It’s Time to Challenge Animal Agriculture—Without the “Go Vegan” Campaigns

Campaigns against animal agriculture are often intellectually questionable and politically inept. The movement against fossil fuels shows us how to do better.

Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash.

If you spend enough time in climate activist circles, you’ve likely had this experience: at a rally, speaking event, or other public gathering, someone in the audience hijacks the conversation and redirects it towards animal agriculture. The sector is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, they claim, and climate groups seem to be intentionally ignoring the problem. They then demand to know: Why isn’t the movement talking more about meat and dairy?

The question is a good one, although often framed unhelpfully and accompanied by inaccurate statistics. The EPA estimates all agriculture, including meat and dairy farming, accounts for ten percent of U.S. carbon emissions—far less than the more inflated figures floating around the internet, but still significant. The climate movement has indeed failed to challenge animal agriculture with the same force it has brought to campaigns against the extraction of fossil fuels. Ironically, however, this is partly because the groups clamoring loudest about the problem have monopolized the discourse with ineffective ideas.

“If you’re serious about protecting the environment,” PETA’s website asserts, “the most important thing that you can do is stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy ‘products.’” This type of messaging, typical of large animal rights groups, focuses on individual behavior change and distracts from the need for policy-oriented, systems-level solutions. Pseudo-journalistic projects like the film “Cowspiracy” add to the noise by accusing environmental groups of being in on an elaborate plan to cover up meat and dairy’s climate impact. All this has polarized the climate community to the point where some activists are reluctant to engage with animal agriculture at all. Yet, the fact remains: the sector is a big problem which our movement can no longer afford to ignore. How, then, do we end the stalemate?

Climate groups who oppose the activities of coal, oil, and gas companies have spent years developing approaches to campaigning that focus on systems-level change, and lessons from this work can help us develop better ways of challenging animal agriculture. The meat and dairy industry presents unique challenges, so campaigns against animal agriculture cannot simply copy-and-paste strategies that worked against coal or oil companies. However, as someone who has been involved in grassroots climate activism—mostly focused on opposing large coal and gas projects—since the early 2000s, I believe we can learn a lot about how to confront animal agriculture from the campaigns where the climate movement’s track record of impactful work is longest. Here are a few suggestions.

Harness the regulatory process

I got my own start campaigning against fossil fuel infrastructure in the early 2010s, when the coal industry’s political might seemed almost unassailable. Coal companies still met nearly 50% of the country’s energy needs, possessed seemingly inexhaustible financial resources, and had virtually free rein to dictate policy in Congress. Yet, over the course of just ten years or so, the industry crumbled to a shadow of its former self, its reputation in tatters and its political clout irreversibly weakened. Many factors contributed to coal’s astonishing collapse, but among them was one of the most well-organized grassroots campaigns in U.S. environmental movement history.

The Beyond Coal campaign, spearheaded by the Sierra Club and its allies, perfected the art of harnessing the regulatory process to prevent the coal industry from passing the costs of pollution on to consumers. Beyond Coal used litigation and regulatory rulemaking processes to challenge permits that allowed coal plants, mines, and export facilities to operate or begin construction. This required not only lots of committed lawyers, but a grassroots organizing strategy capable of turning out large crowds during opportunities for public input. In the Northwest, where I organized against coal plants and proposed export terminals, Environmental Impact Statement hearings affecting these projects regularly drew hundreds or thousands of people. Beyond Coal’s efforts, combined with market forces like low natural gas prices, led to the blockage or closure of hundreds of plants and fundamentally changed the U.S. energy landscape. By 2019, coal’s share of the U.S. electricity mix hit 25%, with continued long-term decline in the forecast.

One of the turning points in the shift from coal came when the Obama EPA began imposing new Clean Air Act rules to limit ozone, mercury, nitrous oxides, and other toxic emissions. This forced many coal plant operators to either shut down, or install costly pollution controls. Although many Obama-era rulemakings were later undone by the Trump administration, coal companies were on notice that a future administration might subject them to regulation again and the industry’s decline continued under Trump (sure enough, the Biden EPA is again rolling out rules to curb coal pollution).

More recently, approaches used by Beyond Coal have been applied in campaigns against oil and gas development, contributing to the demise of projects like the PennEast and Atlantic Coast pipelines. This shows coal as an industry is not uniquely defeatable. 

Could a Beyond Coal-esque campaign work against meat and dairy operations, or at least the worst polluters like factory farms? There is reason to think animal agriculture has reached a point where it is susceptible to new regulatory scrutiny, much as coal was in the 2010s. This is partly thanks to the efforts of Food and Water Watch, one of the few U.S. environmental groups with a robust national campaign against factory farming, which in September won a case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that will force animal feedlots in Idaho to monitor water pollution from their operations. Food and Water Watch says the victory, part of its wider push to get the EPA to regulate factory farming, provides a precedent for challenging similar operations around the country. 

A coordinated, multi-organization effort modeled after Beyond Coal could capitalize on this opportunity to reduce carbon emissions by making factory farms more difficult and expensive to operate. However, it would require major investments in both legal team capacity and grassroots turnout operations. A comprehensive effort to identify opportunities to challenge meat and dairy operations during rulemaking processes would be necessary, as would a strategy for engaging volunteers all over the country. Climate groups would have to allocate funds and staffing to such an effort in a world where these resources are scarce. It would therefore be exceedingly helpful if animal rights groups would divert some of their own not-insignificant resources away from “go vegan” campaigns to this type of collaborative project.

None of this would be simple. However, under the right conditions a well-coordinated coalition of climate groups and animal rights organizations could be a formidable force for shutting down or significantly curtailing the activities of factory farms. The effect on animal agriculture would be potentially transformative.

Challenge the industry’s social license

Creating bad publicity for corporate targets has long been a staple strategy of environmental activists, who seek to shame bad actors into altering their practices. However, starting in 2013, the climate movement adopted a qualitatively new approach to corporate campaigning: fossil fuel divestment. When higher education institutions, faith organizations, governments, and other entities shed their investments in coal, oil, and gas companies, it sends the message these industries are so immoral that no ethically-principled organization should be associated with them. It isn’t a matter of making fossil fuel corporations tweak their practices; their business model itself is morally bankrupt, and companies that use it should be treated as pariahs.

Fossil fuel divestment has become one of the most impactful divestment campaigns in history, diverting almost $40 trillion worth of funds from coal, oil, and gas company stocks. These kinds of actions affect how governments, businesses, and the public perceive an industry, and arguably set the stage for recent waves of banks and insurers fleeing the fossil fuel sector. Could a similar effort targeting animal agriculture succeed? Like fossil fuel extraction, the more intensive forms of meat and dairy production are based on an inherently unsustainable business model. It seems at least possible that climate groups could construct an inspiring narrative around divestment from such operations, which could isolate the industry much as divestment campaigns have done to coal, oil, and gas companies. However, there are important caveats to consider.

While extracting coal, oil, and gas for industrial-scale energy production is probably never sustainable, meat and dairy farming has been practiced for millennia and there is a good case to be made that some forms are consistent with the goal of reducing carbon emissions (some activists will disagree, but they will have a hard time convincing the broader public). Any animal agriculture divestment campaign must therefore be careful about defining its targets, and would probably do well to focus on a specific form of production like factory farming. This will place the blame for animal agriculture’s climate impact squarely on the biggest polluters.

From the earliest days of the fossil fuel divestment movement, organizations like 350.org chose to focus on the 100 largest publicly-traded coal mining companies and a similar list of 100 oil and gas drillers. This is a big enough collection of corporations that divestment from them feels meaningful, but not so huge that for investors to disentangle themselves is terribly difficult. By focusing on industries at the point of extraction—rather than, say, utilities that burn coal or gas—climate groups have conveyed that fossil fuel producers, not consumers, are primarily responsible for creating a planetary crisis. Any animal agriculture divestment campaign would need to be similarly strategic about defining its targets. Activists would need to decide on a list of companies involved with meat and dairy at the point of production, probably based on a percentage of their business activity derived from factory farms. They should then be prepared to clearly articulate to the public why these corporate players deserve pariah status.

There is also the question of whether a divestment campaign would be strategic at this early stage in the climate movement’s effort to address animal agriculture? Divestment can be a tool for engaging supporters and building a movement’s power base—but it only works if it catches on at a large scale, substantially tarnishing an industry’s image and capturing the public’s imagination. The climate movement in 2013 appears to have enjoyed just the right conditions where embarking on divestment made sense. The burgeoning resistance to fossil fuels needed an inspiring new goal to mobilize around and help it expand nationally. Yet, it wasn’t starting from nothing; earlier campaigns against coal and the Keystone XL pipeline had put in place the organizational resources needed to effectively roll out a campaign like divestment.

The opposition to animal agriculture has yet to build this kind of movement infrastructure, and may need to focus on other kinds of policy-oriented campaigns before it is ready to launch a divestment effort successfully. That said, there is reason to think such an effort might eventually find its first major base of support in the same places fossil fuel divestment did.

It is no coincidence fossil fuel divestment started at colleges and universities. By 2013, climate activists had spent over a decade organizing at higher education institutions through projects like the Campus Climate Challenge, which advocated for clean energy policies at higher education institutions. Climate groups who became skilled at running campus-based campaigns during this period later helped bring divestment to schools where they already had a history of organizing. Today, college vegan and animal rights clubs are among the places where opposition to animal agriculture is most visible, and these organizations could perhaps help launch a future divestment campaign.

This analogy between fossil fuel and animal agriculture-focused campus activism isn’t perfect; groups involved in the Campus Climate Challenge always had an eye toward systems-level change, which helped prime students to embrace divestment. To help college vegan clubs make the same kind of leap, animal rights groups with campus support networks should start working now to engage their base in more policy-oriented campaigns. With the right support from organizations committed to challenging meat and dairy at a systems level, student animal advocates could be the ones to jumpstart a future animal agriculture divestment campaign.

In the meantime, activists should explore other options for campaigns that can help the movement against animal agriculture build real political power.

Push for state-level legislation

Despite decades of effort and some incremental progress, the climate movement has failed time and again in its attempts to get major legislation through Congress. Opponents of animal agriculture can expect to encounter equal difficulty, but should take heart from the relative success of state and local climate policy campaigns. In the early 2000s, state laws like renewable electricity portfolio standards helped start the process of bringing clean energy technologies to scale. More recently, 100% clean electricity mandates have taken state climate policy to the next level. Activists ought to consider how they might replicate this kind of success in the agricultural sector.

Rather puzzlingly, the most high-profile effort to regulate animal agriculture through legislation is currently taking place at the federal level, despite almost no chance of near-term success. The Farm System Reform Act, introduced in their respective houses of Congress by Senator Cory Booker and Rep. Ro Khanna, would, among other things, place a moratorium on new factory farming operations. It is a fine piece of legislation, but will go nowhere in the current political climate and with institutions like the Senate filibuster. Organizing to advance it may be useful if the purpose is to raise the profile of factory farming as an issue and highlight the need for systems-level change. When it comes to actually getting bills passed, however, activists would be better served focusing on the state level.

Last summer, in Oregon, we got a glimpse of what state legislation targeting the dirtiest forms of animal agriculture could look like as well as challenges such efforts will face. Lawmakers in both houses of the Oregon legislature introduced versions of a moratorium on factory farming—but it failed to gain traction, with the senate version never clearing a crucial committee. A contributing factor to this disappointment seems to have been that the state’s climate movement never mustered up the same kind of all-hands-on-deck effort to pass the legislation that has gotten other climate bills in Oregon over the finish line.

Legislation to curb emissions from animal agriculture will not be easy to pass, even at the state level. But then, neither is any other meaningful climate policy. During the same session in which the factory farm bill died, Oregon lawmakers passed one of the most ambitious clean electricity mandates in the country. However, this victory came only after a years-long grassroots campaign, and we should expect legislation targeting animal agriculture to require similar levels of effort. The good news is that investing in state or local legislative campaigns provides activists with the opportunity to build a durable base of engaged supporters, while having a meaningful impact at the regional level. One successful state effort to ban factory farming would reduce emissions at least at a local scale, and could serve as a model for similar efforts elsewhere.

Of course, success will come more readily in some places than others, and there is always the possibility that some targeted companies could simply move their operations to other states (though this assumes access to land and other resources not all meat and dairy producers have). These are the same challenges state-level policy work almost always faces, and they don’t negate the fact that such campaigns are a way to begin shifting industries in a more positive direction. Climate groups focused on sectors like electricity and transportation built much of their grassroots power base through this kind of work, especially from the late ‘00s onward, and activists who want to see more focus on animal agriculture can learn from their example.

Organize (the right kind of) high-visibility actions

Large, visible protests that are well-integrated into broader campaigns play an important role putting wind in the sails of grassroots organizing efforts. They may take the form of large rallies, civil disobedience, or creative street theater, and should highlight the moral urgency of a cause. A small sampling of such actions from the fight against fossil fuels in the U.S. includes the 2011 civil disobedience protests against the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House, “kayaktivist” blockades of Shell’s Arctic oil drilling equipment in Northwest ports in 2015, the Indigenous-led Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, and the massive youth-led climate strike marches of 2019. Some of these efforts contributed to wins like the defeat of Keystone XL. Others fell short of their immediate policy goals, but helped energize later campaigns targeting the fossil fuel industry. There are relatively few examples of protests against animal agriculture that have been similarly large and strategically advisable.

Opponents of animal agriculture do organize protests, sometimes quite dramatic ones. However, while the official goal may be to change government or corporate policy, the message viewers come away with often has more to do with shifting consumer habits. For example, animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) recently targeted a San Francisco In-N-Out Burgers location with a street theater performance where activists in cow costumes were “gunned down” in a skit based on Netflix’s “Squid Game.” The immediate goal was to get In-N-Out to divulge whether factory farms are part of its supply chain—an arcane demand that doesn’t translate well into an inspiring public narrative—but the stunt came across as a more general critique of meat eating, failing to communicate the specific goal in a clear way. It exemplified animal rights activists’ tendency to protest in ways that are attention-getting and often highly creative, but too focused on shaming consumers. 

