Lessons from the Frontlines
The most important insights from two decades of open rescue.
What’s up this week
On Sunday, June 11, I’m leading the Open Rescue Experience (ORE) at ALC in Berkeley, where I’ll be diving into the lessons I’ve learned from two decades of rescuing animals from the brink. This newsletter is a preview of some of the things you’ll learn — but no replacement for the workshop itself. Make sure you register separately for the ORE, as you will need to sign a separate agreement in order to participate!
Ben Newman, an activist with Animal Rising, was arrested and remanded to jail for disrupting a horse race in Surrey, United Kingdom. The video of him running on the field has been viewed 1.2 million times on Twitter, and a separate video showcasing the abuse of horses has more than half a million. Unnecessarily disruptive or effective direct action? What do you think?
We’re finalizing our plans for a “ladder of engagement” to get people plugged into open rescue. Our first meeting of Open Rescue Advocates will be on Sunday, June 25 from 4-6 pm PT in San Francisco (and by Zoom). Stay tuned for more on this, but mark that date on your calendar. We’re hoping to have a very special guest.
Lessons from the Frontlines
One of the strange things about my journey towards open rescue is that I did it almost thoughtlessly. When I look back on what I could have achieved if I knew even a fraction of what I know today, the impacts of my actions could have been exponentially higher.
Take, for example, some basic lessons in photography.
Have light. Focus on the best scenes. And take 10x as many photos as you think you need.
The first time I walked into a slaughterhouse with the intent to take photos, I had no lights, making it virtually impossible for the camera to work properly. I had no idea what I wanted to shoot, so I randomly shot all sorts of things — ceilings, gates, animal feces — that had exactly no relevance to what I was trying to expose: the fear of the animals in the moments before they died. And I was so nervous that I’d take 1-2 photos of a scene and then move on to the next, not realizing my photos were so blurry and poorly lit that I might as well have thrown them away.
What is true of photography, however, is true of so many other aspects of rescue activism. Too often, activists with the best of intentions — and often willing to take on the biggest of risks — waste their efforts because they’re missing simple lessons in the art of rescue. I don’t mean this just for frontlines activists, moreover. Whether the focus is animal care or social media, relatively small insights can lead to massive changes in impact. Indeed, this is the primary reason I shifted my activism fully towards developing a network for open rescue. If we can get some of these lessons to spread widely, the entire animal rights movement will become exponentially more powerful.
What are these simple lessons? Here are a few.
Lesson 1: Find a target with size, significance, and a story.
It is embarrassing how I decided on my first site for an attempted open rescue: I chose Chiappetti Lamb & Veal simply because it was convenient. As I shared on Ezra Klein’s podcast, much to his disbelief, I walked into the slaughterhouse simply because it was near where I lived. At the time, many animal rights activists were serving multi-year prison sentences for actions less radical than mine. (My dear friend Lauren Gazzola, for example, spent nearly four years in federal prison for running a website promoting direct action for animal rights!) I was taking a similar risk and not even bothering to think about whether the risk was worth it.
What have I learned since? Not just in our rescue activism, but in all our campaigns, we need to find targets that capture the public imagination or attention. And there are three ways that targets will most often do this. First, they are simply very large. Smithfield Foods made a wonderful target for our open rescue in March 2017 partly because it is the largest pig farming company in the world. By definition, a company of that size is significant.
Even beyond size, however, Smithfield was a significant target because they made a promise to the world in Jan 2007: to end the use of gestation crates within 10 years. They had receive international news media coverage for this promise, including a piece in the Washington Post, meaning their practices had significance even beyond their size. This was particularly true if we commenced our investigation at the exact time where their promise was going into effect: January 2017. Sometimes, it’s not just where or what you investigate, but when you investigate, that makes a target significant.
Finally, Smithfield’s activities in Southern Utah had all the elements of a good story. A unique character: a former law professor climbing barbed wire. A compelling challenge: Utah had recently passed an ag gag law, making the mere act of taking a photograph a crime. A life-changing choice: if we dared to challenge the Utah authorities and industry, we knew our lives would never be the same. Even if Smithfield were not the biggest company, or previously significant in our culture, it was a good target for a rescue because there was a great story waiting to be written. Character. Challenge. Choice.
Lesson 2: First who, then what.
