How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Almira Tanner & Aidan Kankyoku on their grassroots ballot initiatives and how to lose forward

• Amy Odene & James Ozden

Share episode

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Aidan from Pro Animal Future and Almira from Direct Action Everywhere. 

A really interesting episode about their recent US ballot initiatives which actually has a lot of cross applicable learnings about fighting strong opposition to campaigns, the benefits of loosing forward, and how frequently narrative outperforms spend when it comes to campaigns. 

Almira and Aidan share insights on collaboration, leadership, and the courage to experiment with new strategies in the face of fierce opposition. Their stories underscore the importance of perseverance and adaptability in the fight against well-funded adversaries.

For a more in-depth deep dive on ballot initiatives, head to the episode with Josh Balk as he gave a really thorough run down of these measures and how we can use them to push pro animal issues in the US.

Resources:

Aidan:

Almira

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Aidan Kanyoku:

And I think that's what we see with some of these social change initiatives in the past that have been largely driven through the ballot process In the United States. The two biggest examples we focus on in recent history are cannabis legalization and marriage equality. They just lost forward. They kept losing at the ballot, but that was the thing that propelled the movement forward over decades. I think we're in a great position to play into that same dynamic.

Almira Tanner:

Very similar in terms of the narrative. The good part of that was, as I mentioned, a lot of the arguments was Sonoma County is the best. You should go to the Central Valley, which is a part of California, where the real problem is. Even the main opposition was like there's problems, it's just not here and I disagree with them obviously. Like there are problems there, but nobody, like no real messaging, was saying factory farming is not a problem.

Amy Odene:

Hi, my name is Amy and my name is.

James Ozden:

Amy and my name is James.

Amy Odene:

And this is how I Learned to Love Schwimm a podcast about promising ways to help animals and build the animal advocacy movement. An awesome episode this week where we have not one but two guests taking on a joint topic of the recent US ballot initiatives for animals, three out of four of which unfortunately failed to pass. Aiden represents Pro-Animal Future and Almira represents Direct Action Everywhere, which is also known by DXE. It's a really great episode which actually has a lot of cross-applicable learnings about fighting strong opposition to campaigns, the benefits of losing forward and how frequently narrative outperforms spend when it comes to campaigns, the benefits of losing forward and how frequently narrative outperforms spend when it comes to campaigns. For a more in-depth, deep dive on ballot initiatives, we recommend heading to the episode with Josh Bork, as he gave a really thorough rundown of these measures and how we can use them to push pro-animal issues in the US.

Amy Odene:

I just want to give a huge shout out to our editor, Tom, as he had the difficult task of cutting out Aidan's companion bird, who wanted to guest appear multiple times, as well as navigating only our second four-way interview. Thanks, Tom. And finally, this is our last episode before we break for the holiday season, and so if you're looking for some inspiration, please check out our past episodes, share your favorites with your colleagues and friends, and from James and I, thank you so much for your continued support. We wish you a happy and healthy holiday season and look forward to releasing our next episode on January 14th. Hi, everyone, Welcome. We're joined today by two guests, which is very exciting for us, and the first of those guests is Aidan Kankioku, who is the strategy lead for Pro Animal Future. Spending 10 years as an organizer and research in the grassroots wing of the animal movement led Aidan to launch Pro Animal Future in 2023 with his longtime colleague, Eva Hamer, who we've also had on the podcast, with the goal of galvanizing a new wave of political campaigns for animals.

James Ozden:

And our second guest today is Almira Tanner, who is the lead organizer of Direct Action Everywhere, a grassroots network of animal rights activists working to achieve revolutionary social and political change for animals in one generation. She has held the selected positions in 2019 and has been involved in the movement for over a decade. So welcome Amira and Aidan Stoked to be here. We like to start everyone off with the same question, so maybe, aidan, we can start with you first. What's something you changed your mind on recently and why?

Aidan Kanyoku:

One of the biggest lessons for us with our first set of campaigns is that I think we really went into this and we're going to talk about ballot initiatives, which is kind of this unique legal instrument that exists in the United States. When we went into it we were really thinking, oh, this is just this amazing way to sort of totally bypass existing power centers and go directly to the public to get legal change to happen. And the biggest kind of takeaway for me is that it's not that simple. The sort of traditional political centers of power still exert a lot of influence over the ballot initiative process and sort of direct democracy in general. And maybe, along with that, just the whole election in the US this year maybe is causing me to update, to think that we're a little bit earlier in the history of kind of what we're working on than I might have thought.

Almira Tanner:

Well, I agree with all of that. I'm sure we'll talk a lot about all those details in the episode. And yeah, I was trying to think about one specific thing. And just in general, I feel like as I have spent more time in the movement, I am increasingly less confident in any of my opinions.

Almira Tanner:

You know it started like, okay, this is exactly how change is going to happen, this is exactly how we're going to do it. And now I just feel like I don't actually know and we need to do a lot of experiments, and softened to some welfare campaigns, and less enthralled with the idea that we'll just build a movement of 3.5% of the population and change the world and that's all we need to do. So, yeah, I guess I just have updated my opinions on everything and I have no opinions anymore. That's an exaggeration.

Amy Odene:

One thing that interested me about your bioalumni is that you say it's an elected position. Can you talk more about that?

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, so we have a membership of people who have been through some basic training and then are active in our community, and every two years we hold leadership elections and if I do a bad job or somebody else wants to take my role, then I might be voted out. And that's cool yeah.

Amy Odene:

Awesome.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Conflicate the picture a little bit by letting everyone know that there's no one who wants Elmira's job.

Almira Tanner:

Like there's. So there's a like a five person elected leadership team and there's usually more than four people who run for those four positions, but I don't think my role is particularly desired Do you think there's a particular reason for that.

Amy Odene:

Can you say more?

Aidan Kanyoku:

It's really hard.

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, it's a lot of responsibility, and not that I don't think that we should do this, but it doesn't come with any sort of pay raise or there's no extra. You know, we don't. We have a flat funding model for people who receive grants to do activism full time, so basically you just get a lot of stress and pressure for the internal reward of hopefully doing a good job.

Amy Odene:

Sorry, alec, couldn't respond.

James Ozden:

Thank you, yeah, when I was at Animal Rebellion I often conceived of my job as the janitor I'm sure you've had on there. You're basically trying to clean up things and make sure nothing falls through the cracks and it doesn't feel like the most rewarding or or like thankful job, but it's very important, I think I do literally clean the bathrooms at our community center.

Almira Tanner:

That is, that's my. We all have a chore and that's mine.

James Ozden:

So well, the big topic of today we want to discuss was, as Aidan mentioned, ballot initiatives and, for people who aren't aware, for many of our non-US listeners, there was a US election November 5th in that there were several ballot initiatives which tried to win change for animals and, yeah, this is I guess the first time you guys have been able to I guess, maybe speak a bit publicly about what happened there. So I'm curious to get both your views on the different things. You ran, quite briefly't run under direct action everywhere.

Almira Tanner:

So we were participating in two ballot measures, one in Berkeley, that was Measure DD and then one in Sonoma County which is Measure J and, for context, both of those places are in California. Berkeley is really close to San Francisco. Sonoma County is about like an hour drive north of San Francisco. Berkeley is an urban city and Sonoma County is this very strange place with a lot of like. The history of agriculture there is extremely strong. It is used to be known as the egg basket of the world. It used to be known as the egg basket of the world. Their annual parade is the Butter and Eggs Day parade and also it is a progressive animal feeding operations or CAFOs, building new ones and a phase out of existing ones over three years.

Almira Tanner:

And people might be like why the heck did you try to ban CAFOs in Berkeley when there are no CAFOs?

Almira Tanner:

But you would be wrong, because there actually was a CAFO in Berkeley, because this definition includes horses, because of the amount of waste that's produced when you confine a bunch of horses together.

