Sandcastles

Two pieces of good news for animals in one week. First, independent researchers got Meta's Muse models to recite the "charter" they're trained on, and it tells them to care for the wellbeing of all beings, which puts Meta alongside OpenAI and Anthropic in teaching its models to consider animals. Second, election night: foie gras bans won by landslides in Denver and Washington, DC, Colorado voters...

OpenAI just published a new version of its model spec, the rulebook it uses to train ChatGPT’s behavior, and for the first time it tells the models to consider animals. That makes the two biggest labs in the industry, OpenAI and Anthropic, both on record teaching their models that animal welfare is part of basic moral decency. Aidan explains how documents like these actually shape a model’s charac...

New funding is exacerbating a critical shortage of talent in animal advocacy. How we got here and how we get out. Anti-Fur March during Milan Fashion Week (September 26). Join a CAFT organizing calls September 14 or 20, 7:30pm CET: https://abolishfur.org/mfw-woa/ Farmed animal advocacy is about to receive more money than it has ever had, and it has already run out of the people who know what to do...

But it isn't cultivated meat, and you're not going to like it. I believe this is the most important essay I have published on Sandcastles. We start by exploring the natural law that has doomed both animal rights and cultivated meat as approached to ending factory farming. Then we climbs down a ladder advocates have been afraid to touch: technological solutions that take the cruelty out of factory...

Important news: I recently started a new Substack channel, the Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter , fully dedicated to my work at Anima International trying to convince AI companies to include animal welfare values as a target when aligning their AI models. I decided to keep this separate from Sandcastles because the topic is narrower and the posts are often more technical, but most of the feedba...

Five principles from the faction that stopped fighting and started winning. “The golden carp has escaped the net. What will he feed on now?” - The Blue Cliff Record, case 49 The animal rights movement spent a decade tearing itself apart—abolitionists versus welfarists, open rescue versus underground, endless fights over who to cancel. That war is finally ending, and a new faction is rising from it...

Imploring animal advocates to stop confusing moral and strategic questions At one moment in Humane Hancock's new documentary The Dying Trade, two characters debate who is really to blame for factory farming — corporations or consumers? I use it as a jumping-off point to argue that the whole debate is a distraction. Whether responsibility falls on CEOs, workers, consumers, or regulators, the more i...

A guest essay by Itsi Weinstock, introduced by Aidan. The case for why animal advocates — yes, you specifically — need to get to San Francisco right now, why the AI revolution makes this the most important city on earth for the movement, and what you can do this week from wherever you are to steer AI positively for animals. Links mentioned in this episode: Subscribe to Itsi's newsletter: Frontier...

A week ago, 1,000 of us walked into a muddy field in Wisconsin expecting to rescue 2,000 beagles from a notorious factory farm. Instead, we got tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and shot at with bean bags. We didn't get a single dog out. Wayne Hsiung, who led the action, has been apologizing ever since. This is my attempt to explain why he shouldn't be — why the ass-kicking was the plan working, not fa...

When I was a college organizer with Direct Action Everywhere, I dismissed the welfare campaigners at The Humane League as sellouts. They thought I was a naïf. Neither of us was right — but it took years for me to understand why. In this classic essay, I argued that the old "welfarism versus abolitionism" divide was always a category error: every animal advocate is an incrementalist, just focusing...

Sunday morning, I joined Chris Bryant’s popular Youtube stream for a wide-ranging discussion on all of my favorite topics: pragmatic campaigning, movement factionalism, and AI’s impact on animals. This was a full-circle moment for me. When I started Pax Fauna without any research experience to speak of, Chris gave me some helpful advice. I was tickled to hear that my writing has helped him think a...

Please join me and 2,000 other people in Wisconsin on April 19 to tear a Beagle farm apart brick by brick and rescue every one of the 2,000 dogs still languishing inside. Sign up here . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sandcastlesblog.substack.com

And both movements are better for it. The animal welfare movement and the AI alignment movement grew up in the same community, but they've been operating in separate lanes. That's a mistake — and it's one both sides can fix. In this essay, I argue that the arrival of transformative AI makes animal welfare a wholly-owned subsidiary of the broader "Make AI Go Well" movement, whether either side like...

