Episode 100: The Cage-Free Conundrum with Hope Bohanec
Podcast Transcript
Hope:
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals podcast, a project of Compassionate Living. I’m your host Hope Bohanec, and this is Episode 100, I can’t believe it. It’s technically Episode 111 because there is The Reason for Vegan series, and then I did a bonus episode at one point. So there’s 11 other episodes that aren’t in the countdown of the episodes, but officially this is the 100th episode, and today I’m going to be flying solo. No guest today. I have something that I want to share with you. It’s the same information that I’m going to be sharing at our Humane Hoax Chicken webinar, and that’s going to be on International Respect for Chickens Day, May 4, so I thought that I would share this information with you here on the podcast as well.
So this topic is about strategy and tactics in the animal advocacy movement. If you are new to veganism, if you are not quite vegan yet, or if you’re just really not interested in the backroom workings of the animal rights movement, this episode might not be for you, and that’s fine. The last two episodes, Episode 99 and Episode 98, might be better places to start, and I will be back with more inspiring guests in the next coming future episodes, but I think that this topic that I’m about to unpack here is very important, so I’m going to share it with you.
So, of course, another project of Compassionate Livings is the Humane Hoax Project, and I talk about the Humane Hoax and humane labeling and free range and all of those labels a lot. I have two books out on this subject and I give presentations on this topic frequently. And what they talk about is really the consumer side or the animal’s side, the treatment of the animals, how they’re treated in these supposedly alternative operations, the impact on the environment and greenwashing, so humane washing, greenwashing, the marketing of these products, the labeling, the industry lies, all of that.
But today I want to broaden the discussion and talk about the animal advocacy side. This is an aspect of the humane hoax that I really haven’t addressed. That our project really hasn’t addressed yet, but we’re going to start today. And you know, it’s about how much of our energy and our activism is going towards cage-free conversions and other welfare campaigns, and the shift in the last maybe 10-15 years to putting so much energy into welfare strategies. So I’m going to unpack all of this.
However, I do want to start by asking briefly here: Is cage-free better? And of course, I’ve talked a lot about this in past episodes, but I have seen cage-free operations firsthand. I’ve done on-site investigations in Sonoma County, California, and I know that the birds still suffer in these cage-free and free-range situations. They are still coming from the heartless industrial hatcheries where they are debeaked. They’re tossed around like canned goods. Many don’t survive beyond the first hours or days of life. Birds in alternative operations go to a horrifying slaughter at a young age. There’s so much more to this, and I encourage you to listen to past episodes about the humane hoax. I’ll maybe put some of those in the show notes if you want to learn more. And beyond my own experience, there are numerous studies that now show that the bird’s experience can actually be worse in cage-free systems.
There’s really no clear evidence that cage-free is better or provides a better quality of life. Birds in cage-free operations have higher rates of broken bones, smothering, feather picking. There are even studies that found higher mortality rates in cage-free systems, and already every year, nearly 500 million chickens die before slaughter. So that will increase if we go to all cage-free, and these are prolonged, painful deaths. This all reflects my own personal experience when I was doing my own investigation of these facilities, and I found the conditions really varied widely from farm to farm, not necessarily because of the type of farm, even from battery cage operations. I saw cage-free buildings that were worse, and the chickens looked sicker and sadder than battery cage operations that I had seen. So again, both from my observation and from the science, it’s unclear that cage-free is better, and in some instances, it can be even worse.
So why is the animal advocacy community so focused on farming conversions? Recently, there was an announcement that cage-free eggs now are 40% of the U.S. market, and this was going around social media. Both animal advocates were praising this, as well as the industry, the egg industry. And in fact, I got an email from someone, a marketing firm using this as marketing to try to get me to have the executive director of one of the major animal advocacy organizations on my podcast. They said, you know, have so and so on your podcast and talk about this wonderful development of 40% of cage-free eggs. So is this something that we should be celebrating? That’s what I want to talk about today.
So I want to start by saying that I understand working for these welfare campaigns. I do. I get it. You can actually see something happening, some kind of a win, right? When companies go cage-free, or a company says they’ll only source eggs from cage-free sources, any welfare reform-it’s like a little victory in this very, very difficult life of being an animal rights activist. It’s an uphill battle, and you see so little change. So I get it. I understand. I really do.
