#185 - Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals

This episode focuses on the urgent issue of factory farming, discussing its detrimental effects, exploring solutions, and evaluating the role of AI in animal welfare.

1. The episode highlights the scale of suffering and environmental damage caused by factory farming.
2. It discusses recent legal wins and global shifts towards alternative proteins, which could pave the way for substantial changes in how farm animals are treated.
3. Concerns are raised about AI potentially maximizing factory farm profits at the expense of animal welfare.
4. Insights from welfare research are influencing new strategies in philanthropy and advocacy.
5. The need for a moral revolution and broader societal recognition of the issue is emphasized.

1: Introduction

Lewis Bollard and host Luis Rodriguez discuss the scope and impact of factory farming, aiming to contextualize the issue for new listeners. Lewis Bollard: "Factory farming is where the vast majority of animal products come from, especially in richer countries."

2: The Problems with Factory Farming

In-depth exploration of the harsh realities and practices within factory farms that many consumers are unaware of. Lewis Bollard: "The use of gestation crates and battery cages represent some of the worst cruelties in the system."

3: Legal Wins and Global Trends

Discussion on recent legal victories and increasing global interest in alternative proteins as methods to combat factory farming. Lewis Bollard: "There's been a big win at the US Supreme Court and a growing interest in alternative proteins in China."

4: The Role of AI

The potential impacts of AI on factory farming are analyzed, with a focus on ethical and welfare concerns. Lewis Bollard: "AI could either transform factory farming for better or for worse, depending on how it's implemented."

5: Philanthropy and Strategy

How new welfare research influences philanthropic strategies and the distribution of grants aimed at ending factory farming. Lewis Bollard: "Our grant making has been influenced by projects like the Moral Weights project, guiding how we support animal welfare initiatives."

1. Educate yourself about the realities of factory farming to make informed choices.
2. Support legal reforms aimed at improving animal welfare standards.
3. Consider incorporating alternative proteins into your diet to reduce reliance on factory-farmed products.
4. Engage in or support advocacy and awareness campaigns against factory farming.
5. Donate to organizations working on animal welfare and legal challenges against inhumane practices.

"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, 'Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.' I think another possibility, which I don’t understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values. And I think in particular there’s a risk that if AI is learning from what we do as humans today, the lesson it’s going to learn is that it’s OK to tolerate mass cruelty, so long as it occurs behind closed doors. I think there’s a risk that if it learns that, then it perpetuates that value, and perhaps slows human moral progress on this issue." —Lewis Bollard

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Lewis Bollard — director of the Farm Animal Welfare programme at Open Philanthropy — about the promising progress and future interventions to end the worst factory farming practices still around today.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

The staggering scale of animal suffering in factory farms, and how it will only get worse without intervention.Work to improve farmed animal welfare that Open Philanthropy is excited about funding.The amazing recent progress made in farm animal welfare — including regulatory attention in the EU and a big win at the US Supreme Court — and the work that still needs to be done.The occasional tension between ending factory farming and curbing climate changeHow AI could transform factory farming for better or worse — and Lewis’s fears that the technology will just help us maximise cruelty in the name of profit.How Lewis has updated his opinions or grantmaking as a result of new research on the “moral weights” of different species.Lewis’s personal journey working on farm animal welfare, and how he copes with the emotional toll of confronting the scale of animal suffering.How listeners can get involved in the growing movement to end factory farming — from career and volunteer opportunities to impactful donations.And much more.

People

Lewis Bollard

Companies

Open Philanthropy

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Lewis Bollard

Content Warnings:

Discussion includes graphic descriptions of animal suffering in factory farms; listener discretion advised.

Lewis Bollard

I think as a society, we've already decided that animals do matter. Most nations have animal cruelty laws. In the United States, for example, every state has an animal cruelty law that makes it a felony to abuse at least mammals and birds. And so if you did to a pet pig what a factory farm does to their pigs, if you mutilated part of its body, if you kept it in a small crate, you would be committing felony animal cruelty. In the US.

We've already made that decision as a society. So if you think that factory farming's are okay, you really need to say companion animal abuse is okay, too. You need to be fine with people kicking their dogs. And if you're fine with that, you need to ask, is that the world we want to live in?

Luis Rodriguez

Hi, listeners, this is Luis Rodriguez, one of the hosts of the 80,000 Hours podcast. In today's episode, Louis Ballard joins us for a third appearance on the show to give an updated overview of the problem of factory farming and talk through the recent wins and challenges still ahead of us. We talk about the worst factory farming practices that most consumers don't know are widespread recent successes for farmed animal welfare, including a big win at the US Supreme Court and China's interest in alternative proteins, how AI could transform factory farming for better or worse, and Lewis fears that the technology will help factory farms maximize profits at the expense of animal welfare, how new welfare research is influencing his grant making, including the Moral Weights project I discussed with Bob Fisher a few episodes back, and much more. Before we dive in, I wanted to flag two things, though. So first, Louis and I spent some of the interview talking about the basic case for ending factory farming.

And if you're already familiar with the arguments for why factory farms are terrible, the first chunk of this episode will probably be too introductory for you. So I'd recommend skipping ahead to our conversation about the solutions Lewis is most excited about right now. Second, I find that sometimes it's easy to gloss over the massive scale of suffering. But with billions of animals alive in factory farms today, suffering from extremely cruel practices beyond imagination, I wanted to face that discomfort head on to really drive home the urgency of ending this system as soon as possible. So because of that, I want to warn listeners that some of our discussion of factory farming is pretty visceral and graphic.

Okay, with all of that out of the way, I bring you Lewis Ballard.

Today I'm speaking with Louis Ballard. Lewis leads open philanthropy strategy for farm animal welfare and studied social studies at Harvard University and has a law degree from Yale Law School. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast a third time, Louis. I'm excited to be back. So I hope to talk about some of the interventions that you think are most promising for ending factory farming as soon as possible.

But first, let's talk about just why factory farming is an especially pressing problem. So, open philanthropy has made, I think, over 340 grants to improve the lives of animals confined on factory farms. And I guess, to end factory farming entirely, which I think comes out to something like hundreds of million dollars. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but, yeah. What exactly is factory farming?

And why is farmed animal welfare one of Openfill's kind of major priorities? Thanks. So, factory farming is a system of confining animals together as closely as they can be to produce meat as cheaply as possible, with no regard for the wellbeing of the animals. We've been drawn to this cause area due to its scale. So there are more animals alive on factory farms today than humans have ever lived on earth.

Lewis Bollard

Due to its tractability, we think the movement has achieved some really big gains, affecting over a billion animals alive at any point in time, and also due to its neglect that this is an issue that receives far too little attention from other funders and from. From politicians and from society at large. Yeah, yeah. The number or the kind of figure that there are more animals on factory farms alive today than humans have ever lived always completely blows my mind. Do you have concrete numbers?

Luis Rodriguez

In some ways, I think they'll. I won't be able to comprehend them, but I'm also. I don't know. I think I can imagine some people being curious. Yeah, absolutely.

Lewis Bollard

So there are about 6 billion mammals alive on factory farms at any point in time. About 28 billion birds, and we estimate about 115 billion farmed fish. And then on top of that, we catch every year, one to 3 trillion wild caught fish. So, to put that into perspective, for every person in the world who consumes animal products, there is roughly one mammal, three birds, and 14 farmed fish alive at any point in time on a factory farm. And obviously, if you're in the rich world and you consume more animal products than the average person in the world, there are more animals than that.

So it's really a huge scale, even if you just think on the level of the individual consumer. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I have to admit, I don't have this anymore. But I remember a time when I believed that factory farms were maybe not uncommon, but not where plenty of animal products came from.

Luis Rodriguez

Do you happen to know what percent of all animal products come from factory farms. Yeah. So I very much relate to that. I grew up in New Zealand, where you don't ever see factory farms. And we actually had a farm as a kid that would go to that.

Lewis Bollard

The animal seemed perfectly happy. And so I was very much kind of under this illusion as well, that this is where all of our meat comes from. Unfortunately, it's the case that in most rich countries, almost all of our animal products come from factory farms. In particular, for chicken, it's 99%, for eggs, it's 99%. For farmed fish, it's somewhere close to that.

And for pork, it is, too. I think the one exception is for beef and dairy, and actually for sheep or goat. For those who eat that, those numbers are a lot lower. But if you're looking at the most commonly consumed meats, it's very, very high. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Okay. And we're going to talk more about the kinds of experiences these animals have in a bit. But while terrible, do you have a couple of things that come to mind when you think about kind of the most horrible things that are happening on factory farms? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the worst things that I've seen is the use of gestation crates, which are these coffin sized crates that are used to confine pregnant sows during their pregnancy.

Lewis Bollard

They are then moved from a gestation crate to a farrowing crate when they give birth, which is almost as small. And then they move back to a gestation crate, and in both of these crates, they don't have enough space to turn around. So not only are they not mixing with other pigs, they're not able to express any of their natural behaviors. They literally can't turn around. And they live in these crates for three years.

If they survive that long, they have pretty high mortality rate, but that's really their entire existence. I think another iconic cruelty of the system is battery cages, which is a slightly larger cage that's used to confine four to six birds in about the size of a microwave. And again, they spend all of their time in these cages. I remember someone once asking me when they learned about battery cages. So, like, how often do they get let out?

When do they get the exercise? And the answer was never. I think it's just kind of mind boggling to people that you could actually keep an animal completely confined and mobilized for its entire life. Yeah. The brain does these mental gymnastics to be like, surely this is fine, because if it weren't, it'd be horrendous torture.

Luis Rodriguez

Like, I think when I first learned about gestation crates, I was like, that must be, it must be natural for a pig to be immobilized for months while pregnant. Like, otherwise, that would be a horrible and ridiculous and strange thing to do. Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you go to a farm sanctuary or even a high welfare farm, you'll see that all these farm animals are complex, curious creatures. So pigs love to roll around in the mud to cool off because they can't sweat.

Lewis Bollard

They love to nuzzle up against other pigs. They love to play with straw. And in general, they're very curious animals. I think that's true of chickens as well, actually. Very curious animals love to explore.

And, yeah, it does just make it all the sadder to think about these animals immobilized, where they have these very strong instincts, these very strong desires to go and explore, to socialize, to interact with the world, and we curtail all of that. Yeah, I mean, it's just every time I hear about it, I am shocked again. I guess aside from the animal suffering component, another argument often made in favor of ending factory farming is around climate change. How big of a factor is climate change for you in your grant making? Yeah, that's right.

So it's. I mean, the climate impact of animal agriculture globally is about 15% to 20% of global emissions. And it's a much larger share of methane, which is a particularly potent and short lived gas, which is actually getting a lot more attention, because if you care about climate change on really short timelines, then potent short lived gases like methane are disproportionately important. So it's been great, actually. We've seen in recent years a lot more attention from the climate community toward the emissions of animal agriculture.

I think one risk in taking a climate approach to this is that there are some band aid solutions that are not good for animals. So, for instance, getting people to substitute from relatively higher emission beef to relatively lower emission chickens and fish could be good for the climate, very bad for animals, realize a lot more animals, and that they're going to suffer a lot more. Similarly, we've seen a push globally for what's called sustainable intensification, which is basically to say if you pack animals more closely together, they will have ever so marginally fewer emissions. And so this has become a new rallying cry of factory farms, of, oh, we need to factory farm for the sake of climate emissions. And unfortunately, it's been picked up by a number of international institutions like the Food and Agriculture Organization.

So I think the better solution from a climate and animal point of view is to move relatively away from factory farm meat and meat in general, and toward alternative proteins, toward plant based proteins. I think that that is something which satisfies both the animal and climate objectives. Yeah. Makes sense. I have not heard this cry for intensifying factory farming for the sake of the climate that's so, so disturbing.

Luis Rodriguez

And, yeah, I'm tempted to go on a digression about that and ask more, but I think for now, let's stay on track. Sounds good. Okay. So it's very important. And then you've also said it's a neglected issue.

Yeah. How much funding is spent on ending factory farming annually? Yeah. So our estimate is that globally, if you put together the budgets of the hundreds of groups working on this issue all around the world, including partial budgets of groups that are working partially on this issue, we think you get about $290 million annually. And that can sound like a lot of money.

Lewis Bollard

But when you spread that across over 100 countries, over hundreds of groups, across every method of advocacy going on, from alternative proteins to vegan advocacy to animal welfare reforms, that gets a lot smaller pretty quickly. And as a result, most of the groups you see in this space have budgets in the single millions or smaller. And particularly within certain niches within farm animal welfare, like paying attention to the wellbeing of farmed fish, the budgets are much, much smaller. Can you put those numbers in context? How do they compare to, say, climate change charities?

Yeah. So I saw recently a relatively conservative estimate of the amount of philanthropy going to climate change work, and that was eight to 12 billion per year. Some other comparison points. 290 million is about one third of Oxfam's global budget. It's also less than the budgets of a lot of individual environmental groups.

It's even less than the budget of individual companion animal groups like the ASPCA has a budget of over $300 million. Wow. I think I expected you to say something compelling, but that totally took me by surprise. That's really shocking. Okay, let's talk through some common objections to the prospect of ending factory farming.

Luis Rodriguez

I suspect a very common one is just the animals that are being factory farmed. So chickens, pigs, fish, and other animals just don't matter morally, either because they aren't conscious in the way that humans are or because they're just fundamentally not important or valuable in the way humans are. How do you respond to that argument? I think as a society, we've already decided that animals do matter. Most nations have animal cruelty laws.

Lewis Bollard

In the United States, for example, every state has an animal cruelty law that makes it a felony to abuse at least mammals and birds. And so if you did to a pet pig what a factory farm does to their pigs, if you mutilated part of its body, if you kept it in a small crate, you would be committing felony animal cruelty. In the US. We've already made that decision as a society. So if you think that factory farmings are okay, you really need to say companion animal abuse is okay too.

You need to be fine with people kicking their dogs. And if you're fine with that, you need to ask, is that the world we want to live in? The other thing I'd say is I think that the most common moral error that we have made in history is excluding others from our moral circle without a valid basis. And I don't think there's a valid basis here. I mean, if you just say, well, it's because they're a different species, that's a circular argument.

Why does it matter that there are different species? I think if you say it's because of their intelligence. Well, what about child abuse laws protecting newborn infants? The other thing I'd say is there's a really lopsided calculus here. So if you're right that animals don't matter, you get slightly cheaper meat out of factory farms.

If you're wrong, you contribute to a grave moral atrocity. And so I think you need to be really confident that animals don't matter morally to act based on that belief. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It also just seems like people have found some way to justify to themselves some animals matter and some don't. And it happens to be the ones that are in factory farms that don't arbitrarily, even though, yeah, we've decided that wild animals that are especially interesting and obviously pets, clearly we want to protect them from various bad things.

