Sorry for the late comment -- I just saw your piece as a link from the latest Friends of Farmed Animal Funders email. As a mid-level donor to the movement, I've been thinking a lot about these issues -- and I appreciate the thoughtful way you have made your case while avoiding piling on to infighting. I also recommend factoring in the findings of the October 2024 Faunalytics study "The Role Of Humanewashing In Grocery Stores: How Welfare Labels Affect Purchasing Behavior" https://faunalytics.org/humanewashing-in-grocery-stores/ (a study I helped to fund) -- including "participants bought the same number of animal products regardless of which labels they saw." This seems to support your conclusion that we need to focus more on the biggest levers of social change like laws, corporate policies and technology. And I would add that to confront these levers in the current political environment, it is more important than ever to dial down infighting.
The GAP board is now made up of seven people with a vested financial interest in animal agriculture and only three animal “welfare” groups and it is pretty clear it has become a humane-washing and marketing arm for the meat industry. These animal welfare groups are deluding themselves if they think they still have any influence there. For a full reply, please see our post here: https://www.peta.org/blog/the-humane-society-of-the-u-s-aspca-and-others-are-factory-farm-apologists/
I find this article very well written and respectful of the opposite point of view. However, it seems to me that it does not sufficiently analyze the vision that supports the “drop the assured scheme” claim.
Consumers in rich countries have a choice in the supermarket between animal products from the worst farms, animal products from certified farms that are a little less worse, and plant-based products that completely resolve the issue of suffering.
Among consumers as a whole, some still buy the worst products for price reasons, and will only turn away from them when they are no longer on the market. Others, with a more or less pronounced ethical or ecological conscience, want to spend a little more money to buy a product that doesn't harm (or doesn't harm too much) animals.
The question then is how to convince these consumers to turn away from the worst products, and here opinions differ:
- Some think that an excellent solution would be to ensure that for every animal product produced using the worst practices, there is an animal product labeled by an animal advocacy organization, which avoids the worst practices. They feel that getting consumers to turn away from the meat aisle altogether and seek out the plant-based alternative instead is too difficult an objective, and one that has already failed (organizations have been promoting veganism for some time, and it remains an ultra-minority practice). They believe that the counterfactual scenario in which the animalist label would be dropped is one in which consumers would shift to even worse products, with less demanding certifications, and that the impact of such a decision would be net negative.
- Others believe that the most effective way to help animals is rather to convey a simple, clear message, encouraging the purchase of plant-based alternatives only (even if the step seems higher for reasons of price and taste quality), leaving all animal products in the same “don't buy” basket. They point out that the industry is very good at humanewashing, and that by creating false labels that give the illusion of quality, the message to consumers becomes too complex ("buy labelled meat, but remember that one label is a scam and another a real improvement"). Above all, in this skeptical perspective on labels, there is a crucial concern to attack the very idea of ethical meat, and to ensure that no animal product benefits from positive qualifications on its label (“humane”, “assured” by an animal advocacy organization, “free-range”...), to maximize the chances that consumers will buy plant-based alternatives (which, on the other hand, benefit from assumed positive communication). In the end, the counterfactual scenario of the proponents of this position does not consist of simply doing away with the animalist label and then sitting back while consumers redirect themselves to less demanding labels. It's about directing as many of our resources as possible towards communicating to consumers in a way that unambiguously encourages them to turn away from animal products altogether.
I find that the article doesn't really address this fundamental difference in strategic views, and that by simply stating at the outset that the RSPCA Assured label “certifies animal products as being less cruelly produced”, it fails to recognize that this is probably not what consumers understand. The logo printed on products doesn't say “less cruelly produced”, it just says “RSPCA Assured”. I think the spontaneous intuition that 99% of people must have here when they have no prior knowledge of the subject, is that if an animal welfare organization gives a certification for the product, it's validating that buying it is ethical. In fact, on the label's website, the page explaining the meaning of the logo (https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/about-us/the-rspca-assured-logo/ ) reads:
“The RSPCA Assured label is the RSPCA's ethical farm animal welfare assurance label. The label tells you that a product has come from suppliers that have been assessed by the RSPCA's independent assurance provider to check they meet the RSPCA's strict standards of welfare for farmed animals.
The RSPCA Assured label on products makes it easy to spot products from animals that had a better life so you can feel confident about your choice.”
