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.

Yet three decades later, despite billions spent on animal advocacy and countless campaigns, nothing approaching this scale of organic mass mobilization has materialized. The author, Aidan Kankyoku, spent years with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) attempting to catalyze similar movements before stepping back to research why Brightlingsea succeeded where contemporary efforts fail.

Part 0: Understanding Movement Strategy

Why Mobilization Matters

Social movements serve a distinct purpose beyond winning specific policy concessions. While “mass protest usually isn’t the best tool for winning a specific policy,” it excels at shifting what people consider politically possible—the Overton window.

Early DxE strategists, influenced by Erica Chenoweth’s research on nonviolent revolutions, believed that activating 3.5% of the population in sustained civil disobedience could force systemic change. This analysis proved flawed. Chenoweth studied revolutions (overthrowing governments), not social issue campaigns. More critically, this framework ignored “a slew of social processes necessary to engage other parts of society.”

The takeaway: movements need broad passive support, not just active participants. A successful campaign pairs radical vision with achievable demands—what the author calls “motte-and-bailey messaging,” borrowing from medieval fortification strategy.

Three Critical Mistakes in Contemporary Animal Activism

Mistake 1: Presenting Cases Without Credible Demands

Civil rights leaders like MLK used “profound social and spiritual transformation” rhetoric while fighting for modest reforms that commanded majority support outside the Jim Crow South. They inspired through vision while forcing opponents to argue against popular reforms.

Early DxE bypassed this strategy, targeting the public with “total animal liberation” rhetoric divorced from achievable demands. As the author notes, “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… but by stripping away credible demands, we were breaking the fourth wall.”

Mistake 2: Ignoring Passive Supporters

DxE focused narrowly on active participants while neglecting the broader spectrum of people sympathetic to animal concerns. Movement power scales exponentially when campaigns truly capture public sentiment rather than reflecting only organizers’ values. Most contemporary protests remain “astroturfed”—maintained through activist effort rather than organic growth.

Mistake 3: Triggering Consumer Defensiveness

The public engages with food systems primarily as consumers, activating values around personal autonomy and choice. When animal advocates disrupt people in restaurants and grocery stores—the exact locations where consumption decisions happen—they trigger defensive reactions. Effective movements must outline how people can participate without individual sacrifice, through voting, donations, or community action.

Part 1: How Close Have We Come?

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)

Operating from 1999-2007, SHAC targeted a major vivisection company with documented horrific practices. While it executed motte-and-bailey messaging, its punk-rock aesthetic and embrace of property destruction frustrated mainstream breakthrough. “They had little public sympathy when the US and UK governments eventually cracked down.”

Australian Live Export Campaigns (2011-2018)

Between these years, Australian activists achieved “several thousand” participants across major cities at peak days of action—mobilizing tens of thousands cumulatively. This represented “the greatest participation in a campaign for farmed animals since Brightlingsea.” However, it lacked Brightlingsea’s distinctive feature: sustained daily mobilization lasting months.

The difference between mobilizing 1,000 people for a day versus doing so repeatedly over months “goes beyond something that can be explained as a product of deliberate organizing; it has taken on a life of its own.”

The Cage-Free Puzzle

Battery cages for hens and gestation crates for pigs represent mainstream positions—reforms with broad public support. By the late 2010s, cage-free had become the professional animal movement’s central focus, attracting hundreds of staff and millions in philanthropic funding.

Yet cage-free campaigns “failed to inspire anything approaching mass mobilization.” Notably, “DxE protests consistently attracted ten times as many attendees as cage-free protests in the same city,” despite cage-free being far more mainstream.

This paradox suggests something deeper than public opposition. Three explanations emerge:

1. Campaigners weren’t trying: Perhaps professionals found they could win corporate and political campaigns without mass recruitment, making social movement organizing seem unnecessary.

2. The reform isn’t inspiring enough: Maybe cage-free seems too modest to mobilize both activists and public, particularly for chickens (charismatic mammals drove live export protests).

3. Internal movement division: Influential abolitionist philosophers poisoned the well against welfare campaigns just as cage-free was ascending, fragmenting potential grassroots support.

Part 1.1: User Experience Design

Successful campaigns function as products marketed to activists, not the undecided public. Social movement participation meets “higher-order needs” like purpose, community belonging, skill development, and efficacy—“we could provide it, but we currently aren’t.”

