Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?

Disclaimer: This is a weak take — mostly based on anecdotes and vibes — but I thought it’s worth sharing nonetheless, if only as a means of soliciting better takes.
Disclaimer #2: I am very appreciative of everyone who is working tirelessly to pursue farmed animal protection via policy, and I want nothing more than to see it succeed! I just suspect it’s going to be a longer and more difficult journey than I anticipated, and that this is worth having an open and public conversation about.

I fear the policy landscape for farmed animal protection work is looking more and more bleak.

The election results from last night have reinforced this fear, with animal-friendly measures failing across the ballot, a Republican trifecta set to rule for at least two years, and RFK Jr. in line to act as appointed czar of HHS/FDA/USDA. So I thought I would write up a quick memo of the signals that have me worried:

Abolitionist ballot measures lost big in 2024.

The election results aren’t final yet, but there were two major ballot initiatives in liberal cities this year concerning factory farming. I suspect these could have been motivated in part by surprising findings that nearly 50% of US citizens supported banning both slaughterhouses and factory farms. But as predicted by Rethink Priorities, things did not pan out this way.

In Sonoma County, California, where Harris is currently leading by a nearly-50-point margin, Measure J would have banned CAFOs (factory farms) in the county. With 75% of the vote in, it lost by a 60-point margin, with 85% (!!) of the county voting against the measure.

In Denver, Colorado, where Harris is currently leading by a 60-point margin, Ordinance 309 (which would have banned slaughterhouses in the city) lost by a 30-point margin.

Other animal-rights-flavored measures around the country also failed:

Another ordinance in Denver, 308, which would have banned fur sale, and has been successfully passed in democratic cities previously, lost by 15 points. Colorado’s Proposition 127, which would have banned trophy hunting of big cats, lost by 10 points.

In Florida, voters favored enshrining a constitutional “public right to fish and hunt,” which could preempt animal protection laws banning cruel hunting practices, by 34 points.

I know there are theories of change that motivated some of these initiatives that don’t actually include winning the vote — considerations like building momentum, forcing animals into the political conversation, gaining experience and laying the groundwork for future initiatives, etc. But it sure would have been nice if we lived in a world where we could actually get these laws passed.

Incrementalist ballot measures — previously some of the movement’s biggest wins — may simply be undone.

Many people reading this will remember the celebrations when Proposition 12 — the strongest and most meaningful (IMO) farmed animal protection law in the world — was passed by a wide margin in 2018. I think a lot of the excitement for policy work we see today may have been downstream of successful campaigns like this one, or the previous success of MA Question 3 and CA Proposition 2.

The bad news is that these laws face continued threats of simply being undone. The most notable example is the challenge to Proposition 12 which luckily failed at the US Supreme Court. Massachusetts’ Question 3 also faced a string of challenges and narrowly survived.

But now both of these laws may simply be preempted by the EATS act, a piece of legislation that the animal agriculture industry hopes to add to the farm bill, and which would ban state-level prohibitions on the sale of cruelly-raised animal products from other states. They’ve fought for this for multiple years in a row — in 2023, Metaculus gave it a 30% chance of passing. Now it’s back in 2024, where it may or may not be renewed in the lame duck period.

These are just the known threats. With a Republican trifecta set to rule for at least the next two years, I fear things aren’t looking good for pro-animal policies at the federal level, and thus the state level (since there is so much political appetite to preempt state-level protections).

We have opponents on the left and the right.

The reason a Republican trifecta concerns me is in part because it’s largely been Democrats who have publicly opposed the EATS Act. But when it comes to animal protection, the partisan divide really isn’t all that clear or consistent.

As previously mentioned, abolitionist ballot measures recently failed in blue cities, including a fur ban measure which had previously passed in many blue cities in California, Massachusetts, and Colorado. The Denver slaughterhouse ban initiative ended up facing landslide opposition from the democratic party. I worry this is some evidence — albeit very weak — of a potential vibe shift among the left that matches the rightward shift across the country.

Also, in the fight over Proposition 12, it was the Biden justice department that supported pork producers and sided against the state of California, and the liberal justices on the court were split 2-1 on the final decision.

I think both political parties realize that “banning meat” has become a meme. Republicans want to accuse Democrats of planning it, as Trump repeatedly did on the campaign trail. Democrats want to signal, through promises and through action, that they have no such plans.

Supporting legislation to improve the lives of farmed animals, and thus likely raise costs for farmers and consumers in the process, is going to be political anathema for a long time. This isn’t new — I think it is part of why our biggest political wins have come from citizens’ initiatives so far — but see the past two sections; ballot measures aren’t looking good right now. And the stronger the “Democrats want to ban cows” meme is, the harsher I fear the counter-signaling response from both parties will be.

Cultivated meat is under fire. The Trump admin won’t make this any better.

More evidence of “banning meat” being a meme, and politicians wanting to make extremely costly signals to show how much they support animal agriculture — two states have already preemptively banned the sale of cultivated meat. Two more states have considered it (including swing state Arizona, where it passed in the state House, and which has previously adopted cage-free regulations).

Bear in mind that its potential for sale is dependent on the FDA and the USDA, whose approval of cultivated meat products is not a foregone conclusion. With the Trump administration set to take control of both agencies, things don’t look good. Vice President-elect JD Vance called cultivated meat “disgusting fake meat” and “highly processed garbage.” RFK Jr. is a health fanatic who has opposed technological innovations including vaccines, pesticides, and fluoridated drinking water.

So what next?

Maybe political change without real, proactive electorate buy-in is putting the wagon before the horse. So what if this were true? The effective animal advocacy movement has been fighting a battle on multiple fronts. When one isn’t working, the obvious solution is to invest more in others.

If it’s true that US policy work for animals is looking worse and worse, a rational solution is just to adjust our portfolio and invest more in interventions including direct corporate engagement, technological innovation^[1], and even individual change.

Another option is to invest more in international work — I continue to be optimistic about policy progress being made in the EU, as well as corporate engagement work in Asia. As important as the US is to me (as a lifelong resident) and to the world (as an economic leader), it still only accounts for a small fraction of animals used and killed on factory farms.

Tl;dr I fear the vibes for US policy work are off, at least in the near term.

^
Here I’m thinking of technological solutions to animal suffering on factory farms, as is being pursued by Innovate Animal Ag, as well as technological progress on alternative proteins as is being pursued by groups like the Good Food Institute. I think the latter is still worthwhile despite the political hostility toward it since (1) America is not the entire world, and (2) cultivated meat that achieves triple parity (across price, taste, and convenience) will be a much harder technology to oppose.