> I personally tend to equate animal welfare with farmed animal welfare, given the scale and extent of suffering in industrial farming, but not everybody sees it that way.
I'm not sure my opinion here is fully thought through, but I think there's an extent to which the scale of suffering in industrial farming is such a bottomless abyss that it's terrifying to begin to look into it. Is it cruel to carry chickens upside down by their legs? Absolutely. But to confront that is to accept the reality that these chickens are living creatures that we have some moral obligation towards, and then how do you live with everything else that we put them through in pursuit of cheap eggs? Easier just to not think about it, keep the dam closed.
I think this is why it's easier to generate outrage over things like foie gras: most people don't eat duck or goose so we can acknowledge the moral problems of foie gras without having to face unpleasant implications that naturally follow. And of course people's discomfort in the UK with the idea of eating horse, let alone dog. I suspect it's also behind why many people are more uncomfortable with the idea of eating hunted wild game (eg venison) than eating farmed meat, despite being food that I think almost all ethical frameworks would say is clearly "better" (wasn't brought into being for the purpose of being killed, lives a wild / "free range" lifestyle, in the absence of wild predators requires hunting to avoid overpopulation leading to ecological damage and then starvation, wasn't bred for unnatural but commercially valuable properties, generally has a less stressful death).
In fact if you follow this through I would suspect that there's actually a strangely inverse relationship in that the more that an animal is likely to be "ethically" raised, then (provided the consumer is familiar with the details) it actually becomes _harder_ for people to eat, because the act of caring for its wellbeing and for seeing the possibility of its existence and experience being something we care about makes it much harder to kill it.
In general cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and people will find ways to avoid it.
"In general cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and people will find ways to avoid it."
Yes, agree. But I think the upshot is that the majority don't want to engage, leaving the field clear for a passionate minority on either side. And I'm asking why is that passionate minority on the animal welfare side not more mobilised/effective?
I'm not sure I follow. A very small minority of people are passionate about animal welfare inclusive of farm animals. A large number of people are passionate about "narrow" animal welfare (pets and "farm animals i don't personally eat"). And I guess my comment is trying to articulate _why_ it is that people can be so passionate about some set of animal welfare issues and yet have such antipathy towards some other (more meaningful) set.
And once you establish that there is this distinction you see the problem that if those concerned with broad welfare try to take it on and mobilize that group concerned with narrow welfare in support of things like the wellbeing of battery farmed chickens, they actively turn _off_ those otherwise allies by pulling them into a contradiction they would sooner involve and that makes them angry and upset.
Consequently it's relatively easy to rack up wins on the soft side (donkey sanctuaries for all!) and very hard to make progress on the hard side. So if you're looking at it from the broader perspective of animal welfare, you don't see a lot of progress because there simply isn't support for the things that would most move the needle on that. It's really just like any other case where passionate minorities struggle to move on an issue where most people are in disagreement with them. The main reason this case feels odd is (I think) simply that people have a tendency to profess something ("I am opposed to animal cruelty") which is only true in a very narrow sense.
Another possible reason is that farm animal welfare proposals are often framed as a tradeoff with lower food prices, which people care about even more. Whether real or just rhetorical, generally politicians are extremely hesitant to do anything that would raise the cost of food. As we've seen with bird flu, people use the price of eggs as a bellwether for the general state of the economy.
I've been reading a lot of Jilly Cooper recently (for defensible reasons! I swear! don't take away my snob card!) and there's a similar sort of paradox in her fictional portrayals: animals are used almost as a moral litmus test, one's attitudes to them the defining aspect of one's moral character; but also, all moral failures towards animals are completely and immediately forgivable without remainder. As such, the only true bastards in her books are the ones who are *consistently* cruel to animals *without reason*: whereas Rupert Campbell-Black is repeatedly abusive towards animals, and yet comes out with his reputation basically intact, and indeed Cooper seems to expect us to think of him as a kind of animal lover (!).
Jilly Cooper novels are obviously not equivalent to high-quality data about British social attitudes (although...?), but this at least has suggested a hypothesis to me. British hatred of animal cruelty is premised on a kind of model of what animal cruelty looks like: pointless, sadistic, inflicted for its own sake by someone morally irredeemable. This type of animal cruelty is super salient in the average British mind, and so when people are asked "what do you think about animal cruelty?", including as part of e.g. letter-writing campaigns to MPs, they tend to index their answers to this example (availability bias?). But inflicting suffering on animals for a reason is not thought of in anything like the same terms; and people tend to have a very, very low bar for what counts as "a reason" in this context. Most people think the sport of horseracing counts as a reason; almost everybody thinks meat production does. Once a reason is introduced for _why_ people are being cruel to animals, there's no longer any sensitivity to the scope of suffering: it's "needless" cruelty that riles up Brits, and (for whatever reason) they overindex on "needless" cruelty when asked about animal welfare tout court.
It's just a hypothesis, but I think it's pretty consistent with the data you've presented.