Contemporary cage-free campaigns suffer from what one experienced campaigner termed a “missing middle” problem. Activists face binary choices: either join aggressive confrontational groups like ICAW where one “might be expected to scream vulgarities at random customers,” or stand quietly holding signs “hundreds of feet away from the target business.”

The author recounts attending a “grand opening” protest for a target franchise, finding it “deserted except for a couple employees,” posing for a single photograph, then leaving. Despite complete commitment to animal advocacy, he ignored the next invitation. “Even after I’d already given my life over completely to animal advocacy, this was almost tearfully boring.”

Bringing the Party

Extinction Rebellion achieved mass mobilization partly by making protests feel like “a party.” Passersby at XR occupations “would often first mistake it for a music festival. Everyone was smiling, dancing, and having the time of their lives.”

This synthesis of gravity (maximally doomy messaging about extinction) with infectious joy proved magnetic. As one example, the author references a Peruvian environmental protest featuring “a drumline and jugglers on stilts all covered in sequins from head to toe… Everyone is smiling and dancing and I’d be willing to bet they all came back to the next protest.”

Regular community events function as essential infrastructure. When the author shifted from Facebook event posting to organizing consistent social gatherings in his DxE chapter, protest attendance jumped from 5 to 50 people. “Nearly 100% of the time, [struggling organizers] confirm that they are not creating social events that could be a stepping stone to activism.”

Part 2: Evaluating the Demand

Why Cage-Free May Underwhelm

Social movements mobilize around bold visions. Research from Faunalytics analyzing social media responses to cage-free announcements found “a significant group of people do not accept the premise of cagefree campaigns improving welfare for hens.”

The author’s own research discovered that while the public rejects “niche language of animal rights theory,” they “have an appetite for more tangible, transformative action than the kind sought in corporate welfare campaigns.”

An ideal demand balances three qualities:

• Incremental and mainstream (achievable)
• Vivid and inspiring (emotionally resonant)
• Simple and punchy (easily communicated)

Alternative Demands Worth Considering

Sow Crating Bans

Gestation and farrowing crates immobilize sows for weeks, making them “one of the most visibly striking forms of cruelty in animal agriculture.” Pigs offer sympathetic appeal; industry precedent exists in California and other states; federal prohibition remains feasible through sustained campaigns.

Pasture Access Requirements

Pro-Animal Future research identified a potentially more powerful lever: requiring “daily time on pasture for a majority of their life” for all farmed animals. Even 15 seconds outdoors daily would demolish factory farming economics for chickens and pigs; pasture-inclusive definitions would apply to feedlots.

The industry would face an impossible rhetorical position—defending why their business model collapses if animals receive the outdoor access they advertise. Polling in one representative county showed over 50% support, remaining resilient against messaging about costs and industry collapse.

Pasture access is “simple, clear, visually evocative demand… mainstream enough to be taken seriously, yet the impacts are hard to overstate; implemented as a sales requirement nationwide, it would probably shrink the animal ag industry by more than 90%.”

Factory Farming Abolition with Deadlines

More ambitiously, movements could target “end factory farming by 2040”—a demand gaining traction in UK animal circles. Extinction Rebellion’s success partly derived from putting dates on demands. “Net zero by 2030” made the objective feel “more concrete and (if chosen carefully) realistic,” while simultaneously limiting commitment duration (“we are going to go all out on this campaign for a few years”).

Part 3: Internal Movement Division

The Francione Effect

Gary Francione, a prominent animal rights philosopher, profoundly shaped grassroots activism starting in the 2000s. His clear intellectual case for animal rights inspired countless activists, yet his polemics against welfare campaigning divided the movement precisely when cage-free campaigns were ascending.

Francione declared anyone supporting incremental welfare improvements “morally bankrupt”—labeling professional campaigners “moral schizophrenics” and “partners in exploitation.” He insisted vegan advocacy represented the sole acceptable strategy.

This absolutism pulled grassroots activists further from mainstream engagement. As the author notes, “that’s what radical means”—it inherently distances movements from general publics.

Broader Countercultural Requirements

Beyond veganism, reflexive leftist counterculturalism alienated broader constituencies. The author recounts an abolitionist ballot initiative in Portland that rejected a Super Bowl watch party recruitment event. Organizers “scolded” the volunteer, explaining “this group had no interest in sports watching events or in the kind of people who would enjoy them.”

The author’s point isn’t that activists should abandon political convictions. Rather, “every new requirement for animal activism shreds our hopes of building a mass movement.”

