We wanted to share a brochure that circulated in eco-communities and antispeciesist sanctuaries in 2024. It offers a strategic reflection on the ineffectiveness of the antispeciesist struggle. Although ATR (an international movement focused on dismantling the technological system) does not directly adopt the antispeciesist agenda, it remains essential to build strong alliances, as these struggles converge and reinforce each other.
The situation is clear: despite our efforts, animal exploitation continues to grow.
Two explanations can be considered. Either we have already chosen the best strategy, and the increase in animal exploitation is due to the overwhelming strength of our opponents; or, in some way, we are partly complicit in the defeat of the animal rights movement.
Two paths then emerge: reformism, which aims to slow down animal exploitation, and revolution, which requires a strategic shift commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge.
To think strategically, one must:
- Know what we politically want—that is, set a clear goal to achieve.
- Determine whether this goal is achievable given the material conditions of the current world.
In essence, this means identifying:
- Allies,
- Enemies,
- An understanding of the social mechanisms that have led to the defeat of animalism, as well as the practical means we can implement based on our concrete possibilities to overcome them.
Let’s examine each of these points.
(1) It’s actually quite simple. We want to put an end to the animal slaughter that causes immense and unnecessary suffering.
This slaughter is primarily carried out by industrial fishing (where at least a billion individuals die every day) and industrial farming, but also by ecocidal devastations such as global warming or urban expansion, which kill countless non-human animals every day (possibly a thousand times more if you count insects and other species that are hard to quantify).
As for hunting and small-scale farming, while they remain speciesist institutions, they are numerically much smaller and therefore less of a priority for the antispeciesist struggle. I’ll discuss this later.
(2) What are the conditions that make ending all this possible?
(3) The allies we have are few.
(4 and 5) We, radical antispeciesists, broadly understand that we will not end this slaughter by relying on the state apparatus, capitalism, or its colonial logics—neither in farms, oceans, nor in forests destroyed to grow crops[1].
Others, in different struggles, have also understood these mechanisms. Meanwhile, other antispeciesist groups like passive vegans or welfare-oriented organizations only participate in an exploitative system that annihilates, co-opts, and grows stronger through their existence (by legitimizing it and reducing the pressure around these issues), enabling even more exploitation, deforestation, and colonization of lands and seas far from sight and mind.
Therefore, those truly fighting against animal exploitation will always be a minority. A clear example of this is the massive media coverage of PETA’s horrific videos, alongside the simultaneous increase in meat consumption in our societies: awareness has its limits.
These limitations are systemic and rest on three factors:
- Specist ideology strengthens faster than antispeciesism.
- Economic exploitation mechanisms intensify more rapidly than antispeciesist practices spread. Every year, data and investigations reveal an increase in the number of animal corpses found in stores and produced in factory farms and oceans. For every person who adopts veganism, a new factory farm opens.
- Most importantly, because fighting in this way neglects structural exploitation mechanisms: it is impossible to fight specifically against speciesism without also opposing the State, colonialism, and, above all, the concrete material necessities of the techno-industrial system - which orchestrates all oppressions harmoniously. I will return to this later.
Thinking Tactics
Regarding tactics for animal liberation and slaughterhouse blockades specifically, two considerations stand out, despite the apparent advantages they have over awareness-raising tactics.
(a) First, let’s identify the strategic meaning of animal liberation.
It consists of freeing one or several individuals from their condition to place them (though not always) in refuges or sanctuaries. The essence of this tactic is therefore a form of concession: it’s impossible for me to liberate every individual one by one from every cage on the planet (especially since factory farms open faster than animals are freed). However, these small-scale liberations can enable a broader shift in mentality - because the liberated individual then becomes an ambassador for their conspecifics still confined. More marginally, this tactic allows activists to gather in unifying places, create political bonds with a few individuals, and publicize lesser-known issues related to genetic selection. Paradoxically, the tactic of animal liberation mainly amounts to a form of awareness-raising, which inevitably fails for the reasons mentioned earlier.
(b) The tactic of slaughterhouse blockades is more interesting in this regard.
By causing an economic slowdown in a tightly-run supply chain, a slaughterhouse blockade has the advantage of avoiding a logic of immediate gratification. Immediate gratification would be, for example, aiming politically to save animals by literally saving one animal at a time. There is a certain immediacy in this approach - slow and blind to the deeper dynamics of the non-human animal exploitation system. Conversely, the blockade tactic aligns with the interests of exploited animals by slowing down an entire industry and looking beyond just the individuals to be freed, as it targets upstream benefits within the material exploitation system. Yet, despite its inspiring nature, this tactic still fails to be effective for several intertwined reasons.
These tactics overlook the broader structural systems that extend beyond animal exploitation itself: the entire supply chain delivering animals to slaughterhouses, the distribution networks supplying stores, the farms and slaughterhouses connecting the two—in short, the whole infrastructure. It fails to recognize that animal exploitation is deeply intertwined with other extractive industries, state apparatuses, energy grids, transportation networks, and information systems that sustain and reinforce it, whether on industrial farms or fishing vessels.
Moreover, it ignores that animal exploitation depends on a social order shaped by this complex web of infrastructure in which we are all enmeshed. This includes the factories where many are forced to work - including some employees of slaughterhouses and fishing boats, trapped in this system with no viable alternatives besides wage labor; the smartphones that dull our critical thinking; energy-intensive industries that prop up states and dictatorships worldwide; and the exploitation of animal habitats - rivers transformed into energy resources, forests harvested for timber - all playing a significant, often underestimated role in the industrialization and human domination of natural environments. Equally crucial is the role of repression. Ending animal exploitation on a global scale cannot be achieved without confronting the technological might of militaries and police forces - armed to the teeth, equipped with surveillance databases, drones, and armored vehicles ready to crush any rebellion. Ultimately, these interlinked industries shape societies and drive nearly all forms of animal exploitation for human consumption, as well as the widespread killing of animals in the wild.
Targeting slaughterhouses means attacking only one element of a much larger system
A technological system that maintains and locks in this social order both culturally and materially, with animal exploitation now functioning merely as one branch of it. Despite the strategic insight behind this approach, blocking a slaughterhouse does not hit the core targets because it fails to address the upstream causes enabling animal exploitation.
A striking example is the strategy implemented in the 1980s by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the United States against the fur industry. You can find a summary of this in Mathis Poupelin’s thesis We Want Empty Cages (2024). ALF activists, in collaboration with PETA, chose to focus on the mink fur trade. This was seen as relatively manageable because minks are wild animals and didn’t require relocation to sanctuaries or refuges. The strategy seemed promising, achievable within a defined timeframe and with available means. Activists would break into fur farms and liberate minks, causing immediate economic damage to the farms, which often went bankrupt after just two such raids. Through persistent actions, the US fur market was on the verge of collapse. However, this underestimated the industry’s resilience. Fur producers simply responded by relocating their production to China, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
What this well-known example necessarily forces us to recognize is that speciesist exploitation cannot be separated from the rest of the system: we cannot fight speciesism alone, because under the current mode of production, that amounts to a partial struggle against just one element of the system. (I’m not saying that speciesism as such is a direct consequence of this systemic functioning, but that its current form results from its incorporation into the techno-industrial system, which has amplified and strengthened it within its infrastructure, making it an integral part of it.)
Such a systemic vision, recognizing the necessary interconnection of elements that sustain one another, inevitably leads us to seek to halt what hinders our efforts - whether repression or the dependence that all humans have on the system to survive, thereby reinforcing it (for example, through factory labor). We must accept this sobering conclusion: despite all our efforts, we are not yet at a strategic phase where material conditions allow us to abolish all forms of farming, fishing, and hunting.
The current struggle must therefore be carried out differently, by first identifying the real targets - those that hold us back from moving forward - through the shutdown and dismantling of the techno-industrial system. In other words, stopping an interconnected infrastructure network that enables resilience in certain sectors (like fur), but whose interdependent parts make it very fragile in other sectors on which countless other industries rely (oil, transportation, electricity, etc.).
The arguments developed so far have mainly focused on the necessity of dismantling this system to abolish speciesism. I have yet to address the more obvious arguments in detail: the abolition of the techno-industrial system would save the lives of several thousand billion animals every day (including insects and wild animals). From the perspective of a realistic strategy targeting identified and driving forces behind nearly all of the animal slaughter, this would drastically serve the interests of animals - even if it is not explicitly framed as an anti-speciesist struggle.
It would be an unforgivable failure on the part of animal liberation activists not to join the most effective movement to immediately and in the medium term stop 99% of the animal slaughter (if not to lay the groundwork for the realistic anti-speciesist struggle to come). Even if some argue that we must now engage only in anti-speciesist movements with a strictly radical and exclusive anti-speciesist message to protect non-human animals, let us do a quick calculation to show why this position is less effective.
Imagine that, by persisting in this type of struggle, animal exploitation would end in 200 years (a very optimistic assumption); we can conclude that over this entire period, with an average of 500 million animals dying per day during this time (a low estimate), that would amount to 36.5 trillion deaths. Taking into account a 99% proportion instead of 100% - since recreational hunting and fishing account for roughly that percentage of animal deaths - if the anti-tech struggle achieves its goals in 50 years, the total would be about 9.1 trillion deaths, nearly four times fewer animal deaths. These are rough estimates, but they give a sense of the responsibility we face. The struggle for exploited animals is a serious issue, not a symbolic or egotistical one. It is not about being, for example, in good company with other vegans. Given the time it currently takes for the anti-speciesist struggle to produce results (so far none, or even negative), and the short-term impossibility of materially ending the entire carnage, it is necessary to calmly (yet actively and efficiently) reflect on a defined timeframe. Even though participating in the liberation of one or a few individuals might give the illusion of progress in this direction, it is just that - an illusion.
Becoming aware of all this provides a glimpse into the seriousness of the situation and the responsibility that now falls upon us to embark on the right path in history.
Conclusion
Let’s stop swimming against the tide, boxing with Goliath, banning soldiers from carrying weapons on missions, or trying to convert the Pope to Hinduism. After laying bare our weaknesses alongside the system’s strengths, it’s time to focus on practical action - by recognizing our real strengths and the vulnerabilities of this system.
Despite its seeming might, this techno-industrial complex is ultimately a giant with feet of clay. While some sectors within it show resilience, everything it depends on is deeply interconnected. Certain critical industries control the supply, production, and maintenance of vast resources and energy essential to all other economic branches.
Unlike the fur trade - which can vanish from one place only to resurface elsewhere without destabilizing the whole system - some elements of this network are unique choke points. Disrupting these could bring the entire system to its knees, removing any hope of recovery.
Take oil extraction, for example: confined to specific geographic locations, it cannot simply be relocated or replaced. Similarly, key, tightly controlled global routes for raw material transport operate on a razor-thin margin. To shut down or drastically reduce oil production would collapse numerous sectors - including transportation vital to the food industry, such as trucks carrying animals to slaughterhouses that would no longer have fuel. And when we consider the cascading effects - like the loss of mining operations essential for producing the AI systems that monitor and control us - the strategic advantage of targeting the entire techno-industrial system becomes clear and profound.
In short, comrades, we must fight differently.
We must hit where it truly hurts, fully acknowledging the systemic and material roots of the violence that kills, tortures, and prevents us from fighting effectively.
