‘The medium is the message’, as the great Marshall McLuhan put it. The forms that communication takes matter even more than the content it carries because form changes how people think, feel, and pay attention. The message, in the Ridglan beagle rescue case, is that these dogs have intrinsically valuable lives worth living and worth sacrificing for. That humans can at any moment stop looking away from our atrocities against other animals and choose to intervene. An obviously different message than the one sent by haggling with corporations over a few inches of extra cage space — not that that isn’t also indispensable work.
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: You’ve already seen the images — the frightened, disoriented beagles, the solemn rescuers in Apollo-like biosuits, the lashing rain, the flustered police officers and the raging silver pickup truck — as if an action movie set had spontaneously assembled itself in this tiny rural village outside Madison, Wisconsin… I happen to live in Madison. And so, last weekend, I had a front-row seat to one of the most viral, rousing events in the animal rights movement in several years. On the morning of March 15, I watched dozens of activists storm Ridglan Farms, the beleaguered dog factory farm that breeds beagles for biomedical experiments across the U.S…
In my work, I spend a lot of time thinking about the world as a set of tradeoffs. Every choice we make to spend our time and resources on something is a choice not to spend them on something else, which is just as true of how we organize the economy as it is of the strategic decisions made by animal activists. For basically its entire existence, the animal rights movement has been like a great dialectic between two poles — radical tactics vs. moderate ones, saving the lives of a small number of animals vs. somewhat improving the lives of millions more living on factory farms (we are remarkably fractious and intellectually diverse for a tiny movement that no one likes). These debates can feel tedious, but they are morally important, and the mass rescue in Wisconsin can help clarify our thinking about them.
I was astonished by how quickly the morning kept splitting into new, overlapping dramas. A few feet from me, a local activist was sitting in the driver’s seat of a rescue van whose tires had been slashed by someone thought to be a relative of a Ridglan owner. Later, I would learn about everything that had happened inside Ridglan’s facility and beyond it… Here are, in no particular order, some of my thoughts… on the Ridglan action and the philosophy of direct action more generally. SOURCE
RELATED VIDEO: