I have often heard this worry that confrontational/attention-grabbing tactics might be counter-productive at an early stage in the movement. Interestingly, in the wake of Just Stop Oil’s soup-throwing, @James Ozden shared with me a twitter thread from a leading academic of social movement strategies arguing basically the opposite: that controversy is most productive in a movement’s early stage, when it needs to raise awareness, compared to a later stage when it needs to win over skeptical late adopters.
I don’t think this is necessarily a question of inside vs. outside, but rather that outside game strategies look different at different points in the movement. And indeed the most controversy-oriented tactics might fit best at the beginning, though I’m not necessarily arguing that.
Looking at major changes societies have adopted in the past, the path to these changes has often been nonlinear. A frequently-discussed example is the U.S. civil rights movement, where the extent of violent opposition reached a near zenith just before the movement’s largest victories in the 1950s and 60s. Gay marriage in the U.S. was another example: in a 15-year period ending three years before marriage equality was decided by SCOTUS, advocates watched a wave of anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendments succeed at the ballot 30-1. Women’s suffrage, the New Deal, and (most extremely) the abolition of slavery were all immediately preceded by enormous levels of opposition and social strife.
How, if at all, does OP account for the frequent nonlinearity of major societal changes when deciding what interventions to support on behalf of farmed animals?