Ridglan Farms, the notorious beagle-breeding facility in Wisconsin raided twice by activists this year, is officially shutting down. The pressure on them has been intense because the case has attracted quite a sizeable national attention: Glenn Greenwald, Jennifer Welch (I've Had It podcast), Lara Trump and Robert F. Kennedy have all commented on Ridglan decrying the horrors there. Lewis Bollard tweeted this out recently: https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2066542219134452209
Figured I'd share this since some EAs (including myself) were involved in the campaign to get it shut down. A big part of our theory of change was to get this kind of attention. The real question is how to extend to animals more broadly than just dogs, of course, but even this counts as a big win.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it's a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: "you'd break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day", e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and that's the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn't there for the one last weekend in April and don't have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks don't think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I don't think it is ever likely to be primary and I don't want it to be, but I also don't want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what's good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the "OK" side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.
Fantastic feedback - thank you! I've updated the post to not say that these celebrities haven't been active on animal rights, because as you point out they have. Thanks!
I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists.
I think some altruists suffer from lack of moral courage. Especially those of us who work on 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.
If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite.
[Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I'm not advocating any illegal activity, of course.
I feel a lot more optimistic about this direction than you. It's a theory of change that you seem to think is unrealistic, when I think it is highly realistic, and thus you're focused on the downside risks when I think the upside is potentially huge and worthwhile.
My theory goes something like: we block all factory farm expansions -> people realize that we don't want factory farmed products in the UK at all -> public opinion shifts quickly -> multiple policy changes are now simultaneously possible: we ban new factory farms, start working on closing/improving existing ones, and ban low welfare imports.
We know political winds can shift and change can happen quickly, like same-sex marriage. We know activism is critical to such change. We know momentum is crucial for activism, and as a result we need to see consistent wins. This strategy is actively and consistently producing wins in a cause area that really struggles to produce wins.
Sure, there are many ways it can fail. Nobody is claiming this will definitely work. But the evidence you are looking for seems either downstream (like the government policy commitment) or irrelevant to the theory of change (where or how quickly do imports replace UK products). Sure, they are relevant to the downside, and I can definitely imagine ways that downside risk can make the upside not worth it, but when I look holistically I am pretty optimistic overall even seeing the risks.
The evidence which would convince me to stop is mainly loss of momentum on the short term strategy. If blocking factory farms at the planning stage stopped working, for example, and activists spent a year trying hard to restart it but failing, then I would change my mind. I don't think I would want to stop in most cases if it were creating backlash (because backlash triggers discussion and can be useful) but I would want to study the form of backlash carefully.
I also think that if there were other activist strategies that were working better, I would want to stop this one and move onto higher priority strategies. But to me this is one of the ones that's working best.
Hmm, I don't entirely disagree but I also don't fully agree either:
Where I agree: I have indeed hired people on the opposite side of the world (eg Australia) for whom it was not a problem.
Where I disagree: working at weird hours is a skill, and one that is hard to test for in interviews. There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on. I would rather not take that collective risk -- to hire you and discover 3 months in, that the schedule you signed up for is not practical for you.
One thing which may be newly possible in the last few years is getting satellite imagery of the country and using AI to count houses. With appropriate methodology, this is far more likely to be accurate than relying on bureaucratic reporting and/or projections, although there are the obvious pitfalls and probably some non-obvious ones too in backing this out to population. I believe MSF used to do something like this for their deployment areas but I haven't heard of it attempted at a countrywide scale.
Yep... this stuff is simultaneously fairly obvious and surprisingly neglected. I have been looking at TB programs in various developing countries and the best policy proposals all include these components - although the details differ in some places. Implementation is a challenge.
I've been paying special attention to household contacts screening for TB and preventative treatment (TPT; your policy #2). While TPT for household contacts is extraordinarily cost-effective, it is quite frustrating to make progress on this, because of the reasons the report cites: general lack of awareness of TB dangers, as well as that it is quite hard to convince people who are not visibly sick to travel with their family, possibly long distances, to hospitals to get screened and take 3-month courses (or longer!) of preventative antibiotics with sometimes-severe side effects.
