1. JBS Ear Notching - Non-existent commitment, according to Vetted Causes

SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:

Sinergia already explained this is a valid commitment and Vetted Causes was mistaken to classify it as a non-existing commitment. We acknowledge and regret the deadline error in our spreadsheet shared with ACE. 

There are two JBS ear notching commitments Sinergia has claimed existed:

• Commitment 1: A commitment from JBS to stop ear notching by 2023.
• Commitment 2: A commitment from JBS to stop ear notching by 2027.

It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that Commitment 1 never existed.

Note: Sinergia is currently being credited for Commitment 1 even though it never existed.

2. JBS Gestation Crates - Pre-existing Policy Presented As a New Commitment, according to Vetted Causes

SINERGIA'S RESPONSE: 

[...]

2021 Report:
 “New projects adopt the ‘cobre e solta’ system, allowing the sows, after being artificially inseminated, to be housed in group housing.”

It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that this is a pre-existing policy being presented as a new commitment. The policy was already in place in 2021, yet Sinergia claimed it as a new 2023 win.

It’s also worth noting that many of the commitments Sinergia takes credit for don’t use definitive language like “100%” or “all farms.” For example, Alibem's surgical castration commitment from Row 4 states Alibem will: “Maintain immunocastration instead of surgical castration – a procedure that was voluntarily eliminated from the Company’s protocols in 2010.” (translated from Portuguese to English). 

Sinergia took 70% credit for this 2010 policy even though Sinergia didn't exist until 2017. Further, there is no mention of "100%" or "all farms."

Additionally, Sinergia’s own  “Upper bound” for how many companies will actually follow through on their commitments is just 65% (see Cell B14), which shows many of these commitments are not reliable or permanent. JBS themselves has already walked back their ear notching commitment (see Page 42) .

3. Teeth Clipping - Practice Was Already Illegal Prior to Alleged Commitments, according to Vetted Causes

SINERGIA’S RESPONSE: 

[...]

It is also important to clarify that Sinergia Animal did not, at any point, discourage ACE from considering IN 113 as a basis for assessing legal deadlines

It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree teeth clipping was already illegal prior to the alleged commitments. Here is a quote from Sinergia's Pigs in Focus report: "According to Normative Instruction 113/2020 (IN 113/2020), teeth clipping is prohibited".

4. Aurora - Pre-Existing Policy Presented as a New Commitment, According to Vetted Causes

SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:

[…]

The claim that Aurora had a formal and exclusive immunocastration policy prior to 2023 does not align with the timeline of documented changes to the company’s website. On October 24, 2022, Aurora’s webpage underwent two rapid edits, according to Web Archive. 

The first edit, at 16:44, introduced the phrase cited by Vetted Causes: “The Cooperative only chooses to adopt immunocastration, as it is a less invasive practice.” However, this version was online for just one minute (if Web Archive is right). At 16:45, the page was edited again, and that second version—which does not contain the language cited by Vetted Causes—is the one that remained publicly available and is the one we referenced in Sinergia’s 2022 Pigs in Focus report.

This is factually incorrect, the edits Sinergia describes did not occur. Every archive of the webpage from October 24, 2022 states: “The Cooperative only chooses to adopt immunocastration, as it is a less invasive practice.” (translated from Portuguese to English)

Here is a screen recording proving this to be the case.

5. BRF - Pre-Existing Policy Presented as a New Commitment, According to Vetted Causes

SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:

[…]

the current 5% is likely to increase in future years.

It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that Sinergia should not have taken credit for helping 100% of BRF’s sows in 2023 through this commitment when only ~5% were impacted.  

