We at Faunalytics are encouraged by the progress being made in the effective animal advocacy space, particularly in institutional campaigns for farmed animals. However, we have some concern that the pendulum may have begun to swing too far away from individuals and their responsibility.
Yes, given that our research department is made up of social scientists, it is our natural inclination to think about individuals. That inherent bias aside, we feel that there are several reasons to continue to fund research and advocacy with individuals in addition to institutions. These reasons broadly fall into two categories: the fact that research into people’s thoughts and feelings towards animals—and how to encourage changes in them—is still in its infancy, and concerns about possible limits of the thus-far tractable institutional campaigns.
The Problem With Individuals
There have been recent calls in the animal advocacy space to shift most of the resources used to try to create individual diet change to institutional campaigns (e.g., Reese, 2018). This type of call likely arises from the fact that a number of studies haven't found much of a link between advocacy and diet. However, until very recently, most of these studies were too small (and in some cases, too poorly-designed) to draw even weak conclusions from their null effects.
There is currently a long list of things we don’t know about what people think about farmed animals, how they feel about them, what issues matter most to them, and what they want to do to help. And while more and more high-quality research is being done, the overall program of research is still in its infancy. Some of the main reasons for the modest progress include the size of the topic, the number of research questions, the inherent complexity of attitudes and behaviors, and the historical lack of funding for this type of research. We feel that there should have been a push for better social science research instead of shifting so many resources into a domain with even less real-world empirical support.
In addition, even if it turns out that it is currently too difficult to get individuals to change their diet en masse, that does not mean that individuals are uninteresting or unnecessary in the effort to improve the lives of farmed animals. This is because diet change may be the last step of a process with other essential components. We know that, with behavior change, attitudes often precede the intention to make changes, and that intentions often precede behavioral changes (Gollwitzer, 1999; see also Prochaska and Velicer, 1997). We believe that all stages will prove to be important. Put another way, it will likely be difficult to change behavior when the right attitudes and intentions are not there in support. And as we explain below, these attitudes, intentions, and behaviors also seem to be essential for institutional campaigns to be effective.
The Problem With Institutions
As mentioned above, we applaud the institutional campaign work that has been done to date. Changes are being made that will very likely improve the lives of millions of farmed animals.
However, just as pushing the negative ends of two magnets together becomes increasingly difficult the closer they get, institutional campaigns may face increasing resistance as the asks become more substantive and less in-line with how consumer markets and voter sentiment are already shifting. Without the direct and growing support of individuals, there may be a fundamental limit on what agri-businesses and governments will be willing to agree to in response to lobbying from animal rights and welfare organizations. In the following sections, we consider some reasons that this increasing resistance may be likely.
Corporations are about dollars and politicians are about voters. Agri-businesses and politicians have surely done their research and know the tide of animal welfare attitudes is turning. However, our own research has shown that being supportive of corporate campaigns may not necessarily lead to changes in purchasing behavior (Faunalytics, 2019). If consumers are not willing to pay an additional amount or switch brands for an initiative that increases costs for producers, the institutions could walk back changes or resist future asks. Similarly, if voters are not conscious of and vocal about reforms, politicians will have little reason to pursue them. For these reasons, we think that encouraging individual change will be necessary for the continued success of institutional campaigns.
Institutions are likely aiming for “good enough.” Happier, less-stressed animals tend to get sick less (Diener & Chan, 2011), and there is pressure from health agencies to reduce or eliminate sub-therapeutic antibiotics (e.g., Dall, 2017). These facts add another incentive for agri-businesses to improve the lives of animals. However, these incentives are driven primarily by estimations of cost savings and concerns about antibiotic resistance rather than a focus on the welfare of the animals themselves. Therefore, as the lives of animals become good enough to prevent the high prevalence of disease, they will also become good enough for the math of the institutions. The pressure of public opinion is needed to drive welfare beyond “good enough.”
A few hold-out institutions could undermine the progress made. If consumers do not differentiate products made with more animal-friendly farming techniques from those made with pre-reform conditions and value those differences, they will not be willing to pay for a higher-priced product or be willing to support government mandates requiring the welfare reforms. Producers who voluntarily embrace reforms in such an environment will face higher production costs without the price premium to support those costs. If even one major producer holds out on a voluntary reform that the public is indifferent to, they would have a competitive advantage. As a result, their production could increase over time and the production of other corporations could decrease due to low demand for their product. This would drive down the net benefit of the reforms for animals over time. The same type of effect could occur across borders if different states or countries adopt different welfare reform mandates.
