A Wisconsin court banned me from contacting some of the dearest people in my life.

That changed last week.

Last Tuesday, the newly assigned judge in my felony dog rescue case reversed the no-contact order between me and my co-defendants Wayne Hsiung, Misha Lunksy, and Aditya Aswani.

We were all arrested together at both rescue efforts this year at Ridglan Farms: the notorious dog testing and breeding facility in Wisconsin.

For nearly two months, if I so much as “liked” one of their Facebook posts by accident, I could be charged with violating my bail conditions — and lose the $10,000 I had to pay in cash bail.

We all blocked each other on social media and blocked each other’s phone numbers to avoid violating the order.

The order was so broad — prohibiting “direct or indirect contact” with other co-defendants — that I wasn’t sure if I could even link to Wayne’s blog to tell people to subscribe.

Now I can!

In an early and promising victory at our pre-trial hearing last Tuesday, our no-contact order has been lifted. Our legal team argued forcefully that the order improperly violated our constitutional rights — and the new judge in our case lifted the ban. We can speak now without restriction again.

It’s a huge relief.

It was emotionally jarring not to be able to talk to them.

We were all first arrested together in March, when we entered the facility in the rain and rescued twenty-two beagles from cruel procedures — including being injected with rabies and having their eye glands surgically mutilated without anesthesia.

And we were arrested together again in April, when we returned with roughly a thousand people to save the thousands of dogs left behind.

We risked our freedom together. We were tear-gassed by riot police together.

And in one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, we saved suffering pups from abuse together.

These people are some of my deepest inspirations.

I have stood in the rain with Misha Lunsky, detained by police for hours at Ridglan Farms, before we were arrested for refusing to leave the dogs.

I have shared a concrete jail cell with Aditya Aswani, helping each other stay calm as we were both pulled for interrogation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

And I have spent a weekend in jail with Wayne Hsiung, sitting beside him at a metal table writing blogs just like this one, as we waited for a judge to release us.

And yet, without ever being convicted of a crime, a court ruled us “dangerous” to the public and barred us from having any contact with each other.

The no-contact order was abrupt and painful. Following our arrests, we were held separately from each other in jail. We didn’t have a chance to see each other or say goodbye before the no-contact order. I knew it could be a long road to trial, and when I heard the court’s ruling, I didn’t know how long it would be before I would be allowed to speak to my friends again.

Not being able to talk to Wayne was especially difficult.

Wayne is not just my co-defendant. He has been my friend and mentor for years. He introduced himself to me at a community center in 2018 when I was a college senior at UC Berkeley. After I graduated, I led his campaign for mayor of Berkeley. And later, I sat beside him as his legal assistant when he stood trial in Utah on felony charges for saving dying piglets from a multinational factory farm, and won.

For years, Wayne has been someone I could turn to for advice on how to be brave while rescuing animals from powerful corporations: how to face legal risk, how to keep going under public scrutiny, and how to live a full life while the government threatens to imprison you for saving animals.

Now I was in my own felony case — with him. And I wasn’t allowed to talk to the person who had brought me into this work in the first place.

I wanted to ask Wayne how to hold it all together going into trial.

And the court ruled it would be too dangerous for me to do so.

It was all a staggering infringement on our First Amendment rights. We were not allowed to speak with each other, assemble for our legal defense, or — most crucially — organize politically to advocate together for the thousands of dogs in labs like Ridglan Farms who still needed help.

So it was a real victory last Tuesday when the new judge assigned to our case reversed the court’s prior order.

Now we can talk. We can organize. We can prepare for trial together as each of us faces over thirty years in prison.

That all makes me hopeful — not just for our case, but for our ability to use the legal system to create change.

Because we are not just going to trial to defend our freedom.

We are going to defend theirs.

The thousands of beagles at Ridglan Farms had been tortured for years in the dark. Prosecutors turned their backs on them. Politicians treated their cries for help as too unimportant for the attention of those in power.

And now, through our trial, millions of people are watching with outrage and learning about cruel experiments on dogs. An industry that has abused puppies in the dark is finally being brought into the light.

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We are going to trial because we want to change the law for animals. We are going to defend the Ridglan dogs because they are not pieces of property for corporations to abuse. They are individuals. They are members of our community. And when they are being abused, all of us have the right to help them.

Our hearing last Tuesday set our trial date for September 28. We will argue to the jury that we had a legal right to rescue the Ridglan dogs from abuse.

And when they agree, we will set a legal precedent that will shake the foundations of the entire dog testing industry — and help free every dog from a laboratory cage into a loving home.

If I am not in prison after trial, I will go straight to New York in October to join the rescue effort for the 15,000 dogs abused for experiments at Marshall BioResources.

Right now, there is a mother pup in a laboratory in upstate New York who needs our help. I will do everything I can to save her.

I hope you join me.

Some updates

• My first dog passed away last week. She was 16. Nikki was with me my whole childhood and taught me so much. I am grieving deeply and will write more to honor her soon. For now, please say a prayer for her and my family. And thank you to everyone who has shown us so much love and even donated to support us.1

• This case is mind-blowingly bipartisan. I recently spoke with Rex Jones, the son of Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as we celebrated the rescue of the Ridglan dogs. I also talked with Dr. Peter and Ginger Breggin, who have been some of the most powerful critics of the liberal medical establishment. There’s so much I want to say about how saving animals goes beyond political partisanship — and how the Ridglan dogs may show us a path toward being kinder to animals, and each other. More on this soon.

• Join me next Thursday, 7pm in San Francisco! I’m throwing a party with Taj Uppal, my best friend and fellow defendant, to rally support for each of our felony cases rescuing animals from corporate abuse. We’ll speak about our upcoming trials and how you can plug into the movement to end cruel dog testing in the United States. RSVP here!

Follow me on social media for more trial updates: Instagram, Facebook, X.

I was arraigned today!

The prosecutor just filed three additional felony charges against me and each of my three co-defendants for nonviolently saving beagles from criminal abuse.

I now face 31 years in prison.

I pled not guilty.

“You’re getting out today. There’s no way they’ll give you bail for a nonviolent offense.”

That’s what my fellow inmates told me as we awaited our bail hearings after several days in Dane County jail.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I had spent the last few days in a jail dorm sleeping in rows of metal bunk beds with about thirty other men.

This was after being arrested over the weekend for trying to rescue dogs from Ridglan Farms. It was my second visit to Dane County jail in recent months, and by then, the inmates and even the police knew why I was there.

I was the only animal activist in my dorm, even though I was arrested with dozens of others, including attorney and rescue organizer Wayne Hsiung. They separated us this time — I suppose to keep us from being in cahoots for yet another rescue.

The guys in my dorm knew about the beagles. Several had seen us on social media the month before — and we watched coverage of the latest rescue together on the jail TV.

I cheered with my fellow inmates as we watched news coverage of nearly 1,000 activists outside Ridglan — volunteers and grandmothers standing up to riot police, getting tear gassed and pepper sprayed, all while trying to reach dogs trapped behind barbed wire inside an illegal laboratory.

A number of the guys were very familiar with the jail system.

“Don’t worry,” several told me. “You’ll be out soon on a signature bond.”

A signature bond means you don’t have to pay money to get out. You promise to come back to court, and they release you.

That’s what they expected would happen to me. They had been in jail before, often on charges much more serious than mine. Some had been accused of assault and battery. One man told me he had previously been convicted of murder.

And they could not imagine that myself, a peaceful volunteer dog rescuer, would be held on cash bail.

So my fellow inmates were shocked when I walked back from court and told them I was being kept in jail on $10,000 bail.

Baffled, one of the guys showed me the criminal complaint filed against him.

“I’ll kill you all,” the report read.

According to the complaint, he had gotten drunk, assaulted people around him, and it took five police officers to restrain him before he was taken to jail.

He was released that day on a signature bond.

I was given $10,000 bail.

Luckily, I was able to post it. There was massive public outcry after Ridglan rescuers were tear gassed, and generous supporters moved quickly to cover my bail fund. My clothes from the arrest were still covered in pepper spray, so after four days of incarceration, I walked out of jail wearing county-provided shorts and a t-shirt.

A “dangerous” criminal

Why did the court decide that I needed such a high bail amount?

The commissioner who presided over my case told me why.

“The issues are emotional, they are politically charged… But you don’t get to take the law into your own hands.”

He said my “burglary” is “dangerous conduct” to engage in. Even though I have no previous criminal history, he ruled that “cash [bail] is necessary to protect the public.”

I have to say: it did hurt hearing the court’s words. I knew I would face consequences for challenging the dog testing industry. I was proud of why I was there, and I was ready to speak openly about our rescue efforts and defend everything I did.

And yet, there I was — surrounded by armed men and a prosecutor I had never met, while being told I must be prevented from harming others. I stood in a windowless courtroom in blue jail scrubs as the court called me “dangerous” for nonviolently trying to save criminally abused dogs.

But there was one statement that made me perk up.

“I don’t see any affirmative defenses that would be available” to justify my conduct.

That line hit me. It represented the entire reason why we are looking forward to trial.

Before the March rescue, when we saved nearly two dozen beagles from Ridglan Farms, we publicly argued that we had a legal right to rescue the dogs from abuse at Ridglan.

The dogs were victims of criminal abuse so severe that even a local judge granted our petition for the facility to be prosecuted for felony animal cruelty.

Judge Rhonda Lanford found “probable cause” of animal cruelty violations, and ruled that any “reasonably prudent prosecutor” would investigate, given overwhelming evidence of animals at the facility being confined in 2 x 4 foot wire cages their entire lives and surgically mutilated without anesthesia. She found it was improper that the district attorney refused to investigate them and ordered a special prosecutor to do so.

However, the special prosecutor also declined to prosecute — and did nothing to protect the 2,000 victims of ongoing felony animal cruelty at the facility.

At that point, we did everything we could within the law to protect the dogs. So we took action ourselves.

Under state and federal law, if you have exhausted all legal alternatives, you have a right under doctrines such as legal “necessity” that allow people to break lesser laws in order to prevent a greater harm.

We call this the Right to Rescue.

We have a Right to Rescue animals from abuse

If a dog is trapped in a hot car, you are allowed to break the window to save him. The same principle applies to a beagle facing illegal torture in a laboratory.

It is not a novel legal idea to apply this necessity defense to animals.

In one Wisconsin case, a police officer entered private property after seeing an emaciated horse in the front yard. He did not have a warrant. But after walking farther onto the property, he found more sick and dying horses.

The property owners argued that he had trespassed and violated their constitutional rights.

The court disagreed.

It ruled that the officer acted lawfully in an emergency situation. The property owner had rights — but the horses did, too. And their rights not to starve to death were significant enough to justify entering the property without a warrant.

In other words, Wisconsin law has already recognized that helping abused animals can justify “breaking” the law, including by trespassing on someone else’s property.

That is what Harvard Law professor Kristen Stilt, one of the nation’s leading scholars on animal and property law, described in an amicus brief in a previous prosecution of undercover Ridglan investigators — a case so damning to the company that prosecutors dropped it right before trial.

And yet there I was, standing in jail scrubs, as a court commissioner said he could see no possible legal justification for rescuing beagles from criminal abuse.

That was strange.

But it is also where the opportunity begins.

The risk is the reward

I am excited to go to trial because this case gives us a chance to argue, in court, that animals have legal rights — including the right to be rescued from abuse.

In Wisconsin, the “necessity defense” for animals has so far only been used for small-scale animal rescues. It has not been used to challenge powerful corporations.

Until now.

And this will be a challenging fight. We are going up against the biomedical industry which does tens of billions of dollars of business in Dane County — including through animal testing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. They have already put out a press release calling us terrorists who should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

But what they don’t realize is that the law already protects those who intervene to protect animals from harm.

We clearly disagree with the biomedical industry on the law here. And we’ll let a jury decide who is right.

By putting our freedom on the line, we will force courts to ask whether animals are mere “things” under the law — or living beings whose rights are significant enough to justify rescuing them.

A jury will get to answer this question. What matters more: a corporation’s property rights, or an animal left to suffer in a wire cage and die?

Their answer could set case law that affects millions of animals in laboratories across the country.

And by going through a criminal trial, it will not be corrupt prosecutors or politicians who will answer that question. It will be a jury of ordinary people.

I have a deep belief in the goodness of humanity: that when we get past financial corruption and political power — when people have a chance to deliberate in a court of law and look deeply into our relationship with our fellow creatures — that we as a species will act on what we already believe deep in our hearts: that animals are sentient beings who feel love and fear and joy, just like us.

We are meant to be protectors of our fellow creatures, not their tormentors. That is who we are as a species. And risking prison time is a chance to bring that to light.

These beagles are giving us an opportunity to become the protectors our species was always meant to be. Let’s make it happen.

UPDATE: I’m facing even more felony charges!

I was arraigned today in my first court hearing since the prosecutor formally filed charges against me.

They’ve filed three additional felony charges against me, for a total of 31 years in prison.

Again, this is an opportunity. Each charge builds public outrage against the brutality of the system — and reveals how deeply the legal system has violated animals for years.

But whether these charges result in prison time for rescuers or political change for the animals depends on what all of us, together as a movement, do next.

I’ll keep writing as this case unfolds. Thank you for following and sharing these posts. And stay up-to-date with trial updates on Facebook and Instagram.

How you can help

• Join our efforts to save all dogs from cruel lab testing. Sign up at savethedogs.io which will let you receive emails on next steps from the team.

• If you want to support me personally — including my volunteer advocacy, writing, and trial-related costs — you can become a paid subscriber to my Substack.

Thank you for reading and for caring so much for the dogs. Let’s save them all!

This was posted by Dean’s friends while he was in Dane County jail. It was transcribed via his lawyer over the phone.

My left eye still stings from tear gas and pepper spray by riot police. My hand is numb from the hours it was tied behind my back in a squad car.

Today is my third straight day held on felony burglary charges in Dane County jail. I was here only a few weeks ago after myself and 100+ activists nonviolently rescued nearly two dozen beagles from Ridglan Farms. Ridglan is the second largest breeding and research facility in the nation, and it has subjected thousands of dogs to criminal animal abuse, including injecting them with rabies and surgically removing their eye glands without anesthesia.

Even though 27 of us were arrested last time, we returned with roughly 1,000 people determined to save them all.

And I thought we would.

There was overwhelming public support after the last rescue. Millions of people expressed support on social media and thousands signed up to join us at the next rescue. Even Ridglan’s Congressperson Mark Pocan refused the company’s calls to stop activists and urged the safe rehoming of the Ridglan dogs. It seemed clear that the public was on our side.

So I was shocked this week when a thousand of us volunteer rescuers were met on a Saturday morning by riot police and tear gas.

I arrived in a van at the farm shortly after other activists with a press-badged reporter by my side. Almost immediately, a sheriff’s officer approached me in a gas mask and pepper sprayed me directly in the left eye. I clenched my eye, nursed my wounds, and carried on.

For the next few hours, I marched with waves of peaceful grandmothers repeatedly back into clouds of tear gas determined to get past the barbed wire fence and riot police to save the dogs.

How can police be so violent to peaceful advocates?

Well, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett gave us the answer. I watched him on the news from my jail cell as he claimed that we violently aimed to harm police officers, and that his duty was to protect business and property. In this case the business interests are very powerful. The biomedical industry transacts tens of billions of dollars in Dane County every year, in large part through research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And this industry seems intent on coming down on us hard.

After last month’s rescue, the National Association for Biomedical Research, a powerful industry lobbying group, called for us to be prosecuted as terrorists under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA).

