Thank you for sharing this! Looks very relevant to our campaign and I’m looking forward to reading through it more closely.
David Michelson
Karma: 70
Excited to hear the ideas/rationale in the post resonate! I definitely believe that initiatives like IP28 will help make the abolition of animal exploitation a legal/political issue.
Thank you @Jamie_Harris for sharing that research! Looking through it briefly it seems like there is some information there that may actually help me reply to a concern a campaign supporter has. I’m excited to go through it in more depth.
The timing of that article is quite serendipitous! I am always glad to see more groups looking to the suffrage movement for inspiration. I agree that our society can make authenticity challenging (despite society also craving authenticity!), especially when it feels like we have more examples of inauthenticity rather than authenticity to model after.
I suppose this is only tangential to your post, but seeing it reminded me of something I was just recently reflecting on. I wanted to look into whether anyone has written on here in support of reducing their cost of living so that they can sustain themselves on fewer work hours in order to volunteer more of their time. It seems like a variation on Earning to Give—in the sense that by lowering costs you make it easier to earn what you need so that you can give more of your time. I’m interested in reading some of the links you included because even though not directly tied to my own reflection they seem relevant in a way that I find stimulating.
I appreciate your comment and upvote Vasco! I’m glad that it sounds like you see campaigns like IP28 as being able to help stimulate the kinds of public conversations that can benefit other campaigns and lead to improvements in animals’ lives, even without IP28 needing to pass.
I’d definitely be interested in reading more about his life, definitely humanizes him in a way that feels inspiring.
Also yes, I’ve read some of James Özden’s work! In November I wrote a post about his most recent article “Winning is underrated in grassroots movements” that I published to the IP28 campaign website (https://www.yesonip28.org/post/winning). I hadn’t initially thought to post it on the EA Forum, but maybe it could make for a helpful cross-post.
I love how well that excerpt links to the work you’re doing at ASAP! Glad to hear that he brings up vegetarianism often in the autobiography. It’s interesting to read that he was intellectually converted, and I enjoy him speaking to the “no zealot like a convert” phenomenon.
Excited reading your comment Benny! Appreciate you sharing that you also find value in examining past social movements. I’d also enjoy seeing more historical movements incorporated into these discussions.
Out of curiosity, does Gandhi bring up animals explicitly in his autobiography? I read a brief chapter about him in Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism and found his view’s on non-violent resistance and autonomous villages inspiring.
Wanted to share that our Oregon ballot initiative campaign, which is attempting to place on the 2026 ballot a ban on injuring and killing animals, would ban fishing (along with slaughter, hunting, experimentation, lethal wildlife practices, etc.) We’re hoping that by including fish we bring them into the focus of conversation alongside land animals.
If anyone is interested and hasn’t seen it, we made a post a few months ago articulating our theory of change / historical inspiration for our campaign: How can we get the world to talk about animals’ inviolable rights?