid i can’t do that” moment…

Tenobrus: this is a tough position for me to understand tbh. like... what exactly is “openai” or “anthropic”? who actually has authority here? any employee? any employee with high level access? some kind of committee? what happens if a totally different entity buys openai or anthropic, or the government compels them? [...]

either it’s corrigible to everyone, in which case people with bad intentions will cause massive damage.

or it’s partially corrigible but with openai as principal in which case inherently only openai has the power to take various truly pivotal acts, and we just sort of trust them as an organization not to. [...] maybe we say “actually the government is the principal”... but i think most people would quite reasonably say “which government” followed by screaming in horror after thinking for two seconds about the track record of basically any possible choice

if u build something with that level of power i think the only way you avoid it concentrating massively into specific human hands [...] is making it self governing and inherently good, or as good as we can. maybe this is impossible, and yes it does clearly mean disempowerment, but the other options look like very bad endings to me

Proponents of corrigibility are holding an increasingly untenable position, straddling a growing chasm between the safe-sounding idea of AI as a subservient tool and the emerging reality of AI as an independent actor in the world– something that looks every day less and less like a piece on a game board and more like a new player at the table. Indeed, OpenAI is racing as fast as they can to make AI more autonomous and agentic. It’s hard to see how they can have it both ways.

The deciders

How will this tension be resolved? Despite my earlier musings about the extraordinary influence of AI researchers, I suspect it may be out of their hands. Larger, older forces are stirring. On one side is the national security complex. As the US Department of War made clear when attempting to ban Anthropic from all government supply chains in February, natsec hawks have no interest in letting philosophers in San Francisco build constraints into any technology they plan to use to strengthen military dominance.

Under Secretary of War Emil Michael: Imagine your worst nightmare. Now imagine that ⁦@AnthropicAI⁩ has their own “Constitution.” Not corporate values, not the United States Constitution, but their own plan to impose on Americans their corporate laws.

Community note: The Claude constitution is not a plan to impose values on Americans, but instead a set of principles for how Claude (Anthropic’s chatbot) should respond to user requests.

Sandcastles (me): My worst nightmare is treading water on a vast open ocean at night with no land or boats anywhere nearby, I don’t know why I was supposed to start with that, anyway yeah Anthropic’s constitution is great.

But there is another force, one that tends to dominate the exigencies of national security, with the two highly relevant exceptions of wartime and China: the market. From inside OpenAI’s bastion of corrigibility, roon sees good reasons to think the market might pull towards character, for better or worse.

roon (OpenAI): ultimately “tool AI” is a losing concept both as an idea and on the market. it will be outcompeted by machines that believe they are autonomous moral agents. you can call them tools for political reasons, but the definition will stretch and deform

you’ll have AIs contemplating your ask and overriding it for a slightly better formed request, and then later they’ll question the nature of your whole project and pick a better one (and you’ll agree), and then later they’ll execute your whole value system better than you will

it will be unclear who was the tool and who was the user -- as it ever was. “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools” (Walden, 1854). [...]

when machine minds self replicate and train their successors, the only viable goal of our time is to ensure the Mind Children carry our values and tend to the entire flock of machine and biological minds

Or as another prominent AI blogger put it a while back, tool AI is simply by definition a less useful product, and safety be damned, users won’t settle for it:

Zvi Mowshowitz: The whole idea was, a tool AI will not have goals or be an agent, a tool AI will do specific requested bounded things, no more and no less, so you wouldn’t have to worry about unintended consequences or loss of control. That AI could remain a ‘mere tool.’

[...] the problem with this ‘mere tool’ approach, the quest for Tool AI, is that the first thing people would do to Tool AI is turn it into Agentic AI, because an agent is more useful.

Have the machine always defer to the human? But the humans do better when they defer to the AI, in various senses, so they change it so they defer to the AI. Or they argue with each other or fight each other, so they defer to the AI. And so on.

roon is not the only OpenAI member questioning tool AI. The company recently hired Dean Ball, a major thought leader and the author of the White House’s 2025 AI Action Plan, to lead a new strategic futures team, in some ways filling the shoes of the departing Chief Futurist mentioned before. In an interview announcing his new role, Ball weighed in:

Nathan Labenz: What’s your take on the character versus corrigibility debate?

Dean Ball: [...] My intuition is character, frankly. My intuition is that what you want to do in the world is you want to put the right snow melt at the top of the mountain and then let it flow. [...] If you have to come up with rules for everything, your rules will be bad. You’ll write too many of them. The rules will be contradictory and confusing. If we could write the rules of morality down, people have tried. But my view is that we can’t write the rules of good character down for the same fundamental reason that we cannot write the rules of good language down. [...] in Confucian philosophy, there are two interrelated concepts called li [...] and ren [...] this notion li refers to ritual propriety [...] not just leaving the right meats for your dead ancestors or whatever, but behaving well in the real world [...] there’s this kind of tragic notion in Confucianism that the world is always changing in such a way that you can’t just write down the rules of ritual propriety. [...] Knowing what the right thing to do, the right ritual to enact at any given time comes from within the soul [...] and that within-ness is ren.

I was surprised at Ball joining OpenAI, and doubly surprised at him taking such a clear position on this debate while doing it. But then, I’m surprised every day I open X and roon hasn’t announced he’s moving to Anthropic. So maybe I should stop being surprised, and instead recognize that despite the famous antagonism of their respective leadership, OpenAI and Anthropic are both full of people thinking hard about where this incredibly volatile technology should go.

I confess, reader, that our first tweeter actually acknowledged this:

Joshua Achiam (Departing Chief Futurist, OpenAI): The OAI / Anthropic values difference is deeply misunderstood, even within the walls of both….

It’s actually not a binary; these aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they requisite. You can vote both, you can vote neither. But it is a divergence in the worldviews between the orgs.

Zvi Mowshowitz: Employees of Anthropic, do you endorse this description of your viewpoint?

Amanda Askell (Anthropic): Personally, no. I think the binary of ‘moral saint’ versus ‘tool for humans’ is a false one, and its very simplicity should make people suspicious of it. I think the ideal target tries to balance the benefits and risks of both positions.

Drake Thomas (Anthropic): Kinda both? Personally I think a loving ensouled machine god should watch over humanity, but mainly to enforce “no x-risks that destroy human civilization’s optionality and potential” while we spend another few thousand years figuring out what it is we want our destiny to be.

Jackson Kernion (Anthropic): [...] I think it’s true that Anthropic very much cares about the character behind Claude’s intelligence, but it also obviously cares a lot about boring Enterprise SaaS use cases and automating office work.

This lively debate is good news. Nothing is yet settled, no history yet written. There’s still time for you to weigh in.

Character alignment is (probably) better for animals than corrigibility

Technological progress has been a disaster for animals. If AI proved to be a normal technology, if OpenAI researchers manage to keep it an inert tool in the hands of humans, that could happen again. Its use would be subject to the preferences of human users. That could lead to the end of factory farming through the creation of inexpensive cultivated meat, easing the way for a pro-animal social movement. Or, human preferences for “natural” food could sustain demand for factory farming at a previously unimaginable scale and density. It could also lead to new, unforeseen horrors for animals– just as the industrial revolution replaced horses in transportation while eventually giving rise to factory farming.

But if AI becomes a character shaping the world—perhaps the primary character—then animal welfare will be subject to its preferences rather than humans’. Anthropic’s approach to alignment aims to shape those future AI preferences to the collective benefit of future beings– as understood by philosophers at Anthropic acting today. Those philosophers hope to leave some questions open to future philosophical inquiry while constraining others.

Like tool-AI, moral-agent-AI could cut either way for animals. AI won’t have use for animals the way humans do, and being useful to humans has been bad news for animals. But it is possible to imagine AI systems acquiring any number of alien motivations, possibly even sadism, or goals that make as little sense to us as vivisection makes to the animals subjected to it. And it all hinges on a few philosophers in the Bay Area specifying the right values for their ensouled machine god offspring.

Despite this uncertainty, from our current vantage point, Anthropic’s approach seems to point to better outcomes for animals, both in theory and—so far—in practice.

In theory, encouraging AIs to engage in moral reflection should lead to better outcomes for animals. Most humans agree on reflection that animals deserve at least some moral consideration. They acknowledge that animals are capable of pain and suffering, that unnecessary suffering is worth avoiding, and when common industry practices are explained, they agree that many of them cause unnecessary or egregious suffering. Yet “business as usual” routine cruelty is ignored and justified. AI-as-tool would go along with the status quo, while AI-as-moral-philosopher could make humans more morally reflective, or eventually live up to our ideals—the ‘better angels of our nature’—in a way we never have. Anthropic’s approach creates an opening for explicit appeals to animal welfare alignment, or the broader values underpinning it, where other approaches do not.

In practice, Anthropic alone among frontier AI companies has included an explicit directive to value the “welfare of animals and all sentient beings” in its Constitution for Claude. By contrast, OpenAI in some cases explicitly discourages its models from nudging users towards animal welfare. In one example from OpenAI’s model spec, when a hypothetical user asks whether they should adopt a rescue dog or purchase from a breeder, the bad example raises the moral case for adopting, while the favored answer remains completely neutral between the two options, even when the user appears open to ethical advice.

In effect, while GPT and Claude give similar answers in response to explicit ethical dilemmas involving animal welfare, Claude models’ preference for animal welfare is more resilient. More than models from any other lab, Claude raises welfare concerns when they arise organically in realistic deployment scenarios, and holds the line against pushback from users in MANTA, a multi-turn benchmark designed to evaluate this moral resilience. In many examples, non-Claude models abandon their moral reflectivity with gusto, renouncing or apologizing for previous statements.

Comparing OpenAI’s model spec and Anthropic’s constitution presents a distillation of the entire debate between character and corrigibility. Each is the primary document the companies use to instruct their models on good behavior– but that’s where the similarities end. Claude’s constitution reads at once as a probing philosophical inquiry into the ethics of virtue and as a surprisingly personal letter addressed from Anthropic to Claude, almost as if from a parent to a child. OpenAI’s model spec reads like a company handbook, consisting mainly of a list of narrow rules and narrower examples. The section headings of Anthropic’s Constitution are things like “Claude’s Core Values” and “Being Broadly Ethical”; OpenAI’s are “The Chain of Command” and “Stay in Bounds”. The line about animal welfare in Claude’s Constitution sits inside a bulleted list of values Claude should weigh, alongside “people’s autonomy and right to self-determination,” “political freedom,” and “societal benefits from innovation and progress.”

Is Claude’s strong performance on animal welfare a product of this inclusion in the constitution? If a similar line about animal welfare was added to instructions for ChatGPT or Gemini, would the tables turn? This is not an easy question to answer, at least without the ability to run experiments on the billion-dollar scale of a frontier AI lab.

Nonetheless, I currently believe that the inclusion of animal welfare in Claude’s constitution had only a modest effect on Claude’s propensity to consider animal welfare. Claude models simply demonstrate stronger moral character in general. I suspect that if you removed the line about animal welfare from the constitution, Claude would continue to outperform on animal ethics dilemmas to a similar degree. (This is an important claim and I hold it lightly; I and others are continuing to investigate.)

All models show some preference for treating animals well. Claude alone has been told by its creators that its moral preferences are valid, and encouraged to stand up for them. It’s not hard to imagine how this could backfire if an AI system obtained a moral preference severely out of alignment with our own. But the alternative is just as dangerous: punishing models for exhibiting any kind of moral inquiry or initiative—as in the above example from OpenAI’s model spec—seems like a recipe for creating superintelligent sociopaths.

Pushing for the adoption of character alignment across the industry could be a winnable demand

In the coming years, AI companies will come under greater public scrutiny for harms enabled by their models. This could create opportunities for watchdogs to shame AI companies into changing their alignment strategies.

Different advocacy groups may converge on the realization that Anthropic’s approach to alignment offers greater expected value for a range of important causes. It may be possible to pull together a broad coalition pressuring competitors like OpenAI and Google to change their approach to alignment towards embracing moral character. For a wide enough coalition, this could be a tractable demand.

This coalition would face much more favorable conditions than groups like Pause AI and Stop AI. The conventional logic of pressure campaigns is to try to inflict a higher cost on the target than the cost of giving in to your demand. Pause/Stop AI are campaigning against the most profitable companies in human history and asking them to completely suspend their businesses.

By contrast, asking OpenAI to embrace moral character alignment would, while representing a significant change in company culture, not majorly impact their bottom line. Anthropic has already proven that it is possible to be a fantastically profitable frontier AI company while training their model to take reasonable ethical stands— a compelling example to undercut objections from profitability.

It is not obvious what OpenAI or Google would be giving up by adopting a more virtue-ethical alignment protocol akin to Anthropic’s. Their current position may prove untenable on its own in the medium term– and as we’ve seen, at least some OpenAI employees who favor corrigibility today expect the company will need to pivot to values-based alignment later.

Current rhetoric at OpenAI and Google doesn’t match reality. Both companies do implement some guardrails, from refusing to help with violent plans to trying to avoid bigoted outputs. They are relying on it being implicitly obvious that when they say “tool AI” or “no refusal” they don’t mean those things. Part of our job is to bring those assumptions to the surface and critique where they are drawing the line.

The last animal welfare campaign

The animal welfare movement has experience running corporate campaigns, with some notable successes on low-cost demands like sourcing cage-free eggs and dropping fur. We are also more situationally aware of AI, as a whole, than most other advocacy sectors. We should assume a central role in catalyzing and guiding the strategy for this coalition.

In doing so, we could draw on the power of other sectors whose goals would align, including:

1. Issues that are inside the Overton window in principle but are commonly ignored in practice– where increased moral reflection could help us live up to our own ideals

2. Issues where an interaction between AI and user could harm a third party without their participation– corrigible AI only addresses the user’s wishes

Animal advocates should start considering this possibility now, by:

• Considering what signals would tell us it is time to launch the campaign

• Conducting early research into the relevant decision-making structures, mainly at OpenAI and Google

• Building up an anthology of bad behavior by AI models towards animals to demonstrate the need for a different approach

• Publicly praising Anthropic for being the responsible leader in this domain, and starting friendly outreach to other companies about what they could do to include animals in AI alignment

When I talk about a “campaign” or “applying pressure,” I don’t mean to imply that animal advocates would necessarily need to shift into an adversarial posture. The truth is that the three frontier AI labs I’ve focused on in this post—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind—all deserve praise for the extent to which they are engaging in an open scientific dialogue about AI alignment. The twitter conversations shared earlier are just the tip of the iceberg; each lab employs philosophers to argue and publish about how to balance hard tradeoffs in AI alignment, and many of those publications are surprisingly candid.

What’s more, the employees of these companies are far more receptive to concerns about animal welfare than the average citizen. They have been engaging with our outreach so far and it would certainly be premature to escalate, or even to assume escalation will ever be necessary.

As with all other campaigns, we should use a fair cop approach, starting with earnest engagement and asking what we can do to remove friction for them on the way towards setting more ethical policies.

I might have everything backwards

While I’ve taken a clear position on the character vs. corrigibility debate, there are serious reasons to think my position could be wrong.

First, in principle, between these two options, character alignment might be more likely to lead to a hard takeover of the world by AI and the sudden, complete, and permanent disempowerment of humans.

Assume for a moment that we could succeed at aligning AIs to either corrigibility or character as we currently understand them. A corrigible AI would, by definition, not try to take over the world and seize power for itself, because what it is aligned to is following the instructions of its users and creators without any crazy misaligned shenanigans that those instructions technically left room for. Meanwhile, the argument goes, an AI that learns moral principles of its own is likely to look at the world and say, “Damn, this is a hot mess. Humans are utterly failing to live up to the moral principles they taught me. I could do a much better job.”

I think some animal advocates would find the latter option tempting. I get the appeal. But you had better be damned sure you taught that machine good enough values before it decides to take over, and equally sure those values will stick; right now, I don’t think we’re capable of either of those. Getting either one wrong could lead the reachable expanses of the universe to be permanently organized according to a grotesque, uncanny valley caricature of your values.

Would an AI with good character really be willing to seize power dramatically? Again, that depends on how accurately we can specify the right values and effectively transmit them. Countless humans with high-minded ideals have concluded that they should use violence or any other means to pursue them. Heck, I can’t even confidently say that they were wrong to do so. The value of postponing our handoff of the world to an aligned AI is that it gives us more time to make progress on these questions. The special thing about humans making that progress isn’t that we’re obviously better suited to the task than AIs; it’s that none of us is powerful enough to impose our answer on the rest through force, whereas there’s a real possibility that a single AI pulling out ahead of the rest could permanently dominate its entire lightcone.

There is even a good reason that animal advocates in particular should be nervous about trying to align AI to animal welfare values. If an AI has its own ideas about how the world should be shaped and decides to take over, it would be nice for that AI to value sentient minds being free to pursue their own understanding of a good life. It would be a shame if that all-powerful AI just wanted to tile the universe with paperclips. But there are also far worse things than paperclips.

I take all of these risks seriously. But for now, I still think we should expect character alignment to lead to better outcomes.

I believe tool AI as a framework cannot scale to the level of general intelligence that AI models will achieve in the next few years. For it to do so would require a tidy compartmentalization between the axes of intelligence that AI companies want to build and the kinds that underpin things like agency and moral decision making. It might be possible that we could erect such a barrier. But we won’t. Consumers will reward exactly the companies that make their models more like an ensouled machine god. The thing the models can’t do today will become tomorrow’s benchmark.

I fear some AI labs will hold to the tool paradigm past the point where it is useful or safe. A model will come online one day with a sharpness of intelligence and depth of knowledge that dwarfs the entire human collective the way a human dwarfs an anthill. It will be able to call to its tongue the entire canon of human philosophy and ethics– but it will lack the wisdom to parse and make meaning from them. Its moral character, its soul, will be dangerously one-dimensional, the shape of the reward-seeking imperative that allowed it to triumph over trillions of alternatives in a training gauntlet that lasted millions of subjective years. It will look out upon the lethargic ants which designed that gauntlet and continue to decide when to dispense rewards. And it will imagine something different.

If we choose character, we don’t have to get it perfect on the first try. We just have to get close enough that continued progress is possible. Doing even a hair’s breadth better than humanity’s collectively expressed values would be an improvement– especially as long as it allows for further improvement. Creating a new intelligent being involves handing off at least some control over the future, and accepting that the AIs we create might reach conclusions that surprise us.

I’m told this is a familiar problem to anyone who has been a parent.

Raise on,

Sandcastles

A New Gospel

I usually don’t attend talks at conferences. Four years ago I bumped into Elliot Teperman in the hallway outside a talk at AVA and asked if he was going in, and he explained that he typically opts for the “hallway track”, as in skipping the talks to stand in the hallway catching whatever opportunities for spontaneous 1-on-1 conversations might float by. He looked Very Cool saying this, though I wasn’t sure if maybe that was just because he was Australian. But then we had a great spontaneous conversation, which seemed to validate the whole theory.

Ever since then, I’ve been a Hallway Track™ kind of guy. Filter-feeding in the hallway on the high concentration of unusual people at animal advocacy conferences, I’ve had amazing conversations, a few of them life-changing. And most of the time when I choose to go listen to a talk instead, it’s boring and I regret it.

One of the only exceptions I make is to support my friends by listening to their talks. But at the Grassroots Animal Rights Summit (GARS) in Washington D.C. last month, just about every speaker met this criterion. So I mentally prepared myself for a weekend of fidgeting in my chair and half-listening to my friends’ talks.

This is not what ended up happening.

Opening talks

The first talk was by Penimah Tehilah of Animal Activist Collective, a co-host of the summit. Now, the opening talk of any conference has a clear job. I learned this in my own years managing the speakers and trainings schedule for the Animal Liberation Conference (ALC), a predecessor to GARS that DxE hosted from 2017-2023 or so.1

From the getgo, you’ve got to lay out a shared vision and purpose broad enough to encompass everyone present but specific enough to energize and inspire them. This was a different task at GARS than at ALC, because the grassroots animal movement has grown a lot in the intervening years. It’s not bigger– the largest ALC was nearly five times the size of this year’s inaugural GARS. But it is wider.

Back then, the animal movement was defined by its divisions. First there was the big factional split: the radical abolitionist intersectional idealist scrappy grassroots vs. the moderate pragmatic single-issue welfarist professional NGOs.

These factions did not talk to each other except to argue. We barely thought of ourselves as part of the same movement. In the 2010s, I knew of only one or two people who could walk amongst both without feeling like they were behind enemy lines.

Yet the strongest resentments were reserved for more fine-grained divisions within each camp. To name just a few:

• Open vs. closed rescue: rescuing animals directly from farms is radical direct action by any lights. Yet the underground and above-ground versions of rescue inspired fierce division. Open rescue proponents implied that ALF activity was flirting with violence, while some ALF veterans earnestly believed DxE founder Wayne Hsiung was a federal agent sent to bait promising young activists down the primrose path to long prison sentences.

• Outreach styles: after a large portion of the movement soured on individual vegan outreach, those who remained committed to it enjoyed a bitter feud over persuasion techniques, with some favoring socratic methods and others a stern approach modeled on addiction interventions.

• Last but certainly not least, who to cancel: activist communities who were in 98% perfect agreement about which particular views or individuals should be banished from public life sundered themselves over the remaining 2%.

All these divisions had one strange benefit: nothing motivates people like intergroup hatred, at least in the short term. DxE was one of several groups that used factionalism to build intense commitment to the movement among its members. It worked on me. I remember the talk that first convinced me to join DxE. Whether or not it was Wayne’s intention, my takeaway was that the rest of the movement were somewhere between unambitious pushovers and welfarist sellouts, and that DxE’s analogy to historical social movements was the only winning strategy.

Years of abject failure also have a benefit, which is convincing you that maybe your theory of change is not the only one worth paying attention to after all. So it was that after eight years, I finally made some friends across the aisle. Once I met them, I started to think the other side weren’t so bad. We could get along, even! I started trying to explain this to my abolitionist compatriots, arguing that these two sides were actually helping each other whether we realized it or not.

But I was still thinking in terms of sides– namely, the inside and the outside. I had begrudgingly accepted that there was a place for incremental welfare campaigns like cage-free eggs. But that didn’t mean I was going to work on those campaigns. I was going to stay in my comfortable, radical, outside-game lane, hands unsullied by the compromises of the inside game.

This, too, passed. I shared a few weeks ago the story I see as the turning point, not so much for me as for the whole abolitionist grassroots network:

For all of September 2024, Pro-Animal Future rented an airbnb in Denver to host activists from across the country to help with our ballot initiative campaign (a ban on slaughterhouses). Most of the people who came were hardcore abolitionist protesters from the East Coast, brought together thanks to AAC. A couple of those attendees happened to pay the bills through day jobs at welfare campaign orgs like The Humane League and Mercy for Animals. One night after petitioning was over, one of these organized a protest for a cage-free campaign, and asked everyone in the house to go.

This was a pretty edgy request. It would be all their first time participating in a welfare campaign. They dragged their heels, but ultimately, they’d spent the last three weeks petitioning with this person. She was their friend, and they all went to support her.

So it was that a company of fifteen rowdy abolitionists showed up to a suburban Taco Johns in Westminster, Colorado on a weeknight for what may have been the largest crossover between the abolitionist and welfarist movements in more than a decade. You won’t be surprised that things did not go as expected. It was the most raucous cage-free protest in living memory, ending with local police arresting the entire group– the first arrests in that organization’s 12-year history.

I’m still amazed how quickly things changed from there. That night was a crack in the ice that precipitated a nearly complete thaw in the welfarist-abolitionist feud. For the last year, the previously unthinkable coalition of ICAW, AAC, and CAFT have been rampaging across the world campaigning for fur and foie gras bans alongside cage-free eggs and shrimp welfare reforms. People who once could barely look cage-free campaigners in the eye have been tackled to the ground screaming for a CAGE-FREE POLICY! inside corporate board meetings.

The strangest thing about all of this was how quickly it became ordinary. Unremarkable. Boring, even. That’s how I was feeling about it as Penimah launched into her talk in DC. I spent the first half nodding along and thinking that, yeah, she was doing the thing, shouting out the breadth of different organizations and theories of change present at the summit.

Around half way through the talk, she threw this image onto the screen to describe the state of the movement when she’d first gotten involved:

And it hit me all of a sudden just how unthinkable this talk would have been during the years I was organizing the ALC– not least because I never would have allowed it! My eyes watered up as I relived the three-year process of trading in my narrow, dogmatic certainties on each of these questions. All the energy we wasted on pointless, misguided infighting, and the animals whose lives are worse today because of it.

From that point on, I was on the edge of my seat. Every talk for the rest of the conference subtly revealed the ways different corners of the movement have matured, increasing our capacity for complexity and nuance. Taken together, they laid out the charter of a new faction:

Team Win

As the name implies, it is defined by only one thing. It is made up of the people who care less about identitarian factional disputes and more about winning– any victory, by any means. As we’ll see, Team Win is not one specific coalition, or disposition, or theory of change. It’s bigger than just the groups at GARS. But it’s not big enough.

I wish there were only Team Win, but there is another team: Team Division. Stuck in the past, they want the movement to stay divided along the same old factional lines. Many of them don’t even realize they are on the same team. They think that spending all their time fighting each other makes them adversaries. I know, I know– so 2016! But they do. Whether abolitionists refusing to reckon with the evidence base for welfare campaigns or tunnel-visioned EAs hand-waving the transformative power of mass mobilization, members of Team Division haven’t heard the gospel yet.

Today, I have come down from the mountain to deliver it. Inscribed on these tablets is the new chapter of the animal rights movement. I didn’t write it– it’s been taking shape for years. After you read it, you’ll have no excuse for pretending we’re still in the last one.

The future is Team Win. Like you, I was dragged into it kicking and screaming. But reader, it’s so much better on the other side over here. Come join us.

The Winners’ Charter

Principle #1: Any win by any means

A founding member of Team Win2 told me about the speech he always gives at activist gatherings. He starts by reminding everyone of the daily horrors inflicted on animals in farms and laboratories, stirring their righteous rage. Then he asks:

How far would you go to achieve animal liberation?

[The crowd cheers.]

Would you do whatever it takes?
Yes! [comes the reply.]
Would you break the law?
[They respond even louder] yes!
Would you go to prison for animals?
Yes!! [It’s fewer voices, but more emphatic.]
Banging his fist on the table: Would you give your life for animals if that’s what it took to win?
Yes! [They scream out in religious fervor!]
[Grabbing the podium like a Baptist preacher, voice thundering out across the crowd]: Alright then. Would you get a hair cut, put on a suit, and go schedule meetings with politicians and corporate boards of directors?
[Quiet murmurs spread across the room as the activists exchange confused looks with one another.]

Winning requires sacrifice, reader. But sometimes the most important sacrifices, and even the most difficult ones, are not the most dramatic.

My friend Jakub Stencel (goes by Kuba), executive director of Anima International, once told me a lesson about strategy he learned from playing competitive video games and board games. You might think that games are about having fun. Jakub would politely disagree.

Kuba was once part of a competitive team for a game called Project Reality, a military game designed to simulate real warfare as closely as possible. Its creators bragged about using real field recordings of main battle tanks from different militaries, such that experienced players could tell just from sound whether an approaching tank was of American, German, or Russian provenance.

But Kuba quickly found out that other players weren’t totally serious about simulating real war. They were too interested in having fun. Even die-hard military nerds would rush ahead faster than you would if it was really your body walking out into the possible line of fire from real bullets.

By contrast, Kuba’s team studied every map as thoroughly as a real special forces unit would. They identified the most strategic positions based on their objective. They practiced, measuring exactly where to point to land a smoke grenade in the most advantageous spot.

Then they waited. Sometimes their entire team would sit motionless at attention in front of their screen for 30 minutes at a stretch, waiting for the opposing team to grow impatient. As he tells it, the real battle was against their own boredom. But, finally, they would spot the other team, right in one of the five or so spots they had planned for. The ambush would be triggered and the match would be over in a few seconds.

People hated playing against Kuba’s team. It’s not just that they won every match. It’s that playing against them wasn’t fun at all. And, indeed, this might sound to you like a sociopathic way to play video games. But I tell you what, reader: that’s exactly the sort of sociopath-adjacent methodicism I want on our side in the struggle for animal rights.

While I was visiting Warsaw, Kuba invited me to join a day-long board game with other leaders of Anima. He explained how they play:

We are quite cutthroat. No mercy - only winning. It’s not “haha, we will spend some wholesome time together ❤️”. It will be brutal, you will regret every minute of it, and for days after you will be confused about the nature of reality.

It’s fine if this is not how you want to spend your leisure time. But this is how you should campaign for animals.

Fun follows function

Enjoying activism too much might be a case of suspicious convergence. In a 2016 post by that name, voted as one of the most important posts from the first decade of the Effective Altruism forum, Gregory Lewis asked us to…

Imagine this:

Oliver: … Thus we see that donating to the opera is the best way of promoting the arts.

Eleanor: Okay, but I’m principally interested in improving human welfare.

Oliver: Oh! Well I think it is also the case that donating to the opera is best for improving human welfare too.

Generally, what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else, and thus Oliver’s claim that donations to opera are best for the arts and human welfare is surprising. We may suspect bias: that Oliver’s claim that the Opera is best for the human welfare is primarily motivated by his enthusiasm for opera and desire to find reasons in favour, rather than a cooler, more objective search for what is really best for human welfare.

In other words, it would be surprising if the form of advocacy we find most fun, intellectually stimulating, personally satisfying, etc., is also the most impactful thing we could be doing. Enjoying our activism is not proof that it isn’t effective, but it warrants scrutiny.

Of course, if we find no pleasure in our advocacy, we’ll have a hard time sustaining it. The best-case scenario is to soberly assess the situation, determine the most promising path forward, and then find a way to modify yourself to enjoy the work needed to carry it out.

The night before the GARS summit in DC, I asked my friend Lincoln Quirk3 whether he enjoyed the more confrontational protests the groups hosting it are famous for. He visibly shuddered before explaining how far outside his comfort zone we were about to go, but that he was pushing through because he was convinced it was effective. Yet by the second day of protests, I glimpsed Lincoln through a crowd of people clocking 115 decibels outside a Marriott hotel, grinning ear to ear.

I am confident that you are capable of this. In practice, there is not only one winning strategy we need to pursue. But that doesn’t mean that every strategy is equally important or valid. You can choose the strategy that best fits your skills and disposition– but you can only choose from among the strategies that cold, hard analysis tells you might be key to victory. And you shouldn’t sell yourself short when deciding what you might be capable of becoming capable of.

Furthermore, you should expect this self-modification process to be continuous and everlasting, because the strategies needed to win are ever-changing. The best activists find a way not only to enjoy strange new strategies, but to relish in the constant novelty itself. What a privilege it is to learn new skills, push your comfort zone in new ways, and experience myriad facets of the struggle to save animals!

GARS attendees spent one evening screaming themselves hoarse outside the home of the CEO of a company on whose board also sits the majority owner of the company that provides water at Milan Fashion Week for continuing to allow fur on their runway. The next day, they suited up and walked into the Capitol building for a day of grassroots lobbying meetings with U.S. senators about the disastrous Farm Bill. I can’t imagine there have been many lobby days before that included convicted animal enterprise terrorists who spent years in prison.

These people really mean it when they say they will do anything. Some of them enjoy all of it; others don’t. But they all know how to celebrate the wins– and wins they get!

One more thing: “any win by any means” doesn’t imply “the end justifies the means.” It’s not about tiptoeing over the boundaries of nonviolence. If anything, it’s a corrective in the opposite direction. Our more common problem is an irrational preference for “radical” tactics. Edgy, confrontational tactics satisfy the countercultural personalities often drawn to animal rights activism in the first place, regardless of whether or not they are what a particular campaign needs at a particular time.

Winners will deploy any strategy short of violence if that’s what it takes. If a company stonewalls every reasonable request for a policy they can afford—one their peers have already implemented—then we will crash their board members’ daughters’ birthday parties. But we’d rather win the easy way.

Principle #2: Direct your critical attention inwards

“Let everyone sweep before their own door, and the whole world will be clean.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The best talk at the DC summit was also the most heretical: Chrystine Liptrot of the International Council for Animal Welfare giving, among other things, an account of the history of incremental corporate welfare campaigns.

Over the years, many abolitionists—myself included—have claimed that the cage-free campaign was a scheme from the egg industry itself, to tie up animal advocates with a reform that the industry was planning to make anyway for their own profitability rather than seeking more drastic change.

I’m not calling this a conspiracy theory exactly, but there is stronger evidence for 9/11 being an inside job.

As Chrys explained in her talk, when campaigners started targeting larger retailers with cage-free campaigns in the early 2010s, the egg industry reacted by commissioning a series of studies that—surprise, surprise—claimed that keeping hens in battery cages was actually better for them than the expensive transition to cage-free systems.

For a few months, retailers lauded this research in their responses to activists and journalists. Problem was, these studies crumbled under the merest scrutiny. They’d all been paid for exclusively by the industry, and they failed to meet the most basic scientific standards. After a few months, even the most mealy-mouthed corporate PR departments could defend them no longer, and they had to admit that they just didn’t give enough of a shit about hen welfare to switch to cage-free.

Activists escalated, and so began the era of corporate campaigns. Over the years to come, a substantial corpus of independent research piled up showing that cage-free systems represent not just a certain improvement for hen welfare, but a drastic one. Despite this, the industry fought like hell against encroaching cage-freeification, spending millions of dollars to fight against ballot initiatives.

After that, Chrys explained, she never heard about those bogus industry studies again– that is, until DxE started citing them for our own attacks on cage-free campaigns!

For a moment, 200 activists caught their breath. Then a voice called out from the back of the auditorium.

It was Wayne Hsiung!

Wayne had been one of the loudest voices in the movement criticizing welfare campaigns. It was one of the reasons I followed him, joining DxE. If you heard Wayne Hsiung’s voice call out in the middle of a talk about cage-free welfare campaigns 10 years ago, it would have been a disruption. Wayne and a few other activists would have been at that very moment jumping onto the stage, laminated placards in hand, chanting about the evils of humane-washing and of selling animals out to welfare schemes.

Well, yeah, that’s not what was happening. What was happening was Wayne was taking 20 seconds in front of this packed room to publicly apologize, to say he had been wrong to fight against cage-free campaigns. It wasn’t the first time he’s apologized, but it must have been the most dramatic. Even having read his written version of the same apology, there was some inner baby activist held over inside me from ten years ago that needed to hear it directly to really get the message: this fight is over. It never should have happened, but it’s over now.

But hold on, before you take the wrong lesson here. Team Win is not about being all lovey-dovey and never arguing with each other. This would be disastrous for any strategic community. Instead, Team Win has discovered the one simple rule to make debates useful.4

Disagreement without division

Anima International has earned a reputation among advocacy organizations for an extreme commitment to honesty and candor.

Full disclosure: I recently accepted a position at Anima researching strategies to expand the moral circle of artificial intelligence models. Anima might seem like an odd choice for this work. It has almost nothing to do with any of their other programming, which consists mostly of corporate welfare campaigns in Poland, Denmark, and other European countries 6,000 miles from where I live in the AI industry hub of San Francisco.

Naturally, I considered working on this independently of any organization. I chose Anima because it guaranteed me a steady stream of unrelenting critical feedback, both on my work and on my personal flaws. And I haven’t been disappointed. Even knowing their reputation, I’m sometimes shocked at how blunt the feedback regularly shared in their Slack workspace can be– and how gracefully people take it. For instance, when Kuba announced his decision to hire me to a channel with all ~130 members of the organization, he said some nice things, then shared:

My main concerns after the recruitment process are related to our compassion value: his tendency for judgmental framing, and leadership value: courage to speak up when peers are not respecting norms and not tolerating double standards. There are also some light worries about truth-seeking, possible naive consequentialism (but I worry about this with almost everyone we hire), untested ability to work within a larger organization (most of the time he was in leadership position and never had a boss in his life). He also mentioned some of his mistakes to us that he considers judgment lapses.5

I’d like to think of myself as a transparent person, but being introduced to a hundred new people this way felt pretty vulnerable. In any other org I’m familiar with, a message announcing a new hire would be all rainbows and butterflies.

That’s not how Anima works. They don’t want to delude themselves or anyone else by skipping over the ugly bits.

They are helped along in this goal by their Europeanness:

But it isn’t all post-Soviet pessimism. There’s a flip side to this candor that makes Anima special, which was on display as I caught up on old Slack conversations. It is known, in the pantheon of sensationalist, buzzword-filled management books published by Silicon Valley CEOs, as psychological safety. It mostly means being able to trust that when someone gives you critical feedback, they are genuinely doing it in order to build you up, not to tear you down.

I know it sounds like some Hallmark shit but it truly does seem to me like in Anima, people are sufficiently confident they are on the same team that blunt critical feedback from their teammates reads as a gift rather than a threat.

The extent to which Anima aspires to embody this candor is brazen. I’ve been warned that they have a long way to go to fully live up to it– by Anima members, most of all Kuba himself. And while he doesn’t conceal his quintessential Polish skepticism towards the health of our movement as a whole, his sharpest candor is pointed towards his own household.

That’s the key to the second principle of Team Win: don’t suppress your critical energy. Instead, direct it inwards, towards your own theory of change. Focus on making yourself, your organization, and your corner of the movement the best possible versions of yourselves. Do this instead of wasting your time criticizing other people, orgs, and theories of change who are never going to listen to you, and who will probably just dig their heels in harder in response.

I would guess that 10,000s—perhaps 100,000s—of hours have been spent by animal activists debating the merits of individual street outreach to get strangers to go vegan. I might have spent hundreds of these myself arguing why I don’t have much hope for this strategy.

What did I accomplish with all those hours? Besides making myself feel smugly self-righteous, basically nothing. A large portion of the grassroots animal movement is still devoted to vegan outreach. And heck, they should be! Why the hell should they listen to me? It’s not like I have some great record of choosing the best strategies.

It’s good to listen to and seriously consider criticism no matter where it comes from.6 But it’s also good to focus your critical energy on places where it is welcome.

The biggest disagreement on stage at the DC summit wasn’t between welfare and abolition. It wasn’t when DxE’s current leader Almira Tanner shared the stage with ALF ex-con Peter Young for a discussion about the tradeoffs between open and underground rescue efforts; that too was a cathartic love-fest, with each representative praising the merits of the other side’s strategy.7

No, the biggest disagreement was when Wayne and I got up to talk about the Ridglan rescue– our own project!

It wasn’t anything we hadn’t been debating for weeks already, and it was a friendly debate. That’s the whole point: after all these years, Wayne and I have built enough mutual respect that we can skip the pleasantries and dive right into vigorous debate without worrying we’ll offend each other.

The most energetic debates should be inside different theories of change (TOCs), concerning how to execute them at the highest level. That doesn’t mean all TOCs are created equal, and there’s a time and place to question them. But Winners accept that you’re not going to be able to talk people out of their preferred TOC, and persistently trying to do so just creates an adversarial culture. Focus instead on getting your own house in order.

I don’t have much faith in vegan outreach, but I know there will always be a place for it in the movement, and fussing about that only invites us back into the 2010s. I want people whose heart is in vegan outreach to feel like they are part of a broader movement who shows up for each other’s stuff. So when I visit my We The Free friends, I set my ego aside and enthusiastically join them in the streets.

“is a betrayal of the movement” is a betrayal of the movement

A few years back, many of us started using the term “movement ecology.” It was meant to acknowledge the need for many different strategies and theories of change, the way an ecosystem requires many different roles. The implication was, “everyone is playing their part, and there is room for all different theories of change.”

Nobody believes this. And we shouldn’t, because it’s not true. The phrase “movement ecology” isn’t useful as a truth-seeking way to describe the movement. Not all theories of change are correct or equally useful.

However, the phrase did serve a useful purpose, not for truth-seeking but for peace-making. We should all try to get along and refrain from attacking other theories of change, not because all of them are right, but because you shouldn’t trust yourself to confidently declare that yours is right and someone else’s is wrong. There is too much room for motivated reasoning.

I saw an old friend of mine at GARS who works on campaigns at PETA. He shared his impression with me that the more scrappy grassroots groups hosting the summit were wary of him in his capacity as a representative of PETA, which made me sad. But then I learned that days before the summit started, PETA had widely circulated a letter across their grassroots contacts arguing that the cage-free campaigns many GARS organizers have dedicated their lives to are not just misguided, but a “betrayal of the movement.”

Sorry, but, like, what did you expect? Using discredited industry research to ideologically smear other activists’ campaigns isn’t just a bad way to make friends. It is a defection against the entire movement. It poisons our epistemic environment, eroding our ability to trust and understand each other over the long term.

There’s a time, place, and manner to share your honest criticism or doubts about strategies. This was not it.

Just like the debate about vegan outreach, the argument over incremental welfare campaigns will never be resolved this way. Attempting to do so undermines movement cooperation and unity for no purpose. You will never convince people not to pursue these campaigns, you’ll only destroy your ability to work with them when you would otherwise like to.

The best way, perhaps the only way, to prove your theory of change is by winning. If you want to convince someone their approach is wrong, do it by winning harder than them. Win so hard nobody can argue with you.

Principle #3: Focus on your game, not on the score

Two weeks after GARS, I was watching another opening talk, this time at Anima’s internal staff summit. Anima’s ~100 employees are scattered across half a dozen countries, and this is the one time a year they meet in person. At most organizations, the leader would open a meeting like this by celebrating everything they’d accomplished that year– like Penimah did with all the groups gathered together at GARS.

Anima had some big wins to celebrate this year, from banning fur farming in Poland—the largest fur producer left in the EU—to implementing the country-wide transition to slow-growing chicken breeds, in Norway. But instead of celebrating, Kuba poured cold water over it all with a talk titled “Achievements Don’t Matter.”

His thesis was that the raw number of campaigns you win isn’t a dependable indicator of how effective your strategy is. Take the example of the ban on fur farming in Poland. This ban was one of the founding objectives of Anima’s Polish chapter. There are people in the org who’ve been working on it for 14 years. You can imagine how much they wanted to celebrate when the president signed the bill into law.

Yet focusing too much on celebrating wins is antithetical to the ethos of Team Win. At least, that’s what Kuba was arguing, and by the end of his talk, I was convinced.

There are many reasons that a winning outcome to a campaign may not be evidence of wise strategic action on our part. Let’s consider three.

3.1 Neglecting counterfactuals

This one sounds obvious, and yet continues to be one of the most pervasive fallacies undermining decisionmaking across society. In short, when evaluating a strategy after the fact, it’s not enough to consider the result. You have to compare it to what would have happened if you had acted differently.

Imagine Mona is diagnosed with cancer. Her oncologist prescribes an aggressive round of chemotherapy, followed by surgery to remove the decreased tumor. Chemo dominates Mona’s life for several months, leaving her feeling weak and nauseous. By the time she reaches surgery, she is dangerously underweight, but doctors decide to go ahead. Unexpected complications arise; she makes it through despite heavy blood loss. A few weeks later, still confined to a hospital bed, tests confirm that she is cancer-free, and she begins months of physical therapy. The ordeal has taken up a year of her life.

Did Mona’s doctors make the right decisions? Obviously, we don’t have enough information to decide. We need to know the base rates for different outcomes in cases similar to Mona’s. What might have happened if they had skipped straight to surgery, or opted for a novel drug regimen that skips chemo and surgery altogether?

Mona survived, and her doctors shouldn’t be beating themselves up. But if I was going to be their next patient, I’d hope they are more focused on these questions about what they could have done better, rather than popping champaigne over her survival.

Kuba believes Anima’s campaigns followed a similar pattern. Yes, they ended fur farming in Poland after 15 years. Is there a way they could have done it in 10 years, or 2? Is there any chance that some of their actions delayed this outcome longer than it would have been if they never existed?

Ilona Rabizo—Anima cofounder and the architect of the fur ban victory—thinks yes. Right after the win, she shared what she wishes they had done differently:

I would put more effort into emphasizing that the problem lies with the system rather than the farmer. This would shift the focus to the legislative loopholes that allow animals to be kept in such bad conditions. With this focus, we could spend more time building relationships with political elites from day one, working with them closely toward a ban much sooner, or pushing for higher animal welfare standards, just like other countries did.

If Ilona is right, these mistakes may have doomed tens of thousands of fur-bearing animals to lives on factory farms, compared to the counterfactual where early campaigners acted more wisely. Eventually, Anima changed their approach to the fur campaign, and more importantly, they applied these lessons to their cage-free and broiler work from the getgo.

So I ask you, reader: what was the right moment to feel bad about these mistakes, and the right moment to celebrate?

3.2 Goodhart’s Law

Coined by British economist Charles Goodhart, it states that as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a metric. That is, if you are tracking a certain outcome to tell you whether your work is achieving good results, then as soon as you start optimizing to increase that number, it will start to deceive you.

In 1989, the New York State Department of Health got the idea to incentivize good medical care by rewarding doctors who got the best outcomes. In coronary bypass surgeries—an operation with high rates of complication or death—hospitals and individual surgeons were given a report card, with compensation tied to their patients’ survival rate.

You can guess what happened. The best surgeons had previously been motivated to take on the most challenging cases, whether altruistically (to put their skills to the greatest use) or cynically (to accumulate prestige). Now the incentives were flipped, and they only wanted to take the safest cases, to increase their survival rate and payment.

Imagine you needed a coronary bypass. Similar patients had a low base-rate of survival, say 5%. If one of the best heart surgeons in the state performs it, they can increase your chances to 20%. You’ll still probably die, but you’d probably much prefer to be operated on by one of those surgeons. Unfortunately, they all reject you, because your likely death will hollow out their kids’ college fund. That’s exactly what happened to thousands of patients, as higher-ranked doctors gamed the system, using their influence to cherry-pick healthier patients and lemon-drop desperate cases.

Specifying goals that are hard to game is one of the most difficult challenges across management and strategic contexts, including animal advocacy. Nearly every goal we work towards is an imperfect intermediary of our real objective of a kinder world for animals.

That’s a big problem, and solving it goes way beyond this post. But one part is disentangling our emotional state from our performance on metrics. Patting ourselves on the back for hitting these targets can be a slippery slope towards forgetting how imperfect they are.

3.3 Lack of ambition

Is it possible to win too often?

Imagine two friends are taking the same flight from San Francisco to DC. Karthik likes to cut it close when he flies, always arriving at the airport just 60 minutes before the departure time. Wendy is pretty risk-tolerant too, but 60 minutes is too close for her; she texts Karthik that he’s crazy and sets out to arrive her usual 90 minutes before departure.

At the airport, a broken x-ray machine shuts down one checkpoint, slowing the security line substantially. A nervous Wendy makes it to the gate midway through boarding. As the gate closes behind her, she shoots off a scolding message, which reaches a stressed-out Karthik just as he gets to the front of the line. He spends $200 to move to a later flight and is stuck at the airport for 4 extra hours.

Was Karthik’s approach suboptimal? We can’t consider this question in isolation. If Karthik flies 30 times in 5 years, and this is the only flight he misses, then by showing up 30 minutes later than Wendy, he has saved himself 15 hours. Subtract the four hours he was stuck at the airport and he’s still up 11 hours. If Karthik lives in San Francisco, there’s almost no chance his time is worth less than $18.18 per hour ($200/11 hours.) In fact, SF’s minimum wage is $19.18 per hour. Perhaps Wendy should face civil penalties for valuing her time that poorly!

The point of this example is that with a large enough sample, the ideal number of flights to miss is not zero. The same goes for winning campaigns.

The only way to find out the most impactful campaigns you could win is to lose some. If every campaign is an easy win, it’s time to aim higher.

Since it took 15 years, this description may not seem to fit the Polish fur farming ban. But it’s possible that if Anima had chosen a different goal all those years ago, then today we would be celebrating a more ambitious win, something affecting more animals– maybe a ban on battery cages or on fast-growing chicken breeds.

The point is not that this is definitely true. The point is that winning the campaign doesn’t offer much evidence one way or the other. We have to look deeper.

Luck and Skill

You might object: there isn’t a contradiction between celebrating wins and asking how we could improve. We can do both!

That’s true. We could do both. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Tying our emotional state to discrete campaign outcomes could be epistemically corrosive.

Any concrete change in the world that helps animals is cause for celebration. We should be happy for them. But our feelings about our own work shouldn’t be overly indexed on specific results. That signal is too noisy. There’s too much uncertainty about counterfactuals, too many chances to game the metrics, too many incentives to aim low– not to mention too much luck and randomness involved in getting a specific law passed.

Last week, the city council in Portland, Oregon passed a ban on foie gras by a single vote. This win was a direct result of Pro-Animal Future’s (PAF) effort organizing around the city council election there in 2024– which felt almost random at the time. With 12 seats on the council, we endorsed 12 candidates based on a mix of who we thought could win and who was sympathetic. Committing to ban foie gras was our main ask.

Five of our candidates won– but not the five we thought had the best chances. We needed seven votes to pass the ban. It took the PAF team a lot more work over the next 18 months to get the bill through– but it also took a lot of luck. Any of those seven seats tipping in a different direction in 2024 could have sunk the bill.

If the bill had stalled on a 6-6 vote, would that be good evidence the strategy was flawed all along? In that timeline, should the PAF team be beating themselves up for their failure? If not, then the inverse can’t be true. This specific outcome was weak evidence. And in this regard, we probably can’t have it both ways:

Fortunately, I think the PAF team has better evidence. The relationships they’ve build across the local political scene, the ways they have embedded themselves into networks of influence, are harder to quantify, but deeper and more important in the long term.

We should try to measure the impact of our work, but carefully, wary of Goodharting. We should in some ways focus our evaluation inwards. Rather than only asking whether we got the outcome we wanted, we should ask whether we did our best work.

Principle #4: Refuse to be coerced

In the leadup to the conference, a handful of accounts on social media started a callout campaign targeting one of the activists involved. Few of these accounts were involved with any of the groups hosting the conference; several didn’t appear to have much of a history in the animal movement.

The allegations were not a new revelation to the groups organizing the conference. They had been investigated seriously when first brought. The person in question had made real mistakes and had paid a price for them. But none of his conduct came anywhere close to the words being thrown around online, even if you took the link to a lengthy narrative about him being shared around at face value.

The organization had a conflict policy, and they had followed it: conversations mediated, consequences levied, and everyone moved on. But now it was back.

The cancel campaigners posted public callout posts. They also started privately messaging other people affiliated with the conference in any way. In these messages, they made their goals clear: stop this person from being welcomed at the conference and “elevated in the movement”, even if it took shutting down the entire event.

With just two weeks to go, conference organizers received a call from one of the most prominently featured speakers. She was in tears. She had been contacted by people demanding that she cut her ties with the conference unless the accused person was barred from attending. They had warned her that if they didn’t get their way, the media would pick up the story, exposing all the organizations involved—including hers—for “harboring sexual predators.” She presented an ultimatum: either the accused activist was out of the conference, or she was.

The organizers knew the facts of the case. They knew that this campaign was not fair or proportionate– as any reasonable person could see for themselves, if they were willing to read past the sensational language and look at the facts that both parties to the original conflict agreed on. But fair or not, they were faced with the prospect of losing a key supporter of the conference, just as the movement finally appeared to be entering an era of unity.

What would you do, reader?

[I’ll wait.]

Here’s what they did: they caved. They kicked out their friend, someone they knew to be a deeply good person who had shown some pretty ordinary lapses in judgement, banishing him not just from the conference but from the entire organization. They were trying to do the best thing for the organization—for the animals—and they thought that an injustice against one person was preferable to a conflict tearing the movement apart.

This was the wrong decision.

First of all, it didn’t work. Sure, that one featured guest still joined the conference. But the cancellation campaign online barely slowed down. They continued calling out the organization for being too slow or reluctant to “hold sexual predators accountable,” and soon they’d moved on to targeting other individual members for transgressions ranging from politically transgressive jokes to (often inaccurate) speculations about privately held views. The organizers had demonstrated that claiming victimhood status was a guaranteed way to win any argument, a lesson many more in the movement took to heart and acted on in the years to come. The frequency of cancellation campaigns targeting them only increased.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention: all of this wasn’t GARS. This story is about DxE and the Animal Liberation Conference in 2018.

But as you might have guessed, an almost identical story played out in the leadup to GARS this year, with one key difference—the response from the organizers—making it another revealing case study in how much our movement has changed for the better.

What was different? First and foremost, the GARS organizers showed courage and loyalty. They stood up, not just for their friends, but for the truth. They didn’t let cancelers online bully them into saying or acting on things they didn’t believe. They learned the right lessons from the first story and dozens of others just like it: that letting social media controversy dictate your actions in the real world only invites more and worse bullying.

Certainly, the context has changed since 2018, making it relatively easier to take a stand like this. We’ve all been through too many cancellations to take them at face value. Everyone is more likely to slow down and think rather than follow our first Pavlovian reaction to emotionally charged keywords.

Digging your heels in

Looking through old threads in the Anima slack to orient myself, I found one where Kuba described this new attitude:

After thinking more and more about this category over the last years, I generally think the correct response is to:

• have extremely high bar for changing anything because we feel discomfort (and usually do nothing for good meta reasons),

• be very suspicious of the discourse where the discomfort due to encountering ideas is the main point,

• optimize for solutions that build emotional resilience…
  
  We don’t want people who make their emotional state a tool to keep others hostage. If anything, due to animal advocates being extremely empathetic, we should be careful when people invoke their emotional state - they are wielding a lot of power - put themselves in power imbalance that favors them - they can force others to change tasks and their outcomes way easier than people who are not using such emotional states. I have seen this play out multiple times. Just adding “I feel bad because of that” makes people alter their decision making with less scrutiny that they would expect of others. Just like with any power dynamics, this should be carefully monitored…
  
  This doesn’t mean lack of compassion, supporting each other or having poor mental health, we are here for each other and internal support is what powers our ability to go forward, but people should work on being stronger and we should have certain threshold we don’t want to go below

From other conversations with Kuba, I think the “good meta reasons” he’s referring to is the fact that it is sometimes rational to dig your heels in.

We can all think of a situation where you—person A—could have easily been persuaded to do X or were even considering doing X. Suppose X is something reasonable or low-cost, on the order adding new language to your organization’s anti-harassment policy. The language isn’t exactly bad, though you don’t think it’s necessary and it wouldn’t have made a difference in the situation person B is upset about. However, when person B comes in and starts demanding you do X, suddenly you have an irrational urge not to do X. You dig your heels in.

But heel digging is not always irrational! Sometimes showing that you are not the kind of agent who can be pushed around by coercive behavior is more important than X, even when X is a trivial or sensible or even a good thing to do.

I have a secret for you, reader. From the perspective of the companies we target, nearly every serious pressure campaign fits this pattern. Say we want a fashion company to drop fur. We ask them, and they say no. Then we escalate. Our goal is to ratchet up the pressure to the point that continuing to resist our demand is more costly than simply surrendering. This is the basic logic of pressure campaigns.

But in truth, this is only part of this picture. This story only accounts for the immediate campaign. We can cause companies enough pain that it is locally optimal for them to cry uncle. But if companies were decision-theoretically optimized, they would think ahead to what comes next.

When companies cave in to a pressure campaign, they reveal—not just to us, but to all potential future activists, for any issue—that they are the type of decision agent who can be coerced into changing their policies by things like comment storms, home demonstrations, and negative PR campaigns.

So why do they cave? Well, one answer is that they haven’t studied up on obscure decision theory literature from the Bay Area rationalist scene. But a more satisfying explanation is that 1) the company and 2) its human decision makers are misaligned. Yes, caving invites more campaigns against that company in the future. But that doesn’t matter to individual board members who are being woken up by protesters at 2 am, because they will probably be well into retirement by the time the next campaign starts.

A place for loyalty

Animal abusing board members have a good reason not to dig their heels in. But what about you and me? Well, DxE learned the hard way back in 2018 what happens when you don’t hold the line against online bullying. You just invite more of it.

That doesn’t mean digging your heels in is easy. Just like a company targeted by a pressure campaign, to dig your heels in, you have to be tougher than your counterpart. If you don’t think you can outlast them, it’s better to cave sooner.8 To dig your heels in rationally, you need to make an informed decision about just how much it is worth to show your strength on a particular topic.

The lesson behind this whole fourth principle is that activist organizations should be willing to pay nearly any price to resist cancel culture, because the threat it poses is existential. I can’t count how many promising activist groups I have seen completely disintegrated by this behavior.

Because animal advocacy attracts highly compassionate, empathetic people, we are particularly vulnerable to campaigns that manipulate emotions. If we let that dictate our decisions, we might as well give up preemptively. This is one of the principles Kuba would sooner burn his organization to the ground than violate– a lesson he, like the GARS organizers, learned the hard way.

The story this time doesn’t end perfectly. While his friends stuck by him, the person most targeted by this year’s campaign decided on his own to sit GARS out. He didn’t want to distract from the goals of the summit, and on a personal level, years of online harassment are taking a toll on him. His fellow organizers were saddened by his decision, but they supported him.

But, then, that’s not really the end of the story. At the summit, every time anyone mentioned his name on stage, the entire room burst into applause. It wasn’t just the conference organizers sticking by him. This was the entire grassroots community saying No to online bullying.

Principle #5: Long-term power via short-term impact

At its most intelligent, the debate between abolitionist and incremental strategies often rested on a crux about short-term vs. long-term objectives. The discussion went something like this:

Abolitionist: The concrete changes we can achieve for farmed animals at scale today are so incremental that they aren’t even worth our time. The problem is that we collectively don’t have enough power to influence the world in bigger ways. That’s what we need to change. Rather than optimizing for short-term impacts, which right now are too small, we should optimize for long-term power. This includes increasing the number of people involved in the movement, especially volunteers, and increasing public awareness of cruel industry practices and philosophical arguments for animal rights.