That may be why, for my first time in years as an activist, I was pulled in for questioning by state level investigators. On Saturday, I was brought into an interrogation room by two special agents wearing all black uniforms from the Wisconsin Department of Justice. My fellow activist, Wayne Hsiung, is being held separately from me in the same jail, and was similarly visited this weekend for interrogation by the FBI.

A part of me is scared. I am 29 years old and facing felony burglary charges. I do not know how much more of my life I might spend in a cage. But then I feel compelled to act when I think of the millions of animals in laboratories across the country who spend their entire lives in a cage.

I am optimistic that we will soon bring these abuses to an end. People around the world are outraged by what they see happening to the Ridglan dogs. Grandmothers are walking into tear gas to save the most vulnerable creatures on Earth. And politicians are increasingly treating animal rights with the seriousness that it deserves.

This morning, I joyfully sobbed, even though my tears stung from pepper spray still in my left eye, when my lawyer told me by phone that a leading candidate for Wisconsin governor had just called for the safe release of all the dogs at Ridglan Farms.

I know waves of change are coming soon. I do not know if they will come soon enough to keep me out of a cage.

What I do know is that right now there is a mother in a cage at Ridglan Farms. She has never gone outside or looked up at the sun. The district attorney who has sworn an oath to protect her has turned his back on her, allowing her and her children to be sold off for experiments or simply killed to spite the people who care about her. She is one of the thousands of pups still at Ridglan Farms right now. And she needs your help.

So I am asking you to please contact the Wisconsin Attorney General and ask him to protect the thousands of victims of ongoing felony abuse at Ridglan Farms.

If we can save those dogs, then no matter what happens to me, this all will have been worth it.

UPDATE FROM DEAN: I am out of jail! The court ruled that I am “dangerous” and released me on conditions including $10,000 in bail and a no-contact order with my four co-defendants, Wayne Hsiung, Aditya Aswani, Misha Lunsky, and Melanie Brieno. We are eager to argue for the right to rescue in court.

Follow me here and on Instagram, and stay tuned through Wayne’s Substack and savethedogs.io for the Ridglan mass beagle rescue trial. Onward! Let’s save the dogs!

You can also support me personally by becoming a paid subscriber to my blog.

Call Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s office:

(608) 266-1221 → Dial 4

Contact form: joshkaul.org/contact-us

Suggestion on what to say: “I am calling to demand immediate action to investigate Ridglan Farms and to require the facility to release the beagles into safe and loving homes. These dogs deserve protection and cannot be left to be tortured.”

I was moments away from telling my new boss that I might be in jail next week on felony charges.

I had no idea what he would say.

I had just joined the election campaign of Alan Wong, a San Francisco city supervisor. I didn’t know anyone on the team before applying. And this wasn’t an activist campaign. Alan is a moderate in a city with closely guarded reputations and politics so cut-throat that they’re described as “a knife fight in a phone booth.”

So I thought associating my activism with the candidate would be a non-starter.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell my boss, I thought. I’m 28 years old with nothing but a social science degree and a future career to protect. Better he just never found out?

Then I thought of advice from Wayne, an animal rights attorney and fellow activist, who said the biggest risk to my career would be appearing dishonest. Telling them upfront, he said, was the key.

So I took a risk and told my boss.

“I do a lot of progressive activism in my personal time,” I said, “and I don’t want it to conflict with the campaign.”

“Tell me more,” he said, his hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground as we walked.

So I did.

I told him everything. That I’d be joining an activist group next week at Ridglan Farms, a lab that confines thousands of beagles their entire lives in 2 x 4 foot wire cages and for surgical experiments without anesthesia. That the District Attorney refused to protect the victims, even after a judge found probable cause of felony animal cruelty at the facility. And that I was planning to break in next week with about a hundred activists to rescue the dogs myself — and would likely be arrested on felony charges.

He took it all in and said… that’s awesome!

He even suggested I invite Supervisor Alan Wong to be part of the rescue.

I was shocked at his support. I asked whether government staffer roles are more sensitive than campaigns. He said ones with more conservative supervisors might be. “Nowhere you’d want to work anyway,” he said, and added that being arrested for nonviolent activism in this city was a “badge of honor.”

A couple weeks later, I was sitting in a living room with Supervisor Alan Wong and his government staff cheering over videos of me on the news getting out of jail.

The risk is lower than you think

Would-be activists have often told me they can’t risk arrest because they’re worried about losing their job.

My general sense is people believe the risks are higher than they are.

Before last month’s rescue at Ridglan Farms, about 180 people had been arrested at mass open rescues in U.S. history. Fewer than 10% were ever charged. Only two activists were convicted — both after choosing to go to trial and rejecting all plea deals by the prosecution.

I was a senior in college when I was first arrested on felony charges with over fifty activists for rescuing chickens from a poultry farm in 2018. The prosecutor offered to drop my charges. I threw the offer letter in the trash, eager to stand trial for rescuing animals from criminal abuse. I never heard from the District Attorney’s office again.

I know only one person who lost their job for an arrest at a mass open rescue. He was a school teacher and had his job re-instated shortly after.

Professional licenses

Maybe you’re a lawyer worried about losing your license. (I only know of lawyer examples here.)

Wayne Hsiung is the only professional I know whose license was affected by nonviolent rescue activism. He has faced decades worth of felony charges, stood trial three times, and is now a two-time convicted felon for rescuing animals.

He is still a licensed attorney in the State of California, pending results of his felony convictions.

His law license was temporarily suspended after being convicted of felony burglary for sneaking into a farm in North Carolina to take a sick baby goat to the vet. His license was later re-instated, pending resolution on his appeals for both both felony convictions. He has since lost his goat case appeal. The State Bar of California is waiting for the results of his second appeal for a mass chicken rescue before making a next decision on his license.

My young lawyer friend Taj had a similar but less intense experience. After applying to become a lawyer in Arizona, he was called in for a character review after being arrested for rescuing a starving baby goat from a Whole Foods factory farm.

He said he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t do it again. They admitted him anyway.

Travel restrictions

These are among the most real consequences I know of.

Wayne Hsiung, for example, has been denied entry to Canada after his convictions and has not been admitted since.

For myself, I’ve been arrested twice on felony charges — burglary, conspiracy, and grand theft from open rescues at chicken and duck factory farms in 2018 and 2019. Since then, I’ve traveled internationally to seven countries without issue, including my home country of the Philippines and a successful visa application in Vietnam.

In my experience, travel restrictions for nonviolent animal activism come after convictions, not arrests.

Financial consequences

There can also be financial risk.

In some cases, courts have ordered significant criminal restitution after convictions — sometimes exceeding $100,000.

For example, activists like Wayne Hsiung and Zoey Rosenberg have faced six-figure restitution orders tied to open rescue cases.

That said, it can be complex and difficult for animal-abusing companies to actually force you to pay restitution, even after a conviction. Neither Wayne nor Zoey have paid a dime in restitution.

From open rescue activists I talk to, this is one of the most serious concerns, and it’s worth taking seriously. That said, restitution only comes after a conviction. If you are arrested, you are unlikely to be charged unless you are clearly in high-level leadership, and will still have opportunities to plea out.

Some jobs might be stricter. Just ask.

At least one person I know works with a mayor’s office in another state and was told they could participate in the next Ridglan Farms beagle rescue — but only in roles that would not risk arrest.

My friend Taj also said his big law job offer was deferred after he told them upfront. They were supportive of his advocacy for an “important cause,” but decided his charges would need to be resolved before he could start.

So for some jobs, there is more risk.

The good news is you don’t have to guess.

My advice is to just be upfront that you’re considering standing up for your values, and see what they say.

What about the reward?

When I was standing in the rain last month at Ridglan Farms, I considered walking away. I was detained with over a dozen activists for more than an hour, freezing in the rain, with the police saying they would arrest us if we didn’t leave.

Then I heard their cries. Dogs were wailing through an open window only feet from where I stood. They were trapped in cages, never having felt anything soft in their lives.

I knew I couldn’t leave.

I knew I would regret it if I did.

So I stayed. I told the police and my fellow activists, “We wouldn’t want someone to give up on us. So we’re not going to give up on them.”

I spent the next two nights in jail.

And it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

—

From what I can tell, it could also be one of the most potentially transformative moments in the history of animal rights.

The rescue has garnered tens of millions of views on social media. We’ve gotten remarkably positive press coverage from CNN, USA Today, and Washington Post. Wayne Hsiung, who was arrested for organizing the last Ridglan rescue, has drawn support from Ricky Gervais and Jen Welch, one of the nation’s most important political podcasters.

Personally, I was interviewed by Wisconsin news coming out of jail and later by Muni Takes, an up-and-coming San Francisco media channel that has featured several local politicians.

I’ve been an animal rights activist for nearly a decade now. I know how difficult it is to shine light on corporate laboratories and factory farms which confine and mutilate billions of animals across the country. And the Ridglan beagle rescue has created a rare and powerful opportunity for change.

—

I will say — even if I had lost my job, this all would have been worth it.

I stepped back from the Alan Wong campaign after last month’s rescue to volunteer full-time for the upcoming rescue this Sunday, April 19. Over two thousand people have signed up to return to Ridglan Farms and get each of the thousands of dogs stuck there out of cages.

I told my boss I’d be stepping back, with my career uncertain and unsure of how I’d financially support myself afterwards.

He said, “I’ll always give you a job.”

This is a historic moment for animals. Don’t miss it.

Your boss — and the Ridglan pups — might love you for it.

CORRECTION: I previously wrote that the State Bar of California had re-instated his law license after determining his convictions to fit moral character as an attorney. This is has not happened. Rather, his license has been temporarily re-instated, pending results of his second felony conviction appeal. This has been corrected above.

I was released from Dane County jail today where I was held for two nights for my participation in Sunday’s mass rescue at Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin. I am still wearing the clothes I was arrested in, which were returned to me still damp from the rain. I wrote this post while in jail.

It is freezing in the rain, with bits of hail coming down on me. I am surrounded by police, accompanied by over twenty activists at Ridglan Farms, a notorious dog testing and breeding facility. The police tell us if we leave the facility, they won’t arrest us. We are not sure what to do.

Two days ago, I joined nearly a hundred activists in walking into the second largest dog breeding and research facility in the United States. We walked onto the property in broad daylight to rescue the animals inside. Ridglan Farms has been a site of public controversy for years for confining thousands of beagles for cruel experiments, including force feeding them commercial laundry detergent and surgically ripping out their eye glands without anesthesia. The abuses are so bad that a local court ordered them to be prosecuted for felony animal abuse.

Under immense public pressure, the district attorney cut a deal with Ridglan: avoid prosecution if you relinquish your license to sell dogs for research. Ridglan said yes. But the deal still allowed the company to conduct research on animals and did nothing to protect the roughly two thousand dogs still trapped at the facility who could be euthanized or simply sold off for further experimentation.

In response, hundreds of people, including nearly every animal rescue and humane society in Wisconsin, signed an open letter to District Attorney Ismael Ozanne asking him to protect the dogs currently trapped at Ridglan.

The district attorney refused to act. So we did.

Around 8:30am on Sunday morning, our convoy of six passenger vans pulled up to Ridglan Farms. About a hundred of us entered the facility, using angle grinders and crowbars to cut through fencing and enter buildings that held beagles for research. There were too many of us for Ridglan employees to stop, and even as police arrived, we were able to remove twenty-two beagles who were successfully loaded into vans and taken to safety.

Under normal conditions, I would be deeply uncomfortable with our actions. I tend to be a rule-follower by nature. I was a Boy Scout growing up and played guitar for years in my church choir. In the weeks leading up to the rescue, I feared how it would look for us to use sledgehammers and crowbars to break into a building, even if it was necessary to help those inside. But as I sit now after my second night in jail, I know that what we did was not just morally right, but legally right.

Pursuant to state and federal law, it is permissible to take otherwise unlawful actions under the “necessity doctrine” to prevent a greater evil or significant bodily harm to someone else. The question now before the courts, in the case of myself and dozens of other activists who took nonviolent action to protect dogs who were victims of felony abuse, is whether animals are “someone,” or merely “something.”

Watch videos on Instagram and TikTok of the Ridglan beagle rescue

That question is at the heart of why we are here. For far too long, our legal system has treated animals as mere things to use and abuse. They are confined by the millions across the country in tiny metal cages too small to stand up or turn around. They are packed into trucks and cargo ships huddling in their own feces to be torn apart at slaughterhouses. And in the case of the Ridglan dogs, they are injected with rabies and forced to live their entire lives in a two-by-four foot wire cage.

That has to stop. That is why we are here: to directly rescue animals from harm, even if that means going to jail. If we can nonviolently draw attention to corporate animal abuse, we can challenge the treatment of animals as property under the law and drive a broader conversation about whether animals are simple objects or rather sentient creatures worthy of dignity and respect.

This is a difficult fight. But for the thousands of Ridglan dogs, and the countless other animals trapped in cages around the world, it is a fight worth having.

Before my arrest, I was about to give up. After the initial dogs were rescued, over twenty of us walked back onto the property to gather more dogs. We were stopped by police as we attempted to re-enter one of the breeding buildings and were detained for over an hour. They told us if we didn’t leave, we would be arrested. I felt our group’s morale waning as we stood there, shivering under ice and rain, deciding what to do.

Then we heard the cries of dogs crying and wailing through an open window only feet away from where we stood. We decided then that we weren’t leaving — not without the dogs. I told my fellow activists, as well as the officers who detained us, “We wouldn’t want someone to give up on us. So we’re not going to give up on them.”

The officers looked away in seeming acknowledgement of their defeat. Shortly after, a dozen more police officers arrived and moved towards us with zip ties. They tied our hands behind our backs, put us into squad cars, and booked over twenty of us into Dane County jail where Wayne, Alexandra, Aditya, Raquel, and myself remain locked up on criminal charges awaiting a court hearing and possible felony trial.

We are eager to be a voice for animals in a court of law where their voices have been too long denied. I am confident that even if we continue to be trapped in a cage, that our actions will inspire a broader conversation that will help every animal be freed from theirs.

The Ridglan dogs are worth it.

I have been released from jail and am anticipating possible filing of criminal charges against myself and my fellow arrestees. The story of the mass rescue of beagles from Ridglan Farms has only begun. For more, follow me on Instagram as well as Wayne Hsiung, my co-arrestee and lead organizer of the Ridglan beagle rescue, on Substack and social media (Instagram and Facebook.

What’s Next (updated)

• We are RETURNING to Ridglan with 1000+ people to save every remaining pup at Ridglan Farms in a final mass open rescue on April 19. Sign up here to learn more!

• I’ll be speaking next Thursday evening at Mox, a social impact co-working space in San Francisco, with attorney and fellow Ridglan arrestee Abie Brauner. Come through and bring your friends!

In 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. It was an act of protest against brutal repression — the government had banned Buddhist ceremonies, censored speech, and murdered peaceful protestors. So the monk sat down in a busy Saigon intersection, struck a match, and meditated while people looked on in horror.

The journalist David Halberstam, who witnessed the event, wrote:

As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

I’ve been reflecting on this event in contrast with our current culture. After Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024, Google Searches for “self care” hit an all-time high. The global wellness industry is worth trillions of dollars and growing. Endless YouTube videos encourage us to prioritize “work-life balance,” to “be authentic” and “live your best life.”

The story of the Buddhist monk has me wondering if this cultural focus on personal care is misguided. How was he able to sit so at peace, while his body was literally on fire? What does this say about the nature of suffering, and what it takes to find peace in a world of injustice and turmoil?

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In the last year, I’ve spent months solo traveling while recovering from burnout in my nonprofit work, and returned to working with activists who eagerly seek prison time to raise awareness for political causes.

