The Activist Facing 31 Years in Prison for Rescuing Puppies

Correction: We stated in the video that Dean faced up to 12 years in prison. Since filming, he has been hit with 2 additional felony charges, increasing his potential sentence to 31 years.

Dean Guzman Wyrzykowski is an animal rescuer who is facing 31 years in prison for saving nearly 2,000 beagle puppies from torturous conditions in an animal testing facility.

This is not a simple story about a good guy versus bad guys. It's a conversation about what it means to have a moral code that supersedes legal and social norms. Dean has received support coming from unexpected corners from MAGA leaders to militant vegans. Dean speaks with the clarity of someone who has thought deeply about ethics, who understands the weight of his choices, and who has accepted the consequences.

Join us for a heavy and searching conversation about how Dean came to see direct animal rescue as a form of resistance, the day his team saved nearly 2,000 puppies and what they found, why his case has unified people across the political spectrum, what prison means to him now, and what it costs to live according to your convictions when the law says you're wrong.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

I am excited to go to trial on felony charges because I believe in the goodness of our human nature.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

My guest today is Dean Guzman-Werchachowski. Dean is one of the animal rights activists that recently broke in and rescued 1,500 Beagle puppies from Ridgland Farms. Ridland Farms is this animal testing facility in Wisconsin that, even by the standards of our currently pretty lax animal welfare laws, is alleged to have committed some pretty heinous acts of animal cruelty. For saving the puppies, Dean and three of his compatriots are facing 12 years in jail. I wanted to have Dean on because I find that we're living through this really charged political moment where morality, questions of morality, are really at the forefront. And there's a sincere belief that a lot of people have that they don't just disagree about the facts with the other side, but that they have entirely different moral codes. And I find that that framing is not just incorrect, but also fundamentally unhelpful. I find that in reality, most of us actually agree on how people and beings should be treated. The part we disagree on is who that concern applies to. How big is that circle that you draw? For many, it's their family and their town and their city. For some it's the country, for others, it's all of humanity. And for yet others, like Dean, includes humanity and all other non-human animals, as he would call them. But once you take his framing, once you take anyone else's framing of morality, everything he did makes perfect sense. All of a sudden, it doesn't seem crazy if you believed what he believes, that 1,500 beings worthy of your concern are currently being tortured and caged, you would do exactly what he did. You would break in and save them, risking all the jail time and personal harm you had to. And I find that this way of looking at the world gives me much more compassion and empathy for people I disagree with. Because I'm able to look at their actions under the context of their moral code, not under my moral code. That's why I found this conversation to be really interesting. Look, I eat meat, but I have questions about how far my circle of concern should go. And I think that at a larger level, you're seeing everybody dealing with that question with Dean's case. Dogs are, for whatever reason, in a group of their own. And I find that everyone from MAGA Republicans to vegan Berkeley animal rights activists are all on Dean's side on this one. And I just think it's creating a really, really interesting moral debate right now in America. I think you'll find this conversation really interesting. With that, I bring you Dean Guzman Richardsky. Dean, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, Chai, thanks for having me. Uh, I want to start with this. Let's let's start at a very abstract level. Um, when you were growing up, what was your relationship with uh just the concept of morality? Like, what do you think was the moral code that your parents were trying to raise you with?

SPEAKER_04 3:24

Chai, I I knew this was the right interview to come on. This is that's a great question, man. Um I think I was a morally serious kid. Yeah. Um I grew up Catholic. My family is three-quarters Filipino and uh one quarter Polish. And just like very kind of like traditionally religious. Yeah. Um and I remember going to Sunday service uh, you know, every week and listening to the pastor talk about what does it mean to live a good life and a righteous life, right? And to have duty and to serve God and to, you know, be good to our fam family and our parents. And I'm not quite a um uh a religious person or Catholic nowadays, although that um I do feel very spiritual for various reasons now. Um, but I think it just kind of like ingrained in this sense of like duty in um and I was like a particularly enthusiastic Catholic kid growing up among my youth group. I remember going to like the Catholic youth groups and always wanting a new group if my youth group fell apart. Um and I think a lot of that kind of interact with my brother. That's really the core thing here. Um I have one older brother, his name is Brandon, and he uh he has autism and is generally very different from many other uh kids growing up. Um and I think just it it gave me a real soft spot for difference. You know, like he doesn't talk like other kids, he doesn't as far as I know think like the other kids. He's non-verbal, and um and I think so we didn't have like that normal relationship between you know brothers that you might expect. And I think his neurodivergence just taught me that consciousness is such a fluid spectrum on this planet, and I think it gave me a soft spot for animals, it just never made sense to me that there is this clear line that we can draw between the rational human being and the irrational animal, right? We all show up in such different ways in this world. And then to see my brother, frankly, in just a lot of suffering growing up. Um in ways I still don't fully understand, um, but just he had such chemical imbalances in his brain where he was off in just constant confusion and misery, and he didn't know why the people around him were saying the things that they were, or telling him to do the things that didn't make sense to him. And it just always made me think like I wish I could do more for him. Yeah. And I think a lot of my activism for animals is really channeled into just wanting to help the vulnerable beings who I I see so much of my brother in.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah. Um you kind of you kind of touched on this already, but I'm curious about growing up, you have this moral code, right? You feel the sense of responsibility. Um how big was the circle that you drew for who you felt that responsibility towards? Because I find to set this up a little bit more, I find a lot of times people that we believe have vastly different moral codes than us, right? I think there are a lot of meat eaters uh or people who wouldn't consider themselves animal rights activists. I find when they talk to an animal rights activist, they would be surprised by how much you have the exact same morality. You're just drawing a different sized circle around how many people, how many beings you include in that circle, right? So, growing up, how tight was that circle for you? Like what who did you feel a responsibility, a moral responsibility towards?

SPEAKER_04 7:54

Okay, this is that you've read some of my blogs. Uh, I have some, yeah. It's fantastic. I love this. Yeah, man. It's a great question. I mean, fundamentally, this is why I actually have so much optimism that the animal rights movement is going to succeed. Because this is not something that is extraordinarily different from the average American. I think on a basic level, every human being wants animals to live natural lives and for them not to suffer. I think to your point about moral codes, I think I I reflect a lot on my family here. And I think on one hand, I think growing up with my brother gave me a very deep sense of just the stakes of intervening and suffering. Um, it felt very personal to me. And I think there was also just like a helplessness there for me as a kid. Like there's just nothing I can do for him. Right. I'm not a doctor, and I remember one of the most tense moments of my childhood is when I was a freshman in high school, and my mom says in the car, Dean, you need to go to UCLA and become a doctor so that you can heal your brother. Wow. And I kind of just exploded on her.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:25

I told her, What kind of pressure are you doing to put that on a kid? And so I think the flip side of seeing my brother suffer is this helplessness that says I have to look beyond. This my family is just not a place where I can where I can act. And I think I've found other ways to channel that. And I think that instinct, frankly, I think is just very validated by the nature of morality.