Makes a lot of sense. From a report on animal welfare enforcement I did last year: "Deliberate cruelty or abuse is recognised by all as a form of noncompliance, but is assumed to be relatively small scale – there is a risk that these sorts of breaches hijack the enforcement discussion, with a focus on ‘hard to reach farmers’" at the expense of structurally tolerated harmful practices in the mainstream like tail docking of pigs.
1) Caring about (farmed) animal welfare feels distinctly left-coded. There's long been a small-c conservative interest in the environment that can be leveraged to develop cross-party support for action on climate change - I'm not sure the same has been done here, despite the RSPCA's involvement. Add the fact that farmers tend conservative, and it limits the reach. Unlike climate change, there's no obvious way in which the problem will visibly worsen/force itself onto the public policy agenda.
2) The most vocal farmed-animal welfare organisations are very activist and in-your-face (think PETA). That might be necessary to get media cut-through, but I suspect it puts people off the issue.
3) Related to the fragmentation of the sector, there are huge moral differences between different groups. For some, any consumption of animal products is simply exploitation and thus unacceptable. For others, better farming practices or lab-grown meat feel like real wins. Especially while the sector's fragmented, that's a recipe for ongoing infighting, accusations of selling out, and so on.
4) The fact that confronting this issue requires the public to, to some extent, question their daily actions that they've perhaps been taking their whole lives (and presumably enjoy), makes it inherently a hard sell. And see 2) - there are lots of blockers to more people getting involved.
5) Many people who would undoubtedly be considered 'woke' on all sorts of social issues don't seem to pay any attention to this. I don't quite know why, but it's interesting that as far as I know there aren't big campaigns for employer action on this compared to, say, EDI initiatives.
I don't think 1 is right actually. Or rather, while animal welfare *is* somewhat left coded, Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation was pretty well organised and effective, and it's not so culture warry, here, certainly compared to the US.
3 and 4, are good, important points.
On 5, I think there are some efforts (eg meat free Mondays), and surprisingly wide consensus that meat reduction is good. Probably a net positive that it's not too enmeshed with 'wokery'
I agree it's not as culture warr-y as the US, which is a positive.
On your response to 5, I wonder if that's down to it being linked to climate change - which might reduce meat consumption, but says nothing about standards on days people do eat meat. It kind of goes back to points 3 & 4. If the driver for meat-free Mondays is animal welfare... why is it fine on a Thursday?!
Animals don’t vote
Nor do human children - yet we still try, because of our morality, to represent their interests in our politics and our laws.
> I personally tend to equate animal welfare with farmed animal welfare, given the scale and extent of suffering in industrial farming, but not everybody sees it that way.
I'm not sure my opinion here is fully thought through, but I think there's an extent to which the scale of suffering in industrial farming is such a bottomless abyss that it's terrifying to begin to look into it. Is it cruel to carry chickens upside down by their legs? Absolutely. But to confront that is to accept the reality that these chickens are living creatures that we have some moral obligation towards, and then how do you live with everything else that we put them through in pursuit of cheap eggs? Easier just to not think about it, keep the dam closed.
I think this is why it's easier to generate outrage over things like foie gras: most people don't eat duck or goose so we can acknowledge the moral problems of foie gras without having to face unpleasant implications that naturally follow. And of course people's discomfort in the UK with the idea of eating horse, let alone dog. I suspect it's also behind why many people are more uncomfortable with the idea of eating hunted wild game (eg venison) than eating farmed meat, despite being food that I think almost all ethical frameworks would say is clearly "better" (wasn't brought into being for the purpose of being killed, lives a wild / "free range" lifestyle, in the absence of wild predators requires hunting to avoid overpopulation leading to ecological damage and then starvation, wasn't bred for unnatural but commercially valuable properties, generally has a less stressful death).
In fact if you follow this through I would suspect that there's actually a strangely inverse relationship in that the more that an animal is likely to be "ethically" raised, then (provided the consumer is familiar with the details) it actually becomes _harder_ for people to eat, because the act of caring for its wellbeing and for seeing the possibility of its existence and experience being something we care about makes it much harder to kill it.
In general cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and people will find ways to avoid it.
"In general cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and people will find ways to avoid it."
Yes, agree. But I think the upshot is that the majority don't want to engage, leaving the field clear for a passionate minority on either side. And I'm asking why is that passionate minority on the animal welfare side not more mobilised/effective?
I'm not sure I follow. A very small minority of people are passionate about animal welfare inclusive of farm animals. A large number of people are passionate about "narrow" animal welfare (pets and "farm animals i don't personally eat"). And I guess my comment is trying to articulate _why_ it is that people can be so passionate about some set of animal welfare issues and yet have such antipathy towards some other (more meaningful) set.
And once you establish that there is this distinction you see the problem that if those concerned with broad welfare try to take it on and mobilize that group concerned with narrow welfare in support of things like the wellbeing of battery farmed chickens, they actively turn _off_ those otherwise allies by pulling them into a contradiction they would sooner involve and that makes them angry and upset.
