Let go of my moral purity? I may be new, but I know where I stand.
I am 57, and I am an infant in the animal rights movement. I could be embarrassed, but what’s the point? I got here when I got here, and now I’m catching up. It’s a lot.
If you’ve been in this movement for a while, you already know these players and storylines. If you are newer, like me, you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to step into a conversation that’s been happening for decades.
There are some brilliant people in this sphere. If you tend to judge yourself against others you admire, just stop it now.
Be who you are, know what you know, and keep learning.
For example, this week I listened to The Vegan Report podcast with Rayane Laddi. The episode, called “A Fork in the Road: The Future of Animal Protection,” was an interview with Anita Krajnc of Animal Save Movement and Plant Based Treaty.
And I think I finally found my ideological place in the movement. Not Animal Save – bearing witness to animals arriving at slaughterhouse gates is actually my worst fear. I’m not built for that.
I wrote about my surprise encounter with the double-decker truck parked behind my library one blistering day this summer.
It was loaded with dairy cows, some standing, some downed, their route and fate unknown to me but the suffering in their eyes utterly recognizable.
But Plant Based Treaty – shifting the food system away from animals entirely – that’s what I want to devote my efforts to.
The “fork in the road” Anita talked about is the massive amount of AI money expected to flow into the animal welfare branch of Effective Altruism. She says that money should go to plant-based initiatives, not to welfare tech for farmed animals. The goal is to remove animals from the food supply, not engineer their suffering.
Halfway through the conversation, Rayane brought up Aidan Kankyoku’s recent Substack article, “There is a Path to Meat Without Misery.”
Oh, boy.
I had listened to that two hour episode of Sandcastles, which is read in Aidan’s voice by AI. Aidan prefaces it as the “most important essay I have published on Sandcastles.”
I HATED it. But let me go back.
Aidan was actually the first person I spoke to in the movement, sort of.
When I retired from my 20-year massage practice last year, I knew the only thing I wanted to do next was work for animal rights.
My first application was to Pro-Animal Future.
I was reading the Pax Fauna handbook – Pax Fauna is the sister organization of PAF – in preparation for my interview with Natalie Fulton. (And no, I didn’t know what a savvy animal advocacy communicator she was at the time.)
When I started the application, Aidan was listed as a director at PAF; then sometime before my interview, his name disappeared. In place of his contact info was the message, “Like humane meat, this page does not exist,” or something like that. Luckily I had saved an address.
I wrote to ask if the language in the handbook was reality or aspirational. He wrote back, called me astute, but that didn’t really answer the question. I never learned why he left, and I also did not get the job.
But I subscribed to Sandcastles and later watched Aidan in coverage of the Ridglan rescues, always in his signature hat and vest. (He’s facing felony charges now for alleged efforts to save beagles bred for lab testing.)
When I started listening to Sandcastles, his ideas were already AI-heavy, and he was lamenting both the pace of incremental change and the failure of abolitionist efforts.
I guess I saw the shift coming, but I can’t believe where it landed.
In “It’s Everybody’s Fault,” posted in May, Aidan argues it’s the CEOs and the consumers and the workers and the legislators who could end factory farming but don’t. He says asking who is at fault is actually the wrong question; asking how we stop it is the right one.
He said, “In years past, I thought my own hostility to cage-free and other welfare campaigns was strategic. But in hindsight, the line was often blurred. I didn’t want to live in a world where gradual reforms worked better than a clearly communicated vision of transformational change.” And he said he would do anything – harass someone or befriend them – to win campaigns for animals.
But in the August piece, Aidan argues that abolition has failed and a realistic path might be to engineer farmed animals to suffer less, or not suffer at all. In the section called Catabasis, which refers to the ancient Greek descent to the underworld, he goes to depths I don’t recognize.
On whether we should engineer “happier” animals, he describe engineered beings “utterly devoid of negative affect, for whom every moment lying still in the ammonia-choked air is pure bliss, for whom even the blade cutting into their throat feels like an orgasm.”
Gasp. He asked us earlier in the essay to “let go of your moral purity.” No way. The thing that brought me here is my conviction in abolition. There is no strategy around or through that.
Aidan says a version of himself a year or two ago would have been horrified by his own suppositions here and wishes he could pin down what changed.
I want to know, too. So I think I’ll ask him. What the hell, he wrote back before.
Stay tuned.
