Three Gaps in the U.S. Farm Animal Protection Movement

Gap 1: Political Infrastructure

Policy shapes what gets produced, subsidized, and served to millions of people, and right now, it heavily advantages Big Ag and other industries that exploit animals. Without a national political agenda and a coordinated coalition to advance it, the U.S. farm animal protection movement will never tip the scales in animals’ favor. There are pockets of local organizing work, but nothing that adds up to a unified national effort.

We’ve had some unifying fights: most notably, stopping the EATS/SOB Act and other attempts to overturn Prop 12 in California, and in past years, statewide cage-free ballot initiatives have brought groups together. But these efforts did not involve or require building durable political power. We have nothing resembling what other movements have built.

To start building what we need to win, experimentation should happen at the city and state levels. A key strategic principle here is choosing issues where the public is already on our side. Pro-Animal Future is a good example. They’ve picked a local fight they can win, fur, and are using it to build infrastructure: mailing lists, donor relationships, voting blocs. The primary goal is building an engaged base and momentum. Importantly, the short term should be winning rather than advancing a just but unpopular agenda. That’s a different orientation than much of what the movement has done, and it’s what other political movements have understood for a long time: sometimes building power requires incremental wins, uncomfortable allies, or painful compromises.

There is a wide range of projects the movement should begin pursuing, resembling the basic building blocks used by other movements to build real political power. Here are just a few:

• Sophisticated PACs spending in races where animal issues are at stake.
• An Emily’s List–style organization dedicated to electing pro-animal candidates: recruiting them, training them, and helping fund their campaigns from city council races up.
• A candidate and staff training program, comparable to what groups like Run for Something or Emerge have built in other movements, that develops and places the next generation of pro-animal political talent. The same function should also identify and support sympathetic people already working in government, who today have no organized movement infrastructure to plug into.
• An opposition research and accountability operation that tracks the votes, donors, and industry ties of state and federal lawmakers on animal issues, and makes that information legible to journalists, advocates, and voters.

Political giving is another underdeveloped area. Some people in the animal space have been doing exciting work here, particularly around alternative proteins, and that’s something we need a lot more of across the board. Campaign contributions build relationships and help us earn a seat at the table where decisions are made. Other movements understand this and invest accordingly—as do our adversaries.

For anyone building in this space, Julie E. Lewin’s Get Political for Animals and Win the Laws They Need is one great starting point. For historical examples of successful political movement organizing, check out The Fall of Roe, Engines of Liberty, and The Engagement.

Gap 2: Campus Organizing

Campus organizing is happening, and the good work deserves acknowledgment. But the field is underfunded and understaffed, and the gap between what’s happening and what’s needed is significant. We need to get back on campuses on a much larger scale if we hope to build our movement’s long-term power.

Campus work needs to accomplish three things:

1. Develop a pipeline: Identifying the committed, talented people who can be brought into the movement to become strong campaigners and future leaders. This is about finding the next generation of people who will dedicate themselves to the cause.
2. Cultivate latent allies: Reaching students who are sympathetic and open-minded during these formative years can plant seeds that bear fruit years down the line. That might mean being activated later as a voter, a volunteer, or somebody who can assist with corporate policy from inside a target company. You don’t need to turn everyone into a full-time activist; each person who supports our work in small ways is still important (and much easier to create).
3. Plant seeds for broader cultural change: Many other social issues have taken root on college campuses and then spread to the broader population. Consideration for the interests of animals could emerge and grow in the same way.

What does this look like in practice? A few things we think are needed:

• Speaker series that bring compelling voices onto campuses and get students engaging with the ideas directly
• Resources for student clubs: books, materials, funding, and general support so that the students already doing this work aren’t operating on nothing
• Talent scouting: people whose job is specifically to identify top students and connect them with the best internships and volunteer opportunities in the movement, making sure promising young people have a clear path in
• Real campaign experience: students learn organizing by organizing. That means giving them actual campaigns to run on campus and creating opportunities to travel and work on things like ballot initiative outreach, where they develop real skills under real conditions quickly.

TNF is supporting an RFP this year to help more projects move forward in this space. It’s a long-term investment in movement health, not a quick win, but building the next generation of strong leaders is essential.

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Gap 3: Strategic Communications

This goes well beyond social media, though that’s part of it. The broader problem is that the farm animal protection movement has systematically underinvested in raising the salience of our issue with the general public while pouring talent and resources into corporate campaigns and other high-leverage but less publicly visible projects.

That’s understandable. Corporate campaigns have delivered real wins. But those victories happen largely out of public view, and without an effort to communicate that progress, they don’t build the kind of broad cultural momentum that sustains a movement over the long term. Compare us to climate, gun control, or LGBTQ rights. Those movements invested heavily in shifting how ordinary people think and talk about their issues, as well as how many people directly engage in the cause.

A few specific gaps we should fill:

1. Thought leadership and intellectual infrastructure. We don’t have enough people whose primary job is to generate and circulate ideas, write for mainstream publications, appear on podcasts, and shift how journalists, policymakers, and engaged citizens think about animals. Projects like Worldshapers are trying to address this and are worth watching, but the investment here needs to be much larger. We need more writers, more researchers willing to engage publicly, and more organizations explicitly tasked with putting our best arguments in front of people who aren’t already convinced.
2. Earned media and narrative strategy. Independent journalism on these issues is growing, with Sentient and Vox's Future Perfect leading the way. What's still missing is a coordinated earned media operation on the advocacy side. The major campaign groups each run their own underfunded press shops, none of which has the seniority, reach, or coordination to consistently land our perspective in mainstream coverage. A shared press operation working across organizations, rather than each group running its own, could change this significantly.
3. Entertainment and culture. Other movements have learned to work with Hollywood, television writers, and podcast producers to get sympathetic portrayals into mainstream content. We want to ensure that when creators are looking for stories about food, farming, or animals, there are people in their network who can provide access, expertise, and framing. A dedicated effort to build those relationships and potentially fund story development could have an outsized long-term impact on public perception of these issues.
4. Digital and social media infrastructure. Professional animal movement is relatively absent from the platforms that have grown the most in the last several years, and there’s no coordinated strategy across organizations. What’s needed is both activating existing sympathetic creators who already have audiences and experimenting with building dedicated animal-advocacy voices from scratch. This requires treating it like a media operation with real investment, not a side function of an advocacy department.
5. Rapid response capacity. When industry attacks, when a major story breaks, or when there’s an opportunity to insert our perspective into a news cycle, we don’t have the infrastructure to move quickly and in a coordinated way. A shared rapid response function that monitors narratives and circulates talking points and content across organizations would help the whole movement punch harder.

The through line is that raising the salience of animal suffering with the general public is badly undersupplied relative to its importance. The movement needs to recruit mid-career professionals with real depth across the communications craft: message research and testing, campaign strategy and deployment, media training, narrative development, paid and earned media. We have pockets of this capacity, but nothing approaching the seniority or specialization the work demands.

Closing that gap means more talented communicators choosing this movement as a place worth dedicating their careers, and it means funders treating communications as a core strategic investment rather than organizational overhead.

Investing Beyond the Next Campaign

The farm animal protection movement has spent decades proving it can win. But winning individual fights is different from building the conditions for lasting change, and that distinction is what these three gaps are really about.

Political infrastructure determines whether our wins can be defended and scaled through policy. Campus organizing determines whether there will be enough talented, committed people to do this work a decade from now. Strategic communications determines whether the public will ever care enough to demand change at a scale that makes it inevitable. None of these are quick wins, but all are prerequisites for the movement to become the force it needs to be.

It’s likely that part of why these areas are underinvested is that they’re hard to measure. It’s easier to fund what’s legible than to assess whether you’re building lasting political power or shifting culture. We’re aware of that challenge and think it’s worth grappling with honestly.

Not every bet will pay off, and we should expect real failures along the way. But progress in these three areas could generate wins for animals that dwarf anything the movement has achieved thus far.