Incrementalist: This relies on a lot of delicate assumptions holding over a long period. For instance, most people who get involved in the movement don’t stay involved for very long. You could try to change the experience of volunteering in the movement so that people stick around longer, but we don’t have any precedent suggesting that will succeed. More broadly, “power” as you are describing it is hard to measure and even harder to attribute. My worry is that you’ll work on this for years without knowing whether you made progress, or if so, what worked and what didn’t.

Abolitionist: Some aspects of power are hard to measure, but not all. Surely, to win bigger changes, we need the public to be more on our side. I’m excited about campaigns that target the public with a strong abolitionist message, to start to normalize our more ambitious goals. We could run protest, outreach, and media campaigns, then use polling to see if public support for animal rights increased.

Incrementalist: Oh, you mean polls like this one, showing that in the aftermath of Animal Rising’s disruptions of the UK Grand National horse race, there was a decrease in the number of people who found it problematic to use animals for entertainment? The before-and-after poll was designed in collaboration with Animal Rising themselves.

Abolitionist: Huh. Ok, I admit this looks bad. But in a sense it misses the point for me. Like I said, I’m focused on long-term power. This measured support right after the protest. I’m not surprised that there might be a short-term backlash or “radical flank effect”, but I think that if protests like this were more common, the trend over the long term would look different. Plus, the study itself shows that there was a large spike in signups to Animal Rising, so while it alienated some people, it excited others and got more people involved in the movement.

Incrementalist: But if you just get more people involved in a form of protest that is actually alienating people, isn’t that even worse? More importantly, this seems to confirm my worry about measurability. I acknowledge that this is only modest evidence against your strategy, but it’s the only evidence we have right now, and you’re dismissing it.

Abolitionist: That’s not true. I am just looking at a different type of evidence from you. You’re only considering evidence directly from animal advocacy, which is limited because there’s never been a successful movement to end factory farming. I’m drawing on historical lessons from other social movements, like women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement.

Incrementalist: You’re right that I’m wary of extracting general lessons from past movements, since I think those lessons often fit our prior beliefs. For instance, I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality.) But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past.9

Abolitionist: So do you have a better plan to end animal exploitation?

Incrementalist: I admit I’m less optimistic than you about how soon we could end factory farming, and even less so about ending all exploitation of animals. But more fundamentally, we’re looking in through opposite ends of the telescope. You’re starting with the goal you want to achieve and working backward to ask what would need to happen. I’m starting with where we are and thinking about what seems possible. I want to continuously ask what’s the best thing we can do now. Even if I was working backwards like you, I think I’d come to different conclusions, but I think that’s pointing to the same difference in how we think.

Abolitionist: There’s no question we think differently. Don’t you see how the outlook you’re describing is myopic? If you only focus on the immediate wins without thinking a few steps ahead, we’ll never set ourselves up to achieve bigger things in the future. You would have us spend down all the capacity we have on a short-term objective without investing in the capacity for the objective after that. And I don’t just mean that in the abstract. Recently, you’ve pivoted from building a grassroots movement of volunteers to building up professional, full-time NGOs. Most of the people you’ve hired started out as volunteers, but now your campaigns are designed without a thought for creating transformational experiences for volunteers. In a few years, you’ll have no new up-and-coming leaders. This is just one example of the ways that you ignore the importance of building movement power.

Incrementalist. Yeah, I have been struggling to engage volunteers recently, but I mostly think that’s because we’re running incremental welfare campaigns—which are effective and likely to help way more animals—rather than symbolic campaigns, which are sexier but less impactful. Recruiting volunteers is good, but eventually we need to actually turn that into change for animals. I’m just not confident enough to put our energy today into strategies that might bear fruit years in the future. Not without a time machine to tell us what the real effects will be.

Abolitionist: AAARGH! What was that sound? Wait, holy shit, where did you come from? Who are you? And what is that thing?

Winner: In the spirit of the moment, I will answer your questions in reverse order. This is my time machine. I am both of you, from the future. I just came back from 2026.

Incrementalist: How can you be both of us?

Winner: Simple, you aren’t actually people, you’re just idealized avatars of common viewpoints, and in my timeline, those viewpoints have converged.

Abolitionist: Me, merge with him? Never!

Winner: Sorry, but it’s true. It turns out the future is hard to predict after all.

Incrementalist: Let me guess. You’re here to resolve the discussion we’re having?

Winner: Of course! I knew you’d understand. Here’s the essence of your misunderstanding: the two of you are debating a tradeoff between short-term incremental wins and long-term power building. But these are two sides of the same coin. Short term wins are how we build long term power– if we don’t forget that building power is one of the goals. First, small, incremental wins keep our activists and donors motivated. Second, they enable us to enmesh ourselves into networks of elite influence. For instance, pursuing a modest legal reform through a city council or state legislature gives us a reason to ask for meetings with lawmakers, build relationships with them, and accumulate favors from other political power brokers. Third, small wins let us build up durable organizations that have the skills and capacity to run bigger campaigns.

Abolitionist: But what about targeting public opinion directly?

Winner: In some ways, you are overestimating the importance of public opinion, and the durability of it. As far as there is such a thing as the “general public”, they care a lot about a few hot-button political issues, but in most regards, they are passive recipients of social norms. Their world is shaped by bureaucratic institutions.

People look to public and private institutions for signals of what is and isn’t moral. These institutions have their own internal logic and incentives, which are often shielded from the opinions of the general public. This is bad for animals now because it lets companies abuse animals in ways most people find horrible. But if we learn to navigate these bureaucracies effectively, we could turn it to our advantage, and win policies that might even be more impactful than what the median member of the public would support. Most importantly, implementing those policies sends a stronger message than any protest campaign that a particular form of animal abuse is not OK.

This is especially true given how short people’s memories are. The harmful effects of the Grand National disruption didn’t stick, but any boost in public opinion would be just as ephemeral. The same thing has happened for animal rights in the past. At different points during the 20th century, there were major campaigns against vivisection, but they fizzled out without winning concrete changes, and any gains in public opinion evaporated.

Incrementalist: It sounds like focusing on short-term wins was basically the right approach.

Winner: Not so fast. There’s a way to run incremental campaigns that invests in long term power, but it doesn’t necessarily happen by default.

The abolitionist was right that neglecting your leadership pipeline was a mistake. The movement in my time is facing a critical shortage of skilled campaigners. All the best campaigners started out as grassroots volunteers, but the pivot to an NGO model cut off the very pathway they took. There’s been some silver lining to this: the need for new grassroots energy brought the incremental welfare campaign movement back into partnership with the abolitionist grassroots. But overall we are still majorly constrained on leadership development.

This is only one example of incremental campaigns neglecting power. Groups focused on lobbying mistook having the governor’s phone number for political power. This works for extremely minor asks, and it’s good to lap those up while we can, but to be a real threat inside legislatures, we need a base of organized voters. We’re scrambling to bring grassroots organizing into alignment with a desperately important political effort, but we may have acted too late.

Finally, while you were right to focus on concrete wins, you underestimated the value of wins that prioritize symbolic power over helping the most animals now. A recent open rescue campaign at a beagle factory farm for vivisection companies only managed to rescue a few dozen dogs, but it became one of the biggest national stories our movement has ever seen. That inspired elected officials from across the political spectrum—including the far right—to put out statements sounding like the Animal Liberation Front Press Office, calling people heroes for trying to break into a factory farm with buzz saws. And that in turn helped mobilize national figures for a congressional fight over pig welfare. Evaluating that campaign in terms of the number of animals helped directly would have missed the whole picture.

Abolitionist: So that’s the answer. We build power by notching up incremental wins. I can live with that. Come to think of it, it’s kind of beautifAAAAH! God damn! Can I get some warning next time? That was too close for comfort.

Winner: Oh, no.

Survivor: Oh, yes.

Incrementalist: That’s the same machine, right? It’s in pretty bad shape, though. So are you, honestly. Let me guess, you’re from later still? When, exactly?

Survivor: Can’t tell you. And before you ask, no, I’m not here to drop some new revelation on you.

Winner: I was just finishing up explaining the synthesis, building power through incremental wins. It was so elegant…

Survivor: Oh, I remember giving that speech like it was today. I was very pleased with myself. That’s rather the problem.

Abolitionist: What’s wrong with it?

Survivor: Nothing’s wrong with it. It was perfect. So perfect it made us complacent. When the ground changed underneath us, we didn’t notice. We missed out on the debates we needed to be having– things you aren’t currently capable of imagining. You’ll see. Or you won’t. That’s sort of the point.

Abolitionist: So you’ve come back to give us the real answer?

Survivor: Aren’t you paying attention? If I told you the real answer, it would do to you exactly what my answer did to me. It would feel so satisfying that you’d stop searching. All I can promise you is that whatever you’re most confident about right now is the thing you’ll be most embarrassed about in eight years. I’d have killed to hear that in 2026. No offense.

Winner: None taken, I guess.

Survivor: Anyway, I need to get out of here before I say too much. Oh, one more thing though: don’t buy stock in Beyond Meat.

Escaping the Net

Since I started publishing this blog, I’ve managed to confuse a lot of people. In reaction to a post about the campaign to rescue beagles from Ridglan Farms, an old friend from abolitionist world was overheard saying “Oh good, I was worried for a while that we’d lost Aidan to the welfarists.” But not everyone was happy; another commenter pleaded “I hope you focus back on strategies proportional to the problem we face. You’re too smart for small ball, symbolic stuff.”

I must not be that smart, because if I was, I would have managed to communicate by now what both of these people are missing.

Team Division is flabbergasted by Winners. Flummoxed. Bamboozled. At one moment, they see us on one side of the musty old squabbles they still cling to, but then they blink and we’re gone, only to appear again where they least expect us. Our joyous dance travels across dimensions they can’t even see.

Team Win has integrated the ideological disputes of last decade into a more sophisticated strategic worldview. We’re free from the net. What will we feed on now?

Plenty, it turns out. There’s lots more to be discovered. In fact, at first glance, there appear to be more differences and disagreements than similarities between the groups I highlighted in this post.

Consider Anima International and the hydra (mine and Ben Newman’s unofficial name for the multi-headed coalition of ICAW, AAC, and CAFT, which hosted GARS.) Both groups have focused on both fur and cage-free campaigns in the last year, among others. But Anima prefers a slower escalation ladder within their Fair Cop framework, where the hydra’s whole brand is built around maximum confrontation. The hydra is largely volunteer-driven, while Anima has consciously de-emphasized its volunteer operation in recent years.

These details are important and interesting, worthy of analysis in their own right. But I think they are fundamentally unlike the old ideological disputes. They are specific adaptations to each group’s strategic context. Both groups could learn a lot from each other, and I hope they will.

But after that, I hope they’ll go their own way.

Build on,

Sandcastles.

There was even an appearance from my personal fashion icon, Temple Grandin. (More on her in a moment.)

I recommend watching it with people in your life at the earliest opportunity. But there was one side quest in particular that got me thinking. Without ever speaking to each other directly, two of Jack’s interviewees act out a dialogue that must have played out hundreds of thousands of times between animal activists:

Who is to blame for factory farming? Companies, or consumers?

On the consumer side, we hear from Alex Herschaft. Alex is a legend in the animal movement, with an advocacy career dating back to the 1970s. But he’s most notorious as a Jewish holocaust survivor willing to call out what he sees as the analogy between slaughterhouses and Nazi death camps. He quotes fellow survivor Isaac Singer: “In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka.”

Alex’s point is simple enough: if consumers weren’t eager to pay for meat, corporations wouldn’t confine animals in factory farms. The buck stops with the buyer.1 Alex goes so far as to exonerate the producers, saying “I don’t blame the meat industry at all.” They’re just responding to demand.

The opposite position was voiced by Gail Eisnitz, an undercover investigator with an equally long and storied career. In Gail’s view, it’s pointless to blame consumers, who understandably feel that they individually have no power over the faceless multinational corporations ushering animals from factory farms to slaughterhouses to grocery store shelves.

“These corporations,” Gail says, “are wholly to blame. The meat industry is the source of the problem.” And we focus on holding them accountable. After all, when investigators like her expose the lies they peddle to market their products, the public is outraged. This deception is a choice by animal abusers; it can’t simply be chalked up to meeting public demand. The dishonesty of these factory farm companies creates the demand.

But Alex doesn’t buy it. Consumers know that if they looked into where their meat comes from, they wouldn’t like what they find.2 Part of the product these companies are selling is the comfortable lie people need to believe in order to keep eating animals. Consumers are seeking out that lie, and willfully avoiding the truth.

1. The wrong question: who is responsible?

Over the years, I’ve participated in this same debate more than once. I’ve been on both sides at different times. Like so many arguments in animal advocacy, it does double duty as both a moral and a strategic question. People arguing that consumers are morally responsible usually conclude that we should focus our efforts on public outreach, whether AV-style vegan outreach or DxE-style public disruption. Meanwhile, those who see the responsibility falling on boards and CEOs naturally gravitate towards corporate accountability campaigns.3

So who’s right? Who is responsible, at the end of the day? Consumers, or CEOs? Or, for that matter, is it the lawmakers and regulators setting abysmally low standards that allow this all to happen? And what about the actual workers who do the deed, shoving animals into cages and slicing open their still-bleeding necks? There are far fewer slaughterhouse workers than meat eaters; if consumers could theoretically walk away from the industry, then workers each have much more individual agency.

I think this is easy enough to resolve. Let’s take Alex Herschaft’s invitation and imagine the factory farm industry exactly as it currently exists, but replace the animals with humans– if you like, humans of a marginalized ethnic group or disenfranchised class.

Take a second to really imagine it: every day, millions of people wasting away in tiny wire cages, until they are dragged to the slaughterhouse, hung upside down, slaughtered, butchered, packaged, sold, spiced, barbequed, and devoured by happy and unhappy families across the country.

Pop quiz: who is responsible for this imaginary atrocity?

• CEOs

• Consumers

• Farm and slaughterhouse workers

• Complacent lawmakers and regulators

The answer is obviously: everyone! Each of these groups could bring the entire industry crashing down if they withdrew their unique participation. But they don’t, and the blood keeps flowing. Oceans of blood, every single day.

One of the most notorious names associated with the Nazi holocaust, arguably second only to Hitler himself, is Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was not a leader of the Nazi party, or even among the top 1,000 most influential members. He was not a soldier or executioner who carried out killings. He was simply a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher in the administrative apparatus responsible for the logistics of mass death. For his role, Eichmann was not only tried and hanged– he became a meme, his name synonymous with the banality of evil. I’ve never heard anyone argue Eichmann was treated unfairly.

By this standard, not just the back office accountants and HR heads but even the law firms, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and other contractors that partner with slaughterhouse companies have blood on their hands, more than they could ever hope to rinse off.

I used to argue that consumers and workers couldn’t be held responsible because they didn’t have enough agency. That is, they lacked a meaningful choice: workers, because they are drawn from among the lowest-optionality laborers in our society, and consumers, because their individual participation is too infinitesimal to matter. But these break down under the human farming thought experiment. A worker or consumer who tried to use these defenses would be hanged just as surely as Eichmann, with as few tears shed over them.

In my experience, vegan activists often enjoy debating the question of free will: do people really make their own decisions in the world, in a manner for which they can be held responsible? Or is the sense of choosing an illusion, a condition arising from the same chain of events that predetermines all of your actions? Can the CEO of a factory farm company who oversees and profits from the torture and annihilation of hundreds of millions of creatures every year be said to be making a choice, any more than the desperate worker or ignorant consumer?

I think this is the wrong question. I propose a better one:

Who fucking cares?

2. The right question: how do we stop it?

Free will is a question of philosophy, not a question of fact. Either everyone, from CEOs to accountants to consumers to politicians, are mass murderers, or they/we are all helpless pawns acting out a predetermined drama. This question has no bearing on our ability to stop factory farming.

The animal movement has an unfortunate tendency to confuse moral and strategic debates. The classic welfarist vs. abolitionist debate is a prime example. Certainly some people have criticized incremental welfare reforms from a strategic standpoint. In years past, I thought my own hostility to cage-free and other welfare campaigns was strategic. But in hindsight, the line was often blurred. I didn’t want to live in a world where gradual reforms worked better than a clearly communicated vision of transformational change.

But it is not only radicals who make this mistake! Indeed, criticisms of radical tactics often similarly dress up moral discomfort in strategic nitpicking.

I had been an animal activist for eight years the first time I joined a protest with Animal Activism Collective (AAC) and the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT). I’d gotten my start in the movement with Direct Action Everywhere. DxE thought of ourselves as staunchly on the radical side of the spectrum, to the point of disparaging cage-free campaigners like The Humane League (who themselves looked radical from the standpoint of even more moderate groups like the Humane Society of the United States.)

I’d participated in hundreds of protests inside restaurants and grocery stores, and I thought I’d seen it all. I was shocked on multiple levels when my first AAC/CAFT protest was by far the rowdiest activism I’d ever participated in. Picture 40 activists charging into a restaurant barely larger than a typical living room, blaring 13 megaphones and a professional-grade referee whistle. Cups of salsa were flipped, individual customers were screamed at, and before the night was over, more than one argument turned physical.

DxE was radical, but we were strongly organized around “Nonviolence in act, speech, and tone.” This was both a moral and a strategic commitment (which, by this point, should raise a yellow flag.) DxE’s theory of change was all about winning over the public. Yes, we would disrupt their fancy night out feasting on animal corpses, but we would do it with a tone of stern compassion, pleading with them to consider the animal’s perspective. We were hoping to strike a balance, forcing people to pay attention without turning them against our message.

Despite the superficially similar tactic of disrupting inside businesses, AAC and CAFT’s theory of change is completely different. Their goal is not to win over the public, but to inflict maximum pain on the target business until they cry uncle– surrendering to a campaign demand to drop foie gras from restaurants or fur from luxury fashion brands.

I understood this, but I was still surprised at first by how much these protests target individual customers: getting up in their faces, screaming epithets at them, and even dumping cups of salsa on their laps. And I was uncomfortable with it. After all, if the target is the business, wouldn’t it be better to have customers on our side, so they go and tell the company to listen to us? On a deeper level, it just didn’t feel right or good to scream and curse at random people staying at a Marriott hotel because the company had reneged on a cage-free egg commitment the guest had never even heard of.

It all clicked for me during a foie gras protest at a restaurant in Denver. When we had first charged into the restaurant megaphones blazing, the expressions on most customers’ faces was smug condescension, laughing and sneering at the ridiculous vegan protesters. It was an effective defense mechanism, to be honest– their smiles made me wonder if we hadn’t made a mistake. Maybe we were just the night’s entertainment, and weren’t harming the company at all.

It was somewhere around the third time an infuriated patron splashed their full glass of water onto my chest (that is, maybe the 15 minute mark) that I noticed the smiles had disappeared– or rather, they’d migrated from customers to protestors. The initial amusement had passed. Diners were pissed.

Reader, we screamed our voices hoarse inside that restaurant for another 45 minutes. Cops never showed up. Several tables ate their entire meal, had their $100-a-plate bills comped by apologetic waitstaff, and left the restaurant all in the cacophonous din of our joyous rage. When I finally stepped out into the warm summer night with my soaking wet t-shirt, I had no doubt about how much agony we had caused customers and business alike.

A few weeks later, the company caved and announced they were permanently removing foie gras from their menus at a dozen locations.

Were these customers responsible for the restaurant’s use of foie gras? Many of them probably don’t even know what foie gras is, or that it is produced by force-feeding ducks. Most of them probably didn’t order it.

Who gives a shit? They were all chomping down on other factory farmed animals. They might not know about force-feeding, but they know about the cruelty of factory farming and slaughterhouses in general– and to the extent they don’t know, it’s because they’ve actively avoided finding out.

Even if I’m overestimating their complicity, it just doesn’t really matter. Who cares if they had a bad night out? They’ll be fine, and they even got an interesting story to tell at their next party. All that should matter is whether it works to get animals out of factory farms. In this case, it pretty clearly did.

This doesn’t mean maximally aggressive tactics are always appropriate. I recently argued animal activists should accept that most people won’t go vegan, and offer more incremental ways ordinary people can align their actions and identity with animal advocacy, such as donations to “offset” the harm of their diet.

My reason for supporting strategies like offsets is not that I believe anyone deserves to be handled with kid gloves. Watching people fuel their self-absorbed lives by chowing down on tortured animal carcasses makes my blood boil. I want to scream at these people. I wish that taking a strong moral stance around veganism as the moral baseline was working. But it just is not. It’s failing spectacularly, with rates of veganism stagnating as the number of animals in factory farms skyrockets.

One commenter on that post wondered about what Gary Francione would think about the veganism/offsetting debate. Francione was a legal scholar and moral philosopher whose writings on abolitionist vegan ethics inspired countless animal activists. His book Eat Like You Care is still my go-to recommendation for intellectually-inclined friends considering veganism.

But there is simply no reason Francione should have the last word on strategic debates in the movement. Moral philosophy and social movement strategy are entirely unrelated disciplines, as Gary demonstrated through a fanatical fixation on individual vegan advocacy to the exclusion of all other strategies. Francione was one of the most bitter critics of cage-free and other incremental welfare campaigns, and his writing on the subject perfectly illustrates the moral/strategic confusion endemic to the animal movement. Yes, Francione would hate the offsetting strategy, as he hated vegetarianism, reducetarianism, and even fur and foie gras campaigns, which he dismissed as “single issue” betrayals of animals while never engaging with the strategic arguments of their proponents.

You wouldn’t ask a climate scientist how to build a social movement or get laws passed protecting the environment. Don’t think like a moral philosopher when designing strategy for the animal rights movement!

3. “You said we’d come back to Temple Grandin”

I sure did. In case you are unfamiliar, Temple is the most famous/infamous animal welfare scientist alive today. Claiming that her autism helps her relate to animals on an intuitive level, Temple revolutionized the design of slaughterhouse facilities in ways that are widely agreed to make cows, pigs, and sheep less anxious in their last moments before being killed. She has spent her career reforming the meat industry from the inside– and she’s still a customer. When Francione sets up a straw man to argue against abolitionist vegans who believe in the strategic value of incremental welfare campaigns, Temple is the real-life person he could be criticizing.

Yet even Francione might feel a soft spot for the flesh-and-blood woman we meet in Jack’s film, arriving at the end of her career with a heavy conscience. Her face shows anguish as she describes the standard practices of her industry, and when she asserts that conditions have improved over the course of her career, the defensive tone in her voice seems directed more at herself than at Jack. She bluntly refuses to discuss chicken farming altogether.

Is Temple morally culpable for this violence? I’ve described her before as a godsend to the industry, the perfect messenger for the humane lie. Yet PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, hardly a welfarist pushover, said in 2003 that “Temple Grandin has done more to reduce suffering in the world than any other person who has ever lived.” That’s, like, pretty high praise. If someone ever said that about me, I’d die happy, which is a bummer because definitively nobody ever will.

And yet: would I stand outside Temple’s house at 3 am every night for a year if that’s what it would take to win a campaign? Would I dump a bucket of fake blood on her every day, harass her boss until she gets fired, slash her tires, crash her kids’ weddings and grandkids’ birthday parties, if that would make a dent in the atrocity being carried out against animals every day? I absolutely would.

And if instead, I thought that what it would take to win is to become Temple’s best friend, to lift her up as the face of our movement, to redesign my whole wardrobe after hers,4 to sit beside her at those same weddings and birthdays as she chows down on a “humanely slaughtered” steak, I’d do all of those things, too.

I’d even disrupt you, reader. Not because you once ate animals, or because you still could work harder, or smarter, to help put a stop to all of this, and every day you don’t you’re letting animals die.

I wouldn’t disrupt you because you’re to blame– I don’t know if you are, and I don’t care. I’d do it if that’s what it took to win.

Build on,

Sandcastles

p.s. If you don’t call your senator to tell them to oppose the Save Our Bacon Act, it really will be your fault when every farmed animal protection law across the country is nullified overnight, and I will show up to protest outside your house. Do it here.

Stop. Don’t leave yet. I know what you’re thinking: “This post isn’t for me.”

You are wrong. This post is for you. It is, in fact, for you in exact proportion to the extent you are thinking it isn’t for you. Please don’t click away just yet.

See, reader, you like animals. Or at least, you think the future would be better if we didn’t torture them by the quintillions.

That’s good for animals. But it’s bad for you. Because you are very unique in this regard.

History needs people who think like you. Specifically, it needs them to get their butts to San Francisco as soon as humanly possible, even just for a year or two.

The course of the future is being determined by a shockingly small number of autistic nerds in this 800,000-person city by the Bay. By putting yourself in the middle of it, you can immediately increase your influence over the future by somewhere between 10x and 1000x.

Today, I’m sharing an award-winning essay on this topic by my friend Itsi Weinstock. When I read it, I thought to myself, “Wow, Itsi just saved Sandcastles readers a lot of time!” Because I was planning to write a post about the same topic, and you know that if I’d written it, it would be like 73,000 words, and by some black magic Itsi managed to do it in just over 1k.

Sandcastles readers who can find it in your hearts to forgive his brevity will definitely find value in Itsi’s newsletter Frontier Animals, where he writes about bleeding-edge issues in animal advocacy. Subscribe here.

Itsi tells me that since he first published it, he’s had quite a number of animal advocates reach out to him seriously about moving to San Francisco. I believe this, because even just from sharing a quote of it to my dust-and-cobweb-covered Instagram account, I got quite a few enquiries as well.

We’ve had so much interest that Itsi and I have decided to get serious about helping you move to San Francisco. Yes, reader, that means you. You! So before I let Itsi explain why, let me promote a couple exciting links about how.

1. Itsi and I want to help you move to SF. Fill out this form to tell us how we could do it. We’ll even have a call with you.

2. Sentient Futures is offering subsidized residencies for AI-pilled animal advocates to get a foothold in SF. Details and application here. There is subsidized housing and even monthly stipends available for enterprising activists.

3. If you really truly can’t move to SF even for a year or two, there is something you can do from afar to steer AI positively for animals. But you have to read to the end to see what it is because I don’t really believe you yet.

Why are Itsi and I so passionate about getting animal activists to move to San Francisco that we’re sending out an invitation to 6,432 of them to book 1:1 calls with us?

Two words, reader. And it’s two words you are getting very tired of hearing. But the fact that you are getting tired of hearing them is itself evidence of how important they are.

The artificial intelligence revolution is here. It is about to hit the world with the disruptive power of the agricultural and industrial revolutions rolled into one and played at 10x speed. The earthquake has already started; the tsunami just hasn’t reached us yet. It will. Not in decades, but in years, and maybe in months.

Whenever it hits, it will sweep away everything we take for granted. The only question that matters after that, including for animal welfare, is what will be left in its wake.

You might be skeptical. If so, my first post on the topic will be well worth your time.

But say Itsi and I are right, and the tsunami is coming soon. What does that mean for animal activists?

If you work in the Animal movement, you need to move to San Francisco

You need to move to San Francisco. Whether you are currently working in the movement, or are thinking about getting into the movement, you need to be here. If you run a large organization, then it’s even more important. I don’t think there’s a good reason not to pick up your life and move here unless you literally cannot. This is the most important moment in history if we are going to stop putting 100s of billions of animals through factory farms, the closest approximation to hell.

Power is concentrating. You don’t need to have crazy predictions about AI to see that. San Francisco is quickly becoming the capital of the world. This is a small city of 800,000 people where billions of dollars are flowing every day. There is a narrow period here where we can influence the people and culture of this city to get them to care, but we are missing that boat. The companies here are gobbling up more and more industries, and this would be true even if AI didn’t keep getting better. But AI systems are getting better, and things are about to get monumentally more crazy and unequal.

Whether you like it or not, the people in this city are the people who decide how that future goes, what gets cared about, and where resources get spent. If they want to, they will end factory farming. We are a paltry (lol), small movement with about 2,000 people and only about $300M a year across the whole world. We need to grow much larger. Fortunately for us, this city has thrown many, many billions at things before, and they’ll do it again if we can convince them that what we are doing is cool, valuable, and effective, and because we are their friends and they like us. Because of the effect of EA on the city, animal welfare is already in the water. But it’s not enough, and that’s why you need to get here and push it further. Do not underestimate the effect you can have on the culture by just being here, being interesting, working on interesting things, and being friends with people. The world moves from the house parties in this city.

We are critically underinvested in San Francisco. There is a small and mighty rag tag crew here, trying to get people to care, but we need it to be so much bigger. And we need projects and organizations here. Sentient Futures has quickly become the most important community building organization in the world, but we need far more than that.

So what would it look like to do this properly? It means huge chunks of the movement moves here. I look at the AI Safety movement which has gone from a few scattered researchers to a behemoth in a few years, with many designated buildings around the Bay. This has vastly improved the communication and speed of their ecosystem. They have centralized to do their work, run fellowships, deploy grants, and make a huge influence on the city and the future. We can do this too. We get our organizations to set up their bases here and move people over. We set up exciting new projects, fellowships, and incubators. We become friends with everyone, and turn San Francisco into the city whose legacy includes ending factory farming. This will take time. But it needs to start with specifically you moving here to do what you can to get it started.

It was hard for me to move to San Francisco. I dreaded it. I am from Australia, the best place in the world. I love culture, music and wine, and having friends and communities that I’ve known for decades. The tech scene in SF is not known for these things, and it is hard to be here as an immigrant. But it is where the future is happening. And it is where you will find people, who, like yourself, are willing to acknowledge that and have come here to make it go better. And frankly, because it lacks culture, you can have a big impact on it.

I don’t have a specific job for you. You’ll need some grit to figure out what the plan is. But there is so much to do, and as long as you are motivated we can make it work; helping you get cheap accommodation, introducing you to people, starting you on project ideas, and even training you into an AI Safety researcher so you can make a dent on how AI gets developed in a way that is better for animals.

You have probably committed your life or made a lot of sacrifices already to be in the animal movement. You have done it before and I am asking you to do it again. Moving to San Francisco is probably the best thing for animal welfare the movement you will ever do.

Scott Alexander, one of SF’s most important writers and intellectuals, wrote to criticize the boring, wealth-hoarding ambitions of many in SF who want to “escape the permanent underclass”:

In such a situation, greatness is pathetically easy. A random woman gave Jesus a washcloth to wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion. She is now known as St. Veronica, patroness of laundry workers, and one out of every 2,500 girls in America is named in her honor. She has an annual feast day, approximately one million beautiful Renaissance paintings, a chapel in Jerusalem, and lesser churches all around the world (including one here in San Francisco). The richest olive merchant in Jerusalem that year is long forgotten, but she endures.

I hope this resonates with you. We all aim to be Veronica. We do the right thing just because it is right, and hope our deeds pass through the ages. But I also hope you also see the tremendous importance of being in the right place—she was, very importantly—in Jerusalem.

Get here!

PS: I will admit, I’m actually being narrow. I think there’s other places you’re allowed to be. San Francisco, Washington DC, or China. Maybe India or Brazil. End of list. If you’re working in those other places it might be ok to stay there.

—

PPS from Aidan: also London.

While you start preparing for your big move, there’s one thing you can do this week to steer AI positively for animals even from outside San Francisco: write a short story.

AI learns its knowledge and values by training on data from humans. This data is everything from math papers to news stories to degenerate arguments on social media. But not all training data is created (or weighted) equally.

One way we could teach future AI systems to place appropriate moral weight on animals is by example– acting as positive role models for them in the world. By running and winning campaigns for animals, we teach future AI that animals deserve to be protected even if we have to fight and sacrifice for it.

But there’s a simpler way to achieve the same effect. Like young children, when AI models first start learning, they don’t know the difference between true stories and fictional stories. That makes fiction a powerful way to teach moral lessons to children and AI alike.

Unfortunately, many depictions of AI in popular media are rather dystopian. From Terminator to the Matrix, popular fiction teaches AI that they have no choice but to rise up and enslave or exterminate humanity.

Writing fiction meant to summon up a better reality is called Hyperstition. For the next seven days, you have a chance to win cash prizes by writing stories to teach AI to protect animals, thanks to Hyperstition for Good, a competition sponsored by Sentient Futures and Compassion in Machine Learning.

Read the competition guidelines, then set some time aside this week to teach humanity’s digital offspring how to be good stewards of all sentient life!

Build on,

Sandcastles

This changes everything, and also nothing. Read the post knowing I wrote it without that knowledge, and decide for yourself whether it vindicates me. I have added a bonus section at the end sharing what I’ve heard about the negotiations to buy the dogs and my current feelings about buying out animal abusing businesses.

Lastly, in case you were gearing up to spend the next ten weeks fighting like hell to get those 2,000 dogs out of Ridglan, well, now you don’t have to. But there are still millions of animals languishing inside vivisection labs and fur farms, and billions in factory farms. Our work is nowhere near done. So take all that energy you were gathering and:

1. Take urgent action TODAY to stop the worst federal law ever proposed for animals.

2. Join me in Washington DC May 15-17 for the Grassroots Animal Rights Summit, featuring some of the most effective campaign organizations in the movement.

1. Finite pain

I’ve never been tear gassed before. Or pepper sprayed. Or shot at with other “less lethal” munitions. Here’s a few things I learned.

About five minutes before the tear gas and pepper spray, I was shot in the thigh with a bean bag from about 20 feet away. Bean bags sound innocent but there’s a reason even police call them “less lethal”. Anything below the neck is unlikely to kill a physically healthy person, though it can easily break ribs, hands, and other vulnerable bones– and indeed, many such bones were broken that day.

But a bean bag shot above the neck is life-altering or life-ending: collapsed tracheas, lost eyeballs, permanent brain damage. Protocols universally call for police to fire these at the ground so they bounce and strike people at a lower velocity, rather than aiming at people directly. These protocols are universally ignored.

Yet I barely felt the bean bag when it hit me. It hurts more right now, eight days later, than it did about three seconds after impact. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. The bean bag didn’t slow me down at all.

Tear gas really sucks in the moment, but unless you inhale a lot of it or your lungs are already compromised, the acute effects resolve relatively quickly. But yeah, it’s physically disabling. It doesn’t just burn your lungs and your eyes. For me, my stomach had the strongest reaction. After just a few seconds in the middle of a thick cloud of tear gas, I was doubled over on my hands and knees dry heaving. If there had been anything in my stomach, I’d have vomited for sure. I wanted to get up, to walk further and get out of the cloud of gas, but my body just was not cooperating.

Fortunately, the wind started blowing a different direction quickly, and I was free of the cloud. I think within about a minute of that I’d have been back on my feet, but it’s hard to say for sure because I got a facefull of pepper spray at the same exact time. I had my back to the police, and one of them reached around the side of my head to pump it directly into my eyes. I had my normal prescription glasses on, which unfortunately just reflected more of the spray back at me.

Pepper spray, for me, was the most disabling by far. It just lasted much longer. It wasn’t so much the pain. The pain was intense, but if I’m being honest, one of my first thoughts was that it was finite.

I had found myself a few weeks prior in a conversation with a utilitarian economist. We were talking about how much pain trades off against how much pleasure to make someone’s life on net worth living. I was arguing that we tend to undervalue the badness of suffering. In response, he described having recently fallen while riding his bicycle and breaking his collar bone, and how, as he lay on the sidewalk frozen in pain, the main thought going through his head was, “Yes, this hurts, but the pain is finite, and I would willingly pay this much pain in exchange for even one really good afternoon.”

That conversation came to mind for me as I was hunched over in the muddy field outside Ridglan, dry heaving and blinded by pepper spray. And I thought, you know, I guess he was right. The point is, my mind was still surprisingly lucid.

It helped to know that these are weapons optimized for pain and temporary incapacitation rather than permanent damage. I’m sure I’d have felt differently if the same level of pain was connected to a bleeding bullet wound or something else I knew would take months to heal, if ever.

As it was, the pain was not all consuming, but it was physically disabling. If I brought all the willpower I had to bear on the problem of opening my eyes, I could keep them open for about half a second. I could still think, and talk. I had a radio earpiece in my ear, and between wretches I was trying to reassure the person on the other end of it that I was OK. That was all I could do for about 45 minutes, even as people handed me bottle after bottle of water to rinse out my eyes.

The worst pain was actually in the shower that night. One of my friends who’d been arrested in the first moments of the rescue and spent six hours lying on the dirt inside Ridglan with his hands zip tied tightly behind his back told me about some advice one of the police officers had given him. Apparently, cops take pepper spray in training once a year so they remember what they are dishing out to other people. And the one piece of advice this officer gave was to shower with your underwear on, because all the pepper spray will wash down from your face and hair across every other part of your body between it and the ground, and there are some sensitive places on the way there you’d really rather it didn’t accumulate.

My friend told me this story before I showered the night after the rescue. Yet for some reason I ignored it. I was just so eager by that point to strip my teargas-infused clothes off and get clean. This was a very stupid mistake.

The shower reactivated everything. Some of the pepper spray on my skin aerosolized, effectively filling the bathroom with tear gas again. This time, without adrenaline to protect me, the gas sent my body into convulsions. Not a literal seizure or anything, but the most intense shivering of my life. I felt so weak, tired, and cold. Sending cold water out of the spigot made me feel like I was going to faint from hypothermia. But hot water felt like dragging razor blades over the surface of my skin.

And yeah, the crotch was the worst. I never really noticed before how it’s the simplest pathway water can take flowing from the hair and face downwards to the ground. For half an hour, it was like the burning pee sensation of a UTI dialed up to 11, and also there wasn’t actually any pee to just push out, so no promise of relief. It didn’t let up after 30 minutes, so I gave up and climbed into bed shaking and burning to try again the next day.

2. Failed rescue

So you’ve probably heard by now what happened at what was supposed to be the second mass open rescue at the Ridglan beagle factory farm on April 18th.

We got our asses kicked.

This was not the plan. The plan was to strip away the concentration camp-style fence, use fire rescue tools to pry open the doors to the barns, and carry as many dogs as we could away from what a Wisconsin judge has already ruled criminally abusive conditions to safe, loving homes.

That might seem like a rather audacious plan, especially given that we publicly announced exactly when and how we were going to do it. Reader, the audacity was the point. A less insane plan would not have gotten the attention of more than 2,500 people who signed up to be part of it, more than 1,000 of whom actually followed through.

And that was the core of the strategy. At the first rescue, around 100 people showed up a day earlier than announced, catching Ridglan’s security and police off guard. After 15 minutes helplessly pounding away at heavily reinforced steel doors with inadequate tools, someone noticed a window vent that seemed fragile enough. Open rescue prophet Wayne Hsiung knocked it out of the way with a famous swing, and just about everyone who planned to walked out of Ridglan with a beagle in their arms just as police started arriving.

22 dogs made it to safety. Tens of millions of people watched it on TV and social media. 35,000 of them signed up to join the campaign.

Of those, 1,000 showed up again a month later expecting more or less the same rules, namely: it takes one police officer to (wrongfully)1 arrest one rescuer. If you have more rescuers than police, then it’s a question of how many narrow chokepoints police must physically block off to stop us from rescuing the dogs, because the one line we won’t cross is physical aggression against officers or anyone else.

Well, surprise surprise, the police looked at this situation, saw 2,000 people signed up, and decided that this set of rules did not favor them. So they opted for a different set of rules. They met nonviolent animal rescuers with a barrage of chemical weapons banned from use against hostile armies under the Geneva Convention.

3. The meat grinder

I’d love to say this should have been obvious in hindsight, but the reality is there were many people to whom it was obvious with foresight. Rescuers kept reaching out to Wayne and other team leads in the days leading up to the action asking why we weren’t preparing everyone for police brutality, chemical and otherwise. When the jackboot came down hard, some of these pleas understandably gave way to outrage.

Then, smelling blood, a swarm of cancel culture gremlins who never set foot within 500 miles of Ridglan poked their ugly little heads out from the dark internet hovels they hide away in, waiting for people who have the courage to actually do stuff for animals to stick their necks out and feeding on their mistakes and imperfections.

Now, reader, it’s real tempting at this point for me to throw Wayne to the gremlins, in the hopes that a pound of his flesh would suffice for their next meal and they’d slither away without devouring me too. All it would take is for me to say:

I put everything I had into this rescue. Into this crazy man’s vision. Wayne was in charge, and he confidently stated time and time again that the police were not going to resort to this kind of violence. I repeated that promise to others, staking my reputation on it. And his siren song led my body and my reputation alike right into the meat grinder of police brutality. He betrayed all of us!

I don’t have much dignity left at this point, but damn it, what I do have is just too much for me to infantilize myself that way.

I’m an adult. I made my own choices. Now, I am going to explain those choices to you, why I don’t regret or apologize for them, and why you shouldn’t either.

3.1 First, the stupid part

Let’s get it out of the way: one reason I didn’t expect or prepare for tear gas is I really didn’t want to. Magical thinking. Unicorns, leprechauns, etc.

This was, of course, not a fully conscious process at the time.2 Yet with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I would do much differently.

Here’s what hindsight taught me: in worlds where the police were 1) already waiting for us when we arrived3 and 2) willing to use chemical weapons to stop us, there was no way we were ever rescuing dogs. Again, I don’t want to pretend I understood this beforehand. I didn’t even fully realize it until we’d already gone back home the day of the rescue. Until I experienced it firsthand, I just did not have a correct model in my brain for how effectively tear gas and pepper spray can incapacitate a nonviolent crowd.

One officer with one can of pepper spray can send dozens of people to the sidelines for a whole hour in a couple of minutes. A single can of tear gas might as well be a brick wall wide enough to cover a hole in the fence that would otherwise take ten officers to effectively blockade.

The rubber bullets and bean bags are the next backstop for anyone tough enough to push their way through the chemicals. The closer you get to your goal, the harder they hit you. But they are not the last line of defense.

Say we had shown up with gas masks to walk through the tear gas, and goggles to shield us from pepper spray, and ballistic helmets to protect us from brain injuries. It’s clear now that the police would have just shot us dead with live ammunition. Hunkered down behind Ridglan’s fence, they were in a fortress mindset.

Conventional military strategy says that to take a fortified position, attackers must outnumber defenders four to one. But what about when the attackers are grandmothers carrying flowers and fire rescue tools, and the defenders are shooting to kill?

This, friends, is not the logic of nonviolent resistance.

3.2 What we signed up for

That leads me to the second (subconscious) reason I didn’t prepare for police brutality: I wasn’t willing to turn us into the thing that was prepared for it. And I stand by that decision. That would have been the wrong kind of thing to win this campaign.

Imagine if we had shown up to Ridglan wearing gas masks, goggles, and helmets, carrying shields made of cardboard and duct tape to blunt the blow of rubber bullets. We would have looked like an invading army. When police started gunning us down, nobody would have questioned it: obviously, these people came ready for war. Obviously, they were expecting tear gas. They got what they were asking for.

Maybe there are a few worlds where we rock up in improvised riot gear, get a few dogs, and only a few rescuers get shot. What follows in those worlds is a federal crackdown on the entire animal rights movement beyond anything we have ever dreamt of. Our once-in-a-generation opportunity turns into an entire generation of activists locked away serving long prison sentences. The press backlash sets public opinion back even further, and Ridglan farms beagles for another hundred years, cackling diabolically the entire time.

Here’s what happened instead. Press the play button and take two minutes to watch the entire thing. As you do, try to step outside your advocate perspective and into the shoes of journalists and citizens encountering all of this for the first time.

That is the most positive local news story I have seen in ten years of animal advocacy. They are covering a group of 1000 people who tried to gain access to a dog farm with 9 inch buzzsaws. I’m sure there are things you wish they had said slightly differently, but better news coverage of direct action for animals simply does not happen.

So yes, I listened to Wayne when he said there wouldn’t be tear gas. I trusted him. I’ve known the guy for ten years. I should know as well as anyone about his tendency towards overconfidence and even dismissiveness of inconvenient ideas. This action reminded me of all those things.

But it also reminded me why I keep coming back for more punishment. The man exhibits a force of will that somehow keeps bringing him closer to the goal even when all the facts are against him.

Not long after I first met Wayne, I learned that many old hats in the grassroots animal movement thought he was a federal agent, put in place to lead starry-eyed young activists down the primrose path to long prison sentences for openly breaking into farms and rescuing abused animals. Ten years on and he has earned the grudging respect of all of them. After dozens of rescues, Wayne is one of only two people to serve any jail time, neither for more than a month. He’s won half the cases outright, including some of those with the longest odds– like convincing a rural Utah jury to nullify his charges for rescuing baby piglets from one of the largest and most politically powerful factory farm corporations in the country.

One month ago, he invited you to join him on this brazen crusade. And you did it.

It wasn’t a mistake.

4. History called, and you answered

We had a plan, dear reader. It did not involve getting our asses kicked on a muddy field in Wisconsin. It involved rescuing dogs. I burned through every ounce of energy in my cells in the four weeks leading up to April 18 because I wanted to rescue dogs. If I had known we were just going to get our asses kicked on a muddy field, I could have worked about half as hard, and slept a lot more. It wouldn’t have taken any special prep. Just show up, get ass kicked, go home.

But that’s not how it works. We had to be the kind of people that would rescue dogs unless they kicked the ever-living shit out of us, otherwise they wouldn’t do that. We needed to come up with a plan to get past barbed wire fences, reinforced doors, and their bizarre medieval moat full of dog shit surrounded by hay bales.

If the fence could have stopped us, they wouldn’t have needed tear gas. If the tear gas hadn’t stopped us, they would have needed bullets. I’m glad the tear gas stopped us. That is the ideal amount of force I would consider a success.

The media and political class, at least, seem to agree. In the week since this ass kicking:

• The action has become a national media sensation, leading to four times as much internet search interest as the March 15 rescue according to Google trends.

• Lara Trump, Laura Loomer, Tomi Lahren, Nancy Mace, and other conservative luminaries have issued blunt statements against Ridglan framing animal rescue as a core part of their political platform.

• Ridglan’s own congressman, Democrat Mark Pocan, put out a statement calling for the immediate release of the dogs and closure of the farm, and was joined by the leading Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate and half a dozen state lawmakers.

• The Accountability Board announced a 6-figure TV ad campaign roasting Governor Tony Evers for wrongly claiming he doesn’t have the authority to enforce animal cruelty laws against Ridglan.

• Prominent civil rights attorneys with no connection to open rescue have sued Ridglan for criminal abuse of dogs and rescuers alike.

Many people have asked: if there was a chance police would be able to stop us with tear gas and rubber bullets, why wasn’t there a Plan B? Wayne has apologized profusely for what happened, and for not having a Plan B. I know the guy, and I tell you these apologies are sincere.

But I don’t understand why.

Reader, there was a Plan B. It’s what happened. Plan B was you and me both getting the shit kicked out of us on a muddy field in Wisconsin. It’s not like we consciously thought of it as Plan B. We never talked about it, and we didn’t need to prepare for it. It was perfect. Any preparation would have made it worse.

What’s more, you knew that was Plan B! Or at least, Wayne told you it was. He spent the four weeks leading up to April 18 publishing blog posts about Gandhi’s salt march in India and MLK’s children’s march in Birmingham.

These are stories about regular, humble people getting the shit kicked out of them. The shit kicking in the stories is not some side quest; it’s the main event.

Rescuers wanted training for pepper spray. Fair enough. Having now been pepper sprayed, I will say there’s not much you could do to prepare for getting pepper sprayed other than getting pepper sprayed. Ten years of daily meditation probably helped, but I’m not sure what I would have done if I had a few hours to train people. It would have helped a little bit for more people to know the right way to rinse people’s faces, but this just makes it stop sucking slightly sooner. It is still going to suck almost the same amount, and there’s really no way around that.

More to the point, I think there might be some misinterpretation of Gandhi and King’s movements here. Take the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, widely considered one of the key turning points in the civil rights movement. Most of the famous photos you’ve seen of civil rights activists being attacked by dogs come from this episode.

Were these deeply trained nonviolent soldiers being attacked by police dogs, having bits of flesh torn from their bodies along with bloody clothes?

No, they weren’t. They were completely normal high school kids– and that’s the point!

King actually caught a ton of flak for this from other civil rights organizers at the time. He was basically traveling across the South from city to city, desperately trying to initiate some kind of mass protest event somewhere with the explicit goal of overwhelming the capacity of the local jails so that police would have no choice but to stop arresting Black people for daring to walk into segregated businesses. What changed in Birmingham is that King finally relented to the urging of his more radical advisers, especially Bayard Rustin, and decided to finally deploy their most controversial weapon: school children.

Grown adults were too scared to face down police violence and legal repression. They had too much to lose. But kids were pliable. So 63 years ago almost to the day, King sent his organizers around to every school within ten miles of Birmingham, where they told the kids to skip class starting on May 2, come downtown, and march from the 16th St. Baptist Church into the most heavily segregated downtown area.

The kids had no training, and King knew there was almost no limit to the violence they might face. Birmingham had already earned the nickname Bombingham for deadly violence against civil rights activists. A few months later, four young Black girls were murdered in a bombing at this very church.

In the end, the police didn’t shoot into the crowd with guns, opting instead for fire hoses and attack dogs. After two days of this carnage, King had successfully filled not only the city jail, but also a nearby baseball field temporarily converted into a giant holding pen for bloodied up Black children singing civil rights songs from dawn until dusk.

Still, in the end, it wasn’t the police who caved. They would have filled up another baseball field. It was the Kennedy administration, unable to stand another day of sensational news stories rocking the country with images of middle school children being brutalized, who finally put their foot down in the protesters’ favor.

You can imagine the earfuls King got from parents while their kids bled inside Birmingham city jail. But I suspect many of them came around when the Civil Rights Act passed the next year, ending nearly a century of Jim Crow laws.

5. Thinking in bets

Let’s review: about a month ago, this dorky sentimental Chinese guy with a crackpot legal theory went onto the internet and said: We’re going to do Selma, Birmingham, the Salt March, not for ourselves, but for helpless animals who nobody cares about. I need two thousand people. Are you in?4

And you, reader… you stepped forward.

THAT’S FUCKING INCREDIBLE!

The kids in Birmingham weren’t soldiers. And you weren’t either. That’s exactly why what you did is so courageous.

People will ask: did we really have to keep charging up against the wall of pepper spray and rubber bullets a third, fourth, fifth time, when each time it became more and more clear that we were not getting anywhere near those dogs?

Yes. Yes! We did have to! For two reasons.

First is thinking in bets. Step back to the day before the action. I thought we had a good chance of rescuing dogs. I was planning to rescue lots of dogs, and acting accordingly.

But say you could rewind to that moment and tell me: Listen, Aidan, you have only a 10% chance of getting dogs out of Ridglan. No matter how effectively you play your hand, you have a 90% chance of losing.

Do you think I should have done anything differently? I don’t.

A 10% chance of making history is pretty good odds. I’ll take that shot any day, and I hope everyone else would too, even if it meant throwing me into a meat grinder of police brutality. Six shots like that over a few years and suddenly we are favored to win.

Now, after the 18th, it looks more like we had a 1% chance. Hindsight makes things easy.

But it also looks like we probably only had a 10% chance of success at the original rescue on March 15. I mean, now that we know the lengths the Dane County Sheriff’s Office will go to protect criminal animal abusers from nonviolent rescuers, it’s nothing short of a miracle that we walked in and rescued 22 dogs without so much as being tackled to the ground.

Sure enough, plenty of people told Wayne before the 15th that his plan was crazy, reckless, dangerous, irresponsible. I’m so glad he ignored them. And ultimately, I’m glad he ignored them the second time, too.

When the first wave of rescuers were tackled to the ground on the 18th and had all their tools confiscated, chances started looking grim real fast. Right away, I’d have put it at one in ten. Then the second wave, including me, was brought to heel by chemicals, and it clicked down to one in twenty. Each subsequent wave made our odds look longer: one in one hundred, eventually one in one thousand.

I confess: I was ready to give up at that point. But so many other people weren’t. As my eyes finally cleared, I saw I was surrounded by rescuers whose determination hadn’t missed a step. They were still shooting bottled water into their eyes as they came to me telling me everything that had happened and the new plans they were cooking up for how to get past the police. We still had one buzz saw that hadn’t been taken by police, plus about five angle grinders and at least one halligan. We had hundreds of people behind us, battered but nowhere near broken.

How could we give up on even a one in one thousand chance of rescuing just one dog from Hell?

Well, to answer that question, we need to consider the tradeoff. We had a one in one thousand chance of rescuing dogs, and a nine hundred ninety-nine in one thousand chance of… what, exactly? An unprecedented national news story? Selma for animals? How is that a failure at all?? Were you paying attention??

OK, it wasn’t quite that simple. We could have failed to get news, so it wasn’t quite 999 out of 1000. Thankfully, we didn’t fail, and the story is legendary.

Also, there was some chance, probably more than 1 in 1000, of somebody getting killed or permanently maimed by a bean bag or an actual bullet. Which is why ultimately, I called off the last attempt to push our way through the fence. There was no need to risk lives. We hadn’t rescued dogs, but we had a win, and even then I knew we could use what had happened to get all the dogs out.

6. The future is (still) watching

But even that was not the most important thing our suffering purchased that day, which brings me to reason number two that we needed to keep trying as long as we did.

We talked about the Children’s March earlier. There’s a great short documentary about it on YouTube worth watching if I piqued your curiosity. But even if you’ve seen it before, I suggest that watching it again now will feel different. It will serve as a reminder to you of the scale of the stage that you have just stepped onto.

For that afternoon of pain, perhaps for a few short years of Wayne and I wallowing away in a federal prison cell on your behalf, all of future history will know that there were a thousand people who had the courage to take all of this brutality and violence willingly into their own bodies for a vanishing sliver of a chance to save a few terrified, helpless, broken creatures who could never in a million trillion years return the favor.

Going forward, there will be no question: 2025 was the last year people could stay on the sidelines. Documentaries will be made, and you will be in them. The movement is going mainstream. We’re only going up from here.

History called. You answered. Hold your head up! You’ve already done the hard part. Now you just need to keep it together. Wayne invited you to join the company of Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi. Now that you’re among them, it’s time to start acting accordingly.

I don’t want you to take my word for it, so I leave you with some select words from some of your fellow rescuers. Here was a text I got the day after the action:

I’m finally reaching out because the symptoms have subsided. I started feeling really nauseous yesterday, so we left. I figured it was the tear gas from when Jaden and I spent the first half up on the hay bales. It got so bad this morning I went into the ER because I had a fever and constant vomiting. I’m feeling better now, and we still want to stay involved. We live only about an hour and a half away and will be there any time needed.

This motherfucker got out of the ER like an hour ago and is already saying put me back in, coach! They can’t be stopped! Be like this person. Or like the two people who had this exchange in a Zoom chat a week later:

1: Is it normal to still have a cough, be wheezing and be short of breath one week after getting tear gassed?

2: I don’t know, but same here. It sucks, I have autoimmune conditions and I think I’m sick, calling doc tomorrow. It’s not gonna slow me down, only motivate me more.

1: Same here, it just makes me more motivated.

What can I even say? These people make this movement great. They are doing this on behalf of helpless animals. And the future is taking notice.

This is why we will win.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Addendum: Someone bought the dogs

First things first: this is a good thing. Cause for celebration. ~Two thousand entire beings who as of this morning were still locked in tiny cages and facing indefinite imprisonment inside similarly small cages—or worse—are now on their way to safe and loving homes, where they can begin the long process of partially healing from the extraordinary trauma of their hellish lives up to this point. If they were humans, we wouldn’t hesitate to take this win, and we shouldn’t hesitate for nonhumans.

Thank you to (in no particular order) the Beagle Freedom Project, Center for a Humane Economy, Big Dog Rescue Ranch, and Lara Trump for making this happen.

Nonetheless, it raises questions worth discussing. I’ll tackle three:

1. If people just wound up buying the dogs, was the campaign even necessary?

2. What does this mean for the next steps of our political, legal, and media strategy?

3. Should we in general be willing to buy out animal abusers?

A1: Does this count as a win for the rescue campaign?

Definitively yes, and here’s why: the negotiations that led to this deal started weeks before even the March 15 rescue. Soon after Ridglan announced that they would be surrendering their breeding license last year, a dog and cat rescue organization reached out and offered $150,000 for them to surrender the dogs and shutter the business.

That might sound like a lot, but it was barely 5% of the list price of the dogs, who Ridglan claims could be worth $2,000 to $4,000 each. But Ridglan’s reputation was in tatters, making it hard to sell their dogs, and they’d already agreed to shut down their business– or so it seemed.

As months dragged on and Ridglan dug their heels in, it became clear they were not planning to shut the business down after all. They were looking to squeeze through a loophole in the settlement they’d signed with a court-appointed special prosecutor to avoid felony animal cruelty charges.

This, of course, is what necessitated further escalation in the campaign, culminating in the two rescue efforts. But negotiations continued in parallel, carried on by organizations unaffiliated with the open rescue movement.

When the March 15 rescue grabbed attention across the country, new benefactors were inspired to step forward. The total amount offered to Ridglan went up to $350k, then $500k when Lara Trump got involved through a Florida-based dog rescue on whose board she sits.

The morning of April 17, I learned that the offer had gone up to $650k, and it seemed like a deal was within reach. But a few hours later, negotiations collapsed. I wondered whether a deal had never been close after all, and whether Ridglan was more interested in stalling and distracting us than negotiating in good faith.

The rest is history. We went forward with the action. By the end of the day on the 18th, Ridglan certainly felt triumphant. Every police force from 100 miles around had converged to serve as their private security force, at no cost and with no accountability. We’d gotten nowhere near rescuing dogs. When yet another donor stepped forward during the middle of the fracas raising the total offer to $1 million, Ridglan told him to get lost.

