Meat-Eating Grandmothers Blocked Trucks for Sheep. Can It Happen Again?

In search of the missing social movement for farmed animals.

In this post:

• Social movement tactics such as mass protest usually aren’t the best tool for winning a specific policy, but they are uniquely effective at shifting the overton window.

• The UK live export movement in the 90s proved that the public can be mobilized en masse around the right campaign for farmed animals. But their success has not been replicated in 30 years.

• I explore three possible explanations in the hopes that we can catalyze one more wave of mass mobilization for farmed animals before AI starts closing doors:

  • Social movement messaging is at its best when it combines visionary rhetoric (inspiring activists and the public) with incremental demands (forcing opponents to argue against popular reforms).

  • Recent campaigns have focused on either incremental demands or creating a transformative experience for participants, but not both.

  • Live export may have had specific advantages that current incremental goals lack, but we could choose a goal optimized for mass mobilization.

  • Or, maybe cage-free campaigns could have been the basis for a mass movement if anti-welfarist abolitionist philosophy had not divided the movement at a crucial moment.

• I discuss other partial factors—from diversity to luck—and propose a direction for mass-movement organizing.

Thanks to Ben Newman for thorough feedback on a draft.

0. The once and future movement

On January 16, 1995, a crowd of nearly 1500 protesters gathered in Brightlingsea, a massive crowd for a sleepy coastal town most Brits had never heard of. A ship was scheduled to sail at midnight, and the crowd was there to prevent the cargo being loaded: 2,000 live sheep, to be sent across the English Channel to a slaughterhouse in Belgium.

The first truckload of sheep arrived at 6:35 pm, at which time hundreds of protesters laid their bodies down across the only road to the docks, blocking all passage. The police were caught totally off guard, and when it became clear the protestors were ready to camp out, the trucks were called off.

So began the Battle of Brightlingsea, a ten-month drama captivating the nation. By September, the town had turned into a daily battleground, with groups of 1,000+ peaceful protesters standing off against hundreds of riot police, until farmers finally gave up on exporting animals through the town.

Along with similar protests from Shoreham to Dover, the UK campaign against live export represents the high-water mark of sustained, large-scale mobilization for farmed animals. It was qualitatively different from anything that has happened before or since. The crowds defied stereotypes about animal rights activists: a contemporary survey in Brightlingsea found 71% were local residents, overwhelmingly women aged 41-70—and, we can assume, regular meat-eaters. While Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA had been campaigning against live export for years, the sheer size of these protests exceeded anything that a centralized national organization could achieve. In fact, when the police used threats of a conspiracy prosecution to disband the local organizing committee, the leaderless protestors only grew larger and more unruly.

These protests were organic, a legitimate expression of the will of the British public. I don’t mean to romanticize them purely for that reason– if most of the public approve of animal abuse, that doesn’t make it OK, and we should fight against it. But this organic quality made the protests far larger, more sustainable, and more culturally potent than any astroturfed campaign could hope for.

0.1 Missing roots

When I first got involved in animal activism, I was a firm believer in this kind of direct action, so I joined Direct Action Everywhere. As the name implies, we were trying to catalyze mass scale civil disobedience for animals.

How did we do? Our most memorable actions involved crowds of 500 people walking right onto factory farms, carrying away chickens, and daring the police to arrest us for it. At first, that sounds impressive! And don’t get me wrong, it was profoundly inspiring to be part of.

But DxE was a paper tiger compared to Brightlingsea. Our biggest actions took place during the Animal Liberation Conference, an annual gathering that pulled together grassroots activists from around the world. One day each year, this international assembly would board charter buses at the conference venue in ultraliberal Berkeley, California and ride an hour or more out into farm country. You can guess how this invasion was seen by the locals, who made their disapproval clear by eventually voting down a ballot measure proposed by DxE, 15% to 85%.

Outside the ALC, DxE could never mobilize more than 150 people in a given city. It was usually closer to 50, and only for a day at a time. After years of trying to break through these ceilings, most of us became convinced that mass mobilization for farmed animals was impossible. Then I learned about the Battle of Brightlingsea, and I could hardly believe it: people have already done this, decades ago. Why were we failing where they had succeeded?

That question is the focus of this post. It’s been the main focus of my career in the movement, but lately, it’s taken on more urgency. After DxE, I thought we could bide our time and build up small victories until the public was ready for a mass protest event– until the animal movement was due for its own organic Occupy Wall St or Black Lives Matter moment. Now, with time possibly running out before we lose any ability to influence the future, we might have just one more chance to thrust our movement into the mainstream.

In this post, I’ll work through what I see as the major unresolved questions confounding our attempts at mass mobilization.

0.2 Why mobilization matters

In my early years with DxE, we looked at past movements like women’s suffrage and civil rights and concluded that mass protest was the most important tool social movements could use for shifting public opinion. This was the focus of our whole strategy. Our protests weren’t designed to win specific policy demands from companies or politicians. Instead, we targeted the public directly with a message of “total animal liberation,” using dramatic tactics we hoped would go viral on social media and attract new members.

We broadly aligned with this list of the basic ingredients of a successful social movement in a report from Social Change Lab summarizing expert views:

DxE’s theory of change could be summarized as: viral protest → draws in new members → even bigger protest → even more new members → movement goes mainstream. Our goal was to build towards something like Occupy Wall Street for animals: a mass-scale symbolic protest transcending any specific policy demand. Sure, Occupy had not had any apparent impact on public policy, but it had shifted the narrative, transforming the way journalists and the public talked about wealth inequality and laying the ground for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run.¹ We were uninspired by the kind of incremental material reforms the movement could achieve for animals in the short term, and believed a cultural transformation was necessary to make meaningful change possible.

For the first few years, this strategy seemed promising; I was one of hundreds of people to join DxE during a period of exponential growth in chapters across the world. That growth continued for about a year after I joined. Then it plateaued. We spent the next few years tinkering around the edge of our approach, trying to increase recruitment or retention. Things we did not try include softening our maximalist demands or taking on a campaign that had any hope of delivering a short-term win.

Eventually, I had to admit the strategy had stalled, and we were nowhere near on track to an Occupy-style mass mobilization event. In 2021, my co-organizer Eva Hamer and I stepped back from frontline work and started a research organization, Pax Fauna, dedicated to figuring out what was going wrong and how we could fix it.

