For years, I was too scared to rescue animals. I believed the “experts” who told me it was impossible. I was frightened by the state’s threats of punishment. So I blindly obeyed, even when my own reading of the law told me otherwise. I was stupid. And the animals suffered as a result. We are now changing that. Over 1,000 people showed up at Ridglan to fight a stupid system. And it collapsed. And that’s the thing about stupid systems: if enough people push against them, they always fall.
WAYNE HSIUNG: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote those words from a Nazi prison cell, two years before they hanged him. And his words have been on my mind. You see, the company executives and politicians who supported the abuse at Ridglan Farms didn’t usually seem malicious. Take Kalvin Barrett, the Sheriff of Dane County. When I spoke to him on the phone after the March rescue, he was friendly. You could have never guessed that he’d later task his officers with brutally assaulting peaceful rescuers.
What’s unmistakable about the call with Barrett, instead, is that it’s… stupid. Barrett told me, in the tone of a man who sounds weirdly like a TV weatherman, that Ridglan was exempt from the animal cruelty laws. It is not. No statute says so. I had to stop myself from laughing… Stupidity of this sort, Bonhoeffer explained, was the result of power and blind obedience. And that’s exactly what happened with Ridglan Farms. Kalvin Barrett is not a mean man, and perhaps not a dumb man, either. But he is a blindly obedient one. And when he was told by the powerful people in Dane County that Ridglan was exempt from the animal cruelty laws, he accepted this position—even when it was clearly stupid and wrong…
But here is the hardest part. The same is true of all of us. For years, I was too scared to rescue animals. I believed the “experts” who told me it was impossible. I was frightened by the state’s threats of punishment. So I blindly obeyed, even when my own reading of the law told me otherwise. I was stupid. And the animals suffered as a result. We are now changing that. Over 1,000 people showed up at Ridglan to fight a stupid system. And it collapsed. And that’s the thing about stupid systems: if enough people push against them, they always fall. SOURCE
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