Thank you @Marine-Lercier! 🙏🏽

Thank you @adhulesh! We're grateful for your support of the campaign and for all the work you are putting into the Del Mar ballot to ban retail pet sales & San Diego rodeo ban!

Thank you @Tomohaire! We appreciate the support and agree that I think it can help attract others to the cause. :)

Thank you both @Arepo! We do feel excited seeing the show of support :)

To address the funding use question, since we began petitioning for our current election cycle in early July of this year, 88.1% of the $40k spent has been for Wages & Taxes for paid petitioners. Our second-highest expense has been 4.8% covering Hiring (like job posts, required background checks, and a one-off training event). The third-highest is Printing (1.8%), then Payroll Fees (1.6%), and after that it is a bunch of smaller items (e.g. Postage, Vendor Fees, Software, Website Hosting).

Our cost-per-signature (we pay hourly, but still estimate what it roughly costs per signature) is $1.69/sig which is far lower than other campaigns in Oregon we have talked to. We've been able to be so cost-effective thanks to volunteers both helping with administrative work as well as volunteer petitioners supplementing our signature collection (and of course to our petitioners maintaining signature rates close to 15 signatures/hr.). This has allowed us to still pay at $25/hr., which is just above the MIT Living Wage for Oregon, while maintaining a strong cost-per-signature.

Hi @Lucie, I am grateful for your question and the opportunity to share more about our theory of change.

The confidence we have in our initiative's ability to accelerate the animal liberation movement largely comes from two historical precedents that inspire the campaign, which we briefly touched on above but would benefit from going into in more depth.

The Women's Suffrage Movement used as a strategy the ballot initiative process to win the right to vote. Importantly, they forced the vote despite the low chances of initially passing. In Oregon in particular, it took six successive ballot initiatives before it finally passed, and in the first instance only received 28% of the Yes vote. Despite this result they again put it to the ballot in 1900, 1906, 1908, 1910, and finally won in 1912. Nationally, between 1867 and 1920, 54 ballot measures for Women's suffrage were on the ballot, yet only 15 of those were passed. Those statewide initiatives were a core political activity during the movement, just as we hope initiatives like ours become a core political activity of the animal liberation movement. Women's suffrage initiatives forced regional and national conversations about suffrage, and also normalized the desire for suffrage among women themselves, many of whom were not initially supportive of suffrage. In a somewhat parallel way, we hope our initiative not only will generate conversations about animal rights (in an expressly political and systemic way rather than one tied predominantly to consumption habits) but will normalize asking for immediate liberation among animal rights advocates.

As for the Abolitionist Movement, we see parallels between how our initiative calls for the immediate liberation of animals and how the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) called for the immediate abolition of slavery. The approach of the AASS was controversial at the time because it conflicted with the gradual and compensated emancipation being advocated for by the American Colonization Society. The AASS was widely considered to be an influential contributor towards emancipation, as were their individual members who advocated for immediate emancipation. In our current movement for animal liberation, we see some examples of organizations advocating for gradual and compensated liberation, but we don't see organizations—at least not with expressly political tactics—advocating for immediate legal liberation. Speaking personally, I feel quite confident that asking for immediate liberation is more effective because it is both more authentic with respect to asking for the world we want, and is more consistent with respect to the suffering we claim is being caused by animal exploitation. (If witnessing the actions of others is a means of acquiring perceptual information and determining our own views, I worry that seeing others asking for gradual change implies to us that the suffering is not that great, whereas if others witness advocates asking for the immediate end to exploitation, others will start to view the suffering with similar seriousness and urgency.) Aside from my own preference, however, if someone at least accepts the view that a diversity of tactics is beneficial, then this deficit (having more gradualists approaches than immediate approaches) would be a cause for concern.

We are aware our initiative is unlikely to pass in 2026, but like the suffragettes we believe the act of being on the ballot itself will help the movement. Once we do finally pass, we also realize this does not prohibit animals from being killed in other states. Yet just like many of the first northern states to abolish slavery had a far smaller enslaved population than in the southern states, those free states contributed to the conditions necessary for national emancipation.