This public formulation is clearly more positive and less realistic than the “less cruelly produced” formula presented in the article to define the label.
Finally, it seems to me incomplete to describe this campaign by Animal Rising and Peta as “infighting”. This campaign against the RSPCA Assured label is not simply directed at the RSPCA. It is also (and perhaps above all) aimed at the public, with posters in public places advising people to go to welfarewashing.org, which has two calls to action: ask the RSPCA to drop its logo, and sign up to a vegan challenge.
What's the point of such a public campaign? One hypothesis is that by attacking the most demanding label and showing that animals endure severe suffering even in farms and slaughterhouses benefiting from the best possible label, they intend to make a striking demonstration that ethical meat doesn't exist. This sends a clear message to ethically-minded consumers: if you want to make an ethical purchase, you can't rely on labelled animal products. You have no alternative but to turn away from animal products altogether.
I think the question is whether this strategy is more or less effective than labeling the least bad animal products, and the answer doesn't seem obvious to me at first.
What do you think of this argument of mine? The Animal Rising and PETA campaigns push moderate groups to become more radical (for example, if successful, AR's campaign might get the RSPCA to disavow animal consumption and factory farming altogether). If moderate groups become more radical, then the movement can be united in the ambitious goal to end factory farming within our generation (within the next 25 years). If the greater movement is united behind this goal, we are more likely to achieve it.
thanks for the insightful post. a beautiful example of charitably expressed criticism
It feels that somewhere at the basis of the discussion is the age-old and to my knowledge unsolved question about whether animal welfare measures and regulations speed up progress to a world with *much* less animal suffering, or create complacency and lock-in...
You wrote "I also don’t think endorsing less cruel standards means endorsing meat" and I would agree with that. But when you call the less cruel standards "humane" or "animal welfare certified" you are endorsing meat.
There are many hurdles to getting people to stop eating animals, but one of the big ones is that people want to hold onto the false notion that there's some ethical way to do it. It's shameful ASPCA and HSUS are reinforcing that myth.
Fantastic post, Lewis, and not just for the Monty Python link. :-)
It would be one thing if campaigns focusing on individual choices have made a difference. But we have the data from the 50 years since Animal Liberation was published - per-capita consumption of factory-farmed animals is at an all-time high. Indeed, the data would seem to indicate that individual choice campaigns increase factory farming (e.g., looking at the growth of factory-farming chickens before and after the launch of Veganuary).
The perfect has been the enemy of ... anything better for far too long.
> But we have the data from the 50 years since Animal Liberation was published - per-capita consumption of factory-farmed animals is at an all-time high.
There is an enormous confounding factor here though, which is the massive reductions in poverty and increase in purchasing power. I'm not sure it's justified to conclude from this that there has been no progress in terms of educating consumers.
(Note: I have done some anti-RSPCA Assured campaigning and so what I am going to say should be evaluated against this bias)
The Assured scheme suffers from two serious problems:
1. The scheme is compulsory, so a farm is under no obligations to abide by it. In fact, since any farm that follows the scheme will probably raise their prices, they're likely to be out-competed by a farm which doesn't follow the scheme. I would like to see evidence that animals on assured farms are replacing animals that would be on non-assured farms, because otherwise these animals are just adding to the total count and so not actually reducing the total amount of suffering.
2. Advertising for the scheme explicitly encourages meat eating, even if it is for 'more ethical' meat. The now-outgoing CEO of the RSPCA said that consumers can feel comfortable buying assured products, and the RSPCA website even used to have recipes for the assured products. Yes, they may have encouraged reducing meat eating, but 'reducing' is a very wriggly concept that can be interpreted by some to mean switching from beef to fish, which would actually be worse!
I totally agree with you that the animals on RSPCA Assured farms have better lives than those on non-assured farms, but the cost of this is the RSPCA supporting the cultural and legal systems which treat farmed animals as objects for exploitation. Yes, the impact of this is harder to measure than the impact of a cage-free hen house, but I believe that this is ultimately doing more harm in the long run.
Re point #1, you seem to be suggesting that these schemes are _increasing_ animal product consumption. Or in other words, the presence of higher-priced "humane" products on the market causes people to consume animal products who would otherwise avoid consumption because the products are not "humane".
While that's not impossible, it seems _extremely_ unlikely to me. It seems far more likely that these products are capturing a share of an existing market of animal product consumers. That share is made of people with enough income to afford spending more on the same products they would have consumed regardless, because they feel better about buying these "humane" products.
If I'm correct, then this products are strictly a good thing for animals, since the animal product consumption rate would be the same with or without these products. I would be willing to bet a very large amount of money that the vast majority of "humane" product purchases come from people who would otherwise buy regular products, not people who would stop eating animal products entirely if these "humane" products did not exist.
Thank you both for engaging with this! I agree with Dave on #1. Given how supply and demand normally works, I think the onus should be on anti-certification campaigners to show evidence that animals on assured farms are *not* replacing animals that would be on non-assured farms.
But I'm more sympathetic on point #2. I don't think anyone should say that you can feel comfortable buying assured products. I think the meat recipes were on the RSPCA Assured site -- not the RSPCA site -- which feels more defensible to me. But if they were on the RSPCA site, I agree they shouldn't be.
And yeah the crux of our disagreement may be whether the harms of the "RSPCA supporting the cultural and legal systems which treat farmed animals as objects for exploitation" outweigh the benefits to the welfare of certified animals. I suspect they don't, but I agree it's hard to measure and thus very reasonable to have different views here.
I don't think the scheme is causing an increase in meat eating, but I'm skeptical, because of the trend towards increased meat consumption, that they're replacing animals who would otherwise be on non-assured farms. I think you're right that these products are mainly being bought by a particular consumer group, but this is also the group that is probably most sympathetic to veganism and they are being told by the RSPCA that they're actually helping when they buy these products (alongside being misled by images from Assured Scheme advertising). I don't think factory farming ends by everyone deciding to become vegan, but it does end by some people becoming vegan activists and advocating for either 100% plant-based catering in institutions or law changes which capture all animals products, not just a small fraction of the market. The RSPCA is actively hindering this process by telling its supporters it's okay to eat animals from certain farms.
Re: law changes, when these are proposed, one of industry's strongest arguments against new regulations is "this is a crazy untested rule authored by activist bureaucrats with no understanding of our business, and it will force us to raise prices far more than they claim".
Establishing a prototype system of real-world farms following a certain set of rules proves that wrong. So I think it helps more than hinders legal progress.
Thank you Lewis for laying this out so clearly. I listened to Ben Newman's episode on this topic yesterday, on How I Learned to Love Shrimp and, intuitively, it feels like attacking RSPCAs and alikes won't lead to the most animal lives saved. But I'm mostly trying to learn the pros and cons atm, and your article really helped with that.
Love this post. I think there are many people who care about buying humane meat, but are led astray by these labels.
When I was a kid, my parents would always buy the chicken labeled free range, and our whole family assumed it meant the chickens were running around outside leading happy lives.
If more abusive companies lost their certifications, I believe people like my parents (ie liberal folks with disposable income) would change their buying habits. imo, even moving from a bad welfare farm to a less-bad-welfare farm makes a difference.
Plus, as someone who actually buys meat from a small, family farm where the animals are running around outside (https://www.familyfriendlyfarms.com/) it frustrates me that some of the worst factory farms are pretending to be all these things, driving people away from actual high welfare farming. Some of those US labels are a travesty.
(I'm allergic to soy and sensitive to processed foods, which makes it really hard for me to go vegan. As someone who is a meat eater and will continue to eat meat for the foreseeable future, the existence of actual high welfare farms, where chicken and pigs are pastured raised and not high growth breeds, is really important to me.)
You are right on, Lewis. Incremental steps are crucial for making tangible progress, while at the same time we shouldn't ignore the significant, vital role that radicals play in driving change. History shows that (lasting) change often unfolds in stages -- but that radicals are the ones to spark awareness and garner the energy of change (while small reforms can solidify our gains on the way there.) Take the civil rights movement or environmental protections—some bold voices in those quarters set the stage for gradual but lasting reforms.
And as a counterpoint, there are the communist revolutions (which I know too well), which illustrate the cluster-fuck complexity (think of all the unintended-consequences feedback loops) of implementing radical change. Add to this example the French Revolution: it was a drastic, disruptive attempt to dismantle the entrenched aristocracy and establish equality. Initially, it succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy and feudalism from one day to the next. But the aftermath was anything but straightforward. The radical upheaval led to years of instability and violence, eventually paving the way for Napoleon crowning himself Emperor-- an opposite effect of the original revolutionary ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
So really the revolution turned France into an empire focused on military expansion and centralized control that started a series of wars across Europe. Conquest 'trumped' the original principles of democracy and equality. And ultimately, the Congress of Vienna restored the monarchy in full and brought the Bourbon dynasty back to power for practically the rest of the century. The point is that radical changes can sometimes result in outcomes that diverge sharply from their original intentions. These revolutions rapidly overhauled entire systems, driven by strong ideological commitments, but in the end had outcomes that led to destinations entirely off the map.