But for those that do work in that sector, or that donate to organizations that work in that sector, I encourage you to step back and really look at the bigger picture that I’m going to lay out here, and also I’ll just say briefly as well that we don’t know, no one knows exactly what’s going to work. We have opinions, and we’re making educated guesses. But I have been in this movement doing this work for over 30 years. I do have some perspective on it, and I’ve worked all sides of the movement, everything from radical actions and disruptions, and being arrested 14 times in the ’90s, to being the Sonoma County coordinator of Proposition Two, one of the first early cage-free legislations. That was the early 2000s. So I’ve worked numerous angles of this, and I’ve studied this, and I’ve come to conclusions here. And one of the conclusions that I’ve come to is that I feel that the trajectory that we’ve been on in the last 10 to 15 years is causing the animal advocacy movement to be out of balance.
So I’m going to start with my broader thesis and then kind of get into more details. And I think it might surprise some people to know that my critique is really not necessarily of the welfare campaigns themselves, though I do have a bit of that, but I do feel that welfare efforts, cage-free campaigns, corporate campaigns, things like that, It’s not that they shouldn’t exist. I feel that they should be part of our strategy. I’m not completely against welfare campaigns. My critique is on the degree that the movement has shifted to support those welfare campaigns. My critique is on what happens when we focus on welfare in excess, and when you know 90-95% of resources and donations and grant money and jobs and energy and time is going towards welfare, but I do feel there needs to be a diversity of tactics, absolutely, to have a healthy ecosystem. But the question needs to be: what should be central? What should be the overarching message? And what should be supportive tactics? And I think we have that all upside down right now.
Vegan education, grassroots organizing, mass mobilizations should have a much bigger role than it currently does, and reform should just be one of the supportive tools. Okay, so that’s my thesis. Let’s get into the details. So, getting into social justice theory a bit, there’s this thing called the ecology of the movement, and within that ecology, there’s the inside game and the outside game. The outside game is grassroots, right? It’s what I was just talking about. Vegan education. There are numerous things that fall under this umbrella, but it’s working on the grassroots level with the public on the outside of the industry. The inside game is welfare campaigns, corporate campaigns working with the industry to make incremental changes, and these two entities-the inside game and the outside game-really need to be in balance to have a healthy social movement.
And we are really out of balance right now. So I feel that that outside game, right? That individual transformation part is so critical. We need systematic transformational change. We can’t just change what we do, right? We have to change who we are fundamentally, as a people, deeply and culturally, and when I say culture or changing the culture, I’m talking about meat culture, changing the culture of meat and animal product eating. I’m not talking about ethnicity or religious culture in any way. So if I say cultural change, I’m talking about meat culture. I feel that we need so much more energy going into vegan education, educating around speciesism, that causes the change that will affect who we are. Changing farming methods, passing legislation, these are often just temporary measures, easily reversible actions, but changing culture has a much more permanent and lasting effect. Right, reform addresses the symptoms, but veganism addresses the cause. Reforms are a band-aid and easily reversible. There have been a couple of very scary federal bills just in the last few years that, if passed, would wipe out all of the hard-fought state animal welfare bills across the U.S. So we have numerous bills, right, that activists have been fighting for for decades now in states across the U.S. that are varying degrees of animal welfare bills. With one federal bill, and and there have been some that have been working their way through the legislature, it would just wipe out all of those bills. I mean, we’re talking about millions of dollars of activist time and energy would be just wiped away with one law. This strategy, this welfare strategy, is really flimsy without the public shift, without the cultural change to support it, and human culture and behavior is reversible too. I don’t mean to say it’s not, but I think it’s a heck of a lot harder to change once it’s set in the mainstream, right? We need deep, lasting change for it to be sustainable. Not that we shouldn’t have legislative bills, not that we shouldn’t have welfare, but we need the culture to be ready for the change. Don’t just focus on welfare reforms. Assume that it’s going to change the culture. It’s not. We have to change people’s hearts. They have to understand that animals are individual, sentient beings that need to be free of human-imposed suffering. They need to understand speciesism. These things won’t come to light with welfare alone. Okay, so let’s think about the welfare trajectory here now.
What is the end goal? So ultimately, right, our goal should be no animals suffering, no animals exploited, no animals commodified, right? And and I feel that our work needs to reflect that. That’s the thing that really bothers me about all this.
