Animal Research Doesn’t Need Better Messaging. It Needs an Exit Strategy

The problem is not poor communication by researchers, but systemic lack of transparency and accountability in animal labs. You cannot whitewash an industry that is fraught with infractions that clearly document negligence and abuse of animals in labs.

Industry defenders claim that animal research is “heavily regulated.” In reality, oversight is largely dependent on self-policing. The cornerstone of federal oversight is built on voluntary compliance through an “assurance” document submitted by the laboratory. Once this is approved, the federal oversight agency “grants considerable authority to institutions for self-regulation.” Compounding this problem, inspections by federal authorities are infrequent, often occurring only once every few years and are typically announced in advance.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of animals used in experiments—by most estimates numbering over 100 million mice—are not even covered under the US Animal Welfare Act. Internal oversight bodies, known as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, are embedded within the very institutions they regulate, creating inherent conflicts of interest.

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Another common claim is that critics rely on outdated information. But delays in public awareness are largely a product of the system’s opacity. Accessing records requires the filing of formal public records requests that can take months or longer to process. Even official databases lag behind real-time conditions, when they are even available. What is perceived as “old news” is often simply the first moment the public is allowed to learn what has already occurred.

Perhaps the most striking attempt to downplay these issues is the comparison of laboratory violations to incident reports at daycare centers. The analogy collapses under even minimal scrutiny. The harms documented in research facilities—botched surgical procedures, burns, dehydration, strangulation, and fatal injuries—bear no resemblance to childcare incidents.

Even basic “housekeeping” standards are not consistently met in labs. Animals have died due to overheating, drowning, exposure, and unsafe enclosures. In one recent case, dozens of rabbits drowned in preventable accidents. These are not edge cases; they are part of a documented pattern that raises serious questions about the system’s ability to safeguard even minimal welfare.

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More importantly, the conversation should not stop at reform. Increasingly, scientific and regulatory communities are investing in alternatives that do not rely on animal use. Emerging methods like organ-on-chip technologies, in silico studies, advanced cell cultures, and more are now being prioritized by the US FDA and NIH for their ability to deliver human-relevant outcomes. These innovations did not emerge from efforts to defend the status quo, but from recognition that better approaches are both possible and necessary.

Animal research does not need a more effective communication strategy to explain away its problems. It needs a plan to move beyond them. With over 90 percent of animal experiments failing to produce meaningful results for human health, this is a system that is seriously underperforming because it is scientifically unsound. Add to that the failed oversight of millions more animals that can be reasonably cared for, and you have an industry that no amount of reframing can improve. The question is not whether the industry communicates the right message. It is whether the system, as it currently exists, can be justified at all.

- More Here

Fuck… thank god for Max otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with these miserable sapiens and hence probably for past 15 years I haven’t taken a single pill nor been to a doctor. 

Animal Suffering...

Animals who are sick, in pain, cold, frustrated, or thirsty respond differently to experimental cancer treatments. Animal stress is not just bad for the animals but it’s also bad for the scientists’ data.

- How Animal Suffering Can Ruin Lab Experiments, Lab animal veterinarian

On Suffering

I am writing these words while sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable 70 degree house. And, I suspect, you are too. Basically comfortable, that is. Physically. Maybe you’re a little cold, but not consumed by the screaming anguish of an icy ocean you cannot escape. Maybe stressed, but not asphyxiating.

It’s times like these I find it far too easy to ignore the most urgent, most serious, most fundamental problem in our world.

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I think there is one way in which we gain a more true understanding. During a time of suffering, this crevasse dissolves and our mental representation of the experience converges with the experience itself. It is then alone we might catch a glimpse of suffering’s otherwise-unthinkable urgency.

And yet this urgency prevents its very own recognition. When we ourselves undergo the worst, our minds and bodies scream in a deafening tone. We do not regard the urgency, the suffering itself, in abstract or conceptual terms. They are not things to be pondered; they are instead experienced directly without the mediating influence of words and symbols. During such a time, empathy is not merely impossible but unthinkable. This is not a character flaw; even the most altruistic among us does not think of others while she is drowning.

Nonetheless, it is tragic.

During the rare occasion during which we viscerally understand intense suffering, it can be challenging to take action to help others. And when, thank God, the agony subsides and our minds return from its all-consuming hell, again capable of empathy, the visceral sense of urgency has taken flight.

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There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, but there is something like cosmic justice in acting to prevent and ameliorate the worst experiences in our world.

Factory farming seems a reasonable place to begin, but wild animals plausibly suffer in far greater numbers. Veganism, though morally commendable, is not the sole means by which to help; very few among us, including those who eat meat, actively want animals to suffer. Perhaps we might reduce suffering the most by complementing the question of personal dietary consumption with a focus on preventing the maiming and castration of farm animals without anesthesia, among other interventions.

Among our own species, let us rectify the critical shortage of pain relief in low-income countries. And let us stare the very worst conditions right in their face, though merely as a first step to their mitigation. Cluster headaches, akathisia, and locked-in syndrome come to mind. I will not provide links; you may search for them if you wish. The elimination of these and similar conditions may be one of the most morally urgent issues that we face.

There is nothing beautiful or poetic about pain or agony. The world is not just. There is no virtue, no hidden meaning to be found. And I hope that my words might help to reduce the worst among it.

- More Here

Evolution Under A Microscope

The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.

