Thanks for this—has been very interesting to read and glad Animal Ask has been looking into this!
I’ve got a some pushback on your point that other campaigns within animal advocacy similarly serve the stigmatisation argument (which I think is central to your argument):
However, there are many other animal advocacy campaigns that involve a similar stigmatisation process such as veganism or reducetarianism, corporate campaigns, and policy change campaigns. Veganism and vegetarianism even work through the similar principle of a boycott, and the symbolism is largely the same. Moreover, since the arguments for the direct effects of these campaigns are much stronger, divestment appears to be a generally weaker campaign option in the animal advocacy context.
I’m not sure I agree with this. I think the stigmatisation provided by divestment campaigns is quite different to veganism (either as a boycott or outreach), corporate campaigns and policy change campaigns. For one, divestment campaigns are generally extremely targeted at the industry and a) making them look bad and/or b) making other institutions ashamed of working with them. Some reasons I don’t think your examples do these elements very well:
Vegan or reducetarian outreach doesn’t target the animal agriculture industry in the same way divestment does, in that it’s focused on changing the minds of individuals. Whilst vegan outreach might make the industry look bad, I think this effect isn’t that big, it’s not the main goal and it certainly doesn’t make other institutions ashamed of working with them. In the case of vegan outreach, the aim is often some combination of generating concern in one person for the environment, animal welfare and one’s health, which (in my opinion) is usually done without any explicit stigmatisation of the animal ag industry. Often, animal welfare concerns aren’t even the main reasons given to go vegan, as health and environmental concerns might dominate a lot more, as in recent years.[1]
Even when vegan outreach strongly pushes animal welfare concerns for going vegan over health or environmental reasons, I feel like it sounds more like “do you care about animal welfare” rather than “This industry is responsible for the death of billions of sentient beings and destruction of our planet”. I think the latter is much more likely to cause industry stigmatisation, yet is rarely ever implemented.
On people going vegan themselves (your boycott point): I’m not sure how this would significantly influence cultural perceptions of the animal ag industry as it’s an invisible act of omission, in that society is not really monitoring individual diet preferences, whereas big visible acts of divestment are often covered widely in the media. In addition, divestment campaigns themselves, even if unsuccessful (in their stated aims), often garner lots of media coverage in a way that the corporate campaigns etc. fail to (in my opinion). I think this media attention is crucial to highlight the bad practices of the industry and therefore delegitimise it, and a gap that other animal advocacy methods aren’t quite filling (also in my opinion).
I would argue the same points above are true for corporate campaigns and policy change issues in that:
They are not directly optimising for making the industry look bad, so will leave a lot of value on the table.
This seems especially true as in both cases, you essentially need industry support for the corporate campaign / policy to be realised, so you can’t attack the industry too directly for fear creating a strong backlash.
Whilst corporate and policy change camapaigns probably generate more media coverage than vegan outreach, I think this is less than divestment-esque campaigns. One small data point is that Animal Rebellion’s style of campaigning (more similar to the fossil free divestment movement) garnered 800+ media mentions in 2.5 years, and I think no corporate campaigns etc. have been on a similar level of public attention.
The example you give that I definitely agree with is undercover investigations, which do make the industry look bad and occasionally cause some institutions to withdraw their support. I just think this alone isn’t enough, and we need more efforts to delegitimise the industry as a whole, but we don’t currently have much of this happening.
P.S. I wrote this fairly quickly so might have missed some points and sorry if it’s comes across as blunt, that’s definitely not intended!
Thanks for your deep engagement with the report and thoughtful comment! No, it didn’t come across as blunt or rude or anything! :)
I was thinking of something closer to a vegan outreach campaign that was optimized for delegitimizing the industry when I wrote that. We did write that we think that its an institutional focus is more effective, and perhaps its abolitionist focus too, though veganism can also be framed in that way. Perhaps the report should have talked more about how other types of animal campaigns can (and should) leverage the stigmatization process.
