When I was a college organizer with Direct Action Everywhere, I dismissed the welfare campaigners at The Humane League as sellouts. They thought I was a naïf. Neither of us was right — but it took years for me to understand why. In this classic essay, I argued that the old "welfarism versus abolitionism" divide was always a category error: every animal advocate is an incrementalist, just focusing on different increments. The more useful frame, borrowed from social movement theory, is the inside-outside strategy — and once you see it, the apparent contradiction between cage-free campaigns and restaurant disruptions starts to look less like a civil war and more like a playbook.

Sunday morning, I joined Chris Bryant’s popular Youtube stream for a wide-ranging discussion on all of my favorite topics: pragmatic campaigning, movement factionalism, and AI’s impact on animals.

This was a full-circle moment for me. When I started Pax Fauna without any research experience to speak of, Chris gave me some helpful advice. I was tickled to hear that my writing has helped him think about AI and even inspired him to drop thousands of dollars on Claude Max plans for his team.

Enjoy!

Please join me and 2,000 other people in Wisconsin on April 19 to tear a Beagle farm apart brick by brick and rescue every one of the 2,000 dogs still languishing inside. Sign up here.

And both movements are better for it.

The animal welfare movement and the AI alignment movement grew up in the same community, but they've been operating in separate lanes. That's a mistake — and it's one both sides can fix. In this essay, I argue that the arrival of transformative AI makes animal welfare a wholly-owned subsidiary of the broader "Make AI Go Well" movement, whether either side likes it or not. For animal advocates, that means putting AI at the center of our strategic thinking, including designing our campaigns with AI training data in mind. For alignment researchers, it means recognizing that a post-AGI world full of factory farming is a failure mode, not a footnote. I make the case that both movements need each other more than they realize, and that the skills each has developed are exactly what the other is missing.

This audio version of Sandcastles is produced using an AI clone of Aidan's voice. Please forgive mispronunciations. Read the original on Substack.

Open rescue isn't an alternative to pragmatic campaigning. It's the missing piece.

I came out of open rescue retirement to join hundreds of activists in storming a dog factory farm in Wisconsin. In this essay, I tell the story of the Ridglan Farms rescue, what it felt like to be back, and why the experience resolved a tension I've been wrestling with for years. Open rescue and focused, winnable campaigns aren't alternatives — they're different types of artifact that belong together. But the deeper argument is about something I'm calling proportionate action: a movement that claims to be fighting a moral atrocity of historic proportions will lose its soul if no part of it ever takes action commensurate with that claim.

This audio version of Sandcastles is produced using an AI clone of Aidan's voice. Please forgive mispronunciations. Read the original on Substack.

In search of the missing social movement for farmed animals.

In 1995, thousands of people—disproportionately meat-eating moms and grandmas—laid their bodies across a road in a tiny English coastal town to stop trucks carrying live sheep to slaughter. For ten months, crowds of over a thousand showed up day after day, facing down riot police, in what remains the high-water mark of mass mobilization for farmed animals. Nothing like it has happened since. In this episode, I ask why. Drawing on my own years as an organizer with Direct Action Everywhere, I work through the strategic mistakes that have kept the animal movement small and insular—from messaging that alienates the public, to campaigns designed for efficiency rather than inspiration, to an abolitionist philosophy that divided the movement over the very campaigns that could have united us. And I propose some directions for what it would take to trigger one more wave of mass protest for farmed animals before the window closes.

This audio version of Sandcastles is produced using an AI clone of my voice. Please forgive mispronunciations. Read the original on Substack.

Advice for animal advocacy orgs and job seekers in the age of agents 🦞🦞🦞

AI agents aren't coming — they're here, and they're already reshaping what it means to work in animal advocacy. In this post, I break down the last twelve months of AI breakthroughs, from Claude Code to OpenClaw, and argue that every advocacy organization should be racing to adopt these tools right now. Drawing on conversations from the Sentient Futures Summit in San Francisco, I introduce a framework for the two roles that will define advocacy organizations going forward: agent orchestrators, who can single-handedly automate the digital work of entire teams, and human interfaces, whose irreplaceable social skills become the true bottleneck to impact. I make the case that spending $20 a month on AI in 2026 is organizational malpractice, that young CS graduates are the movement's most undervalued resource, and that both small and large organizations need to rethink their structures before the pace of change leaves them behind. This is a prediction, a dare, and a practical guide — because every hour you spend deliberating is an hour your agents could have spent working for animals.

This audio version of Sandcastles is produced using an AI clone of Aidan's voice. Please forgive mispronunciations. Read the original on Substack.

Punchline: I’d be grateful to anyone who spends time engaging at the link below, which is meant to elicit a wide range of ideas for what projects animal advocates should be prioritizing if we think AI will turn the world upside down in 5-15 years.

Share your thoughts:

https://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/36eenMwaMqN

The episode contains some context that might make this exercise more useful to both you and me.