Okay, let’s let’s look at this trajectory. So, if the movement, if this is the movement’s primary focus, and it certainly seems to be the money and resources are pointing in the direction of welfare reform, then we may work for okay, let’s say 10 more years until all egg operations are cage free. Okay, great. So we’ve gone cage free. What next? Well, then we move on to maybe gestation crates in pig farming. That’s becoming very popular now to work on getting the mama pigs out of the gestation crates. So that’s another maybe what 20 to 30 years for all pig production to be crate free. Then what? Debeking, dehorning, castration? I mean, there are endless cruelties that we could tackle one by one till 100 years have passed, 200 years have passed, and we are still confining and killing animals for food. I think the animal agriculture industry would love to do this dance, right, for as long as they can, while still selling even more cage-free and crate-free products. This is a detrimental road to be careening down. I don’t see animal liberation at the end point. It’s incredibly frustrating to see this happening to the movement. Vegan education focuses on the intrinsic worth of individual animals, and that we should not be causing them to suffer-that is key to all of this. Just getting them out of the cages, and maybe at some point this will cause people to start caring for animals, and then they’ll stop eating them. How?
It kind of feels like the welfare reform thing- it almost feels like we’re giving up in a way, like there’s a group of people that have said, “Well, there’s no way the world’s gonna go vegan, so let’s at least do a little something to make their horrific lives better.” But it’s so minimal and so little and so unclear if it’s even better, and in some cases it could actually be worse. I don’t think that it’s going to lead us to our end goal, diverting our energies and our efforts and our money into welfare reform, as the movement has been doing now for the last 10 years. I just don’t see it ultimately liberating animals in the end. There isn’t a clear path to liberation through welfare reforms alone.
So another point that I want to make is that I believe that animal agriculture is unreformable. Welfare reforms are reforms, and the animal agriculture industry is unreformable because there is no industry without exploiting animals’ bodies, so how can it be reformed? There’s no endpoint where you could ever truly produce humane meat, dairy, and eggs. That’s what consumers are hoping for, right? And we’re falsely implying that there is some ideal humane endpoint where you can have your animal products, but we know that’s not the case. We know that there is no humane way to commodify someone’s bodies, so we’re sending the wrong message with these welfare reforms and this labeling.
The strategy of welfare reforms may also empower and embolden the industry, making animal products more attractive and taking us even further away from animal liberation. If it’s so bad for the industry, which is one of the claims, right? Supporters of welfare reforms will say that that it costs money for the industry to make these transitions, so it’s going to hurt them and hurt their bottom line. But if that’s the case, why are they so willing to go along with it? You know, this is where they profit off of animal exploitation. They’re going to get more money from people who buy these products, who are sympathetic, who want to stop animal suffering, and it gives the impression that they’re moving in the right direction, the number of animals out of cages, the amount of space-you know, inches more space-that the animals have. There’s all this empirical data points where you can say that there’s improvements, but then you’re also helping the very industry that exploits the animals, providing them marketing tools so they can sell at higher prices to a new market and quell consumer customers. That’s the humane hoax.
So arguably, how can you help the animals and the industry that exploits them. They have to be mutually exclusive. You can’t help animals and also help the industry. I think that the animal agriculture industry is looking at the welfare reforms and they’re saying, “okay, huh? So we get the animal people off our back. We get the public to believe in our product again. We can charge higher prices to a new market because it’s humane. We’re gonna bet that this is gonna be good for animal agriculture. Sure, we’ll go cage free.”
Some industries are unreformable, like the fossil fuel industry. You can’t have a planet-friendly fossil fuel Industry. Same with animal agriculture. There is no animal industry without harm. These industries are unreformable and need to be dismantled and replaced. The data may give the impression that incremental change is happening, but the reality is that if it would really bring animal liberation, industry wouldn’t be working with you, and now we’re helping them with their promotion and advertising. The only collaboration that should be happening with the animal agriculture industry is to support them to get out of animal farming, transitioning to plant farming, or simply out. That’s the only partnerships, the only support, the only collaboration that should really be happening. We can’t get to our goal with reform alone. It is not a clear path to liberation. But now we have so many companies that have made promises to transition to cage-free.
Also, this thing called the Better Chicken Commitment is another system advocacy groups have created- the Better Chicken Commitment. It’s a three-to-seven-year commitment that the company makes to make improvements, but in the meantime, advocacy groups are promoting them by putting their logo on the website, this Better Chicken Commitment website, saying they’re doing better for animals even before they’ve done anything at all, and the Better Chicken Commitment-it’s not even cage-free. I dug into the language of what is required for the Better Chicken Commitment, and it says nothing about prohibiting cages for egg-laying hens, it says that the stocking density has to be six pounds per square foot of bird, like six pounds of however many pounds of birds are. I hate this kind of language for these individual beings, but they say that they have to have whatever a square foot of space per six pound of bird. This can often mean just enriched cages. They’re just basically bigger battery cages. There was a really great investigation recently by Animal Justice in Canada exposing the reality of enriched cages and basically comparing them to battery cages in visual form and video form. There was a great video showing how they’re just basically the same. The birds are still in just horrible conditions. Anyway, so this Better Chicken Commitment is not even cage free. It does say that it prohibits all forms of broiler cages, and this is where this is so industry friendly. Broiler chickens aren’t in cages; they are kept in the floor systems. Floor systems are these windowless warehouses, where the birds are just by the 1000s out on the floor, same as cage free, same as the breeder chickens, they are in floor systems as well. It’s the egg laying hens that are kept in cages. Ugh. Anyway, and there’s so many companies that have signed up for this Better Chicken Commitment. If you go to the website, you can see all their logos, and there’s just so many recognizable logos and companies.