In general, then, we feel that many of the possible limitations on institutional campaigns have the same solution: changing the hearts and minds of the public. Without people making supportive purchases and making their desires known to politicians, the gains of institutional campaigns may be short-lived.
Now, the argument could be made that we don’t know a lot about individuals, but that we do know that institutional campaigns are effective thus far. However, it’s worth pointing out that while we do know that some institutions are willing to make commitments, we don’t know what the end-result of these commitments will be. If consumers and voters turn out to be indifferent, will there simply be an institutional backslide as bottom-line calculations encourage recidivism? And how many institutions will even implement their commitments fully in the first place? Other EA Forum posts have pointed to some of the broken and unclear corporate commitments, and subjective estimates are that roughly 53% of companies will follow-through (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2018).
We can use cage-free egg reforms as an illustrative example of some of the difficulties that can be faced in implementing institutional campaigns. Individual producers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their farms with a total estimated cost of four billion dollars (Bloomberg, 2017 is the original source, but a free version is here). This results in increased product costs (e.g., Malone & Lusk, 2016). In response to initially weak demand for cage-free eggs, some producers put off improving additional barns, and some said that their move towards the commitment would halt until consumer demand increased (Bloomberg, 2017). Similar outcomes have been seen with gestation crate commitments (Belluz, 2016).
However, the tide also seems to be turning somewhat: more recently, manufacturers have mentioned increasing consumer demand for cage-free products and the effects of Prop 12 (e.g., Cal-Maine Foods, 2019; Painter, 2019). Therefore, based on both the challenges faced in institutional reform and the apparent solution to them, their continued success is likely to be codependent on the dietary choices that individuals make and the political pressure they can apply.
No Problem
The obstacles mentioned above do not mean we should abandon corporate campaigns any more than the difficulties in trying to change people’s minds are grounds for abandoning individual outreach. Both approaches will be hard and they will be messy--quick, substantial progress will not always be made. While this is frustrating in the moment, it is also completely normal for any social movement. As we increase our knowledge in both areas, we will make progress in spite of the inevitable pitfalls--it’s how both activism and research progress.
In sum, institutional commitments are an excellent avenue for EAAs to pursue, particularly while the sector’s practices lag behind public opinion. These reforms may be the low-hanging fruit. But as agri-businesses and governments grind towards mediocrity, these types of campaigns may face increasing institutional resistance...especially if the public is indifferent to additional changes and institutions find the necessary improvements difficult or expensive.
We feel that the continued success of these campaigns will ultimately hinge on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Therefore, we should not throw the individual out with the bathwater, especially when we know so little about them: The movement should be thinking “institutions and individuals,” not “institutions or individuals.”
Thanks to Samara Mendez, Economist at The Humane League Labs, for her input on the economics of corporate animal welfare commitments. Thanks also to my colleagues at Faunalytics for their comments and contributions. This post is cross-posted from the Faunalylics Blog.
I don't think anyone is suggesting shifting "most of the resources" (Jacy only suggests 50% of existing individual resources) and certainly not all resources, so I don’t think the "and" not "or" message is really relevant. Of course, if there are people who hold this view I’d be curious to learn more. I think the question for most is identifying the optimal ratio. Sentience Institute is also quite clear on the evidence underlying that belief and it's not a lack of a link between advocacy and diet, but the existence of more public support for institutional change, historical precedent and psychological arguments. For what it’s worth I also believe we need some balance between the two, as Harish Sethu wrote about at Labs.
I appreciate your pointing out that many institutional approaches have “even less real-world empirical support.” As you know, The Humane League Labs is actively working to rectify this :) However, one might object that in the history of social change, institutional approaches have significantly more empirical support, at least in so far as few if any social movements seem to have succeeded by convincing each individual to their cause. I think there is still work to be done marshalling this evidence and I’m not convinced the existing evidence is applicable to animal advocacy. But I nonetheless find this evidence (the history of social change) more convincing than not in support of institutional approaches (maybe 60% credence).
I am also concerned that it’s not clear what individual efforts you’re suggesting. At least in the US, attitudes and intentions towards animals seem quite good:
These numbers could certainly be higher, but overall they seem decent and have been at least somewhat validated with the success of state-level legislation passed at the poll. Of course, the attitude-behavior and citizen-consumer gaps mean attitudes and intentions don’t necessarily translate to other behavior changes, like reduced animal product consumption or choosing cage-free over caged eggs. But to me, this suggests we need to focus on measuring and changing the behaviors we’re interested in, rather than the attitudes and intentions that don’t translate.
More broadly, I agree with a commenter elsewhere that this discussion seems to focus primarily on corporate animal welfare campaigns when there are many other institutional avenues to consider.
