19th-century animal rights activists had a lot of moxie. Here’s how to get it back.

Many people think of animal rights and veganism, at least in the West, as a relatively contemporary phenomenon — and a niche one at that. Despite all the buzz surrounding plant-based diets, the share of Americans who call themselves vegan or vegetarian is in the single digits and may have even decreased in recent decades. 

But there was once a time when the animal rights movement had gained such cultural significance that, as Irish playwright, Nobel laureate, and vegetarian George Bernard Shaw remarked in a 1906 address to the London Vegetarian Association, “I am beginning to be astonished at the difficulty I now have in finding anybody who eats meat.” 

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, long before we had high-tech meat alternatives, the Western world saw a surge of interest in meatless diets and animal welfare. This early wave of vegetarianism — a movement I’ll call animal rights 1.0 — was connected to a range of other social justice issues of the day, including women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Suffragist Maud Joachim, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union who was jailed multiple times for her activism, wrote in 1908, “It is a strange fact that the ranks of the militant suffragettes are mostly recruited from the mild vegetarians … and the authorities [in prison] have allowed us a special vegetarian diet.” 

The vegetarian cause also attracted the attention of prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who regularly met with newspaper editor, politician, and vegetarian reformer Horace Greeley at Grahamite boarding houses. Named after anti-meat advocate and graham cracker creator Sylvester Graham, these houses were hot spots for abolitionists, temperance advocates, anti-tobacco activists, and vegetarians. The founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in London in 1824 and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866 were part of the same broader humanitarian and reformist wave. 

While today’s animal rights activists struggle to attain mainstream attention and credibility, these problems did not seem insurmountable to the 19th-century vegetarians. The British socialist, women’s rights activist, and advocate for self-rule in India Annie Besant declared in an 1897 speech that “the food reform movement has outlived the period of ridicule; it is entering on a period … of recognition amongst all thoughtful and intelligent people.” 

Besant and other vegetarian adherents believed it was simply wrong to exploit those who lack power, whoever they were, and connected violence against animals with violence against humans. A vegetarian diet “strikes at the root of all evil,” English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley declared. Advocacy against vivisection, or animal experimentation — on the basis not just of its cruelty to animals but also because it inures those who practice it to cruelty to humans — also enjoyed more legitimacy than it does today. 

The imposing gothic-style cathedral of the 19th-century Vegetarian Society headquarters in London symbolized just how well-positioned the movement appeared to combat the emerging threat of large-scale industrialized animal slaughter more than 150 years ago. Yet despite the successes of concurrent social reform movements like the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and children’s rights, animal rights 1.0 now feels like a distant golden age. 

Far from fulfilling animal rights advocates’ utopian dreams, the 20th century instead saw the rise of modern intensive animal agriculture, along with a vast public-private bureaucracy designed to ensure its profitability and protect it from public scrutiny. Over the last century, America’s per capita meat consumption has nearly doubled. 

The industry worked to push its products onto consumers through a system of generous public subsidies, regulatory capture, and an agricultural policy focused on flooding the market with cheap meat and dairy — all while keeping up the sacred American illusion of a free market. It has thoroughly captured and absorbed the US Department of Agriculture, along with my profession, veterinarians — who have perhaps more influence than any other over the treatment of animals — into its slaughter-industrial complex.

After a period of dormancy, the animal rights movement re-emerged in recent decades with a consumer choice-focused message: “Go vegan!” But against animal agriculture’s economic and political power, urging individuals to restructure their lives around a meatless diet was no longer a strategic ask. The livestock industry recognized what animal rights activists had not: Demand for its products could not be left up to the whims of consumer choice. 

Today, factory farming poses ever-greater threats to society, including the rise of viruses of pandemic potential, climate change, and the moral abomination of large-scale animal slaughter. The time is ripe to take on the meat industry. The activists of animal rights 1.0 showed us that radical change is possible, but to realize their vision, today’s strategies will need to be fundamentally different. Animal advocates are increasingly recognizing a need to focus less on telling consumers to avoid meat and more on changing the systems that force all of us to prop up corporate animal exploitation, whether we buy its products or not.

The vegetarian movement couldn’t compete with the rise of factory farming

The extensive writing of Russian author Leo Tolstoy on vegetarianism and animal slaughter is often summed up in the apocryphal quote: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will always be battlefields.” The reverse may also be true. The world wars of the 20th century shattered the utopian aspirations that had once flourished.