The legendary business strategist Jim Collins undertook a massive study of the greatest companies in America. And, among the most important patterns he observed, in looking at great organizations and leaders, was that most focused first on who they wanted to recruit, then moved to figuring out what they were to do. Consider:
The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it. They said, in essence, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”
The same is true for rescue (and for animal rights generally). If you don’t have the right team, it doesn’t matter how great your idea is. Your project will fail. In contrast, even bad ideas can do well with great teams, partly because teams will refine an idea if they’re functioning well.
What makes for a great team?
The first and most fundamental concern is a person’s character: is the person radically candid, dependable, and kind? If a team member lacks any one of these attributes, they do not belong on the team. Lies and manipulation are the most dangerous attribute, as they undermine trust across the entire team. Irresponsibility is nearly as bad as manipulation, however, as it undermines a team’s ability to set high standards — and therefore achieve results. But perhaps the worst attribute in a team member is meanness. When someone is not just uncaring, but actively rude to other team members, it can destroy morale for the entire team. Indeed, evidence from organizational research suggests that a single toxic team member — a manipulator, a laggard, or a jerk — can undermine the value of two great team members!
One of my greatest mistakes, over the last ten years, has been to have too low of a bar for open rescue projects. We had good motivations for keeping the bar so low. We wanted to build a mass movement. We wanted to make things as inclusive as possible. We believed in the goodness of human beings. But the result of this mentality was to let people into teams who literally destroyed some of our most high potential projects. Don’t make my same mistake. Get to know your teams, and their character, before you even start. (I offer a number of tips on how to do this at the ORE.)
Lesson 3: Write your story — and your closing argument — before you head into the field.
When I walked into my first slaughterhouse in 2007, I had no idea what I was going to find. Even worse, I had no idea what I even hoped to find. The result is that, in the high adrenaline environment of an undercover investigation, I accumulated almost nothing of interest.
In contrast, when we went into Smithfield’s Circle Four Farms in 2017, I already knew the story I thought we wanted to tell: a cover-up of mother pigs in crates. I had reviewed satellite imagery of the farm over many years and saw that there were no major renovations, despite the company’s dramatic promise. I had heard from employee whistleblowers that mother pigs were still in crates. And when we did site surveillance in Utah, we saw row after row of industrial sheds — and nothing to suggest anything had changed for the animals inside. When we finally entered the facility to document and give aid, then the project was a piece of cake. Because we had an idea of the story we wanted to tell, we knew what pieces to look for.
This is even more true, however, of legal narrative. In a court of law, a judge will strictly control what evidence is allowed in court. Understanding what theories of law might be allowed, then, is crucial not just to effective storytelling but to mounting a legal defense. I’ve said before that I believe I did 95% wrong in the Utah trial, from a legal prep perspective. But the little I did right was because I was envisioning our closing argument from Day 1 — and therefore knew, for example, that the value of the pigs would be a legitimate path (under the law) for us to talk about the condition the animals were raised in.
The rest, of course, is history. And it all happened because we put a little bit of thought into what our closing argument would be — and therefore had the evidence we needed in court to prevail.
I could write a book with other lessons I’ve learned from 20 years of rescue. But let me just end with this: everyone has a role to play. One of the key insights that I share in the Open Rescue Experience is that there is an entire ecosystem around open rescue that is necessary to ensure that the movement grows and thrives. It is not just the people taking the animals out. It’s the people doing the research to show that a company’s marketing has been deceptive, such as Michael and Leslie Goldberg, former journalists who helped us place our investigations in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. It’s the caretakers who spend day and night keeping the animals alive, like Zoe and Sherstin Rosenberg at Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary. And it is the thousands of people who respond to the call to action, when the government or industry tries to repress the movement. If not for you, I’d probably be in federal prison.
I dreamed 10 years ago that we could build a mass movement around open rescue. The court cases that will unfold in the next couple months will be a test of that dream. But it is not enough to win in court. We need to win in the court that matters most, the court of public opinion. And for us to do that, we need everyone to find their role — so we can super charge the movement for open rescue and truly make animal liberation a reality.
I hope I’ll see you on June 11th for the Open Rescue Experience — or, if you’re not at ALC, at a workshop near you sometime soon.
I'm looking forward to your 6/25 Zoom presentation.
Another valuable learning experience.