Thanks for this excellent piece James. I had thought the trends were more positive than this, and am disheartened to hear that I was wrong.
One additional set of graphs I think would help set context is on the number of animals subject to some of the worst practices (e.g. battery hens). Many campaigns have been focused on avoiding some of the worst harms of factory farming, so presumably campaigners feel that reducing these practices is a big win. If so, we should be measuring it, celebrating the successes, and also putting them in context of the other big trends.
For longterm trend analysis, it would also be useful to have a geographic breakdown. e.g. if one of the main arguments for a good longterm outcome is a kind of ethical eating Kuznets curve — that as economic development increases, people first cause more harm to animals per capita, but then this decreases again. If so, we would expect to see this first in economically developed countries and measuring this would be helpful for understanding the timescale / income needed to bend that curve back down. And if there isn’t any evidence of a Kuznets curve, that would be very important to know too!
Thanks for this excellent piece James. I had thought the trends were more positive than this, and am disheartened to hear that I was wrong.
One additional set of graphs I think would help set context is on the number of animals subject to some of the worst practices (e.g. battery hens). Many campaigns have been focused on avoiding some of the worst harms of factory farming, so presumably campaigners feel that reducing these practices is a big win. If so, we should be measuring it, celebrating the successes, and also putting them in context of the other big trends.
For longterm trend analysis, it would also be useful to have a geographic breakdown. e.g. if one of the main arguments for a good longterm outcome is a kind of ethical eating Kuznets curve — that as economic development increases, people first cause more harm to animals per capita, but then this decreases again. If so, we would expect to see this first in economically developed countries and measuring this would be helpful for understanding the timescale / income needed to bend that curve back down. And if there isn’t any evidence of a Kuznets curve, that would be very important to know too!