When Progress Misleads: The hidden baseline problem in animal advocacy
Animal advocacy has undergone a remarkable transformation. What began in the 1970s as a largely grassroots movement grounded in moral persuasion has evolved into a highly professionalized sector, with sophisticated legal strategies, measurable outcomes, and significant institutional funding. By many conventional measures, this trajectory represents success. And yet, during the same period, the scale of harm has expanded dramatically. In the U.S. alone, roughly 9-10 billion land animals are slaughtered each year, the overwhelming majority raised in industrial systems. When institutions claim their work ‘benefits animals’ or advances ‘liberation’, what baseline are they using to measure that impact?
LAProgressive: Earlier this year, a little-noticed institutional complaint was filed against the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. It did not challenge a specific policy position or legal argument. Instead, it raised a more fundamental question: when institutions claim their work “benefits animals” or advances “liberation,” what baseline are they using to measure that impact — and what, exactly, are they disclosing to the public?
At first glance, this may seem like a technical issue. But it points to a broader problem across animal advocacy, environmental policy, and corporate sustainability. In each of these domains, institutions regularly report progress. They point to laws passed, lawsuits won, partnerships secured, and programs expanded. Yet in many cases, the underlying harms they aim to address (industrial animal production, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss) continue to grow.
If both of these things are true at the same time, then the question raised in the Denver filing becomes difficult to ignore: progress relative to what? This is what might be called the “baseline problem.” Progress is often measured against a narrow or internal reference point—such as a prior year, a specific program, or a defined intervention—rather than against total, system-level outcomes.
Over the past several decades, animal advocacy has undergone a remarkable transformation. What began in the 1970s as a largely grassroots movement grounded in moral persuasion has evolved into a highly professionalized sector, with sophisticated legal strategies, measurable outcomes, and significant institutional funding. By the early 2000s, the movement had entered a phase of institutionalization, increasingly oriented around metrics, scalability, and partnerships with corporations and policymakers.
By many conventional measures, this trajectory represents success. The movement is larger, more visible, and more influential than ever before.
And yet, during the same period, the scale of harm has expanded dramatically. In the United States alone, roughly 9 to 10 billion land animals are slaughtered each year, the overwhelming majority raised in industrial systems. Even modest increases in population and demand translate into hundreds of millions of additional animals annually. Globally, similar patterns hold. Emissions have reached near record highs, habitat loss continues unabated, and biodiversity decline persists despite decades of advocacy and reform.
This is not to suggest that advocacy efforts have failed. Many have achieved real, measurable improvements. The issue is how those gains are evaluated—typically within a local or programmatic baseline rather than against total system outcomes…
The goal is not to dismiss incremental progress or to demand perfect measurement in complex systems. It’s to ensure that claims of impact are anchored in clearly articulated assumptions. At a minimum, this would mean specifying the baseline against which progress is measured, distinguishing between local improvements and system-level outcomes, and acknowledging where key variables like growth and demand are not fully accounted for.
Without that clarity, the gap between reported progress and real-world outcomes is likely to persist. Institutions will continue to celebrate success, even as the problems they seek to address expand. ROBIN SCHER
RELATED VIDEO: