With remarkable speed, the cause of animal rights and the abuses of industrial animal agriculture have been catapulted from fringe left-wing activist circles to the center of a wide range of non-ideological policy, ethical, environmental, political, and moral debates. That has happened, as is true of most societal changes, largely due to increased awareness and greater information, which in turn compels a shift in thinking about how our actions, policies, and beliefs should be best understood. For years, the horrific realities of factory farms and industrial agriculture were — by extensive design — kept almost completely hidden from public view. Using their lobbyist-driven control over both federal regulatory agencies and state legislatures, the industry succeeded in having implemented a series of laws that criminalized key methods for reporting on their abuses and imposed absurdly excessive punishments on activists who worked to expose them, to the point of classifying activism against the industry as a form of terrorism, complete with draconian prison sentences and harsh incarceration conditions.

But that secrecy has crumbled. Courts have ruled so-called ag-gag laws — which criminalized undercover reporting on factory farms — to be unconstitutional on free speech and free press grounds. Increasingly creative means used by activists, such as virtual reality filming, as well as the emergence of more and more whistleblowers of conscience from within the industry, have led to mass public exposure of the atrocities and evils that this industry has worked so hard for decades, with great success, to conceal from public view. Being forced to confront the indescribable torture and suffering of billions of highly complex and socially intelligent animals each year — along with the vast damage that industry practices are causing to the environment, communities around the world, and public health — has rendered all of this unsustainable. The increasingly important role that animals, particularly dogs, play in the lives of humans who now live and work in a globalized society incapable of meeting humans’ basic psychological needs, has independently changed how millions of people think about the capacity of animals to suffer. All of these changes mean that a specific political ideology is no longer required to view the cause of animal rights and the abuses of industrial agriculture as a matter of great ethical, political, and public policy importance. It is clear that the time for humanity to grapple with its treatment of animals, and the multilevel damage being done in order to feed the planet through the use of animals, has arrived.