Animal sanctuaries aren’t best use of resources
When I was writing a 2017 biography of Ronnie Lee, founder of the Animal Liberation Front, my subject said he’d worked at a nonhuman sanctuary, but preferred campaigning to caretaking. “I thought it went more to the root cause of things,” Lee recalled. In his view, sanctuaries were only necessary so long as activism was unsuccessful.
I agree with this perspective. The amount of resources our movement dedicates to sanctuaries seems disproportionate to the limited number of animals they save. Of course, such caretaking is just a part of sanctuary work. They also, generally, contribute to vegan-education efforts. However, I’m skeptical about how effective these are.
A lot of animal activists speak glowingly about sanctuaries. They talk about visits to such locations like transformative pilgrimages. I’ll admit I’ve never actually been to one of these facilities. Part of this is because I’ve never had a convenient opportunity to do so. However, perhaps a bigger part of this is because I grew up on an ‘educational’ farm.
Perusing their material, frankly, they don’t actually look that different from where I grew up. Now, they are different. I imagine the animals receive a much higher standard of care at sanctuaries. They’re not destined for slaughter as the animals in my childhood experience were. But, in terms of aesthetics, the locations appear quite similar.
So I’m afraid of being underwhelmed. I also have serious doubts about some of the claims my activist peers make about sanctuaries’ potential impact on others. For instance, many campaigners will say things like, if only more people had an opportunity to hug a cow or nuzzle a chicken, more people would go vegan. I’m sure there’s some truth to this.
But, again, growing up on an ‘educational’ farm, where countless children and adults worked over the years, I know many people are perfectly capable of living in close, at times affectionate, contact with animals, while consuming flesh and other nonhuman products. It’s contradictory, but, unfortunately, many people can compartmentalize in this way.
My guess is most of those who choose to visit sanctuaries are predisposed to having a transformative experience in terms of their relationship with other creatures. Maybe there’s a way to accurately measure the effectiveness of such vegan-education efforts and perhaps it’s been done. But you’d need to select truly random visitors.
Beyond this, my first political love was socialism. In the workers’ movement, within certain traditions, there’s a long-standing critique of prefigurative politics. This is a form of politics which places inordinate emphasis on ‘prefiguring’ the future world, as opposed to changing the current one. Let me provide an example of what I mean.
Instead of engaging in a union campaign or some other form of direct class struggle, a prefigurative socialist might choose to participate in an intentional community which models the left-wing future. As contemporary Marxist Paul D'Amato once put it, "You can't build little islands of socialism in a sea of market capitalism.”
Even if you could, they don’t challenge a systemic problem. In the same way, I see animal sanctuaries as largely prefigurative, doing comparatively little to address nonhuman exploitation. Arguably, personal veganism falls into this category as well. That’s why I don’t place much emphasis on it, despite remaining personally vegan.
For these reasons and more, I agree with Lee that it’s more effective to campaign for the end of all animal exploitation, rather than to try to care for a handful of its victims. Perhaps those who donate to and volunteer with sanctuaries wouldn’t transfer their efforts to campaigning. In that case, God bless. But, if they would, I believe they should.