‘DEAL’ OR ‘NO DEAL’: Is the animal rights/welfare movement united in getting things done?
The philosophy of incremental and numbers-oriented welfare work has gotten a lot done. It represents a synthesis of the two threads of the animal advocacy movement: animal welfare vs. animal rights. The suit-wearing 'animal welfare' advocacy types get the meetings with corporations, and make demands carefully chosen based on rigorous analysis of which asks to do the most for animals. The corporations’ reason to go along is that should they refuse, they will face 'animal rights' protesters willing to put their bodies on the line for animals.
KELSEY PIPER: It’s one of those facts of the world that most people know but don’t really want to know: Billions of animals on factory farms live their lives in gruesome and torturous conditions so that our eggs and meat are a bit cheaper. Virtually no one really approves of it, but almost everyone participates in it. If you want to change that, what should you do about it?…
Activists for animals had some passionate disagreements about which approach to take. A lot of them favored leafleting — handing out flyers with grotesque pictures of the horrifying conditions on factory farms, with the idea of shocking people into change. Others favored protests in restaurants and grocery stores, or daring rescues of dying animals from confinement. Some people hoped we could obviate meat altogether with plant-based or lab-grown alternatives, while others wanted to work towards gradual legislative change.
One division was between people who called themselves animal rights activists — working toward a world where we did not treat nonhuman animals as property, but acknowledged them as individuals — and people who called themselves animal welfare activists, and who tended to favor interventions to make the processes by which we raised and killed animals for food more humane…
The growing effective-altruism-inspired giving to animal advocacy tended to come down on the animal welfare side of the spectrum. Consider lobbying to make a factory farm slightly more humane, even as it still subjects animals to awful conditions. Many animal rights activists feel like that amounts to complicity in the abuses that even supposedly more humane farms would go on to perpetuate.
Effective altruists, by contrast, tended to jump at such opportunities — after all, 10 percent better conditions for animals, while hardly perfect, is still better. Many sanctuaries for rescued farm animals were bitter about effective animal advocates’ disinterest in funding them; effective animal advocates, in turn, would grimly observe that sanctuaries simply don’t have that many animals in them, compared to the number in factory farms. It was a matter of numbers.
There was also a difference in ethos. Faced with an atrocity, some people are drawn to splash themselves with blood and march down the street, trying to make passersby realize the magnitude of the horrors they’re complicit in. Other people are inclined to whip out some spreadsheets. These two groups often end up suspicious of each other, each exasperated to have allies who refuse to do what it takes.
A decade on, the philosophy of incremental and numbers-oriented welfare work has gotten a lot done. One recent blog post published by the Open Philanthropy Project, which has funded effective animal advocacy work, lays out how they did it. The Open Wing Alliance, a coalition of animal advocacy organizations, zeroed in on corporations as a good target for pressure to improve conditions. Since these corporations tend to sell eggs to consumers, they care about their reputation.
The Open Wing Alliance would effectively offer them a deal: commit to going cage-free, or else: “Protesters will mobilize online and on the ground; they’ll show up in chicken costumes at corporate headquarters and franchise locations. Public ads and social media shame campaigns will further drive negative press. The OWA … will do its best to make [the target’s] brand synonymous with animal cruelty if they refuse to make necessary welfare improvements.”
In an important way, this represents a synthesis of the two threads of the animal advocacy movement…: the suit-wearing lobbying types get the meetings with corporations, and make demands carefully chosen based on rigorous analysis of which asks do the most for animals. But the corporations’ reason to go along is that should they refuse, they will face protesters willing to put their bodies on the line for animals.
It’s proven to be a very powerful tactic. Hundreds of pledges have been made, and broadly, they’ve been kept. Hundreds of millions of chickens live lives that are still pretty horrifying, but still significantly better than they’d otherwise have been — one estimate concluded that compared to a hen raised in a cage, each hen raised cage-free will spend 275 fewer hours in “disabling pain,” and thousands of hours less time in lower levels of pain.
No one is declaring victory, but it seems like the negotiation-and-threat-of-protests strategy is a highly cost-effective way to improve conditions for animals… it’s impossible to imagine fully addressing the horrors of factory farming with this approach — or with any single approach…
On a problem as big as this one, you can accomplish a ton and still have an unfathomable distance to go… Since a decade ago, there’s been a serious maturation of the field. It has integrated the many varying perspectives on what advocates are trying to achieve, and somewhat grown past the frictions of very different people trying to work together toward a common goal. And people have accomplished real and worthy things, and learned a lot about what works. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: