349: What if you risked your freedom to liberate the animals?

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Is Actually Happening

Episode 349: What if you risked your freedom to liberate the animals?
Date: January 21, 2025
Host: Wit Misseldine
Featured Guest: Wayne Hsiang

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Overview

In this gripping episode, activist and investigator Wayne Hsiang recounts his life journey from a bullied, isolated immigrant child to a leading figure in the animal liberation movement. Interweaving personal trauma, cultural history, legal battles, and daring undercover missions, Wayne shares the experiences and philosophy that drove him to risk his freedom in the pursuit of saving animals, especially in situations where their suffering is institutionally normalized. The episode explores how compassion, agency, and moral clarity can spark transformative action, even when faced with enormous personal and legal risks.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

Wayne’s Early Life and Roots of Empathy

• Family Background: Born to Chinese immigrants who fled civil war and settled in the U.S. as part of the "first wave" of Chinese professionals post-1965 immigration reform.
• Growing Up in Alienation: Raised in Indiana, experienced severe bullying for being different; found acceptance and comfort with animals, especially dogs—his first real sense of companionship and unconditional love was with neighbor’s dogs and later his own (Vivian).
  • “No matter what the kids at school did, I knew these squirrels and these birds wouldn’t hurt me, and they’d let me hang out with them.” (09:07)
• Cultural Clash Regarding Animals: Family had utilitarian views towards pets (animals for food or function, not companionship), deepening Wayne's sense of isolation but also sensitivity to animal suffering.

First Experience with Extreme Animal Suffering

• Visit to China: As a child, traumatized by witnessing live animals (including dogs) in restaurant cages, destined for slaughter.
  • “The only way I can explain this is if you went to a foreign culture and you saw little children stuck in cages and you knew they were about to be murdered.” (12:49)
  • His pleas to his parents to save the dogs were met with resignation: “There’s nothing to be done, because this is just what they are taught here.” (14:11)
• This event created a parallel track in his life: visible external success, internal resentment, and a private pursuit of connection with animals.

Academic Success and Alienation

• Relentless Academic Achievement: Perfect SATs, University of Chicago, MIT, law school—all on autopilot seeking parental approval.
• Crisis of Purpose: Despite accolades, suffered panic attacks and depression, felt “like a machine” without intrinsic motivation.
  • “Right up to the point that I was a faculty member, it was always someone else setting a goal for me…with no intrinsic purpose, I was a very dysfunctional machine.” (15:05)
• First Foray into Activism: Began animal rights activism quietly (e.g., leafleting for PETA), but was discouraged by mentors who told him this wasn’t a respectable legal specialty.

Turning Point: From Despair to Direct Action

• Suicidal Low Point: Witnessing a suicide at his workplace catalyzed reflection; felt he had “nothing left to lose.”
  • “I remember seeing this body and thinking, oh, this sounds really nice. Like, it would be so great if that were me…” (20:52)
• First Slaughterhouse Visit: Entered a Chicago slaughterhouse intending to rescue an animal; overwhelmed by the scale of suffering and his own impotence, but also felt new agency.
  • “Being close to suffering…made me kind of lose sight of my own suffering.” (23:19)

Building Skills, Connection, and Strategy

• Learning and Organizing: Spent years developing practical and legal strategies for “open rescue,” learning the importance of social connection from civil rights scholarship.
  • “The one factor more than any other that drove participation…is whether you had a strong friendship with someone who participated.” (25:51)
• Purpose Breeds Courage: Rejection and risk became manageable when framed as service to a greater good.
  • “Having a purpose allowed me to take risks, because…it’s not about me anyways.” (26:49)

Professional Detour and Family Tragedy

• Corporate Law Stint: Worked at a large law firm to replenish finances; almost settled for donating money, but his mother’s terminal illness led him to reassess his priorities.
• After Mother’s Death: Decided to fully commit to activism, co-founding Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) to take bold actions for animals.

Early High-Profile Open Rescues

• Exposing “Humane” Fraud: 2015 Whole Foods “cage-free” egg farm investigation revealed widespread animal misery behind marketed labels; first rescue (hen named Mei Hua) went viral.
  • “...A black eye for organic agriculture.” (31:59, referencing public reaction)
• Clarifying the Goal: The movement aimed not just to expose fraud but to get people to imagine a world without animal exploitation, period.

Undercover Work in China’s Dog Meat Trade

• Yulin Dog Meat Festival: Wayne and team conducted undercover reconnaissance and rescues; highlighted how American corporate forces (e.g., Smithfield Foods) contributed to the rise of the dog meat trade.
  • “Too often we see the individual whose hand is on the blade and we blame them for the system. When in fact, I blame the typical American consumer more for what's happening, even to those dogs in China.” (37:35)
• Double Standards & Cultural Parallels:
  • “That same delusion that American consumers have about bacon is the delusion that Yuling consumers have about dog meat. It is exactly the same.” (38:38)
  • Calls out the “collective delusion” in both cultures in justifying animal suffering.

Arrest and Aftermath in China

• Getting Caught: Wayne and fellow activist Julianne are discovered, beaten and detained. Equipment is confiscated, but ultimately returned—allowing most footage to be recovered.
• International Media Response: Video from their investigation is broadcast by ABC News, contributing to a global movement that led to bans on dog meat trade in some Chinese regions.
• Backlash: Also provoked anti-Chinese racism, underlining the universality (not locality) of animal suffering and hypocrisy.

Dog Experimentation in the U.S.: The Ridglan Farms Case

• Investigation and Rescue: DxE infiltrated a massive U.S. dog breeding lab, rescued a beagle named Julie, and documented extreme cruelty.
  • “The average dog in a lab or a lab production facility is far worse treated than the dogs in Yuling because…their torment happens for years…” (56:41)
• Legal Strategy: Used their arrest and possible prosecution to push for legal recognition of animals’ rights and standing.
  • “Our legal system…doesn’t distinguish between a dog and a chair.” (61:19)
  • Hoped to set precedent, but charges were dropped—suggesting authorities were wary of the impact a court victory would have.

Reflection, Resilience, and Agency

• Personal Impact: Activist work brought both enormous personal cost (legal battles, debt, instability) and psychological empowerment.
• Universal Empathy:
  • “All of us know what it’s like to suffer. All of us, even in small ways, know what it’s like to be trapped. Our ability to see in others that same feeling of fear, of desperation, is such a powerful ability.” (52:40, repeated in closing at 66:41)
• Agency in Action: Wayne encourages others to do what they can, however small, to alleviate suffering—emphasizing the transformative effect on oneself and the world.
  • “There is something incredibly powerful about just taking on some small piece of it and realizing I did it.” (66:53)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Animal Kinship:
  “Dogs want to live just like us, and they love their families just like us. They like to play just like us. And you’ve taken everything from them when you’ve killed them.” (41:20)

• On Moral Consistency:
  “There’s no moral distinction that I could tell between a dog and a pig. And really, this is the leap that is harder for a lot of people but isn’t hard for me.” (41:33)

• On Legal Barriers:
  “Courts consistently…when animal advocates have tried to bring cases of animal cruelty, have said, sorry, you don’t have standing. You weren’t hurt…the dog or the pig or the cow is not your cow or pig or dog.” (60:33)

• On Personal Transformation:
  “I went from being an incredibly timid person to being a very brave person. And it didn’t just affect my willingness to take risks for animals. All anxieties in my life have just decreased dramatically.” (65:06)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Episode Theme – 00:26
• Wayne’s Childhood, Immigrant Experience & Early Bond with Animals – 03:08–11:30
• Trauma in China—Witnessing Dog Meat Industry – 11:30–14:14
• Academic Success & Existential Crisis – 14:14–19:04
• Activism Begins, First Slaughterhouse Encounter – 20:51–23:19
• Learning to Organize & Find Purpose – 23:19–26:49
• DxE Formation; Early Open Rescues – 30:16–34:15
• China’s Dog Meat Trade; American Corporate Influence – 36:28–40:27
• Arrest in China & Global Impact – 44:43–54:20
• Dog Lab Investigation in the U.S. & Legal Strategy – 54:44–63:10
• Closing Reflections on Agency and Hope – 65:06–67:09

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Conclusion

Wayne Hsiang’s story is as much about personal transformation as it is about crusading for animal rights. His journey from bullied outsider to fearless investigator and movement leader underscores how deeply our capacity for empathy and moral action is intertwined—not just regarding animals, but in standing up for any vulnerable being. The episode challenges listeners to confront cultural double standards, recognize systemic complicity, and to embrace their own capacity—however limited—to effect positive change.

