Thoughts my own and don’t represent my employer
ASuchy
Karma: 334
Thanks for the additional insight.
I think you are in a better position to see what is needed. How I would think about this is what leverage do your opponents to these asks have and if you think your actions would be powerful enough to overcome them.
Good luck on the next phase!
Glad to hear it was helpful. I think they are planning to do another piece of research that will incorporate this as well. Awesome organisation.
This is a great write up! Thanks for sharing it!
I’m curious how you see this aspect playing out?
Many MPs are supportive of animal issues but have little incentive to raise it as a political issue. One MP and one staffer said that politicians are often exposed to radical animal activists and need to be shown that animal advocates can be moderate and offer reasonable policy solutions.
I think there is a difference between radical actions and radical asks. If a radical action is asking for a country to immediately stop eating meat, the ask and action are generally considered easy to write off and dismiss as being unrealistic. I think this is often a default view of animal activists. Radical actions (and the threat of them) with a reasonable ask, ie cage-free campaigns, are more difficult to be dismissed.
The issues you chose to focus on from my perspective, seem quite reasonable. Are you considering incorporating more radical actions into your future plans?
If I get it right, your thoughts are how do we mitigate costs, limit logistics and provide better access to major organisations and funders.
I’m excited about and supportive of how AVA has developed regional conferences. I attended the Asia AVA and noticed that numerous funders from other parts of the world were in attendance as well as staff from major organisations. I think the regional events provide a number of other pluses that AVA Africa pretty much say themselves.
By hosting this event on the continent, we can:
Bring together a larger, more diverse group of advocates from the region.
Address logistical and cost barriers such as visa challenges and travel expenses.
Facilitate better-informed and regionally relevant interventions for farmed animals.
Many funders I’ve spoken to have a genuine interest in supporting and growing animal protection work in other parts of the world and I can imagine that their attendance will continue and probably grow at these regional events. I also see potential, that these regional events, might inspire future funders in each region, something I see as important as we continue to grow this work.
I can see that LA might not be the best place if we are looking at a global event, concerns about the scholarship progress and your burning desire to do great things for animals. I also think that the addition of the regional conferences is a fantastic step in improving accessibility for organisations to meet, co-create, build community and fundraise.
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In your post and subsequent comments I sense dissatisfaction with the scholarship process and that your primary goal of attending AVA US is to access funders. I realise you are posting from an anonymous account, so maybe you already do this, but if not. Post about the work your organisation is doing here and on FAST. I’m sure people would love to hear about it. If you haven’t presented at a regional AVA summit or a conference like CARE I think might be a great thing to do.
Working with many food companies on their commitment to transition to a cage-free egg supply. I have seen the following happen, staff gain internal buy-in, publicly state it on their website, in some cases the first time the company has a tangible stated animal welfare position.
I’ve rarely encountered people at a company who don’t care about animal welfare, I think the challenge for them is understanding how they can operationalise it. I think the cage-free work has helped many companies, and staff within them, to move forward and builds inertia.
An example I like of this is Carrefour’s work on cage-free for chickens and then moving forward to create cage-free systems for quail.
I understand that in total corporate commitments cover about 70-80% of the US egg market.
The remainder 20-30% is more or less what you identify, non-chain restaurants and non-chain companies in other industries, where the time to do corporate work is probably not worth it and would be expected to shift following law making.
Many schools and cafeterias use third party catering companies like Sodexo, Compass, Aramark etc, that have cage-free commitments and are making solid progress on their commitments.
If you’re calculating the 40% aggregate by assuming that all the companies have equal market share, that can skew what is happening. The largest in each sector normally have the largest piece. And sector by sector by market share it is grocery stores, restaurant chains/caterers, manufacturing and then hotels.
I agree in the large change in a short amount of time. Small thing, my colleagues at THL recently wrote a blog on an update on USDA numbers which slightly changed the data.
Edit (forgot to add the link)
And I agree with Jakub’s take.
Welfare Footpring Institute, gives a nice overview of the pain reduced moving from cage to cage-free environments here.
Hi, I’m not sure if I have all the answers you need.
I think some reasons for this are:
The term cage-free’ is more understandable for a non-technical audience than deep litter, that as you say is more of a technical term for veterinarians. This is important for public communication and campaigns.
A campaign message is often benefited by keeping it simple, in this case asking for ‘cage-free’ and then as companies and governments adopt agree, we see more deeply defined standards developed and adopted, that do not confine birds to cages and also include other criteria like you are mentioning in deep litter and free-range systems.