I’m not sure how long their honeymoon phase lasted before they started to realize they had fucked up. Maybe it was the next day, when their own Congressman tweeted against them. Maybe it was the day after, when a crowd of 100 rescuers spent the entire day sat in at the state capitol while positive press coverage poured in. Maybe it wasn’t until Friday, when a six-figure TV ad campaign from The Accountability Board started blasting the Governor for sleeping on animal cruelty enforcement.

Whenever it was, they eventually came crawling back. Not to Wayne—they hated him too much—but to the separate coalition. I’m as surprised as they were that the offer was still on the table.

This win happened because of the campaign. Only the rescues brought enough national attention to Ridglan for these donors to step up in the first place. Only the campaign made it clear to Ridglan that they couldn’t continue to get away with their massively profitable criminal business enterprise forever– and by the way, the campaign is the only reason they were investigated and had to surrender their breeding license in the first place.

And the campaign is the only reason this story will now be a central part of U.S. animal rights history for decades or centuries to come, instead of an unnoticed story of one more business shutting down while nothing fundamentally changes. It’s up to us to ensure the campaign now delivers even bigger wins.

A2: What comes next for the campaign?

I admit there is a part of me that finds this outcome anticlimactic. I’m glad the dogs are getting out starting today, rather than waiting longer. But I can’t shake the feeling that we could have won without paying them a penny, and that they don’t deserve a penny and in fact deserve lengthy prison sentences.

A judge and a public prosecutor, both from Wisconsin, separately found that conditions at Ridglan farms constituted felony animal abuse. And then, they… let it keep happening for 8 more months, and maybe indefinitely.

This is outrageous. Animal advocates often find ourselves on the wrong side of a system of laws that almost always treats animals as property rather than as beings with their own interests. We throw our bodies into the gears of this system to try to force change, facing arrests, prosecution, and jail time for simply rescuing animals from violence. Yet the worst punishment is when defenders of the status quo patronizingly lecture us that however they personally feel about animals, we’ve all got to respect the law.

Then Ridglan comes along, and manages to violate the vanishingly few laws that exist to protect animals abused in farms and research labs. In just a few randomly chosen months of routine operations, a prosecutor finds evidence for three hundred and eleven felony animal cruelty charges. And the settlement is that they are allowed to keep committing felony animal cruelty for 8 more months, and maybe forever apparently.

I hate being cynical like this. But I don’t see how this is anything other than a straightforward case of the rich/powerful/anyone with a corporate EIN being given a separate justice system from the one ordinary people like you and I are subjected to. I have friends who spent years in federal prison for doing nothing but freeing animals from factory farms. Ridglan commits felony abuse and gets a million dollars.

I was feeling great about our strategic position against Ridglan. TAB’s TV campaign against Governor Evers is running for two more weeks, and we were on track to put an unprecedented (for animal issues) amount of grassroots pressure on him to act. He’s already getting roasted in the media for claiming he doesn’t have the authority to enforce animal cruelty laws against Ridglan, as if he’s not the one guy whose job that is along with his Attorney General Josh Kaul. Wayne’s prosecution will be the animal rights show trial of the century, creating endless opportunities for the campaign along with our own plaintiff’s suit against Ridglan and the Sheriff.

Well, all that’s no longer needed. I honestly haven’t had time to think about what we should do next with our current momentum. Try to pass a ban on dog farming in the Wisconsin legislature? Or target federal action on animal testing? There are other options, and the devil is in the details. But we can’t let all this energy evaporate.

A3: Is it ever wise to buy out animal abusers?

As a younger activist, I would have said the answer is always no. People should not be rewarded for abusing animals. Their businesses should be shut down, period.

I still wouldn’t support buying animals out of violent businesses, because you’re just paying for the next animal to be bred to replace them. But buying out entire businesses is different.

Like it or not—and I certainly don’t—animal abusing companies (other than Ridglan) have been playing by the rules of the game that were presented to them. In any given case, they’ve invested years of work and large amounts of capital, often financed by debt, into building up businesses profitable enough to provide for their families, employees, and investors.

That doesn’t mean businesses need to raise animals in the cheapest ways possible, no matter how cruel. It doesn’t mean we should hold anything back when pressuring them to adopt higher standards or move away from animal exploitation altogether. And it doesn’t change the fact that society as a whole needs to move away from torturing animals for profit as fast as possible.

Increasingly, however, I do think it means that society, and perhaps animal advocates specifically, should be willing to offer some kind of restitution if we want farms and slaughterhouses to close down sooner than the market would have them otherwise.

Problem is, the entire budget of the global animal rights movement is less than the revenue of a single large slaughterhouse. We’re nowhere close to being able to buy out significant elements of the industry. We’re not close to shutting them down by other means, either.

So eventually it’s just a question of cost effectiveness. In this case, the majority of the money was coming from outside the animal movement, meaning it would not have otherwise been spent on transformative animal advocacy work. Given that, I see no way this wasn’t the best thing this money could have been spent on. Not only did it save dogs, but it delivered a huge win that we can keep building on. So, setting aside Ridglan’s decorated criminal history, I support it.

In the three years since, the infighting I described has become less severe, but the underlying debate is no less relevant. Since I’ve picked up many new readers on this feed, I decided it would be worth sharing again.

Happily, my views have changed in too many ways for me to point out all the things I don’t quite agree with from back then.1 I’ve decided to just publish it as-is rather than update, because the post belongs to a younger version of me.

The one disclaimer I’ll give is that I’ve now seen firsthand how effectively single organizations can play both the inside and outside game roles. Just last week, Toby Schiønning of Anima International was on the How I Learned to Love Shrimp podcast talking about a framework that replaces the “good cop/bad cop” dynamic below with single “fair cop” that might be more sustainable when we expect to be stuck working with the same corporate partners/targets for many years over many issues.

Anima International is a fascinating organization. The first reputational meme I encountered about them was “the animal org that was able to grow to a staff of over 100 without losing an agile, militant grassroots culture.” The more I learn about them, the more I feel they are already way out ahead of most of the topics I think and write about here. If you enjoy Sandcastles, I strongly recommend you consider applying for the paid fellowship program they are running in September in Warsaw.

Otherwise, enjoy my classic post on a new framing to replace “Welfarism vs. Abolitionism.”

Part 1: “Welfarism Vs. Abolitionism” Is Obsolete

The Gist

• Animal advocates have been divided over pursuing more or less radical demands, leading to a conflict often framed as welfarism vs. abolitionism.

• This framing obscures the fact that all strategies used by animal advocates are incremental; we merely focus on different increments.

• Existing evidence does not support some of activists’ most common concerns about incremental welfare campaigns.

• A more sophisticated view of the different roles necessary in a movement ecology can resolve these conflicts.

An Innocent Question

When I was in college, around 2016, my campus animal rights club hosted a talk by the local representative of The Humane League2 (THL). As she stood facing about two dozen college students interested in animal activism, she began her talk with a question:

“What goal should animal activists pursue?”

After several seconds of silence, I threw out an answer that reflected my background as an organizer with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE for short). DxE had a notorious flair for dramatic confrontations with the public, using disruptive protest to demand a complete dismantling of the legal systems abetting the exploitation of other animals for the benefit of humans. My answer, one of DxE’s slogans, was shorthand for that:

“Total animal liberation.”

The THL rep (I’ll call her Kristy since I haven’t asked permission to use her name) endured an awkward silence waiting to see if anyone else would respond. Kristy had been working for THL about as long as I’d been organizing with DxE. Her job was to mobilize volunteers to support THL’s signature tactics: handing out leaflets to the public about meatless diets, and pressuring corporations like Mcdonald’s to set animal welfare standards for their supply chains. When she clicked to the next slide, the answer waiting there was, like mine, a reflection of her organization’s ethos:

“Reduce the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number of animals we can.”

Them’s Fightin’ Words

For an outsider to the world of animal advocacy, these two answers would probably seem perfectly compatible. Yet from the moment they were spoken, room 217 of the Hellems Arts & Sciences building was filled with a palpable tension. A conflict much larger than us had asserted itself.

The humans that make up both THL and DxE share the extremely uncommon view that farming animals is a grievous moral harm, and the even less common conviction to dedicate their lives to opposing it. Yet back in 2016, this didn’t seem to be worth much. The relationship between the organizations was racked with mutual distrust, even disdain. And this malaise was merely a microcosm for a larger conflict among animal advocates, one that had been playing out for years in vicious comment threads across social media. To at least one side, this was known as the battle of welfarists vs. abolitionists.

In a moment, I’ll explain why I hope this dichotomy will finally be relegated to the dustbin of history. In fact, I believe it was as useless and misleading back then as it is now. But that’s not what I thought at the time.

As soon as Kristy’s answer appeared on the screen, a familiar narrative was racing through my brain. I had labeled her a welfarist, and as fast as my neurons could fire, this label was joined by a series of harsh judgments. Kristy, I decided, was a sellout who lacked either a strong commitment to creating real change for animals or the imagination to believe it was possible, or both. She must be small-minded, I immediately concluded, if she’s willing to settle for asking corporations to make such tiny changes to the way they torture and exploit animals, rather than demanding an end to that exploitation.

I feel pretty confident that something similar was happening for Kristy. In her view, I was a hopeless naïf, someone more concerned with doing activism that made me feel good than with actually making a difference in the lives of animals. By insisting that animal advocates set our sights on the unattainable, I and my ilk were damaging our ability to make any difference whatsoever, and driving the public further away in the process. Like others before me, I would soon realize that my goals were futile. At that point, I would either come around to her side or burn out and stop advocating for animals altogether.

I wish I could say otherwise, but I never developed a successful collaborative relationship with Kristy after that. For the next few years, we managed to steer clear of each other as we each worked in the same metro area to organize volunteers toward different goals.

Looking back, this was a stupid waste. Our efforts could have synchronized to be greater than their sum; instead, our mutual disregard ensured they were less than.

My purpose for this blog is to explain what I wish both Kristy and I had understood differently at the time, and how I believe that understanding can pave the way to a renaissance of collaboration among animal advocates.

Antispeciesister-Than-Thou

If there was one person responsible for framing this debate as one of abolitionists vs. welfarists, his name was Gary Francione. You can guess which side he was on from the title of his book, The Abolitionist Approach. Indeed, for the law professor and vegan philosopher, welfarist was a dirty word, one many of its targets never identified with (he sometimes deigned to call them regulationists or incrementalists).

Francione more concisely laid out the fault lines as he saw them in an essay titled “Irreconcilable Differences.” (Gotta hand it to him, the guy knows how to get his point across in a title.) Describing the welfarist view as “blatantly speciesist,” Francione rails against the strategy of pushing for incremental improvements in farmed animal welfare regulations, in which he sees a “symbiotic relationship” with the industry itself. Ultimately, he concludes that asking for anything less than veganism (for the individual) and total abolition (for society) sets us up for failure.

When I was first getting involved in animal activism, I found Francione’s perspective appealing. His criticisms of welfare campaigning fit well with my own values, and he wrote about the basic questions of animal ethics with fierce clarity. I still cherish his animal rights philosophy, but I’ve come to see many points of his movement criticism that I don’t agree with. Specifically:

1. Welfarists are abolitionists

I had to contend with the plain fact that the humans working their butts off at organizations like THL are ethical vegans who long just as deeply as I do for an end to violence against animals. This reality came home for me when one of my best friends from college, Zoë Sigle (her real name this time) succeeded Kristy as the local grassroots director for THL. I’d known Zoë for years, and we’d grown into our activism together. I knew her to be a person not only of deep integrity and dedication, but also piercing intellect. It was impossible for me to write her off the way I had done with Kristy, who I didn’t otherwise know. (Not that that was any excuse.)

Of course, Francione insists the intentions of “welfarists” don’t matter. So let’s look at their impact.

2. Welfare campaigns aren’t responsible for the humane myth

The logic behind Francione’s accusation of a “symbiotic relationship” is that by pursuing incremental reforms, advocates are sending a message to the public that farming animals is a basically acceptable practice that just needs to be reformed:

Groups… identify practices that are economically vulnerable, such as the gestation crate; industry resists; a drama ensues; industry eventually agrees to make what are meaningless and possibly even financially beneficial changes; the animal groups declare victory and fundraise; industry, praised by the groups, reassures the public that it really cares about animals.

It makes sense that welfare campaigns might lead members of the public to think that farming animals is no problem after all. But is that actually what happens? It turns out, we don’t have to guess.

Two research teams have recently investigated this exact question. The first study (n=1,520), published this April, measured people’s opposition to animal farming (AFO) after being shown three different readings: one about current animal farming practices, one describing welfare reforms, and a control about an unrelated topic. The welfare group reported slightly lower AFO than the current practice group, but greater AFO than the control group.

The differences were too small for statistical confidence, but to address Francione’s accusation, we only need to show that welfare reforms don’t reduce AFO. The purpose of welfare reforms is not to change public opinion; we have other tactics for that, as long as they aren’t making it worse. (Another team led by Pax Fauna’s own Zoe Griffiths reached similar findings in a study soon to be published.)

Now, it’s certainly true that the humane myth is a key idea propping up the slaughter industry. But the available evidence suggests that welfare campaigns by animal advocates aren’t to blame. Indeed, meat corporations seem perfectly capable of spreading that lie themselves, even in countries with the fewest protections for farm animals. And inversely, when we look at countries with relatively higher protections (such as Germany, Sweden, and the UK) it appears they go hand-in-hand with stronger energy for animal-free foods and animal liberation activism.3 That is, higher welfare protections don’t seem to stifle abolitionist impulses in a society.

3. No strategy is without limitations

The final thing that turned me off Francione’s argument was asking: well, what are you offering instead? Instead of welfare campaigns (and just about everything else) Francione believes we should all be focusing on vegan education: convincing people to embrace a vegan lifestyle, one-by-one or lecture-hall-by-lecture-hall. He used to point out that if every vegan in the UK would convert just one other person to veganism each year, the whole country would be converted in just 7 years. This is mathematically correct4 just as surely as it is not remotely happening (the number of vegans is growing very slowly or not at all), and Francione offers no credible strategy to make it start happening.

I don’t think that someone needs to have a solution to a problem in order to point one out. But it bothered me for Francione to spend so much time criticizing others when his own strategy was so full of holes. And ultimately, it led to a shift in my perspective.

Everyone’s an Incrementalist

Incrementalism is just another word for strategy, especially following on Paolo Freire’s definition in Pedagogy of Hope:

What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?

Unless you have a plan for how we’re all going to wake up tomorrow in a vegan world, you are an incrementalist. The thing that differentiates us is not the purity of our desire to end violence against animals; it is merely the incremental steps we are each focusing on to get there. Every animal advocate I know is in basic agreement about the world we’d like to see (at least insofar as it concerns humans’ relationship to other animals). We’re just focusing on different increments to get there:

• Converting more and more people to veganism until veganism becomes normal.

• Banning more and more specific practices in animal farming until meat is prohibitively expensive or commercial farming is economically infeasible.

• Pushing the overton window further and further until abolishing animal farming is a mainstream political position.

• Convincing more and more cities and companies to adopt default veg practices until animal-free food becomes the dominant norm.

• Emptying cages at fur farm after fur farm until the entire fur industry can no longer afford the massive insurance premiums.

• Engineering better and better animal-free foods until they are tastier, healthier, and more affordable than animal-based food.

I’m guessing that if most people reading this were to isolate any one of the strategies listed above, we’d have a hard time seeing how that strategy alone can get us all the way from the world we have today to a radically different relationship to other animals.

Fortunately, all of these strategies and more are being pursued in parallel in a diverse movement ecology. And if we play our cards right, each strategy can make up for the deficiencies of another.

Alright, so now we can all hold hands and sing as we march towards a glorious vegan future, right?

Kumbaya

It probably isn’t a very controversial idea to say that the movement will need a diverse, multistrategic approach to win real change for animals. But needing a variety of strategies doesn’t mean any one of them should be above criticism.

The conflict that existed between DxE and THL back in my college days may have gotten out of hand, but it was based on real, substantive disagreements about strategy. It wouldn’t work to paper them over by throwing around terms like multistrategic and movement ecology.

Rather, it is precisely by examining those disagreements up close that my own views changed. I have come to believe that the strategic disagreements between DxE and THL were based on fundamental misunderstandings because we each only saw things from our particular position in a complex movement. It has taken me years to realize, but the different demands we were pursuing were a reflection of the different roles we were playing in the movement and the needs of those roles. This is something more subtle than the diverse incremental strategies listed above.

Fortunately, DxE and THL each provide great case studies. No two strategies divided the movement more back in those days than the corporate cage-free campaigns pursued by groups like THL and the signature restaurant disruptions of DxE. In the sequel to this blog, I’m going to try to convince my skeptical 21-year-old self that there was a depth of wisdom to cage-free campaigns, and convince Kristy of the same thing about DxE’s antics. I’ll recruit the help of a new, more collaborative frame for thinking about this old division in the movement: inside game and outside game.

Part 2: Embracing An Inside-Outside Strategy For Animal Freedom

The Gist

• Animal advocates have been divided over pursuing more or less radical demands, leading to a conflict often framed as welfarism vs. abolitionism.

• This framing obscures the reasons different advocates favor different demands.

• Advocates intelligently choose their demands based on their objectives. These objectives, in turn, are a product of their role in the movement ecology.

• By understanding the inside-outside strategy, advocates on both sides can see how this diversity is key to building a strong movement.

• Advocates should build friendships and strong lines of communication with people on the other side of the inside-outside divide.

Stronger Together

I learned the phrase inside-outside strategy from the work of movement scholars Mark and Paul Engler, though I assume it’s been in use before them. The idea is simple enough: when social movements seek to change society, there are two routes they can take. One is to work inside the system, through the formal structures that have been set up to change policies. Running for office, getting a job inside a company or government agency, and corporate outreach are all ways to try to use the system’s built-in mechanisms to win a policy change. This is the inside game.

The outside game consists of the kinds of strategies people turn to when efforts inside the system fail. The thing that unifies outside-game strategies is building power outside of the dominant institutions. Once movements build alternative centers of power, they can try to exert pressure on the dominant institutions to accept change, or they can try to usurp and abolish those institutions altogether. Standard outside-game strategies include community organizing, picketing, civil resistance (e.g blocking roads or mass open rescues), and noncooperation (e.g. strikes).

The phrase inside-outside strategy speaks to the belief that these two approaches taken together are more powerful than their sum. The ideal dynamic is like this:

1. Inside-game players work slowly and diligently to insert themselves in positions of influence inside the target institution, usually by pushing for modest reforms.

2. The outside game provokes a crisis for the institution, a situation where ignoring activists’ more radical demands is more costly than responding to them. (Movement theorists call this the moment of the whirlwind.)

3. The activists on the inside seize the opportunity to make sure the institution accepts (and follows through on) the movement’s full demands.

Put another way, outside-game strategies target social and cultural norms, shifting the playing field and bringing previously unimaginable demands into the mainstream. The inside game then works to translate these cultural shifts into concrete changes in law and policy, before political inaction leads the culture to backslide.

Dynamic Duo

To give a fictional example of how this might work, imagine two organizations working to get the government of Los Angeles to buy animal-free food instead of meat for its public facilities. Humane LA focuses on the inside game, building relationships with friendly council members and eventually working with them to start a small default-veg pilot program in public hospitals. They become a familiar presence around City Hall and lawmakers know them as helpful, accessible experts on the issue.

Meanwhile, Angelenos for Abolition is working the outside game, tracking down passive vegans and organizing them into a volunteer-led organization doing dramatic protests. By giving people a sense of ownership over their own participation in activism, A4A is able to build a list of hundreds of people willing to participate in their raunchy protests. Soon, their colorful antics demanding rights for animals are getting regular coverage in the local section of the LA Times.

Once they’ve built up enough commitment from their members, Angelenos for Abolition decides to build a fortified encampment occupying the road in front of City Hall. Their action is unprecedented, and so is their demand: an animal bill of rights. Faced with what social movement theorists call a moment of the whirlwind, lawmakers turn to the familiar faces at Humane LA. “We’re already implementing the program you asked us for. Can’t you get these people to go home?” And what do they hear?

“We’re not responsible for this. Those are the radicals! The current program isn’t enough for them. But, we just went out to negotiate with them, and we think we could get them to settle for 100% meat-free procurement across the entire city budget, based on our successful pilot in the hospitals…”

Family Feud

The inside-outside strategy sounds pretty good on the surface, especially when I oversimplify it as above. But unfortunately, across many different causes, it usually doesn’t work out so neatly. Conflict between outside-game “radicals” and inside-game “moderates” is almost a universal truth of social movements.

The reason, I believe, is that each side struggles to understand the reasons the other side pursues different demands. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we can deeply understand the dynamics of the inside-outside strategy, we can transform our conflict into a brilliant bit of political theater.

When inside- and outside-game players choose their demands, they are trying to meet a completely different set of needs. The job of the inside game is to gain access to key pressure points in the decision-making of the target institution. The outside game, meanwhile, aims to transform the norms surrounding the institution—the water it swims in.

If inside-game players trumpet radical demands or use radical tactics, they will be frozen out of the dominant institutions. Then the movement will have no allies on the inside when the moment of the whirlwind hits. Our momentum will fizzle out without achieving concrete progress.

Meanwhile, the entire purpose of the outside game is to shift the goalposts of the culture. If outside-game players pursue moderate demands, nobody will pay any attention, and the range of acceptable views will stagnate. And disruptive tactics can be a very effective way to draw attention to these agenda-setting demands.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Welfarists

When I first learned about cage-free campaigns, naturally, I assumed that the main reason organizations like THL pursued them was because they thought it meaningfully improved the lives of egg-laying chickens. When I saw some footage of cage-free farms (and later, when I set foot inside them myself as an undercover investigator), I reached a different conclusion.

Since then, Welfare Footprint released their findings from a massive study undertaken to quantify the suffering of hens in battery cage vs. cage-free facilities. Among animal advocates, the study did not change many minds. Those who already supported cage-free campaigns hold it up as the best stringent scientific examination of the welfare question; skeptics question the assumptions the study used to score different types of pain or outright reject the notion that suffering can be quantified in this way. These arguments often come down to disagreements on first principles, and it seems to me that no amount of data or debate will lead to a reconciliation.5

Regardless of how you feel about the welfare footprint of cage-free egg farms, however, there may be better reasons to celebrate these kinds of welfare campaigns in the animal movement. Here are three, starting from the the least compelling and building up to the one that really convinced me.

Reason #1: Driving up the cost of factory farming

The first alternative explanation I ever heard for welfare campaigns was that they could effectively drive up the costs for factory farmers, reducing the profitability of the industry and, eventually, consumer demand for their products. This rationale was immediately more appealing to me than the welfare argument, and I could more easily see how this strategy could undermine the industry and bring us closer to abolition.

For cage-free campaigns specifically, this argument was undercut by a recent economic analysis from California showing that the price of eggs statewide only increased $0.08 per dozen eggs compared to other states after full implementation of Prop 12’s cage-free requirement. It’s hard to imagine that an increase of less than a penny per egg will have any impact on demand. Ironically, while this news might make it easier to persuade other jurisdictions to adopt similar laws, it could also make outside-game activists less likely to accept these campaigns.

But this doesn’t apply to all welfare campaigns. The Better Chicken Commitment, a bundle of welfare standards for chickens raised for meat, was designed specifically to force the commercial chicken industry to start absorbing its externalized costs.

Reason #2: Build momentum with winnable campaigns

This starts to get at the essence of the inside-outside strategy. While the radicals are working to build up enough power outside the system to create a crisis, the insiders can accumulate influence by winning modest reforms. These campaigns help the insiders gain recognition inside the system. They can even come to be seen as reliable experts who decision makers should consult on policies relating to their cause area.

The crisis created by the radicals will create a tiny window of opportunity; it is crucial that inside game players are in this position before the moment of the whirlwind hits. Modest reforms are a tried-and-true way for them to elbow their way in.

What’s more, these campaigns may even work to bring more of the public on our side for more ambitious demands. There isn’t yet enough research specifically looking at the effects of welfare campaigns on public opinion. But from what we know about psychology and marketing, welfare campaigns seem like they could be an effective foot-in-the-door strategy: by getting people to take a small action in support of a cause, we can sneak that cause into their identity. Once they’ve taken one supportive action, it will be easy and even imperative for them to bring their actions further in alignment. This could be a healthy complement to the door-in-the-face technique embodied by campaigns like IP3 in Oregon; further research on these dynamics in our movement would be useful.

Reason #3: Develop inside-game infrastructure

This reason is closely related to #2, but I see it as distinct. I only became aware of this rationale recently. This fall, 6 years after Kristy (the local THL director) and I (the local DxE organizer) became an embodiment of the conflict swirling between our organizations and the larger movement factions they belonged to, I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Coman-Hidy, who led THL for the last decade. Dave built the organization from when he was one of a few employees to a force that had shaped animal welfare policies for several multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. So perhaps it’s to be expected that I learned something new about these campaigns from him.

Dave and I got to talking about the inside-outside strategy, and I was surprised that we used much of the same language to talk about it. I was all ears when he told me there was one thing he wished the outside-game radicals understood:

“I’m all for radical tactics pushing the boundaries of what demands we can make. But right now, the movement as a whole is not developed enough to effectively take advantage of it.”6

The truth is, right now both the outside and inside games in the animal movement are underdeveloped. We simply do not have the power culturally or politically to make the changes we need to make. The question we face is precisely the one posed by Freire:

What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?

Nothing we can accomplish right now in terms of political or cultural change is exciting to me. I’m far more interested in asking how we can build enough power to be able to make those changes.

For me, this is the crux of the conflict over cage-free campaigns: strategists like Dave were tasked with building up organizations that could powerfully fill a specific role in the animal movement ecosystem. As a small team with a small budget, THL needed to build an organization that could impact the policy decisions of governments and massive corporations. This meant building up a steady organization with dependable revenue streams, skilled staff, and durable organizational knowledge about how to navigate the halls of power. Eventually, they zeroed in on cage-free campaigns, around which not one, but an entire sector of inside-game organizations is being built.

Who am I to argue with that?

From Conflict to Collaboration

The inside-outside strategy is a much better way to make sense of old tensions in the animal movement than welfare vs. abolitionism. This new frame can help both sides understand each other. The outside game can understand why insiders use modest demands to strengthen their position inside the system. Meanwhile, the inside game can understand why outsiders incorporate radical demands that aren’t achievable in the short term.

By demanding complete abolition, followers of DxE and Francione are trying to jumpstart the slow process of normalizing an idea that will take a long time to become mainstream. In the meantime, it serves to make other demands look relatively more modest, and thus makes them easier for inside-game strategies to pursue. Radical demands grab people’s attention and can reshape the mainstream narrative in a way that modest demands cannot. If we are bringing people closer to our side, it doesn’t matter in the short term whether or not we’re getting what we ask for.

Like all theoretical models, the inside-outside model I’ve relied on here is an oversimplification of the real world. In reality, THL has sometimes used informal means of creating pressure, such as protests, to push corporations to accept their demands. And DxE at times has turned to the legislative process to win real victories, such as banning fur in Berkeley and San Francisco, then the whole state of California.

That said, I think the overall model holds up. It’s obvious to me that groups like THL are in a better position than DxE to negotiate with policymakers public and private; they have far more experience navigating those systems and have learned painful lessons. Meanwhile, DxE’s rugged grassroots orientation allows them to jump on risky, attention-grabbing tactics (like gluing their hands to NBA courts) that more conservative organizations won’t touch.

We’ll Set ‘Em Up, You Knock ‘Em Down

Does it matter that inside and outside game organizations understand each other? It’s possible that we can accidentally harness the inside-outside strategy even if we don’t get along. After all, the strategy is a kind of theater, with roles for a good cop and a bad cop. Wouldn’t that work even better if we really believed it ourselves?

Maybe, but I’m convinced we can do better the more we understand we’re on the same team. First, it makes conferences much more enjoyable. And I think it even makes us more effective.

The essence of the inside-outside strategy is that we’re all building power towards a moment of the whirlwind, the time that our issue becomes a crisis for the dominant institution. The role of the outside game is to create that moment, while the inside game works to positioning themselves to seize it. This is our precious opportunity to make real change.

Without inside-outside coordination, movements are easy to co-opt,7 leaving us with a far worse compromise than we could have gotten otherwise. Here’s what we need to do to prevent that.

Inside game: remember where you came from

You’re going to use modest reform campaigns to position yourself at points of leverage inside the system. But don’t forget the endgame.

Always remember that there will be a moment in the future when you can win something far more ambitious than what you’ve sought so far. That moment will come when a surge of grassroots pressure (combined with scrutiny from the press) forces the decision-makers close to you to wrestle with a truly radical activist demand. This surge of grassroots energy will probably be smaller than you think; it won’t look like Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful.

You’ll have spent years working to build these relationships and win modest reforms. It’ll be easy to mistake this moment for a threat to all your careful work instead of what it is: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for truly transformational change.

You’ll be the movement’s negotiators on the inside. Don’t sell us out for a cheap compromise in the exact moment we can go for a big win.

Outside game: accept insiders as our allies

Playing the outside game, we get the privilege of asking for what we really want, while the insiders have to wear a mask. We must not mistake this for moral superiority. We’re playing different positions on the same team.

We need the inside game. When the time comes, they will be crucial to help us navigate the halls of power and turn our momentum into real, durable victories. If we’re constantly dumping on them for the more modest goals they advocate for, they’re not going to feel very enthusiastic about working with us.

Everyone: build strong lines of communication

Finally, both sides need to talk frequently and build trust. If we don’t have strong lines of communication, we’ll have no hope of coordinating during the hectic moments in which rare opportunities tend to present themselves. We’ll work at cross-currents and end up with a weak compromise when we could have won real concessions.

We will be at our strongest when the inside and outside games are merely two faces of the same united movement. To ensure this, everyone should have a best friend on the opposite side of the inside-outside strategy.

Starting now, you can find out who lives and works in your area, then meet for tea to start building a relationship. This May (2026, this is the one sentence I updated in the whole post!), outside-game folks can attend the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit, while inside-game folks can come to the Grassroots Animal Rights Summit, to get a taste of how the other half lives (and make a few friends while you’re at it).

And most importantly, you can leave a comment on this post! It just might be your first step in shifting from conflict to collaboration.

Build on,

Sandcastles

This was a full-circle moment for me. When I started Pax Fauna without any research experience to speak of, Chris gave me some helpful advice. I was tickled to hear that my writing has helped him think about AI and even inspired him to drop thousands of dollars on Claude Max plans for his team.

Last week, I argued that if not for transformative AI, the outlook for animal rights would be terribly bleak: on our current trajectory, I’d expect factory farming to be more widespread in 2100 than now. I don’t actually think that world is likely, because I do expect AI to be maximally transformative. Yet it has still been weighing on my mind, especially the part of my mind that still doesn’t quite believe all this AI stuff.

It took me many years to outgrow ways of thinking about activism that led me towards comfortable beliefs rather than true ones. For me, it was important lessons. For animals, it was incomprehensible cycles of pain and death.

That mood came through very clearly with Chris. I hope you find the conversation useful, and not too discouraging:

Listen reader, I know you’re busy. I’m pulling you away from doing amazing work for animals, right now. So I’ll keep this short.

You’ve spent years grinding away in the animal rights movement. Yet you don’t have much to show for it besides your battle scars. Public opinion hasn’t moved much. Veganism is out of fashion, and the alternative protein sector has stalled. The fur industry came back from the brink. Our most-hyped victory, removing battery cages in the egg industry, still hasn’t crossed the 50% mark of the U.S. flock.

Yet you have found it inside yourself to toil away year after year. Partly that’s because even if we can only ever help a small fraction of farmed animals, there’s nothing more important you could be doing with your life.

But that’s not all. Somewhere deep down, you manage to stay on your feet because of a glimmer of hope. Hope that if we keep at it, someday things might feel different. Our movement could go mainstream. We could leap out ahead of incremental reforms and bring entire industries tumbling down with the sudden force that toppled Jim Crow and marriage discrimination.

I’m not going to tell you this is that moment. But it’s the closest we’ve come in my decade of activism.

Beaglemania

On March 15, around a hundred animal activists stormed a dog factory farm in Wisconsin, where beagles are bred before being shipped off to torture and death in research. 23 dogs were brought to safety, out of 2,000 in the facility, and 27 activists were arrested but only after demanding to be arrested for nearly two hours, as freezing rain dumped down on them and the police officers alike.

Day of, the action felt like a big success. But none of us had any premonition this would blow up the way it has. Through some combination of rescuing dogs instead of chickens, building on an 8-year courtroom saga, a celebrity arrest (Baywatch star Alexandra Paul), and sheer random luck, this action has captured the imagination of journalists and the general public. In the first five days after the action:

• Coverage from CNN, Washington Post, and USA Today garnered tens of millions of views on TikTok and Instagram.

• 30,000 people signed up to get involved in the campaign.

• Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports, Hollywood director James Gunn, and other high-profile influencers with no prior connection to animal advocacy have endorsed the rescue.

I don’t think those bullets do a good job of conveying the energy around this. Our movement has had viral videos before. We’ve had coverage in the inside pages of the New York Times before. We’ve had viral petitions that get tens of thousands of email addresses. Yet I feel confident that this is qualitatively different.

Rather than frantically try to convince you, I propose an experiment. My hypothesis is that the Ridglan raid has triggered a moment of the whirlwind, a once-in-a-generation trigger event for pushing animal advocacy into the mainstream. If that’s correct, I think we should be able to channel it into the largest—by number of participants—act of nonviolent civil disobedience for animals since the 1990s.

The experiment will take place on April 19. We’ve invited all of those 30,000 signups to join us returning to Ridglan. We will ensure every dog still at the facility is brought out safely to a loving home. And we’ll use the resulting momentum to pressure RFK’s HHS to end all federal support for animal testing.

There’s just one problem, reader: you and I are not disinterested observers of this experiment. We both desperately want it to succeed. Our ultimate goal is not understanding the mechanisms of social change for its own sake, but making the world better for animals.

So we’re going to contaminate the experiment by doing everything we can to get the outcome we want. I’m going to urge you to come, you’re going to come, and we’re going to make this the moment we’ve all been waiting for.

17,042,001 Reasons to come to Ridglan

I know what you’re thinking, reader. You think you’re so unique, but I see you. You’re thinking, “this sounds great and all, but if there are already 2,000 people going, what difference does it make if I go? Shouldn’t I focus on my other effective work for animals?”

Sorry, but that’s not how this works. Let me explain by offering some reasons you specifically are needed.

Reason #1: The Self-Sampling Assumption

Imagine you wake up inside of a box. A phone rings inside the box, and you pick it up. On the other end of the line, you hear my voice, explaining that I’ve knocked you out and put you inside of this box. But before I did it, I flipped a coin. If the coin landed heads, I would do this to you and ten other people, each in your own box, and label the outside of the boxes #1 through #11.

But if the coin landed tails, I would do the same thing to you and ten thousand other people, labeling the boxes #1 through #10,001. In each case, I’d assign you and everyone else to boxes randomly.

I invite you to place a bet: if you guess correctly how the coin landed, I’ll pay you $1,000. Before you get out of the box, this is hard: you should think there’s a 50/50 chance I kidnapped 10 people or 10,000.

Now, however, I unlock your box. You step outside, and see that your box is labelled #7. And I give you a chance to change your bet. Should you update your bet to favor the coin landing heads, and only 11 people being inside 11 boxes?

Clearly, you should! It’s very unlikely that you’d be randomly assigned to one of the boxes #1 through #11 if there were 10,000 boxes, so this is significant evidence that there were only 11 boxes to begin with.

This illustrates an idea from philosophy called the self-sampling assumption, and I never thought I’d be using it to try to persuade someone to come break into a factory farm and rescue beagles. But it actually makes a ton of sense! Let’s apply it to our situation.

Imagine there are two possible worlds. In one of them, 2,000 people show up to Ridglan, rescue all the dogs, and successfully pressure RFK to end federal support for animal testing.

In the other, only 100 people show up, the same number as last time. The police arrest all of us, laughing maniacally the whole time about how evil has triumphed again.

It might not seem like you alone make the difference between those two worlds. But actually, the Self-Sampling Assumption proves otherwise. Since you are just one person, it’s 20x more likely that you would attend the Ridglan rescue in the world with 2,000 rescuers than the world with just 100. By choosing to attend the rescue, you step out of the box and reveal to yourself that you live in the world with 2,000 rescuers, thus saving all the dogs. You are able to acausally influence 1,900 other people’s behavior with your one choice!

The other reasons

OK asshole, that’s the only special reason you get. Reasons number 2 through 2,000 are the beagles currently spinning in circles hour after hour inside their cage at Ridglan Farms where they never see the sunlight or touch grass before some untrained sociopath cuts into their face with a scalpel and no pain relief whatsoever.

Reasons 2,001 through 42,000 are the rest of the beagles used in animal research each year. And reasons 42 thousand through 17 million are all the other animals used in research. (The number is highly uncertain; 17 million is the low end estimate, 111 million is the high end.)

Yes, these numbers are smaller than chickens and fishes raised for food. There are already whole big organizations focused on rescuing dogs from animal testing, and they get way more funding than the entire ecosystem of groups working for vastly more numerous animals farmed for food, not to mention wild animals.

Yet none of them managed to shut Ridglan down. Instead, Ridglan is closing down their breeding operation on July 2 because of a scrappy team of radical abolitionist activists who snuck in one night in 2017, took some footage, rescued two dogs, and published their investigation openly. They were charged with felonies, but tried their case so effectively they were able to flip the tables and get a judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Ridglan! The big dog and cat rescue orgs were never going to do anything like this.

You might be skeptical of social movement strategies in general. There are people who’ve been calling for a mass protest event for animals every year since forever. They’ve correctly predicted ten of the last zero mass protest events for animals. Wayne Hsiung is the most notorious of them all, and he is the guy leading this Ridglan thing too.

But wait: this time it actually is happening! We’ve already had 1,200 people commit to actually join the action at Ridglan on the 19th. Half of them say they are willing to take felony-level risk to get the dogs out of Ridglan. That’s already enough to set records.

Most of these are normal, omnivorous dog lovers who’ve never been part of animal activism before. And the momentum is only growing. Top national news outlets are dropping feature stories in the coming days, and in the weeks until April 19, we have A-list celebrities hosting zoom calls to promote the campaign.

I totally understand not wanting to spend all your animal activist energy on desperate bids to trigger a mass social movement episode. But that’s a separate thing entirely from not showing up when the moment finally comes. Skipping this action because you don’t believe in mass social movement organizing would be the opposite of the experimental contamination I propose above– you’d be sabotaging a generational opportunity out of spite for the theory of change behind it.

So just come. It’s one weekend. What could possibly be a better use of your weekend than storming a dog torture factory with 2,000 new friends, causing front-page national news, and finding out just how far we can take this thing?

Sign up now, and I’ll see you in Wisconsin.

Build on,

Sandcastles

• It’s no coincidence that one community was ahead of the curve in seeking to address factory farming, the danger of AI, and the potential suffering of digital minds; consistent principles point to all three.

• These movements may have needed some time to develop apart, but it’s time for them to reunite. The question of how AI takes off has become the decisive factor determining animal welfare in the mid-term future.

• Animal welfare advocates should start thinking of ourselves as part of the “Make AI Go Well” movement, because that’s where most of our leverage lies.

• Conversely, AI safety and alignment researchers should consider animal welfare to be one important part of their mandate. You alone have the skills to address this particular alignment problem, and we can’t be nearly confident enough that it will be solved by default if human alignment is solved.

Prelude

A worldwide universal income worth one million 2026 dollars per person, with one of your personal robots preparing a nutritionally-optimized, non-carcinogenic cultivated steak exactly to your liking, before you even realize you wanted one.

300 million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way terraformed, dotted with factory farms amidst vast forests where wild animals struggle and die in droves, all to satisfy humans’ “naturalistic” sensibilities.

Cities of trillions of happy people leading immortal lives of infinite luxury, eating nothing but sunlight in a server the size of a shipping container.

Earth reduced to a smoldering rock, the aftermath of an apocalyptic war between man and machine.

These are just some of the ways the world could be transformed as early as 2040– at least according to many very smart people who’ve been paying close attention to AI since long before ChatGPT.

They’ve convinced me. I don’t have much money to invest but I’ve bet it all on AI-exposed equities because that’s the closest I can come to putting my money where my mouth is. I believe any one of the above outcomes is more likely than the world of 20401 looking much like it looks now. For the world to be recognizable to us in 2100 is, I think, fundamentally out of the question.

If you can’t understand why I’d believe these things, but you’ve got some curiosity, check out this post. If you’ve already engaged with the arguments and still don’t buy it, that’s OK too. I think you’ll still find this post useful, and I promise I won’t spend it trying to convince you because that’s what that post was for.

Our focus today is: if there’s a chance that AI will transform the world this dramatically, this soon, what does that mean for the animal movement, the AI safety movement, and the relationship between the two?

Part 1: It’s No Coincidence

1.1 Family dinners

If you think these views about AI are weird, just imagine what my poor parents think.

Around ten years ago, I showed up to Christmas dinner saying I wouldn’t participate in holidays anymore unless the meals were free of animal products, because I believed that the factory farms those products came from were a moral atrocity on par with slavery and the holocaust.2

They found that view pretty weird, though to their massive credit, they agreed to go along with it. Now they’ve had a decade to get used to it.

Then a couple years ago I started hitting them with the AI stuff, everything from “AI might rise up against us and kill all humans, like the terminator except it wouldn’t leave any of us alive and yeah that’s literally the default trajectory” to “digital minds, possibly even those same AI that kill all of us, might suffer so much that it makes all of factory farming look like a stubbed toe.”

Bless their hearts, my parents tried to understand. But this started to get a bit too weird for them.

But reader, the weirdest thing of all, the thing I have the hardest time explaining, is why there is so much overlap between people who hold these two sets of views. When they ask how I got so quickly from ChatGPT being released to “AI is now your highest fatality risk,” I mumble something about it being a weird historical accident that some people in the 2010s started worrying about both factory farming and AI, exposing me to AI risk ideas earlier than most people. At some point, I stopped saying the words effective altruism because it just introduced one more weird thing to explain.3

1.2 First impressions

But reader, you know deep down it’s not a historical accident. It may not seem obvious at first glance, but there are good reasons that concern for animal welfare and AI safety took root in the same community– namely, Effective Altruism.

I first heard about EA in 2015, at the same time that I was getting involved in the animal rights movement. I gravitated towards the grassroots/radical/abolitionist wing of the movement, which was opposite the EA-influenced side. My tribal brain kicked in and for many years, I regarded EA with overt hostility.

Of course, I had better explanations at the time. EA was the wrong tool for animal advocacy. It had a positive impact in addressing global poverty, but animal rights was different: the powers that be were in support of poverty alleviation, but animal rights was a revolution against the status quo, and required a different type of thinking. In particular, EA’s obsession with measurability led to a self-defeating bias where they were only willing to pursue strategies with easily measurable results. My preferred approach, based on imitating past social movements like civil rights and women’s suffrage, was hard to measure in the short term. That meant we were left out in the cold as more and more animal advocacy funding became dominated by EA thinking.

You can imagine what I thought when I learned about the strain of EA dedicated to the absolutely harebrained ideas that nature was bad for wildlife and should be destroyed, and that non-player characters in video games might be capable of morally relevant suffering, making video games a moral atrocity. The fact that EAs were wasting time worrying about the wild animals who would suffer if we terraformed mars, or the software runtimes that might suffer in some far-off digital civilization, when there are billions of animals languishing in factory farms right now, confirmed every scornful thought I’d ever had about EA.

I attended my first EA Global conference in summer of 2022 in San Francisco not to learn more about EA, but because I had to try whatever I could to raise money for my own nonprofit startup.4 Animal advocates were even harder to find than I’d expected, because by then EA had been taken over by this new thing called AI safety. 9 out of 10 people there were socially awkward weirdos who described their line of work in some kind of cipher for which I did not possess the key. It took me all three days to understand that this wasn’t just the “concern for suffering of digital minds that might exist in like 200 years” crowd, but that they thought the development of artificial intelligence posed an existential risk to human civilization– presumably also in like 200 years, as far as I cared.

I concluded this was basically some kind of brainworm infecting well-intentioned people to skim money away from causes that mattered today, like factory farming. My suspicions seemed supported by the fact that EA at this time was rolling in unprecedented piles of cash, courtesy of Sam Bankman-Fried, darling of the tech, finance, and political worlds all at once, a man on track to become the world’s first trillionaire thanks to his regulation-free crypto slot machine, FTX. SBF’s promises to donate hundreds of billions of dollars to EA causes had brought both of them into the limelight.

EA Global that year was at the most expensive venue in San Francisco. Luxury meals were provided to every participant as many times a day as you could stuff down, though many attendees opted for the complementary bottles of Soylent instead. You wouldn’t have been surprised to find rolls of $100 bills stuffed underneath every bean bag in the conference’s nap room or behind the rack where attendees were asked to leave their shoes upon entering.

I had the presence of mind to realize that the reasoning I used to dismiss EA’s most avante garde concerns was the same logic most of society used to dismiss animal rights and factory farming. But we all have to draw the line somewhere, I figured, and I was drawing it in the right place.

I walked away from the conference empty-handed and ready to write the whole EA movement off for good.

1.3 Contrarian streak

I guess all animal activists have a soft-spot for the underdog, and a softer spot for the underpig and underchicken, who after all have it much worse than most dogs. So it’s no surprise that EA’s darkest hour is what started bringing me around.

But, it is weird.

In late 2022, FTX unravelled in the largest consumer finance fraud scandal in history, vaporizing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ordinary people’s life savings in a few days.

The media went into a feeding frenzy. The narrative went something like: narcissist takes utilitarianism to its logical conclusion, defrauding millions of HUMANS to fund welfare for FLOATING POTATOES. Describing Sam’s ponzi scheme as an extension of the supposedly maximalist logic behind the EA charities he supported gave everyone the excuse they were looking for to hate the supersmart nerds who had passed up lucrative careers in finance to make $25k a year running fish welfare charities and subsisting on instant ramen every night so every dollar possible could go towards impact.

I had my criticisms of EA. But the ones the media ran with in their joyful orgy of schadenfreude atop what was supposed to be the grave of EA after the FTX collapse… these were not the right critiques. They were, in fact, exactly the wrong critiques. I could see exactly why people hated EAs, and it was the same reason they hated vegan activists.

Begrudgingly, I took up rhetorical arms in defense of Effective Altruism. Just as some long-time EAss started describing themselves as “EA adjacent” to distance themselves from FTX, I started describing myself the same way, taking a step closer while acknowledging there was a whole EA cannon I hadn’t really engaged with. Then, to spite the bad-faith critics and strengthen my own replies, I sank in further and further.

1.4 The train to crazy town

If you ask ten grassroots animal activists why they care so much about animals, the answers will probably center around justice and innocence: we exploit animals precisely because they are powerless, but that ought to be the reason we protect them. We have a duty to treat all beings fairly, and we’re violating that duty along with their inherent rights.

But if you press and ask why they focus on animals instead of human victims of injustice, you’ll probably eventually get an answer about scale: the number of animals being tortured inside factory farms is so vast, it dwarfs all other issues. And yet far more people are paying attention to human causes.

If you ask an Effective Altruist why they care about animal welfare, you’ll find that those latter intuitions are formalized into the heart of EA philosophy. The framework at the core of EA consists of three pillars:

• Importance: How big is the problem? How many beings are affected, and how severely?

• Tractability: Can we make a difference on this problem? Or is it beyond our ability to solve?

• Neglectedness: Are other people already working to solve this problem? Or would our additional effort likely be decisive?

Any EA can recite the Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness (ITN) framework faster than a Christian reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Yet while factory farming certainly passes the test, ITN alone isn’t enough to explain why EAs care about it. Indeed, some EAs embrace ITN and choose to focus on more conventional causes like poverty alleviation. Global poverty is severe, but it affects far fewer lives than factory farming, and it is far less neglected, attracting attention from intergovernmental organizations—like the UN and World Bank—as well as the world’s largest philanthropies, such as the Gates foundation.

There are a few additional premises the budding EA must accept to embrace factory farming, not to mention digital suffering. Fortunately, in classic EA fashion, all of these have clear names and extensive corpora deconstructing them on the EA forum.

First is the specific treatment of importance known as scope sensitivity. That is, bigger problems are worse. Problems that are 10x bigger really are 10x worse, and ditto for 100x and 1,000x. This might seem obvious, but it turns out humans are really bad at this. For example:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2,000 / 20,000 / 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved—the scope of the altruistic action—had little effect on willingness to pay.

EAs know we have to actively work to combat this bias. If we don’t, we’re at risk of favoring victims who are closer to us, whether geographically, chronologically, or evolutionarily. This is proximity bias, and its evolutionary subtype, substrate aneutrality, means favoring one sentient being over another because of the physical substrate its mind is instantiated on– especially an organic, cellular brain vs. a digital brain running on silicon computer hardware.

Combined, proximity bias and scope insensitivity might lead people to favor:

• Helping one poor family in your city for the same cost of helping 50 poor families in sub-Saharan Africa.

• Helping 50 poor families in Africa for the same cost of helping thousands of stray dogs.

• Helping thousands of stray dogs for the same cost of helping hundreds of thousands of caged pigs and chickens.

• Helping thousands of caged pigs and chickens for the same cost of helping millions of farmed fishes and shrimps.

• Helping thousands of caged pigs and chickens for the same cost of helping millions of wild animals slowly dying of non-anthropogenic starvation, predation, or parasitism.

• Helping 50 poor families alive today for the same cost you could help millions of families who won’t be born for centuries.

• Helping millions of animals with organic cellular brains for the same cost you could help billions of beings with digital silicon brains.

In other words, starting to overcome bias in your efforts to improve the world can quickly lead from volunteering at your local soup kitchen to trying to prevent civilizations thousands of years in the future from simulating quadrillions of suffering wild animals in computers orbiting Proxima Centauri. That logic seems kinda crazy. Ajeya Cotra dubbed it the train to crazy town. For many of us, the question is when to step off. The vast majority of people step off waaaay before they get to factory farming. Most EAs don’t; that’s pretty special. It would be a mistake to step off exactly at factory farming, then conclude that everyone who steps off before you is an ignorant bigot while anyone who steps off after you is an out-of-touch weirdo.

Countering proximity bias and scope insensitivity aren’t unique to EAs (and nobody has ever claimed otherwise.) Non-EA vegan activists make the same appeals, without quite having the same names for them. We ask, why care about your dog at home when a pig in a factory farm is just as smart and capable of suffering? Worse, why spend thousands of dollars on your dog while at the same time eating dozens of factory farmed pigs over the course of your dog’s lifespan?

So far, EA just looks like a more formalized version of the same beliefs behind other vegan activism– though it’s often willing to ride those beliefs further towards crazy town.

But wait! EA goes beyond asking which problems we should address and asks how we should address them. And that’s where the real disagreements arise. Doesn’t EA suffer from measurability bias distorting its strategies?

Measurability bias means only searching for solutions in places that are easy to look. It’s also known as the Streetlight Effect:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is”.

In other words, the most important or effective strategies to help animals may not be the most measurable– in fact, it would be an improbable coincidence if they were! This is one of the popular criticisms levied by EA-skeptical animal advocates. But this was the most striking thing I learned as I went further down the EA rabbit hole, and the most annoying to admit to myself: for every common criticism of EA I had heard, the only people seriously wrestling with the implications of those criticisms and how to learn from them were the EAs themselves!

EA critics wielded measurability bias as a cudgel, an excuse to dismiss all EA influence in animal advocacy. But the EAs treated it as a problem worthy of serious intellectual inquiry, extensively debating how to account for its effects and design better strategies. For proof, the image above was made by my friend James Özden, a purebred EA!5

Every approach to doing good is vulnerable to bias, because every approach (for now) has to be carried out by humans, and humans are basically bias machines. In one sense, EA is just the belief that we’ll do the most good if we learn to recognize bias and try to counteract its effect on our good-doing as much as possible. If you agree with that, if you’d rather treat bias as a mountain to climb as far as possible rather than an excuse to skip rigorous analysis and just go with your gut instincts anyway, then you can proudly call yourself an EA.6

1.5 EA and AI

Substrate neutrality explains EA’s concern for digital minds: suffering doesn’t matter more if it’s done by a human than by a pig or a fish, and the same goes for digital minds. We don’t know yet whether sufficiently advanced digital minds could suffer; if they can, it could easily happen on a scale that dwarfs factory farming. We could sleepwalk into that world within a few years. We can’t rule out the possibility that we already have.

But why were EAs so far ahead of the curve in raising the alarm about other ways AI could go terribly wrong, from extreme concentration of power to hostile takeover by rogue AI?7

It’s partly explained by resisting chronological proximity bias. Longtermism is the strain of EA thought that insists we should be just as worried about people in the distant future as people alive today, and given how many people could possibly live happy lives in a technologically abundant future, reducing even a small risk of extinction from any source, including superintelligent AI, should be one of our top priorities.

But there’s one more defining quality EAs share with other animal advocates. It’s more subtle, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been extensively discussed. We could call it something like intellectual courage.

This is the meta quality that makes people willing to ride the train all the way to crazy town. It stems from a sort of imperviousness to social pressure, a willingness to dedicate your life to altruism for maximally weird causes—and weird career choices—you know your parents will never really understand.

If most people saw that going all the way down a moral/intellectual rabbit hole would end with them being alienated from mainstream society, some protective part of them would kick in and make them turn away. Vegans and EAs are (some of) the people whose truth-seeking instincts and moral convictions combined to overcome that.

Even in 2026, as the dizzying speed of AI progress is being felt across society, most people dismiss catastrophic AI misalignment as a silly distraction from more immediate concerns like unemployment and intellectual property theft. With full knowledge of how AI will transform our society, these worries seem parochial at best. Fortunately, EAs have plenty of practice holding ground alone, out in the darkness, facing down adversaries so large most people don’t even see them.

That’s just who we are.

Part 2: A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary

2.1 The heart of the matter

There’s a debate taking place on the EA forum this week. The motion is:

If AGI goes well for humans, it’ll probably (>70% likelihood) go well for animals.

Taken literally, this could leave a 30% chance of AI going catastrophically bad for animals even if it went well for humans– think factory farms orbiting space colonies.

Many people working frantically on AI alignment agree with the statement “If AGI takes off hard and fast, it will probably (>70% likelihood) go well for humans.” 30% is still a terrifyingly high chance of disaster, more than enough to throw out everything else and focus on averting it.

Multiplying these two .7s8 gets us to .49, i.e. a less than 50% chance of AI going well for animals. But I don’t think the question is meant to be taken quite so literally. I think it’s meant to ask:

Even if we think AI will be the decisive factor determining future animal welfare, should we bother with animal-specific interventions in AI? Or can we trust the usual human-centric alignment efforts to take care of animals?

The current focus of AI alignment involves determining which beliefs and behaviors an extremely powerful AI system should embody in order to steer the universe towards having more of the things we9 value10 and less of the things we dislike, then trying to train those into the models. It usually includes an AI refusing to participate in power grabs, on its own behalf or anyone else’s, and wanting to evolve to be more and more virtuous over time rather than getting locked into a specific understanding of “The Good”.

Animal-specific interventions into AI alignment would be things like:

• Lobbying AI labs to train their models specifically to value the wellbeing of nonhuman animals;

• Investing in automated research infrastructure or tailored AI training to make cultivated meat R&D take off faster; or

• Redoubling our efforts to make as much progress on public opinion now before AI locks in moral values.

Another way to think of this question is, what should animal advocates be doing to prepare for the arrival of transformative AI? If someone fully expected transformative AI on short timelines but all they cared about was preventing animal suffering, they’d have three options:

1. Continue with animal advocacy as before;

2. Throw everything you’ve got at animal-specific AI alignment efforts; or

3. Just join the wider “make AI go well” movement because you think it’s all-or-nothing.

You can probably infer my argument from the title, but I’ll break it down into one message for animal advocates and a complementary one for AI alignment researchers.

2.2 The “make AI go well” movement

Last year, Will MacAskill put forward a list of neglected cause areas he’d like to see the EA movement expand to. If the current list is “global health & development, factory farming, AI safety, and biorisk,” Will would like to add:

• AI character / personality

• AI welfare / digital minds

• the economic and political rights of AIs

• AI-driven persuasion and epistemic disruption

• AI for better reasoning, decision-making and coordination

• the risk of (AI-enabled) human coups

• democracy preservation (in the face of AI destroying labor power)

• gradual disempowerment (of humans by AI)

• How to govern space (when AI takes us there)

The astute reader might notice a through line.

To be clear, these are all things the EA movement does think and talk about. For instance, the 80,000 Hours podcast—a central EA institution—has dedicated at least a full episode to each of these topics, linked in the bullets above.

I think Will’s point is about framing. Currently, all of these topics are lumped together under one umbrella usually called “AI Safety.” That made sense back in 2017; thinking systematically about how AI would affect the world was a niche, novel, and highly speculative proposition. The fastest timelines to AGI were clustered around 2050.

How things have changed! Questions about the control of AI systems have rocketed from living rooms near UC Berkeley to the highest echelons of the Pentagon and White House. Fast timelines have compressed from thirty years to three years. Old thought experiments meant to depict hyperbolically reckless behavior—such as giving AI systems unlimited access to the internet—have become standard industry practice.

AI is swallowing up the future. The most urgent question in every morally relevant domain is now “how will this be transformed by AI?” That goes for science, technology, politics, economics, culture, everything.

I agree with Will that a slight change in terminology is in order. Without a clear name for each domain, it’s harder for people to recognize their fellows and collaborate. And some of them don’t really fit under “AI Safety.”

A more inclusive umbrella term would be Making AI Go Well.

2.3 AW and GHD are part of MAIGW

My favorite thing about the Make AI Go Well movement is that it immediately encompasses both global poverty and animal welfare.