And I’ve come to believe that much of living a good life — one of the deepest levels of peace, meaning, and happiness — comes not from seeking our own peace and happiness, but in letting go of ourselves in the service of others.

And Thích Quảng Đức showed us how.

Setting Fire to the Self

How did Thích Quảng Đức sit still while setting himself on fire? Much of the answer lies in a radical release of the self.

In Pali, the language of ancient Buddhism, the concept of anatta refers to the idea that the self, at least as we typically understand it, is an illusion. Everything that we could point to as “me” is constantly changing and exists in many ways beyond our control.

You can try to see this for yourself. Set a timer for one minute, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. Let your mind empty and avoid thinking any thoughts.

Did any thoughts pop up? Were you able to choose to stop thinking? Or choose your next thought? Often, we identify with the voice in our head — we sense an “I” that “thinks” our “thoughts.” But watching how thoughts arise on their own can challenge the very idea that we are the ones thinking them.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris writes, “Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined.” In meditation, when we try to “look for the thinker,” we may fail to find it — and perhaps even realize it’s not there to begin with.

This de-identification with thought can similarly be done with anger, grief, fear, and even pain. It is a posture of acceptance — one that is aware of our feelings without trying to control or soothe or respond to them. It simply lets things be as they are. By practicing this perspective shift, we can foster a sense of ease and detachment from the tumults of our body and mind.

This may all seem very abstract. But Thích Quảng Đức showed it can have profound implications.

In his final moments, Thích Quảng Đức likely experienced unimaginable pain. He let go of the impulse to resist, and simply allowed the burning to happen. It is as though the fire was a river, not latching onto his body, but simply passing through his consciousness, for those eternal moments as he himself passed on.

Is the Self Making Us Happy?

How do we in the West relate to our own desires, and our own sense of self? Is it making us happy?

It’s easy to look around and see that rather than losing a sense of self, we’re increasingly looking to gratify it.

For example, look at higher education. Between 1950 and 2006, the share of college students saying that finding a greater meaning in life is important fell from 80 to 50 percent. Universities are closing entire humanities departments while focusing resources on career preparation. And students at top universities have formed a culture that turns away from public service and explicitly encourages each other to “sell out” for prestigious high-paying jobs — a trend true at all levels of financial need and socioeconomic status.

As a society, we are shifting away from questions of broader meaning towards how to secure more security and pleasure for ourselves.

Arthur C. Brooks, a professor of happiness at Harvard University, has warned of the dangers of these trends. He cites research that helping others reliably makes us happier, even when we are unhappy ourselves.

Explaining why young people are experiencing increasingly poor mental health, he writes:

Folks lack a sense of meaning; they don’t feel they know the “why” of their lives. Worse, evidence suggests that they’re not even looking for it, nor are we encouraging them to do so. This creates a feeling of hollowness and futility, especially when times are inevitably rough, and that encourages a culture that strives to provide a sense of security that is doomed to prove false and can only make the problem worse.

This futility had been building even before the pandemic. In the decade prior to COVID-19, feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness among high schoolers increased by 40%.

Some might argue that self-focus is not the problem — the world is. Just look at climate change. Racism. Existential threats to democracy.

These are real issues. But they’re not entirely new. Our parents drilled for nuclear annihilation in elementary school during the Cold War. Their parents were drafted into World War II during a depression and a global rise of fascism.

What does seem unique is the rise of social media. It leads us to view societal crises alone from our phones while comparing our lives with the most glamorous highlight reels of peers and influencers. In other words, our digital era is leaving us hopeless and isolated while leaving us ever more concerned with ourselves.

Whatever you want to call it, whether it’s neoliberalism, or individualism, or if you’re a Buddhist, dukkha, it seems clear that many are being failed by all this focus on the self. There has to be another way. And ancient traditions like those of Thích Quảng Đức may point towards it.

A Path Forward

For those who know me, this all may seem contradictory. I spent much of the last year solo traveling after burning out from years of animal advocacy. It seemed like it was time for me to “focus on myself.”

But something about that story always seemed off to me. In retrospect, the reason seems to me that I made my activism too much about myself.

I began animal activism in my senior year of college, drawn in by campus outreachers showing undercover VR footage of a “cage-free” Whole Foods egg farm. I saw tens of thousands of birds screaming in an endless shed, facing so much cannibalism and abuse that investigators found eggs covered in blood.

I was horrified by the violence and began campaigning with local activists against factory farms. It was thrilling. We helped pass a historic statewide fur ban in California and won two high-profile criminal court cases against massive corporate animal abusers.

But at a certain point, other motivations mixed in. The wins stacked, and so did my ego. My lesser-traveled path of activism felt like a satisfying way to differentiate myself from the highly competitive culture of university life. It fed a part of me that was eager to boost my self-image. This damaged my relationships and stoked my desires for status and recognition. I would later burn out and step away from the animal rescue nonprofit I created.

Now, I’m slowly learning to zoom out. Through meditation and therapy, I’m gradually healing through old wounds that kept me too acquainted with the thoughts and desires in my head.

Following my burnout, I thought my mission was to learn how to be happy and “take care of myself.” I turned to fellow travelers on YouTube offering self help and life advice. One of whom wrote:

I choose peace. I choose self-love. I choose to trust the universe. I choose food freedom. I choose authenticity. I choose to accept what I can't change. I choose to be proud, and I choose to keep going.

That video brought me to tears. It tapped into a part of me that didn’t believe my happiness mattered. Growing up, my home was marked by instability and violence. My older brother had autism and regularly burst into physical violence before being committed to a mental hospital where my parents stayed with him daily, leaving me alone at home for most of high school. I internalized a sense that my needs don’t matter — that my brother needed my parents more, and I always came second.

Traveling was my way of finally starting to unpack feelings of grief and inadequacy. So watching that video on self-love moved something within me that gave me permission to take my own happiness seriously.

But the following months of travel still left me unsettled. I enjoyed the beachside motorcycle rides, unlimited mango sticky rice, and adventures with new friends. In the end, however, it was returning to my nonprofit advocacy in California — with old friends, united by a mission to protect the most vulnerable creatures on earth — that I slowly began again to feel whole.

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I don’t mean to say I have it all figured out. I am still learning to regulate my emotions and frequently worry I’m not on the “right path” in life. But I do know that I tried to “focus on myself” for a while — to seek adventure and joy out of a belief that once I nailed that down, I’d be back in a position to reconnect with my sense of mission and service to others. And I know that that didn’t quite work.

I’ve come to believe that yes, much of the practice of self-care is important. Go on runs. Hang out with friends. Meditate.

But self-care culture misguides us by reinforcing a belief that the good life comes from ultimately prioritizing our own happiness. In reality, the deepest peace comes from letting go of self-concern and living our lives for something greater.

The way out of despair is not within. It is outwards. It is towards a more expansive sense of self. That is what some of the greatest people in history have discovered.

Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years of prison with a sense of radiant compassion that touched even those who threw him in jail, becoming the first president of post-apartheid South Africa. Martin Luther King was jailed nearly thirty times while advocating for Black and white Americans to live together in peace. Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who survived the Holocaust, remarked that those in concentration camps who were most likely to survive were often driven by a purpose beyond themselves — whether love, family, or a sense of duty.

It is commitments to a greater good that enabled these people to find peace amid atrocity.

Indeed, when I returned from travel, I asked my co-founder Wayne Hsiung — a Buddhist attorney who has faced decades in prison and spent time in jail for rescuing sick and dying animals from factory farms — how he has been able to have a smile on his face while confronting profound suffering. He told me, simply, that he “does not feel a strong sense of self.”

Now, I don’t mean to say that if you feel overwhelmed by self-concern that you should set yourself on fire for a political cause. For starters, this might not do much good. Recent self-immolations have not achieved their political goals. More importantly, I don’t want to encourage impulsive sacrifice out of self-loathing. Even self-hatred is a form of undue focus on the self.

The best form of self-care is the kind that allows us to focus beyond ourselves. It’s the soothing of our inner voices so that we have the space to be a voice for others.

Indeed, many Buddhists emphasize the importance of monastic retreats — places without distraction where people can still the mind, soften the ego, and in doing so cultivate a deep sense of compassion.

The 13th century Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Zenji wrote, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”

I dream of a world, envisioned by monks like Thích Quảng Đức, where each of us is free from self-concern and suffering — and finds rest in the expansive peace that comes from losing ourselves in the service of others.

How are some people so quick to call strangers their brothers? Is it baseless fluff, or genuine care?

I began exploring this question around this time last year when I joined a month-long hippie encampment in the backwoods of Taiwan.

The camp was one of many Rainbow Gatherings organized by a loose network of nature enthusiasts and spiritual seekers who gather via word-of-mouth invitation in hard-to-reach locations around the world. Rooted in anarchy and volunteerism, they function without fees or formal leaders and typically sprout deep in the wilderness (recently in Nepal, Tasmania, and Colorado) without permission from the government.

I was invited through a friend from college. My buddy Rohan had moved from California to the island country where he met a Taiwanese hippie in his 40’s who was doing vegan street outreach. The invite chain grew, and thus our Rainbow adventure began.

Rohan and I embarked from his home in urban Kaohsiung to the Rainbow Gathering. We took a train to a small coastal village, hitchhiked on the back of a pickup truck to a pinpoint on a map, and backpacked along a rocky river for roughly an hour without cell service before finally reaching the camp site.

As we pushed through brush towards the campsite, hinted only by a few colored ribbons on trees, we started hearing cheers. “Welcome home, family!”

I guess we were home. It was a strange feeling. Rohan and I had never met these people, save for his local friend Truman who found us later. The gatherers were from all over the world: a third were Taiwanese locals, plus travelers from Spain, Japan, Israel, Turkey, Germany, and the United States. I did not expect to be greeted so brightly by these eclectic strangers.

And I was surprised by another detail: many of them were naked. Turns out, this was a nudist hippie camp.

I’ll never forget how I was first greeted at Rainbow. A naked bespectacled Israeli man with a full beard and booming low voice approached me with a big hug and called me family.

To put it short, this was out of my comfort zone. Raised in Los Angeles, I am used to strangers greeting each other with firm handshakes and an obligatory “How are you?” This was very different. For one, they were naked. More alarmingly, I was suspect of this whole “family” thing — and how everyone casually extended this welcome to total strangers.

The first Rainbow Family gatherings started in the counter culture of the 1970s. Americans were horrified by the Vietnam War and an increasingly disconnected and materialistic society that allowed it. So tens of thousands of people escaped into the woods to create an alternative vision for what the world could be: one of non-hierarchy, non-commercialism, and voluntaristic cooperation. Behind all of that was an intention to foster universal warmth — a cooperative sense that we are all family. At the time, that seemed so desperately needed. And the Gathering was an attempt to create that.

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In the coming weeks of Rainbow, I would come to ask: Why do some people seem so quick to warm up to and connect with others? Was this woo-woo spirituality bulls***, or was there something genuine underneath?

There, with a few dozen strangers without cellphone access in the Taiwanese wilderness, I had the opportunity to find out.

We set up our tent and joined the culture. For the next few days, we held hands twice a day for an hour in a big circle around a campfire chanting about nature spirits before each communal meal. We trekked into the woods to hack bamboo with machetes to build the communal kitchen. We bathed naked in the communal waterfall.

Some of the hippies were more reserved. One of them, a bearded Japanese man, told us how he had been backpacking the world for a decade — and most recently survived being chased by a bear while rowing an inflatable kayak in Alaska. Others, like the Israeli, seemed to be immediately open and warm, as though they were hiding nothing up their (clearly non-existent) sleeve.

More than anything, I was struck by how different this world felt.

Before, I was somewhat of a work-a-holic. I had organized diligently for animal rights groups in the SF Bay Area, including directing voter outreach for a pro-animal mayoral campaign and co-founding an impact litigation startup that pursued criminal legal cases against factory farms. But like many advocates, I eventually burned out, and it was time to try something new. Solo travel and Rainbow Gathering was that something.

After a few days, Rohan had to return home for work, and I decided to stay. For the next month, I tried to relax the SF-based tech-and-social-justice parts of my brain to get a feel for a different way of thinking and being.

Soon enough, it was over. A month later, following a full moon party that peaked at over a hundred attendees, the camp would disassemble and we would all go our separate ways. I continued for several months traveling through Southeast Asia before returning to my nonprofit activism in California.

In that time, I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of connection and community — and how much of that journey started with the weirdness and wonder of Rainbow Gathering.

The naked Israeli man, who went by Milky Way, ended up becoming one of my closest friends from camp. We regrouped with fellow gatherers in Taiwan a few weeks after the campsite dispersed, sparking little adventures like juggling and singing for money at night markets. Shared experiences at the camp, like huddling for several days through a rain storm under tarps in a makeshift bamboo kitchen, had brought us together. On my final day with Milky — at a foggy fishing port where he tried-and-failed to hitchhike on a boat to Japan — it was time to say goodbye. We hugged, called each other brother, and parted ways.

Along my travels, I reflected on people in my life who shared that immediate openness and warmth of Milky Way. People who would really look you in the eyes when they met you — who, seemingly beyond reason, were so natural and without hesitation when they called a stranger their brother.

I’ve been going back-and-forth between thinking there was something to this, and thinking it’s all malarky. Not everyone can be friends with everyone. It takes time to ease up their boundaries and be vulnerable with others.

But I am starting to move in a direction that to me also seems to make sense.

The natural warmth that some people seem to convey so quickly with strangers often comes from a genuine depth of goodwill and warmth they have both for others and themselves.

I recently read how many people, when giving hugs, are so caught up in the social norms of the hug that they don’t pay much attention to the hug itself. Our minds focus on various considerations (“Am I hugging this person for too long? How tightly should I squeeze?”) that we forget to actually enjoy the embrace itself.

I’ve thought of this recently as I meet people — especially fellow guys — in my day-to-day life. For a long time, I’ve been big fan of handshakes. Now that I’m back in America, I squeeze just a little tighter, and hold eye contact a little gentler. It’s a way of saying to a stranger right-off-the-bat, “I see you. I recognize the goodness in you. I walk this shared journey through the difficulties and joys of being on earth with you.”

If this sounds scary and vulnerable, that’s kind of the point. It can be intimidating to open yourself up emotionally to a stranger — to intentionally hold each other’s gaze, revealing ever-so-slightly whatever emotions cloud your heart at the moment, to show that you are inviting a connection with this person through the risk that they may not be open to the same with you.

The academic social worker Brené Brown writes of the ways we close ourselves off to vulnerability. We fear rejection and hurt, so we preempt this by limiting the ways we expose ourselves to others. Over time, many of us learn to approach others with guardedness, and avoid going deeper even with family and friends out of fear that we may not be received.

But that guardedness from hurt, she writes, also cuts us off from deeper joys. In closing ourselves off from pain, we dull ourselves to pleasure. Often, that dulling comes from a sense that this joy, too, can be taken away.

Little by little, I am deciding not to live my life like this anymore. I realize how much of my life has been lived with guardedness from vulnerability — to approach social settings with an attitude of “Can I make it through this evening without rejection or judgment? Will I ask the right questions and show the right enthusiasm to get along with other people here?”

In my family, brother was something dangerous. I would often get into physical fights with my older sibling who is non-verbal with autism. In the worst moments of his condition, hugging him meant risking my brother biting my ear off, or tackling me to the ground. I learned from then on to be more closed-off — to guard myself from connection out of fear.

Now I’m seeing what it is like to be a little less guarded, and a little more open — both to the warmth, and the hurt.

