You Can Just Rescue Animals

The Ridglan raid proves open rescue isn't an alternative to pragmatic campaigning. It's the missing piece.

In this post:

• Open rescue historically hasn’t delivered concrete change for animals.

• But the action at Ridglan Farms this weekend shows that it can do so much more. While open rescue historically hasn’t been used as part of sustained, winnable campaigns, bringing these two together would strengthen them both.

• On a more subtle level, open rescue is one of the only actions we take which in its tone is proportionate to the atrocity we are fighting. If no part of our movement was taking proportionate action, part of our soul could wither.

The Spray

A familiar feeling washed over me this past Sunday morning. It washed over me along with a thick spray of manure thrown up off rain-soaked farmland by the wheels of a pickup truck driven by the maniacally enraged brother-in-law¹ of the general manager of a dog factory farm outside Madison, Wisconsin.

It’s hard to describe this feeling. Not the feeling of the manure, but the state of mind in which I didn’t care about the manure, nor about the respectable, dress-code-compliant clothes it was probably ruining.

All around me were dozens of animal activists, many of them nestled inside white biosecure coveralls, most of those carrying beagles. These beagles were in the process of being rescued from Ridglan Farms, one of those dark hellish corners of the world that goodness herself has forgotten. They were getting their first glimpse of sunlight after a lifetime of uninterrupted torture that would make de Sade blush.

Moments after the shit spraying. I still can’t get the smell out of my hat. Photo Yash Mangalick.

It was not guaranteed that I should find myself here, feeling this familiar, hard-to-describe feeling– the feeling of open rescue. I had started to think I would never feel it again.

Years ago, I had believed that mass open rescues like this were the key to achieving total animal liberation. But I eventually lost faith, drifting towards forms of advocacy that I thought of as trading in excitement for tangible impact.

When the call came from an old friend asking me to come out of open rescue retirement to take on Ridglan, I thought I’d say no. But the thought kept nagging at me. It was only when that soggy poo splattered against my glasses that I finally understood why.

Without open rescue, there has been a hole in the animal rights movement. Its absence threatens to make us lose sight of something invaluable, something that matters far beyond the grassroots wing.

At the same time, Ridglan shows how open rescue can be done smarter than in the past. Through my shit-speckled glasses, I finally saw how open rescue should be a key part of the toolbox for Team Win, and resolved that I’ll never miss another chance to be part of it.

You can just do things

I got my start as an animal activist at the 2015 National Animal Rights Conference in Washington, DC. Out of dozens of organizations assembled there, I was most drawn to Direct Action Everywhere. There were lots of things I liked about DxE, from the entrepreneurial grassroots culture to the way founder Wayne Hsiung grounded the theory of change in historical case studies.

But the thing that really made me sign up to organize a local chapter was the sense of urgency. DxE was the only organization at the conference that year whose tactics seemed proportionate to the scale and severity of the moral crisis we were fighting against. Handing out vegan leaflets, meeting with CEOs about cage-free commitments, and researching new protein scaffolding techniques seemed great and all, but if that’s all we do, my younger self thought, then why would the public listen to us when we describe factory farming as an atrocity on the level of slavery or the holocaust? They wouldn’t even believe that we believed it.

DxE set a different tone, starting with protests inside of grocery stores and restaurants where animals’ bodies were being sold, a desperate emotional plea for people to wake up to the fact that these were literally slices of someone’s body they’d been violently parted with. After a few years, DxE grew large enough to realize Wayne’s true vision.

The first test run was in May 2017, at a wet market in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A group of 200 activists descended on the store, where a couple dozen went inside, taking chickens and quails out of cages and loading them into a van waiting around the corner. We managed to rescue a few dozen birds before police arrived, at which point Wayne began pleading with the owner and the police to release the rest of the animals to a sanctuary we’d already lined up. He said he’d refuse to leave until the animals were released, so the police arrested him.

My most vivid memory from this action is looking over at my friend Zach as police ushered Wayne to the cruiser. He was crying. For a moment, I was confused. Everything had gone perfectly according to plan– a plan Zach had played a large role designing. We’d saved animals from imminent painful slaughter, and we had an arrest to juice up interest from the media.

Zach noticed my confusion, and explained:

“I just can’t believe that is the world we live in. The police are arresting someone for trying to rescue innocent animals.”