(Lastly, at the risk of nit picking on a very minor note in the intro, but social sciences like economics and political science often consider institutions, so I’m not sure social science necessarily inclines one toward the individual.)
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I’ll address each point one at a time. Your comments are in bold:
First, I'm not sure I follow the "Institutions are likely aiming for "good enough."" section: if an improvement in animal welfare is profitable, it should presumably happen without any advocacy. But I'm not sure it then follows that "the pressure of public opinion is needed to drive welfare beyond "good enough".
The last line is really close to the central thesis of the work. In this section, I discuss the fact that agri-corps and governments may be driven in part by concerns about health and antibiotic resistance, which would increase the tractability of institutional campaigns. That boost would be short-lived once those relatively low bars are met.
Most asks we make of corporations will likely not increase profits. In order to minimize any negative financial impact, institutions will do the least amount needed ("good enough") to maintain positive public opinion. Additional public pressure will be needed to take the next step, and so on.
Second, most corporate cage-free commitments don't rely on consumer “willingness to pay” for cage-free eggs per se. Instead of asking people to directly choose cage-free over caged eggs, entire restaurant chains and states provide exclusively cage-free eggs, so the choice would have to be made at the restaurant or state-level. It’s possible people would then choose not to buy certain products or patronize particular restaurants, but given the low price elasticity of eggs I wouldn’t expect this to be a large effect; it seems even less likely that people in Los Angeles or San Francisco would drive hours to obtain modestly cheaper eggs.
I think restaurants could face the same type of pressure that producers do: if you’re putting a more expensive product on the plate, you need consumers to support those costs. If they don’t, your competitors have an advantage. The choice of a slightly more expensive breakfast that features more ethical eggs is still a willingness to pay. (That said, the eggs are only one of the things on the plate, so this effect is diluted. It’s also entirely possible that cage-free eggs would attract as many--if not more--diners as they discourage, although I’m not aware of any research on that addresses that question. All-told, I think that restaurants may be a bit more immune to the proposed effects than grocery stores or whole markets. Also, eggs may not be the best example for restaurants given the small impact on consumers, but future welfare reforms that affect meat may have more impact on costs and therefore consumer reactions.)
Now, passing state legislation is obviously wonderful. And no, I really don’t think people will drive for hours to buy cheaper eggs. The point I was making was a general one about holdouts, rather than a specific argument relating to Prop 12.
That said, it’s worth noting that Prop 2, the precursor to Prop 12, originally only covered Californian production. This meant that non-compliant eggs produced in other states would still have been sold in California. Therefore, the mechanism I proposed was in place (until a new law was passed to correct the issue). My understanding of Prop 204 in Arizona suggests it is subject to the same limitations.
Prop 12 also represents a “willingness to pay” among the Californian public in my opinion because they were already well aware of the cost premium of cage-free eggs based on their experiences with Prop 2. Specifically, Prop 2, which had fewer protections, had already led to a 22% average increase in egg prices. This increase would have been taken into account by most voters when voting for the more expansive measure. There were also industry efforts to highlight the additional increases of Prop 12 to the public.
I think this interpretation that corporate campaigns wins have been caused by the attitudes, intentions and behaviors of the public is likely where we disagree most. I agree there is likely some requisite threshold of public support, but it’s not clear this public support then causes change.
I don’t think I implied that individuals caused institutional wins like Prop 12, but feel free to correct me on that. The legislation originated in the Humane Society’s Prop 2 as I understand it.
However, Prop 12 only passed because individual people cared enough to vote for it. In short, one of the biggest institutional wins of them all so far was completely reliant on voters.
If other states have similarly high levels of support for such an initiative and the political will to put it on a ballot, then that’s great, and something we should definitely pursue if the change for animals is meaningful enough to warrant the investment! In the states that don’t meet these requirements, we have more work to do. That’s where we still need to be shifting the individual.
(And we also have to consider whether the current ballot initiatives meet our end-goal, and if not, whether we currently have the necessary public support to get there. I would argue again that we likely still have work to do. While the numbers you shared look good in the abstract, I think there’s a lot of work needed to convert that support into meaningful legislation.)
Third, I agree with the concern about holdouts. However, this is where the power of legislation, and, unless that holdout is a producer, secondary targeting can come in to play.
Fair enough, and it would depend on the proportion of holdouts for a given reform.
Fourth, at least where the industry has actually transitioned to cage-free (about 20% currently), I’m less concerned about “institutional backslide” as this would again require large capital investments to reinstall cages.