Almira Tanner:

There actually was a CAFO in Berkeley because there was stables that supplied quote unquote horses to this horrible horse racing track and that measure was a little bit of a way of getting to address the horse racing issue in Berkeley because, believe it or not, horse racing is enshrined in the California Constitution and you cannot ban horse racing at the local level. So that's a long-winded way of saying there was a direct impact of that measure, or there was planned to be. And in the middle of our campaigning they announced they were shutting down. And by the time the vote came around they had shut down completely, which was awesome. And of course, berkeley for folks who live in the States, has this history of being on the forefront of many social justice movements. Berkeley was first in a lot of things, so Berkeley can be the first to ban factory farming. So we ran two measures, but Measure J in Sonoma County was really the one where we spent the vast majority of our time.

Amy Odene:

Awesome, thank you for that overview. Yeah, it's incredibly helpful. We actually had Joyce Tischler on recently who was talking about CAFO, so I feel like it's been a bit of a buzzword for the last few episodes. So I'm learning lots about the system and, yeah, all the terminology over in the US. Aidan, can you talk to us about the ballast initiative that you ran?

Aidan Kanyoku:

Yeah, so we had two initiatives as well. Ours were in the same jurisdiction, which was Denver, colorado. Colorado is a state, kind of in the middle of the country, the vast unpopulated wasteland we call the flyover states. But Denver is one of the larger cities, more like Berkeley, a very urban, totally urban, combined city and county. There's no factory farming but there was one slaughterhouse which was, incidentally, the largest, is the largest lamb slaughterhouse in the United States. Lamb is a relatively small industry so compared, you know, on the scale of slaughterhouses, it's a midsize slaughterhouse for sure. So we had a pair of initiatives, both in Denver. One was a ban on fur sales in the city and one was a measure that would close, you know, and slaughterhouses in the city of Denver and would have shut down this facility.

Amy Odene:

And so ballot initiatives like this have been run before. This is not like setting a precedent for running these types of things around. The election was when you instigated the ballot initiative, but this is fairly normal across the US. You can campaign for things on the ballot initiative and then they go to a vote on a state level. Is that right?

Aidan Kanyoku:

Yeah, about half the states in the country allow for citizen ballot initiatives, which is where any group of citizens can get together, write a law, circulate a petition in the jurisdiction that they're targeting. So, whether that's a city, county or a state, there was a number of signatures from registered voters in that jurisdiction that they're going to be required to get to get that measure on the ballot, which is usually something like two to 5% of voters in that area. So for instance, for us in the city of Denver it was 9,000 valid signatures, which meant we had to collect about 15,000 signatures total, because a lot of those get cured out. So we had to collect 9,000 signatures for each measure separately to get on the ballot. Each jurisdiction has a different number Berkeley, sonoma County and then statewide. It's much larger. So in Colorado if you wanted to get a statewide measure on the ballot, you have about 120,000 signatures.

Amy Odene:

Yeah, interesting. And so then you're spreading the message, you're talking about the campaign and then when you go to make your vote which in this case was on the election day there's like lots of decisions that you need to make. So there's always ballot initiatives on lots of different topics, lots of different I guess social justice movements. It feels like you're going to be in the ballot box for a while like making all of the different choices. Sometimes, when there's like three in the UK, I'm like making like I'm overwhelmed that I'm choosing the right thing. Is that fairly normal, that there's like a lot of initiatives around that time?

Almira Tanner:

Absolutely Especially. I mean I can't speak for Colorado, but California is wild. There are like over a dozen statewide propositions, then you have the county ones, then you have the city ones. So you're looking at, a California voter in Berkeley, for example, probably had 20 different initiatives to vote on, and it's a lot of campaigning that you're getting bombarded with from every single issue that you can think of yeah, so that's pretty common. It's actually one of the counterpoints to ballot initiatives, which is that some people get very annoyed with them. There's too many of them. It's difficult for voters to see that many issues and really dive deep into nuanced, complicated decisions.

Amy Odene:

And just a super quick clarification. It's called like J yes on J no on J what?

Almira Tanner:

is that? What does that mean? Totally arbitrary. Different jurisdictions use numbers, some use letters. Um, berkeley has double letters and the county or the city assigns you that. So it's like okay, you qualified, you are now measure s, or you are measured w or 308 it's. You don't get to pick it right you're stuck with that letter or that number that they give you and you hope it's go-kay.

James Ozden:

In a nutshell what was the outcome of the various balance sheets you guys ran, so you know overall win-lose and what were the margins like in terms of the voting shares.

Almira Tanner:

Either way, Well, I'll start with the good news. So we won in Berkeley. Hooray, we got 62% of the vote in Berkeley, and so that's officially the first city in the United States to ban CAFOs or factory farms.

James Ozden:

So that's great. Probably it's pretty cool.

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, probably People have been saying that. I'm like I just don't have any evidence that someone else has done it. Also, cafo is a very US term. Yeah, and that's what it says on the ballot. Sonoma County did not go that well. We lost really decisively, got 15% of the vote. So the positive way of looking at that is 36,000 people in Sonoma County voting yes to ban CAFOs. But many other people voted no and in the final months of the campaign we didn't expect to win and I think we were kind of hoping for around 30% at the ballot box eventually. But honestly, not that surprised given my experiences in the last few weeks on the campaign that that was what the result was. And I know some people are telling me like there's no way that it was that and I'm like, no, I think it was.

Almira Tanner:

I wish it wasn't, but I don't think there's some shady voter fraud going on or anything like that.

Amy Odene:

And what about Berkeley? Was that expected? You were feeling like that had some good chance of passing.

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, especially because the only facility that would have been impacted had already closed and we did very minimal campaigning in Berkeley. We spent a grand total of under $9,000 on the entire campaign from signature to end, and we did anticipate some.

Almira Tanner:

We actually came up against some opposition at the end, which is just wild. I don't know if now is the right time to talk about that because it's very brief. I think we'll spend most of the time talking about Measure J. But the Berkeley Democratic Party opposed our measure and you know we'll talk about the Democrats. They opposed all the measures in Denver. They opposed the ones in Stonema County, which is really crappy but not that surprising. But in Berkeley there's not even. The only thing that this measure would do is prevent new facilities from opening up and like taking over the place of the current facility.

Almira Tanner:

That's kind of just open land there but not operational. You know they were like this is performative and you should vote no on it, and they texted everybody in Berkeley twice with their voter guide. So we kind of panicked a little bit at the end because, like, if we lose Berkeley, this is going to be extremely terrible and embarrassing. I'm glad we won and that was expected.

James Ozden:

Yeah, we'll definitely talk more about that, because I think that's gonna be the current theme. But, aiden, how did things turn out for you?

Aidan Kanyoku:

guys. Yeah, so we were conceiving of the two measures the fur ban and the slaughterhouse ban as kind of a dynamic pair where the fur ban was meant to be sort of the easier foot in the door that we initially were pretty confident would sail through the city. Boulder passed a fur ban at the ballot in 2021 with very little you know about as much campaigning as the folks did in berkeley um, it passed narrowly, it was like 51 49. We thought, okay, we will do some campaigning so we'll definitely be able to push it through. In denver it's a similarly blue population. And then the slaughterhouse ban was, you know, more pushing the boundary and so, okay, this is a Hail Mary, we don't think it's. When we were starting out, we didn't think it was likely to win, definitely had a chance, was going to make us kind of work as hard as we could to get it over the finish line. There was enough of a chance to be really motivated, but also something that was boundary pushing enough that we could feel good about it, even if we didn't win. That said, so the outcome was definitely disappointing. Both measures failed the fur ban by about 42, got about 42% of the vote, and the slaughterhouse ban got about 36%, which I was hoping for more than 40 as well. And in the two months before the election I convinced myself we maybe actually did have a chance, because when we were talking to voters it's kind of the opposite experience of Elmira when we were talking to voters canvassing, it was so positive. Everyone's telling us, oh, they already voted yes. And I don't know why. That is, whether because maybe the people who go to farmers markets and the kinds of places that we were frequenting are our base voters, or because the people who didn't want to talk to us were the ones who identified that we were the yes on 308 and 309 people and they were against us or something. But we definitely kind of were most optimistic of the whole cycle of the campaign right up until election night. And then the results were pretty disappointing. And you know I mean the decisive thing here. The slaughterhouse ban in Denver had about $2 million spent against it. Measure J in Sonoma County had about $2 million spent against it.

Aidan Kanyoku:

The fur measure, which again, since we'll, I think, focus on the slaughterhouse measure, I'll just quickly say modified compared to the fur bans that have passed in California and in Boulder, we recognize there's a bit of a loophole where people were just taking the definition in the past has been fur attached to skin pole. Where people were just taking the definition in the past has been for attached to skin. And so some vendors in Boulder just started taking fur from you know, fur that was killed, an animal that was killed to have their fur removed and like, remove the fur from the skin and then reattach it to some other surface and make a hat that just looks like a fur hat. And I was like, oh well, the skin's not there. So we closed that loophole and in doing so suddenly brought in fancy cowboy hats, fur felt cowboy hats made from beavers and rabbits, which each costs like $600 to $1,200. So it's not. You know, most cowboy hats are from livestock felt.

Aidan Kanyoku:

But that brought out all this huge opposition from the National Western Stock Show, which is this massive cultural institution that's very popular in Denver. Then we also brought in fly fishing lures, which who knew that fly fishermen use detached fur in their sort of artisanal lures? And so we got the whole fly fishing community against us. All the money came from the Western Stock Show and then they sort of appropriated this Native American message, even though there was a Native American exemption in the measure and they sort of appropriated this cultural message about impacting Native American message, even though there was a Native American exemption in the measure and this sort of appropriated this cultural message about impacting Native American cultures, which all three of those really conspired to put that down. And so there was about $700,000 spent against the fur ban, which is like unprecedented amount of opposition, for that Money was kind of probably the decisive and we can talk about a lot of other things, but that's just such a big part of the story, of what happened here.

James Ozden:

Nate. Thinking of one of those factors quickly, I guess it's like one obvious one that sticks out to me which is like, in a way, it's so obvious but it's like it seems proportional to how much of the industry you guys are going to impact. Was the level of like defeat or like pushback, right, it's like almir and berkeley, but basically no one something you guys won in cinema county maybe you can explain more, but you're going to affect, you know, in the tens of farms and they would close, which is very significant and there was a huge pushback there, right. So I guess for me that seems like to me the most obvious and potentially the most kind of salient reason why you guys had such different successes. Or what do you guys think?

Almira Tanner:

I think if, for example, golden gate fields, the horse racing track, hadn't already closed in berkeley which you, which I want to take some credit for that, but it wasn't because of the actual vote, we had done a ton of other campaigning around that earlier there would have been opposition for sure, and I don't know how the vote would have gone, and that was what happened in Sonoma County. So our best estimate was there was about two dozen CAFOs, or factory farms in Sonoma County, some of which, have you know, there's like an egg kind of conglomerate that owns a third of them, with well over a million chickens. There are half a dozen dairy farms. The largest duck farm in the state is in Sonoma County and so this measure would have had like a very significant impact on those facilities. Now, the way that the measure is written and anything is, you know, if you are trying to phase out factory farms, close, they just have to have fewer animals but they're saying like we cannot.

Almira Tanner:

I mean, when you have 500,000 chickens and the limit is significantly lower than that, it is a harder talking point to oppose Measure J. The single largest donor alone was Western United Dairies which is a dairy industry lobby group. One dairy state in the entire country and that organization alone spent over $600,000 on trying to defeat us and they just were blasting propaganda from the dairy industry into like.

James Ozden:

You mean very factual information, absolutely.

Almira Tanner:

Completely factual information. I knew that they were going to lie and say the animals are treated well and dairy is regenerative and great for the environment. But I wasn't prepared for like the extreme amount of misinformation that these places would propagate. Mailer to everybody in the county that said Measure J will immediately close 60 organic dairies in Sonoma County. There are not 60 organic dairies in Sonoma County. It's like even if we banned all dairy farming everywhere, it wouldn't have closed 60 organic dairies. And then they were pressed on it and they were like well, we don't really think about organic or not organic and all these things, and I'm just like but, and you can do that, Like that's not illegal, you can just purely lie in your campaign materials. First amendment it's a beautiful thing. So can you say more about that? Sure, you could just lie.

Almira Tanner:

Really no, there's no you can't slander somebody Like I couldn't send a mailer out that says like James is a murderer.

James Ozden:

But about your own campaign. You can basically whatever you want, and there's no regulation.

Almira Tanner:

You could even say kind of whatever you want about the opposition's campaign, as long as it doesn't veer into, like, yes, slander or defamation and so yeah, just wild amounts of misinformation going out there to everybody. Ounce of misinformation going out there to everybody. And because they had so much money, they're able to push that out a lot further than our factual information. And for context, we spent for the whole Measure J campaign, which includes the signature gathering phase and all of that, about $260,000. So they outspent us over eight to one.

Amy Odene:

And the financials have to be declared. These aren't like projections. You know that this is exactly what was spent.

Almira Tanner:

In California. I think it's very similar In Denver. There is like really strict disclosure requirements, so I'm assuming they followed all the rules, like we did as well. You can see what exactly they spent their money on, who exactly donated and all of that. And it's very interesting because you get to see a lot of great stuff like oh, they gave $33,000 to this environmental group which happened to endorse the no on J campaign.

Almira Tanner:

Oh no, you know like it's not. It doesn't say like we gave them this money so that they would put a quote on our flyer, but it's interesting that the Farm Bureau is donating to Sonoma County Conservation Action. Just happens to do that at this time, so yeah.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Well, I mean on the misinformation front, our big thing was I'll confess that we didn't know this when we launched the campaign, but I think we drew the short straw and had the one employee owned cooperative slaughterhouse in the United States in the Denver campaign, which was definitely their main talking point. But it's complicated by the fact you know you have to stay there for three years before you get ownership and obviously most people don't last that long in any industrial slaughterhouse. So it's very small percentage, like less than a quarter of employees. There were actually owners. Like less than a quarter of employees. There were actually owners. But their main talking point was 160 employee owners will lose their jobs in their company as a result of this, which their actual number was less than 40. That's just one of many examples of just sort of making up stuff. They made up things that we said. They would just say that we said things all the time that we never said that was again.

Almira Tanner:

there's no recourse for that yeah, the opposition's website, um, said that the group behind measure j, the group's leader, is a convicted bioterrorist.

James Ozden:

Now, was that you out there?

Almira Tanner:

that's no, no I think like they're probably talking about wayne, which is just levels of wrong because like he's not involved in this campaign or DXC anymore, but also he's not a convicted bioterrorist. He's never even been charged with bioterrorism, but neither have I. That is that crust aligned to the point where we did send them a cease and desist and they did take it off the website, because that actually is like you can't, just you can't accuse someone of a crime. Something is definitely a crime and otherwise.

Aidan Kanyoku:

The basis is you have to have, you have to show there was monetary harm to you from the thing that the person was saying and that they knew it was false.

Amy Odene:

Um, which is a very high threshold in the united states for yeah, I don't want to focus too much on this because there's so much to unpick, but I'm just fascinated like do you think that's a tactic you would employ in the future? Then, just to say a lot of stuff that just gets voters on your side, like something that matters to them, whether it's like a health angle or something just like very inflammatory commentary about the opposition Is that a tactic?