0.3 Gradually, parts of the answer became clear.

0.3.1 Motte-and-bailey messaging

First, movements should not bypass achievable instrumental demands in the quest for cultural change. In DxE, we were more interested in the symbolic power of protests than in winning incremental change, so we targeted our protests directly at the public with a radical message. But without a concrete demand, our protests were not taken seriously by anyone. In other words, there is a theatrical element to all successful protest movements, using attention-grabbing tactics and provocative demands. But by stripping away credible demands, we were breaking the fourth wall. Everyone could see it was all fake, and ignored us accordingly.

Regular Sandcastles readers will remember this observation from Lewis Bollard which left him “wary of extracting general lessons from past movements.” Where DxE saw the civil rights movement as a story of radical activists triumphing over incrementalist moderates, Lewis says:

I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that for decades clocked up small achievable incremental legal and political wins in service of several larger incremental wins (two key federal laws and several Supreme Court rulings) but that failed in its more radical goals (racial and economic equality)… But I suspect this is largely me projecting my beliefs on the past…

At the risk of falling into the precise trap Lewis outlined, I think there’s a way to square these two perspectives: civil rights leaders like MLK often addressed the public using rhetoric of profound social and spiritual transformation and radical equality. But underneath that rhetoric, in any given instance, they were asking for modest reforms that were no-brainers to a majority of the population outside the Jim Crow states.

Their messaging functioned as a motte-and-bailey strategy. The term refers to a medieval fortification where villagers lived in a spacious but vulnerable area (the bailey) and retreated to a heavily defended tower (the motte) when attacked. Today, it describes a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which a controversial argument retreats to a more defensible one under pressure: “I’m not saying immigrants are racially inferior, just that they don’t share our cultural experiences!” In the hands of civil rights leaders, though, this wasn’t dishonest; it allowed them to inspire their base with a genuine vision for the world while forcing their opponents to argue against popular reforms. This strategy was so deft that activists are still falling for it six decades later.

0.3.2 Neglecting passive supporters

Movements cannot focus only on their active participants, to the exclusion of a spectrum of passive supporters. Many others have already pointed out this mistake in early DxE’s thinking, so much that it would feel mean to rub it in if I wasn’t rubbing it into myself.

Early in DxE’s history, we came across the research of Erica Chenoweth, a scholar who studied national revolutions– that is, movements that overthrew and replaced governments. Chenoweth was surprised to find that revolutions which stay nonviolent succeed in bringing down governments more often than those that take up armed struggle. But even more surprising was the finding that no revolution has ever failed after activating as little as 3.5% of the population into sustained civil disobedience– that is, general strikes, street protests, etc.

In the mid 2010s, DxE was one of several activist groups to grab onto this number, making it the centerpiece of our strategy. Now, 3.5% would have been more than 10 million activists, which makes it sound not so small after all. But privately, we believed we could succeed with a lower number, perhaps as low as 0.1%, around the size of the March on Washington in the Civil Rights Movement.

This analysis was badly flawed. First, Chenoweth was studying revolutions, not social issue campaigns. Overthrowing a government may sound hard, but in many ways it is much easier than changing culture; if the U.S. government were to crumble tomorrow, there’s no reason to think that whatever emerged in its place would be more hostile to factory farming. Culture endures.

Worse, focusing purely on active participation ignores a slew of social processes necessary to engage other parts of society. Chenoweth always meant 3.5% as a measure of broad social support rather than as a goal that organizers could pursue narrowly.² If a movement somehow magically activated 3.5% of the public for a cause opposed by large majorities of people, without weakening the institutional pillars propping up the status quo, that movement would fail spectacularly. Which is probably a moot point, because no unpopular movement could ever activate 10 million Americans.

That’s not to say you need a majority of the public on your side– if we had that, we’d already have won. We’re here to persuade. But our incremental demands need support much wider than the 15% who supported DxE’s ballot measure, not to mention the 1-4% who currently live vegan. A mainstream movement for farmed animals will tautologically require demands and tactics that invite participation from the general public. Which leads to my third point:

0.3.3 Escaping consumerism

DxE was founded in part on the conviction that individual consumer advocacy was not a realistic pathway to animal liberation. It was a reaction against the vegetarian leafleting that dominated animal advocacy for the decade from around 2006 to 2015. DxE substituted the “go vegan” message for one about “systems change” and “total animal liberation.”

To our great frustration, the public didn’t seem to notice this change. Commenters reacting to videos of protests on social media continued to explain why they couldn’t or wouldn’t go vegan, despite us never saying anything about them going vegan.

What was going on? During Pax Fauna’s research, two answers became clear. First, members of the public are strongly primed to think about food and food systems in the context of their role as consumers. This activates strong values of personal choice and autonomy: nobody can tell me what to eat! And through the consumer lens, they are technically correct– you can’t stop anyone from buying meat, no matter how much you’d like to.

Compared with other causes, animal advocates have to put in extra work explaining to the public how our vision for change goes beyond their individual sacrifice. Which leads to the second insight: DxE was undermining our “systems change” messaging by disrupting the public inside restaurants and grocery stores– the exact locations where they engage with the food system as consumers.

Animal advocates need to bend over backwards to avoid triggering this consumer-centric defensiveness. We need to outline clear ways the public can participate in our movement without going vegan. Voting for pro-animal political initiatives and donating to animal charities are both promising options. But the Brightlingsea protests show that omnivores will take much bolder action, up to and including civil disobedience and arrest, in support of popular incremental reforms relevant to their local community.

0.4 How close have we come?

Taken together, all of this suffices to explain why DxE was unable to catalyze a social movement for farmed animals. We presented our case in a way that alienated us from the general public, even the people who might have been sympathetic.

But DxE was never the only game in town. Why hasn’t a social movement for animals appeared anywhere else since Brightlingsea?

Some notable efforts have come closer. The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign targeted a major vivisection company from 1999 to 2007. SHAC was strict about security culture, so exact numbers are hard to pin down, but ChatGPT reasonably estimates that across the US and Europe, core campaigners numbered less than 100, the largest actions numbered in the low hundreds, and the total number who participated over the 8 years of the campaign was in the thousands– all around, more than an order of magnitude smaller than the live export movement.

SHAC executed motte-and-bailey messaging, pairing a radical message with a narrow campaign target of shutting down one company with a well-documented record of horrific abuses. But the choice to dress this all up in a punk-rock aesthetic—embracing of property destruction tactics—frustrated their ability to break into the mainstream. They had little public sympathy when the US and UK governments eventually cracked down.

More recently, campaigners in Australia came close to replicating the UK’s success with their own live export movement in the 2010s. Between 2011 to 2018, major days of action saw crowds of several thousand across Australia’s largest cities. Over the years, this must have mobilized tens of thousands of unique participants to in-person protests.

As far as I can tell, this was the greatest participation in a campaign for farmed animals since Brightlingsea. But while the size was similar, the level of sustained action in the UK is still unique.

If you don’t have experience organizing a campaign yourself, it’s hard to explain the difference between mobilizing 1,000 people for a day and doing it day after day for months. The first is remarkably difficult, but the second goes beyond something that can be explained as a product of deliberate organizing; it has taken on a life of its own.

At the risk of repeating myself: campaigners attach a mythical significance to organic, self-sustaining mobilizations for more than just aesthetic reasons. In campaigns that reflect the values and priorities of a cadre of organizers, the power of the movement scales only linearly with the effort and skill of those organizers. To mobilize 10x as many people, they need to work 10x harder, or 10x smarter, or both. But when a campaign truly captures the spirit of a wide segment of the public, it can grow exponentially. In these cases, organizers might be most successful by getting things started and then getting out of the way.

These moments are rare even beyond the animal movement. The vast majority of protests are astroturfed. The term astroturfed, as opposed to genuinely grassroots, is usually meant to deride causes propped up by wealthy, out-of-touch elites. Here, I mean to lovingly extend it to include merely middle-class out-of-touch elites, such as most vegans.

Vegan activists are well aware that our values are out of step with the public, broadly speaking. When we hold “total animal liberation” protests, we try hard to make it look like our demand is mainstream, when in fact it is fringe. We are trying to change that. The question is how.

One way would be to activate tens or hundreds of thousands of ordinary omnivores into a mass movement that reflects their values while simultaneously nudging them—and the culture as a whole—a step further in our direction.

0.5 Cage-free conundrum

That brings us to one more would-be success story: the cage-free campaign. (For this article, I’ll use cage-free to refer collectively to opposing both battery cages for hens and gestation crates for sows.)

The first campaigns against extreme confinement took place in the 90s; by the late 2010s, battery cages and gestation crates were the central focus of the professional wing of the farmed animal movement, and they still receive the lion’s share of philanthropic funding. Political initiatives like California’s Prop 12 and corporate campaigns like the one ongoing against grocery conglomerate Ahold Delhaize have brought the largest organizations in the movement together into coalitions representing hundreds of staff and millions of dollars.

These modest reforms put campaigners well inside the bounds of mainstream opinion. From what we’ve covered so far, cage-free seems like just as good a candidate for social movement organizing as live export.

Yet after three decades and tens of millions of dollars, cage-free campaigns have failed to inspire anything approaching mass mobilization. In my years with DxE (about 2015-2018), DxE protests consistently attracted ten times as many attendees as cage-free protests in the same city. There have been a few exceptional moments, especially around the ballot initiatives– Prop 12 in 2018 engaged thousands of volunteers, hundreds of whom went out week after week to gather signatures. But this momentum was scattered into the wind once the initiative passed.

Why hasn’t a social movement materialized around cage-free campaigning? If we can answer this question, I think we’d be most of the way to triggering one more mass-mobilization campaign in the coming years. I see three strong candidates to explain this:

1. The campaigners aren’t trying. Perhaps leaders found they could win corporate and political campaigns without focusing on mass recruitment and public opinion. If so, we might still be able to use ongoing cage-free campaigns to trigger a larger mobilization.

2. Cage-free isn’t inspiring enough. Maybe the reform is too modest, not just for abolitionist activists but also for the wider public. Or maybe the public doesn’t care enough about chickens (live export featured charismatic mammals.)

3. Abolitionist thought-leaders poisoned the well. Just as cage-free was coming to the fore, influential figures like Gary Francione and Wayne Hsiung turned the grassroots against it, keeping the movement divided. Perhaps this was an accident of history.

Let’s take a closer look.

Possible explanation #1: user experience design

Summary: cage-free campaigners have not triggered mass mobilization because they weren’t earnestly trying to– they saw an easier, more direct route to each individual policy win. Yes, organizations like THL and MFA had community organizing programs, but these programs were ineffectually bolted on to an efficient campaigning machine. Cage-free campaigners simply learned that they could win commitments from the world’s largest food corporations without the enormous effort of social movement organizing, so that’s what they did.

On this view, a campaign or organization designed from the start around mass mobilization could succeed using cage-free demands. This would have the advantage of harmonizing the grassroots and professional wings of the movement behind a single goal.

What does it look like to build a campaign around mass mobilization?

I see a common misunderstanding about the relationship between social movement organizers, participants, and the public. Social movements organizers succeed when they think of themselves as marketing a product, not to the undecided public, but to activists. In particular, social movement participation is a subscription product– the customers need to have their needs met continuously and have a great experience, or they’ll cancel their subscription.

If this sounds icky or capitalistic, here’s the cool part. Social movement participation meets just the sort of higher-order needs that feel so scarce in modern times: a sense of purpose, belonging to a community, contributing to improving the world, and growing your skills in the process. And we provide all this without exploiting anyone.

Or rather, we could provide it, but we currently aren’t. The user experience design for activists in cage-free campaigns has historically been abysmal. As Zachary Segall recently put it. “No one wants to participate in animal activism because animal activism sucks.”

A friend experienced with cage-free campaigning recently framed this as a missing middle problem: activists can protest with ICAW, where they might be expected to scream vulgarities at random customers,³ or with THL,⁴ where they might quietly hold a sign alongside a busy road hundreds of feet away from the target business. There’s nowhere a moderately extroverted person can go.

