Posts
The Winners' Charter
“The golden carp has escaped the net. What will he feed on now?” - The Blue Cliff Record, case 49
A New Gospel
I usually don’t attend talks at conferences. Four years ago I bumped into Elliot Teperman in the hallway outside a talk at AVA and asked if he was going in, and he explained that he typically opts for the “hallway track”, as in skipping the talks to stand in the hallway catching whatever opportunities for spontaneous 1-on-1 conversations might float by. He looked Very Cool saying this, though I wasn’t sure if maybe that was just because he was Australian. But then we had a great spontaneous conversation, which seemed to validate the whole theory.
It’s Everybody’s Fault
Imploring animal advocates to stop confusing moral and strategic questions
My friend Jack (aka Humane Hancock) just released his new animal rights documentary on YouTube. It has everything I want to see in a pro-animal movie: rather than bombarding the viewer with facts, The Dying Trade takes us on a personal journey centered on Jack’s strained relationship with his father, a slaughterhouse worker whose family has been in the meat industry for generations. The film is guaranteed to leave every omnivore with a vegan friend or family member squirming in the best way possible, and it does it all without a single frame of gore.
Yes, You. Move to San Francisco.
A guest post for the 95% of animal advocates who think this isn’t about them.
Intro from Aidan:
Stop. Don’t leave yet. I know what you’re thinking: “This post isn’t for me.”
You are wrong. This postis for you. It is, in fact, for you in exact proportion to the extent you are thinking it isn’t for you. Please don’t click away just yet.
See, reader, you like animals. Or at least, you think the future would be better if we didn’t torture them by the quintillions.
We Got Our Asses Kicked. It Worked.
Now that the Ridglan dogs are free, Wayne should stop apologizing.
I wrote this whole post Monday on the assumption that we had a tough political fight ahead of us to finish off the campaign against Ridglan, a beagle factory farm in Wisconsin. As I was applying the finishing touches, an old friend called me to tell me otherwise: the Ridglan dogs are—as you read this—safe and on their way to loving homes. A separate coalition of dog rescue groups paid an undisclosed amount of money, rumored to be around 25% of their list price, to buy out the farm and permanently shut it down.
We're All Incrementalists Now
Classic post showing “Welfarism Vs. Abolitionism” was a category error for describing animal advocacy strategy
Three years ago, I took a break from my research at Pax Fauna to write a hobby article about a bugbear I’d been wrestling with for years. Nobody noticed it at first, but over the years it refused to die. It eventually became the most-viewed page on paxfauna.org and the piece of writing people most know me for.
Our lessons are paid for in animals' blood
Wrestling with pragmatism on Chris Bryant’s stream
Sunday morning, I joined Chris Bryant’s popular Youtube stream for a wide-ranging discussion on many of my hardest lessons from 10 years in animal advocacy.
This was a full-circle moment for me. When I started Pax Fauna without any research experience to speak of, Chris gave me some helpful advice. I was tickled to hear that my writing has helped him think about AI and even inspired him to drop thousands of dollars on Claude Max plans for his team.
I am once again asking you to come rescue some beagles
This is a once-in-a-generation moment for animal rights. Don’t miss it.
tl;dr: please join me and 2,000 other people in Wisconsin on April 19 to tear a Beagle farm apart brick by brick and rescue every one of the 2,000 dogs still languishing inside. Sign up to join the action here and RSVP to our next zoom briefing this Saturday at 1p ET.
Listen reader, I know you’re busy. I’m pulling you away from doing amazing work for animals, right now. So I’ll keep this short.
The Animal Movement is Just Part of AI Alignment Now
Why both groups of advocates should celebrate this.
In this post:
It’s no coincidence that one community was ahead of the curve in seeking to address factory farming, the danger of AI, and the potential suffering of digital minds; consistent principles point to all three.
These movements may have needed some time to develop apart, but it’s time for them to reunite. The question of how AI takes off has become the decisive factor determining animal welfare in the mid-term future.
You Can Just Rescue Animals
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.
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-law of the general manager of a dog factory farm outside Madison, Wisconsin.
Meat-Eating Grandmas Blocked Trucks for Sheep. Can It Happen Again?
In search of the missing social movement for farmed animals.
Introduction: The Once and Future Movement
On January 16, 1995, nearly 1,500 protesters gathered in Brightlingsea, a small English coastal town, to block trucks carrying 2,000 sheep destined for continental slaughterhouses. This event launched the Battle of Brightlingsea—a ten-month sustained campaign that became “the high-water mark of sustained, large-scale mobilization for farmed animals.”
What made Brightlingsea remarkable wasn’t the radical nature of its participants. A contemporary survey revealed that 71% were local residents, predominantly women aged 41-70, overwhelmingly meat-eaters. These weren’t professional activists or vegans—they were ordinary people mobilized by a concrete, achievable demand.
