How to Make Real Change Happen

Leah Garces has loved dogs since she was a little girl.

She's devoted her professional life to helping dogs, making their lives better, easing their suffering. And she's been spectacularly successful.

Now Garces has written a book about how she’s helping to change the dog breeding industry to improve the lives of billions of dogs.

Wait. Did I say dogs? I meant chickens.

Sorry about that little bait and switch. I thought I might attract more readers if I said dogs.

But I also hoped it might make a point. As Garces argues, maybe we should extend the compassion we have for dogs to chickens as well. Sure, chickens aren’t nearly as cute and cuddly. But, as science has shown, birds do have emotions and the capacity to feel pleasure and pain.

Even if you aren’t convinced that chickens and dogs have similar moral status, Garces’s book is fascinating and important.

That’s because of the remarkable way that Garces has made change happen.

She has worked WITH big business, seeing them not as enemies, but as partners. She has befriended executives in Big Poultry, including such companies as Perdue Farms. She has convinced them that change can be a win-win situation. The result is real progress: More humane conditions for the chickens (roomier, lighter housing), and Big Poultry cautiously embracing plant-based proteins.

I think working with adversaries -- as uncomfortable as it may be -- is one key to improving businesses either from the inside or out. To put it another way: Sometimes protest and conflict can be effective tools. But just as often, working with the businesses to make small, steady improvements might be the best route to a better world.

I talked to Garces about her career, how businesses can do good while not sacrificing profits and her new book "Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry."

You call yourself an "odd duck" for loving and respecting chickens the way you do. How did this compassion for them start?

 I grew up in the swamps of Florida watching wild ducks hatch in my backyard.

This gave me empathy for all birds, which most people do not have. Birds, and fish in fact, lack our ability for facial expressions, so we have less empathy for them. But as a kid I had a front-row seat to the ducks’ private lives, their struggles, their motivations, and their desires. There was no question in my mind that they—and any feathered animal—were every bit as worthy of protection as the dogs and cats who share our homes.

One of the profound revelations in your book is that sometimes shaming and protests are NOT good ways to make change happen. Sometimes working alongside your adversaries – in this case industrial farms – can actually have a bigger impact. Can you talk about that a bit?

 The eventual goal should always be to sit down and negotiate with the so-called enemy and build solutions together. When these conversations are lacking, direct action and campaigns are important tactics for drawing attention to issues and bearing pressure on the powers that be. But they should be designed to lead to conversations, collaboration, and negotiations, not destruction of the enemy. Mahatma Gandhi profoundly said, “The goal is not to bring our enemies to their knees but to their senses.” So if you go too aggressive and use shaming and personal attacks, you don’t leave any doors open for a conversation with those who hold power over animals— and the environment and vulnerable humans.

How did you find common ground exactly? Can you take us through an example?

I have three main rules: (1) Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, meaning you must be ready and willing to talk to people who don’t agree with you; (2) Stay focused on impact and progress—don’t get hung up on your principles or point scoring; and (3) Realize that the person you are negotiating with is a human being and likely has a lot more in common with you than you’d care to admit. Make a personal connection, and build trust from there. I’ve always been able to make a lot more progress once I’ve made a personal connection. I learned this on one of my visits to a major chicken producer’s headquarters. Compassion in World Farming, where I worked previously, had been invited to discuss this producer’s treatment of chickens. We were the first organization they had ever invited. After short introductions and handshakes, one of the executives sat back down and crossed his arms. His body language made it clear he was not comfortable. I’m sure mine did too. I fumbled to open my laptop and pull up my presentation. As I did, the background photo on my desktop popped up. It was a photo of my three kids. Andrea clearly looked different from me with her beautiful ringlets and coffee-colored skin, and he noticed. His face tilted, and his arms uncrossed. He leaned forward: “Are those your kids?”

 I told him about the recent adoption of my daughter. This was the first month since then that I was back at work, and it wasn’t easy. But things that are worth it rarely are. I was adjusting, and so was my daughter. My emotions were raw. I probably blabbed more than usual. But his face softened. It turned out he had two adopted kids. He and his wife ran a ministry that worked with foster care. We spent the next 20 minutes talking about the joys and difficulties of raising our kids. We compared stories. In those moments, I forgot who we were supposed to be. I forgot why we had come to the table. In those moments, the walls came down, a bridge was built, and a divide was crossed. From that point, so much more progress was possible.

What advice do you have for other folks who want to make other businesses more ethical, whether it’s factories or healthcare companies or mass media. How should they start? What are the lessons from the victories you’ve achieved with the farm industry?