So I agree with you -- it’s about strategically and methodically chipping away at issues, while at the same time keeping the fire of radical change alive. A dual approach can and should work synergistically. If all of us can recognize all of our efforts' worth at the strategy table, we can, and we will, stay united for the cause.
Thank you for your nuanced insight. We shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater! Every group's effort, even if flawed, helps the global move towards what's right.
Sorry for the late comment -- I just saw your piece as a link from the latest Friends of Farmed Animal Funders email. As a mid-level donor to the movement, I've been thinking a lot about these issues -- and I appreciate the thoughtful way you have made your case while avoiding piling on to infighting. I also recommend factoring in the findings of the October 2024 Faunalytics study "The Role Of Humanewashing In Grocery Stores: How Welfare Labels Affect Purchasing Behavior" https://faunalytics.org/humanewashing-in-grocery-stores/ (a study I helped to fund) -- including "participants bought the same number of animal products regardless of which labels they saw." This seems to support your conclusion that we need to focus more on the biggest levers of social change like laws, corporate policies and technology. And I would add that to confront these levers in the current political environment, it is more important than ever to dial down infighting.
Thanks Alysoun! I really appreciate those thoughts. And thank you for everything you're doing through your memorial fund and volunteer work!
The GAP board is now made up of seven people with a vested financial interest in animal agriculture and only three animal “welfare” groups and it is pretty clear it has become a humane-washing and marketing arm for the meat industry. These animal welfare groups are deluding themselves if they think they still have any influence there. For a full reply, please see our post here: https://www.peta.org/blog/the-humane-society-of-the-u-s-aspca-and-others-are-factory-farm-apologists/
I find this article very well written and respectful of the opposite point of view. However, it seems to me that it does not sufficiently analyze the vision that supports the “drop the assured scheme” claim.
Consumers in rich countries have a choice in the supermarket between animal products from the worst farms, animal products from certified farms that are a little less worse, and plant-based products that completely resolve the issue of suffering.
Among consumers as a whole, some still buy the worst products for price reasons, and will only turn away from them when they are no longer on the market. Others, with a more or less pronounced ethical or ecological conscience, want to spend a little more money to buy a product that doesn't harm (or doesn't harm too much) animals.
The question then is how to convince these consumers to turn away from the worst products, and here opinions differ:
- Some think that an excellent solution would be to ensure that for every animal product produced using the worst practices, there is an animal product labeled by an animal advocacy organization, which avoids the worst practices. They feel that getting consumers to turn away from the meat aisle altogether and seek out the plant-based alternative instead is too difficult an objective, and one that has already failed (organizations have been promoting veganism for some time, and it remains an ultra-minority practice). They believe that the counterfactual scenario in which the animalist label would be dropped is one in which consumers would shift to even worse products, with less demanding certifications, and that the impact of such a decision would be net negative.
- Others believe that the most effective way to help animals is rather to convey a simple, clear message, encouraging the purchase of plant-based alternatives only (even if the step seems higher for reasons of price and taste quality), leaving all animal products in the same “don't buy” basket. They point out that the industry is very good at humanewashing, and that by creating false labels that give the illusion of quality, the message to consumers becomes too complex ("buy labelled meat, but remember that one label is a scam and another a real improvement"). Above all, in this skeptical perspective on labels, there is a crucial concern to attack the very idea of ethical meat, and to ensure that no animal product benefits from positive qualifications on its label (“humane”, “assured” by an animal advocacy organization, “free-range”...), to maximize the chances that consumers will buy plant-based alternatives (which, on the other hand, benefit from assumed positive communication). In the end, the counterfactual scenario of the proponents of this position does not consist of simply doing away with the animalist label and then sitting back while consumers redirect themselves to less demanding labels. It's about directing as many of our resources as possible towards communicating to consumers in a way that unambiguously encourages them to turn away from animal products altogether.