- USDA and European Union use the term ‘cage-free’ to describe their standards as do influential organisations in animal welfare advocacy like the RSPCA. As significant advocacy on this issue has happened in these regions, and a large proportion of EA’s come from Europe and english speaking countries where this term is used, the term has probably been adopted as a default.
The terminology might vary by region? I’m not sure where you are based. For example, working in Europe, I have most often heard ‘deep litter’ used when working with German companies.
Overall, I would emphasise, that cage-free is not a standard that is intended to compete with any other definition of housing for laying hens, rather it is a minimum ask, the birds shall not be confined to cages, which allows for significant reduction in their pain.
The ambition and execution your team has continues to inspire me.Looking forward to seeing this continue!
Thanks for sharing this update Stephen, it’s been inspiring to see the recent momentum your organisation has had.
Thanks for looking into this. Two things.
I have heard a number of positive endorsements of https://www.vegan-friendly.com/ work from people that I view has having better insight into this than I.
In conversations I’ve had on cage-free and moving to egg replacements with companies. Perhaps, the largest concern I’ve heard is the fear of a company being reliant on one brand/product. The companies are often of the opinion that eggs give them much more flexibility in their supply chain to scale up/down and shift suppliers. I imagine that egg replacement solutions that share that characteristic might be better received.
Appreciate you thinking about and giving this thought publicly Emre.
A colleague shared a model of three concentric circles representing engagement, attributed to M. Bauman, but I’ve yet to see the original source. The model categorises engagement as follows:
External Partners: “How can I benefit?”
Members: “How can I contribute?”
Core: “How can I serve?”
If I understand correctly, your concern is that the core segment isn’t expanding sufficiently within EA-supported animal organizations. My interpretation of this model is that there should always be an invitation to engage more deeply. The changes you are considering for yourself seem to align with this principle, and I would be very interested to hear about your experiences if you implement them.
Some actions I’m considering:
-Switching to a physical office and using it as a community space. Maybe even sharing space with a vegan restaurant.
-Spending more time in-person with our supporters myself.
I’m not sure whether the issue lies in the prevalence of single-issue communication or in the belief that organisations must embody people power to drive change. If our focus is on achieving quick wins in animal welfare, there might be less emphasis on harnessing people power. Similarly, if an organisation is predominantly funded by a small group of major donors, it may not feel the need to cultivate a large supporter base.
I think growing people power is important and perhaps the strongest tool to do this is local volunteer groups. An example comes to mind of an org that has their flagship campaigns as a cage-free, broiler work and had a local volunteer group run their own campaign to ban pony rides at a local fair. The volunteer campaign used generally the same approach of a pressure campaign that would be used on cage-free and broiler work and gave the volunteer group an up close look at the strategies and allowed them to see and create change that was more tangible and personal to them. I saw this have the effect of deepening the engagement of many of the volunteers to do more of their own work and also engage on bigger asks on the organisations flagship campaigns.
What you propose as your actions on single issue campaigns, I think can happen at local group gatherings where people have space to discuss, and see the variety and nuance in others thinking and importantly take action that drives work forward which I think helps with that engagement. In person informal discussions can also feel like lower stakes in expressing a dissenting view vs sharing on a public forum.
I don’t have any insight into why this grantee wanted to remain anonymous.
I do know of some situations in the animal advocacy space, and advocacy space in general, where it is strategic to not have on the public record (or as little as possible) where one is receiving funding from. Reasons for this might include:
Increased government scrutiny and harassment as a ‘foreign agent’ by receiving money from abroad.
Exposing how groups and initiatives might be connected can damage how their targets interact with them. Ie bad and good cop initiatives having the same funding source can often damage the ability of the good cop to carry out their role.
A local organisation, with large amounts of funding from abroad, can easily be criticised for not representing local interests.
Sometimes it is simply just really useful for adversaries and people, organisations you want to influence to know as little about you as possible.
Probably more reasons I’m not thinking of right now
I hear the concern you raise and also see there are cases where the tradeoff with transparency on distributed funds and setting the grantees up for success may be in conflict. Might some insight into why the grant is anonymous help bridge that gap?
For example:
One of our grantees, who received $291,000, requested that we do not include public reports for their grants as doing so is likely to negatively impact their ability to carry out their work by exposing publicly how they are connected to other organisations.