Consequently it's relatively easy to rack up wins on the soft side (donkey sanctuaries for all!) and very hard to make progress on the hard side. So if you're looking at it from the broader perspective of animal welfare, you don't see a lot of progress because there simply isn't support for the things that would most move the needle on that. It's really just like any other case where passionate minorities struggle to move on an issue where most people are in disagreement with them. The main reason this case feels odd is (I think) simply that people have a tendency to profess something ("I am opposed to animal cruelty") which is only true in a very narrow sense.
In Germany there is an animal health party. But it never gets into the parliament
Another possible reason is that farm animal welfare proposals are often framed as a tradeoff with lower food prices, which people care about even more. Whether real or just rhetorical, generally politicians are extremely hesitant to do anything that would raise the cost of food. As we've seen with bird flu, people use the price of eggs as a bellwether for the general state of the economy.
More about that here: https://optimistsbarn.substack.com/i/153089085/the-politics-of-animal-welfare
I've been reading a lot of Jilly Cooper recently (for defensible reasons! I swear! don't take away my snob card!) and there's a similar sort of paradox in her fictional portrayals: animals are used almost as a moral litmus test, one's attitudes to them the defining aspect of one's moral character; but also, all moral failures towards animals are completely and immediately forgivable without remainder. As such, the only true bastards in her books are the ones who are *consistently* cruel to animals *without reason*: whereas Rupert Campbell-Black is repeatedly abusive towards animals, and yet comes out with his reputation basically intact, and indeed Cooper seems to expect us to think of him as a kind of animal lover (!).
Jilly Cooper novels are obviously not equivalent to high-quality data about British social attitudes (although...?), but this at least has suggested a hypothesis to me. British hatred of animal cruelty is premised on a kind of model of what animal cruelty looks like: pointless, sadistic, inflicted for its own sake by someone morally irredeemable. This type of animal cruelty is super salient in the average British mind, and so when people are asked "what do you think about animal cruelty?", including as part of e.g. letter-writing campaigns to MPs, they tend to index their answers to this example (availability bias?). But inflicting suffering on animals for a reason is not thought of in anything like the same terms; and people tend to have a very, very low bar for what counts as "a reason" in this context. Most people think the sport of horseracing counts as a reason; almost everybody thinks meat production does. Once a reason is introduced for _why_ people are being cruel to animals, there's no longer any sensitivity to the scope of suffering: it's "needless" cruelty that riles up Brits, and (for whatever reason) they overindex on "needless" cruelty when asked about animal welfare tout court.
It's just a hypothesis, but I think it's pretty consistent with the data you've presented.
Am fascinated to hear what "research" you've been reading Jilly Cooper for
Makes a lot of sense. From a report on animal welfare enforcement I did last year: "Deliberate cruelty or abuse is recognised by all as a form of noncompliance, but is assumed to be relatively small scale – there is a risk that these sorts of breaches hijack the enforcement discussion, with a focus on ‘hard to reach farmers’" at the expense of structurally tolerated harmful practices in the mainstream like tail docking of pigs.
https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Taking-responsibility-Oct-2024.pdf
A bunch of tangential and unsequenced thoughts:
1) Caring about (farmed) animal welfare feels distinctly left-coded. There's long been a small-c conservative interest in the environment that can be leveraged to develop cross-party support for action on climate change - I'm not sure the same has been done here, despite the RSPCA's involvement. Add the fact that farmers tend conservative, and it limits the reach. Unlike climate change, there's no obvious way in which the problem will visibly worsen/force itself onto the public policy agenda.
2) The most vocal farmed-animal welfare organisations are very activist and in-your-face (think PETA). That might be necessary to get media cut-through, but I suspect it puts people off the issue.
3) Related to the fragmentation of the sector, there are huge moral differences between different groups. For some, any consumption of animal products is simply exploitation and thus unacceptable. For others, better farming practices or lab-grown meat feel like real wins. Especially while the sector's fragmented, that's a recipe for ongoing infighting, accusations of selling out, and so on.
4) The fact that confronting this issue requires the public to, to some extent, question their daily actions that they've perhaps been taking their whole lives (and presumably enjoy), makes it inherently a hard sell. And see 2) - there are lots of blockers to more people getting involved.
5) Many people who would undoubtedly be considered 'woke' on all sorts of social issues don't seem to pay any attention to this. I don't quite know why, but it's interesting that as far as I know there aren't big campaigns for employer action on this compared to, say, EDI initiatives.
I don't think 1 is right actually. Or rather, while animal welfare *is* somewhat left coded, Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation was pretty well organised and effective, and it's not so culture warry, here, certainly compared to the US.
3 and 4, are good, important points.
On 5, I think there are some efforts (eg meat free Mondays), and surprisingly wide consensus that meat reduction is good. Probably a net positive that it's not too enmeshed with 'wokery'
I agree it's not as culture warr-y as the US, which is a positive.
On your response to 5, I wonder if that's down to it being linked to climate change - which might reduce meat consumption, but says nothing about standards on days people do eat meat. It kind of goes back to points 3 & 4. If the driver for meat-free Mondays is animal welfare... why is it fine on a Thursday?!