And Mercy for Animals recently did an assessment of these companies’ compliance, right, with the Better Chicken Commitment, and they were graded from A to F. Chipotle’s got a C, Starbucks got a D, Denny’s got an F, and they’re promoting those companies as if they’re doing better for welfare. But behind the scenes, they’re doing very little or nothing at all. Even if they do follow through and get an A, it’s still so little, so little change for these sensitive, sentient animals.
Okay, so I’m going to talk about something else here that is really driving all of this, and that is effective altruism, or EA. That’s the acronym. So effective altruism, or EA, it has a huge influence on all of this-it’s really what’s driving and fueling this welfare push. I really want to touch on it. I don’t have the time to get deeply into it. It could be a whole other podcast it’s so deep, but I’m going to just kind of talk about it briefly here. So, effective altruism-it’s a philosophy. It goes well beyond nonprofit strategy. It comes from Utilitarianism. If you’re familiar with philosophical strategies, I’m not going to get into all that. But when it’s applied to nonprofit work, it’s about doing the most good for the least effort or the least resources. It uses logic and reason making, not emotions, not feeling. You don’t want to get your emotions involved. Just look at the data, look at the numbers. It looks really good on paper. You know, it sounds really good. Of course, we want to do the most good for the least amount of money or the least effort, yeah, of course. But when it’s applied in the real world, there are numerous problems that arise. Like I said, it’s very data driven. Numbers, stats, data is essential to decision making with EA, and that’s how cage free has really become the darling of the movement when using EA philosophy, because effective altruism funders, and this is why so much of the movement has leaned into EA, because there’s a lot of big money, big tech money being donated through EA entities, and they want numbers. So an animal advocacy organization can say something like, “This cage-free transition will affect 100,000 chickens or 500,000 chickens” right? But the key word there is affect. How will they be affected? What’s going to be happening? Is it really going to relieve the suffering of these animals? The data may look good, right? There’s big numbers. It may give the impression that a lot of animals are “affected”, right? That incremental change is happening, but is it really relieving suffering? And we’re putting all our efforts and all this these millions of dollars into it. And key here, is it leading us to animal freedom?
So I don’t think that we should ignore data. I do feel that numbers are important. We should have numbers and stats and studies to guide us. There’s a certain amount of activism that is quantifiable, that you can count, but there’s also a lot of tactics and strategies that are non-quantifiable, but equally as critical. We shouldn’t use stats and numbers as the only way to measure the ability or effectiveness of social action because you can’t predict human behavior. Emotion has to play a part in this. We can’t just focus on numbers. Emotion creates change. The emotion behind the behavior, and vegan education addresses that. Emotion is so important. People react and respond to different things differently. You may have a campaign or an entire project like a farmed animal sanctuary that may not reach big numbers, that may not, you know, affect big numbers of animals, but they can reach key people, early adopters in a deeper emotional way that creates a passion and an excitement that is more powerful than anything else, and I mention animal sanctuaries here because EA is famously critical of farmed animal sanctuaries, and they’ve been losing funding for the last 10 years or so with the rise of EA and data-driven giving and data-driven funding, and I know sanctuaries that have lost all their funding. They’re having to consider downsizing or moving, or giving the animals to other sanctuaries because they have lost all their funding. This this is really really awful.
This is critical for so many animal advocacy entities, the numbers become reductive. They start to feel that the only way to do activism is with big numbers, more people reached, more animals affected, but it doesn’t take into account the emotion, the myriad of non-quantifiable activities that are critical to that cultural shift that I’ve been talking about. There’s so much more on this Effective Altruism thing. I don’t really have the time to get into it deeper, but I do recommend a really wonderful book. It’s called “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism.” I’ll mention it again at the end, and I’ll put a link in the show notes to how you can get that book. But this issue, this is big. It deeply affects animals. It deeply affects animal advocates. So please learn all you can about.