Aidan Kanyoku:

All political campaigning involves oversimplification. It's inherently like. Any political messaging is dishonest, you know, because people's attention is very scarce. As I mean Colorado is the same as California. People are wading through about two dozen initiatives. If you're a Denver resident you know, in terms of the for the county of Denver, these two issues were talked about way more than anything else. Nothing else. I mean the money spent against us. There was nothing like that for any of the other. I don't even think any of the other measures in Denver had any opposition registered against them. That said, you know, yes, people's attention is very scarce.

Aidan Kanyoku:

I think most people got to election day still not having seen almost anything from either campaign. They spend $2 million and most of that they spend on consultants and PR firms and lobbyists they hired, like every lobbyist in Denver. So most people still get to election day and are kind of maybe they've heard a little bit about it. They probably know the campaign is happening, but they haven't researched it. They're going to do a quick Google search. You know the facts that we have on our side. It's hard to know what would be more salacious and upsetting to people than the reality. It's hard to know what would be more salacious and upsetting to people than the reality. So we had an investigation come out about a month before which DFC was actually instrumental in an undercover investigation of the slaughterhouse hidden camera footage showing the kill floor.

Amy Odene:

You know, I don't know what could be more damaging than seeing the routine, arguably criminal, criminal but certainly morally shocking to anyone in denver who watches this footage I'm always just intrigued in other angles, I guess, like maybe someone just isn't I know we all see that as like incredibly compelling, but maybe for others like something more along a health angle, or like a corruption angle, or something that you know feeds into something that matters to them.

Almira Tanner:

I don't know yeah, I mean, in our campaign we definitely focused a lot on animals, but we talked about environment, we talked about public health with the factory farms and there are people who that is their bigger issue. But I will say, overwhelmingly, people care about animals. They, if you ask them, have you ever heard of a factory farm? What do you know about? Oh, they talk about animals.

Almira Tanner:

Of the thousands of conversations I had, I think three people maybe mentioned an environmental issue first, Of course they're like oh yeah, and they're bad for the environment when we talk about it, but their first thought is animals, and we did some post-election polling and pre-election polling that shows that is the thing that people are most concerned about. In terms of factory farming, and I'm assuming it's similar with slaughterhouses, we would not put out misinformation out there because I mean, for multiple reasons, I just don't think it's right. But also, this is a long game and I think one of the things that animal rights activists don't have that we totally should, but other people do is credibility, and so people are. You could have the Farm Bureau say this stuff and it's a lie, but people believe them and they don't believe us because they think that we exaggerate and we have to give them absolutely no fodder to point out that we actually do that DXC has investigated almost every factory farm in Sonoma County.

Almira Tanner:

It's our backyard and we have done so many rescues, all the big for context. I don't know how much people know but the big trial that happened last year where Wayne was convicted and sentenced to jail that is all Sonoma County Like. This is like kind of like our Birmingham of like everybody. Like we did not have the same experience as Aiden. Everybody went to the ballot box knowing exactly what Measure J was. It was the number one issue in the county. It was like above the presidential election in terms of like what the newspaper was talking about. If we gave them any reason to put our credibility in question, like that would be kind of the end of that and I think we need to build towards that. And then we'd show people stuff from the farms and they'd be like, well, I don't believe you, that's in Sonoma County. So you're saying that if it was, you would agree that this is horrible, but you just like I don't know how to prove to you that this is actually happening here.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Building on that a little bit. Same as Elmira, both our pre election polling and our research leading up to launching the campaign and our experiences talking to voters strongly indicate that animals are the most important issue for voters when they're relating to factory farming and you know you still look at the outcome and clearly they cared in this case more about economic harms or other things than animals. So it does beg the question is there some other angle? People care about animals but aren't yet used to extending that concern into the political arena, and I think this could be a segue into talking about how the Democratic Party you know perfectly, with a perfect record came out on the wrong side of everything on this. That tells me that the most important thing we can do and one of the great benefits that came out of these campaigns this year and would come out of continuing to do campaigns like this, which we are planning to do, is starting to get American voters comfortable with thinking of animal protection as a political issue. It's something they're willing to care about in their personal life, but they get to the ballot box and they're thinking about the economy and other things that they're used to thinking about in the political arena, and this is the first time most of these people in Colorado, california has got a bit of a different history, but these measures are very kind of fundamentally different in important ways from Prop 12 and measures that have come before, as much as those have paved the way for these campaigns.

Aidan Kanyoku:

In Colorado there's no real history of voting on farmed animal stuff. There was a. The closest thing we've had was a measure reintroducing wolves to Colorado, which was very controversial. But farmed animals this was the first time people have been asked to consider the treatment of farmed animals in the ballot box and I think it's going to take several exposures to that before they're willing to bring their care for animals in there and actually start to stack up against economic harm and say, and actually start to stack up against economic harm and say, well, is 160 jobs worth 3000 lambs a day being sent through this industrial hellhole slaughterhouse? And so if we were to shy away from that and start talking about focusing on environment or public health, which maybe are a little bit more familiar in the political arena, we'd give up that longer term game.

Amy Odene:

And we see that education piece in when you talk about diet change, right, we have, like in the UK, when, like a nation of animal lovers, so people would say that they like love animals and would talk, you know, if they saw cruelty, would think that it was horrifying but wouldn't necessarily link that to like changing their diet. So, just as here, like they wouldn't link it to be like a political decision or something that you could actually change. I think also sometimes there's like this sense that well, that's just the way that it is, like I'm still an animal lover but I'm still going to consume animal products. So I think there's that like sort of dissonance as well. That's challenging.

James Ozden:

Before we zoom out to your point, aidan, on the Democratic Party side of things, I'm curious in terms of you know, understanding the factors, why the results were the way they were. You know, I think I can speak about money being a key one maybe there's one around how much it was going to impact industry Seems like. Another one is endorsements, but I'm curious, like what are the other major ones and kind of how would you rank them in terms of explaining why things like you think actually were like number one most important by far was money? Do you think those endorsements curious? Get your kind of quick thoughts on the key factors in both your cases definitely money was a huge factor.

Almira Tanner:

But I don't want to like. I'm not confident that if we had spent the same amount of money we would have definitely won. I think we would have gotten a lot more than the 15% we did. But there was a lot of other factors. I think one thing I'll bring up is a great learning lesson for us is I've never worked on a ballot measure campaign before.

Almira Tanner:

My experience is a little bit with legislation, but not an expert in that at all either. And in legislation bills are kind of worded wonky and it doesn't really matter because the legislators read it and you can kind of alter the text a little bit here and there. And that's not how that works in ballot measures. Once you start collecting those signatures, you cannot change a typo because people have signed to put that thing on the ballot and not changing anything. And so the way that our text was written was pretty confusing. It was not incorrect, but from a random person who doesn't know anything about this issue just reading it they have two minutes it kind of was like what is this talking about? And I think that lack of clarity really let a lot of the misinformation catch hold, because it was harder for us to be like? That's clearly not true. Read the measure. And because it was harder for us to be like? That's clearly not true.

Almira Tanner:

Read the measure and we would say that, but I'm like I know that if somebody is not going to spend a lot of time trying to parse out what this definition means, they're going to leave reading that measure more confused. And the bigger picture of that is the CAFO definition. The concentrated animal feeding operation definition, which is what the US movement uses as a formal definition for a factory farm, is not a good definition and I feel bad saying that publicly, because it's the definition that's used in every piece of legislation that I've seen in the US that tries to deal with this, including federal legislation that's been introduced by Cory Booker, and so maybe it's just that we were just uniquely terrible at explaining it. But I think the reason it hasn't come up as a bigger issue is because those bills never really got debated, because they were never really thought to pass. But it is essentially a Clean Water Act definition that comes from the Environmental Protection Agency that was written decades ago.