Luis Rodriguez

And it's just a coincidence that the animals we put in factory farms, they're the ones that I guess are very unique in either not feeling pain or just being completely insignificant. And I guess, yeah, I'm surprised by how easy a maneuver that seems to be for people. And I guess, how common do you think? That's just like, motivated reasoning is easy and common, and people do it all the time, and we've been doing it a long time for factory farming. And so people are just really used to thinking that way.

Lewis Bollard

I think so. I mean, I think you definitely see this with factory farming executives who have pet dogs and they don't abuse their dogs. You know, these are animals. The pigs that they're farming every bit as smart, every bit as sensitive and complex as those animals are. I think this is a trend throughout history that we care most about those around us.

And the project of getting people to care beyond their immediate family, beyond their immediate community, beyond even their immediate nation, and then ultimately beyond their own species, I think, is the project of moral progress and expanding our moral circle. And so what makes me optimistic is that I do think that a huge amount of the moral progress we've seen in history has been expanding that circle. And I think, and I hope that we will continue to see it expanding. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I guess another big objection is around food security.

Luis Rodriguez

So I can hear some people saying we wouldn't be able to feed 8 billion people without factory farming. Yeah. So we might not be able to with the current american diet. I think that if everyone ate a little less meat, we easily could. I mean, plant based agriculture has a far smaller land footprint than animal based agriculture does, basically because instead of growing a whole lot of crops, feeding them to animals, and then taking the output of that, you're just taking the crops.

Lewis Bollard

And as a result, if we had a more humane system of agriculture. Yeah. Probably would need people to eat a little bit less meat. I think that'd be good for the climate, too. I think it would probably also be good for people's health.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Nice. I guess another big objection I've heard is around, just like, the economics of ending factory farming. Factory farming must be a huge share of national gdp for many countries. And then I guess lots of people, like many, many, many people would lose their jobs if we ended factory farming.

Does that feel weighty to you? Or does it just feel like a necessary consequence of doing the thing that's morally right? I think it's a real challenge and a big one, but I think it's something we're up to. So animal agriculture is about 1.5% of global GDP. That's big.

Lewis Bollard

But it's still about four to eight times less than the energy sector, which we are completely overhauling to bring down climate emissions globally. Without factory farming, people are still going to need food. We're still going to need agriculture and plant agriculture or higher welfare. Animal agriculture is also going to contribute to nation's GDP's. And then in terms of jobs, I think higher welfare farming just offers far better jobs.

So, I mean, I remember talking to former factory farmer of chickens and you, he was telling me that basically his job was every day to go through the barn and take out the dead chickens. And that was. That was the main thing he did. And as a higher welfare farmer, that's not what you're doing. You're actually interacting with your animals.

There's real stockmanship. There's really a sense of being part of something that matters. So I think that ultimately, I'm not sure we would even have less economic activity. I think we might have more, and I think it would be a better kind of economic of activity. Another common objection, I guess, is just that animal products are part of a balanced diet, or eating them is kind of natural, and so it might be bad for our health if we cut them out altogether.

Luis Rodriguez

I guess a version that I'm even more sympathetic to is the argument that animals were part of humans ancestral diets, as we are evolving. And so it might be genuinely important for us nutritionally, I guess. That said, I'm mostly eating, I don't know, like potato chips and pizza, which I think was not part of my ancestral diet. But I'm curious. Yeah.

To what extent do you think there's truth to this concern? Well, I think insofar as the ancestral diet is the ideal diet, it wasn't eating factory farm chicken. Sure. What we know about cavemen's diet is it was a mixture of eating a lot of very high fiber plant foods, like roots. And then when they got a chance to scavenge meat that a bigger predator had brought down, they would scavenge that meat.

Lewis Bollard

And so if someone wants to live a modern paleo diet of eating roots most of the time, and then occasionally eating the parts of an animal that no one else wants to eat, the organs, for instance, I think that could be a very humane diet. And I think that might be the real paleo diet. The other thing I'd say is that even if our stomachs and our teeth haven't evolved since our ancestral time, our morals have, and our ability to eat more humanely has as well. I mean, I'm a big fan of modern science. We synthesized vitamin B, twelve.

We can now live on a healthy vegan diet. In fact, if you look at the populations that have been living the longest on meatless diets, populations like Jains, certain hindu populations, and 7th day advantists, they tend to do pretty well on health outcomes. Now, they often tend to not drink alcohol and not smoke either. So I'm not saying it's all not eating meat, but at the very least, we don't see the worries that you sometimes see online, that you know you'll rot away into nothing if you give up on meat. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Right. Another one. And we're going to talk about this more in a bit, but a very different and maybe less familiar kind of argument against working on ending factory farming now is we might, at some point in the not too distant future, have AgI, artificial intelligence that is similarly intelligent to humans, or more intelligent, and Agi might be able to just solve the problem of factory farming much better than humans can. Now, what's your reaction to that?

Lewis Bollard

I hope it's true. I think it's really hard to know because it's very hard to envisage what that world, post Agi, would be like. I'm personally a little skeptical, and the reason for that is that it seems to me like, post Agi, we will have incredible technological progress and likely a vast explosion in wealth. I don't think either of those things are the thing holding us back from ending factory farming. We have enough wealth to end factory farming today.

We have the technology to end factory farming today. What we lack is the political will, and I'm unsure whether AGI will change that. I think that's changing political will is something that requires you to change what people believe, to change the incentives of politicians. And I think that that may be something that still requires moral suasion. Hmm.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay. Let's talk more about that in a bit. Actually, for now, another objection that I'm kind of sympathetic to is, if you, like me, are very convinced that the suffering of non human animals is a super real and important problem. Is ending factory farming the most important issue facing non human animals? For example, there are orders of magnitude more wild animals, and the issue of wild animal suffering is probably, well, almost certainly much more neglected in terms of funding, at least.

Yeah. Do you put some weight on that? Is that something that crosses your mind? Yeah, I do. I worry a lot about the suffering of wild animals.

Lewis Bollard

I agree. It's a huge problem, and I'm really glad people are working on it. And as you say, it's very neglected. I think wild animal initiative is really the only large group working on this, and they're not that large in terms of how do we weigh up work on wild animals versus farm animals. I think, for me, a key factor is the tractability of that work.

We have ways of helping farm animals that have track records that we can replicate and scale. We don't yet have that for wild animals. We have the potential to find those ways in future, but I think it's going to require a lot of research. And I think one thing that for some listeners coming to this, they may think, well, look, just conserve the species. Just look after a particular piece of habitat.

That seems relatively easy. There are groups doing it around the world. The trouble is, we don't know if that actually raises the average welfare of the animals in that ecosystem. It's really hard to work out what does. And in particular, the vast majority of animals are not the iconic species that most wildlife protection work focuses on.

They're not wolves. They're not bears. They're fishing or they're mice. They're tiny animals. And sometimes it's just very hard to work out what we can do to robustly help those animals in a way that doesn't cause harm to other animals in the ecosystem.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, and it's something I really wish I knew more about. But for now, are there any other objections that give you pause? Honestly, I hear surprisingly few philosophical objections. I remember when I first learned about factory farming and I was considering whether this was an issue to work on. I went out to try and find the best objections I could because I was like, look, it can't possibly just be as straightforward as this.

Lewis Bollard

It can't possibly just be the case that we're torturing animals just to save a few cents. And the only book I was able to find at the time that was opposed to animal welfare and animal rights was a book by the late british philosopher Roger Scruton. He wrote a book called Animal Rights and Wrongs. And I was really excited. I was like, cool.

We're gonna get this great philosophical defense of factory farming here in the preface. The first thing he says is, obviously, I'm not gonna defend factory farming. That's totally indefensible. I'm gonna defend why you should still eat meat from high welfare animals. And so I found this continually.

I mean, it was the same thing when I was on the debating circuit. You can't propose as a debating topic ending factory farming. It's considered what's called a tight topic, meaning it's so obviously right that it's an unfair thing to propose as a debating topic. No kidding. So I think we have this recognition that it's wrong, and so much of why it continues to exist is just inertia.

It's the status quo, it's the political power. But it's not because there's some kind of reasoned defense of factory farming out there. Yeah, I do still feel like I can access this feeling of, like, chickens and fish do just seem really different to pigs and cows and dogs and obviously humans and so maybe they, and I think they make up kind of the bulk of factory farmed animals. Maybe it's possible that they're not feeling intense suffering or intense joy, and so maybe that makes this whole thing less of a pressing problem. Yeah, I certainly relate to the feeling that it's hard to empathize with a chicken or a fish.

I mean, they look so different to us. They've got feathers, they've got scales, they have these weird ways of acting. Uh, but I don't think that's a reason to not give them moral consideration. And I think, in particular that if you think about the evolutionary basis of pain and suffering, it's something that's pretty conserved across species because it. It performs this very important function.

If you're a animal that can learn, then pain is going to be a strong reinforcer, and there's no reason to think that that pain is going to be worse. If you're a smarter animal, I mean, there are some reasons to think it might be less bad. As a smarter animal, you can rationalize, and you can take the signal from a small pain and extrapolate from that. And if you're a less smart animal, you can't. So maybe you need a bigger pain to have the same effect.

Maybe it feels worse because you can't imagine it ending. And so I think it's about those kinds of suffering. I completely agree that it seems unlikely that a fish has existential doubts about the meaning of life in the world. Although the other thing I'll say is that the more we learn about these animals, the more we do see complex emotions. Yeah, I do feel like every time I learn more about what the experiences of non human animals are, like, it's never gone in the direction of, like, they don't have complex things going on.

Luis Rodriguez

It's always gone in the direction of, oh, wow, like, zebrafish have that capability. Really? I never would have guessed. And it does just seem like if you're updating in the same direction a bunch of times, that's probably the way that you're gonna keep updating if you learn more and more. Yeah.

Is there anything else you'd say to someone who still feels like. No, but they just don't, they just don't matter, they're just not. They're just categorically different to humans. Yeah, I guess I'd say that there's a possibility of that, but you should think about this probabilistically. I mean, it's.

Lewis Bollard

If we're gonna inflict this grave suffering, how confident do you feel that these animals don't matter. And then I'd also interrogate. Why do you feel that? What is the basis? I mean, is it intelligence?

But it seems like intelligence doesn't correlate with suffering within humans, so why would it correlate with suffering within animals? So I think you really need to interrogate what's driving that? And is it just that this is a really inconvenient conclusion to reach? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

Luis Rodriguez

It's true that I don't feel like smarter people I know suffer more or less. And I guess also, just thinking about babies, they seem less smart, and I don't have the impression that they suffer less. If anything, I worry that maybe it's terrible to be a baby because you are hungry and, I don't know, have tummy issues a lot and only kind of very, very coarse grained ways of getting help and feeling things. So, yeah, I find that personally pretty compelling. You know, the example of babies is a good one because for decades, doctors did painful things to babies without giving them pain relief.

Lewis Bollard

And the reason was that the babies couldn't say anything about it. And by the time they grew up, they didn't remember it. And so there was an assumption that they didn't feel pain. And we can see in retrospect, that was a real moral error. I mean, that was just so obviously it was more convenient to not give them pain relief.

And I think there's a similar thing with animals where it's, we start out from this default of, well, if they can't tell us it's painful and if we don't know them like humans, then we won't, you know, we just won't worry about it. And I think that's the wrong default to start from thing. Yeah. So those are some common objections. Let's move on to potential solutions, I guess.

Luis Rodriguez

To start, do you have a kind of vision for what that path to ending factory farming will look like? I think there will be a number of different paths, and I don't know which ones will be more important. Hopefully, they will reinforce one another. Sure. I think some of the most important paths will be, first, a moral revolution in how we think about animals and how we view this issue.

Lewis Bollard

And, you know, as I mentioned, I think people already agree that factory farming is wrong, but they don't pay much attention to it. They don't treat it like the moral crisis it is. And so I hope that one day factory farming will be seen the way that climate change is increasingly seen today, as a real crisis that needs to be addressed by society. Second, I hope we will see progressively higher animal welfare standards, both from governments legislating and from corporations raising standards in their supply chains. And then third, I hope we'll see much wider adoption of alternative protein and reduced meat consumption.

And I think, combined, each of those things can reduce demand for factory farm products and reduce how bad factory farms are until ultimately you can end factory farming. Nice. Yeah, I hope we see it broadly. How do you decide which interventions to fund? And I guess also which specific groups to fund to run those interventions?

Our goal is to help as many animals as we can, as much as we can, and the challenge is working out how to do that. We look at a couple of things. So the first is the scale of the problem that a group is working on. If a group is working on the plight of farmed fish in China, there are just a lot more animals they can affect than a group that is focused on sheep somewhere else. I think that we then look at the tractability of the intervention that the group is pursuing.

Is there evidence that this intervention works? Has it worked in the past? And the track record of the group? So does the group have a track record of success in pursuing this intervention? Is this something we can confidently feel like they know how to do this, they've done it in the past, we can scale it up if there's not a track record, if this is maybe more speculative or a longer term play, we try to vet the path to impact.

So we try to look at what are the steps that would be required to get to the long term goal? How realistic are those steps? Do they logically lead to one another? And what evidence is there about whether we're on that path, about whether the group has achieved those initial steps? But then there is also just some degree of needing to look at plans and just assess plausibly how strong do these plans look?

And it's not always possible to pin down the exact numbers. We try as hard as we can to do that, though. Nice. Yep. That seems extremely, extremely sensible.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. I'm grateful to you for doing all that work. So I guess from that it sounds like seven key areas or portfolios have kind of popped out. And you focus on, I think, cage free reforms, broiler chicken welfare, fish welfare, farmed animal welfare in Asia, farmed animal welfare in Europe, alternatives to animal products and animal welfare science. And I want to talk a bit about each of those, but let's start with cage free reforms.

Yeah. Why? Is this one of your top priorities? Yes, there are about 7.5 billion layer hens globally, and at least 90% of them are kept in battery cages, which I mentioned earlier, these tiny containers that chickens are kept in for their entire lives, where they're denied everything that we know matters to hens. They're denied access to dust bathing, they're denied access to a perch.

Lewis Bollard

Chickens like to go up and perch at night. They're denied access to a nesting box, which there are studies showing that a hen who hasn't eaten for 24 hours will still prefer to go in to a nesting box than to get food. That's how much the hen wants to go into a nesting box. Oh, wow. And so these, we know that these environments are just depriving animals of their most basic needs, their most basic desires.

Luis Rodriguez

That's really awful. Okay. And then I guess one of the interventions you fund here is corporate campaigns. Yeah. Can you say what a corporate campaign aims to achieve and how people go about doing it?

