If you consider on-farm (rather than slaughterhouse) CCTV, the welfare benefits increase significantly, as you’re monitoring a much longer period of each animal’s life. However, the tractability of an on-farm CCTV campaign would probably* be much lower. Farmers often have closer, more personal relationships with their farms than slaughterhouse owners do with their slaughterhouses. Proposing to install CCTV on farms would likely trigger a lot of backlash from farmers (particularly given the common public image of the ‘family farm’).
*Admittedly, this is mostly speculation (although speculation that we checked with experts). It could be the case that an on-farm CCTV campaign is more tractable than we think. If somebody tests a campaign and finds it to be tractable, then yes, my opinion of such a campaign would increase significantly. That would start to look like a highly impactful campaign. But you would first need to show that the campaign is tractable, which I don’t have high hopes for. I could imagine that you might be able to increase the tractability by only focusing on industrial/factory farms, which would capture almost all of the impact for animals anyway.
Thanks for sharing this—interesting! Would your opinion on the mandatory use of CCTV change significantly if you considered on-farm CCTV instead?
Thanks for the positive feedback :)
If you consider on-farm (rather than slaughterhouse) CCTV, the welfare benefits increase significantly, as you’re monitoring a much longer period of each animal’s life. However, the tractability of an on-farm CCTV campaign would probably* be much lower. Farmers often have closer, more personal relationships with their farms than slaughterhouse owners do with their slaughterhouses. Proposing to install CCTV on farms would likely trigger a lot of backlash from farmers (particularly given the common public image of the ‘family farm’).
*Admittedly, this is mostly speculation (although speculation that we checked with experts). It could be the case that an on-farm CCTV campaign is more tractable than we think. If somebody tests a campaign and finds it to be tractable, then yes, my opinion of such a campaign would increase significantly. That would start to look like a highly impactful campaign. But you would first need to show that the campaign is tractable, which I don’t have high hopes for. I could imagine that you might be able to increase the tractability by only focusing on industrial/factory farms, which would capture almost all of the impact for animals anyway.