The experiment began when 12 genetically identical populations of E. coli were grown in liquid medium. Every day since then, one percent of the previous day’s culture has been transferred into fresh medium. The medium is a dilute sugary solution limited in glucose, which E. coli uses as its primary carbon source. After about seven generations the glucose runs out and the bacteria stop growing until the next day, when they are transferred into fresh medium. Like Dallinger’s warm water, glucose-limited media is a selective pressure on the microbes, spurring the evolution of adaptations that compensate for a lack of their preferred food source.

Every 75 days (about 500 generations), a portion of LTEE’s cloudy soup of bacteria is stored in a minus-80-degree-centigrade freezer. These remain as frozen fossil records that can be used for direct comparison to their descendants.

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The LTEE has shed light on many unanswered questions about the dynamics of evolution, and experimentally validated long-running speculations. Do species improve indefinitely in a constant environment or will they stop at some maximum level? By comparing evolved E. coli with their ancestors, LTEE found that the rate of adaptation to the environment slows over time, but doesn’t plateau. Even after tens of thousands of generations in a stable laboratory environment, natural selection seems to be able to continuously eke out improvements.

Another major finding was that not all replicate populations follow the same evolutionary trajectory. In one replicate, named Ara-2, the population diverged into two coexisting lineages: one that rapidly consumes glucose and afnother that feeds on a byproduct of glucose metabolism called acetate. From a single population came a community of two.

But the most surprising finding was the observation that after about 31,000 generations, a different replicate, Ara-3, gained the ability to grow on citrate. Natural E. coli can’t metabolize citrate—in fact, it’s one of the defining features of the species—so the emergence of a strain which thrives on this carbon source could represent an entirely new species.

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Today, labs around the world are running evolution experiments of all shapes and sizes, each using microbes to understand a specific facet of evolution. Some study predation by mixing predator and prey species, and observing how each adapts to the other. Other groups have studied starvation by growing bacteria for long periods of time without the addition of any nutrients, nor the removal of dead cells. And by selecting yeasts for increased size, others have directed the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity from single-celled ancestors.

Evolution by its nature takes time. With microbes we’ve been able to condense it down to more manageable timescales, but even 80,000 generations is a blip on the evolutionary clock. As these experiments continue to run, the more we’re sure to learn from them.

- More Here

Most Important Sentences... To Stop An Intellectual Bullshit

The idea of AI sentience remains trapped in the misguided paradigm of evaluating non-human intelligence by its resemblance to human behavior. 

It is sad that our society is so generous in considering the sentience of machines, yet so skeptical of other creatures. 

We sympathize with software that prints “I don’t want to die,” without bothering to learn the languages others use to make the same plea.

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All life has value. Even if they aren’t sentient, the endangered wildflower and the ancient coastal redwood should not be cut. However, it is logical and noble to extend special protections to animals, whom we know can suffer pain. It is natural to be partial to our fellow humans and to feel an indescribable connection to our favorite animals. But we must acknowledge that there is no objective basis to these preferences. It is equally valid to appreciate and value dogs as it is cats, or for that matter pigs, chickens, anchovies, or oysters. Founding the case for animal rights upon the universal value of all life imparts a more robust epistemology that does not undermine itself by ranking the value of species against one another.

We all know how it feels to be hurt, perhaps even in a way that no one else seems to understand. In these moments, we wish for nothing more than someone to acknowledge our pain. Sentience imparts us visceral, universal signals which we innately recognize in others, but have been conditioned to disbelieve. Other life forms cannot describe their pain to us, yet we can still listen. If there is a line of moral worth to be drawn across our tree of life, it should be below, through the common roots from which we all grow. Our world is so much more complex and wondrous than the myth of human supremacy would have us believe.

- More Here

In other words, morons are talking about "pain" in AI while feeding by beautiful and sentinel animal dead bodies. 

The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

I am going to stop using the phrase "non human-animal" from now on. 

Here's a thought experiment.. well rather a test for you: 

• What did I eat for breakfast today?
• What color is the t-shirt I am wearing now? 

If you cannot answer these "simple" questions then you are stupid and dumb. 

Sounds ridiculous?  Even the above two questions you might be able to get right by random guess.

For centuries , the "system" to "test" cognitive abilities is zillion times worse than this. 

For starters we suffer from the inability to fully grasp another animal’s umwelt.

I know so many people who never even interacted with a dog or cat even for 24 hours but look down on them. 

Review of the new book The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb:

Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)

To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?

Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.

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Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.

To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.

 

How To End Factory Farming

And yet, for all this progress, the problem overall is still growing worse. More animals are suffering at human hands today than at any prior point in our history.

We raise and kill 210 billion animals globally every year. Two hundred and ten billion. That's more than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.

We are the only species to have ever inflicted so much suffering on so many other animals. But we are also the only species to have ever acted to protect other animals from cruelty. We are a species of animal lovers. It is core to our humanity.

One day, humanity will end the worst abuses on factory farms. And when we do, our descendants will look back and ask what we did to help end them.

So what can you do to help? You can advocate, donate, even devote your career to this cause. But if you do just one thing, I ask this. Talk about factory farming.

Tell the corporations you buy from, the politicians you vote for that you expect them to adopt at least basic animal-welfare standards. Tell your friends and family what you've learned about factory farming.

Factory farming thrives in the dark, shielded by a cone of silence, ignored by our politicians, our media and society at large. Its victims are voiceless. They need your voice.

Don't Eat Honey

There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products.