SPEAKER_03 10:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:01

That our families, deeply important as they are to us, are not the only source of moral importance on this planet. We are all interconnected, and I don't think our duties stop at the front door. Yeah. You know, and I think Peter Singer is a famous Princeton moral philosopher who has made this point probably more forcefully than anybody else. And he may be, well, he is known as perhaps the world's most influential living philosopher for his work on morality. And he has this paper, um, I believe the 1971 moral philosophy paper called Famine Affluence and Morality, where he is looking at famines happening around the world. I believe, um I forget exactly where, but there were just so many people starving to death from war and conflict. And he charges um just ordinary Americans for failing a moral duty to intervene. Yeah that just for basically dollars, or maybe just a few hundred dollars, you could provide life-saving aid to someone around the world. And there's a child who could live and survive if you were to only give up something so trivial as a new pair of shoes. And I think this is challenging our moral instincts. I think our species has evolved and survived because of our instincts to cooperate and to help one another, but primarily within this kind of local social unit, a tribe, really. Yeah. And there's and so we now have a global society where we are able to affect people around the world, we're able to affect animals around the world. And we have extraordinary capabilities. We have AI technology, right? We have the ability to go into space, right? With plans from many folks here in the city of San Francisco to colonize space. And just with the extraordinary capacities we have as a species, they have run so far beyond often just our base moral instincts, which often keep a moral circle pretty closely tied around us and our family and our immediate communities. Yeah. And I think for us to survive as a species and to just to live, frankly, the righteous lives that we as a species are destined to do, we have to expand this moral circle in a way that I'm not even sure that a circle would still exist. I think every single creature on this planet, if not this universe, who suffers, who experiences, who has desires, those desires matter. Yeah. And I think it's on all of us to take those desires seriously.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Well, there's um, was it Peter Singer that had that uh the famous thought experiment, right? Of um uh, you know, if your neighbor was starving to death, um, you would intervene immediately. Yeah, this is the Drowning Child thought experiment. Just for people that don't know, please add to this if I'm missing anything. But if you came across a pond and you saw a little girl drowning in it, you would do everything in your power to save her. But the reality is that effectively, hundreds of thousands of little girls are drowning every single day. You just don't see them. Yeah. Right. And why should our moral responsibility towards them be contingent on whether or not we can see them, whether or not we are physically close to them, right? Exactly. Um so I want to I want to kind of bring that to you for a second. Um so you have this moral understanding, right? And you're kind of tussling with it. A lot of it is shaped by your relationship with your brother, a lot of it is shaped by your relationship and the limitations of your relationship with your family. Um at what point do you start to think about? I guess let's even make it much simpler. I'm gonna guess, growing and knowing that so much of your family is uh Filipino, uh, there was a lot of meat being consumed. Um what um what and how much did you think about animals growing up?

SPEAKER_04 14:21

Yeah. Um I mean, I was a sensitive kid. I remember elementary school, my childhood best friend next door would stomp on snails. Um, and I would just be horrified. I've joined him before, you know, like kind of pouring salt on a snail. Because we all wanted to see what happens, right? And just even now I'm just thinking back on that snail and how horrific that must have been for that little creature, right? I mean, they have pain receptors, right? And their entire skin is just made of like this like soft membrane mucus that like senses everything around them. And to have salt kind of just poured on that, right? And just burn them to death. I remember doing that as a kid and just regretting doing that. And then so for my, you know, that I think a lot of kids just have that instinct, right? I think it people ask me all the time, like, how did you develop such compassion for animals? And I don't think I developed it. I think it's something that we're all born into, and society just beats it out of us. You look at Disney stories, right? Almost every Disney story is an animal just trying to help those around them, right? And we there's something about that instinct that has been beaten out of us. And I think a lot of our work as animal activists is just unlocking the natural instinct inside. Um, but you asked me about like how did I kind of like think about animals growing up? That was kind of like my first initial memory of what the snails. My first real memory thinking about animals and vegetarianism was when I went to the Philippines as a kid in fifth grade. And I saw Lechon, the very traditional like pig on a table, right? And there's like this small baby pig, essentially, right? Maybe like this long, maybe like two, three feet long. And you just I saw them on the table, like with their paws in front of their face, their face down, and you can, they were fried, right? It's like the entire, and I realized this is an animal, right? This is an individual who was dead here. And I remember just being in fifth grade and just backing as far away as I could from that table. And I didn't make much of it at the time, but a year later, I went vegetarian basically out of nowhere on a school field trip, and I didn't even know why.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:47

But I think it it made that connection. And part of this is cultural too, right? Like I grew up in the United States, uh, born in Los Angeles, and we didn't have that kind of like lechon in my family, like immediately growing up, because my cousins were mostly in the Philippines. I didn't really have that. Um, but then to kind of like immediately see, like, oh, this is an animal on a table, and for all of my family to be dancing and cheering and culturally like getting excited to dig into this pig with forks. I think it was an alienating experience, honestly. Yeah, I didn't feel super connected to my Filipino heritage growing up. And it's hard to say in retrospect, but I I wonder how much of it was just feeling this alienation as like this 12-year-old vegetarian vegan. I went vegan just a few months after I went vegetarian as a child. Partly because I just saw PETA factory farm videos online. Um So I don't know. Yeah, it's it's an alienating experience.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Yeah. Um I share a lot of those experiences. I think maybe maybe to take it at a at a broader level first, right? And then I want to actually like get not facts, but I want to get your understanding of of our relationship with animals in a second. Yeah, yeah. I it's interesting how much of this is cultural, right? I think in uh one of the bigger challenges that I find, just as a layman, uh the animal rights movement faces in uh in this world are actually cultural barriers, right? For for so many of my friends, for my Chinese friends, for my Korean friends, to stop eating meat would be tantamount to not being able to enjoy a meal with their family anymore, right? Yeah, that's real. And it is a that's a really big thing. And it's and if you want to really go further into it, right? I mean, like the idea of you know, one roasted pig in the middle and everybody's dancing around is so primal, right? Like it's beyond culture. It's like this kind of this deeply primal thing. That is not a moral justification of anything. Um what I'm trying to like get at is that we have these like thousands of years of like baked culture and traditions and like instincts around how we treat animals that now show up. It feels to me like a like a bug that just never got taken out of the code, right? Yeah. And we're just putting it right. And it's like it just is still there. And now we're living these, you know, the classic uh thing. I've I'm sure I've said it 700 times on the podcast, but like the big problem for humans and with humans is that we have um primordial brains, medieval institutions, and god-like technology, right? And so we have these like primordial brains that love the idea of ah, yes, we hunted a big animal and we roasted and we all feasted together and then and we all danced around it. And meanwhile, we're like communicating like truly like aliens from a thousand years from today, right? It's just it feels like such a relic in our society. And I by the way, I say all of this, I should clarify for the podcast. Uh I eat meat, and it is far and away the thing in my life that I'm the most torn about. I have had bouts of vegetarianism. I like you, after one experience in high school, gave up meat for years and have had sort of like a contentious, complicated relationship with it. Um, I mean, it's only complicated by the fact that I don't think I should do it, but I still do it. It's the my biggest moral inconsistency. Um, but but anyway, this is that's awesome. You went vegetarian in high school. Uh that's very funny. We'll we'll we'll get into we'll get into this in a second. But actually, I want to bring this back to like, let's now take uh give me your analysis sort of of like how do we, as let's just say American society, right? Like, what is our relationship with animals to you? Like, do we because it seems like it's more than just exploitation, but ex it's also not not exploitation, right? What is what is our like as a society, what is our relationship with animals to you?