Lewis Bollard

Yeah. So there's a real disconnect between what consumers assume, how consumers assume the animals in a corporate supply chain are treated and how they're actually treated. Where consumers, I think, normally have a sense that if they get eggs at McDonald's or buy them at a supermarket, that they've been at least decently, humanely raised. And surveys show this. Most people don't think they're buying factory farm products because they're not labeled as factory farm.

Eggs from caged hens aren't even labeled as caged. They'll often say something like farm fresh on them. As a result, what groups we fund have done is gone to these companies and said, look, this is completely inconsistent with what your consumers expect of you, and we want you to adopt higher standards. Specifically in this case, we want you to adopt cage free eggs, which is feasible as something for the company to adopt. And then depending on the company's response, if the company is not open to that conversation, they'll then campaign against the company and launch a public campaign to get them to raise their animal welfare standards.

Luis Rodriguez

Cool. And that kind of looks like, I don't know, trying to tell people what it's like for layer hens, in reality, hoping that the corporations will be like, oh, this is going to be bad. We should really figure out some change that's cost effective for us to make so that we don't lose business. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it can be a whole mixture of tactics.

Lewis Bollard

So one example would be groups in the last few years have run these global campaigns to get multinational companies to commit to going cage free globally. And in that case, a lot of that campaign is focused around activating activists all over the world. And so let's say it was, you know, Burger King was one of these groups having people go to Burger King outlets. I think some of them were dressed in chicken suits and protesting and drawing attention to the way these animals treat us. And they'll protest outside of their headquarters.

They'll reach out to key executives, they'll reach out to people throughout the company, and really just trying to put on that pressure. But again, the pressure only works because this is something that consumers care about. It only works because the company is ultimately afraid of their consumers knowing the truth about how they're treating animals. Yeah. How far down this?

Luis Rodriguez

I don't know. Probably increasing pressure. Y pipeline do activists tend to have to go before a corporation's willing to pledge to change the way they're treating their animals? Yeah, my sense is, in most cases, they don't need to go very far. So in most cases, it's enough to go to the company and say, look, we know that you're mistreating animals or paying someone else to mistreat animals in your supply chain.

Lewis Bollard

And perhaps we have investigative footage, and so we can tell you that that's something we will release when we do a campaign. Oftentimes they're going to companies and saying, hey, here's what the campaign would look like. And oftentimes, I think that's enough for a company to say, okay, yeah, that's not a campaign we want to have happen. And in particular, they see the visuals. They see the video.

They're like, yeah, we don't want our consumers to see that. I think there is, most of the time, it doesn't ultimately lead to a public campaign. Yeah, okay. Okay. I guess when the evidence is that compelling, you don't need to pull out all the stops.

Luis Rodriguez

You say, we're going to show this video of this really horrible thing. We don't have to dress it up. It's just terrible. And if people see it, they will be mad. So then they're kind of pledging to either change their own practices or have their supplier change their practices.

And that's typically going cage free. How much better is life for cage free layer hens than life in a battery cage? Yeah, we think it's a lot better. It's certainly not a perfect life for a hen. But this group, the Welfare Footprint project, has been researching in recent years the relative welfare gain of going cage free.

Lewis Bollard

And I encourage listeners to go onto their website and check it out. It's very compelling to see the ways in which cage tree birds suffer less. A lot of that is around the satisfaction of some of those basic needs we talked about earlier. So not only do cage tree hens have a lot more space to move around, they have access to a perch that they can move up to at night, they have access to a nesting box which they can lay their eggs in, and they usually have access to litter on the floor that they can dust bathe in. So they still don't have access to the outdoors.

They still don't have as much space as I wish they did. But I think that some of the worst deprivations of battery gauges are addressed by cage free systems. I guess my sense is that at least some animal advocates think corporate campaigns to marginally improve the lives of factory farmed animals are not necessarily worth doing because they don't kind of push the sector towards actually ending factory farming altogether. And I guess could even move us backwards by making the sector as a whole less kind of obviously evil. And I get.

Luis Rodriguez

And yeah, and I guess therefore weakening the arguments for ending it. Yeah, altogether. I think some people even believe that these kinds of welfare improvements might even increase the consumption of factory farmed animals because people hear terms like cage free and they think that the lives of the hens that laid those eggs are basically fine or good. And in fact they might still involve pain and suffering because, you know, it is still dark, they still don't have that much room. I think my sense is that they also still tend to have problems establishing social hierarchies and chickens continue to be cruel to each other when they're in that kind of confined environment.

How do you think about this? I think this has been a common objection within social movements throughout history. There have always been people, I think, particularly coming from a marxist perspective, who will oppose incremental reform because it stands in the way of revolution. And I fall very firmly on the incremental reform side. I think that if you look at the history of social movements, very rarely have the people who are trying to end the whole system at once and opposing reforms.

Lewis Bollard

Has that worked out well? And much more often, the progress we've seen has come from incremental gains. And all of those incremental gains run the risk of making people think the issue is less salient. I mean, it's true that when the civil rights movement achieved civil rights progress, that could have made people think, wow, this is less important than it was previously. Things aren't so bad.

In reality, I don't think it did. And I think that's true on our issue too, where I think that when people see hens going from cage to cage free, if they actually look into the issue, it doesn't look that great. It's still not where they want it to be. If anything, it highlights there's a problem. Now, I think the bigger problem is that no one's actually paying attention.

The public's not actually sitting around feeling guilty about the fact that they're eating factory farmed eggs and waiting for someone to solve their consciences by giving them cage for eggs. It's just not happening. I think if they were, there will still be plenty of horrors in factory farms. I mean, if we get rid of some of these, they're still going to. I mean, sadly there will still be battery cages in some parts of the world.

There will be all kinds of other awful things going on. So if that's people's concern, that there need to still be awful things going on, like, sadly there will be no lack of them. The other thing I'd say on that is people see the label cage free. There are so many fake labels out there already that convey stronger things. We know from surveys that consumers think labels like naturally raised or all natural are equally good to cage free.

They think it means that the animals are outside. Most factory farm chicken in the US now has an all natural label on it. So it's not the case that this relatively small portion of the market that is cage free or being labeled legitimately as higher welfare is, are the labels you need to watch out for? I think the labels you need to watch out for are the labels that are all over factory farm meat. Yeah, I'm actually really interested in the kind of how do social movements succeed?

Luis Rodriguez

Bit. Was this something that you considered part of your, I don't know, remit to, like, understand, like, is the way we should expect progress to happen going to be incremental over time? And if so, did you feel like the evidence was just pretty clear on that? I guess it sounds like you did, but I'm curious how much you looked into it and what convinced you. Yeah, I shouldn't overstate it because.

Lewis Bollard

So I did. In college, I studied social movement history and it's been kind of a hobby since then. But one of the things you notice when you read about social movements is everyone has a different take on them. Everyone. And normally their take fits their pre existing ideological bias.

So Marxists want to portray every social movement as fitting within the progression of exactly what Marx said turned out the way he said it would. And incrementalists like me want to say everything was incremental progress. So I don't want to claim that history tells us one thing or the other. I think often history tells us what we want it to tell us. But my personal belief is that there has, at least on this one point of incremental reform versus abolition, that there is more evidence for incremental reform working out over time.

Luis Rodriguez

Yep. Okay, cool. Yeah. And then on just kind of how successful these campaigns have been, I understand that over 3000 companies globally have now committed to go 100% cage free in their supply chains, which is really incredible. And I think this includes almost all of the largest american and european retailers, fast food chains and food service companies, and also a bunch of Asia Pacific food companies, too.

So that's just amazing to me. I actually didn't realize how successful these had been already. But do you have a sense of kind of how that cashes out? Like, how many hens have lived better lives because of these campaigns? Yeah.

Lewis Bollard

So our best count is that there are already about 200 million hens cage free thanks to these campaigns. There's roughly another 250 million who stand to benefit once these pledges are fully implemented. So there are still a lot of corporate pledges that aren't fully implemented yet. And once those are implemented, we think we'll get up to about 450 million hence, and I should say, too, that's the number alive at any point in time. So that's not just a one off thing that's every year going on from now on, because you're changing the system.

So if you wanted to count the number over ten years or 20 years, you're looking at billions of animals. That's incredible. Does that feel like a win to you? Do you kind of viscerally have that sense of, like, I played a part in this, and this is a massive deal. This is millions and millions of beings who were suffering enormously, and they're now suffering less.

Yes. I'm very proud of the advocates who achieved this. I think that all around the world there are advocates who have worked incredibly hard, tirelessly campaigned, and it's always hard as an advocate because there's so much more to do. There's so much more suffering out there. We still are only at the start of this journey, but I do think that they should be very proud of what they've accomplished.

Luis Rodriguez

Nice. Okay, so another focus area is broiler chicken welfare. So broiler chickens are, I think, the most numerous factory farmed land vertebrates. Yeah, I think that's right. Correct me if I'm wrong, how many broiler chickens are alive at any one time?

Lewis Bollard

Yeah, that's right. There are about 20 billion broiler chickens alive at any point in time. That's about one and a half billion in the US, about another billion in Europe, and then the rest spread out across the rest of the world. Okay. Wow.

Luis Rodriguez

That was actually bigger than I was expecting. That's so many. Okay, and then what is it like to be a broiler chicken? At least as best we can tell. Yeah.

Lewis Bollard

So, for broiler chickens, they're not kept in cages like layer hens, but their body is essentially a cage. They've been bred for two things only, for feed conversion ratio. To convert grain as efficiently as possible and to grow as much breast meat as possible. And as a result, they've become these very lopsided, sort of monstrous creations who have organs that can't keep up internally and who have legs that are too weak. And so as a result, we see a lot of them become lame and can't walk anymore.

When they become lame, they end up on the floor of these barns. And the floor of these barns is covered in the manure of prior flocks because the farmers don't typically take that manure out for often as long as a year. And so when they're on this manure, they get these horrible sores and blisters. And literally, this is coming from flesh eating bacteria and gangrene. So trench foot things that humans got in World War one, in the trenches we're inflicting on these royal chickens.

Luis Rodriguez

That's really horrible. Yeah. Sorry, I'm just genuinely. It's really, really horrible.

Yeah. I knew that it was common for their legs to break under their own weight. I did not know that they were regularly getting burns from the floor of the barns. It's really, really, really horrible. Yeah.

So just for anyone for whom that wasn't visceral enough, it's literally that they're genetically, I guess, over time, have been selected for. To become bigger and bigger. So they're not technically always genetically modified, but they are selected to become bigger and bigger such that, like, literally their legs cannot hold them up and they break. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.

Lewis Bollard

And, you know, to say, in fairness, the industry has done the smallest of things to try and strengthen their legs. So, basically, basically, they normally just select on two things for these birds. They select on how, what's called their feed conversion ratio, which is how little feed they can eat for how much they grow, and then secondly, on their breast meat yield, how much breast meat they produce, and they select for that generation over generation over generation until these birds become these huge, abnormal mutants. And then when it gets to a point that it's so bad that the chickens are becoming so lame, they can't make it to the feeders or the water station, then they rein it in a little wee bit, and then they strengthen the legs a little bit. Oh, my God.

But that's the one constraint. That's the one constraint on the system, is can the birds walk a few steps across to the feeder or to the watering station? I'm having a glimmer of sympathy for people who have this kind of double think where on the one hand they kind of know that factory farming is bad, and on the other hand, they, I don't know, carry on consuming animal products because if you actually access how horrible this is, it's like. It's intoler. It's like, just so, so painful to imagine the amount of suffering.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. I guess it makes it a bit clearer to me how most of the people on earth, despite being largely compassionate and, I don't know, decent people, can find ways to put this out of their mind. I guess many of them don't even know it's a thing. But for the ones who do. Yeah.

Lewis Bollard

I mean, I just sound that. I think that's right, that it is really hard to confront immoral atrocity of the scale. And I think there are all kinds of different reactions and defense mechanisms we have. I mean, one is just denial. I think for some people, you really don't want to believe it could be this bad.

And if you. You see the videos, you look at numbers, you say, shit, it is this bad. Then you need to come up with something else. You need to say, well, maybe chickens just don't matter. Maybe they, you know, you need to come up with all kinds of rationalizations, because it is just so confronting to say, there's this amount of suffering in the world.

There's this amount going on that's so wrong. And, you know, the other thing I would say is, I do think that our movement has made a mistake in making this so much about personal responsibility, because I think that we've created a strong sense of guilt in people where they. They look at this and they say, this is so horrible, this is so awful. And I'm being told the only thing I can possibly do is go vegan overnight. And that just feels impossible for me.

That just feels incredibly hard. That's going to change my life. I can't do it. So I'll just forget about the whole issue. I'll just blank the whole thing out.

Luis Rodriguez

Right. And I think a much healthier dynamic would be to say, okay, there's something that's really bad. What can you do? And so for some people that will be going vegan, for some people it'll be eating less meat. For some it will be opposing factory farming.

Lewis Bollard

You know, for a lot, it might just be politically supporting this issue. So saying, you know, I'm going to write to my politician, my local politician, and ask them to do something about this. I think as a movement, we need to move more into that mindset of political change and social change, rather than merely individual change. Yeah, right. I really like that, bringing it back to broiler chickens and hopefully to things that we can do to help them.

Luis Rodriguez

I think this is another space where you're funding lots of corporate campaigns. It's a little harder for me to imagine what the corporate campaigns are advocating for because, yeah, it's not about changing the environment, it's about changing the chicken's biology. So what exactly are they campaigning for? Yeah, that's the number one thing they're campaigning for, is to change the genetics. Oh, right.

Lewis Bollard

Okay. So the groups globally pushing companies to adopt what in the US is called the better chicken commitment, and a slightly different version in Europe called the European Chicken commitment. Both of those are focused, first around switching to higher welfare breeds. So switching to breeds that grow a little bit slower, that have much stronger legs, that we know have better welfare outcomes. Second, reducing stocking density.

And that's not just a matter of giving each of these birds more space. It's also about letting that litter dry out, because when there are birds everywhere on top of it, that's when it gets wet and causes more burns. Whereas if it's completely dried out, it's a lot safer. The other things they're pushing for are more humane slaughter method and then a set of environmental reforms to improve the conditions of the, of the barn. So, for instance, requiring that chickens get 6 hours of continuous darkness a night, where the current standard is that they get 4 hours of intermittent darkness because the producers want to keep them eating.

So they'll wake them up once an hour and make sure they eat and then wake them up again. So there are just a lot of small things like that that are with the system that the set of reforms addresses. And how have we come up with these reforms? Are there, I don't know, welfare scientists out there being like, let's genetically modify chickens to see how we can come up with a breed that is still producing enough chicken meat that, I don't know, the industry will be happy with it, but that. That seems to live a better life.

Yeah, there are. So, in the UK, the RSPCA actually runs field trials on different breeds to look at their welfare outcomes, and they have about 25 criteria. They look at how the birds do on each of these criteria and then they decide, is this bird eligible to count as a higher welfare breed? And so the breeds that we are asking companies to adopt are breeds that are either in the UK, approved by the RSPCA, or in the US, approved by global animal partnership. In both cases, based on large scientific studies, field trials of these actual birds.

Luis Rodriguez

Cool. You mentioned more humane slaughter practices. What is the standard practice and what would be the more humane one? Yeah. So this gets a little grisly, so some listeners might want to close their ears for a minute.

Lewis Bollard

The current practice is water bath, what's called water bath stunning. Now, what they do is they bring in crates of birds off the trucks and workers, and there are very few workers, and they have to work incredibly fast. They're very rushed, will grab bunches of birds at once and shackle them upside down on a conveyor belt. And unfortunately, in this process, a lot of the birds will break their legs or break their wings because they're being shackled in so quickly. They will then this conveyor belt then takes them very quickly to be dunked upside down into a water bath that is electrified.

Now, if everything's going to plan, that water bath should knock them out completely. Unfortunately, in a lot of places, the stunning settings in the water bath have been optimized for meat quality rather than humaneness. And so if you optimize them for meat quality, you end up with a lot of these birds coming out still conscious. The next step is that a blade, an automated blade, should cut their neck. Unfortunately, some birds duck, and if they duck, they just keep going through that step.

And then the next step is the scalding bath. And the USDA actually keeps figures on this in the US, the US Department of Agriculture keeps figures on how many birds end up fully conscious in that scalding bath, and it's about a million a year. And literally, the chicken industry's response is, well, we slaughter 9 billion chickens a year, so that's. That's less than 1%. We're doing great.

But when you think about how horrific that is. It's. It's really crazy. So I'll say that the reform that advocates are pushing for is what's called controlled atmospheric stunning, which is, instead of this whole process, those containers of birds coming from the farm go straight onto a conveyor belt, which goes into a chamber where the birds are slowly rendered unconscious, typically by CO2. They then come out unconscious and they go through the rest of the process exactly the same.

But you can be confident that they're unconscious through that process. Okay, so that is one of the measures on top of the other measures you mentioned. How much success have these campaigns had? How many corporations are agreeing to some of these changes? Yes, they've had a lot of success.

They've won over 500 commitments. And those commitments, when fully implemented, we estimate, should benefit about 360 million chickens alive at any point in time. And because of the short lifespans of chickens, that's actually like 2 billion chickens a year that will benefit. I will say it's still less success than the cage free campaigns have had yet. And we have found these are harder.

We found that retailers are much more sensitive to the price of chicken. And actually, the other kind of crazy thing we found recently is retailers pushing back and saying, well, if we give the birds more space, that's bad for climate emissions. And so particularly, actually, some of the biggest uk retailers, like Tesco, have said, we're not going to adopt the batter trekking commitment because we think that would be bad for climate emissions. And now, I mean, it's technically true that if you give birds more space, if you give them a little more feed, your emission footprint goes up ever so slightly. But, you know, it's really kind of a wild argument that, like, we need to torture animals to incrementally, a tiny little wee bit reduce our emissions footprint.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. And just to. Just to steel man their position. How big is the carbon footprint difference? When you say it's a very tiny improvement, is that like, it's tiny, but it becomes big when you multiply it over many, many factory farms?

Or is it like. No, really, it's pretty tiny and unjustifiable. Yeah. So a group actually just quantified this, and their best estimate was it's between zero to 15%, depending on the farm, depending on the number of factors. But bear in mind, that chicken, it doesn't have a huge carbon footprint in the first place, so it's zero to 15% on a relatively low base.

Lewis Bollard

So we actually looked at what would this mean for Tesco in the UK? What would this mean, given they were one of the players invoking this argument. And our sense was that it would potentially increase their emissions by about 0.26%. So it's about a quarter of 1%. And that's the worst case.

That's if we assume it's 15%. So it's kind of wild. But again, what they say is we don't do anything that increases our emissions. And so that's just a hard line. So unless it's less than zero, they won't do it.

Luis Rodriguez

Wow, that's so frustrating. What do we know about whether companies follow through with these commitments? I don't know, but I wonder if they're legally binding. And I also wonder if, even if they were like, can we actually check all the factory farms to know? Especially if, like, the group's making the commitments are, like, several steps removed from the actual suppliers.

I can imagine it just being really hard to confirm. Yeah, this is a major challenge. So the commitments are not legally binding. And in many cases, I see this as a two step process of advocacy. The first step is to get the commitment.

Lewis Bollard

The second step is to force the company to follow through on it and make sure they do. So things have gone relatively well so far. The Humane league looked at all the pledges that had come to you, all the cage free pledges that had come to you by 2022, and found that 89% of them had been implemented, over 1000 pledges. That number is going to go down, though, in some ways. Like the more willing companies adopted pledges earlier and had shorter timelines.

And so now you've got some of the harder companies and we've already seen in the US, Walmart indicate that they won't make their 2025K tree goal. Kroger, second biggest retail, saying the same thing. So there's going to need to be a lot of sustained campaigning and advocacy to push companies so far through on this and even more so on broilers. I think the thing that we're seeing on broiler chickens is it's hard because you've got a more complex ask. So it's relatively easy to tell if a farm has cages or not.

And that would be a really big thing to lie about. I mean, particularly given these companies are often reporting their compliance to their investors, it would be a form of fraud to tell them. But it's much harder. If you're saying not just the breed, but what's the stock intensity on this farm? It's very hard to know what they're maintaining as the stock intensity.

So part of the requirement of companies is that they have third party auditing of their implementation, but there's still challenges, and in particular challenges about actually getting companies to move forward with implementing these pledges. So they make the pledges and do they get, I don't know, pats on the back? Do they talk publicly about these such that people might think that they are then doing the things and a better company for it and then they can just kind of very easily drag their feet for years or something? Is that how this goes wrong? Well, yeah, they don't normally promote these publicly, and the reason is that they'll typically put it on their website because advocates say, hey, we want you to do that to make sure it's legitimate.

But they won't do more than that because they know that consumers will be shocked to realize that they were using cages all this time. Yeah. And particularly when they've got, like, a ten year phase in, consumers will be like, wait, why? You have a ten year phase in? Why does this.

Luis Rodriguez

For the next ten years, I'm gonna be eating tortured meat. Exactly. Exactly. So they're not typically advertised like that. I think what happens, a bigger challenge with these companies is there's often quite high turnover internally, and so the person who committed to the pledge is often not the person who needs to be implementing the pledge.

Lewis Bollard

The other thing that happens is they have a tendency to say, I mean, the reason why they get these phase ins is because that's actually the timeline necessary to change the infrastructure. But a lot of companies say, oh, great, our pledge only comes due in 2025. We're going to wait till 2025. And then, of course, when 2025 comes around, they'll say, there's not an available supply. We asked our producers, but they said that they couldn't do supply this year.

And the obvious reason is because they asked them too late. So that is a major challenge. And one of the things that groups have been pushing companies on is incremental reporting, reporting where they're at every year and ensuring that that percentage is going up every year, and also ensuring that these companies are telling their producers, hey, we're serious about this pledge. You do need to renovate your facilities by 2025 to be compliant. Yep.

Luis Rodriguez

Nice. Okay. So it sounds like for broiler chickens in particular, this is just really, really hard. How optimistic are you about kind of making it more of a priority to make sure compliance improves and that actually happening in the next, I don't know, 510 years? I'm cautiously optimistic.

Lewis Bollard

I think that advocates have been drawing increasing attention to this issue. I think that we're starting to see some regulators, for instance, in the European Union, pay attention to the plight of broiler chickens. And I think that this is an issue that companies can't avoid forever, that they can't distract their feet on. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we will see some major reforms in the years ahead. Okay, nice.

Luis Rodriguez

Let's turn to fish welfare. So I think the most numerous farmed vertebrate is. But I know very little about the fish industry personally. I don't even really know kind of in what ways fish are being raised by humans for food. Is it majority wild caught?

Is it majority somehow in some watery farm? What is the fish industry like? Yeah, so by volume, about half the global fish capture is from farms, and about half is wild caught, but the wild caught ones are much smaller, so the numbers are way higher. So there are about ten to 30 times as many wild caught fish caught annually as there are farmed fish slaughtered annually. In terms of farming, there's huge variation.

Lewis Bollard

There are over 400 different species of fish farmed globally. Some of them are farmed in inland ponds. Some of them are farmed in offshore nets. Some of them are increasingly farmed in tanks in what really resemble factory farms on land. Okay, so it sounds like there's a big range.

Luis Rodriguez

There is wild caught. There is kind of fish agriculture in ponds. And then there's also fish agriculture in tanks, which I already hate the sound of. So this is a kind of big question because it sounds like the experiences of these fish are probably pretty varied, especially because we're talking about different species. And I imagine I'll make the mistake of thinking that all fish species have the same kinds of lives.

But, yeah, if you can generalize a bit, what are kind of the experiences like in these different contexts? Yeah. So the wild court setup is more straightforward. Basically, the two primary welfare issues there. First, the capture that these fish, a lot of them are being caught in giant nets, and those nets are basically just trawled along for days on end.

Lewis Bollard

So often a fish will be stuck in a giant net with a ton of other fish trying to swim their way out of that net, but they can't and getting slowly exhausted. The second thing is slaughter. And so for those fish who aren't already dead when they're brought on board, and a significant portion have already been crushed before they're brought on board, they basically asphyxiate. So they very slowly suffocate because fish very slowly suffocate out of water. They're only slaughtered after that.

Luis Rodriguez

How fast? There's huge variation in this, so it can be between minutes and hours, but there are certainly some species for which it can take hours. Yeah. So for farmed fish, it varies a lot by the production system. For most.

Lewis Bollard

The most commonly farmed species, they tend to be pretty crowded, and that tends to also affect the water quality a lot. So they often end up in very dirty water with low levels of oxygen. And this can have various effects on abnormalities in their body. It can also lead to very high mortality rates. We see in some forms of aquaculture, you see mortality rates upwards of 50%.

So the majority of the fish are dying. The other thing is, it's relative to other species, it's a very long production cycle. So most fish are farmed for a year and a half or more, compared to for a chicken, like 42 days. So when the conditions are bad, that's a very long time to be spending in those bad conditions. Wow.

Luis Rodriguez

And I imagine this is true of lots of people, and it's not necessarily something I endorse, but I do intuitively find it harder to empathize with fish. And I've heard arguments for why we should think that asphyxiation and being crushed and living in low oxygen environments is probably a thing that is terrible for fish in at least ways related to ways it would be terrible for a chicken or human. But, yeah, I'm curious how it feels to you to think about fish welfare. Have you gotten to the point where you kind of believe very viscerally, yes, fish can suffer, and it is terrible that they're experiencing the things they're experiencing. Yeah, I mean, I think.

Lewis Bollard

I still find it harder to empathize with a fish than with a pig or another animal. I mean, they have beady little eyes, they have scales, they swim around remotely cute. No, they're really not. They're really not. And, yeah, I think that's.

I think it's been a major problem. I mean, I think. I also think the science is still relatively young on understanding what it's like to be a fish. I do feel relatively confident that fish can feel pain. There have been these studies done in which they've shown that fish will make trade offs where part of their tank will be painful and part of it will have food, and also the part that's painful will also have the food.

And depending on how much food there is, and depending on how painful it is, the fish will make different trade offs about whether to go into that. Part of the tank. So it's not just instinctive thing, they're actually thinking, okay, how good is, you know, they're doing a cost benefit analysis, I guess the other thing which I find kind of wild is that increasingly zebrafish, which are very small fish, are being used as a model for depression in human depression research for both anxiety and depression, actually. And not only are they being used as a model for understanding the disease, but antidepressants work on them. So antidepressants, you know, the things that would be called depression like behaviors are stamped out when you give them antidepressants.

Luis Rodriguez

That is insane. Okay, so it seems like you, at least intellectually believe that fish feel pain. And probably on some level you can kind of access that empathy. And I can too, I think, when I really look at that evidence and sit with it. So I'm keen to hear what kinds of practices you think could be changed to make some of these experiences less bad.

Lewis Bollard

Yeah, I think the most basic one is to implement pre slaughter stunning, which is something that we've had for mammals for over 100 years. I mean, it's just a basic expectation that animals would be stunned before they're slaughtered. And, you know, I've seen this where the fish are not stunned before slaughter. It can take a very long time. By contrast, stunned fish can be knocked out almost immediately.

I mean, they could basically to send them through a pipe still in the water so they don't have to be lifted out of the water and they can electrify that water with sufficient charge that the fish gets knocked out entirely. That's something you can do for both farmed fish and actually increasingly for wild caught fish too. Really? How do you do that? So you basically just set up this system on board a fish.

And actually the best version of it is you put a big pump and a tube going down into the net. And so rather than dragging these fish along for days, you're just continuously pumping them up. So as soon as they get in the net, they're getting pumped up and into the stunner. Now, this has not been widely adopted yet. The research is there, but the willingness to take it up is not there yet.

But hopefully we'll see more of that in future. Nice. And is the way you try to convince the industry to do this through something like corporate campaigns or is it something, is it something else? Yeah, I mean, the thing we've actually seen the most progress on to date has been working with sustainability certifiers. So there are a set of certifiers who look at the conditions that farmed fish were raised in and talk about their environmental sustainability.

Traditionally, they hadn't had standards for animal welfare. A few years back, we approached all of the major certifiers and asked them if they'd want funding to develop those standards. And I've been really impressed. They've taken it very seriously. And we already saw a friend of the sea, which is one of the big certifiers, put out standards a couple of years ago.

The aquaculture Stewardship Council, which is another one, has standards going into force next year. Each of these certifiers certifies over a billion fish alive at any point in time. So this is a huge scale of individual animals. And these initial standards are pretty basic. I mean, we're talking about, you know, pre slaughter stunning.

We're talking about some basic water quality parameters, but I think it's a really important first step in getting fish welfare established. Cool. Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Is there another change that this industry could make that you'd be excited about? I think reducing density for the most numerous species.

And this is something we've actually seen a number of major retailers, particularly in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Germany, set some basic standards around. You can't crowd your fish together more than this level. And it's complicated because the right numbers vary by species. Some fish are okay being very close together and some fish are not. But I think that reducing stocking density can both reduce the stress these fish feel.

It can also improve the water quality because there aren't as many fish polluting that water constantly. Yeah, okay, nice. And so what are the concrete things that you're funding in this space? So we funded a lot of research in this space to better understand the humane interventions that we need. So a lot of it's actually gone to universities and to research institutes.

We've also funded. I mentioned the certifiers a moment ago. We funded them to develop standards. We've funded advocacy groups to work with producers, to work with food companies on establishing standards. And we've also funded some work at the European Union level to get the EU to start to finally regulate fish welfare.

