Do you think illegal activism or terrorism for animal rights, such as liberating pigs from farms and publicizing it on the media, causes net felicific benefit?

Ultimately, animal welfare ethics is a political contest. The only solution here is that the public comes around to the view that animals deserve to be treated better. On the face of it, the direct effect of liberating animals from an unethical industry is huge. A ton of suffering will be saved. But that's nothing. Nothing compared with its PR ramifications. It polarises people massively. Animal activism separates itself from the mainstream. Almost all publicity is good publicity but this is clearly no good.

I think it raises awareness, and some people actually end up agreeing with the ends if not the means. But I suspect it mostly polarizes people. Then again, it's possible those polarized people may consider "the terrorists" the enemy and "moderate animal welfarists" the ally, if the moderates condemn the actions of the terrorists. I'm not sure what the evidence points towards.

From a systematic perspective, a real difference would occur from inducing massive costs to the industry that just can't be compensated. For instance, if every month or so, a multi-million factory farm somewhere on the planet burned down completely, and the industry is helpless. That would drive prices and make suffering-inducing production less profitable.

But such a scale would polarize the public even more, since consumers would experience reduced availability of low-price food and other animal products. And if the scale is too small, rebound effects will eat up the benefit (e.g. one factory farm burns down, the competition increases production volume to compensate the demand etc.). Not even to mention the human and financial costs of the organizational effort such a terrorist conspiracy would require, and the massive violent response of current legal systems against them.

With regards to the idea that moderate animal welfarists might be thought of as the ally against terrorist animal activists, we need to ward against some fuzzy thinking here. What is our objective? To send a message about animal welfare. What is the best way of sending that message. By presenting a unified front. It's like a political party. When a member of a party you vote for goes and presents some extreme view or commits some illegal act, does this publicity do them a service? Of course not. It gains publicity for the party, but it distracts from the message. I'm not saying we should force anyone to stay on message, nor that we should excommunicate people who fail to converge upon some animal welfarist gospel truth. Just that it's possible for someone to act with the best intentions and to act counterproductively.

So I turned on the television two days ago and by chance I watched a program where people who send a letter can denounce stuff, and the producers use a hidden camera to infiltrate to get proof of the bad claims. One of the things they showed that day was an organization called Equanimal breaking into a farm with very badly treated pigs. The guys from Equanimal took four pigs and sent them to a vet to later let them live in an animal sanctuary, meanwhile denouncing the awful conditions in which the pigs are being kept. I normally don't think this is a good thing, because the public does not believe it is justified to break into a farm to do such a thing thus the public won't sympathize with the activists' claims and it will tarnish the animal rights movement. However, this time I saw in the show that the guys where doing it with their faces being clearly shown, not hiding their identity, and saying that they are not afraid of being punished for what they're doing because they believe the injustice being committed with the animals is much greater than their possible punishment and must be shown. They will gladly take the punishment for breaking in and stealing pigs to denounce what we're doing as a species with the pigs. Which makes me think, does this honest behaviour change the reaction of the public from negative to positive?

If they're just doing it to show the injustice, rather than free the animals, it seems like it would be fine. If people break into factory farms, gather video, and release it, the only harm it does to the animal farm is publicizing what they do.

Actually taking the pigs would cause problems, but there's a lot of stuff that they'd have to send them to a vet to figure out, and I'm not sure I like the idea of them sending the pigs back after.

I'm not sure exactly how much revealing their identities would change things, but I'm pretty certain it would help.

Just to flag up, I think the following two questions are more important than the one originally asked (though I'm not sure what the answers are!):
Do you think illegal activism or terrorism for animal rights, such as liberating pigs from farms and publicizing it on the media, is an optimal use of time? (i.e. is it something any of us should consider taking part in ourselves?)
How should we publicly react to illegal activism or terrorism for animal rights, such as liberating pigs from farms and publicizing it on the media?