SPEAKER_04 21:06

Yeah, it's a good question. I think the short answer is tyranny. It's tyranny. So Peter Singer, uh, who we just talked about, is also an avid animal rights advocate. And he wrote a book called Animal Liberation. It's like the seminal work on the moral philosophy of take of why animals are not different from human beings in terms of their moral status. And the first line in his book is this is a book about the tyranny of human over non human animals. And it's a to think about that tyranny, right? And if you're, you know, if if you're to pick this up as as uh just an ordinary person, right, and see, oh, I I care about you know. Generally good things. I'm a progressive. I care about social change, right? Um, and I try to like eat less factory farm meat. And then you read this book and you say, Oh, I I I am a tyrant. That's it's a strong claim. And fundamentally, I think one that is true. There are roughly 10 billion land animals in the United States in factory farms, and they live in the most brutal conditions you can imagine. You have chickens raised for meats who are raised so quickly that their bones collapse under their weights and they cannot stand up or bring themselves to food and water. You have these large factory farms that we've been inside of, that I've been inside of, where chick these chickens maybe 10 or 10% or more die before ever reaching slaughter because their legs are too broken and weak to bring them to food and water. And that is an experience that is common to billions and billions and billions of animals every year in the United States alone. Not to mention the 80 billion land animals in factory farms across the world. I think if you were to take the suffering of pigs and cows and chickens in American factory farms alone, it would outweigh the totality of suffering and happiness of all human beings on this planet. And we can disagree on the moral significance of that suffering. Yeah. But in strictly objective scientific terms, the suffering of animals is profound, it is mind-blowingly significant, and it's happening because of us. So our relationship with them is broken, and we need to fix it.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

When did you start to think of this being um your calling in life? That was there a moment, was there, was it a series of moments that you started to think, okay, this is what I'm gonna dedicate my life to?

SPEAKER_04 24:25

Yeah. I mean, I went to community college in Los Angeles and I was like, I'm vegetarian, I'm really passionate about this, but like what am I gonna do for my career?

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Yeah, like what am I gonna do?

SPEAKER_04 24:35

Like we can't be professionally vegetarian.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:38

At least not at the time.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Fair enough. I guess some would argue you found a good way to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:43

I think we found a way. Yeah. God bless, man. Um yeah, but I didn't see any pathways for that, right? Um and so I came to Berkeley, I transferred, and I was studying political economy. I wanted to go to law school. And I was planning on working in basically government and set myself on law and economics. I wanted to do antitrust litigation and kind of fight these big corporations uh that just really screw people over. Um, and that's when I met animal activists at UC Berkeley. They were just handing out flyers and telling people to go vegan, and they gave me a headset and they said, Hey, do you want to see where uh free-range eggs come from? And I was actually vegetarian at the time because as a middle school kid, it was too hard to be vegan, right? I was like, Oh, well, my friends are having ice cream, uh ice cream birthday cake parties, and I can't join. So I stopped being vegan, a vegetable vegetarian for um most of my childhood. Um and then I put on this headset of a cage-free egg farm, a Whole Foods cage-free egg farm, that they, this person in front of me, had either personally investigated or was like part of a group that did. And I just saw the brutality of it. I mean, you're looking down this VR headset, and you're in this actual space, and it's just this endless dark hallway with two rows of chickens in cages layered on top of one another, screaming, and you hear their screams in the middle of the night, right? These clearly the chickens had never been able to even just hear silence in their lives. Yeah, right. And it helped me understand how severe the suffering was, and I think even just in that context where I'm looking in this VR headset, yeah, in the middle of UC Berkeley, the so-called most progressive campus in the nation. And people are just walking by, kind of smiling at the vegans, saying, uh, that's their little thing. I don't really want to talk to them right now.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:02

It was a jarring experience, right? And it just made me think this is one of the most significant issues on the planet, and no one is talking about it. And it just made me feel like this is what I have to do. And shortly after I joined them and became an activist.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

And um, what role did uh effective altruism play? When did that enter your consciousness?

SPEAKER_04 27:26

Much later. Much later. And I will say, too, on the last point. Um Yeah, I wanted to become a lawyer when I was in college. I was taking practice LSATS. Um, and I think I realized that even if I do go into governments and public service, our political and legal systems are so broken that it is extraordinarily difficult for someone to go inside and create meaningful change, right? And that's part of what these activists help me understand, that there are other ways to create social change. You can organize from the outside, you can organize grassroots movements, you can do what people call nonviolent direct action and essentially just break into farms. And if you believe that we as a species are tyrants over non-human animals, then let's get these animals out and just start freeing them. And we can challenge these broken institutions to say, okay, I helped this animal. What are you gonna do to me? And just see what happens.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

So this is this is, I'm glad you brought this up. I want to, I want to really center the conversation around this.

SPEAKER_04 28:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Um, let's say someone can really put themselves in your shoes in your early 20s on that Berkeley campus, right? You've at this point, we know this kind of like dense and complicated morality that you grew up with, right? Uh affected by so many things, and you've kind of become aware of the suffering of animals and the tyranny of humans towards animals. And you are now, you find yourself on the Berkeley campus, fully ready to give your life to this cause, right? I want to understand what you either at that moment and if it's changed, then now. Um, if if somebody's in your shoes at that point, right? Somebody is dean, ready to give their life to the animal rights cause, um, how do you understand the most effective places to this? Is why I wanted to ask about EA as well. Yeah, um, what is the best use of somebody's 60-year career in animal rights? Like, what is the biggest impact you can have? How do you think about that? Yeah, based off of the math that you've done or the understanding you have of this industry, what what where is the best place for somebody to spend their time?

SPEAKER_04 29:44

Yeah. I love the question. I think the most fundamental answer is just not even a strategy or a tactic. It's it's a it's a belief. The first thing that we should do is believe that we can create a world where animals are free and where we end the torment of these creatures. And if we start from that belief, then we can find out what it would take to make that happen in my lifetime. And this is the vision that really inspired me when I was a a college senior. Um, I mean, I had been vegetarian, vegan on and off for maybe 10 years at that point, right? And here was this man named Wayne Sheng. He was this MIT PhD educated uh attorney who said, Look, man, if you want to create change for the world, don't go to law school. You should become an activist and basically just join us in breaking into farms and organize the movement for people breaking into farms and getting animals out. And the whole vision was that if we believe that animals need to be rescued from these situations, let's not sit on our hands and let the government do it. Yeah. Let's just do it ourselves. And this is going in a long tradition of what we call nonviolent direct action. It's essentially what Gandhi said about be the change you want to see in the world. Yeah. And I want people to understand how profound that is coming from Mahatma Gandhi, right? This is a man who organized as SALT marches with thousands of people against a tyrannical British Empire that had openly gunned down thousands of people in open fields who were unarmed and nonviolent. Right. And Gandhi had organized these people to do things like raid a salt factory because the British Empire had constrained the supply of salt and said, like, you are not allowed to consume this salt, maybe, uh, because you are just a peon, you're an Indian, right, ordinary person. And so they said, Look, we don't think that this is just. Let's just go in there and take the salt ourselves. Yeah. And he knew that when they tried this, they were going to be brutalized. And I believe they did this nonviolently, and they were just gunned down in the in the streets.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:26

And that's the spirit of what Gandhi meant by be the change you wish to see in the world. That this moral circle, this moral universe, is so much more vast than our immediate selves, than our families, even our communities. That we need to go and create change. And if we do that, it will tap at some of the deepest instincts in our human species. Our better angels of our nature, if you will. Because Mahatmas Gandhi. Sorry, Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi believed that humans are so fundamentally good inside that if we are forced to reckon with the question of what does a good and just world look like, even in the face of extreme violence, that people will see people getting gunned down in the streets and say, that is not okay. I don't want to be part of an empire that does this. Yeah. And that is how the British Empire collapsed its rule over India. Um, so I think nonviolence is and a fierce nonviolence that says I'm not just going to be uh abstaining from violence on myself. I am going to directly intervene in violence, put myself, my body, between the victim and the blade. Yeah. And say that if I do that, ordinary people are going to agree with me and say, this is the world we need to create. So it's kind of my answer.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Um, we need to do a separate podcast about like um two to three days long, where you and I just talk about Gandhi and philosophy. I would love that. It is um it is a an endless area of fascination for me. My mom was a voracious meat eater, her whole family was. Uh, and then she read Gandhi's autobiography and gave it up forever as a 13-year-old and is now, you know, nearing 70, has not eaten meat in uh 57 years. Um I was raised on the autobiography too. And I I find it is masterful, not just a biography, the the the body of work, and this philosophy around like how do you bring attention to a cause? How do you expose? I think like one of the great points of genius that he had, and I think it relates your work with direct action, is how do you hold up a mirror to a society that on the surface, or um, you know, in its words, has these high sort of uh you know, high mind is high-minded morals, but in its practice is so far from them, right? And I think he was such a political and kind of moral genius around the idea of like, I mean, it's for those that don't know, you just did a great job of explaining the philosophy of it, but the British Empire made it such that Indians had to buy salt, had to buy British made salt. And Gandhi found this, was almost tickled by this idea and also, of course, aggrieved by it and offended by it. And he just said, What if I just marched to the sea and made my own salt? Now, that is the genius of that idea is that it's so simple, right? And the there's a forrest gumpy aspect of it, like if you march, people will join. And the longer the march, the more press coverage it'll get, right? And it's all building up to this 80-year-old man who is gonna just walk up to the ocean and hold up some seawater, right? And the British Empire, with all of its high-falutin values of like uh uh of equality of all men and of democracy, is like sweating in their boots, not knowing what to do when this 80-year-old man reaches the water, right? And I think there's like such a poetic, beautiful genius to like pointing out the absurdity. Um, and I think and then the other part of it that like would be uh its own two-day long podcast is if you're ever interested, um, I really I'll send it to you afterwards. It's this poem that was Gandhi's favorite poem, and India's first uh Nobel laureate uh Tagore wrote the poem as an anthem for the Indian uh independence movement. It's called uh Ikola Cholo, and it's uh every Bengali kid has a tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. Like it is a it's a really powerful concept, um, which is Ekalacholo literally means in Bengali, it means a walk alone, and which also sounds like a green day song, but it's uh the idea is because you know you have this mathematical problem when you're running um a movement for any cause, right? Which is that any one person will be too small to be able to have enough of an impact. And that is, among other things, very demoralizing, because then you start to feel like, well, I can't take down the most powerful empire in history. I can't take down the suffering of 80 billion beings. Maybe I should do nothing, right? And demoralize uh demoralization is paralyzing. And this poem, what it does, and it's it shows up, there's a reason why it's gone, these favorite poem. It shows up everywhere is this idea of like, okay, if you put out a siren's call, you put out a call for a cause and no one comes. Um, these are the first lines of the poem, no one comes to attend your gathering to follow your march, walk alone. Um, and it repeats that phrase throughout and says, if you try and you try and you try and nobody comes with you, walk alone. And I think a an aspect of direct action that I mean, I've heard you talk about, but I I don't think is like discussed enough is how much it helps overcome the personal um, let's say, hesitation with personal demoralization, right? There is something very empowering about taking direct personal action, which I think like beyond just the fact that it it tries to solve the problem that exists today, it is also at a personal level, I think, very empowering. And if you get enough people to feel empowered, then you know you can have bigger impact. Anyway, all of this is to say, let's, let's, let's bring this down to a very specific moment of personal action, right? Direct action. Uh, tell me about your first uh what is the term for it? Uh I I want to use the clinical scientific term for this. Is it a uh break-in can't be the right term? Is it a planned release? What is what's the term? We call it a rescue. A rescue. That that makes a lot of sense. Uh what tell me about your first rescue? Like you give me yes, the details of it, uh, but also like how were you freaking out? Were you nervous? Were you scared? What what were all the feelings you were going through? Yeah, just talk me through the day or the days of your first rescue.

SPEAKER_04 39:21

Yeah, it was a September morning, uh, my senior year of college at Berkeley. And I had been part of this animal activist group called Direct Action Everywhere for maybe a couple months now. And then after a year, I was like, you know what? Like, frankly, I wasn't just succeeding in my law school aspirations. I wasn't getting like the summer legal internships that I wanted to. And I found a job application for Direct Action Everywhere, this animal activist group. I was like, Oh, I remember these guys. And they said, come be a legal intern with us. We want you to do uh corporate paperwork for our 501c3 corporate entity and uh maybe even do political lobbying with us. And so I actually applied and I joined them to lead their local political lobbying efforts. And I spent the next few months helping people knock on doors for local city council candidates who had committed to introducing consumer transparency legislation, essentially letting people know if their local Berkeley uh animal products were coming from factory farms. And the longer that I spent with the group, I got to understand how they did uh their more activist kind of stuff. And they said, This political stuff is awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, Dean. Also, do you want to break into farms with us?

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Was that like a did they say that in a hushed tone?

SPEAKER_04 40:42

No, actually, thank you for catching me on that. No, it's this was open. And so the entire thing that we do is called open rescue. And essentially, in this spirit, like you mentioned of Gandhi, right? Be the change you want to be in the world, be the change that you want to see in the world, and do so openly so that others are inspired to join you as well. And so I saw their videos of them walking into these factory farms in the dead of night, just at you know, midnight, walking in through an unlocked door, risking trespass and burglary charges to document the conditions inside. And when they found an animal, I remember just watching the video, like they said, this chicken inside this massive factory farm, she is mangled, her feet are curling around wire that struggling to even stand. Um, and they said, we have to check, take this chicken out, and they did. And that video of this open rescue of this chicken was so profoundly inspiring to me. And they then brought the chicken out, not just of the factory farm and the doom and gloom, but to sanctuary. And you see her walking around in the grass, looking and sniffing at the grass and looking up at the sun. And that it was inspiring and hopeful. And to know that after a decade of being a vegetarian who was abhorred by the suffering of factory farms, that these people were willing to just say, let's just walk in and take the animals out.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

It's beautiful. Must have felt great too. Was it well at a personal level, it must have felt great to do that.

SPEAKER_04 42:14

Uh so yeah, so I watched the videos, right? And they said, All right, Dean, here's your chance. Uh, and they they had like a three-hour kind of workshop um where they showed me their whole strategy and science behind social change, right? Social change doesn't just come from lobbying our legislators or running office, it comes from organizing social movements. Uh the our line is uh um, I think find your voice, find your friends, and fight like hell. And just work with people around you, ordinary people, and just start being the change you want to see in the world, taking animals out of farms. And so I I joined them. Yeah, that was that was a fun, that was a fun day, man. Remember getting into a van uh in this tennis, uh basically like in this tennis court in in Berkeley that we gathered at. And I got in with essentially strangers. I hadn't known most of these people going to an undisclosed location. I didn't even know where we're going. And then we show up at this farm, wait around for a little bit, um, and then we walk in and we march in with peace signs and flowers, and they start the live stream. And now it's like this big kerfuffle, right? They are now something like hundreds of people walking to this farm in broad daylight, risking trespass and burglary charges, saying there are animals inside here who are being falsely marketed as humane and cage-free, and we need to take them out. Right. And so we did, and I remember uh the chaos of that day of the farm employees driving around us in like these vehicles saying, like, get out of here, like you're stealing our stuff, right? And calling the police and you can hear the sirens and you're going up and opening cages. And I didn't go inside the buildings, I did walk around. Um, and so I helped set up a medical tent. On site. And I remember being scared. And I actually told them I bailed and I said, Hey, like this is too hot for me. I can't do this right. And I walked away and kind of just joined people kind of just standing out on the property. And so activists were then coming out and bringing chickens for us to hold to show to the cameras what was happening inside. And an activist handed me this body of a chicken who was unrecognizable as an animal, just covered in what looked like just like brown, maybe dirt, or maybe their skin had just rotted and decayed beyond recognition. And I remember holding this animal in the rain and thinking, what did we do?

SPEAKER_02 44:51

What have we done to you?