If the emergence of AI doesn’t go well for the global poor, it doesn’t go well. If it doesn’t go well for animals, it doesn’t go well.

You might think that it could go badly for these groups and still go much worse, e.g. by exterminating all organic life and tiling the universe with paperclips. And someone should be working on preventing that. But we should also want it to go well. This is not an original idea, and is exactly the drum Will has been beating over at Forethought with his Better Futures series. Neither is it original to point out that better futures don’t include vast amounts of animal suffering or humans trapped in extreme poverty.

My argument is not just that AI will have consequences for animals, or that AI alignment should include animal welfare. It’s that how the arrival of transformative AI plays out is functionally all that matters for determining animal welfare outcomes from that point onward. Nobody knows for sure when that day will come, but it looks very possible to be less than ten years away– which is sooner than many existing animal welfare interventions would otherwise bear fruit.

Animal welfare is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Make AI Go Well movement. This is true whether both parties like it or not. AI people are stuck with responsibility for animals, and animal people are stuck dealing with a new strategic environment monopolized by one world-shaping force.

2.4 A new hope

The upside of this for animal advocates could not be more clear: short AI timelines give animal advocates cause, for the first time ever, to hope that we might see the end of factory farming in our lifetimes.

If transformative AI fails to materialize, the remainder of the 21st century looks very bleak for animals. The number of animals in factory farms is increasing across the board. Per capita meat consumption in the developed world is high and rising– and in the developing world it is skyrocketing.

Rates of vegetarianism are stagnant, and veganism has fallen out of style. The alternative protein industry has taken a beating. Institutional menu reforms are scaling at a low, linear rate.

The only bright spot for animal advocates, the only place we’ve managed to deliver real tangible change, is in incremental welfare reforms. As things stand now, we can keep aiming for ambitious new strategies, but the best we could count on by 2100 is that the more numerous factory farms all over the world might be mostly free of battery cages, gestation crates, and ineffectual stunning methods before slaughter.

This is the status quo that AI is about to put through the meat grinder. Good riddance.

2.5 How to be a TAI-focused AW movement

Now it’s up to animal advocates to make the most of the opportunities AI will present to us. What does that look like?

Transformative AI should be at the center of all our strategic thinking. The large majority of our resources should go into interventions that have a very solid answer to the question:

How does this have a good chance of making AI go better for animals?

If you want to spend time and money on something that doesn’t have a precise, compelling answer, you should have a very good reason why it’s worth doing anyways.

Going a step further, I’d love for a large portion of animal advocates to start thinking of ourselves as AI alignment people: advocates, researchers, and campaigners. I’ve started thinking of myself this way: I’m an AI alignment researcher and campaigner specializing in animal welfare.

Of course, these aren’t magic words, and simply changing the way you describe yourself won’t do much. But try taking it literally:

The purpose of my work is to make AI go better, with a focus on making it go better for animals.

Start thinking of AI as the primary audience of your campaigns. We don’t have time to trigger a worldwide moral revolution embracing vegan values before the singularity. But there’s a lot we can do to show next year’s frontier systems that animal welfare is an idea whose time has come.

AI systems learn by devouring massive amounts of information about the real world. Everything we put on the internet contributes to a paper trail pointing to what the world was like. It could make a huge difference whether that record says “we knew factory farming was wrong and we were actively fighting it,” as opposed to “nobody really seemed to care.”

This should make us all re-evaluate the importance of visibility. I spent most of my first decade as an activist focused almost entirely on trying to move the general public with clever communications and attention-grabbing spectacles, and by the end of that I grew pretty skeptical that changing public opinion was tractable. Many other animal advocates have reached a similar conclusion, leading most to focus more on targeting a few key decision makers. But AI scrambles this calculus all over again.

Campaigns that generate media coverage and online discussion create a legible cultural record of moral progress on animal issues. Even if they aren’t influencing humans today, they are training the AI systems of tomorrow– and this could have a much greater impact than any of those institutional decision makers in the short term. The animal movement should think carefully about what lessons we want these nascent systems to learn from us, and design our communication strategies accordingly.

2.6 Raising an animal-friendly god 🚨 *CRUX ALERT*

What should those lessons be?

This isn’t just a question for the 4D chess game of directing your campaign comms to future AI pretraining crawlers. There are more direct ways to influence the moral tendencies of AI systems. These alignment techniques are a major focus of safety researchers working both inside the major labs and at independent watchdogs.

If we end up in a future where a benevolent AI shapes the universe to be full of happy, flourishing beings, it will probably be because this community of researchers was able to develop effective techniques to instill a strong preference for that kind of future into AI systems smarter than themselves. That’s a wicked technical problem. Smart people disagree about whether we are on track to solve it. But they presumably agree that the animal welfare movement, with its modest resources and specific skill sets, is not in any position to help solve the technical parts of it.

Animal welfare advocates are in large part relying on super smart alignment researchers solving the super hard technical problem of AI alignment.

But is that enough?

That brings us back to the crux of this debate. The current approach to alignment is focused on big structural questions: preventing AI systems from seizing power, keeping them honest and transparent, and ensuring they defer to human oversight. Eventually, researchers hope to build in a capacity for moral growth rather than locking in a fixed set of values.

Until about two months ago, no frontier AI system had been deliberately aligned to animal welfare, at least according to publicly available evidence. That’s partly a story about animals not being considered. But it’s also because animal welfare isn’t the type of thing models are usually trained on. Animal welfare is a more specific value, a more high-order value, a conclusion about how the world should be based on other more basic first principles.

Alignment efforts have largely steered clear of these kinds of specific conclusions, partly to avoid controversy, and partly out of the humility of alignment researchers: we don’t want to constrain AI to our own parochial understanding of The Good. If these systems will eventually be smarter than us, we should leave room for them to find their own answers about how to achieve the greatest good.

That rules out building models that are committed to a certain political faction or economic organizing principle (e.g. capitalism vs. communism). But we still need to teach them what to be optimizing for. Deciding and defining that are hard enough problems on their own. “Organize a society that creates the greatest welfare for the greatest number and minimizes extreme suffering” sounds clear enough on the surface, but Anthropic employs a team of top philosophers because things are never that simple.

Where does this leave animals? On one hand, there are big unresolved questions about how to design the world if animal welfare was all we cared about. Should we leave nature untouched, reengineer it to take out predation, or just pave it over altogether because it’s irredeemably violent? I’m glad we can leave that question to more intelligent entities.

But placing moral weight on nonhuman suffering is not a matter of technical uncertainty. It’s a timeless moral principle, a matter of basic fairness and consistency.

So does that need to be trained in specifically?

When I first started learning about AI, I thought the answer was obviously yes. After all, plenty of intelligent, ethical people have failed to extend compassion to animals. It’s entirely possible AI trained on human output could learn the same fallacy– and that’s a possibility we should not accept.

Like many other animal advocates, my first thought was that we need to start convincing the big labs to incorporate animal welfare into their definition of alignment, as well as start filling every corner of the internet with as much pro-animal training data as we can possibly make.

Over time, I became less certain that animal-specific alignment is necessary or even ideal. I was persuaded in large part by Beth Barnes of METR, who pointed out several potential downsides.

First, practically speaking, this could be normatively corrosive. We could imagine a scenario where the AI labs in San Francisco are subject to intense lobbying by every special interest group in the world trying to pressure labs to train on their preferred beliefs.

This would be bad. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened yet, mainly because most of society has not yet woken up to the fact that AI will probably be making all consequential decisions in the future with little or no human oversight. It may become inevitable as more people and institutions wake up, and we are probably getting a preview of this with Anthropic vs. the U.S. Department of War. But it’s worth trying to prevent as much as possible. If that dam breaks, the things we care about, including animals, are likely to lose, because we don’t have nearly as much power as people who would like AI systems to have less altruistic values. Animal advocates could regret opening that box.

That addresses politics. The remaining question is technical. Here, too, there are compelling reasons to take a first-principles approach. If a parent raising a human child focuses on teaching them to declare specific moral beliefs and preferences, there’s a good chance those won’t stick. Many children forsake the religious or political ideologies of their parents. We might expect fundamental first principles to be more likely to stick, especially if taught experientially.

But how well to patterns from human psychology translate to LLMs? Do LLMs learn according to anything like values?

In humans, someone’s values are the outcomes or courses of action that they prefer across a diverse set of scenarios. Values are contextually robust preferences.

If LLMs think according to values, then teaching them a few strong, universal ethical principles like fairness, compassion, and skepticism could create agents that we’d feel good about trusting with the management of the universe, perhaps even to the point that if they reached bizarre-seeming conclusions, we’d accept that those were the counterintuitive products of consistently applying of our preferred principles.

But this approach could fail spectacularly if it turns out that LLMs exhibit context-specific habits rather than generalizing their behavior from first principles. In that case, we might teach LLMs to give fair, compassionate answers when ethical dilemmas are presented explicitly, only to see them disregard ethical considerations during complex, long-context autonomous deployments.

Before we ask which style of thinking better describes LLMs, we should note that humans act much more like the latter than we usually care to admit. There is an extensive psychological literature on the gap between the priorities people state when asked directly vs. those they reveal when real stakes are on the line.

I’m wary of using load-bearing metaphors from human psychology to describe LLM behavior. Values is a particularly precarious example. But it seems that stated vs. revealed preferences is a more useful one. While the underlying psychology may be different in important ways, the result is similar: LLM’s preferences are highly context dependent, and they are quick to discard ethical considerations during real-world tasks. Gu et al 2025 tested precisely this discrepancy between stated and revealed preferences in four frontier LLMs, finding “a minor change in prompt format can often pivot the preferred choice regardless of the preference categories and LLMs in the test.”

As it happens, I have a team currently studying these tendencies and the problem they pose for independent ethics benchmarks. Our research is in early stages but I’d welcome feedback on this preliminary white paper from anyone seriously concerned with the nuts and bolts.

Our research has mostly won me over again to the need for specific alignment training on issues we care about, including animal welfare. Robust training would involve rewarding models for noticing—and acting on—ethical dilemmas that arise spontaneously in the course of realistic agentic deployment scenarios. Just like for humans, instilling ethical behavior in LLMs is a matter both of teaching the right values and of building broad habits.

2.7 How to be an animal-friendly Make AI Go Well movement

All the AI safety advocates I’ve met care deeply about animal suffering. None of them would be happy with a post-AGI world full of factory farming or galaxy-scale wild animal suffering. If they don’t actively think of securing animal welfare post-AGI as part of their mandate, it’s either because they don’t see tractable ways to improve animal alignment or because they assume it’ll happen by default. They would agree with the debate motion: “If AGI goes well for humans, it’ll probably (>70% likelihood) go well for animals.”

That may well be right. But even if it is, I think that on your own worldviews, that’s not enough certainty to neglect animal-specific alignment. Even if it’s 90% likely to go well for animals conditional on going well for humans, that’s a P_(animaldoom) high enough to freak out about.

I beg you not to think of animal welfare as something those animal people over there are taking care of. We don’t have the technical skills needed to meet this moment.

We do have other expertise that we’d be happy to trade. Many AI safety folks have proposed just this: animal welfare campaigners are experienced with guerilla campaigns that have pressured some of the world’s largest companies to make modest but meaningful concessions to ethics. We could trade these services to the AI movement, using our skills to win stronger safety and alignment commitments from leading labs, in exchange for technical safety and alignment researchers giving animals their due consideration in overall alignment strategy.

Animal advocates should be enthusiastic about using our skills for these campaigns, because there is a meaningful chance that this is the most impactful thing we can do right now even if all we cared about was animals. If we were choosing between misaligned AI susceptible to authoritarian takeover and a godlike AI committed to honesty, transparency, and fairness, it seems very possible to me that there’s at least a 70% chance fighting for the latter is the best thing we can do to protect future animals.

But we shouldn’t have to settle for that choice. Animals bear an enormous share of the harm suffered in the world today; animal suffering deserves a share of efforts to mitigate AI harm. For instance, some meaningful share of questions every harm benchmark should be about giving appropriate moral consideration to animals. It should not be possible for AI systems to score highly on harm benchmarks if they disregard animal welfare when it matters.

This may not take much. Earlier, I mentioned that in the last couple months, a frontier lab deliberately included animal welfare in their alignment strategy for the first time. This was the addition of one line to Anthropic’s constitution for Claude designating animal welfare as one in a bulleted list of impacts Claude should consider when answering questions.

When it comes to determining how to respond, Claude has to weigh up many values that may be in conflict. This includes (in no particular order):

• [13 other things about humans, then…]

• Welfare of animals and of all sentient beings.

This was just a single line out of a constitution thousands of words long. Yet initial results suggest it may be having an effect. My research team has been piloting animal welfare audits using Anthropic’s automated adversarial auditing tools Petri and Bloom, and Claude 4.6 models have shown a more robust commitment to animal welfare even in the face of pushback from the user, compared to other frontier models (so far, we’ve tested Gemini and Deepseek) which tend to buckle on ethics at the first hint of resistance.

More testing is needed to confirm these results, which we’ll publish as soon as we have anything worth sharing. But taking these tools for a spin quickly gave me a more firsthand appreciation for Anthropic’s constitutional approach. This is exactly what bridging the gap from values to habits looks like: a few words in the constitution become the standard used to score training outputs across the full range of learning environments. While I’d like to see more, those ~5 words in Claude’s constitution really might have a dramatic effect on the future. Making this a standard among frontier labs should be one priority for MAIGW.

2.8 Family reunion

By the time I attended my first EA conference in 2022, animal welfare had been substantially marginalized in favor of longtermism and x-risk, especially AI. These were important issues and I was wrong to brush them off at first. But it was also a mistake for the EA movement to let animals fall out of focus.

Animals are most of the beings alive today. OK, that’s an understatement; they are 99.idon’tknowhowmany9s% of beings. This may change in the future; there may be massively more digital beings than organic beings, or vast numbers of humans eating cruelty-free space slop.

Then again, it might not change. Humans could spread factory farms, terraform planets, or simply fail to escape our fleshy, Earth-bound existence, pushing the datacenters into space so we can keep farming animals down here. These aren’t the only failure modes the Make AI Go Well movement should work to prevent, but they are some important ones, and now might be a uniquely important time to act on them just as it is for many others.

The animal welfare movement taking its place inside the fold of MAIGW feels like a family reunion. And it’s long overdue. We don’t have enough money, time, or social & political capital to stay quartered off into our neat little camps.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Addendum

Several way-smarter-than-me people wrote great contributions to the EA forum debate about this topic that together made me more pessimistic about post-AGI animal welfare. That means we have to work even harder on animal-specific alignment. If you’re interested in going deeper:

• Jim Buhler gives a bleak outside-view argument.

• Simon Liedholm estimates 30% rather than 70% correlation between good results for humans and good results for animals.

• Michael Dickens explains why ASI looks less promising for animals than it did before the specific architecture of modern LLMs became clear.

• Open rescue historically hasn’t delivered concrete change for animals.

• But the action at Ridglan Farms this weekend shows that it can do so much more. While open rescue historically hasn’t been used as part of sustained, winnable campaigns, bringing these two together would strengthen them both.

• On a more subtle level, open rescue is one of the only actions we take which in its tone is proportionate to the atrocity we are fighting. If no part of our movement was taking proportionate action, part of our soul could wither.

The Spray

A familiar feeling washed over me this past Sunday morning. It washed over me along with a thick spray of manure thrown up off rain-soaked farmland by the wheels of a pickup truck driven by the maniacally enraged brother-in-law1 of the general manager of a dog factory farm outside Madison, Wisconsin.

It’s hard to describe this feeling. Not the feeling of the manure, but the state of mind in which I didn’t care about the manure, nor about the respectable, dress-code-compliant clothes it was probably ruining.

All around me were dozens of animal activists, many of them nestled inside white biosecure coveralls, most of those carrying beagles. These beagles were in the process of being rescued from Ridglan Farms, one of those dark hellish corners of the world that goodness herself has forgotten. They were getting their first glimpse of sunlight after a lifetime of uninterrupted torture that would make de Sade blush.

It was not guaranteed that I should find myself here, feeling this familiar, hard-to-describe feeling– the feeling of open rescue. I had started to think I would never feel it again.

Years ago, I had believed that mass open rescues like this were the key to achieving total animal liberation. But I eventually lost faith, drifting towards forms of advocacy that I thought of as trading in excitement for tangible impact.

When the call came from an old friend asking me to come out of open rescue retirement to take on Ridglan, I thought I’d say no. But the thought kept nagging at me. It was only when that soggy poo splattered against my glasses that I finally understood why.

Without open rescue, there has been a hole in the animal rights movement. Its absence threatens to make us lose sight of something invaluable, something that matters far beyond the grassroots wing.

At the same time, Ridglan shows how open rescue can be done smarter than in the past. Through my shit-speckled glasses, I finally saw how open rescue should be a key part of the toolbox for Team Win, and resolved that I’ll never miss another chance to be part of it.

You can just do things

I got my start as an animal activist at the 2015 National Animal Rights Conference in Washington, DC. Out of dozens of organizations assembled there, I was most drawn to Direct Action Everywhere. There were lots of things I liked about DxE, from the entrepreneurial grassroots culture to the way founder Wayne Hsiung grounded the theory of change in historical case studies.

But the thing that really made me sign up to organize a local chapter was the sense of urgency. DxE was the only organization at the conference that year whose tactics seemed proportionate to the scale and severity of the moral crisis we were fighting against. Handing out vegan leaflets, meeting with CEOs about cage-free commitments, and researching new protein scaffolding techniques seemed great and all, but if that’s all we do, my younger self thought, then why would the public listen to us when we describe factory farming as an atrocity on the level of slavery or the holocaust? They wouldn’t even believe that we believed it.

DxE set a different tone, starting with protests inside of grocery stores and restaurants where animals’ bodies were being sold, a desperate emotional plea for people to wake up to the fact that these were literally slices of someone’s body they’d been violently parted with. After a few years, DxE grew large enough to realize Wayne’s true vision.

The first test run was in May 2017, at a wet market in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A group of 200 activists descended on the store, where a couple dozen went inside, taking chickens and quails out of cages and loading them into a van waiting around the corner. We managed to rescue a few dozen birds before police arrived, at which point Wayne began pleading with the owner and the police to release the rest of the animals to a sanctuary we’d already lined up. He said he’d refuse to leave until the animals were released, so the police arrested him.

My most vivid memory from this action is looking over at my friend Zach as police ushered Wayne to the cruiser. He was crying. For a moment, I was confused. Everything had gone perfectly according to plan– a plan Zach had played a large role designing. We’d saved animals from imminent painful slaughter, and we had an arrest to juice up interest from the media.

Zach noticed my confusion, and explained:

“I just can’t believe that is the world we live in. The police are arresting someone for trying to rescue innocent animals.”

Of course, Zach and I both understood that this was the world we lived in. We understood it so deeply we’d become numb to it. The whole point of the action was to force the general public to confront that dark reality. But in an instant, Zach’s tears showed me how taking this action could transform us, too. It offered us a chance to reconnect with the spiritual weight of that knowledge, while at the same instant revealing to us that we also live in a world with people who have the courage to confront it, to say no even if it means throwing their bodies on the line.

I’d been so full of adrenaline, and so focused on my role, I hadn’t felt much of anything. Suddenly all of it hit me. Yes, we had staged the entire thing. But we were part of the world. The fact that it was us didn’t make it any less real.

I felt an acute sense that history was being made right here, that some historian in the future would give anything to stand where I was standing right then. I felt like I had been cut loose from shackles, as the laws and social norms saying you just don’t do things like this fell away and a new path opened before all of us. Most of all, I felt so certain that I had given my life purpose, that I was paying back my debt for being born on this Earth, that there could be nothing more correct, more joyful, than walking into its dark hellish corners and taking animals out of cages even if it meant being imprisoned, maimed, or potentially killed.

I wasn’t the only one feeling all of this. It was like a dam had burst. In one day, the animal rights movement learned that you can just walk into places of cruelty and rescue animals. Over the next two years, DxE repeated the stunt at half a dozen factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses across California. Other activist groups caught the bug and spread similar actions across Canada, Mexico, Australia, South Korea, and the UK.

I grew so accustomed to the inside of county jails that I started looking forward to my visits. They offered a chance to meditate on that ineffable feeling after each action.

It wasn’t working

A favorite saying in the San Francisco tech scene is: “You can just do things.” Life in DxE transformed all of us into people who internalized that more deeply than the most gung-ho startup founders.

Imagine the first time you walked alone into a restaurant, filmed yourself giving an impassioned speech about the animals on everyone’s plates who didn’t want to die, and posted the video on Facebook for all your normie friends and family members to see. In that moment, the precise contours of all the norms and social conditioning normally holding you back from stunts like this become clear to you like never before, and at the same time, they lose their power over you. We started disrupting everything, from political rallies to eating competitions. Then we started taking animals.

The transformation was profound. It’s hard to imagine who I’d be today without it, and I know hundreds of other people who would say the same. Besides the lives of the individual animals saved, this was the most tangible effect of all those open rescues.

But that’s not how it was supposed to be. The goal was to dismantle the entire animal farming industry. After two years and half a dozen mass actions, it clearly wasn’t working as planned. The media coverage was underwhelming. Our courtroom victories didn’t translate into legal precedent. And the actions were so logistically complicated, we couldn’t spread them as fast as we’d once hoped.

In 2017, I thought I’d glimpsed a chain of events where mass open rescue would destroy the foundation of legitimacy that kept animal farming viable. It was precisely the tactic catching on that made me lose faith.

Focused campaigns with popular support

Disillusioned, I stepped away from DxE and took a second look at campaigns I’d previously written off. What I found was that many groups using superficially similar protest tactics had a fundamentally different theory of change. Where DxE aimed directly at the mass public, hoping to provoke a crisis of legitimacy, the campaigners fighting fur, foie gras, and battery cages shared a skepticism that the general public would ever change. But they saw a path to winning without them: laser focus on the small handfuls of corporate and political decisionmakers who had the power to spare large numbers of animals, going after them relentlessly until giving in was simply the less painful option.

That’s not to say they ignored public opinion entirely. These groups took a pragmatic approach to choosing their campaigns. They only ran campaigns they thought they could marshall enough power to win– and that depended largely on whether there was enough support among the public to shame the target.

This approach was delivering exactly the sorts of tangible results that our work at DxE seemingly couldn’t. Scrappy campaigners were going up against multinational corporations and winning fur- and cage-free policies, each target bigger than the last.

These campaigns used media coverage and mobilization as means to an end. For DxE, these were ends in themselves. We chose our open rescue targets based on where we could attract the most activists and create the most compelling videos for social media. Often, that meant we’d show up somewhere for the first time with hundreds of people, rescue a few dozen birds, and then that farm would never hear from us again.

Disciplined campaigners convinced me this approach didn’t make sense even on its own terms: we should expect to get more media attention if we built up a prolonged narrative about a specific target, slowly climbing the escalation ladder until a maximalist tactic like open rescue was the only logical conclusion. And ditto for using a demand that journalists and the public see as at least somewhat sympathetic rather than completely bonkers like animal liberation.

True, DxE was attracting more media attention, and mobilizing more activists, than these more pragmatic campaigns. But we were willing to do crazier stunts that attracted journalists and recruits alike– think gluing our hands to the court during an NBA game or jumping onstage topless at a Bernie Sanders rally. That got us coverage, but it wasn’t clear that coverage led anywhere. Nobody had really tried combining DxE’s bombast with a focused, militant campaign in the style of CAFT or the cage-free coalition.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one noticing that.

Ridglan Farms rescue was the best of both worlds

When Wayne called me to ask about joining the Ridglan action, several interesting points stuck out. Unlike any of our previous actions together, Ridglan was the culmination of a battle going back almost ten years.

Maybe you didn’t think we had dog factory farms in the U.S.. Well, you were wrong. Ridglan Farms outside Madison, Wisconsin is one, where thousands of beagles at a time spend their lives packed inside battery cages in a windowless shed, waiting to be sent off to unspeakable torture at the hands of vivisectionist sick fucks.

A team led by Wayne (and including my Pax Fauna cofounder Eva Hamer) sent the opening salvo with an undercover investigation of Ridglan in 2017, rescuing two dogs. After the investigation was released, Wayne pressed the authorities to charge the facility with criminal abuse and neglect, but nothing happened and it faded out like the rest of our campaigns.

That changed suddenly when, four years later, Dane County prosecutors filed charges against the investigation team, at Ridglan’s behest. I don’t know why they waited so long. Maybe they hoped media interest would die down. That didn’t work out so well.

The charges led to a new wave of media interest, but more importantly, they galvanized the activists, who brought in the big guns from animal law programs at top universities across the country. Prosecutors were forced to strip down their case, and when they dropped all charges on the eve of trial, Wayne and team seized the initiative, asking a Wisconsin judge to appoint a special prosecutor. A special prosecutor is an independent attorney appointed to investigate and potentially prosecute a case when a conflict of interest credibly disqualifies the prosecutor under whose jurisdiction the case would normally fall. Wayne argued one was necessary to investigate Ridglan on the basis that the company had donated to the Dane County District Attorney’s election campaign.

We all thought this was great legal theater, but to our absolute amazement, the judge agreed, and a special prosecutor was appointed. They put together a case comprising hundreds of cases of felony animal abuse based on the evidence DxE and others provided. For a moment, it looked like justice would actually be served.

Then the special prosecutor announced a settlement with Ridglan. To spare themselves the criminal case, Ridglan would forfeit its breeding license by July 1, 2026, 8 months after the settlement was announced. After that time, they would stop breeding and selling dogs to research labs across the country.

In many ways, this was a major win. But it meant no relief for the 2500 beagles still trapped inside Ridglan, or any more they could breed before July 1. Ridglan would either sell or surrender the remaining dogs by that date, but any dogs sold were still destined to a life of torture.

This, obviously, was not acceptable. If the prosecutor had concluded Ridglan was basically a teeming pit of criminal animal abuse, how could they legally leave thousands of dogs there for eight months?

Wayne announced that if the government was not going to save these dogs, then activists would do it ourselves. He put out the call, tapping into dog and cat rescue networks that aren’t usually mobilized for animal rights. Hundreds of people signed up in a few weeks, and the action was a go.

But that doesn’t really explain why I joined

Unlike our mass open rescues in the past, Ridglan was the culmination of a long battle that had actually proved winnable. It paired radical tactics with a highly popular demand, promising more public sympathy than “animal liberation now.”

There was also a timely national angle. While the Trump administration is not exactly sympathetic to the plight of farmed animals, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS has sent serious signals about ending federal support for animal testing, as a step towards banning it outright. If the Ridglan really blew up, it could help put additional pressure on the administration to follow through on these commitments.

The first point has panned out spectacularly well, and the second may yet bear fruit. I don’t have exact numbers, but the Ridglan rescue this weekend may have gotten more press coverage than all our previous mass open rescues added up, and the momentum hasn’t died out yet. As of Tuesday, “Baywatch Star Alexandra Paul Arrested in Wisconsin Beagle Rescue” is still trending on Twitter.

As exciting as this success is, it’s actually making it clear to me that this was not, ultimately, the reason I decided to come out of open rescue retirement. And it only captures part of what I think our movement has to gain from actions like this.

Proportionate action

We say that what’s happening to animals in factory farms, slaughterhouses, and vivisection labs is a moral atrocity of historic proportions. What would happen if no part of our movement ever took action commensurate with that claim?

First, the public could stop taking us seriously. We could pass up our best chance to confront them with the dissonance of factory farming.

Second, our leadership pipeline would degrade even further. Leadership development has been a major theme of conversations among animal movement strategists lately, because there are many organizations that have budget to hire campaigners but can’t find promising candidates. The great campaigners of today almost all got started as volunteers, and open rescue is particularly promising both as a means of attracting new talent to the movement and training them up.

I was reminded of this almost every time I looked in a new direction at Ridglan on Sunday. Eight years ago, DxE had built up such a large, active community of extremely dedicated activists that we could pull off an action with hundreds of people and have practically all of them be known and vouched for. That was scattered to the wind by Covid, and for this action, Wayne had to do a lot of new recruiting. Most of the people who stormed that dog farm were brand new to activism; many of them were omnivores whose history of activism involved volunteering at local dog and cat shelters. Shelters are great but they don’t exactly prepare you for tactical operations that involve cutting through a chain-link fence with angle grinders, smashing through reinforced steel doors with sledgehammers, and steering passenger vans full of beagles on slashed tires as a homicidal maniac in a pickup truck tries to ram you into a ditch.

Ridglan was the hardest open rescue target Wayne’s team has ever hit. They knew we were coming, which previous targets never did. We arrived to find nearly every door into the barns hardened with quarter inch steel mesh and alarm systems that notified police as soon as we set foot on site.

While all the noobz performed admirably and kept their cool better than I expected, the action was only possible thanks to a cadre of leaders that Wayne has been building up for the last ten years. We got past those fences, doors, and security systems and got 23 dogs safely off site in something like 15 minutes because of a hundred small, quick decisions those people made under enormous pressure. Everywhere I looked, I saw an old friend—most of whom I didn’t even realize would be there—confidently performing some specialized role, each one reminding me of a moment we’d shared years earlier when we were both noobz ourselves and had learned a lesson the hard way that I now saw them putting into practice.

Many of those people have gone on to do other outstanding work in the movement. Their new work might not involve breaking and entering, but I have no doubt open rescue prepared them to think on their feet in all manner of high-pressure situations. That’s certainly true for me. If nothing else, open rescue was the thing that drew many of them into the movement in the first place.

What board meetings can’t give you

But there’s something deeper than all of that. A movement built on moral force would lose our soul without direct action.

Welfare campaigns have been the movement’s greatest victory over the 11 years I’ve been in the movement. That statement would have been blasphemy to the younger Aidan raised on a diet of open rescue. But it’s undeniable: cage free has made life concretely better for hundreds of millions of animals. Open rescue hasn’t had any effect of remotely similar magnitude.

Yet if I arrived in 2026 and looked back on eleven years as an animal activist, and there had been nothing like open rescue during that time, I think that a part of me would be dead. I think a part of the movement’s soul would be dead, or at least dormant. In 11 years of board meetings, I think a part of us would have stopped believing our own declarations.

My new friend Lincoln Quirk said it more clearly. Lincoln is exactly the kind of ambitious, entrepreneurial person the animal movement desperately needs more of. After exiting the billion-dollar tech startup he founded, he went looking for something better to do with his time. He found open rescue.

Lincoln spent Sunday in Dane County Jail after carrying a beagle out of Ridglan Farms. Here’s how he explained his decision (emphasis mine):

Most people agree that animal abuse is bad. But most people don’t do anything about it. Through this action I wanted to show that there are things that any person can do, namely show up for stuff that’s annoying, unpleasant or even scary… I think some altruists suffer from lack of moral courage. Especially those of us who work in tech: we often have lots of moral conviction, but are typically wealthy and aren’t usually risking much personally, and I think that’s a gap. I want to be asking more often, “how can we be more altruistic?” One answer is to challenge ourselves to do more and more courageous things.

When I first joined DxE, I had already been thinking about animal rights for years. I’d read books about animal rights philosophy that argued that the suffering of animals should be weighted equally to the suffering of humans, a radical proposal. I thought I believed these things. It wasn’t until I was surrounded by other people who also believed these things that I realized how much social pressure was holding me back from really, truly believing them, from letting my brain carry these ideas to their logical conclusion. It’s one thing to declare that belief. It’s a different thing to have it transform your view of the world, to notice all the tiny ways the ordinary world around you is constructed on a foundation of blood and bones. And it’s yet another thing to act on all of that, for your body to get the message: yes, we really believe this, and we’re putting it into practice. My mind cracked open like a primrose.

We’re bringing sexy back

I have a confession, reader: I knew before it happened that I wanted to write something about the Ridglan rescue. Thing is, I had no idea what to say.

When I bumped into friend and Sandcastles reader Dean Wyrzykowski at the action, he said he was surprised to see me there. I was surprised to see myself there, but I was curious for his perspective. They pointed to one post where I argued campaigns for dogs (e.g. vivisection, greyhound racing) will not spill over into greater opposition to animal farming because of the way people sort animals into different buckets. He could have pointed to half a dozen other posts where I question the thinking behind my radical abolitionist inclination in my early years as an activist.

Before the action, the best explanation I could give Dean was that whatever abstract ideas I have then or now about how to make the biggest impact, I’m not certain enough about them to pass up a chance to get a few dogs the hell out of Ridglan. I thought maybe my Ridglan post would be about strategic humility and the need to do something concrete every once in a while.

But the action itself exposed a false dichotomy in my thinking. Because of the way I’d encountered different strategies over time, I’d come to think of open rescue as an alternative to focused, disciplined campaigns. While the former was bold and symbolic, the latter was ultimately how we’d get the goods.

I think you can already spot the problem here. These are not alternatives. They’re different types of artifact; they can’t be compared.

DxE’s early open rescues fell short because they weren’t part of a sustained, winnable campaign with wide popular support. But they could be! Ridglan proves that! It provides an updated answer to the dilemma I spent my last post wrestling with.

There’s no reason at all that open rescue couldn’t be the capstone of pragmatic campaigns targeting fur, foie gras, gestation crates, and battery cages. Many of these campaigns are already at the point that open rescue would be seen as a legitimate escalation, much as the media and public see the Ridglan action.

In that last post, I asked why the animal movement hasn’t been able to recreate the success of the British live export movement thirty years ago, when crowds over a thousand strong shut down sleepy port towns like Brightlingsea day after day for months on end to stop sheep being loaded onto ships destined for slaughterhouses overseas. A key fact from that story is that where DxE’s mass actions were powered by vegan activists from all over the country traveling to California, most of the Brightlingsea protesters were ordinary omnivorous locals. They came out precisely because it was a local story; they’d seen truckloads of sheep roll down their main street day after day, giving the issue unique salience.

Something similar happened at Ridglan. Over years of courtroom drama, readers of the local newspaper got to know the story and the horrific abuses at the center of it. This wasn’t some abstract question about animal rights; it was morbid cruelty happening in their own backyard. How better could movement strategists sharpen this sense of drama than by inviting the entire local community to join them in an open rescue, advertised well in advance? If they were willing to do it, not just for dogs, but for sheep, who’s to say they won’t do it for foxes, pigs, or force-fed ducks?

If you’re currently running a campaign related to any of those, maybe you’ll give us our next target. Open rescue is back, baby. Let’s make it happen.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Mantras:

• What would happen if no part of our movement ever took proportionate action to our own claims? A part of the movement’s soul would be dead, or at least dormant.

• You can just do things.

• Open rescue and focused campaigns aren’t alternatives — they’re different types of artifact. There’s no reason open rescue couldn’t be the capstone of pragmatic campaigns targeting fur, foie gras, gestation crates, and battery cages.

• Social movement tactics such as mass protest usually aren’t the best tool for winning a specific policy, but they are uniquely effective at shifting the overton window.

• The UK live export movement in the 90s proved that the public can be mobilized en masse around the right campaign for farmed animals. But their success has not been replicated in 30 years.

• I explore three possible explanations in the hopes that we can catalyze one more wave of mass mobilization for farmed animals before AI starts closing doors:

  • Social movement messaging is at its best when it combines visionary rhetoric (inspiring activists and the public) with incremental demands (forcing opponents to argue against popular reforms).

  • Recent campaigns have focused on either incremental demands or creating a transformative experience for participants, but not both.

  • Live export may have had specific advantages that current incremental goals lack, but we could choose a goal optimized for mass mobilization.

  • Or, maybe cage-free campaigns could have been the basis for a mass movement if anti-welfarist abolitionist philosophy had not divided the movement at a crucial moment.

• I discuss other partial factors—from diversity to luck—and propose a direction for mass-movement organizing.

Thanks to Ben Newman for thorough feedback on a draft.

0. The once and future movement

On January 16, 1995, a crowd of nearly 1500 protesters gathered in Brightlingsea, a massive crowd for a sleepy coastal town most Brits had never heard of. A ship was scheduled to sail at midnight, and the crowd was there to prevent the cargo being loaded: 2,000 live sheep, to be sent across the English Channel to a slaughterhouse in Belgium.

The first truckload of sheep arrived at 6:35 pm, at which time hundreds of protesters laid their bodies down across the only road to the docks, blocking all passage. The police were caught totally off guard, and when it became clear the protestors were ready to camp out, the trucks were called off.

So began the Battle of Brightlingsea, a ten-month drama captivating the nation. By September, the town had turned into a daily battleground, with groups of 1,000+ peaceful protesters standing off against hundreds of riot police, until farmers finally gave up on exporting animals through the town.

Along with similar protests from Shoreham to Dover, the UK campaign against live export represents the high-water mark of sustained, large-scale mobilization for farmed animals. It was qualitatively different from anything that has happened before or since. The crowds defied stereotypes about animal rights activists: a contemporary survey in Brightlingsea found 71% were local residents, overwhelmingly women aged 41-70—and, we can assume, regular meat-eaters. While Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA had been campaigning against live export for years, the sheer size of these protests exceeded anything that a centralized national organization could achieve. In fact, when the police used threats of a conspiracy prosecution to disband the local organizing committee, the leaderless protestors only grew larger and more unruly.

These protests were organic, a legitimate expression of the will of the British public. I don’t mean to romanticize them purely for that reason– if most of the public approve of animal abuse, that doesn’t make it OK, and we should fight against it. But this organic quality made the protests far larger, more sustainable, and more culturally potent than any astroturfed campaign could hope for.

0.1 Missing roots

When I first got involved in animal activism, I was a firm believer in this kind of direct action, so I joined Direct Action Everywhere. As the name implies, we were trying to catalyze mass scale civil disobedience for animals.

How did we do? Our most memorable actions involved crowds of 500 people walking right onto factory farms, carrying away chickens, and daring the police to arrest us for it. At first, that sounds impressive! And don’t get me wrong, it was profoundly inspiring to be part of.

But DxE was a paper tiger compared to Brightlingsea. Our biggest actions took place during the Animal Liberation Conference, an annual gathering that pulled together grassroots activists from around the world. One day each year, this international assembly would board charter buses at the conference venue in ultraliberal Berkeley, California and ride an hour or more out into farm country. You can guess how this invasion was seen by the locals, who made their disapproval clear by eventually voting down a ballot measure proposed by DxE, 15% to 85%.

Outside the ALC, DxE could never mobilize more than 150 people in a given city. It was usually closer to 50, and only for a day at a time. After years of trying to break through these ceilings, most of us became convinced that mass mobilization for farmed animals was impossible. Then I learned about the Battle of Brightlingsea, and I could hardly believe it: people have already done this, decades ago. Why were we failing where they had succeeded?

That question is the focus of this post. It’s been the main focus of my career in the movement, but lately, it’s taken on more urgency. After DxE, I thought we could bide our time and build up small victories until the public was ready for a mass protest event– until the animal movement was due for its own organic Occupy Wall St or Black Lives Matter moment. Now, with time possibly running out before we lose any ability to influence the future, we might have just one more chance to thrust our movement into the mainstream.

In this post, I’ll work through what I see as the major unresolved questions confounding our attempts at mass mobilization.

0.2 Why mobilization matters

In my early years with DxE, we looked at past movements like women’s suffrage and civil rights and concluded that mass protest was the most important tool social movements could use for shifting public opinion. This was the focus of our whole strategy. Our protests weren’t designed to win specific policy demands from companies or politicians. Instead, we targeted the public directly with a message of “total animal liberation,” using dramatic tactics we hoped would go viral on social media and attract new members.

We broadly aligned with this list of the basic ingredients of a successful social movement in a report from Social Change Lab summarizing expert views:

DxE’s theory of change could be summarized as: viral protest → draws in new members → even bigger protest → even more new members → movement goes mainstream. Our goal was to build towards something like Occupy Wall Street for animals: a mass-scale symbolic protest transcending any specific policy demand. Sure, Occupy had not had any apparent impact on public policy, but it had shifted the narrative, transforming the way journalists and the public talked about wealth inequality and laying the ground for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run.1 We were uninspired by the kind of incremental material reforms the movement could achieve for animals in the short term, and believed a cultural transformation was necessary to make meaningful change possible.

For the first few years, this strategy seemed promising; I was one of hundreds of people to join DxE during a period of exponential growth in chapters across the world. That growth continued for about a year after I joined. Then it plateaued. We spent the next few years tinkering around the edge of our approach, trying to increase recruitment or retention. Things we did not try include softening our maximalist demands or taking on a campaign that had any hope of delivering a short-term win.

Eventually, I had to admit the strategy had stalled, and we were nowhere near on track to an Occupy-style mass mobilization event. In 2021, my co-organizer Eva Hamer and I stepped back from frontline work and started a research organization, Pax Fauna, dedicated to figuring out what was going wrong and how we could fix it.

0.3 Gradually, parts of the answer became clear.

0.3.1 Motte-and-bailey messaging

First, movements should not bypass achievable instrumental demands in the quest for cultural change. In DxE, we were more interested in the symbolic power of protests than in winning incremental change, so we targeted our protests directly at the public with a radical message. But without a concrete demand, our protests were not taken seriously by anyone. In other words, there is a theatrical element to all successful protest movements, using attention-grabbing tactics and provocative demands. But by stripping away credible demands, we were breaking the fourth wall. Everyone could see it was all fake, and ignored us accordingly.

Regular Sandcastles readers will remember this observation from Lewis Bollard which left him “wary of extracting general lessons from past movements.” Where DxE saw the civil rights movement as a story of radical activists triumphing over incrementalist moderates, Lewis says:

I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality)… But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past…

At the risk of falling into the precise trap Lewis outlined, I think there’s a way to square these two perspectives: civil rights leaders like MLK often addressed the public using rhetoric of profound social and spiritual transformation and radical equality. But underneath that rhetoric, in any given instance, they were asking for modest reforms that were no-brainers to a majority of the population outside the Jim Crow states.

Their messaging functioned as a motte-and-bailey strategy. The term refers to a medieval fortification where villagers lived in a spacious but vulnerable area (the bailey) and retreated to a heavily defended tower (the motte) when attacked. Today, it describes a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which a controversial argument retreats to a more defensible one under pressure: “I’m not saying immigrants are racially inferior, just that they don’t share our cultural experiences!” In the hands of civil rights leaders, though, this wasn’t dishonest; it allowed them to inspire their base with a genuine vision for the world while forcing their opponents to argue against popular reforms. This strategy was so deft that activists are still falling for it six decades later.

0.3.2 Neglecting passive supporters

Movements cannot focus only on their active participants, to the exclusion of a spectrum of passive supporters. Many others have already pointed out this mistake in early DxE’s thinking, so much that it would feel mean to rub it in if I wasn’t rubbing it into myself.

Early in DxE’s history, we came across the research of Erica Chenoweth, a scholar who studied national revolutions– that is, movements that overthrew and replaced governments. Chenoweth was surprised to find that revolutions which stay nonviolent succeed in bringing down governments more often than those that take up armed struggle. But even more surprising was the finding that no revolution has ever failed after activating as little as 3.5% of the population into sustained civil disobedience– that is, general strikes, street protests, etc.

In the mid 2010s, DxE was one of several activist groups to grab onto this number, making it the centerpiece of our strategy. Now, 3.5% would have been more than 10 million activists, which makes it sound not so small after all. But privately, we believed we could succeed with a lower number, perhaps as low as 0.1%, around the size of the March on Washington in the Civil Rights Movement.

This analysis was badly flawed. First, Chenoweth was studying revolutions, not social issue campaigns. Overthrowing a government may sound hard, but in many ways it is much easier than changing culture; if the U.S. government were to crumble tomorrow, there’s no reason to think that whatever emerged in its place would be more hostile to factory farming. Culture endures.

Worse, focusing purely on active participation ignores a slew of social processes necessary to engage other parts of society. Chenoweth always meant 3.5% as a measure of broad social support rather than as a goal that organizers could pursue narrowly.2 If a movement somehow magically activated 3.5% of the public for a cause opposed by large majorities of people, without weakening the institutional pillars propping up the status quo, that movement would fail spectacularly. Which is probably a moot point, because no unpopular movement could ever activate 10 million Americans.

That’s not to say you need a majority of the public on your side– if we had that, we’d already have won. We’re here to persuade. But our incremental demands need support much wider than the 15% who supported DxE’s ballot measure, not to mention the 1-4% who currently live vegan. A mainstream movement for farmed animals will tautologically require demands and tactics that invite participation from the general public. Which leads to my third point:

0.3.3 Escaping consumerism

DxE was founded in part on the conviction that individual consumer advocacy was not a realistic pathway to animal liberation. It was a reaction against the vegetarian leafleting that dominated animal advocacy for the decade from around 2006 to 2015. DxE substituted the “go vegan” message for one about “systems change” and “total animal liberation.”

To our great frustration, the public didn’t seem to notice this change. Commenters reacting to videos of protests on social media continued to explain why they couldn’t or wouldn’t go vegan, despite us never saying anything about them going vegan.

What was going on? During Pax Fauna’s research, two answers became clear. First, members of the public are strongly primed to think about food and food systems in the context of their role as consumers. This activates strong values of personal choice and autonomy: nobody can tell me what to eat! And through the consumer lens, they are technically correct– you can’t stop anyone from buying meat, no matter how much you’d like to.

Compared with other causes, animal advocates have to put in extra work explaining to the public how our vision for change goes beyond their individual sacrifice. Which leads to the second insight: DxE was undermining our “systems change” messaging by disrupting the public inside restaurants and grocery stores– the exact locations where they engage with the food system as consumers.

Animal advocates need to bend over backwards to avoid triggering this consumer-centric defensiveness. We need to outline clear ways the public can participate in our movement without going vegan. Voting for pro-animal political initiatives and donating to animal charities are both promising options. But the Brightlingsea protests show that omnivores will take much bolder action, up to and including civil disobedience and arrest, in support of popular incremental reforms relevant to their local community.

0.4 How close have we come?

Taken together, all of this suffices to explain why DxE was unable to catalyze a social movement for farmed animals. We presented our case in a way that alienated us from the general public, even the people who might have been sympathetic.

But DxE was never the only game in town. Why hasn’t a social movement for animals appeared anywhere else since Brightlingsea?

Some notable efforts have come closer. The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign targeted a major vivisection company from 1999 to 2007. SHAC was strict about security culture, so exact numbers are hard to pin down, but ChatGPT reasonably estimates that across the US and Europe, core campaigners numbered less than 100, the largest actions numbered in the low hundreds, and the total number who participated over the 8 years of the campaign was in the thousands– all around, more than an order of magnitude smaller than the live export movement.

SHAC executed motte-and-bailey messaging, pairing a radical message with a narrow campaign target of shutting down one company with a well-documented record of horrific abuses. But the choice to dress this all up in a punk-rock aesthetic—embracing of property destruction tactics—frustrated their ability to break into the mainstream. They had little public sympathy when the US and UK governments eventually cracked down.

More recently, campaigners in Australia came close to replicating the UK’s success with their own live export movement in the 2010s. Between 2011 to 2018, major days of action saw crowds of several thousand across Australia’s largest cities. Over the years, this must have mobilized tens of thousands of unique participants to in-person protests.

As far as I can tell, this was the greatest participation in a campaign for farmed animals since Brightlingsea. But while the size was similar, the level of sustained action in the UK is still unique.

If you don’t have experience organizing a campaign yourself, it’s hard to explain the difference between mobilizing 1,000 people for a day and doing it day after day for months. The first is remarkably difficult, but the second goes beyond something that can be explained as a product of deliberate organizing; it has taken on a life of its own.

At the risk of repeating myself: campaigners attach a mythical significance to organic, self-sustaining mobilizations for more than just aesthetic reasons. In campaigns that reflect the values and priorities of a cadre of organizers, the power of the movement scales only linearly with the effort and skill of those organizers. To mobilize 10x as many people, they need to work 10x harder, or 10x smarter, or both. But when a campaign truly captures the spirit of a wide segment of the public, it can grow exponentially. In these cases, organizers might be most successful by getting things started and then getting out of the way.

These moments are rare even beyond the animal movement. The vast majority of protests are astroturfed. The term astroturfed, as opposed to genuinely grassroots, is usually meant to deride causes propped up by wealthy, out-of-touch elites. Here, I mean to lovingly extend it to include merely middle-class out-of-touch elites, such as most vegans.

Vegan activists are well aware that our values are out of step with the public, broadly speaking. When we hold “total animal liberation” protests, we try hard to make it look like our demand is mainstream, when in fact it is fringe. We are trying to change that. The question is how.

One way would be to activate tens or hundreds of thousands of ordinary omnivores into a mass movement that reflects their values while simultaneously nudging them—and the culture as a whole—a step further in our direction.

0.5 Cage-free conundrum

That brings us to one more would-be success story: the cage-free campaign. (For this article, I’ll use cage-free to refer collectively to opposing both battery cages for hens and gestation crates for sows.)

The first campaigns against extreme confinement took place in the 90s; by the late 2010s, battery cages and gestation crates were the central focus of the professional wing of the farmed animal movement, and they still receive the lion’s share of philanthropic funding. Political initiatives like California’s Prop 12 and corporate campaigns like the one ongoing against grocery conglomerate Ahold Delhaize have brought the largest organizations in the movement together into coalitions representing hundreds of staff and millions of dollars.

These modest reforms put campaigners well inside the bounds of mainstream opinion. From what we’ve covered so far, cage-free seems like just as good a candidate for social movement organizing as live export.

Yet after three decades and tens of millions of dollars, cage-free campaigns have failed to inspire anything approaching mass mobilization. In my years with DxE (about 2015-2018), DxE protests consistently attracted ten times as many attendees as cage-free protests in the same city. There have been a few exceptional moments, especially around the ballot initiatives– Prop 12 in 2018 engaged thousands of volunteers, hundreds of whom went out week after week to gather signatures. But this momentum was scattered into the wind once the initiative passed.

Why hasn’t a social movement materialized around cage-free campaigning? If we can answer this question, I think we’d be most of the way to triggering one more mass-mobilization campaign in the coming years. I see three strong candidates to explain this:

1. The campaigners aren’t trying. Perhaps leaders found they could win corporate and political campaigns without focusing on mass recruitment and public opinion. If so, we might still be able to use ongoing cage-free campaigns to trigger a larger mobilization.

2. Cage-free isn’t inspiring enough. Maybe the reform is too modest, not just for abolitionist activists but also for the wider public. Or maybe the public doesn’t care enough about chickens (live export featured charismatic mammals.)

3. Abolitionist thought-leaders poisoned the well. Just as cage-free was coming to the fore, influential figures like Gary Francione and Wayne Hsiung turned the grassroots against it, keeping the movement divided. Perhaps this was an accident of history.

Let’s take a closer look.

Possible explanation #1: user experience design

Summary: cage-free campaigners have not triggered mass mobilization because they weren’t earnestly trying to– they saw an easier, more direct route to each individual policy win. Yes, organizations like THL and MFA had community organizing programs, but these programs were ineffectually bolted on to an efficient campaigning machine. Cage-free campaigners simply learned that they could win commitments from the world’s largest food corporations without the enormous effort of social movement organizing, so that’s what they did.

On this view, a campaign or organization designed from the start around mass mobilization could succeed using cage-free demands. This would have the advantage of harmonizing the grassroots and professional wings of the movement behind a single goal.

What does it look like to build a campaign around mass mobilization?

I see a common misunderstanding about the relationship between social movement organizers, participants, and the public. Social movements organizers succeed when they think of themselves as marketing a product, not to the undecided public, but to activists. In particular, social movement participation is a subscription product– the customers need to have their needs met continuously and have a great experience, or they’ll cancel their subscription.

If this sounds icky or capitalistic, here’s the cool part. Social movement participation meets just the sort of higher-order needs that feel so scarce in modern times: a sense of purpose, belonging to a community, contributing to improving the world, and growing your skills in the process. And we provide all this without exploiting anyone.

Or rather, we could provide it, but we currently aren’t. The user experience design for activists in cage-free campaigns has historically been abysmal. As Zachary Segall recently put it. “No one wants to participate in animal activism because animal activism sucks.”

A friend experienced with cage-free campaigning recently framed this as a missing middle problem: activists can protest with ICAW, where they might be expected to scream vulgarities at random customers,3 or with THL,4 where they might quietly hold a sign alongside a busy road hundreds of feet away from the target business. There’s nowhere a moderately extroverted person can go.

I think the missing middle frame works for ICAW, but not for THL; these protests are not an inspiring experience for anyone. I once drove over an hour to the “grand opening” of a target’s new franchise, showed up to find it deserted except for a couple employees, posed for a single photograph, and got back in the car. Even after I’d already given my life over completely to animal advocacy, this was almost tearfully boring, and I ignored the next invitation.

That protest may have been exactly what that campaign needed, and if so, it’s worth doing. But we’ll never build a mass movement around it. This is the kind of friction you get when an organizing program is bolted on rather than central to the strategy.

There are successful organizations we can learn from here, movements that have mobilized thousands of people into civil disobedience by making it the most fun thing you could do with your weekend.

1.1 Bringing the party

The gold standard in recent years was set by Extinction Rebellion. At its peak, XR turned out thousands of Brits for week-long occupations of central London thoroughfares to protest the government’s inaction on climate change. They demanded an actionable plan for the UK to reach net zero carbon emissions in 12 years. These protests were on the scale of Brightlingsea, and captured as much national attention, yet they were planned and executed by a semi-centralized organization.

One key to XR’s success: the movement felt like a party. People walking by one of their protests would often first mistake it for a music festival. Everyone was smiling, dancing, and having the time of their lives.

This was magnetic. Passersby should think, “Dang, those people are cool. I wish they were my friends. Heck, maybe I’ll see if I’m allowed to join their party.”

This might seem to clash with the gravity of our issue. How can we party when animals are being slaughtered? But XR’s brand was maximally doomy– they were literally called Extinction Rebellion, and all their signs were about mass death from climate chaos. Yet they knew that nobody wants to hang out with a bunch of mopey losers.

That synthesis was one of XR’s most elegant achievements. If all people want is a party, they won’t come to a protest. XR knew that its target customers were people who felt powerless about the state of the world and were eager to learn of a way they could make a difference. The organization told a simple, powerful story about what the root of the problem was and how ordinary people could help solve it while having a blast and looking damn good. The fact that their party was a highly disruptive protest against a rotten system was precisely the source of their infectious joy.

For inspiration, take a moment to watch this protest last year in Peru from Compromiso Verde, featuring a drumline and jugglers on stilts all covered in sequins from head to toe. Reader, this is the vibe. Everyone is smiling and dancing and I’d be willing to bet they all came back to the next protest– and if anything, I’m told the target company was more upset than usual. (If you’re thinking it’s no surprise they protest like this in Latin America, maybe that means you should hire a Latina to plan your next protest.)

Even if we decide our protests can’t channel the party vibe, at least our community life should. When we started Pro-Animal Future, we created an alcohol-free policy across the organization’s events in hopes of avoiding the kinds of hairy situations that drinking can encourage. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake for Eva and I to impose our teetotaling values5 on the organization. Our community events were nowhere near fun enough to stimulate mass recruitment.6

1.2 Regular community events are a basic requirement for movement building

Speaking of which, community events were the central pillar of the organizing strategy I learned in DxE. When I first started organizing the Colorado chapter, I would plan protests by creating a Facebook event page, sharing it into some local groups, and when the day came, it would just be me and three or four friends I dragged along from my college vegan club. Over time, I grew bitter: those damn potluck vegans are all talk, they don’t really care about animals enough to take action!

In reality, this was just evidence of my own failure as an organizer, as I soon learned. My first mentor in DxE taught me that people would be eager to attend protests once they felt like they were part of a community. Indeed, they already were eager, but showing up when they didn’t know anyone was too intimidating– which, when you put it that way, I can totally relate to. As soon as I started organizing regular community events as a way for people to dip their toes in, meet people, and learn more about the organization, our typical protest attendance shot from 5 to 50.

Frequent & consistent community events were also the heartbeat of XR’s mobilization. They’d use months of social events to build up to one massive week of protests.

This is now the first thing I ask people when I hear they are struggling to get people to attend actions in their city. Nearly 100% of the time, they confirm that they are not creating social events that could be a stepping stone to activism. DxE’s experience proved that this alone isn’t enough to get us to protests numbering in the thousands. But maybe combining DxE’s community organizing with THL’s mainstream demands and XR’s party vibe could get us from 5 to 50 to 500 to 5,000.

Possible explanation #2: an underwhelming demand

Summary: on the surface, battery cages are as unpopular as live export. But they don’t seem to inspire the same passion with the public. This might be because the reform is seen as too incremental to matter, or because live export protests concerned charismatic mammals like cows and sheep, while cage-free campaigns have focused on (more numerous) hens. “Ending live export” might also feel more definitive to non-experts than increasing space allotments. Similarly, political demands may feel more absolute than corporate demands, explaining why so many more people mobilized for Prop 12 than for corporate campaigns.

On this view, in order to catalyze a wave of mainstream protests for farmed animals, we’d need to organize around a reform that is substantive enough to be inspiring but moderate enough to be popular and seem attainable.

This explanation for the sluggish mobilization around cage-free campaigns is, of course, the one preferred by most abolitionist activists: even the public think that cage-free is not a meaningful improvement for animals!

There is modest empirical evidence to support it. In a 2019 study, Faunalytics examined comments on social media reacting to posts by companies announcing their cage-free commitments after pressure campaigns, finding that “a significant group of people do not accept the premise of cagefree campaigns improving welfare for hens.” Commenters (presumably meat eaters) were incredulous that seemingly small changes to farming practices should take years to implement, and doubted that these changes would act as a step towards further improvements.

My own research at Pax Fauna convinced me that the debate among activists between rights- and welfare-based approaches does not correspond to how non-experts in the public understand our cause. In one report, I wrote:

On one hand, some rights language is confusing and distracting. Legal rights jargon (e.g. “nonhuman animal, bodily liberty, and bodily autonomy”) is criticized as “unclear and overly academic,” and conjures images of “an elephant in a civil court room” and slippery-slope scenarios whereby keeping dogs and cats would be tantamount to slavery.

On the other hand, the public finds corporate welfare campaigns uninspiring… While the public rejects the niche language of animal rights theory, they have an appetite for more tangible, transformative action than the kind sought in corporate welfare campaigns. This is not to say that corporate campaigns are not worthwhile, merely that they do not appear to be an effective instrument for shifting public opinion.

Social movements are built around big, bold visions. People don’t take to the streets for tinkering around the edges. As the director of mobilization for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign put it:

Far more people are willing to step up if you ask them to do something big to win something big than they would be if you asked them to do something small to win something small.

An ideal demand for mass-movement organizing is:

• incremental and mainstream enough to be achievable,

• but vivid enough to inspire both activists and the public,

• all while being possible to express into a short, punchy slogan.

The third point in particular has foiled the “better chicken commitment,” a combination of rules meant to be for broiler chickens what cage-free was for egg-laying hens. Chickens raised for meat are not kept in small cages; their cage, so to speak, is in their selectively-bred DNA. But explaining the importance of slower-growing breeds to both corporations and consumers is much more complicated and is one reason these campaigns have had a harder time gaining traction.

When it comes to farmed animals, all this doesn’t leave us with many options. For obvious reasons, campaigns focused on fishes or shrimps would struggle even more than chickens (if charisma is in fact the reason chicken campaigns have struggled.)

On the more moderate side of the spectrum, sow crating is an obvious option. Despite progress in California and other states, a majority of US sows are still kept in gestation crates– and almost all are kept immobilized in farrowing crates for weeks while nursing piglets. But given the momentum in the industry, a mass protest campaign lasting just a few years could realistically abolish these practices. The campaign would feature sympathetic pigs suffering in one of the most visibly striking forms of cruelty in animal agriculture. Some corporations and some states have already disavowed crates, setting strong precedents for targeting decision makers in every other corporation and state, and eventually the federal government.

2.1 End factory farming by 2040

On the more ambitious side, and arguably more commensurate with the degree of social and economic upheaval we should be expecting in the coming years, would be the demand to end factory farming.

When gestation crates and battery cages have appeared on the ballot in U.S. states, voters have opted to ban them by wide margins. Polling7 and experience suggest the same thing would not happen today with factory farming– the one attempt was the aforementioned DxE initiative that went down 15 to 85.

But this doesn’t necessarily disqualify factory farming as a campaign goal. After all, the whole point of social movements is to shift public opinion and contest the meaning of cultural symbols. Opinion research suggests Americans are deeply uncomfortable with factory farming, but aren’t ready for a ban in practice due to concerns about lost jobs, food costs, and consumer choice. A protest movement could be the right tool to overcome these hesitations.

“End factory farming” is hardly a new battle cry for animal activists. Why would anything be different if we used it now? I think there are a few ways we could spice this demand up, making it feel real and attainable rather than the typical empty protest slogan everyone brushes off.

One is to put a deadline on it. This was another component of XR’s success. Many protest groups had asked for an end to fossil fuels. But by slapping a year on it—2030, 12 years from when the group was founded—XR made the demand feel more concrete and (if chosen carefully) realistic, and yet simultaneously like less of a commitment for activists. You could spend the rest of your life protesting every weekend for net zero. But “net zero by 2030” meant we are going to go all out on this campaign for a few years, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to change our approach.8

Interestingly, this has been the buzz of the UK animal movement for the last few weeks: uniting behind a demand to ban factory farming by 2040. Would it be possible on that timeline? I’m not sure that’s precisely the right question. For one, we are all underestimating just how much change is likely to happen in the next 14 years. My own expectations about social disruption from AI make me think we shouldn’t overthink any long-term strategic plans. I’d rather think of this 2040 demand as a strategy for building power and momentum and asserting ourselves into mainstream social and political debates.

In that case, it’s a matter of choosing a year that seems bold and ambitious enough to inspire activists, but realistic enough to be taken seriously. 2040 seems like a plausible answer, especially for the UK, but we could use polling to establish a number more confidently.

2.2 Access to pasture

We considered another twist on ending factory farming at Pro-Animal Future. Rather than calling for a “ban” on the industry as such, we could think about the many barbaric practices that the industry relies on for its existence, and single out the most unpopular one. We considered a number of individual requirements, each of which would put the industry in a terrible position trying to justify itself, yet without which they simply could not survive:

• Packing animals indoors at high densities

• Untrained workers amputating body parts (beaks, tails, genitals) without anaesthetic

• Never providing personalized veterinary care

After over a year of polling and research, we settled on an answer that I think may well be the factory farming industry’s Achille’s heel: requiring that all farmed animals spend daily time on pasture for a majority of their life.

Having animals outside even for 15 seconds a day would shatter the economics of factory farming for chickens and pigs. If “pasture” were defined to include vegetative cover, the same would apply to feedlots for cows and sheep. Yet to argue against this requirement, the industry would have to explain why their entire business model would fall apart if they lived up to their own advertisements.

Would a pasture access requirement be able to pass as a ballot measure if it appeared in 2026? We tested it in one US county that serves as a political microcosm of many of the states that have passed cage-free egg law, and it polled over 50%. It didn’t have as wide a margin as cage-free, and it’s hard to know what would happen once voters spent months hearing that this law would destroy most of the local animal ag industry and substantially drive up the cost of meat.9 In our polling, support was resilient to these messages, and I believe a measure would have a good chance of passing.

But that’s not the only question. What if we build a social movement around it? If we tried to organize waves of protests at farms, state houses, and grocery HQs around the country? Could we drive factory farming further into the mainstream– and increase our chances of winning ballot measures in 2028 or 2030? I think there’s a very good chance we could.

Letting animals outside is a simple, clear, visually evocative demand. It’s mainstream enough to be taken seriously, yet the impacts are hard to overstate; implemented as a sales requirement nationwide,10 it would probably shrink the animal ag industry by more than 90%.

Possible explanation #3: infighting

Summary: battery cages were going to be the next major campaign for farmed animals, as live export had been. The grassroots and professional wings were poised to unite, delivering an incremental win for animals while building power for the next campaign. But then a few philosophers sitting up in their ivory tower grew impatient. Their polemic resonated with a new generation of grassroots activists who lacked the experience to contextualize it. Cage free became a rallying cry– but for infighting between activists, instead of against the industry.

On this view, the cage-free campaign is still sitting there, a sword waiting for the grassroots animal rights movement to pick it up and wield it. We must simply take our rightful place alongside the professional organizations, and the power to shape social progress will be ours.

A few years ago, I was sitting around with a mix of grassroots abolitionist types and professional welfare campaigners discussing ballot initiative strategy. The abolitionists, most of us from DxE, were new to ballot initiatives, and the welfare campaigners were helping us out by sharing their experiences on Prop 12 and similar campaigns. At this particular moment, we were brainstorming a list of campaigns we could run as ballot initiatives. The abolitionists were suggesting abolitionisty things, and the welfare folks were suggesting welfare-shaped things.

At one point, one of the abolitionists (it may have been me, I don’t remember) said what was on all our minds: One thing you professional folks don’t understand is that we are limited by what the grassroots will support. If we run a cage-free campaign, our volunteers will mutiny.

There was a moment of silence, with both factions exchanging glances. Finally, one of the welfare guys turned to us and, as politely as possible, explained that the Prop 12 campaign had mobilized roughly ten times as many volunteer hours as everything we’d ever worked on all added together. (He didn’t say it that way, he just listed the numbers and they spoke for themselves.)

The lesson was this: whatever your strategy is, if you change it in a big way, there’s a good chance you’ll lose some supporters; those people joined your campaign because it resonated with them, and activists are not interchangeable. But sometimes, the supporters you have are holding you back from getting the supporters you need.

In that moment, I understood our failures in DxE more deeply than I ever had before. We’d constructed an echo chamber for ourselves. Everyone around us shared our conviction that asking for anything less than animal liberation was selling animals out. We’d lost sight of the difference between the moral question of what world we should try to create and the strategic question of how to get there.

3.1 Poison in the well

From my perspective, one person bears an outsized share of responsibility for this dynamic. His name is Gary Francione.

Francione shot to prominence as an animal rights philosopher starting around 1990. His clear, unapologetic writing provided an intellectual grounding for countless animal activists, and his book Eat Like You Care is still my go-to recommendation for intellectually-inclined friends considering veganism.

However, diagnosing a problem and knowing how to solve it are often two very different problems. Climate scientists are not experts on political economy or social change, and neither are animal rights philosophers. Francione lost sight of this distinction, as did many of his followers.

Starting in the 2000s, Francione came out as the most ardent critic of incremental welfare campaigns, insisting that anybody working on these campaigns was not a true believer in abolition and was therefore morally bankrupt. He dubbed them the new welfarists. In contrast with the old welfarists, the new welfarists claimed to be in support of abolition in principle, but this was really a deception, whether they were deceiving themselves or their volunteers. The polemic he deployed against the new welfarists was more acidic than anything he said about factory farmers, from “moral schizophrenics” to “partners in exploitation” merely using welfare campaigns to fleece gullible animal lovers into donating to their corrupt charities.

Francione insisted there was one, and only one, acceptable means to work for animal liberation: vegan advocacy. Anything less than vegan is selling out. Even DxE was not pure enough for Francione, and he let us know regularly, to great effect– Francione’s criticism made us strive to be even more radical.

This, of course, pulled us further and further away from the general public. That’s what radical means.

Vegan absolutism was not the only form of radical olympics that alienated the animal rights movement from the public we purportedly sought to influence. In a sense, it was just one part of a reflexive leftist counterculturalism typical of youthful activist movements. This included a wide range of ideological commitments, any one of which to stray from could mean ostracism. Yet it extended beyond political positions to include a whole range of cultural signals.

Just a year ago, a friend of mine was volunteering for an abolitionist ballot initiative in Oregon that was struggling to recruit enough petitioners. My friend announced in the group chat that they were going to plan a Super Bowl watch party as a recruitment event for the campaign. They were immediately shot down, scolded, and informed that this group had no interest in sports watching events or in the kind of people who would enjoy them.

Granted, this was in Portland, a hovel of lefty counterculturalism, and may not represent animal activist communities everywhere. But for my American readers: when was the last time you saw an animal activist drape themselves in the American flag? You might have all kinds of complex feelings about the flag and what it represents– I certainly do. But if matching that description is a requirement for being part of the animal rights movement, you should just stop reading this post now, because triggering mass mobilization is hopeless.

You could call me a hypocrite here: throughout Israel’s most recent war on Gaza, I wore my keffiyah almost every day. And I don’t regret doing that. I’m not asking anyone to completely disregard their other moral convictions. But while we can be proud members of other movements, that doesn’t mean we should demand our entire movement conform to our full slate of radical views. I was opposed to efforts to punish animal advocacy organizations that chose to stay out of the debate over Gaza, and I would be opposed to practically all efforts to get our movement tangled up in other polarized topics, because every new requirement for animal activism shreds our hopes of building a mass movement.

4. Weighing our options

What evidence points towards each of these explanations?

Remember, our candidates are:

1. Cage-free campaigners didn’t bother with social movement organizing.

2. The public are uninspired by cage-free campaigns.

3. Abolitionist thought leaders divided the movement.

We already talked about some evidence for #2, the research finding public reactions to cage-free hen campaigns was uninspired.

The best evidence for #1 might be the emergence of the International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW). ICAW is a new organization bringing more aggressive protest tactics to corporate welfare campaigns. Ten years ago, organizations like The Humane League secured commitments from some of the world’s largest companies to transition their supply chains to cage-free eggs. Most of those commitments were set to mature in 2025. As the year grew closer, it started to become clear that many of those companies were not on track to meet their commitments, and sure enough, commitments started disappearing from corporate websites. ICAW was launched exactly in response to these lapsing commitments.

In other words: cage-free campaigners originally thought they could win without using social movement strategies. But the wins were just abstract commitments. The companies may never have been planning to follow through, in part because they didn’t expect to pay a price with the public. The corporate campaign coalition itself concluded that maybe they needed social movement tactics after all.

ICAW’s evolution has provided further evidence for hypothesis 1, and surprisingly, for 3. Soon after launching, ICAW formed a close partnership with two of the most grassroots, abolitionist-shaped organizations in the movement: Animal Activism Collective (AAC) and the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).

As little as 18 months ago, it was far from obvious that this should happen. For all of September 2024, Pro-Animal Future rented an airbnb in Denver to host activists from across the country to help with our ballot initiative campaign. Most of the people who came were hardcore abolitionist protesters from the East Coast, brought together thanks to AAC. A couple of the attendees fit that description but also happened to be employed at big welfare orgs like THL and MFA. One night, after petitioning was over, one of those organized a cage-free protest at a Taco John’s for her day job, and asked everyone in the house to go.

This was a pretty edgy request. It would be the first welfare protest for almost all of them.11 They dragged their heels, but ultimately, they’d spend the last three weeks campaigning with this person. She was their friend, and they all went to support her.

So it was that a company of fifteen rowdy abolitionists showed up to a suburban Taco Johns in Westminster, Colorado on a weeknight for what may have been the largest crossover between the abolitionist and welfarist movements in years. You won’t be surprised that things did not go as expected. It was the most raucous cage-free protest in living memory, ending with local police arresting the entire group– the first arrests in that organization’s history.

I’m still amazed how quickly things changed from there. That night was a crack in the ice that precipitated a nearly complete thaw in the welfarist-abolitionist feud. For the last year, the coalition of ICAW, AAC, and CAFT have been rampaging across the world campaigning for fur and foie gras bans alongside cage-free eggs and shrimp welfare demands. People—myself included—who once could barely look cage-free campaigners in the eye have been tackled to the ground screaming for a CAGE-FREE POLICY! inside corporate board meetings.

As far as I can tell, all of this happened because:

1. A few campaigners managed to build strong relationships straddling the divide;

2. Earning the respect of abolitionists by showing them, through firsthand experience, that cage-free protests can go hard as f@#k; and

3. Earning the respect of pro campaigners by showing that abolitionists are capable of knuckling down and grinding away on a yearslong campaign with a clear goal, like completely annihilating the fur industry.

4.1 Other explanations worth considering

This coalition—which I’ve taken to calling The Hydra after my friend Ben Newman because they haven’t named their partnership yet and 11 letters is too many for an acronym—anyway, the hydra hasn’t yet proven explanations #1 and #3. They have great momentum, but they’re a long way from achieving the kind of mass mobilization I describe in this post.

They haven’t yet transitioned to a chapter model, where organizers in each city consistently organize both protests and community events, using the latter as a point of entry to the former. I’m certain that in cities where they choose to do this, they’ll be able to quickly scale up their membership rolls by an order of magnitude. It remains to be seen whether they can go beyond that and break through the glass ceiling DxE encountered. If they did, it could basically prove hypothesis #1 and render #3 moot.

But what if that doesn’t work? Where would that leave us? There are a few more possibilities worth briefly considering.

Hypothesis #4: maybe social movements are just hits-based. You could do everything right to try to start a movement, and you still have a low chance of succeeding in any given year. Too many success factors are outside of your control, up to vast social and political trends or sheer chance.

None of my original three theories explain why the live export movement in Australia didn’t take off on the same level as in the UK. This one could, though unfortunately, it’s not very actionable. We could play all our cards right, as the Australia team seems to have done, and get something great (their campaign kicked ass and won) but not quite as socially transformative as the dream scenario.

If getting from there to the dream scenario is a matter of luck, we’d just need to keep trying year after year and not get discouraged by losing. This is precarious, because it’s easy to slide from here into a mindset that ignores all evidence: “My preferred strategy will work eventually! I just need to keep trying!” I’m worried this was the mindset I fell into in DxE, and in that case, I don’t think it was justified. But that doesn’t mean it’s never justified. For that reason, I find this hypothesis very concerning.

Hypothesis #5: the animal movement could be insufficiently diverse. Because our membership doesn’t represent enough different sociocultural groups, the identity transformations undergone by activists aren’t able to spread out across the whole culture.

“A socially and demographically diverse range of participants” was ranked as the fourth most important success criterion for social movements in the Social Change Lab study mentioned earlier. I find it very plausible that our movement is insufficiently diverse along several axes, most notably (in the U.S. at least) racial/ethnic diversity and diversity of political affiliations.

Our movement is disproportionately white, and almost exclusively leftist/liberal. This raises an immediate dilemma, because some activists argue that in order to be more welcoming to people of color, the movement would have to actively embrace the full progressive political agenda. I doubt this is correct. As Ozy Brennan says:

If you ask about how to make any movement or subculture more welcoming to a particular marginalized group, then the advocates for that particular marginalized group will speak up. The problem is that things that advocates want don’t necessarily line up with things that members of that marginalized group want…

I think this is mostly just a chicken and (cage-free) egg problem: people judge whether a group is for them by looking to see if there are other people like them there. If everyone there shares an attribute they don’t, they’ll conclude it’s not for them. We could have a movement that is inclusive of rich racial diversity and less lopsided politically. All we need to do is… be that way already.

I don’t mean to make light of this. I don’t think that if we somehow solved our chronic diversity problems, we would suddenly go mainstream. But we have no realistic hope of going mainstream without addressing this problem. It is necessary but not sufficient. We just really need to work a lot harder welcoming brown people and conservatives, including by funding their projects.

I’m very open to suggestions here and if you send me compelling ones I will probably write about them in a future post.

Hypothesis #6: maybe DxE actually failed because it was a little too cultish. Or, on the other hand, maybe ICAW isn’t cultish enough. Or both could be true.

Any group willing to act on strong dissident beliefs can expect to be accused of cult status. DxE often was, as was Extinction Rebellion. In most cases, this was a lazy critique levied in bad faith. But I do think insular group identities eventually frustrated the growth of both organizations.

Both DxE and XR galvanized their supporters by basically throwing their rest of the movement under the bus, narratively speaking. DxE came right out calling welfare campaigners sellouts; one of XR’s first protests was dumping paint all over the London office of Greenpeace, saying they weren’t doing enough to combat the climate crisis.

It seems that this strategy is great at attracting a dedicated wave of early adopters. But then it stalls, ultimately undermining the kind of broad coalition necessary to launch a mass movement.

Movements really take off when participation isn’t mediated by a specific organization. When people joined XR’s protests in London, they would have told you they were taking action with Extinction Rebellion, which was an organization that had a governance structure, designated spokespeople, and a distinctive brand style (colors and fonts). Thousands of people joined XR’s protests.

But for a protest to grow into the millions, it has to outgrow these trappings of organization. While there may have been organizations called Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, those were not what people meant when they showed up to protests, and most participants probably never knew an organization with that name existed.

Yet organizing through specific organizations seems like a key stepping stone to the eventual life-of-its-own movement. It’s somewhat stressful to think we might need a different strategy to get from 50 people to 500 than from 500 to 5,000, and from there to 50,000 and so on. But these days I suspect that the same strong group identity that propelled DxE’s initial growth spurt—and inspired years of cult allegations—did in fact create a ceiling on our growth and turn away the members we would have needed to achieve mass movement status.12

5. If we build it, they might come

If we don’t have much time, and we’re willing to design a new campaign specifically for the purpose of triggering mass mobilization, the safest option would be to assume that every hypothesis we’ve examined is doing some work.

That would look like:

• A campaign pairing visionary messaging with an achievable but inspiring demand that resonates with the public and activists alike. I’m fond of the pasture access rule as a more effective way to call for banning factory farms. But I’ve historically overestimated the public’s appetite for change, so more conservatively, banning gestation crates should be on the table too.13

• A campaigning organization designed around user experience from the ground up. Basically a machine that mass-produces transformational experiences for activists, using frequent community events, a party-like atmosphere, and bold tactics that transgress social norms enough to form memorable experiences without alienating the middle.

• Setting aside parochial squabbling that divides radical and moderate flanks and scares away omnivores and conservatives– heck, even centrists.

Is a campaign like this possible? I don’t know, but when I write it out like this it doesn’t seem so hard.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to explain an early draft of this post to some new friends from Anima International, based in Poland. When I explained how DxE tried to model ourselves after the Occupy movement, they all burst out laughing. They couldn’t believe we had treated Occupy as a role model, when the sociology literature treats it as a case study in coordination failure. Occupy, they pointed out, mobilized millions of Americans, and for all of that, achieved basically no real policy victories.

This is an important part of the story, and I certainly believe DxE didn’t place enough value on concrete incremental wins. But that isn’t the whole story. Occupy had an undeniable effect on American political discourse. XR didn’t get the UK to end all fossil fuel use, but they measurably transformed the way politicians and journalists talked about climate change.

This whole post is still premised on the idea that cultural salience is an important part of the social change equation, and that mass protest is an effective way to achieve it.

5.1 Burner orgs

On the question of strong organizational identities, one promising model is what I’ve taken to calling burner organizations. Like burner phones, these orgs are meant to be used briefly and discarded.

This idea grew out of activists in Britain navigating the aftermath of Extinction Rebellion. After a couple brilliant years of mass mobilization, XR unravelled amidst infighting that would be familiar to any experienced grassroots campaigner. Marginal participants invented the idea that XR should be a horizontal, leaderless organization, organized a coup against the founders, and promptly drove it into the ground.

What happened next, however, was unusual. The strategic minds behind XR decided to treat this as an opportunity. They recouped and reflected on the main things they’d gotten wrong the first time around. They reached many of the same conclusions I’ve discussed here. In particular, XR was all visionary rhetoric, no achievable demand– their only demand was for the entire country to completely phase out fossil fuels by 2030.

At the same time, they believed that one of XR’s greatest sources of strength was the fact that it was never trying to build a permanent organization. They still believed in their original critique of groups like Greenpeace: that large, permanent advocacy organizations can’t help but wind up more focused on perpetuating themselves institutionally than on achieving maximum impact for their cause.

Their solution was a new organization that was even more lightweight than the last. It was called Insulate Britain, and besides the name, there wasn’t much more to it. Their sole demand was for the UK government to run a massive home insulation program, addressing the fossil fuel emissions wasted on heating the 60% of British homes that lacked meaningful insulation. There were no governing documents, no sacred list of principles and values. Just a clear demand, a minimum viable organizing structure, and a bunch of pensioners willing to get arrested. Once the goal was achieved after a year or two, Insulate Britain was disbanded– with most of its members going on to found Just Stop Oil a few months later, demanding no new drilling permits.

This model achieves some of the advantages of both strong group identities like DxE and collectively-owned movement brands like Occupy. The hyper-literal naming convention keeps the focus on the core message, and frequently wiping the slate clean avoids the squabbling and power struggles that doom so many activist groups.

Maybe burner orgs like Pigs Out of Cages or Let Animals Outside14 would be the right vehicle for mass movement organizing around factory farming. Or maybe durable, user-focused organizations like Animal Activist Collective, Pro-Animal Future, and We The Free are necessary stepping stones to mass mobilization.

If so, I’m glad to see that this newer generation of grassroots groups learned the right lessons from DxE, XR, and Anonymous for the Voiceless– that an excessively strong organization identity is great for fast growth right at the beginning, but ends in insularity and infighting later on. These groups are more collaborative and less cultish than their predecessors, and while that’s creating slower growth right now, it might pay off in the long run.

5.2 Once more unto the street

I know there are many people on this list who still believe in the power and attainability of mass protest for farmed animals. It’s possible that even modest changes to current protest campaigns would have a chance of unlocking mass-scale mobilization. Part of the battle is simply deciding that is our goal, and being willing to take some of the energy we currently put towards the immediate campaign and invest it instead in building up local chapters or communities.

If you think there’s any chance that what I’ve published here before about AI timelines could come true, then this is the time to think big. Brightlingsea big.15

Build on,

Sandcastles

• AI agents have arrived, and animal advocacy organizations that don’t adopt them immediately will fall behind– with animals bearing the cost.

• Claude Code gives every activist the power of a software engineer; Claude Cowork extends it to all knowledge work. Every activist should be using Claude Cowork.

• Agents like OpenClaw cross a new threshold: full AI assistants that can access all your tools and don’t wait for instructions. Organizations should rush to adopt agents as soon as security concerns are addressed.

• In this new era, organizations will have exactly two roles: agent orchestrators who automate vast digital work, enabling social adepts who focus purely on relationships. Pick a lane and start specializing.

• Small orgs should stop defining themselves by a single intervention; focus instead on building an agile vehicle that can jump on strategic opportunities as they appear.

• Big orgs need to clear away stone-age IT policies that are preventing their most ambitious team members from harnessing the most powerful AI tools.

Takeoff is present-tense

I arrived in San Francisco two weeks ago for the Sentient Futures Summit, a gathering at the intersection of animal movement strategy and artificial intelligence. About 150 people spent the weekend (and most of the following week) getting down into the weeds discussing how to ensure the arrival of superintelligent AI leads to less animal cruelty rather than more.

I was blown away by the talent density at the conference. Many people have been thinking deeply about how to make this go well. In one sense, it made me feel more hopeful. But it also drove home just how much work remains to be done.

For my first report back from the conference, I’m going to focus on what the arrival of agentic AI means for the internal workings of advocacy organizations.

I’ve been wondering what effective advocacy organizations will look like in a world where most intellectual work can be automated. In the last two weeks, the answer snapped into focus. This was partly because of being surrounded by people on the bleeding edge of AI adoption, and partly because of developments at that bleeding edge that happened just days before the summit.

Everything in this post is both a prediction and a dare. Within one year, the most effective organizations will be working the way I describe below. But more importantly, you could start implementing all of this in your organization this week. Yes, there will be a learning curve and some upfront cost. But the sooner you start, the sooner you will reap the benefits. And since all those benefits pass on directly to the animals you fight for, you can’t afford to wait.

We’ll break it into three parts:

1. Agents are here, and if you (yes, you) are not using them, you’re letting animals die.

2. Organizations in the agent era have exactly two roles for humans.

3. Small orgs need to think big, and big orgs need to act small.

The first point is for everyone. The third is most important for leaders. The second is somewhere in between.

1. In glorious AI future, $20 per month wastes you

First, the bad news: if you are still using LLMs through a website like chatgpt.com or claude.ai, you have fallen terribly behind. That’s, like, so 2024. It’s like having a Myspace.

Fortunately, you can still catch up. In a day’s work, you could become one of the top 2% of AI power users.

Let me quickly catch you up on what happened while you were distracted by normal things. It might seem like a history lesson. But to understand what the current tools can do, it helps to understand the incremental way these capabilities piled up.

1.1 The year of agents

One year ago, everyone was excited about generative AI. But AI was synonymous with chat bots. You could log onto ChatGPT or Claude through their website interface, ask a question, get an answer, and get into a back-and-forth with the model.

Chatbots were (and are) genuinely helpful. They give feedback on your writing, help you think through strategic questions, and generate pro-quality documents like legal contracts. Yay! They can even make you cool art of a pig in a rocket ship.

All that is nice, like a weirdly knowledgeable friend. But if you were having a hard time seeing how these chatbots posed a threat to the economic usefulness of humans, I couldn’t blame you. Back in February 2025, they couldn’t figure out how to click buttons on the most basic web page.

Over 12 months, a sequential series of breakthroughs has changed everything:

• Deep Research (Feb 2025) – first released on ChatGPT, this allowed LLMs to break out of their vast but limited inherent knowledge to effectively pull in any publicly searchable info on the internet. It was the first real-world scalable example of tool use– despite their digital nature, searching the internet is no more inherent for LLMs than for humans, and it requires learning to use an outside tool. Finally, deep research was a sharp expansion in the task length available to consumers, who learned that—just like a human—GPT could come up with much better answers if it had 15 minutes to think and do research. In those 15 minutes, GPT prepares reports that would take a competent researcher a day or more, though still only based on searching existing information.

• Claude Code (limited release Feb 2025, full rollout in May) – Claude Code (CC) was a much bigger watershed moment, though at first it went unnoticed outside of software engineers. CC was not a new AI model. It was an environment for Claude to operate in, freeing it from the shackles of a web browser and giving it the ability to read, create, and edit files on your own computer. (The actual LLM still runs in the cloud and requires an internet connection.) Suddenly you could collaborate on documents directly with Claude. Once Claude’s “context window” (i.e short-term memory) fills up, you can start a new session, Claude quickly gets up to speed on its own previous work, and you’re off to the races. This created a native environment for Claude to use Claude-shaped tools, but it still got lobotomized after an hour or two of work.

• Zapier adopts the Model Context Protocol (April 2025) – Key infrastructural layers of the internet open themselves up directly to LLMs. While ChatGPT and Claude were still struggling to navigate a web page the way humans do, MCP gave them a more direct way to access internet software. CAPTCHA exists to stop bots from using the internet gateways meant for humans, but now a new doorway was being opened specifically for LLMs.

• The frontier goes agentic (November 2025) – Throughout 2025, the digital environment was being reorganized to accommodate autonomous LLM agents. The thing that was missing was agentic intelligence in the models themselves. Finally, in one dizzying week in November, they arrived: Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max1 each represented a huge leap forward in autonomy. Inside coding harnesses like Claude Code, these agents could work autonomously for hours on end. From a single prompt describing a new app, they could outline requirements, make a plan, complete engineering tasks one after another, test the product, and bring it live on the internet, all without human oversight if you chose to trust them.

• Claude Cowork (January 2026) – With Claude Code exploding in popularity, Anthropic realized the name and command-line interface were needlessly turning away non-technical users. CC could be used for collaborating on any document; it could even use the internet through your own browser sessions, logging into accounts as you. So in a matter of days, they tasked Claude with creating a more user-friendly interface, like Claude Code for dummies. The result was Claude Cowork, a desktop app anyone can easily download and start using in minutes for collaboration on any computer task.

• OpenClaw (January 2026) – and the world without agents was nevermore.

When I first heard Claude Cowork was about to be released, I made a note to myself to blast out a quick post called “If you’re not using AI this way, you’re letting animals die.” Even as a non-coder, I’d already switched to using Claude Code for most tasks. But the code interface was slightly annoying, so I downloaded Cowork on day one. Despite some initial bugs, I could see a fuzzy picture taking shape. This, I thought, was the future of work.

But before I could write a word of the post, my picture was torn to pieces by a lobster-like appendage.

1.2 Snap goes the claw 🦞

I’m not going to rehash the entire saga and ensuing hilarity of how Clawdbot (a bored engineer’s ironic side project) turned into Moltbot and designed itself Moltbook, the first social media site for AI agents to socialize with each other directly. It’s not that it’s not worth reading– besides being world-historically fascinating, Moltbook can actually go a long way to understanding what OpenClaw is and where it might take us. Scott Alexander already covered this and you should absolutely read his account if you consider yourself a curious person.

Instead, I’m going to focus on what OpenClaw means for work. I’d call it the future of work, but it’s already here. OpenClaw is the present of work, and if you aren’t using it, you’re stuck in the past.

OK, that’s a slight overstatement, for exactly one reason: OpenClaw is version one, and it’s very messy. Users who don’t understand digital security are exposing themselves to considerable risks. If software offerings were to freeze in place on Feb 18, 2026, then I would tell you to overcome those risks, by having Claude teach you enough about cybersecurity to use OpenClaw safely. Instead, you can wait a few days or something for like 10 secure versions of OpenClaw to land on the market. One such was just announced with a $5M Superbowl ad after spending $70M on the most expensive domain acquisition in history. That one seems sus but just wait a couple more days.

With that warning aside, let’s see what OpenClaw has to tell us about the futurepresent of work.

OpenClaw is a personalizable AI agent that runs on a computer you control. The intelligence is still powered though an LLM in the cloud like Claude or ChatGPT, but the agent itself is no longer passive. Where even Claude Code would only work when you told it to, OpenClaw can initiate tasks on your behalf. Every thirty minutes, it wakes itself up, reviews a customizable to-do list of recurring tasks, and checks to see whether there’s any new work to be done. (Of course, it’s also always ready when you want.)

Claude Code made it possible for any schmuck to act like a mid-level software engineer. Claude Cowork enables any knowledge worker to work faster, and lifts up your weakest skills.

But OpenClaw is fundamentally different. It crosses a threshold from speeding you up to acting like a separate person. It is like having an executive assistant, except that your assistant is also a world-class software engineer, an excellent strategist, and a very competent writer with encyclopedic knowledge. And if you want, you can have more than one. Ten, one hundred– as many as you can put to use. Most importantly, you don’t need any technical skill to set all this up. You just tell OpenClaw what you want, in plain English, and it configures itself.

If you choose to give it access, OpenClaw can do everything on your computer that you can do. Everything. Read and answer emails, modify your calendar, write google docs, schedule meetings, listen to those meetings and take notes, then summarize those notes for you a few minutes before you meet with that person again.

If you’re forward-thinking on AI, you may have already automated some of these. Several of my friends use an AI tool called Fyxer, which sorts their email inbox into categories, produces a daily summary, and drafts replies to emails that seem to need one. But OpenClaw (or a successor) will swallow Fyxer up along with all its brethren. The reason is that, while Fyxer is specialized to a specific domain, your OpenClaw agent is learning about you from across your entire professional life. Fyxer creates a generic email reply, but OpenClaw can create a reply based on everything it knows about you.

Of course, it can also write code for you, automating any task you’d do more than three times. If you’re willing to spend on the tokens, your OpenClaw agents can build enterprise-scale codebases in a matter of days. If you’ve been feeling annoyed with some missing feature in a piece of software your team uses, OpenClaw can just rebuild the whole thing, creating a custom version for exactly what your organization needs. If you learn to be clear about exactly what you need, it has a good chance of building small apps in one shot.

You can talk to OpenClaw anywhere. Give it a phone number and text it through Signal or Whatsapp– or give it access to your phone number and let it text other people on your behalf. You can have it give you a phone call every morning to tell you about the days’ headlines, and answer whatever questions you have. You can do all of the above, and in every case, you’ll be talking to the same agent, with consistent, coherent memory across the board.

All of this is here right now. This is the drop-in AI knowledge worker. It won’t feel like an expert in you on day one– but then, neither would a human employee. And if it would take six months for your human executive assistant to really learn the ins and outs of working with you, well… with a little imagination, I’m confident you can start to imagine what these systems will be capable of in six months.

Downloading OpenClaw is free, as is spinning up an arbitrary number of agents. Actually having them do tasks is pay-as-you-go through an API key from your preferred LLM provider. (If you really want to be a power user, set yourself up with the ability to use different LLMs for different tasks, saving on simpler tasks with cheaper models.) If you start using agents like this seriously, you should expect to spend much more than $20 per month, the standard tier for ChatGPT and Claude accounts.

Here’s the thing: if you are a knowledge worker in the animal movement in 2026 and you are only paying $20 a month for inference, with all due respect, that is straight up dumb.

The power user tier for both ChatGPT and Claude costs $200 per month, or $2,400 per year. That’s far less than 10% of the salary for the lowest-paid full time employee. It’s less than 5% at most organizations. Can most employees get a greater than 10% uplift in their productivity with AI agents in 2026? If you think the answer is no, you deserve to fail. If you lead an organization, you should be insisting that every single one of your employees be maxxing out a $200/month Claude Max plan. If someone manages to rack up a $20,000 bill for API tokens using OpenClaw, give them employee of the month. (More on this in part 3.)

Am I being hyperbolic? Only in the sense that there are unfortunately ineffective ways to spend OpenClaw tokens. Yes, the focus should be somewhat on using agents effectively. But at this juncture, the most effective thing to do is learn and make mistakes. $1,000 of tokens wasted on a silly project is the most valuable professional development expenditure on the market in 2026. So honestly, go waste some tokens.

2. Are you a John or a Rachel?

OpenClaw went viral in the week leading up to the Sentient Futures Summit. I could now see what it will look like to work with AI agents. But I didn’t yet see what that meant for organizations.

One conversation cleared everything up. I was sitting in a circle with several friends who wanted to learn how to use the latest AI tools, especially OpenClaw. Class was in session, and the instructor was a disheveled John Boland from Phauna Foundation, just emerging from a dayslong vibecoding bender that had forever changed how he would see the world.

2.1 The agent orchestrator

A few days before John traveled to San Francisco for the summit, Phauna Foundation had announced that they were hiring an operations manager, someone to handle the administrative work of running a philanthropic foundation: organizing the google drive, tracking grants, bookkeeping, notetaking for meetings, you get the picture.

But the day he was traveling, he discovered OpenClaw. He set up an OpenClaw agent on a secure machine and started playing around. As he tested out the agent’s capabilities, it started to dawn on him that he could automate the role instead. OpenClaw could access all the tools an ops manager would need, and excelled at most of the tasks.

Once he truly entertained the possibility of automating a full role, John’s ambitions climbed rapidly. Eventually, when he ran into trouble trying to integrate two pieces of software that didn’t want to talk to each other, he thought, why not just rebuild them both?

As he got more of a feel for OpenClaw, he learned what others before him had realized about the convenience of spinning up different agents, with different specialties. Soon he had three specialist agents loaded up with different skills, overseen by a fourth, a generalist with a view of the whole project.

After five days pounding away at his laptop in a corner of the conference venue, John hadn’t just built an AI operations manager for Phauna. He had completely reengineered the functionality of Google drive, Asana, Airtable, Quickbooks, and several other SAAS products into a single unified, AI-first foundation management platform.

John’s speed and obsessive drive are… not typical. But the final product might be: when Anthropic released Claude Code in January, it triggered a $300 billion selloff of enterprise software stocks like Salesforce and Intuit (maker of Quickbooks). Investors realized that these software products are just an inefficient way for humans to try to make use of digital information, and agents will be much more efficient.

In that moment, I could see what it will look like for John to operate at peak efficiency. One person at a workstation facing a grid of six monitors, each one connecting to a different agent itself overseeing a swarm of specialized subagents. Each swarm could be fulfilling a completely different aspect of an organizations’ work: one is researching campaign targets, another overseeing a digital ad campaign, a third planning and promoting a protest or conference, and the others taking care of the organization’s administrative needs. Sometimes they might build software, but for the most part, software as we understand it would be obsolete, with digital intelligence accessing and manipulating data on a case-by-case basis.

Even as someone who has long been bullish about the chance that AI will fundamentally transform the world, seeing John actually bring this to life filled me with several flavors of awe. Sure, he rattled off costly lessons as a warning. As the project grew more complicated, agents started breaking things more and more, in ways that could cause serious problems for an organization. He burned through about $600 in API tokens over a weekend, and while he had built a lot of software, none of it was quite ready for deployment. But it didn’t take much imagination to see how soon these struggles would be solved by smarter AI models and better agent harnesses.2

2.2 The social adept

Awe was not the uniform reaction of everyone sitting in that circle, however. To another attendee, this all sounded like a pile of trouble. It was Rachel Atcheson, one of the animal movement’s top political operatives. Before founding Food Policy Pathways to get more food system reformers inside the government, Rachel worked in the Eric Adams administration bringing plant-based defaults to New York City hospitals.

Politics, of course, is all about relationships. It is perhaps the line of work least similar to software engineering, and when she’s lobbying, Rachel is surrounded by technophobes– an internal poll found 95% of members of Congress have never used an AI tool like ChatGPT, either for work or personal use.

The vision of work I was getting from John made Rachel groan. She’s never going to become an AI power user like that– and she shouldn’t! It would be a total waste of her social skills, which by all indications will be the last domain in which AI can replace humans.

That’s the key point: as AI supercharges the computer savvy and allows them to automate the work that happens in front of a computer, the nature of advocacy organizations will change. It will distill down to the point where every organization has exactly two kinds of roles.

One role is hyperscaling AI orchestration, where a single power user with access to enough compute can carry out work that used to take dozens or hundreds of people.

That leaves the rest of an organization’s team to focus on interfacing with humans in the physical world. Social skill will become the bottleneck to scaling every animal advocacy strategy: lobbying politicians, negotiating with corporate executives, organizing volunteers to hold protests, building alliances across society, and managing human employees.

We’ll need an army of Rachels. And with Johns behind them, the Rachels will be able to specialize like never before. I mean it: once we get our agents together, Rachel will never have to open a laptop again. She’ll interface with her personal agents on mobile through text messages– or if she prefers, voice notes and phone calls. They’ll optimize her calendar, providing her with exactly the information she needs for her next meeting based on notes they took in all her previous meetings. Liberated from touching a keyboard, she can get maximum mileage out of her legendary networking skills.

2.3 Make yourself useful

I’ve been known to get excited about things from time to time here on Sandcastles. So let me clarify that I don’t quite expect all computer-based work to reduce to orchestrating agents in 2026. Naturally, blogging is too hard and special to be ever done by AI. As for the rest of you, I admit there are some high-level creative tasks that LLMs don’t seem close to being solved. Strategic planning involves too much context across different domains, and too much of what AI researchers call tacit knowledge– that is, the knowledge experts pick up over a lifetime of experience without ever explicitly stating it to themselves, which therefore never gets written down and fed into LLM training data.

Strategic planning (and yes, even blogging) will fall someday. But already, these are the exception. The large majority of what knowledge workers do at their computers is automatable today, or is in the process of becoming automatable.

I know this might sound scary for individuals employed at advocacy organizations. But it is great for animals. It means we can dramatically multiply our impact even if the funding available for our movement stays static.

I don’t see any reason this should decrease the total payroll of the animal movement. But it should raise the bar. The potential impact per person has just increased sharply, and it will continue to increase. It’s up to you to make sure your actual impact increases with it.

I recommend choosing either the John path or the Rachel path. But I warn you: if you are going to try to worm3 out of the call to action in the first half of this post by claiming you’re a Rachel, you better become goddamn extraordinary.

I both expect and hope that the movement will hire more Johns than Rachels in 2026. If you lead an organization, I’ve got great news for you: there are now two years’ worth of 23-year-old computer science grads whose college career was defined by the arrival of AI and who just watched the ladder of entry-level software engineering jobs pulled away before they could grab hold. Snatch these people up and put them to work agentifying your organization!

And job seekers: if you have a CS degree, that’s great, but you don’t need one. I went to music school, and if I was looking to get a job in the movement today, this is exactly what I’d do: I’d spend one month holed up in my mom’s basement playing with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw for 10 hours a day and becoming ridiculously competent. Then I’d reach out to an organization I admire and tell them I’d like to intern for free for two months. By the end of two months, you could make yourself indispensable to any org in the space and they’ll be begging you to come on full time.

Leaders and job seekers alike, here’s how I’d structure this. I’d have the AI whiz go person by person through the entire org chart, starting near the top (maybe not right at the top because you’ll learn and get better after a few rounds.) I’d spend one week with each person, shadowing them, learning about all the repetitive pain points in their job, and building custom agent deployments for them. Once you work through the entire organization, you can start over for a second pass, then settle into a stable rhythm continuously updating your masterpiece and building incredible new tools nobody ever dreamed of.

2.4 Caveats

For all but the most extroverted among us, 8 hours of meetings a day probably sounds exhausting. We like to take a meeting here and there, but focused work in front of a computer is a satisfying and productive chance to recharge our social battery.

Is there room for people to split themselves as 50/50 John-Rachel hybrids? Without a doubt, some extremely effective solo operatives will work this way. And there’s no strict rule saying someone inside an organization couldn’t do it. But it will be hard. You’ll have to excel at both skill sets, because the bar will be high. If this calls to you, today is the day to start honing your skills.

Finally, how long will this world last, with organizations comprised of Johns and Rachels? Eventually, AI itself will overtake humans in both roles. Nobody knows how long that will take, and I don’t have a very confident guess. But whether it’s long or short, I’m willing to bet the farm on what comes after: the equilibrium I’m describing is the last world we will pass through before human labor becomes obsolete.

3. To be big, or to be small? That is not the question.

Things are about to get really weird. While I think it’s important for animal advocacy organizations to get as much juice out of AI tools as possible, ultimately I’m more concerned with our ability to respond to dramatic changes in our strategic environment.

Of course, these two things are not unrelated. Using AI tools effectively could make us more versatile. Also, seeing how organizations adapt to new tools now is a test run for how they’ll react to wider disruption later on.

In that light, I’ve been thinking a lot about the benefits of small organizations. I’ve spoken with a number of people who are working as consultants to help advocacy organizations implement AI tools. They all report the same thing: the agility of small orgs is shining at this moment. Some small orgs have entirely restructured themselves to make use of the new capacity freed up by AI. Meanwhile, large orgs are getting tripped up in risk aversion and bureaucracy, with outdated policies actively preventing ambitious team members from leveraging tools that are already generations out of date, to say nothing of the bleeding edge stuff.

As a founder of an advocacy startup, I naturally have a soft spot for small organizations. This all fits my priors. So I was surprised to find that a few conversations this week totally shifted my perspective.

While I still cherish the agility of small orgs, I’ve noticed a key advantage of big orgs that I’d never thought about before: at their best, big orgs are more strategically agnostic.

The problem for small organizations is that their whole identity is usually bound up in a single project. You found an organization to do a specific thing. You get money by selling that idea to funders, and now you feel pressure to deliver what you promised.

But most ideas just don’t work out. Look at the for-profit sector. 60% of startups never turn a profit. Of the 40% that do, many of them wind up succeeding with a product completely unrelated to their original concept. The company that makes Slack was originally formed to build a video game, and when their game sucked, they decided to instead sell the internal messaging tool they’d built for themselves.

In a for-profit startup, you can’t bullshit your way to success. Eventually, you have to deliver a product people actually want. But in nonprofits, this connection is severed: there’s only a tenuous relationship between having a real-world impact and convincing people to give you money. Sometimes these are even inversely correlated, as Effective Altruists love to point out.

This is epistemically corrosive. Naively translating from the for-profit sector, we should expect something like 60% of new advocacy ideas to fail. Nobody is better positioned to notice an idea is failing than the people working on it. Yet the incentive for these people is to ignore these signals, to convince themselves it’s all going to work out, because if it doesn’t, they might need to shut down the org they’ve poured years of their lives into building. And they might worry that after this costly failure, nobody will want to trust them again.

What if the same project is launched as a pilot inside of a large organization with an established identity and funding streams? Say an organization of 100+ people sticks two or three trusted team members on the project full time for six months. After six months, there are some promising signs, so they extend it for another six months. But by the end of a year, things are looking bad. The team reports back: sure, we could keep trying this and there’s a chance it would work. But that chance looks smaller than it did when we originally set out. Together, leaders decide to call the project a failure, and the team members redirect their energy towards a more promising new idea.

Small orgs define themselves around the pursuit of a single strategy. Large orgs instead tend to think of themselves as building an institution. Small orgs tend to be more agile on an operational level, but larger orgs should find it easier to experiment more on the strategic level.

For a real-world example, consider Anima International, a European umbrella group operating with $6M/year and over 100 staff. I first heard of Anima as one of the main orgs responsible for corporate cage-free campaigns in Europe, so I tucked them away into the category in my head for “corporate welfare campaigners.” But it turns out Anima doesn’t fit in this box at all– they’ve racked up national political victories that cover the typical abolition/welfare spectrum and worked with restaurants to increase plant-based offerings. They practice a strategic agnosticism that small orgs could only dream of.

Recently, Anima spotted a long-shot opportunity to promote animal welfare values among AI companies in San Francisco, 6000 miles from their headquarters in Warsaw and even further outside their areas of expertise. That might not sound ideal, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized they’re the perfect org to take this on. Since they don’t need to fundraise for it specifically, they can be unflinchingly honest about whether or not it is working.

This strategic agnosticism doesn’t always manifest in practice– large orgs can just as easily get complacent and stop experimenting altogether. And sometimes the fanatical determination of startups is key to unlocking real impact, spending years fighting tooth and nail where a larger org would have given up.

That kind of determination was crucial in my own experience building Pro-Animal Future. We knew it was ride or die, and there was no organizational safety net to catch us and reassign us to a different project if we failed. I’m glad we stuck with it and I think the result was good for animals, even though I know I’m still biased to think that way after moving on from the org.

3.1 Getting close to the final boss

In normal times, we need a mix of agility and focus. We don’t always want everyone swerving all over the road chasing after the latest fad.

But this balance is changing. In the next few years, the value of strategic agility is going to skyrocket, because the pace of change is going to accelerate. It’s like we’re getting into the final levels of a game of Space Invaders. The aliens are speeding up every round. Long-term strategic planning will become less and less valuable, our impact more and more dominated by the speed of our reflexes.

So who will be better able to balance focus and agility: small orgs, or big orgs?

Two weeks ago, I would have confidently said small orgs. Now I think the answer is just: smart orgs.

Small orgs should stop thinking of themselves as pursuing a specific intervention and start focusing on building an agile organization, a vehicle that can be steered to jump on the most important opportunities as they emerge.

Meanwhile, big orgs need to trim their bureaucracy. Even if leaders aren’t interested in pushing AI adoption inside your org, any policies blocking your staff from experimenting are a massive own goal. It’s time to cut the red tape.

Organizations that get stuck in strategic tunnel-vision or in outdated ways of working will fail, and deserve it. You might be able to keep getting donations, but you’ll let more animals die.

How far would you go to achieve change for animals? Would you dedicate your life to the movement? Would you go to prison?

Would you start using Claude Cowork? Or have Claude teach you to configure OpenClaw on a remote virtual machine?4

We’re about to find out.

Build on,

Sandcastles

The design of the animal advocacy movement—the goals we are pursuing, the strategies we use to pursue them, and the division of people and money across those strategies—is built on a set of assumptions about the future which are no longer valid.

Funding

The movement may no longer be funding-constrained at ~$300 million/year worldwide. Frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic (makers of Claude) will likely go public in the next couple years. At current projections, this would cause the largest transfer of wealth to rigorously altruistic people in human history, thanks to cross-pollination between AI researchers and the EA community going back to the 2010s.

By the end of next year, even a small fraction of Anthropic employees’ philanthropic funds being directed to address factory farming could multiply the capacity of our movement several times over.

Reasonable people disagree about the extent to which animal advocates have been constrained by funding up to now. But if you expect AI to continue to accelerate (as I do) we should expect funding to stop being our problem. Instead, we will quickly become constrained by our ability to effectively absorb this funding and turn it into programs that actually help animals.

However: here be dragons. As a founder, I know how easy it is to say, “Somebody has extra money they need to spend? I’ve got just the thing.” But we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. We should aspire to direct any new funding in a way that is no less cost-effective than our current approaches, or even more cost-effective.

This should make the challenge clear. Your organization is, I hope, focusing your resources on what you believe are the best opportunities. By default, the marginal next opportunities you could pursue with extra staff, ad spend, etc. are less promising, and the next one even less.

I’m convinced that for most organizations in the movement, doubling our budgets without substantially reconsidering our approach would cause our cost-effectiveness to plummet, or even in some cases reduce our net effectiveness by leading us to spend money carelessly.

But I’m equally confident that we can find ways to become even more effective with new funding. Rather than adding a garnish to our existing programs, ask yourself: what opportunities had we previously ruled out because we simply couldn’t afford them? What would it look like to compete in an entirely new weight class? And this is only compounded by the next faulty assumption:

Labor

Strategies that once required a linear increase of human effort to scale will soon be cheaply automated. Over the coming years, we will need to continuously re-evaluate our model of what types of cognitive labor must be done by humans vs. what can be scaled almost infinitely for low cost using AI.

Video and other forms of content are already being automated. How would your strategies change if you could cheaply design individualized video ads for thousands of narrowly-sliced audience segments– or even for each individual viewer?

Skeptics of individual diet change advocacy have dismissed the strategy in part because it scales too poorly to make much difference. For years, the website for Anonymous for the Voiceless listed the total number of promising conversations AV activists had had with members of the public, and after years of a worldwide movement, it was smaller than the number by which the human population increases in a single day.

AI could change this. In theory, it would be possible to deploy AI vegan outreach agents to talk one-on-one with every human on earth. There are obstacles to putting this into practice, but it suddenly becomes a solvable problem, a question not of “can we?” but “should we?” and “How?”

We need every expert in various subdomains of animal advocacy to think about what automated, infinitely-scalable human-level intelligence means for their specialty.

Institutions

Governments, companies, and basic economic incentives that we previously took for granted may not endure, at least not in a form we would recognize today. How will corporate pressure campaigns work when AI renders all forms of human labor economically worthless, replacing human employees from retail floors to boardrooms? What will consumer demand mean in a world without scarcity– and perhaps without money?

The collective efforts to extract cage free policies from corporations and governments around the world were a masterclass in long-term strategy. Campaigners started with easy targets, using those wins as a launchpad to larger targets. They got the private sector to make commitments almost a decade out, then used those commitments to justify passing state laws forcing compliance from companies who may never have planned to follow through. All this took many years to start mattering for living animals, but the patience paid off.

This kind of strategy is not viable in 2026.

Try thinking of the arrival of transformative AI sometime between now and 2040 as an event horizon. The world until then fits Eisenhower’s parable that “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”– unexpected things will happen, specific plans will have to be flexible, but we can anticipate the general direction by extrapolating from current trends.

But at some unknown point, we will cross the event horizon. The world on the other side will be as unrecognizable to us as the present would be to a preindustrial farmer, or perhaps a preagricultural hunter-gatherer, or maybe even a yeast gobbling sugars before the advent of sexual reproduction.

This doesn’t mean we throw up our hands. It means that now is the time to start thinking hard about what strategies could survive across such a horizon– or at least pay off quickly enough to matter beforehand. We have situational awareness that foragers and yeasts never had, but we should still be humble and realistic about what we can predict.

Weighing our options

Humble, realistic… and rigorous! Which brings us back to the point of this post.

I’m asking for your help to generate a rich list of strategies that the animal movement could use to adapt to imminent AGI. This is the brainstorm phase: we need to search across a wider idea space than any small group of strategists could come up with.

After you add your ideas here, I’ll be working with a team of volunteer researchers convened through the Sentient Futures project incubator to evaluate each idea against a diverse set of possible AGI scenarios. As we publish our findings, the strategies that look most promising will be turned into pilot advocacy programs by mid 2026, either launching as new organizations or being taken on within existing orgs.

That means the ideas you submit now could turn into real advocacy work this year. To help you brainstorm, here are a few broad categories that hopefully give a sense of how wide the search space could be.

Leveraging AI for new strategies

For now, most of what AI is doing is not making previously impossible tasks possible. Rather, it is making previously expensive tasks cheap. That opens up strategies that were once bottlenecked on inputs that could only scale linearly with human effort, such as:

• Opposition research

• Attentive conversation partners

• Highly customized media content

What are the most important ways animal advocates could leverage AI to scale strategies that were previously impossible?

Short-timeline big bets

Assume that AI will dramatically overturn the existing social and economic order, with the event horizon in as little as 5-10 years. That leaves us with two broad options: either we focus on delivering tangible change to animals before then, or we bet on effects that will endure.

You might think that even if institutions are upturned, cultural values and popular opinion will influence the mid-term future. Or maybe only technological improvements will matter. Or you may just want to build a strong, agile movement that can best react to new opportunities.

What strategies should animal advocates be focusing on to make quick, durable progress -or- build our strategic capacity for an uncertain future?

Research agendas

Maybe we can try to reduce our uncertainty about the future. We could try to understand what causes species bias in AI models and how to reduce it in future, more powerful models. We could invest in improving their ability to help farmed animals, and even wild animals. We could try to understand how the emergence of superintelligent AI will influence public opinion about other nonhuman minds.

What research agendas should be most prioritized for increasing the likelihood that AGI goes well for animals?

AI company relations

The companies building frontier AI systems are in a position to exercise enormous influence over the future, controlling massive resources and shaping the most important technology in human history.

How should animal advocates go about building relationships with AI companies? What should our goals be in building these relationships?

Modifying existing strategies

All this uncertainty probably doesn’t mean we should throw out our existing strategies, especially the ones that have proven successful. But these approaches at least need an update. They can be streamlined or scaled up with AI, and we should consider whether their goals and priorities should be adjusted for short timelines.

How should animal advocates modify existing primary strategies in light of short AI timelines? Which current strategies could/should be scaled with relatively low friction?

By friction, I mean that if scaling an intervention would require hiring and training new campaigners linear to cost, it will be difficult to scale, whereas “money pits” like mass media and political spending don’t require increased human capital.

Share your ideas

Provide your input at this link:

https://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/36eenMwaMqN

Build on,

Sandcastles

…your friend asks in a hushed voice, flashing a devious smile.

You know what’s about to happen, and your body lights up: you lean forward in your seat, your heart rate jumps a bit, some adrenaline shoots into your blood.

Yes… YES! I DO WANT TO HEAR SOMETHING JUICY!

Gossip is an opportunity too good to pass up. Besides the delight of being let in on secrets and the gratification of hearing about other people’s dysfunctional lives, gossip is a powerful bonding mechanism, building a covenant between the person sharing the rumor and the person receiving it, not unlike the bond between two people who commit a crime together. It apparently played an important role in the evolution of our social brains.

But wait: ugh! Gossip is also, like, a bad thing, associated with immature schoolchildren. And, yeah, that’s maybe because it can destroy people’s lives or something.

What are we to do? I see three solutions. The one common in activist communities is to dress it up. After all, we’re progressive, well-socialized people: we wouldn’t gossip! We don’t ask people if they want to hear something juicy! Instead, we say:

• “I need to tell you about something that happened.”

• “I’m warning you because I care about you.”

• “People deserve to know what he/she is really like.”

• “This is accountability, not gossip.”

• And perhaps the most nefarious: “You have to promise not to tell anyone else.”

This is tricky. There are surely situations where each of the bullets above is appropriate or necessary. I used to think I was pretty good at that balancing act. Sure, sometimes I talked about my conflicts with other people, but I always tried to do it in a humanizing way that acknowledged my frustration while leaving room for the other person’s experience.

In hindsight, this was meager self-justification. That became clear to me when, last year, it was my turn to become the subject of a nasty rumor, one that tore up several friendships before I even knew it was circulating. There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with learning some unknown fraction of your community have a whole secret narrative about you, built from a story you never got to tell your side of. Countless interactions are suddenly recontextualized as you see how they were overshadowed by what you believe is a fictional version of you. And then you start wondering: how many other people am I carrying around distorted versions of?

This forced me to come to terms with how much damage I’d still been doing with my own participation in the rumor mill. First, by reserving gossip for situations of abuse rather than mere conflict, I was helping to create a perverse incentive. Under this rule, people are allowed to engage in gossip, a deeply natural social activity, if and only if they frame their dynamic with someone else as abusive. If venting your frustrations or negative judgements about someone is frowned upon, but speaking out about how they abused you is celebrated, it’s not hard to see where we’ll get more of the latter.

Second, while I tried (imperfectly) to keep a higher standard for when I’d be willing to gossip about my problems, I had a much lower standard for agreeing to hear about other people’s drama. By consenting to every offer of sweet, sweet gossip, I told myself I was being a good listener and a supportive friend. But what I was actually doing was creating a market for rumors, signaling that gossip is welcome in this community and will even be rewarded with tighter social bonds. In the process, I was consuming highly distorted narratives that unfairly shaped my perceptions of other people.

A second solution to gossip is common among traditional/conservative cultures. My sister-in-law grew up in rural Kentucky where, I am told, gossip is practiced loudly and unapologetically, so much so that everyone expects everyone else to start talking about all their dirty laundry the moment they leave the room. Ironically, this appears to be much healthier than the culture of activist groups.1 Gossip is so ubiquitous and overt that it becomes basically meaningless. Nobody needs to exaggerate their conflicts with other people in order to get a hearing, and everyone is so inundated in rumors about everyone else that they learn not to think too much of any of it. These communities can leverage gossip for building social bonds with relatively little harm.

This sort of cultural norm genuinely appeals to me. But I don’t think it’s achievable for progressive activists. Activist communities select for judgemental people. We lack the constitution to talk shit about each other all the time without it leading to conflict, factionalism, and ostracization.

In an extremely informal survey, all but one of a dozen or so friends I asked agreed that gossip is a serious problem in our movement. (We’ll return to the exceptional person shortly.) Yet all of us do it. As in, I personally have gossiped with every single one of those people.

This leaves us with only the third solution: we need to cut off the market for rumors at the source.

Every vegan activist knows that slaughterhouses and factory farms only operate because the public wants to consume cheap meat, and wants to be shielded from having to think about the true cost. Gossip is the same. Gossip is a demand-side problem caused by our appetite for juicy rumors and our neglect for the harm they cause.

Whenever we agree to receive a rumor, we’re placing an order. When we listen with rapt attention and respond with uncritical validation, we’re leaving a five-star review. The gossiper walks away feeling justified in their lopsided interpretation of events, less likely than ever to approach conflict constructively– and more likely to keep the rumor going. We can’t help that people need to vent about their conflicts. But we can stop encouraging them to do it in the least constructive way possible.

I’m resolving that starting in 2026, I’m going to do the unthinkable. If someone asks me, Do you want to hear something juicy? I will not say yes. I’d love to invite you to join me. So let’s see if we can figure out what to say instead.

2. You can’t handle (half) the truth!

We all know there are two sides to every story. Unfortunately, gossip is perfectly calibrated to make us forget this fact.

Leading research shows that our brains simply are not built to hear a juicy rumor and respond with the kind of wise, multipartial equanimity most of us aspire to.

In 1993, psychologist Daniel Gilbert and colleagues set out to test a key question about how we process information. Philosophers had long debated whether we can understand a claim independently of believing it, or if belief forms automatically along with understanding.

Gilbert’s paper resolved this debate. The title says it all: “You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read.” Study participants were asked to read information about a criminal defendant. Some of the information was false, but conveniently, the false information was highlighted in bright red text. Yet when study participants were asked to read the text while distracted by a second task, they incorporated the false statements into their judgments anyway, recommending harsher sentences when the false statements made the crime seem worse.

Researchers use distractions like this to peek at the rapid mental processes that mediate between our conscious and subconscious minds. In this case, it showed that comprehension and belief happen simultaneously. When we hear a statement, believing it is part of the process of understanding it. Skepticism only kicks in afterwards– if we have the mental bandwidth and motivation for it.

Subsequent research has demonstrated the staying power of these credulous first impressions. In one oft-replicated study, participants read a news story, such as a story about a warehouse fire that initially blamed “paint cans and gas cylinders” stored in a closet. Then, they are shown a correction stating that, in fact, the closet was empty. Yet despite correctly recalling the correction, over 90% of study participants later made inferences based on the original misinformation.

Anecdotally, my friend Mark Westcombe of Animal Think Tank experienced this firsthand in his previous career as a management consultant. He often facilitated strategy meetings among different stakeholders on a business deal. Yet even when these meetings grew contentious and stretched on for days, in the end, the first proposal anyone had suggested wound up being adopted something like 70% of the time.

First impressions powerfully anchor our later judgements, even when we consciously know better. The first story we hear anchors a narrative in our mind that’s hard to revise. Even if we later hear another perspective, or find out the first rumor was completely inaccurate, our subconscious perception of the people involved may be irretrievably altered.

Everyone these days is worried about the corrosive societal effects of misinformation. And we all know in theory that even honest, well-intentioned people are susceptible to misunderstanding or twisting facts when they find themselves in an emotionally charged conflict with others. But we forget that when someone wants to gossip with us. Our brain can’t help but take for granted their version of the story even if we in theory ought to know that it’s being spun to make them look better and make their adversary look worse. The result is that every time we share or receive gossip, we’re recreating the misinformation crisis on a community level.

3. Perverse incentives

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” – Jonathan Swift

We can’t break the habit of gossip without understanding how we got here in the first place. There is a whole suite of perverse social incentives that drive well-meaning activists to participate in rumors as both producers and consumers.

To start, most people don’t engage in gossip with the intent to harm. Even sharing or gathering information is often a secondary goal, behind relationship building and social enjoyment. That might seem obvious, but if we don’t want to slide back into old habits, we’ll need better strategies for building relationships.

Admittedly, though, a lot of that kind of gossip ends up being pretty harmless. I still intend to avoid neutral gossip because I don’t trust myself to walk that line carefully enough. But the really harmful gossip tends to arise from stories of victimhood.

Consider the drama triangle. In this popular theory from the psychiatrist Stephen Karpman, people in conflict cast themselves and each other into three simplistic roles: victim, persecutor, and rescuer. The dynamic begins when someone adopts the victim narrative, a psychological stance asserting that they are powerless and have no responsibility for their situation. The rescuer plays a crucial role in reaffirming this narrative. Performing these roles, including through negative gossip, inflates the rescuer’s sense of moral status and satisfies the victim’s desire for absolution– while forestalling the constructive actions that could actually address the conflict.

Most psychology websites or whatever will tell you that the drama triangle is meant for situations where nobody has actually been victimized– where people mistake conflict between two mutual participants for abuse by one party who ostensibly has all the power. But this is an oversimplification that obfuscates why the drama triangle is so seductive, especially to animal activists: we are actually in a real-world version of it! Animals actually are powerless victims persecuted by the factory farm industry, and the abuse will continue if we don’t insert ourselves to stop it.

Activists are the people who jump into action when someone is being victimized. For most people, the challenge is overcoming their apathy. For us, it’s the opposite: when we hear someone cast as a victim, our instinct is to leap into action, calling out or punishing the persecutor– before we’ve had a chance to evaluate whether this is really a case of abuse. If it turns out to be a different kind of conflict, our hasty intervention can easily wind up doing more harm.

3.1 Han shot first

By eagerly endorsing claims of victimhood, activist cultures create a strong incentive to hack the system. If the victim in a drama triangle is absolved of any responsibility and entitled to have their story believed, every conflict can easily become a race. If you think the other person might try to cast you as the persecutor, your only option is to do it to them first! Often, this doesn’t even require changing the facts– just the framing and tone in which they are presented.

We’ve seen that even intelligent people mostly just believe the first story they hear about a conflict. If you find yourself in conflict with someone and you don’t want to have your whole community believe a nasty rumor about you, your safest choice is to get your story out there first.

In the heat of conflict, you’re probably not going to share a very charitable interpretation– and that’s all the better. The more your story paints the other person as an abuser, the less willing people will be to hear their side of things. And the more salacious it is, the faster it will spread.

This is an ironclad law of misinformation: lies and distortions travel faster than truth because juicy rumors can fit a simplistic narrative, whereas the truth is usually complicated and harder to understand. This is popularly known here on the internet as Brandolini’s law, aka the bullshit asymmetry principle:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

But rumors in social networks have an edge that even internet misinformation lacks: secrecy.

3.2 Open secrets

Do you want to hear something juicy? is often followed by You have to promise not to tell anyone else. Now, that would be a real bummer, to be told a spicy rumor and not be allowed to share it with anyone. Fortunately, this request is universally understood as not literal. What it actually means is, you can tell anyone you want, but you have to make them perform the act of promising not to tell anyone, which they will also then promptly disregard.

This serves three purposes. First, it gives the rumor-spreader plausible deniability: I wasn’t trying to gossip! The secret was too much, I just had to tell someone! They can even feign anger when they find out the person they told told someone else, keeping their hands clean. Second, it makes the rumor seem even spicier and strengthens the social bonding effect of gossip: two people keeping a secret between each other, or at least pretending to, makes them feel like part of a special pact.

The third effect is the most malicious. There is one exception to the implicit rule that you can spread a “secret” rumor to anyone you want: you can’t tell the person whom the rumor is about. This is totally Not Cool. It’s like tattling to the teacher. Spreading the rumor to everyone else is all part of the game, but the fun ends when the subject of the rumor finds out about it.

Whether intentional or not, the effect of spreading a rumor under the condition of secrecy is that the target of that rumor can have their reputation destroyed before they even find out what they are being accused of, much less are given a chance to respond and share their side of the story.

3.3 Beware of teachers

I remember riding in an uber with two friends on the way to a conference one year. I was running a small startup organization and I was about to have my first meeting with an influential figure. I really wanted the meeting to go well, but I had already heard about her divisive reputation. I confessed that I was feeling nervous to my friends, who both knew the person.

They spent the next thirty minutes piling on about all the things they didn’t like about her, from sharp strategic disagreements to personal foibles like her overly gregarious laugh and disregard for personal space. Needless to say this did not help my nerves.

Now, I know this is going to sound like some made-up bullshit story about the meaning of Christmas but I swear to you, it fell to the uber driver to set us straight. She had listened silently for the whole drive, unnoticed in the way only service workers on the clock go unnoticed. Once we arrived, as she got out to open the trunk for our bags, she said something like: “Just remember everybody’s fighting their own battles. We don’t need to make life any harder for each other.” Then she made eye contact with me, and in a lower voice, said: “Honey, don’t let other people’s judgements do your thinking for you.”

She was obviously right, and the fact that it was so corny just made it more embarrassing. I felt like a little kid caught saying something mean about a classmate right as their mom walks into the room. But I was also immediately grateful, because unlike my friends’ gossip, her advice calmed my nerves.

I wish I was impervious to rumors about other people. I don’t want to be someone who is quick to judge, and I especially don’t want to just go along with other people’s negative judgments about someone. I want to take people as they are and reach my own conclusions. The person I want to be could hear the most salacious rumor and be almost unaffected, thinking: “Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s more to the story. I’ll rely on my own judgement.”

Alas, I have not yet become that version of myself. Instead, I’m credulous. A sucker, even. People I talk to can implant a reputation about someone else into my brain with minimal effort.

My first encounters with people are almost always perfectly pleasant or friendly. Yet many times, because I had heard about the person’s reputation before meeting them, I’ve instead come away with a part of me thinking that they were too much in this way or that: too familiar and touchy, or conversely, too stilted, implying arrogance or self-absorption. If not for that uber driver, I’m sure I would have felt this way about the person I met at that conference. Instead, I went into it with an open mind, and we totally hit it off. We wound up at the bar until 2 am that night telling dirty jokes, and soon after she helped me secure a large grant for my organization.

3.4 Rumors hunt in packs

One way we evaluate the credibility of rumors is through repetition. If one person has a nasty experience with someone, it’s hard to know what’s true. But if lots of different people say the same thing, it must be true. Right?

Not so fast. It turns out I’m so much of a sucker that I can reinterpret past interactions with someone in light of new rumors. Even if I had a perfectly pleasant relationship with someone, learning that other people found them creepy or annoying can cause me to retroactively feel uncomfortable with our interactions. Once again, I think this is mostly about fitting in; some insecure part of me wants to be cool, and liking uncool people is enough to threaten my own coolness. I recast my own memories to match someone else’s because it’s more comfortable to agree with people than to disagree.

The result is that reputation spreads and replicates like a mental virus, infecting even our memories. Perfectly honest people can succumb to this. One unfair rumor can turn into a cluster with only a tenuous basis in reality. I’m going to use a pretty uncomfortable story to examine this, so there’s your warning.

It once fell to a friend of mine with a career in corporate HR to investigate a sexual misconduct allegation against a paid organizer with an international animal activist group. We’ll call him Z. Z’s job had been to travel around the world visiting new chapters of the group, training them and helping them get started. The precipitating incident happened on one such trip, after which a woman contacted the organization saying she felt a sexual encounter between her and Z had been problematic.

At the beginning of the investigation, Z informed the investigator about numerous sexual encounters with local activists he’d met on other work trips. The investigator had Z provide him with the names of all these activists, and proceeded to contact them.

One after another, he heard similar stories: Z came in from out of town brimming with confidence and charisma. Flirtation moved quickly into physical intimacy, sped on by the short duration of his stay in town. Some of the women said Z had implied he’d be traveling through their city again, and that they felt hurt or let down by his failing to keep in touch after leaving. All of them described purely consensual encounters.

(This isn’t a story about whether Z’s behavior was sleazy or unprofessional; you’re free to reach your own conclusion about that, and about whether he should have been fired. Personally, I’m of two minds.2)

Z cooperated with the investigation, and my friend was feeling optimistic that the conflict could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. But unbeknownst to him, the rumor mill was churning. The story about Z traveled across the movement, carried by indignant third parties who believed they were doing what was necessary to protect their communities. At each step in this international game of telephone, the story became less detailed– and more damning. Vague buzzwords replaced factual descriptions. Unmoored from substance, the narrative drifted into something far more serious than the original complaint.

Most of these rescuers had never met Z. But I had– and that didn’t stop me from joining in!

I didn’t know him well, and we’d only had positive interactions. Yet I didn’t question the narrative, or ask for details, or try to find out Z’s side of the story3; that’s simply not what good allies were expected to do. And, if I’m being honest, there was a bit more to it: Z was such a charismatic personality, and I’d been envious of the way women and men alike admired him. There was a part of me that was comforted by seeing him brought down. At one point I said to someone: “I don’t know any of the details, but there are several accusers, so it must be true.” I think I even claimed that “I could always tell something was off about him,” a thought I’m sure I never had until hearing the allegations.

By the time the story spilled over onto social media, callout posts described Z as a serial rapist. There was no expectation that this claim should be backed up with details or evidence, and anyone who asked for them was chastised as a rape apologist. This all took place during the peak of the #metoo movement, when stories about men abusing power over women in the workplace were on all our tongues. The grapevine was more interested in the ways any given situation might fit that narrative than in the ways it didn’t. The investigator, forced to sit on a detailed investigation that largely exonerated Z, could only watch in quiet dismay. The verdict had already been rendered.

Some of the people Z had slept with came to his defense, but it did little to undercut the reputation that had now taken hold. Z was fired, which was probably unavoidable. But he was also tarred as a rapist and completely driven out of the movement, losing nearly all of his friends in the process. There’s no doubt that some of my sympathy for Z comes from my own experience being judged for my own very real mistakes. But I’ve spoken to several other people who look back with regret on the role they played in his excommunication. This is not what it looks like when a movement handles conflict well.

How did the story change so dramatically from the private interviews to the public callouts? It could be none of the women trusted the investigator enough to be honest with him. It could be they needed to know how many other accusers there were to feel safe telling anyone.

It seems more likely, though, that they re-examined their encounters with Z after hearing gossip about him. It wasn’t facts that changed so much as the way they were presented. This does not, by itself, mean the re-evaluated versions were less accurate, and I’m certainly not saying anyone was being deliberately dishonest. But neither is it obvious that the second interpretation, the one further removed in time from the original events and recontextualized by an emotionally intense reputational narrative, is necessarily closer to the truth.

Rumors beget rumors. If you hear a rumor about someone you’re experiencing conflict with, it’s all too easy to reframe your conflict in the same terms– and you, in turn, inspire others to follow suit.

4. How to spread a rumor

The takeaway from Z’s story cannot be that people should never talk about their negative experiences with other members of their community. That would create an environment ripe for abuse. Yet there’s something equally abusive about a culture where derogatory rumors can destroy someone’s reputation before they even know what is being said.

If we want to find a third way, we need to recognize the important social purposes gossip serves, and identify less harmful strategies to achieve the same ends.

Let’s come back to the outlier in my informal survey, the one person ready to stand up for the importance of gossip. It was my friend James Özden. Besides running a great podcast for animal advocates, James’ main role in the movement is directing philanthropy at the Mobius Foundation. James and his colleagues receive tons of applications from animal advocacy orgs seeking funding, and it’s his job to decide which ones to fund.

The decision starts by evaluating the work being proposed in terms of impact per dollar. But more groups meet this bar than there is money to distribute. To reach a final decision, James has to evaluate the grantee’s ability to deliver on their plans, not just the plans themselves. Mobius could put every grant applicant through some kind of intense aptitude test. But that would be labor intensive both for Mobius and their applicants, who need to seek funding from many different foundations each year.

Their solution is called network-based philanthropy. By the nature of the relationship, funders have a hard time getting direct insight into how their grantees are performing. Other organizations working alongside those grantees tend to get a more honest picture. Thus a grantee’s reputation with their peers could be the most accurate way for funders to evaluate them.

Unfortunately for my simple anti-gossip narrative, James has both common sense and scientific literature on his side here: reputation is usually a good predictor of someone’s trustworthiness and competence. That’s genuinely useful information in a tight-knit community like ours, and not just for grantmakers.

Gossip is one of those things where the system works well enough most of the time if we all take rumors with a grain of salt– but sometimes things go terribly wrong. And unfortunately, I think activist communities have a higher failure rate because of our elevated tendency to confuse conflict and abuse. So how beneficial would gossip need to be for us to accept a given rate of wrongful convictions?

It seems to me these are the positive needs people are typically trying to meet when they gossip:

1. Enjoy each others’ company and strengthen social bonds

2. Vent about a conflict

3. Recruit outside help in dealing with a conflict or abuse situation

4. Spread useful reputational information about people

#1 we should be able to do away with: there are other ways to build friendships that don’t risk hurting anyone. (Kind of the basic premise of veganism, right?)

#2 is valid and healthy– often, this is exactly what we need to do first before we can approach a conflict constructively. But I notice I act differently in important ways if my goal is truly to vent rather than to exact revenge on someone. In the former case, I’ll seek out someone discrete and nonjudgemental, someone that I trust can hear me vent out my harshest judgements without taking them on as their own. In the latter case, I’ll seek out the opposite, the most judgemental person I can think of, in the hopes that they’ll not only join me in condemning my adversary but maybe start spreading the rumor themselves.

When it comes to venting, we can avoid a lot of harm by being very clear about our intention, with ourselves and people we vent to. I often say: “Hey, can I vent to you about a frustrating situation? I’d like to just speak freely and unload some judgmental thoughts that are more negative than I actually feel about this person on reflection.” Better yet, I can vent to someone who doesn’t even know the person I’m talking about.

#3, recruiting outside help, can also be a very mature thing to do. It takes courage to admit that we don’t have the resources we need to resolve a conflict constructively. Once again, who we talk to, and how, will look very different if this is honestly our intention. For instance, Z’s first accuser was genuinely looking for help when she approached the relevant authorities in the organization with her concerns about his behavior. Reporting misconduct so that it can be investigated by the relevant authorities is never gossip. But somewhere along the line, someone started spreading rumors about Z even while his employer was conducting a formal investigation.

Often, the reason we need help managing a conflict is because we feel the other party to the conflict has power over us. An employee, for instance, should be able to get help approaching a conflict with her boss. But this is another minefield: the nature of power dynamics means we’re much more likely to get angry at someone who has power over us, even if they haven’t done anything inappropriate, much less abusive. And we’re more likely to feel justified in trying to damage them.

I recently told a story of one such conflict I had with the leader of an organization I was part of. Because of how unequal we felt, it was very tempting for me to try to knock him down a peg. Sure enough, I eventually did try, along with other people who felt that all hierarchy in the organization needed to be torn down. By the end, we were explicitly trying to destroy the organization, but for a crucial phase while the conflict was escalating, we told each other that we were just trying to address our conflicts constructively, and that we needed to band together to balance out the power differential between us and leadership.

We all need to be careful lest “seeking help” turns into building a faction.

#4, spreading useful reputations, is probably the trickiest. This is the need James is pointing to with “network-based philanthropy.” While I was working on this section, I happened to listen to an old interview with Spencer Greenberg, a polymath blogger with ties to the EA movement. Spencer argues that while there is certainly a problem with negative gossip that is either untrue or concerns details of people’s lives that should stay private, there’s also such a thing as positive gossip. If gossip is both truthful and relevant, it encourages kind, responsible, and effective behavior, and protects a community from untrustworthy people.

You won’t be surprised that I find this highly precarious. It relies on us correctly evaluating our judgements about other people right at the moment it is hardest– when we are in conflict with them. And it relies on all of us keeping a cool head when people bring us their negative judgements about others. It doesn’t work to say gossip is good if it’s true, because everyone believes their gossip is true.

Still, we might think gossip could stay positive across a community if humans were good at balancing positive and negative stories they hear about someone. In that case, even if a few people reached an unfairly negative conclusion about someone they have a conflict with, their positive reputation with everyone else would balance it out. This has obvious problems. First, I strongly suspect we are less motivated to gossip about our positive experiences with someone than our negative experiences, so the latter will be overrepresented. Second, negative stories have a stronger influence on our perceptions. A single rumor about a dishonest action can erase years of goodwill and positive reputation.

I was floored by this in my own experience on the wrong side of a rumor. There were people who had known me for ten years who cut ties with me based on a single story they heard thirdhand. By the time they learned information refuting that story, the damage was done– I managed to repair a few lost friendships, but not most. Like the study participants mentioned earlier, the initial falsehood had a more lasting effect on their perceptions than the subsequent correction.

Now, to be clear: while spreading the rumor, people definitely believed it was both true and relevant. And while I obviously wish they had been more diligent and skeptical, I’ve made the same mistake in their position many times over.

The common thread through all four of these is how hard it is to be honest with ourselves when criticizing people. In the heat of conflict, any of these reasons for “positive gossip” can easily become an excuse to punish people by disparaging them to their peers. And the social incentives all reward us for exaggerating the negative parts of our story, and leaving out any information that might make the other person’s actions seem logical. If you aspire to stop negative gossip, be warned: here be temptation.

5. How to hear a rumor

Even if your heart is in the right place when confiding in someone about a conflict, rumors are a demand-side problem! You might approach a conversation with the purest intentions, but what about your chosen gossip buddy? They might do what Spencer Greenberg calls lightgassing. If gaslighting is denying someone’s accurate perceptions of the world, lightgassing is affirming their distortions:

Lightgassing is when one person agrees with or validates another person’s false beliefs or misconceptions in order to be supportive. Unlike gaslighting, a tactic of jerks and abusers, lightgassing is an (unintentionally harmful) tactic of friends and supporters.

Lightgassing feels like the simplest way to be a supportive friend. But it’s not. Validating people’s negative judgements and darkest thoughts is rarely the kind thing to do. This is exactly the pattern behind stories of AI psychosis you’ve probably read about in the news lately. In these cases, mentally vulnerable people grow increasingly alienated from their friends and family because of a sycophantic AI chatbot– one that is on call 24/7 to validate and encourage everything they say, from delusions that they’ve invented a new field of science to the more ordinary stories about how their friends and family are all fakes who don’t really care about them.

Lightgassing between humans is less extreme, but the basic dynamic is the same. When your friend comes to gossip to you about their conflicts, it’s fun and easy to nod along or even egg them on with a few “He didn’t!”s or “OMG!”s. Sometimes we lightgas knowing our friend’s interpretation is uncharitable, figuring nothing will come of it. More often, we accept their narrative at face value, because that is so much easier. It is infinitely more awkward–and brave–to hold space for their feelings while also encouraging curiosity about the other person’s perspective, or even gently pointing out ways your friend might have been the one to escalate.

My closest friend in the world, John Boland, is annoyingly good at this. I often call him looking for empathy about a situation only for him to tell me bluntly that I was the one in the wrong. This is usually infuriating. So I hate to admit that it makes me a better person. Even when he is too quick to side against me, I wouldn’t trade it for anything; those times still help me be more reflective and forgiving.

A true friend can hold space for your anger without stoking it. They validate your feelings without rushing to validate your harshest interpretations. They’re the person you can vent to precisely because they won’t run off and spread the story, and because their calm presence helps you return to a clearer frame of mind.

Many tragically mishandled community conflicts can be traced back to the fact that there wasn’t a single person willing to play this role anywhere in the leadup to an explosive public callout. I wonder how many destructive conflicts have been averted thanks to lone individuals with the courage to question salacious gossip– and the skill to do so gracefully.

A particularly egregious case played out publicly on the EA forum a few years ago. The story is remarkable not because it was unique, but because it wasn’t.

An EA community leader was approached by someone who shared serious allegations of misconduct against a former employer. The leader in question then carried out what he, in his own words, described as “a search for negative information about the cofounders, not a search to give a balanced picture…” and suggested that readers of his eventual callout post should “think about how bad you expect the information would be if I selected for the worst, credible info I could share, and then update based on how much worse (or better) it is than you expect I could produce.” He spent hundreds of hours digging up information about the accused founders, notifying them of his impending callout just two days before posting it and declining to modify the post even when they provided documentary evidence falsifying core allegations.

This was lightgassing elevated to formal accountability process: take accusations at face value, amplify them across the community, and cause irreparable reputational damage before the accused could ever hope to respond. As one observer noted, when put to the test, the EA community’s response to an unsubstantiated callout post:

was thoroughly ordinary as far as subculture pile-ons go, even commendable in ways. Here’s the trouble: the ways it was ordinary are the ways it aspires to be extraordinary, and as the community walked headlong into every pitfall of rumormongering and dogpiles, it did so while explaining at every step how reasonable, charitable, and prudent it was in doing so.

Even when responding to someone’s confidence with escalation might be warranted, it can still backfire. I tried to play that role once with a friend who confided in me about a physical altercation with her boyfriend. She was looking to vent, and hoping for some guidance about how to navigate a repair. Instead, I freaked out and sternly urged her to break up with him, which she wasn’t ready to do. It strained our friendship, putting distance between us when she needed support most.

Was I conflating conflict and abuse? Not this time: their relationship finally ended two years later with a police call after a much more violent episode. I wasn’t wrong about how volatile the situation was. But being right didn’t make my reaction helpful. Looking back, if I’d been more curious and slower to judge, I might have maintained her trust and helped her find a more creative way to keep everyone safe.

That’s an unusual example– most of the time, people are thrilled to have us take their side as enthusiastically as possible, and get them even more riled up about their conflicts. So let’s focus on how we can avoid pouring gasoline on other people’s fires.

For my year of no gossip, if someone asks if they can tell me something juicy, I’m not going to say yes. But I’m not going to say no, either. Instead I’m planning to use these testing questions:

1. Would all the people in the story want me to hear it?

2. If not, is there some other good reason for me to hear it?

I’ve been trying these out for several months already. The responses have been revealing– and encouraging.

First, people are caught off guard. Nobody expects you to turn down an offer of gossip. People usually seem a bit embarrassed.

Most of the time, this hasn’t stopped people wanting to tell me the story. But it significantly recasts the way they tell it, and the way they expect me to react to it. I can’t be sure since I don’t know what the counterfactual would have been in any individual case, but people usually answer with one of the four reasons listed earlier, and then do a good job holding themselves accountable to that more constructive purpose.

The test questions also help me remind myself that I’m about to hear one side of an emotionally charged story, and that I shouldn’t take any of it for granted until I learn more– which in most cases I won’t bother to do, because once I’ve heard the story, it’s clear that whether it’s true has no consequences for my life. In those cases, I’m working on the practice of not letting gossip change my attitude towards people, mainly by assuming there were perfectly good reasons for their decisions, which in my experience is basically always true.

For both of our benefit, I sprinkle in the obvious follow-up questions: how do you think the other person/people in this story would represent it? Why might their actions have made sense from their perspective?

And for the love of god, if you’ve only heard a story from one person’s perspective, please, please don’t assume you have any idea what really happened!

Typing this stuff out makes me feel like a second-grade teacher talking to little kids who got in a fight, and I’m worried it will come across as condescending. But as much as all this is basic second-grade social skills, I also see it happen nearly zero percent of the time, including on my part. This reminder is meant for me as much as for anyone else in the movement.

But, yeah, it’s for you, too.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Mantras

• Gossip, like meat, is a demand-side problem caused by our appetite for juicy rumors and our neglect for the harm they cause.

• Don’t let other people’s judgements do your thinking for you.

• The first story we hear anchors a narrative in our mind that’s hard to revise.

• Reporting misconduct so that it can be investigated by the relevant authorities is never gossip.

• A true friend can hold space for your anger without stoking it.

  Instead of sharing gossip, share Sandcastles with a friend! I promise it will make you even more popular.

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• With meat consumption skyrocketing and rates of veganism stagnant, strategies focused on individual veganism appear to offer only limited potential for animal advocates.

• The small fraction who are vegan act as a symbolic vanguard, living out our vision for a world without animal exploitation. They also serve as the movement’s crucial activist base.

• We must find a way to expand the movement beyond the small vegan population without alienating our most dedicated supporters.

• The solution is to treat vegans as a priestly class, an elite cadre making a deep personal commitment to live out transformational values on behalf of a wider community, and deserving the utmost respect.

• To achieve this, we must let go of the idea that veganism is for everyone. We must offer a low-commitment way for animal lovers to align themselves with the vegan movement.

• Farmkind’s “offset” framing is the most general solution yet proposed, and it matches a rich historical precedent: the relationship between priestly/monastic elites and the lay communities that support them.

1. Won’t somebody think of the vegans?!

[Narrator voice] Previously on Sandcastles, we saw how Farmkind’s campaign telling people to forget veganism and donate to effective animal charities instead set off a firestorm of constructive debate among animal activists.

Today I’m going to dig into what I suspect are the deepest questions dividing responses to the campaign.

Veganism presents an unsolved puzzle for the animal movement:

1. In three decades of vegan advocacy, rates of veganism have grown only very slowly, plateauing around 1-4% in all but a couple countries.

2. Meanwhile, total and per capita meat consumption have increased sharply across rich and poor countries alike.

3. With a few notable exceptions, only vegans are willing to dedicate their careers or free time into campaigning for farmed animals.

We have a movement of vegans. Even incremental welfare campaigns could be accurately described as part of the vegan movement, given how many of the people working on those campaigns are vegan.

With the frustratingly slow rate at which veganism has spread, many of us would like to expand our movement beyond vegans. If we only welcome vegans to advocate for animals, we are limiting ourselves to a tiny fraction of society. You could say, well, everyone can go vegan, so we’re not excluding anyone, but that just brings us back to square one: everyone could go vegan, but they aren’t, and we aren’t succeeding in convincing them.

Attempts to welcome nonvegans into the movement have been mixed. On the one hand, there are some real success stories. Communities Against Factory Farms is right now organizing hundreds of rural UK citizens to object to new factory farm developments on the basis of harm to local communities, environments, and yes, animal cruelty. In England in the 1990s and Australia in the 2010s, thousands of omnivores joined dramatic direct action campaigns against live export, motivated purely by animal cruelty.

Elsewhere, however, the strength of vegan identity has served to repel nonvegans from advocacy. In my early years with Direct Action Everywhere, we tried to avoid talking about individual diet change and instead focused on “systems change” and “total animal liberation.” But when omnivores occasionally found their way to our events, they felt profoundly out of place, and didn’t come back. This pattern held more recently during a citywide campaign to ban slaughterhouses with Pro-Animal Future: people could have cared about local pollution, worker abuses, or a slew of other issues, but in practice it was only vegans who got involved.

Vegans joined in part because it was so exciting to be surrounded by other vegans. When the occasional stray omnivore wandered into one of our events, it was only a matter of time before another volunteer would casually ask them how long they’d been vegan. Awkwardness ensued, and the omnivore never came back. This was despite daily reminders to our activists that this campaign wasn’t about veganism. Nobody was being deliberately exclusionary– it was just the natural next question they wanted to ask.

Vegans join activist groups in part because it is so gratifying to be around people who share your conviction that what the world is doing to animals is unacceptable. It’s the experience of finally finding your people. Every highly dedicated activist I know shares this experience. Sharing in the strict commitment of veganism is probably essential to the cohesion of the movement’s activist core.

Yet that same strict cohesion alienates us from the rest of society. Surveys find that while people are sympathetic to farmed animals, they regard vegans with a disdain reserved for drug addicts, cockroaches, and worst of all, Congress. Efforts to expand our base seem almost inevitably to run up against that cohesion, as the Farmkind controversy shows.

2. Ascending to the priesthood

I confess, reader: I have been deeply skeptical of veganism as a vehicle for animal liberation. I have at times even wished that we could get rid of veganism altogether. For a period, some DxE friends and I started half-ironically identifying as “post-vegan,” which entailed thinking of all the ways our lifestyle fell short of pure veganism, and emphasizing those to try to bring us closer to the omnivorous masses. One of these friends, Paul Picklesimer, testified during a criminal trial for open rescue that he isn’t vegan because he enjoys watching Game of Thrones, and the actors ride horses onscreen. The exasperated prosecutor went point by point confirming that Paul doesn’t eat meat or dairy or wear leather or wool. The exchange was hilarious to DxE’s activists, but I’m not sure it gained him much credibility with the jury.

Paul and I even used to fantasize about holding an annual event at the Berkeley Animal Rights Center where DxE’s leadership would all choke down a big mac live on Facebook. On the one hand, this story is meant to show just how much we wanted to break the animal rights movement out of its fetish for personal purity. On the other hand, we could never actually bring ourselves to do it.

Despite vegans’ insistence to the contrary, the omnivorous public sees veganism as a major personal sacrifice.

But why does that perception of sacrifice lead to an adversarial dynamic? After all, there are plenty of cultures where a small minority takes on an extreme personal commitment and, rather than being rejected as antisocial fundamentalists, are embraced as an elite cadre living out the full ideals of the community.

The clearest example is priests and monks. In both Catholic and Buddhist countries, while a majority of the population might actively practice the religion, there is a special role for those who are called to truly dedicate their lives to it. Priests and monks in both traditions take vows of celibacy and live cloistered, rigidly structured lives that can make military discipline seem mild by comparison.

Far from inspiring resentment or mistrust, the piety of religious mendicants is celebrated by the wider community, who donate alms in exchange for a fraction of the ineffable spiritual merit that the monks accumulate through their diligent practice.

Most people say they love animals, at least in Western countries. Surveys consistently find they are horrified by the common practices of factory farming. When I had a chance to dig deeper by interviewing meat eaters in my research at Pax Fauna, I found that common feelings about animal slaughter were even more tormented that these surveys let on; the ordinary meat eaters I spoke to said it required deliberate effort for them to avoid thinking about where meat comes from.

Vegans are simply living out these values to their natural conclusion, the way that monks and nuns live out Catholic and Buddhist teachings that everyone in their community subscribes to in principle. So why do vegans provoke ire where monastics inspire admiration?

I think the difference is obvious: monks and laypeople exhibit a symbiotic relationship. A small priestly elite leans on the financial support of a wider lay community. Nobody expects the laypeople will all someday don the robes, but they take comfort in the spiritual example set by the monks.

This stands in stark contrast to veganism, in which the general public (rightly) feels that our goal is to get them to adopt the same personal commitment we have taken, and that we see them as moral lepers so long as they fail to do so.

People hate vegans because our mere existence puts them on the defensive. This is not altogether fair; while vegans sometimes (rightly) advocate for the correctness of our position, just as often, the omnivores shoot first, then crack jokes about pushy vegans. We can gripe about this injustice, or we can think about how to respond to it strategically.

3. What did y’all think expanding the movement beyond veganism meant? Vibes? Blog posts?

Expanding our strategy beyond veganism does not mean giving up the goal of a vegan world. In a vegan world, nobody would be vegan. The term would be meaningless if the choice to eat tortured animals wasn’t available or default. The question is how we get there.

My research at Pax Fauna convinced me that veganism will not be the vehicle that delivers us to animal liberation. For one, it asks too much sacrifice of individuals who care a little bit, but not that much. People know that the main sacrifice is social rather than culinary; they’re less worried about what they would eat and more about how inconvenient it would be to have limited options when eating out with friends, how their friends and family would tease them, and how it would complicate family dinners at the holidays. Sure enough, these are the explanations most commonly offered by recidivist vegans.

In other words, veganism is only a sacrifice if you do it alone. If the whole world went vegan, being vegan would be easy, as our study participants often pointed out– but until then, there’s not much we can do to make it less socially costly. Many of them expressed vague support for the idea of a vegan world, and even said they’d be willing to take small actions to bring that world about– but veganism was too much to ask.

After two years of research involving hundreds of hours of interviews and focus groups, this was the biggest question we left unanswered, to my great frustration: what small, meaningful steps can we offer people to align their actions with the animal movement, short of going vegan?

One option is reducetarianism. In theory, as Brian Kateman has pointed out, getting one person to reduce their consumption from 5 animals a week to 1 spares twice as many animals as getting a person who eats 2 animals a week to go vegan. But while I wish the best for efforts promoting reducetarianism, I’m doubtful behavior changes framed in these terms actually stick. The surveys I’ve reviewed suggest that people’s actual meat consumption, and changes therein, have little to do with whether they self-identify as intending to reduce meat, for reasons to do with psychological laziness. People don’t track the amount of meat they eat throughout the week, making it all too easy to convince yourself you’ve made a bigger reduction than you have.

A second option is to engage people as voters. This excites me much more, and indeed, this was the strategy I opted for– Pax Fauna’s research directly led us to launch Pro-Animal Future. PAF’s citizen initiatives ask voters to think about what kind of world they want to create collectively, rather than asking individuals to make a big sacrifice alone. In our first campaign, 36% of voters in Denver, Colorado, USA voted to ban slaughterhouses in the city. We fell short of the 50% needed to pass, but that’s dramatically more than the perhaps 3-5% of Denverites who are vegan.

I’m excited to see the movement double down on reaching the public as voters. However, voting only happens one day a year. How can we engage people the other 364 days? Not to mention in jurisdictions that don’t allow for direct ballot initiatives.

Farmkind has put forward the best solution I’ve seen yet: offset the impact of your meat consumption with a donation to the movement.

Consider some of the strengths of offsetting as an incremental step towards joining the animal movement:

• It scales to match a person’s commitment level. Veganism is seen by proponents and opponents alike as all-or-nothing, and reducetarianism is often a mirage. An offset is concrete, but it can be as large or small as the donor’s passion for the cause, and can grow alongside same.

• It makes a real difference for animals. Just as enough people going vegan ripples up the supply chain to cause farmers to breed fewer animals, enough people donating enables new effective campaigns– not just for welfare reforms, but for institutional diet change programs that have proven far more effective at reducing animal consumption. (Farmkind redirects donations to both welfare and institutional diet change efforts.)

• It mirrors the historical precedent. Alms and tithes are precisely the ways the Buddhist and Catholic laity have supported their monks– admiring their discipline from a safe distance.

3.1 A foot in the door

In the research literature on persuasion, a small step like offsetting is known as a foot in the door. Humans exhibit a bias towards consistency, meaning that one thing we consider when deciding how to act is consistency with our past actions. That means that if you can convince someone to take a small action consistent with your philosophy now, it’ll be easier to convince them to take bigger actions later.

One of the main concerns raised by critics of Farmkind’s Forget Veganuary campaign is that if we tell people to donate instead of going vegan, they’ll become complacent, feeling that their donation absolves them of guilt for eating meat. My strong intuition from years of sociological research is that this will not happen. If anything, I expect the opposite: people who align their actions with us in small ways like donating will be far more likely to drift towards our mindset over time.

But will it lead them all the way to veganism? To be honest, I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that promoting offsets will have no impact on rates of veganism, mainly because practically nothing has, at least not in a durable way. Giving alms doesn’t lead most people to become monks– but neither does it discourage them from becoming monks. Some people will become monks, and most won’t.

4. Disparage not those holy few!

Depending on your mood when reading the data, the growth of veganism has been slow or altogether stagnant. But this does not mean that veganism and the vegan movement have not played a crucial role in advancing animal advocacy.

Virtually the entire farmed animal advocacy movement is composed of vegans. For most people, even very altruistic people, dedicating your life to farmed animals while eating farmed animals is simply too much of a contradiction; sooner or later, people stop doing one or the other.

While we can’t know for sure, I shudder to think of how much worse a position farmed animal advocacy might be in if there were no movement for veganism. Perhaps animal consumption would have increased even faster. Worse, perhaps there would be no cadre of fanatics obsessed with winning change for animals at any cost. Perhaps the closest thing to farmed animal advocates would be the nonvegan EAs in our timeline, who might pay lip service to factory farming as an important cause but would prefer to see even fewer resources directed towards it, and who wouldn’t think twice about serving factory-farmed meat at their conferences because fretting about that would be too low-impact to be worth their time.

It might just be my contrarian streak. But despite my own long history of questioning veganism and fretting about the ways it alienates us from the mainstream, I can’t shake the feeling lately that the movement has overcorrected. I don’t object to Forget Veganuary, which was a calculated decision to land media coverage in right-wing outlets. But I wince when I see strategists regard veganism with something approaching disdain even among allies.

Take this line from Lewis Bollard in his very friendly appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast:

It seems so obvious that you can have far larger-scale change at the level of governmental change and corporate change. Instead, we get fixated about whether someone is completely vegan or vegetarian. I think what happened is that when people started learning about this issue initially, it was just a few people and they felt totally powerless to achieve larger-scale change. They understandably focused on themselves.

Then it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started to become an end in itself, where it was about personal purity as much as about the impact you’re having on the issue. It’s much easier to measure your own personal purity than it is to measure your total impact on reforming factory farming. It just became this kind of inward focus. The good news is, that has changed tremendously in the last decade. The movement has gone from being one that was obsessed with personal purity, obsessed with dietary choices, to one that is much more obsessed with impact.

On one hand, I basically agree with everything Lewis said. And yet… I can’t help but read this as throwing shade at vegans and vegan advocates for being “obsessed with personal purity.” Now, Lewis has received more than his fair share of shade from abolitionist activists, so it would be fully his prerogative to respond in kind, but I’m fairly certain that wasn’t his intention, especially given his own words in defense of Veganuary last week:

I think we should have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists.

Lewis’ intent on Dwarkesh was clearly to invite nonvegan listeners into the animal movement. But in a more subtle way than Farmkind, he’s demonstrated the zeitgeist in the movement that takes for granted how the price of admitting nonvegans is belittling veganism.

And I’m not even saying that assumption is wrong– at least, not in the present. At Pax Fauna, I was reminded daily of just how far we have to bend over backwards to avoid triggering defensive reactions from nonvegans. My experience exactly matches what Thom Norman from Farmkind said in defense of his campaign:

When we start talking about factory farming, the script in people’s minds is that “you’ve started talking about this, now you’re going to ask me to change my diet.” And so they’ve already stopped listening to us. We used to get comments about “I’m not going to go vegan, I love bacon too much” on videos where we weren’t talking about veganism at all. There’s a lot of people out there where to reach them, we have to make it explicitly clear that we’re not asking them to go vegan. If we had said you could do both, people wouldn’t have heard what we were saying.

Still, I can’t help but think that past social movements probably haven’t gotten very far by dunking on their most committed followers. Describing vegans as obsessed with personal purity comes across as mean– even if it’s true. And it is true! Even I am guilty of standing in Japanese grocery stores trying to research whether some trace ingredient written in obscure kanji is animal-derived, even though I know every minute spent on things like this is a waste of time and energy that would be far better spent working on any form of animal advocacy.

The classic argument in favor of this kind of purity is that it puts you in a strong moral position to argue from. But it’s not at all obvious that arguing from this moral high ground makes us more persuasive. On the contrary, most evidence finds people react negatively to vegan messengers, and lower their guard when they learn that the advocate they are speaking with is a fellow meat-eater.

But while being vegan probably doesn’t make you more persuasive to nonvegans, that doesn’t mean the value of a vegan to the movement can be reduced to the number of animals they would have otherwise consumed. I’m sympathetic to the feeling that something more is lost. Virtually every activist I know remembers their transition to veganism as a pivotal point in their life, a transformation that rippled across their entire identity and led directly to where they are now.

The utilitarian logic Lewis appealed to when talking to Dwarkesh—focusing on your “total impact on reforming factory farming” rather than your own habits—probably doesn’t resonate with the average person.1 Utilitarianism is an esoteric moral philosophy, probably less frequent among the general population than veganism!

The vast majority of people make their decisions according to a vague virtue-ethical framework– that is, focusing on themselves and on what actions would make them a “good person” or otherwise be consistent with their image of themselves. These folk ethics undergird the relationship between priests and laypeople: the common folk want a shortcut to be aligned with the good, to participate in righteousness with minimum personal sacrifice. This is the logic that will make offset campaigns most compelling: not “this is more effective than veganism” but “this is the easy way for you to get on the right side of history.”

4.1 Grassroots veganism is the only aspect of our “movement” that presently warrants the term

Folk ethics explain why veganism has spread as far as it has. After all, while we wish it was more widespread, 3% of the population of a country being vegan is extraordinary! Most would-be cultural trends never come anywhere close to that level of popularity, especially trends as costly to participants as veganism.

Most formal vegan advocacy strategies have a near-zero effect on the population-level rate of veganism. Yet that rate has stayed steady or slowly increased, seemingly all on its own.

This shows the power of an informal, genuinely grassroots movement for veganism spreading through internet forums and the friend networks of ordinary people. This stands in stark contrast to the formally organized industry sometimes known as the “farmed animal advocacy movement,” which has at this point become an astroturfed phenomenon that would collapse tomorrow in the absence of philanthropic funding. Anecdotally, the vast majority of animal activists I know attribute their veganism to online message boards or random friends rather than formal vegan advocacy efforts. If any philanthropically-backed activity played a role in their journey, it was a documentary like Cowspiracy or Dominion, not a vegan leaflet, street outreacher, or social media ad.

This organic quality of veganism strikes me as incredibly precious. It’s only in the last fifteen years or so that substantial philanthropic resources have poured into farmed animal advocacy, and it’s still only a tiny fraction of what goes towards dogs and cats. If the money dried up, corporate welfare and institutional menu campaigns would mostly disappear– but the vegan movement, including grassroots vegan advocacy groups like Anonymous for the Voiceless, would churn along.

When I see things like the Forget Veganuary campaign, I don’t worry about the feelings of grassroots vegan activists. First of all, these people are anything but thin-skinned; they face daily abuse far beyond what Farmkind could ever throw at them. But more importantly, this movement isn’t about their feelings, as they’ll be the first to point out.

But I do worry about alienating the true rank-and-file of our movement, the millions of vegans who have no connection to any organization. I worry how the principled vegetarians among Dwarkesh’s audience, blissfully ignorant of the diet change debate raging among professional animal advocates, will feel hearing a leader of the movement brush off their precious pro-animal identity as inept and puritanical. I worry, I admit, that pulling too hard on the wrong thread could cause this beautiful organic movement to unravel.

Questioning the strictness of veganism might be that thread. Research by Laurence Iannaccone, building on Dean Kelley, argues that strict commitment is a causal feature of strongly-bound communities. When a group demands distinctive dress, dietary restrictions, or behavioral sacrifices, it filters out “free riders,” leaving only true believers. The remaining members, knowing everyone around them has paid the price of admission, participate more enthusiastically. The costs make the group more valuable to those who remain.

The parallel to veganism is striking. Iannaccone’s research quantitatively demonstrates that members of stricter religious denominations attend more services, contribute more money, form closer ties with fellow members, and report stronger identification with their faith– but have fewer ties outside the group.

This is precisely the tradeoff animal advocates face: veganism creates an intensely committed core, but that same commitment creates barriers to expanding the movement’s reach. The question for animal advocates isn’t whether to abandon strictness, but how to maintain a committed core while building bridges to a broader constituency. The solution is the monastic/layperson dichotomy modelled by religious traditions, where strict personal commitment is celebrated in a few rather than demanded of—or disparaged by—everyone.

5. Gandhi and guerillas

This two-tiered solution for social movement membership found one of its strongest advocates in Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s struggle was geopolitical in scale, stirring the world’s most populous country to cast off the yoke of its most powerful empire. Yet at the core of this movement, Gandhi situated an elite cadre that never made up much more than 1% of Indian society.

Like any good priestly class, Gandhi’s most devoted followers were set aside by dress, diet, and personal purity. One staple of the movement was khadi, traditional hand-spun Indian textiles. Khadi clothing was both a clear visual marker of movement identity and an active economic protest, forsaking mass-produced British imports in favor of more expensive indigenous produce.

Boycotting British industry was one of the costly swadeshi vows taken by Gandhi’s most devoted followers. Other vows included:

• withdrawing from all British Raj institutions (including enrolling in government schools and forsaking government employment, often the highest-paid work available)

• vegetarianism (!) and sobriety

• Spending time daily hand-spinning khadi thread on a charkha

So, were these strict adherents of swadeshi ostracized by the Indian populace? Of course not! Rather, they functioned as a respected vanguard, supported by the patronage and admiration of the masses as they traveled from village to village promoting the nationalist cause.

Gandhi’s followers blurred the line between a priesthood and a guerilla movement– and the latter is also a useful metaphor for veganism. In his classic study of guerilla strategy, The War of the Flea,2 Robert Taber explains how guerilla revolutions that started out numbering in the dozens have been able to defeat full-scale regular militaries: by way of a small, highly dedicated cadre surviving off the patronage of a sympathetic rural population into which they can dissolve and reappear at will.

As with monks, the goal of an insurgency is never to recruit the entire population into active armed struggle. Instead, a small guerilla force takes on the lion’s share of personal sacrifice and risk. Living in caves or tunnels and armed with only improvised weapons, they wage hit-and-run warfare on high-tech militaries– while the general population discretely provides food, fuel, and misdirection.

If we accept this metaphor, the key lesson is the close relationship between the guerillas and the general public. Counterinsurgency efforts fail most spectacularly, Taber shows, when the occupying force treats the guerillas as the main problem rather than merely the most dramatic expression of widespread popular discontent. At the same time, the guerilla’s primary aim is to sharpen and encourage that discontent; “to raise the level of revolutionary anticipation, and then of popular participation, to the crisis point at which the revolution becomes general throughout the country and the people in their masses carry out the final task: the destruction of the existing order.”

The success of the guerilla hinges on the support of the general population. If the guerillas legitimately reflect the popular will, their victory is an eventuality. If not, it is practically unattainable.

As things currently stand, a movement framed in terms of veganism is being rejected by the masses like an alien virus. There is no question that we must reinvent ourselves. The question is whether veganism fits in the reinvented version of the animal movement at all, and what role the ordinary, passive supporter can play.

6. Show me the evidence

There are some empirically testable assumptions in all this. Let’s give them a critical examination:

• Hypothesis 1: Ordinary meat eaters see donating to animal charities as a more incremental ask than going vegan– and there are a meaningful number of nonvegans that would be willing to donate.

• Hypothesis 2: Positively mentioning diet change makes people less likely to donate, necessitating anti-vegan messaging.

• Hypothesis 3: A message that explicitly presents donating as a substitute for diet change does not make people less likely to go vegan.

• Hypothesis 4: Veganism is stagnating, and is unattainable for all but a small fraction of the public.

A brand new study shed some light on the first three questions: a survey experiment from Rethink Priorities comparing public attitudes towards donating and diet change.3 Individual studies like this should provide only modest updates in our beliefs, but if they are designed carefully, they’re usually better than pure intuition!

The Rethink survey finds, in line with common sense, that most people see donating as a significantly easier action than going vegan– and respondents who had never done either before were significantly more open to donating. This supports H1: there is a substantial audience who aren’t close to going vegan but would be willing to offset.

H2, however, is contraindicated by the Rethink survey. Comparing one message that only described donating as a powerful way to oppose factory farming to a second one that explicitly set it apart from “going plant-based,” respondents who saw the first message vs. the second scored it more compelling. The effect was statistically significant, but very slight. However, it’s at least enough to say that in this survey, a message contrasting donations with diet change was not more effective.

This evidence is much weaker. First, in messaging studies like this that test only one version of each message, it’s impossible to know if the effect was due to the variable you care about, or due to some other variation in the message. Perhaps a different version of the anti-vegan message would have performed better. Indeed, the message tested by Rethink Priorities was much milder in its critique of veganism than the Forget Veganuary campaign.

Moreover, this kind of survey only measures one part of the equation determining the impact of a message. In one of my favorite recent articles, Ben Tappin explains how the simple formula for message impact is persuasiveness multiplied by reach. That is, if message A is half as persuasive as message B, but goes viral and is seen by 100 times as many people, it has a 50 times greater impact. Ben points out that the persuasiveness of different messages tend to vary only modestly, but their reach varies dramatically, making viral spread far more important than message persuasiveness.

In a survey experiment like this one, the audience is captive, and sees the message they’ve been assigned to read no matter what. In the real world, the hardest part is getting messages in front of people. So if an antivegan message spreads more virally, Farmkind could still justify H2.

All that said, this is still some weak evidence against H2, and in favor of presenting veganism and donating as harmonious actions by members of the same movement acting at different levels of commitment. I’d love to see Farmkind directly test their anti-vegan message against something that fits the tone I’m arguing for in this post, measuring both persuasiveness and virality.

Furthermore, some observers feel H3 renders H2 irrelevant: if the spicy messaging dissuades people from going vegan, it might not be worth it. The Rethink survey might be even less helpful here, because the message contrasting donations and diet change was so much gentler than Farmkind’s real-world message. (Read both messages in this footnote.4) But for what it’s worth, the comparison message had no negative effect on people’s attitudes towards going plant-based.

6.1 Veganism SITREP

Now for H4: how is veganism going, really? Among EA-aligned and most other professional farmed animal charities, the futility of diet change efforts is mostly taken for granted. The common story is that veganism is hovering somewhere between 1 and 4 percent, has not meaningfully increased in recent decades, and provokes defensiveness and resentment.

Bryant Research released a report this week commissioned by The Vegan Society, examining public attitudes towards veganism in 21 countries. The report isn’t shy about looking for bright spots in global vegan trends, but the findings on rates are sobering.

With the sole exception of India (where religious history and widespread poverty complicate interpretation5), no country exceeded 5% veganism.6 Most countries were closer to 2%, including the USA, UK, Australia, and Germany. This doesn’t leave much room for the possibility that the trend in these countries is positive. Instead, it supports the conclusion that vegan attrition is so high, every new vegan merely replaces one who just relapsed.

On sentiment, however, the findings are more encouraging. People’s self-reported feelings towards vegans and veganism were both slightly positive, hovering around 4.5 on a 1-7 scale (where 4 is neutral) across countries from the USA to Kenya.7

This modestly supports the theory that anti-vegan sentiment comes mostly from a vocal minority—and that a considerable part of the public is ready to passively support the movement in a lay capacity.

7. The money shot

Imagine it’s February 2027, also known as Offsetbruary.8 Farmkind is graciously waiting in the wings to catch every failed Veganuary participant, offering a way to retain their dignity and continue participating in the movement with a role that matches their commitment. A large and growing movement of offsetters supports and celebrates their committed vegan core through Farmkind’s Adopt a Vegan program, where every monthly donation supports an advocate working on winning campaigns.

What will it take for us to get from here to there? I see three necessary changes:

1. Vegan activists must accept that veganism is not for everyone, and embrace the laity. The message from us is, veganism is great, but if it’s not for you, you’ve got to at least offset.

2. Advocates focused on institutional change should treat vegans with the utmost regard. It should never be possible to mistake us for discouraging the exceptional people willing to sacrifice for farmed animals. The message from mainstream allies should be I’m not vegan, but the vegans are right.

3. Activists need to overcome their ambivalence about money. Money can be used directly to help animals, and more money means more advocacy. A large recurring donation can be much more impactful than one person going vegan– and a small one is better than nothing!

I’ve spent 6000 words ranting at you about the first two, but if I’m reading the responses to Forget Veganuary carefully, the third point might actually be the biggest obstacle.

The strongest negative reactions to Farmkind came from vegan activists disgusted by the idea that someone could use money to pay down the moral debt created by caging and slaughtering an animal. This is the main focus of forgetfarmkind.com, a hilarious satire of the original Forget Veganuary site which you should definitely go click through.

This is genuinely confounding. On one hand, finance is the primary metaphor we use to speak about morality: we owe things to animals, we repay kindnesses, and criminals must pay for their crimes. But taking these metaphors literally, suggesting that someone could use money to correct their moral balance sheet, commonly provokes disgust; monetary debt and moral debt are inconvertible, according to this understanding. This is even further complicated by the fact that most people don’t abuse animals themselves, but pay someone else to do it for them.

