Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be an animal rights activist. Tens of billions of animals are being tortured and slaughtered every year. It is, to you, a rolling horror. But to the people you love, the world you live in — it’s normal. You’re the weird one.

So what do you do? How do you engage, politically and personally, when so few see what you see?

Leah Garcés is the executive president of Mercy for Animals and the author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry, which documents her journey to reduce the suffering of chickens by building coalitions with industrial chicken farmers.

Garcés story is about more than animal suffering. It’s about the core question of politics: the choice we face, every day, between condemnation and compromise. Whether your issue is health care or climate or civil rights or abortion or taxes or foreign policy, you’re faced daily with people working for a world you find repellent. What do you do when they’re the majority and you’re the minority? How do you maintain your own morality when the system itself is sick? When do you draw bright lines, and when do you erase the lines you’ve spent your life drawing?

This conversation gets uncomfortable at times. But Garces offers an extraordinary lesson in the daily practice of politics, one worth hearing even if it’s not ultimately your path. You can listen to our whole conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts. A partial transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ezra Klein

There is a pretty deep human ability to empathize with dogs, somewhat with cats. We’ve co-evolved with each other. Empathizing with chickens is harder. With my dogs, I can see the emotions on their faces, but I can’t see them on the face of a chicken. Can you talk a little bit about what we know and do not know about the emotional and physical lives of chickens?

Leah Garcés

Chickens are at a huge disadvantage in this sense, as are fish. They don’t usually vocalize pain, and they don’t share facial expressions like we do and other mammals do. We have this affinity toward animals that are closer to us. We want to protect them. And the closer they are to us, the more we say that they must feel pain — that they’re worthy of protection. And the further they are evolutionary from us, the easier it is to morally excuse abuse of them. That’s what has happened with chickens and fish. But there are lots of tests that have shown chickens’ capacity for empathy.

There’s a great study that demonstrates this by Joanne Edgar at the University of Bristol. What the researchers did was put little puffs of air on the chicks and when the chicks showed distress, the mother would display distress as well. What then happened is the mother hen would be able to anticipate what was about to happen. She could predict and anticipate that this chick was about to have distress and showed signs of worry and concern before the air puff was released. That’s empathy. That’s what you feel for your friend when their girlfriend is about to break up with them.

Ezra Klein

Or, when I went to take my son for shots the other day.

Leah Garcés

Even better analogy. It’s exactly like you’re going to go take your kid for shots and you’re stressed out because you know they’re going to suffer. It’s the same thing.

And baby chicks can also count. Right from when they’re hatched, they have this mathematical ability. In tests where they are given a choice, they will choose the greater thing right away. Now we might think that is obvious, but that’s counting. That’s understanding. And that’s not always something human babies can do. And, these are just some recent tests that a few scientists have done. Now imagine we were obsessed with chickens, and we did tests on them all day long like we do on human babies. The depth of knowledge we would have about them would be much greater.

Ezra Klein

Something I did not expect when I began talking to people in the animal rights movement is that chickens are often the dominant concern. From the outside people think about cows or pigs, but to those on the inside the most important is chickens, not only because they have a particularly bad quality of life but because the numbers are astonishing. Can you talk a bit about the scale of chicken farming?

Leah Garcés

I wrote this book because I wanted people to grapple with these numbers. In this country alone, we raise and slaughter 10 billion farm animals every year for our consumption, 90 percent of which are chickens. So, 9 billion chickens (not including egg-laying hens) end up on our plate every year. All the other animals combined don’t even come close — and globally it’s a very similar picture.

So, in terms of numbers, when you talk about the meat industry, you’re talking about the chicken industry — and the United States is the leading producer in the world. Chicken farming is the leading cause of animal suffering on the planet.

Typically, there are 30,000 individual chickens shoved into a darkened warehouse where there’s nothing to do and living on their own feces, which is often not cleared out for years. So, you probably have the feces of years of flocks that have come before. This produces an ammonia that smells so bad it hurts your eyes. You can taste it afterward. It stays in your hair. That’s the chickens’ only existence. Their whole life is in these long warehouses, wall-to-wall with their flock mates.

