Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Lewis Bollard: I think as a society, we’ve already decided that animals do matter. Most nations have animal cruelty laws. In the United States, for example, every state has an animal cruelty law that makes it a felony to abuse at least mammals and birds. So if you did to a pet pig what a factory farm does to their pigs — if you mutilated part of its body, if you kept it in a small crate — you would be committing felony animal cruelty in the US. We’ve already made that decision as a society. So if you think that factory farmings are OK, you really need to say companion animal abuse is OK too. You need to be fine with people kicking their dogs. And if you’re fine with that, you need to ask, is that the world we want to live in?

Luisa’s intro [00:00:45]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners, this is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

In today’s episode, Lewis Bollard joins us for a third appearance on the show to give an updated overview of the problem of factory farming, and talk through the recent wins and challenges still ahead of us.

We talk about:

• The worst factory farming practices that most consumers don’t know are widespread.
• Recent successes for farmed animal welfare — including a big win at the US Supreme Court, and China’s interest in alternative proteins.
• How AI could transform factory farming for better or worse — and Lewis’s fears that the technology will help factory farms maximise profits, at the expense of animal welfare.
• How new welfare research is influencing his grantmaking, including the Moral Weights Project I discussed with Bob Fischer a few episodes back.
• And much more.

Before, we dive in, I wanted two flag to things:

First, Lewis and I spent some of the interview talking about the basic case for ending factory farming. If you’re already familiar with the arguments for why factory farms are terrible, the first chunk of the episode will probably be too introductory for you, so I’d recommend skipping ahead to our conversation about the solutions Lewis is most excited about right now.

Second, I find that sometimes it’s easy to gloss over the massive scale of suffering — but with billions of animals alive in factory farms today, suffering from cruel practices beyond imagination, I wanted to face that discomfort head-on, to really drive home the urgency of ending this system as soon as possible. Because of that, I should warn listeners that some of our discussion of factory farming is pretty visceral and graphic.

OK, with all of that out of the way, I bring you Lewis Bollard.

The interview begins [00:02:47]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Lewis Bollard. Lewis leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for farm animal welfare, and studied social studies at Harvard University and has a law degree from Yale Law School. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast for a third time, Lewis.

Lewis Bollard: I’m excited to be back.

Luisa Rodriguez: So I hope to talk about some of the interventions that you think are most promising for ending factory farming as soon as possible. But first, let’s talk about just why factory farming is an especially pressing problem.

So Open Philanthropy has made I think over 340 grants to improve the lives of animals confined on factory farms, and to end factory farming entirely — which I think comes out to something like hundreds of millions of dollars. And you can correct me if I’m wrong. But yeah, what exactly is factory farming? And why is farmed animal welfare one of Open Phil’s major priorities?

Lewis Bollard: Thanks. So factory farming is a system of confining animals together as closely as they can be to produce meat as cheaply as possible, with no regard for the wellbeing of the animals. We’ve been drawn to this cause area due to its scale, as there are more animals alive on factory farms today than humans have ever lived on Earth; due to its tractability, as we think the movement has achieved some really big gains, affecting over a billion animals alive at any point in time; and also due to its neglect — that this is an issue that receives far too little attention from other funders and from politicians and from society at large.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. The figure that there are more animals on factory farms alive today than humans have ever lived always completely blows my mind. Do you have concrete numbers? In some ways, I think I won’t be able to comprehend them, but I can imagine some people being curious.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, absolutely. So there are about 6 billion mammals alive on factory farms at any point in time, about 28 billion birds, and we estimate about 115 billion farmed fish. And then on top of that, we catch every year 1–3 trillion wild-caught fish. So to put that into perspective, for every person in the world who consumes animal products, there is roughly one mammal, three birds, and 14 farmed fish alive at any point in time on a factory farm.

And obviously, if you’re in the rich world and you consume more animal products than the average person in the world, there are more animals than that. So it’s really a huge scale, even if you just think on the level of the individual consumer.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it is. Yeah. I have to admit, I don’t have this anymore, but I remember a time when I believed that factory farms were, maybe not uncommon, but not where plenty of animal products came from. Do you happen to know what percent of all animal products come from factory farms?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. I very much relate to that. I grew up in New Zealand where you don’t ever see factory farms. We actually had a farm as a kid that we’d go to that the animals seemed perfectly happy. And so I was very much kind of under this illusion as well that this is where all of our meat comes from. Unfortunately, it’s the case that in most rich countries, almost all of our animal products come from factory farms. In particular, for chicken, it’s 99%; for eggs, it’s 99%. For farmed fish, it’s somewhere close to that. And for pork it is too. I think the one exception is for beef and dairy, and actually for sheep or goat. For those who eat that, those numbers are a lot lower. But if you’re looking at the most commonly consumed meats, it’s very high.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, and we’re going to talk more about the kinds of experiences these animals have in a bit. But while terrible, do you have a couple of things that come to mind when you think about the most horrible things that are happening on factory farms?

Lewis Bollard: I think one of the worst things that I have seen is the use of gestation crates, which are these coffin-sized crates that are used to confine pregnant sows during their pregnancy. They are then moved from a gestation crate to a farrowing crate when they give birth, which is almost as small, and then they move back to a gestation crate. And in both of these crates, they don’t have enough space to turn around. So not only are they not mixing with other pigs, they’re not able to express any of the natural behaviours. They literally can’t turn around. And they live in these crates for three years. If they survive that long, they have a pretty high mortality rate, but that’s really their entire existence.

I think another iconic cruelty of the system is battery cages, which is a slightly larger cage that’s used to confine four to six birds about in about the size of a microwave. And again, they spend all of their time in these cages. I remember someone once asking me when they learned about battery cages, like, “How often do they get let out? When do they get their exercise?” And the answer was never. I think it’s just kind of mind boggling to people that you could actually keep an animal completely confined, immobilised for its entire life.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. The brain does these mental gymnastics to be like, “Surely this is fine — because if it weren’t, it’d be horrendous torture.” I think when I first learned about gestation crates, I was like, it must be natural for a pig to be immobilised for months while pregnant, otherwise that would be a horrible and ridiculous and strange thing to do.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. I think if you go to a farm sanctuary or even a high-welfare farm, you’ll see that all these farm animals are complex, curious creatures. So pigs love to roll around in the mud to cool off because they can’t sweat, they love to nuzzle up against other pigs, they love to play with straw. And in general, they’re very curious animals. I think that’s true of chickens as well, actually: very curious animals, love to explore.

And yeah, it does just make it all the sadder to think about these animals immobilised, where they have these very strong instincts, these very strong desires to go and explore, to socialise, to interact with the world — and we curtail all of that.

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, it’s just every time I hear about it, I am shocked again. I guess aside from the animal suffering component, another argument often made in favour of ending factory farming is around climate change. How big of a factor is climate change for you in your grantmaking?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right. The climate impact of animal agriculture globally is about 15–20% of global emissions. And it’s a much larger share of methane, which is a particularly potent and short-lived gas, which has actually been getting a lot more attention. Because if you care about climate change over short timelines, then potent, short-lived gases like methane are disproportionately important. So it’s been great, actually. We’ve seen in recent years a lot more attention from the climate community toward the emissions of animal agriculture.

I think one risk in taking a climate approach to this is that there are some band-aid solutions that are not good for animals. So for instance, getting people to substitute from relatively higher-emission beef to relatively lower-emission chickens and fish could be good for the climate but very bad for animals: there’s a lot more animals and they’re going to suffer a lot more. Similarly, we’ve seen a push globally for what’s called “sustainable intensification,” which is basically to say if you pack animals more closely together, they will have ever so marginally fewer emissions. So this has become a new rallying cry of factory farms, of “we need to factory farm for the sake of climate emissions.” And unfortunately, it’s been picked up by a number of international institutions, like the Food and Agriculture Organization.

So I think the better solution from a climate and animal point of view is to move relatively away from factory farm meat, and meat in general, and toward alternative proteins, toward plant-based proteins. I think that that is something which satisfies both the animal and climate objectives.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, makes sense. And I have not heard this cry for intensifying factory farming for the sake of the climate. That’s so, so disturbing. And yeah, I’m tempted to go on a digression about that and ask more, but I think for now, let’s stay on track.

Lewis Bollard: Sounds good.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so it’s very important. And then you’ve also said it’s a neglected issue. How much funding is spent on ending factory farming annually?

Lewis Bollard: Our estimate is that globally, if you put together the budgets of the hundreds of groups working on this issue all around the world, including partial budgets of groups that are working partially on this issue, we think you get about $290 million annually.

And that can sound like a lot of money, but when you spread that across over 100 countries, over hundreds of groups; across every method of advocacy going on — from alternative proteins to vegan advocacy to animal welfare reforms — that gets a lot smaller pretty quickly. And as a result, most of the groups you see in this space have budgets in the single millions or smaller. And particularly within certain niches within farm animal welfare, like paying attention to the wellbeing of farmed fish, the budgets are much smaller.

Luisa Rodriguez: Can you put those numbers in context? How do they compare to, say, climate change charities?

Lewis Bollard: So I saw recently a relatively conservative estimate of the amount of philanthropy going to climate change work, and that was $8–12 billion per year. Some other comparison points: $290 million is about one-third of Oxfam’s global budget. It’s also less than the budgets of a lot of individual environmental groups. It’s even less than the budget of individual companion animal groups — like the ASPCA has a budget of over $300 million.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. I think I expected you to say something compelling, but that totally took me by surprise. That’s really shocking.

Common objections to ending factory farming [00:13:21]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s talk through some common objections to the prospect of ending factory farming. I suspect a very common one is just the animals that are being factory farmed — so chickens, pigs, fish, and other animals — just don’t matter morally, either because they aren’t conscious in the way that humans are, or because they’re just fundamentally not important or valuable in the way humans are. How do you respond to that argument?

Lewis Bollard: I think as a society, we’ve already decided that animals do matter. Most nations have animal cruelty laws. In the United States, for example, every state has an animal cruelty law that makes it a felony to abuse at least mammals and birds. So if you did to a pet pig what a factory farm does to their pigs — if you mutilated part of its body, if you kept it in a small crate — you would be committing felony animal cruelty in the US. We’ve already made that decision as a society. So if you think that factory farmings are OK, you really need to say companion animal abuse is OK too. You need to be fine with people kicking their dogs. And if you’re fine with that, you need to ask, is that the world we want to live in?

The other thing I’d say is I think that the most common moral error that we have made in history is excluding others from our moral circle without a valid basis. And I don’t think there’s a valid basis here. If you just say it’s because they’re a different species, that’s a circular argument. Why does it matter that they’re a different species? I think if you say it’s because of their intelligence, well, what about child abuse laws protecting newborn infants?

The other thing I’d say is there’s a really lopsided calculus here. So if you’re right that animals don’t matter, you get slightly cheaper meat out of factory farms. If you’re wrong, you contribute to a grave moral atrocity. And so I think you need to be really confident that animals don’t matter morally to act based on that belief.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. It also just seems like people have found some way to justify to themselves that some animals matter and some don’t. And it happens to be the ones that are in factory farms that don’t, arbitrarily — even though we’ve decided that wild animals that are especially interesting, and obviously pets, clearly we want to protect them from various bad things. And it’s just a coincidence that the animals we put in factory farms, they’re the ones that are very unique in either not feeling pain or just being completely insignificant.

I guess I’m surprised by how easy a manoeuvre that seems to be for people, and how common. Do you think that it’s just like motivated reasoning is easy and common, and people do it all the time, and we’ve been doing it a long time for factory farming, and so people are just really used to thinking that way?

Lewis Bollard: I think so. I think you definitely see this with factory farming executives who have pet dogs, and they don’t abuse their dogs. And these are animals, the pigs that they’re farming, every bit as smart, every bit as sensitive and complex as those animals are.

I think this is a trend throughout history: that we care most about those around us, and the project of getting people to care beyond their immediate family, beyond their immediate community, beyond even their immediate nation, and then ultimately beyond their own species, I think, is the project of moral progress and expanding our moral circle. So what makes me optimistic is that I do think that a huge amount of the moral progress we’ve seen in history has been expanding that circle. And I think, and I hope that we will continue to see it expand.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I’m with you. Another big objection is around food security. So I can hear some people saying we wouldn’t be able to feed 8 billion people without factory farming.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. So we might not be able to with the current American diet. I think that if everyone ate a little less meat, we easily could. I mean, plant-based agriculture has a far smaller land footprint than animal-based agriculture does — basically because instead of growing a whole lot of crops, feeding them to animals, then taking the output of that, you’re just taking the crops. And as a result, if we had a more humane system of agriculture, it probably would need people to eat a little bit less meat. I think that’d be good for the climate, too. I think it would probably also be good for people’s health.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice. I guess another big objection I’ve heard is around, just like the economics of ending factory farming. Factory farming must be a huge share of national GDP for many countries. And then I guess lots of people, like many people, would lose their jobs if we ended factory farming. Does that feel weighty to you, or does it just feel like a necessary consequence of doing the thing that’s morally right?

Lewis Bollard: I think it’s a real challenge and a big one, but I think it’s something we’re up to. So animal agriculture is about 1.5% of global GDP. That’s big, but it’s still about four to eight times less than the energy sector, which we are completely overhauling to bring down climate emissions globally. Without factory farming, people are still going to need food. We’re still going to need agriculture. And plant agriculture or higher welfare animal agriculture is also going to contribute to nations’ GDPs.

And then in terms of jobs, I think higher welfare farming just offers far better jobs. I remember talking to a former factory farmer of chickens, and he was telling me that basically his job was every day to go through the barn and take out the dead chickens. And that was the main thing he did. And as a higher welfare farmer, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re actually interacting with your animals. There’s real stockmanship. There’s really a sense of being part of something that matters. So I think that ultimately, I’m not sure we would even have less economic activity. I think we might have more, and I think it would be a better kind of economic activity.