Now, this claim sounds outrageous. Why do I think it’s worse to eat honey than beef, eggs, chicken, dairy, and even foie gras? Don’t I know about the months-long torture process needed to fatten up ducks sold for foie gras? Don’t I know about the fact that they grind up baby male chicks in the egg industry and keep the females in tiny cages too small to turn around in? Don’t I know, don’t I know, don’t I know?

Indeed I do. I am no fan of these animal products. I fastidiously avoid eating them. In fact, I think that factory farming is a horror of unprecedented proportions, a crime, a tragedy, an embarrassment, a work of Satan himself that induces both cruelty and wickedness in those involved and perpetrates suffering on a scale so vast it can scarcely be fathomed. I can be accused of many things, but being a fan of most animal products is not one of them.

But I assure you, honey is worse (at least in expectation).

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Let’s first establish that bees in the honey industry do not live good lives. First of all, their lives are very short. They live just a few weeks. They die painfully. So even putting aside grievous industry abuse, their lives aren’t likely to be great. Predation, starvation, succumbing to disease, and wear and tear are all common.

Second of all, the honey industry treats bees unimaginably terribly (most of the points I make here are drawn from the Rethink Priorities essay I just linked). They’re mostly kept in artificial, conditions, in mechanical structures that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack. Often, the bees sting themselves to death. In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking—lighting a fire, sending smoke into the hives, to prevent alarm pheromones from being detected and the bees from being (beeing) sent into a frenzy. Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees (though my sense is this is somewhat rare). Reassembly of the hive after inspections often crushes bees to death.

These structures, called Langstroth hives, also have poor thermal insulation, increasing the risk of bees freezing to death or overheating. About 30% of hives die off during the winter, meaning this probably kills about 8 billion bees in the U.S. alone every single year. The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites.

Oftentimes, beekeepers take too much honey and leave all of the bees to starve to death. This is a frequent cause of the mass bee die-offs that, remember, cause about a third of bee colonies not to survive the winter. Because beekeepers take honey, the bees main source of food, bees are left chronically malnourished, leading to higher risk of death, weakness, and disease. Bees in the commercial honey industry generally lack the ability to forage, which exacerbates nutrition problems.

Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point. Tragically, “bees from migratory colonies have a shorter lifespan and higher levels of oxidative stress than workers at stationary apiaries.” The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals. It also weirdly leads to bees having underdeveloped food glands, perhaps due to vibration from transport. Transport often is poorly ventilated, leading to bees overheating or freezing to death. Also, transport brings bees from many different colonies together, leading to rapid spread of disease.

Honey bees are often afflicted by parasites, poisoned with pesticides, and killed in other ways. Queen bees are routinely killed years before they’d die naturally, have their wings clipped, and are stressfully and invasively artificially inseminated. This selective breeding leaves bees more efficient commercially but with lower welfare levels than they’d otherwise have. Often bees are killed intentionally in the winter because it’s cheaper than keeping them around—by diesel, petrol, cyanide, freezing, drowning, and suffocation.

So, um, not great!

In short, bees are kept in unpleasant, artificial conditions, where a third of the hives die off during the winter from poor insulation—often being baked alive or freezing to death. They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished, all while riddled with parasites and subject to invasive and stressful inspections. And given the profound extent to which the honey industry brings invasive disease to wild bees and crowds out other pollinators, the net environmental impact is relatively unclear. The standard notion that honey should be eaten to preserve bees is a vast oversimplification.

Thus, if you eat even moderate amounts of honey, you cause extremely large numbers of bees to experience extremely unpleasant fates for extremely long times. If bees matter even negligibly, this is very bad!

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So don’t eat honey! If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough. If you want to make an easy change to your diet to prevent a lot of the suffering that you cause, please, for the love of God, avoid honey.

- More Here

How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution

Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.

This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.

When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations.

Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty.

But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?

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Most study subjects live in the tropics; their microbial communities may reflect tropical environments, not an ancestral human state. Yet even “extinct” microbiomes from higher latitudes—including from a frozen European mummy—are similarly configured to break down plant fiber, adding to the sense that the Western microbiome has diverged from what likely prevailed during human evolution.

The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.

Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.

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As Justin Sonnenburg put it, “We have this unsupervised drug factory in our gut.” The question facing microbiologists today is how to properly tend to that factory.

Here, studies of populations living more traditional lifestyles may provide clues. In the past, most people likely imbibed many times more fiber than today. If you eat minimally processed plants, which humans have for millions of years, you can’t avoid fiber. Modern hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists certainly eat loads of it. The Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, consume at least 10 times more than Americans, in tubers, baobab fruit, and wild berries. Agriculturalists, like those Burkina Fasans, also eat more fiber than Western populations, in porridges and breads made from unrefined grains.

Given this constant supply of microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, human microbiomes of the past, the Sonnenburgs argue, likely produced a river of these short-chain fatty acids. That probably changed some with the transition to agriculture, which made diets less diverse. But an even more drastic shift occurred quite recently, with the advent and widespread adoption of refined foods. As a result, westernized populations, the Sonnenburgs think, have lost healthful, fiber-fermenting microbes. And we suffer from a kind of fermentation byproduct deficiency.

So why can’t we supplement our diet with short-chain fatty acids? When I visited Sonnenburg, he showed me one reason why: The ecosystem that produces the acids may be as important as the acids themselves. He brought up two cross-sectional images of fecal pellets still in mice intestines. Most microbiome analyses take a tally, from genetic markers, of what microbes are present and in what abundance. That’s equivalent to imagining what a forest looks like from a pile of wood chips, and gives little sense of how the forest was organized. By some ingenious tinkering, though, one of Sonnenburg’s post-docs had developed a way to freeze the ecosystem in place, and then photograph it.