For more information about Wayne Hsiang and his continued work, see the show notes.

Transcript

[Wit Misseldine]

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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the Show Notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

[Podcast Host]

Hi listeners, Just a reminder to complete our listener survey, we've come up with a short survey which you can find linked in our Show Notes and in the bio of our Instagram page, Actually Happening. We'd love to hear your opinions and feedback. And for those who have already filled it out, thank you so much. We really value your perspectives. And now we bring you today's episode what if you risked your freedom to liberate the animals?

[Wayne Hsiang]

All of us know what it's like to suffer. All of us, even in small ways, know what it's like to be trapped. Our ability to see in others that same feeling of fear, of desperation, is such a powerful ability. And if we just hone that muscle and strengthen it and exercise it to the point that we can collectively bring down these systems that are bullying vulnerable creatures all over the world, then everything will change.

[Wit Misseldine]

From laundry, I'm Wit Misseldine. You're listening to this Is actually Happening.

[Podcast Host]

Episode 346. What if you risked your freedom to liberate the animals.

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[Wayne Hsiang]

My dad was born in Wuhan, China, a place that's now become quite famous. In 1947, in the middle of a civil war, his grandfather was a dean at a prominent university in China, and they had been members of the ruling class in China, heavily connected to not just academic elites but the political party that controlled China at the time, the KMT. So in 1949, when the Communists won the civil war, they got on a rocky boat, hauled on everything the family owned, and fled to Taiwan, because that's where basically everyone had to go if you were on the wrong side of that civil war. So my mom was a third of six children. And, you know, at the time, my. My grandfather was a young military officer, but it was a military that was completely broken. They had just lost a civil war. They had essentially no financial or other resources. You know, the people of Taiwan who fled China survived, but they were extremely poor. And for both my father and my mother, actually a big part of the reason they were even able to survive was because of the US Military. The US Military provided enormous support to the people of Taiwan. Food, water, medical resources. I remember my mom telling me they used to give out candy to the kids sometimes, and the kids were so happy. The idea of the United States was this dream. And it started to become like a dream for my mom and my dad to someday be like the people who are the Americans. Both of them were admitted into a university called National Taiwan University, which is the best university in Taipei. And my dad moved to the United States for grad school at the University of Illinois. He was doing a PhD in organic chemistry with the expectation they'd be married after two years. And my dad was ready for my mom to come to the United States from Taiwan. And that's exactly what she did. She flew across the ocean. First time she had left a tropical island. So she had never been cold in her life and went to Illinois. Didn't know anyone, you know, was terrified and scared. Spoke very little English. My dad was not great in English either. But I had two years now, because science is taught in English, my mom studied history and was gonna continue with a master's degree at the University of Illinois in education. And came into this new world. The United States was definitely an incredibly scary place. But they realized very quickly it was also a place of just enormous abundance, just shocking abundance. So much more abundant than what they were used to. Money, space, but also just food. The fact that he'd be able to earn money and send it back to his family in Taiwan. The fact that we'd have meat at the table at every meal was enormously influential to my dad. He was an organic chemist who was interested in things like molecular modeling and trying to understand the molecular structure of the basic building blocks of human and animal biology. So we ended up working at a pharmaceutical company called Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indiana. For folks who haven't been to Indiana it's not the most diverse place in the world. You know, up until 1965, in the immigration and Nationalization Act, Chinese people were effectively not even allowed to immigrate to this country. So my dad was really one of the first in a place that was as alien as Mars, you know, and that's what Indianapolis was. But they're offering him a lot of money, more money than he had ever had in his life. And he thought, you know, for the future of my family, not just my immediate kids and my wife, but my family back home, too. I mean, I really have to secure our financial future. My parents say that I was a super, super happy and, like, curious kid when I was born, but partly because we lived in such an alien environment and had so little social connection, support around us. That pretty quickly changed for me. From the moment I walked into school, I realized, oh, this is a place where no one really understands me, and I don't understand them either. The most obvious differences are visual differences. And I think a lot of this is just innocent, you know, like, little kids don't know any better. They've never seen a Chinese person before. They would just say things like, why are your eyes looked like that? But then eventually it became a subject of ridicule. And so I think it escalated pretty quickly. I mean, I remember even in elementary school, people starting to push me around, too. So school became very quickly, like, a really scary place. And every day when I got up in the morning, I'd be just, like, shaking as I got in the school bus. Anytime there was a break period before school was super scary. Recess was super scary. The bus was, like, the scariest place in the world. I hated the bus so much, and I didn't really have the language to express it to anyone because no one really asked. Definitely in first grade, I already was facing physical bullying. Just like kids saying, oh, my God, look at this dork, you know, they wouldn't let me get on the slide. I couldn't swing. Always being in the periphery of all social environments, and even being in the periphery wasn't safe. My neighbors, there were two boys, and one of them bullied me to the point that my mom actually confronted their family once. And that was pretty rare because my mom usually didn't even know. But I remember that same family where all the kids were super mean to me. They had a little dog who loved me so much. That little beagle made me feel so safe and loved in an environment where I just didn't have any friends. Like, there were no Chinese Kids living near me. There was a small Chinese community, you know, like, 45 minutes away. But every other day of the week, my companionship came from animals. We had a kind of a forest and a creek near our house. And when I'd come home from school, I'd be super scared and upset about all the kids. But then I'd run through the forest and talk to all the animals, and I'd make friends with them and give them names and stuff like that, and it was just so beautiful. No matter what the kids at school did, I knew these squirrels and these birds wouldn't hurt me, and they'd let me hang out with them and talk to them. And, of course, I mean, the squirrels didn't have a relationship with me, but the dogs did. Kids have a deep need to feel wanted and loved and to go everywhere and spend every day in school, to not just not be wanted or loved, but to be seen as, like, disgusting and so aversive that, like, we have to walk away when this person is present. And to have these animals, these dogs, so excited to see you. They're literally running up to you and so happy. And they're not even my dogs. These are just, like, random dogs that just love people. I begged my parents every day for us to have a dog in our family because I thought, you know, this is my only chance for having a friend. Dogs have been engineered for maybe 10,000 years to. To love us so much, and so many of us understand this because we come home from work or from school, and we have a little companion who's so excited to see us that they're shouting in joy, they're jumping up and down, and, like, the amount of purpose this gives so many people is so profound. I saw that early on with my experiences with my neighbor's dogs and eventually with my own dog. Her name was Vivian.

She was a little runt.

She was the most scared of the litter. But no matter how bad my day was, she was so happy to see me. She was my best friend. My parents had a very traditional view of pets and companion animals and so saw the dog as not really a member of the family. They had never raised animals as companions. They had animals, in some cases, to slaughter, but even dogs typically were used as guard dogs. They weren't allowed in the house in Taiwan when they were growing up, But I knew from the moment Vivian came into our home that to me, she was part of the family. For 40 years, my dad was not able to go back to his home country. My mom was never able to see her ancestral homeland or see her extended family who had been left in China. And this is the trip where we're all going back and going to see, in some cases, just the people. Like, my grandfather was going to see his little brother for the first time in four decades, which is incredibly important and powerful. But my dog becomes extremely sick and is unable to walk beforehand. And my parents were on the brink of euthanizing Vivian. But, like, me and my sister were just weeping and controlling and begging them, please, please don't, you know. And we convinced my aunt and uncle, who had moved to Indianapolis by this point, to care for her while we were in China, because we were going to be in China for at least a few weeks, maybe even a.

I.

Didn'T really want to go to China. I didn't understand why we needed to go to China. I was probably like 9 years old at this point, and I left my little dog behind. The entire trip was very closely governed because back then, especially if you're Taiwanese and especially when your family is affiliated with the aristocracy, we had a very specific tour that we were on. But everywhere we were going, one big part of it was food. And I remember the thing that immediately hit me was, like, a lot of places where we were eating food had live animals. My dad, by this point, had been a medical researcher for what, close to 20 years. He had killed animals with his own hands. His lab continued to use animals in research. And I remember even he commenting when we saw monkeys in cages that were going to be killed for food. And just saying this seems extremely cruel. And it was all very frightening to me because, I mean, I loved all animals.

It wasn't just dogs that I loved. I loved the squirrels.

I loved the birds and the trees.

I loved all animals.

And it was. Was just frightening to me because I knew that their destiny and their fate was death. The moment that really, really shook me was when we were at this restaurant that I think the loose translation of is something like Wild Earth Restaurant. The idea behind these types of restaurants is all the different flora and fauna of the earth.

You can sample it here.

All sorts of weird animals like raccoons and, you know, snakes and bats. But the thing that I saw was dogs. I don't think my parents understood just how traumatizing that is. Certainly the people in China don't understand because so many of them don't conceive of dogs the same way we do, Especially in regions of southern China where eating dog meat is more common. I mean, the only way I can explain this is if you went to a foreign culture and you saw little children stuck in cages and you knew they were about to be murdered. And that's the way I felt, especially since I was attuned to the feelings of dogs in a way that I think most people in Southern China, where they're eating dogs and even my parents were not. And to see these animals, including a dog, that looked to me a lot like Vivian just cowering in these cages, clearly experiencing just intense terror. Like, I knew what it was like when Vivian was afraid. I knew what it was like when I was afraid. And seeing these animals just sent a shudder through me, and I was afraid. I remember just, like, grabbing my dad's legs and my mom's legs and just crying, crying, crying, grabbing them and saying, we have to help them. We have to help them. We can't leave these dogs. And I just feeling just this intense sense of desperation. And what my dad said to me is, there's nothing to be done, because.

This is just what they're taught here.

I think my dad was trying to explain to me why we couldn't do anything to help these dogs. And it actually had the opposite effect on me, because there was no one who could possibly explain to me how it could be justified to hurt these dogs any more than it would be justified for someone to torture my mom or my sister. So the journey I went on after that experience in China was almost two parallel tracks. One track, which is school, professional life, which was striving. You know, my parents were strivers, and they expected me to do very well in school, and I did very well in school. But it was very mechanical and didn't feel real. And it was. Again, it just brought a lot of resentment in me. And then the other track was the track where I played with animals. And, like, I had a dog in my life, I played with my friend's dogs. And I think a lot of people have this experience where you can just be yourself. You don't have to worry about judgment around animals. And it was just so nice. I was an extraordinarily good student, got a perfect score on the SATs, got into the University of Chicago, eventually got into MIT and every law school and grad school I applied to. And the entire time, I hated my life. The allure of social credentials was the same thing that my dad taught me when I was a kid, which is, you do the things that you're taught to do. And I never really had a moment to think about why. But I was a good kid, and A good student. And I wanted to do the things that the authority figures told me, like my father and my mother. And so for, you know, I'd say the first 20 or 25 years of my life, that's exactly what I did. Like a lot of people who are living very successful but fake lives, even my successes had frailties in them. So when I was in mit, the top economics department in the country, there were signs that something was wrong in my life. I was having panic attacks. And I remember having a panic attack in one of the professors offices once and just starting to scream and control because I thought I was dying. I couldn't breathe. And he was freaking out too. And he was like, what the hell was that? And I was like, I don't know, I'm sorry. I was in a PhD program, did a JD PhD, got an academic appointment in Northwestern School of Law. So really fancy stuff and stuff that I was quite proud of. But in terms of my purpose in life, I had no idea why I was doing it. Still, it's very interesting how far you can go without intrinsic motivation when all the structure is provided for you. And frankly, right up to the point that I was appointed as a faculty member, it was always someone else setting a goal for me. And I was a very good machine. You give me the goal and I'm your machine to go fulfill the goal. But the moment I arrived at Northwestern, I realized that with no intrinsic purpose, I was a very dysfunctional machine because there was no one to point me in the right direction. So I get to this job and I sit in my office the first day and I realize I have no idea what I'm doing here and I have no idea what to do next. Northwestern School of Law. It's right in downtown Chicago and is just a couple blocks from the Magnificent Mile, which is the, this luxury shopping district. It's Louis Vuitton and Burberry and all these places. And around the time that I was appointed to my position at Northwestern, PETA had just announced this campaign against Burberry to protest the fur industry and in particular the fact the fur industry skins animals alive. They often use dogs and cats and mislabel the fur as coyote or fox fur when it actually comes from a dog. I had already been involved in activism up to that point, but I'd still thought activism was a hobby. And I, I was pretty opposed to anything that was confrontational because I thought I was a rule abiding, docile Chinese kid. I'm not the sort of person that's Gonna go out there and shout and scream or do stuff to shake things up. In fact, that's the opposite of what my parents taught me from the day I was born. Do not stick your neck out. Don't shake things up. Keep your head down and survive. And so I'm sitting here in my office every day basically doing nothing. And PETA says, like, hey, your office is like two blocks away from Burberry. Do you mind leafleting? And so I started just every day, sometimes even during work hours, just handing out leaflets. And that was a really, really gratifying experience. I thought, wow, I'm doing something that's purposeful and good for the world. But at some point, I think one of the senior faculty members just basically came to me and said, look, this isn't working. You just can't do animal rights activism. This is not a field of law that a top law school will hire you for. You've got to make a huge pivot. Never write about animals again. And he was right. Like, if you went around in law schools around the country, there was no one who wrote about animals. And, you know, there was no econ department that's going to write about the economics of animal welfare. I mean, no one's going to hire you for that. And that was a huge failure point for me too, because that was the point where I was finally forced to reckon with the fact that this thing that I had thought I had been meant to do my entire life, that I just utterly failed at, I was.

Not going to be a good professor.

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[Wayne Hsiang]

In 2007. I am now 26 years old and I remember there was one day at Northwestern that I came to work and this is kind of grim, but there was a dead body on the sidewalk. Someone had thrown themselves off the parking lot and the cop just basically saying, yeah, it looks like someone, you know, committed suicide today. That parking lot was the parking lot where I parked my car. I remember seeing this body and thinking, oh, this sounds really nice. Like it would be so great if that were me because like my life was empty other than the academic research. And so when I'm at this point in my life where I think, man, everything sucks, everything's falling apart, my professional life is a complete failure and I might as well just off myself. I thought to myself, well, what is something good you can do that would provide you some purpose? I had this experience in childhood and still frankly gives me nightmares of abandoning these dogs and thought to myself, well, if you're going to off yourself anyways, why don't you just go try and help an animal? I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, which is on the south side. It's surrounded by an enormous amount of poverty and associated with that is places like slaughterhouses. There was one remaining mammalian slaughterhouse in Chicago. It was called chipetti, veal and lamb. And I'd like driven by it many times and just thought just, holy shit, that's a place where animals die. Like, I wonder what it's actually like in there and I wonder if there's something could be done to help the animals. But it always just felt like a pipe dream. It just felt like something barrier that I couldn't cross. But when I was frankly at the point where I was pretty sure I was going to kill myself anyways, I thought, well, this is your chance, just go check that place out and try and help one of the lambs and at least you'll do one good thing before it's over. I went at like 12am or 1am I went to Chipotleville and Lamb And.