I think the missing middle frame works for ICAW, but not for THL; these protests are not an inspiring experience for anyone. I once drove over an hour to the “grand opening” of a target’s new franchise, showed up to find it deserted except for a couple employees, posed for a single photograph, and got back in the car. Even after I’d already given my life over completely to animal advocacy, this was almost tearfully boring, and I ignored the next invitation.

That protest may have been exactly what that campaign needed, and if so, it’s worth doing. But we’ll never build a mass movement around it. This is the kind of friction you get when an organizing program is bolted on rather than central to the strategy.

There are successful organizations we can learn from here, movements that have mobilized thousands of people into civil disobedience by making it the most fun thing you could do with your weekend.

1.1 Bringing the party

The gold standard in recent years was set by Extinction Rebellion. At its peak, XR turned out thousands of Brits for week-long occupations of central London thoroughfares to protest the government’s inaction on climate change. They demanded an actionable plan for the UK to reach net zero carbon emissions in 12 years. These protests were on the scale of Brightlingsea, and captured as much national attention, yet they were planned and executed by a semi-centralized organization.

One key to XR’s success: the movement felt like a party. People walking by one of their protests would often first mistake it for a music festival. Everyone was smiling, dancing, and having the time of their lives.

This was magnetic. Passersby should think, “Dang, those people are cool. I wish they were my friends. Heck, maybe I’ll see if I’m allowed to join their party.”

This might seem to clash with the gravity of our issue. How can we party when animals are being slaughtered? But XR’s brand was maximally doomy– they were literally called Extinction Rebellion, and all their signs were about mass death from climate chaos. Yet they knew that nobody wants to hang out with a bunch of mopey losers.

That synthesis was one of XR’s most elegant achievements. If all people want is a party, they won’t come to a protest. XR knew that its target customers were people who felt powerless about the state of the world and were eager to learn of a way they could make a difference. The organization told a simple, powerful story about what the root of the problem was and how ordinary people could help solve it while having a blast and looking damn good. The fact that their party was a highly disruptive protest against a rotten system was precisely the source of their infectious joy.

For inspiration, take a moment to watch this protest last year in Peru from Compromiso Verde, featuring a drumline and jugglers on stilts all covered in sequins from head to toe. Reader, this is the vibe. Everyone is smiling and dancing and I’d be willing to bet they all came back to the next protest– and if anything, I’m told the target company was more upset than usual. (If you’re thinking it’s no surprise they protest like this in Latin America, maybe that means you should hire a Latina to plan your next protest.)

Even if we decide our protests can’t channel the party vibe, at least our community life should. When we started Pro-Animal Future, we created an alcohol-free policy across the organization’s events in hopes of avoiding the kinds of hairy situations that drinking can encourage. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake for Eva and I to impose our teetotaling values⁵ on the organization. Our community events were nowhere near fun enough to stimulate mass recruitment.⁶

1.2 Regular community events are a basic requirement for movement building

Speaking of which, community events were the central pillar of the organizing strategy I learned in DxE. When I first started organizing the Colorado chapter, I would plan protests by creating a Facebook event page, sharing it into some local groups, and when the day came, it would just be me and three or four friends I dragged along from my college vegan club. Over time, I grew bitter: those damn potluck vegans are all talk, they don’t really care about animals enough to take action!

In reality, this was just evidence of my own failure as an organizer, as I soon learned. My first mentor in DxE taught me that people would be eager to attend protests once they felt like they were part of a community. Indeed, they already were eager, but showing up when they didn’t know anyone was too intimidating– which, when you put it that way, I can totally relate to. As soon as I started organizing regular community events as a way for people to dip their toes in, meet people, and learn more about the organization, our typical protest attendance shot from 5 to 50.

Frequent & consistent community events were also the heartbeat of XR’s mobilization. They’d use months of social events to build up to one massive week of protests.

This is now the first thing I ask people when I hear they are struggling to get people to attend actions in their city. Nearly 100% of the time, they confirm that they are not creating social events that could be a stepping stone to activism. DxE’s experience proved that this alone isn’t enough to get us to protests numbering in the thousands. But maybe combining DxE’s community organizing with THL’s mainstream demands and XR’s party vibe could get us from 5 to 50 to 500 to 5,000.

Possible explanation #2: an underwhelming demand

Summary: on the surface, battery cages are as unpopular as live export. But they don’t seem to inspire the same passion with the public. This might be because the reform is seen as too incremental to matter, or because live export protests concerned charismatic mammals like cows and sheep, while cage-free campaigns have focused on (more numerous) hens. “Ending live export” might also feel more definitive to non-experts than increasing space allotments. Similarly, political demands may feel more absolute than corporate demands, explaining why so many more people mobilized for Prop 12 than for corporate campaigns.

On this view, in order to catalyze a wave of mainstream protests for farmed animals, we’d need to organize around a reform that is substantive enough to be inspiring but moderate enough to be popular and seem attainable.

This explanation for the sluggish mobilization around cage-free campaigns is, of course, the one preferred by most abolitionist activists: even the public think that cage-free is not a meaningful improvement for animals!

There is modest empirical evidence to support it. In a 2019 study, Faunalytics examined comments on social media reacting to posts by companies announcing their cage-free commitments after pressure campaigns, finding that “a significant group of people do not accept the premise of cagefree campaigns improving welfare for hens.” Commenters (presumably meat eaters) were incredulous that seemingly small changes to farming practices should take years to implement, and doubted that these changes would act as a step towards further improvements.

My own research at Pax Fauna convinced me that the debate among activists between rights- and welfare-based approaches does not correspond to how non-experts in the public understand our cause. In one report, I wrote:

On one hand, some rights language is confusing and distracting. Legal rights jargon (e.g. “nonhuman animal, bodily liberty, and bodily autonomy”) is criticized as “unclear and overly academic,” and conjures images of “an elephant in a civil court room” and slippery-slope scenarios whereby keeping dogs and cats would be tantamount to slavery.

On the other hand, the public finds corporate welfare campaigns uninspiring… While the public rejects the niche language of animal rights theory, they have an appetite for more tangible, transformative action than the kind sought in corporate welfare campaigns. This is not to say that corporate campaigns are not worthwhile, merely that they do not appear to be an effective instrument for shifting public opinion.

Social movements are built around big, bold visions. People don’t take to the streets for tinkering around the edges. As the director of mobilization for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign put it:

Far more people are willing to step up if you ask them to do something big to win something big than they would be if you asked them to do something small to win something small.

An ideal demand for mass-movement organizing is:

• incremental and mainstream enough to be achievable,

• but vivid enough to inspire both activists and the public,

• all while being possible to express into a short, punchy slogan.

The third point in particular has foiled the “better chicken commitment,” a combination of rules meant to be for broiler chickens what cage-free was for egg-laying hens. Chickens raised for meat are not kept in small cages; their cage, so to speak, is in their selectively-bred DNA. But explaining the importance of slower-growing breeds to both corporations and consumers is much more complicated and is one reason these campaigns have had a harder time gaining traction.

When it comes to farmed animals, all this doesn’t leave us with many options. For obvious reasons, campaigns focused on fishes or shrimps would struggle even more than chickens (if charisma is in fact the reason chicken campaigns have struggled.)

On the more moderate side of the spectrum, sow crating is an obvious option. Despite progress in California and other states, a majority of US sows are still kept in gestation crates– and almost all are kept immobilized in farrowing crates for weeks while nursing piglets. But given the momentum in the industry, a mass protest campaign lasting just a few years could realistically abolish these practices. The campaign would feature sympathetic pigs suffering in one of the most visibly striking forms of cruelty in animal agriculture. Some corporations and some states have already disavowed crates, setting strong precedents for targeting decision makers in every other corporation and state, and eventually the federal government.

2.1 End factory farming by 2040

On the more ambitious side, and arguably more commensurate with the degree of social and economic upheaval we should be expecting in the coming years, would be the demand to end factory farming.

When gestation crates and battery cages have appeared on the ballot in U.S. states, voters have opted to ban them by wide margins. Polling⁷ and experience suggest the same thing would not happen today with factory farming– the one attempt was the aforementioned DxE initiative that went down 15 to 85.

But this doesn’t necessarily disqualify factory farming as a campaign goal. After all, the whole point of social movements is to shift public opinion and contest the meaning of cultural symbols. Opinion research suggests Americans are deeply uncomfortable with factory farming, but aren’t ready for a ban in practice due to concerns about lost jobs, food costs, and consumer choice. A protest movement could be the right tool to overcome these hesitations.

“End factory farming” is hardly a new battle cry for animal activists. Why would anything be different if we used it now? I think there are a few ways we could spice this demand up, making it feel real and attainable rather than the typical empty protest slogan everyone brushes off.

One is to put a deadline on it. This was another component of XR’s success. Many protest groups had asked for an end to fossil fuels. But by slapping a year on it—2030, 12 years from when the group was founded—XR made the demand feel more concrete and (if chosen carefully) realistic, and yet simultaneously like less of a commitment for activists. You could spend the rest of your life protesting every weekend for net zero. But “net zero by 2030” meant we are going to go all out on this campaign for a few years, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to change our approach.⁸

Interestingly, this has been the buzz of the UK animal movement for the last few weeks: uniting behind a demand to ban factory farming by 2040. Would it be possible on that timeline? I’m not sure that’s precisely the right question. For one, we are all underestimating just how much change is likely to happen in the next 14 years. My own expectations about social disruption from AI make me think we shouldn’t overthink any long-term strategic plans. I’d rather think of this 2040 demand as a strategy for building power and momentum and asserting ourselves into mainstream social and political debates.

In that case, it’s a matter of choosing a year that seems bold and ambitious enough to inspire activists, but realistic enough to be taken seriously. 2040 seems like a plausible answer, especially for the UK, but we could use polling to establish a number more confidently.

2.2 Access to pasture

We considered another twist on ending factory farming at Pro-Animal Future. Rather than calling for a “ban” on the industry as such, we could think about the many barbaric practices that the industry relies on for its existence, and single out the most unpopular one. We considered a number of individual requirements, each of which would put the industry in a terrible position trying to justify itself, yet without which they simply could not survive:

• Packing animals indoors at high densities

• Untrained workers amputating body parts (beaks, tails, genitals) without anaesthetic

• Never providing personalized veterinary care

After over a year of polling and research, we settled on an answer that I think may well be the factory farming industry’s Achille’s heel: requiring that all farmed animals spend daily time on pasture for a majority of their life.

Having animals outside even for 15 seconds a day would shatter the economics of factory farming for chickens and pigs. If “pasture” were defined to include vegetative cover, the same would apply to feedlots for cows and sheep. Yet to argue against this requirement, the industry would have to explain why their entire business model would fall apart if they lived up to their own advertisements.

Would a pasture access requirement be able to pass as a ballot measure if it appeared in 2026? We tested it in one US county that serves as a political microcosm of many of the states that have passed cage-free egg law, and it polled over 50%. It didn’t have as wide a margin as cage-free, and it’s hard to know what would happen once voters spent months hearing that this law would destroy most of the local animal ag industry and substantially drive up the cost of meat.⁹ In our polling, support was resilient to these messages, and I believe a measure would have a good chance of passing.

But that’s not the only question. What if we build a social movement around it? If we tried to organize waves of protests at farms, state houses, and grocery HQs around the country? Could we drive factory farming further into the mainstream– and increase our chances of winning ballot measures in 2028 or 2030? I think there’s a very good chance we could.

Letting animals outside is a simple, clear, visually evocative demand. It’s mainstream enough to be taken seriously, yet the impacts are hard to overstate; implemented as a sales requirement nationwide,¹⁰ it would probably shrink the animal ag industry by more than 90%.

Possible explanation #3: infighting

Summary: battery cages were going to be the next major campaign for farmed animals, as live export had been. The grassroots and professional wings were poised to unite, delivering an incremental win for animals while building power for the next campaign. But then a few philosophers sitting up in their ivory tower grew impatient. Their polemic resonated with a new generation of grassroots activists who lacked the experience to contextualize it. Cage free became a rallying cry– but for infighting between activists, instead of against the industry.

On this view, the cage-free campaign is still sitting there, a sword waiting for the grassroots animal rights movement to pick it up and wield it. We must simply take our rightful place alongside the professional organizations, and the power to shape social progress will be ours.

