Lessons From Two Pioneering Advocates For Farmed Animals

Heart touching lessons from two greatest humans ever lived on earth (and many people don't even know their names).

I have seen myself go through a "meditative transformation" in the last 20 years on how to live amongst humans and live a normal life when knowing these humans inflict so much unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. 

The simplest lesson - If you want to do good in the world, first make sure your actions will not make things even worse. 

Looking at these lessons, I am glad Max held my life together to make this transformation happen. 

How much can one person achieve for animals? Ruth Harrison (1920-2000) and Henry Spira (1927-1998) started out pessimistic. They inherited an animal welfare movement that had generated more noise than results, especially for farmed animals.

As factory farming arose in the mid 20th Century, the movement paid little attention. Moderate groups, like the ASPCA and RSPCA, were too busy sheltering lost cats and dogs — a role that had largely supplanted their original missions to win legal reforms for all animals.

Radical activists, meanwhile, were waging an endless war on animal testing. “Self-righteous antivivisection societies had been hollering, 'Abolition! All or Nothing!,'” Spira recalled, noting that during that time animal testing had skyrocketed. “That was a pitiful track record, and it seemed a good idea to rethink strategies which have a century-long record of failure.”

Harrison and Spira shook up this impasse. Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines exposed factory farming to a mass audience and led to the world’s first on-farm animal welfare laws. Spira’s campaigns won the world’s first corporate animal welfare policies, first for lab animals and then farmed animals.

Today’s movement, which has won dozens of laws and thousands of corporate policies to protect factory farmed animals, owes much to Harrison and Spira. So how did they do it? And what can we learn from them?

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The seven habits of (two) highly effective advocates

How did they do it? I studied their lives and writings and asked a few advocates and researchers who knew them. I think these are their most relevant lessons for us today:

• Focus. Our movement has often tried to fight every injustice to animals, seldom solving any. Harrison and Spira prioritized. Harrison focused solely on factory farming and mostly on the worst practices that could be reformed. Spira focused even more narrowly: he sought out discrete winnable campaigns with a clear target and a clear ask. As he put it, “we have to focus. Things don't get accomplished by random activity.” 

• Radical tactics, reasonable demands. Moderate advocates long sought reasonable demands through weak tactics, while radicals sought un-winnable demands via strong tactics. Harrison and Spira inverted that, seeking reasonable demands through strong tactics. Harrison coupled her calls for moderate political reforms with graphic images and headlines like “Fed to Death.” Spira coupled his requests for modest corporate improvements under hard-hitting slogans like “how many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?” 

• Do what works. Our movement, Spira observed, is prone to “day-dreaming about perfect and absolute solutions.” Spira’s solution was simple: “activists need to push for the most rapid progress. Above all, we need to continually assess what differences we are making.” Harrison was equally practical. Animal Machines contains no theorizing on what a perfect food system might look like. Instead it focuses on the sources of the greatest suffering — and the reforms that could end alleviate that suffering. 

• The inside and outside game. Moderate advocates traditionally favored private engagement, while radicals preferred loud protests. Harrison and Spira did both. Harrison loudly denounced factory farming and then quietly worked with animal welfare scientists and officials to reform it. Spira began every campaign by trying to privately push decision-makers to do the right thing. But when that failed, he was unafraid to go public. “The point isn't to socialize for its own sake,” he explained, “but to get results. And when dialogue isn't getting anywhere, then we shift to confrontation.”  

• Compromise. “Too often,” Spira observed, “the animal advocacy movement has been viewed as a holy war with the world divided between saints and sinners. Just as often the war cry has been ‘all or nothing,’ — with the almost inevitable result being nothing.” Harrison and Spira both agreed with radical advocates that the entire factory farming system was rotten. But they saw it could only be reformed in small steps. Harrison asked farmers what was feasible before proposing reforms. And Spira ensured that every campaign had a winnable goal. 

• Facts matter. Some animal activists are prone to exaggeration: no, milk doesn’t cause autism. Harrison saw how a reputation for inaccuracy could harm our movement’s political credibility. So she was meticulous with her factual claims, visiting farms and consulting scientists to ensure she was accurate in every detail. So did Spira, who noted that “credibility is the most precious resource any campaign against injustice can have.” 

• Focus outward, not inward. Our movement has long been oddly fascinated with itself. Activists have fought each other over what’s “humane,” who’s “vegan,” and which ideology is “right.” “Sometimes it seems as if more time is spent discussing whether or not the public functions of animal organizations should be vegetarian than fighting to protect farm animals,” Spira observed. Harrison and Spira’s antidote was simple: focus on external campaigns to help farmed animals, and let other people do the infighting. 

We lost Harrison and Spira a quarter century ago. But their work lives on in the effective advocacy of the modern farmed animal movement. Today’s movement is more focused, strategic, and successful thanks to them. That’s an impressive legacy.