Of course, Zach and I both understood that this was the world we lived in. We understood it so deeply we’d become numb to it. The whole point of the action was to force the general public to confront that dark reality. But in an instant, Zach’s tears showed me how taking this action could transform us, too. It offered us a chance to reconnect with the spiritual weight of that knowledge, while at the same instant revealing to us that we also live in a world with people who have the courage to confront it, to say no even if it means throwing their bodies on the line.

Filming the rescue at Ming's live market in Chinatown

I’d been so full of adrenaline, and so focused on my role, I hadn’t felt much of anything. Suddenly all of it hit me. Yes, we had staged the entire thing. But we were part of the world. The fact that it was us didn’t make it any less real.

I felt an acute sense that history was being made right here, that some historian in the future would give anything to stand where I was standing right then. I felt like I had been cut loose from shackles, as the laws and social norms saying you just don’t do things like this fell away and a new path opened before all of us. Most of all, I felt so certain that I had given my life purpose, that I was paying back my debt for being born on this Earth, that there could be nothing more correct, more joyful, than walking into its dark hellish corners and taking animals out of cages even if it meant being imprisoned, maimed, or potentially killed.

I wasn’t the only one feeling all of this. It was like a dam had burst. In one day, the animal rights movement learned that you can just walk into places of cruelty and rescue animals. Over the next two years, DxE repeated the stunt at half a dozen factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses across California. Other activist groups caught the bug and spread similar actions across Canada, Mexico, Australia, South Korea, and the UK.

I grew so accustomed to the inside of county jails that I started looking forward to my visits. They offered a chance to meditate on that ineffable feeling after each action.

Mass action at Sunrise Farms, a cage-free factory farm in Sonoma County, CA. At least four of us in this photo were at Ridglan– relevant momentarily

It wasn’t working

A favorite saying in the San Francisco tech scene is: “You can just do things.” Life in DxE transformed all of us into people who internalized that more deeply than the most gung-ho startup founders.

Imagine the first time you walked alone into a restaurant, filmed yourself giving an impassioned speech about the animals on everyone’s plates who didn’t want to die, and posted the video on Facebook for all your normie friends and family members to see. In that moment, the precise contours of all the norms and social conditioning normally holding you back from stunts like this become clear to you like never before, and at the same time, they lose their power over you. We started disrupting everything, from political rallies to eating competitions. Then we started taking animals.

The transformation was profound. It’s hard to imagine who I’d be today without it, and I know hundreds of other people who would say the same. Besides the lives of the individual animals saved, this was the most tangible effect of all those open rescues.

But that’s not how it was supposed to be. The goal was to dismantle the entire animal farming industry. After two years and half a dozen mass actions, it clearly wasn’t working as planned. The media coverage was underwhelming. Our courtroom victories didn’t translate into legal precedent. And the actions were so logistically complicated, we couldn’t spread them as fast as we’d once hoped.

In 2017, I thought I’d glimpsed a chain of events where mass open rescue would destroy the foundation of legitimacy that kept animal farming viable. It was precisely the tactic catching on that made me lose faith.

Focused campaigns with popular support

Disillusioned, I stepped away from DxE and took a second look at campaigns I’d previously written off. What I found was that many groups using superficially similar protest tactics had a fundamentally different theory of change. Where DxE aimed directly at the mass public, hoping to provoke a crisis of legitimacy, the campaigners fighting fur, foie gras, and battery cages shared a skepticism that the general public would ever change. But they saw a path to winning without them: laser focus on the small handfuls of corporate and political decisionmakers who had the power to spare large numbers of animals, going after them relentlessly until giving in was simply the less painful option.

That’s not to say they ignored public opinion entirely. These groups took a pragmatic approach to choosing their campaigns. They only ran campaigns they thought they could marshall enough power to win– and that depended largely on whether there was enough support among the public to shame the target.

This approach was delivering exactly the sorts of tangible results that our work at DxE seemingly couldn’t. Scrappy campaigners were going up against multinational corporations and winning fur- and cage-free policies, each target bigger than the last.

These campaigns used media coverage and mobilization as means to an end. For DxE, these were ends in themselves. We chose our open rescue targets based on where we could attract the most activists and create the most compelling videos for social media. Often, that meant we’d show up somewhere for the first time with hundreds of people, rescue a few dozen birds, and then that farm would never hear from us again.

