Ridglan Farms in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin is a breeder of beagles for scientific research. It’s been a target of animal activism for about a decade, as the philosopher Aaron Yarmel details here. In mid-March of this year, activists broke into Ridglan and, in broad daylight, removed thirty of the two thousand dogs who were housed there at that time. Eight of those dogs were later recovered by police.

After that raid, activists audaciously announced and widely publicized an intention to return to the facility about a month later to remove all of Ridglan’s dogs. A specific date was announced. There was even a website where anyone could sign up to join the action.

I was one of the hundreds of activists who participated in that second, much larger, action.

When we arrived at Ridglan Farms on the morning of April 18, police were there to meet us. Using tear gas, guns loaded with rubber bullets, and other “less-lethal munitions,” the police successfully repelled our attempt to invade Ridglan Farms.

No dogs were saved that day. But less than two weeks later, Ridglan agreed—in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money—to surrender a substantial majority of their beagles to rescue groups. At the time that I’m writing this post, dogs are being removed, and there’s hope that all of the dogs presently at Ridglan will soon be placed in family homes rather than sold to laboratories.

This was an instance of what’s known as open rescue. In an open rescue, activists go into a place where animals are being harmfully used—say, a farm, slaughterhouse, laboratory, or breeding facility—and remove the animals without permission of their legal owners. What makes it an open rescue is that the animals are being rescued from threat of harm; what makes it an open rescue is that the rescuers do not hide their identities and do not intend to “get away with” what they are doing. In many cases, open rescuers seek arrest and prosecution in order to defend their actions in court.

I hold that open rescue is a form of moral speech. When activists perform or attempt to perform an open rescue, there is at least one moral proposition that they thereby assert. In a moment, I’ll address the question of precisely what is asserted in the act of open rescue. But first I want to address a more basic qualm about what I am proposing.

Some might say that only speech acts of the canonical sort—which occur in natural languages such as English—can be propositional assertions. So, they will say, actions like open rescue, which (unlike canonical speech acts) are not essentially linguistic, can never be propositional assertions. In other words, actions that aren’t essentially linguistic (hereafter just “actions”) simply aren’t the sorts of things that can function to assert propositions. Thus goes the objection.

The objector will grant, of course, that one can make propositional assertions while performing actions. For example, suppose you believe that your neighbor has been abusing her dog, so you go onto her property and, without permission, take her dog away from her. While performing the act of removing the animal, you might at the same time say to her (in spoken English): “Your dog does not deserve to be mistreated, so I am taking your dog away from you.” In that case, your English utterance would be a propositional assertion. But surely the act of taking the dog could not itself be a propositional assertion. So the objection goes.

But the idea of speaking through action is intuitive. If you have a spouse, for example, you can tell her you love her by speaking aloud those English words. Or you can tell her you love her by doing something loving for her. This, I think, is familiar to anyone who’s been in an intimate relationship. It is not at all strange to think that a proposition such as I love you can be asserted through one’s actions.

In Hannah Arendt’s historically pivotal work, The Human Condition, she writes about actions “performed in the manner of speech” and refers to the “content” and “meaning” of actions. I think she is talking about something along the lines of what I have in mind here. The core idea is that there is a form of speech that might be called action-articulated speech: speech through action. Action-articulated speech is often accompanied by speech through words (as in the above case where you rescue your neighbor’s dog). But it needn’t be. If you wordlessly do something loving for your spouse, for example, your action can speak volumes on its own. My view, as I’ve said, is that open rescue is an action with meaning and propositional content. It is a kind of action that is also a kind of speech. It’s a way of doing something, but it’s also a way of asserting something. In short, it is action-articulated speech.

This is not an innovative view of open rescue specifically or of activism in general. On the contrary, it seems to be commonly assumed that activism has a fundamentally communicative and assertoric function. For example, in his agenda-setting discussion of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that civil disobedience is assertoric when he identifies it as a “mode of address” to the disobedient’s community. Similarly, in an influential paper on activism, Bernard Boxill suggests that activist protest is a “claim” that “the victim of some injury has a right not to be injured.” And when philosophers talk about open rescue specifically, they often seem to assume that it is a communicative form of action (see, e.g., Danny Weltman on the communicative function of open rescue in his reply to Tony Milligan’s work on covert animal rescue). Open rescue leaders, too, seem keenly attentive to speech-related facets of open rescue (see, e.g., this Substack post by a leader of the April 18 action).

But if open rescue does function to make a propositional assertion as I maintain, then what exactly is the proposition that it asserts?

When open rescuers go into a place where animals are being harmfully used in order to save those animals from the threat that human beings pose to them, I think this is a way of asserting, first of all, that:

(1) These specific animals—the particular individuals whom the rescuers are trying to save—deserve to be saved from the danger they are in.

And I think that (1) conversationally implies that

(2) These specific animals are a sort of being, S, such that beings of sort S, when in danger, deserve to be saved.

And (2) logically implies that

(3) Beings of sort S, when in danger, deserve to be saved.

In (3), a certain kind of moral status is being attributed to beings of the sort in question. And attribution of that moral status carries heavy implications that go well beyond the proposition that beings of sort S deserve to be saved when they are in immediate danger. Among other things, there is the fairly obvious implication that these beings should not be so routinely threatened by humans in the first place and thus should not so often be in need of rescue. This, in turn, may require deep revisions to conventional views about our obligations to beings of sort S.