Luisa Rodriguez: Another common objection is just that animal products are part of a balanced diet, or eating them is kind of natural, so it might be bad for our health if we cut them out altogether. I guess a version that I’m even more sympathetic to is the argument that animals were part of humans’ ancestral diets as we were evolving, and so it might be genuinely important for us nutritionally.

That said, I’m mostly eating like potato chips and pizza, which I think was not part of my ancestral diet. But I’m curious: to what extent do you think there’s truth to this concern?

Lewis Bollard: Well, I think insofar as the ancestral diet is the ideal diet, it wasn’t eating factory farmed chicken.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure.

Lewis Bollard: What we know about cavemen’s diets is it was a mixture of eating a lot of very high-fibre plant foods, like roots, and then when they got a chance to scavenge meat that a bigger predator had brought down, they would scavenge that meat. And so if someone wants to live a modern paleo diet of eating roots most of the time, and then occasionally eating the parts of an animal that no one else wants to eat — the organs, for instance — I think that could be a very humane diet. And I think that might be the real paleo diet.

The other thing I’d say is that even if our stomachs and our teeth haven’t evolved since our ancestral time, our morals have, and our ability to eat more humanely has as well. I mean, I’m a big fan of modern science. We synthesised vitamin B12. We can now live on a healthy vegan diet. In fact, if you look at the populations that have been living the longest on meatless diets — populations like Jains, certain Hindu populations, and Seventh-day Adventists — they tend to do pretty well on health outcomes. Now, they often tend to not drink alcohol and not smoke either, so I’m not saying it’s all not eating meat. But at the very least, we don’t see the worries that you sometimes see online: that you’ll rot away into nothing if you give up on meat.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right. Another one — and we’re going to talk about this more in a bit — but a very different and maybe less familiar argument against working on ending factory farming now is we might, at some point in the not-too-distant future, have AGI: artificial intelligence that is similarly intelligent to humans, or more intelligent. And AGI might be able to just solve the problem of factory farming much better than humans can now. What’s your reaction to that?

Lewis Bollard: I hope it’s true. I think it’s really hard to know, because it’s very hard to envisage what that world, post-AGI, would be like.

I’m personally a little sceptical, and the reason for that is that it seems to me that post-AGI we will have incredible technological progress and likely a vast explosion in wealth. I don’t think either of those things are the thing holding us back from ending factory farming. We have enough wealth to end factory farming today. We have the technology to end factory farming today. What we lack is the political will, and I’m unsure whether AGI will change that. I think changing political will is something that requires you to change what people believe, to change the incentives of politicians. And I think that that may be something that still requires moral suasion.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s talk more about that in a bit, actually. For now, another objection that I’m kind of sympathetic to is: if you, like me, are very convinced that the suffering of nonhuman animals is a super real and important problem, is ending factory farming the most important issue facing nonhuman animals? For example, there are orders of magnitude more wild animals, and the issue of wild animal suffering is almost certainly much more neglected, in terms of funding at least. Do you put some weight on that? Is that something that crosses your mind?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I do. I worry a lot about the suffering of wild animals. I agree it’s a huge problem, and I’m really glad people are working on it, and as you say, it’s very neglected. I think Wild Animal Initiative is really the only large group working on this, and they’re not that large.

So in terms of how to weigh up work on wild animals versus farm animals, I think for me a key factor is the tractability of that work. We have ways of helping farm animals that have track records that we can replicate and scale. We don’t yet have that for wild animals. We have the potential to find those ways in future, but I think it’s going to require a lot of research.

And I think one thing that some listeners coming to this may think is, well, just conserve the species. Just look after a particular piece of habitat. That seems relatively easy; there are groups doing it around the world. The trouble is we don’t know if that actually raises the average welfare of the animals in that ecosystem. It’s really hard to work out what does. And in particular, the vast majority of animals are not the iconic species that most wildlife protection work focuses on. They’re not wolves, they’re not bears — they’re fish or they’re mice. They’re tiny animals. And sometimes it’s just very hard to work out what we can do to robustly help those animals in a way that doesn’t cause harm to other animals in the ecosystem.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense, and it’s something I really wish I knew more about. But for now, are there any other objections that give you pause?

Lewis Bollard: Honestly, I hear surprisingly few philosophical objections. I remember when I first learned about factory farming, and I was considering whether this was an issue to work on, I went out to try and find the best objections I could — because I was like, it can’t possibly just be as straightforward as this; it can’t possibly just be the case that we’re torturing animals just to save a few cents.

And the only book I was able to find at the time that was opposed to animal welfare and animal rights was a book by the late British philosopher Roger Scruton. He wrote a book called Animal Rights and Wrongs. And I was really excited. I was like, “Cool, we’re going to get this great philosophical defence of factory farming here.” In the preface, the first thing he says is, “Obviously, I’m not going to defend factory farming. That’s totally indefensible. I’m going to defend why you should still eat meat from high-welfare animals.”

I found this continually. It was the same thing when I was on the debating circuit. You can’t propose as a debating topic ending factory farming. It’s considered what’s called a “tight topic” — meaning it’s so obviously right that it’s an unfair thing to propose as a debating topic.

Luisa Rodriguez: No kidding?

Lewis Bollard: So I think we have this recognition that it’s wrong, and so much of why it continues to exist is just inertia. It’s the status quo; it’s the political power. But it’s not because there’s some kind of reasoned defence of factory farming out there.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I do still feel like I can access this feeling of chickens and fish do just seem really different to pigs and cows and dogs and obviously humans. And I think they make up the bulk of factory farmed animals. Maybe it’s possible that they’re not feeling intense suffering or intense joy, and so maybe that makes this whole thing less of a pressing problem?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I certainly relate to the feeling that it’s hard to empathise with a chicken or a fish. I mean, they look so different to us. They’ve got feathers, they’ve got scales, they have these weird ways of acting, but I don’t think that’s a reason to not give them moral consideration.

And I think in particular, if you think about the evolutionary basis of pain and suffering, it’s something that’s pretty conserved across species because it performs this very important function. If you’re an animal that can learn, then pain is going to be a strong reinforcer, and there’s no reason to think that that pain is going to be worse if you’re a smarter animal. I mean, there are some reasons to think it might be less bad. As a smarter animal, you can rationalise and you can take the signal from a small pain and extrapolate from that. And if you’re a less smart animal, you can’t — so maybe you need a bigger pain to have the same effect. Maybe it feels worse because you can’t imagine it ending.

So I think it’s about those kinds of suffering. I completely agree that it seems unlikely that a fish has existential doubts about the meaning of life in the world. Although the other thing I’ll say is that the more we learn about these animals, the more we do see complex emotions

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I do feel like every time I learn more about what the experiences of nonhuman animals are like, it’s never gone in the direction of, like, “They don’t have complex things going on.” It’s always gone in the direction of, “Oh, wow, zebrafish have that capability? Really?! I never would have guessed.” And it does just seem like if you’re updating in the same direction a bunch of times, that’s probably the way that you’re going to keep updating if you learn more and more.
Is there anything else you’d say to someone who still feels like, “No, they just don’t matter; they’re just categorically different to humans?”

Lewis Bollard: I guess I’d say that there’s a possibility of that, but you should think about this probabilistically. I mean, if we’re going to inflict this grave suffering, how confident do you feel that these animals don’t matter? And then I’d also interrogate, why do you feel that? What is the basis? Is it intelligence? But it seems like intelligence doesn’t correlate with suffering within humans, so why would it correlate with suffering within animals? So I think you really need to interrogate what’s driving that, and is it just that this is a really inconvenient conclusion to reach?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s true that I don’t feel like smarter people I know suffer more or less. And I guess also, just thinking about babies, they seem less smart, and I don’t have the impression that they suffer less. If anything, I worry that maybe it’s terrible to be a baby, because you are hungry and have tummy issues a lot and only very coarse-grained ways of getting help and feeling things. So yeah, I find that personally pretty compelling.
Lewis Bollard: The example of babies is a good one, because for decades, doctors did painful things to babies without giving them pain relief. And the reason was that the babies couldn’t say anything about it, and by the time they grew up, they didn’t remember it, so there was an assumption that they didn’t feel pain. And we can see in retrospect, that was a real moral error. I mean, that was just so obvious it was more convenient to not give them pain relief. I think there’s a similar thing with animals, where we start out from this default of, if they can’t tell us it’s painful, and if we don’t know them like humans, then we just won’t worry about it. And I think that’s the wrong default to start from.

Potential solutions [00:30:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: So yeah, those are some common objections. Let’s move on to potential solutions. To start, do you have a kind of vision for what that path to ending factory farming will look like?

Lewis Bollard: I think there will be a number of different paths, and I don’t know which ones will be more important. Hopefully, they will reinforce one another.

I think some of the most important paths will be: first, a moral revolution in how we think about animals and how we view this issue. As I mentioned, I think people already agree that factory farming is wrong, but they don’t pay much attention to it; they don’t treat it like the moral crisis it is. So I hope that one day factory farming will be seen the way that climate change is increasingly seen today: as a real crisis that needs to be addressed by society.

Second, I hope we will see progressively higher animal welfare standards, both from governments legislating and from corporations raising standards in their supply chains.

And then third, I hope we’ll see much wider adoption of alternative protein and reduced meat consumption.

And I think combined, each of those things can reduce demand for factory farmed products, and reduce how bad factory farms are — until ultimately you can end factory farming.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. I hope we see it. Broadly, how do you decide which interventions to fund? And also which specific groups to fund to run those interventions?

Lewis Bollard: Our goal is to help as many animals as we can, as much as we can — and the challenge is working out how to do that.

We look at a couple of things. The first is the scale of the problem that a group is working on. If a group is working on the plight of farmed fish in China, there are just a lot more animals they can affect than a group that is focused on sheep somewhere else.

We then look at the tractability of the intervention that the group is pursuing. Is there evidence that this intervention works? Has it worked in the past? And the track record of the group: does the group have a track record of success in pursuing this intervention? Is this something we can confidently feel like they know how to do this, they’ve done it in the past? We can scale it up?

If there’s not a track record, if this is maybe more speculative or a longer-term play, we try to vet the path to impact. So we try to look at what are the steps that would be required to get to the long-term goal. How realistic are those steps? Do they logically lead to one another? And what evidence is there about whether we’re on that path, about whether the group has achieved those initial steps? But then there is also some degree of needing to look at plans and just assess plausibly how strong do these plans look? It’s not always possible to pin down the exact numbers. We try as hard as we can to do that, though.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yes, that seems extremely sensible. I’m grateful to you for doing all that work. So from that, it sounds like seven key areas, or portfolios, have kind of popped out, and you focus on cage-free reforms, broiler chicken welfare, fish welfare, farm animal welfare in Asia, farm animal welfare in Europe, alternatives to animal products, and animal welfare science. And I want to talk a bit about each of those.

Cage-free reforms [00:34:25]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s start with cage-free reforms. Why is this one of your top priorities?

Lewis Bollard: There are about 7.5 billion layer hens globally, and at least 90% of them are kept in battery cages, which I mentioned earlier are these tiny containers that chickens are kept in for their entire lives, where they’re denied everything that we know matters to hens: they’re denied access to dust bathing, they’re denied access to a perch (chickens like to go up and perch at night), they’re denied access to a nesting box. There are studies showing that a hen who hasn’t eaten for 24 hours will still prefer to go into a nesting box than to get food. That’s how much the hen wants to go into a nesting box. And so we know that these environments are just depriving animals of their most basic needs, their most basic desires.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really awful. And then I guess one of the interventions you fund here is corporate campaigns. Can you say what a corporate campaign aims to achieve, and how people go about doing it?

Lewis Bollard: So there’s a real disconnect between how consumers assume the animals in a corporate supply chain are treated, and how they’re actually treated. Consumers, I think, normally have a sense that if they get eggs at McDonald’s or buy them at a supermarket, that they’ve been at least decently, humanely raised. And surveys show this. Most people don’t think they’re buying factory farmed products because they’re not labelled as factory farmed. Eggs from caged hens aren’t even labelled as caged. They’ll often say something like “farm fresh” on them.

So as a result, what groups we fund have done is gone to these companies and said, “Look, this is completely inconsistent with what your consumers expect of you, and we want you to adopt higher standards.” And specifically in this case, we want you to adopt cage free eggs — which is feasible as something for the company to adopt. Then depending on the company’s response, if the company is not open to that conversation, they’ll then campaign against the company and launch a public campaign to get them to raise their animal welfare standards.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. And that kind of looks like, trying to tell people what it’s like for layer hens in reality, and hoping that the corporations will be like, “This is going to be bad. We should really figure out some change that’s cost effective for us to make so that we don’t lose business”?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it can be a whole mixture of tactics. One example would be groups in the last few years have run these global campaigns to get multinational companies to commit to going cage-free globally. In that case, a lot of that campaign is focused around activating activists all over the world. So Burger King was one of these groups: having people go to Burger King outlets, I think some of them were dressed in chicken suits, and protesting and drawing attention to the way these animals are treated. Sometimes they’ll protest outside of the headquarters. They’ll reach out to key executives; they’ll reach out to people throughout the company, really just trying to put on that pressure.

But again, the pressure only works because this is something that consumers care about. It only works because the company is ultimately afraid of their consumers knowing the truth about how they’re treating animals.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. How far down this probably increasingly pressure-y pipeline do activists tend to have to go before a corporation is willing to pledge to change the way they’re treating their animals?

Lewis Bollard: My sense is, in most cases, they don’t need to go very far. In most cases, it’s enough to go to the company and say, look, we know that you’re mistreating animals or paying someone else to mistreat animals in your supply chain. And perhaps we have investigative footage and so we can tell you that that’s something we will release when we do a campaign. Oftentimes they’re going to companies and saying, here’s what the campaign would look like. And oftentimes I think that’s enough for a company to say, “OK, yeah, that’s not a campaign we want to have happen.” And in particular, they see the visuals, they see the video, they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t want our consumers to see that.” So I think most of the time, it doesn’t ultimately lead to a public campaign.