The Recent Thaw

Remarkably, recent developments suggest potential for healing. International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW), formed to pressure companies on lapsing cage-free commitments, partnered with grassroots abolitionist organizations Animal Activism Collective (AAC) and Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).

A pivotal moment came when a THL employee organized a cage-free protest at a Taco John’s in Westminster, Colorado, inviting abolitionist activists from a shared project space. Though hesitant, fifteen “rowdy abolitionists” attended—resulting in the organization’s first arrests and unexpected consequences.

“That night was a crack in the ice that precipitated a nearly complete thaw in the welfarist-abolitionist feud.” This coalition—nicknamed “The Hydra”—now campaigns simultaneously for “fur and foie gras bans alongside cage-free eggs and shrimp welfare demands,” with former opponents tackling each other “screaming for a CAGE-FREE POLICY! inside corporate board meetings.”

This reconciliation grew from relationship-building, firsthand experience of cage-free tactics’ intensity, and abolitionist demonstration of sustained campaign commitment.

Part 4: Other Explanations

Hypothesis 4: Luck and Timing

Perhaps successful movements require factors beyond organizers’ control—favorable social conditions, political moments, or pure chance. The Australian live export campaign executed excellently yet never reached UK intensity, suggesting luck plays a role.

This hypothesis poses dangers: activists can too easily rationalize failures as bad timing rather than strategic errors. Yet some external factors genuinely matter, making persistent effort across multiple years necessary.

Hypothesis 5: Insufficient Diversity

The Social Change Lab identified “socially and demographically diverse participation” as the fourth most critical movement success factor. Contemporary animal activism skews heavily white and left-progressive—particularly in the US.

Some argue that welcoming people of color requires embracing full progressive politics. The author disputes this, citing Ozy Brennan’s observation that marginalized group advocates’ preferences don’t necessarily align with what members of those groups actually want.

“We just really need to work a lot harder welcoming brown people and conservatives, including by funding their projects.”

Hypothesis 6: Organizational Insularity

Strong group identities attract early adopters but eventually frustrate broader coalition-building. Both DxE and Extinction Rebellion galvanized supporters partly by attacking other movements: DxE called welfare campaigners “sellouts”; XR dumped paint on Greenpeace’s London office.

This strategy excels initially but “ends in insularity and infighting later on.” Mass movements require participation unmediated by specific organizations. While millions participated in XR protests, most “probably never knew an organization with that name existed.”

Newer grassroots groups like Animal Activist Collective and Pro-Animal Future appear to have learned these lessons, building “more collaborative and less cultish” cultures. “Slower growth right now, it might pay off in the long run.”

Part 5: A Path Forward

Core Elements of a Mass Mobilization Campaign

Assuming multiple hypotheses carry weight, an effective campaign would combine:

Motte-and-Bailey Messaging Pair visionary rhetoric inspiring activists and public with achievable demands forcing opponents into defending unpopular positions. Pasture access requirements or gestation crate bans represent stronger options than nebulous “total liberation.”

User Experience Design Build organizations around “mass-producing transformational experiences for activists,” featuring frequent community events, party-like atmospheres, and tactically bold but not alienating actions.

Movement Unity “Set aside parochial squabbling that divides radical and moderate flanks” and avoids scaring away omnivores, conservatives, and centrists.

The author observes: “When I write it out like this it doesn’t seem so hard.”

Burner Organizations

Extinction Rebellion’s post-collapse strategists developed an innovative model: lightweight, temporary organizations with single clear demands, disbanded once achieved. Insulate Britain demanded government-funded home insulation programs; after success, members shifted to Just Stop Oil demanding no new drilling permits.

This approach “achieves some of the advantages of both strong group identities like DxE and collectively-owned movement brands like Occupy.” Hyper-literal naming (Pigs Out of Cages, Let Animals Outside) maintains message focus while avoiding permanent organizational squabbling.

Conclusion

The author emphasizes that we may have limited time. References to “AI timelines” suggest accelerating technological change may soon make influencing farmed animal futures increasingly difficult. “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.”

The infrastructure for mass mobilization exists in contemporary organizations like The Hydra. Whether current efforts break through plateaus remains uncertain. But the strategic lessons are clear: combine visionary messaging with achievable demands, create joyful transformational experiences, welcome ordinary omnivores, and build coalitions across historical divides.

“If we build it,” the author concludes, “they might come.”

Build on, Sandcastles