Is there any reason to believe this is pretty common? My understanding is that backing down from a pledge is exceedingly rare (New Report: 92% of Global Cage-Free Egg Commitments Fulfilled, Signaling a Tipping Point for Farm Animal Welfare | Ethical Marketing News). Of course, the above-mentioned news is tragic given the size of the companies involved.
6+ years as a THL volunteer here, so I'm an informed source but not an official one. I don't think the BCC will affect THL's efficiency much directly, since we've mostly been focusing on cage-free campaigns for the past couple years. Those have largely been going well. The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Companies reneg with some frequency (at least enough frequency to keep us busy), which prompts us to run campaigns to get them to recommit to their pledge. Those have mostly been successful. I'd estimate somewhere around 70-80% success rate with recommitting, but of course actual data would be nice.
Hi Zachary, do you have any notion of the success rate in going from recommitment -> realised changes?
Also, thanks for your service! 6+ years is a lot of volunteering.
Hi Siobhan, good question. I haven't seen enough data to build a good sense of the success rate. Some of that is just the time scales - a lot of these campaigns have been in the past few years and we haven't had a chance to see how good the follow through is.
There is some evidence that even companies that are breaking their commitments have made progress. When we do get companies to recommit, they'll start publishing their numbers. A lot of them have made some progress (like 5% to 20%) and a few of them have made a lot of progress, getting close to 100% (maybe they broke their commitment because they didn't want to be beholden to us?). Based on these bumps from the original commitment, I think it's plausible that recommitment would cause another bump.
Might they just be lying about the numbers?
Thank you for your service 🫡
The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Could you give more detail on this?
I had a conversation with my regional organizer a couple years ago about how companies weren't committing to the BCC as readily as the cage-free egg commitment. I don't know what the exact commit/win rate was, but it was low enough that THL decided to back off pushing on the BCC, leave those campaigns to other organizations (I think MFA), and focus on closing out the cage-free commitments instead. Most of our campaigns since then have been national and international cage-free commitment adoption and follow-through.
We're getting into my speculations here, but I think there's a couple reasons why companies were unwilling to commit:
Altogether, the BCC seems too big for our current level of collective power. If we had more activists and a stronger tagline, we might be able to push companies more effectively.
Indeed! I asked the same questions in a recent LinkedIn post and am planning to address this topic in a new substack post soon (so now I'm wondering if we know each other 🥷🏽).
To answer your last question - pretty common. The majority I think, though estimates differ.
As promised, we've put together a post which will hopefully be helpful for providing some context! Thank you all for your patience :)
Major food companies in the UK, including KFC, Nando’s, Wagamama, and Burger King, have dropped their pledge to improve the welfare of chickens.
The pledge in question is the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a six-point welfare initiative that corporations can voluntarily sign up to implement. Arguably, the most notable parts of the pledge are the creation of a maximum stocking density of 30kg/m2 or less, compared to the current UK standard of 39kg/m2, and the transition to slower-growing breeds of broiler chickens.
What implications does this kind of thing have for the cost-effectiveness estimates of charities like The Humane League where putting pressure on corporations to sign pledges to improve welfare is a large part of their work? How common is it for companies that sign these pledges to bail on them, actually?
(this post made from a temporary throwaway account)
Hi all, I'm a member of The Humane League UK team!
Thank you for raising this and for the questions being asked here. We know that many EAs have supported our BCC work over the years and may have questions about this news. We’re planning to post an update here on the Forum once we’ve completed an internal review and are in a position to share more.
At the moment, our team is very busy gathering the relevant information, analysing the recent events, and planning our next steps. We've also been working to secure significant media coverage of this news, some of which you may have seen.
I’ll make sure to share a link in the comments section once we have posted our response to this situation.
Thank you for your patience while we work through this.
Love this @Molly Archer-Zeff , the kind of lowish effort highish impact comment which reassures people that the Humane League is on it (which I don't doubt). Nice one.