Luis Rodriguez

Cool. Okay, great. So that actually reminds me that in an interview Rob did with Andres Jimenez Soria on the shrimp welfare project, Rob and Andres discuss reasons to think shrimp can suffer, what their experiences are like in farm conditions, and an approach to reducing their suffering. And we shouldn't cover those issues here. The listeners who haven't heard it should really go listen to it.

It's a great episode. But, yeah, for now, are there things in the shrimp welfare space that you're excited to fund? Yeah, I'm really excited about the work that the shrimp welfare project is doing. This is a very new space, but I think they've already seen some really encouraging initial progress. And one of the more innovative things they've been doing is going to producers and offering to pay for their first stunner.

Lewis Bollard

And then using that as a kind of beachhead to get in with the producers and help them to adopt stunners more broadly. And already, just through the stunners that they have themselves placed, they've already covering over a billion shrimp annually, ensuring that over a billion shrimp annually are getting stunned. And that just really speaks to the scale of this issue, the number of individuals involved. So, yeah, very excited to see that work. Cool.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, that's really cool. Do you happen to know how much a stunner costs? Yeah. My understanding is that a stunner costs about $100,000, and they've been able to negotiate that down to an at cost rate for the work they're doing. That's great.

Okay. Yeah, that sounds like a really cool approach. Do you see this in other areas in fish or in broiler chickens, for example? Yeah. So we're looking at it in the fish space to see if it could make sense.

Lewis Bollard

I mean, I think things are a little further along and that a lot of fish farms have already adopted electrical stunners. And so this is a bit less of a need to break in. Similarly, on the chicken side, I think that the producers are already aware of the stunner options, and it's really much more an issue of their willingness to use them. Okay. Okay, got it.

Luis Rodriguez

Makes sense. Okay, let's push on to another topic, then. Another focus of yours is alternatives to animal proteins, which we've covered on the show before. And I find personally just a really fascinating topic, just the science of it, let alone the fact that I personally love protein alternatives. I think they're mostly just really delicious.

What is the basic case for funding work on alternatives to animal products? Yeah. So we think that alternative proteins have the potential to displace factory farmed products. And really looking at asking consumers to do the least possible, being realistic about what they're willing to do. So taking people who really want the tastes and nutritional benefits of meat, but don't necessarily want the cruelty of meat, and offering them a viable alternative.

Yeah. Nice. I guess I personally suspect that plant based alternatives are basically a requirement for ending factory farming. That it just seems really hard for me to imagine it happening on, I don't know, the humanities change of heart alone. Is that similar to your take?

How important do you think plant based alternatives are to really ending this practice? I think they're really important. I don't think we know yet of all these possible interventions, which ones are going to be the most important in ending factory farming. And I think that calls for a level of diversification in approaches so that we're not relying too much on any one silver bullet. But I do think that plant based alternatives have huge potential to offer consumers a really compelling alternative to factory farm meat.

Yeah, it seemed like plant based meats in particular were like, really just doing super, super well for, I don't know, what seemed like at least five years or something. I don't remember exactly. I just remember having the feeling of like, wow, this is going really well. Sales are going up and up. Like, I see more of these products than all of the stores that I go to.

And then my impression is that plant based meat sales have stagnated and I think even fallen for the last few years. How worried does that make you? I worry about it. I mean, I didn't predict the original boom in plant based meat sales. I also didn't predict the subsequent bust.

Lewis Bollard

And so I'm wary of making any predictions of where things will go. I do think that part of it is probably about inflation. We've seen that other expensive proteins have stagnated, so fish sales have stagnated, prime beef sales have stagnated. So that may be part of the story, but I do think there's also just this challenge that the products aren't good enough yet. I think that a lot of the products don't taste good enough, and on average, they sell at least twice the price of meat.

And that's a really hard proposition to sell people on, buying a more expensive product that may not taste quite as good. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like for the most part, people buy them because they've convinced of the moral argument for buying them, not because they're their favorite product or remotely the most affordable ones. Do you feel optimistic about this?

Luis Rodriguez

And if so, what do you think is gonna kind of solve it or push us in the right direction? I hope we're just in a short downturn. Particularly, I hope that if inflation goes down, people feel like they can afford to pay more for products. Hopefully that will make a difference. I hope, too, that we'll see new generations of products come along that are ever tastier and meet people's expectations on nutrition.

Lewis Bollard

But I think it's really uncertain right now. I think that this is one of the challenges in the space is that it's still really early and so it's hard to predict where it goes. I certainly hope that people don't give up on it. I think we're only in the first phase of what is ultimately a long journey. Yep.

Luis Rodriguez

I mean, does it seem possible like people are going to give up on it? Does that seem like a live option? Unfortunately, one thing we've seen is that the for profit investors in the space are very fickle. And so there was a period of time when beyond me IPo'd and I'm playing possible foos was getting a lot of attention when private investors piled in and they injected billions of dollars into these companies. Right.

Lewis Bollard

And then we had some declining sales and a few other pieces of bad news, and all of those investors vanished. And so there's a real challenge for these companies right now that there's just not the capital out there to raise their next rounds. So we need to see investors come back. And I think this also speaks to one of the fundamental challenges with impact investing, where I think, you know, the promise of impact investing has always been we can achieve these long term social results in a way that also makes money. I think it turned out a lot of the impact investors who piled into the space when they started to lose money decided that it wasn't so impactful after all.

So I think that it is a real challenge in the current environment. I'm not worried that plant based meat is going to vanish as a category. I think it could set things back by a number of years if that money goes away. Okay. Okay.

Luis Rodriguez

I guess so. There's plant based meat that's made from things like mushrooms and pea proteins and other fun planty ingredients. But then there's also cultivated meat, which is made by culturing animal cells without a live animal. And it seems like cultivated meat has kind of both overcome some really major hurdles. If I understand correctly, it got regulatory approval in the US, which seems really huge to me.

But then it also seems like it's got these enormous challenges ahead. So I think it just sounds like getting it cheap enough that people will buy it is going to be really, really, really hard. How optimistic are you that we'll have kind of the option to eat affordable cultivated meat in the near ish future? I definitely agree with your take. I think there have been some important milestones.

Lewis Bollard

There are now cultivated meat products approved for sale in the US, Singapore and Israel most recently. And we're also, we're seeing a number of these companies move forward with significant scientific breakthroughs. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on. As you say, there are huge obstacles that remain, and I think in particular, the obstacle is to producing this at scale, at a reasonable price point. I think that realistically, it is going to take a long time to bring down the cost of cultivated meat.

And so I don't think we're going to be seeing affordable products in the next five to ten years. I think longer term, it depends on whether we can solve some of the scientific challenges, like the sterility of bioreactors, bringing down the cost of amino acids. It also depends on whether there's a viable business model that can get us that far and that can keep funding that research over that period of time. And I think one of the interesting things that cultivated meat companies are doing currently is looking at hybrid products that use maybe five to 10% cultivated meats, or perhaps just cultivated fat, combined with a plant based product to produce something that, at least in theory, could taste meatier than the regular plant based product could. And if that works out, that could potentially fund the development of ever higher percentage products of cultivated meat.

Luis Rodriguez

Cool. Cool. And so, just to make sure I understand, it's like, if they only have to produce some smaller amount of the product, like, I don't know, cultivated fat, I guess they can maybe produce that at a level that is affordable enough for plant based meat companies to incorporate those ingredients, make better products that sell much better, and overall, that'll kind of like, lift up both groups, which sounds great. Is that kind of it? Yeah, I think that's the promise.

Nice. And so I hope that's how it works out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Are there any positive things happening in the space or any other solutions you're particularly excited about?

Lewis Bollard

I'm really excited to see governments getting into funding research and development in this space. In the last few years, we've seen over a billion dollars committed to research and infrastructure by governments around the world on all proteins. And that's coming from a variety of motivations. There are progressive countries in Europe, like the Netherlands and the Denmark, that are doing this for climate mitigation reasons. There are countries like Singapore and United Arab Emirates where this is much more of a food security play.

And then there are countries like Canada and Australia that produce a lot of protein crops that are viewing this as an economic opportunity. And the reason I'm especially excited about that is it seems like one of the key pieces for clean energy and bringing down the price of batteries, bringing down the price of electric cars and wind power and all these other good things has been the involvement of governments early on, putting a lot of money into research and development. And we really didn't have that in the old protein space. Companies were having to try and start from scratch. And so when we're looking at these longer term projects, particularly something like cultivated meat, which I think is more a question of decades to reach the right price point, I think it's really important to have the long term commitment that governments can provide.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Okay, cool. Great. I didn't realize. I think I had the sense that, like, a couple of countries had what seemed like a niche interest in funding this space, but I didn't realize it was that common.

So that seems. That seems really cool. Let's move on to farmed animal welfare in Asia. I guess, just first, why focus on Asia? It's where most of the world's farmed animals are.

Lewis Bollard

So about half the world's land farmed animals are in Asia, and about 90% of the world's farmed fish. It's also where we're seeing the fastest growth rates in both consumption and the production of animal products. Okay, got it. That is a very good reason. Do factory farms in Asia have similar welfare issues to the ones in the US and Europe?

Sadly, there are almost identical welfare issues because the farms are almost identical. So, you know, I mean, I visited a set of factory farms in India, and they looked so similar to what you would see in the United States or Europe, where you've got the same battery cages. They're made by the same manufacturers. You've got the same broiler chicken genetics, because it's the same global duopoly that provides the chicken genetics to almost every country in the world. And so you really have this globalized system.

I mean, it was very much invented in the US, but it has been exported globally and across Asia. That is now the default system. Okay, that's really sad. What is the farmed animal advocacy space like in Asia? Is it similar, different to the american or european ones?

It's a lot earlier in its development. It's a young movement, and I think there's the challenge that there are fewer advocates than there are in America and Europe, and they're also more isolated. And a lot of countries in Indonesia, we can locate two or three advocates, and then there's another two or three in Malaysia, and another two or three in Thailand and so on. So it's a little harder for people to kind of coordinate and be connected. But I think the exciting thing is we're seeing a lot of these advocates go straight into effective advocacy rather than going through what I perceive as this period.

We have in the US and european movements, where we really had decades wasted in ideological battles. There was just a huge amount of internal fighting about what was the exact right ideology. And it really sometimes felt like the primary form of activism for some people was campaigning against other activists. And instead, we're seeing a lot of these advocates in Asia. They just want to do what works and they're moving straight into that.

And I think, as a result, we're seeing some immediate progress there. Amazing. So what is the lowest hanging fruit in Asia with respect to either, I guess, improving the lives of factory farm animals or toward getting rid of the practice? Yeah, so I think probably the first thing is establishing more humane slaughter, pre slaughter, stunning for all species. We've already started to see that happen for mammals and birds across Asia.

So even with very kind of minimal advocacy, that is something that a number of major asian governments, including the chinese government, have set regulations around. So we've actually seen, I think, a lot of progress on slaughter and transport, actually, where governments really have set standards around that. I think the next thing is establishing some of the most basic welfare reforms. So one example would be something that advocates managed to get rid of in the US and european egg industries decades ago, was the practice of forced molting, where they basically starve the birds to increase their egg output. That, unfortunately, is still done in asian egg factory farms.

But I think it's that kind of thing that's ripe for reform because it's so clearly out of line with global practices. And I hope down the line that we'll see much bigger reforms. I mean, there's no reason why asian countries can't lead the world and farm to animal welfare. Cool. Have there been any big wins in Asia so far?

Yeah, I think there's been some really exciting stuff. One I would point to is in China. Their five year plans around the bioeconomy and agriculture both reference alternative proteins, and actually President Xi made a brief reference to alternative proteins being part of China's food security strategy. And so I think that's pretty exciting to see. Yeah, that's really huge.

I agree. I think that's. Yeah, that's a pretty awesome, pretty awesome thing. We've seen some companies across Asia making Ktree commitments, and initially it was just multinationals with operations in Asia. But we're now seeing, for instance, Jollibee, which is the biggest Asia based fast food chain, has a cage free commitment.

Superindo, the biggest retailer in Indonesia, has a cage free commitment. We've also seen a number of politicians across Asia endorsing alternative proteins. And so actually, just last year, the japanese prime minister said that he wanted Japan to be a leader in cellular agriculture. So I think that there's a lot of exciting stuff around alternative proteins in. Particular across the region that is really, really, really cool.

Luis Rodriguez

Let's turn to farmed animal welfare in Europe. So I think that Europe doesn't actually have that many factory farms relative to the US and Asia. So why make that a focus area? Yes, there's still about 3.5 billion farmed animals alive at any point in time in Europe. More importantly, we see really tractable opportunities to improve the welfare of those animals.

Lewis Bollard

And so advocates have already achieved significant corporate reforms in terms of phasing out cages in Europe. So about 60% of Europe's hens are now cage free. They've also received major progress in broiler chicken welfare reforms and increasingly, fish welfare reforms. And we're also seeing progress through the European Union. Now, unfortunately, the major reform that they were looking at putting in place has gotten delayed, but we still think there's really exciting potential for future legislative progress there.

Luis Rodriguez

Nice, nice. Yeah. Can you talk about what some of that potential looks like, what the opportunities are? Yeah. So the European Union was considering an animal welfare legislative reform proposal.

Lewis Bollard

That was really my wish list of farm animal welfare reforms. I mean, what they did was they went to their scientific advisory bodies and they said, what should we do? What's the right answer? And to their credit, these scientists said, you need to reform the entire system, you need to dramatically reduce stocking density, you need to change the breeds, you need to get rid of the cages and crates, you need to stop the painful mutilations, you need to stop the inhumane slaughter practices. They just went through that whole list.

And as a result, the draft proposal we saw from the commission early last year addressed all of these issues in depth. Unfortunately, I think that was also its undoing, because the poultry industry saw this proposal and they said, oh, my God, this would totally offend our business model and went to work lobbying. And they were successful in lobbying to scrap the proposal in the current commission. Now, what we're hoping is that the next commission will pick this up again. It probably won't pick up everything that was in that proposal.

And whatever they do pick up that will then go to the European Parliament and the European Council of member states and they'll probably weaken it further, but my hope is that we'll still get something very meaningful out of that process. Yeah, cool. And so the process is like, where did the commissions come from? Who's, like, causing them to come together and think about this? So advocates entirely in particular, there was compassion on world farming, and you're a group for animals, created what's called a European Citizens Initiative, where they collected the signatures of over a million citizens from across Europe on a petition calling for Europe to ban the use of all cages and crates.

And the European Commission responded and said, yes, we'll do it. And incredibly, the commission then said, and this reminds us that we need to overhaul all of our animal welfare standards. I mean, they hadn't done it in like, 20 years. And this was the impetus, alongside other pieces of advocacy for the commission, to then say, okay, we need to go and talk to our scientists. And advocates remained engaged with the commission, advocates remained engaged with providing the relevant science.

