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 on different increments. The more useful frame, borrowed from social movement theory, is the inside-outside strategy — and once you see it, the apparent contradiction between cage-free campaigns and restaurant disruptions starts to look less like a civil war and more like a playbook.

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