After all, that’s what family means. It’s the misunderstanding of what you’re doing with your career. The grief of losing a loved one. The shame of not living up to expectations, or even experiencing violence or conflict over money. Only by weathering it do we open ourselves to the warmth and forgiveness and joy that can make life so precious.

Is the woo-woo stuff just a performance? An empty posture without tests of real hardship? For some people, yes. But I also saw the warmth of many that month survive contention and painful social conflict. What I once saw as woo-woo fluff now seems to be a warmth that can be practiced, with little risks of openness again and again.

My time with Milky Way and my fellow travelers was brief. But it marked a little transformation in me — one towards living with a little more vulnerability, and a little more openness to connection.

Because only through openness to pain and rejection can we fill our lives with warmth and joy and belonging. That’s a beauty worth getting hurt for.

Can thinking about our moral obligations actually make us less compassionate to others?

That may sound strange. After all, isn’t morality a reason why we treat others well? But the question reminds me of a famous study in economics.

In 2000, researchers following daycare centers in Israel found that after they imposed a fine for picking up children late from daycare, late pickups actually increased by 40%.1

The key insight is that financial motivations can crowd out other more intrinsic motivations. The inclusion of a financial penalty for something that was originally free prompted parents not to ask, “Is this the right thing to do?”, but rather, “Is this worth the money?” It replaced a social norm with a market transaction.

I’ve been thinking about how this “crowding out” phenomenon can apply to other motivations. Maybe focusing on moral obligation (and a desire to be a good person) can crowd out our intrinsic desires to actually do good things for others.

Readers of this blog may know that I’ve been kind of obsessed recently with the idea of moral obligation. I think a lot about what it means to “do the right thing” and to “be a good person.”

At first glance, these can seem like good motivations! Isn’t it good for people to be good people and do the right thing? I think the answer to that is broadly yes. But I think an excessive focus on one’s moral standing can actually be counterproductive.

I’ve been in a bit of a rut recently. I’m currently job searching and thinking a lot about what I want to do next in my life — and what, more broadly, I’d like my life to be about. That’s often left me with a tension between what I want to do and what I should do. (Get a comfortable, stable job? Nonprofit work? Or startup social impact venture? Or…?) And so when my want and my should aren’t perfectly aligned, I have felt really guilty and bad about myself — a sense that I’m failing or not doing the right thing. It’s more apparent to me now that all that rut thinking has drained my energy from other things I care about.

I recently came back from a 10 day silent meditation retreat. It was quite intense. The Vipassana retreats were started by a Burmese businessman in the 1970s who claims to have rediscovered the pure form of meditation originally practiced by The Buddha thousands of years ago. The whole retreat (which in my case included ~80 people divided in half by gender) is offered with zero communication with other participants: no eye contact, gesturing, or spoken word allowed.

To start the retreat, we take several ethical vows. Do not kill, do not lie or steal, etc. For a while, I wondered what the basis for these vows were. After all, this was a meditation course to bring inner peace — not a moral philosophy class! And then at the end, they revealed the answer.

The purpose of the ethical vows was to keep you from doing anything that would make you feel guilty and therefore prevent you from getting out of your head.

The pathway to feeling inner peace and clarity, say many Buddhist meditative traditions, is to lessen the ways in which we obsess about ourselves — to quiet the inner voice that can take up so much of our time and attention. And one of the ways we can get caught up thinking about ourselves is when we feel guilty about doing harm to others.

This Vipassana version of Buddhist meditation was not designed to cultivate morally good human beings. But that seems, in their worldview, to be an invaluable side effect. By sitting together in over 100 hours of silence (10.5 hours / day over 10 days), participants learn to let go of the habits of thought that on a day-to-day basis that can entangle us in our own heads. And when that happens, more space is created for compassion for others — not as a goal, but something that starts to arise naturally.

This approach seems to work for them. There are over 250 Dhamma Vipassana centers across 94 countries. They’ve hosted millions of attendees for intensive retreats — each is completely free and funded entirely through voluntary donations.

And so now, I wonder how much all my obsessing over morality has actually been counter-productive. Asking “Am I a good person?” can keep us overly concerned with our self-image, rather than actually doing good things for others.

That’s roughly aligned with the worldview of The Good Place, a widely popular TV show about moral philosophy. (It’s so good!) It was created with UCLA moral philosophy professors — and surprising to me, their thesis is that you cannot try to be a good person. If your motivation is to “be good”, then you are actually pursuing self-interest around who you want to be rather than doing things selflessly.

When I first heard that thesis several years ago, I basically tuned out. It seemed absurd to me. How can it be wrong to want to be a good person? But as I have experienced more of the world, I’m really starting to resonate with their point.

One benefit of my meditation practice has been to calm the voice inside of me that can obsess over whether I am good. And in that calmness, I am noticing how compassion naturally flows, without the effort and overthinking that has usually come with my moral pondering.

Ancient traditions like Buddhism have shown that when we let go of all the silly complexities that our societies create — from our definitions of social status to our laws that order who does and does not have a right to the fruits of this earth — we as humans are left with a natural desire to be kind.

Moral reasoning can point us in the right directions and help us identify blind spots in what we currently see as urgent or morally good. But perhaps it’s not something we need to motivate us to be good. It seems to me that with the right room to breathe, that’s a desire that lies within all of us already.

In the winter of 2023, I burned out from animal activism. I had been involved in high-stakes criminal cases against corporate animal abusers and had a front-row seat to legal wins that were covered in national media outlets like The New York Times. I felt on top of the world. But unbeknownst to me, I was about to come crashing to the ground. I quit my job, exhausted and burnt out, and solo traveled the world for a year before returning to animal advocacy.

This is a story of how that happened. It’s a story of how we can sometimes do activism for the wrong reasons: in my case, out of moral guilt, and an effort to feel a sense of self-worth that I struggled to find outside of my work.

It’s a journey through the wounds that drive many of us to obsess over not doing enough to help others — and of learning how to return to activism while feeling enough, myself.

If you know how any of that feels, I hope this story helps you.

And it starts with imagining what you would do if you saw a child drowning right in front of you.

A drowning stranger

Imagine you pass by a shallow pond and you see a child drowning. You could easily walk in and save them… but doing so would ruin your $200 pair of shoes. Should you do it? After all, saving them would cost you little but mean everything to them.

Now imagine the child is on the other side of the planet, dying of malaria. And for $200 worth of anti-malarial treatments, you could save their life. Do you still have a duty to act?

This thought experiment, popularized by the moral philosopher Peter Singer, struck a deep chord in me when I first encountered it. I was 26 years old at the time and co-founding The Simple Heart, a legal advocacy nonprofit that supports undercover investigators who expose the mass cruelty of factory farms. I spent much of my days sifting through footage of graphic animal cruelty — mother pigs going insane from overcrowding, ducks rotting to death, chickens being boiled alive. And I was surrounded by people risking everything to save them.

My co-founder, Wayne Hsiung, seemed to embody the strangers drowning principle to the fullest. An attorney and animal rights activist, he himself has faced decades in prison on felony charges for leading undercover investigations into the largest factory farms in the United States. He invited these charges against himself to bring attention to the billions of animals suffering in industrial farms around the world. A brilliant MIT-educated lawyer, he could be living a lucrative and comfortable life, yet chooses to sacrifice to save creatures distant and out-of-sight from himself.

His determination inspired me, and I tried to follow his lead. I joined his animal rescue efforts in 2022 after several years embedded in the California animal rights movement. I worked long hours and spent much of my free time reading and strategizing about social change. I participated in undercover factory farm investigations and was arrested several times during animal rights demonstrations. And our efforts led to tangible results: we won two acquittals for activists in cases against major corporations like CostCo and Foster Farms, and our campaigns generated national press coverage exposing wide-scale mistreatment of animals. It was fast-paced and exhilarating.

But cracks in my resolve — and personal life — were beginning to form.

In 2023, our advocacy had caught the attention of Peter Singer himself. A huge animal rights supporter, he came to speak with our nonprofit while on tour for his new book decrying factory farms. It was that summer that I first read his famous 1971 paper, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” where he criticized those in affluent nations for not doing more to intervene in humanitarian disasters. There, in the context of wide-scale famine in Bangalore, he laid out his famous thought experiment on our moral obligations towards others. And here he was, the famous Princeton philosopher, speaking with us about the urgent need to end industrial violence towards animals.

This added a new moral weight — and an elevated sense of pressure — to my work. Every second of every day, thousands of animals were being starved, crushed, and boiled alive. And every moment of my own pleasure, that philosophy paper reminded me, was another second I wasn’t doing anything to intervene in this suffering.

While my anxiety and moral urgency grew, so did my arrogance. I’d accuse people in my life — at times silently, and other times overtly — that they “weren’t doing enough.”

I solidified a belief that shadowed over how I saw myself and others: If I don’t work as hard as I can for the animals, I am a moral failure.

Then I burnt out.

A painful breakup later that year left me emotionally devastated and unable to continue my work. It revealed deeper cracks in my personal life — that my total focus on animal rights had left me precariously unsupported in a time of emotional need. I had undermined my friendships and neglected my mental health.

Feeling broken, I had little choice but to quit.

A burnout-turned-world adventure

So I left my job and decided to travel around the world.

My colleagues graciously celebrated as I took my first break from activism in years. It was time to get some perspective. And it was wonderful.

Over the next few months, I visited old friends in Mexico City, sang karaoke in the Philippines, and camped with forest hippies in Taiwan. It was thrilling exploring new parts of the world, getting distance from my old life and learning from ones anew.

But a few months in, a familiar feeling grew stronger and stronger: that my time traveling, despite being prompted by a need for perspective and personal recovery, were selfish.

For the first lengths of my travel, I would casually pitch Singer’s moral dilemma to fellow travelers. “Hey, what do you think of this thought experiment…?” But over time, I brought it up less as a conversation piece and more as a personal obsession. Unsurprisingly, I was often met with uneasy body language and discomfort. “I don’t think it’s healthy,” at least one person said to me, “to be driven by so much guilt.”

The fact that no one could give me reasons why Singer was wrong led me to become even more confident in my moral beliefs. I saw every conversation as confirmation that there were no perspectives, even globally, that could undermine his simple logic. I more and more understood myself as a rare person who was able to handle the discomfort of what morality demands of us.

Then I found my confidence dislodged by a familiar perspective. I befriended a young traveler in a beach-side hostel in Taiwan. She was a climate activist from the Netherlands who was very familiar with senses of urgency and catastrophe. She interrupted me as I frantically explained the drowning strangers dilemma. “You are not responsible for factory farming or climate change,” she said. “You can’t bear the weight of the entire world on your shoulders. You have to find some joy in life.”

I wasn’t convinced. If you encounter a child drowning in a pond, why would it matter whether you were responsible for putting her there? But I did know that on some level, she was right. I saw how emotionally consumed I was by the idea and felt a glimmer of shame at how I had wielded it with arrogance over those around me.

I tried more desperately after that to work out my thoughts. I scribbled furiously for hours into my notebook to find cracks in Singer’s argument. After weeks of spiraling contemplation, it became clear to me that all that thinking wasn’t doing me, or anyone else, any good. This wasn’t a rational dynamic — it was an emotional one.

A turn within

From that point forward, I reframed my relationship to the vivid moral dilemma. I tried to understand not only the logic of moral obligations but also my emotions around them.

I turned my gaze inward. And with lots of meditation and the help of my therapist, I began to see more clearly the roots of what drew me so strongly to animals and to activism in the first place.

When I was a child, I lived with my older brother who has autism. He is non-verbal and, due to chemical imbalances in his brain, suffered deeply with near-constant confusion and anger.1 Being around him blurred the line for me between human and animal and gave me a soft spot for difference — an impulse to protect the most vulnerable.

And then he was sent away. When I was entering high school, his condition worsened to the point of him having violent tantrums that regularly required my mother and I to tackle and restrain him. Later, in one example of his outbursts, he charged at my mom and, missing by only inches, nearly smashed her head into the corner of a marble countertop. Reluctantly, we called 911 — first once, then again and again. After a couple months, the state forced him into a mental hospital.

After that, I went through high school without seeing much of my parents. They both worked full time and drove several hours each day to visit my brother until visiting hours were done. I often felt lonely at home, seeing my family only when they returned late into the night. I struggled to do well in school. Occasionally, my mom would praise me, sighing with relief that I seemed to be doing okay. I never complained. I internalized a sense that to be a good kid is to “take one for the team” — to devalue my needs relative to others. So for much of high school, I sat at home, alone, believing deep down that if I couldn’t have attention, at least I could be good.

A return home

I am back home now after what feels like a year of solo travel. After Thailand, I continued traveling around Southeast Asia — through Laos, Vietnam, and one final month visiting old friends in Taiwan.

My eight months abroad were thrilling and painful. As a forced breather from my activist world, it was one filled with self-exploration and self-doubt.

Perhaps most importantly, my time and space traveling gave me the courage to tap into old wounds that had laid hidden for so long.

During my first week returning home, I opened up to my mom for the first time about my feelings of abandonment. We talked about everything: the family trips longed for but never planned; the school plays unattended because of an emergency at home; the hurt I never voiced because I believed I had to hide it from my mother; the resentment I carried unknowingly into adulthood because of the deference I gave to my brother.

I explained to my mom how I became avoidant as an adult, fearing closeness with people out of an unspoken fear of abandonment. And I unpacked the moral anxieties that laid under much of my activism.

She cried. I cried. My mom told me that she now understood why for years I’d pushed her away. After that conversation, I noticed my inner child finding the softness to forgive, and to finally have the bravery to open up to her. I call her on the phone regularly now with an ease that I‘ve never had before. And it feels that for the first time in my adult life, I finally have a real relationship with my mom.

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—

So, where do I stand now on Singer’s thought experiment?

I still believe in the core principle: if we have the ability to prevent others from suffering without a significant sacrifice to ourselves, we should. Privilege carries with it a moral responsibility to act. But I believe now, too, that the reasons why we act can be just as important as the actions themselves.

My burnout taught me that tying one’s self-worth to one’s good deeds is a dangerous place to be. Our life circumstances will, at times, knock us out of the patterns that we use to find validations in ourselves. The actions that we rely on to justify our existence can and will be wrestled out of our control, at which point we will have nothing left to say we are good; nothing left to tell us we are worthy.

To me, this is not a story of “I worked too much and burned out.” Hard work is essential to some of the deepest beauties in this world, including caring for loved ones and the most vulnerable. Rather, this is a story of how the work we do can burn us if done for the wrong reasons — in my case, to patch over the vulnerability I never fully expressed to myself.

Now, I am back to organizing campaigns with The Simple Heart and inspired once again by the activists of the SF Bay Area. Their determination for animals reminds me that hope is far more powerful than guilt; inspiration more resilient than fear. And that inspiration will flow most naturally when our care for others is matched by a healthy care for ourselves.

The psychologist Kristen Neff writes, “Compassion isn’t a zero-sum game. The more compassion that flows inward, the more resources we have available to be there for others.”

I hope each of us is able to find that self-compassion — for the sake of ourselves, for those we care about, and for the world.

Thank you for reading. If you’re struggling with burnout and guilt, feel free to reach out to me to connect. I‘ve also benefited from this article on impact obsession from the EA Forum and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff.

The book Strangers Drowning is the most direct exploration I’ve found of guilt and Singer’s thought experiment. It narrates the lives of several people who have struggled through questions of moral responsibility and dedicated their lives to social impact. It’s an easy read that’s been taking me a long time to get through — as all true “fixes” do.

This is Part 3 in a three part series on open rescue (one, two).

In the days following my first release from jail, I was worried I may have ruined my life.