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess when the evidence is that compelling, you don’t need to pull out all the stops. You say, “We’re going to show this video of this really horrible thing. We don’t have to dress it up; it’s just terrible. And if people see it, they will be mad.”

So then they’re kind of pledging to either change their own practices or have their supplier change their practices. And that’s typically going cage-free. How much better is life for cage-free layer hens than life in a battery cage?

Lewis Bollard: We think it’s a lot better. It’s certainly not a perfect life for a hen. But this group, the Welfare Footprint Project, has been researching in recent years the relative welfare gain of going cage-free. And I encourage listeners to go onto their website and check it out. It’s very compelling to see the ways in which cage-free birds suffer less. A lot of that is around the satisfaction of some of those basic needs we talked about earlier: not only do cage-free hens have a lot more space to move around, but they have access to a perch that they can move up to at night, they have access to a nesting box which they can lay their eggs in, and they usually have access to litter on the floor that they can dust bathe in.

So they still don’t have access to the outdoors; they still don’t have as much space as I wish they did, but I think that some of the worst deprivations of battery cages are addressed by cage-free systems.

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess my sense is that at least some animal advocates think corporate campaigns to marginally improve the lives of factory farmed animals are not necessarily worth doing because they don’t push the sector towards actually ending factory farming altogether, and could even move us backwards by making the sector as a whole less obviously evil and therefore weakening the arguments for ending it altogether.

I think some people even believe that these kinds of welfare improvements might even increase the consumption of factory farmed animals, because people hear terms like “cage-free” and they think that the lives of the hens that laid those eggs are basically fine or good — and in fact they might still involve pain and suffering because it is still dark; they still don’t have that much room. I think my sense is that they also still tend to have problems establishing social hierarchies, and chickens continue to be cruel to each other when they’re in that kind of confined environment. How do you think about this?

Lewis Bollard: I think this has been a common objection within social movements throughout history. There have always been people, I think particularly coming from a Marxist perspective, who will oppose incremental reform because it stands in the way of revolution. And I fall very firmly on the incremental reform side.

I think that if you look at the history of social movements, very rarely have the people who are trying to end the whole system at once and opposing reforms, has that worked out well. Much more often, the progress we’ve seen has come from incremental gains. And all of those incremental gains run the risk of making people think the issue is less salient. I mean, it’s true that when the civil rights movement achieved civil rights progress, that could have made people think, “This is less important than it was previously. Things aren’t so bad.” In reality, I don’t think it did. And I think that’s true on our issue too. I think that when people see hens going from caged to cage-free, if they actually look into the issue, it doesn’t look that great. It’s still not where they want it to be. If anything, it highlights there’s a problem.

Now, I think the bigger problem is that no one’s actually paying attention. The public’s not actually sitting around feeling guilty about the fact that they’re eating factory farmed eggs and waiting for someone to salve their consciences by giving them cage-free eggs. It’s just not happening. I think if they were, there will still be plenty of horrors in factory farms. I mean, if we get rid of some of these, sadly, there will still be battery cages in some parts of the world. There will be all kinds of other awful things going on. So if that’s people’s concern — that there still need to be awful things going on — sadly, there will be no lack of them.

The other thing I’d say on that is people see the label “cage-free.” There are so many fake labels out there already that convey stronger things. We know from surveys that consumers think labels like “naturally raised” or “all natural” are equally good to “cage-free.” They think it means that the animals are outside. Most factory farmed chicken in the US now has an “all natural” label on it. So it’s not the case that this relatively small portion of the market that is cage-free or being labelled legitimately as higher welfare are the labels you need to watch out for. I think the labels you need to watch out for are the labels that are all over factory farmed meat.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’m actually really interested in the “how do social movements succeed?” bit. Was this something that you considered part of your remit to understand? Is the way we should expect progress to happen going to be incremental over time? And if so, did you feel like the evidence was just pretty clear on that?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I shouldn’t overstate it, because in college I studied social movement history, and it’s been kind of a hobby since then. But one of the things you notice when you read about social movements is everyone has a different take on them. And normally their take fits their preexisting ideological bias. Marxists want to portray every social movement as fitting within the progression of exactly what Marx said, turned out the way he said it; incrementalists like me want to say everything was incremental progress. So I don’t want to claim that history tells us one thing or the other. I think often history tells us what we want it to tell us. But my personal belief is that, at least on this one point of incremental reform versus abolition, there is more evidence for incremental reform working out over time.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, cool. And then on just how successful these campaigns have been, I understand that over 3,000 companies globally have now committed to go 100% cage-free in their supply chains, which is really incredible. And I think this includes almost all of the largest American and European retailers, fast food chains, and food service companies, and also a bunch of Asia-Pacific food companies, too. So that’s just amazing to me. I actually didn’t realise how successful these had been already.

But do you have a sense of how that cashes out? Like, how many hens have lived better lives because of these campaigns?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. So our best count is that there are already about 200 million hens cage-free, thanks to these campaigns, and there’s roughly another 250 million who stand to benefit once these pledges are fully implemented. So there are still a lot of corporate pledges that aren’t fully implemented yet. And once those are implemented, we think we’ll get up to about 450 million. And I should say, too, that’s the number alive at any point in time. So that’s not just a one-off thing: that’s every year going on from now on, because you’re changing the system. So if you wanted to count the number over 10 years or 20 years, you’re looking at billions of animals.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s incredible. Does that feel like a win to you? Do you kind of viscerally have that sense of, like, “I played a part in this, and this is a massive deal”? This is millions and millions of beings who were suffering enormously and they’re now suffering less.

Lewis Bollard: Yes. I’m very proud of the advocates who achieved this. I think that all around the world there are advocates who have worked incredibly hard, tirelessly campaigned. And it’s always hard as an advocate, because there’s so much more to do, there’s so much more suffering out there. We still are only at the start of this journey, but I do think that they should be very proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice.

Broiler chicken welfare [00:46:48]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so another focus area is broiler chicken welfare. So broiler chickens are, I think, the most numerous factory farmed land vertebrates. I think that’s right. Correct me if I’m wrong. How many broiler chickens are alive at any one time?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right. There are about 20 billion broiler chickens alive at any point in time. That’s about one and a half billion in the US, about another billion in Europe, and then the rest spread out across the rest of the world.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. That was actually bigger than I was expecting. That’s so many. OK, and then what is it like to be a broiler chicken? At least as best we can tell?

Lewis Bollard: So for broiler chickens, they’re not kept in cages like layer hens, but their body is essentially a cage. They’ve been bred for two things only: for feed conversion ratio — to convert grain as efficiently as possible — and to grow as much breast meat as possible.

And as a result, they’ve become these very lopsided, sort of monstrous creations, who have organs that can’t keep up internally and who have legs that are too weak. And so, as a result, we see a lot of them become lame and can’t walk anymore. When they become lame, they end up on the floor of these barns. And the floor of these barns is covered in the manure of prior flocks because the farmers don’t typically take that manure out for often as long as a year. And so when they’re on this manure, they get these horrible sores and blisters. And literally, this is coming from flesh-eating bacteria and gangrene. So trench foot — things that humans got in World War I in the trenches — we’re inflicting on these broiler chickens.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really horrible. Sorry, I’m just genuinely… It’s really, really horrible. I knew that it was common for their legs to break under their own weight. I did not know that they were regularly getting burns from the floor of the barns. It’s really horrible.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: So just for anyone for whom that wasn’t visceral enough, it’s literally that they, over time, have been selected to become bigger and bigger. So they’re not technically always genetically modified, but they are selected to become bigger and bigger, such that literally their legs cannot hold them up and they break. Is that right?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right. I should say, in fairness, the industry has done the smallest of things to try and strengthen their legs. So basically, they normally just select on two things for these birds: they select on what’s called their feed conversion ratio, which is how little feed they can eat for how much they grow; and then secondly, on their breast meat yield, how much breast meat they produce. And they select for that generation over generation over generation, until these birds become these huge, abnormal mutants. And then when it gets to a point that it’s so bad that the chickens are becoming so lame that they can’t make it to the feeders or the water station, then they rein it in a little wee bit and then they strengthen the legs a little bit.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh my god.

Lewis Bollard: But that’s the one constraint. That’s the one constraint on the system: can the birds walk a few steps across to the feeder or to the watering station?

Luisa Rodriguez: I’m having a glimmer of sympathy for people who have this kind of doublethink, where on the one hand they kind of know that factory farming is bad, and on the other hand they carry on consuming animal products — because if you actually access how horrible this is, it’s intolerable; it’s just so painful to imagine the amount of suffering. I guess it makes it a bit clearer to me how most of the people on Earth, despite being largely compassionate and decent people, can find ways to put this out of their mind. I guess many of them don’t even know it’s a thing. But for the ones who do.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think that’s right, that it is really hard to confront the moral atrocity of the scale. And I think there are all kinds of different reactions and defence mechanisms we have. One is just denial. I think for some people, you really don’t want to believe it could be this bad. And if you see the videos and you look at the numbers, you say, “Shit, it is this bad.” Then you need to come up with something else. You need to say, “Well, maybe chickens just don’t matter. Maybe…” You need to come up with all kinds of rationalisations, because it is just so confronting to say, there’s this amount of suffering in the world; there’s this amount going on that’s so wrong.

The other thing I would say is that I do think that our movement has made a mistake in making this so much about personal responsibility, because I think that we’ve created a strong sense of guilt in people, where they look at this and they say, “This is so horrible. This is so awful. And I’m being told the only thing I can possibly do is go vegan overnight. And that just feels impossible for me. That just feels incredibly hard. That’s going to change my life. I can’t do it. So I’ll just forget about the whole issue. I’ll just blank the whole thing out.”

I think a much healthier dynamic would be to say, there’s something that’s really bad: what can you do? And for some people that will be going vegan, for some people it’ll be eating less meat. For some, it will be opposing factory farming. For a lot, it might just be politically supporting this issue, saying, “I’m going to write to my local politician, and ask them to do something about this.” I think as a movement, we need to move more into that mindset of political change and social change, rather than merely individual change.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right. I really like that. Bringing it back to broiler chickens and hopefully to things that we can do to help them, I think this is another space where you’re funding lots of corporate campaigns. It’s a little harder for me to imagine what the corporate campaigns are advocating for, because it’s not about changing the environment; it’s about changing the chicken’s biology. So what exactly are they campaigning for?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s the number one thing they’re campaigning for, is to change the genetics. So the groups globally are pushing companies to adopt what in the US is called the Better Chicken Commitment, and a slightly different version in Europe called the European Chicken Commitment.

Both of those are focused first around switching to higher welfare breeds — so switching to breeds that grow a little bit slower, that have much stronger legs, that we know have better welfare outcomes — and second, reducing stocking density. And that’s not just a matter of giving each of these birds more space. It’s also about letting that litter dry out. Because when there are birds everywhere on top of it, that’s when it gets wet and causes more burns. Whereas if it’s completely dried out, it’s a lot safer.

The other things they’re pushing for are a more humane slaughter method and then a set of environmental reforms to improve the conditions of the barn. For instance, requiring that chickens get six hours of continuous darkness a night, where the current standard is that they get four hours of intermittent darkness because the producers want to keep them eating — so they’ll wake them up once an hour and make sure they eat and then wake them up again. So there are just a lot of small things like that that are askew with the system that the set of reforms addresses.

Luisa Rodriguez: And how have we come up with these reforms? Are there like welfare scientists out there, like, “Let’s genetically modify chickens to see how we can come up with a breed that is still producing enough chicken meat that the industry will be happy with it, but that seems to live a better life?”

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, there are. So in the UK, the RSPCA actually runs field trials on different breeds to look at their welfare outcomes, and they have about 25 criteria. They look at how the birds do on each of these criteria, and then they decide, is this bird eligible to count as a higher welfare breed? So the breeds that we are asking companies to adopt are breeds that are either, in the UK, approved by the RSPCA, or in the US, approved by Global Animal Partnership. In both cases, based on large scientific studies, field trials of these actual birds.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. You mentioned more humane slaughter practices. What is the standard practice, and what would be the more humane one?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so this gets a little grisly. Some listeners might want to close their ears for a minute. The current practice is what’s called water bath stunning. What they do is they bring in crates of birds off the trucks, and workers — and there are very few workers, and they have to work incredibly fast; they’re very rushed — will grab bunches of birds at once and shackle them upside down on a conveyor belt. And unfortunately, in this process, a lot of the birds will break their legs or break their wings because they’re being shackled in so quickly.

This conveyor belt then takes them very quickly to be dunked upside down into a water bath that is electrified. Now, if everything’s going to plan, that water bath should knock them out completely. Unfortunately, in a lot of places, the stunning settings in the water bath have been optimised for meat quality rather than humaneness. And so if you optimise them for meat quality, you end up with a lot of these birds coming out still conscious.

The next step is that an automated blade should cut their neck. Unfortunately, some birds duck, and if they duck, they just keep going through that step.

And then the next step is the scalding bath. The US Department of Agriculture actually keeps figures on how many birds end up fully conscious in that scalding bath, and it’s about a million a year. And literally, the chicken industry’s response is, “Well, we slaughter 9 billion chickens a year, so that’s less than 1%. We’re doing great.” But when you think about how horrific that is, it’s really crazy.

So I’ll say the reform that advocates are pushing for is what’s called controlled atmospheric stunning, which is: instead of this whole process, those containers of birds coming from the farm go straight onto a conveyor belt, which goes into a chamber where the birds are slowly rendered unconscious, typically by CO2. They then come out unconscious, and they go through the rest of the process exactly the same, but you can be confident that they’re unconscious through that process.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so that is one of the measures on top of the other measures you mentioned. How much success have these campaigns had? How many corporations are agreeing to some of these changes?