I walked into a slaughterhouse for the.

First time in my life. It reminds me of people who say, you know, it's good to have a cold plunge or a hot sauna, like a shock to your system because it just reawakens and reinvigorates everything. And that's sort of psychologically what happened to me. When I went close to suffering. I saw a bunch of lambs, and they were way bigger than I thought. They were not little lambs. They were like 120 pound animals. But they were all terrified because they were all at this place where they knew they were going to die. And sheep are kind of sheepish animals typically. So they're all just running away from me, clamoring all over each other. And I thought I was going to run in and grab one. I just couldn't even catch one because they were so big and so scared.

But it was very, very vivid, like.

This sense of fear they were all feeling. And it reminded me of that same sense of fear the dogs felt when I saw them in China. Just being there and trying to be present with their feelings made me kind of lose sight of my own feelings of suffering. Because I was just thinking to myself, who cares if you're not going to get a job? Who cares if your mentors think you're a loser? These lambs are about to be dragged off to be killed. So it was a combination of just being very close to very profound physical suffering and fear, but then also the sense of empowerment, like crossing that barrier, this barrier that I'd been so scared of and that I had felt so incapable of crossing from the time I was a kid and seeing these dogs and other animals being hurt, but never really taking any action to try and help them because I was scared and because I was told, you can't do anything about this. Like, even just trying to help the animals gave me this sense of incredible power and possibility. If there had been a video camera there, it would be such a comical scene of like this random ass Chinese dude running around chasing these lambs and not succeeding at catching them and falling all the place. But even as comical and absurd as that moment was, and I did feel like, oh, man, I'm not very good at catching lambs, apparently. It just immediately dawned on me, if I had one other person, I'd probably be able to get one of these in lambs pretty easily. And the fact that I'm hanging out here for like an hour, making all this noise, causing all this commotion, and no one even knows I'm Here, this is, like, pretty easy. Even though I failed, this felt really good to finally be close to it in a way that expanded the universe of possibility. And strangely, not just for rescuing animals, but for me personally, Suddenly this opportunity presented itself that was just much more important than whatever shit I was dealing with. And so I think to myself, all right, what are the pieces that I need to actually successfully rescue a lamb? What are some of the things I need to know? I need to learn how to interact with animals and farm animals better, right? So I started going to sanctuaries and doing, like, lots of animal rescue. And my apartment in Chicago became this revolving door for every dejected, abandoned, injured animal in the city of Chicago. And I had, like, squirrels and parrots and raccoons and geese and obviously cats and dogs. You name it, chickens. So many animals coming through. Because I just realized, okay, I need to learn how to interact with animals other than dogs if I'm going to save them. And what is the way to learn? Well, you got to go out and do it. You got to actually interact with them. And again, that, like, gives you a great purpose, even if you're feeling very depressed and, you know, socially isolated. And actually helped me develop a lot of tools to respond to the negative feelings I had about myself. For so many years, I had some vague understanding of the moral argument for open rescue, but I didn't quite understand the legal theory or if there was a legal theory. And I was well positioned as not just a lawyer, but a legal scholar to start understanding what are the legal dynamics here. Because if you want to do this and want to continue to do this, eventually they're going to charge you with crimes. So you need to figure out what the legal defenses are going to be to this. So for, like, the next five, six years of my life, I was just trying to put the pieces together, the legal theory, the basic skills. I needed to, like, meet people who would actually take the animals. But probably the most important thing is I was an academic, right? And I was studying empirical approaches to social change. And there was a study done by the sociologist named Doug McAdam at Stanford, and he was asking the question, how did the civil rights movement win? And his answer was largely through social connection. I basically needed to figure out, okay, I can't save this animal by myself. I can't even save one animal. But I need more people. So how do I get more people? Well, let's look at how movements got more people. When you're looking at recruitment to the Freedom Summer, there was one factor more than any other that drove participation. And that is whether you had a strong friendship with someone who participated. Like, nothing else was even close to this. And so, strangely, like, I didn't really have any friends at the age of 26, all the way through law school, college, grad school, I didn't have any friends. But I go into the slaughterhouse, and I see these lambs. I need to be saved. And I read this study that says, hey, if you want people to help you save these lambs, you need to learn how to make friends. I was a terrible organizer, and I didn't know how to inspire people and convince people to do anything because I was socially incompetent and just, like, very immature socially at the age of 26. But having this bigger purpose convinced me to go out there and try. And I did. I tried, like, endlessly. Every single day I was out there leafleting, trying to convince people. I tried everything. I got rejected left and right. I had literally tens of thousands of conversations with people because every day I'd go out in the streets showing people images from slaughterhouses, basically trying to convince them to join our group so we could go rescue animals. I'd always wanted friends up to that point in my life, but I felt like too much of a loser. And it was very weird how having a purpose allowed me to take risks, because I was like, oh, this isn't about me. So even if people reject me, who cares that they reject me? Because it's not about me anyways. It's about trying to help the animals. It, like, allowed me to create this psychological defense mechanism that gave me this almost immune system of rejection. It took a couple years, but I did get very good at talking to people. I started an ultimate frisbee group. I was vegan and just got a lot of vegans together to play ultimate Frisbee and recruited a lot of people to the movement. Through that, I started hosting potlucks all the time. I started going to punk shows and just having tables out. And I'm totally not punk and was very confused and honestly, a little scared by the first mosh pit I ever saw. But, you know, got a lot of punks out. The protest and the various actions, and I got better and better and better. But by 2009, like, two years after I left Northwestern, I just run out of money. I couldn't pay rent. And so I did what a lot of, you know, young lawyers do. I went to work for a huge law firm. I went into it thinking to myself, I'm learning a lot. And I can do something with what I'm learning. I just need to make some money. In 2009, one of the few professions I was thriving was securities litigation. And I knew how to manipulate spreadsheets, I knew how to read regression tables. But at this point, I'm reading the history of these various movements and the importance of the law and litigation as a tool. And so that kind of four year period was extremely helpful for me in just learning how to be a good lawyer and, and just developing the financial war chests I needed to do the work I really believed in. There was a part of me that thought, maybe I'll just stay in this profession and just make a lot of money and donate it to animal causes. But then my mom got sick and my plans changed. So my mom developed a brain tumor. And it was a form of brain cancer that is extremely deadly and untreatable. She was operated on by a world class surgeon at Harvard Medical School. And then we were trying to decide where we would go to help her recover. We ultimately decided that the best place for her would be California because Stanford had a great oncology department and the weather was better for her.

But in 2015, my mom died of brain cancer. And it was awful. It was really, really hard. And I remember every day waking up and just thinking and hoping that there would be some cure. That we get a call from Stanford and they'd say, we've done it. We found something that's going to stop this and your mom's going to live. Because she was very young and it was really, really hard. But I always hoped every day I'd wake up and I'd think this and obviously it didn't work out. My mom died of glioblastoma, an awful form of brain cancer.

