RIDGLAN WAS NEVER ABOUT THE DOGS - AND THAT'S OKAY

Two weeks ago, activists from all over the country crossed state lines with the explicit goal of rescuing 2,000 dogs from the world’s second-largest dog breeding facility in the United States: Ridglan Farms.

When activists arrived on the scene Saturday morning, they were met with the full force of the Dane County police. Rubber bullets and tear gas were used on the activists who descended on Ridglan Farms almost immediately upon arrival. Despite this, the movement did not waver.

Activists used power tools to cut through the fences of the farm while being pepper sprayed directly in the face; another activist had his teeth knocked out by a police officer while attempting to breach the barricades; demonstrators even went as far as driving a vehicle through the fence in a desperate attempt to make a path for the liberators to access the farm. Simply put, the activists were prepared to do whatever it takes to get the dogs out of Ridglan Farms.

Progress for animals can often feel to move at the pace of molasses, so I cannot help but feel a sense of euphoria from how inspiring the dedication is from the activists that faced off with Ridglan. However, inspiration alone is not the goal of these activists; they came with the expectation to rescue the beagles from this torture facility, and instead of marching through police lines with dogs in their arms, they were met with hostility by law enforcement and not a single dog was freed from the rescue directly.

I have seen bold claims from the community ranging from complaints that they felt deceived by leadership on the risks involved, to assertions that the Ridglan campaign was not a success, citing the failure of the open rescue and the large amounts of outside money required to purchase the dogs.

I think that it is easy to get down on these details, but I want to challenge those who are reading this to see the positive side of what has unfolded in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The reality of this attempted open rescue is that the action was never really about getting the dogs out of Ridglan Farms. If it were, the organizers would not have notified the authorities a month in advance, giving authorities time to fortify the facility.

In the first open rescue a month prior — done without notice — 22 puppies were saved, but the organizers later shared videos of the dogs’ locations on social media, putting their safety at further risk after the rescue. The research team at CAFT uses these types of social media overshares to locate targets all the time in our campaigns — and if we can do it, I assure you the FBI can do it much faster, and has in similar actions in the past.

Ridglan and open rescue in general have always been about the story and the inspiration that comes from seeing our comrades and friends be willing to go to prison so that they can have a platform to speak up for the animals rotting away in cages.

With news stations around the world talking about the scene at Ridglan Farms and shining a bright light on the atrocities of the vivisection industry at a strategically important time politically — given our current administration’s position on animal testing — I would argue the battle at Ridglan Farms has accomplished all it was ever capable of: inspire, create mass mobilization, and shine a light on the atrocities of animal testing.

I’m proud of all of my friends and community members that stood up to the vivisection industry so dramatically, but I have heard the frustrations from those of you who did not realize what you were up against. If you were one of the many that believed you were going to Ridglan for the dogs, this article is for you.

OPEN RESCUE VS. CLOSED RESCUE

People have been breaking into laboratories and fur farms for decades under various banners, and the open rescue approach popularized by groups like Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) and the closed rescue approach from decentralized movements like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) share almost nothing in common outside the fact that they both use the tactic of animal rescue. On the surface both approaches are about liberating animals, but the strategy and goals are what truly define these groups of activists.

For the past decade or so in the United States, the majority of the focus from our movement has been fixated on the media-hungry approach of open rescue, and I often wonder if our movement has forgotten that we do not need to let our enemies know we are coming to liberate the animals in advance — and further, we do not need to intentionally get arrested after the action is over. I have rarely seen open discussions about these two approaches, and with many activists asking this exact question on social media in the wake of the Ridglan action, now seems like a good time to address the issue.

The Animal Liberation Front

The ALF is not a group or a non-profit that you can donate money to; there is no address or centralized hub where you can obtain information. The ALF is more of an ideology than a group, and anyone with the willingness to break the law for animals who identifies as vegan or vegetarian is welcome to call themselves part of the Animal Liberation Front.

This simplicity was attractive to me when I was a young kid, and I gravitated towards direct action in part because it was just really easy to do. Find a facility or establishment that is abusing animals, plan the action, execute the action under the cover of night, report the action to the media anonymously, and carry on with your life as if nothing happened.

The power of the ALF largely comes from the fact that the actions are carried out in secret and, instead of being designed to maximize media exposure like open rescue, they are intended to maximize damage against the companies targeted.

If the Animal Liberation Front were planning an action against Ridglan Farms, the activists carrying out the action would not make a social media post notifying the farm that they are coming, but instead would go to great lengths to keep their preparations secret. The ALF would not have video calls with hundreds of strangers to plan their rescue on Ridglan, but instead would communicate in person with only their most trusted confidants. There would be no media stations or police waiting for the ALF on the scene because nobody outside the working group would even know that the action was about to happen.

If the Animal Liberation Front had targeted Ridglan Farms, the liberators would not have walked away empty-handed.

Closed Rescue Is About Saving Individuals, Not Media

If it sounds like I am a little biased against open rescue, you would be right. But it is not because I think ALF-style raids are the solution to animal liberation. Nighttime raids have their limitations as well, and this is why movement leaders like Wayne Hsiung have dedicated their lives to building the open rescue network.