I was part of a demonstration that exposed criminal fraud at a large industrial chicken farm that marketed itself as “free range” and “humane”. After entering the property, we found sick and starving birds who were unable to bring themselves to food and water.

We asked the authorities to conduct an investigation into the facility. Instead, they arrested me and fifty other advocates on multiple felony charges including theft and burglary.

I believed our actions were righteous, and even legal under state law. But would others — in a world where seemingly no one gives a second thought to what happens to the animals on their plates — see my actions similarly?

It turns out, I had no reason to fear.

After I was released from jail, my professors commended me for putting my social studies into practice and gave me extensions on exams.

My friends reached out to me (not the other way around!) to talk about factory farming and asking for advice on how they could find purpose in their own lives.

My family’s reaction was the most powerful. My parents drove several hours to see me following the arrests, and my mom said to me words I will never forget:

“With our son putting his freedom on the line, we cannot in good conscience continue to eat animals.”

—

For most of my life, I thought it was a simple truth that people don’t care about animals — at least, not enough to talk about the cruelty involved in many of our meals.

But since I got involved with open rescue — a movement of people directly saving animals from abusive factory farms, slaughterhouses, and experimentation facilities — I’ve seen avoidance and dismissal turn into captivation and inspiration.

I’ve learned that the ways many of us have been taught to discuss factory farming is dead wrong. Often, we turn to “objective arguments”, i.e. the environment, health, ethics, et cetera. 

But humans are emotional creatures. We share knowledge and understand the world through stories: tales of characters facing challenges and making choices to overcome them. 

I’ve since come to understand the open rescue movement, almost above anything else, as a powerful story. It’s a story of people around the world walking right into places of violence and risking everything to protect the most vulnerable creatures on earth. 

If we want to change hearts and minds, we should start not with arguments, but with stories.

Humans are emotional animals (that’s a good thing)

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who passed away this year) became a popular icon for his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In it, he describes the two ways our brains process information.

System I thinking is quick and instinctive. This is the judgment when a smile tells you “Oh, I can trust this person,” or when your gut tells you this alleyway isn’t quite safe. 

System II is slower, more methodical. It’s the rational, analytical part of your brain that helps you learn a new cooking recipe or multiply 16 by 7. It’s a step-by-step process that entails reflecting on our reasoning.

Both systems of thinking are valuable. If we only used analytical System II for all of our thinking, our brains would be constantly overwhelmed. (Imagine if you had to list out all the muscle movements in your hands and feet every time you walked to the grocery store.)

On the other hand, if we only used System I, we would never reflect on when our first impressions may be wrong — which Kahneman famously demonstrated that they so frequently are.

When we try to convince somebody of something new, we often get frustrated they’re “not being rational.” But rationality is not only the words we use in a discussion or argument. It involves the gut-feelings that evolution has ingrained in our brains and our bodies to make effective decisions in a complex world. It’s the intuition that tells us what motivates us and how to comfort a friend in distress.

Of course, our intuition can also very often be wrong. Challenging our unchecked social intuitions on the normality of factory farming requires changing both our factual beliefs and our emotional ones. To do that, we need tools that can effectively transform those emotions.

The Story of Open Rescue

A good story typically contains Three C’s: Character, Challenge, and Choice. In the case of an open rescue, that often involves:

1. a Character — an ordinary person who sees an animal in need;

2. a Choice — a decision to rescue that animal, despite the risks;

3. a Challenge — someone enduring jail and prosecution for helping her.

Part of the skill of storytelling is identifying real events that can be told as compelling stories. Open rescue is a natural platform for compelling storytelling because it features these elements — and perhaps most important of all here, the challenge of being prosecuted by corporations and a powerful government. As one open rescue advocate and investigator has told me, “the bigger the challenge, the better the story.”

What Rescue Stories Do for Animals

After years of getting used to people ignoring social issues involving animals, I’ve seen open rescue stories captivate, cut through, and inspire courage.

1. Captivate

When I started telling people in college that I was arrested for animals, people suddenly started to pay attention. They became curious, wanting to hear more about what could be worth risking my future career for — and what kind of cruelty a nationally reputable “organic” farm could possibly be doing to their animals.

Stories captivate in a world that is constantly competing for our attention. There are over 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. But not all of it goes viral. Jonah Berger, a viral marketing guru at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that social media content is far more likely to go viral if it contains a compelling story.

Open rescue has proven to be a powerful story on social media. Videos about the #SonomaRescueTrial regularly received millions of views. And a story published by The Intercept about an FBI manhunt for two piglets rescued from the world’s largest pig factory farm became the most widely shared article then in the media outlet’s history.

2. Cut through

Not everything that catches attention changes minds. Good stories not only captivate, but also cut through emotional barriers that often prevent us from openly supporting a cause.

Research from LGBTQ+ advocacy has shown that door-to-door storytelling is one of the few effective ways to get people to change their voting behavior. They engage the parts of our brains that can imagine what it is like to be someone else — to feel their motivations and their struggles — and thereby sympathize with them.

Often, social problems feel so big that they will never be solved. They make us feel a sense of futility — “This is a huge problem, and no one cares.” Stories like ones of open rescue show that there are people who care, and are willing to sacrifice to make change.

In the case of open rescue, they also reframe the central issue in a way that seems more solvable. By challenging the legal system, open rescuers can shift the question of how to end factory farming away from “How do we get everyone to go vegan?” to “How can we pass laws to better protect animals?”

3. Inspire Courage

Stories inspire the courage that advocates need to drive systemic change. And open rescue storytelling has already created political change for animals.

In 2018, advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) approached Katy Tang, a member of the powerful San Francisco board of supervisors, with the FBI story on the rescue of Lily and Lizzie. Katy Tang was inspired by the story, saying that she wanted to do something for animals. She later spearheaded the passage of the San Francisco fur ban. A year later, California followed the city’s lead to become the first state in the nation to outright ban the sale and manufacture of fur.

Interestingly, that fur ban was somewhat unrelated to the story that inspired it (pigs don’t have fur!). But the story of rescuing animals from factory farms is so compelling that it inspired Supervisor Tang to ask what else she can do for animals.

Now, DxE is on a path to banning factory farming in one of the most powerful ag counties in California. The group succeeded recently in qualifying a ballot measure to ban factory farms in Sonoma County. This was only possible through gathering over 30,000 signatures with over 150 highly motivated volunteers. 

Several of these volunteers are themselves facing felony charges for open rescue investigations in Sonoma County. I imagine that many members of the broader group feel extra motivated to talk to voters knowing that their fellow signature gatherers have taken risks to help animals from the very factory farms they are advocating to ban.

You can tell stories that change the world

Nowadays, I often mention in casual conversation that I have been involved in open rescue. That often looks like one of the following:

• I mention it’s “what I do for work”, i.e. co-founding a nonprofit for open rescue advocacy;

• People ask me why I’m vegan / vegetarian, and I say I’ve been involved with groups that do open rescue investigations;

• When the mood is right at parties, I say my “fun fact” is I’ve been arrested for animals.

What I’ve found surprising is that people are often moved by these stories even when I tell them in a way that minimizes my personal connection to it. I sometimes say that I have friends who do open rescue without mentioning that I’ve been involved in my own demonstrations.

As a reader of this blog, you can say you have been following the open rescue movement, and (if true) that they have moved you to rethink how society should relate to animals. You can ask friends and family if they’ve heard of these open rescue cases, and what they think of them.

What I envision in the coming decades is a mass movement of open rescue advocacy: one that includes not only the animals and the rescuers, but of ordinary people telling these stories to their friends and family. I imagine statewide ballot initiatives across the nation motivated in part by stories of risk and rescue.

We can create a world that ends systemic violence against animals. And through your own storytelling, you can help make that world a reality.

This is the last post in a three part series (one, two) on open rescue.

A felony trial relating to this mass open rescue concludes this week. Follow the Sonoma Rescue Trial Twitter for updates and the Simple Heart blog for trial reflections from Wayne Hsiung, the last remaining defendant. 

This is the second post in a three part series on open rescue.

On a misty morning in September 2018, I gathered at a park in south Berkeley with over a hundred animal rights activists to take what was then the biggest risk of my life.

I was a college senior at UC Berkeley studying for law school at the time. Months earlier, I joined Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), an animal activist organization that claimed to have been exposing fraud and cruelty at “humane” commercial farms around the nation. 

For most of my life, I had been a vegetarian. I cared about animals and saw documentaries on industrial agriculture as a child that led me away from animal products. But I saw these concerns as relatively mild quirks of my personal life. After all, there may be some bad companies out there, but as a whole, the government set standards for farms, and many of them seemed to be becoming “organic” and “certified humane” anyway. With all the regulation and certifications, animal agriculture couldn’t be cruel as a whole, could it?

Now, I had a chance to see for myself. 

After an hour-long briefing, we broke and shuffled into a convoy of passenger vans. Our destination was kept confidential to a handful of organizers to avoid tipping off the industry and local authorities.

What I didn’t know is that our convoy was heading towards the largest organic poultry farm in the nation. 

Petaluma Poultry, owned by Perdue Foods, was a major supplier to Whole Foods. The New York Times had published two articles praising Purdue’s animal welfare practices, positioning the company as a spearhead in a new era of humane meat. And one of their flagship facilities was located in Sonoma County, less than a two hour drive north of my campus at UC Berkeley.

To the rest of Sonoma County, it was a sleepy overcast morning. For many of us, it would be one of the most important days of our lives. 

 — 

My car was the first to arrive. We pulled over onto a sleepy road in the Sonoma countryside. An occasional horse stood on the horizon amid the green hills around us. I wondered if our mission to uncover industrial animal cruelty had brought us to the wrong place. 

The rest of the convoy arrived shortly after. A crowd of people and banners formed on the gravel road. Soon after, DxE activist Wayne Hsiung began a livestream and announced that our march would begin.

For months, he said, undercover investigators had documented filthy, overcrowded conditions at the facility of over a hundred thousand birds that violated state animal cruelty laws. And when they reported these conditions to the authorities, they did nothing.

Now, in the middle of a factory farm, we were going to set up an on-site medical facility and bring care directly to suffering animals. I lugged a tent over my shoulder as we walked. Others carried medical fluids and scrubs. 

Priya, another activist on the livestream, summed up our mission: “We’re going to bring compassion to one of the most violent places on Earth.” 

This was not the first daylight open rescue that DxE had conducted. Since 2017, DxE had gathered ordinary people in civil disobedience at several slaughterhouses and factory farms around the Bay Area. The previous action at Sunrise Farms, a massive Whole Foods egg supplier also in Sonoma County, led to forty activists being willingly arrested. No one was criminally charged. Each time, things went largely according to plan. 

No one in previous actions was arrested who didn’t expect to be. There was no reason this time should be different, right?

 — 

The property looked charming and bucolic. A massive chicken statue stood at the front by the road. We walked up a short winding road and passed a bungalow and a building painted red to look like a farm house. Most people held up white flowers in one hand and a peace sign in another. I carried the medical tent on my shoulder.

For a surprisingly long moment, no one stopped us. Then we heard a vehicle approaching. A woman stopped us at the front gate. “Get off my property! This is private property!” 

Under California Penal Code 597e, it is legal to enter someone’s property to aid to animals who have been denied food and water for over twelve hours. Wayne offered a letter to the farm owner describing our right to give aid to the animals we knew were being neglected at this facility. She rejected the letter.

The rest of us continued marching. The farm was a series of dirt roads lined by long metal sheds. Discolored roofs stood atop off-white corrugated metal. Tattered tarps flapped in the wind. Two of the sheds had wire enclosures next to them, each with a few dozen to a hundred chickens outside on dirt. 

A severed chicken foot lay on the ground as we marched past. 

Having arrived squarely in the center of the farm, some activists slipped on white biosecurity suits and began to enter sheds. Farm employees rushed to hold facility doors shut, but the activists were too many. The woman aggressively drove past us while yelling on the phone to other farm employees and the police. 

“They’re stealing our chickens, goddammit! They’re stealing our ch—!” 

I handed the tent I was carrying to other activists and joined one of the gatherings. I stood there observing. It felt like being in the eye of a storm. White biosecurity suits rushed past facility workers. A police helicopter began to circle overhead; police sirens made their way towards us in the distance.

I reflected on the risk I was taking being here. I had only known this activist group for a few months. I was taking practice LSATs and preparing for law school. Were we justified in entering this property that, with the occasional severed limb, seemed otherwise taken out of a children’s book? Was I right to entrust this rag-tag activist group with my freedom?

Then I saw the birds.

Inside, activists live streamed the conditions. Ten thousand birds were confined in each industrial shed. Some were collapsed on their backs, chests rising and falling heavily as they struggled to breathe. Others flapped desperately on the floor, legs collapsed and unable to walk. Undercover footage had documented similar conditions for months — and today was no exception.

 Among the living were the dead.

An activist handed me and other activists towels with dead birds wrapped inside. I saw mangled bodies that were indistinguishable from heaps of dirt. Tattered feathers, exposed bone, red flesh. Some bodies were unrecognizable as animals. 

I had been briefed that birds on chicken farms typically suffer from overcrowding, disease, and cannibalization. Now, I was seeing what that looked like with my own eyes.

California state animal cruelty laws define it as illegal to maliciously and intentionally maim, torture, mutilate any animal — and there is no exemption for farmed animals. When I saw the birds, it was clear to me that the real criminals were not those of us who were trying to give aid to sick and dying animals. It was the massive facility that was abusing these animals in the first place. 

Factory farmers in the county would later justify these conditions. This is a farm with hundreds of thousands of birds. It’s like a city filled with people. With a large enough number, some will become sick, and some will die.

In time, I would realize the grotesqueness of this logic. A city is not just a mass of bodies. It has hospitals and grocery stores. It has families and emergency services. In a complex of industrial sheds, each crammed with over ten thousand chickens bred to grow to six times their normal size and collapse under their own weight before being slaughtered at only six weeks old, this was no city. 

This was a death camp for kindergarteners.

 — 

A line of law enforcement officers detained us as we began to depart from the farm. The clouds grayed as it began to rain. Activists held about a dozen birds who were in urgent need of medical attention. Dehydration. Broken wings. Ammonia burns from lying in their own feces. If they did not receive rapid intensive care, they would die.

Over an hour-long stand-off, Wayne attempted to negotiate. He explained our legal right to give aid and the medical urgency of the situation. 

I wondered what was running through the officers’ minds. One of them, an athletic-looking man with a military buzzcut, fixed his eyes on the birds. He hunched over slightly, his eyes fixed on one of the mangled bodies. I imagined what he was thinking: these people might be breaking the law… but God, are these birds in awful shape.

Nonetheless, an officer gave an order for us to be arrested. Officers ripped dying birds out of the hands of other activists who through their cries pleaded with the officers not to hurt the animals. 

While I put my hands behind my back and felt plastic zip ties tighten around my wrists, I solemnly reflected on the irony of the situation: We are not the criminals here. The farm is. And we’re being arrested for trying to expose it. An officer recited to me those strangely familiar words: “You have the right to remain silent.”

Later, a state veterinary report would reveal the injuries of the birds who were seized by authorities. The birds, it read, were in “distress,” had “exposed muscle tissue and bone,” and had a “necrotic smell.” In other words: they were literally rotting to death. The injuries were so severe that the government’s own veterinarian recommended the farm for charges of criminal animal cruelty. And yet, we were the ones being arrested. 

They ushered us past the chicken statue and loaded us onto a bus set for county jail. We sang songs despite protests from the bus driver. 

I’m gonna keep on walking forward… keep on walking forward… never turning back.