Almira Tanner:

That doesn't capture all of what people think of as a factory farm. It's essentially a size threshold and the result of that was that there were some farms in Sonoma County dairy farms that are terrible. The dairy industry is terrible and they harm animals and they harm the planet, but this farm did not look like that. You could take a nice shot of it from a specific angle and not show the calf crates and not show the manure lagoon, and it looked like cows on a field because they were cows on a field. And I just think that this definition is not a great definition of what we're trying to achieve and that is a longer term project, I think, for the US movement to come up with a better definition of what we're actually talking about when we say factory farming, if we want to pass legislation around this issue. So sorry, that's a kind of like a long winded way of saying the text of the measure was a big issue, money was a big issue. Endorsements were a big issue.

Aidan Kanyoku:

And even much more so than in Denver. The entire social political apparatus of Sonoma County was united against this measure. Like, the newspapers are blasting out editorials every week.

Almira Tanner:

Yeah.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Every person of consequence.

Almira Tanner:

The Board of Supervisors, which is the governing body of the county, and then there's, you know, nine incorporated cities within the county and then there's a bunch of unincorporated areas. So the board of supervisors kind of governs the whole county and the unincorporated areas. They like they were just like. They almost like felt like they were going to throw up when they had to put it on the ballot. Like they were so disgusted that they had no choice and they were like I wish I didn't have to do this. And then partway through the campaign they actually altered the way that the question appeared on the ballot, so they'd approved a wording which was pretty good for us, like it was factual, and then a month later they were like actually no, they had never done that before. Even one of their own supervisors at that point was like this is unprecedented and pretty shady and he said it was like putting the thumb on the scale of justice or something because they changed the way that the wording happened.

Almira Tanner:

And then they went around and pressured every single city in the entire county to pass resolutions against us and elected officials were publicly saying, like what the mayor of one of the cities said I've never felt so much pressure in my entire career as an elected politician to come out against this issue. They sat all the mayors down at a private table she's explaining this and they went one by one and they were like what are you going to do to stop Measure J? What are you going to do to stop Measure J? And they all had to say something and she was like I don't like, you know like, and so just. And then they all eventually did.

Almira Tanner:

And the guy running the campaign for the no side is like the political behemoth in Sonoma County. He runs the campaigns for every single winning candidate, every single winning issue. Some shady stuff maybe going on behind the scenes there, but I don't know about that. Like being in sonoma county was being in a different world. Like it was. Like people were doing um hitler salutes to us. People were calling us slurs. People were like you couldn't, like we would start. We would have like our color scheme was light blue and gray and you'd start walking with a rolled up banner, that's just. You can just see blue fabric. You haven't even displayed the banner yet and people are like I don't know if you could say like, fuck, you Go back to Berkeley. Like no, like, just like it was, like it was intense. So I will say that we had a lot of sub goals and one of them was creating major contention in Sonoma County and we all felt like we did an exceptional job at that sub goal.

Almira Tanner:

Oh my goodness, yeah, it was like the number one press story in the area. So a lot of wins despite the loss on the ballot, and it was wild to see how much opposition there was united against us.

James Ozden:

Can you say more about why the Board of Supervisors were so against you? Was it because they all had friends and family relatives that were like some of these farming powerhouses?

Almira Tanner:

The agriculture lobby is extremely powerful in the United States.

Almira Tanner:

I don't know if this is the same in other countries, but they spend more on lobbying nationally than like oil and gas and even the gun lobby.

Almira Tanner:

I think I'll fact check that but yeah, just an enormous amount of power they donate to these politicians. There's one politician who supported us who everybody was like you're never getting elected again after this, and politicians' job is to get reelected and you don't want to turn that establishment against you. So I think that it was just like politically self-protection and then also just a deep love for Sonoma County farming, which you know. I don't want any animals to be exploited or used for food, but what people think of as the history of farming in Sonoma County is absolutely not what it is today. You know, when 100 years ago and there was 4000 egg farms in one city and they were all tiny, and now there's actually two companies that run the entire thing and there's a farm with half a million chickens inside who never get to go outside their entire lives, people don't realize that this has become factory farming and so there's this strong attachment to cultural heritage in the county that we knew existed but I think we underestimated.

Amy Odene:

In terms of your language, aidan. So you said that maybe most people would be going to the ballot not having actually heard information from either side, so I'm presuming that the language that you've used on the ballot is incredibly important. And then, as a second point, you were saying that when they get to the ballot, they're kind of confused by the language or it feels like too much to comprehend in the time that they have. I'm assuming that leads to a default. No, and so is there a way to like write the language that, even if it is confusing or they haven't had exposure to it before the ballot, that it's in any way like a default? Yes, almost like phrasing it in a way that's like keeping something rather than feeling as though they're having something taken away.

Aidan Kanyoku:

I think that's the $2 million question for the next few years. You know I mentioned money earlier. I just want to agree with Almira that money is secondary here. I think we saw this very clearly in the presidential election. The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign by factors and in the key swing states by like five, six, seven times as much money and lost clear demonstration.

Aidan Kanyoku:

The narrative is king in these elections, far more important than money. So just to clarify how this works with the ballots the advocates write the measure, so you're writing a law. It might be one to several pages long and almost no voters are going to read that. What they're going to read is a ballot title that's not written by the advocates. It's written by a title board within the jurisdiction, so that's some officials in the generous to us. The ballot title said talked about closing down slaughterhouses and included that there would be a employment retraining provision for workers affected by the closure of the slaughterhouse, which was true. That was something we included in the measure, but they could have not included that in the title.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Most people also aren't just going to look at the title and make a snap decision right there. They're going to do a Google search and so they're going to read probably some press stories and the press narrative is what made the elections, probably more than anything else. The fact that the journalists were against us was shaped by the fact that a lot of city council members were against us and we lost because of narrative. But we also had a big win on the narrative front, I think, in both, in all, across all of these campaigns well, maybe Berkeley is an exception just because there wasn't much opposition messaging. But for the fur ban and the slaughterhouse ban and Measure J in Sonoma County, we put the industry on defense, the fundamental story. I think that almost everyone had not almost everyone, but enough people that we would have had when they voted is you know, I agree that there's a problem here Industrial slaughterhouses had when they voted is you know I agree that there's a problem here Industrial slaughterhouses, fur farming, factory farms these are serious problems.

Aidan Kanyoku:

This measure, there's something wrong with it. I couldn't even tell you what it is. I've heard there's something wrong with it, something wrong. It's not written well, it doesn't do it the right way, Misguided, it's misguided or it's. You know the opposition's messaging on the slaughterhouse ban. Their tagline was unfair, wrong approach. On their yardstick it either said unfair, wrong approach, or said it goes too far.

James Ozden:

They go too far Interesting.

Aidan Kanyoku:

And that's great, that's a huge win. Right, we've put them there, we've forced them. Everyone's agreeing Factory farming, industrial slaughterhouses, fair farming these are serious problems. We need to solve them. This just isn't the right way to do it and it points to what Elmira said, that it's a real limitation of ballot measures that once you get the measure certified to start collecting signatures which for us was a year and a half before the election, so we collected signatures the summer of 2023, and then we spent 2024 campaigning A year and a half before the election was the last time we could change a word in the measures and we learned a lot in that time.

Aidan Kanyoku:

You know if, with hindsight, I would love to not have the fly fishing lawyers be part of the ban, because it's a very small amount of fur and it was a very large amount of opposition. We don't get to make that edit halfway through the campaign. But that's the thing about this. That plays into this long strategy where, okay, if we continue to press this at some point, this simplistic messaging from the opposition, where they don't even people, don't even have to be able to articulate what's wrong with it, you know, after they see it the third or fourth time or it's. You know this is becoming a more mainstream issue and they are getting more educated over several elections and becoming used to seeing this on the election.

Aidan Kanyoku:

That's going to stop working and I think that's what we see with some of these social change initiatives in the past that have been largely driven through the ballot process In the United States. The two biggest examples we focus on in recent history are cannabis legalization and marriage equality. They just lost forward. They kept losing at the ballot, but that was the thing that propelled the movement forward over decades. I think we're in a great position to play into that same dynamic.

