Thom from FarmKind here. We at FarmKind wanted to provide a bit of context and explanation for the choices we’ve made around this campaign.
Context
Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.
Origin: At this time of year, due to the annual Veganuary campaign, many people and the UK press debate the pros and cons of diet change, often with very entrenched views on both sides. This creates a unique opportunity to get people who are currently unwilling to change their diet to consider donating as an alternative entry-point into helping farmed animals—something that is extremely hard to get media attention for most of the time.
Goal: The goal of this campaign is to get the question of ‘should you do Veganuary’ more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not.
Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.
Campaign
The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.
By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals.
Our campaign aims to show that those who are unwilling to change their diet today can and should still begin their lifelong journey of helping animals by donating to charities working to change the food system.
Concerns
We know that some may have concerns about this approach and feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying competitive eaters who are eating meat, even in an effort to help farmed animals. However, to make change we have to start from where people are now. For most people, that starting point is eating and enjoying meat and being unwilling to change their diet.
Some media coverage has suggested that our campaign aims to encourage people to eat meat or that we are running a ‘meat-eating campaign’. This is untrue, and we have corrected them. Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why they’re running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage.
As part of our commitment to being as transparent and effective as we can, we’re happy to answer specific questions anyone has about the campaign but as this campaign is ongoing we may have to answer some questions in the future or privately via email.
Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.
I think it would be more useful to clarify if Veganuary supported you doing this campaign. If the answer is yes, that seems great! If the answer is no, this seems explicitly not cooperative, and in that case, it would be misleading to frame this as a cooperative effort (independent of if this was good or bad to do). I don’t think whether or not Veganuary was informed was what folks were looking for, but if they endorsed the idea or did not endorse it / anti-endorsed it.
I think this just seems like a clarification worth making here given how negative the reaction has been to the campaign (from within the movement—hopefully it had a positive reaction externally!)
Thanks for this reply—I agree with most of what you have written here.
I think though you’ve missed some of the biggest problems with this campaign.
1. This seems to undermine vegans and vegetarians (see image above), and their efforts to help animals. It seems straightforwardly fair to interpreted this as anti-veganuary and anti-vegan, especially at a glance.
2. What matters in media is how you are portrayed, not what the truth is. Your initial campaign poster is ambiguous enough that its easy to interpret as a pro meat-eating campaign and anti-vegan campaign. I could have interpreted it as that myself, I don’t think the media were grossly wrong here to report that.
The Telegraph article is pretty good actually overall and makes good points that could be good for animal welfare, although the first “clickbaity” title and paragraph is unfortunate (see above)
Media lasts for a day, correcting it is the right thing to do but doesn’t have much of an impact.
I can see what you are trying to do here, and its quite clever. I love most of your stuff, but this campaign seems like a mistake to me.
Thanks Thom for responding. I wasn’t actually aware of who FarmKind were when I wrote my post above. It looks like a very good project overall, thanks for your work in the space.
Your response doesn’t answer for me the question of why it was decided to create such an anti-vegan campaign (at least in its webpage). I can see there could be a lot of good done by persuading people who are unlikely to try a vegan diet to donate. But something along the lines of “If you don’t want to be vegan but want to help animals, try this instead” or even “If you hate Veganuary, here’s how to beat vegans at their own goals” or something would seem to suffice (but with better words...). Creating a webpage full of negative messages about being vegan doesn’t seem necessary, and seems to me to actually be misinformation, given I’m not aware of anything showing that the typical Veganuary participant’s experience is like what is presented.
Having read the article in the Telegraph, I didn’t think it was actually that bad—it seemed to be mainly arguing for promoting donations rather than diet change, and didn’t actually seem to put veganism down (except for bringing up “vegan dogma”). (Though I wouldn’t agree that putting on a meat-eating challenge is ethically OK.) So being negative about veganism doesn’t seem to have been necessary to get publicity, so it makes it seem even stranger why the campaign web page takes this line.