6. Female Piglets Surgical Castration

SINERGIA’S RESPONSE: […] Sinergia never said the number of piglets was correct. It was an unintentional mistake of Sinergia’s team to leave all piglets

It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that:

• ACE’s impact calculations were not correct
• Sinergia and ACE didn't account for female piglets not being surgically castrated
• Sinergia was incorrectly credited for helping millions of female piglets through surgical castration commitments 

@Jeff Kaufman 🔸, @Jason, @Toby Tremlett🔹,

Thank you for providing your opinions on this situation. Do you think it is reasonable for us to post our response on April 17? If so, we will notify Sinergia by email.

Thanks for the tip! We've implemented it.

Thanks for letting us know! Thankfully there was nothing that important that we covered in black bars. 

How did you get the text of the emails? We didn't think we posted it or share it with you, and you've included information we didn't think we posted, including the name of a previously anonymous member of Vetted Causes.

Maybe I am misunderstanding, I took this email as saying that you were sending them the post before posting in order for them to review, and clarify anything that needs clarifying

The clarifications refers to the 3 clarifying questions we sent (referenced in Email 7):

We didn't include this image in the list of emails before, but we've added it now. Sorry for the confusion!

The assumption is that since you are asking for their response, it's in their court to tell you how long a response would take.

We think there is a misunderstanding. We never asked Sinergia for a response to our article. We simply told Sinergia we would send them our article before publication. 

Hi Toby, thank you for your reply.

Here's the request you're looking for:

"after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response".

We’re a bit confused, because the quoted statement — "after reviewing them, we will inform you of the time required to provide our response" — does not request anything from us. It simply says Sinergia will do something. 

Hi Jason, thank you for your insights. We have decided not to post the article today to respect the charity's wishes as reasonably as we can.

We did not mention this in our initial post since we did not yet have permission from the charity (Sinergia) to post the emails. Now that we have permission, the full context regarding the "request to check on deadlines" can be found here (we don't want to strawman what Sinergia meant when they said this).

To me, that is enough to forbear from publishing tomorrow without getting into the lost e-mail issue at all.

Also, to clarify, Sinergia has indicated to us that no email was lost. 

Hi Toby, thank you for your thoughtful reply. 

We did not mention this in our initial post since we did not yet have permission from the charity (Sinergia) to post the emails. Now that we have permission, here is additional context.

Our article is about factual corrections to Sinergia's response to our review of them. We believe our organization has been suffering reputational harm from factually incorrect claims in Sinergia’s response, and we’ve been trying to move quickly to correct the record.

Here's a brief timeline:

• On March 26, we emailed Sinergia informing them of our plan to publish an article responding to them.
• On March 27, we scheduled a call with Carolina (Sinergia's director) after she accepted our offer to do one.
• On April 2, we informed Carolina we would need consent to record the call. In response Carolina canceled the call.
• On April 3 (now knowing we wouldn't be able to ask our clarifications on the call with Carolina), we sent three written clarification questions.
• On April 4, we told Carolina about our plan to publish our response on April 10th, noting that we "want to post our response soon since people are likely wondering why we haven’t responded yet."

Between April 4 and the morning of April 9, we received no replies from Sinergia to any of our emails. We then sent Sinergia the draft article for their review on the morning of April 9, reiterating the planned April 10 publication date.

It was only after receiving the article that Sinergia responded, stating 

we do plan to share in the forum our disappointment that our request to check on deadlines was not accepted. We are likely not to respond to further requests if they are done in the same manner. 

However, in our email history, no such request was ever made. 

We'd also like to note:

• We offered to show the article to Sinergia more than 24 hours prior to publication, but Sinergia never told us they wanted this.
• Sinergia showed us their response to our review only 24 hours prior to publication, and their response was much longer than our upcoming article.
• Vetted Causes is a small, volunteer-run organization. Sinergia is a multimillion-dollar organization with paid staff. If 24 hours was sufficient for our volunteers, we believed it would be fair for Sinergia as well.

That said, we have decided not to post the article today to respect Sinergia’s wishes as reasonably as we can. We are working with them to coordinate a reasonable timeline for publication.

Thanks again for your feedback — we really appreciate it as we continue improving our process.