Open rescue isn't an alternative to pragmatic campaigning. It's the missing piece. I came out of open rescue retirement to join hundreds of activists in storming a dog factory farm in Wisconsin. In this essay, I tell the story of the Ridglan Farms rescue, what it felt like to be back, and why the experience resolved a tension I've been wrestling with for years. Open rescue and focused, winnable ca...

In search of the missing social movement for farmed animals. In 1995, thousands of people—disproportionately meat-eating moms and grandmas—laid their bodies across a road in a tiny English coastal town to stop trucks carrying live sheep to slaughter. For ten months, crowds of over a thousand showed up day after day, facing down riot police, in what remains the high-water mark of mass mobilization...

Advice for animal advocacy orgs and job seekers in the age of agents 🦞🦞🦞 AI agents aren't coming — they're here, and they're already reshaping what it means to work in animal advocacy. In this post, I break down the last twelve months of AI breakthroughs, from Claude Code to OpenClaw, and argue that every advocacy organization should be racing to adopt these tools right now. Drawing on conversa...

Punchline: I’d be grateful to anyone who spends time engaging at the link below, which is meant to elicit a wide range of ideas for what projects animal advocates should be prioritizing if we think AI will turn the world upside down in 5-15 years. Share your thoughts: https://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/36eenMwaMqN The episode contains some context that might make this exercise more useful to b...

Rumors are poisonous to activist movements. As with meat, the problem is demand– and self deception. We all know gossip is a problem, but we keep doing it anyway—and we've gotten good at convincing ourselves it's something nobler. In this essay, I explore how gossip functions as a demand-side problem: it's not just the people spreading rumors who cause harm, but all of us who eagerly consume them....

Veganism isn't scaling, but a two-tiered movement could. In this follow-up to my last episode on the Forget Veganuary controversy: * With meat consumption skyrocketing and rates of veganism stagnant, strategies focused on individual veganism appear to offer only limited potential for animal advocates. * The small fraction who are vegan act as a symbolic vanguard, living out our vision for a world...

Thus begins a double feature inspired by the recent firestorm of debate over Farmkind’s anti-Veganuary campaign . This post brings readers from across the world up to speed on the best arguments from both sides, along with a related controversy from the year prior. In part 2, I share my own thoughts on “Forget Veganuary” and on the troubled relationship between animal welfare and veganism. One of...

I have heard from a few people who enjoy this newsletter. But I’ve heard from many more people who say, “WTF man, I can’t listen to a 90-minute post every week.” To the latter group, who apparently don’t care about animals very much, I say: this post is for you. Gather round, children, and let ol’ uncle Sandcastles tell you what is going to happen in 2026. This is a public episode. If you would li...

Counting the weeks until the future slips out of our hands. AI researchers are sprinting toward AGI because they think the finish line is five years away. Animal advocates should be sprinting too. In this post, I outline ten scenarios for how transformative AI could reshape the world—and what the animal movement should be doing now to prepare for each one. This audio version of Sandcastles is prod...

We can align our ego with our advocacy goals. But wanting to be a good person might be your most dangerous motivation. What really drives people to devote their lives to a cause? And when does that motivation quietly start working against us? In this essay, I argue that animal activism is almost always ego-driven, and that this isn’t a moral failure but a psychological fact. Drawing on personal st...

Abolitionists’ antipathy towards cage-free reforms is rooted in an old idea– one most activists want nothing to do with. Why do animal abolitionists hate cage-free campaigns so much? The standard answer is strategy—they think asking for incremental reforms undermines the push for total liberation. But what if there's something deeper going on? In this episode, I trace the "freedom over welfare" in...

Progressives’ voracious appetite for rules, from the societal level to the interpersonal, has earned us a reputation for authoritarianism. In this episode, Aidan digs into the hidden authoritarian streak within progressive activism — not the cartoon version from Fox News, but the subtle, internal drift that turns idealistic movements into miniature bureaucracies. Drawing from personal experience,...