Thanks for sharing Vasco! On the point about public support—sadly I don’t think that Welfare Footprint’s data will be enough to convince people about these kinds of reforms. I think welfare reforms have to almost immediately make intuitive sense for them to receive mainstream public support. E.g. organizations have been doing a great job trying to popularize the term ‘Frankenchickens’ as a way to make the welfare issues of broiler chicken breeding more salient, but that’s still been a really heavy lift and comparing two different kinds of cages seems even harder.
Hi Max. I very much agree WFI’s estimates alone will not be persuasive to the public. However, I wonder whether it would be possible to communicate the importance of nests, perches, and litter. The EU banned conventional cages. So at least some decision-makers and citizens in the EU had to prefer furnished cages over conventional cages. Maybe these were people that engaged more with the topic, and such level of engagement cannot be reached as a result of public campaigns targeting companies. In this case, as I say in the post, “there may still be room to advocate for political change in more authoritarian countries like China where companies are less subject to public pressure”.
Thanks for sharing Vasco! On the point about public support—sadly I don’t think that Welfare Footprint’s data will be enough to convince people about these kinds of reforms. I think welfare reforms have to almost immediately make intuitive sense for them to receive mainstream public support. E.g. organizations have been doing a great job trying to popularize the term ‘Frankenchickens’ as a way to make the welfare issues of broiler chicken breeding more salient, but that’s still been a really heavy lift and comparing two different kinds of cages seems even harder.
Hi Max. I very much agree WFI’s estimates alone will not be persuasive to the public. However, I wonder whether it would be possible to communicate the importance of nests, perches, and litter. The EU banned conventional cages. So at least some decision-makers and citizens in the EU had to prefer furnished cages over conventional cages. Maybe these were people that engaged more with the topic, and such level of engagement cannot be reached as a result of public campaigns targeting companies. In this case, as I say in the post, “there may still be room to advocate for political change in more authoritarian countries like China where companies are less subject to public pressure”.