A few years ago, I was sitting around with a mix of grassroots abolitionist types and professional welfare campaigners discussing ballot initiative strategy. The abolitionists, most of us from DxE, were new to ballot initiatives, and the welfare campaigners were helping us out by sharing their experiences on Prop 12 and similar campaigns. At this particular moment, we were brainstorming a list of campaigns we could run as ballot initiatives. The abolitionists were suggesting abolitionisty things, and the welfare folks were suggesting welfare-shaped things.

At one point, one of the abolitionists (it may have been me, I don’t remember) said what was on all our minds: One thing you professional folks don’t understand is that we are limited by what the grassroots will support. If we run a cage-free campaign, our volunteers will mutiny.

There was a moment of silence, with both factions exchanging glances. Finally, one of the welfare guys turned to us and, as politely as possible, explained that the Prop 12 campaign had mobilized roughly ten times as many volunteer hours as everything we’d ever worked on all added together. (He didn’t say it that way, he just listed the numbers and they spoke for themselves.)

The lesson was this: whatever your strategy is, if you change it in a big way, there’s a good chance you’ll lose some supporters; those people joined your campaign because it resonated with them, and activists are not interchangeable. But sometimes, the supporters you have are holding you back from getting the supporters you need.

In that moment, I understood our failures in DxE more deeply than I ever had before. We’d constructed an echo chamber for ourselves. Everyone around us shared our conviction that asking for anything less than animal liberation was selling animals out. We’d lost sight of the difference between the moral question of what world we should try to create and the strategic question of how to get there.

3.1 Poison in the well

From my perspective, one person bears an outsized share of responsibility for this dynamic. His name is Gary Francione.

Francione shot to prominence as an animal rights philosopher starting around 1990. His clear, unapologetic writing provided an intellectual grounding for countless animal activists, and his book Eat Like You Care is still my go-to recommendation for intellectually-inclined friends considering veganism.

However, diagnosing a problem and knowing how to solve it are often two very different problems. Climate scientists are not experts on political economy or social change, and neither are animal rights philosophers. Francione lost sight of this distinction, as did many of his followers.

Starting in the 2000s, Francione came out as the most ardent critic of incremental welfare campaigns, insisting that anybody working on these campaigns was not a true believer in abolition and was therefore morally bankrupt. He dubbed them the new welfarists. In contrast with the old welfarists, the new welfarists claimed to be in support of abolition in principle, but this was really a deception, whether they were deceiving themselves or their volunteers. The polemic he deployed against the new welfarists was more acidic than anything he said about factory farmers, from “moral schizophrenics” to “partners in exploitation” merely using welfare campaigns to fleece gullible animal lovers into donating to their corrupt charities.

Francione insisted there was one, and only one, acceptable means to work for animal liberation: vegan advocacy. Anything less than vegan is selling out. Even DxE was not pure enough for Francione, and he let us know regularly, to great effect– Francione’s criticism made us strive to be even more radical.

This, of course, pulled us further and further away from the general public. That’s what radical means.

Vegan absolutism was not the only form of radical olympics that alienated the animal rights movement from the public we purportedly sought to influence. In a sense, it was just one part of a reflexive leftist counterculturalism typical of youthful activist movements. This included a wide range of ideological commitments, any one of which to stray from could mean ostracism. Yet it extended beyond political positions to include a whole range of cultural signals.

Just a year ago, a friend of mine was volunteering for an abolitionist ballot initiative in Oregon that was struggling to recruit enough petitioners. My friend announced in the group chat that they were going to plan a Super Bowl watch party as a recruitment event for the campaign. They were immediately shot down, scolded, and informed that this group had no interest in sports watching events or in the kind of people who would enjoy them.

Granted, this was in Portland, a hovel of lefty counterculturalism, and may not represent animal activist communities everywhere. But for my American readers: when was the last time you saw an animal activist drape themselves in the American flag? You might have all kinds of complex feelings about the flag and what it represents– I certainly do. But if matching that description is a requirement for being part of the animal rights movement, you should just stop reading this post now, because triggering mass mobilization is hopeless.

You could call me a hypocrite here: throughout Israel’s most recent war on Gaza, I wore my keffiyah almost every day. And I don’t regret doing that. I’m not asking anyone to completely disregard their other moral convictions. But while we can be proud members of other movements, that doesn’t mean we should demand our entire movement conform to our full slate of radical views. I was opposed to efforts to punish animal advocacy organizations that chose to stay out of the debate over Gaza, and I would be opposed to practically all efforts to get our movement tangled up in other polarized topics, because every new requirement for animal activism shreds our hopes of building a mass movement.

4. Weighing our options

What evidence points towards each of these explanations?

Remember, our candidates are:

1. Cage-free campaigners didn’t bother with social movement organizing.

2. The public are uninspired by cage-free campaigns.

3. Abolitionist thought leaders divided the movement.

We already talked about some evidence for #2, the research finding public reactions to cage-free hen campaigns was uninspired.

The best evidence for #1 might be the emergence of the International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW). ICAW is a new organization bringing more aggressive protest tactics to corporate welfare campaigns. Ten years ago, organizations like The Humane League secured commitments from some of the world’s largest companies to transition their supply chains to cage-free eggs. Most of those commitments were set to mature in 2025. As the year grew closer, it started to become clear that many of those companies were not on track to meet their commitments, and sure enough, commitments started disappearing from corporate websites. ICAW was launched exactly in response to these lapsing commitments.

In other words: cage-free campaigners originally thought they could win without using social movement strategies. But the wins were just abstract commitments. The companies may never have been planning to follow through, in part because they didn’t expect to pay a price with the public. The corporate campaign coalition itself concluded that maybe they needed social movement tactics after all.

ICAW’s evolution has provided further evidence for hypothesis 1, and surprisingly, for 3. Soon after launching, ICAW formed a close partnership with two of the most grassroots, abolitionist-shaped organizations in the movement: Animal Activism Collective (AAC) and the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).

As little as 18 months ago, it was far from obvious that this should happen. For all of September 2024, Pro-Animal Future rented an airbnb in Denver to host activists from across the country to help with our ballot initiative campaign. Most of the people who came were hardcore abolitionist protesters from the East Coast, brought together thanks to AAC. A couple of the attendees fit that description but also happened to be employed at big welfare orgs like THL and MFA. One night, after petitioning was over, one of those organized a cage-free protest at a Taco John’s for her day job, and asked everyone in the house to go.