Later, I would learn that not all of the birds we tried to rescue were taken by the authorities. During the stand-off, one officer took mercy on the animals. She asked us which bird needed the most help. She told an activist to take the sickest bird and run. She was rushed to veterinary care and taken to an animal sanctuary. They named her Rose.

 —

Sonoma authorities held us in county jail overnight where they announced our charges. The molasses pace of our jail intake was punctured by a gasp as the first activist received the news of our charges: felony burglary, felony conspiracy, and grand theft. Our bail was set at $20,000 each — a total for all fifty eight of us of nearly $1.2 million. 

In the days after our release, I reflected on the answers I had set out on my journey to seek. I had seen “humane” animal agriculture with my own eyes — that even the Whole Foods’ and Purdues of the world were engaging in criminal animal cruelty that would shock the conscience of anyone who found out. And that the government, far from regulating these industries, was actively prosecuting those who tried to expose it.

Today, five years later, the era of open rescue trials has begun. As I write this, Wayne Hsiung is on trial for trespass and felony conspiracy for leading hundreds of people in demonstrations against factory farms in Sonoma County. 

It is a chance for a jury of ordinary people to see what I have seen and decide who the real criminals are: the activists shining light on cruelty, or the corporations fighting to keep it in the dark. 

Twice now in a row, animal activists have been acquitted for rescuing sick and dying animals from slaughterhouses and factory farms. I’m confident that similarly, the jury in the Sonoma Rescue Trial will make the right choice. 

When they do, it will further inspire people around the world who agree that rescuing animals is not a crime; that companies should not be allowed to torture innocent creatures and call it “humane”; and that our laws should not treat animals as mere property to abuse, but rather living beings who deserve compassion and respect.

This has been Part 2 in a three part series on open rescue. Read Part 1 here and subscribe for Part 3.

Four years ago, when I was a senior in college, I took a chance and joined a rag-tag group of activists staging an occupation of the nation’s largest organic chicken farm. The goal was to give aid to sick and dying animals and expose conditions at an aggressively marketed “humane” supplier. 

After a two-hour standoff with dozens of law enforcement officers and a police helicopter, over fifty of us were arrested on felony charges and spent the night in jail in Sonoma County. 

This might not be the first strategy people think of to prevent animal suffering. So why did we take these risks?

If you’re like me, you know what it’s like to feel frustrated and hopeless at the scale of violence our society inflicts upon animals. Nearly ten billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year in the United States. For chickens, a hundred and forty thousand are slaughtered every minute — virtually all having lived their lives in filthy, overcrowded factory farms riddled with sickness and disease. And when you look at the absence of these discussions in our politics, our social movements, and our diets, no one seems to care.

A central task of the animal rights movement is to get people to care about animal suffering. Too often, however, our strategy is to deliver arguments why they should. It’s bad for the environment! Look at climate change! Animal suffering is wrong!

These are important arguments. But by and large, humans are not moved to large-scale changes by argument. We also need motivation and emotion. That’s where open rescue comes in.

Open rescue is the act of removing suffering animals from factory farms, slaughterhouses, experimentation facilities, and other places of violence, and defending the action in courts and to the public. 

What gives me hope is that I’ve seen how stories of open rescue can transform people’s care for animal rights. I’ve seen how tales of ordinary people risking prison to expose conditions at the nation’s largest industrial facilities have captivated those around me when I’d normally expect them to turn away at the first mention of animal suffering. I’ve seen how a rising movement of animal activists has already been able to channel that care into social and political change for animals. 

And most personally, I’ve seen how open rescue has unlocked the care for animals that was always inside of me. 

Stories of open rescue have begun to capture the public imagination and change people’s lives. I’ll show you how: with my own story of how I went from being a quiet vegetarian to sitting in handcuffs on the floor of a factory farm.

I was in elementary school when I learned the difficulty of getting people to care about animals. I went vegan after seeing a short PETA documentary on factory farming, and soon after gave a PowerPoint presentation to my sixth grade class on why everyone should be vegan, too. 

But I didn’t convince anybody. People quickly saw my veganism as a personality quirk — not a moral stance to seriously consider. Knowing no other vegans, I soon saw it as a silly quirk, too. I broke my childhood veganism in middle school after attending one too many birthday parties where I was the only kid not eating the ice cream cake.  

For a moment when I got to UC Berkeley, I thought things might be different. After all, I was at the campus symbolic of America’s progressive idealism. But I was wrong. Vegan outreachers were a mainstay on campus, but I saw them met with the familiar mockery and dismissal that I had seen at my own advocacy growing up.

One friend, however — a philosophy major in my pre-law society — was one of the few to humor me. Over a two hour lunch conversation, I explained the logic that there is no morally relevant difference between humans and other animals that justified violence against one for the pleasure of the other. At the end, he let out a chuckle and said, “You’re right, I just don’t care.”

 — 

For a long time, experiences like these led me to be deeply pessimistic about the future of animal rights. It seemed painfully clear that when it comes to the widespread violence animals experience in the food we eat every day, there’s something in human nature that leads our species to simply not care.

But there was a flaw in my reasoning. My approach to advocacy was based on a More Information Hypothesis: that all I had to do was educate people about factory farming and then they would change. Then I would run into its spiteful cousin, the Lack of Care Hypothesis — that if people didn’t change based on the information, they simply didn’t care. 

There are, however, often hidden and complicated forces that shape how we respond to new information. 

One of them is social pressure. After years of simply not knowing any other vegans, my younger vegan self gave way to relatively mild peer influence out of a desire to fit in. In his recent book, the political journalist Ezra Klein argues that this desire is hardwired so evolutionarily deep within us that our brains will often unconsciously refuse to process information that threatens our sense of social belonging.

Another is hopelessness. A report by the research group Pax Fauna found through hundreds of hours of interviews with non-vegans that perhaps the most common rationalization people have for eating animals is a sense of futility. Participants often said that no matter how awful animal farming was, there was nothing they could do about it. After all, the whole world eats meat and will never change anyway.

There is a broader takeaway here: that the fact that many people eat animals often has nothing to do with their care about animals. Instead, people are protective of their emotions and identities, avoiding the discomfort that can come with sticking out from the crowd and reflecting on suffering that they feel unable to change.

To get around this, we need to get people to believe that the world can change. We need a movement that inspires hope. 

That’s where open rescue comes in.

 — 

In my senior year of college, I was taking practice LSATs and preparing for law school. I didn’t have a lot of hope for social change. I was weary of politics and wanted to find a modest role in some government office. 

Then I attended a workshop on social change with a local animal activist group called Direct Action Everywhere. The lessons there would change my life. 

I had been volunteering with their political advocacy team for a couple months before I was invited to learn about their broader strategy to create impact for animals. Through a four hour discussion of historical examples and social science studies, the workshop challenged what I thought I knew about how to create social change: that bold ideas like ending factory farming might seem initially strange to the public, but they create a vision that inspires a movement to make incremental steps toward it in the long run; that protests often work not by persuading observers, but by activating their participants; and that instead of waiting for a majority of people to support a cause, social movements can shape policy and public opinion with far fewer people and in shorter time frames than people expect.

But there was another perhaps more important effect the workshop had on me. It inspired me.

On the projector, Wayne showed videos of DxE activists brazenly walking into factory farms and slaughterhouses in broad daylight and openly taking animals out. In one video, seemingly over a hundred people gathered at a slaughterhouse a few miles away from where I was sitting. 

Despite protest from the facility’s owners, several of the activists walked in and filmed horrid conditions inside. A bunny stood inside a cage atop the rotting bodies of two other dead bunnies. A live quail was found in a trashcan filled with blood, guts, and the severed bodyparts of other birds.

But what was different in this footage from virtually all the other cruelty footage I’ve seen in my life was that they didn’t just document it. They took the animals right out. Several animals were saved that day, including a sheep and several birds. 

In doing so, over twenty of the activists were willingly arrested for misdemeanor trespassing. They were cited and released; and it was one of several examples of the workshop of people doing what they believed by saving animals and daring the police and industry to stop them.

That, Wayne explained, was the essence of nonviolent direct action. By putting their own freedom on the line and inviting suffering into their own lives, they were showing the urgency of their cause and bringing attention to the suffering of others.

Social movements around the world have engaged in this kind of nonviolence to powerful effect. From the civil rights movement to the environmental movement, people around the world have transformed political systems and social norms with the power of nonviolent direct action. For the first time, I saw animal rights as a real social justice movement — one that could use nonviolence to change the world, too.

I looked around and realized that the people around me — from those sitting in the workshop to my fellow volunteers on the political team — were the same people in the videos. I realized that the activists walking into factory farms were not some group of special other people. They were regular people, just like me. It made me ask, what am I willing to do for what I care about?

In September 2018, I had my chance.

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11 min read

This weekend, I’m attending my first EA Global conference, hosted by the Center for Effective Altruism. Broadly, the group organizes the effective altruist (EA) movement which seeks to use evidence and reason to do the most possible good in the world —  especially in cause areas that may not currently receive much funding or people power.

It feels a bit funny for me to be here. Increasingly, the movement is turning its eyes to the stars.

At their recent EAGxBerkeley conference (held in the beautiful and historically rich Oakland, CA), they gave each participant a copy of the latest book by Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill. In it, he lays the foundation for a longtermist moral philosophy where he argues that the single greatest moral priority of our species is protecting the very longterm future of humanity. This includes reducing existential risk (ex: nuclear war, rogue artificial intelligence). And it includes colonizing space, so there are lots and lots of humans in the future on planets beyond our own. (Elon Musk is a fan of this book.)

With that galactic perspective, I chuckle a bit that I am here. The reason? Essentially, I work full time to rescue baby animals from abuse. I am the co-founder of a recently founded animal rights nonprofit called The Simple Heart Initiative. Recently, one of our open rescues received national media coverage, including two pieces in The New York Times, after my co-founder and his co-defendant were acquitted on felony charges for rescuing two dying piglets named Lily and Lizzie from the nation’s largest pig factory farm.

The goal is to leverage the stories of rescued animals to shift social and legal norms ultimately towards constitutional rights for nonhuman animals. It’s deeply meaningful work to me. But you may ask, if you subscribe to longtermist thinking: what does rescuing baby animals mean, in the grand scheme of the universe?

I often feel I differ from how many EA’s think. I worry too much thinking in the movement relies too much on abstract thought experiments and neglects the political implications of its ideas. But I do identify strongly with its moral case of using evidence and reason to make people’s lives better. And I found much of MacAskill’s book valuable and persuasive. There are many versions of long-termist thought, but its core idea is simple: the potential arc of the universe is long, and we should seriously reflect on our role within it. (I also have a big soft-spot for the EA movement. They were one of the first non-animal rights groups I found that takes animal suffering seriously. It’s where I’ve met many wonderful fellow vegans; and the conference food is all vegan, too!) 

This blog is an adaptation of my application to the conference describing (in roughly EA terms) how I am trying to make the world a better place. I’ll discuss:

• Why open rescue — the act of removing animals from places of abuse and defending the practice to the public — is an effective way to do good;

• Some of Will MacAskill’s ideas on longtermism and animals, including how to weigh the morality of nonhuman suffering and the importance of value lock-in;

• How wild animals can benefit from open rescues of farmed animals.

Overall, it’s an edited brain dump making the case that even in the grand scheme of the universe, one of the kindest, most impactful things we can do is to rescue a baby piglet from the floor of a factory farm.

In October, two animal activists walked free after facing a decade in prison on felony charges for investigating the nation's largest pig factory farm. The #SmithfieldTrial verdict in rural conservative county in southern Utah shocked many, leading major outlets, including The New York Times, The Intercept, Democracy Now!, and others to publish highly sympathetic pieces on the trial and animal welfare.

I do this work because I believe it is effective. I believe this for two reasons. First, that animal suffering is one of the most important, tractable, and neglected (ITN) cause areas. And second, that open rescue -- as a strategy to end not just factory farming but animal suffering as a whole -- is powerful and underutilized.

Animal suffering is a key moral issue in the effective altruist ITN framework. Let’s first look at scale. The investigation in Utah, at a facility that raises over 1.2 million pigs a year, revealed that around 15% of its animals were dying before reaching slaughter. A common cause: the industry-termed "hypothermia-crushing-starvation complex". 

Essentially, mother pigs are genetically manipulated to give birth to more piglets than they have nipples. What happens to the runts who cannot compete for the limited amount of nipples? They starve. Their bodyweight falls to a fraction of their siblings, causing hypothermia that leads them to more desperately seek warmth underneath their mother. And since the mother’s metal gestation crate she will spend the rest of her life in is too small to allow her to stand up or turn around, she crushes her child.

This is an example of the suffering factory farming routinely inflicts upon trillions of animals every year. This suffering includes mutilation, crushing, overcrowding, starvation, and psychological deprivation. If Will MacAskill is correct in suggesting that neuron count is a decent approximation of welfare capabilities (which some EAs and myself believe actually undersells the issue), then in his words, the fact that "the vast majority of farmed animals... live lives full of intense suffering" may mean that the suffering of farmed animals "could well outweigh total human wellbeing."

Despite this, only a tiny fraction of our species' efforts go toward ending factory farming. In 2021, three percent of US charitable giving went to environmental and animal charities, with factory farming receiving a small proportion of those funds. And rates of vegetarianism have remained stable in the single digits for decades.

However, there is reason to believe in the historical contingency of these trends. One study by Pax Fauna suggests that one of the biggest reasons people tell themselves that factory farming will never end is a sense of futility. The rise of new technologies such as plant-based and cultivated meats can combat the sense of futility that prevents people from adopting pro-animal attitudes. 

The most exciting development to me in animal welfare, however, is the movement of open rescue. Here, I define open rescue as a strategy for social change featuring removing suffering animals from places of abuse and defending these actions in courts and to the public. Ideally, this is done in a strategic manner to shift societal values around animals. 

Only a handful of people in US history have engaged directly in open rescue. And there has been very little institutional support. With little exception, major animal welfare organizations have avoided touching open rescue with a ten foot pole, partly out of fear of controversy and legal liability. 

This thin track record means there is relatively little direct evidence for its effectiveness. Consequently, there is significant uncertainty in its ability to end factory farming. However, this also means there is significant potential opportunity. Direct evidence and broader historical trends give us reason to believe the upper range of its potential impact is very high, with evidence supporting the idea that expected value is closer to the higher end than the lower end.

For direct evidence, open rescue has led to significant positive legislation and media attention for animals. The Smithfield trial was covered widely by both national and local outlets, with major journalists demonstrating interest in covering future open rescue trials. Additionally, early journalism about the Smithfield trial from 2017 inspired an SF supervisor to pass a city-wide fur ban, paving the way for California in 2019 to become the first state and largest economy in the world to ban the sale and production of fur. More recent coverage on open rescue has also been exceptional. In response to our upcoming open rescue trial against Foster Farms, columnist Farhad Majoo at The New York Times writes:

I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, but as I’ve written before, vegans and animal rights activists deserve society’s immense respect rather than mockery because they are clearly right about the big issues: that industrial-scale animal farming is an incomprehensible cruelty many of us try our best not to think about, lest it ruin our lunch; that the animals we grow to eat are biologically no less complex and deserving of dignity and humane treatment than the animals we keep as pets; and that the production of cheap and plentiful meat has been an environmental and public health catastrophe whose obvious solution — eat less meat! — nevertheless remains culturally and politically verboten.

In these rescues, activists are again putting themselves on the line to establish a worthy principle.

Beyond recent media and political developments, open rescue seems effective to me because it is similar to other nonviolent direct action tactics that have historically been key to social change. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 may have seemed like an initial setback for the anti-slavery movement. But it triggered a backlash against slavery that turbocharged the abolitionist movement (including the Underground Railroad). That energy soon led the momentum to codify racially egalitarian values in the 13th Amendment. This dynamic of state repression sparking a progressive backlash has been seen in other movements, especially later in the civil rights movement. When advocates have the discipline and strategic capacity to leverage their own suffering for a cause, they can create  moral asymmetry that raises issue salience to the public and elites and allows them to sympathize with victims over abusers. 

The practice of open rescue forces the state (and factory farm supporters) into a decision dilemma. Do we prosecute people rescuing animals, or let them walk free? In either case, a powerful story is generated for the public. If these stories instill pro-animal sentiments in elites and the general public, they could reduce the scale and longevity of factory farming by decades or more.

To drive the point home on the urgency of shifting social norms around animals: a recent EA Forum post by Alene Anello at Legal Impact for Chickens warns that the USDA is funding research into factory farming on the moon. If they’re successful, and industrial animal agriculture is allowed to continue into the very long-term future, the implications could literally be astronomical.

The motivation for my work, however, is much broader than factory farming. It also includes the suffering of wild animals. 

Ther neuron count of nonhuman animals, driven almost entirely by fish, outweighs human neurons by a factor of seventeen. Their lives, full of predation and starvation, are likely full of incredible suffering. Will MacAskill’s briefly noted quasi-solution to this in What We Owe the Future is that hey, at least humanity is driving them to extinction. If we consider that wild animals live lives that contain more suffering than pleasure, he writes, then “we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.”

This strikes me as selling the issue, and our species, short. Research is only now scratching soil on our abilities to intervene in wild animal suffering, from pigeon contraception to pathogen mitigation. The folks at the Wild Animal Initiative allow us to envision a world where nonviolent population management limits some of the worst impulses of mother nature. 

To me, the broader vision of open rescue is that if we can shift social norms in a pro-animal direction (ex: an animal bill of rights), we can mobilize our species’ resources and ingenuity to research scalable ways to intervene in wild animal suffering. And if the technological optimism of MacAskill and Musk includes visions of a future among the stars, then I will allow my own visions to include a future of meaningful interventions in wild animal suffering.

This social norm change for animals becomes more urgent, however, when we recognize that the values of our species could well be locked in the other way. As my co-founder writes in his recent post on artificial intelligence and factory farming: “[b]efore we continue developing powerful technologies, it’s crucial that our deepest values are actually, well, good.”

There are many uncertainties for me regarding open rescue as an effective cause area. How vulnerable is the movement of open rescue to state repression or cultural backlash? How tractable is wild animal suffering? How does the intensity of factory farming weigh against the moral implications of AGI and human extinction? 

Part of this uncertainty for me is resolved by the humbling recognition that I simply care deeply about animals. I am grateful and encouraging of the work people do for other important cause areas. 

Another part is resolved by the spillover effect. If we’re lucky, social norm change for animals will increase consideration for sentience more broadly. The basic principle of animal welfare to me is that all sentience counts. If that sentience lives within an AGI, then we had better give that machine learning algorithm the respect they deserve.

Overall, whether on Earth or in the stars, animals will exist in the long-term future. Their suffering is real, in factory farms and beyond. And it should be a moral priority of our species to end it. If longtermists are correct that our future is one of fantastic artificial intelligence and GDP growth extending to the cosmos, then we can imagine that the ensuing capabilities may enable us to make a meaningful difference in wild animal suffering. This presents us with an opportunity to help our cousins of Kingdom Animalia live lives with a bit less fear and a little less suffering. And, dare I say it, perhaps even make their lives ones of happiness and flourishing.

Thanks for reading! I write to engage intellectually with people I care about. Do comment below, and subscribe to my blog to stay connected. For more writing on open rescue, check out my co-founder’s blog, The Simple Heart.

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Even though nothing was forcing me to stay, I felt trapped. The person I was talking to — a tall, burly man with a seemingly argumentative personality — had plenty of words and little space for my own. 

I could have walked away. Indeed, that may have been the smart move. I was getting late for work, and a disagreement on a street corner is hardly the ideal space for changing hearts and minds. But something in my brain, whether an ethical commitment to speaking against injustice or or simply an impulsive draw towards conflict, narrowed my vision to this moment right here. 

I had met him only moments ago, and yet he felt the license to tell me hurtful, violent things. He said my friends didn’t belong here. He said they were pests. He said they even deserved to be killed! And so an argument with a stranger on a Friday afternoon became the most important thing in the world. 

With each interruption, it became harder to keep my cool. Yet I knew meeting fire with fire would do no good. I knew then that I had to make a choice. 

We have all felt trapped in a futile conversation. Maybe it’s with a family member on a sensitive topic, or a stranger at a political event. Some disagreement has ensnared your focus, and the other person seems too stubborn or closed-minded to listen to what you have to say. 

That was my situation that day. The outcome, however, was a surprisingly sweet ending. And key to that were a few tricks I’ve learned on how to navigate difficult conversations with more grace and joy.

I was walking by the Ferry Building when something to my left caught my eye. There, standing on a tourist-filled pier by downtown, was a smiling woman with a hawk perched on her arm. Standing tall and attentive, the creature was surrounded yet unfazed by a small crowd of bystanders. I joined the fray and asked the woman why she was there.

The purpose of her mission, it turns out, was pest control. The “pest” in question? The common rock dove — known simply to most as the pigeon. Companies paid her to stand there to keep pigeons away. 

As the woman described her anti-pigeon mission, a burly voice spoke up to my left. “Flying rats, I say!” 

The stocky man next to me was wearing a full black outfit topped with a leather jacket. He sported a long gray beard and spoke with a husky confidence that reminded me of someone in construction. He stood tall, somehow rising a few inches above me even as he leaned over, propping himself up on a wheelchair.

The moment the woman started explaining her mission, I felt a wave of dismay. I love pigeons. I spend my breaks at work pigeon-watching. I have even volunteered with pigeon first aid groups to “destring” pigeons, removing hair and debris from their feet that can choke blood flow and amputate their limbs. So it gave me feelings of offense and distress to hear someone describe these gentle beings I cared for as pests.

Gathering all the patience I could, my head angled as I asked them, “Why are the pigeons pests to you?”

The woman offered her perspective. She explained that pigeons can cause damage in urban environments. They are a non-native species. Their droppings can corrode equipment and spread disease. The man nodded frequently, clarifying his agreement. The woman seemed to have some sympathy for the birds; her eyes drooped apologetically when she said she tried, though not always successfully, to prevent the predatory hawk from catching and eating the smaller birds. The man was less sympathetic. To him, the pigeons were an invasive pest — no more, no less.

The man’s complaints continued to a broader topic. Namely, that the world is full of uninformed people who speak up without really understanding the issues, “like those terrorists at PETA!”, he scoffed. This one hit a bit close to home. I’ve spent much of my last few years working with animal rights nonprofits, and only weeks before this interaction, I helped record a podcast with PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk.

For the first time in our conversation, I verbally registered my opposition.

“I am actually involved in animal rights circles,” I said.

My face and body language, it seems, had already given me away. The man smirked, “Oh, I could tell.” 

At this point, the conversation started to seem futile. It seemed clear where the man stood. My friends were his pests. And the people I associated with were not well-intentioned advocates, but straight-up terrorists. He didn’t seem at all interested in what I had to say, and the few words I was able to get in didn’t have much impact. There didn’t seem much point in staying.

I thought then of my choices. I could storm off from the conversation. I could interrupt him and correct what I saw were his factual errors. I could stay quiet and just nod along.

But I made a different decision. 

I realized that while I had a good sense of his ideas, I didn’t understand why he held them. I extended an olive branch, inviting peace with a spot of common ground. 

I told him that he seems to have a lot of respect and compassion towards animals. I offered, “it sounds like you would never want an animal to suffer unnecessarily.”

Before I could finish the sentence, he began nodding vigorously. “Absolutely,” he said.

That’s when he opened up to me about his story.

He grew up in the forested German countryside where his family practiced falconry and managed a plot of land. They did not own the land; on this point he was very clear. Instead, they agreed to stewardship with the owner. They could live there, living off the woods and training their predatory birds to hunt. But they were never to take more from the woods than they naturally restore. They were to be of the ecosystem, not to exploit it.

This did not immediately strike me as inspiring. Growing up, I loved animals, yet would recoil in horror at nature documentaries. There never seemed to be victory when a terrified seal escaped a starving mother polar bear. Balance matters, absolutely. But the circle of life seems of little consolation to the gazelle being eaten alive, or the field mouse rotting from disease. 

For this reason, many ethicists and biologists are calling on us to take wild animal suffering seriously. There are growing efforts in the fledgling field of welfare biology to protect the interests of animals. This includes by protecting habitats, curing diseases, and reducing starvation. It also includes, heart-warmingly to me, research on contraception for pigeons. Far from a world of immovable torment, an ideal world to me is one where we treat the suffering of animals not as an inevitable fact of life but rather one that we have the care and determination to contain.

What I did resonate with, however, was the reverence with which he spoke of his woodland duties. His upbringing brought him closer to animals, and where we could agree was that the natural world was not simply a resource for us to use — it was a community to protect.

These shared values softened my heart, and I asked more about his story with a renewed sense of curiosity. He described his career in the French Foreign Legion, an elite fighting unit known for special forces operations. It was through there that he met his wife from my own home country, the Philippines. 

This last fact perked me up. “I’m Filipino!”, I blurted out. Turns out, we shared a surprising connection — his wife may have known the woman who introduced my grandparents. They were from the same city in the same circle of friends. The connection wasn’t certain, but for a chance sidewalk encounter, the odds were surprising enough.

After this point, we didn’t talk much more about animals. We marveled at the smallness of the world and the improbability of our connection. The burly man enthusiastically told me about his frequent visits with his wife to my mother’s hometown. His stories endeared me, and we bonded over shared appreciation of the island nation’s tropical beauty and cantankerous politics.

Suspecting I was becoming late for work, I began to part from the conversation. I began to turn away, and he stopped me. “People like you and me, who share our values, we have to keep speaking up.”

Even though the conversation took positive turns, I was stunned. Moments earlier, he grouped me into a category of terrorists. And here he was, saying we were on the same team. He called me “brother” and told me to be well. He left me with a quote from Steve Jobs, commending my energy and urged me to stay hungry. 

Left feeling warm from the connection, I turned to my bike and we parted ways.

For much of my life, I fixated on petty disagreements. I was on the debate team in college, and I often turned casual encounters into bickering debates. My friends joked that Dean is a guy who can “win” an argument and “lose” a conversation. 

I’ve learned a lot since then. And that’s come with a few helpful tricks. 

First, if you’re in a tough conversation, get clear on your goal. Do you want them to adopt a specific political view? Or simply soften to where you’re coming from? Maybe it’s something else entirely, and you’d rather build or strengthen a relationship. There’s only so much anyone can change their mind in a single conversation, and clarifying our goals can take the pressure off and lead to more open conversations.

Second, focus on trust. Research shows that minds change most over time with repeated interactions with people they trust. Sometimes the first step towards changing a mind is winning a heart. You can start that by finding more commonality than disagreement and asking genuine questions to build trust.

Third, replace your anxiety with curiosity. The same part of the brain that makes us anxious is also responsible for excitement. If you feel strained, ask how you might turn that tension into curiosity. Why does this person think the way they do? What in their background may have shaped their beliefs? Think of the other person less as an agent of a harmful perspective and more as a curious mystery to solve. 

My conversation with my burly friend that day did not transform a hunter into a vegan. And it did not transform the struggles of my pigeon friends. But if nothing else, I’ll take that my afternoon stroll helped a stranger find that a young man on a pier wasn’t so much of a terrorist after all. 

This blog is inspired by The Sanctuary Initiative, a new organization I am co-founding with my friend Wayne Hsiung who is going to trial next month on felony charges for rescuing sick baby piglets from factory farms.

We combine storytelling and community building to change the world for people and animals. Read his blog here.

This post contains mild spoilers for the movie Pig (2021).

Growing up, I watched Nicolas Cage evolve from cinema artist to legendary meme status. I still remember studying American civics in elementary school when National Treasure came out, and my fifth grade class went bananas at the discovery that we could “steal” our own copies of the Declaration of Independence from the local gift shop. “What do you want to do today?”, asked our chaperone. “Let’s steal the Declaration of Independence!”

With this backdrop of unbearable and massive talent, our cinematic legend surprised me by rendering a more serious role in his 2021 movie, Pig.

In the movie, Nicolas Cage is introduced as a solitary wilderness dweller. He hides in the woods with his only companion, an exceptionally trained truffle pig. A bucolic montage of their woodland foraging illustrates their close bond. The plot is kicked off when she is violently abducted by thieves, setting Nicolas Cage up for a Liam Neeson-esque mission to save his kidnapped friend.

The part of the film I was most intrigued by, going into the cinema, was the central relationship: Nic Cage’s connection with his pig. He is willing to risk everything — his anonymity, his safety, and even his life — to save her. In the context of a broader critique of our highly commercialized foodie and fine dining scenes, his struggle is an exploration of the powerful bonds that are possible between humans and animals. 

The final scenes of the movie complicate this theme. In them, Nicolas Cage softens the heart of an adversary by cooking a meal that reminds them of a loved one. The key ingredient of this warmhearted moment, however, is the body of a young animal hunted from the wild. As someone who has dedicated my life to the protection of animals, it frustrated me to see a movie illustrating a powerful connection between a human and an animal, yet treat a bird as a mere ingredient as though they had no story of their own.

This made me reflect on how the writers of the movie could write such a scene with a straight face — without an overriding sense of irony that asks, why would we treat one animal’s life with meaning and discount that of another?

While the movie left this question without an answer, I did come away with two lessons. First, that food can fill our lives with kindness and meaning. And second, that our desires for kindness and meaning can underlie even our most violent behaviors.

Finding Beauty in Brutality

Towards the end, Nic Cage cooks a meal so masterfully prepared that the person he cooks it for breaks down and reveals key information regarding the plot of the movie. Through familiar scents and flavors, the food transforms a stoic culinary critic from a hostile adversary to a lonely man who is reminded of a beloved partner. On its own terms, the scene is a compelling illustration of the deep importance of connection in the human experience.

To the animal activist, however, the scene is grotesque. The meal Cage prepares is of a squab — a term for the body of a young pigeon with the developmental characteristics of an infant. In Hollywood fashion, the scene of a chef cutting into the flesh of a small bird is washed with classical music, and, in seeming contrast to the commercialized world of Portland’s fine dining scene, portrays this as a simpler, more “pure” form of experience. 

Ironically, I was watching it in the first place with friends from my animal rights circles. I was disgusted by the portrayal, and my friend exclaimed “This is bullshit!” during the scene and walked out. I wanted to do the same and felt validated that someone else had the sense to do so.

The scene was so out of place to me that it left me wondering for months: how could someone produce an entire movie about a guy fighting to save his pig, then with a straight face write a scene where the same guy cuts in to the body of an animal not so different from his own?

This pointed me toward a simple but powerful truth: that we often find deep meaning in food. 

It’s the comfort of a warm noodle soup. It is the innocent joy of a freshly steamed bao. It is the sizzling dishes we pass around to loved ones with white rice and crispy lumpia. It is the sensory binding that ties us to the people and places that fill our lives with memories and meaning. 

And that’s why this movie and this particular scene to the animal rights advocate can be so painful. Squinting from the right angle, there is beauty here. But that beauty is overwhelmed by the inescapable presence of violence.

The Meaning of Happiness

To find out whether there can be meaning amid violence, it helps to ask: when does happiness have meaning in the first place? One answer might be found in one of history’s most influential philosophers, John Stuart Mill. 