Some people might say “well, but you have to have small steps. You have to take small steps first, right? Incremental change. It’s so important.” And what I say to that is, yeah, I agree. I believe that you do have to have small steps, incremental change, but those small steps need to move us towards our goal, right? Yes, you want to have small steps, but our ask, the message needs to be a continuation and a follow through to not commodify and kill animals. That’s not the case with welfare reforms and with these labels like cage-free. That’s not the ask, right? The only incremental messaging should be to wean off animal products, reduce animal products, reduce to eliminate different forms of farming. Different species of animals exploited, different labels on the products, I don’t believe that these are paths to elimination, to animal freedom. So, again, yes, we should have small asks along with big asks, but they need to all be moving in the direction of animal liberation. There was an academic study in the Journal of Environmental and Economic Policy. It was called “Animal Welfare Labeled Meat is Not a Stepping Stone to Animal Free Diets. Empirical Evidence From a Survey.” They asked consumers about their animal product choices and different welfare labels. I honestly, I didn’t read the whole study. Unfortunately, it was $100 or over $300 to access the study for a month. So yeah, I didn’t see the whole study, but I did read the abstract and a lot about it. And they said in their abstract, “The survey shows very weak and mixed evidence that the introduction of an animal welfare label could be counterproductive for animal welfare. In the long run, it could result in a locked-in equilibrium with a less harmful social norm, i.e. a suboptimal state of animal farming that still contains animal suffering” That locked in is very key, right? That’s what these welfare reforms do. It locks in animal farming, animal exploitation for the long run. That’s what the industry is banking on. That’s why the industry is playing along with these labels, with these transitions.
So I’m going to be wrapping up here, and I want to bring it back to that imbalance that I was talking about in the beginning. We need to build up the grassroots, the outside game, that outside game of grassroots vegan education, mass mobilization, protest, presentations, webinars, podcasts, YouTube, social media, animal sanctuaries, veg fests, conferences, leafleting, tabling, outreach, and so much more. This is all so critical for that deep, lasting cultural change. We need to promote ethical veganism, teach about speciesism, focus on the intrinsic worth of individual animals. Having been in this movement for over 30 years now, and seeing the trajectory towards welfare campaigns fueled by Effective Altruism in the last decade or so, I am very concerned. I can’t tell you how many activists I talk to about this privately, how many activists feel the same way, say the same things I’ve been saying, but they’re afraid to say anything publicly about it for fear of losing funding. And I hope here that I haven’t hurt Compassionate Living’s chances for getting funding by going public with all of this, but feel that this is getting to a critical point where we need to start speaking up about it.
So, when you’re thinking about giving donations, when you’re thinking about volunteering your time, any way that you support the movement, pay attention to who you’re supporting, what their campaigns are. Look into what you’re giving your money to what you’re giving your time to, and consider supporting small grassroots organizations. They’re putting a lot of amazing content out, like Compassionate Living, like our webinars, like this podcast, also farmed animal sanctuaries, mass mobilizations, other grassroots activities, chicken micro-sanctuaries that are caring for and giving loving homes to chickens. The money is flowing away from all of us now, so please help us out. I encourage you to get more information about this. I’m going to have some resources and links in the show notes. Animal Think Tank is doing a lot of work around this, really exploring and studying the ecology of the movement, and they are starting to speak out about how we are out of balance right now as well. That book that I mentioned about Effective Altruism, “The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, Critical Essays on Effective Altruism”. I really encourage you to check out that book, and I also want to give a plug to Emily Moran Barwick of Bite Size Vegan. On her website, BiteSize Vegan, she talks a lot about cage free. She has some great stuff, great videos and articles. Just to put an exclamation point on the end here, we have to focus on who we are, on that cultural shift, that deep change in our being as humans to be compassionate, ethical people. We want people to choose the veggie burger, but without the societal concept and the understanding that animals are sentient beings that deserve to live free of human-imposed suffering, without that context, as they’re reaching for that veggie burger, without the meaning behind the action, I feel that we can just too easily slip back from any progress that alternative proteins have helped to create.
We have to establish a cultural shift in our relationship to animals, that we have an ethical relationship to animals to maintain any gains that we make, and we need to begin to dismantle the animal, agricultural, industrial complex-not work with them, not help promote them, but dismantle them. This podcast is a project of my organization, Compassionate Living, and we are devoted to that vision-that vision of identity transformation, individually, culturally, collectively, and to creating a compassionate, just vegan world. So please support us, support the grassroots, become a monthly donor to Compassionate Living, and share this episode, this critical information far and wide. And please, live vegan.