This was a pretty edgy request. It would be the first welfare protest for almost all of them.¹¹ They dragged their heels, but ultimately, they’d spend the last three weeks campaigning with this person. She was their friend, and they all went to support her.

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

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

As far as I can tell, all of this happened because:

1. A few campaigners managed to build strong relationships straddling the divide;

2. Earning the respect of abolitionists by showing them, through firsthand experience, that cage-free protests can go hard as f@#k; and

3. Earning the respect of pro campaigners by showing that abolitionists are capable of knuckling down and grinding away on a yearslong campaign with a clear goal, like completely annihilating the fur industry.

4.1 Other explanations worth considering

This coalition—which I’ve taken to calling The Hydra after my friend Ben Newman because they haven’t named their partnership yet and 11 letters is too many for an acronym—anyway, the hydra hasn’t yet proven explanations #1 and #3. They have great momentum, but they’re a long way from achieving the kind of mass mobilization I describe in this post.

They haven’t yet transitioned to a chapter model, where organizers in each city consistently organize both protests and community events, using the latter as a point of entry to the former. I’m certain that in cities where they choose to do this, they’ll be able to quickly scale up their membership rolls by an order of magnitude. It remains to be seen whether they can go beyond that and break through the glass ceiling DxE encountered. If they did, it could basically prove hypothesis #1 and render #3 moot.

But what if that doesn’t work? Where would that leave us? There are a few more possibilities worth briefly considering.

Hypothesis #4: maybe social movements are just hits-based. You could do everything right to try to start a movement, and you still have a low chance of succeeding in any given year. Too many success factors are outside of your control, up to vast social and political trends or sheer chance.

None of my original three theories explain why the live export movement in Australia didn’t take off on the same level as in the UK. This one could, though unfortunately, it’s not very actionable. We could play all our cards right, as the Australia team seems to have done, and get something great (their campaign kicked ass and won) but not quite as socially transformative as the dream scenario.

If getting from there to the dream scenario is a matter of luck, we’d just need to keep trying year after year and not get discouraged by losing. This is precarious, because it’s easy to slide from here into a mindset that ignores all evidence: “My preferred strategy will work eventually! I just need to keep trying!” I’m worried this was the mindset I fell into in DxE, and in that case, I don’t think it was justified. But that doesn’t mean it’s never justified. For that reason, I find this hypothesis very concerning.

Hypothesis #5: the animal movement could be insufficiently diverse. Because our membership doesn’t represent enough different sociocultural groups, the identity transformations undergone by activists aren’t able to spread out across the whole culture.

“A socially and demographically diverse range of participants” was ranked as the fourth most important success criterion for social movements in the Social Change Lab study mentioned earlier. I find it very plausible that our movement is insufficiently diverse along several axes, most notably (in the U.S. at least) racial/ethnic diversity and diversity of political affiliations.

Our movement is disproportionately white, and almost exclusively leftist/liberal. This raises an immediate dilemma, because some activists argue that in order to be more welcoming to people of color, the movement would have to actively embrace the full progressive political agenda. I doubt this is correct. As Ozy Brennan says:

If you ask about how to make any movement or subculture more welcoming to a particular marginalized group, then the advocates for that particular marginalized group will speak up. The problem is that things that advocates want don’t necessarily line up with things that members of that marginalized group want…

I think this is mostly just a chicken and (cage-free) egg problem: people judge whether a group is for them by looking to see if there are other people like them there. If everyone there shares an attribute they don’t, they’ll conclude it’s not for them. We could have a movement that is inclusive of rich racial diversity and less lopsided politically. All we need to do is… be that way already.

I don’t mean to make light of this. I don’t think that if we somehow solved our chronic diversity problems, we would suddenly go mainstream. But we have no realistic hope of going mainstream without addressing this problem. It is necessary but not sufficient. We just really need to work a lot harder welcoming brown people and conservatives, including by funding their projects.

I’m very open to suggestions here and if you send me compelling ones I will probably write about them in a future post.

Hypothesis #6: maybe DxE actually failed because it was a little too cultish. Or, on the other hand, maybe ICAW isn’t cultish enough. Or both could be true.

Any group willing to act on strong dissident beliefs can expect to be accused of cult status. DxE often was, as was Extinction Rebellion. In most cases, this was a lazy critique levied in bad faith. But I do think insular group identities eventually frustrated the growth of both organizations.

Both DxE and XR galvanized their supporters by basically throwing their rest of the movement under the bus, narratively speaking. DxE came right out calling welfare campaigners sellouts; one of XR’s first protests was dumping paint all over the London office of Greenpeace, saying they weren’t doing enough to combat the climate crisis.

It seems that this strategy is great at attracting a dedicated wave of early adopters. But then it stalls, ultimately undermining the kind of broad coalition necessary to launch a mass movement.

Movements really take off when participation isn’t mediated by a specific organization. When people joined XR’s protests in London, they would have told you they were taking action with Extinction Rebellion, which was an organization that had a governance structure, designated spokespeople, and a distinctive brand style (colors and fonts). Thousands of people joined XR’s protests.

But for a protest to grow into the millions, it has to outgrow these trappings of organization. While there may have been organizations called Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, those were not what people meant when they showed up to protests, and most participants probably never knew an organization with that name existed.

Yet organizing through specific organizations seems like a key stepping stone to the eventual life-of-its-own movement. It’s somewhat stressful to think we might need a different strategy to get from 50 people to 500 than from 500 to 5,000, and from there to 50,000 and so on. But these days I suspect that the same strong group identity that propelled DxE’s initial growth spurt—and inspired years of cult allegations—did in fact create a ceiling on our growth and turn away the members we would have needed to achieve mass movement status.¹²

5. If we build it, they might come

If we don’t have much time, and we’re willing to design a new campaign specifically for the purpose of triggering mass mobilization, the safest option would be to assume that every hypothesis we’ve examined is doing some work.