SPEAKER_04 45:01

And so that was my first experience firsthand just seeing what these factory farms were doing to these creatures. And the irony of it is that the police were rushing to stop us. And you hear the sirens in the distance, you hear the police helicopters now circling around us as we are standing here without weapons, with no harm, no intent to harm anybody. And we're just holding these animals, right? To have been devastated. All while other activists are trying to get other live chickens out, because even though this animal in my arms is dead, there are still others in there who need our help. They were taking them out. And so we tr we were kind of detained and in the standoff with the police, and people tried leaving the farm with the chickens, and the police sland they stopped us, said, You can't leave with them. And so, yeah, we were detained in the rain, and eventually the order came, and chickens were torn out of the arms of crying activists who wanted nothing more than that hen to be okay. And it was devastating because I think even the officers were emotional. If you look at the photos, like you can see them kind of just like I remember this one image of this man, police officer, yeah, um, with like this kind of like buzz crew cut kind of haircut, just like look looking like a very, you know, broish police officer dude. And he's just like looking straight at this chicken. And you can see this expression of pr possible sadness on his face. And so there was and one officer actually that day who said, Look, like we can't let you take all 12, but just pick one, take the sickest chicken and run. And they made it out. And that chicken made it to sanctuary, and her and she was named Rose. And she lived out the her life on a sanctuary. And so it kind of showed like even the authorities, when they up front see what is happening, they don't they don't want these animals to be harmed. That's if you could boil down our entire strategy, our whole political theory here for change. It is that no one wants to see animals being hurt.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Yeah. That's it. How many rescues have you been a part of now? Hard to count, but I know I've been arrested five times for animals. Well, that was gonna be my next question. Um, yeah, what's your wrap sheet look like right now?

SPEAKER_04 47:38

Yeah, well, for a while I was pretty clean. Uh I've been arrested many times. Yeah. Uh, but I've essentially just had my charges dropped. Uh because prosecutors are often wary to charge nonviolent activists, um, especially when there are so many like dozens, if not hundreds, of people involved. Um But now, uh you know, celebration for me, I'm getting my first charges. Yeah. And I am now facing 12 years in prison on felony burglary charges because I broke into Ridgland Farms, the second largest dog testing and breeding facility in the nation, and carried out the beagle and tried to get her to safety.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

Let's talk about Ridgemin Farms, right? Um let's start here. Uh, when did you become aware of what they were doing?

SPEAKER_02 48:32

Yeah. Um not too long ago.

SPEAKER_04 48:40

Uh I guess maybe like 2022 or so. Um, and my activist group as a whole had investigated them in 2017. And they rescued a dog there named Julie during their investigation, where they found these animals in these two by four foot wire cages where they had spent their entire lives. And you go inside, and there's just rows and rows of beagles stacked on cages on top of each other in this windowless shed. And they're spinning around rapidly going psychotic from a life in a cage. And it's horrifying, and that is very similar to what I saw. I went in probably a different building from what I saw in those videos in 2017, but that's those were the investigations that kicked off all of this. Excuse me. And so for years and years, uh, the public was begging the authorities to intervene pursuant to this investigation, asking the district attorney to pursue animal cruelty charges just to investigate the facility, right? Um and the res authorities, instead of investigating the animal cruelty, investigated the animal rescuers. And so those 2017 investigators were then prosecuted and faced years of uh criminal litigation. And finally, I believe in 2023, on the eve of trial, facing felony burglary charges and multiple years in prison, the prosecutors dropped all of the charges because they did not want trial to reveal what was going on inside of this facility. Yeah. And so I found out basically, I mean, I had known about Ridgemen Farms kind of like around the uh trial that ended up not happening. Um, and then I got looped in shortly after.

SPEAKER_01 50:38

I I want to just sort of set the stakes here a little bit, right? Which is um so we've got, you know, many verticals of of animal cruelty, right? Or of um sort of human mistreatment. There's factory farming, and there's, you know, kind of day-to-day. You know, you can go down the list. Very specifically, I want to talk about like this this world of of testing, right? Of animal testing. Um, I guess I would just love uh if you could explain for people like me who don't know a lot about this. Um what is that world like? A question I keep getting when I was telling people about your work and that you're gonna be on the podcast is everybody has the same question, which is why beagles specifically. I know that's like a tiny little point, but I think it's relevant to what's going on here, right? Um yeah. Tell me about the world of animal testing, specifically why beagles, and why uh what what made Rigiland Farms stand out as being uniquely bad in an already terrible industry?

SPEAKER_04 51:48

Yeah. There are hundreds of millions of animals um being used every year for animal testing in the United States across species. Uh rabbits, mice, ferrets, cats, and of course dogs. And we We know that they test on beagles because they are bred specifically to be incredibly docile and gentle. They will not fight back. You can hold them down on a laboratory table, you can inject needles into their arms, they will struggle, they'll wail, and they'll thrash around. But they will not bite you. And when you approach them again and again, to pull them out of a cage, to vivisect them, to open them up, to cut them open alive, that it is so in their nature to trust that they will not fight back when you do so. So that's why beagles. And these dogs are an example of what hundreds of millions of animals are experiencing every year in animal testing in the United States.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

What made you what made Rigeland farms so uniquely terrible?

SPEAKER_04 53:18

I think the tragic answer is it's not. It's just a dog farm. You go on Google Maps and you see its designation, and it's a livestock breeder. Just like any other livestock breeder in the US, they mass produce animals for us to use for human purposes, whether it's laboratories or consumption, whatever it is. Origin Farms did uh it was unique, partly just because we were able to get inside. Uh it is easier to access than other facilities. The largest dog testing and breeding facility in the US was called Marshall Bioresources, part of an international conglomerate with locations in the UK and previously in Italy. And when you look at it on Google, it is a fortress. They uh have just endless rows of these industrial sheds filled with mini pigs, cats, dogs, and even ferrets, when you look at their um documentation. And when you look at dogs alone, by last count, I've seen documents with over 15,000 dogs, beagles on site at Marshall Bioresources, with estimates I've heard of up to 40,000 dogs at the facility alone. And so that's martial bio marshall bioresources. Um and it is uh by many accounts an impenetrable fortress surrounded by forest and barbed wire fence.

SPEAKER_00 55:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:03

We went to Ridgeland, to my understanding, because we could. It is the it is maybe one-fifth the size of martial bioresources in terms of dogs alone, probably less than one-tenth the size in terms of its total facility. And so we went to Ridgeland because it was easier to get in.

SPEAKER_02 55:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:27

Tell me about how you freed the dogs. What yeah, give me give me all of it. Uh, because this I find even in the story of your career, this has uh been a uniquely successful operation, right? A uniquely successful rescue. I know a lot of people from the Trumps to Ricky Gervais got involved, and this became this kind of international story. There is so much AI slop right now of Ricky Gervais carrying beetles out of labs. I it is you know what's hilarious? I thought that one of them was a real picture. I didn't do it when you said that. I thought I thought he was there. I I did not realize I looked at AI Slop. Okay, and I'm here for it, it's filling my feet. It's good to use AI. Um, yeah. It's been a wildly successful rescue, right? Why? Why has this been so much more successful than most rescues? Warm Intro is brought to you by Wii Funder. Wii Funder created this thing called the community round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And, you know, this is not a traditional Android. I used Wii Funder for my company three times. We ran three rounds in Wii Fund and we raised over a million dollars. And I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers, they felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more, they told their friends about it. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a WeFund around. Especially for companies that care about community, there is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to wefunder.com slash join to check it out.