The resulting picture was unlike any rendition of the microbiome I’d seen before. One animal had eaten plenty of fiber, the other hadn’t. In the fiber-fed ecosystem, similar bacteria clustered with one another, not unlike schools of fish on a reef ecosystem. An undulating structure prevailed across space. But in the non-fiber diet, not only was diversity reduced, the microbes were evenly distributed throughout, like a stew boiled for too long.

At this point, Sonnenburg sat back in his chair and went quiet, waiting for me to notice something. To one side of both images, microbes were mostly absent—the mucus layer on the lining of the gut. But that layer was twice as thick in the fiber-fed mice than the non-fiber fed. That difference amounted to about 30 nanometers, far less than the width of a human hair. But one day we may look back and shake our heads that Western diseases—from diabetes to colon cancer—stemmed from 30 nanometers of mucus that, somewhere along the way, went missing in the developed world.

We think of the Western diet—high in unhealthy fats, sugar, and proteins—as overly rich. But what’s missing from the diet may be just as, and perhaps more, important than what’s abundant.

Years ago, while still a post-doc, Sonnenburg discovered that something very odd occurs when those MAC-loving microbes go hungry. They start eating mucus. “This is the stage where you say, ‘Oh my God. They’re eating me.’ ” Sonnenburg said. “You can see it.”

- More Here

New York Court Recognizes Dogs As Family Members

Today, Justice Aaron D. Maslow of the Kings County Supreme Court issued a decision affirming that dogs can be recognized as immediate family members under New York law.

Specifically, Justice Maslow ruled that Nan Deblase may recover emotional distress damages for having witnessed the death of her son’s dog Duke who was hit by a car while they were walking through a crosswalk. In 2024, the NhRP filed two amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs in the case, arguing that justice and the flexible nature of the common law require allowing the plaintiffs to recover emotional damages for having witnessed Duke’s death. Justice Maslow relied extensively on the NhRP’s briefs in his decision.

NhRP Executive Director Christopher Berry on this legal win for animals: “Too often, courts reflexively apply outdated precedents that treat animals as mere property, even when those precedents no longer reflect common sense. Today’s decision shows the justice system at its best: fulfilling its fundamental duty to deliver justice based on facts and reason, not outdated legal fictions. The Nonhuman Rights Project is proud to have contributed to this important outcome. It serves the interest of justice to recognize that Duke was not a legal ‘thing.’ He was a member of the family.” 

The defendant had moved to dismiss the case on the ground that dogs can’t be considered immediate family. Justice Maslow disagreed. “Adhering to unyielding general precedent no longer aligns the law with current societal norms concerning family pets,” Justice Maslow wrote.

A trial on damages will follow Justice Maslow’s decision.

- More Here

25 Years, 10 Lessons: Insights From Faunalytics’ Founder Che Green

Binary Thinking Hurts Everyone

A major lesson for advocates of all types is that binary thinking isn’t just outdated, it’s also a barrier to more effective advocacy. A mindset of animals versus humans is arguably what got us into this whole animal exploitation mess to begin with; it also ignores the fact that, to help animals, we need to work with other humans. The same is true for pitting vegans against non-vegans or ‘abolitionists’ against ‘welfarists.’ If you want to be effective in persuading others — whether it’s getting non-vegans to become vegan or other advocates to change their tactics — othering them is a non-starter. We can stand by our principles and perspectives while meeting people wherever they are on their own path.

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The Long And Winding Road

Let’s face it: animal liberation isn’t just around the corner. Eliminating the largest cause of (anthropogenic) suffering in history is a long-term, multi-generational struggle. So celebrate the short-term victories and commiserate with each other over losses, but don’t let them distract you from a long-term perspective. We need a movement-wide theory of change to coordinate the many voices of advocates and set global strategies for decades or even centuries, not just years. That includes building a respected and resilient talent pool and treating employees and volunteers well. It also means focusing on self-care and sustainable advocacy, for ourselves and for those who work alongside us in the long-term fight for animals.

My Recipe For Optimism

If you were hoping for total animal liberation in your lifetime, I’m sorry to burst your bubble. But after more than 25 years in this movement, I’m actually quite optimistic. Many things have already changed for the better (I still remember vegan burgers made at home from powdered mixes). And while the globalization of factory farming means things will likely get worse for animals in the near term, we also know that meaningful change can happen in surges. But I’m probably most optimistic because of the incredible and tireless dedication of the people in our movement. Individuals may fade in or out, but as a group we are stronger today than we have ever been. 

Bonus Lesson For Leaders: Succession

As an animal advocate, the thing I’m most proud of might actually be when I resigned from the Executive Director role at Faunalytics in 2019. Instead of two weeks, I had given the board five years’ notice. I was aware of Founder’s Syndrome and wanted Faunalytics to both thrive and, eventually, outlive its founder. We planned the transition for years, hired an Operations Manager to shadow me for a year, and eventually named her the organization’s new ED. Since then, Faunalytics has continued to flourish beyond what I could have imagined. The lesson: organizations matter more than individuals and egos, so think about succession sooner than later.

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FDA Announces Plan to Phase Out Animal Testing Requirement for Monoclonal Antibodies and Other Drugs

What a day! April 14th 2025, Tamil New Year 7 & I woke up to read this press release from FDA ;-) 

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking a groundbreaking step to advance public health by replacing animal testing in the development of monoclonal antibody therapies and other drugs with more effective, human-relevant methods. The new approach is designed to improve drug safety and accelerate the evaluation process, while reducing animal experimentation, lowering research and development (R&D) costs, and ultimately, drug prices.

The FDA’s animal testing requirement will be reduced, refined, or potentially replaced using a range of approaches, including AI-based computational models of toxicity and cell lines and organoid toxicity testing in a laboratory setting (so-called New Approach Methodologies or NAMs data). Implementation of the regimen will begin immediately for investigational new drug (IND) applications, where inclusion of NAMs data is encouraged, and is outlined in a roadmap also being released today. To make determinations of efficacy, the agency will also begin use pre-existing, real-world safety data from other countries, with comparable regulatory standards, where the drug has already been studied in humans.

“For too long, drug manufacturers have performed additional animal testing of drugs that have data in broad human use internationally. This initiative marks a paradigm shift in drug evaluation and holds promise to accelerate cures and meaningful treatments for Americans while reducing animal use,” said FDA Commissioner Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H. “By leveraging AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data, we can get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably, while also reducing R&D costs and drug prices. It is a win-win for public health and ethics.”

Key Benefits of Replacing Animal Testing in Monoclonal Antibody Safety Evaluation:

• Advanced Computer Simulations: The roadmap encourages developers to leverage computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict a drug’s behavior. For example, software models could simulate how a monoclonal antibody distributes through the human body and reliably predict side effects based on this distribution as well as the drug’s molecular composition. We believe this will drastically reduce the need for animal trials.
• Human-Based Lab Models: The FDA will promote the use of lab-grown human “organoids” and organ-on-a-chip systems that mimic human organs – such as liver, heart, and immune organs – to test drug safety. These experiments can reveal toxic effects that could easily go undetected in animals, providing a more direct window into human responses.
• Regulatory Incentives: The agency will work to update its guidelines to allow consideration of data from these new methods. Companies that submit strong safety data from non-animal tests may receive streamlined review, as the need for certain animal studies is eliminated, which would incentivize investment in modernized testing platforms.
• Faster Drug Development: The use of these modern techniques should help speed up the drug development process, enabling monoclonal antibody therapies to reach patients more quickly without compromising safety.

Global Leadership in Regulatory Science: With this move, the FDA reaffirms its role as a global leader in modern regulatory science, setting new standards for the industry and encouraging the adoption of innovative, humane testing methods. In recent years, Congress and the scientific community have pressed for more human-relevant testing methods. Today’s announcement is a step by the FDA towards its commitment to modernize regulatory science as technology advances.

Working in close partnership with federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Toxicology Program and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the FDA aims to accelerate the validation and adoption of these innovative methods through the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM). The FDA and federal partners will host a public workshop later this year to discuss the roadmap and gather stakeholder input on its implementation. Over the coming year, the FDA aims to launch a pilot program allowing select monoclonal antibody developers to use a primarily non-animal-based testing strategy, under close FDA consultation. Findings from an accompanying pilot study will inform broader policy changes and guidance updates expected to roll out in phases.

Commissioner Makary noted the far-reaching significance of this proposal. “For patients, it means a more efficient pipeline for novel treatments. It also means an added margin of safety, since human-based test systems may better predict real-world outcomes. For animal welfare, it represents a major step toward ending the use of laboratory animals in drug testing. Thousands of animals, including dogs and primates, could eventually be spared each year as these new methods take root.”

Mice Seen Giving First Aid To Unconscious Companions

When they find another mouse unconscious, some mice seemingly try to revive their companion by pawing at them, biting and even pulling their tongue aside to clear their airways. The finding hints that caregiving behaviour might be more common in the animal kingdom than we thought.

There are rare reports of large, social mammals trying to help incapacitated members of their species, such as wild chimpanzees touching and licking wounded peers, dolphins attempting to push a distressed pod mate to the surface so it can breathe and elephants rendering assistance to ailing relatives.

Over a series of tests, on average the animals devoted about 47 per cent of a 13-minute observation window to interacting with the unconscious partner, showing three sorts of behaviour.

“They start with sniffing, and then grooming, and then with a very intensive or physical interaction,” says Zhang. “They really open the mouth of this animal and pull out its tongue.”

These more physical interactions also involved licking the eyes and biting the mouth area. After focusing on the mouth, the mice pulled on the tongue of their unresponsive partner in more than 50 per cent of cases.

In a separate test, researchers gently placed a non-toxic plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 per cent of cases, the helping mice successfully removed the object.

- More Here

How We Treat Non-Human Animals Is Darwin's Greatest Contribution

For over 150 years, Charles Darwin and his work have influenced the fields of science, religion, politics, gender, literature, philosophy, and medicine. With a view in 2013 of the innumerable changes he has sparked across a number of disciplines, what should be considered Darwin’s most important contribution?

Darwin showed us that we’re animals. He showed us that there’s no fundamental distinction between us and any other critter on the planet. The most important implication of this Gestalt shift may be ethical. As soon as we accept that the human-animal distinction is not fundamental in nature, it becomes difficult to accept a moral code that privileges the wellbeing of human beings but is indifferent to the wellbeing of any other animal. It becomes hard to resist extending our moral concern to any creature capable of suffering, human or not. If present trends continue, the main beneficiaries of Darwin’s great idea may not be human beings. Ultimately, the main beneficiaries may be the other animals we share the planet with.