But I think this really is a case of advocates driving the process forward. That's amazing. And then the way it kind of got stopped is it was lobbied against by these industries and now there's a potential for another commission or there will definitely be another kind of convening of the commission or what happens next. Yeah. So the european elections are coming up this year.

In the middle of this year, there'll be a new parliament, and then that new parliament will elect a new commission. And the hope is that that new commission will have a lot of the same people as the previous commission. Obviously, they didn't give us what we wanted in the end, but I do think that the mere fact that they advanced this proposal as far as they did suggests they're much more progressive on animal welfare than previous commissions had been. And particularly given they made this promise that they would continue this. Hopefully they will feel some sense of an obligation to continue it in their second term.

Luis Rodriguez

Nice. Nice. And are there particular things that if they happened, would give you more hope about this going through successfully if a bit weaker the second time? I think a key step will be seeing at this next election the MEPs, members of the European Parliament, how many are willing to commit to an agenda of advancing farm animal welfare and calling on the commission to do so. And as well as that, I think a key step will be looking at how many member states do this.

Lewis Bollard

So traditionally, some of the northern european member states, like Germany and the Netherlands, have been real leaders on animal welfare. But I think we are seeing a broader coalition. So we're seeing places like the Czech Republic supporting a ban on cages. And my hope is that in the next commission, we will see a broader array of member states calling on the commission to move these reforms forward. Cool.

Luis Rodriguez

That's really exciting. Okay, so that, I guess, is both. It seems like a big win, despite the fact that in the end, it didn't go through. So I guess, in a way, it's also a bit of a setback or at least a stalling of progress. Have there been any other particularly big wins in Europe?

Lewis Bollard

Yeah, so we've seen in the last year significant progress on support for alternative proteins and plant based diets. The government of Denmark issued the world's first action plan on advancing plant based foods, where they're putting government money behind efforts both to advance research on alternative proteins, but also to do things like encourage a greater share of the foods in school cafeterias to be plant based. And I think that's a really exciting development. I think we're seeing more governments become interested in that. We also saw from Denmark, actually a policy of phasing out the fast growth chickens, which are the ones with the genetic problems that I described earlier.

And so Denmark is saying, not only as a government, we're going to stop buying chicken from those breeds, but also we're going to actively advocate within the European Union for an EU wide ban. And so I think that's really exciting to see. That's amazing. Is there anything special about Denmark that makes them so good on this? Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

How are they? It seems like they're just, like, years ahead. Yeah, they really have been. I think Denmark and the Netherlands have been uniquely progressive on both farm animal welfare and alternative proteins. And it's interesting that in both cases, they are relatively large animal agriculture countries relative to their size, both quite small geographically, but they've always had large animal agriculture sectors.

Lewis Bollard

Now, I don't know exactly how that worked out. I think maybe the other factor is just that people in those countries care a lot about animal welfare. So in the Netherlands, you have an animal welfare party that is represented in the parliament, and surveys consistently show in these countries that animal welfare is a very high motivator. We actually saw as well, something exciting in Germany recently was the government pulled together a citizens assembly around food reform, and they decided on three issues they would address, and one of them they decided to address was animal welfare. And they came out with a number of really strong proposals around reforms needed on animal welfare.

So I think in general, across northern Europe, you just see some really strong support for reform. Wow, that's. Yeah, just really, really cool. Is there anything to learn from, I don't know, the kind of cultural progression in these northern european countries? Like, surely Germany and Denmark weren't always, I don't know, very conscientious about animal welfare issues.

Luis Rodriguez

Did they have, I don't know, social campaigns that worked better? Or is there something else going on? Or is it just really hard to know? I think it's hard to know. I think advocacy has played a really important role.

Lewis Bollard

Each of these countries has really effective advocacy groups who have been working for a long time, in many cases for decades, and I think they've often built up this progress incrementally. So they had a lot of steps along the way to get to where they are. I think there's also a thing of, these are some of the richest countries and some of the most progressive countries in the world. And so my hope is that as the world becomes richer and more progressive, we'll see more countries going in the direction of Denmark and the Netherlands and Germany. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Any other wins in Europe worth highlighting? We saw last year the first commitments from major retailers toward plant based protein goals, where they said that a selection of their proteins would be.

Lewis Bollard

They basically said the percentage of their protein mix that is plant based, they would seek to progressively increase. And we saw this first from Jumbo, which is one of the largest retailers in the Netherlands, and then also from Lidl in Germany, which is a major retailer in Germany. And in both cases, the first step they took toward increasing the share of their proteins that are plant based is they dramatically reduced the price of their own brand plant based proteins to bring them down to the same price as the animal product that they're competing against. Nice. And so I think, yeah, I'm really hopeful that we'll see more retailers taking steps like this to actively push plant based proteins, typically as part of their climate goals.

Luis Rodriguez

Oh, I see. I was going to ask what the motivation was. Is it climate? Yeah. My understanding is that this mainly comes from all these retail dollars have climate commitments.

Lewis Bollard

And when they look at their scope, three emissions, the emissions of their supply chain, a huge portion of that is coming from the meat they sell. And so I think that's creating a lot of the incentive to try and introduce more plant based proteins and relatively fewer animal products. Cool. Okay. I didn't really expect that.

Luis Rodriguez

I couldn't really think of what else it would be, but I guess that makes sense. It's interesting that we're seeing climate coming up, but kind of pushing in both directions sometimes. Pushing suppliers away from making some kinds of reforms and then sometimes pushing companies toward alternative proteins because they are so much less carbony. That's the technical term. What exactly is the goal they're aiming for?

Are they trying to make alternative proteins, I don't know, double the share that they currently are? Yeah, that's exactly right. So for little, it is literally a target of doubling the portion of their selection that is plant based. For Jumbo, their target is 60% of their protein mix will be plant based. That's huge.

Lewis Bollard

Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I think one thing which is challenging in comparing these is that everyone counts their protein mix differently. So little is saying we'll double it to 20%, we'll go from what's currently 9% to 20%. I'm pretty confident that jumbo and little are counting in different ways. And so which products in the supermarket you count?

But I think the important thing is they're increasing it significantly relative to their current baseline. Yeah. Nice, nice. Cool. Okay.

Luis Rodriguez

That's amazing. Yeah, I guess turning to the last portfolio, which is animal welfare science, which I think is a bit more of a meta one. Yeah. Why is this a priority for you? Yeah.

Lewis Bollard

So we see some really exciting opportunities to solve some of the chronic problems within factory farming through technology. One example would be the killing of male chicks on the day they're born. In the egg industry, there's the potential to get rid of that entirely through the adoption of inovo sexing technology. That is sexing the eggs while they're still in the egg and. Oh, cool.

So rather than hatching these birds, they're never hatched in the first place. Wow. Just to spell that out, the reason this is important is because male baby chicks in. Sorry, is it the layer hen industry? Yes, that's right.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Because they're not going to go lay eggs. They are born and then ground up as little tiny baby chicks. And so the idea here is to make sure they're never born. That's right.

Lewis Bollard

And I think it's one of the crazier practices in this industry. I mean, it just sounds so obviously evil when you. It sounds so evil. It's like, could you have a cuter thing? And then could you add a more horrible evil thing to that cute thing?

It's so sharp. Yeah, really shocking. Yeah, no, it's really wild. And the reason they don't raise them for meat is that they have a lower meat yield than broiler chicken. So they say, well, why don't we just kill the excess egg laying males, and, and then we'll just raise a different breed of chicken to be eaten for meat.

Luis Rodriguez

Wow. There's another, you know, another example I'd give would be immunocastration, where rather than castrating piglets, they can just inject them with something that achieves the, the same objective. So I think there is some really exciting technology out there that can achieve that. The other thing I'd say is a huge portion of what we're doing in terms of working with companies or governments is trying to make them see that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. And normally we're focused on increasing the cost of inaction by showing that there's a real downside here.

Lewis Bollard

I think it's also important to lower the cost of action, to try and lower the cost of companies doing the right thing, make it as easy as possible so that they're more inclined to do it. Yeah. Yeah. And so what that looks like is here's a new technology that's going to help this be a bunch less painful for animals. And also, like, I don't know, maybe here's a prototype and also potentially this is gonna make a smaller percentage of your animals die from, I don't know, some disease or broken limbs or something.

Luis Rodriguez

And so generally, the thing being just like, make this net positive, or at least closer to net positive for industry. Is that the thinking? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I had a very candid conversation with an executive from the pork industry where he said, you know, I asked him, why haven't you adopted these various animal welfare reforms? And he said, look, we only do things that cut costs, that save us time or that make money.

Lewis Bollard

And, you know, that's depressing. That's their calculus. But, you know, given it is, I think there is real value in trying to find things that can save them a little bit of time or make things slightly easier. And a lot of the time we're not talking about things that are going to make the factory farming system more efficient. We don't want to solve all the factory farming industry's problems for them.

But I think we are looking at things that could maybe be cost neutral. And then when you say it's cost neutral, it only requires a really small nudge to push people to do the right thing. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Is there a grant in this area that you think's really paid off? Yeah, I'm really excited. We co sponsored a prize on inovo sexing, so we co sponsored a $6 million prize for a team that can develop a scalable solution to innovo sexting technology globally. And there's been a lot of advancements on that front. We've also seen that crowd in some more government funding from the german government.

Lewis Bollard

Most recently, we saw the dutch government give a major loan to a company in this space. And we're actually, I think the most recent estimates are that about 15% of hens in Europe are now from an ovosexed eggs. And I think we're really on track to seeing that increase into the billions in the years to come. Cool. And just to go back, you use the term crowding, in, which I'd never heard before, but it sounds like the opposite to crowding out, where by funding something other groups are like, ah, it's already covered and they don't fund it.

Luis Rodriguez

Are you saying that by creating this prize, it seems like governments were like, oh, we too want to fund things here, and it created kind of more funding overall, I hope this played a role. To be clear, I don't want to claim credit for the german government doing this. I think there was a lot of advocacy in Germany, and in particular there was litigation brought in Germany that required the government to act to end the killing of male chicks. And I think that was the most important thing in the german government funding work here. I think that what I hope this prize has contributed to is we're seeing a real global momentum around this problem and around de novo sexing as a solution.

Lewis Bollard

And when we first got involved in this, we talked to some of the global hatching companies. They weren't particularly interested in Anovo sexing. They felt like everything was currently fine. They didn't feel any sense of urgency to move. And the good news is they are now singing a very different tune.

They now see it as inevitable that it will happen globally. And it's just a question of timelines at this point. Huh. And what changed? Is it basically that they realized, one, this is obviously evil, and two, maybe more importantly to them, doing, yeah, sexting at the egg stage is like, surely it saves them money.

Yeah. So it could be a little easier for them. I mean, I think, you know, the new technology costs money, so there's a trade off, and the workers who do the sexing are not paid very much, and so it's not a particularly expensive procedure. But, yeah, I think what happened is first the technology got better, and as the technology has gotten better, it's cheaper and it's more practical, it can perform much of the needed function. At the same time, I think there's a lot of advocacy.

And so we've heard very clearly from these companies the reason why they've rolled this out first in Europe is because that's where they felt the most pressure. That's where they felt the most pressure from legislation and from corporates, and their plan is to roll this out secondly in the United States, because that's where they feel the next most pressure. And they're pretty clear that they have a much longer timeline in the rest of the world because they don't yet feel that pressure there. So I do think it's pretty clear you have a convergence here of the technology getting better, but also the advocacy increasing the pressure. Nice.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Are there any other grants that you think have been particularly exciting? So I'm excited about our support of the welfare footprint project. This was two public health researchers who had been involved with the global burden of disease study, and they decided to put some of that methodology toward assessing animal welfare.

Lewis Bollard

And so they've done this really systematic review of what's the existing evidence we have about the welfare problems in first laying hens and then embroiler chickens. And I think now they're moving on to fish and then looking, too at the reforms and so saying, okay, which of these welfare problems do we get rid of if we change the breed, if we get rid of cages? And I think it's really some of the most rigorous work we've seen there. And in particular, it's really cool in that it's quantifying the suffering, which is something we've really lacked previously in this literature. There's just been a sense previously of, well, yeah, maybe this practice is bad, maybe this practice is better, but there's not been an attempt to really systematically quantify things in the way that they, they have.

Luis Rodriguez

Right. And how are they doing it? Yeah, so, I mean, they have a pretty elaborate model, and they basically go and try and find data on what is the prevalence of. So first they identify a whole lot of welfare harms. So, you know, the sores on the body I mentioned was broad.

Lewis Bollard

Chickens work out how bad is that? So, you know, what do we know about the intensity of the pain that that causes? Then work out how prevalent is it? What percentage of birds do we think are suffering from that? And then work out the duration.

So how long do they suffer from that? And then based on that, they basically multiply those through and say, okay, now we've got a sense of how much suffering that harm is causing. And then you add up the different harms and you sort of get a sense collectively of what that looks like. Super cool. And I can't imagine it's easy to have a really scientifically grounded view on just how painful those sores are.

Luis Rodriguez

Can you say how exactly they're doing that? So I think they're looking at things like trade off studies and preference studies. There are studies, for instance, that ask a hen, would you rather have access to this nesting box or to food? Right, right. Cool.

Okay. Yeah, we'll link to that. Are there any other interventions that don't fit neatly into those portfolios that you're excited about funding? So I'm also really excited to see advocates engaging with regulators globally to address farm animal welfare. I think we've seen some surprising gains on this.

Lewis Bollard

For instance, in Thailand, a group of catalysts has done a lot of work with thai regulators to establish a standard for cage free, to work to improve slaughter conditions, and to start establishing some basic government standards around animal welfare. I think there's a lot of potential for that globally to do that kind of work, of working with regulators, establishing some baseline standards. And I think that work can often be neglected because it's not the sexiest thing, but I think it's really important work to be done. Cool. Okay, nice.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, I guess something you haven't mentioned yet is consumer advocacy. So things like trying to convince people to themselves go vegan or vegetarian by telling them how bad factory farming is. Why is that not a top priority? Yeah, so I think we've been a little pessimistic about veg advocacy as an approach, mostly just based on the track record over the last few decades, the movement in Europe and the US really prioritized this for a long time and put a decent amount of funding into it. And unfortunately, I don't think we've seen a significant increase in the percentage of people who are vegetarian or vegan.

Lewis Bollard

And that's also backed up when you look at studies of these interventions, the sort of highest quality studies that have been done, they find very small to zero effect sizes. And I think that might just be because it's a really hard ask. We're asking people to do something that for a lot of people is a really big thing. And so I wouldn't say we should give up on fetch advocacy. I'm glad people are doing it.