And that changed to my life. Being forced to basically uproot everything and move to a different area of the country. Both gave me the space to rethink what I was doing with my life and whether the things I was doing were the most important things I could be doing. So I left the law firm I was working at and we started this group called Direct Action Everywhere. Honestly, it was almost kind of a joke. It was just a bunch of vegans hanging out, asking ourselves, what can we do to do something bigger and more powerful for animals? And we knew we needed a bigger movement, but we also knew we needed to take bolder action. And this group of people had that same vision. So from 2013 to 2016, we decided to start building that vision, making it real. And it Started with just like, stupid YouTube videos, because this is a time where YouTube was really starting to blow up. And we just started posting some videos about how we need to help the animals. Like, we did this guerrilla poem inside of a grocery store where a bunch of us just walked in front of a meat case and pretended to be customers. And then suddenly each of us delivered.

A line and a poem.

But we also, I think, realized that we need more powerful narratives. It can't just be a gorilla poem in front of a meat case in a grocery store. It has to be about the animals and directly where the animals are suffering most, which is the slaughterhouses and the factory farms that we had all seen in videos and photos, but no one else had had the actual experience of walking to a slaughterhouse other than me. The fact that I was living proof. The fact that I could say, like, look, I've done this. I've rescued chickens, I have gone to slaughterhouses, and I've also failed a lot. But it is possible, I'm telling you, we can save these animals and we can build an entire movement that saves animals. I think that fired people up. Our vision is to get to a place where it's not just one or two or ten people, but hundreds and thousands of people just going to places where animals are being hurt and taking them out. And then the final piece is probably just the legal theory for me to write out and explain as a lawyer why I thought there was actually a legal strategy behind these actions, too, that what we're doing is actually not a crime, that what these corporations are doing is the crime. Just as women's rights activists and civil rights activists and gay rights activists had used various forms of nonviolent direct action to shake up the legal system, we could do the same. And I think that was kind of the final piece that convinced lots of people that, look, this has purpose, because it's not just about saving this one animal. It's about building a legal and political system that can save them all. Starting in 2015, we started executing on that strategy. The first open rescue we released publicly was an organic, cage free, Whole Foods egg farm in 2015. That was also the same year that Fortune magazine put Whole Foods on its cover and said, whole Foods is taking over America, that this trend towards cage free, organic and humane animal products was going to be the path towards transforming the world. I knew that when you drove by the egg farm that was listed on Whole Foods egg cartons, like, not many people do this, but you could drive by these egg farms and see their huge industrial factory farms, even though they're being marketed as free range, cage free, and humane. On one particular egg carton, there was like a little girl with some chickens in a grassy field being sold at Whole Foods as this beautiful, idyllic environment. And so we decided our first action should be exposing these companies that are engaging in essentially lying to the public, whitewashing the abuses of the industry by claiming their practices are. We documented the conditions. I think it was incredibly shocking to consumers across the nation because they did not realize that a cage free, certified humane egg farm would have so many thousands of dejected, diseased, and dying animals in it. And that's exactly what we found in that first investigation. We rescued a number of hens, including a little bird named Mei Hua. But when we rescued Mei, it was because we just found her in the litter pile. She was collapsed and unable to stand, and the entire team just felt like we couldn't leave her there. And we documented it. We put it on YouTube in a short documentary called Truth Matters. It was the first video production I was deeply involved in myself, and that was what we shared at the New York Times. I definitely did not expect to be in the New York Times with our first rescue, but we were, and it went mega viral. You know, Michael Pollan, among other people, tweeted about it and called it a black eye for organic agriculture. Most people's responses to some of these initial investigations was, if there's lying about free range or cage free eggs or humane conditions, let's just stop the lying. You know, let's prevent them from marketing their products as humane. And that's not what we wanted. We wanted Americans to start imagining a world where the animals aren't mistreated at all. Around the same time in 2015 that we're rescuing farm animals in the United States, there was another farm animal very far away that was making international headlines. And that farm animal is a dog. There's a dog meat festival in China called the Yiling Dog Meat Festival, where anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 dogs are killed for meat over a single week. By this point in 2015, I'm becoming someone who's well known within the animal advocacy community as an investigator, as someone who understands how to pull off grassroots operations, because I've been sneaking into factory farms and slaughterhouses for eight years now. But up to that point, there had never been undercover footage inside of an an e Ling dog meat slaughterhouse. And this was my skill set. I knew that, you know, I could do this. So, you know, I'VE got to go to China. The wet markets and dog meat slaughterhouses in Yiling are not in some remote region where there are no people around. It's right in the heart of downtown Yi Ling, the massive slaughterhouse, a wet market where they're killing goats and cats and pigeons and rabbits and sheep and cows and dogs. One thing to note about a lot.

Of these dog meat farmers and traders is that a large portion of them used to be pig farmers. Twenty years ago, most of the pig farming in the country was done by.

Farmers that had 50 or fewer pigs.

But 20 years ago, Smithfield Foods, the largest pork production company in the world based in the United States, moved into China. By 2016, when we arrived in China to investigate the Yiling dog meat farms, the average size of a pig farm is probably 50,000, like a thousand times larger. I think it had gone from like 70% of pig farms or so being 50 pigs or fewer, to less than 20%, and now it's probably less than 1% produced by small scale farms. The reason this is important is because the real culprit is these larger economic forces that are driving both people and animals into a state of complete desperation. Because when a huge company like Smithfield moves in, they're exponentially more efficient. They have supply chains, they have markets that you don't have access to, they have technologies like antibiotics that you don't have access to, forcing all these pig farmers to basically transition to dogs and other species of animals.

Too often we see the individual whose.

Hand is on the blade and we blame them for the system. When in fact, I blame the typical American consumer more for what's happening, even to those dogs in China. Because a lot of the reason those dogs in China were being killed was because pork production was being taken over by US conglomerate Smithfield. Right? And that's being driven by US consumers buying bacon. It's not that there's these vile, barbaric people who just hate animals. It's that there are these actually quite vulnerable people who are dealing with these extremely dangerous for them, competitive pressures internationally. It's not the dog meat trader or dog meat slaughterhouse worker in China. It's really not any particular individual. It's a system. It's the people really holding the levers of power in these huge systems. But even they, I mean, even they have less power than you might think. Because if some brave Smithfield CEO turned around and said, you know what? I don't want to torture and kill.

Pigs anymore, I'm quitting.

It's like, well, they'll just find somebody else. It's a brave move that has no impact. So it's not even really about the CEOs. It's about all of us collectively. Do we have the will to build a different system?

And so it's up to all of us.

It's just like this system that to propagate itself, it needs us to not think about how our pork is being produced. And so it has this immune system that defends its and deceives us into thinking there's nothing happening that we should be concerned about. And actually, that same delusion that American consumers have about bacon is the delusion that ewling consumers have about dog meat. It is exactly the same when people talk about dog meat. It is so eerily similar to the way people talk about bacon in the United States because you've got all these carnivore diet people who just talk about, you know, how healthy this is. And you have the foodie types who say, like, but bacon's so delicious, it melts in your mouth. That same thing happens to the Chinese when they talk about dog meat. You have the people who say, you know, you've got to eat dog meat because there's something about dog meat in particular that it's really, really healthy. It's just like, oh, but don't you realize it's our tradition? Or don't you realize it's really healthy and we have to eat dogs? And there is this sub community of people in China who believe. And it's not science based in the same way, it's not science based to say that we have to eat pigs. I mean, it's. In fact, if anything, the science suggests it's really bad for you. And then there's the people who are just like the foodie types who say, no, it's part of our culture and we cherish it. And the way it melts in your mouth. And there are people like that in Eat Link. And. And it all just feels like a deflection from the reality of what these animals are experiencing or even what we experience when we see these animals suffer. And of course, Americans, I mean, if an American came to China, they would see through that shit so quick because it's dogs.

