Thanks for the question. I agree that cultural change is important, both for farmed and wild animals. I’m actually thinking about writing a future newsletter on the topic.
Our challenge funding in this area has been identifying funding opportunities that seem likely to influence cultural change on a large scale. As you allude to, it’s not clear that a lot of our movement’s past efforts at education and awareness-raising have been effective in this goal. And I’m not clear that past movements have achieved this absent a huge organic grassroots movement (civil rights) or huge funding (anti-tobacco) or both (climate change).
What sorts of interventions do you have in mind? And do you see any examples of past success at cultural change in our movement? It’s obviously much easier to scale up successful approaches than to hope for the success of untested ones.
I have in mind several different examples of cultural strategies that are well known in France, but probably less so (or not at all) in the US.
- One very effective cultural strategy is that of Paris Animaux Zoopolis / Projet Animaux Zoopolis (https://zoopolis.fr), which deals with wild animals (not RWAS) and liminal animals, but also recreational fishing and farmed fish for restocking rivers, and which, by changing the public’s image of animals (e.g. rats), undoubtedly has a general cultural impact that changes the public’s view of animals. PAZ uses the cultural (media) impact of its battles to put pressure on political figures (mayors, MPs) and achieve greater cultural effectiveness or even new laws (its other objective): I’ve written a description of the work of this association, and how it uses cultural struggle very effectively to bring about concrete, sometimes legislative changes. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cj2w9xd9vNjNBGuTpe_WNjIi816E_2roIx_FnK6cvug/edit
- A cultural strategy that would be more effective if it had a bit more funding: the organisation of the World Days for the End of Fishing (and Fish Farming: https://end-of-fishing.org) and for the End of Speciesism (https://end-of-speciesism. org), in which about a hundred organisations from all five continents participate each year (Africa is still poorly represented), and whose aim is to penetrate the culture of the animal advocacy movement by proposing that it take part in these World Days and that once a year (while waiting for something better!) it adopt a discourse centred either on the denunciation of speciesism or on the question of aquatic animals (fish, shrimps), elements that the movement hardly takes into account spontaneously. The strategy is cost-effective (one full-time staff member can reach two times a year hundreds of organisations, some of which will then carry out campaigns), but suffers from its limitations: one full-time staff member can’t organise each year more than two days of action, nor can he or she better monitor and advise the organisations. The ideal situation would be to organise real campaigns throughout the year, or over two weeks, etc. In short, to have a full-time worker more. See more here: https://end-of-fishing.org/en/theory-of-change/ https://end-of-fishing.org/en/plans/ https://end-of-fishing.org/en/kpis/
- One cultural and community-building strategy is the Réseau Sentience (Sentience Network), a network of student associations focused on challenging speciesism, promoting sentientism and effective altruism, and vegetalizing university canteens. It currently exists in France, but it would like to export it to the US, India and elsewhere. The network is now run by a small team, and each local branch is autonomous but linked to the network and run by students on a volunteer basis (and the branches are to some extent funded by their universities!) The number of actions carried out is significant, the aim is to occupy cultural space, and many students train as activists and then remain part of the movement, either joining existing organizations or creating new initiatives. See its Theory of Change: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tpaIfaUrG_7Wyach3O64iYE1fJnai-pgadyyswiXksw/edit
There are other examples, of course, such as annual meetings that are important for the movement itself, magazines and so on.
I think the work done by organizations like Animal Think Tank or Animal Ask, or Social Change Lab, is also very important, in terms of research into cultural change (often linked to political struggles and insitutional change).
Thanks for the question. I agree that cultural change is important, both for farmed and wild animals. I’m actually thinking about writing a future newsletter on the topic.
Our challenge funding in this area has been identifying funding opportunities that seem likely to influence cultural change on a large scale. As you allude to, it’s not clear that a lot of our movement’s past efforts at education and awareness-raising have been effective in this goal. And I’m not clear that past movements have achieved this absent a huge organic grassroots movement (civil rights) or huge funding (anti-tobacco) or both (climate change).
What sorts of interventions do you have in mind? And do you see any examples of past success at cultural change in our movement? It’s obviously much easier to scale up successful approaches than to hope for the success of untested ones.
I have in mind several different examples of cultural strategies that are well known in France, but probably less so (or not at all) in the US.
- One very effective cultural strategy is that of Paris Animaux Zoopolis / Projet Animaux Zoopolis (https://zoopolis.fr), which deals with wild animals (not RWAS) and liminal animals, but also recreational fishing and farmed fish for restocking rivers, and which, by changing the public’s image of animals (e.g. rats), undoubtedly has a general cultural impact that changes the public’s view of animals. PAZ uses the cultural (media) impact of its battles to put pressure on political figures (mayors, MPs) and achieve greater cultural effectiveness or even new laws (its other objective): I’ve written a description of the work of this association, and how it uses cultural struggle very effectively to bring about concrete, sometimes legislative changes. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cj2w9xd9vNjNBGuTpe_WNjIi816E_2roIx_FnK6cvug/edit
- A cultural strategy that would be more effective if it had a bit more funding: the organisation of the World Days for the End of Fishing (and Fish Farming: https://end-of-fishing.org) and for the End of Speciesism (https://end-of-speciesism. org), in which about a hundred organisations from all five continents participate each year (Africa is still poorly represented), and whose aim is to penetrate the culture of the animal advocacy movement by proposing that it take part in these World Days and that once a year (while waiting for something better!) it adopt a discourse centred either on the denunciation of speciesism or on the question of aquatic animals (fish, shrimps), elements that the movement hardly takes into account spontaneously. The strategy is cost-effective (one full-time staff member can reach two times a year hundreds of organisations, some of which will then carry out campaigns), but suffers from its limitations: one full-time staff member can’t organise each year more than two days of action, nor can he or she better monitor and advise the organisations. The ideal situation would be to organise real campaigns throughout the year, or over two weeks, etc. In short, to have a full-time worker more. See more here:
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/theory-of-change/
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/plans/
https://end-of-fishing.org/en/kpis/
- One cultural and community-building strategy is the Réseau Sentience (Sentience Network), a network of student associations focused on challenging speciesism, promoting sentientism and effective altruism, and vegetalizing university canteens. It currently exists in France, but it would like to export it to the US, India and elsewhere. The network is now run by a small team, and each local branch is autonomous but linked to the network and run by students on a volunteer basis (and the branches are to some extent funded by their universities!) The number of actions carried out is significant, the aim is to occupy cultural space, and many students train as activists and then remain part of the movement, either joining existing organizations or creating new initiatives. See its Theory of Change: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tpaIfaUrG_7Wyach3O64iYE1fJnai-pgadyyswiXksw/edit
There are other examples, of course, such as annual meetings that are important for the movement itself, magazines and so on.
I think the work done by organizations like Animal Think Tank or Animal Ask, or Social Change Lab, is also very important, in terms of research into cultural change (often linked to political struggles and insitutional change).
Thanks Yves! I’ll check out those links and groups.