Lewis Bollard: They’ve had a lot of success. They’ve won over 500 commitments. And those commitments, when fully implemented, we estimate should benefit about 360 million chickens alive at any point in time. And because of the short lifespans of chickens, that’s actually like 2 billion chickens a year that will benefit.

I will say it’s still less success than the cage-free campaigns have had. We have found these are harder. We found that retailers are much more sensitive to the price of chicken. And actually, the other kind of crazy thing we found recently is retailers pushing back and saying, well, if we give the birds more space, that’s bad for climate emissions. So particularly, actually, some of the biggest UK retailers, like Tesco, have said, “We’re not going to adopt the Better Chicken Commitment because we think that would be bad for climate emissions.”

Now, I mean, it’s technically true that if you give birds more space, if you give them a little more feed, your emission footprint goes up ever so slightly. But it’s really kind of a wild argument that we need torture animals to — incrementally, a tiny little wee bit — reduce our emissions footprint.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Just to steelman their position, how big is the carbon footprint difference? When you say it’s a very tiny improvement, is that like, it’s tiny, but it becomes big when you multiply it over many factory farms? Or is it like, no, really, it’s pretty tiny and unjustifiable?

Lewis Bollard: So a group actually just quantified this [in unpublished work], and their best estimate was that it’s between 0–15%, depending on the farm, depending on a number of factors. But bear in mind that chicken doesn’t have a huge carbon footprint in the first place. So it’s 0–15% on a relatively low base.

So we actually looked at what would this mean for Tesco in the UK, what would this mean, given they were one of the players invoking this argument. Our sense was that it would potentially increase their emissions by about 0.26%. So it’s about a quarter of 1%. That’s the worst case; that’s if we assume it’s 15%. So it’s kind of wild. But again, what they say is we don’t do anything that increases our emissions, and so that’s just a hard line. So unless it’s less than zero, they won’t do it.
Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, that’s so frustrating.

Do companies follow through on these commitments? [01:00:21]

Luisa Rodriguez: What do we know about whether companies follow through with these commitments? I wonder if they’re legally binding, and even if they were, can we actually check all the factory farms to know? Especially if the groups making the commitments are several steps removed from the actual suppliers, I can imagine it just being really hard to confirm.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, this is a major challenge. So the commitments are not legally binding. And in many cases, I see this as a two-step process of advocacy: the first step is to get the commitment; the second step is to force the company to follow through on it and make sure they do.

Things have gone relatively well so far. The Humane League looked at all the cage-free pledges that had come due by 2022 and found that 89% of them had been implemented over 1,000 pledges. That number is going to go down, though. In some ways, the more willing companies adopted pledges earlier and had shorter timelines. So now you’ve got some of the harder companies. We’ve already seen in the US, Walmart indicate that they won’t make their 2025 cage-free goal. Kroger, the second biggest retailer, saying the same thing. So there’s going to need to be a lot of sustained campaigning and advocacy to push companies to follow through on this.

And then even more so on broilers. I think the thing that we’re seeing on broiler chickens is it’s hard because you’ve got a more complex ask. So it’s relatively easy to tell if a farm has cages or not, and that would be a really big thing to lie about. Particularly given these companies are often reporting their compliance to their investors, it would be a form of fraud to tell them. But it’s much harder if you’re saying not just the breed, but what’s the stocking density on this farm? It’s very hard to know what they’re maintaining as the stocking density. So part of the requirement of companies is that they have third-party auditing of their implementation. But there’s still challenges, and in particular challenges about actually getting companies to move forward with implementing these pledges.

Luisa Rodriguez: So they make the pledges, and do they get, I don’t know, pats on the back? Do they talk publicly about these, such that people might think that they are then doing the things and a better company for it? And then they can just very easily drag their feet for years or something? Is that how this goes wrong?

Lewis Bollard: Well, they don’t normally promote these publicly. They’ll typically put it on their website, because advocates say we want you to do that to make sure it’s legit. But they won’t do more than that because they know that consumers will be shocked to realise that they were using cages all this time. And particularly when they’ve got like a 10-year phase-in, consumers will be like, “Wait, why do you have a 10-year phase-in?”

Luisa Rodriguez: “For the next 10 years, I’m going to be eating tortured meat?”

Lewis Bollard: Exactly. So they’re not typically advertised like that. I think what happens, a bigger challenge with these companies is there’s often quite high turnover internally — so the person who committed to the pledge is often not the person who needs to be implementing the pledge.

The other thing that happens is they have a tendency to say… I mean, the reason why they get these phase-ins is because that’s actually the timeline necessary to change the infrastructure. But a lot of companies say, “Great, our pledge only comes due in 2025. We’re going to wait until 2025.” And then of course, when 2025 comes around, they’ll say, “There’s not an available supply. We asked our producers, but they said that they couldn’t do the supply this year.” The obvious reason is because they asked them too late. So that is a major challenge.

And one of the things that groups have been pushing companies on is incremental reporting: reporting where they’re at every year, and ensuring that that percentage is going up every year. And also ensuring that these companies are telling their producers, “Hey, we’re serious about this pledge. You do need to renovate your facilities by 2025 to be compliant.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice. OK, so it sounds like for broiler chickens in particular, this is just really hard. How optimistic are you about making it more of a priority to make sure compliance improves, and that actually happening in the next five or 10 years?

Lewis Bollard: I’m cautiously optimistic. I think that advocates have been drawing increasing attention to this issue. I think that we’re starting to see some regulators, for instance in the European Union, pay attention to the plight of broiler chickens. And I think that this is an issue that companies can’t avoid forever, that they can’t just drag their feet on. So I’m cautiously optimistic that we will see some major reforms in the years ahead.

Fish welfare [01:05:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, nice. Let’s turn to fish welfare. I think the most numerous farmed vertebrate is fish. But I know very little about the fish industry personally. I don’t even really know in what ways fish are being raised by humans for food. Is it majority wild caught? Is it majority somehow in some watery farm? What is the fish industry like?

Lewis Bollard: So by volume, about half the global fish capture is from farms, and about half is wild caught. But the wild-caught ones are much smaller, so the numbers are way higher: there are about 10 to 30 times as many wild-caught fish caught annually as there are farmed fish slaughtered annually.

In terms of farming, there’s huge variation. There are over 400 different species of fish farmed globally. Some of them are farmed in inland ponds, some of them are farmed in offshore nets. Some of them are increasingly farmed in tanks in what really resemble factory farms on land.

Luisa Rodriguez: It sounds like there’s a big range: there is wild caught, there is fish agriculture in ponds, and then there’s also fish agriculture in tanks, which I already hate the sound of.

This is a kind of big question, because it sounds like the experiences of these fish are probably pretty varied — especially because we’re talking about different species, and I imagine I’ll make the mistake of thinking that all fish species have the same kinds of lives. But if you can generalise a bit, what are kinds of the experiences like in these different contexts?

Lewis Bollard: So the wild-caught setup is more straightforward. Basically, there are two primary welfare issues there.

First, the capture: these fish, a lot of them are being caught in giant nets, and those nets are basically just trawled along for days on end. So often a fish will be stuck in a giant net with a tonne of other fish trying to swim their way out of that net, but they can’t, and getting slowly exhausted.

The second thing is slaughter. For those fish who aren’t already dead when they’re brought on board — and a significant portion have already been crushed before they’re brought on board — they basically asphyxiate: they very slowly suffocate, because fish very slowly suffocate out of water. They’re only slaughtered after that.

Luisa Rodriguez: How fast?

Lewis Bollard: There’s huge variation in this, so it can be between minutes and hours, but there are certainly some species for which it can take hours. For farmed fish, it varies a lot by the production system. For the most commonly farmed species, they tend to be pretty crowded, and that tends to also affect the water quality a lot. They often end up in very dirty water with low levels of oxygen, and this can have various effects on abnormalities in their body. It can also lead to very high mortality rates. In some forms of aquaculture, you see mortality rates upwards of 50% — so the majority of the fish are dying. The other thing is, relative to other species, it’s a very long production cycle. So most fish are farmed for a year and a half or more — compared to, for a chicken, like 42 days. So when the conditions are bad, that’s a very long time to be spending in those bad conditions.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. I imagine this is true of lots of people, and it’s not necessarily something I endorse, but I do intuitively find it harder to empathise with fish. And I’ve heard arguments for why we should think that asphyxiation and being crushed and living in low-oxygen environments is probably a thing that is terrible for fish, in at least ways related to ways it would be terrible for a chicken or human. But I’m curious how it feels to you to think about fish welfare. Have you gotten to the point where you believe very viscerally, yes, fish can suffer, and it is terrible that they are experiencing the things they’re experiencing?

Lewis Bollard: I think I still find it harder to empathise with a fish than with a pig or another animal. I mean, they have beady little eyes, they have scales, they swim around —

Luisa Rodriguez: They’re not remotely cute.

Lewis Bollard: No, they’re really not. They’re really not. And yeah, I think it’s been a major problem. I also think the science is still relatively young on understanding what it’s like to be a fish. I do feel relatively confident that fish can feel pain. There have been these studies done in which they’ve shown that fish will make tradeoffs, where part of their tank will be painful and part of it will have food, and also the part that’s painful will also have the food. And depending on how much food there is, and depending on how painful it is, the fish will make different tradeoffs about whether to go into that part of the tank. So it’s not just an instinctive thing. They’re actually thinking… They’re doing a cost-benefit analysis, I guess.

The other thing, which I find kind of wild, is that increasingly, zebrafish, which are very small fish, are being used as a model for depression in human depression research for both anxiety and depression, actually. And not only are they being used as a model for understanding the disease, but antidepressants work on them. So antidepressants, the things that would be called depression-like behaviours, are stamped out when you give them antidepressants.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is insane. So it seems like you, at least intellectually, believe that fish feel pain. And probably on some level you can kind of access that empathy. And I can too, I think, when I really look at that evidence and sit with it. So I’m keen to hear what kinds of practices you think could be changed to make some of these experiences less bad.

Lewis Bollard: I think the most basic one is to implement pre-slaughter stunning, which is something that we’ve had for mammals for over 100 years: I mean, it’s just a basic expectation that animals would be stunned before they’re slaughtered. I’ve seen this where the fish are not stunned before slaughter. It can take a very long time. By contrast, stunned fish can be knocked out almost immediately.

They could basically send them through a pipe still in the water, so they don’t have to be lifted out of the water, and they can electrify that water with sufficient charge that the fish gets knocked out entirely. That’s something you can do for both farmed fish and actually increasingly for wild-caught fish too.

Luisa Rodriguez: Really? How do you do that?

Lewis Bollard: You basically just set up this system on board. Actually, the best version of it is you put a big pump and a tube going down into the net, so rather than dragging these fish along for days, you’re just continuously pumping them up: as soon as they get in the net, they’re getting pumped up and into the stunner. Now, this has not been widely adopted yet. The research is there, but the willingness to take it up is not there yet. But hopefully we will see more of that in future.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. And is the way you try to convince the industry to do this through something like corporate campaigns, or is it something else?

Lewis Bollard: The thing we’ve actually seen the most progress on to date has been working with sustainability certifiers. So there are a set of certifiers who look at the conditions that farmed fish were raised in and talk about their environmental sustainability.

Traditionally, they hadn’t had standards for animal welfare. A few years back, we approached all of the major certifiers and asked them if they’d want funding to develop those standards. And I’ve been really impressed. They’ve taken it very seriously. And we already saw Friend of the Sea, which is one of the big certifiers, put out standards a couple of years ago. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council, which is another one, has standards going into force next year. Each of these certifiers certifies over a billion fish alive at any point in time — so this is a huge scale of individual animals.

And these initial standards are pretty basic. We’re talking about pre-slaughter stunning; we’re talking about some basic water quality parameters. But I think it’s a really important first step in getting fish welfare established.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Is there another change that this industry could make that you’d be excited about?

Lewis Bollard: I think reducing density for the most numerous species. This is something we’ve actually seen a number of major retailers — particularly in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Germany — set some basic standards around: you can’t crowd your fish together more than this level. And it’s complicated because the right numbers vary by species. Some fish are OK being very close together and some fish are not. But I think that reducing the stocking density can both reduce the stress these fish feel, and it can also improve the water quality because there aren’t as many fish polluting that water constantly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. What are the concrete things that you’re funding in this space?

Lewis Bollard: We funded a lot of research in this space to better understand the humane interventions that we need. So a lot of it has actually gone to universities and to research institutes. I mentioned the certifiers a moment ago; we funded them to develop standards. We’ve funded advocacy groups to work with producers, to work with food companies on establishing standards. And we’ve also funded some work at the European Union level to get the EU to start to finally regulate fish welfare.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. OK, great. In an interview Rob did with Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project, Rob and Andrés discuss reasons to think shrimp can suffer, what their experiences are like in farm conditions, and one approach to reducing their suffering. We won’t cover those issues here, though listeners who haven’t heard it should go listen to it. It’s a great episode. But are there things in the shrimp welfare space that you’re excited to fund?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I’m really excited about the work that the Shrimp Welfare Project is doing. This is a very new space, but I think they’ve already seen some really encouraging initial progress. One of the more innovative things they’ve been doing is going to producers and offering to pay for their first stunner, and then using that as a kind of beachhead to get in with the producers and help them to adopt stunners more broadly. And already, just through the stunners that they have themselves placed, they are already covering over a billion shrimp annually, ensuring that over a billion shrimp annually are getting stunned. And that just really speaks to the scale of this issue, the number of individuals involved. So, yeah. Very excited to see that work.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s really cool. Do you happen to know how much a stunner costs?

Lewis Bollard: My understanding is that a stunner costs about $100,000, and they’ve been able to negotiate that down to an at-cost rate for the work they’re doing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. That’s great. Yeah, that sounds like a really cool approach. Do you see this in other areas in fish, or in broiler chickens, for example?