SPEAKER_04 57:26

Yeah, I think there's two reasons. Uh the first one is that this is dogs.

unknown 57:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 57:30

I think, you know, I've been arrested for rescuing chickens from factory farms before, um, and uh received some love for sure from like people I knew. Um, but the locals just kind of hated us. Uh and it just did not get kind of national attention. Um, I think something about this being dogs certainly helps. Um I think the second reason is that the history of Ridgeland Farms perfectly exemplifies the brokenness of our legal and political systems, especially with respect to how they treat animals. We had been reporting violations of criminal animal cruelty laws to the authorities for years. And they had not investigated the facility. In fact, they prosecuted us instead. And so after years um of uh prosecution, the charges were dropped at trial. And then the activists who I I hadn't I wasn't directly involved in these efforts, um, but this is just the story. The activists then went from the defensive to the offensive, and they filed for a special prosecutor uh to intervene and investigate the farm. And a judge granted this. And the judge ruled that a um any reasonably prudent prosecutor with this evidence would investigate this facility, and it is improper that they had refused to do so. And the judge said that I find probable cause of felony animal cruelty violations at this facility based on the whistleblower testimony and the documented footage that I am receiving here. And so that was a glimmer of hope in our legal system for these poor little beagle puppies who have been ignored for years. But unfortunately, the special prosecutor Tim Grunky cut a deal with the facility saying, I will not file charges against you if you agree to give up your sale and breeding license. Essentially, just don't sell dogs to other facilities anymore, and then you'll be good to go. Now, to Grunky's credits, I do think that this probably would have resulted in at least a large shutdown of original and farms, the majority of their operations. And it did prevent a lot of dogs from becoming um subjects of testing. But it just didn't go far enough. And partly because there were still victims of felony animal cruelty on site. The deal said you can't do this to dogs after July 1st, but there were still thousands of dogs there. And the district attorney and the prosecutors were doing nothing to protect them. And so I think it just showed when that story hit the public, it had them understand how broken the system is, right? You're telling me that the government had prosecuted these nonviolent undercover investigators for years. It had dropped their charges and then decided that it even as a judge found probable cause of felony animal cruelty, that it's still and is not going to intervene to protect victims of criminal cruelty at this very moment. That is just not okay. That there are thousands of dogs who the district attorney has turned their back on. And I think people just said that those dogs need to get out. And that's why I think this has been just a juicy story.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:29

I have learned uh as I'm as I get older, um to, in the interest of politeness and in the interest of you know being palatable, to not start to sanitize things that ought not to be sanitized, right? Uh what I mean by that is every bone in my body wants to not ask you about what these felony animal cruelty actions were. Uh but I think to not do that is to feed into the system in a way that I don't want to. Yeah, tell us. Um, and this is the point at which everybody has stopped listening to the podcast. What was going on here? What is the kind of thing that was happening that is that constitutes, even by our uh current laws, um, animal cruelty.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:22

I'll tell you what Judge Rhonda Landford had in her judicial order for the special prosecutor. There was all the stuff that we had seen of dogs in these two by four foot wire cages where they had developed painful foot infections from a life on wire. Where they I said it was called interdigital dermatitis, some where they could barely stand up. These are beagle puppies. So that was bad. Where you had these multiple dogs inside of their cages put in with each other, and they had been driven to insanity. The scientific term for this in animal husbandry is called uh stereotypic behavior, where these dogs would be chewing on bars over and over again for no reason, or they'd be spinning around in their cages endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. Screaming while doing so. And these dogs were going psychotic from confinement. And so the story in the judicial order is of two dogs who were in these cages and had been found to be fighting. Then they were not separated by employees. And I think employees, I think they think is there was a former employee who had seen this, Matthew Reich, saw these dogs um fighting, and then came back. And one of them was dead. And so he reaches in to pick up the dog, the body of this dog, and his hand collapses into the cavity of the dog's chest, because apparently the other dog had been driven to insanity and eaten this other puppy's insides. Judge Rhonda Landford found this to be probable cause for intensive confinement that is improper for an animal under Wisconsin's state animal cruelty laws. I read this order after my first rescue on March 15th. I didn't even know what was happening to the full extent. And I you're you're I actually have a very similar attitude to you of I don't even want to know what's happening to these dogs. Right? Even as I'm really risking my freedom, I don't want to know. And I will say I'm actually subjecting myself to legal liability as I'm saying this right now, because now I'm giving the prosecutor evidence that I didn't fully understand what was going on before I decided to, in their eyes, break the law, which could undermine my defenses of necessity. Um but I want to be open about everything because I think the truth is so important here. Just to say lay it all bare and let the public decide what should happen here. And so I had been, I was reading this judicial order on the plane coming back from Wisconsin after getting out of jail, coming back to California.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:03

Reading over and over with these videos are going through So now How many puppies have been freed?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:25

At our first rescue, we saved about two dozen Beagle puppies. And our second rescue, we saved none. But now, because of that rescue, where we got tear gassed and brutalized by riot police, the public outcry has been so immense that over 1,500 dogs are now making it out of Virgin Farms. They're being put onto propeller planes flying out of Madison, Dane County Regional Airport, to go to New York, to Florida, to loving homes all across the country. And to see this transformation of an animal who has spent her entire life in a cage, treated as this garbage by this company that didn't even have enough employees to properly walk around the facility to give them proper care. For that animal to be put on a propeller plane to a loving home who is going to hug and care for her and have her play with their children and run around in a backyard. That is the most beautiful turnaround that I've seen. And it's it's part of why I'm able to look at the suffering and keep on fighting.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:42

Um I've been following the reaction to the rescue. And um obviously, as I think a lot of people watching this will be aware of, uh, there's been a lot of support for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:59

And I guess my question is, does any part of the support piss you off?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:07

That's a great question. At the level of like, oh, you had to see it happen to a cute beagle for you to give a shit. Does it because to me, the you know, I'll I'll um there are many, many uh people you can kind of quote here or or or talk about. You know, there's the uh Dr. King idea of um injustice anywhere is is an affront to justice everywhere, right? Um there, you know, there are many angles to attack this, but just at a very plain level, it seems so fucking stupid that we had to, it had to be done to an animal we consider cute for people to give a shit, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:51

Yeah, and I'll I'll take that step further too. Why did we have to get tear gassed for this? No, like think about that, right? Like, if our legal and political institutions are working, why did it take like years after like after 2017 was the initial investigations in which all of this evidence really came out, right, for the most part. Why did it take almost a decade for the public for the author for these dogs to get free? Right. And it's like this is the these are the exact same dogs at the exact same farm, right? With the dog with the same public who cares about beagles, yeah, puppies, right? And it still took a second rescue effort where with like you know maybe like a thousand people showed up on April 18, right, to get those dogs out. We had grandmothers, right, who had been shot with rubber bullets and had welts like red welts on their body, right? You had active you had you had people with press badges, reporters walking on site who had riot police walk up to them and pepper spray them directly in the eyes, right? Who then who had to like find their way blind out of a cloud of tear gas, right? That is what it finally took to save the thousands of dogs at Ridgeland Farms, right? And if we had a functional democracy with a working political and legal system that was responsive to what ordinary people want, it would not have taken grandmothers getting tear gassed in order for these dogs to get free.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:32

Yeah. Um I want to set this up in a broader kind of cultural context for a second, right? You and I are not too far in age. You're how old are you now?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:44

I'm 29. 29, okay. I'm I thought it was in uh I was in jail the week of my birthday.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:49

Oh that's pretty related, Bert. Thank you, really. Um how old are you? I'm 31. 31. So, you know, we both remember uh through the early 2010s, I mean, honestly, I'm gonna say into um the even the early 2020s, right? The primary emotion most people felt towards vegans and animal activists was one of annoyance and contempt, right? Um, I mean, one of my heroes, somebody without whom this podcast probably wouldn't exist, Anthony Bourdain's book of his right there, would again, a man I deeply love and miss, his favorite punchline was about vegans, right? Every single famous, every episode had a six-minute timer which he needed to make a joke about vegans, right? No, so probably why I never watched the guy.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:41