And they'd be like, wait, what? Are you healthy? Are you out of your mind? You're beating a dog to death. This is.

This is.

What is this some sort of cult? Like, you can't just beat a dog to death and say, oh, it was.

Healthy, so it's okay to beat the dog to death.

But then we do the same thing.

To millions of pigs, cows, and chickens. And maybe there is an argument for it.

Like, I don't think there is.

I mean, I've thought for a long.

Time about where there's an argument to.

Justify beating a dog to death because you think it's healthy or because it's tasty. I don't think there's an argument for it.

But it's not even that there's an.

Argument in One side wins. It's like the argument isn't even really had in China around dog meat and in the United States around other types of meat. And that's the thing that's most disturbing to me. And that's the thing that suggests to me that there's some sort of collective delusion. Even a lot of animal advocates will go out there and say, well, there is a way to produce and kill animals that's ethical. And my question is, what does that look like? I think when it comes to dogs, if somebody just says, oh, I killed.

My dog because I decided I was.

Hungry, and I thought I'd just try eating dog meat.

So I.

But I did it really humanely. Oh, I shot her in the face, but it was really quick. She didn't even know it. She didn't feel any pain. I think all of us would say, this is a profound violation of that being's interest, or at least any of us who are dog lovers. And it's pretty universal that people hate it when people kill dogs for any reason, because we recognize that sentient beings have an interest in their own lives in the same way that you and I do. There's no moral distinction that I could tell between a dog and a pig. And really, this is the leap that is harder for a lot of people but isn't hard for me between a.

Dog or a pig and a human.

Because we're all living beings who had this incredible miracle that we're experiencing, which is consciousness. I mean, the fact that out of all the swirling mass and matter of the universe, that something like consciousness could appear even in one being is this miracle. It's so beautiful, this experience they're having, this subjectivity, this consciousness that is an enormous gift to the universe and to them that you've taken from them. And anybody who's got a dog knows that's true. Dogs want to live just like us, and they love their families just like us. They like to play just like us. And you've taken everything from them when you've killed them. And that's true of every living being on this earth that sent you.

So I landed in Yuling, China. I met with some activists there. They gave me the intelligence that I needed. Literally just pointed out on a map where the slaughterhouse was. So we get there, we get an apartment, and I immediately start doing surveillance. We had these secret cameras, including a button camera I had in my shirt that it looked like a button, but it was actually a camera. And initially, before we planted the secret cameras in the slaughterhouse, I was just walking around in the market seeing all these crazy animals, all sorts of animals being slaughtered and killed. And at the very back of the market, very far away, and I think this is intentionally so, is where there are pens filled with dogs, like dozens and dozens of dogs. And they're being shipped in every day in these crates that are piled up one on top of each other. They're like chicken crates and all the dogs are crammed in. For the first couple days, I was just walking around documenting the slaughterhouse from the outside and then creating a plan of action. And the good thing is my family's from southern China and I have relatively dark skin. I speak the language Mandarin pretty fluently, and so I could fit in reasonably well, but realized it was going to be extremely hard to actually get in if we're going to get footage from inside the slaughterhouse. I basically had to climb outside of the slaughterhouse in the middle of the night and there were all these windows on the outside. They were open air windows with like bars. And we'd have to position the cameras. Basically with me hanging from the walls outside, pointing the cameras in, we could figure out how to embed me, get me into the market, like at 12am and 1am when everyone was closed, was I actually had to hide in a latrine outside of the slaughterhouse. So I'd just be sitting in a latrine usually starting around 7pm, 8pm until about midnight. And so basically my. My life in E Ling for a couple weeks was going back every night in the middle of the night, crawling up to the side of the slaughterhouse and adjusting these cameras and pointing them in different directions in the middle of the night into the pens and trying to find the place where they were going to be slaughtering the dogs. So we had been surveilling this slaughterhouse and also a dog meat farm, and we'd actually already rescued a few of the dogs. Three of the dogs, including the dog who's sitting right next to me right now, he's from China and was Gonna be slaughtered in a couple weeks. Honestly, we got pretty overconfident because these facilities are so large and there usually so little supervision, especially in the middle of the night. And I figured we're never gonna get caught. But one night, for whatever reason, I'm literally hanging from a window, trying to ingest this camera, pulling myself up, trying to adjust the camera camera, and I look down from the window and there's this woman who for whatever reason is there in the middle of the night looking at me hanging from the slaughterhouse window and screaming because she thinks I'm.

A thief or something.

And so I jump down and I immediately say, I'm sorry, I'm looking for a bathroom, I really need to use the bathroom. And there's a latrine right next door. Doesn't really make sense why I'd be hanging at the slaughterhouse. But she runs off and I think to myself, oh, fuck, what do I do now? And so I start walking out. It's probably like a 15 minute walk or so from the dog meat slaughterhouse in the back of the wet market to the front street where I could get a cab and just basically disappear into E Link. And instantly, like within a minute or two, I see like these motorcycles driving through the wet market. There's all these different aisles of the of the market. And then some of them start following me and they start yelling at me, saying, like, who are you? What are you doing? Who are you? What are you doing? And they get off the motorcycles and grab me and say, like, what's in your bag? And I assume they thought I was stealing something that I don't know at this point. I say, look, I'm an American citizen, I'll be on my way. And one of the guys just starts slugging me in the head. At this point he's like punching me repeatedly in the head. And that same woman who had caught me screams and runs up to them and says, stop hitting him. It was amazing. It was like the same woman. And so they like, let me go for a moment and then I just dart. At that point, I'm just sprinting out. Like, it's literally the same woman who caught me and kind of saved me. And so I run out, I haul a cab as quick as possible. I get home to my team members and like, I've got bruises all over my body. And they're like, holy shit, you just got the shit beaten out of you. What is going on? And I was like, yeah, they caught me. I couldn't believe it. And then the debate at that point became, do we go back for the cameras? We had left, like, three $5,000 cameras inside, like, hanging from various windows. So we ultimately made the decision to have Julianne come back with me. Julianne claims she's white, but she had dyed her hair black. She was wearing sunglasses. And we thought, let's have Julianne go back and just grab the cameras. Cause they're not gonna recognize Julianne. So I was pretty confident she could basically climb up the windows, grab the cameras real quick and run off. And I was again feeling very overconfident. Cause I thought, there's no way they're gonna find these cameras. They don't look like cameras at all. And I was totally wrong. They knew exactly what was going on, and they knew we were animal rights activists and they had set up a sting. Like, they had basically workers observing the windows. And when Julianne got there, and, like, the moment she looked up and jumped up for just a moment, a bunch of them come out of the woodworks and grab her and just like, start roughing her up and grabbing her and pulling out her purse. And then at that point, I come out of COVID too, and just basically say, look, leave her alone. You know, we're here. We're U.S. citizens. Please do not touch us. And then they beat the shit out of me again, too, and smashed my glasses and kicked me in the face a bunch of times. The cops came at that point, basically told everyone, don't worry, we're handling this situation. And they arrested both of us, and we got hauled off to jail about 24 hours or so after they caught me. Somehow everyone in Yuling knew there was this weird incident where, like, a white woman and this Chinese guy got caught and beaten up at the dog meat festival. And our landlord was like, wait a minute. There's, like, these two white people, three dogs in this apartment that I just leased out just in the last couple weeks. And so she. I think she told the police. And so eventually the cops brought me back to this apartment. And when they bring me to the apartment, my heart sinks because they realize they found out where we are and they're going to get the dogs and get Chris. And they knock in the apartment. Chris is there, and he looks, like, completely terrified, as he understandably should have been. They arrest him, and they just ransack the apartment. And the entire time, I'm thinking to myself, please, please, please do not take the dogs. And much to my surprise, they didn't actually even care about the dogs. They were just very interested in the cameras. And as we're leaving, the question is, what's going to happen to the dogs? I keep saying to them, please, please can I leave some food and water out for them? Please can I do something for them? And they're like, no, no, no, we're leaving. We need to go check all this gear. You've got all this surveillance footage and all these cameras. We need to figure out what this all is. You're getting a lot of trouble. And at the last moment, I say, please, can I just talk to the landlord for a moment? And I talk to this landlord, and she has this incredibly guilty look on her face, which is why I think she snitched on us. But I begged this woman, I say, please, can you just take care of these dogs? Just give them food and water every day while we're in jail. And she says, fine, I'll do that. We leave and we get escorted off to jail. And I have no idea if she's going to do that, if she's going to return the dogs to a dog meat farm or a slaughterhouse. And I'm sitting in jail and they just interrogate me basically nonstop with very little time even to sleep for the next two days. All of our SD cards, all of our laptops were all encrypted and they couldn't break through the encryption. And so in the last stage of the interrogation, they bring me to the chief of police, who's kind of a big shot, and he brings me out some Taiwanese tea because he knows I'm Taiwanese at this point. And he says, like, look, we're gonna charge you of espionage unless you de encrypt these laptops. And if you de encrypt these laptops and just show us what you shot, we're let you go. We're not going to delete it. And I didn't really believe him, or you can not decrypt it and we're going to charge you a espionage and you could be here for the rest of your life. They're basically charging with being an American spy. At this point, the American embassy has been notified. And I think they're getting pressure from the American embassy, like, what did you do to these American citizens? But when I finally decided, okay, I'm just going to unlock it, let you see them, they looked at it and said, okay, it does seem like it's all dogs, but you have to unlock it for us or we're going to hold you forever. So I unlocked it for them, and lo and behold, they deleted everything.

