Hey! Thanks for your efforts and for the post-mortem.
Why did you prioritise these two asks out of the inquiry’s 18 recommendations? (Some prioritisation makes sense, but it’s not obvious to me why these specifically).
And why do you feel “the marginal return from the final few participants was probably quite low”? (It makes sense to met that you hit marginal diminishing returns at some point, but it’s not clear to me how many volunteers it takes to get there, and it probably makes more sense to me to think about it in terms of number of MPs contacted).
We prioritised these two tasks after consulting with some experts here in Australia. We broadly looked at the scale of impact (should that ask be sufficiently met), the amount of suffering an intervention reduces, and how likely it is for an ask to be met.
Establishing an independent office for animal welfare would affect all animal species, and not just pigs, so the scale of impact here is large. Moreover, the state of NSW has already committed to an independent office for animal welfare, so we thought this might be a relatively easy commitment to get from the Victorian government as another Australian state has already committed to it.
As for banning farrowing crates, we chose this ask because it is a large source of suffering for mother pigs and are used when the urge to act on maternal instincts is the most intense. This ask is a lso a sufficiently concrete ask compared to other recommendations mentioned in the inquiry report.
We say the marginal return from the final few participants was low because we already had participants in the districts the final participants were from. If they had been from districts where we didn’t already have participants engaging in this campaign, then the marginal return would have been higher. However, this wasn’t the case.
Hey! Thanks for your efforts and for the post-mortem.
Why did you prioritise these two asks out of the inquiry’s 18 recommendations? (Some prioritisation makes sense, but it’s not obvious to me why these specifically).
And why do you feel “the marginal return from the final few participants was probably quite low”? (It makes sense to met that you hit marginal diminishing returns at some point, but it’s not clear to me how many volunteers it takes to get there, and it probably makes more sense to me to think about it in terms of number of MPs contacted).
Hi Ben,
We prioritised these two tasks after consulting with some experts here in Australia. We broadly looked at the scale of impact (should that ask be sufficiently met), the amount of suffering an intervention reduces, and how likely it is for an ask to be met.
Establishing an independent office for animal welfare would affect all animal species, and not just pigs, so the scale of impact here is large. Moreover, the state of NSW has already committed to an independent office for animal welfare, so we thought this might be a relatively easy commitment to get from the Victorian government as another Australian state has already committed to it.
As for banning farrowing crates, we chose this ask because it is a large source of suffering for mother pigs and are used when the urge to act on maternal instincts is the most intense. This ask is a lso a sufficiently concrete ask compared to other recommendations mentioned in the inquiry report.
We say the marginal return from the final few participants was low because we already had participants in the districts the final participants were from. If they had been from districts where we didn’t already have participants engaging in this campaign, then the marginal return would have been higher. However, this wasn’t the case.
This makes sense, thanks for the response! :)