URGENT: if you live in a state in this document, please call your Senator(s) about the Farm Bill. You can follow the directions in this doc. You can read more about why this is so important here.

You and What Army?

When you think of activist movements, you might picture massive crowds of people flooding a town square. You might imagine thousands of people coming together to march down the streets, like an invading army that has just broken through the city walls.

Animal activism could not be more different. In a decently sized city like Pittsburgh, the number of genuine activists is somewhere in the double digits. And you’ll be lucky if any protest is attended by more than 7 or 8 people. Those same 7 or 8 people are organizing and showing up to all the anti-fur, anti-foie gras, and cage-free campaigns. It’s amazing that they’ve managed to pretty much dismantle the fur industry and secure major welfare commitments like the recent Ahold Delhaize one.

But we have run up against our limits.

While the tactics we use can be radical (comparatively; we never do anything violent or destructive), the asks are often pretty marginal. They can be as tepid as demanding a company make good on cage-free commitments that they made 10 years ago. It’s not that we want to be so marginal—if there was a button we could press to make the world go vegan today, we’d all press it in a heartbeat. The issue is tractability. You can get many shops to drop fur or leather because most people aren’t into that. You can get chains to go cage-free because they can still have their eggs. But no one is insane enough to try getting Walmart to stop selling pig meat. Even the most grizzled and stubborn activist doesn’t believe that’s a campaign they can win—there are too few activists, and there is too much demand for cheap meat. So we are stuck nibbling at the margins. It’s important work, and it keeps the teeth sharp, but the real bulk of the problem remains untackled.

The Ouroboros of Exploitation

There are no true shortcuts in life.

Sometimes, when you talk to people on the street, they’ll point out that veganism is hard for consumers because producers make it hard. They flood the market with cheap animal products, stuffing them into every fast food joint, every convenience story, and every school lunch. Why don’t we make systemic change rather than demonizing the individuals?

The focus thus turns from consumers to producers: the farmers, meatpackers, and retailers. Even if we are few and they are many, we could have immense impact through shaping food policy in governments and large corporations. And that’s true. But it, too, has its limits. I began to realize this after reading Grilled: Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry, by former Mercy For Animals CEO Leah Garces. In Grilled, Garces explores the perspectives of animal farmers, retailers, and corporate executives in a way few other animal advocates have. Her dialogue with an animal welfare insider at a major food company is particularly telling:

“Cheryl’s team were polite and engaged, but after the meeting Cheryl wrote me to say that broiler-chicken welfare was not a priority for them. It was nearly impossible for her to bring this sort of policy change to the boardroom when it was not of major public concern. This would be the same message I’d hear again and again as I did the circuit, pitching to food companies that they needed to care more about chickens. These birds were 90 per cent of farmed animals in our food system, and their lives were miserable. But the answer was always the same: not a priority. Too expensive. No one cares. Of all the executives I met with, Cheryl gave the clearest advice: if you want me to move this issue, she said, go make a stink about it with the public.” (p. 145)

People want animal welfare, but they want cheap meat more. And while I don’t trust these companies for a second, the logic is to be taken seriously. In anything resembling a competitive market, if one producer raises welfare at some expense, another producer will just snap up a share of the market. And if the government forces everyone to farm animals in a way that is anything near “humane,” then the supply shortage will cause such an increase in prices that the consumers will riot.

I’ve spent years looking for the root cause of industrial animal farming, and I ended up right back where I started. At the consumer.

The reality is that there’s no single cause of industrial animal farming—it’s not just consumers, and it’s not just producers. There’s no single freestanding “source” of animal exploitation—rather, it is distributed across all echelons and sectors of society, and it is a self-reinforcing cycle. There is thus no magic fulcrum that will give our movement, in its current state, the leverage it needs to greatly diminish animal exploitation. Isolated effort focused on any single level or part of it will thus be at best marginal and at worst ineffective.

One may think of animal exploitation as an ouroboros, a mythical serpent that consumes its own tail. If you want to tackle the problem from its source, you will never get around to it, because there is no source to be found. Rather, to end animal exploitation, we must strike everything, everywhere, all at once. And for that, we need more people.

Expanding the Animal Advocacy PPF

In economics 101, you learn about the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF): a curve that represents a society’s capacity to produce and trade off between two goods. Now imagine that we have a PPF for animal advocacy. What much of our movement is doing right now is trying to move along the edge of the curve—working on the margin. But that only gets us so far. To continue to make progress, it is necessary to expand the PPF outward. In many economic contexts, this is achieved through an increased labor force, technological advancement, and capital accumulation. All three are important, but I will focus primarily on the first: getting more people.

But we can’t just settle for any kind of people. We need people who will stand on the street for hours debating passers-by. People who will send 60,000 emails to corporate executives. People who will show up with megaphones and signs week after week. People who will go to jail to make a statement about the importance of animal rights. People who will work tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure moral consideration of animals shows up on the ballot, at the boardroom, and in the AI training data. And we just don’t have enough of those people right now.

So how can we get more people active, and how can we build a larger, stronger movement? That’s what I’ll explore in my next set of posts, so stay tuned, and stay active.