 When looking to solve hard problems, we need to build a big tent that everyone—in my case from the vegan animal advocate to the factory farmer to the mega meat industry—can get under. These lessons apply to many hard cases, whether a battle with one person, like a neighbor, an ex-husband, or an in-law or a battle with systemic exploitation, like factory farming, climate change, racism, or misogyny. The world’s smallest and largest problems are rarely solved by beating down our enemies but rather by finding incremental win-win solutions that hopefully build a critical mass. They require letting go of “us and them” and accepting that there is only “us” and an unjust system that can best be corrected together. These conversations are challenging. The path to progress is messy. It is uncomfortable. But it is so worth it.

For me this means instead of thinking about how I can put factory farmers out of a job, I consider the challenges they face and look for the win-win for farmers. Can I find a farmer a different job, like growing mushrooms or hemp? In fact, a farmer I later worked with found just that. When Mike Weaver of West Virginia became fed up raising chickens, we teamed up to film and expose what was really happening behind the closed doors of his warehouses. But Mike didn’t stop there. It turned out the conditions for raising chickens weren’t very different from those needed to grow hemp. Here was an environmentally friendly way to stay on the land and pay the bills without raising chickens in factory farms. It was the ultimate win-win—and one Mike, the once chicken factory farmer, and I, the vegan animal rights activist, could both get fully behind. 

 In addition to working with the companies, you say that public pressure is also important. How did you get the public on your side? And what advice do you have for others?

Direct action, protests, public pressure, and civil disobedience all have a place. Civil disobedience has immense strategic value in forcing dialogue and compelling change. Iconic activists Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have proven the role it can play in social change, and countless others have used this powerful tactic to create a more just world. But civil disobedience must be precisely designed to force dialogue where none is happening. This means leaving doors open for dialogue and always being willing to sit down with the so-called enemy. This means not becoming so entrenched in your principles that you aren’t willing to enter the uncomfortable space of dialogue.

In my case, the most powerful thing Compassion in World Farming did to get the public on our side was to work side by side with a factory farmer, Craig Watts, to expose the realities of chicken factory farming. He agreed to work with me to film inside his farm. Our unlikely alliance put the truth on a global platform. The New York Times broke the story. Within 24 hours, a million people had seen our video. The horrors of chicken factory farming were viral and had a megaphone. The public was truly outraged. This outrage eventually led Perdue to invite me and other advocates to the table to discuss a way forward. After many long conversations, again pushing myself into that uncomfortable and messy place, we started to make progress. Perdue published its first animal care policy, committing to some of the exact things I had criticized them for not doing. This was the first major poultry company to make these commitments. And year after year, through these conversations, Perdue continues to make meaningful progress.

Videos, especially those showing the realities of factory farming, are very powerful catalysts for change, which is why Mercy For Animals focuses so much on undercover investigations. We don’t have to exaggerate or dramatize the problem because the images speak for themselves and provoke intense outrage and action. And for a food company or meat producer, this presents a huge PR problem that often forces dialogue where none was happening before. 

I’m surprised and delighted that plant-based meats have caught on so quickly. Five years ago, I would never have guessed that almost all fast food chains would have embraced Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger. What explains how it changed so quickly?

What did the Beyond Burger and Impossible and their advocates do right?

And what lessons can we learn from that? 

 Finding the win-win was key. Rather than refuse to sit down with Burger King and partner, plant-based meat companies saw an opportunity and the potential of a company like Burger King to mainstream plant-based options. Now Burger King advertises a plant-based burger nationally with a budget and demographic animal advocates would never have dreamed of accessing with our nonprofit budgets. Instead of asking ourselves how we could put the meat industry or fast-food companies out of business, we asked ourselves what they cared about most: the bottom line, their brands, shareholders, growing their businesses, and pleasing their customers. We thought about how we could inspire them to evolve into different businesses that allow them to feed the world but with less animal cruelty and environmental damage.

 Recently, Perdue announced it was exploring plant-based protein. Cargill, one of the world’s largest meat companies, renamed its meat department a “protein department.” Tyson announced it was developing a new line of meat alternatives.

It became clear to me that asking ourselves those questions could create real, lasting progress.

For anyone trying to shift a social justice issue, finding the win-win and inspiring change from that standpoint is the golden ticket.

 What are you working on now?

 Right now, I’m at the beginning stages of a project about helping factory farmers transition from raising animals in warehouses, cages, and crates to farming plants only. I’d like to create a replicable model that reinvigorates the rural economy toward a more sustainable and compassionate future. This means using the resources farmers have already invested in factory farms and repurposing them to grow other things, like hemp, mushrooms, or hydroponic lettuce. I’m excited to help accelerate change and the construction of compassionate food and farming systems in this way.