I don’t think veganism is really a quiet act of omission. Generally quite a few other people will come to know that you are vegan and veganism gets plenty of popular press. I don’t think this would be happening if there were much fewer vegans. Maybe if veganism only involved dietary choices, but that’s not what you’re getting with vegan outreach, unless you’re really leading with the health arguments. Having said that, I agree that it looks like divestment is better at getting press, though hard to say exactly. We did cite that as the strongest reason for engaging in divestment.
It does still seem to be like basically all animal advocacy campaigns involve stigmatization to some significant extent. It’s not much of a jump from meat is immoral to the companies that are creating it are immoral. Legislative campaigns also involve pointing out serious inadequacies in the industry practice that need to be reformed, though the message may not be as strong here.
I think there is something to the idea that divestment hits closer to the pocketbook with the stigmatization that it brings, though I’m not convinced that that makes up for the paucity of direct effects.
I do think there should be people trying divestment in the animal advocacy context and seeing how it goes, but unless the results proved us wrong, based on the arguments in this report, I wouldn’t recommend a big shift of resources towards it.
Sorry I never replied but here’s a very quick thing on what I thought our main disagreement was but maybe we’re closer than I initially thought! I interpreted your conclusion to be something along the lines of “We shouldn’t do any divestment as other approaches are less risky and more effective” but your final paragraph above is basically the view I hold too:
I do think there should be people trying divestment in the animal advocacy context and seeing how it goes, but unless the results proved us wrong, based on the arguments in this report, I wouldn’t recommend a big shift of resources towards it.
Basically I totally agree, in that we should a couple campaigns/organisations trying divestment in a somewhat rigorous way to get some good learnings out of it, before deciding whether to stop it completely or scale up. I just think when I read your sentence:
We think that, given the existing evidence, many existing animal advocacy campaigns will be more effective and less risky than divestment.
I interpreted this as we shouldn’t do it or invest in it at all! Not sure if it’s just me but I think adding what you said above “some people should try it with some limited resources to test it properly” to the conclusion would really help with understanding your final recommendation. Thanks for all your work on this again—super interesting!
Thanks for this—has been very interesting to read and glad Animal Ask has been looking into this!
I’ve got a some pushback on your point that other campaigns within animal advocacy similarly serve the stigmatisation argument (which I think is central to your argument):
I’m not sure I agree with this. I think the stigmatisation provided by divestment campaigns is quite different to veganism (either as a boycott or outreach), corporate campaigns and policy change campaigns. For one, divestment campaigns are generally extremely targeted at the industry and a) making them look bad and/or b) making other institutions ashamed of working with them. Some reasons I don’t think your examples do these elements very well:
Vegan or reducetarian outreach doesn’t target the animal agriculture industry in the same way divestment does, in that it’s focused on changing the minds of individuals. Whilst vegan outreach might make the industry look bad, I think this effect isn’t that big, it’s not the main goal and it certainly doesn’t make other institutions ashamed of working with them. In the case of vegan outreach, the aim is often some combination of generating concern in one person for the environment, animal welfare and one’s health, which (in my opinion) is usually done without any explicit stigmatisation of the animal ag industry. Often, animal welfare concerns aren’t even the main reasons given to go vegan, as health and environmental concerns might dominate a lot more, as in recent years.[1]
Even when vegan outreach strongly pushes animal welfare concerns for going vegan over health or environmental reasons, I feel like it sounds more like “do you care about animal welfare” rather than “This industry is responsible for the death of billions of sentient beings and destruction of our planet”. I think the latter is much more likely to cause industry stigmatisation, yet is rarely ever implemented.
Arguably the most important part of divestment work is making other institutions ashamed of collaborating with or withdrawing their ties to the industry in question, which veg*n outreach campaigns don’t do at all. This is especially true for big cultural institutions e.g. museums, galleries, universities, etc.