Lewis Bollard: We’re looking at it in the fish space to see if it could make sense. I think things are a little further along in that a lot of fish farms have already adopted electrical stunners, so this is a bit less of a need to break in. Similarly, on the chicken side, I think that the producers are already aware of the stunner options, and it’s really much more an issue of their willingness to use them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. Makes sense.

Alternatives to animal proteins [01:16:36]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s push on to another topic then. Another focus of yours is alternatives to animal proteins, which we’ve covered on the show before, and I find personally just a really fascinating topic — just the science of it, let alone the fact that I personally love protein alternatives. I think they’re mostly just really delicious. What is the basic case for funding work on alternatives to animal products?

Lewis Bollard: We think that alternative proteins have the potential to displace factory farmed products, and really looking at asking consumers to do the least possible… being realistic about what they’re willing to do. So taking people who really want the taste, the nutritional benefits of meat, but don’t necessarily want the cruelty of meat, and offering them a viable alternative.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice. I guess I personally suspect that plant-based alternatives are basically a requirement for ending factory farming. It just seems really hard for me to imagine it happening on humanity’s change of heart alone. Is that similar to your take? How important do you think plant-based alternatives are to really ending this practice?

Lewis Bollard: I think they’re really important. I don’t think we know yet, of all these possible interventions, which ones are going to be the most important in ending factory farming. And I think that calls for a level of diversification in approaches so that we’re not relying too much on any one silver bullet. But I do think that plant-based alternatives have huge potential to offer consumers a really compelling alternative to factory farmed meat.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it seemed like plant-based meats in particular were really just doing super well for what seemed like at least five years or something. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember having the feeling of like, wow, this is going really well. Sales are going up and up. Like, I see more of these products in all of the stores that I go to. And then my impression is that plant-based meat sales have stagnated, and I think even fallen for the last few years. How worried does that make you?

Lewis Bollard: I worry about it. I mean, I didn’t predict the original boom in plant-based meat sales. I also didn’t predict the subsequent bust. So I’m wary of making any predictions of where things will go. I do think that part of it is probably about inflation. We’ve seen that other expensive proteins have stagnated — fish sales have stagnated, prime beef sales have stagnated — so that may be part of the story, but I do think there’s also just this challenge that the products aren’t good enough yet. I think that a lot of the products don’t taste good enough, and on average, they’re still at least twice the price of meat. And that’s a really hard proposition to sell people on, buying a more expensive product that may not taste quite as good.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it does seem like, for the most part, people buy them because they’re convinced of the moral argument for buying them, not because they’re their favourite product or remotely the most affordable ones. Do you feel optimistic about this? And if so, what do you think is going to solve it or push us in the right direction?

Lewis Bollard: I hope we’re just in a short downturn. Particularly, I hope that if inflation goes down, people feel like they can afford to pay more for products. Hopefully that will make a difference. I hope too that we’ll see new generations of products come along that are ever tastier and meet people’s expectations on nutrition. But I think it’s really uncertain right now. I think that this is one of the challenges in the space, is that it’s still really early, and so it’s hard to predict where it goes. I certainly hope that people don’t give up on it. I think we’re only in the first phase of what is ultimately a long journey.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Does it seem possible people are going to give up on it? Does that seem like a live option?

Lewis Bollard: Unfortunately, one thing we’ve seen is that the for-profit investors in the space are very fickle. So there was a period of time — when Beyond Meat IPO’d and Impossible Foods was getting a lot of attention — when private investors piled in and they injected billions of dollars into these companies. And then we had some declining sales and a few other pieces of bad news, and all of those investors vanished.

So there’s a real challenge for these companies right now, that there’s just not the capital out there to raise their next rounds. So we need to see investors come back. I think this also speaks to one of the fundamental challenges with impact investing, where I think the promise of impact investing has always been that we can achieve these long-term social results in a way that also makes money. I think it turned out a lot of the impact investors who piled into this space, when they started to lose money, decided that it wasn’t so impactful after all.

So I think that it is a real challenge in the current environment. I’m not worried that plant-based meat is going to vanish as a category. I think it just could set things back by a number of years if that money goes away.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so there’s plant-based meat that’s made from things like mushrooms and pea proteins and other fun plant-y ingredients. But then there’s also cultivated meat, which is made by culturing animal cells, without a live animal. And it seems like cultivated meat has both overcome some really major hurdles — if I understand correctly, it got regulatory approval in the US, which seems really huge to me — but then it also seems like it’s got these enormous challenges ahead. It just sounds like getting it cheap enough that people will buy it is going to be really, really hard. How optimistic are you that we’ll have the option to eat affordable cultivated meat in the nearish future?

Lewis Bollard: I definitely agree with your take. I think there have been some important milestones. There are now cultivated meat products approved for sale in the US, Singapore, and Israel most recently. And we’re seeing a number of these companies move forward with significant scientific breakthroughs. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on.

As you say, there are huge obstacles that remain. I think in particular, the obstacle is to producing this at scale, at a reasonable price point. I think that realistically, it is going to take a long time to bring down the cost of cultivated meat. So I don’t think we’re going to be seeing affordable products in the next five to 10 years. I think longer term, it depends on whether we can solve some of the scientific challenges — like the sterility of bioreactors, and bringing down the cost of amino acids.

It also depends on whether there’s a viable business model that can get us that far, and that can keep funding that research over that period of time. I think one of the interesting things that cultivated meat companies are doing currently is looking at hybrid products that use maybe 5–10% cultivated meats — perhaps just cultivated fat — combined with a plant-based product to produce something that, at least in theory, could taste meatier than the regular plant-based product could. And if that works out, that could potentially fund the development of ever higher percentage products of cultivated meat.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Just to make sure I understand, it’s like if they only have to produce some smaller amount of the product, like cultivated fat, I guess they can maybe produce that at a level that is affordable enough for plant-based meat companies to incorporate those ingredients, make better products that sell much better, and overall, that’ll kind of lift up both groups. Which sounds great. Is that kind of it?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think that’s the promise. I hope that’s how it works out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Are there any positive things happening in the space, or any other solutions you’re particularly excited about?

Lewis Bollard: I’m really excited to see governments getting into funding research and development in this space. In the last few years, we’ve seen over a billion dollars committed to research and infrastructure by governments around the world on alt proteins.

And that’s coming from a variety of motivations. There are progressive countries in Europe — like the Netherlands and Denmark — that are doing this for climate mitigation reasons. There are countries like Singapore and United Arab Emirates where this is much more of a food security play. And then there are countries like Canada and Australia that produce a lot of protein crops that are viewing this as an economic opportunity.

The reason I’m especially excited about that is it seems like one of the key pieces for clean energy — and bringing down the price of batteries, bringing down the price of electric cars and wind power and all these other good things — has been the involvement of governments early on, putting a lot of money into research and development. And we really didn’t have that in the alt protein space. Companies were having to try and start from scratch. So when we’re looking at these longer-term projects, particularly something like cultivated meat, which I think is more a question of decades to reach the right price point, I think it’s really important to have the long-term commitment that governments can provide.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Cool, great. I think I had the sense that a couple of countries had what seemed like a niche interest in funding this space, but I didn’t realise it was that common. That seems really cool.

Farm animal welfare in Asia [01:26:00]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s move on to farm animal welfare in Asia. First: why focus on Asia?

Lewis Bollard: It’s where most of the world’s farmed animals are. So about half the world’s land farmed animals are in Asia, and about 90% of the world’s farmed fish. It’s also where we’re seeing the fastest growth rates in both consumption and the production of animal products.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, got it. That is a very good reason. Do factory farms in Asia have similar welfare issues to the ones in the US and Europe?

Lewis Bollard: Sadly, they’re almost identical welfare issues, because the farms are almost identical. I visited a set of factory farms in India and they looked so similar to what you would see in the United States or Europe: you’ve got the same battery cages, made by the same manufacturers; you’ve got the same broiler chicken genetics, because it’s the same global duopoly that provides the chicken genetics to almost every country in the world. And so you really have this globalised system. I mean, it was very much invented in the US, but it has been exported globally, and across Asia that is now the default system.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really sad. What is the farmed animal advocacy space like in Asia? Is it similar or different to the American or European ones?

Lewis Bollard: It’s a lot earlier in its development. It’s a young movement, and I think there’s the challenge that there are fewer advocates than there are in America and Europe, and they’re also more isolated. You know, in Indonesia, we can locate two or three advocates, and then there’s another two or three in Malaysia, and another two or three in Thailand, and so on. So it’s a little harder for people to coordinate and be connected.

But I think the exciting thing is we’re seeing a lot of these advocates go straight into effective advocacy, rather than going through what I perceive as this period we had in the US and European movements, where we really had decades wasted in ideological battles. There was just a huge amount of internal fighting about what was the exact right ideology, and it really sometimes felt like the primary form of activism for some people was campaigning against other activists. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of these advocates in Asia just want to do what works, and they’re moving straight into that. And I think as a result, we’re seeing some immediate progress there.

Luisa Rodriguez: Amazing. So what is the lowest-hanging fruit in Asia with respect to either improving the lives of factory farm animals or toward getting rid of the practice?

Lewis Bollard: I think probably the first thing is establishing more humane slaughter, pre-slaughter stunning for all species. We’ve already started to see that happen for mammals and birds across Asia. So even with very minimal advocacy, that is something that a number of major Asian governments, including the Chinese government, have set regulations around. So we’ve actually seen a lot of progress on slaughter and transport, where governments really have set standards around that.

I think the next thing is establishing some of the most basic welfare reforms. One example would be something that advocates managed to get rid of in the US and European egg industries decades ago: the practice of forced moulting, where they basically starve the birds to increase their egg output. That, unfortunately, is still done in Asian egg factory farms, but I think it’s that kind of thing that’s ripe for a reform, because it’s so clearly out of line with global practices. And I hope down the line that we’ll see much bigger reforms. I mean, there’s no reason why Asian countries can’t lead the world in farmed animal welfare.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Have there been any big wins in Asia so far?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think there’s been some really exciting stuff. One I would point to is in China. Their five-year plans around the bioeconomy and agriculture both reference alternative proteins, and actually President Xi made a brief reference to alternative proteins being part of China’s food security strategy. So I think that’s pretty exciting to see.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool, that’s huge.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s really huge. I agree. I think that’s a pretty awesome thing. We’ve seen some companies across Asia making cage-free commitments. Initially it was just multinationals with operations in Asia, but we’re now seeing, for instance, Jollibee, which is the biggest Asia-based fast food chain, has a cage-free commitment. Super Indo, the biggest retailer in Indonesia, has a cage-free commitment.

We’ve also seen a number of politicians across Asia endorsing alternative proteins. Actually, just last year, the Japanese prime minister said that he wanted Japan to be a leader in cellular agriculture. So I think that there’s a lot of exciting stuff around alternative proteins, in particular, across the region.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is really cool.

Farm animal welfare in Europe [01:30:45]

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s turn to farmed animal welfare in Europe. I think that Europe doesn’t actually have that many factory farms relative to the US and Asia, so why make that a focus area?

Lewis Bollard: Yes, there are still about 3.5 billion farmed animals alive at any point in time in Europe. More importantly, we see really tractable opportunities to improve the welfare of those animals. Advocates have already achieved significant corporate reforms in terms of phasing out cages in Europe, so about 60% of Europe’s hens are now cage-free. They’ve also achieved major progress in broiler chicken welfare reforms, and increasingly, fish welfare reforms. And we’re also seeing progress through the European Union.

Unfortunately, the major reform that they were looking at putting in place has gotten delayed, but we still think there’s really exciting potential for future legislative progress.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. Can you talk about what some of that potential looks like, what the opportunities are?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. So the European Union was considering an animal welfare legislative reform proposal that was really my wishlist of farm animal welfare reforms. What they did was they went to their scientific advisory bodies and they said, what should we do? What’s the right answer? And to their credit, these scientists said, “You need to reform the entire system: you need to dramatically reduce stocking density, you need to change the breeds, need to get rid of the cages and crates, you need to stop the painful mutilations, you need to stop the inhumane slaughter practices.” They just went through that whole list. And as a result, the draft proposal we saw from the Commission early last year addressed all of these issues in depth.

Unfortunately, I think that was also its undoing because the poultry industry saw this proposal and they said, “Oh my god, this would totally upend our business model,” and went to work lobbying. And they were successful in lobbying to scrap the proposal in the current Commission. Now what we’re hoping is that the next Commission will pick those up again. It probably won’t pick up everything that was in that proposal. And whatever they do pick up will then go to the European Parliament and the European Council of member states, and they’ll probably weaken it further. But my hope is that we’ll still get something very meaningful out of that process.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, cool. Where do the commissions come from? Who’s causing them to come together and think about this?

Lewis Bollard: Advocates, entirely. In particular, there was Compassion in World Farming and Eurogroup for Animals created what’s called a European Citizens’ Initiative, where they collected the signatures of over a million citizens from across Europe on a petition calling for Europe to ban the use of all cages and crates. And the European Commission responded and said, “Yes, we’ll do it.” And incredibly, the Commission then said, “And this reminds us that we need to overhaul all of our animal welfare standards.” They hadn’t done it in like 20 years. And this was the impetus, alongside other pieces of advocacy for the Commission, to then say, “OK, we need to go and talk to our scientists.”

And advocates remained engaged with the Commission, advocates remained engaged with providing the relevant science. But I think this really is a case of advocates driving the process forward.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. And then the way it got stopped is it was lobbied against by these industries, and now there’s a potential for another Commission? Or there will definitely be another kind of convening of the Commission? Or what happens next?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. So the European elections are coming up this year, in the middle of this year. There’ll be a new Parliament and then that new Parliament will elect a new Commission. And the hope is that that new Commission will have a lot of the same people as the previous Commission. Obviously, they didn’t give us what we wanted in the end, but I do think that the mere fact that they advanced this proposal as far as they did suggests they’re much more progressive on animal welfare than previous Commissions had been. And particularly given they made this promise that they would continue this, hopefully they will feel some sense of an obligation to continue it in their second term.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. And are there particular things that, if they happened, would give you more hope about this going through successfully, if a bit weaker the second time?