What is really difficult for most people to get their head around is that each of those animals in those warehouses are individuals having an individual experience like your dogs. Each has their own personality. Some will want to have lots of friends. Some will want to be alone. Some will be athletic and some will not. And the industry treats these animals like they’re potatoes — like they’re completely monolithic. But they’re not. These are individuals with individual needs and wants, and this system can’t cater to that because it benefits economically from treating them this way.

Ezra Klein

There’s a tension here because many people are turned on to these issues for climate reasons, so they move away from red meat toward poultry and fish. Or, they do the same because they intuit that cows or pigs are highly intelligent. But from the animal rights perspective, moving from red meat to white meat is a catastrophe.

Leah Garcés

This is a huge concern. I hear people say it all the time: “I don’t eat red meat. I don’t eat pigs and cows. I eat fish and chicken.” This makes my head explode.

People will say it’s because of the environmental impact. But our environmental debate is really narrowly around greenhouse gas emissions. That is only one aspect. Another big aspect is arable land and water use. When you think about a chicken’s impact on the environment, you might want to think just about the box they are kept in, but somewhere out there in the world is all the feed and grain and soil that is being raised to feed that chicken. We use a huge amount of our arable land just to feed animals in tortured factory farms scenarios. We’re losing 70 percent of the calories in the process and then we’re eating that animal. And that animal also is treated inhumanely. It’s an insane system.

I think we’re very quickly going to realize, especially as our land becomes unusable, that we have to be way more serious about how soil is used — that it needs to go directly to humans rather than to a factory farmed animal to our plate.

Ezra Klein

One other piece of this context is how chickens raised for slaughter and laying hens are treated compared to some of the other animals that we raise for food. I’m not saying anybody’s treated great in this process, but chickens are considered to live the most miserable lives. Is that accurate?

Leah Garcés

First, I need to differentiate between a laying hen and a broiler chicken, which are totally different species now. They do different things for our industry and they have different lives in the industrial farming system. They look very different. They live for different amounts of time.

Because egg-laying chickens are kept in small cages, they end up getting irritated with one another and start pecking each other. In some cases, this results in cannibalism. To solve this problem, the industry, instead of giving the chickens more space, trims off their beaks. It’s a horrible procedure, but it is a standard one.

While the laying hen often has a physical cage, meat chickens have a genetic cage — their own bodies. Over the last 50 years, we’ve selectively bred a bird to grow as big as possible, as fast as possible, so we can get as cheap meat as possible The result is that by day 40 [of their lives], 25 percent of birds have great difficulty walking and 3 percent can’t walk at all. They have difficulty breathing; they have difficulty with their immune system, even their muscular-skeletal system, meaning they collapse under their own weight. Their legs are in constant pain. Scientists did a study where they offered these chickens two types of feed. One essentially had aspirin in it and the other one didn’t, and the birds categorically chose the one with aspirin in it because they were in pain.

Ezra Klein

Can I interrupt to say one thing here? I’m sitting in this conversation and, even as someone who is aware of many of these practices, this is all horrifying. This is one of those issues where just talking about it straightforwardly is really uncomfortable — I don’t even like being here right now. This is not a fun issue to look at it in the face.

So I want the audience to know that it will be worth sticking with this. We are not going to spend the whole time talking about how terrible chickens’ lives are. But there’s a reason I want Leah to lay it out. First, because it’s important. Second, because it’s going to offer a crucial frame for the story that comes next.

But I do want to recognize that it is emotionally hard to face up to this. In your book, you mentioned that Albert Schweitzer quote — that the worst suffering is the suffering you refuse to see. That’s where we are at with this issue. This suffering is so bad that just talking about it makes it hard to keep enough people in the room to do anything about it. That’s what makes it so difficult.

Leah Garcés

That’s why I wrote the book the way I did. I was worried that if I wrote a book that just spoke truth to what’s happening, people wouldn’t get past the first page.

How a chicken welfare activist built coalitions with unlikely allies — industrial chicken farmers

Ezra Klein

For those who learn about animal suffering, and even more so for those who devote themselves to reducing that suffering, it can be very totalizing. When you look around and you see the scale of the harm, the scale of the death, and the degree to which people don’t want to look at, it changes you. The world becomes grotesque.

One of the things that can happen in politics with issues like this is that it takes persuasion off the table for people. It becomes less about the changes we can make today to make things better and more about avoiding complicity altogether. I’m curious, what was your approach early on in the movement and how did that approach change?

Leah Garcés

I was always very pragmatic. Maybe it was because I came into this issue professionally in the United Kingdom or because I had a science background, but I just came at it with the mindset that we just needed to get people the facts. If I just work hard enough, I’ll eventually convince everybody. But it didn’t work like that, and that was the hard lesson for me. Many activists think that way — if only people knew the facts, they would change what they’re doing. There is this faith that if humanity had more information, they would do the right thing.

Ezra Klein

This seems true in almost every big issue. You talk to people on climate, people who deal with poverty, and so on. There’s a certain sense of alienation that comes with seeing an injustice yourself and then realizing that the public knows or at least should know, but they don’t care. That’s a hard moment in an organizer’s evolution.

Leah Garcés

You go through different phases. Phase one is the feeling that you’ve learned all this information, and you have to share it with everyone. If everybody knew what I know, they would change like I did.

Phase two is when you realize they’re not going to change, and you get angry. So, I got angry. I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t change, especially my family members and my friends. They know how much I care about this. They even agree with me on many points. But then they go to dinner, and they’re eating butterball Turkey. I don’t get it. I still have moments like that where I have to walk away from an event with family and friends and take like 60 breaths in the bathroom because I’m going to lose it.

Then, you arrive at the phase that I’m at now. It doesn’t matter if I convince everyone that chickens are special — what matters is impact. So my goal is to find the win-win to get everybody there. You simply can’t convince everybody to choose their food from an ethical perspective. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can get to changing and shifting things.

So, now I am working with people that a decade ago I thought were the most evil people on the planet, and we don’t agree on a lot of things. I was in West Virginia in the last few days talking to ex-factory farmers. They hunt, they’re Trump voters, they’re super-religious, and we’re sitting down having really important conversations about how to shift the food and farming system. And I really like them. They are my friends.

Ezra Klein

Were you there 12 years ago?

Leah Garcés

I was not there 12 years ago. What happened was I met a chicken factory farmer named Craig Watts. I moved from London to the United States around 2009, and I was living in Georgia surrounded in every direction by chicken factory farming. One day a journalist through Reuters contacted me to come and help him analyze some documents he had gotten a hold of. They were really confidential documents with more detailed information about chicken antibiotics than I had ever seen. When I asked this journalist where he got the documents he pointed me to Craig Watts. Craig was a chicken farmer for Perdue Farms who had just given this journalist confidential information.

So Craig and I start talking, and I got to hear his story. In 1992, Craig wanted to stay on his land and raise his kids in this beautiful part of North Carolina. But he has to find something to do, and there isn’t much going on in North Carolina at that time. So the chicken industry comes to town and says, ‘If you raise chickens for us, we’ll pick them up at end of their lives and we’ll pay you for that.’ But to do this, he has to take out a giant loan. So he took out a quarter of a million dollars in 1992 to build two houses to house the chickens. And the only way to pay off this loan is to keep raising chickens for Perdue.

Raising the chickens goes great at first when the houses are new and clean, but, after a while, the chickens start to get sick, and when they get sick he gets paid less because he only gets paid for the number of chickens he can bring to the slaughter weight. So, if a lot of them get sick, he pays the price, not the company.

Ezra Klein

Why does the company do it this way? Why don’t they just hold the whole process within their corporate structure?

Leah Garcés

For one thing, Purdue doesn’t have to give the loans — those are issued by normal banks. Perdue prepares the paperwork and the business plan for getting the loan, and the loan is issued by a private bank. But, [due to various loopholes], the loans are often backed by US tax dollars. So if the farmers don’t pay it back, none of the burden falls on Perdue — it falls on the US taxpayers.

But, [more broadly] this is how chicken companies outsource the risky parts of the business. Farmers are responsible for taking care of the chickens, so they saddle all of the associated risks while the company makes a profit.

If anything goes wrong, like if there is a disease in the flock, then Craig’s livelihood is at risk. Those loans are often tied to their land, so if they default on that loan, they’re going to lose their land — and keeping their land is the very reason they decided to do this in the first place. So a lot of farmers are fed up with this system.