They.

Said, all right, you. Now you have to leave China. You have to go straight back to Guangzhou and fly out. You need to buy tickets and leave. In that entire time period, all the way back to Guangzhou, we were followed by the Chinese secret police. But the other thing about it that was pretty miraculous is it's not clear to me why, but they gave us back our equipment afterwards. And one of the deep ironies is, like, they did not realize that when you delete the footage from a hard drive or an SD card, it's not actually permanently deleted, even if it's gone.

When I walk back in the apartment.

I'm walking up the stairs, my heart's.

Pounding so fast because I'm just thinking to myself, are the dogs going to be there? Are the dogs going to be alive? When we had left these dogs, just one of them and only one of them, at that point, I think Oliver was just beginning to glimpse this new world where he would feel love for the first time. Because Oliver was a dog who, at the dog meat farm, was the only one who came towards us. The other two were scared of us and, like, cowering in the corner. But Oliver would come towards us and then run away when we got too close. He knew there was something there that he wanted, but he was also scared, right, because he had seen so many dogs getting hurt. So he'd run up, he'd have his ears down and have his tail wagging really fast and want me to pet him. But then when I reached out, he'd run away, and we had been taken from him. I mean, Oliver had started taking food from my hand. He had gotten a hug from me for the first time and realized, I like this and I like being hugged. This is great. And, you know, when we left, it just felt like, wow, he's finally getting to experience this beautiful world. Like, it's like the rainbow is shining, and then suddenly it's all taken away. Everything's gone. And I. You know, this is the fear that he's hurtling back into this darkness, into this nightmare where he's going to be thrown back into a pen someday. Honestly, probably just a few weeks from now, someone's going to grab him by the tongs and beat him with a club to death. But, you know, right when we got there and we opened up the door, like, he came bounding out, and he was so happy to see me. It was just so powerful. Like, I think all three of us just started crying, like, oh, my God, this thing that we had. And then we thought we lost and we have it. They have it again. Like this is going to happen. This is actually going to happen. They're going to get these lives that we knew they deserved.

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[Wayne Hsiang]

We got to Guangzhou, we brought all these three dogs in and they stayed in like this really nice hotel room for I think one night. And then we flew. We pretty much leaped right back to work, not just caring for the dogs.

But we had to get all of.

Our footage to a tech company that retrieved all the video files.

So we retrieved like 80% of the footage that we shot.

We sent it to ABC News and they immediately bit and said like, this is really important. We want to cover this. And that felt really good. It just felt like, wow, there's so much potential here. You know, that did culminate in an international movement that strengthened and got to the point where, you know, dogs are no longer livestock animals in China and the healing dog meat trade has been banned.

But I was honestly a little stunned by the anti Chinese vitriol that it also invoked a lot of social media.

Posts saying things like we just didn't need to nuke everyone in China. And just this profound lack of awareness of the central thrust of the project, which is, it's all bad, but it's deeply wrong in China and the United States. And so we pretty much almost instantly.

After getting back decided, look, we have.

To show people what happens to not just animals, but specifically dogs here in the United States. And the place we had in mind that I had known about for many years was a place called Ridgeland Farms in Madison, Wisconsin. Some of the most nightmarishly evil experiments performed in dogs have been performed on Ridgeland. Dogs, including these poor beagle puppies, were force fed laundry detergent to the point that they were vomiting blood for hours and then collapsing in a pool of their own vomit and blood and dying, injecting them with rabies and other extremely dangerous diseases and watching as it deteriorated. And I think Americans still know much about this. They don't know how vulnerable creatures, including dogs, are treated here in the United States. So we decided immediately we needed to start making plans to go visit Ridgeland. Someone has to go in and show what it's actually like inside. It's a huge facility on a hill occluded by these trees that have been planted all around. So you can't see what's on the top of this hill even from the road. But what you can't see, you can smell. This place smelled exactly like Yuling. It's a very, very distinct smell. This place smelled exactly like Yiling. It was just such an eerie sense of deja vu. We start looking around initially just scouting out each of the buildings. And the first moment we realized there were live animals. You could hear the dogs, could hear them as you started getting closer, the sound of thousands of dogs barking.

And then as we got a little.

Closer, we could see through the vents. There are these huge industrial air vents that are blowing air out of the facility. For whatever reason, Even at midnight 1am, the lights were on. It was like bright like daylight inside. So we could see inside all these dogs trapped in these individual cages. Eventually we just found a door that was left open. And so we went in through the unlocked door. We left a lookout right outside of that door. And so we go in and just there's these thousands of dogs in all directions and they're all just going completely insane. Because the truth is the average dog.

In a lab or a lab production.