Closed rescues do a significantly better job when it comes to saving the lives of animals, and the numbers prove this without a shadow of a doubt. A single ALF-style raid can result in thousands of animals being liberated.

The last time the ALF was truly active in the United States was the summer of 2013: tens of thousands of animals were saved from farms in the USA. I am able to speak to this because I was part of an ALF cell that liberated 2,000 minks from a fur farm in Illinois, resulting in the farm permanently closing and causing the facility $200,000 in damage.

Over the entire history of the ALF, the lives saved is numbered in the millions. When compared to the number of animals that the open rescue network has saved — roughly a few hundred — it becomes very clear who the winner is if the metric is damage caused to the target or animals’ lives saved.

But as we discussed earlier, open rescue has never been about the animals in the farms targeted, but rather the cultural shifts that we can create with the stories told by the activists who rescue them. A major shortcoming of ALF-style raids is that they are occasionally vilified and, because they operate anonymously, there is no possibility of using them for mass mobilization.

Getting 1,000 people to Wisconsin for a closed rescue is simply out of the question.

Which Type of Rescue Is Better?

I think the style of direct action that one favors has less to do with one being better or worse and more to do with how the individual participating views the world and what their goals are with the action.

For me personally, it really boils down to what my strengths are as a person and wanting to use my skills as efficiently as possible to save the lives of animals. I have always had a very high risk tolerance, whether that be in sports I participated in as a kid, like racing motocross where broken bones were a regular occurrence, or breaking into fur farms in the middle of the night with a police scanner in my ear so that I would be notified when the time was up to stop releasing animals from their cages.

My high risk tolerance and interest in figuring out complex problems, like how to avoid FBI surveillance so I could get away with crimes that the government deems acts of terrorism, made me a perfect fit for the Animal Liberation Front style of direct action.

As I stated earlier, progress towards animal liberation can feel painfully slow, and in the past 21 years of activism I have only grown more convinced that the general public is extremely far from taking the rights of animals seriously on the scale needed to abolish industries that most of the public believes are necessary. For that reason, I believe that we need to operate from a place of pragmatism, get tangible wins that save lives, while still leaving the door open for these larger goals to be achieved.

However, if you are part of the “animal liberation in one generation” crowd like our friends at The Simple Heart, I can see good reason to prioritize the media exposure generated from open rescue like what just went down at Ridglan. If you believe that getting the message of animal rights in front of enough people and showing them the horrors that take place on a daily basis to billions of animals is likely to lead to drastic culture shifts similar to movements like Occupy, then open rescue might be the strategic approach you favor.

My personal position is that there is room for both styles of direct action, and for that reason I supported my community’s participation. Open rescue is great for media stunts and exposure that can change hearts and minds, while ALF-style raids are good for saving individual animals and maximizing damage. The only time ALF actions break news stories comparable to what has happened in the past month in Wisconsin is when someone gets caught and goes to prison.

Speaking of repression, we need to talk about the police response at Ridglan Farms.

THE BATTLE AT RIDGLAN FARMS

When I first started hearing battle stories from the front lines between the Dane County Police and animal liberators, I noticed a common theme: almost everyone seemed surprised by the violent repression against them. It is almost as if many of the activists involved did not realize the severity of the crime they were partaking in.

Let’s make something clear: our movement is challenging the most violent industries on the face of the planet, and I am not surprised even a little bit when they use state violence to stifle us.

It is legal in the United States of America to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, and abuse animals for commercial purposes. Further, it is the role of the police to protect those industries’ legal right to do so. The role of police is not to protect activists breaking the law, but rather to protect capital - and right now in Wisconsin, the beagles inside Ridglan are property as far as the law is concerned, and the police have every right to use force to uphold the law.

I remember participating in one of my first mass demonstrations in 2008 on the annual May Day march. Tensions were high because so many Americans were suffering in the 2008 financial crisis, and I was one of them. The anger I felt because my family had lost our home and were forced to squat in a half-built home without working plumbing gave me the courage to do something about it regardless of the risks. However, unlike the activists attending Ridglan, I was prepared for what was to come because of the generational knowledge passed down from the activist scenes I was part of at the time.

Our goal was to make a statement to our government that the working class was tired of being discarded, and we faced off with riot police armed with plastic shields to push through police lines, wore shatterproof glasses to protect our eyes, gas masks to endure the tear gas — and many others in attendance had far more protective gear than this. Organizers had medics on site to tend to the wounded, and with thousands bringing Los Angeles city streets to a standstill, we made our statement that the working class was done asking nicely.

What happened at Ridglan was predictable, it was expected, and the fact that so many of our community members were put at risk because of the lack of experience of the leadership team breaks my heart. I warned my close friends about the dangers but carry guilt for not being more vocal - which is in part why I have decided to write this article.

Over the past week, I’ve been reaching out to various members of the leadership team to offer support and gain clarity on why things transpired the way they did. What I’ve concluded is that this comes down to a group of people who genuinely care about animal rights, but haven’t been around long enough, or followed movement history closely enough, to fully understand the crushing power of the state and the lobbying power behind the vivisection industry.