As European farmers became soldiers, American farmers were called to pick up the slack and feed the Allied forces by producing grain and meat that could be easily shipped abroad. In 1917, a meat industry trade journal foreshadowed the coming intensification of US agriculture, writing that “the stern necessity of war has created an undreamed of efficiency that will last long after the war. We, as a nation, must compete with that efficiency if we are going to hold any share of trade in the world.” 

War also annihilated the foundations of the vegetarian movement in parts of the world. At the dawn of World War I, the Russian Empire was home to a vibrant vegetarian community; a Kyiv Vegetarian Society canteen, one of about a dozen vegetarian canteens in the city, served more than 200,000 visitors in 1911. Jews made up the single largest group of diners at the canteens, according to a 1912 survey. By the end of World War II, the Holocaust had decimated Eastern Europe’s Jewish population. 

In the interwar and postwar periods in the US and Europe, governments poured money into agriculture to boost productivity and food security. Agricultural yields improved dramatically, allowing farms to produce more food with fewer inputs. Biomedical innovations like the advent of antibiotics, combined with novel methods of extreme confinement and selective breeding, fueled the rise of modern intensive animal agriculture, along with meat giants like Cargill and Tyson, that could mass produce unfathomable numbers of animals for slaughter. 

The livestock industry recognized what animal rights activists had not: Demand for its products could not be left up to the whims of consumer choice

The animal rights movement couldn’t compete. By 2022, the US slaughtered more than 10 billion land animals for food. Almost paradoxically, the imperative to squeeze as much profit from as few inputs as possible enabled the expansion of animal agriculture, the least-efficient, most resource-intensive form of food production. Producing billions of animals for slaughter requires growing many times more crops to feed them than simply farming plant-based foods — so much that two-thirds of crop calories grown in the US are fed not to humans, but to farmed animals.

For Big Ag’s ascent after World War II, this inefficiency became a feature, not a bug. As historian Ariel Ron put it, “the astonishing profusion of commodity crop production required finding new ways to upsell calories for an affluent consumer society. Meat was the economic solution to the historically unprecedented problem of large structural caloric surpluses.” In short, the agriculture industry could make more money feeding animals for human consumption than it could directly feeding crops to humans.

The levels of meat and dairy consumption that Americans take for granted today are a product not of innate consumer demand but of a kind of welfare state for agribusiness that works to create a guaranteed market for the livestock industry’s products. The federal government has come to serve as animal agriculture’s benefactor, customer, and advertiser. American taxpayers pay animal agriculture tens of billions of dollars through a labyrinthine system of subsidy programs managed by the US Department of Agriculture that shield it from risk and competition. One of the biggest beneficiaries is the dairy industry, which derives about 73 percent of its revenue from some form of subsidy, according to one 2015 estimate. To name one example, milk is given to schoolchildren through the National School Lunch Program, which requires schools to serve milk to millions of students every day at public expense.

To help stabilize prices and ensure farmers’ economic stability, the government buys up vast quantities of surplus products. This has led to massive stockpiles, including the federal government’s well-known “cheese caves.” 

Ensuring a stable food supply in this way does not have to be bad policy — and the federal government does stockpile fruits and vegetables, too. But by propping up our ruinous system of animal agriculture, policymakers allow corporations to extract more than their fair share from taxpayers, while threatening public health and the climate and contaminating our air and water.

The livestock industry is shielded from the costs of these externalities. Federal law even requires the USDA to oversee marketing programs for the meat and dairy industries and other agricultural products, known as checkoff programs, which are funded by fees collected from producers on a portion of their sales.

More insidious than the subsidies and the government-funded advertising campaigns, though, are the livestock industry’s efforts to more directly engineer Americans’ consumption habits, making purchases of their products a reflex rather than a conscious decision. “If you build a habit, something they will do day in and day out, you’ve got a great business. Google is a toothbrush. Facebook is a toothbrush,” Mohan Sawhney, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, was reported saying at a growth and innovation webinar for the National Pork Board. “We’ve got to make pork into a toothbrush — not something that’s exotic, that you do occasionally.” 

