Ruth Harrison and Henry Spira won major reforms for farmed animals. How did they do it? Here are some lessons for effective animal advocates today:

1. Focus: prioritize specific, winnable campaigns with clear targets and demands.
2. Radical tactics, reasonable demands: combine…

torturing animals is cruel, illegal, and utterly barbaric — that is unless you scale it up by the millions and sell their flesh for profit

A day in the life of my very cool Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare colleague, Abhi Kumar 🐔🍔 (<- my emoji attempt at capturing his alt-protein focus)

openphilanthropy.org/research/day-i…

Factory farming is a moral crisis of our time. It’s also a moral opportunity to reduce a source of great suffering.

We discuss the progress in this struggle on my new 80,000 Hours podcast.

80000hours.org/podcast/episod…

This is following the standard farm animal cruelty playbook…

A whistleblower sees cruelty … police and the USDA ignore their complaints … the farm owner claims, w/o evidence, that the cruelty was staged.

Next steps is local officials will try to discredit the whistleblower.

Your taxes at work: the USDA paid $500 million last year to factory farms to bake 66 million chickens and turkeys alive.

Less cruel methods exist, as does a vaccine to stop H5N1. But the USDA won't require either because they'd cost factory farms and limit exports. Priorities.

The meat industry is lobbying Congress to nullify state bans on cruelly produced meat.

The meat industry is also lobbying states to ban cultivated meat.

This may seem hypocritical, but is actually principled ... the principle is that laws should favor the meat industry.

The first US hatchery is about to adopt new tech to end the killing of baby chicks!

For every American, the egg industry kills about one day-old male chick every year.

Great piece by Cara Buckley on Innovate Animal Ag's work to end this.

nytimes.com/2024/03/28/cli…

The US chicken industry has an annualized mortality rate of 44% -- about 9X higher than backyard flocks.

Some might worry about the farm conditions that cause so many birds to die.

But the industry worries more about how to remove them -- and the Chicken Reaper is the answer.

It's wild how many sustainability scholars think finding more 'efficient' animals to factory farm is a solution.

The newest victims are pythons. They each endure 1-1.5 years in a crowded tank.

But apparently they have a good feed conversion rate.

nature.com/articles/s4159…

I have a new piece in Aeon on 'The Dangers of AI Farming' with Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert. We want to sound the alarm about the possible harms of even well-intentioned uses of AI in animal agriculture. 1/4 aeon.co/essays/how-to-…

Industry vets are factory farms' best spokespeople. They present as impartial experts, w/o noting their conflicts of interest.

For example, this vet opposing a cage ban works for factory farms and is married to the CEO of the Animal Agriculture Alliance.

stardem.com/news/general_a…

China is key to the future of farmed animal welfare. New survey results give me hope:

- 87% of Chinese agree farm animals can experience emotions similar to humans'
- 66% agree it's important to establish legislation for farm animal welfare

N=5,284
nature.com/articles/s4159…

A long, excellent interview with ⁦Lewis Bollard⁩ of ⁦Open Philanthropy⁩ about factory farming and how to reduce the suffering of farmed animals currentaffairs.org/2024/03/why-fa…

Relatively low-profile activism aimed at elite persuasion and targeting a relatively small number of giant purchasers has made a big difference for adoption of cage-free eggs.

(maybe everyone knew this already but someone explained it to me yesterday and I was surprised)

Top Dutch retailer Jumbo will stop running price promotions on all fresh meat!

Factory farmed meat's low price excludes its costs to animals, the environment, and our health. Jumbo's move creates a fairer playing field with plant-based meats.

esmmagazine.com/retail/jumbo-t…

Washington state just passed the nation's first ban on octopus farming!

To most people, octopuses inspire awe and wonder. To factory farmers, they inspire greed and cruelty.

It's the 21st Century. We know enough to know we shouldn't factory farm new species.

The problem: farmed animals worldwide still lack legal protections for their welfare.

But globally, most people—Europeans, Americans, Brazilians, Indians—agree with some version of the above statement.

So why do laws fail to reflect the preferences of so many?