Ezra Klein

Let me explore why that is a tense space though. A lot of animal rights activists hold the view that what we want is not slightly more ethical chicken farming — we want people to stop eating chicken. And that isn’t what Craig wants. He doesn’t want to end all chicken farming — he wants better conditions for farmers like him and somewhat better conditions for his chickens.

There’s always a real tension, particularly on issues that can feel as morally black and white as animal suffering, between making incremental progress and being accommodating toward a fundamentally sick system. So, how did you think about that? What was some of the pushback you got from people on your side of the aisle?

Leah Garcés

I think about things through the lens of suffering. My purpose is to reduce suffering. And when you walk into a conventional factory farm system — where it’s dark and so crowded that the animals are living in their feces — versus walking into a house that has windows and more space, it becomes clear that the animals in the latter situation are suffering less.

Life is short. I’m not going to stop suffering on the planet, but I can reduce it. So if there’s any system that’s leading us in that direction, we have to pursue it.

When people say I’m perpetuating the system, I use this analogy. If you were a prisoner on death row and you were in a horrible prison, what would you want? Would you want someone to only advocate for the end of the death penalty or would you want them to advocate for the end of the death penalty while also improving your prison conditions in the time that it takes to achieve that?

You would very clearly want the latter, and if animals could talk to us, I’m sure that is what they would want. It’s going to take a long time and some big technological offerings for people to stop eating animals. So let’s work on improving animal conditions while we move toward a market and a business solution where everybody wins.

Ezra Klein

I think today that has become a more standard view, but was that true at the time you started doing this? Or was there more controversy in your circles?

Leah Garcés

I have definitely been criticized a lot for this approach from the purists in our movement. But it’s not them I need to convince — they’re already doing the right thing. The truth is that only 5 percent of the United States is vegetarian/vegan, and that number hasn’t changed in 20 years. And there are more animals being slaughtered today than ever before in history by a lot. Globally, the United Nations predicts that by 2050 the number of farmed animals that are raised and slaughtered will double.

So right now, we’re at about 70 billion animals every year and we are looking, by 2050, to go to 140 billion if we carry on the way we have been. That’s something that’s hard for me to wake up to every day because, empirically speaking, we’re failing.

Between condemnation and compromise: What the animal rights movement can teach us about American politics

Ezra Klein

One of the evolutions you go through in the book is moving from seeing the chicken farmers as the enemy — as the ones responsible for these horrors — to seeing them as victims of the system as well. And that was a very big perspective change for you. Can you talk about that shift?

Leah Garcés

It’s still something my colleagues and I struggle with. But it comes down to the fact that I want to change that industry the most efficient way, and the most efficient way is to convince McDonald’s and Tyson and Perdue to do it. if I can convince them by whatever means necessary to change, that means it might happen in my lifetime.

Sitting down with Craig taught me that he’s a human being just like me. We have a lot in common — from each having three kids to caring about the environment. Starting to make those connections was really important because they made me see him as a human being. They even then allowed me to see Jim Perdue as a nice guy. There’s always common ground you can find with these people because they’re human beings. They have families, they go on vacation, they like sports teams. You can find these like common places to tear down the walls that we arbitrarily set up between our so-called enemies and ourselves.

Ezra Klein

This is somewhere where I want to widen this conversation beyond animal rights. One thing that I see a lot of right now is what I’ve come to think of as an “anti-politics,” — an effort to raise up the walls between people and write them out of the conversation. These people may be the sort you need to win over, but they become irredeemable to you.

It’s a very hard practice to reorient the way you experience people who are supporting something you think of as awful, but oftentimes, it is necessary in politics if you’re going to win. I’m curious about this as a practice for you. What are you doing to try to get over that feeling that you are personally compromised? How do you not lose sight of the horror you’re fighting even as you’re building coalitions with the people carrying out the very thing you’re fighting?

Leah Garcés

It’s really hard. You’re always walking a line. But I stay focused on impact and I try not to get hung up on wanting to look and feel good by being angry and assigning blame. Sometimes that does achieve things, but most of the time it doesn’t.