The dairy industry’s USDA-sponsored marketing boards have poured resources into getting more of its products into fast food restaurants, where two-thirds of Americans eat at least once a week. Dairy Management Inc., an arm of the Dairy Checkoff program, in 2009 placed scientists in positions at McDonald’s to stuff more dairy into its menu items — adding butter to Egg McMuffins, featuring milk in Happy Meals, and introducing the now-discontinued Mozzarella Sticks and Buttermilk Crispy Chicken — which helped them sell an additional 500 million pounds of dairy products annually, a dairy industry publication reported in 2016. Similar strategies at other fast food chains have reportedly increased the amount of cheese on menu items as much as eightfold.

Where the modern movement against factory farming went wrong

The animal rights movement reconstituted roughly 50 years ago with the publication of philosopher Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975. The now-classic book brought veganism and animal advocacy to a new generation of activists at a time when animal slaughter had been systematized and mechanized in ways the Victorian-era vegetarians could have never imagined. New groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), founded in 1980, and a crop of farm animal rights organizations in the ensuing decades aimed to expose conditions inside animal production facilities and slaughterhouses to persuade the public to stop eating animals. 

For a population that had gotten hooked on cheap meat and dairy, the animal movement’s message was polarizing, judgmental, and restrictive. To be vegan was to be morally superior. 

The activists of animal rights 2.0 successfully drew public attention to the contemporary plight of slaughter-bound animals. Their call to action, though, was one that could only be adopted by those with the personality and mindset to resist social pressure and the meat industry’s glut of publicly subsidized products. It was fundamentally a movement built on individuals’ consumption choices, which made for committed activists but also an insular, fractious community that has struggled to convince a critical mass of the public to change its diet. For a population that had gotten hooked on cheap meat and dairy, the animal movement’s message was polarizing, judgmental, and restrictive. To be vegan was to be morally superior. 

By framing animal exploitation as a consumer issue, animal advocates unwittingly reified animal agriculture’s narrative: that eating their products was a matter of personal choice  — a choice that vegan extremists sought to take away. In reality, the meat industry has fought to ensure that we’re all forced to pay them, whether we buy their products or not. Consumers have no ability to opt out of, for example, paying for the cruel taxpayer-funded exterminations of tens of millions of animals taking place now at poultry giants like Tyson and Jennie-O because of the poultry industry’s failure to adequately prepare for bird flu. Vegan or not, few people want to see these mega-corporations bailed out on the public’s dime. 

In recent years, the animal movement has diversified its work beyond vegan advocacy to tactics from welfare reforms on animal confinements to taking direct action to investing in the next generation of meat alternatives. But it still lacks a coherent strategy to change the foundational agricultural policies that give livestock production the upper hand. 

One promising route to doing that may be through the veterinary profession, a key gatekeeper standing between animal agriculture and the public purse. The public expects vets to advocate for animals’ interests, but right now, organized veterinary medicine is captive to the livestock industry, often serving to “legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale” for animals raised for food, as veterinarian Gwendolen Reyes-Illg told Vox last year. 

The animal agriculture and pharmaceutical industries (the latter profits from selling vaccines, antibiotics, and other medications to slaughter-bound animals) have become heavily entangled with the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the country’s leading veterinary organization, which helps shape federal and state policy on how animals are treated. Livestock companies give veterinary students scholarships, forge partnerships with veterinary schools and production-optimizing animal science programs, and even build their own veterinary schools abroad. 

Earlier this year, the AVMA endorsed federal legislation designed to invalidate one of the most important farm animal welfare laws ever passed in the US: California’s Proposition 12, which bans the pork industry’s confinement of pigs in gestation crates, cages barely larger than their bodies. In the bird flu outbreak of the last few years, the AVMA has played a central role in enabling factory farms’ dependence on ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+), a method being used to mass cull chickens and turkeys on farms hit with bird flu by heating them to death in sealed sheds. It’s one of the most shockingly cruel meat industry developments in recent memory, and it’s being carried out at taxpayers’ expense. 

Livestock producers are only supposed to be reimbursed for culling animals when they use methods that are AVMA-approved. But public records have shown that veterinary officials have pushed for approval for the industry’s preferred kill methods, no matter how cruel, ensuring that meat producers can get taxpayer-funded bailouts. 

