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 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.