Love this post, I think animal welfare could benefit significantly, both from an impact perspective and in developing their funding streams by putting more effort in Measure, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and the mission motor is working on this. I’m not sure what their funding situation is like, but it might be an area that appeals to you.
Also, up front I work at THL.
When I started reading about animal charity evaluations, I was struck by how different it was from global health & development. There’s no longer RCTs and high-quality studies, no longer organizations with a long, proven track record. There’s usually no clear estimate of how many animals are impacted, and where there is, the figure is speculative
I think what you are getting at here—the “professionalism” of the global health & development space vs that of the animal space, was a significant factor for me to work in the animal space rather than in the climate space, where I was currently working. It seemed work on factory farming was so neglected and with more focus and attention, significant change could be made here.
When it comes to corporate outreach work on cage-free and broilers my experience has been different to what your partner and I experienced in the climate space. I think this stems from the climate space being much more developed and it being a very ‘standard’ thing executives need to work on. Farm animal welfare for the most part has not been on these companies radars and the organisations doing corporate work have driven this change. For many of the companies Open Wing Alliance members work with, cage-free is often the first animal welfare policy a company ever makes and subsequent change for animals has then been easier to advocate for and in some cases has often then come from the company themself, ie Carrefour making a quail cage-free egg policy.
With fulfilment work, my personal experience has shown that attention on the fulfilment of the commitments is definitely needed and we would not be seeing the high fulfilment rates we see in this report without this happening.
From what I can tell the main crux here is how much the change is driven by a company and their associates vs a charity. My perspective from the inside is that there are genuinely people in these companies that care about the work we are doing, but these companies have a lot of things on their priority list and keeping animal welfare at the top of it is a task that requires a lot of effort from charities. I’m not sure how might align on that difference?
Note on the THL numbers, the reported 3.4M is the number of hen spaces that we estimate a company no longer has in cages in 2024 between their previous reported numbers. This differs from Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar where I believe it is also making an estimate of how long would it take for a company to make these changes without these campaigns “Mean years of impact”. Which I think can also give some insight into the role charities play in bringing about this change.
Thanks for shining the spotlight on MEL and animal welfare charities.
Thanks! Working on cage-free and broiler campaigns, I can attest to grit being an essential ingredient for progress.
Love this!
Soldiers win wars. The most accurate map made by the most virtuous scout is worth nothing without soldiers to do something with it.
My experience in animal protection has shown me the immense value of soldiers and FWIW I think some of the most resolute soldiers I know are also the scouts I most look up to. Campaigning is probably the most mentally challenging work I have ever done. I think part of that is constantly iterating through the OODA loop, which is cycling through scout and soldier mindsets.
Most animal activists I know in the EA world, were activists first and EA second. It would be interesting to see more EAs tapping into activist actions, which often are a relatively low lift. And I think embracing the soldier mindset is part of that happening.
Thanks for writing this Jeff. You inspired Caroline and I to write this post.
Thanks thanks for breaking it down Tyler!
In adjusting the portfolio, I think it is also important to consider how important we think US policy is in total for overall change for animals in the US vs the other areas we could dig more into. If we think it is very important, then the current situation might be the reason we need to invest more into US policy work and think more deeply about why the situation is perhaps playing out differently to Europe. FWIW I also am optimistic about policy in the the EU.
For example, a difference I see in animal organizations in the EU compared to the US is I think many of the EU organizations are more focussed on externally appearing as politically neutral than they are in the US. And at the same time it is really interesting how you’ve shown how the ballot initiatives have panned out in the liberal cities here.
Personally being more focussed on corporate engagement work, I notice that US companies need more effort to be held accountable than EU companies. So the US passing legislation would probably reduce the effort needed on corporate accountability work. Whereas, EU legislation will have a smaller impact on corporate accountability work success. Probably not the strongest reason to focus on policy work, but one thing that would make me nervous about us stepping too far away from policy work in a portfolio adjustment.
Thanks for writing this, this is also something I have been thinking about and you’ve expressed it more eloquently.
One thing I have thought might be useful is at times showing restraint with job titling. I’ve observed cases where people have had a title for example Director in a small org or growing org, and in a larger org this role might be a coordinator, lead, admin.
I’ve thought at times this doesn’t necessarily set people up for long term career success as the logical career step in terms of skills and growth, or a career shift, often is associated with a lower sounding title. Which I think decreases motivation to take on these roles.
At the same time I have seen people, including myself, take a decrease in salary and title, in order to shift careers and move forward.