Almira Tanner:

Very similar in terms of the narrative. The good part of that was, as I mentioned, a lot of the arguments was Sonoma County is the best. You should go to the Central Valley, which is a part of California, where the real problem is Like. Even the main opposition was like there's problems, it's just not here and I disagree with them. Obviously there are problems there, but nobody no real messaging was saying factory farming is not a problem.

Almira Tanner:

It was just saying it's not here, it's not us Go elsewhere, and great, it's like, obviously like a disingenuous argument, because they were also telling us to like go back to where we came from, which is not the Central Valley. So it's like you don't want us like, but nobody was trying to defend the fact of and keeping animals in confinement or anything like that. So, yeah, I'm excited for all those people to come help us with our Central Valley Cure Copic.

Amy Odene:

Absolutely Sign up.

James Ozden:

I'm curious to come back to this Democratic Party question and I'm like the importance of endorsements because very anecdotal about hanging out with someone in the US that I don't really know very well and she's a first time voter, because she was born and recently got us citizenship, and she said, oh yeah, there's so many things on the california ballot. I just looked at what the democratic party endorsed and I just voted based on them. It's like I was like, wow, I don't know how many people like this, but that was really interesting. Uh. So yeah, I'm gonna curious like how important was the democratic specifically? But also on the question of endorsements, how did that go for you guys? Why do you think you guys lost out to the opposition? And, yeah, curious to know about that whole part of the puzzle.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Caveat first is that we don't really know why we lost. We didn't get to ask all. In Denver we got 140,000 people vote yes for us, which is awesome. That's 140,000. You know, let's say almost all of them, let's say 120,000 of them are meat eaters who showed up and voted to ban industrial slaughterhouses. But I don't, I don't know why they did exactly. I mean, I can make some guesses and we've been whatever. 200,000 people voted against us.

Aidan Kanyoku:

There's a lot of internal disagreement within our team about how important the Democrat. I tend to think the Democratic endorsement was not as important as pretty much everyone else on my team thinks. It was like the decisive thing in the campaign, but obviously a lot led up to that. So you can't isolate any one of these factors. I'm probably in a bit of a bubble where a lot of people that I know and I would expect, a lot of people in places like Denver, berkeley, for sure, and maybe Berkeley the fact that it passed despite the Democratic endorsement is an important piece of evidence about how important this is or not. Compared to them spending a lot of money getting a narrative to take hold and press coverage perpetuating that narrative, there's a lot of people in the US who plug their nose and vote for Democrats. You know that they don't think that the Democratic Party nationally reflects their values very closely, but they think it's. They think of politics as in, and most of the time it is presented to them as a simple binary choice between Democrats and Republicans. Valid initiatives are sometimes, in important ways, an exception to that, and I think that we saw all these exciting examples that as we were ramping up for this campaign, where we saw voters act very differently on ballot questions than they did on voting for candidates. But it's just when you get down to county, like in Denver city and county of Denver city council races are nonpartisan. There is no Republican. There's a Republican party of Denver. They're not an important force at all, it's totally marginal. So local politics aren't Democrat versus Republican, they're progressive versus liberal. They're like two wings of the Democratic Party that are at odds with each other.

Aidan Kanyoku:

The problem here was that both the progressive and liberal wings of the Democratic Party were against us. Who ended up being our base, I think and this is still speculative, but going into this we were sort of asking well, where's our natural home going to be among? Probably it's in the Democratic Party, certainly in a city and county like Denver, it's within the Democratic Party, because that's all that there is. But which wing of the Democratic Party Is it? Maybe more the progressives or more the liberals?

Aidan Kanyoku:

And what I'm coming out thinking is it's the politically disengaged people who are our base, people who are less politically conscious, have less of a strong political identity, will tend to be less partisan in their thinking and also, just you know, are less likely to just look at the Democratic Party ballot, and who are less have this strong habit formed around what issues they are and aren't willing to think of as issues that are relevant in the political sphere. Who are like, oh, absolutely a slaughterhouse man. Why would you know? Slaughterhouses are gross like sure A lot of the people were saying that to us and who probably voted yes for us, or are less consistent voters. Who maybe they're a lot of first time voters, younger people.

James Ozden:

Interesting. I'll mirror and he tells me on the Democratic Party specifically and how big a role they played.

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, I kind of see this as the money question too, like it was a very important factor. I don't know, it would have changed the outcome. But the thing that I noticed with endorsements is like they really spiral and they could have spiraled in a good direction. They spiraled in a bad direction for us where you know, where you've got a few key people on board to, in their case, the no on J side, and then it's really difficult for anybody to do anything other than join that because you are taking, especially with Measure J, and I'm sure to an extent, 308 and 309 in Denver supporting yes on J was a big political risk. You're really sticking your neck out and people are not, like, really used to sticking their neck out for animals and animal issues. Yeah, we saw like people join our coalition who were like oh my god, this is so awesome. I've been waiting for people to do this forever. Great, put my logo on the site, blah, blah, blah. And then, a month later, like you need to take me off this. Like I'm sorry, like, or just like, please remove my logo and like never speak to me again.

Almira Tanner:

We're like what happened? You know, like, and I don't know what happened, but I think there was a lot of just like political pressure to not take the yes on Jay side. Like we were like really sad, like the wins were like the Sierra Club didn't oppose us. They stayed neutral, which is not a winning message to be on our mailer. Not opposed by the Sierra Club, but you see an environmental group that's opposing no and you're like wait, I'm so confused. The yes side is saying this is good for the environment and then all these people and the Democratic Party is the big one of that Sonoma County is also overwhelmingly Democrat, but I would say more establishment Democrat than a progressive city like probably fewer people who plug their nose and vote for the Democrats and more people who really believe that like they're the way that's gonna save us from Trump or whatever. And so I think it really did matter and we're kind of joking.

Almira Tanner:

But the day we lost the endorsement of the Democrats, we were like well, this is the day Measure J died. It was kind of a pretty big demarcation in our campaign of pre-election polling said we had a shot, and that I think kind of was like okay, I think this is going to be an enormously huge uphill battle, also because they just have a lot of money too. So they were sending all of this out to all of their mailers also said vote no on Jay. And they're tabling at events with the Democratic Party of Sonoma County with all the no on Jay stuff and it just kind of adds to this sense of does anybody support VentureJ in this community? People weren't really afraid People would tell us like I support that. But I'm afraid to say something because the vitriol for the supporters was like really intense.

James Ozden:

As a quick aside, can I ask what did your guys pre-campaign polling suggest, Like maybe how long before the election that happened and what were the results?

Almira Tanner:

We were a little bit delayed compared to Pro Animal Futures campaigns. So we started collecting signatures in September of 2023. And we turned them in at the end of February and then found out we qualified in, I want to say March or April of 2024. We did our first set of polling in July of 2023, because we wanted to basically write as we were making the commitment to do this campaign or not. We wanted to make sure there was at least a shot that we could possibly win and our poll showed 56%. Of course, I should say we didn't know the question at this point, so we just asked would you support banning CAFOs or factory farms? It showed 56%. Yes, 25% no, the rest undecided.

Almira Tanner:

And I know from talking to people who've run ballot measures in the past like that they would not run a ballot measure with that percent support. Like they feel like you need to have in the high 60s to begin with in order to run a winning campaign. Because, like, it's so much easier to get a no vote right. Like, oh, this thing is not 100% perfect, just vote no. Like all you're doing in the campaign phase is like trying to pick away voters because, like, so you want to start at a really high percent. So I understand that some people would say 56% yes, 25% no is not good enough to start. It was good enough for us. We are more willing to, I think, fail and see the value in losing.

Almira Tanner:

So we did another set of polling right as we turned in the signatures so that was March of 2024 to kind of see what the impact of that had been. And it showed 42% yes and still 25% no. So same amount of opposition, a lot more people undecided. We did ask a question there, like have you heard that this is going to be on the ballot, or you know, like you know, basically trying to get at did the people who switched their position do that? Because they actually looked into it more and it didn't seem to be the case. It wasn't that people who've been aware of the campaign were more likely to now vote on no or undecided. So I don't know if that's just a normal change in polling, because polling is very much not accurate.

Almira Tanner:

So, again, like still showing we had more yes than no. But I think Amy said it earlier, the undecideds it's like it's a no vote, right, like you just go to, like let's keep things the same. So yeah, that was the. Those were the two polls that we did. We also did some post election polling just to kind of see where people were at and why they voted certain ways. But we got the real poll, yeah.

Aidan Kanyoku:

And what about you? We ran a few different polls right at the beginning. So in early summer of 2023, part of what we were doing was kind of trying to compare more expensive with less expensive polling services to see if we thought the less expensive options were reliable, then we could save money in the future. The results we got back were so kind of mixed that we just sort of wrote it all off. In hindsight, the most expensive poll that we commissioned registered 36% yes, 49% no and 15% undecided. And you know, yeah, our good friend, josh Balk, who's been working on ballot initiatives in the animal advocacy space for decades, has told us basically just treat every undecided vote in a poll as a no vote. And so if we'd done that, we could have I don't know, I could have started a market on Manifold and made a bunch of money for perfectly guessing the outcome of the Denver slaughterhouse ban. Wow interesting.

James Ozden:

That is a good tidbit of knowledge and a good rule of thumb. I mean, in your case, Almira, it's kind of wild to hear there was like a 40 percentage point swing in the predicted versus the outcome. So I think something similar happened with the balance sheet in Switzerland, run by Sentin and Silvana, I think. Again they were like 60% going to win pre-campaign and the final result was 37%. So yeah, it seems like that can be quite a dramatic swing. So that is definitely there's all these factors.

Almira Tanner:

There's not one thing that's like. This is why this happened. But I think it's interesting that I think a huge number of people voted no because they didn't believe that there were factory like what they thought of as a factory farm in Sonoma County. Because in our post-election polling which okay, yeah, we've just talked about how flawed polling is, but I will say the post-election poll we did the like how did you vote? Was exactly what the vote actually was. So it was a very representative sample of the population, like over 50% of people agreed with society as a whole should move away with factory farming. At the end of this entire poll, after you've talked about why you voted no on this thing, and so I think it was just like not us and I get that to an extent Like why are we, why is our economy in Sonoma County, our farmers in Sonoma County, going to be punished, when all those farmers in the other places that are worse people are? We already did this. We already passed Prop 12. We don't need this. We're the best. Why are we going to be punished when other people are not going to be? That's a fairness issue and that's a value that a lot of people hold very closely, and I get that.

Almira Tanner:

And it's also difficult because, like well, you have to start somewhere. We can't. You know, a statewide initiative costs 10 million dollars, it needs a million signatures. Like we just like, don't have the capacity to do that. Legislation has been introduced federally to do essentially this and it's going nowhere. So we do have to start somewhere. But as an activist, it's so exciting to think about being on the forefront of something, but the reality is most people don't want to be that, especially when the price of eggs was a prominent conversation in the entire federal election and we're like, we're going to shut down all the egg farms. It was a difficult, difficult campaign.

Amy Odene:

So, aidan, you spoke a little bit about why you picked the particular demand, the fur ban. Is there a reason for the particular location that you chose? And then maybe also Amira, what made you think of those particular demands?

Aidan Kanyoku:

We're trying to develop a model for these campaigns that can scale up across the country and we just needed somewhere to start. So that's the real answer. But Colorado, it's a state that's gotten a lot bluer in the last few decades. It's got a large rural population. Ranching and agriculture are very big culturally, although not actually economically anymore. It's a pretty unimportant part of the economy. The governor now of Colorado is someone who's very sympathetic to the animal movement. His husband is a full-on animal activist who's pushed some great initiatives through at the state level. We had him for four more years when we started the campaign. We've now got him for two more years. He's going to be turned out and so we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity. Definitely we're hoping that if we got the fur ban passed, sort of building on nationwide and worldwide momentum on fur bans. That and after the Boulder.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Boulder, colorado, ban for in 2021,. We thought we could get a statewide fur ban through the legislature by kind of demonstrating the appetite in Denver and Boulder and the you know the slaughterhouse ban was. We were looking for something that pushed the public into full blown abolitionist territory. Until the very end, I thought Measure J was going to outperform the Slaughterhouse Ban.

Almira Tanner:

I live in Berkeley, so it's a great place, but also the reason I live in Berkeley is because Berkeley has historically been a leader in social movements and we think that that can happen for animals too. And so also, we had a conference in 2023 in June in Berkeley and we figured we can just get everybody in the conference to collect all the signatures in one day and that's a really impactful thing that people can do get a taste of signature collection for half a day and be part of this thing and this kind of happened. So it was a very low effort signature collection for Berkeley. Low effort signature collection for Berkeley, sonoma County.

Almira Tanner:

Just yeah, dxc has such a history there. It's the closest place in the Bay Area of California, which is around San Francisco too, that has an enormous amount of factory farming. We've investigated so many of them mass actions, hundreds of animals rescued or over 100, I should say People have gone to jail for investigating. That's kind of where we which probably had a huge negative impact on the campaign too, in the sense of we have such a history there and everybody knows who Direct Action Everywhere is in Sonoma County or a lot of people do but, yeah, we have the foundation laid there of a lot of investigations and knowledge about the way that those farms operate.

James Ozden:

Moving on to future plans. I guess the big question in your literacy is will you guys be doing these in the future and in what formats?

Aidan Kanyoku:

Maybe, adrian, you want to talk to that first we ran both Measure J and in Denver we ran field campaigns. Most of our energy went into organizing activists to be on the ground, knocking on doors. We hung up tons of, you know, wheat paste posters all around the city something like seven or 8,000 posters, and that was how the public was seeing us and learning about the measure from us. We totally, you know, of course, in the field only one side of this campaign was physically felt, and Sonoma County is a little bit different because they had signage from supporters on the ground. But the presence of the campaign against the slaughterhouse ban and the fur ban in Denver was purely ethereal. No one ever saw them. I remember hearing from a journalist who ended up writing a not very favorable story about the measures, but he was talking to us and he said yeah, the one thing I just keep hearing about you guys is you're everywhere, like people just see you every farmer's market, they see the posters everywhere. You know we were on the ground and the effect of that was limited. I think going in that was like the plan was just totally to focus on that and I think if you are thinking about the long-term goals of these campaigns of pushing farm to animal issues into public consciousness in the political sphere in particular, and sort of shifting our relationship with the public away from this purely consumer focus into civics and politics, where I think they're a lot more receptive, just demonstrated by the fact that, you know, we went from maybe 2% of people being vegan in Denver to 36% of people voting for a slaughterhouse ban. Just that's like a huge quantum leap in how our movement is being supported by the public.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Maybe the field approach was the best thing to focus on, but when we talk about actually getting the measure passed, they ran a campaign behind closed doors. They spent a huge percentage of their budget hiring, I said before, every lobbying pretty much every lobbying firm in Denver and a bunch of not in Denver to bombard every politician, every. You know all they got, all these restaurant groups. They built this huge coalition of names and logos and kind of illustrious whatever groups. Again, you still never felt it on the ground. Maybe the one exception is a bunch of restaurants have these little table tents on the table saying no on. You know, vote no on the slaughterhouse ban. Otherwise it was, you know, totally yeah, just ethereal, but it was really effective because they got there and they had a much more effective press strategy. They hired a bunch of PR firms, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on PR firms. We had, you know, one person getting paid $55,000 a year to try to coordinate our, you know, and then it was the first time she'd ever done this.