Disciplined campaigners convinced me this approach didn’t make sense even on its own terms: we should expect to get more media attention if we built up a prolonged narrative about a specific target, slowly climbing the escalation ladder until a maximalist tactic like open rescue was the only logical conclusion. And ditto for using a demand that journalists and the public see as at least somewhat sympathetic rather than completely bonkers like animal liberation.

True, DxE was attracting more media attention, and mobilizing more activists, than these more pragmatic campaigns. But we were willing to do crazier stunts that attracted journalists and recruits alike– think gluing our hands to the court during an NBA game or jumping onstage topless at a Bernie Sanders rally. That got us coverage, but it wasn’t clear that coverage led anywhere. Nobody had really tried combining DxE’s bombast with a focused, militant campaign in the style of CAFT or the cage-free coalition.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one noticing that.

Ridglan Farms rescue was the best of both worlds

When Wayne called me to ask about joining the Ridglan action, several interesting points stuck out. Unlike any of our previous actions together, Ridglan was the culmination of a battle going back almost ten years.

Maybe you didn’t think we had dog factory farms in the U.S.. Well, you were wrong. Ridglan Farms outside Madison, Wisconsin is one, where thousands of beagles at a time spend their lives packed inside battery cages in a windowless shed, waiting to be sent off to unspeakable torture at the hands of vivisectionist sick fucks.

Ridglan Farms is a factory farm, but for dogs.

A team led by Wayne (and including my Pax Fauna cofounder Eva Hamer) sent the opening salvo with an undercover investigation of Ridglan in 2017, rescuing two dogs. After the investigation was released, Wayne pressed the authorities to charge the facility with criminal abuse and neglect, but nothing happened and it faded out like the rest of our campaigns.

That changed suddenly when, four years later, Dane County prosecutors filed charges against the investigation team, at Ridglan’s behest. I don’t know why they waited so long. Maybe they hoped media interest would die down. That didn’t work out so well.

The charges led to a new wave of media interest, but more importantly, they galvanized the activists, who brought in the big guns from animal law programs at top universities across the country. Prosecutors were forced to strip down their case, and when they dropped all charges on the eve of trial, Wayne and team seized the initiative, asking a Wisconsin judge to appoint a special prosecutor. A special prosecutor is an independent attorney appointed to investigate and potentially prosecute a case when a conflict of interest credibly disqualifies the prosecutor under whose jurisdiction the case would normally fall. Wayne argued one was necessary to investigate Ridglan on the basis that the company had donated to the Dane County District Attorney’s election campaign.

We all thought this was great legal theater, but to our absolute amazement, the judge agreed, and a special prosecutor was appointed. They put together a case comprising hundreds of cases of felony animal abuse based on the evidence DxE and others provided. For a moment, it looked like justice would actually be served.

Then the special prosecutor announced a settlement with Ridglan. To spare themselves the criminal case, Ridglan would forfeit its breeding license by July 1, 2026, 8 months after the settlement was announced. After that time, they would stop breeding and selling dogs to research labs across the country.

In many ways, this was a major win. But it meant no relief for the 2500 beagles still trapped inside Ridglan, or any more they could breed before July 1. Ridglan would either sell or surrender the remaining dogs by that date, but any dogs sold were still destined to a life of torture.

This, obviously, was not acceptable. If the prosecutor had concluded Ridglan was basically a teeming pit of criminal animal abuse, how could they legally leave thousands of dogs there for eight months?

Wayne announced that if the government was not going to save these dogs, then activists would do it ourselves. He put out the call, tapping into dog and cat rescue networks that aren’t usually mobilized for animal rights. Hundreds of people signed up in a few weeks, and the action was a go.

But that doesn’t really explain why I joined

Unlike our mass open rescues in the past, Ridglan was the culmination of a long battle that had actually proved winnable. It paired radical tactics with a highly popular demand, promising more public sympathy than “animal liberation now.”

There was also a timely national angle. While the Trump administration is not exactly sympathetic to the plight of farmed animals, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS has sent serious signals about ending federal support for animal testing, as a step towards banning it outright. If the Ridglan really blew up, it could help put additional pressure on the administration to follow through on these commitments.