A bedrock of Western liberalism, Mill promoted a controversial moral theory that the root of all that is meaningful is simply happiness. Anything that produces more happiness, or pleasure, than its opposite, pain, is good. 

However, says Mill, not all pleasure is created equal. There is something different between binge-watching Netflix and composing a Beethoven concerto. By requiring us to overcome our instincts of what feels good in the moment, some activities strengthen our character and cultivate our abilities for more meaningful pursuits. In short, these activities result in a better form of happiness because they make us better people.

This doesn’t strike me as obviously true. Who cares if I’m playing video games rather than practicing piano, if that’s really what I’d rather do? What I do find helpful, though, is asking what kinds of things don’t simply make us “feel” the most pleasure, but leave us with a deeper sense of contentment and meaning. 

There are trends that lead us to answers. Surveys show that people often find their most meaning in life in friends and family. Research shows that a sense of connection is crucial to health and wellbeing. And one of the key drivers of motivation is the will to do good for others.

This isn’t to say that all life is about being-for-others. Happiness, as the writer Arthur C. Brooks puts it, is a healthy balance of personal enjoyment and broader goals. One of the key parts of this balance though, says Brooks, is purpose — a sense that our lives have meaning beyond our individual selves. 

The meaning of life may not lie simply in finding happiness. What we do know, however — as shown by research on happiness and the reaction of our food critic in the movie, Pig — is that the kinds of happiness that often mean the most to us are those that invoke kindness and connection with others.

The Hidden Kindness of Joy

In animal rights circles, positive experiences from food are often described as pleasure. Framed this way, the pleasure of food — done at the expense of others — can be self-evident as “selfishness”.

What our discussion of higher and lower pleasures reveals to me is how what we value as a source of pleasure may come with hidden intuitions of connection and meaning. 

The final dining scene in Nicolas Cage’s movie captures this. To the critic, his meal was not something that he simply enjoyed eating. It was tied to his memories of family and loved ones. These are memories that not only fill our lives with meaning, but may even seem to have a purpose beyond ourselves. 

The activities we identify as meaningful often relate in some way to the happiness of others. A concerto performance can exhilarate a concert hall. A memoir can share stories that cultivate our empathy. And food can, perhaps subtly, remind us of the meals we’ve shared with the ones we love. Research even shows that pleasant activities are more pleasurable when experienced with others. 

Connection with others is often our deepest, most meaningful source of joy. Sometimes what we describe as pleasure may more accurately be described as a sense of meaning. And one of the most meaningful examples of this in my life comes from my familial bond with my dog, Nikki. 

As I write this, a photo of her sits next to me at my desk. She has been my best friend growing up, so close to me that my mom calls her my sister. In her photo, she sits improbably stable as she holds her favorite toy, a basketball over half her size. She needs no words to tell me what she feels: I am happy. I am joy.

When I think of her, I am filled with a profound sense of joy and kindness. There is a distinct quality to this happiness — one I might not feel from video games or learning guitar. It is not simply pleasurable. It is meaningful. It feels as though that this is not just a higher form of happiness for myself, but somehow intertwined with deeper meanings of why we are here.

Perhaps the utilitarian philosophers, in their quest to find secular meaning, found another source of spiritual direction. The Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, writing in the 1920s, said, “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” It’s the kind of happiness that makes you think, this is why we are here. We are here to love, and to be loved by others. And in these moments of shared joy, thoughts melt away and the universe suddenly seems to make sense. 

True Happiness is Kindness

The final dining scene of Pig is weird. The whole movie celebrates a guy fighting tooth-and-nail to rescue his animal companion, then ends with a depiction of violence towards animals by the same guy who through the whole movie seemed most inclined to protect them. 

There are a few lessons on happiness that I gather from this weirdness. 

First, that there are kinds of happiness that might be left out by simple understanding of pleasure. There are many ways pleasure can take shape, from joy and meaning to satisfaction and mastery and love and connection. Identifying which ones we find the most meaningful can help us live more intentional, more gratifying lives.

Second, that things that tend to be higher pleasures often connect us with others. The difference between happiness for ourselves and for others, therefore, may not be so distinct. From enjoying a meal to caring for our loved ones, the things that leave us with the deepest happiness are often those that strengthen social bonds and allow us to live kind, cooperative lives. 

Third, that even harmful behavior may come from kind, subtle values. When something feels good, we may feel it as something pure, virtuous, and moral. This intuition may be invisible to us (as are the subtle reasons for many of our beliefs). The result is that even harmful behavior might come from a hidden sense of connection with those we love.

I don’t mean in any way to excuse the violence we commit against animals for food. I have seen first-hand the atrocities of animal farming and do not believe violence against animals is justified by any amount of happiness it creates for human beings. And to me, focusing so much on the pleasure humans received from food while neglecting to show the violence behind it is a major shortcoming of the film.

What I do mean to say, however, is that we often have more understandable reasons for our beliefs than the ones we give. This realization may even give us a path towards more effective advocacy. Research suggests that activists can be more effective when they appeal to other people’s intuitively held beliefs. And finding the goodness in others can help us be more patient and forgiving when talking to people whose values differ from our own.

In doing so, we can fight for a world of plant-based food systems that resolve these tensions between violence and happiness. Where the meals we eat at family gatherings are both joyful and kind. Where the foods that fuel our cultures don’t rely on violence but are themselves symbols of compassion. 

What really emerges from this discussion, however, is a case for connection. It’s the source of some of the deepest pleasures and highest meaning we can experience. What Nicolas Cage teaches us is that one of the truest forms of happiness… is kindness.

The fact that time now is a permeable, amorphous, indiscrete phenomenon makes writing a “yearly” book list feel like a strange endeavor — almost a dishonest one. And yet, I look back on the last 12 months with a distinct gratitude. I came out of a political campaign, started a new job in the nonprofit sector, and embraced the emptiness that can come along with setting a new life direction. It’s a time when I learned and grew without knowing exactly where it would take me. And I am proud of that.

Last year, books helped me slow down and reflect. As Ezra Klein remarks from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, the main value of a book comes often not from its ideas but from the time you spend engaging with them. Reading, an admittedly a difficult activity for me as a citizen of the digital age, is a rare opportunity to slow down and focus — to reflect and find a calming peace in both text and in the inner worlds of ourselves.

Here’s a list of books that were part of my journey.

• A Promised Land, Vol. 1, by Barack Obama

• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

• The Overstory, by Richard Powers

• Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

• Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, by Damon Centola

• Don’t Think of An Elephant, by George Lakoff

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman

• Superforecasters, by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner

• Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer), by Duncan Watts

• State of Resistance, by Manuel Pastor

• Think Again, by Adam Grant

• Lead From the Outside, by Stacey Abrams

• Atomic Habits, by James Clear

• The Stranger, by Albert Camus

And here’s some books I didn’t finish but appreciated:

• How to Break Up With Your Phone, by Catherine Price

• Stories of Your Life (And Others), by Ted Chiang

• The Anthropocene: Reviewed, by John Green

• Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

• Originals, by Adam Grant

• Why Civil Resistance Works, by Erica Chenoweth

• The Divide, by Jason Hickel

• Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, by Teresa Gowan

• The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

• Animal, Vegetable, Junk, by Mark Bittman

• America’s Boy, by James Hamilton-Paterson

• The LSAT Trainer, by Mike Kim (joking, kind of)

Here are some reflections on the books that left the biggest impressions on me.

Non-Fiction

A Promised Land, Vol. 1, by Barack Obama. Long a believer in change yet remarking at its difficulty, I picked up Obama’s latest biography after losing an election I put my heart and soul into. Politics is a tough game. And I found that the reflections of a former president — both on the challenges of winning an election to the constraints that can come from occupying even of the most powerful positions in the world — offered clarity for me as I decompressed from intensely a local grassroots campaign.

Two books I enjoyed covered similar themes. Lead from the Outside, an inspiring biography by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, gave me an appreciation for the unique challenges often faced by people of color in entering public service. And State of Resistance, an activist handbook-esque history by Manuel Pastor, reminds us that while America today may seem to be spiraling into individualism and inequality, California was not always a liberal standard bearer — and that it flipped decades ago from being a Reagan-led conservative stronghold to its current eminence as a national progressive leader.

A few books I read to tune up and tinker with my sputtering engine of a brain. Think Again by Adam Grant is a call for us to reflect on our assumptions, change worldviews with humility, and engage with others constructively. Typifying the contrasting modes of thought of preachers (those who pronounce their views), prosecutors (those who tear down the views of others), and politicians (those who change views to gain the support of others), he encourages us to adopt another mental state — that of scientists (whose seek truth). Having finished a political campaign where all P’s came into play, I appreciated reflecting on my own cognitive blind spots with a few hundred pages of cognitive tips and pithy anecdotes.

Also offering cognitive boons, Superforecasters by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner totally changed how I organize my thoughts. Based on the Good Judgement Project, possibly the most rigorous and methodical study of how to more accurately forecast the future, the books made me feel like I finally understood the political egg heads around me who always seemed to get things right. Technically about prediction, I think its lessons are also applicable to forming accurate opinions about the world (for example, whether industrialization has done more harm than good).

One of my favorite insights is the usefulness of taking the “outside” view on predictions. For example, if you and I were to predict whether the recent marriage of our friend would end in divorce, we shouldn’t start with weighing all of the inside characteristics of their relationship — whether they share interests, how often they fight, etc. Instead, we would first look to general marriage statistics — say, the U.S. divorce rate of 41% — to get an outside view of marriages in general. Then we would look at the specifics of their marriage to “update” our prediction up or down from this baseline probability. With each fight or bond-solidifying experience, we can increase or decrease our probability assessment based on the experience and how many came before it. The authors explain it way better than I do, and their ideas helped my brain hurt less when juggling lots of information. (It gets easier over time — and you might find it so fun you start a Google Sheet prediction ring with your friends).

Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, by Damon Centola, was perhaps the most foundational social science book on my understanding of social change. First, because it provided scientific grounding for many of my intuitions on how to change social norms. Second, because some of the predictions I made after reading the book — were upended multiple times in 2021. As Tetlock and Gardner suggest, I may have been well-served to start from a more general outside view of political campaigns and social movements, then applied these more narrow insights on how social networks influence social change, updating my beliefs incrementally rather than throwing out my faith all at once. In any case, Centola’s Change is a thought-provoking framework on how the dramatic events we see on our Instagram stories facilitate transformative changes around you and me.

Also in this category is Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer), by Duncan Watts. My friend Wayne Hsiung has been constantly talking about this book (and did a fascinating podcast with the author). When I finally picked it up, I found it a powerful reminder of how “common sense” can provide enticingly obvious yet false explanations for past events and lull us into misleading confidence in predicting the world to come. With memorably convincing anecdotes (of course farmers were better soldiers in WWII!), I was left with an urgent sense that I need to seek real evidence — not simply rely on gut feelings — to before I resolutely decide what is true about the world. If you want to be intellectually humbled, read this book.

Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff is one I’ve put off and am glad I finally got through. It was a tough read for me because it’s foundational in roaring debates among activists on movement strategy, framing, and messaging. I finally finished it only by committing not to overanalyze it page-by-page but simply take in its overall lessons and allow them to suffuse over time into my lived everyday experience. The lessons to many may be counterintuitive, and I’ve spent much time figuring out what its lessons really mean for what we should do as activists. Also in this category is Erica Chenoweths’ social movement case study collection of Why Civil Resistance Works. Both are worthy reads for social justice activists.

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Enough people — a list including effective altruists, intermediate economics professors, and city council candidates — have recommended this book to me that I felt compelled to eventually check it out. I did, partially, and appreciated the read. Message me to discuss.

Finally, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is worth its own blog post. In his review, Ezra Klein remarked that the value of a book comes not from the ideas of the text, but rather the time you spend engaging with it. I’ve found this to be true, and it changed how and how often I read. The book fascinatingly illustrates the neuroscience behind focus and reading. And it argues, persuasively and urgently, that these skills and modes of being are being disastrously undermined by the internet and social media.

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Our evolution has primed our brains to scatter our focus — to dart our attention towards a rustle in the leaves, or a pair of eyes in the dark. When they emerged in history, books and written text for the first time allowed us to hone our attention more deeply — to develop a silent inner voice that enabled reading complex meandering thoughts and the ability to derive meaning from it.

The internet undermines that. It takes us away from centuries of training our brains back to a time when our attention was scattered by constant threat — though this time, the danger is less real in terms of violence and more digital and psychologically insidious. The internet reverts our brain to a state of scattered attention that focuses not on ever-possible threat, but a deafening lack of meaning. Stay tuned for a post here.

Stories (fiction)

Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus The Overstory and his shorter Bewilderment tore me apart and put me back together several times over.

The empathy that The Overstory famously engenders for trees is the same that Bewilderment does for (non-human) animals. I so often felt giddy at the short story’s relatability. One love interest is an animal rights lawyer, and one meal is arguably the quintessential meal of veganism: “For lunch, I scrambled tofu, using the exact ratio of black salt and nutritional yeast that [my son] loved.”

Ezra Klein captured my feelings on Bewilderment: “It is a devastating book. We live in a maddening world where simply saying what we should do constrains the limits of what we will do.”

Peppering the story — one of a single father and his neurodivergent son — with references to broader political and cultural trends, Powers makes the larger world we are living through feel so personal and urgent. Ezra reviews,

It is about our cognition, our brainwaves, the way we can live in a time of wonders, but a time also of horrors — of climate crisis and mass extinction and poverty that doesn’t need to be there and violence — how we can live in that time and see nothing but normalcy, sometimes see nothing but ourselves. It’s about the limits of our cognitive empathy and what it would take to change them and what we do to those among us who aren’t so limited. It is an enchanting and — my God — it is a devastating book.

And,

Whether your concern is climate or it’s poverty or it’s animal suffering or it’s global health or any of a list we could keep doing, there is just a chasm between what we should do and what we will.

And what makes that even worse is that often, insisting on what we should do… can lead to tremendous political backlash. It can lead to a shrinking of what we will do.

The books capture what many — especially young people — may experience now as polarization and climate anxiety. The empathy that Powers fosters for nature and animals enables the in-story political dynamics to tear us emotionally apart. They instilled in me a deeper sense of connection and tragedy to our collective anthropocene’s mark on the world. The books are devastatingly relatable, but in a weird way, peacefully relatable and empowering.

These stories, too, enhanced my life and helped chip away at my embarrassing years-long neglect of fiction. Stories of Your Life (And Others), by Ted Chiang (who wrote the story that inspired the awesome movie Arrival), and The Anthropocene: Reviewed, by my childhood hero John Green, reminded me the joy of immersing myself in an imagined world and the insights this can glean on our own.

Philosophy & Self Help

(Two categories that I insist are, at their best, basically the same)

Finally, there are some philosophy and self-help books I enjoyed — ones that I felt I needed to read as a twenty-something-year-old in the tumultuous year of twenty-twenty-too. Atomic Habits, by James Clear, and How to Break Up With Your Phone, by Catherine Price, were mere text on pages that have so far improved my life for the better. Thank you.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman met me at the perfect time. I listened to this driving back from my parents’ house during the 2021/2022 Omicron Winter Games. Gently carrying me into a new year — perhaps metaphorically similar to the way the Greek ferryman Charon carries newly departed souls across the river from living to the afterlife — it reminded me that there is only so much I can do in my brief time on this Earth, and that there can be joy (despite the anxiety) in deciding what I find truly important. 10/10 would read again. Thank you Anna Whitney for the recommendation.

What have you enjoyed this past year? What’s on your reading list? Comment below or message me on Facebook.