Ridglan Farms, the notorious beagle-breeding facility in Wisconsin raided twice by activists this year, is officially shutting down. The pressure on them has been intense because the case has attracted quite a sizeable national attention: Glenn Greenwald, Jennifer Welch (I've Had It podcast), Lara Trump and Robert F. Kennedy have all commented on Ridglan decrying the horrors there. Lewis Bollard tweeted this out recently: https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2066542219134452209
Figured I'd share this since some EAs (including myself) were involved in the campaign to get it shut down. A big part of our theory of change was to get this kind of attention. The real question is how to extend to animals more broadly than just dogs, of course, but even this counts as a big win.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it's a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: "you'd break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day", e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and that's the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn't there for the one last weekend in April and don't have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks don't think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I don't think it is ever likely to be primary and I don't want it to be, but I also don't want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what's good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the "OK" side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.
Update: Peaceful activists were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets yesterday at Ridglan Farms. No dogs were rescued.
I'm not sure yet what this says about the overall strategy -- debrief should be incoming -- but it was not good for those involved. (I wasn't there)
Fantastic feedback - thank you! I've updated the post to not say that these celebrities haven't been active on animal rights, because as you point out they have. Thanks!
I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists.
I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt:
More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its
If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite.
[Edited to add:] I believe there is a lawful basis for this action and I intend to fight any attempted prosecution in court! I'm not advocating any illegal activity, of course.
I feel a lot more optimistic about this direction than you. It's a theory of change that you seem to think is unrealistic, when I think it is highly realistic, and thus you're focused on the downside risks when I think the upside is potentially huge and worthwhile.
My theory goes something like: we block all factory farm expansions -> people realize that we don't want factory farmed products in the UK at all -> public opinion shifts quickly -> multiple policy changes are now simultaneously possible: we ban new factory farms, start working on closing/improving existing ones, and ban low welfare imports.
We know political winds can shift and change can happen quickly, like same-sex marriage. We know activism is critical to such change. We know momentum is crucial for activism, and as a result we need to see consistent wins. This strategy is actively and consistently producing wins in a cause area that really struggles to produce wins.
Sure, there are many ways it can fail. Nobody is claiming this will definitely work. But the evidence you are looking for seems either downstream (like the government policy commitment) or irrelevant to the theory of change (where or how quickly do imports replace UK products). Sure, they are relevant to the downside, and I can definitely imagine ways that downside risk can make the upside not worth it, but when I look holistically I am pretty optimistic overall even seeing the risks.
The evidence which would convince me to stop is mainly loss of momentum on the short term strategy. If blocking factory farms at the planning stage stopped working, for example, and activists spent a year trying hard to restart it but failing, then I would change my mind. I don't think I would want to stop in most cases if it were creating backlash (because backlash triggers discussion and can be useful) but I would want to study the form of backlash carefully.
I also think that if there were other activist strategies that were working better, I would want to stop this one and move onto higher priority strategies. But to me this is one of the ones that's working best.
Great work. This has the vibes of an instant classic. I'm probably going to be linking this for a long time.
Hmm, I don't entirely disagree but I also don't fully agree either:
Where I agree: I have indeed hired people on the opposite side of the world (eg Australia) for whom it was not a problem.
Where I disagree: working at weird hours is a skill, and one that is hard to test for in interviews. There is a reasonably high base rate (off the cuff: maybe 30 percent?) of candidates claiming overconfidently in interviews that they can meet a work schedule that is actually incredibly impractical for them and end up causing problems or needing firing later on. I would rather not take that collective risk -- to hire you and discover 3 months in, that the schedule you signed up for is not practical for you.
One thing which may be newly possible in the last few years is getting satellite imagery of the country and using AI to count houses. With appropriate methodology, this is far more likely to be accurate than relying on bureaucratic reporting and/or projections, although there are the obvious pitfalls and probably some non-obvious ones too in backing this out to population. I believe MSF used to do something like this for their deployment areas but I haven't heard of it attempted at a countrywide scale.
Yep... this stuff is simultaneously fairly obvious and surprisingly neglected. I have been looking at TB programs in various developing countries and the best policy proposals all include these components - although the details differ in some places. Implementation is a challenge.
I've been paying special attention to household contacts screening for TB and preventative treatment (TPT; your policy #2). While TPT for household contacts is extraordinarily cost-effective, it is quite frustrating to make progress on this, because of the reasons the report cites: general lack of awareness of TB dangers, as well as that it is quite hard to convince people who are not visibly sick to travel with their family, possibly long distances, to hospitals to get screened and take 3-month courses (or longer!) of preventative antibiotics with sometimes-severe side effects.
Glad to see more people working on this.