I agree that no corporation would re-renovate (unless it made financial sense to do so). I am worried about stopping current renovations and scrapping plans for future improvements, as we have seen happening (e.g., Bloomberg, 2017, as cited above).
Also, some of the “commitments” of some of the very largest organizations like Walmart have left themselves a lot of wiggle room to back out if price or demand aren’t there to support the change. The language makes that explicit: “Transition to a 100 percent cage-free egg supply chain, based on available supply, affordability and customer demand by 2025.” They could walk away quite easily if any of the three conditions were not met.
ACE has estimated that just over 50% of organizations will keep their commitments, and no one can estimate how lack of follow-through on this campaign will affect future campaigns, so we are concerned about downstream effects of this type of backsliding. Even Prop 12 is going to be challenged in the courts.
Fifth, I think we should not take the industry's claims (like “In response to initially weak demand for cage-free eggs...”) at face value, and there are many possible reasons a particular producer might not remove cages. (The article offers some other explanations, like the wide price spread resulting from the post-avian influenza egg glut. But we should also consider more mundane possibilities like Rose Acres creditors weren't willing to lend them more money—it certainly looks better to say there was insufficient consumer demand!)
That certainly could be the case, but creditors generally have no problem shelling out for something that is either lucrative or that leads to greater market share.
As for avian influenza, as this industry report shows, the price gap between conventional and cage-free eggs decreased because of the avian flu crisis, but then increased again as flocks recovered.
Lastly, I'm not sure which particular outcomes you're referring to with gestation crate commitments, but the details of the pork industry and the commitments create some dissimilarities with the cage-free commitments.
Same as with eggs: increased costs and issues around supply and demand.
I don't think anyone is suggesting shifting "most of the resources" (Jacy only suggests 50% of existing individual resources) and certainly not all resources, so I don’t think the "and" not "or" message is really relevant. Of course, if there are people who hold this view I’d be curious to learn more. I think the question for most is identifying the optimal ratio. Sentience Institute is also quite clear on the evidence underlying that belief and it's not a lack of a link between advocacy and diet, but the existence of more public support for institutional change, historical precedent and psychological arguments. For what it’s worth I also believe we need some balance between the two, as Harish Sethu wrote about at Labs.
To be precise on the language, Reese (2018) says “We need to shift over 50% of the resources and messaging we currently use to promote individual change.” When giving examples of the kinds of dietary change efforts he recommends, he says “On the final page of a leaflet, for example, it may be best to offer several concrete calls to action, one of which can be individual diet change.” So individual change (which is defined as dietary change) is now a point on the back of a leaflet.
(Despite this narrow definition of individual work, some articles take it to mean that individual approaches are likely to be less effective than institutional approaches. I think part of this is confusion around the conflation of one type of behavior change with all individual efforts. As Jamie and I discovered on the other post, Sentience’s definition of individual work is quite narrow and mine is quite broad. That definition is perhaps where the main disagreements between us lie as well.)
Also, the psychological evidence provided for the claim in the Reese post is quite broad: one could choose other psychological theories and evidence to generalize and make similar arguments in the opposite direction. In short, we need to use better evidence to make our claims, and if such evidence doesn’t exist, we need to be creating it.
I’m also skeptical of the arguments based on historical social movements. Simply put, while social movements don’t generally focus on behavioral change, they are still reliant on it. Martin Luther King Jr. would not have gotten far if people hadn’t stood up to march with him. Yes, the moment of victory comes in the form of legislation. But without individuals, that day would simply not have arrived.
I’m most convinced by the argument around existing public attitudes, which I’ll address in response to your comment below.
All that said, I would still consider the leaflet that was given as the example in the article as an individual outreach effort: it looks to create support for ballot initiatives and to create new advocates. And I agree that diet change is likely the hardest, final step to reach. As I argue above, we still very likely need to reach it in many cases.
So all-told, you may be right that the either/or message may not be accurate. I liked this line from the HLL link you provided: ”When outcomes of interventions are interdependent, the effectiveness of each is inextricably linked with those of the others. Justifying one as being more effective than another is not quite straightforward — declaring so is often misleading.” I think I was getting the impression that some were starting to make declarations. I also wholeheartedly agree with this line: “Not only is the likelihood of the success of each form of advocacy increased by the success of the other, each of them is crucial to the other for sustained progress toward their shared goal.” The last half of the quote is what I was trying to argue above.