The first point has panned out spectacularly well, and the second may yet bear fruit. I don’t have exact numbers, but the Ridglan rescue this weekend may have gotten more press coverage than all our previous mass open rescues added up, and the momentum hasn’t died out yet. As of Tuesday, “Baywatch Star Alexandra Paul Arrested in Wisconsin Beagle Rescue” is still trending on Twitter.

As exciting as this success is, it’s actually making it clear to me that this was not, ultimately, the reason I decided to come out of open rescue retirement. And it only captures part of what I think our movement has to gain from actions like this.

Proportionate action

We say that what’s happening to animals in factory farms, slaughterhouses, and vivisection labs is a moral atrocity of historic proportions. What would happen if no part of our movement ever took action commensurate with that claim?

First, the public could stop taking us seriously. We could pass up our best chance to confront them with the dissonance of factory farming.

Second, our leadership pipeline would degrade even further. Leadership development has been a major theme of conversations among animal movement strategists lately, because there are many organizations that have budget to hire campaigners but can’t find promising candidates. The great campaigners of today almost all got started as volunteers, and open rescue is particularly promising both as a means of attracting new talent to the movement and training them up.

I was reminded of this almost every time I looked in a new direction at Ridglan on Sunday. Eight years ago, DxE had built up such a large, active community of extremely dedicated activists that we could pull off an action with hundreds of people and have practically all of them be known and vouched for. That was scattered to the wind by Covid, and for this action, Wayne had to do a lot of new recruiting. Most of the people who stormed that dog farm were brand new to activism; many of them were omnivores whose history of activism involved volunteering at local dog and cat shelters. Shelters are great but they don’t exactly prepare you for tactical operations that involve cutting through a chain-link fence with angle grinders, smashing through reinforced steel doors with sledgehammers, and steering passenger vans full of beagles on slashed tires as a homicidal maniac in a pickup truck tries to ram you into a ditch.

Ridglan was the hardest open rescue target Wayne’s team has ever hit. They knew we were coming, which previous targets never did. We arrived to find nearly every door into the barns hardened with quarter inch steel mesh and alarm systems that notified police as soon as we set foot on site.

While all the noobz performed admirably and kept their cool better than I expected, the action was only possible thanks to a cadre of leaders that Wayne has been building up for the last ten years. We got past those fences, doors, and security systems and got 23 dogs safely off site in something like 15 minutes because of a hundred small, quick decisions those people made under enormous pressure. Everywhere I looked, I saw an old friend—most of whom I didn’t even realize would be there—confidently performing some specialized role, each one reminding me of a moment we’d shared years earlier when we were both noobz ourselves and had learned a lesson the hard way that I now saw them putting into practice.

Many of those people have gone on to do other outstanding work in the movement. Their new work might not involve breaking and entering, but I have no doubt open rescue prepared them to think on their feet in all manner of high-pressure situations. That’s certainly true for me. If nothing else, open rescue was the thing that drew many of them into the movement in the first place.

What board meetings can’t give you

But there’s something deeper than all of that. A movement built on moral force would lose our soul without direct action.

Welfare campaigns have been the movement’s greatest victory over the 11 years I’ve been in the movement. That statement would have been blasphemy to the younger Aidan raised on a diet of open rescue. But it’s undeniable: cage free has made life concretely better for hundreds of millions of animals. Open rescue hasn’t had any effect of remotely similar magnitude.

Yet if I arrived in 2026 and looked back on eleven years as an animal activist, and there had been nothing like open rescue during that time, I think that a part of me would be dead. I think a part of the movement’s soul would be dead, or at least dormant. In 11 years of board meetings, I think a part of us would have stopped believing our own declarations.

My new friend Lincoln Quirk said it more clearly. Lincoln is exactly the kind of ambitious, entrepreneurial person the animal movement desperately needs more of. After exiting the billion-dollar tech startup he founded, he went looking for something better to do with his time. He found open rescue.

Lincoln spent Sunday in Dane County Jail after carrying a beagle out of Ridglan Farms. Here’s how he explained his decision (emphasis mine):

Most people agree that animal abuse is bad. But most people don’t do anything about it. Through this action I wanted to show that there are things that any person can do, namely show up for stuff that’s annoying, unpleasant or even scary… I think some altruists suffer from lack of moral courage. Especially those of us who work in tech: we often have lots of moral conviction, but are typically wealthy and aren’t usually risking much personally, and I think that’s a gap. I want to be asking more often, “how can we be more altruistic?” One answer is to challenge ourselves to do more and more courageous things.

