Hi Ben,
We prioritised these two tasks after consulting with some experts here in Australia. We broadly looked at the scale of impact (should that ask be sufficiently met), the amount of suffering an intervention reduces, and how likely it is for an ask to be met.
Establishing an independent office for animal welfare would affect all animal species, and not just pigs, so the scale of impact here is large. Moreover, the state of NSW has already committed to an independent office for animal welfare, so we thought this might be a relatively easy commitment to get from the Victorian government as another Australian state has already committed to it.
As for banning farrowing crates, we chose this ask because it is a large source of suffering for mother pigs and are used when the urge to act on maternal instincts is the most intense. This ask is a lso a sufficiently concrete ask compared to other recommendations mentioned in the inquiry report.
We say the marginal return from the final few participants was low because we already had participants in the districts the final participants were from. If they had been from districts where we didn’t already have participants engaging in this campaign, then the marginal return would have been higher. However, this wasn’t the case.
That’s an interesting distinction between radical actions and radical asks; I think subconsciously I have been thinking about the two interchangeably.
In terms of asks, I think we’ll most likely be sticking to non-radical asks.
In terms of actions, I think we’ll most likely be sticking to non-radical actions. While I see the importance of a pluralistic approach to animal advocacy, we’re thinking about this from the perspective of filling a gap; there already seems to be many activist groups engaging in radical actions.
This is how we’re currently thinking about it, but very happy to be convinced otherwise.