SiobhanB
Comments4
Thanks for highlighting this exciting campaign, Martin.
I think it’s well worth making a donation:
https://massentierhaltung.ch/spenden/
Voting day is 25 September and is the culmination of 6+ years of political advocacy in Switzerland. It is a real David and Goliath story.
As you say, the results could have implications for other countries and spark future referendums.
I think that 37% is a decent result when you consider the difference in budget between our camp (I recently started working for Sentience Politics) and the opposition, who also represented the status quo. For them, it was a sitter. But I'd be sitting less comfortably now.
More than 1 in 3 voters decided that they were prepared to pay a little extra to phase out the most egregious of animal husbandry practices over a period of 25 years.
Over the next 25 years, my crystal ball tells me we will see a mahoosive proliferation of alternative proteins, such that an initiative like this may well not be required anymore. So I think EAs should focus on speeding that process up prontissimo.
It won't be ethics that causes most people to change their diet, nor environmental concerns (overblown as they may sometimes be by animal advocates). It'll be the all-else-being-equal availability of a convenient alternative. Most likely grown in a lab.
As for the animals suffering in the here and now, and where to go in the aftermath of the initiative, I think it would make sense to look at which of the demands garnered the most support, and how to re-package them in such a way to maximise the likelihood of individual success. At the moment, it looks like consumers took the biggest issue with the small spaces that animals are forced to live in. That's a straightforward matter without much room for convolution.
Eleos, I'm not sure that your number 2 is controversial, or that it ought to be, but I am sure that I think it's spot on. Having the kind of resources that the opposition had would likely have made a difference. Perhaps all the difference. This wasn't an exercise in navel-gazing but a huge opportunity to make a, as you say, 'real world' difference under the EA banner. On a side but related note, reading most of the posts on this forum gives me a headache. I'm too thick, along with most of society. We've got to make EA ideas digestible and practicable for the common Jim.