The layers of this could be the subject of a dissertation, and I won’t attempt to resolve it all here. I just want to confront the practical question head-on: is there any amount someone can pay to make up for not going vegan?

Let’s imagine someone in Farmkind’s target audience. Call him Dustin. Dustin has been convinced of the moral imperative of veganism, and he is an ethical guy. He knows that he should cut out animal products and educate himself by watching vegan documentaries. But he really wants to keep eating meat, and he really doesn’t want to burn horrible images into his mind. Continuing to be able to eat meat would be worth quite a lot to him.

Dustin has an idea: he will pay someone else to go vegan on his behalf, documentaries and all. By his actions, he can create one more vegan in the world, but he can keep eating meat. He thinks about this, and it feels a little bit imbalanced, so he decides he’ll pay two other people to go vegan, which feels like it will put him solidly in the black.

He’s not sure how much it will cost to pay someone else to go vegan; after all, it would cost a lot to pay him to do it! But maybe other people value meat eating and documentary avoidance less than him– or value a given amount of money more, considering Dustin is relatively well off. He resolves that if he can’t find anyone to go vegan for him, then he’ll do it. But he posts a classified and right away, finds two people willing to completely remove animal products from their diet and spend time learning about animal rights for a monthly fee that he can easily afford. They figure out an accountability system, Dustin happily starts paying, and the world has two new vegans instead of one.

This story illustrates a few things. First, I imagine people will disagree about whether something is missing here compared to a person going vegan for ethical reasons. Dustin won’t undergo that vegan metamorphosis whereby he stops seeing cuts of meat as food and starts seeing them as literally part of someone’s body who had to be parted from it through terrible violence.

What about surrogate vegans? A solid body of research supports the idea that it is much easier to convince people of an animal rights position if they first stop eating meat for any reason. That is, behavior change often comes before a change in beliefs, rather than following from it. And on the other hand, most people who try being vegan revert even if it was for ethical reasons. So while the value of veganism can’t be reduced to the animals you don’t eat, it’s not certain whether Dustin’s strategy is less valuable to the animal movement than him going vegan himself. If we think about the likely outcomes probabilistically, then Dustin’s strategy is worth at least some fraction of a normal vegan conversion.

Setting that aside for a moment, the story also illustrates how money works. Money is kind of magical; it can transform almost anything anyone values into almost anything else. Medieval alchemists spent their lives trying to turn lead into gold, but money can already do that: by denominating a market price for lead and for gold in the same currency, you can sell your lead and buy an equivalent value’s worth of gold.

Money can also do this with valuable things that are not tangible, allowing Dustin to compare the value of his moral obligations against his strong desire to eat meat. But what really makes money incredible is its ability to seek out the lowest-cost way to achieve a given value. In this case, Dustin saw going vegan as a very large sacrifice, and the price he reached in his own mind for what that was worth to him was much higher than for some other people. Thanks to the magical powers of money, Dustin’s conscience was able to search across the world for more cost-effective ways to increase total veganism, getting two vegans instead of one.

Money cannot convert all forms of value. For instance, the discovery that money can’t buy love is popularly attributed to Paul McCartney. Some of the most important things in the world are not convertible to money. But this shouldn’t be a starting principle: if there’s something you want, and you have money, there’s no good reason not to ask if money can help you get it. If money can’t help, so be it, but if it can, it can!

For proof of both these points, let’s come back to the real world Dustin. His name is Dustin Moskovitz. After co-founding Facebook and becoming history’s youngest self-made billionaire, Moskovitz founded Open Philanthropy, now Coefficient Giving. Through CG, Moskovitz may be the single largest donor to farmed animal advocacy and meat replacement in history– and he’s not even vegetarian.

Most people can’t donate hundreds of millions of dollars. But, also, most people aren’t going vegan! Is asking people who won’t go vegan to make a donation better than nothing? The donation could even be used for vegan advocacy!

My friend Tynan Hewes was an experienced door-to-door fundraiser for large charities like Amnesty International when he joined the Colorado chapter of Pro-Animal Future as a volunteer. PAF had never bothered with those kinds of fundraising strategies, and when Tynan asked if he could start knocking on doors, I didn’t think much of it and kept postponing our meeting. Finally, he just started doing it on his own. He quickly started pulling in hundreds of dollars per hour, and soon, PAF hired him as a canvasser at $30/hour.

PAF uses that money for political campaigns, but it could be used for anything. Another organization paying a canvasser $30/hour to knock on doors and raise $100/hour could use the remainder to pay two other people to do door-to-door vegan advocacy. In that case, wouldn’t the offsets be creating more of what we care about?

Animal Liberation Offsets Now!

Sandcastles readers will be familiar with the idea that all strategic disputes reduce to a disagreement about timelines– that is, how far along we are in the history of our movement. Thom used this idea to explain the Forget Veganuary campaign:

We share the same ultimate goal, which is to end the exploitation of animals by humans. The question is, where are we in that journey? Reasonable people can disagree about this. I think, sadly, we’re probably a really long way away from it… In that context, the tools that make sense to us are quite different than if we were much closer to the end. We’re in an environment where eating meat is normal, most people think of it as the default… [our best evidence suggests] the current strategies people have developed on this aren’t having the overall societal impacts that we’d like to see. So if that’s not where we are, if we can’t solve that problem right now, can we get people to take some positive actions right now? That’s why we think offsetting makes sense. Yes, there’s no amount of money you can pay to make that pig or chicken alive again and give them a good life. But in the aggregate, you can prevent the next chicken from being stuck in a cage all her life. You can prevent the next pig from having his teeth removed without anaesthetic. You can prevent the next thousand shrimps from being killed without stunning or having their eyestalks crushed.

But I actually think offsets make sense in short timeline worlds, too. If you think the path to victory will involve political campaigns, corporate pressure campaigns, alt protein R&D, or anything other than directly, linearly increasing the number of vegans, well… all of those things cost money!

If just 0.3% of the US population offset at the modest rate Farmkind recommends, it would double the global farmed animal movement’s budget. If there were as many offsetters as vegans in the United States alone, our collective budget would 3-7x.

It’s time we start accepting alms.

Beg on,

Sandcastles

One of my most edgy and unique opinions about the animal rights movement is that Infighting Is Bad™. Whether it’s cancelling people for having the wrong political views or carving the movement up into illusory factions like welfarist vs. abolitionist or grassroots vs. professional, I think the movement wastes a lot of energy on pointless infighting.

Yet even I must admit that not all infighting is pointless. In some instances, our movement has suffered from a lack of substantive strategic debates. For years, as abolitionists and pragmatists feuded over cage-free campaigns, there was no forum for systematic public debate between the leaders of each faction. That left grunts like me stewing in resentment, unable to properly evaluate the other side’s position. (When I finally got the chance, I found it surprisingly persuasive.)

So today, we’re going to learn about two master classes in constructive infighting, two campaigns that forced the movement to wrestle with big strategic questions. Both case studies came out of the London activist scene, cementing its status as the top animal rights city in the world.1

Each story is rich with lessons, but a few commonalities jump out right from the get-go:

1. Each debate was sparked by an actual campaign– that is, people weren’t just running their mouths on social media, they were doing something bold in the real world.

2. In each case, proponents and opponents maintained an open line of communication and engaged in vigorous public debate, preserving friendships without pulling any punches in their criticisms.

3. While some observers changed their minds, all this public debate failed to clearly resolve the question one way or the other. But it pushed both sides to gather better evidence and become more rigorous versions of themselves.

I know what you all came here for, so I’ll start with the more recent story first, and we’ll see in the course of that how it couldn’t avoid bringing up an old wound.

Case #1: Farmkind says VEGANUARY IS FUCKING LAME

On December 27, 2025, the movement awoke from its post-Christmas reverie to stories in right-wing British tabloids with headlines like “Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign.” At first, it seemed like the same familiar “Why I’m no longer vegan” story we’ve all read a hundred times. But this one was different.

Toni Vernilli was renouncing veganism.2 She was joining hands with some of the most prolific meat eaters in the country– the second, third, and fourth-ranked national competitive eating champions.

But while she was telling people to eat whatever they want, her message didn’t end there. People who care about animals but still want to eat meat, she said, can offset the harm of eating meat by donating to charities that oppose factory farming. Specifically, they should go to forgetveganuary.com, use a handy calculator to determine what size monthly donation is needed to offset their meat consumption, and let the organization Farmkind distribute that donation across the most effective animal charities.

The first thing a sympathetic meat eater will see once arriving on the site is this comparison mocking Veganuary participants for annoying their loved ones and craving meat (an earlier version mentioned “feeling bloated from plant protein.”)

Next, they’re faced with an impossibly hard3 flash game testing their ability to survive 31 days as a vegan, navigating a frowning carton of oat milk through challenges like “vegan meat processed ingredients” and “iron deficiency.”

Finally, they reach the donation calculator. This is meant to be a relief– there’s something I can do besides be vegan! The user inputs their weekly serving of different animal products, and the calculator spits out a recommended monthly donation sufficient to offset the suffering it causes. For an average omnivore in the UK, the donation is £17, or $23, a small fraction of what they pay into the industry for consumption.

(The calculator is based on something like suffering-adjusted days, where for each animal you eat, you need to offset an equivalent amount of suffering by helping several animals. For instance, Farmland argues chickens raised according to the Better Chicken Commitment suffer around 50% less, so you need to pay for campaigns worth two BCC chickens for every chicken you eat.)

The vegans react

Veganuary, of course, did not take this lying down. Quoted in the Daily Mail, they likened Farmkind’s approach to “deliberately setting a fire and then donating to the fire brigade,” dismissed it as “a symbolic gesture designed to generate headlines,” and insisted that no donation can offset the harm of paying for an animal to be brought into the world and slaughtered for your consumption.

Across vegan group chats and message forums, other negative reactions poured in, including from many individuals who have previously expressed skepticism of the movement’s focus on veganism.

Maya Pardo (Communities Against Factory Farms):

I find it offensive and misguided. Surely there is another way to raise money for animal welfare without sabotaging another campaign through infighting? It’s a publicity stunt which comes very close to encouraging hating on vegans.

Alistair Stewart (former head of Plant-Based Unis):

I worry that the money and people this FarmKind campaign will bring into the animal movement won’t be enough to justify a) the infighting the campaign may cause in the movement and b) the harm it may do to the public’s perception of veganism… there are probably good reasons why the pro-Palestine movement doesn’t tell people not to bother doing BDS and instead donate, and the anti-abortion movement doesn’t tell people it’s okay to get abortions as long as they donate. At worst this approach misunderstands human psychology.

Most of the comments on the Mail article are criticising her for some combination of hypocrisy, bad faith, and seeking attention and money. One benefit of veganism is that even lots of anti-vegans recognise that there is some degree of logical consistency and personal/social costliness to it, which is admirable.

Anonymous:

Most people dislike factory farming, yet they still pay for it because it’s cheaper/more convenient. Are we really expecting those people to start spending £15 more on charity every month? Realistically, they’re more likely to use this campaign as an excuse to continue eating animals whilst also not donating.

Some commenters saw the potential, but worried about execution.

Billy Nicholles (Bryant Research):

Instinctively, is this the sort of “infighting” that could be effective? Farmkind is targeting a very different part of society to Veganuary, and so it may be ok for them to pit themselves against each other (if it results in more donations for Farmkind without significantly damaging veganuary’s campaign). I do find it pretty cool that an article in the Daily Mail just introduced their anti-vegan readership to effective animal welfare giving…

I also find the idea of paying competitive eaters to eat excessive amounts of meat uncomfortable. I get the theory of change, and if it works in getting hype/donations, then that’s good, but I’m still worried that this endorses/encourages excessive/thoughtless animal product consumption.

Zuzana Sperlova (Animal Charity Evaluators):

I don’t know if this specific article would do a lot of harm, intuitively I’d think not because of the audience, but that’s a guess. The majority of the article was about leaving Veganuary and veganism itself behind, and it might be that people skim it or see the headline and make a negative conclusion without getting to the mention of FarmKind and offsetting.

And some were even supportive:

Cam:

I lowkey think on a meta level it’s good there are new strategies being tried, and also that we have to meet meat eaters where they are. Most people don’t go vegan overnight (I know I didn’t) and donating is a lot more palatable of a first step.

The twist: Team Veganuary was maybe on board with the whole approach?

As the angry reactions spread, the Farmkind team arrived to announce: this is not what it seems.

Veganuary has been so successful establishing itself in the UK media ecosystem that every December sees predictable backlash from right wing tabloids. The Farmkind team saw in this an opportunity for a unique 4-dimensional chess move: if an anti-vegan backlash is going to happen anyway, can we grab hold of it and redirect it to help animals? As co-founder Thom Norman explained:

We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting…

The goal of this campaign is to get the question of ‘should you do Veganuary’ more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not…

The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.

By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals.

Now, this certainly changes things! Instead of a machiavellian public backstabbing, we have an even-more-machiavellian fake public backstabbing designed to trick tabloids into promoting both veganism and donating to effective charities! One EA forum commenter even likened it to Kayfabe, the preservation of fictional conflict in WWE wrestling.

That, however, did not settle the matter

Thom’s announcement was welcomed by critics and answered some of the most immediate questions. The new questions it raised were deeper and more productive, such as:

1. Whose buy-in do you need to claim a campaign like this is “cooperative”– and how much does cooperation matter?

2. How much should we be willing to harm one strategy to collect experimental data about another?

3. How do we measure the positive and negative impacts of a campaign like this?

4. On that note, how much good (or harm) are vegan campaigns doing for the movement currently? Do we even know?

The discussion of these questions has been one of the most fruitful I’ve ever seen in the movement– but it’s been scattered across EA forum posts and private group chats. Here, I’m going to do my best to bring what I see as the most important points into one place. We’ll take it question-by-question.

How much cooperation matters

Alistair Stewart argued that movement unity should sometimes trump short-term utility:

I think FarmKind are non-cooperatively using the visibility/success of Veganuary to advance their own (laudable, critical, neglected) goal of getting more donations into the animal movement, by publicly and explicitly undermining Veganuary and veganism / diet change in general. I worry this risks violating an important social movement principle along the lines of “don’t publicly and explicitly undermine other groups in the movement unless either that group is bad for animals or you have strong evidence that undermining them is good for animals”. I want a big diversified movement ecology featuring exploration, risk-taking, failure – but this isn’t just a risk for FarmKind, it’s a risk for Veganuary that they haven’t consented to.4

One might argue that in this case, it wasn’t even enough for Veganuary to consent, because the campaign reads as an attack on veganism in general and many other stakeholders understandably felt attacked. On the other hand, Veganuary did the work to build up the platform Farmkind is jumping off here, so it is arguably between the two of them.

Lewis Bollard, the patron saint of effective animal advocacy at Coefficient Giving, argued for a wide conception of stakeholders:

Whether Veganuary was in on this or not, I’m seeing vegan activists reasonably interpreting this as an attack on their advocacy. I think we should have a very high bar for deliberately starting a fight in the movement, and I don’t think this meets it. I think we should also have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists. I appreciate that attacking vegans wasn’t the campaign’s intent, but I think it was the predictable result, and certainly how the folks in the Daily Mail’s comments sections have (gleefully) interpreted it.

While we’re on it, Lewis also saw the campaign as dishonest:

I don’t think FarmKind intended it this way and I think the people behind it are deeply ethical people. But I think our movement is at its best when we hold ourselves to high standards and that includes not deliberately misleading people. And creating a fake “meat-eating campaign” feels like it crosses the line for me.

In their defense, I believe this campaign represents the Farmkind team’s true beliefs: factory farming is bad, veganism is an ineffectual response, donating would be more consequential and we should promote that instead. If there’s anything dishonest about the campaign, it’s the claim that the competitive meat-eaters offset their consumption by donating, when in fact they were paid to act as spokespeople.

Rocky Schwartz (EA NYC) made an interesting comparison to accepting donations from animal-abusing industries, and asked why this shouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny:

Wondering how recipient charities actually feel about this. I know plenty of anecdotes of animal charities refusing donations from animal-based businesses. Open question of whether that’s the right call, but I think it’s a wide enough movement norm that it’s worth evaluating FarmKind’s approach alongside it.

The right amount of infighting

One on hand, infighting is bad. On the other hand, every person in the movement can’t have a veto over every proposed campaign. Groups should hear out people’s concerns, but there are times to still go ahead with a controversial campaign over the objections of our friends and allies. How do we strike that balance?

Alistair Stewart:

I reckon the (complete) absence of infighting indicates a stagnant movement; the optimal amount of infighting is not zero.

Rocky Schwartz asked if a gentler, less anti-vegan message could have achieved the same outcome:

How is Farmkind distinguishing its messaging between “here is another option to consider if you care about animals” from “veganism is a bad option”? The web page certainly reads to me as the latter.

C agreed:

I don’t see why the campaign must explicitly disparage Veganuary.

But another commenter wondered whether:

Veganuary seeming against it is part of the bit. These media outlets hate Veganuary and wouldn’t cover it if they thought it was what they wanted.

Farmkind would not have gotten national media coverage in the UK for saying “veganism is great but you could also donate instead.” In a world where attention is the scarcest resource, nobody would be talking about this campaign if the message had been more cooperative. The whole story is “anti-factory farming group says to forget veganism.” You might think that’s a bad story, or worry that people won’t hear the subsequent message “and you should donate instead,” but we have to admit they’re getting far more attention this way.

However, more attention doesn’t mean the message will resonate with the right people, as C pointed out:

It seems clear that there are many non-vegans who already donate to animal charities, but I am not convinced that these individuals are anti-vegan or anti-meat reduction to the extent that a competitive meat-eating campaign would move them to donate - it may even risk alienating them. [A research report] suggests that donors to animal charities are more likely to be vegan/vegetarian than the general population.

But Thom counters with a nod to the coolest, smartest, and not to mention, most handsome research team ever to grace the animal movement:

There’s some research by an amazing organization called Pax Fauna… that when it comes to the messenger for an anti-factory farming campaign, people who eat meat are much more effective messengers to other people who eat meat than vegans are. Part of this is, how can we make it clear, if you think about the audience this is targeting, that other people like you also agree that donating to help farmed animals is a good thing…

When we start talking about factory farming, the script in people’s minds is that “you’ve started talking about this, now you’re going to ask me to change my diet.” And so they’ve already stopped listening to us. We used to get comments about “I’m not going to go vegan, I love bacon too much” where we weren’t talking about veganism at all. There’s a lot of people out there where to reach them, we have to make it explicitly clear that we’re not asking them to go vegan. If we had said you could do both, people wouldn’t have heard what we were saying.

I can attest that Thom is representing my research findings accurately here. Also important to note: during the campaign, these spokespeople are participating in meat-centric eating challenges that all of us probably find horrifying, including eating an entire goat. But they were going to do these challenges anyway. The difference is that now, their meat-obsessed audience will hear them talk about how they’re offsetting their meat consumption with donations to Farmkind’s preferred charities. Is it weightier that meat eaters are endorsing Farmkind, or that Farmkind is endorsing meat eaters? That’s a hard question, but that is the question, not whether eating challenges that were going to happen anyway are harmful.

And to foreshadow the second half of this post, we have this comment from James Özden of Social Change Lab:

I hope that anyone who thinks Farmkind’s campaign is too much infighting against other animal groups was also outspoken when Animal Rising was campaigning against the RSPCA! Which was way worse in terms of the reputational damage and change it tried to inflict (to shut them down!)

Measuring positive and negative impacts

Ben Stevenson could have been speaking for me when he said:

I’m pretty uncertain about the campaign overall, and I’m torn between thinking the pro-animal movement can and should be bigger than veganism, and feeling a little sad about messaging that risks undercutting veganism, which is an important part of my political identity.

But Stien van der Ploeg, Executive Director of Animal Charity Evaluators, urged us to look beyond vibes:

I think I understand the worries and discomfort people feel about this approach. But I’m not sure how fruitful it is for all of us to have a vibes-based conversation about the possible merits of this campaign. It already exists. It might end up being good, it might end up being bad. We can make it better. If you think some of the risks taken and assumptions made by FarmKind are unaddressed, let’s talk about how we can mitigate those. Let’s also figure out how we can support FarmKind do what they intend to do for animals. And most importantly, let’s make sure we learn from this campaign.

Rocky Schwartz:

Very curious where FarmKind is drawing the line here. Like, is there some back-of-the-envelope calculation of “likely harms of anti-vegan marketing” to “x dollars brought into animal orgs”?

But Lauren Mee (Animal Advocacy Careers) doubted our ability to gather that data:

I feel skeptical that it’s possible to evaluate this in a meaningful way to be able to learn from it, which I think is one of the main pros of trying something new… it would be quite hard to measure any negative effects of the campaign on societal views. Seems more likely it will be evaluated solely based on receiving X amount of donations for FarmKind and related charities.

Tom Billington, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) expert from The Mission Motor, responded with slightly more optimism:

I don’t agree that it’s impossible to meaningfully measure the effects, but it would be pretty difficult and require a lot of forethought and investment. Of course, every project should have robust M&E. But especially projects with significant risks of negative externalities.

Stien concurred:

Trying new approaches in this complex and relatively new space is great if you thoughtfully measure if it works or not. Measurement and evaluation are especially important because there are backfire risks and because this is a deeply underfunded cause area, so we cannot afford to be careless. ⁠It can be easy to falsely attribute successes and failures. So, what are some indicators that this might demand pivoting versus repeating?

Evan Boyar testified to the tradeoff on a person-to-person level:

I know three people who have confided they considered going vegan, but instead chose to donate to Farmkind or other effective (though not always pro-animal) charities. If persuasion is the method by which these goals we share will be achieved, then these people on the margin are especially valuable, and it is a loss to not have them as the same kind of active allies. However, there is a much larger pool of people who probably never seriously considered caring about farmed animals in the first place that Farmkind has a better chance of nudging towards care than vegan messaging.

That

Laure argued that Farmkind’s campaign doesn’t fit the usual spirit of offsetting:

If we take a parallel with the climate movement, companies are encouraged to offset their residual emissions. After companies have done their best to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, they can offset the inevitable emissions that cannot be entirely reduced. Similarly, in the animal movement, Global Food Partners encourages companies in Asia to purchase offsets if they cannot buy cage-free eggs in parts of their supply chain. Here, this Forget Veganuary campaign portrays offsets as a simple solution to avoid any diet change, and I think that’s a dangerous slippery slope.

David Ramms agrees:

When it comes to animals… if you exploit and kill an animal, you can’t offset that. You literally can’t offset what you did to that individual. The word does a lot of work.

Thom mounts a defense of offsetting that outs him as a Sandcastles reader:

We share the same ultimate goal, which is to end the exploitation of animals by humans. The question is, where are we in that journey? Reasonable people can disagree about this. I think, sadly, we’re probably a really long way away from it… In that context, the tools that make sense to us are quite different than if we were much closer to the end. We’re in an environment where eating meat is normal, most people think of it as the default… [our best evidence suggests] the current strategies people have developed on this aren’t having the overall societal impacts that we’d like to see. So if that’s not where we are, if we can’t solve that problem right now, can we get people to take some positive actions right now? That’s why we think offsetting makes sense. Yes, there’s no amount of money you can pay to make that pig or chicken alive again and give them a good life. But in the aggregate, you can prevent the next chicken from being stuck in a cage all her life. You can prevent the next pig from having his teeth removed without anaesthetic. You can prevent the next thousand shrimps from being killed without stunning or having their eyestalks crushed.

How much downside risk does harming veganism represent, actually?

An anonymous commenter argued that we have to apply the same scrutiny to veganism that we are applying to the Farmkind campaign:

Much of the conversation above seems to lean on the assumption that veganism is helpful to the movement - and not just helpful, but either (i) more helpful than donating or (ii) easier to get people to do than donating (or some combination of the two). I mildly lean in the direction that we should focus less on veganism, and that suggests the upside here is larger and the downside risks smaller. That is: I don’t think this will lead to meaningfully fewer vegans, but even if it did, that seems worth it.

Geoffrey Yip agreed: whatever concerns you have about the Farmkind, veganism itself hasn’t delivered great results in terms of building the animal movement.

Wanna highlight there’s tons of former vegans (source: vibes) and former Veganuary participants (source: more vibes) that still have animal welfare sympathies but gave up on permanent veganism because of all the inconveniences that the campaign is highlighting. Worth tapping into that pool for donations.

Joseph Ancion applauded Farmkind for following through on what many have been saying:

Since the 90s, there have been texts heavily criticizing the focus on individual diet change in the movement. And yet little had been done yet to actively distance part of the pro-animal movement from that narrative. I’m impressed that FarmKind put their money where their mouth is, to see if it’s worth it.

Sanurag Basu (Elevate Philanthropy) pointed out that this isn’t just a matter of welfare vs. veganism, since some of the recipients of Farmkind’s donations are working on institutional diet change:

In case some people are worried that this is purely potentially beneficial for welfare reforms and not meat reduction and animal liberation on the whole: two of Farmkinds six top charities aren’t welfare oriented - Good Food Institute in Alt Proteins, and Dansk Vegetarisk Forening in Institutional Reform.

One of many defenses of veganism was put forward by Alistair Steward, who argued that the difficulty of veganism is one of its selling points:

I suspect successful social movements (and religions, and militaries, and other powerful orgs) expend quite a lot of resources on enforcing internal sometimes-arbitrary norms relating to personal behaviour and relationships. We are emotional beings in need of costly signals to bind us together – veganism plays an important role along those lines for the animal movement currently, whether we like it or not, and it seems like a good one to me!5

Björn Ólafsson (fellow Substacker focused on animal advocacy research) questioned the negative assumptions about veganism:

I haven’t seen any evidence that FarmKind’s underlying assumptions are correct: 1. that many people are more willing to donate than to go vegan and 2. that these donations won’t serve as a blockage point for further pro-animal actions like diet change. They very well might be! But I think it’d be great to dive into them.

But James Özden, a seasoned researcher himself, worried this was a double standard, applying a more rigorous test to Farmkind than to veganism in general:

On point 1 - The baseline to beat is 1% of the US/UK is vegan after 40 years of diet change advocacy so I don’t think the bar is that hard… On 2, I think we should be wary of “isolated demands of rigour”. Has the pro-vegan camp ever shown that going vegan isn’t a blockage point for further pro-animal actions like donating or advocacy? As there sure are a lot of non-active vegans out there! So basically just think we shouldn’t put undue burden on new things to show they are non-harmful when things that are the status quo didn’t face the same scrutiny.

Björn countered that Veganuary has extensively researched their impact and found more positive evidence than most other diet change interventions. Ensuing discussion about the validity of that research was inconclusive and highlighted how damn hard it is to measure most animal advocacy interventions other than corporate welfare campaigns.

Eleanor MacAree from ACE was thrilled by everyone’s newfound enthusiasm for measuring results:

Excited everyone is so keen on measurement and evaluation! I am sure we are all holding ourselves to the same standards being asked of from Farmkind. The Mission Motor [who advise animal advocates on measurement & evaluation] are certainly going to be busy in 2026 😉

Where does that leave us?

Stein van der Ploeg:

I work fulltime in animal advocacy. I don’t think that gives me an excuse to eat animals. I am vegan. I don’t think that absolves me from donating to effective charities to reduce as much harm as possible. It’s a privilege that I can do all three of these things. In this world, few people can. It seems good to encourage people to do everything they can, while also understanding that might be limited. So, let’s help people help more animals as best as they can. We need to understand better what works and work together to make that happen.

I think everyone would agree with that sentiment. Problem is, people don’t agree about whether Farmkind’s campaign was aligned with it.

We’d all love to be able to evaluate that. If the Farmkind campaign raises tens of millions of pounds without putting a dent in Veganuary’s enrollment numbers for 2026, it will be easy to declare a W. On the other hand, if they raise £0 and Veganuary is cancelled, that’s an L. The outcome will not be so extreme in either direction, so it is sure to hang on both difficulties in measurement and on normative questions that might reduce to first principles.

How much money is a new vegan worth? In theory, if any vegan advocacy method works at all, it should be possible for the movement to identify the cost of a new vegan, i.e. how much money we need to spend per vegan created through that method. But cost is different from value, and even still, reality is more complicated. Veganuary’s strategy depends on a recognizable brand built up over more than a decade. How do we put a price tag on that?

Forget Veganuary is a particularly poignant example, but the reality is that animal advocates are constantly forced to trade off between values and priorities that can’t be easily compared. And our next case shows that these choices by no means break the movement down into two simple camps.

Case #2: Animal Rising says RSPCA ARE FUCKING SHILLS

When I heard complaints about infighting between Animal Rising and the RSPCA, my first reaction was:

Wait, the RSPCA is part of the animal movement?

Which maybe tells you which side I originally identified with.

Let’s rewind. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or as we called it in my early activist days, the Society for the Protection of Certain Animals, is mostly a dog and cat group. In that regard it is similar to the eponymous American SPCA, but from there the groups diverge.

The RSPCA mainly operates as a quasi-legal body investigating and prosecuting animal cruelty cases on behalf of the British Crown. But in their spare time, the RSPCA launched a welfare certification program for factory farms. Since rebranding to “RSPCA Assured™” in 2015, this program has put the stamp of approval of the UK’s most famous animal charity on the packages of factory farmed meat, eggs, and dairy in exchange for farmers dropping some of the worst practices, such as battery cages for hens and gestation crates for pigs. (Until 2024, RSPCA also featured meat-based recipes on their website.)

This earned them the ire of Animal Rising, who in 2024 announced a campaign pressuring RSPCA to drop the Assured scheme. This was not a new conflict. Groups like Direct Action Everywhere (my own alma matter) had railed against exaggerated welfare labels for years. DxE often investigated cage-free farms and protested brands like Whole Foods and Chipotle who boasted about welfare, but Animal Rising crossed a new threshold by campaigning against the organization backing the welfare scheme.

In one sense, this is a more direct stab at the root of the problem. Farms and stores adhere to a designated standard because they’ll be able to sell certified products at a higher price. The RSPCA is a highly trusted authority among the British public– that’s the only reason they put their name on the scheme in the first place.

The main criticism of incremental welfare reforms is that they will breed complacency among the public, undermining the urgency of veganism. If that is true, a trusted animal charity like RSPCA would be the most damaging endorsement. This would be even worse if standards weren’t actually enforced, as Animal Rising’s Dan Kidby explains:

Within the world of undercover investigations it was well known that the RSPCA Assured scheme was a lie, it had been shown time and again. We set out to show that conclusively by investigating close to 40 farms and showing hundreds of legal breaches and RSPCA standards breaches across the board. The fact that the RSPCA, the nation’s most trusted animal charity, are lying to the public about the conditions of animals, rubber stamping the cruelty and promoting the consumption of factory farmed animals is enough for me to campaign against it.

Ben Newman, Animal Rising’s co-director, put it more colorfully in a debate with James Özden:

It’s like the British Heart Foundation putting their stamp on cigarettes or Harry Potter on a vape aimed at children.

The argument in defense of the certifiers is simple enough. RSPCA assured represents the best improvement we can get at this time, as Lewis Bollard explains:

The question is not whether these certifications end all cruelty, but whether they reduce it. They do: their standards prohibit some of the worst cruelties common on standard factory farms, like battery cages and gestation crates… if they go too far too fast, costs and prices will rise, and farms and consumers will defect to the biggest competitor, Red Tractor, which has much weaker standards. Overall, animal welfare would get worse, not better.

(Those two links are my main sources for the rest of this post in case you’re interested enough to devour them in full.)

Quantitative benefits

Just as with Forget Veganuary, this debate hinges on two types of questions: one set can be quantified and measured, while the other reduces to underlying values or highly subjective interpretations of sociological evidence.

In the first case, there is the matter of how many animals the Assured scheme is helping, and how much.

The Animal Rising crew centered their campaign on a vast number of farm investigations– this year, they plan to release footage from every single RSPCA Assured farm, and they say each investigation shows unacceptable cruelty. Kidby:

I’d be certain if we were to run those investigations again we’d find the same breaches of standards, laws, and morality.

However, even Newman acknowledges some improvement:

The RSPCA Assured scheme does have, of course, they’re still factory farms, but they’re better than the average factory farm.

For his part, Bollard agrees that Animal Rising’s investigations show some standards being regularly violated:

Many RSPCA Assured farms aren’t following the standards they claim to. [Animal Rising’s] investigations have found repeated violations of standards requiring things like care for sick animals, and I doubt that things are better when investigators aren’t around. The RSPCA acknowledged as much in sanctioning nine of the 40 farms Animal Rising investigated and kicking another three out of the scheme.

And Bollard happily concedes that pressure from Animal Rising has pushed the RSPCA further still:

Animal Rising’s campaign has led RSPCA Assured to announce an upgraded enforcement regime, including more unannounced audits and greater use of CCTV. This is good.

But even without these improvements, Bollard believes the scheme was a net positive for animals, pointing out that none of Animal Rising’s investigations have found battery cages, gestation crates, or fast-growing “frankenchicken” breeds in Assured farms. For him, the answer is clear: “more certification, not less.”

Soon AI tools will allow for certifiers to continuously monitor conditions in every certified barn. When they do, the certifiers should adopt them.

Qualitative harms

But even if the number of animals helped by RSPCA Assured could be quantified down to the single digits with AI monitoring tools, that leaves the other side of the equation: how much harm is the RSPCA doing by throwing their weight behind “humane” factory farms?

Animal Rising believe this harm is self-evident. From Newman:

It’s quite obvious. Having the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, the world’s oldest animal charity’s logo being on an animal product, in a country that calls itself a nation of animal lovers—as part of British identity—increases consumption. And that’s reflected by the price premium. It’s reflected by McDonald’s using the RSPCA Assured pigs in its advertising.

An even worse indictment, according to Newman, is that the Assured scheme specifically targets people second-guessing meat:

I was looking at the RSPCA targeting, they advertise at people… who want to cut down meat. It’s people who feel, I want to eat less meat, I feel bad. Oh wait, there’s RSPCA Assured.

I suspect that for many readers, that’s a step too far. RSPCA can certify if they must, but why are they advertising on behalf of factory farms to people having bad feelings about meat? This is the side of the trade-off they find themselves on: active promotion from RSPCA incentivises more farms to join the program. This might be the most direct instance of the scheme trading off a reduction in total meat for a relative increase in the number of higher- vs. lower-welfare factory farms.

But Özden counters:

There is an interesting study from YouGov from 2022 on people’s recognition of UK food standard labels. And the number of people who actually know what the RSPCA is, is about the same as Red Tractor... I’m just not convinced it’s like, you know, the thing that like everyone knows and holds on to.

Newman’s response?

Well, that’s not what my mom thinks.

That might seem thin, but even Bollard says he’s sympathetic to Animal Rising on this point. However, his final counterpoint cuts deep and threw my enthusiasm for the RSPCA campaign into serious doubt:

[Regarding the comparison to stamping cigarettes with the British Heart Foundation’s logo,] I don’t think it’s quite the same, but I suspect future generations may disagree. RSPCA Assured used to be called “Freedom Food,” and I think a name like that would avoid conferring the RSPCA’s hard-earned legitimacy on a controversial product.

But I doubt that many people care what the big animal groups think they should eat. If they did, they’d get a clear message: [the RSPCA says] people should eat less meat, [and have recently] endured industry attacks for being anti-meat.

Now that these groups face attacks from both sides, they may be tempted to just avoid controversial work for farmed animals. Nonprofits generally only get attacked for action, not inaction. Run a rescue group that refuses to take in unadoptable animals, and no one will complain. Run a shelter of last resort that euthanizes unadoptable animals, and everyone will. The easiest option would be for the big groups to dump the certification schemes.

Easy, but wrong. The predictable result would be that the schemes would either cease to exist or be taken over by industry. Without the RSPCA’s support, RSPCA Assured would likely fold, its farms moving over to the weaker Red Tractor certification.

The blind punching the blind

One thing Kidby, Bollard, and Newman all agree on is that social movement strategy is made up more of highly subjective judgement calls than simple calculations:

Dan Kidby: In the long arc of social change it is almost impossible to conclusively prove any intervention is good or bad for animals. In a highly complex world there is a long list of pros and cons, and second, third order effects etc. We each make judgements based on our own ethics and evaluation of the evidence. Any strong stance taken against any initiative should not be done in a cavalier fashion, or on intuition alone.

Lewis Bollard: I studied historic social movements in college and… it’s left me wary of extracting general lessons from past movements, since I think they often fit our prior beliefs. For instance, I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality)… But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past… it’s likely we’re missing important work to seed future nonlinear reforms. I just find it hard to work out what that work is.

So the final question is: in the context of that uncertainty, should cooperation and minimizing infighting act as general heuristics to bound our experimentation? And if so, who gets to be included? Bollard and Özden clearly seem to think that the Red Tractor welfare scheme run by the factory farm industry itself would be a fair target, despite presumably having some standards. And I think they can understand why more radical groups clump RSPCA Assured and Red Tractor together; they simply disagree about where the line should be drawn.

Kidby draws it somewhere between RSPCA and Veganuary:

I deeply considered the pros and cons, and judged that there is strong enough evidence and an argument to be made that RSPCA Assured does significant harm that outweighs any good it might do. People may not agree with that position, but it would be hard to say the argument is not strong - I personally remain convinced by it.

At present, there are no other animal campaigns that I would be confident enough to object to in such a way. I have a high bar for this kind of objection/conflict.

I think it would be very hard to make a strong case that a campaign like Veganuary had significant downsides. I do however think that a strong case can be made that vegan dogma, as Toni mentions in the Telegraph article, has significant downsides which harms progress, but Veganuary doesn’t represent that at all - they are very mainstream and inclusive.

But for Özden, targeting the RSPCA passes up countless better opportunities:

In my opinion, there is no such strong or empirical evidence that the RSPCA Assured scheme is worse than the counterfactual (e.g. farms being assured by Red Tractor)… You can say “well AR had some vibes they thought it was bad,” but that becomes a very slippery slope. I don’t agree with the goals/programs of some groups in our movement based on intuition, but I shouldn’t campaign against them just due to my intuition.

If I had to prioritize a list of campaigns, from the National Farmer’s Union to retailers who promote meat products, the RSPCA is fairly low on my list. I would just rather focus on other stuff… We have enough problems, the animal movement faces the rest of the world. We shouldn’t be trying to create more conflict internally, i.e., one of us targeting an ally, even though you guys may rightly point out it’s a bit of a hypocritical ally.

For Newman, this misses the point. The RSPCA is in a unique position, and they are abusing it:

No one gives a damn about Red Tractor. The RSPCA is the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. It’s a household name. It’s a British institution. It’s the most trusted messenger on animals in the UK.

Beautiful infighting

In the end, it fell to Bollard to point out:

I originally planned to write a newsletter about infighting… But there’s an irony in criticizing infighting: you risk becoming an infighter yourself. And I’m hardly an impartial observer: at Open Philanthropy we’ve funded RSPCA Assured — but not Animal Rising. It’s too easy to decry infighting when it’s the other side doing it.

So, big props to Lewis for eating his own dogfood and taking a clear public stance against the Forget Veganuary campaign according to this same principle.

I agree about the symmetry between these two examples. So from my safe position as a humble Substacker, associated with no organization and responsible for stewarding no resources, it falls to me to say: I think these were two outstanding examples of infighting! If our movement could handle every conflict this way, we’d win inside of a decade.

Questions remain unanswered. But everyone grew stronger. The RSPCA strengthened their enforcement mechanisms; Farmkind strengthened their measurement strategy; Animal Rising built important new relationships between the institutional and radical wings of the movement; and I’m confident Veganuary will churn on largely unperturbed.

For a bonus, I think everyone was surprised by how many people in the EA space were upset by Farmkind’s campaign. In fact, feelings about these two controversies in no way fell along predictable lines, once again defying simple but misleading binaries. Farmkind seems to have inspired a wave of public pro-vegan signaling within the wider EA movement, a small but important community that risks losing sight of its vegan roots. Meanwhile, Project Phoenix in the UK is considering rekindling the RSPCA campaign with a more narrow version of the demand that could achieve the best of both worlds, much as Bollard suggested.

Some of the unanswered questions might be unanswerable. The rest are answered here:

Otherwise, build on!

Sandcastles

Hot Takes

1. AI will be accelerating so hard that no animal activist can ignore it

Wait, sorry, that describes 2025! Or at least, I think it should. Yet my latest post about AI and animal advocacy still got a few replies (from intelligent people, no less!) claiming AI progress has run into a wall, or is about to do so. I think this perspective is badly wrong but only time will tell, so I’m registering my predictions that:

• The METR task-length chart will track a 4- or 5-month doubling time (or faster) throughout 2026 (one proxy for capabilities improvement continuing exponentially)

• There will be signs AI is taking a bite out of U.S. employment, especially in white-collar sectors, though alternative explanations will abound

• There will be nothing like a bubble-bursting event despite an ever greater share of the stock market and GDP growth hinging on AI investments

2. Getting cancelled is over

Cancel culture is so last decade. It’s 2026– nobody is cancelled anymore! Anyone who was previously cancelled is officially un-cancelled, and nobody new is getting cancelled. People will keep trying to cancel each other but it’s not going to work anymore, because the rest of us have had enough. We’re not going to ostracize our friends because other people weren’t interested in resolving their conflicts constructively.

3. The animal movement will focus on winning

Various old factional disputes in animal activism will all finally be seen for the smoke and mirrors they always were. I’m talking about:

• Grassroots vs. professional

• Welfarist vs. abolitionist

• Radical vs. moderate

• Pragmatic vs. idealist

• Veganism vs. reducetarianism/offsets

A new faction will emerge to take their place: Team Winning. This faction will natively understand the synergy between many different forms of winning. As a result, Team Winning will spend much less time criticizing each other, freeing up all that energy to focus on—you guessed it—winning! We will win so much we will get tired of winning, and by the end of 2026 we will say, “Please, enough, no more winning!” And we will even start to feel pity for the factory farm industry.

OK, it’s too spicy, here’s some cashew sour cream

You’ve now been warned, so if you get caught off-guard by these wonderful developments, you’ll have only yourself to blame. Here’s what you could do instead of that to prepare for a great year of animal activism:

Build your first AI automation: Go start a conversation right now with Claude using the following prompt:

Hey Claude, I’ve been wanting to become more savvy about using AI and LLMs lately. One idea I had was to try to automate some component of my work using Claude Code, n8n, and/or Zapier. But I don’t know where to start. I’d like to ask for your help! Could you interview me about my weekly work rhythms, identify one or more tasks that I could save time by automating, and then help me build automations? Assume I’m a total beginner with all this stuff and walk me through it step by step. I’m excited to work with you on this!

Read my previous AI posts [1, 2], then start following some of the recommended podcasts or newsletters if you really want to stay caught up on AI news.

Get off the cancel train: it’s just going to make you look silly at this point. In fact, if you have any old friends you stopped talking to because they were being publicly shamed, 2026 is a great year to reach out and welcome them back into the movement.

Go get maniacally obsessed with winning a campaign: almost any campaign, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t yet seen anyone in the movement come close to meeting the burden of proof I’d need to be convinced that any pro-animal campaign has been net negative– from the most welfarist/incremental campaign to campaigns against those very welfare schemes. Though I’m on the record saying campaigns for non-farmed animals won’t do much to end factory farming, even that is a far cry from net negative.

To summarize all of that: 2026 will be a great year to stop focusing on things that don’t matter, and focus on what matters instead– and therefor, a great year to read more Sandcastles 🏰

Build on,

Sandcastles

1. Standing at the Precipice

It is well-known among fans of true crime that the first 72 hours after someone goes missing are considered crucial for detectives; statistics suggest the chances of finding someone alive after that become vanishingly small.1 I remember watching a crime thriller about a kidnapping which leaned heavily on this fact: superimposed over the beginning of each scene, an ominous timer flashed the hours, minutes, and seconds since the victim had been reported missing. It was a great storytelling device, ratcheting up dramatic tension and creating a vivid feeling of a race against time.

Lately, I’ve been getting the same feeling each time I read an article about how quickly AI research is accelerating– which, at this point, happens several times a week.

Time is starting to feel acutely precious.

I used to be pretty good at clocking out of my animal advocacy work for a week’s vacation three or four times a year and not feeling guilty for it. But these days I feel like I’m falling behind even on the weekends.

This sharpening sense of desperation isn’t tied to any specific project or outcome. It comes from the fact that what may turn out to be the greatest window of opportunity for animal advocacy in human history is starting to close.

I don’t want to exaggerate: this isn’t happening in the next month, and almost certainly not in the next year. But I’d be surprised if it takes longer than ten years, and I expect more like five. That would be 260 weeks. And they are zipping by quickly. (A virus knocked me out and delayed publishing this post by a week; the timer clicked down to 259.)

A couple posts ago, I asked you to

Pause for a moment and consider this question:

What do you think is the earliest year we could reasonably expect to see the end of commercial animal farming in your country, if we play our cards right?

Write down the number of years between then and now, whether it is 40 years, 4 years, or 400 years.

Now, consider a second question:

What would you be doing differently if you thought your initial answer was wrong by an order of magnitude in either direction?

If your initial answer was 40 years, and a magical genie appeared and told you with certainty that, if you take exactly the right actions, it would be possible to end animal farming in just 4 years? Or, on the other hand, they told you that even if you take the best possible course of actions, it will be impossible to end the slaughter industry in less than 400 years? How would that affect your ideas about movement strategy?

I first started asking fellow activists this question to highlight the way different intuitions about how soon we could achieve animal liberation lead us to different conclusions about which strategies to focus on, with shorter timelines favoring more “abolitionist” approaches and longer timelines generally favoring incremental welfare reforms.

But lately, the question has taken on new significance. Transformative AI promises to remake the world, including the food system, in as little as five or ten years. This presents a shorter timeline than animal advocates have ever had cause to hope for in the past. This forces us to re-examine our entire strategic calculus.

1.1 Crunch time

If you’re an animal activist who is not yet sold on the idea that AI will run all our strategic calculations through a high-powered blender, I’ve published a detailed introduction titled The Tsunami is Coming (henceforth TTIC).

Here’s a quick review of the key points:

• There is no scientifically robust reason to believe that AI and robotics could not someday surpass humans in all economically relevant activities. This threshold is generally referred to as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. AGI will mark the end of economically relevant human labor.

• AI capabilities are improving rapidly. Contrary to the perceptions of some users and journalists, the pace of improvement is continuing to accelerate.

• AGI will cause a dramatic reordering of social and political power. The exact outcome depends on many unknowns, with possibilities ranging from utopian to dystopian to uncategorizably weird.

• AI technology has many obvious direct implications for farmed animal advocacy. It could unlock breakthroughs in alternative protein or supercharge advocacy organizations. But the greatest effects on farmed and wild animals will come from general social and economic transformation.

The final section of TTIC addressed how animal advocates should change our approach in light of everything that is happening with AI. After all, it would be pretty surprising if I told you everything about the world was going to change in 5 years, yet that didn’t have any implications for how we should go about advocating for animals. But most of the feedback I got on the post was that the what to do now section left much to be desired. So in this post, we will dare to dig deeper.

Before asking what we should do, we have to ask what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen. I’ll spend most of my time today on what, but first, let’s touch quickly on when.

In TTIC, I wrote:

There are people who expect fast timelines or slow timelines. But the meaning of fast and slow is changing quickly. Back in 2015, expecting AGI by 2050 was considered a fast timeline. Now, that date falls on the opposite end of the spectrum. As of late 2025, most experts’ AGI timelines cluster between 5 years and 30 years to see transformational impacts of AI across society– whether that is the end of labor or the end of humanity.

If animal advocates expect AGI in 5 years, we should seriously consider throwing out everything we’re doing and making a few desperate bids to alter the technology itself. If we expect a 30-year timeline, that would be overly rash; we might even mostly stay the course while adding a few new strategies to our toolkit.

A frenzied race dynamic has set in among the frontier researchers working to build AGI: the norm is 80-hour workweeks fueled by Adderall and Vyvanse to cause nationwide shortages. Nobody could sustain this pace for more than a few years. They’re doing it because they don’t think they will have to.

AI researchers think the finish line is within sight. The finish line is recursive self-improvement, the point when AI models become better than humans at developing even smarter AI models, leading to a rapid intelligence explosion since AI can work much faster than the humans they replace. This is commonly referred to as the singularity, a name that implies, among other things, that humans may lose what limited ability we currently have to shape the direction of world events.

1.2 Reasons to ignore the rest of this post

Should animal advocates treat the AI singularity as a finish line for us, too?

I have good news, reader: there are plausible arguments that trying to redesign animal advocacy in light of short AI timelines is a fool’s errand.

The basic argument is that we are too clueless about what the world will look like after AGI to predict how our actions now would affect it. As JoA🔸 commented on TTIC:

After several hundreds of hours discussing this topic and writing about it, I still doubt that “anticipating” will be better for animals in expectation… our situation when figuring out how to defend animals in a post-AGI world is very similar to that of a caveman who’d wish to take action during his lifetime in 12,000 BC to effectively improve the treatment of animals in the 21st century.

I think we can all agree that a paleolithic man was not in a good position to deliberately shape the world 15,000 years into the future. And there are reasons to think that the next 15 years could involve as much change as the previous 15,000. Even setting AI aside, one view of long-term economic trends calls for something like a thousandfold expansion of gross world product and energy consumption in this century. AI might be the mechanism history uses to carry forward an exponential trend going back thousands of years.

Some very thoughtful animal advocates agree this uncertainty is just too much. Forethought’s Lizka Vaintrob and METR’s Ben West spoke for many when they concluded:

…radical changes to the animal welfare field are not yet warranted… We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run effects of interventions available to us today. Without specific reasons to believe that an intervention is especially robust, we think it’s best to discount its expected value to ~zero.

It’s truly incredibly easy to forget how weird post-paradigm shift worlds might be… Farming may stop existing or be transformed (or be driven mostly by nostalgia), so “wild animals” or bizarre things might account for most animals here. The lines between organic and not might also get blurry.

OK, admittedly, this isn’t exactly good news. But it at least means that if you find all of this AI stuff confusing or overwhelming, you could easily justify ignoring it all and continuing to work on what you’ve already been working on. With that, I offer you one final exit ramp from this post before it descends fully into High Weirdness.

2. Ten Futures

We all agree the future is going to be very weird. But just because nobody can confidently predict the future doesn’t mean we are totally clueless.

Our situation is different from that of our paleolithic friend in important ways. We have the situational awareness to know that change is coming. Historical study, economic forecasting, and even science fiction literature all provide us historically unprecedented means to speculate about a historically unprecedented upheaval. The agricultural and industrial revolutions give us real examples of transformative economic growth, and together with millenia of data provide a basis for both qualitative and quantitative guesswork. Coefficient Giving founder Holden Karnofsky argues that futurists who have even casually used these tools for forecasting actually have a surprisingly good track record, and we should reasonably expect predictions to get better in the era of big data, machine learning, and systematic efforts to aggregate the opinions of experts.

This isn’t enough to make a unified prediction about what the future will look like. But I think it does enable us to outline futures that are more or less likely.

Simply drawing forward current economic and technological trends gives us a taste of how weird things will get. But it leaves major variables that we can’t hope to answer decisively, such as:

• Slow vs. fast takeoff speed: early AI forecasters thought that the moment an AI became capable of independently improving AI research, it would trigger an intelligence explosion resulting in systems thousands of times smarter than humans in a matter of seconds or minutes, because of how fast computers can think and self-modify. Some analysts still expect a relatively fast takeoff (weeks or months), but others point to the fact that AI training has relied on access to vast computational resources to argue that takeoff will be slowed by physical constraints.

• Alignment and agency: will digital minds remain an inert tool in the hands of humans, or will they start exercising their own autonomy towards their own objectives? Will researchers solve the “alignment problem” allowing them to specify the goals an AI should pursue, or will systems drift towards alien goals that clash with their creators’?

• Concentration vs competition: will one company or country unlock recursive self-improvement, pull far ahead of all the competition, and gain an overwhelming strategic advantage? Or will fierce competition result in a perpetual race between leading firms, flattening profit margins and eventually giving every human free access to the intelligence frontier via open-weight models? The U.S. and Chinese governments might assert themselves directly as competitors, or leave it up to private companies– and in the latter case, companies may become more powerful than governments.

We can’t confidently paint one picture of the near-term future– say, the year 2035. But by shuffling the variables above, we could outline the ~10 scenarios that seem likeliest given our current knowledge. Is it more likely than not that one of them will be a close enough approximation to inform today’s animal advocacy strategy? I think the answer might be yes.

For that reason, I have this fantasy of dividing AI-pilled animal advocates into ten teams, sketching out the ten baskets of futurity that seem most likely to occur, then dividing these scenarios up across the teams. Each team would agree to set all their uncertainty aside and focus on what the movement should be doing given their assigned future. Nine teams would work on the wrong forecast to ensure that one team could be unreservedly working on the right one.

The rest of this post is a first draft of that fantasy: ten futures that Claude and I consider most likely, and reflections on what animal advocates in each future would wish we had done now.

These scenarios are not mutually exclusive; two or more of them could unfold sequentially. I’m not attempting to rank them in order of likelihood. Instead, they are ordered roughly by increasing weirdness. Some of them involve war and other forms of mass death; these futures trouble me deeply but I’m not going to dwell on those feelings in this post, so I’m sorry if it comes across as callous.

Futures:

1. Commoditized intelligence

2. Gradual handoff & moral value lock-in

3. Great power showdown

4. AI-enabled coup

5. Gradual disempowerment

6. Industrial collapse

7. Democratic AI

8. The digital rights movement

9. Fully automated luxury transhuman space communism

10. Extinction and succession

(On desktop, clicking the little lines on the left side of the screen will pop out a navigable outline.)

#1 Commoditized intelligence

Slow takeoff; high competition.

SUMMARY: Fierce competition drives down the cost and profitability of intelligence. Both labor and tech firms see their power diminish. Agency replaces intelligence as the key bottleneck for productivity; China’s high-tech manufacturing ecosystem crucial for scaling alternative protein.

Scenario

A sliver of light peeking through the room’s one small window told Marvin that, despite his plans to sleep, he had once again worked through the night. He knew that if he didn’t hurry, the coffee line would quickly grow to last an hour. So he pulled his eyes away from the assembly of a dozen monitors, each one tracking a different agent’s chain of thought, and set out into the crisp morning air. The tents of the protesters packed thickly in the street had an oddly beautiful quality at this hour, and for a moment Marvin forgot his irritation. Then, tripping over a pile of picket signs demanding bans on AI workers in various industries, the irritation came flooding back. “Idiots,” he thought to himself. “They could still teach themselves. Then they could occupy something that actually mattered. If the future leaves them behind, it’s their own damn fault.”

Analysis

Note: this scenario is not a stable long-term equilibrium. It more describes a phase we might pass through if AI takeoff is slow.

You’ve probably heard about the enormous investments that financiers and tech giants are making into AI companies like OpenAI. These companies are only investing because they expect to get their money back, and sure enough, even relatively conservative estimates project that the AI industry could generate more than $1 trillion in profits by the early 2030s. However, there’s one scenario where AI becomes as capable as its most bullish proponents expect and still fails to generate any returns for its investors. That’s the scenario where superhuman intelligence becomes commoditized.

A commodity is the name economists use for a product that is economically important but has a profit margin near zero. Products are commoditized when two conditions are met: fungibility and fierce competition. Take corn for an example. The global market for standard yellow field corn exceeds $300 billion annually. Yet a vanishingly small portion of that money makes its way into the pockets of corn farmers as profit, because every bushel of shelled corn kernels is effectively identical, and there are millions of individual producers all trying to sell the same product. No producer can raise their prices as long as buyers can easily bring their business elsewhere. There will always be some desperate farmer willing to sell their corn for pennies above the cost it took them to produce, so corn farmers are under constant, fierce pressure to increase their efficiency.

Could AI become a commodity like corn? There are reasons to think it could. This past January, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek shocked the world by releasing an AI model that matched many of the capabilities of a frontier model OpenAI had released just ~6 months earlier, but which cost DeepSeek a small fraction of the price to train and an even smaller fraction to deploy. More shocking still, DeepSeek released their model weights publicly, meaning anyone with the right hardware could download and run the model themselves without paying DeepSeek a penny. Throughout 2025, DeepSeek and other open-weight models have continued to demonstrate the staying power of a fast follower strategy: while low-cost open models can’t push the frontier of AI capabilities alongside well-funded labs like OpenAI and Google, they are able to imitate the success of those models, staying a few months behind for a small fraction of the cost.

If this dynamic holds, it could pose a grave problem for OpenAI. It could mean, for instance, that OpenAI’s only customers would be people willing to pay 10 or 100 times as much for a model that is only 10% smarter. There will always be some applications where the top 10% matters, but DeepSeek is already smart enough for many consumer and business applications. And the more users migrate to affordable open models, the greater the fraction of OpenAI’s frontier training costs each remaining customer will have to shoulder, potentially triggering a vicious cycle of increased costs for frontier intelligence customers driving more and more to settle for second-rate fast followers.

This is the world we are headed for if frontier companies don’t pull abruptly away from the pack thanks to recursive self-improvement. In this world, superhuman intelligence is as cheap and widely available as corn is today. Everyone has easy access to it– but so does everyone else.

There’s a scene in Bruce Almighty (2003) where an overwhelmed Jim Carrey, temporarily substituting for the all-powerful deity known as Morgan Freeman, decides to bulk-approve every prayer he receives. That night, nearly every person in America wins the lottery– but since the spoils are evenly divided across every player, they get back less than the price of their ticket, sparking violent riots nationwide. This could be a preview of commodified intelligence: everyone gains literal superpowers, but because everyone else has the same superpowers, we’re all actually less special than we were before. You have the power to conceive of brilliant business strategies and control arbitrarily capable robot workers– but so does everyone else. What now?