It seems that quantifying the relative balance may help alter the misperception that can arise from more general arguments. With that in mind, it might be helpful for the discussion if you could define what you consider to be “individual” approaches and “institutional” approaches and suggest roughly how much of the resource pool you would assign to each. Your arguments here all seem to point in one direction, so I’m curious where the balance lies for you--although you may have perceived me as trying to pull the pendulum in the other direction (when I was more trying to stop it in the middle) and been presenting an argument from that perspective. We may be closer to agreement than it appears.
I appreciate your pointing out that many institutional approaches have “even less real-world empirical support.” As you know, The Humane League Labs is actively working to rectify this :) However, one might object that in the history of social change, institutional approaches have significantly more empirical support, at least in so far as few if any social movements seem to have succeeded by convincing each individual to their cause. I think there is still work to be done marshalling this evidence and I’m not convinced the existing evidence is applicable to animal advocacy. But I nonetheless find this evidence (the history of social change) more convincing than not in support of institutional approaches (maybe 60% credence).
I don’t think that social movements need to convince each individual. I don’t think they realistically can. I do think we need to convince enough people, though.
As above, neither MLK Jr. or Prop 12 would have gotten anywhere without the requisite support. And while sometimes that already exists and just needs to be tapped, other times it needs to be created. (It’s also worth noting that the reason this support exists is in no small part due to years of effort.)
I am also concerned that it’s not clear what individual efforts you’re suggesting
I guess in general, we need to be increasing our knowledge of people’s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and behaviors (including donations, signing petitions, voting, activism, and also diet) as they relate to farmed animals. And we need to find scalable interventions that can lead to meaningful shifts in the areas mentioned above.
Personally, as above, I see a lot of “institutional” efforts as having quite large individual components: if we want someone to sign a petition, that’s an individual ask in service of an institutional effort. So too with many fundraising asks, voting, et cetera. As I mention below, it seems that only in the case of litigating existing legislation we’re free of dealing directly with individuals in some way.
At least in the US, attitudes and intentions towards animals seem quite good [….] These numbers could certainly be higher, but overall they seem decent and have been at least somewhat validated with the success of state-level legislation passed at the poll.
I agree that these numbers look good, but I’d also say that California is probably also low-hanging fruit for behavioural change at this point. They lead the country in not only animal protection laws, but also clean air (through CARB under the CAA) and things like warning about heavy metals like lead in consumer goods (Prop 65).
In order to effect change through a popular vote, it looks like 21 states have initiated, non-constitutional statutes. I’m sure you and others know a lot more about this than I do, and I haven’t seen state numbers, but I’m somewhat doubtful that a good number of the included red states would pass something similar to Prop 12, in part because political beliefs are related to attitudes towards animals. In addition, even though Ohio is a lot closer to the political center than a number of the other statute states, it’s also one of the largest egg-producing states in the country. I’m guessing there would be a very strong pushback to defend that industry and its exports to other states and countries.
That said, the blue states up the West Coast seem to be very good candidates. And as above, if ballot initiatives have a decent chance of passing, then by all means, we should be doing that work! If we don’t have that support, there is other work that needs to be done.
Of course, the attitude-behavior and citizen-consumer gaps mean attitudes and intentions don’t necessarily translate to other behavior changes, like reduced animal product consumption or choosing cage-free over caged eggs. But to me, this suggests we need to focus on measuring and changing the behaviors we’re interested in, rather than the attitudes and intentions that don’t translate.
As I mention in the piece, there is indeed a well-known gap between each of attitudes, intentions, and behavior.
That does not mean that there is zero correlation between the three--and we don’t get near-perfect translations when dealing with people like we do in other sciences. So in some fields, you do X, and 97.3% of the variance in Y is explained. Dealing with people is much messier than that, unfortunately. You necessarily get larger error terms in studies where perfect control isn’t possible (i.e., we can’t randomly assign people to be raised a certain way).
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a meaningful association. It just means that the relationships are smaller because of other noise. This may be frustrating, but we really have no other choice: As hard as it is to change behavior in general, it is generally even harder to do when we don’t have those supportive attitudes and intentions in place already.
More broadly, I agree with a commenter elsewhere that this discussion seems to focus primarily on corporate animal welfare campaigns when there are many other institutional avenues to consider.
That’s a fair point, and one we should have made clearer in the post. That said, aside from litigation where the laws are already in place, I would stand by my points about considering the entire ecosystem of individual and institution.
(Lastly, at the risk of nit picking on a very minor note in the intro, but social sciences like economics and political science often consider institutions, so I’m not sure social science necessarily inclines one toward the individual.)
Fair enough, and thanks for the correction--I shouldn't have over-generalized. That said, it was a section where we were owning up to our bias, so I hope that additional bias in how I think about the social sciences can be included in that as well.