I actually do not blame them for this - I blame myself for not speaking up sooner.

SAVED BY OUTSIDE MONEY

While the second open rescue at Ridglan was an utter failure, most of the dogs are being released none the less. Deep pockets in the rescue scene bought 1500 dogs from Ridglan so that they can be adopted by loving families. The amount of money that was dropped on the purchase is confidential but considering the dogs have an estimated 6 million dollar price tag we know it must be substantial.

This is far from the outcome planned by activists storming Ridglan, but hey, it beats the hell out of the dogs being killed for vivisection.

I have seen a lot of criticisms online from the keyboard warriors rejecting this as a win, since it was not created by the open rescue but rather a buyout that is rewarding Ridglan financially. I understand this point and agree it was not what organizers had in mind and is certainly not a scalable model that can be repeated due to its extremely high price tag that would bankrupt the animal rights movement and still not even put a dent in the vivisection industry.

Campaigning is not an exact science, sure there are plenty of variables that can be controlled to increase our odds of coming out on top and I believe CAFT has gotten pretty damn good at creating scenarios that produce results for animals. Literally every company we have targeted in the past 5 years (23 in total) has caved, including companies that were deemed impossible to beat by organizations with budgets and resources that dwarf ours. With each win, we are one step closer to abolishing the fur industry entirely.

The most recent company we beat, Visa Inc., has an annual revenue of over 40 billion dollars and we easily pressured them to drop Milan Fashion Week in a mere 7 days. All this to say, I feel very confident with my ability to run campaigns and I would be lying to not admit that there is a certain amount of luck involved in winning all of them.

So the question remains, was Ridglan a win? I say absolutely.

The fact of the matter is that these wealthy outsiders would not have sprung into action had the campaign against Ridglan not been able to get their breeding license revoked due to animal cruelty violations and get the whole country talking about abused beagles through bold (and arguably reckless) media stunts that forced the world to pay attention.

Ridglan organizer Aidan states in his article recapping the situation that he believes they likely only had a 1% chance of pulling off this rescue, and while I would never roll the dice on a CAFT campaign with those odds, much less with a rescue that runs the risk of lengthy prison sentences for everyone involved - it is hard not to be impressed with the outcome.

The first round of dogs started being released this past weekend and a network of rescues are stepping up to find homes for the dogs. I have never heard of anything exactly like this happening in the history of our movement and even though it is not something that we can reliably replicate, this detail makes the Ridglan open rescue unique because it transcended the strategic strengths of open and closed rescue. I briefly considered not releasing this article due to how confusing this factor makes bringing clarity to the situation, but felt strongly that its important that the movement not take the wrong lessons away from Ridglan so that we can move forward with a proper understanding how we can leverage different strategies against the industries we aim to dismantle.

A MESSAGE TO ANIMAL LIBERATORS

1,000 activists just came together to liberate the dogs at Ridglan, and I know that many of you are disappointed that you walked away battered, bruised & empty-handed - don’t be.

The open rescue strategy has never been about the individual animals but rather the story, and right now, every newsroom in the world is talking about beagles, and by what is probably more of a miracle than calculated planning - all but 500 of the dogs will be safe.

Cultural change through open rescue and other media stunts is gradual, and it will take decades before our movement is ready to take on vivisection head-on (we have a post digging more into this coming out in a couple of weeks!).

However, the 500 dogs inside Ridglan Farms do not have decades — they are suffering right now. So instead of feeling disheartened by what could have been, or criticizing leadership on how the action was handled with police, those who feel strongly about this could take matters into their own hands and do something about it.

The movement came together in an attempt to do the impossible. And even though the task was flawed from the start, it raises an interesting question. If someone were willing to break the law in the presence of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, what would stop that same person from finding their local animal abuser and showing up in the middle of the night — when no police are there to intervene, armed with nothing more than a pair of bolt cutters and the courage to liberate as many animals their team can carry? The answer is nothing. Stop posting on social media and let the cover of nightfall assist you in emptying every last cage.

A MESSAGE TO LEADERSHIP

First of all, congratulations, you pulled off the impossible (sorta!). While I agree with the internet trolls that this action was incredibly reckless, hats off to you all for having the heart to defy the odds.

I have done my best to reach out to as many of you as possible before posting this opinion piece, and inevitably I was unable to talk to all of you - but since so many of my closest friends and community members were in attendance, I felt this was something I needed to speak about. I truly respect what you are all doing and I promise this post comes from a place of concern, not disapproval.

I am aware that some of the strategies behind the “right to rescue” campaign are left out of this article due to how long it is already. I plan to address this in a future post about my experiences challenging the law in the Supreme Courts for the “right to rescue”, and why it failed. I have also left out some concerns stemming from similar breeder campaigns that led the movement down a 14 year crusade against vivisection that left our movement in shambles and ultimately led CAFT to pivot towards a drastically more vulnerable industry: fur.

Sending love and solidarity to you all, and I hope to continue the conversation in DC at the Grassroots Animal Rights Summit May 15 - 17!