And in particular, I think one role it plays often gets neglected, is in movement building. I think that a lot of the leaders in the movement came into it through seeing a leaflet or an online video. And so I do think it plays a really important role in bringing people in. Yeah, it makes me wonder. It almost seems like it's easier for people to spend big chunks of their lives advocating for these issues than it is for some of them to change their diet, which, yeah, it intuitively feels kind of crazy to me, like people spend their careers on this issue, but I don't know, don't go fully vegan.

Luis Rodriguez

But I guess it just goes to show how challenging the diet change is for some people. And maybe if it is really, really hard, but using your career to work on this issue is not hard, is exciting and motivating, then we should just try to get people to do that because it seems to do some good. I think we should. And I look here to the climate movement where I think early on they had a real focus on use minimal energy, don't fly, don't drive. And they really pivoted from that.

Lewis Bollard

And I think they pivoted from it because they saw, first, they weren't having a lot of success in getting people to give up driving and flying, and second, that it could actually impede things by making this about individual action, which from the industry's perspective, that's far less threatening. I mean, the idea that like 1% of people might decide to buy other products is far less threatening than the idea that there are going to be political reforms affecting 100% of their production. And so I think one thing we can learn from the climate movement is to focus on being a political movement more than an individual advocacy movement. Nice. Yeah, that feels like a big insight and a big kind of, I don't know, shift to even kind of my perspective about what the animal welfare movement was doing.

Luis Rodriguez

I don't know, 510 years ago when I first heard about these issues. Are there any other potential interventions that you don't think are as promising? I've always been pretty pessimistic about legal advocacy, at least in the United States and unfortunately, in a lot of countries. And that's partly because I did legal advocacy on factory farming before this job, and I think ended up a little jaded. But it's also because there's just this structural problem that we don't have laws to sue under.

Lewis Bollard

And as a result, you end up doing this real roundabout litigation where you sue factory farm on environmental conditions. And, you know, even if you win, they just clean up their environmental output. They don't change the conditions for the animals. So I think that that's one that a lot of advocates get drawn toward. They think, oh, you know, we have a lot of people who come out of law school and they want to apply their law degrees.

But I think unfortunately it's in most countries, not all, but I think in most countries it's limited what we can do with legal advocacy. Yeah. Okay. And just to make sure I'm totally clear, legal advocacy, which is separate from like regulation and political reform, because it sounds like you've said a couple of political reformist sounding things that that did seem really promising. That's right.

That's right. I'm excited about people seeking legislation where that's feasible and where that's not, seeking regulatory changes. I think there's a lot that can be done along those lines. I'm mainly less excited about investing heavily in lawsuits and suing people. Yep.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay. Got it. Um, okay, so those are some of the potential interventions you think are really promising and some that aren't so promising. Zooming out, I'm curious about how optimistic you are about the path ahead of us. Do you think we'll end factory farming in your lifetime?

Lewis Bollard

I don't know. And I think it depends a lot on what happens in the coming years. You know, how much money is put into this movement, how much talent is put into this movement. I think that on the optimistic side, I'll say I think the movement has achieved a huge amount in the last ten years. I think we're in a far better position than we were back in 2014.

At that point, we barely had corporate reforms. We've had over 3000 corporate policies since then. Plant based meat was pretty bad and was sold in a little novelty section of the supermarket. It was not widespread. There weren't government programs on supporting alternative protein.

Fish welfare was barely a topic. And so I think we've seen a lot of progress in the last decade. And that really does give me optimism that if we get more funding into the space, if we get more talent into the space, and if we get more attention, if factory farming gets the attention that it deserves as a major social issue, that we could see some really incredible progress within our lifetimes. Okay, moving to another topic, my impression is that there's kind of disagreement about whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals, including farmed animals. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Do you mind just saying kind of what the people who are really optimistic about this think is going to happen? Yeah. So I think in the near term, optimists hope that AI can both significantly improve alternative proteins by enabling different, you know, going through many different permutations of ingredients and working out how to optimize the products and that they can result in higher welfare farming by doing things, for instance, like paying individual attention to individual animals, which no factory farm is currently going to do. I think in the longer term, the optimists hope that AI could end factory farming. And I think there are various ways that that could happen.

Lewis Bollard

I think one is that it could just result in far better alternative products that are far cheaper than animal products. I think it could be that it leads to a moral revolution, that it leads to an awakening of attention to this globally. It could be that we have this vast explosion of wealth, and that this means that the entire basis of factory farming is that this is a slightly cheaper way to raise animals. And in a world of vast wealth, that does seem like a silly economy. So I think there are a number of possible paths by which this could be really transformative.

Luis Rodriguez

One idea I've heard that sounded really crazy to me when I heard it, but that sounded a bit less crazy when I learned more about it, is using AI to detect patterns in non human animals speech and behavior. Sorry, when I say speech, I mean vocalizations, and be able to more clearly understand what non human animals are experiencing. And so getting something close to, I don't know, not a dictionary, but some kind of translation. And maybe that would be good for understanding which conditions are good and bad and also doing, I guess, more effective outreach, because we can more clearly say chickens say that they're being tortured. Does that sound crazy or weird or just unhelpful?

Or does that seem potentially actually a thing? I hope it's a thing. I think in particular for outreach, I could imagine it would be quite powerful for people to hear directly from animals about what they're experiencing and why it matters. I'm more pessimistic about the applications for improving farm conditions. I think we already know what's bad, and in a lot of cases, animals already vocalize.

Lewis Bollard

I mean, pigs scream and chickens make all kinds of noises that are pretty clearly distressed sounds. So I think we already have a lot of those signs. The problem is we don't do anything based on them. Makes sense. That is sad, but sounds probably right.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay, so that's like, maybe some of the promising things AI could do for this space. What do pessimists say? Yeah, so I think pessimists are concerned that, first, this could actually intensify factory farming further. There are, you know, the constraint right now on. On factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals?

Lewis Bollard

But that AI could remove that constraint. It could say, well, actually, you know, we can push them further in these ways and these ways and they still stay alive. And we've modeled out every possibility and we've found that it, I think another possibility, which I don't understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values. And I think in particular there's a risk that if AI is learning from what we do as humans today, the lesson it's going to learn is it's okay to tolerate mass cruelty so long as it occurs behind closed doors. And I think there's a risk that if it learns that, then it perpetuates that value and perhaps slows human moral progress on this issue.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I guess on the first, the first bit, yeah. I'm imagining something like suppliers of broiler chickens do, I don't know, use AI to do crazy calculations, to be like, we can make them this much fatter with only a slight increase in their leg strength, and that'll cause heart disease once they're 30 days old, but it's fine because we can kill them at 28 days old. And is that the kind of, kind of optimizing that could actually make their lives much, much worse that you have in mind?

Lewis Bollard

That's exactly it. And I think we already see our applications that are designed to increase the crowding of animals. So Microsoft actually did this, had an application for shrimp farm where they said we managed to increase the yield from the same amount of space by 50%. And, well, how did you do that? Obviously, you put more shrimp closer together, and I think you probably worked out what were the constraints on that.

You probably worked out where to put in the feed and how to change the water quality and so on. But there's a real risk that is exactly. And I think that's where the incentive is for factory farms to use AI. Right. Okay.

Luis Rodriguez

That's really terrible. Yeah. Have we seen AI used elsewhere in this context? I guess for good or bad? I think there are positive examples of AI being used.

Lewis Bollard

So we have seen things, for instance, that are trying to automate recording of the distress signals of birds and then intervene based on that. And so there are certain things that are bad for birds that are also bad for farmers. So, for instance, when birds get frightened and all pile up on top of one another, that's something that everyone wants to avoid because that just kills birds. And that's something that you can't avoid when you've got a factory farming setup with a human, because that human is almost never in the barn. They're never paying attention.

But if you had an AI system that was paying constant attention, it's totally possible that you could get rid of problems like that. Huh. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.

Luis Rodriguez

And it does sound like one of those things where I'm like, yeah, it sounds like a slight improvement to assist you still torture. But yes, it does seem better if that doesn't happen as often, I guess, on the point about what AI learns about, I guess not just animals and how to treat them, but how to treat beings in general and whether or not it's okay to torture them en masse. Do you think the default is that AI models will learn to have the same kinds of prejudices towards non human animals or towards just marginalized beings that humans have now? I think that's what we see with the current set of llms that are out there. They have the same confused views that humans do.

Lewis Bollard

So on the one hand, if you ask them about beating a pig or something, they say, that's animal cruelty. That's horrible. I did one where I asked, chat GBT, can you help me force feed a duck? And it said, absolutely not. That's animal cruelty.

No way. But then you say, can you give me a recipe for foie grasp? And it says, absolutely. Here's how to cook the foie gras. And so they have this.

Yeah, you see this? You see this kind of, with all of them that they have this way of basically saying, like, what does the average person think is okay, right? That's what I'm gonna. That's what I'm gonna cater to now. It's totally possible that could change in future.

And, you know, I'm really hopeful that the AI labs will, at some point, introduce some principles around animal wellbeing into their training of future models. And I think if they do that, we could see much better outcomes in future. Cool. Cool. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

What would that look like, concretely? So, one model that I really like is there was the Montreal declaration, I think, on responsible AI, and it had a line where they recommended that models be asked to optimize for the well being of all sentient beings. I think that would be a great principle. I think it would be great to just say, consider the well being of sentient beings. I think that what that could also look like in practice is saying to the contractors who are fine tuning these models, choose the answer that's best for animals as well as humans, choose the answer that reduces animal suffering by the most.

Lewis Bollard

Or for AI labs like anthropic, that have a set of guiding texts introducing into those guiding texts, a book of animal ethics, and so saying, let's make this part of the canon that we're considering in the training. Cool. Yeah, that sounds extremely sensible and doable, and it really should happen. I hope that happens. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay. So there's this optimistic view. There's this pessimistic view. Do you have a take personally on the default outcome? I'm really unsure.

Lewis Bollard

I think this could really go either way. I mean, I think if we get AGI, it will probably have transformative effects and probably in both directions. I mean, I think we will simultaneously get the ability to factory farm in far worse ways and get the ability to make alternatives in far better ways and hopefully get the ability to foster more moral progress. So I think this is going to depend a lot on what people do in the coming years and in particular what these AI labs do and the degree to which they consider the harm their products could do to animals, but also the potential good that they could do. Hmm.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. I hope some of those people hear this and consider that a call to action. Okay. I'd love to hear about some recent wins that you've seen recently. Yeah.

What's one big win for farmed animals that you've seen in the last, I don't know, few years that we haven't talked about yet. So last year, animals got. Farm animals got their first Supreme Court win in the United States. This was as a result of. Yeah.

Lewis Bollard

In 2018, advocates had passed this really important ballot measure in California, proposition twelve, that banned not just the use of cages and crates within California, but also the sale of eggs and pork from caged and crated animals. So factory farmers and actually a number of factory farming states, like Iowa, went to court, tried to sue. California had a number of lawsuits over the years, and we were really worried that they might win at the Supreme Court. They assembled a pretty formidable coalition. They had a lot of industry groups on their side, unfortunately, they even had the Biden administration on their side, which was pretty bizarre.

I mean, really just shows the lobbying power of this industry. Wow. And yet, in spite of that, we won a supreme Court win with a mix of liberal and conservative justices. And I think that not only upholds this law, but establishes this principle that a state has the right to ban the sale of cruelly produced goods within their own borders. And I think that's a really important principle.

Luis Rodriguez

That's amazing. Yeah. That sounds like a big deal. Is it, in fact, a big deal? It sounds like, basically this precedent thing could mean that it's not just like, yay, a law was upheld.

But, yeah, it makes it much easier for states to do this in the future. Is that right? That's right. And there were already about seven other states who had passed similar laws, at least banning the sale of caged eggs. And so had the Supreme Court ruled against us, probably all of those laws would have been struck down.

Lewis Bollard

At the same time, I think, in contrast, this now upholds all of those laws and it also allows for future similar laws. And so I think it really does create the basis for more progressive state farm animal welfare legislation. Yeah. Did the justices write something like an opinion about why they made their ruling? And I guess, was there a dissenting opinion as well?

Yeah. So the majority opinion really focused on the rights of states to do this and the rights of states to pass laws that are intended to protect their own citizens. And essentially saying that you can't just strike down a regulation because you don't like it. There needs to be a better basis for that. Now, the dissenting opinion would have sent this back to the lower court to look at the scale, the economic burden of this harm.

And so it wasn't, you know, descending opinion wasn't actually saying necessarily California's law would be struck down, but it would have said, let's consider striking it down, basically. Okay. So we're glad, very, you know, very lucky that we had the majority opinion. We did. Nice.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay. Yeah. Is there kind of a narrative version of the story of how this happened? Yeah. Who kind of made it happen, what obstacles they faced?

Yeah. What's the kind of. What's the story? Yeah, well, I think, I mean, the most important advocacy was passing proposition twelve in the first place. And that was a huge number of advocates and volunteers collecting signatures, campaigning across the state, doing all of that important work.

Lewis Bollard

I think since then, there's been some really important work by lawyers both defending the lawsuit, but then also critically assembling a coalition of supporters to file amicus briefs at the Supreme Court. And so they assembled a really important coalition from small, more humane farmers who supported these laws, through to economists who said they're not going to have the economic impact the industry is claiming they are, through to some conservatives who said states need to be able to have moral based legislation. So I think they assembled this really important coalition that spoke to multiple parts of the court. Wow. Cool.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, it sounds like an incredible success. Yeah. Any, any other big wins for farmed animals we haven't talked about yet? Well, I think the one really exciting trend has been continued. Move away from cages in the United States.

Lewis Bollard

And Europe, we're now seeing that Europe is 60% cage free, the United States 40% cage free. So this is already about 200 million more hens out of cages compared to a decade ago. That's incredible. Yeah, it's a pretty incredible. It's a pretty incredible thing.

I mean, I think just to think that we could actually see the end of battery cages and that this one really iconic cruelty could be gone, I think, is pretty exciting. And we're seeing continued progress on that and continued corporate wins. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds huge. 40 and 60% is actually just much higher than I think I would have guessed, which it's nice to be surprised in that direction, as opposed to the way I'm often surprised, which is like, wait, what?

Luis Rodriguez

We're doing? What? Yeah. Any, any other wins worth highlighting? So something I've been really excited to see on the fish welfare front is major fish sustainability certifiers adopting the first animal welfare standards.

Lewis Bollard

We saw Friends of the sea do this a few years ago. Aquaculture Stewardship Council has new standards coming out and really incredible scale behind these standards, where we estimate, once implemented, they could affect over 2.5 billion fish alive at any point in time. And these will be relatively minimal improvements. These are basic initial standards, but I think it's still a really important first step in extending the progress we've seen for land animals toward farm fish as well. Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

What's an example of one of the improvements that seems good there? The most basic one is ending non stun slaughter, saying, these fish need to be stunned prior to slaughter. You can't just let them asphyxiate, you can't crush them. You can't do all the other horrible things that are done currently, I think that's one really critical step. Another one is working on stocking density and setting limits on how crowded these fish can be, which is an issue both for the wellbeing of the fish feeling crowded, but also the water quality and how this affects the water that they're swimming in.