I try to constantly think like a calculator: Does this reduce suffering? Does it move the needle? Taking that lens helps me get less hung up on worrying so much about whether people agree with me. You don’t need to agree on everything to make progress — you don’t even need to agree on the central reason why you are doing something. Luckily for me, factory farming hurts so many aspects of our world — environment, human health, communities, animals — so it is easier to find overlap.

Ezra Klein

I’m wondering how you deal with that feeling of moral outrage in all aspects of your life. I’m beginning to see this trend in our politics more broadly. Our politics are becoming more expressive and symbolic — about demonstrating our non-complicity and outrage.

Leah Garcés

What I’ve done with my career has really changed how I feel about what’s going on our country right now. I am very sad that it is really hard for me to find anybody to have a conversation with that disagrees with me. We build these bubbles, and we never venture out of them, especially on social media.

I’m very concerned about how polarized we are now. I have a family that was divided in half by the 2016 election, and we just don’t talk about these things — it’s just not on the table. But what I found interesting is when I went to West Virginia, I did have a conversation with them about guns, about Trump, and I learned so much talking to them. I just wish those spaces were more available in our country. They aren’t right now. And they need to be if we’re going to actually break this moral gridlock that we’re in.

Ezra Klein

I think family can actually be the hardest. The other day I was reading about the respect that emerges from distance. When you’re further from someone or something, it can be easier to know less about it and be more curious about it. When you’re closer — like with your family — it can sometimes feel more like a judgment on you.

I’ve heard the argument that a problem with social media, with Twitter, is that it collapses distance. It makes everything feel close. It makes everybody feel near when actually sometimes you want people to feel a little bit more alien so that you can approach them as an explorer, or persuader, or a coalition builder. When you’re so close, it feels like if you can’t convince them, then there’s no way you can convince anyone.

Leah Garcés

With family, I think we act differently because we don’t want to lose that relationship. And, it is easier to just put that to one side because, in the end, that’s one person. Convincing that one person is different than convincing a system. The work I do is really not convincing individuals — it’s about convincing systems and institutions. When you change McDonald’s mind on something, you change the choices for hundreds and millions of people. And that changes the lives of billions of animals.

Ezra Klein

I think there’s a real relief in being able to see things as systems for exactly the reason you’re discussing here. I’m writing a book about politics, and a big part of that book is understanding politics as a system, not as a collection of individuals. People make the decisions that the system incentivizes them to make. And there is respite in that because if you focus entirely on individuals, then it starts to seem like there’s an unbridgeable gulf between us. But, if you can see us all as part of a system making decisions that are shaped somewhat beyond us, then it is possible that people are still good but just trapped in a bad system. To me, this can be a helpful way of demoralizing an issue — to recognize that if you could change the system then these very same people would make very different choices. There’s hope in that. You can fight an institution without losing faith in humanity.

Leah Garcés

Exactly. Much of my objective is just to take the bad choices off the shelf because most people are buying into the system without understanding the real consequences. They’re not really choosing the consequences of that system. They’re doing it because it’s what everybody else does. It’s cheap. It’s convenient. It’s the norm. If we take away those bad choices, we take the bad choices off the shelf and menus. So, I’m trying to reframe the argument. It’s not us against them. It’s all of us against the system that is harming us. So we need to work together. And to do that you have to find the win-wins for everybody.

Ezra Klein

Let me touch on one final thing. You were talking about the difficulty you have waking up in the morning knowing that the number of animals in this system has been going up, not down. How do you manage just the scale of what you’re working on and the pain that you’ve opened yourself up to by working on it? When you’ve opened yourself up to the suffering on this global 70 billion a year scale, how do you not go crazy?

Leah Garces

Well, I definitely have my, my dark moments. It’s terrifying that I’m spending my time fighting the system where I feel like I’m spinning my wheels at times because what I’m giving up is real. I’m giving up watching these parts of my kids’ lives that I’m not going to get to see now because I’m off fighting factory farming. But at the same time, I think about the world that I’m going to hand them, and I want that world to be better for them.

I couldn’t sit knowing that I could have done something. The only choice for me is to try to reduce suffering. Suffering existed before I was born. It will exist after. The best I can do is try to reduce it.