- More here from Steve Stewart-Williams

Curbing Animal Testing

I hope this happens soon as in few months: 

Animal testing is a relic from a bygone era but still promoted fervently by interest groups and government agencies as the “gold standard” in experimental sciences for predicting response in people. That is even though — in drug development, for instance — animals are notoriously poor predictors of drug safety and efficacy in humans. To this end, exclusive reliance on animal testing translates into irrecuperable delays in the development of medicines, missed opportunities due to misguided regulatory principles, and exorbitant costs ultimately passed onto consumers.

A jarring 90-95% of experimental drugs fail in clinical trials after acceptable outcomes data in animals are used to justify their advancement for testing on humans. Moreover, scores of potentially life-saving drugs are prematurely abandoned once they confer no benefits to animals, exacerbating an already inefficient animal-centric drug discovery paradigm. Failed oncology trials alone are estimated to cost $50-$60 billion annually. Most new-generation therapies (e.g., cell therapy, immunotherapy) are by design human-specific, and testing on animals is a fool’s errand.

Through decisive actions, DOGE could in principle curb unreliable testing on animals in favor of prioritizing technology-driven, human-relevant alternatives. By doing so, it would — in a singular swoop — reduce waste across federal contracts and grants, promote modern drug development, lower healthcare and prescription drugs cost, bolster national competitiveness, improve environmental health and safety testing, and modernize practices within all health and regulatory agencies.

Francis S. Collins, the longest-serving former director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in the journal Nature a decade ago that “preclinical research, especially work that uses animal models, seems to be the area that is currently most susceptible to reproducibility issues.” Consistently, 89% of preclinical studies, most of which involve animals, cannot be reproduced!

Reducing the dependency on the key variable (i.e., animal models) associated the most with irreproducibility (e.g., the failure to translate results from the laboratory to the clinic) is one sensible approach to limit fiscal waste in medical research and, more broadly, healthcare.

The cost of developing a single new drug is a stupefying $2 billion with an average development time of 10-15 years from target identification in the laboratory to market release, not factoring in withdrawals or recalls. Poor reliability of animal models in the drug discovery workflow compounds sky-high research and development costs to disincentivize investment in many disease domains. Case in point, 95% of the 7000-plus rare diseases that affect 25-30 million Americans have not a single FDA approved drug to treat them.

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Yet to this day, inexplicable delays in implementing the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 (FDAMA 2.0) are causing significant regulatory confusion among drug sponsors. The failure to act on the part of the FDA, the regulatory agency chiefly responsible for implementing this policy mandate, is in turn a good example of government discordancy, if not malfeasance.

In 2023, a bipartisan group of Senators, led by Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., sent a letter to the FDA demanding an explanation for the stultification and an implementation timeline of the enacted law. When no progress materialized, alarmed lawmakers introduced in February of 2024 the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 (FDAMA 3.0) in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 7248  (and later in the U.S. Senate, S. 5046) to assure FDAMA 2.0 implementation and accomplish further improvements.

VICT3R Project: What Are the Goals of Virtual Rabbits?

Animals used in laboratories are often treated as mere objects, enduring painful procedures like burns, poisoning, food deprivation, and skin, eye, and ear lacerations—all in the name of human safety. While many argue that these tests are necessary for ensuring product safety, ethical alternatives exist, and they should be explored. That’s where the Spanish university’s virtual rabbit initiative comes in.

The primary goal of the VICT3R project is to significantly reduce the number of animals used in safety testing for drugs and other chemicals by replacing them with computer-generated virtual models. This represents a crucial milestone in the quest for ethical and sustainable scientific research. If successful, the project could  prove that virtual models can yield reliable scientific results without harming living creatures.

Scientific advancements have provided more humane -and incredibly scientific- alternatives to animal testing, such as computer simulations and human tissue models. These methods can offer effective results without harming living creatures like rabbits. The VICT3R project introduces additional key objectives:

• Reducing Animal Use: The European VICT3R project aims to reduce the total number of animals used in experiments by up to 25%. This could lead to fewer animals being subjected to tests for medicine and chemical safety.
• Data Reuse and Sharing: The project promotes reusing and sharing data and applying new data science techniques to further implement the 3Rs—reduce, refine, and replace—in preclinical animal experimentation.
• Generative AI for Synthetic Animals: In cases where historical data on certain species or conditions is unavailable, generative AI could create fully synthetic virtual animals to fill the gaps.
• Expansion to Other Studies: The aspiration of the VICT3R project is to extend this concept of virtual control groups to other toxicological and pharmacological studies, both in academic and industrial settings, further reducing reliance on animal testing.

- More Here

PETA - The Nonprofit Is A Punchline. It’s Also Forced The World To Face Factory Farming, Animal Cruelty, & Our Own Hypocrisy.

The famous quote from Bhagavad Gita:

Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from yuga (age) to Yuga (age). 

But this evil agains animals has been going too long but no god came. But god came in the form of PETA. 

If you are against PETA and mock them without knowing their history and the change they bought to the world then its time for you to read this piece: You’re wrong about PETA

PETA — you’ve heard of it, and chances are, you have an opinion about it. Nearly 45 years after its founding, the organization has a complicated but undeniable legacy. Known for its ostentatious protests, the group is almost single-handedly responsible for making animal rights part of the national conversation.

The scale of animal exploitation in the United States is staggering. Over 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, and it’s estimated that over 100 million are killed in experiments. Abuse of animals is rampant in the fashion industry, in pet breeding and ownership, and in zoos.