You are letting animals die by missing out on AI productivity
Advice for animal advocacy orgs and job seekers in the age of agents
In this post:
AI agents have arrived, and animal advocacy organizations that don’t adopt them immediately will fall behind– with animals bearing the cost.
Claude Code gives every activist the power of a software engineer; Claude Cowork extends it to all knowledge work. Every activist should be using Claude Cowork.
Agents like OpenClaw cross a new threshold: full AI assistants that can access all your tools and don’t wait for instructions. Organizations should rush to adopt agents as soon as security concerns are addressed.
Input Needed: What Should Animal Advocates Do About AI?
Outdated assumptions
The design of the animal advocacy movement—the goals we are pursuing, the strategies we use to pursue them, and the division of people and money across those strategies—is built on a set of assumptions about the future which are no longer valid.
Subscribe below and I’ll invalidate even more of your assumptions at no cost to you.
Funding
The movement may no longer be funding-constrained at ~$300 million/year worldwide. Frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic (makers of Claude) will likely go public in the next couple years. At current projections, this would cause the largest transfer of wealth to rigorously altruistic people in human history, thanks to cross-pollination between AI researchers and the EA community going back to the 2010s.
My New Year's Resolution: Hear No Gossip
1. Do you want to hear something juicy?
…your friend asks in a hushed voice, flashing a devious smile.
You know what’s about to happen, and your body lights up: you lean forward in your seat, your heart rate jumps a bit, some adrenaline shoots into your blood.
Yes… YES! I DO WANT TO HEAR SOMETHING JUICY!
Gossip is an opportunity too good to pass up. Besides the delight of being let in on secrets and the gratification of hearing about other people’s dysfunctional lives, gossip is a powerful bonding mechanism, building a covenant between the person sharing the rumor and the person receiving it, not unlike the bond between two people who commit a crime together. It apparently played an important role in the evolution of our social brains.
Vegans Are Monks, and Other Analogies to Environmental Activism
In this post:
With meat consumption skyrocketing and rates of veganism stagnant, strategies focused on individual veganism appear to offer only limited potential for animal advocates.
The small fraction who are vegan act as a symbolic vanguard, living out our vision for a world without animal exploitation. They also serve as the movement’s crucial activist base.
We must find a way to expand the movement beyond the small vegan population without alienating our most dedicated supporters.
Constructive Infighting: Forget Veganuary
Thus begins a double feature inspired by the recent firestorm of debate over Farmkind’s anti-Veganuary campaign. This post brings readers from across the world up to speed on the best arguments from both sides, along with a related controversy from the year prior. In part 2, I share my own thoughts on “Forget Veganuary” and on the troubled relationship between animal welfare and veganism.
One of my most edgy and unique opinions about the animal rights movement is that Infighting Is Bad™. Whether it’s cancelling people for having the wrong political views or carving the movement up into illusory factions like welfarist vs. abolitionist or grassroots vs. professional, I think the movement wastes a lot of energy on pointless infighting.
Animal Activist Hot Takes for 2026
I have heard from a few people who enjoy this newsletter. But I’ve heard from many more people who say, “WTF man, I can’t read a 10,000 word post every week.” To the latter group, who apparently don’t care about animals very much, I say: this post is for you. I even gave it a clickbaity title and everything! So gather round, children, and let ol’ uncle Sandcastles tell you what is going to happen in 2026.
The End of Animal Advocacy
Readers who closely follow AI news and TAI<>animals discourse might skip to section 2. Thanks to Joseph Ancion and Itsi Weinstock for thorough feedback.
1. Standing at the Precipice
It is well-known among fans of true crime that the first 72 hours after someone goes missing are considered crucial for detectives; statistics suggest the chances of finding someone alive after that become vanishingly small.1 I remember watching a crime thriller about a kidnapping which leaned heavily on this fact: superimposed over the beginning of each scene, an ominous timer flashed the hours, minutes, and seconds since the victim had been reported missing. It was a great storytelling device, ratcheting up dramatic tension and creating a vivid feeling of a race against time.
We Should Pay Mass Shooting Heroes
I am highly uncertain about everything I argue in this post.
Did you know your government has determined the monetary value of a human life?
Many people feel squeamish about this upon learning about it for the first time. But this is an unavoidable reality for modern governments. States spend a lot of money trying to keep their citizens alive, often despite those citizens’ best efforts.
But states don’t have infinite resources, and they have other responsibilities besides life-saving, such as making sure nobody opens cute little businesses in areas zoned residential. In order to compare different life-saving interventions, the government has put a dollar amount on each life saved. Programs that come in under that dollar amount are, in theory, moved to the top of the funding queue.