So, propositions of form (3) may carry major implications. And I want to claim that propositions of form (3) are asserted, or at least conversationally implied by what is asserted, in the act of open rescue.

But what exactly is sort S? This is where things get tricky. At the April 18 open rescue, there were at least two kinds of activists: mere dog-lovers, who just love dogs and don’t want them to be hurt, and hardcore animal activists, who are dedicated to advancing the cause of justice for animals in general.

It was easy to tell who was who at mealtimes. Mere dog-lovers are usually meat-eaters or vegetarians; hardcore animal activists are usually vegans. Based on my anecdotal observations, I’d say the mere dog-lovers well outnumbered the hardcore animal activists. However, most if not all of the leaders and organizers of the action were hardcore animal activists.

If you were to ask the mere dog-lovers, I think they’d say that S=dogs. That is, they would say that, in attempting to rescue the Ridglan beagles on April 18, we were thereby asserting, and standing up for, the view that dogs specifically deserve to be saved from threats posed to them by human beings.

But if you were to ask the hardcore animal activists, I think they’d give a much more expansive answer: S=animals. That is, they would say that, in attempting to rescue the Ridglan beagles on April 18, we were thereby asserting, and standing up for, the view that all animals—not just dogs, but also rats and mice and chickens and pigs and cows, and so on—deserve to be saved from threats posed to them by human beings. (Even more expansively, S might be thought to include some humans, e.g., disabled people. See this blog post by Mich Ciurria on Ridglan and disability justice.)

So, there is an animal liberationist reading of the action, according to which it was a way of speaking against all oppression of animals—including not just the use of beagles for scientific experimentation, but also, for example, the use of chickens, pigs, and cows as livestock. I think that that’s a fundamentally vegan reading (since heeding its core message would require, among other things, dismantling the institutions of animal agriculture). And then there is a much less radical reading, according to which the action was a way of speaking against bad treatment of dogs in the specific context of Ridglan Farms and places like it, and it was silent about harms to or exploitation of any other animals in other contexts. That’s not a fundamentally vegan reading.

Which is the correct reading of the action? Perhaps they’re both correct. Perhaps the action we performed on April 18 was ambiguous in its meaning. Hundreds of us came together to make some sort of statement through direct action, but it’s not clear what exactly we said. It is as if we came together to sing the same song but had rather different ideas about what the song meant. And maybe that’s OK. After all, the animal liberationist reading isn’t inconsistent with the less radical reading. It’s just a lot more ambitious.

I favor the animal liberationist reading. When I showed up to invade Ridglan Farms on April 18, I did so in hope of joining an effort with hundreds of other people to use our bodies and our actions—not just our words—to speak out for all animals who are oppressed by human beings. I did this because I think that this form of speech through action, that is, action-articulated speech, has special power.

To support this point, come back to the example of expressions of love in intimate relationships. I observed above that you can tell your spouse that you love her either by saying so out loud or by doing loving things for her. And if you want a healthy relationship with your spouse, you’ve probably got to do both of those things. Verbal assertions of love, if unaccompanied by actions that communicate love, come across as hollow, inauthentic, and insincere.

In intimate relationships, therefore, action-articulated speech is meaningful in ways that verbal and written forms of speech aren’t. I don’t know if actions speak louder than words, as the common expression says, but in any case I feel sure that actions speak differently than words. I think that much the same is true in the case of open rescue. It is one thing to speak the English words: “Animals (of sort S) deserve to be saved.” It is an altogether different thing to make that same assertion through the direct action of saving animals (of sort S) or attempting to do so.

My position is that open rescue is a morally defensible and perhaps even morally necessary form of confrontational animal activism. But I do not think it is at all obvious that I am right about that. There are many reasonable moral objections to open rescue that can be made.

Here is a moral concern about the April 18 action that, in my view, deserves to be taken seriously. I believe that the organizers of the April 18 action intended the action to have an animal liberationist meaning (and as I said above, that’s the meaning that I’m cheering for). But I also believe that most of the participants in the action did not intend it to have such an ambitious meaning. Some, perhaps most, of them were mere dog-lovers who intended only to make a statement against harmful use of dogs in scientific research.

So, it can be argued that the mere dog-lovers (who, I believe, comprised the majority of participants in the April 18 action) were being used by hardcore animal activists (who were the principal organizers of the April 18 action) to make a statement that far outstrips the much less ambitious statement that the mere dog-lovers thought they were making. Might that have been wrong?

In general, I don’t think it’s always wrong to use others for our own ends, provided those ends are morally good and our use of others is properly consensual. Thus it is not usually wrong, for example, to hire someone to do errands for you. It may be wrong to use others as mere means, as Kant says, but we can use others as means without using them as mere means. Rob Streiffer and I have argued that using others is morally risky because it can change what we owe to others by affecting our relationships to them, but it isn’t inherently wrong.

However, even if I’m right about all of that (a big if), this does not fully answer the moral concern here. Even if using others isn’t always wrong, it’s surely sometimes wrong. So, the question remains: If mere dog-lovers were being used on April 18 to make a very ambitious statement for animal liberation that goes beyond their own values, is there anything wrong with that? Or is this just how coalitional movement-building works?