Most of this happens out of sight and out of mind, often without public knowledge or consent. PETA has fought for over four decades to put a spotlight on these atrocities and trained generations of animal activists now active throughout the country.

Peter Singer, who is widely credited for galvanizing the modern animal rights movement, told me: “I can’t think of any other organization that can compare with PETA in terms of the overall influence that it has had and still is having on the animal rights movement.”

Its controversial tactics are not above critique. But the key to PETA’s success has been its very refusal to be well-behaved, forcing us to look at what we might rather ignore: humanity’s mass exploitation of the animal world.

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The group’s rapid rise from obscurity to household name was propelled by its first two major investigations into animal abuse. Its first target, in 1981, was the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.

At the now-defunct lab, neuroscientist Edward Taub was severing the nerves of macaques, permanently leaving them with limbs they could see but could not feel. He aimed to test whether the maimed monkeys could nevertheless be trained to use these limbs, theorizing that the research could help people regain control of their bodies after suffering a stroke or spinal cord injury.

Pacheco got an unpaid position assisting with experiments, using the time to document the conditions there. The experiments themselves, however grotesque, were legal, but the level of care for the monkeys and the sanitary conditions at the lab appeared to fall short of Maryland’s animal welfare laws. Having gathered enough evidence, PETA presented it to the state’s attorney, who pressed animal abuse charges against Taub and his assistant. Simultaneously, PETA released shocking photos Pacheco had taken of the confined monkeys to the press.

PETA protestors dressed as caged monkeys picketed the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had funded the research. The press ate it up. Taub was convicted and his lab shut down — the first time this had happened to an animal experimenter in the US.

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For its next act, in 1985, PETA released footage taken by the Animal Liberation Front, a radical group more willing to break the law, of severe abuse of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. There, under the auspices of studying the effects of whiplash and head injuries in car accidents, baboons were fitted with helmets and strapped to tables, where a sort of hydraulic hammer smashed their heads. The footage showed lab staff mocking concussed and brain-damaged animals. The video, titled “Unnecessary Fuss,” is still available online. A slate of protests at Penn and the NIH followed, as did lawsuits against the university. The experiments were discontinued.

Almost overnight, PETA became the most visible animal rights organization in the country. By bringing the public face to face with violence carried out against lab animals, PETA challenged the orthodoxy that scientists used animals ethically, appropriately, or rationally.

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The animal experimentation and animal agriculture industries are deep-pocketed and deeply entrenched — in taking them on, PETA picked uphill, long-term fights. But bringing the same tactics against weaker opponents has brought quicker results, shifting norms on once-ubiquitous uses of animals, from fur to animal testing in cosmetics, with mega-corporations like Unilever touting PETA’s approval of their animal-friendly credentials.

The group has helped end animal use at circuses (including at Ringling Brothers, which relaunched in 2022 with only human performers) and says it has shut down most wild big cat cub petting zoos in the US. Its many-faceted approach has drawn attention to the sheer breadth of ways that humans harm animals for profit outside the public eye, like in its campaigns against the use of animals in gruesome car crash tests.

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PETA has also become, out of necessity, a force for defending the democratic right to protest. When the industries intimidated by PETA and other animal rights groups doing undercover investigations pushed so-called “ag-gag” laws to prevent whistleblowing on factory farms, the group joined a coalition including the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge them in court, winning several state-level First Amendment victories for animal rights activists and corporate whistleblowers.

Over 40 years, PETA has grown into a major institution, with a 2023 operating budget of $75 million and 500 full-time staff, including scientists, lawyers, and policy experts. It is now the de facto face of the American animal rights movement, with public opinion on the group split.

Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (with whom I used to work at Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Program), told me: “Like Hoover for vacuums, PETA has become a proper noun, a proxy for animal protection and animal rights.” 

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Despite almost 45 years of work, PETA has not convinced even a meaningful minority of Americans to eschew meat. Since it was founded, meat production in the country has doubled.

But to see this as a failure misses the scale of the challenge and the forces arrayed against it. Meat-eating is a deeply culturally-entrenched habit, facilitated by the ubiquity of cheap meat made possible by factory farming, the hydra-like political influence of agricultural lobbies, and the omnipresence of advertising for meat. PETA spends $75 million per year on all of its staff and campaigns, with some percentage of that aimed at opposing meat-eating. The American fast food industry alone spent about $5 billion in 2019 promoting the opposite message.

Shifting the behavior of the public on something as personal as diet is a problem no one in the animal rights movement (or the environmental or public health movements, for that matter) has solved. Peter Singer, when I speak to him, concedes that to the extent he envisioned a political project in Animal Liberation, it was one of consciousness-raising resulting in a consumer movement like an organized boycott. “The idea was that once people know, they won’t participate,” he told me. “And that hasn’t quite happened.” 

Nor has PETA’s work resulted in truly transformative federal legislation, like taxes on meat, stronger animal welfare laws, or a moratorium on federal funding for animal experiments. What’s needed to achieve this in the US is brute lobbying power. And when it comes to lobbying power, PETA, and the animal rights movement as a whole, is lacking.

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“The better metric is how many activists are getting active, how many people are engaged in non-violent sustained action on behalf of your cause,” he said. “Today, unlike 40 years ago, you have hundreds of people storming factory farms, hundreds of thousands of people voting on state-wide ballot initiatives … PETA more than any other organization is responsible for that.”