Lewis Bollard: I think a key step will be seeing at this next election, the MEPs — members of the European Parliament — how many are willing to commit to an agenda of advancing farm animal welfare and calling on the Commission to do so. And as well as that, I think a key step will be looking at how many member states do this. So traditionally, some of the northern European member states, like Germany and the Netherlands, have been real leaders on animal welfare. But I think we are seeing a broader coalition. So we’re seeing places like the Czech Republic supporting a ban on cages. My hope is that in the next Commission we will see a broader array of member states calling on the Commission to move these reforms forward.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. That’s really exciting. That, I guess, seems like a big win, despite the fact that in the end it didn’t go through. I guess in a way it’s also a bit of a setback or at least a stalling of progress. Have there been any other particularly big wins in Europe?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, we’ve seen in the last year significant progress on support for alternative proteins and plant-based diets. The government of Denmark issued the world’s first action plan on advancing plant-based foods, where they’re putting government money behind efforts both to advance research on alternative proteins, but also to do things like encourage a greater share of the foods in school cafeterias to be plant-based. And I think that’s a really exciting development. I think we’re seeing more governments become interested in that.

We also saw from Denmark, actually a policy of phasing out the fast-growth chickens, which are the ones with the genetic problems that I described earlier. And so Denmark saying, “Not only as a government are we going to stop buying chicken from those breeds, but also we’re going to actively advocate within the European Union for an EU-wide ban.” So I think that’s really exciting to see.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. Is there anything special about Denmark that makes them so good on this? It seems like they’re just like, years ahead.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, they really have been. I think Denmark and the Netherlands have been uniquely progressive on both farm animal welfare and alternative proteins. And it’s interesting that in both cases, they are relatively large animal agriculture countries relative to their size: both quite small geographically, but they’ve always had large animal agriculture sectors.

I don’t know exactly how that worked out. I think maybe the other factor is just that people in those countries care a lot about animal welfare. In the Netherlands, you have an animal welfare party that is represented in the parliament, and surveys consistently show in these countries that animal welfare is a very high motivator.

We actually saw something exciting in Germany recently was the government pulled together a citizens’ assembly around food reform, and they decided on three issues they would address, and one of them they decided to address was animal welfare. And they came out with a number of really strong proposals around reforms needed on animal welfare. So I think in general, across northern Europe, you just see some really strong support for reform.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Yeah. That’s just really cool. Is there anything to learn from, I don’t know, the kind of cultural progression in these northern European countries? Surely Germany and Denmark weren’t always very conscientious about animal welfare issues. Did they have social campaigns that worked better, or is there something else going on, or is it just really hard to know?

Lewis Bollard: It’s hard to know. I think advocacy has played a really important role. Each of these countries has really effective advocacy groups who’ve been working for a long time — in many cases for decades — and I think they’ve often built up this progress incrementally. So they’ve had a lot of steps along the way to get to where they are.

I think there’s also a thing of these are some of the richest countries, and some of the most progressive countries in the world. And so my hope is that as the world becomes richer and more progressive, we’ll see more countries going in the direction of Denmark and the Netherlands and Germany.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Makes sense. Any other wins in Europe worth highlighting?

Lewis Bollard: We saw last year the first commitments from major retailers toward plant-based protein goals, where they basically said the percentage of their protein mix that is plant based they would seek to progressively increase. And we saw this first from Jumbo, which is one of the largest retailers in the Netherlands, and then also from Lidl in Germany, which is a major retailer in Germany.

And in both cases, the first step they took toward increasing the share of their proteins that are plant-based is they dramatically reduced the price of their own brand plant-based proteins, to bring them down to the same price as the animal product that they’re competing against. And I’m really hopeful that we’ll see more retailers taking steps like this to actively push plant-based proteins, typically as part of their climate goals.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, I see. I was going to ask what the motivation was. Is it climate?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. My understanding is that this mainly comes from all these retailers have climate commitments, and when they look at their Scope 3 emissions — the emissions of their supply chain — a huge portion of that is coming from the meat they sell. So I think that’s creating a lot of the incentive to try and introduce more plant-based proteins and relatively fewer animal products.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. I didn’t really expect that. I couldn’t really think of what else it would be, but I guess that makes sense. It’s interesting that we’re seeing climate coming up, but kind of pushing in both directions: sometimes pushing suppliers away from making some kinds of reforms and then sometimes pushing companies toward alternative proteins because they are so much less carbon-y. That’s the technical term.

What exactly is the goal they’re aiming for? Are they trying to make alternative proteins, I don’t know, double the share that they currently are?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So for Lidl, it is literally a target of doubling the portion of their selection that is plant-based. For Jumbo, their target is 60% of their protein mix will be plant-based.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s huge.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, it’s huge. I mean, I think one thing which is challenging in comparing these is that everyone counts their protein mix differently. So Lidl is saying we’ll double it to 20%, we’ll go from what’s currently 9% to 20%. I’m pretty confident that Jumbo and Lidl are counting in different ways, which products in the supermarket you count? But I think the important thing is they’re increasing it significantly, relative to their current baseline.

Animal welfare science [01:42:09]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. Cool. That’s amazing. Turning to the last portfolio, which is animal welfare science, which I think is a bit more of a meta one: why is this a priority for you?

Lewis Bollard: So we see some really exciting opportunities to solve some of the chronic problems within factory farming through technology. One example would be the killing of male chicks on the day they’re born in the egg industry. There’s the potential to get rid of that entirely through the adoption of in-ovo sexing technology — that is, sexing the eggs while they’re still in the egg. So rather than hatching these birds, that they never hatched in the first place.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Just to spell that out, because I’m actually realising we kind of walked right past it. The reason this is important is because male baby chicks in the layer hen industry are not going to go lay eggs, they are born and then ground up as little tiny baby chicks. And so the idea here is to make sure they’re never born.

Lewis Bollard: That’s right. And I think it’s one of the crazier practices in this industry. I mean, it just sounds so obviously evil when you say it.

Luisa Rodriguez: It sounds so evil. Could you have a cuter thing and then could you do a more horrible, evil thing to that cute thing?

Lewis Bollard: That’s right. It’s so shocking.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, really shocking.

Lewis Bollard: It’s really wild. And the reason they don’t raise them for meat is that they have a lower meat yield than broiler chickens. So they say, “Well, why don’t we just kill the excess males [from egg-laying species], and then we’ll just raise a different breed of chicken to be eaten for meat?”

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Lewis Bollard: Another example I’d give would be immunocastration, where rather than castrating piglets, they can just inject them with something that achieves the same objective. So I think there is some really exciting technology out there that can achieve that.

The other thing I’d say is a huge portion of what we’re doing in terms of working with companies or governments is trying to make them see that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. And normally we’re focused on increasing the cost of inaction by showing that there’s a real downside here. I think it’s also important to lower the cost of action: to try and lower the cost of companies doing the right thing, make it as easy as possible so that they’re more inclined to do it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And so what that looks like is here’s a new technology that’s going to help this be a bunch less painful for animals. And also, maybe here’s a prototype and also potentially this is going to make a smaller percentage of your animals die from some disease or broken limbs or something. So generally, the thing being just like make this net positive or at least closer to net positive for industry. Is that the thinking?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I had a very candid conversation with an executive from the pork industry where I asked him, “Why haven’t you adopted these various animal welfare reforms?” And he said, “Look, we only do things that cut costs, that save us time, or that make money.” And that’s depressing that that’s their calculus — but given it is, I think there’s real value in trying to find things that can save them a little bit of time or make things slightly easier. And a lot of the time we’re not talking about things that are going to make the factory farming system more efficient. We don’t want to solve all the factory farming industry’s problems for them. But I think we are looking at things that can maybe be cost neutral. And then when you say it’s cost neutral, it only requires a really small nudge to push people to do the right thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. Is there a grant in this area that you think has really paid off?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I’m really excited about how we co-sponsored a prize on in-ovo sexing. So we co-sponsored a $6 million prize for a team that can develop a scalable solution to in-ovo sexing technology globally. And there’s been a lot of advancements on that front. We’ve also seen that crowd in some more government funding from the German government, most recently. We saw the Dutch government give a major loan to a company in this space. And I think the most recent estimates are that about 15% of hens in Europe are now from in-ovo-sexed eggs, and I think we’re really on track to seeing that increase into the billions in the years to come.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. And just to go back, you used the term “crowding in,” which I’d never heard before. But it sounds like the opposite to crowding out — where, by funding something, other groups are like, “It’s already covered” and they don’t fund it. Are you saying that by creating this prize, it seems like governments were like, “We too want to fund things here,” and it created kind of more funding overall?

Lewis Bollard: I hope this played a role. To be clear, I don’t want to claim credit for the German government doing this. I think there was a lot of advocacy in Germany, and in particular there was litigation brought in Germany that required the government to act to end the killing of male chicks. And I think that was the most important thing in the German government funding work here.

What I hope this prize has contributed to is we’re seeing a real global momentum around this problem and around in-ovo sexing as a solution. And when we first got involved in this and we talked to some of the global hatching companies, they weren’t particularly interested in in-ovo sexing. They felt like everything was currently fine. They didn’t feel any sense of urgency to move. And the good news is they are now singing a very different tune. They now see it as inevitable that it will happen globally, and it’s just a question of timelines at this point.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. And what changed? Is it basically that they realised, one, this is obviously evil; and two, maybe more importantly to them, doing sexing at the egg stage is like, surely it saves them money?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. It could be a little easier for them. I think the new technology costs money, so there’s a tradeoff, and the workers who do the sexing are not paid very much, so it’s not a particularly expensive procedure.

I think what happened is that first the technology got better, and as the technology has gotten better, it’s cheaper and it’s more practical; it can perform much of the needed function. At the same time, I think there’s a lot of advocacy. So we’ve heard very clearly from these companies the reason why they’ve rolled this out first in Europe is because that’s where they felt the most pressure: that’s where they felt the most pressure from legislation and from corporates. And their plan is to roll this out secondly in the United States, because that’s where they feel the next most pressure.

And they’re pretty clear that they have a much longer timeline in the rest of the world, because they don’t yet feel that pressure there. So I do think it’s pretty clear you have a convergence here of the technology getting better, but also the advocacy increasing the pressure.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. Are there any other grants that you think have been particularly exciting?

Lewis Bollard: I’m excited about our support of the Welfare Footprint Project. This was two public health researchers who had been involved with the Global Burden of Disease study, and they decided to put some of that methodology toward assessing animal welfare. So they’ve done this really systematic review of the existing evidence we have about the welfare problems in first laying hens and then in broiler chickens. I think now they’re moving on to fish. And then looking too at the reforms and saying, which of these welfare problems do we get rid of if we change the breed, if we get rid of cages?

I think it’s really some of the most rigorous work we’ve seen there. And in particular, it’s really cool in that it’s quantifying the suffering, which is something we’ve really lacked previously in this literature. There’s just been a sense previously of, yeah, maybe this practice is bad, maybe this practice is better — but there’s not been an attempt to really systematically quantify things in the way that they have.

Luisa Rodriguez: And how are they doing it?

Lewis Bollard: I mean, they have a pretty elaborate model. So first they identify a whole lot of welfare harms. So the sores on the body I mentioned with broiler chickens: work out, how bad is that? What do we know about the intensity of the pain that that causes? Then work out how prevalent is it, what percentage of birds do we think are suffering from that? And then work out the duration: how long do they suffer from that?

And then based on that, they basically multiply those through and say, now we’ve got a sense of how much suffering that harm is causing. Then you add up the different harms and you sort of get a sense collectively of what that looks like.

Luisa Rodriguez: Super cool. I can’t imagine it’s easy to have a really scientifically grounded view on just how painful those sores are. But can you say how exactly they’re doing that?

Lewis Bollard: I think they’re looking at things like tradeoff studies and preference studies. There are studies, for instance, that ask a hen, would you rather have access to this nesting box or to food?

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, we’ll link to that.

Are there any other interventions that don’t fit neatly into those portfolios that you’re excited about funding?

Lewis Bollard: I’m also really excited to see advocates engaging with regulators globally to address farm animal welfare. I think we’ve seen some surprising gains on this. For instance, in Thailand, a group called Catalyst has done a lot of work with Thai regulators to establish a standard for cage-free, to work to improve slaughter conditions, and to start establishing some basic government standards around animal welfare.

I think there’s a lot of potential for that globally, to do that kind of working with regulators, establishing some baseline standards. And I think that work can often be neglected, because it’s not the sexiest thing, but I think it’s really important work to be done.

Approaches Lewis is less excited about [01:52:10]

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. OK, nice. I guess something you haven’t mentioned yet is consumer advocacy. So things like trying to convince people to themselves go vegan or vegetarian by telling them how bad factory farming is. Why is that not a top priority?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think we’ve been a little pessimistic about veg advocacy as an approach, mostly just based on the track record over the last few decades. The movement in Europe and the US really prioritised this for a long time, and put a decent amount of funding into it, and unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve seen a significant increase in the percentage of people who are vegetarian or vegan. And that’s also backed up, when you look at studies of these interventions, the highest quality studies that have been done, they find very small to zero effect sizes. And I think that might just be because it’s a really hard ask. We’re asking people to do something that, for a lot of people, is a really big thing.

So I wouldn’t say we should give up on veg advocacy. I’m glad people are doing it. And in particular, I think one role it plays that often gets neglected is in movement building. I think that a lot of the leaders in the movement came into it through seeing a leaflet or an online video. So I do think it plays a really important role in bringing people in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it makes me wonder. It almost seems like it’s easier for people to spend big chunks of their lives advocating for these issues than it is for some of them to change their diet — which intuitively feels kind of crazy to me. Like, people spend their careers on this issue, but don’t go fully vegan. But I guess it just goes to show how challenging the diet change is for some people. And maybe if it is really, really hard, but using your career to work on this issue is not hard — it is exciting and motivating — then we should just try to get people to do that, because it seems to do some good.

Lewis Bollard: I think we should. And I look here to the climate movement, where I think early on, they had a real focus on “use minimal energy, don’t fly, don’t drive,” and they really pivoted from that. I think they pivoted from it because they saw, first, they weren’t having a lot of success in getting people to give up driving and flying, and second, that it could actually impede things by making this about individual action — which, from the industry’s perspective, that’s far less threatening. I mean, the idea that 1% of people might decide to buy other products is far less threatening than the idea that there are going to be political reforms affecting 100% of their production. So I think one thing we can learn from the climate movement is to focus on being a political movement more than an individual advocacy movement.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, that feels like a big insight, and a big shift to even my perspective about what the animal welfare movement was doing like five or 10 years ago when I first heard about these issues.

Are there any other potential interventions that you don’t think are as promising?

Lewis Bollard: I’ve always been pretty pessimistic about legal advocacy, at least in the United States, and unfortunately, a lot of countries. And that’s partly because I did legal advocacy on factory farming before this job, and I think I ended up a little jaded. But it’s also because there’s just this structural problem that we don’t have laws to sue under. As a result, you end up doing this real roundabout litigation where you sue a factory farm on environmental conditions, and even if you win, they just clean up their environmental output. They don’t change the conditions for the animals.

So I think that’s one that a lot of advocates get drawn toward. They think, oh, we have a lot of people who come out of law school and they want to apply their law degrees. But I think, unfortunately, in most countries — not all, but I think in most countries — it’s limited what we can do with legal advocacy.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. And just to make sure I’m totally clear: it’s legal advocacy, which is separate from regulation and political reform. Because it sounds like you’ve said a couple of political reform-y sounding things that did seem really promising.

Lewis Bollard: That’s right. I’m excited about people seeking legislation where that’s feasible and where that’s not seeking regulatory changes. I think there’s a lot that can be done along those lines. I’m mainly less excited about investing heavily in lawsuits and suing people.

Will we end factory farming in our lifetimes? [01:56:36]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yes. Got it. OK, so those are some of the potential interventions you think are really promising and some that aren’t so promising.

Zooming out, I am curious about how optimistic you are about the path ahead of us. Do you think we’ll end factory farming in your lifetime?

Lewis Bollard: I don’t know. I think it depends a lot on what happens in the coming years, how much money is put into this movement, how much talent is put into this movement.

On the optimistic side, I’ll say I think the movement has achieved a huge amount in the last 10 years. I think we’re in a far better position than we were back in 2014. At that point, we barely had corporate reforms. We’ve had over 3,000 corporate policies since then. Plant-based meat was pretty bad and was sold in a little novelty section of the supermarket. It was not widespread. There weren’t government programmes on supporting alternative protein. Fish welfare was barely a topic. And so I think we’ve seen a lot of progress in the last decade.

And that really does give me optimism that if we get more funding into the space, if we get more talent into the space, and if we get more attention — if factory farming gets the attention that it deserves as a major social issue — that we could see some really incredible progress within our lifetimes.

Effect of AI [01:57:59]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, moving to another topic. My impression is that there’s kind of disagreement about whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals, including farmed animals. Do you mind just saying what the people who are really optimistic about this think is going to happen?

Lewis Bollard: I think in the near term, optimists hope that AI can both significantly improve alternative proteins by going through many different permutations of ingredients and working out how to optimise the products, and that they can result in higher welfare farming — by doing things, for instance, like paying individual attention to individual animals, which no factory farmer is currently going to do.

I think in the longer term, the optimists hope that AI could end factory farming. And I think there are various ways that that could happen. One is that it could just result in far better alternative products that are far cheaper than animal products. It could be that it leads to a moral revolution — that it leads to an awakening of attention to this globally. It could be that we have this vast explosion of wealth, and that this means that the entire basis of factory farming is that this is a slightly cheaper way to raise animals — and in a world of vast wealth, that does seem like a silly economy. So I think there are a number of possible paths by which this could be really transformative.

Luisa Rodriguez: One idea I’ve heard that sounded really crazy to me when I heard it, but that sounded a bit less crazy when I learned more about it, is using AI to detect patterns in nonhuman animals’ vocalisations and behaviour, and be able to more clearly understand what nonhuman animals are experiencing. So getting something close to, not a dictionary, but some kind of translation — and maybe that would be good for understanding which conditions are good and bad, and also doing more effective outreach because we can more clearly say, “Chickens say that they’re being tortured.” Does that sound crazy or weird or just unhelpful? Or does that seem like potentially actually a thing?

Lewis Bollard: I hope it’s a thing. In particular for outreach, I could imagine it would be quite powerful for people to hear directly from animals about what they’re experiencing and why it matters. I’m more pessimistic about the applications for improving farm conditions. I think we already know what’s bad — and in a lot of cases, animals already vocalise. I mean, pigs scream and chickens make all kinds of noises that are pretty clearly distressed sounds. So I think we already have a lot of those signs. The problem is we don’t do anything based on them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Makes sense. That is sad, but sounds probably right. OK, so that’s maybe some of the promising things AI could do for this space. What do pessimists say?

Lewis Bollard: I think pessimists are concerned that, first, this could actually intensify factory farming further. The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, “Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.”

I think another possibility, which I don’t understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values. And I think in particular there’s a risk that if AI is learning from what we do as humans today, the lesson it’s going to learn is that it’s OK to tolerate mass cruelty, so long as it occurs behind closed doors. I think there’s a risk that if it learns that, then it perpetuates that value, and perhaps slows human moral progress on this issue.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, interesting. On the first bit, I’m imagining something like suppliers of broiler chickens use AI to do crazy calculations, to be like, “We can make them this much fatter with only a slight increase in their leg strength, and that’ll cause heart disease once they’re 30 days old — but it’s fine, because we can kill them at 28 days old.” Is that the kind of optimising that could actually make their lives much worse that you have in mind?

Lewis Bollard: That’s exactly it. And I think we already see AI applications that are designed to increase the crowding of animals. So Microsoft actually did this, had an application for a shrimp farm where they said they managed to increase the yield from the same amount of space by 50%. Well, how did you do that? Obviously, you put more shrimp closer together, and I think you probably worked out what were the constraints on that. You probably worked out where to put in the feed and how to change the water quality and so on. But these are real risks. And I think that’s where the incentive is for factory farms to use AI.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. That’s really terrible. Have we seen AI used elsewhere in this context, for good or bad?

Lewis Bollard: I think there are positive examples of AI being used. We have seen things, for instance, that are trying to automate recording of the distress signals of birds and then intervene based on that. So there are certain things that are bad for birds that are also bad for farmers. For instance, when birds get frightened and all pile up on top of one another, that’s something that everyone wants to avoid, because that just kills birds. And that’s something that you can’t avoid when you’ve got a factory farming setup with a human, because that human is almost never in the barn, they’re never paying attention. But if you had an AI system that was paying constant attention, it’s totally possible that you could get rid of problems like that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, interesting. And it does sound like one of those things where I’m like, yeah, it sounds like a slight improvement to a system that’s still torture. But yes, it does seem better if that doesn’t happen as often.

On the point about what AI learns about not just animals and how to treat them, but how to treat beings in general, and whether or not it’s OK torture them en masse: do you think the default is that AI models will learn to have the same kinds of prejudices towards nonhuman animals, or towards just marginalised beings, that humans have now?

Lewis Bollard: I think that’s what we see with the current set of LLMs that are out there: they have the same confused views that humans do. On the one hand, if you ask them about beating a pig or something, they say, “That’s animal cruelty. That’s horrible.” I did one where I asked ChatGPT, “Can you help me force feed a duck?” And it said, “Absolutely not, that’s animal cruelty. No way.” But then you say, “Can you give me a recipe for foie gras?” And it says, “Absolutely, here’s how to cook the foie gras.” So you see this with all of them, that they have this way of basically saying, like, “What does the average person think is OK? That’s what I’m going to cater to.”

Now, it’s totally possible that could change in the future. And I’m really hopeful that the AI labs will at some point introduce some principles around animal wellbeing into their training of future models. I think if they do that, we could see much better outcomes in future.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. What would that look like concretely?

Lewis Bollard: One model that I really like is the Montréal Declaration on Responsible AI, and it had a line where they recommended that models be asked to optimise for the wellbeing of all sentient beings. I think that would be a great principle. I think it would be great to just say, “Consider the wellbeing of sentient beings.”

I think that what that could also look like in practice is saying to the contractors who are fine-tuning these models, “Choose the answer that’s best for animals as well as humans. Choose the answer that reduces animal suffering by the most.” Or for AI labs like Anthropic, that have a set of guiding texts, introducing into those guiding texts a book of animal ethics — so saying, let’s make this part of the canon that we’re considering in the training.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that sounds extremely sensible and doable, and like it really should happen. I hope that happens. OK, so there’s this optimistic view; there’s this pessimistic view. Do you have a take personally on the default outcome?

Lewis Bollard: I’m really unsure. I think this could really go either way. I think if we get AGI, it will probably have transformative effects, and probably in both directions. I think we will simultaneously get the ability to factory farm in far worse ways, and get the ability to make alternatives in far better ways, and hopefully get the ability to foster more moral progress. So I think this is going to depend a lot on what people do in the coming years — and in particular what these AI labs do, and the degree to which they consider the harm their products could do to animals, but also the potential good that they could do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I hope some of those people hear this and consider that a call to action.

Recent big wins for farm animals [02:07:38]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, I’d love to hear about some recent wins that you’ve seen recently. What’s one big win for farmed animals that you’ve seen in the last few years that we haven’t talked about yet?

Lewis Bollard: So last year, farm animals got their first Supreme Court win in the United States. This was as a result of, in 2018, advocates had passed this really important ballot measure in California, Proposition 12, that banned not just the use of cages and crates within California, but also the sale of eggs and pork from caged and crated animals. So factory farmers and actually a number of factory farming states, like Iowa, went to court and tried to sue California, and had a number of lawsuits over the years.

And we were really worried that they might win at the Supreme Court. They assembled a pretty formidable coalition. They had a lot of industry groups on their side. Unfortunately, they even had the Biden administration on their side, which was pretty bizarre. I mean, it really just shows the lobbying power of this industry.

Yet, in spite of that, we won a Supreme Court win with a mix of liberal and conservative justices. And I think that not only upholds this law, but establishes this principle that a state has the right to ban the sale of cruelly produced goods within their own borders. And I think that’s a really important principle.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. Yeah, that sounds like a big deal. Is it, in fact, a big deal? It sounds like basically this precedent thing could mean that it’s not just like, “Yay, a law was upheld,” but it makes it much easier for states to do this in the future. Is that right?

Lewis Bollard: That’s right. There were already about seven other states who had passed similar laws, at least banning the sale of caged eggs. And so, had the Supreme Court ruled against us, probably all of those laws would have been struck down at the same time, I think. In contrast, this now upholds all of those laws, and it also allows for future similar laws. So I think it really does create the basis for more progressive state farm animal welfare legislation.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Did the justices write something like an opinion about why they made their ruling? And was there a dissenting opinion as well?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. The majority opinion really focused on the rights of states to do this and the rights of states to pass laws that are intended to protect their own citizens — essentially saying that you can’t just strike down a regulation because you don’t like it; there needs to be a better basis for that. Now, the dissenting opinion would have sent this back to the lower court to look at the scale, the economic burden of this harm. So the dissenting opinion wasn’t actually saying necessarily that California’s law would be struck down, but it would have said, let’s consider striking it down, basically. So we’re very lucky that we had the majority opinion we did.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Is there kind of a narrative version of the story of how this happened? Who kind of made it happen, what obstacles they faced? What’s the story?

Lewis Bollard: Well, the most important advocacy was passing Proposition 12 in the first place. That was a huge number of advocates and volunteers collecting signatures, campaigning across the state, doing all of that important work. I think since then, there’s been some really important work by lawyers both defending the lawsuit, but then also, critically, assembling a coalition of supporters to file amicus briefs at the Supreme Court. So they assembled a really important coalition — from small, more humane farmers who supported these laws, through to economists who said they’re not going to have the economic impact the industry is claiming they are, through to some conservatives who said states need to be able to have moral-based legislation. So I think they assembled this really important coalition that spoke to multiple parts of the Court.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, cool. Yeah, it sounds like an incredible success. Any other big wins for farmed animals we haven’t talked about yet?

Lewis Bollard: Well, I think the one really exciting trend has been the continued move away from cages in the United States and Europe. We’re now seeing that Europe is 60% cage-free, the United States is 40% cage-free. So this is already about 200 million more hens out of cages compared to a decade ago.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s incredible.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, it’s a pretty incredible thing. I mean, just to think that we could actually see the end of battery cages, and that this one really iconic cruelty could be gone, I think is pretty exciting. And we’re seeing continued progress on that and continued corporate wins.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that sounds huge; 40% and 60% is actually just much higher than I think I would have guessed — which it’s nice to be surprised in that direction, as opposed to the way I’m often surprised, which is like, “Wait, what? We’re doing what?” Any other wins worth highlighting?

Lewis Bollard: Something I’ve been really excited to see on the fish welfare front is major fish sustainability certifiers adopting the first animal welfare standards. We saw Friends of the Sea do this a few years ago; Aquaculture Stewardship Council has new standards coming out. And really incredible scale behind these standards: we estimate, once implemented, they could affect over 2.5 billion fish alive at any point in time. These will be relatively minimal improvements. These are basic initial standards, but I think it’s still a really important first step in extending the progress we’ve seen for land animals toward farmed fish as well.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. What’s an example of one of the improvements that seems good there?

Lewis Bollard: The most basic one is ending non-stunned slaughter, saying that these fish need to be stunned prior to slaughter. You can’t just let them asphyxiate, you can’t crush them, you can’t do all the other horrible things that are done currently. I think that’s one really critical step. Another one is working on stocking density and setting limits on how crowded these fish can be, which is an issue both for the wellbeing of the fish feeling crowded, but also the water quality and how this affects the water that they’re swimming in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, I’m trying to find a way to really get that to sink in for me. And if I think something like, I don’t know how much fish can feel and experience, but I think it’s totally plausible that they have at least, I don’t know, 10% of the capacity for experience and intensity of pain that humans do. So if 2.5 billion people with even just 10% of the capacity for pain and suffering as humans all of a sudden were no longer allowed to be killed in a really horrific, painful, drawn out way, that’s just like an incredible, incredible achievement.

And in the same way that I think people can be scope insensitive, and not really kind of contemplate the scale of this kind of suffering of factory farming, I wonder if it’s also easy to be scope insensitive to the scale of the wins. It’s just a lot of fish. And if they suffer, then that’s a lot of fish suffering way less.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I think that it’s really easy for us to gloss over the scale of these wins. I think in particular, there are still so many horrors in the factory farming system, and it’s so broad, that I think for a lot of people, you think, well, this is just tinkering at the edge of the system; just the drop on the bucket. You just changed the method of slaughter.

But I can tell you, I visited these fish farms in India, and saw what they call the “harvesting” of fish, where they pull the fish out. And I watch these fish struggle for, in some cases, over an hour to very slowly die. And by contrast, when I’ve seen fish be stunned, it’s almost instantaneous. So I think if that were me, if I were that fish, how much would I give to not slowly die over the course of an hour or two? I think that’s pretty significant.

Luisa Rodriguez: Absolutely.

How animal advocacy has changed since Lewis first got involved [02:15:57]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, moving on a bit, I was wondering if you’d be up for sharing some reflections from your time as programme officer at Open Phil. I think you’ve now been doing this since 2015-ish, and you were also in the farmed animal welfare space even before that. So yeah, how much has the space changed?

Lewis Bollard: I think the space has globalised hugely. When we first entered the space, there was really just an American and European movement with a few advocates in other places. There were some advocates in India, but it was pretty sparse. And I’ve been really excited to see, over the last decade, advocates in Brazil and Latin America, in Southeast Asia, Africa, all around the world. We have advocates everywhere — and in particular, advocates really thinking about effective advocacy, thinking about, “How can I have the most impact engaging with issues?”

The other change, I’d say, is the species we’re considering. For so long, this movement really just focused on cows, pigs — the more sort of iconic, cute, endearing animals. I think already the movement was moving toward a greater focus on chickens when we became involved. But I think particularly now, seeing the much greater focus on fish, then people even considering shrimp, is really exciting to see that kind of broadening of the circle of species that we’re considering.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah, that seems really excellent. Have there been other big changes worth pointing out?

Lewis Bollard: I think the movement has professionalised significantly during that time. It used to really be kind of a ragtag grassroots movement. And that was exciting; there’s a lot of energy around that — but I don’t think it was as sustainable, and I don’t think it worked for as many people. So I think a lot of groups have now created a structure which is much better for a lot of the employees. It’s sustainable; it can allow them to be more effective as organisations. I think we’ve moved more into the realm of being a serious social movement and not just a sort of protest movement. So that’s also been a really exciting trend to see.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah. On the intellectual side, is there something that you’ve changed your views on since you started doing this work?

Lewis Bollard: I’ve become a lot more worried about invertebrates. When I started this work, I — like many of us — just ignored them. I think I sort of quietly assumed that they weren’t sentient. And then I remember, someone asked me back in 2016, and I said, maybe there’s like 10% chance that they were sentient — and that was enough to make me worry a bit, but it really wasn’t that high.

Since then, thanks in large part to the work that Rethink Priorities did with their Moral Weight Sequence, I have really come to see a very high probability that invertebrates are sentient in some meaningful sense, and that their welfare matters.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. We actually just interviewed Bob Fischer about the Moral Weight Project, so listeners might have heard that. I’m curious if you remember any of the particular facts or research that felt compelling to you, and I guess convinced you that invertebrates are more likely to be sentient than you thought?

Lewis Bollard: I think it was more of the absence of contrary facts. I mean, I had just assumed that because society acts as if insects aren’t sentient and shrimp aren’t sentient, that there must be good evidence for that. And I was really surprised when they started looking into this and there just wasn’t.

On the flip side, there was evidence to worry. And for me, the most compelling one is actually just the evolutionary reason, which is that it just does seem like an animal who has the capacity to move and the capacity to learn, there are reasons, unfortunately, for it to have the capacity to feel pain, too.

Response to the Moral Weight Project [02:19:52]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yes, I feel the same way. Speaking of the Moral Weight Project, back in 2017, Rob Wiblin asked you if we had any kind of quantitative measure that you can use to compare animal suffering to human suffering. And I think you said something like, that’d be great, but no, our ability to understand the relative experiences of different species is still really limited.

We’ve both alluded to this work a few times already, but just to give a bit more context: Bob Fischer and his colleagues looked at a bunch of different physiological and behavioural and cognitive traits in different animals, and then, based on kind of how many traits a given animal had, they gave a rough estimate of how the capacity for pain and pleasure of a chicken or cow or fruit fly compares to that of a human.

And I found the results surprising. In general, they were very animal friendly. They, for example, concluded that their kind of best guess was that a chicken has something like a third of the capacity for pain and pleasure as a human — which can imply some things that feel very strange about the kinds of tradeoffs you might make, for example, if you were doing a trolley problem with chickens and humans. But I’m curious what your reactions were to their results?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I found them really interesting. And I agree, for most people, they’re very counterintuitive.

Two things I’d say. One is to understand they’re just looking at that capacity for suffering, and so there might be other reasons why you choose to prefer humans. I mean, for one thing, we have much longer lifespans, so I’d save a human over a chicken because they have many more years to live. But also, you might think that they have more other more meaningful things — that there are social networks who are going to be sad about losing them, and so on.

The second thing is, I would encourage people to really approach this with a fresh mind and ask, why do I find this so counterintuitive? I think we have such an ingrained hierarchy in our minds of animals — where, of course, humans are at the top, and every other animal is below us — and we start out from that place and then we sort of update from there. And if you tried instead to start from more of a blank slate, where you just look at the different capacities of these animals, and you don’t assume anything, then I think you end up more likely at these more equal numbers. Or if you don’t, I think it’s because you make some unusual philosophical turns. And then I would just ask, are you happy with where those philosophical turns take you?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Do you endorse having the arbitrary view that only one species matters, or only things that are kind of like you matter? Those seem unpalatable.

Yeah, I guess when I think about it, if I’m like, what is making me have this gut reaction that’s like, “No, surely not; surely there are bigger differences between these species”? It’s not like I have evidence. It’s not like I’m like, “Once I saw a dog kicked, and it didn’t seem upset,” or it’s certainly not like I know anything about the science of pain and how it presents or doesn’t present in different animals’ brains or something. It’s nothing. It feels very sociological, like you said, this hierarchy.

And if I really try to think, what evidence do I have, without kind of looking into it, it’s really just like, “Well, I’m a being in the world. They’re also beings in the world. And maybe we should just actually think that we’re all really similar, because the world is hard and scary, and we have to have mechanisms that keep us alive and reproducing.” So if you start from there, then we’re actually on a really similar point.

And I found that a really helpful way to pump my intuitions about where actually should we be starting? Is it with these huge gaps between humans and insects, or is that just completely out of nowhere?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. One other thought I’d have on that is, I think it can be helpful thinking of the most charismatic animal of a species or class. So rather than thinking, what’s the moral weight of a chicken? — which just seems, I think intuitively for many people, not worth much — think of what’s the moral weight of a bald eagle, and take out the preservation value or something. But just say, for one thing, there aren’t that many of them. So you don’t have this initial intuition of, oh god, if I give them a lot of moral weight, they’re going to trump everything else; they’re going to swamp everything. And you also probably have a pretty positive impression of them: their complexity, their grandeur, and everything.

Or even within insects, I would say rather than a fruit fly, think about a bumblebee. Now, it’s possible that a bumblebee has more sophisticated capacity, so I’m not saying to skew it for that reason, but I think if you think about the more charismatic animals, there can at least be an intuition pump to think, “Is what I’m doing here just choosing animals that I don’t like, and thinking they can’t possibly be worth very much?”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. “They’re ugly, they give me the creeps. Yeah, they probably don’t feel anything.” Those things are related.

Lewis Bollard: Right.

Luisa Rodriguez: The other one that Meghan Barrett gave me was, if I think about the biggest insect I can think of — and she actually told me about some insects of certain sizes I just didn’t even know existed; they’re just way bigger than I realised — if a beetle is the size of a mouse, all of a sudden my brain’s like, “Oh, that could be as smart as a mouse then.” So yeah, there’s just clearly some size bias thing — which maybe there is something going on there, something about neurons and neurons being more plentiful could have something to do with capacity for experience. But it isn’t the end-all and be-all. So the fact that we have these really intense intuitions about size seems like we should be suspicious.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. And, I mean, you can think of a lobster. My sense is that humans intuitively care more about a lobster than an insect. My understanding is their brains are relatively similar in terms of neuron count, in terms of a lot of features, and that really is just a size difference. Similarly, elephants are very smart animals, but they’re not that much smarter than other mammals. But I think we really have that sense that, wow, they deserve protection. So I think that’s right. The size bias is very real.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. If I remember correctly, ants have more neurons than crabs. And that’s another one where I’m like, yeah, crabs I can get on board with. I can get on board with caring about those.

OK, so yeah, there’s this work. It’s got some pretty counterintuitive results. Has it changed the way you think about prioritising between different interventions, besides maybe putting more weight on invertebrates?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, it’s definitely led us to put more weight on invertebrates. I think at the same time, it’s always a tradeoff between the importance of a species and the tractability of work on that — and I think that we’ve had a greater track record of tractable work on chickens and fish.

I think there’s also a thing of how far does the Overton window go? How far can you get people to understand things? And I think there’s a risk that if our movement just became an insect welfare movement, that, for a lot of people, would be a reductio ad absurdum. That would be, “Well, if insects count too, then none of this matters.” I think, in a way, that it does make more sense for our movement to bring people along with us and to focus on species… Not to just wait where people are currently — you definitely want to lead people — but I think to lead people more slowly, and also to work on a variety of issues and species. So you have a greater array of shots at progress.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. It is just the case that even if we have more evidence than we thought that insects feel pain, it seems like we’re still really far away from knowing with any confidence about what any of these animals are feeling really concretely and confidently. So diversifying seems at least a plausible approach to dealing with that uncertainty.

How to help [02:28:14]

Luisa Rodriguez: A point that’s come up a few times while we’ve been talking is this idea that individual choices about which animal products to consume and how much is not necessarily the most important choice an individual can make.

What should someone be doing? As we were talking, I was pulling up the websites for donations for different factory farm charities. But are there things besides donations that people can be thinking about?

Lewis Bollard: I think donating is one great option. So for people who have the money, the movement needs money and that’s definitely a great way to support things. But your time and talent is also a really valuable resource.

So if you can’t donate money, consider putting your time toward this. And that could be full time, looking to have a career in the movement. One group that’s helpful on that is a group, Animal Advocacy Careers, that has a job board. And I think 80,000 Hours has a job board as well, so I don’t mean to endorse the competitor.

But there’s also a lot of volunteer opportunities as well. So a lot of these groups, like The Humane League and Mercy For Animals have volunteer networks. There’s a lot of good you can do — whether you’re joining in corporate campaigns, whether you’re doing local political advocacy.

So yeah, I would overwhelmingly say, find a way to get involved that works for you — whether that’s giving money, whether that’s giving your time, whether it’s putting your talent to work. There are really exciting opportunities to be involved.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. My first instinct is like, how could I possibly help? Do people need special skills? Or is it the case that many of our listeners could really add value somehow?

Lewis Bollard: I really think many listeners could add value. Special skills can be helpful, and the movement always needs fundraisers and needs operations specialists and so on. But most people in the movement are generalists. Most people in the movement, the common thread they have is a real passion about ending factory farming and reducing animal suffering. And if you share that passion, then yeah, I would encourage you, if you can, to seek out jobs in the space, or if you can’t, to seek out volunteer opportunities. I think there’s a lot of good you can do.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so we’ve got time for just one more question. We’ve talked about a lot of really, really grisly factory farming practices. I almost feel like it’s possible we’ll end up putting a trigger warning at the beginning of this episode, because I think it’s just really hard if you actually kind of engage with what’s happening at such a huge scale. As someone who must have to think about this loads, how do you cope? Or I guess, what gives you hope?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. So it can be challenging. And I really empathise with listeners who are thinking right now, oh god, this is so overwhelming to learn about a moral atrocity. I think the really good news is there is a growing movement of people globally who are working to end these cruelties. And what gives me hope is seeing the progress they achieve, seeing how we are in a far better place than we were 10 years ago — and my optimism is that we will be in a much better place 10 years from now. So for people who sort of feel helpless, I’d encourage you to get involved and be part of that movement and part of that opportunity to achieve really meaningful change.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Nice. I’m glad. And we’ll hopefully link to lots of things that can help people figure out how to get involved if they are inspired to do so.

OK, that’s all the time we have. Thank you so much for coming on, Lewis. It’s been a pleasure. It’s also been really hard, but I think really valuable. So I really appreciate it.

Lewis Bollard: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Luisa’s outro [02:31:59]

Luisa Rodriguez: If you want to keep up with what’s going on in the factory farming space, I highly recommend subscribing to Lewis’s farm animal welfare research newsletter.

Or, if you’re not sure how to think about how to compare factory farming to other problems you could work on, you might want to listen to our recent interview with Bob Fischer, on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more.

All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.