I'm very aware of like the jokes he would make. And it was they would show up on my Instagram feed of like him making digs at vegans, and I'm like, ah, I'm never gonna watch this guy.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:49

Well, like I think, but you know, he existed within this kind of broader cultural context where even if you cared about yeah, of course. I mean, what kind of civil person wouldn't care about uh the treatment of cute beagle puppies? But also these animal rights people, they they they're going way too far. I'm not saying this myself, like this was the understanding, right? And I have seen in my lifetime that shift to you catch this Jubilee um debate that was gone viral. I think that was my friend's actually. Oh, really? Interesting. So uh for for those that don't know and aren't on the side of the internet that I'm on, Jubilee does these debates, right? Where you bring in an expert in a field and you put them in the middle, and then there are like 20 people that disagree with them vehemently, um, and are generally speaking much less educated in the field. Uh, and then uh those people can go up one at a time and there's like other quirks to it and debate this person, right? And so they have on this uh uh this animal rights activist named Zoe Rosenberg. Uh there you go. Friend Zoe. Uh oh, I I might be talking about a uh a different one then. Um but um this was a British man. Oh, this is Matthew. Yeah, Matthew. McCeefrey, I love you brother, and I see man. So you know, you've got Matthew sitting in the middle, uh, and you've got these people going up and and debating him about like various sort of like um, you know, your kind of standard circuit of like um uh points that people make in this debate, right? And I rem I I of course I agreed with Matthew in a lot of what he was saying. I mean, I would say basically every single thing that he said. But the other thing I found really interesting, and I found to be in stark contrast with where I remember this conversation being 10 years ago, right? Was the people on the other side. I encourage everyone to go listen to this debate. The people on the other side looked ridiculous and they looked silly because they kept you could you got this distinct sense that they hadn't gotten the memo, that the the sort of the moment had shifted, right? The cultural understanding had shifted because they're still making like you know, the the like we could speed run through these arguments of like uh, oh, you care about suffering? Why not the suffering of plants, right? Like it's like the standard this is your prime part, it's in our it's in our it's in our muscles. Like we're supposed to be brown, like forgetting so much like basic logic. You don't need to know any science to just like um first thing, animals eat plants, so even if you care about the suffering of plants, like you should still care about this. Um you if you believe in primal, well, how about a beagle's primal need to not be in a fucking cage? Like, you know, you can just kind of keep going down the the uh again. I'm saying all of this as a meat eater, right? So I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything, but my point is it's you see these debates, you see this debate happening. And yes, of course I agreed with Matthew, but I found they just looked so silly on the other side. And then I open up the comments, and the comments are all saying, wow, these people look really fucking dumb. Which people? Uh, the people on the other side of Matthew, not Matthew. And I so all of this is me setting up one point, which is um there are few social issues in my life that I have seen bigger cultural evolution on than the issue of animal rights and and uh animal activism, right? Where now I would say where a lot of my friends are at is yeah, it's terrible. I don't know if I can do anything about it. Um, but I would love for there to be something done about it, right? That's I find that that's where a lot of people are at right now. Um all of this to set up uh the question, which is uh, how hopeful are you? And uh, you know, there are two futures we can imagine, right? There's a there's a future you can imagine in which um these arguments continue to hold some power. And for many, many years, decades to come, maybe centuries to come, people continue to say these things of like, well, you know, what I said earlier is just like, I can't have a relationship with my family if I don't eat meat. I can't really, I can't get enough protein, and I can't do this, and I can't do that. And again, I'm I'm talking about the meat argument, but I'm really make talking about like a broader arguments against this, right? There's a future in which these arguments just continue to hold power and we continue to do not enough for many, many, many decades to come. And then there's another understanding of fit. We've seen this now with a lot of social issues, which is that people don't really change, but generations change, right? That somehow you you know, everybody in those like 1960s videos, right, that's like throwing things at Dr. King and everybody in his in his marches, those people are alive today. But can you find a single person that that will voluntarily say that they were the ones throwing things, right? No, never. Somehow, apart from ended in 1994, right? But somehow there are no white South Africans that are willing to admit that they were on the other side of it, right? That they opposed it. So the the argument there being there's really interesting uh studies to back this up, that people's opinions don't change, even though they might pretend like they've changed. Uh, but what does happen is all of a sudden a new generation of people is born that holds majorly different views and evolved views from their parents, right? Yeah. So what I want to understand here, this is the longest question set up in the history of the podcast. Where do you see the future of this? Do you see it as like, okay, this is a slow chipping away at these old, outdated, now silly and absurd arguments? Or do you see it as like, nah, man, like we're never gonna convince some of these people, but their kids will, their kids will love me and their kids will understand? How do you what makes you hopeful? How do you think about how do you think this gets to a better place?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:50

Yeah, I'll I'll bring you back to the vision that inspired me as an activist in uh in college and and maybe turn away from uh being pre-law to just breaking into farms. I believe that we can achieve animal liberation in our generation. I believe that we can end industrial abuse towards billions of animals in our systems for food systems, our scientific biomedical pharmaceutical systems. I believe we can end this in our lifetimes. And I have this belief, this faith, partly because of the social science literature on social change. I'm gonna love to talk more about that. And also just on a human intuitive level, I think there is something so powerful about these animals, and you see it in them. I think this is why this is a profoundly bipartisan phenomena. Like I'm all blown away in the last week. You know, I am a radical UC Berkeley educated vegan who repeatedly breaks into farms because I don't want people to eat meat.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:10

And I am been retweeted this week by top MAGA Republicans like Nancy Mace in Congress, uh, Nicholas Worthington, and Did Lara Trump get involved? Lara Trump is involved. Lara Trump's organization is the one who freed the Beagles and worked with us. Her organization ranch rescue, uh who is being led by Lori Simmons. God bless that woman, right? That Trump-aligned dog rescue in Florida is the one who is re making the final steps to negotiate the release of 1,500 Beagles from Ridgland Farms and bring them to Loving Homes. And I gave a hug to Lori Simmons in this last week. I never thought that would happen, right? I literally work on democratic political campaigns in the city of San Francisco, right? I, you know, God bless him, Alan Wong. I left his political campaign as a Sunset D4 supervisor as a field organizer for myself because I wanted to break into farms to rescue dogs. And I just never thought I would see this kind of bipartisan support, right? And I think I think this is intuitive in so many levels. Like people love dogs, so of course this is happening, right? But I think on a more complex level, I think these dog rescue efforts are reflecting a fundamental realignment in some of our power structures in American society. People are seeing that animal cruelty is not an issue of left versus right. It is an issue of basic human decency versus powerful interests. And to make that a little more concrete, like we see how these power lines have been constructed in American society, right? We've had Bernie Sanders running on a populist agenda, right, to pivot towards like the working class versus the ultra-wealthy, right? And that political project has had a lot of success recently, but is you know, is still an ongoing project. But so far, that has largely been an issue of left and right, right? Bernie Sanders is very clearly celebrated among the left with some support on the right, but not exactly like mass mainstream Republicans coming out and holding hands with Bernie Sanders. I think this dog rescue stuff is a lot more bipartisan, even than that. Right. I mean, congressional Republicans and Democrats are both retweeting these posts about the dogs. And I think something in our human nature is being so fundamentally tapped by these little beagle puppies that it's allowing us to get out of just our tribalism that has sorted us into these political identities. And it is allowing us to unlock the most tender, empathetic instincts of our human nature, even when they have been sorted by these forces of political polarization. Yeah. So I think I have a lot of hope for dogs in testing laboratories across the country. And I have hope that these kinds of rescues of ordinary people, of grandmothers walking into clouds of tear gas, of risking everything, including our freedom, to save the most vulnerable creatures on the planet, that even though our society is deeply enmeshed in factory farming and political parties, both on the left and right, defending these powerful industries, that these vulnerable creatures are so tied to our most basic instincts to protect and to empathize, that rescuing them could heal some of the most deep political divides in our society.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:13

Yeah. It's also something that for me, um, as a marketer, uh I find to be really powerful in your work, which is that I believe that nearly 100% of Americans, maybe take out the 0.001% of Americans employed by factory farms, um just almost every American, if you told them what is being done to their beloved dogs at these testing facilities, right? Um they would be categorically opposed to it. But it's just that Peter Singer thing, right? Because it's not your dog and it's another dog, and it's not you can't physically see it right now, you become okay with it. And so I think the power of the work that you're doing and organizations like yours are doing is is actually that camera. Because if you can just see it, if that's the big, if that's the big barrier here that people can't see the misery. And so that allows them to compartmentalize and not think about it, then yeah, one of the most powerful things you can do is to put a camera in there to live stream it, right? Um, there's a lot I could ask you about this, but I actually want to pivot this to close this out. I actually want to pivot to you personally. Um this is awful, grueling, legally dangerous work that you do. Um I guess I'll just start with how are you doing? Uh how it's a little late in the conversation to ask this, but how do you feel?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:55

I feel everything, man. Yeah. I feel scared of spending significant years of my life in prison. I also just feel excited. Like I honest to God truly do. I think a bit about the costs and the the rewards of this kind of work, right? Um I think I'm just like really optimistic that we are going to end these abuses towards these animals.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:36

I've meditated a lot on these questions.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:38

Like, what is my duty in this world? Like, is it worth it for me to risk my freedom and face 12 years in prison on felony burglary charges to save even just a few hundred or a few thousand beagles? Right? In the grand scheme of things, how could that possibly be worth it? We have a war in Iran, right? We have AI technologies threatening to overturn our entire society, right? And so I think to myself, like, why is it that I'm willing to go to prison for these little beagle puppies? I think there is just a sacred connection that I feel with these animals when you look into their eyes and understand that these are some of the most trusting and loving creatures on the planet, and that there is nothing that we can do in terms of calculation or number crunching that could possibly make it unworthy to risk everything to save these animals. I wrote recently on Substack um that these animals have given us their lives. God knows what we owe them. And I think they're human beings are kind of just wired as these deontological creatures that we feel driven by a sense of duty. You know, world be damned. I think there's this famous uh court ruling from the British Empire um during the time of uh human slavery. And I believe we believe it was a Somerset case where a British judge uh had a um human slave in front of him and had to ask, does this human slave exist as a piece of property? Or are they an individual who deserves the same legal rights as any other member of our British citizenry? And the prosecution is making these arguments like, of course not. Like, regardless of whatever you think is the moral status of a human slave, can you imagine the floodgates it would open up destabilizing our entire society if you were to recognize thousands and thousands of literal. Slaves as full members of our society. And the judge ruled that we cannot allow this to continue. And that we must give this human being the freedom that he deserves, let heavens may fall. And so I think that story is such a fundamental one to the human instinct that no matter how complex this world is, no matter how hard it is for me to envision complex social change or start to calculate how to create the greatest impact, you know, most efficiently with my resources, I think if we just believe that we have a duty to do the right thing. And to do that thing no matter what it takes, I think that is something that is profoundly honorable. But more importantly, to me, as frankly, as a utilitarian who has much broader aspirations for social change, I think that is a story that can scale because it is so connected to the fundamentals of our human nature, to allow people around the world to either directly participate in the liberation of animals from these cages, or to do what they can to agitate, to write to their legislators, to organize people in their communities, to create systemic changes for these animals. And so that's why I feel good, man. Yeah. I am excited. I am excited to go to trial on felony charges because I believe in the goodness of our human nature. That if I am to go in front of a jury of my peers and tell them openly everything that I did, that I took a crowbar to a private building to break in because I knew that there was someone in there who needed help. I think that jury is going to see that we are not criminals, but that we are just rescuers, that we are ordinary people who are just trying to do the right thing, and that if they were in our position, they would feel compelled to do the same. And I believe in this so deeply that I'm willing to risk my freedom on it. I bel I believe that this is something that can cross our political divides, that even folks on the political left and the political right can see a beagle puppy in a cage who has spent her entire life without ever looking up at the sun and say, look, that is someone who needs help. And if you're going to put an alleged criminal in front of me and tell ask me whether I think that they deserve to spend time behind bars, I cannot good and in good conscience convict that person. And so I feel incredibly optimistic with the political response, the public response, everything here. And I will say, I'm gonna get a little silly here. I'm excited, honest to God. Um, because I think that there is a decent chance that I'm convicted. The our legal system is profoundly broken. That prosecutors are going to do everything they can to block evidence from trial, to deny our ability to present evidence of criminal animal cruelty in this facility, and to muddy our narrative, to basically deny us a defense. And so I will say, I am willing to be convicted here and spend time in prison. Because even if I am, people are going to be so outraged that nonviolent puppy rescuers are sitting in a jail cell. Yeah. And it is going to create change, sparks of reform across this country for beagle puppies in cages and for animals in laboratories and even slaughterhouses and factory farms across this country. And that change may take time, it may take years. But if I am sitting in a jail cell while that change is happening, I could not think of a more honorable way for me to live my life. And even if I am convicted, I think this creates incredible opportunities for us. Our goal is to reach the United States Supreme Court and have it reckon with the question of whether animals are mere property or whether they are individuals and whether they should be recognized as persons under the law. And if we can get our pellet Supreme Courts to recognize animals as legal persons, we can open up the floodgates for all of the legal rights that animals deserve, their constitutional rights to equal protection under the law, their right to habeas corpus, to not be subjected to confinement and imprisonment without due process. Right. And so I'm not under, I understand, I'm fully aware that to many people, this may be a bridge too far. But I believe that as people see ordinary people risking their freedom and going to prison because they believe so deeply in the fundamental worthiness of these little creatures, I am hopeful that people will come in touch with the better angels of our nature and say, I just want that animal to receive the help that she needs.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:04

And that's why I'm excited to go to trial.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:07

One thing in what you just said that it reminded me of, and maybe this is a good place to end, is uh a very powerful argument I heard once for veganism, but in general for better treatment of animals, was, you know, in society we have this understanding that if somebody isn't as capable as us, that we don't treat them any worse. That that that is the basis of a lot of our modern morality. And you we started this podcast by talking about your brother, right? Um that if somebody isn't able to do all of the things that we're able to do, we don't treat them any worse. That is truly, if there's a foundation to our moral moral system, it is that what are animals, if not just people who are less capable than us, right? Yeah. Um, I want to just to close this out is a final question I want to ask you. Uh, you grew up Catholic. You, like me, are a fan of Buddhism, um, and of uh mindfulness and meditation. Um, do you have any words that from text or just something a friend said that's helping you stay sane and and stay grounded at this time that you're going through all of this? Any words that you kind of reflect on often?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:43

Four days was enough time for me to spend in jail for me to really reflect on this question. And there's an old Buddhist prayer that came into my head. I am of the nature to grow sick and old and die. I am of the nature to lose everything and everyone that I love.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:12

How then shall I live?

SPEAKER_04 1:36:19

So I think of everything that might lie ahead of me. And I think that prayer helps me see that the answer for me is clear. I think that's a beautiful place to end.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:31

Dean, thanks so much for doing this, man. Chai, thank you so much, brother. Warm intro is produced by J Wan Moon and Alex Aiko. Hosted by me, Chai Mishra. Presented to you by WeFunder.