Ego Is OK in Animal Activism
1. Ego alignment
A few weeks ago, I shared this story about my friend Josh going undercover in a chicken slaughterhouse:
Between his broad, athletic build and gregarious personality, Josh tends to attract attention. So he was a bundle of nerves when he showed up the first day undercover, loaded up with 2005-era camera and microphone gear hidden under a thick jacket. It took all his attention to keep his hands from shaking as he stood outside in the early morning chill with the other workers; he already stood out like a sore thumb as the only one passing up the chance to smoke a cigarette.
The Roots of the Welfarist-Abolitionist Debate in Animal Rights
For at least ten years, the farmed animal advocacy movement has been persistently divided over cage-free campaigns. Cage-free acts as a Rorschach test; where half the movement sees the most successful animal advocacy strategy ever discovered, affecting more animals than all other animal rights campaigns combined, the other half sees a betrayal of the entire notion of animal rights and a strategic blunder setting the movement back decades.
When I first got involved, I was staunchly on the abolitionist side of this debate. Over time, I’ve become less certain. This essay (my shortest one yet!) presents a surprising argument for the origin of this debate. At least, I think you’ll agree it’s surprising, if I can convince you it holds any truth. Understanding this won’t immediately resolve the dispute, but it can help us stop talking past each other. It may have limited relevance outside Western countries, for reasons that will become clear shortly.
When Activists Start Thinking Like Bureaucrats
“[Moral authoritarianism] covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules… it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them… finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
Intro: Facing our demons
I don’t remember when I started identifying as a leftist. I grew up in a very liberal community. My first political awakening came when I was 13, during a televised debate for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Out of 8 candidates on the stage, I somehow developed a fixation with Barack Obama, maybe because he was the only one whose hair hadn’t already gone completely white. I wound up knocking on doors for Obama’s primary campaign, playing the cute “I can’t vote so you’ll have to do it for me” shtick.
The Radical Welfarists vs. the Moderate Abolitionists
This post was originally part of International Shrimpact Week, a competition between Substackers to raise matching funds for the Shrimp Welfare Project. While that particular matching drive is over, you can still help around 1,400 shrimp per dollar donated here!
Intro: we’ve got radical<>moderate all mixed up
“Moderation in all things – including moderation.”
I recently talked to an abolitionist animal activist who expressed discomfort with the idea of using radical tactics to advocate for welfare reforms. The case in point was protests by the International Council for Animal Welfare, who have staked out a niche by deploying radical tactics in favor of cage-free and other welfare campaigns, occupying corporate offices and shouting down customers at retail outlets.
The Bitter Lesson for Animal Activists
A new generation is revolutionizing the grassroots animal movement, by learning the same way superintelligent AI learns.
There are a lot of things about activism that I wish I had learned sooner. When I think back on my first five years as an activist, I’m not sure I helped a single animal. (Well, OK, there were about two dozen chickens I manually removed from factory farms, and I’m very happy for them, but I was aiming a lot higher.)
The Virtue of Moral Uncertainty
The animal movement will keep devouring its own until we find the courage to accept discomfort.
“The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.” – Saul Alinsky
Conviction is a double-edged sword
When I first woke up to the horror of factory farming, I fell into a deep depression. I stayed there for months, withdrawing from friendships with people who didn’t get it. I remember night after sleepless night tormented by the uncountable beings trapped in the system, feeling utterly hopeless.
My 'Grassroots' Identity Crisis
After 10 years in animal advocacy, I realized my attachment to being ‘grassroots’ was holding me back from thinking clearly about what actually enables movements to mobilize activists.
The Pressure to Professionalize
“The transition from movement to institution is the moment ideals meet payroll.” – Robert L. Allen
Imagine you are leading a young, fast-growing grassroots activist organization. Your org is built around a community of activists, and mobilizing more activists is an important part of your strategy. After starting as an all-volunteer project, you got your first grant, which was enough to bring three co-founders (yourself included) on full time, each at $32k/year– barely over one half of the median full-time salary in the U.S. With your full attention, the organization has been thriving, attracting larger grants from new donors. The size of the paid team has tripled, and you’ve increased the salary to a sustainable living wage of $55k. Between salaries and other expenses, you’re hoping to raise a $1 million budget next year, a significant scale up. Historically, applying for philanthropic grants has been one of your many responsibilities, and up until now you’ve raised almost all your money that way aside from a trickle that has come in organically through your website’s “donate” button. But to scale up to $1 million, you’re going to need to diversify.
The Tsunami is Coming
This post is meant to help animal advocates start thinking about how the artificial intelligence revolution will impact our work. If you’ve been feeling anxious about AI but weren’t sure where to begin, or if you’ve never considered that AI technology could be disruptive to animal advocacy, you’re in the right place.
Part 1: Building Sandcastles
Working for the future
“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” – Ayn Rand