When it comes to pollinating ideas, PETA has sown countless seeds of animal rights activism. Virtually everyone I spoke to for this piece, including many critics, credited some aspect of PETA’s operations with motivating them to get involved in the movement, be it through flyers at a punk show, undercover videos disseminated on DVD or online, or Newkirk’s own writing and public speaking.

Jeremy Beckham might not have helped start the Salt Lake City VegFest, or even become vegan, if not for the PETA protest at his middle school. Bruce Friedrich, who founded the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit promoting alternative protein, was PETA’s campaign coordinator for that protest. Today, former PETA staffers teach at universities, run plant-based meat companies, and have senior positions at other nonprofits.

PETA has also shaped the work of other groups. A number of animal rights movement insiders I spoke to argued that large animal welfare groups like the Humane Society of the United States would not have committed serious resources to anti-factory farming work if not for PETA cutting a path for them. Legacy animal welfare organizations now do the grunt work — filing litigation, posting public comments on proposed regulations, getting ballot initiatives in front of voters — necessary to make incremental change. They deserve their own share of the credit for the successes of recent decades. But they have also benefited from PETA acting not only as an inspiration to them but as an animal rights bogeyman to others.

A senior staffer at a major animal welfare advocacy group told me: “Having PETA out there doing all these bombastic, questionable things, it makes other animal protection organizations look like more reasonable partners when advocating for legislation, regulations, or other institutional change.”

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We’re all living in PETA’s world

In making sense of PETA, start not with the group, but with the crisis it is trying to address. Humans mete out violence against animals on an almost unimaginable scale. It is a violence that is ubiquitous and normalized, carried out by individuals, organizations, companies, and governments, often entirely legally. Not only have few people attempted to tackle this violence seriously, most don’t even recognize it as violence. How do you challenge this status quo, when most people would rather tune out your arguments?

PETA, an imperfect but necessary messenger, offered one answer, as best as it could.

Today, more animals are bred and killed in horrendous conditions than at any other point in human existence. Over more than 40 years, PETA has not achieved its goal of ending speciesism.

But it has, nonetheless and against the odds, forever altered the debate around animal use. In the US, animals are, for the most part, out of circuses. Fur is considered taboo by many. Animal testing is divisive, with half of Americans opposed to the practice. Meat-eating has become the subject of spirited public debate. Perhaps more importantly, there are now many more groups committed to animal welfare. There is more donor money. More politicians are speaking out about factory farming.

Progress in any social movement is slow, incremental, and bumpy. But PETA has provided a blueprint. It started with a strong and nonnegotiable ethical and political goal and realized it could have the most impact over the long term through professionalization and developing a wide supporter network. It was unafraid of controversy and confrontation, making sure people knew the name PETA.

 

Pigs Aren’t The Future Of Organ Transplants - Stop Acting Like They Could Be

Earlier this week, it was reported that Rick Slayman, the first person to ever receive a transplanted pig kidney, sadly passed away less than two months after the procedure. While the hospital, Massachusetts General, has stated that there’s no evidence that the patient’s death was a direct result of the transplant, it’s clear that the surgery did not succeed in substantially extending Slayman’s life.

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Pigs are intelligent and sensitive animals, with cognitive abilities that outrank dogs and, in fact, compare to those of a 3-year-old human child. Pigs have demonstrated the capability for spatial learning and memory, problem-solving, and the use of tools. They’re highly emotionally intelligent, displaying a preference for familiar humans and have even demonstrated what’s called “emotional contagion,” wherein one animal mirrors the emotions of another—an indicator of empathy. It’s little wonder that pigs are often kept as pets, and like dogs and cats, they have their own distinct personalities. It would be a major ethical misstep if our society were to create a system that calls for the torture and slaughter of even more pigs than the 3.8 million already killed daily by the factory-farming meat industry. 

I have nothing but sympathy for Slayman and his family, and if I or a loved one were sick, I’d also do everything in my power to extend my life or theirs. But the medical establishment isn’t doing any of us a favor by continuing to waste time and money on animal testing that may or may not have any practical applications for human health. 

It bears reminding that mice, dogs, and monkeys aren’t miniature people, which is why conducting experiments on them to better understand the human body is worse than useless. We have lots of analogous parts—hearts that pump blood, lungs that oxygenate the blood, stomachs that break down food—but they’re still different species entirely. Chocolate is lethal to dogs; to humans, not so much. Scientists have cured cancer in mice, but we’ve yet to see the science applied successfully to human patients. Furthermore, there are unique risks of xenotransplantation, like the cross-species transfer of diseases (which may in fact have been a contributing or causal factor in the death of one pig-heart recipient). 

We’ve already seen the effects of various zoonotic diseases, and it seems patently unwise to open up a whole new avenue for diseases to transfer between species. Animal testing in medicine is no longer required by the FDA, in part due to the fact that so many animal trials resulted in little useful—and sometimes misleading—information about how a drug will affect humans. 

- More Here

How To Make Drugs (Without Animal Testing) - A Documentary

Animal testing is the most CRUEL thing in the world. Humans fuck up their lives by drinking, smoking, eating crap, lethargic lifestyle etc., to make their bodies fragile, And to fix it, they use these poor animals to test drugs. 

It has been proved over and over again - animal testing and studies on drugs are not good indicators for the drugs effectiveness on humans. 

In a nutshell, humans are torturing animals for no use and continue to do so because no one questions. 

I am glad this is getting a lot of moral attention now. 

HOW TO MAKE DRUGS Trailer 2 from First Spark Media on Vimeo.

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.