A vision for animal rights 3.0

For the meat industry, this alliance with the veterinary profession has paid off abundantly. The next wave of animal activism, animal rights 3.0, will need to take a page from their playbook and work to turn animal professionals — including veterinarians and state and federal agriculture officials — against the systems that have enlisted them into profit-driven animal cruelty. 

Many veterinarians go into the profession because they love animals. Yet in veterinary school, we’re often taught that animal rights is a threat to our profession, that limiting animal experimentation would harm medical progress, and that factory farming is necessary to feed the world. Like the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz doing the bidding of the Wicked Witch of the West, veterinarians obediently recite anti-animal rights narratives, serving the interests of multibillion-dollar conglomerates. 

The vast majority of US veterinarians working today treat companion animals — like cats and dogs — not animals raised for food, and I’ve often observed that rather than rock the boat, they tend to defer to their livestock industry colleagues’ expertise about the appropriate treatment of farm animals. The small percentage of veterinarians who do work in animal agriculture and industry are overrepresented in the AVMA’s decision-making bodies, through greater access and opportunities for positions on the AVMA’s various committees and advisory panels, while veterinarians who vocally oppose industry practices, as I have, are silenced. 

Animal rights 2.0, with its focus on boycott and abstinence from systems that it finds reprehensible, has missed an opportunity to develop activists within the professional community that’s perhaps best positioned to challenge corporate animal abuse. Even veterinarians who already support animal rights and oppose factory farming, when I voice my concerns with the AVMA, have told me countless times, “That’s why I am no longer a member.” That’s exactly how the industry likes it: pro-animal voices lacking the ability to comment on policies and guidelines, join committees, and hold positions of influence. 

Animal rights 3.0 will have to shed the fixation on personal purity that has prevented the movement from shaping policy and regulation. Animal advocates should have a seat at the table in rooms where decisions are made about how animals live and die. Veterinarians are deeply embedded in the USDA — the agency “hires the highest number of veterinarians of any other national organization in the world,” Pat Basu, former USDA chief public health veterinarian, told me in an email, making it a prime opportunity for vets who want to help farm animals. 

Animal rights 3.0 will have to shed the fixation on personal purity that has prevented the movement from shaping policy and regulation

Those whose long-term career ambitions do not depend on the livestock industry have the unique opportunity to obtain positions of influence within the USDA, state agriculture departments, or the AVMA, work to rigorously enforce animal welfare laws that often go ignored, and publicly speak out if they’re prevented from doing their jobs. They can use their roles to question the ongoing denial of rights to animals and advocate for redirecting public funds away from animal agriculture. 

We already have the building blocks for this: A nascent movement of veterinarians is fighting to change the profession’s priorities to align with the interests of animals instead of their corporate oppressors. More veterinarians, including myself, are working with animal rights activists to draw public attention to animal agriculture’s atrocities. We need more organizational capacity in animal rights to develop partnerships with professionals who work with animals, including not just the already converted, but also those who work in industries that exploit animals and are questioning the ethics of their roles. 

The latter phenomenon, sometimes known as “moral injury,” is well-known in veterinary medicine, yet too often, veterinarians are trained to quiet the inner voice that tells them they’re participating in an unjust system. We can empower these people to follow their conscience and protect the most vulnerable among us. Eventually, we can build institutional courage in organizations like the AVMA — a concept coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd for when institutions that have committed grievous harm apologize for wrongdoing, correct the damage caused, and put systems in place to protect victims and whistleblowers in the future. 

There will be backlash, as we’re already seeing today, with meat industry-led state bans on cell-cultivated meat and legislation challenging animal welfare laws. We have to prepare ourselves for a brutal fight.

We can draw inspiration from the animal activists of the 19th century, who achieved so much with far less wealth and resources than we have today, and understood the connection between all forms of social injustice. But they were unprepared for the arrival of a new economic order that would transform the American food environment and trade away the environment, public health, and animal welfare for abundant cheap meat. 

A century later, animal rights 2.0 awakened the public to the horrors of factory farming, but it emerged at a time when it was not yet clear how unlevel the playing field was between vegan advocates and their meat industry opponents. The next wave of animal activism will need to integrate these lessons from the past, building a movement that bridges the divide between activists, veterinarians, and other professionals, and empowers them to confront the systems that lead humanity to inflict large-scale atrocities on the animals with whom we share this planet.