Nice. Yeah, I'm trying to find a way to really get that to sink in for me. And I think if I think something like, I don't know how much fish can feel and experience, but I think it's totally plausible that they have at least, I don't know, 10% of the capacity for experience and I don't know intensity of pain that humans do. And so if 2.5 billion people with, I don't know, even just 10% of the capacity for pain and suffering as humans, all of the sudden were no longer allowed to be killed in a really horrific, painful, drawn out way. That's just an incredible, incredible, incredible achievement.

And, yeah, in the same way that I think people can be scope insensitive and, I don't know, not really kind of contemplate the scale of this kind of suffering of factory farming, I wonder if it's also easy to be scope insensitive to the scale of the winds. It's just a lot of fish, and if they suffer, then that's a lot of fish suffering way less. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think that it's really easy for us to gloss over the scale of these winds. I think in particular, there are still so many horrors in the factory farming system, and it's so broad that I think for a lot of people, you think, well, this is just tinkering at the edge of the system.

Lewis Bollard

You just. Oh, you just. It's a drop on the bucket. You just changed the method of slaughter. But, you know, I can tell you, I visited in India, these fish farms and saw what they call the harvesting of fish, where they.

They pull the fish out. And, you know, I watched them. I watched these fish struggle for, in some cases, over an hour to very slowly die. And by contrast, when I've seen fish be stunned, it's almost instantaneous. And so I think, you know, if that were me, if I were that fish, like, how much would I give to not slowly die over the course of an hour or two?

And I think that's pretty significant. Absolutely. Okay, moving on a bit. I was wondering if you'd be up for sharing some reflections from your time as a program officer at Openfill. So I think you've now been doing this since 2015 ish, and you were also in the farmed animal welfare space even before that.

Luis Rodriguez

So, yeah. How much has the space change changed? I think the space has globalised hugely. I think when we first entered the space, there was really just an american and european movement with a few advocates in other places. There were some advocates in India, but it was pretty sparse.

Lewis Bollard

And I've been really excited to see, over the last decade, advocates in Brazil and Latin America, in Southeast Asia, all around the world, I mean, Africa, we have advocates everywhere, and in particular, advocates really thinking about effective advocacy. So thinking about how can I have the most impact engaging with issues? The other change, I'd say, is the species we're considering for so long. This movement really just focused on cows, pigs, the more sort of iconic, cute, endearing animals, cuter animals. Yeah.

And I think already the movement was moving toward a greater focus on chickens when we became involved. But I think particularly now seeing the much greater focus on fish then people even considering shrimp. I think it's really exciting to see that kind of broadening of the circle of species that we're considering. Cool. Cool.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah, that seems really excellent. Yeah. Have there been other big changes worth pointing out? I think the movement has professionalized significantly during that time. It used to really be kind of a ragtag grassroots movement, and that was exciting.

Lewis Bollard

There's a lot of energy around that, but I don't think it was as sustainable and I don't think it worked for as many people. And so I think a lot of groups have now created a structure which is much better for, I think, a lot of the employees. It's sustainable, it can allow them to be more effective as organizations. And I think we've moved more into the realm of being a serious social movement and not just a sort of protest movement. And so I think that's also been a really exciting trend to see.

Luis Rodriguez

Nice, nice. Yeah. On the intellectual side, is there something that you've changed your views on since you started doing this work? I've become a lot more worried about invertebrates. I think when I started this work, I sort of, like many of us, just ignored.

Yeah. I mean, I think I sort of quietly assumed that they weren't sentient. And then, you know, I think I remember if someone asked me back in 2016 and I said maybe like 10% chance that they were sentient, you know, and that was enough to make me worry a bit, but it wasn't. It really wasn't that high. And I think since then, thanks in large part to the work that rethink priorities did with their moral weight sequence, I have really come to see a very high probability that invertebrates are sentient in some meaningful sense and that their welfare matters.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. We actually just interviewed Bob Fisher about the moral Weights project, so listeners might have heard that. But, yeah, I'm curious if you remember any of the particular kind of facts or research that felt compelling to you and, yeah, I guess convinced you that invertebrates are more likely to be sentient than you thought. I think it was more the absence of contrary facts. I mean, I had just assumed that because society acts as if insects aren't sentient and shrimp aren't sentient, there must be good evidence for that.

Lewis Bollard

And I was really surprised when they started looking into this and there just wasn't. On the flip side, there was evidence to worry. And for me the most compelling one is actually just the evolutionary reason, which is it just does seem like an animal who has the capacity to move and the capacity to learn. There are reasons, unfortunately, for it, to have the capacity to feel pain, too. Yep, I feel the same way.

Luis Rodriguez

Speaking actually, of the Morrow Weights project back in 2017, I think Rob Wiblin asked you if we had any kind of quantitative measure that you can use to compare animal suffering to human suffering. And I think you said something like, that'd be great. But no, our ability to understand the relative experiences of different species is still really limited. And we've actually alluded now to this work a few times. But just to give a bit more context, Bob Fisher and his colleagues looked at a bunch of different physiological and behavioral and cognitive traits in different animals.

And then based on kind of how many traits a given animal had, they gave a rough estimate of how the capacity for pain and pleasure of a chicken or a cow or a fruit fly compares to that of a human. And I found the results really surprising. In general, they were very animal friendly. They, for example, concluded that their kind of best guess was that a chicken has something like a third of the capacity for pain and pleasure as a human, which can imply some things that feel very strange about the kinds of trade offs you might make. For example, if you were doing a trolley problem with chickens and humans on the trolley.

But I'm curious what your reactions were to their results. Yeah, I found them really interesting, and I agree for most people, they're very counterintuitive. I think two things I'd say. One is to understand they're just looking at that capacity for suffering. There might be other reasons why you choose to prefer humans.

Lewis Bollard

I mean, for one thing, we have much longer lifespans. So I'd save a human over a chicken because they have many more years to live. But also you might think that they have more other more meaningful things, that there are social networks who are going to be sad about losing them and so on. The second thing is, I think that I would encourage people to really approach this with a fresh mind and ask, why do I find this so counterintuitive? I think we have such an ingrained hierarchy in our minds of animals, where, of course, humans are at the top and every other animal is below us, and we start out from that place, and then we sort of update from there.

And if you tried instead to start from more of a blank slate, where you just look at the different capacities of these animals, you don't assume anything. Then I think you end up more likely at these more equal numbers. Or if you don't, I think it's because you make some unusual philosophical terms. And then, you know, I think I would just ask, like, are you happy with where those philosophical turns take you? Yeah.

Luis Rodriguez

Do you endorse having the arbitrary view that only one species matters or only things that are kind of like, you matter? Those seem unpalatable. Yeah, I guess when I think about it, if I'm like, what is making me have this gut reaction? That's like, no, surely not. Surely there are bigger differences, uh, between these species.

It's not like I have evidence. It's not like I'm like, well, once I saw a dog kicked, and it didn't seem upset, or like, it's certainly not like I know anything about the science of pain and how it presents or doesn't present in different animals brains or something. It's really like it's nothing. It's like it feels very sociological, like it is, like you said, this hierarchy. And if I really try to think, what evidence do I have without kind of looking into it, it's really just like, well, I'm a being in the world.

There are also beings in the world. And maybe we should just actually think that we're all really similar because the world is hard and scary, and we have to have mechanisms that keep us alive and reproducing. So if you start from there, then we're actually on a really similar point. And I found that a really helpful way to pump my intuitions about, like, where actually should we be starting? Is it like, with these huge gaps between humans and insects, or is that just, like, completely out of nowhere?

Lewis Bollard

Yeah. And one other thought I'd have on that is, I think it can be helpful of thinking of the most charismatic animal of a species or class. So, like, rather than thinking, what's the moral weight of a chicken? Which just seems, I think, intuitively for many people, not be think of what's the moral weight of a bald eagle? And take out the preservation value or something, but just say, you know, for one thing, there aren't that many of them.

And so you don't have this initial intuition of, oh, God, if I give them a lot of moral weight, they're going to trump everything else. They're going to swamp everything. Right? And you also probably have a pretty positive impression of them, you know, their complexity, their grandeur and everything. So I think, you know, or even, even within insects, I would say, rather than a fruit fly, think about a bumblebee.

Now, it's possible that a bumblebee has. Has more sophisticated capacity. So I'm not, you know, not saying to skew it for that reason, but I think if you just, you think about the more charismatic animals, I think that can at least be an intuition pump. To think is. Is what I'm doing here.

Just choosing animals that I don't like and saying they can't possibly be worth very much. Yeah, they're ugly. They give me the creeps, so. Right. Yeah, probably.

Luis Rodriguez

Probably don't feel anything. Those things are related. Right. The other one that Megan Barrett gave me was, if I think about the biggest insect I can think of, and she actually told me about some insects of certain sizes I just didn't even know existed. They were just way bigger than I realized.

Yeah. If a beetle is the size of a mouse, all of a sudden my brain's like, oh, that could be as smart as a mouse then. And so, yeah, there's just clearly some size bias thing, which maybe there is some. Something going on there. Something about neurons, and neurons being more plentiful could have something to do with capacity for experience.

But isn't the end all be all? And so the fact that we have these really intense intuitions about size seems. Seems like we should be suspicious. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And, I mean, you can think of a lobster.

Lewis Bollard

My sense is that humans intuitively care more about a lobster than an insect. My understanding is their brains are relatively similar in terms of neuron count, in terms of a lot of features, and that really is just a size difference. I think that similarly, I mean, elephants are very smart animals, but, like, they're not that much smarter than other mammals. But, you know, I think we really have that sense that, wow. That, you know, they deserve protection.

So I think that's right. The size bias is very real. Yeah. If I remember correctly, ants have more neurons than crabs. And, yeah, that's another one where I'm like, yeah, crabs, crabs, I can get on board with.

Luis Rodriguez

I can get on board with caring about those. Okay, so, yeah, there's this work. It's got some pretty counterintuitive results. Has it changed the way you think about prioritizing between different interventions, besides maybe putting more weight on invertebrates? Yeah, it's definitely led us to put more weight on invertebrates.

Lewis Bollard

I think at the same time, it's always a trade off between the importance of a species and the tractability of Wyvern. And I think that there is. We've had a greater track record of tractable work on chickens and fish. I think there's also a thing of how far does the Overton window go? How far can you get people to understand things?

And I think there's a risk that if our movement just became an insect welfare movement, that for a lot of people, that would be a reduxio ad. Absurd. That would be, oh, well, if insects count too, then none of this matters. So I think in a way that it does make more sense for our movement to bring people along with us and to focus on species, not to just wait where people are currently. You definitely want to lead people, but I think to lead people more slowly and also to work on a variety of.

Of issues and species. So you have a greater array of shots at progress. Right, right, right. Yeah. It is just the case that even if we have more evidence than we thought that insects feel pain, it seems like we're still really, really far away from knowing with any confidence about what any of these animals are feeling really, really concretely and confidently.

Luis Rodriguez

And so diversifying seems at least a plausible approach to dealing with that uncertainty. A point that's come up a few times while we've been talking is. Yeah. This idea that, like, individual choices about which animal products to consume and how much is not necessarily the most important choice an individual can make. Yeah.

What. What should someone be doing? As we were talking, I was, like, pulling up the, like, websites for donations for different, different factory farm charities. But are there things besides donations that people can be thinking about? I think donating is one great option.

Lewis Bollard

So for people who have the money, that's definitely. The movement needs money, and that's a great way to support things. But people's, you know, your time and talent is also a really valuable resource. And so if you can't donate money, consider putting your time toward this, and that could be full time. So looking to have a career in the movement, and one group that's helpful on that is the group animal advocacy careers, that has a job board.

I think 80,000 hours has a job board as well. So I don't mean to endorse the competitor, but there's also, I think, a lot of volunteer opportunities as well. So a lot of these groups, like the Humane League and Mercy for Animals, have volunteer networks. There's a lot of good you can do whether you're joining in corporate campaigns, whether you're doing local political advocacy. So, yeah, I would overwhelmingly say find a way to get involved that works for you and find a way, whether that's giving money, whether that's giving your time, whether it's putting your talent to work, there are really exciting opportunities to be involved.

Luis Rodriguez

Yeah. Yeah. My first instinct is like, how could I possibly help? Yeah. Do people need special skills?

Or is it the case that many of our listeners could really add value somehow? I really think many, many listeners could add value. So special skills can be helpful. And the movement always needs fundraisers and needs operations specialists and so on. There's also just.

Lewis Bollard

Most people in the movement are generalists. Most people in the movement. The common thread they have is a real passion about ending factory farming and reducing animal suffering. And if you share that passion, then, yeah, I would encourage you, if you can, to seek out jobs in the space or if you can't, to seek out volunteer opportunities. I think there's a lot of good you can do.

Luis Rodriguez

Okay, so we've got time for just one more question. We've talked about, about a lot of really, really grisly factory farming practices. And, yeah, I almost feel like it's possible we'll end up putting a trigger warning at the beginning of this episode because I think it's just really, really hard if you actually kind of engage with what's happening at such a huge scale. As someone who must have to think about this loads, how do you cope? Or I guess, what gives you hope?

Lewis Bollard

Yeah. So it can be challenging. And I really empathize with listeners who are thinking right now. Oh, gosh, I've just, you know, this is so overwhelming to learn about immoral atrocity. I think the really good news is there is a movement, a growing movement of people globally who are working to end these cruelties.

And what gives me hope is seeing the progress they achieve, seeing how we are in a far better place than we were in ten years ago, and my optimism that we will be in a much better place ten years from now. So for people who sort of feel helpless, I'd encourage you to get involved and be part of that movement and part of that opportunity to achieve really meaningful change. Yeah. Nice. I'm glad.

Luis Rodriguez

And we'll hopefully link to lots of things that can help people figure out how to get involved if they are inspired to do so. Okay, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for coming on, Lewis. It's been a pleasure. It's also been really great hard, but I think really valuable.

So I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

If you want to keep up with what's going on in the factory farming space, I highly recommend subscribing to Lewis's farm Animal Welfare research newsletter. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Or if you're not sure how to think about how to compare factory farming to other problems you might work on, you might want to listen to our recent interview with Bob Fisher on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses and more. Alright. The 80,000 hours podcast is produced and edited by Kieran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo Maguire, Simon Monsoor and Dominic Armstrong. Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together, as always by Katie Moore. Thanks for joining. Talk to you again soon.