It doesn’t seem to have been picked up by any substantial media outlet other than the right wing UK press—I’d have thought it would be desirable to get a broader reach, since I’d guess that people on the political left would be more likely to donate, and I wonder if being less adversarial might have worked better.
It would be good to see follow up analysis of what impact on donations the campaign actually has.
Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout.
Aidan says here that it is a “bit”. That would seem to imply that Veganuary are collaborating with you on this. Can you say if that’s accurate? If there’s a follow up, it would seem good to highlight it to people here.
Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.
One of the things that people are going to do with a campaign like this is try to see who is funding it. Currently if you click the “Transparency” link at the bottom of the campaign page, it goes to a list of FarmKind’s funders, including the EA Animal Welfare Fund. It’s then going to at least raise the possibility in people’s minds that these funders implicitly endorse the campaign. Unless you’ve switched to self-funding, it does seem like these funders’ money is being used to finance it (including individual donors to the EA AWF). Would it not be normal to check with funders before launching a campaign that’s expected to be controversial? Particularly if their own donors might feel attacked by the campaign? It seems like it creates a fair amount of potential for blowback against the EA animal welfare movement.
If there is some complex strategy involving coordination with Veganuary or others, I’d hope it was discussed with a diverse range of experienced people in the animal welfare space and got their endorsement.
I would also say that the campaign web page loses credibility by calling competitive eaters “experts” (I’ve seen this in comments in non-EA spaces) - why would anyone go to such people for expertise on how to best help farm animals through donating? To me, relevant “experts” would be people knowledgeable about welfare campaigns and ethics.
I think there should also be considerably more nuance around the idea of offsetting impacts of meat-eating—calling it “like carbon offsetting” seems misleading as they seem different in a number of significant ways, which may affect what people want to decide to do.
Thank you so much for your response, Thom. Would you be able to clarify whether the meat-eating challenge “in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day”, as reported in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, were misrepresentations by these outlets, or was this originally part of the campaign and FarmKind then changed course in response to the backlash? The articles still have the same headlines and no corrections have been made with regards to the meat-eating competition in either of the articles, as far as I can tell.
Hi all,
Thom from FarmKind here. We at FarmKind wanted to provide a bit of context and explanation for the choices we’ve made around this campaign.
Context
Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.
Origin: At this time of year, due to the annual Veganuary campaign, many people and the UK press debate the pros and cons of diet change, often with very entrenched views on both sides. This creates a unique opportunity to get people who are currently unwilling to change their diet to consider donating as an alternative entry-point into helping farmed animals—something that is extremely hard to get media attention for most of the time.
Goal: The goal of this campaign is to get the question of ‘should you do Veganuary’ more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not.
Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.
Campaign
The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.
By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals.
Our campaign aims to show that those who are unwilling to change their diet today can and should still begin their lifelong journey of helping animals by donating to charities working to change the food system.
Concerns
We know that some may have concerns about this approach and feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying competitive eaters who are eating meat, even in an effort to help farmed animals. However, to make change we have to start from where people are now. For most people, that starting point is eating and enjoying meat and being unwilling to change their diet.
Some media coverage has suggested that our campaign aims to encourage people to eat meat or that we are running a ‘meat-eating campaign’. This is untrue, and we have corrected them. Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why they’re running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage.
As part of our commitment to being as transparent and effective as we can, we’re happy to answer specific questions anyone has about the campaign but as this campaign is ongoing we may have to answer some questions in the future or privately via email.
FWIW:
I think it would be more useful to clarify if Veganuary supported you doing this campaign. If the answer is yes, that seems great! If the answer is no, this seems explicitly not cooperative, and in that case, it would be misleading to frame this as a cooperative effort (independent of if this was good or bad to do). I don’t think whether or not Veganuary was informed was what folks were looking for, but if they endorsed the idea or did not endorse it / anti-endorsed it.
I think this just seems like a clarification worth making here given how negative the reaction has been to the campaign (from within the movement—hopefully it had a positive reaction externally!)
Thanks for this reply—I agree with most of what you have written here.
I think though you’ve missed some of the biggest problems with this campaign.
1. This seems to undermine vegans and vegetarians (see image above), and their efforts to help animals. It seems straightforwardly fair to interpreted this as anti-veganuary and anti-vegan, especially at a glance.
2. What matters in media is how you are portrayed, not what the truth is. Your initial campaign poster is ambiguous enough that its easy to interpret as a pro meat-eating campaign and anti-vegan campaign. I could have interpreted it as that myself, I don’t think the media were grossly wrong here to report that.
The Telegraph article is pretty good actually overall and makes good points that could be good for animal welfare, although the first “clickbaity” title and paragraph is unfortunate (see above)
Media lasts for a day, correcting it is the right thing to do but doesn’t have much of an impact.
I can see what you are trying to do here, and its quite clever. I love most of your stuff, but this campaign seems like a mistake to me.
Thanks Thom for responding. I wasn’t actually aware of who FarmKind were when I wrote my post above. It looks like a very good project overall, thanks for your work in the space.
Your response doesn’t answer for me the question of why it was decided to create such an anti-vegan campaign (at least in its webpage). I can see there could be a lot of good done by persuading people who are unlikely to try a vegan diet to donate. But something along the lines of “If you don’t want to be vegan but want to help animals, try this instead” or even “If you hate Veganuary, here’s how to beat vegans at their own goals” or something would seem to suffice (but with better words...). Creating a webpage full of negative messages about being vegan doesn’t seem necessary, and seems to me to actually be misinformation, given I’m not aware of anything showing that the typical Veganuary participant’s experience is like what is presented.
Having read the article in the Telegraph, I didn’t think it was actually that bad—it seemed to be mainly arguing for promoting donations rather than diet change, and didn’t actually seem to put veganism down (except for bringing up “vegan dogma”). (Though I wouldn’t agree that putting on a meat-eating challenge is ethically OK.) So being negative about veganism doesn’t seem to have been necessary to get publicity, so it makes it seem even stranger why the campaign web page takes this line.
It doesn’t seem to have been picked up by any substantial media outlet other than the right wing UK press—I’d have thought it would be desirable to get a broader reach, since I’d guess that people on the political left would be more likely to donate, and I wonder if being less adversarial might have worked better.
It would be good to see follow up analysis of what impact on donations the campaign actually has.
Aidan says here that it is a “bit”. That would seem to imply that Veganuary are collaborating with you on this. Can you say if that’s accurate? If there’s a follow up, it would seem good to highlight it to people here.
One of the things that people are going to do with a campaign like this is try to see who is funding it. Currently if you click the “Transparency” link at the bottom of the campaign page, it goes to a list of FarmKind’s funders, including the EA Animal Welfare Fund. It’s then going to at least raise the possibility in people’s minds that these funders implicitly endorse the campaign. Unless you’ve switched to self-funding, it does seem like these funders’ money is being used to finance it (including individual donors to the EA AWF). Would it not be normal to check with funders before launching a campaign that’s expected to be controversial? Particularly if their own donors might feel attacked by the campaign? It seems like it creates a fair amount of potential for blowback against the EA animal welfare movement.
If there is some complex strategy involving coordination with Veganuary or others, I’d hope it was discussed with a diverse range of experienced people in the animal welfare space and got their endorsement.
I would also say that the campaign web page loses credibility by calling competitive eaters “experts” (I’ve seen this in comments in non-EA spaces) - why would anyone go to such people for expertise on how to best help farm animals through donating? To me, relevant “experts” would be people knowledgeable about welfare campaigns and ethics.
I think there should also be considerably more nuance around the idea of offsetting impacts of meat-eating—calling it “like carbon offsetting” seems misleading as they seem different in a number of significant ways, which may affect what people want to decide to do.
Thank you so much for your response, Thom. Would you be able to clarify whether the meat-eating challenge “in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day”, as reported in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, were misrepresentations by these outlets, or was this originally part of the campaign and FarmKind then changed course in response to the backlash? The articles still have the same headlines and no corrections have been made with regards to the meat-eating competition in either of the articles, as far as I can tell.