No One Cared I Was Vegan. Then Came Open Rescue.

My arrest at the nation’s largest organic poultry farm showed me the power of story to transform how people see animals — and ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

 — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where open rescue comes in.

 — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In September 2018, I had my chance.

End of Part 1. Subscribe for Part 2!