Stupidity Hurts Animals More Than Malice

Learn to fight stupidity at the Save the Dogs Summit. (Today is the last day for early-bird pricing, after which the price doubles!)

The absurd response by Dane County authorities to the Ridglan rescue included tear gas and rubber bullets.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote those words from a Nazi prison cell, two years before they hanged him. And his words have been on my mind. You see, the company executives and politicians who supported the abuse at Ridglan Farms didn’t usually seem malicious. Take Kalvin Barrett, the Sheriff of Dane County. When I spoke to him on the phone after the March rescue, he was friendly. You could have never guessed that he’d later task his officers with brutally assaulting peaceful rescuers.

What’s unmistakable about the call with Barrett, instead, is that it’s… stupid. Barrett told me, in the tone of a man who sounds weirdly like a TV weatherman, that Ridglan was exempt from the animal cruelty laws. It is not. No statute says so. I had to stop myself from laughing.

Bonhoeffer had similar interactions with members of the Nazi regime. He wrote:

Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bonhoeffer learned this lesson at the cost of his own life. But this stupidity is not individual. It’s social — more virus than trait. Bonhoeffer wrote:

[It] is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid… [P]ower in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.

Stupidity of this sort, Bonhoeffer explained, was the result of power and blind obedience. And that’s exactly what happened with Ridglan Farms. Kalvin Barrett is not a mean man, and perhaps not a dumb man, either. But he is a blindly obedient one. And when he was told by the powerful people in Dane County that Ridglan was exempt from the animal cruelty laws, he accepted this position—even when it was clearly stupid and wrong.

But here is the hardest part. The same is true of all of us. For years, I was too scared to rescue animals. I believed the “experts” who told me it was impossible. I was frightened by the state’s threats of punishment. So I blindly obeyed, even when my own reading of the law told me otherwise. I was stupid. And the animals suffered as a result.

We are now changing that. Over 1,000 people showed up at Ridglan to fight a stupid system. And it collapsed. And that’s the thing about stupid systems: if enough people push against them, they always fall.

That is the ultimate lesson of Bonhoeffer’s life. The stupidity of Nazism was its downfall. You cannot build a system on blind obedience. The Sheriffs of the world can tell us these animals must be tortured. Over the long run, the people won’t accept it. And once they rise up, the stupid will fall.

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Speaking of which, there’s no better place to learn to fight stupidity than the upcoming Save the Dogs Summit in Wisconsin from Sept 4-6. And today is the last day for early-bird registration! Here’s a provisional schedule that will show you what we’re going to be up to.

And here are five reasons we NEED you there.

Reason 1: 16,000 dogs are facing sickening abuse at Marshall, including being bred for toxic inhalation studies. This is the summit where we’ll prep you to get them out.

Reason 2: To succeed at the next rescue, we need to defend the last one. Just days before the summit, 47 new defendants will be charged with serious crimes. We need to support them—and set a precedent for the right to rescue that is heard across the nation.

Reason 3: New evidence of criminal abuse will be revealed shortly. We want to share this info with you, and strategize together on how we can make sure it has maximum impact on saving the dogs.

Reason 4: We’ll be deploying novel AI-empowered training methods—and teaching you to harness those methods to train others. From a mock trial to astonishing new research techniques, you’ll learn about powerful methods that have never been used before.

Reason 5: You’ll be around some of the most inspiring dog rescuers in the world. It’s not just the 51 defendants but the 100s of others who risked everything to save the dogs. We are stronger together. You’ll see that—feel that—if you come to the summit!

See you in Madison!