When I first joined DxE, I had already been thinking about animal rights for years. I’d read books about animal rights philosophy that argued that the suffering of animals should be weighted equally to the suffering of humans, a radical proposal. I thought I believed these things. It wasn’t until I was surrounded by other people who also believed these things that I realized how much social pressure was holding me back from really, truly believing them, from letting my brain carry these ideas to their logical conclusion. It’s one thing to declare that belief. It’s a different thing to have it transform your view of the world, to notice all the tiny ways the ordinary world around you is constructed on a foundation of blood and bones. And it’s yet another thing to act on all of that, for your body to get the message: yes, we really believe this, and we’re putting it into practice. My mind cracked open like a primrose.

We’re bringing sexy back

I have a confession, reader: I knew before it happened that I wanted to write something about the Ridglan rescue. Thing is, I had no idea what to say.

When I bumped into friend and Sandcastles reader Dean Wyrzykowski at the action, he said he was surprised to see me there. I was surprised to see myself there, but I was curious for his perspective. They pointed to one post where I argued campaigns for dogs (e.g. vivisection, greyhound racing) will not spill over into greater opposition to animal farming because of the way people sort animals into different buckets. He could have pointed to half a dozen other posts where I question the thinking behind my radical abolitionist inclination in my early years as an activist.

Before the action, the best explanation I could give Dean was that whatever abstract ideas I have then or now about how to make the biggest impact, I’m not certain enough about them to pass up a chance to get a few dogs the hell out of Ridglan. I thought maybe my Ridglan post would be about strategic humility and the need to do something concrete every once in a while.

But the action itself exposed a false dichotomy in my thinking. Because of the way I’d encountered different strategies over time, I’d come to think of open rescue as an alternative to focused, disciplined campaigns. While the former was bold and symbolic, the latter was ultimately how we’d get the goods.

I think you can already spot the problem here. These are not alternatives. They’re different types of artifact; they can’t be compared.

DxE’s early open rescues fell short because they weren’t part of a sustained, winnable campaign with wide popular support. But they could be! Ridglan proves that! It provides an updated answer to the dilemma I spent my last post wrestling with.

There’s no reason at all that open rescue couldn’t be the capstone of pragmatic campaigns targeting fur, foie gras, gestation crates, and battery cages. Many of these campaigns are already at the point that open rescue would be seen as a legitimate escalation, much as the media and public see the Ridglan action.

In that last post, I asked why the animal movement hasn’t been able to recreate the success of the British live export movement thirty years ago, when crowds over a thousand strong shut down sleepy port towns like Brightlingsea day after day for months on end to stop sheep being loaded onto ships destined for slaughterhouses overseas. A key fact from that story is that where DxE’s mass actions were powered by vegan activists from all over the country traveling to California, most of the Brightlingsea protesters were ordinary omnivorous locals. They came out precisely because it was a local story; they’d seen truckloads of sheep roll down their main street day after day, giving the issue unique salience.

Something similar happened at Ridglan. Over years of courtroom drama, readers of the local newspaper got to know the story and the horrific abuses at the center of it. This wasn’t some abstract question about animal rights; it was morbid cruelty happening in their own backyard. How better could movement strategists sharpen this sense of drama than by inviting the entire local community to join them in an open rescue, advertised well in advance? If they were willing to do it, not just for dogs, but for sheep, who’s to say they won’t do it for foxes, pigs, or force-fed ducks?

If you’re currently running a campaign related to any of those, maybe you’ll give us our next target. Open rescue is back, baby. Let’s make it happen.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Mantras:

• What would happen if no part of our movement ever took proportionate action to our own claims? A part of the movement’s soul would be dead, or at least dormant.

• You can just do things.

• Open rescue and focused campaigns aren’t alternatives — they’re different types of artifact. There’s no reason open rescue couldn’t be the capstone of pragmatic campaigns targeting fur, foie gras, gestation crates, and battery cages.

1. We think. Haven’t 100% identified the guy yet.