That would look like:

• A campaign pairing visionary messaging with an achievable but inspiring demand that resonates with the public and activists alike. I’m fond of the pasture access rule as a more effective way to call for banning factory farms. But I’ve historically overestimated the public’s appetite for change, so more conservatively, banning gestation crates should be on the table too.¹³

• A campaigning organization designed around user experience from the ground up. Basically a machine that mass-produces transformational experiences for activists, using frequent community events, a party-like atmosphere, and bold tactics that transgress social norms enough to form memorable experiences without alienating the middle.

• Setting aside parochial squabbling that divides radical and moderate flanks and scares away omnivores and conservatives– heck, even centrists.

Is a campaign like this possible? I don’t know, but when I write it out like this it doesn’t seem so hard.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to explain an early draft of this post to some new friends from Anima International, based in Poland. When I explained how DxE tried to model ourselves after the Occupy movement, they all burst out laughing. They couldn’t believe we had treated Occupy as a role model, when the sociology literature treats it as a case study in coordination failure. Occupy, they pointed out, mobilized millions of Americans, and for all of that, achieved basically no real policy victories.

This is an important part of the story, and I certainly believe DxE didn’t place enough value on concrete incremental wins. But that isn’t the whole story. Occupy had an undeniable effect on American political discourse. XR didn’t get the UK to end all fossil fuel use, but they measurably transformed the way politicians and journalists talked about climate change.

This whole post is still premised on the idea that cultural salience is an important part of the social change equation, and that mass protest is an effective way to achieve it.

5.1 Burner orgs

On the question of strong organizational identities, one promising model is what I’ve taken to calling burner organizations. Like burner phones, these orgs are meant to be used briefly and discarded.

This idea grew out of activists in Britain navigating the aftermath of Extinction Rebellion. After a couple brilliant years of mass mobilization, XR unravelled amidst infighting that would be familiar to any experienced grassroots campaigner. Marginal participants invented the idea that XR should be a horizontal, leaderless organization, organized a coup against the founders, and promptly drove it into the ground.

What happened next, however, was unusual. The strategic minds behind XR decided to treat this as an opportunity. They recouped and reflected on the main things they’d gotten wrong the first time around. They reached many of the same conclusions I’ve discussed here. In particular, XR was all visionary rhetoric, no achievable demand– their only demand was for the entire country to completely phase out fossil fuels by 2030.

At the same time, they believed that one of XR’s greatest sources of strength was the fact that it was never trying to build a permanent organization. They still believed in their original critique of groups like Greenpeace: that large, permanent advocacy organizations can’t help but wind up more focused on perpetuating themselves institutionally than on achieving maximum impact for their cause.

Their solution was a new organization that was even more lightweight than the last. It was called Insulate Britain, and besides the name, there wasn’t much more to it. Their sole demand was for the UK government to run a massive home insulation program, addressing the fossil fuel emissions wasted on heating the 60% of British homes that lacked meaningful insulation. There were no governing documents, no sacred list of principles and values. Just a clear demand, a minimum viable organizing structure, and a bunch of pensioners willing to get arrested. Once the goal was achieved after a year or two, Insulate Britain was disbanded– with most of its members going on to found Just Stop Oil a few months later, demanding no new drilling permits.

This model achieves some of the advantages of both strong group identities like DxE and collectively-owned movement brands like Occupy. The hyper-literal naming convention keeps the focus on the core message, and frequently wiping the slate clean avoids the squabbling and power struggles that doom so many activist groups.

Maybe burner orgs like Pigs Out of Cages or Let Animals Outside¹⁴ would be the right vehicle for mass movement organizing around factory farming. Or maybe durable, user-focused organizations like Animal Activist Collective, Pro-Animal Future, and We The Free are necessary stepping stones to mass mobilization.

If so, I’m glad to see that this newer generation of grassroots groups learned the right lessons from DxE, XR, and Anonymous for the Voiceless– that an excessively strong organization identity is great for fast growth right at the beginning, but ends in insularity and infighting later on. These groups are more collaborative and less cultish than their predecessors, and while that’s creating slower growth right now, it might pay off in the long run.

5.2 Once more unto the street

I know there are many people on this list who still believe in the power and attainability of mass protest for farmed animals. It’s possible that even modest changes to current protest campaigns would have a chance of unlocking mass-scale mobilization. Part of the battle is simply deciding that is our goal, and being willing to take some of the energy we currently put towards the immediate campaign and invest it instead in building up local chapters or communities.

If you think there’s any chance that what I’ve published here before about AI timelines could come true, then this is the time to think big. Brightlingsea big.¹⁵

Build on,

Sandcastles

1. Yes, that failed too. But was it a near miss, or doomed from the start?

2. See Goodhart’s Law

3. Forgive the dramatic flourish. As should become clear shortly, I have nothing negative to say about these tactics.

4. I’m using THL as a stand-in here for many similar groups. THL: I love you, you’ve been the top-rated charity by ACE for umpteen years, and this isn’t even a criticism of your strategy, so I think you can take it.

5. And, let's be honest, risk aversion. Alcohol can help create exactly the kind of messy situations that cause endless headaches for community organizers. I’m not trying to pretend there isn’t a real tradeoff here.

6. Ben Newman from AR argues mobilization groups should spend as much as 25% of their budget on parties, including on alcohol. This seems plausible to me.

7. E.g. internal polling from my time at Pro-Animal Future deciding which ballot measures to run.

8. For many XR activists, that meant that if they weren’t winning after two or three years, they’d move out into the country to start cooperative farms and prepare for societal collapse.

9. Opponents would say this whether it’s true or not.

10. Actually implementing it would be a huge goal, and barring AI would take decades. My point is that it is highly transformative, enough to inspire activists and the public.

11. I lived locally so I wasn’t actually staying at the house and heard all this second hand.

12. Ben argues the key here is “leadership which can withstand the pressure of group dynamics.” Basically, it will fall to the leaders of a mobilization group to discipline the insular tendencies of the early adopters.

13. We can fit battery cages in, but focus messaging more on pigs.

14. Hat tip to Plant Based Universities. Ben says the name was inspired by Insulate Britain.

15. Last note from Ben: “People need to understand social movement organisations as a critical part of movement infrastructure, not just another organisation. Everyone should pitch in to make them successful - they are projects several orders of magnitude bigger than a traditional org.”