Dan Shannon: How Change Happens

"There will come a time in the future where historians look back on this era of history and sort of see it as this moment of historical atrocity, which is what I think it is today. I do think that factory farming and the suffering caused to billions and billions of animals every single year is a moral atrocity of historic proportions.

I think we see it that way today, and I am very confident it will be seen that way by a kind of broad consensus in the future. But that's not inevitable. We have to do the work get to get there. And that's exactly what we're trying to do at the Humane League, is kind of take the steps that we think are the steps to be taken today, to ultimately bring about the end of factory farming in the long run." - Dan Shannon

Factory farming is one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time. Yet it's treated like background noise. Tens of billions of animals are raised in systems designed to keep suffering efficient and invisible. The cages, the confinement, the speed, and the cruelty are all hidden behind corporate branding and grocery store shelves. And even though awareness is growing, the numbers of animals in our food system keeps rising.

This conversation is with Dan Shannon, the CEO of The Humane League, one of the most effective organizations in the world when it comes to forcing the food industry to change.

Dan is helping lead the fight to eliminate one of the most atrocious practices in agriculture - battery cages, where chickens live in tiny, cramped cages for their entirety of their lives. This is a conversation about strategy, momentum, and what it really looks like to dismantle cruelty.