There are exceptions to the trend. Some other recent DxE protests focused on easily-understood policy goals like pushing California to ban factory farming—although prematurely escalating to aggressive tactics like camping outside the Governor’s house might not attract the hoped-for public support. However, these protests usually involve relatively small numbers of people who go through a lengthy preparation process. Such actions can play an important role in attracting attention and galvanizing public opinion, but are no substitute for larger demonstrations designed for mass participation. Groups who oppose animal agriculture do sometimes join mobilizations organized by the larger climate movement, but often do so in ways that are counterproductive. “Shut Up About Climate Change if You Eat Meat,” read a popular PETA sign at 2019 strike events. This is U.S. animal rights advocacy at its worst: preachy, exclusionary, and focused on diluting the message of an action meant to be about systems-level change. 

Activists elsewhere have been more adept. In July 2020, Greenpeace Aotearoa (the New Zealand branch of the international Greenpeace organization) blockaded the entrance to a factory making synthetic nitrogen fertilizer used by the dairy industry. Thanks to New Zealand’s already relatively clean energy grid, meat and especially the country’s large dairy sector have been a much bigger focus for the climate movement there than in the U.S. In November, New Zealand activist group Rise Up for Climate Justice planned a mass mobilization targeting dairy producer Fonterra. Although it had to be scaled back due to COVID concerns, the organization encouraged supporters to join a series of smaller actions, including one where activists locked themselves to the gate of a Fonterra facility. All of this is part of an effort to get the New Zealand government to address dairy emissions as part of its climate agenda. The campaign’s tactics are reminiscent of those used by U.S. climate activists who have blockaded construction of oil pipelines and interfered with the supply lines of companies building fossil fuel infrastructure.

Large protests, when effective, serve two important functions. They focus public attention on an issue and increase popular support for action, as polls suggest the 2019 climate strikes did for climate change. At the same time, they demonstrate to policymakers that a large, organized base of supporters already exists. Opponents of animal agriculture will need to accomplish both these things to counter the pushback they will encounter. Last July, New Zealand farmers rolled into major cities on tractors to demonstrate against climate policies that affect agriculture, and U.S. activists must be prepared to respond to or overwhelm similar backlash. There will be the usual apocalyptic claims from industry about real or imagined price increases and the impact on consumers. Here, however, opponents of animal agriculture may actually have an advantage over climate campaigns targeting fossil fuels used for electricity generation or transportation.

In our modern world, electricity—and, in rural areas, cars—really are necessary for basic functions of daily life. The same is not true of meat or dairy-based foods. Many people perceive cheap animal products as a necessity, but this is a cultural prejudice born from decades of government policy that favors highly polluting forms of mass livestock production. Our best hope for the climate, at least in the medium-term, is probably a managed, just transition to a regulatory regime where the most carbon-intensive ways of raising animals are no longer economically viable, and more sustainable alternatives are incentivized. For most people, animal products will become a more expensive side dish consumed in small quantities, not a dietary staple. There will be pushback, but it will be rooted more in cultural resistance to change than genuine inability to adapt.

Strategic demonstrations can help counter the inevitable backlash against policies that discourage the worst forms of meat and dairy production—both by bolstering public enthusiasm for change, and by showing policymakers a large segment of the populace strongly supports reforms. Building the capacity to organize such mass actions should be a major priority as the climate movement seeks to more effectively challenge animal agriculture.

Moving forward

At present, the best answer to the question, “Why isn’t the climate movement talking more about animal agriculture?” is that the conversation has been hijacked by groups promoting individual behavior-based solutions to a systems-level problem. This hampers efforts to try out more effective approaches to campaigning—but the climate movement desperately needs to embark on this kind of experimentation. I have offered four suggestions for strategies that seem worth pursuing, each taking inspiration from the more politically sophisticated resistance to coal, oil, and gas companies. Challenging fossil fuel companies is where the climate movement has built its strongest track record of successes so far, and it makes sense for activists concerned about other sectors of the economy to learn from this hard-won experience. 

Those who want to see climate activists focus more on animal agriculture are right about one thing: emissions from the meat and dairy industry are a major issue which the movement cannot leave unaddressed. We urgently need a better toolbox of tested options for campaigning against animal agriculture, lest climate goals be undermined by a failure to deal with this source of emissions. Thus, the sooner we leave behind counterproductive, individualistic solutions and make room for campaigns that focus on systems-level change, the better.

Nick Engelfried is an environmental educator, activist, and writer living in Washington State. He tweets @nickengelfried.