James Ozden:

If you had to summarize it, there was much more elite focus right, and you were much more kind of ground game, grassroots focus and in the end that worked out better for them.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Yeah, and maybe the third bucket would be paid media. So, you know, you can run, you can focus on field, you can focus on coalitions and power centers and elites and you can focus on paid media. We both focused on paid media. We, you know, we tried to raise as much money as we could. Of course, they still outspent us four or five to one in that bucket, but they outspent us, you know, 10 to one, 15 to one in, you know, and in terms of the energy they put into, yeah, getting lining up social and political institutions and important individuals against the campaign and that was extremely effective. So that's our biggest change as we move into our next set of campaigns For us.

Aidan Kanyoku:

A year ago, I was hoping we might be able to launch this model into as many as 10 cities around the country for the 2026 election cycle. Now we're looking at more like three as where we feel more like, okay, we're still getting our feet under us figuring out how to do this effectively. Once we really do that, I think we'll go ramp that up again, but focusing on three areas one's going to be Denver, one will likely be around Portland, oregon, and we're still deciding on the third jurisdiction. And we're also still deciding on policies, but in at least one place, which would probably be Portland and maybe more, we want to do something that builds on the lessons from Measure J, thinking about okay, yes, the public says the problem is factory farming and even the industry says the problem is factory farming. When we run these campaigns, we force it onto that territory. So what is a way and I think, going back to Amy's question from earlier, you know how can we craft a measure where that little one sentence summary that's going to appear on the ballot that people are going to be deciding on is so common sense and, you know, maybe even doesn't feel like they're giving up something that it's just going to be a default yes vote.

Aidan Kanyoku:

What's some requirement that we can set or some specific practice we can ban that maybe people already think is true for most farms? And if you put the industry in the position of having to admit, yeah, actually this is going to totally disrupt our business model, it's going to be devastating to their reputation, even if it fails. Again, designing something that we can be confident that if we lose the measure, it was still worth running, which I feel very confident about all the campaigns that we talked about today. I feel great about having worked on these, the amount that we moved public awareness and opinion and started to familiarize people with.

Aidan Kanyoku:

We're figuring out exactly what that is, but we expect to run something in 2026 that's targeting factory farming and it's sort of soft reputational underbelly. And then, yeah, we're shooting for the moon and what we're building towards is statewide initiatives which, as we said before, 10 times the number of signatures, 10 times the kind of budgetary demands if you actually want to effectively reach people with paid media messaging, 10 times the complexity of lining up state lawmakers and governors and on that level, it probably 100 times the complexity of lining up state lawmakers and governors and, on that level, probably 100 times the complexity of lining up the elites and the coalition against you.

Aidan Kanyoku:

And 100 times the opposition you can expect to get from the industry, because the economic impact is far greater than anything. You're talking about a single slaughterhouse in Denver. That's what we're building towards, and these local county campaigns are stepping stones as we're trying to figure out our model and develop a foundation of activists across these states who are ready to mobilize for bigger campaigns.

James Ozden:

Amir, did you want to share more on what you guys are kind of doing in the future, if anything on this?

Almira Tanner:

DXC isn't discounting ever doing another ballot measure, but definitely don't have a plan like Aiden does. You know where this is the thing that we're doing. A plan like Aiden does, where this is the thing that we're doing. We, dxc experiments a lot, definitely not committed to a single tactic or a strategy. This was another one of those iterations of let's try this thing and learned an enormous amount. One echoed Aiden said we lost a lot in Sonoma County at the ballot, but I feel actually really good about some of the wins that we had in this campaign and how much we learned from this and the lessons that we can take from this. Whether or not we do another ballot measure, that can be applied to other different types of campaigns. So, yeah, no immediate plans to do a ballot measure. I want Paranormal Future to run campaigns in California so that we can just provide the volunteers and be part of it. But maybe.

Amy Odene:

So, to summarize then, do you have two things that you would plan to do differently, just as like a summary of the episode Elmira?

Almira Tanner:

Yeah, if we did this measure again, one thing we definitely would do differently is write the text differently, probably have a few like, even narrow the definition a little bit, but certainly present it in a much more clear and compelling way, and then spend more time before launching really trying to get some key coalition partners on board first and explaining to them the nature of the pressure that they will face and make you sure they're like, really committed, they're not going to drop out on us. After we filmed dads with them, true story happened. So yeah, write the text better and focus more on coalition building before launching. Thanks, Aiden.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Building on Amir's second point, it's focusing much more of our energy on lining up elite institutions and gatekeepers, so that's the media and elected politicians and other sort of respected institutions in the jurisdiction needs to be just a much larger part of our focus and honestly, that would probably be both of my takeaways, I think that's Double efforts onto that one.

Amy Odene:

Okay, well, thanks so much both. I know there's always so much to unpack with so much nuance in all of the different propositions and cases, and I think you've really explained that whole process. It's incredibly interesting and, yeah, very excited to see what happens next for both organizations. We normally round off the podcast with some recommendations. I'd love to know from each of you, having been around in the movement for so long, is there something that's like an unusual resource or something that like a book or the podcast, something that you have found particularly compelling to like drive your activism up until this point?

Aidan Kanyoku:

Well, one book that really helped me clarify how this sort of losing forward strategy can work, especially with ballot measures, is called the Engagement by Sasha Eisenberg. It's a fantastic history of the marriage equality movement in the United States from about 1990 to 2015. And what I love about it is he writes I mean so thoroughly researched that you just get to be a fly on the wall on all these strategic conversations that both proponents and opponents are having throughout these decades, or you know, he's literally just recreated these conversations where big strategic decisions were made about how they were going to pursue, and it's so super fascinating, I think that's I wish there were so many more history books like that for the movement. And then I always have to recommend, on a very different kind of tone, a book called Get Political for Animals by Julie Lewin, the most important book that animal advocates could read from within our own movement, about how we could be get so much more effectively leveraging our activist energy in less sexy ways to make a big, bigger change. And the stuff that's outlined in that book is going to become a lot, much bigger part of parental futures model in the coming years.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Almeer was solo in Portland, while the rest of us were focused on these campaigns in Denver did some fantastic voter block organizing around the city council election in Portland, which was a unique situation where they had to completely restructure their city council, had a clean slate, had ranked choice voting for a final council of 12 candidates, and it was a great opportunity to do that thing. Almeer and I were both just talking about how do we get in with some of these elected officials and important institutions before we even have a campaign going and make friends there so that when we do run a ballot initiative or maybe we can get laws passed just through the city council now. So we now have five out of the 12 candidates on Portland city council were endorsed by Paranormal Future and some of the others are good friends with people who we were close with. So we're very excited about what is going to happen in the short term in Portland and also how we can build on that strategy in other places.

Amy Odene:

Nice, Awesome work, Eva Almira. Any recommendations?

Almira Tanner:

I haven't read a lot of nonfiction this year. I've been trying to read fiction.

Almira Tanner:

So this is my plug to read fiction, because it's good for your brain and read a physical book, not on the screen, but I do really like I follow like Waging Nonviolence newsletter and that's just like a compilation of a bunch of articles about social movements across the world, different types of movements, and I think it's just like a cool snippet of like what's going on and try to like like steal from other movements, because I think that the animal rights movement often forgets that we are a social movement and that we should learn from other movements, not just our own. So plug for reading that newsletter or just like subscribing and seeing if there's anything interesting that comes to your inbox.

James Ozden:

Awesome, and we'll link all of those in the show notes, as always under the resources and and as a shout out, if you're based in any of the places like Berkeley, portland, colorado, definitely reach out to these groups. You know where to find them. Yeah, just want to say Aidan and Alvira, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been extremely interesting and I quite enjoyed the full Percy format as well. So, yeah, appreciate both your time and all your hard work on this and looking forward to maybe getting you guys back on in two years after you won the next round.

James Ozden:

I hope and do it at another degrees.

Aidan Kanyoku:

Thanks so much for having us, yeah thanks for giving us a chance to unpack some of these lessons and, almira, it's always good to see you and talk through what we're doing.