On people going vegan themselves (your boycott point): I’m not sure how this would significantly influence cultural perceptions of the animal ag industry as it’s an invisible act of omission, in that society is not really monitoring individual diet preferences, whereas big visible acts of divestment are often covered widely in the media. In addition, divestment campaigns themselves, even if unsuccessful (in their stated aims), often garner lots of media coverage in a way that the corporate campaigns etc. fail to (in my opinion). I think this media attention is crucial to highlight the bad practices of the industry and therefore delegitimise it, and a gap that other animal advocacy methods aren’t quite filling (also in my opinion).
I would argue the same points above are true for corporate campaigns and policy change issues in that:
They are not directly optimising for making the industry look bad, so will leave a lot of value on the table.
This seems especially true as in both cases, you essentially need industry support for the corporate campaign / policy to be realised, so you can’t attack the industry too directly for fear creating a strong backlash.
Whilst corporate and policy change camapaigns probably generate more media coverage than vegan outreach, I think this is less than divestment-esque campaigns. One small data point is that Animal Rebellion’s style of campaigning (more similar to the fossil free divestment movement) garnered 800+ media mentions in 2.5 years, and I think no corporate campaigns etc. have been on a similar level of public attention.
The example you give that I definitely agree with is undercover investigations, which do make the industry look bad and occasionally cause some institutions to withdraw their support. I just think this alone isn’t enough, and we need more efforts to delegitimise the industry as a whole, but we don’t currently have much of this happening.
P.S. I wrote this fairly quickly so might have missed some points and sorry if it’s comes across as blunt, that’s definitely not intended!
To check this, I just googled “reasons to go vegan” and the 3 top links were mainly about doing so for health reasons, a mix of health and animal welfare concerns and more industry focused animal welfare stuff (this is more in line with what you’re suggesting but I definitely don’t think this is the norm, well done THL).
Hi James,
Thanks for your deep engagement with the report and thoughtful comment! No, it didn’t come across as blunt or rude or anything! :)
I was thinking of something closer to a vegan outreach campaign that was optimized for delegitimizing the industry when I wrote that. We did write that we think that its an institutional focus is more effective, and perhaps its abolitionist focus too, though veganism can also be framed in that way. Perhaps the report should have talked more about how other types of animal campaigns can (and should) leverage the stigmatization process.
I don’t think veganism is really a quiet act of omission. Generally quite a few other people will come to know that you are vegan and veganism gets plenty of popular press. I don’t think this would be happening if there were much fewer vegans. Maybe if veganism only involved dietary choices, but that’s not what you’re getting with vegan outreach, unless you’re really leading with the health arguments. Having said that, I agree that it looks like divestment is better at getting press, though hard to say exactly. We did cite that as the strongest reason for engaging in divestment.
It does still seem to be like basically all animal advocacy campaigns involve stigmatization to some significant extent. It’s not much of a jump from meat is immoral to the companies that are creating it are immoral. Legislative campaigns also involve pointing out serious inadequacies in the industry practice that need to be reformed, though the message may not be as strong here.
I think there is something to the idea that divestment hits closer to the pocketbook with the stigmatization that it brings, though I’m not convinced that that makes up for the paucity of direct effects.
I do think there should be people trying divestment in the animal advocacy context and seeing how it goes, but unless the results proved us wrong, based on the arguments in this report, I wouldn’t recommend a big shift of resources towards it.
Sorry I never replied but here’s a very quick thing on what I thought our main disagreement was but maybe we’re closer than I initially thought! I interpreted your conclusion to be something along the lines of “We shouldn’t do any divestment as other approaches are less risky and more effective” but your final paragraph above is basically the view I hold too:
Basically I totally agree, in that we should a couple campaigns/organisations trying divestment in a somewhat rigorous way to get some good learnings out of it, before deciding whether to stop it completely or scale up. I just think when I read your sentence:
I interpreted this as we shouldn’t do it or invest in it at all! Not sure if it’s just me but I think adding what you said above “some people should try it with some limited resources to test it properly” to the conclusion would really help with understanding your final recommendation. Thanks for all your work on this again—super interesting!