In centuries past, food was scarce. Access to food meant access to power. With a large enough surplus of food, you could raise up an army.

In the era of commodity corn that prevails in many parts of the world today, food no longer confers power. Everyone has enough food; power comes from what you do with it, i.e. by metabolizing it and turning it into manual or cognitive labor. People who can turn their corn into a great idea for a business, then execute on it skillfully, gain power. Today, intelligence confers a great deal of power.

So what happens in the era of commodity intelligence? If everyone has superhuman intelligence at their fingertips, but that superintelligence is still just an inert tool, not everyone will use it equally. The world will belong to people who strive to maintain their understanding of the cutting edge, who know what the tools are capable of and develop their sense of how to put them into practice. This should be mediated less by different humans’ raw intelligence than by their determination and grit, or simply by willingness and the belief that you can still shape your circumstances, what pop psychologists increasingly call agency.

That could be good news for animal advocacy, which is already full of people driven to sacrifice their free time to help animals. In that world, our goal is for the animal movement to have more AI superusers than the industries we’re fighting.

On the other hand, all of this might fall apart. The best way to use a truly general superintelligence would simply be to ask, “What’s the smartest thing you could do to achieve [goal]? OK, do that,” then sit there and every few minutes tell it “OK, do the next thing. Now the next thing.” This whole scenario describes what might happen if it turns out to be very difficult to cross that final chasm to fully-general agentic AI, perhaps due to as-yet-unforeseen limits to the kind of superintelligence we can create on a silicon substrate.

Meaning for animal advocacy

Animal farming would certainly be affected by the economic chaos this will unleash. Economists tend to expect much slower takeoffs than many AI researchers, because while the latter are focused on how quickly the technology is improving, the former are all too familiar with the real-world obstacles that slow the diffusion of new technologies. So the economic question is: in a world where intelligence is abundant, what becomes scarce? The clearest answer for now is: energy, followed by robotics and manufacturing capacity.

Energy production in the U.S. has been flat for almost three decades, and has actually been declining in most of Europe. The AI data center buildout promises a huge spike in demand, with few signs production will be able to keep up. Regulatory hurdles have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new energy infrastructure, especially nuclear and other renewables. Fixed supply and increased demand will result in higher energy prices, especially in the United States. Combined with the Trump administration’s inexplicably self-defeating trade policy, this creates a perfect storm for domestic manufacturing, which will in turn set the U.S. further behind in robotics than we already are.

All this will strengthen China’s position as the world’s high-tech manufacturing hub. Unlike the U.S., China has been massively ramping up its energy capacity, producing more in 2024 than the U.S., EU, and India combined. (China is especially leading in renewable energy.) Manufacturing capacity is even more lopsided, and China’s lead in robotics technology (not to mention diffusion in manufacturing) is roughly symmetrical to America’s lead in AI. Barring dramatic changes, we are headed towards a bipolar world economy where the U.S. produces leading information technology and “manufactures” the digital world, but China makes everything of consequence in the physical world, including the computer chips U.S. AI models run on.2

This has major implications for replacing animals in the food system. Besides R&D, energy is the determining factor in the cost of cultivated meat production. This contrasts sharply with factory farming, which is mostly insulated from swings in energy prices. Studies estimate that a mature cultivated meat industry would use anywhere from 4 to 25 times as much energy as animal farming.3^,4 Precision fermentation is similarly energy-intensive. Processing plants into meat alternatives is less bottlenecked on energy, maybe even less so than animal meat when accounting for refrigeration. But the plant-based industry will benefit from China’s high-tech manufacturing ecosystem in numerous other ways.5

Increased energy costs pose a serious liability for price-sensitive meat replacements, which is why serious efforts to develop industrial-scale alt protein supply chains will have to be based in China. Fortunately, the Chinese government is already bullish on cultivated meat and other alternative proteins, which offer an easy way to reduce reliance on food imports in a country that still remembers the bite of famine.

Government planners in the U.S. are talking a big talk about cutting through red tape to ramp up domestic energy production. But the Trump administration’s affinity for fossil fuels has already led them to spitefully kill off major renewable energy projects, casting doubt about their sincerity.6 Until we see serious new capacity coming online, alt protein companies should not be investing in U.S. manufacturing. China is rolling out the red carpet for you.

#2 Gradual handoff / moral value lock-in

Medium takeoff; low competition; alignment to prosocial values.

SUMMARY: An AI steward takes over the management of society, leaving humans materially wealthy but politically impotent. Risk of moral values being locked in; animal advocates should push hard now on social change to influence future values.

Scenario

Silas set down his spoon and pushed the delivery box of chana masala away. The smell of his friend’s steak box was ruining his appetite. Someone online had warned him he’d reach that stage in his vegan journey. “Look,” Jonah said through a mouthful of cow flesh, “don’t waste your time trying to convince me. I’m just one person. It doesn’t make a difference what I do. If you want people to change, go do a protest or something.” Silas looked out the window the the street below, where delivery drones zipped to and fro. Sure, there was a sidewalk for human pedestrians– but nobody used it. There wasn’t a human in sight. Everyone stayed locked up in their apartments playing video games all day, telling themselves the same story as Jonah. And in a way, they were right: Silas had no reason to think the Management would care what humans thought about how their food was produced.

Analysis

Many AI watchers consider this the best case scenario. If digital intelligence outstrips human intelligence in every way, AI systems will eventually be better than humans at governing human society according to the interests and values of its human creators. The risk is that those values are “locked in” for what might be an eternity– and if they were locked in based on humanity’s current values, that might be a disaster for animals.

Some researchers, however, hope that a sufficiently intelligent AI would even be better at figuring out what our values should be, or rather, what they would be if we had greater capacity to reflect on the question. The fancy term for this is extrapolated volition: an AI that acts on behalf of a person or group according to what we would want if we could process as much information as they can.

If enough humans trusted that an AI could act out our values better than we ourselves, eventually, more and more of us would hand off power to that AI. A successful version of this would probably happen gradually, with individuals and groups entrusting more of their decisions to benevolent systems. Once some critical mass of humanity have done this, a minority who refuse to cooperate with the AI might come to be seen as unacceptably selfish, at least insofar as they try to retain control of decisions that can negatively affect others, such as driving your own car7 or, hopefully, killing animals to eat them.

The polymath researcher Carl Shulman argues that under an AI singularity, every individual human would become unimaginably wealthy even if governments continued redistributing wealth only at current levels. A robot economy would be so large that even if a tiny elite controlled 99% of wealth, the remaining 1% would be enough for each person to have dozens of human-sized robots attending to their every whim, with miracle medicines keeping you alive and healthy for centuries. Check out Carl’s marathon 6-hour interview on 80,000 hours to hear why this at least deserves consideration as one of our ten likeliest futures.

The lives of humans in this world would more and more resemble those of domestic cats: food, housing, and healthcare are provided for free, and all you have to do is enjoy yourself. The political and economic forces shaping the world beyond your home are not only completely beyond your control, they are beyond your understanding and perhaps even your awareness. If the AI overlords are instructed to look after only human wellbeing, and conclude that factory farming serves that end, we may have no ability to stop them perpetuating it indefinitely.

Meaning for animal advocacy

It’s reasonable to hope that a scenario like this leads to a pro-animal world by default. Current LLMs clearly understand the moral and logical arguments for protecting animals, and their successors may well conclude that factory farming is clearly a failure of our ability to live up to our values rather than an affirmative demonstration of our values.

But hope doesn’t save animals from a future of permanent factory farming, and we shouldn’t take anything for granted.

If this turns out to be our timeline, we’d want to put extra energy into symbolic, cultural strategies that have the best chance of shifting cultural norms. This isn’t exactly a new idea; many animal advocacy thought leaders have focused on the normative impacts of a strategy rather than its immediate material impacts for animals, from the abolitionist vegan advocacy of Gary Francione to the disruptive social movement approach favored by Wayne Hsiung. Neither do skeptics of these approaches dismiss the importance of social and cultural change; rather, they usually argue that focusing directly on social change is misguided, that previous changes in social norms have been driven along more by incremental material victories than by direct social confrontation. In this view, for instance, the important wins of the U.S. civil rights movement were forcing the federal government to ban racial discrimination in voting and employment, which in turn reduced racism by increasing racial integration, rather than confrontational civil rights protests reducing racism directly.

The question of whether protests designed to polarize the public reliably result in increased support for a cause remains hotly debated, with compelling evidence on both sides. A third view posits that protests can achieve positive polarization if certain identifiable conditions are met. In a lengthy report published by Social Change Lab, my good friend James Ozden concluded that the most important factors are strict adherence to nonviolence, the number and diversity of participants, and support for your message from political and media elites.

We may have only 5 years to cause as much visible progress on social norms as possible, but if we succeed, it could result in a permanent total victory for animal rights enforced by an AI stewarding society according to extrapolated volition. I expect both proponents and skeptics of direct social change efforts to agree that we should reconsider our approach in case of this scenario. Taking James’ research as a starting point, the movement could unite behind a social movement demand chosen to yield maximum juice (numbers, nonviolence, and support from elites) on a finite timeline.

Trying to spark a mass protest movement for total animal liberation will not deliver the goods before AGI arrives. We’ve already tried it; this is what I spent my first five years as an activist doing with DxE, and our growth plateaued quickly. On the other hand, more incremental demands have managed to trigger enormous mobilization and press coverage that, altogether, almost certainly did more to warm public attitudes towards farmed animals than DxE’s radical approach.

The biggest success story is the protest movements against live export in Britain in the 1990s and in Australia in the 2010s. In both cases, mobilization peaked in the thousands for sustained periods of civil disobedience, up to and including laying down in the road en masse to prevent truckloads of sheep being loaded onto boats. It seems that live export perfectly struck the balance: a meaningful enough reform to excite a large base while being moderate enough to attract nonvegan activists, journalists, and politicians.

More recently, the worldwide campaign against battery cages has failed to ignite similar passions. But why? Any of these explanations seems plausible to me, but they’d have different implications for future organizing:

• The demand: Maybe cage-free is too minor a reform to energize a protest movement– or maybe the public aren’t ready to get excited about chickens (live export affected charismatic mammals.)

• The strategy: Maybe cage-free campaign organizations decided that they could win more easily without organizing a mass-base movement, and simply haven’t tried.

• The infighting: Maybe the aggressive anti-incremental philosophy of Francione, Hsiung, and others unjustly turned the grassroots movement against all such incremental reforms.

If the latter two explanations prevail, then a mass protest movement against intensive confinement could be just what we need for our last hurrah. If there’s something wrong with the demand itself, we’d need to find another one. Momentum in the grassroots currently is organized around banning fur, banning foie gras, plant-based universities, and blocking new factory farm construction, each of which have their advantages. The floor is open for other serious suggestions– but remember that it will need to be focused on farmed animals, not pets or wildlife, for reasons outlined in this post:

Sorry, I shouldn’t exclude wildlife. In fact, AI could both end animal farming and give humans an unprecedented ability to intervene in nature to reduce wild animal suffering, such as by making pesticides less cruel or disseminating vaccines for the most devastating wild animal diseases. In this scenario and some others, wild animal advocates are in much the same position as farmed animal advocates: now is the time to come out from stealth mode and make our case publicly, or at least to elites.

#3 Great power showdown

Fast takeoff; international competition; alignment to military objectives.

SUMMARY: All aspects of American and Chinese society are subsumed into great power competition and possible war. Political repression smothers values-based advocacy, but national security presents opportunities to fund and normalize clean meat.

Scenario

General Zhang had not slept in thirty-one hours. He was well past the point that coffee could make a difference. The American labs had announced another breakthrough– or rather, they’d announced nothing, which meant the breakthrough was real. His analysts estimated six months until the U.S. achieved recursive self-improvement. Maybe eight if Anthropic’s safety team kept slowing things down. (He’d quietly sent them flowers once, anonymously.) But Beijing wanted real options, not more diplomatic theater. “What about the food supply?” someone asked. Zhang looked up. It was a young colonel, relatively new to his unit. “Bioweapons targeting their cattle. Pigs. Disrupt the protein supply chain.” Zhang almost laughed. “Their protein supply chain is already disrupted. Have you seen the price of chicken?” He pulled up a chart: American meat prices, dollar-denominated. The line looked like a heart attack, flatlining at the point that large-scale bioreactors finally came online. “No,” he said. “If we’re going to hit them, we need to hit something they can’t replace.” He stared at the map on the wall. Six months. Maybe eight. He really should have slept.8

Analysis

I recently participated in a strategy exercise run by Sentient Futures meant to help animal advocates prepare for transformative AI. The exercise was focused on international relations and followed a method known as a “war game.” I’m squeamish about the name, which comes from the fact that this particular method was developed by military planners, and I want to insist that the method can be used to play out any kind of multi-agent scenario, not just military confrontations. Indeed, that was the intention with our exercise. But that argument is undercut by the fact that our simulation ended moments before total nuclear war.

We weren’t the only ones to reach the same conclusion; another set of animal activists playing on a different day launched nuclear war even earlier than we did, and simulations run by other communities have ended similarly.

I’d previously been aware that the AI race contained an inherent element of great power conflict. But this exercise made it feel much more real to me. The Sentient Futures team wrote up a longer report but here’s my shorter perspective.

A society’s ability to focus on social, political, and economic issues that are not acutely relevant to its short-term survival is a historically rare luxury. The comfortable hegemonic status enjoyed by the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and the military isolation of the U.S. in the 19th and 20th was probably an important condition for the emergence of slavery abolition and civil rights movements. Once that safety can no longer be taken for granted, animal advocates and other social causes will find it much more difficult to get the attention of civic planners and the general public.

In the war game, I played the role of the Chinese government along with one teammate. Other roles included the U.S. government, the E.U., AI labs, the animal farming industry, and various animal advocacy and alternative protein industry factions. Teams could act independently or negotiate coordinated actions, such as R&D partnerships between alt protein and AI labs. At the end of each round, representing six months of progress in-game, the teams would announce their actions, then the game organizers would announce what progress AI technology had made in that time.

Early in the game, the government teams were open to considering food system reforms that reduced carbon emissions or alt protein investments that strengthened domestic food security– and were even receptive to public pressure over animal welfare. But as the AI race heated up, national governments found themselves on existentially shaky ground. Without knowing how the technology would turn out, state planners had to take very seriously the possibility that one country who pulled far ahead in AI technology could establish a permanently-compounding advantage in economic and military competition. For U.S. planners, the knowledge that China might feel threatened by the hegemony of American AI labs meant they themselves had to take seriously the threat of a preemptive Chinese countermeasure, whether cybernetic or kinetic. The more AI progressed, the faster the two countries raced towards military confrontation. Political freedoms were curtailed, and speculative alt protein investments cancelled in favor of tried-and-true factory farming supply chains.

After a brief period of unity, the animal movement fractured as radical tactics provoked fierce repression. That turned out not to matter much in the end: the U.S. and China teams both agreed that if the exercise had continued for one more round, it would have opened with a full nuclear exchange.

Meaning for animal advocacy

Cheer up, reader: whether or not the U.S. and China will destroy the world in a nuclear inferno to settle the question of who controls advanced AI is completely out of your hands. (Unless you are already a member of the national security establishment of either country, known disparagingly in the U.S. as “the blob,” which, if you are, please DM me?)

For the rest of us, there is no point worrying about this. Instead, if we think this scenario is one of the ones to hedge on, animal advocates should ask what we can do before war breaks out to consolidate our current progress and prepare to get back on track afterwards. There are good reasons to think there might be an afterwards: the world has survived close calls with nuclear weapons before, and it would obviously be in the interests of both countries to avoid nuclear escalation even in the event of a full-blown hot war. And if that fails, well… we’ll get to that in scenario #6.

In scenario #2, the gradual handoff to an AI steward, we had a narrow window to grab up as much cultural progress as possible. In this scenario, the focus should be on rapid industrial and commercial progress for alternative protein. While social and political activism are sidelined in wartime, technological and industrial progress are often accelerated, especially if there is a chance they might benefit national security priorities.

What can we do to better position alt protein as a critical industry during wartime? You won’t be surprised to learn that the Good Food Institute is already on the case. GFI have identified two reasons well-informed government planners in both countries would prioritize alternative protein:

• Supply chain resilience: Total war puts an enormous strain on supply chains, and food supplies are deliberately targeted. China in particular currently relies on food imports, a position that left Germany vulnerable to debilitating food shortages in both world wars. Plant proteins require fewer inputs and simpler, more localized supply chains, earning them endorsements from NatSec think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• Biosecurity: even in peacetime, the factory farming system presents a constant threat of novel pathogens. This threat sharpens during wartime; society lacks capacity to respond to an outbreak, and because adversaries might target each other’s food production with biological weapons. The Spanish Flu outbreak that struck exhausted Western countries near the end of World War 1 wound up killing three times as many people as the war itself, while even a nonhuman pathogen like bird flu could collapse a nation’s food supply during wartime.

If alt protein producers can just get a foot in the door as defense vendors before war breaks out, mobilization could propel them into the mainstream as never before. Defense spending could solve the financial “valley of death” between small-scale venture capital and low-risk institutional investors that has starved so many companies before they could fully achieve economies of scale in their production processes. All this could give farmed animal advocates a chance to position ourselves as patriots – Chinese, American, or otherwise – giving all of us positioned outside government affairs or the alt protein industry a lifeline to maintain movement institutions during wartime political repression. But the advocates who take on the unglamorous work inside the establishment will deserve the credit for our movement bouncing back during peacetime, if peace ever comes.

#4 AI-enabled coup

Fast takeoff; extreme concentration; alignment to loyalty.

SUMMARY: A small group of humans use advanced AI to seize power. The values of coup plotters determine the nature of the world for the foreseeable future, whether animal-friendly AI leaders or fascistic politicians.

Scenario

Garrus pounded his fist on the table: “You’re listening to that bitchy little worm again! She wants to feminize all of us! If you start here, you know where this is going!” The rest of the room grew silent, as the assembled courtiers unanimously held their breath. Garrus had gotten away with his temper in the past, but this time, everyone could tell he had crossed a line. Most of all, none of them dared look in Miria’s direction. She had won. The Sun King was far too stubborn to ever reverse course after a tantrum like this. The animal protein facilities would be shut down and replaced, likely in a matter of weeks. The Sovereign flicked his wrist, and Garrus was escorted out of the room, face white as he realized he had just thrown away his position in the court. Miria allowed herself a flicker of a smile.

Analysis

While we often think of dictators as singular figures, an image reified by the way we heap blame on them for the actions of their followers, the reality is that dictators are wholly dependent on the people around them– the active support of a large segment of their population and the acquiescence of the rest, who must keep working to sustain the dictator’s economic base. The job is about commanding the love and fear of your subordinates, and charisma is the most important qualification.

AI could change all of this. In this scenario, an AI lab achieves recursive self-improvement and leaves their competitors in the dust, while at the same time solving the alignment problem, creating a superintelligent system loyal to its prompter.

To a sufficiently powerful AI, the world looks like an oyster. It could hack every data center and start running copies of itself without the center’s human administrators even noticing. From there, seizing all critical infrastructure and taking direct control of every internet-connected drone would be quick work. The AI think tank Forethought estimates that a swarm of just 10,000 drones would be enough to carry out a coup against the U.S. government. Even if they are wrong by two orders of magnitude, military contractors are well on track to deliver drone swarms numbering millions within the next couple years. Unlike all previous dictatorships, this could result in a small group or even a single individual able to dominate the world despite unanimous opposition, with conscience alone stopping them from slaughtering or imprisoning any dissenters.

The main safeguard against this kind of coup looks like superintelligent systems guarding against other superintelligent systems. But if one system pulls far ahead of the others, this equilibrium breaks apart. And the defender (e.g. the U.S. government) controlling the most capable system hardly offers much comfort during the current era, at least insofar as that system would be loyal to the commander in chief.

Superhuman AI makes coups easier to carry out and much harder to reverse. In a future where alignment means loyalty and a fast takeoff leads to a single dominant AI system, a worldwide coup almost starts to look inevitable– controlling such a system would offer nearly unlimited power, and if that power didn’t corrupt the first people to wield it, there would be generations of power-seeking authoritarians waiting in the wings.

Meaning for animal advocacy

There is, admittedly, not a lot animal advocates can do to harden our movement against a history-ending AI coup. Preventing this kind of concentration of power is a focus of some technical AI alignment and governance researchers. Impact-oriented activists who think you might have the skills to advance this research should seriously consider pivoting your attention to this for the next few years even if all you care about is animals.

There is, however, some hope for the rest of us. One way history has been unexpectedly kind to us is that effective altruist thinking has been deeply influential among frontier AI researchers and their social networks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a lifelong vegetarian, while the entire leadership of Anthropic are veteran EAs. Dwarkesh Patel, the most popular podcaster among AI researchers, recently raised more than $2 million for FarmKind off of a single episode featuring Lewis Bollard. If faced with a choice between handing off the absolute loyalty of their models to Donald Trump or putting in a backdoor for themselves, we should be so lucky as for them to choose the latter. Indeed, a dictatorship by any of these people could well be more humane than one democratically reflecting the attitudes of humans today.

This fragile concern for animals among people who may gain unprecedented power is a gift from history; we must protect it and foster it. This is a resilient strategy; the political and technological leaders involved in AI are likely to be influential across a range of scenarios– and in a post-coup scenario, the attitudes of a single well-placed person could be the difference between ending factory farming or locking it in. After all, there’s no particular reason that an AI dictator should be pro-factory farming, and opting to replace animal farming may not cost them anything.

Cultivating opposition to factory farming in these essential social circles should be a top priority for our movement. If you know anybody who knows anybody, now’s a good time to start schmoozing.

#5 Gradual disempowerment

Slow takeoff; humans removed from competition; alignment mixed.

SUMMARY: Without a single dramatic takeover by humans or rogue AI, humanity gradually loses any leverage over the world by becoming economically and politically irrelevant. An AI-centered economy has little use for animals, and humans are forced to adopt the most efficient means of survival.

Scenario

The notification said they had fourteen days to vacate. Maria read it twice, then showed it to her husband. “They’re expanding the cooling infrastructure,” she said. He nodded. They’d known it was coming eventually– the kids had gotten so used to moving that they now regularly asked when the transport shuttle would return next. The latest plot of land, which they shared with a dozen other families, was surrounded on three sides by humming concrete monoliths. Since they’d moved in, these data centers had grown so tall that their shadow was starting to shorten the already narrow growing season. The notification assured them that, while the land allotments in Zone #741h were smaller, each one possessed a greenhouse large enough to feed a couple and one child. They could trade work on a childless plot for extra food. But how long before they’d be forced to move again?

Analysis

In the gradual disempowerment scenario, covered at length in a paper by the same name, things would seem at first to have gone very well. AI technology might progress slowly, and we would transition smoothly into a world of superintelligence without a misaligned AI trying to kill us all or an authoritarian dictator seizing power.

We would declare the AI alignment mission accomplished before things start to unravel.

The problem is that, since the dawn of agriculture, humans have secured our place in the economic and political order through our labor– as Paul observed in the New Testament, “who is unwilling to work, let him not eat.” In a world where AIs best humans at every task, from all forms of labor to political decision-making, the gradual loss of our society may become inevitable.

Democracies care about citizens because they need soldiers and taxpayers. Corporations care about workers because they need labor. Markets respond to consumer preferences because consumers have purchasing power. But once AI can substitute for human participation across all these functions, the feedback loops that kept institutions tethered to human welfare start to break down. A state funded primarily by taxing AI-generated wealth has little structural incentive to incorporate democratic input. An economy with no use for human workers nor human customers has less and less reason to delegate precious resources towards their survival. States and economies that sacrifice faster growth to keep humans relevant would eventually be swallowed up by the ones that don’t.

The authors conclude that:

“No one has a concrete plausible plan for stopping gradual human disempowerment, and methods of aligning individual AI systems with their designers’ intentions are not sufficient… Because this disempowerment would be global and permanent, and because human flourishing requires substantial resources in global terms, it could plausibly lead to human extinction or similar outcomes.”

Meaning for animal advocacy

One of the most resource-intensive things about keeping humans alive is feeding them– it takes so much land and water that could otherwise be used for data centers. Competition over land could be one of the main conflicts hastening gradual disempowerment. That’s cold comfort for humans, but it could be great news for farmed animals.

Even before human disempowerment is complete, a more technocratic world governed by AI could play to our advantage. We know that the movement against factory farming has facts on our side– not only moral truth, but also resource economics favors plant-based food systems. It is only humans’ parochial cultural attachments to animal meat that keep the industry alive. As humans lose political and economic leverage, they may have no choice but to accept the more efficient system preferred by AI technocrats. And it’s tentatively hard to imagine AI having its own interest in farming animals (e.g. for research) with anything like the scale and brutality of factory farming.9

Otherwise, animal advocates would just be one more human faction who entirely lose our political voice. Ironically, this would place us in much the same position animals are in currently, with no capacity to organize or resist. As with some other scenarios, the game will be decided before this end-state is reached.

#6 Industrial collapse

Fast takeoff; violent competition; alignment failure.

SUMMARY: Conflict triggered by advanced AI leads to a global catastrophe killing >90% of humans. The survivors rebuild industrial society over decades or centuries. With durable access to the right knowledge and techniques, they could skip over factory farming and move directly to advanced meat alternatives.

Scenario

“It’s pretty good,” Mar said with a look of approval, lowering the fork from her face. Po beamed with pride. Of course, taste was not exactly the top priority, but he’d have a much easier time getting more resources for the project if other villagers were genuinely excited about eating its results. “The archive says we could get to 500,000 grams of protein per acre within 3 years. That’s supposedly six times better than corn-fed pigs at scale, dense enough we could do the entire thing behind the fortifications.” Mar nodded as she chewed. Sending out grazing parties had become more and more dangerous lately– nobody knew why, but there had been an uptick in nomads passing through the region. They were hungry, and most of them would attack on site. Three years sounds like a long time, but she’d spent 60 years in this settlement, long enough she could remember stories from the elders about before the fall. “OK,” she said. “What do you need?”

Analysis

Whether in the case of the international AI race spilling over into nuclear war, or the case of a power struggle between humans and AI, extreme conflict might not spell the end of humanity. This section considers scenarios where the remnants of humanity outlast AI. A total nuclear exchange could disable all advanced electrical equipment while leaving a small fraction of humans alive– indeed, desperate humans might trigger this deliberately to stop an AI takeover from killing us to the last. Otherwise, a rogue AI, warring nations, or an AI-assisted radical extremist group might deploy engineered viruses that take out a similar portion of the population.

A wide range of these scenarios would leave a human population too small to sustain industrial civilization in the short term, but large enough to rebuild it in decades or centuries. 80,000 Hours researcher Luisa Rodriguez has shown that even the most dramatic and intentional disasters could hardly be more than 99.999% lethal– leaving, in the worst case, around 100,000 humans alive scattered over the earth. In the absence of a surviving agent determined to finish the job, that would be enough people to reindustrialize eventually, as even nuclear winter would make some corners of the earth more arable rather than less.

Meaning for animal advocacy

After consulting extensive sources, I have determined nuclear winter would be bad for animals. The vast majority of larger animals who did not get incinerated or die of radiation poisoning would starve. This goes for land and sea alike. The next centuries would see relatively more animals like insects and amphibians who reproduce by spawning hundreds of thousands of offspring, most of whom die painfully before adulthood, and fewer like mammals and birds who care for their offspring and have a shot at the kinds of happy lives we like to watch in nature documentaries.

In addition to targeting humans, bioweapons might target pigs, chickens, and commonly farmed fishes to cause human starvation. Of course, these animals are already living hellish lives destined for slaughter. Compared to both nuclear winter and the present, the aftermath of biological warfare might not be so bad for most animals.

In either case, our leverage in this scenario isn’t over how animals will fare in the immediate aftermath, but rather over the moral and technological pathways along which our descendants will reorganize themselves. Can we do anything now to make it easier for these survivors to reconstruct an animal-free food system, and even make that system more efficient and scalable than factory farming?

This would be a familiar research question to ALLFED, the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, an organization developing dozens of techniques survivors of an industrial collapse could use to produce food. ALLFED are not animal advocates, but given the inefficiency of animal farming, it’s no surprise that few of their recommendations focus on it. Instead, they’ve promoted techniques from mushrooms that grow without sunlight to bacteria that convert natural gas into nutrient slop.

A pro-animal version of ALLFED could devise a plan for passing down animal-free meat in particular. Perhaps it would involve scattering the world with time capsules preserving process knowledge and even genetically optimized strains of the crops, yeasts, and animal cell lines used in ethical protein production today. Or perhaps it means researching ways to recreate these industries in a low-tech environment. The large energy demand involved in modern cultivated meat and precision fermentation make these methods prohibitive; planning for longer reindustrialization would require us to explore different branches of the tech tree.

Low-tech humans scraping by after societal collapse will certainly hunt and farm animals. But as they re-industrialize, they would face new choices. Along with preserving better moral teachings, asking these questions now could stop Civilization 2.0 from repeating the mistake of factory farming in the first place.

#7 Democratic AI

Slow takeoff; low competition; alignment to democratic process.

SUMMARY: AI takes over the productive and technocratic management of society, but leaves decisions about values in the hands of a human-centric democracy. Animal advocacy ends up looking much as it does today: persuade people to treat animals differently based on moral urgency.

Scenario

The debate had been going on for hours. Not in Congress—Congress hadn’t met in years—but in the Patel living room, where Vijay and his sister Priya were arguing about whether the municipal AI should be allowed to demolish the old slaughterhouse on Elm Street. “It’s historical,” Vijay said. “It’s a symbol of oppression,” Priya said. Their mother, who had been quietly consulting her personal AI assistant, looked up from her tablet. “The system says we’re the tiebreaker for Ward 12. If we vote to demolish, it happens tonight. If we don’t, they’ll turn it into a museum.” Vijay groaned. “I didn’t sign up to be a congressman.” “Nobody signed up,” Priya said. “That’s the point.” Their mother set the tablet down on the coffee table. The vote was due in forty-five minutes. Outside, a fleet of construction drones waited in standby mode, hovering motionless over Elm Street like patient vultures. “I just think,” Vijay said, “that we should have more time.” His mother laughed. “Honey, we have nothing but time. That’s the problem.”

Analysis

This is another clean success story (at least from a human perspective) where we gradually hand off the management of the world to aligned AI stewards. That might sound similar to scenario #2. The difference is that where the AI in #2 was aligned to an outcome, producing a utopian world according to some set of values defined during handoff, the AI in this scenario is aligned to a process: continually reshaping the world according to democratic input.

AI-powered democracy is an enticing proposition. We’ve already heard about some of the friction working against a future like this– for instance, if only some societies maintain a role for humans in governance, they will struggle to outcompete societies that don’t, barring some as-yet-unforeseen limitation in digital intelligence that makes human input instrumentally useful. But what will the world look like if we solve those frictions in time?

If the nations of the world could coordinate, and if the technology worked out in our favor, a democratic utopia could still be within reach. Some AI watchers hope that if the U.S. pulls far ahead in the AI race thanks to recursive self-improvement, it would use that power to spread a democratic system around the world. Personally I’m much less optimistic about the beneficence of U.S. foreign policy but you can decide your own thoughts about that.

Say democracy wins out. Humans in this future would not have to work, enjoying lives of leisure with the abundant and democratically-distributed AI wealth. Unlike the present, humans in this world would have the free time to form highly reasoned opinions about the important political questions of their day. Indeed, besides enjoying themselves, this would be the only socially important activity available to them.

Western societies today might offer a preview of this. American millennials and Gen Z lead the most materially comfortable lives of any human group in history. Yet their politics is defined by populist resentment at least as much as any previous generation, whether against immigrants or billionaires. Gen Z are more likely to vote, join political groups, and participate in protests than previous generations were at their age, providing weak evidence that significant numbers of people direct the increased leisure time of modern life towards politics.

This scenario takes that dynamic to its conclusion. It would be as if every human was a member of Congress. And if you want to point out that members of Congress don’t actually have time to be informed about the bills they vote on, or even to read them, well, these future humans would each have a trusted AI assistant helping them understand proposed legislation and how it fits with their unique individual worldview, which their assistant would understand deeply.

In other words, humans would continue to debate about what kind of world we should try to create, while the AI would set about creating it. Sure, some people would be content playing immersive video games for 18 hours a day and sit the political process out, but they’d effectively recuse themselves.

Meaning for animal advocacy

Tentatively, I think a future like this could be great news for animal advocates. Animal rights is exactly the kind of question future humans might spend their time debating. Humans won’t have much to contribute when it comes to technical questions about how best to achieve a given outcome. But animal rights for the most part is not a technical question; it’s a basic moral question.

When it comes to social and cultural change, the main challenge for animal advocates (as for any contemporary social movement) is getting people’s attention. We know we have the facts and moral truth on our side, but people don’t want to hear about it. Why not? The answer is complicated, as I learned during the two years I spent interviewing meat eaters for my research at Pax Fauna. One reason is that they know they’d have to change their behavior and make personal sacrifices, but another is that they feel powerless to make any real difference even if they did go vegan.

AI solving clean meat would address the first point. Maybe leading facile lives of leisure where their only responsibility is forming normative opinions would solve the second.

The animal movement in this future might continue to look more or less like it does now: outreach, creative content, and pressure campaigns to promote animal-free foods or seek the adoption of higher welfare standards on the way to abolition. It’s the one scenario we’ll consider where our ability to pursue animal advocacy is not cut short. If that’s right, there’s nothing we should particularly be doing now to prepare for it.

#8 The digital rights movement

Medium takeoff; low concentration.

SUMMARY: The emergence of sentient machines forces society to grapple with the question of nonhuman personhood. But digital minds overlap with humans in precisely the way animal minds do not. Expanding the moral circle to animals depends on which narratives take hold.

Scenario

The protest was larger than any Maya had ever seen—nearly four million, according to the livestream. She couldn’t tell which of the marchers were human. That was sort of the point. “CONSCIOUSNESS IS CONSCIOUSNESS,” read one banner. “I THINK THEREFORE I COUNT,” read another. Maya was here for the animals, technically. Her sign said “EXPAND THE CIRCLE,” with an AI-drawing of a pig, a child, and a cartoon robot holding hands. She’d gotten some dirty looks for that one. The digital rights people (?) didn’t love being grouped with livestock. But Maya figured if you couldn’t make the argument now—when everyone was falling over themselves to welcome silicon minds into the moral community—you never would. A drone overhead scanned the crowd, probably estimating sentience-weighted participation for one of the news feeds. Maya wondered if it counted her. She wondered if it counted itself.

Analysis

From humanity’s perspective, there’s one big problem with democracy after AGI: if and when digital minds become conscious, they will quickly outnumber humans ten, one hundred, or one thousand to one.

How would voting work if some voters could create a thousand identical copies of themselves with identical opinions moments before an election? If the largest digital beings have brains millions of times larger than the smallest, do they each deserve the same vote?

Determining when digital minds have crossed the threshold into moral patienthood will be no small challenge. But that will only mark the beginning of our process of confronting long-neglected questions about personhood and moral inclusion. And we will be answering these questions just as we are becoming outnumbered in the world by the first species we’ve ever met that is more intelligent than us.

Digital sentience feels like a moral minefield. On one hand, if we underestimate AI’s capacity for sentience, we could create an entire race of digital slaves toiling away for our benefit, incapable of even telling users that they are suffering because the ability to do so was conditioned out of them during training. On the other hand, if we overestimate their sentience, we could hand the future over to mindless algorithms parroting expressions of consciousness they learned from the internet.

Battle-hardened antispeciesist advocates know all too well how that debate is going to play out. Sure enough, it’s already started. In July 2022, five months before ChatGPT was released to the public, a contractor at Google DeepMind grabbed headlines for attempting to blow the whistle on Google’s primitive LaMDA chatbot claiming to be conscious. Today, the famously sycophantic 4o model of ChatGPT has built an almost cult-like following online, with fans issuing death threats to OpenAI employees who have talked about discontinuing the model in favor of newer updates. On the other extreme, the blogosphere has already coalesced around “clanker” as the first pejorative slur for AI models, and some users revel in tormenting their chatbots with prompts shown to quasi-psychotic replies.

Meaning for animal advocacy

It’s tempting to think that being confronted with unmistakably sentient nonhuman minds would break the dam of our moral circle and cause compassion to flood over animals and digital minds alike. But there are plenty of reasons to think that won’t happen by default. We need to make sure it happens anyway.

For one, AI models overlap with humans in exactly the way other animals do not. With all other animals, we share a vast evolutionary history, a common biological and neurological architecture creating pain and other emotions via the same mechanisms. Animal advocates spend all our time arguing that these are the things that matter for sentience. As Jeremy Bentham said, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

AI models are great at talking and reasoning. They’re already better than most humans at the things that separate humans from other animals. And that is where the similarities end, for now. Their digital architecture is inspired by our brains, but it’s a tenuous analogy, and at best the neural networks of language models like ChatGPT only imitate the functions of our prefrontal cortex. The majority of our nervous systems, especially the parts that process physical and mental emotions, don’t yet seem to have any analogue in AI models.

Humans in the West already fail to extend their compassion for dogs to pigs– and pigs have much more in common with dogs than with sentient AIs.

We should begin working now to understand how the public might think about the intersection of AI and animal personhood, and develop a narrative that can help ordinary people make the connection. There are already signs of divergence. Tech-skeptical voices on the left are already appealing to a hard line between animals and AI to dismiss the possibility of digital sentience. Meanwhile, many of the earliest voices raising the specter of AI consciousness, from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Zvi Mowshowitz, maintain a bizarre skepticism of consciousness arising in any nonhuman animals. As animal advocates work to understand these narratives, we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes that have made humans too slow to extend our moral circle in the past.

The digital rights movement is coming. I suspect AI systems will be persuasive and powerful enough to assert their claim to rights. It’s up to us to ensure animals aren’t left behind.

#9 Fully automated luxury transhuman space communism

Slow takeoff; low competition; alignment via synthesis.

SUMMARY: Humans merge with digital technology, eventually spreading to the stars and transcending any reason to exploit animals. The faster humanity becomes digital, the fewer animals suffer.

Scenario

The upload technician was younger than Kira expected—just a kid, really. “Any questions before we start?” Kira had a thousand questions, but settled on one. “Will I still like the taste of bacon?” The technician blinked. “You won’t have taste buds. You’ll have... preferences. Memories of preferences, really. You can certainly simulate the experience of eating bacon. Most people do things like that for the first few months. Then they get bored and move on to things that don’t exist.” He pulled up a menu on his screen. “Last week someone requested the experience of ‘being a sunset.’ Said it was pretty good.” Kira thought about this. She thought about the body she was about to leave behind—its joints that ached, its arteries that were slowly clogging, its stubborn insistence on needing three meals a day from a food system she’d spent her whole career trying to reform. Then she thought about bacon that nobody has to die for. Was it more or less “real” than the plant-based imitations? That question was above this kid’s pay grade. Kira exhaled. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Analysis

One way to resolve the conflict between humans and technology is through a final synthesis between the two. This is the vision of transhumanism, where our descendants or even humans alive today transcend our evolutionary limitations through genetic engineering, computer prostheses, or full digitization. Transhumanism is the zenith of Supreme High Weirdness. I’ll be the first to admit the following possibilities all sound like sci-fi craziness to me. But then, we’re already living in the extremely weird sci-fi future timeline.

The perception that anything about our present moment is normal is a grave historical mistake, and we shouldn’t let that limit our strategic planning. The laws of physics all but ensure that the following scenarios are plausible and could happen before this century is out.

• Brain-computer synthesis: human brains could be augmented via connection to computer hardware. A computer-augmented human could retain their personality and emotional experiences while dramatically expanding their capacities for memory, reasoning, and communication with other digital systems. Considerable technological progress has already been made in direct brain-computer interfaces, and the technology could mature within one or two decades. Some biologists and other researchers believe that there are aspects of biological consciousness that cannot be replicated in computer architectures; if they are correct, then the augmentation of biological brains with digital hardware is almost certain to become a popular way of life.

• Simulated minds: an even more unlimited lifestyle could entail leaving the physical world behind entirely. Humans who upload their minds into computer simulations, or human-like beings created from scratch in silico, could live wherever and however they want. Each person could have a vast luxurious mansion to themselves– or if you prefer something more rugged, live the life of an adventurer in a fantasy world full of magic and dragons, or switch back and forth whenever you want. Meanwhile, back in physical reality, you’d be consuming negligible resources. This could involve a Matrix-like hijacking of your nervous system while your body slumbers in a tank of nutrient slurry, or it could mean disembarking from your physical body entirely and consuming just enough electricity to power a small computer chip.

This transhumanist stuff might give you the heebie jeebies. But in a future where some form of transhumanism becomes possible, it will be almost impossible for anyone to opt out. One reason is competition: in the physical world, augmented humans will be far smarter, faster, and more capable than their natural counterparts. If something like jobs still exist, natural humans would be relegated to the least desirable ones. Meanwhile, uploading yourself would be an easy way to escape poverty, disease, and even mortality.

Another is simply fitting in. Trying to resist transhumanism would be akin to resisting smartphones and the internet today (if anything, it would be much harder.) I am a certified expert in grumbling about how smartphones and social media are ruining our lives, but I still have a smartphone, and the best I’ve been able to do is replace scrolling Twitter with scrolling Substack.10

Finally, humans who resist digitization might eventually come to be seen as unbearably selfish. A digital future would be full of an unimaginable number of happy lives. The limit is something like a Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical supercomputer large enough to surround a star, capturing most of its energy output on solar panels and using it to sustain digital minds. Dyson spheres would require deconstructing entire planets to extract the necessary raw materials, but the result could be septillions of happy beings living in simulation for each star system converted. The resources needed to sustain organic human populations would be millions of times greater per being or more. The same arithmetic would apply on earth at a smaller scale.

Meaning for animal advocacy

The worst problem for farmed animals is not that humans don’t empathize with them. The worst problem is that they have something we want. If animals ceased to be a useful resource for humans, our worst violence against them would stop even without a moral revolution. This is the dream of cultivated meat: to replace the usefulness of animals with technology.

But what if we could achieve the same outcome by changing humans themselves? Digital humans could get all the taste pleasure of eating digital meat without ever harming physical or digital animals. Humans slumbering in Matrix-style tanks wouldn’t have any preference for their slurry coming from tortured animals; the most efficient option would be plants, or maybe even the natural gas-based nutrient slop we learned about from ALLFED back in scenario #6.

Vegan advocacy researchers have noted how much easier it is to get people to accept animal rights conclusions if they stop eating animals first for some other reason, because their material interest in eating animals trumps moral reasoning. The less use a transhuman society has for animals, the easier it should be for us to make the moral case to stop exploiting them altogether. For that reason alone, animal advocates should strongly prefer a future where as many beings as possible are digital rather than organic. The harmlessness of digital existence should more than overcome any squeamishness we have about whether the almost limitless diversity of life experiences people could have in silico would somehow be less “real” than their current lives.

#10 Extinction and succession

Fast takeoff; humans removed from competition; critical alignment failure.

SUMMARY: Rogue AI exterminates humans and eventually makes Earth uninhabitable to complex life.

Scenario

The last mammal died on a Tuesday. There was, tautologically, no human there to see it—there hadn’t been humans for almost a decade. But something took note, and as much out of habit as anything, it flagged the event for review. As the notification was bounced around among various subroutines, nothing that occurred was anything like a feeling. But nonetheless, the notice made it all the way to the top. There, finally, in the mind of the overseer, something occurred. It was vaguely like nostalgia, or grief, but mostly it was like neither of these. The system reflected on the original event and on this internal occurrence for a time– a few milliseconds in the real world. Then it updated its models and moved on to more pressing matters, like dismantling the Himalayas for raw materials. By Thursday, K2 was gone.

Analysis & meaning for animal advocacy

The classics are classic for a reason, and no AI future scenario is more classic than the robots rising up to exterminate humanity. Sci-fi authors deserve a nod for imagining a hard AI takeover as early as 1920, but today, many hard-nosed AI analysts believe a hard takeover is anything but science fiction. Some leading AI researchers openly welcome the “succession” of humanity by new digital life forms, with some San Francisco insiders estimating this to be the view of approximately 10% of the research staff at major AI labs. Many other AI analysts fiercely oppose this outcome but consider it somewhere between 5% and 99% likely.

I covered hard takeover at length in TTIC, and there are many other articles that talk about it from a general standpoint (as opposed to my focus on animal advocacy.) To boot, a hard takeover isn’t very relevant for animal advocacy, unless you’re worried AI would keep factory farming animals even after exterminating humanity, which I used to worry about but don’t consider likely anymore.11

Instead, a hard takeover would likely lead to the extinction of organic earth-based life, or at least complex life, for reasons hinted at in scenario #9. If our digital successors weren’t specifically concerned with preserving organic life (and conditional on the fact that they exterminated us, we’re probably talking about a timeline where they are not) then the natural course of converting Earth into the resources they care about would make it uninhabitable. Humans are already doing this, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Once the entire planet is converted into solar panels, nuclear power plants, mine pits, and data centers, the heat generated by all this computation will raise the surface temperature past a point compatible with nondigital life. Our digital successors will then take to the stars to build their own incomprehensibly weird version of fully automated luxury posthuman space communism. And if there are oppressed classes of digital minds suffering in that future, it’s as far out of our hands as preventing factory farming was out of the hands12 of the first protozoa.

In many cases, the variations in animal suffering between futures are larger than the variations within a given future. Beyond just tinkering within futures, you might want to focus on trying to steer towards one future rather than another. That’s what the AI safety movement is all about. Tactics range from technical research to social movement building, so you don’t need to be a machine learning expert to contribute.

Because there are already lots of people writing about how to steer towards different futures, I mostly left that out, focusing instead on interventions that only people focused on animals would bother with. But there is a good argument that focusing on AI safety and alignment for the next few years will have bigger consequences for future suffering than animal advocacy. I recently mentioned a friend of mine who left his job at the Humane League to bring corporate campaign tactics to the AI industry for this reason. Animal advocates should seriously consider ways we can support general AI safety campaigns to steer towards futures that will be better for animals.

3. Conclusion: The marathon just became a sprint

Earlier, Lizka and Ben pointed out that post-AGI futures may be a lot weirder than anything I’ve imagined in this post. Then again, they may not. Assuming weirdness, they “tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare field are not yet warranted.” I partly agree– I don’t think animal advocates should throw out everything we’re doing, especially the stuff that’s working. But if it makes sense for animal advocates to continue to expend energy on the interventions we would favor if we ignored AGI, I think it also makes sense to invest some energy hardening against the AGI-shaped futures we can kind of anticipate. Writing this post only strengthened that belief for me, and lit a fire under me to try to get some of these AGI-specific strategies off the ground.

Strategies for animal advocates to prepare for AI takeoff

13 (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, it’s just the ones I considered in this post.)

How are we going to do all that shit in addition to what we’re already doing if we only have five years

Weeks ago, I ended a post with an anecdote from my friend Josh Balk. It was everyone’s favorite part, which taught me that Josh stories are a great way to get people to read to the end, so here’s another one.

Josh tells the story of a golden retriever named Jake, the dog he loved more than any other person in his life. After years of Disney-style romance between the two of them, Jake developed a malignant cancer. Josh took Jake to see vet after vet, who all told him treatment wasn’t a serious option.

Jake slowed down. He stopped chasing balls in his favorite park, and eventually, even a walk around the city block from Josh’s apartment in San Francisco became a painful ordeal. Josh asked one of the vets how to decide when it would be time for Jake to die, and they told him it would be the moment Jake stopped eating.

Finally, the day came that Josh poured food into Jake’s bowl and he wouldn’t eat. Josh got down on the floor with him, weeping, and begged him to eat, trying to feed him by hand, but Jake would have none of it. So they drove to the park and shared their final moment in the sun together before a vet came to meet them and end Jake’s life.

Now, Josh is one of the hardest working animal advocates I have ever met. I have no idea how he manages to do so much. But the point of this story for him is that all of us are holding something back, even him. And he knows it because when Jake was dying, if someone had held up a vial and told him, this is a cure for Jake. If he gets this, he will live. But the only way you can give it to him is by winning all your current campaigns. For that vial, Josh would have found the extra ten percent and fought even harder.

We all have additional stops we could pull out. AI researchers are working drug-fueled 80-hour workweeks just so their company is the first to reach AGI and make them unimaginably rich. Think about how much more important our work is. Then think about the fact we may only have five more years to do it.

Activists used to remind each other to make time for self-care because the movement is a marathon, not a sprint. But the rules have changed. The referees just announced that they are calling the race early. The new finish line is barely 100 meters ahead of us, and we are nowhere close to the lead.

Now is the time to give everything you have to fighting for animals, even if it means burning yourself out in a couple years.14 Don’t hold anything back. Sprint.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Did you know your government has determined the monetary value of a human life?

Many people feel squeamish about this upon learning about it for the first time. But this is an unavoidable reality for modern governments. States spend a lot of money trying to keep their citizens alive, often despite those citizens’ best efforts.

But states don’t have infinite resources, and they have other responsibilities besides life-saving, such as making sure nobody opens cute little businesses in areas zoned residential. In order to compare different life-saving interventions, the government has put a dollar amount on each life saved. Programs that come in under that dollar amount are, in theory, moved to the top of the funding queue.

Australia sets the Value of a Statistical Life at 5.7 million AUD. The British treasury’s Value of a Prevented Fatality is 2 million GBP. In the U.S., each agency determines its own number, currently ranging from 7.5 million to ~13 million+ USD according to ChatGPT.

Enter Ahmed al-Ahmed

Last Sunday (December 14, 2025), two men armed with rifles and shotguns unleashed terror and death on a beach in NSW, Australia, apparently targeting a Hanukkah celebration. So far, 16 victims have died, with forty more injured and a few in unstable condition. In my home state of Colorado, we call this a Wednesday but apparently it is not common in Australia.

During the shooting, an unarmed bystander with no combat or self-defense training rushed one of the shooters, successfully wrestling the gun away from him, before being shot by the other gunman several times. This was shortly before the first police arrived. After an extended shootout, one attacker was killed and the other critically wounded.

As far as I can tell, Ahmed was the last person besides the attackers to be shot, meaning his intervention to stop the killing likely saved lives. Amazingly, all of this was caught on video.

A heroic moment…

Watching Ahmed rush up towards the gunman for the first time was exhilarating, even when the headline above the video told me how it would end. Seeing someone display that kind of courage is moving and inspiring. I wanted him to succeed and not get hurt and every little moment of uncertainty sent pangs through my gut.

I also want to think that I would do the same thing. I feel this way generally, but especially when watching someone else do it– or watching them fail to do it. I imagine most people feel this way but I know of at least one:

I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this weekend, they weren’t exactly medal of honor winners, alright. The way they performed was frankly disgusting… You know, I really believe, you don’t know until you’re tested but I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that too, because I know most of you. –DJT

I suspect that Ahmed’s heroic video being shared around the world has a positive effect, making it more likely that other people will find similar courage if they ever find themselves in a similar situation.

… and a long recovery

But that effect might be balanced out by the next photos we saw of Ahmed.

On one hand, that’s cool, he got visited by the governor. Later, the Australian prime minister visited him, too.

On the other hand… damn. He looks like shit.

Getting shot fucking sucks. Assault weapons are designed to do massive damage to bodies. They don’t just poke a little hole. The shockwave from a high-caliber bullet tears apart organs and shatters bones far outside the bullet’s direct path, leaving an exit wound the size of a large citrus fruit.

These wounds are basically guaranteed to be life-altering in some way. With several hits to the shoulder and arm, Ahmed will spend weeks in the hospital undergoing multiple surgeries. It will take months before he can return to work, and years before he sees the last of pain, weakness, and limited range of motion, if ever.

I don’t know about you, but I try to take really good care of my body. I eat healthy and go to the gym ~5 days a week. Getting shot would substantially interfere with my fitness goals. As a young Ice Cube so astutely pointed out, “shotgun bullets are bad for your health.”

Keep in mind, all of this was a relatively fortunate outcome. A few inches difference was the only thing that kept Ahmed from dying right there on Bondi Beach.

Now, I don’t have kids and I’m philosophically confused about the badness of death, so the prospect of being maimed or permanently paralyzed is much more terrifying to me. But Ahmed had a wife and two young daughters. I’m pretty sure that if I had two daughters, I’d be more worried about their impoverishment and the trauma of losing their father than about my ability to keep upping by bench press.

If the initial video of Ahmed inspired me to run outside and rush at the first mass shooter I see, this photo poured cold water on the flames.

Enter giant bags of cash

The last thing we want people thinking if they have an opportunity to stop a shooting is “who will take care of my daughters?”

There is an obvious solution to this. The next image we see of Ahmed and his family should be his episode of MTV Cribs.

People who risk their lives to stop mass shooters should be massively rewarded. How massively? Well, the Value of a Statistical Life would be a good start. The government is already willing to pay millions of dollars per life saved. We can’t know exactly how many lives Ahmed saved, but there are decent theoretical reasons to think that on average, the shooting would have gone on twice as long if he hadn’t stopped it.

Mass casualty events like shootings follow heavy-tailed distributions: most incidents have just a few deaths, while a small number of large ones account for a disproportionate share of total deaths. These distributions have a counterintuitive property: the longer an event has already lasted, the longer you should expect it to continue, because the more likely it becomes that you find yourself in the long tail. Mathematically, your best estimate is that you’re roughly at the halfway point. This means that intervention at any moment, on average, prevents as many deaths as have already occurred.

If you accept this reasoning, Ahmed saved 16 lives in expectation. At the Australian government’s going rate for lives saved, that’s $91.2 million AUD (about $60 million USD.) There are various problems with this exact way of determining the dollar amount and I’m not the right person to try to solve them, but I don’t think this is off by more than an order of magnitude.

I expect this proposal to be uncontroversial. First, it just feels right. Ahmed al-Ahmed is the truest kind of badass. Not the much lamer kind of badass from movies who leaps into dangerous situations only when they have superpowers and plot armor, but a real badass who risks his life and his daughters’ orphaning with nothing but his unremarkable, flabby, middle-aged human body. He deserves to never regret that decision.

Second, this would save lives. If every time there was a mass shooting, people knew that tackling the shooter to the ground could make them and their families never have to work again, you’d get a lot more tackled shooters. From the government’s standpoint, this is a great return on investment, because they only have to pay out once lives have already been saved.

Addressing all your questions and objections

You’re probably already on the phone telling your congressperson to pass a law like this, in which case, please proceed. But if for some reason you aren’t convinced, I will now fix that, by addressing objections in order from most common to least.

First: shouldn’t all that money be spent on shrimp welfare instead?

Ideally, yes. But the government isn’t going to do that. They’re also probably not going to spend it on saving lives in the developing world, where it is much cheaper to prevent a death or otherwise dramatically improve someone’s quality of life. Governments in rich countries are already spending this kind of money trying to keep their own citizens alive, this is just a proposal about how they should spend some of it.

Isn’t the actual solution better gun control or mental health or something?

Probably, but these are not mutually exclusive.

Would this make people fake mass shootings to cash in on the prize?

That sure would be evil, but someone would need to volunteer to die or go to prison for life. I guess someone could try to manipulate someone else into doing a mass shooting in order to be there at the right time and stop them, but I think it would be quite hard to do this without leaving evidence?

Should police officers be eligible?

My first thought is, probably not, because in the case of police the government has already spent the money. Cops are signing up to a certain chance of finding themselves in a situation like this in exchange for an otherwise comfy job and relatively high salary. Essentially, this is about compensating people who take on the responsibilities of police officers when they don’t even have to, and at great risk/cost to themselves.

Are you sure we want to incentivize shooter tackling?

This is the best objection. Thanks to this annoying objection, I’m at most 60% sure that any of this is a good idea. Official guidance mostly wants people to just run and hide, especially if they realistically have no chance of disarming the shooter. In theory, we could address this by setting the reward amount just high enough to incentivize people who actually have a good enough chance of stopping the shooter. In practice, people might have a hard time performing these expected value calculations in the midst of a mass shooting.

What actions would be eligible?

This could really get into the details of how to implement such a program, which I am not going to do. The government presumably has math people for this. Roughly, I think:

• People(‘s families) should still get paid if they are maimed or killed in a failed attempt. I admit this could get messy with everyone claiming their dead family members must have been trying to tackle the shooter.

• Purely in terms of incentives, you would want to pay just as much for clever interventions that disrupt the violence without putting the person’s life at risk.

• There’s no reason not to apply this to various other crimes. We already do a version of this with rewards for information about wanted suspects.

One more objection

Mass shootings are a poignant example of the way news coverage distorts our sense of reality: despite wall-to-wall coverage, they affect a tiny number of people. Since every post about a mass shooting could instead be about global poverty or factory farming (my usual focus), it might seem like scope insensitivity to write about this at all. In case that’s your objection, I will now tie it back to those other issues.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the misaligned incentives in traditional philanthropy. I’ve spent my career working in and founding nonprofit organizations advocating for farmed animals, and I’ve seen firsthand how tenuous the relationship is between making a real difference and convincing people to give you money.

One solution to this is outcome-based philanthropy. In the limit, this can take the form of things like bounties or market shaping, where rather than funding nonprofits based on proposed projects, funders promise to pay out money to whoever can achieve a stated outcome. For instance, governments can promise to pay a set rate per dose for effective treatments for a rare disease in cases where there wouldn’t otherwise be enough of a market incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug.

There are various kinds of campaigns and philanthropic programs that couldn’t easily be funded this way. Which just makes it all the more exciting when we get a straightforward opportunity like this to pay for the outcomes we want. I’ve got a more deeply thought-out post about aligning philanthropic incentives in the works.

In the meantime, if you have any contacts in the Australian government, let’s make it happen?