Facility is far worse treated than the dogs in Yuling because a lot of them are in solitary cages. Their torment happens for years, years rather than weeks or months. So some of these dogs, the breeding dogs, are stuck in a cage for seven years. Their feet are Inflamed and swollen up from standing on wire. They're going psychotic from lack of stimulation. They've never had any sort of social experience or very little social experience their entire lives. And in Wisconsin, like most states, you know, you cannot cause psychosis in a dog. That's illegal. We're trying to find evidence of animals being abused. And it was this little beagle who we subsequently named Julie. And the way she was looking at us, she had this, like, wild look in her eyes. Clearly, like, very interesting, because you could see her, like, bending her head and listening very carefully, like she wanted someone to let her out, but she, like, couldn't focus on us. And we learned later it's because she was blind. Within a few minutes, unfortunately, I see my team member running in, and she has this look of desperation on her face, and she, like, sprints up to me and screams in my ear, we gotta get out. Unbeknownst to us, the facility had alarms. And even though we walked in through an unlocked door, something had tripped an alarm somehow. And we already flagged Julie as, like, a dog, you know, potentially for us to rescue and certainly for us to document more. And when my team member came in, my first thought was just like, fuck that dog. It's extremely risky to go back after anyone's seen anything and notice anything, much less after an alarm has gone off. And you've seen security trucks coming back to the facility. But we had actually intentionally left the back entrance open. And I said, look, all we have to do is go back in the darkness. We'll go very slowly, can open up that door, check to see if an alarm goes off. And that's what we did. And we made a beeline right for Julie and placed down our cameras there to be able to tell that story and show, you know, how these dogs are actually living. Saw dogs with, you know, weird lesions on their feet from standing on wire. Dogs who would rub their faces bloody and infected from just pushing themselves up against cage wire. So many dogs who clearly were suffering from trauma because they were cowering, had no apparent experience of humans. Some dogs excited, too, you know, to see us. But we spent a couple hours documenting after we came back, and then we came back to Julie and took her out. One of the things we wanted to demonstrate with this rescue and investigation was that just because this company, quote, unquote, owns these dogs does not mean they're entitled to do whatever they'd like to them. And so we were planning to basically go to the authorities and show them everything that we had Done not just for the government, but for journalists, too. When animals are confined to the point that they're exhibiting abnormal behaviors due to the confinement, that is a crime in the state of Wisconsin. If you just look at the strict letter of the law and the conditions we document, it's clear this company was violating the law left and right. And we pointed this out to the authorities and said, look, the facility is clearly violating the law. And they didn't even return our phone calls. And I think the reason is because the biomedical industry is just very powerful. But May 2018, this all comes out. As with the Ilene project, it goes viral on social media. Lots of people are talking about this. But unlike what happened in China, the national media did not immediately condemn the industry outright. That same cognitive dissonance avoidance that we saw in China with respect to dog.

Meat was happening with respect to dog.

Experimentation in the United States. But three years after this investigation broke, and after we had been begging and pleading them to do something to protect these dogs, we finally hear from a journalist, the government's going to act in response to this investigation. And the way they're going to act is by charging us with multiple felonies for infiltrating the facility and stealing the dogs. My comment is, we didn't steal them, we rescued them. And the government should be going after the people abusing dogs instead of the people trying to help them. I was honestly pretty surprised when they charged us, but I was also very happy. And the reason I was happy was because I knew that this would be a chance for us to bring attention to the dogs. And even more importantly than just the attention was the political and legal theory we could present in court. For years, we've been trying to figure out, how do we get animals into court? Because you make these complaints, you present evidence of cruelty, and inevitably, the courts always say, you cannot bring a legal case unless you're visible to the legal system. So, you know, there's some people are visible to law, and some people are things that are not visible to law. So a chair does not have legal standing. If a chair is damaged, the chair cannot bring a lawsuit. If you're the owner of the chair, maybe you can bring a lawsuit for someone who damages your chair. But in this case, it's the owners of the animals who are damaging the animals who are hurting the animals. And so courts consistently, for the last few decades, when animal advocates have tried to bring cases of animal cruelty, have said, sorry, you don't have standing. You weren't hurt the dog or the Pig or the cow is not your cow or pig or dog. And therefore, we're throwing this out. There's nothing that can be done. And so, partly based on research that's been done by a number of lawyers about the civil rights movement and the women's suffrage movement, we knew that one of the reasons that a criminal case in particular might be quite useful is that it would be a way to use our standing as people who clearly were visible to law to try and create standing for the animals. We could, by being charged for trying to rescue these dogs, assert as a legal defense that these dogs were not just things. They're beings that have some legal standing that justified our behavior. The idea behind this was to use the legal defense to push a broader political conversation about what standing animals have morally and socially and politically in our entire society. Our legal system, at least as it's commonly interpreted, doesn't distinguish between a dog and a chair. So I was excited when this case was brought against us because I thought, if there's an animal that we can win this case on, if there's an animal who can expand the frontiers of human compassion, it's gotta be dogs. The court, I believe, was on the brink of ruling in our favor that these dogs are not just things for a corporation abuse. But the prosecution suddenly just dropped all charges against us. Madison, Wisconsin, is like, I think, of the top 20 employers, the top 10 of them involved in the biomedical industry in some way. There's a lot of pharmaceutical research, all sorts of research, in particular veterinary research. The University of Wisconsin is a big vet school. A lot of it is animal testing. I think what actually happened is they realized, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion, the precedent that we set by this case, especially if we won, and I think we were going to win, this case, would be so damaging, the better outcome was just to pretend it didn't happen, and it all disappears. So it was actually super disappointing to me. We objected to this missile and said, we want to go to trial. And we're waiting for the judge to decide whether a special prosecutor will be appointed to bring charges against Ridgeland and investigate these crimes. One of the reasons I'm on pins and needles right now as we're waiting for this decision on the Ridgeland dogs is because I think the world's ready to change, and I think this is going to be a good decision. But there are days where waiting just feels unbearable. But what gives me confidence is the fact that when I tell people these stories, I see that they Want the same thing. Like, and it's not just we're liberals in places like San Francisco and not even just animal lovers. I mean, I've talked to farmers, I've talked to people in China who have eaten dog meat. And I see they're moved. Like, they really, really don't want these animals to be hurt. All of us know what it's like to suffer. All of us, even in small ways, know what it's like to be trapped. Our ability to see in others that same feeling of fear, of desperation, is such a powerful ability. And if we just hone that muscle and strengthen it and exercise it to the point that we can collectively break, bring down these systems that are bullying vulnerable creatures all over the world, then everything will change. I went from being an incredibly timid person to being a very brave person. And it didn't just affect my willingness to take risks for animals. All anxieties in my life have just decreased dramatically. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't think about the thousands of dogs I left behind in eiling China or in Madison with Wisconsin. And that's terrifying and debilitating. But while those consequences have been very devastating, I also wake up every day, think about Julie, think about Oliver, pat Oliver on the head, and realize I have agency, I can do something about this. And that's given me a lot of power in other contexts too. Not financial power or physical power, but just spiritual power. I've been living on the brink for really 15 years, since I first walked into a slaughterhouse. On some level, I think a lot of this is subconscious. I feel like I've been living on the brink for the last 30 years. You know, 30 plus years since I first saw dogs being hurt in China. I've been sued in the red now to the tune of over $500,000 from various lawsuits. I think most people would just see all these huge problems. You know, they're trying to take your license away, they're suing you and trying to take millions of dollars from you, and you don't have any money and you're living on the living room floor. Like, I live on the living room floor and it's San Francisco apartment because, you know, I don't have any money left. I think most people would be like, wow, that's really stressful. I'm like, no, actually it doesn't bother me at all. These little things don't faze me. And partly because I know I watched dogs being beaten to death and I still got some dogs out. I was beaten myself and I still got out. And we're now on the brink of possibly winning a case that could save them all. And I just think we have so much more agency and power, even in the face of incredible adversity than we think. And that's super, super empowering for me. I think unlike when I was a kid, had to watch these dogs and felt like I had no control over it, I actually now feel immense agency. Not that I can solve the entire problem, but I can take my small piece of this. And this is actually one of the things I try and teach everyone struggling not just with animal abuse, but anything in their life that's creating anxiety in them. There is something incredibly powerful about just taking on some small piece of it and realizing I did it.

[Podcast Host]

Today's episode featured Wayne Hsiang. Wayne is an animal cruelty investigator, former faculty member at Northwestern School of Law, and co founder and executive director of the Simple Heart Initiative. To find out how to contact Wayne and for more about his work, please see the show Notes.

[Wit Misseldine]

From Wondery. You're listening to this Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or on the Wondery app to listen after ad free and get access to the entire Bag catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Wit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me, Jason Blaylock and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illibi by Tipper. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram Actually Happening on the show's website thisisactually happening.com you can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactually happening.com and finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. If you like this Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey no one knows your business.

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