I find that the article doesn't really address this fundamental difference in strategic views, and that by simply stating at the outset that the RSPCA Assured label “certifies animal products as being less cruelly produced”, it fails to recognize that this is probably not what consumers understand. The logo printed on products doesn't say “less cruelly produced”, it just says “RSPCA Assured”. I think the spontaneous intuition that 99% of people must have here when they have no prior knowledge of the subject, is that if an animal welfare organization gives a certification for the product, it's validating that buying it is ethical. In fact, on the label's website, the page explaining the meaning of the logo (https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/about-us/the-rspca-assured-logo/ ) reads:
“The RSPCA Assured label is the RSPCA's ethical farm animal welfare assurance label. The label tells you that a product has come from suppliers that have been assessed by the RSPCA's independent assurance provider to check they meet the RSPCA's strict standards of welfare for farmed animals.
The RSPCA Assured label on products makes it easy to spot products from animals that had a better life so you can feel confident about your choice.”
This public formulation is clearly more positive and less realistic than the “less cruelly produced” formula presented in the article to define the label.
Finally, it seems to me incomplete to describe this campaign by Animal Rising and Peta as “infighting”. This campaign against the RSPCA Assured label is not simply directed at the RSPCA. It is also (and perhaps above all) aimed at the public, with posters in public places advising people to go to welfarewashing.org, which has two calls to action: ask the RSPCA to drop its logo, and sign up to a vegan challenge.
What's the point of such a public campaign? One hypothesis is that by attacking the most demanding label and showing that animals endure severe suffering even in farms and slaughterhouses benefiting from the best possible label, they intend to make a striking demonstration that ethical meat doesn't exist. This sends a clear message to ethically-minded consumers: if you want to make an ethical purchase, you can't rely on labelled animal products. You have no alternative but to turn away from animal products altogether.
I think the question is whether this strategy is more or less effective than labeling the least bad animal products, and the answer doesn't seem obvious to me at first.
Great post, Lewis! Thanks for the read.
What do you think of this argument of mine? The Animal Rising and PETA campaigns push moderate groups to become more radical (for example, if successful, AR's campaign might get the RSPCA to disavow animal consumption and factory farming altogether). If moderate groups become more radical, then the movement can be united in the ambitious goal to end factory farming within our generation (within the next 25 years). If the greater movement is united behind this goal, we are more likely to achieve it.
thanks for the insightful post. a beautiful example of charitably expressed criticism
It feels that somewhere at the basis of the discussion is the age-old and to my knowledge unsolved question about whether animal welfare measures and regulations speed up progress to a world with *much* less animal suffering, or create complacency and lock-in...
You wrote "I also don’t think endorsing less cruel standards means endorsing meat" and I would agree with that. But when you call the less cruel standards "humane" or "animal welfare certified" you are endorsing meat.
There are many hurdles to getting people to stop eating animals, but one of the big ones is that people want to hold onto the false notion that there's some ethical way to do it. It's shameful ASPCA and HSUS are reinforcing that myth.
Fantastic post, Lewis, and not just for the Monty Python link. :-)
It would be one thing if campaigns focusing on individual choices have made a difference. But we have the data from the 50 years since Animal Liberation was published - per-capita consumption of factory-farmed animals is at an all-time high. Indeed, the data would seem to indicate that individual choice campaigns increase factory farming (e.g., looking at the growth of factory-farming chickens before and after the launch of Veganuary).
The perfect has been the enemy of ... anything better for far too long.
> But we have the data from the 50 years since Animal Liberation was published - per-capita consumption of factory-farmed animals is at an all-time high.
There is an enormous confounding factor here though, which is the massive reductions in poverty and increase in purchasing power. I'm not sure it's justified to conclude from this that there has been no progress in terms of educating consumers.
(Note: I have done some anti-RSPCA Assured campaigning and so what I am going to say should be evaluated against this bias)
The Assured scheme suffers from two serious problems:
1. The scheme is compulsory, so a farm is under no obligations to abide by it. In fact, since any farm that follows the scheme will probably raise their prices, they're likely to be out-competed by a farm which doesn't follow the scheme. I would like to see evidence that animals on assured farms are replacing animals that would be on non-assured farms, because otherwise these animals are just adding to the total count and so not actually reducing the total amount of suffering.
2. Advertising for the scheme explicitly encourages meat eating, even if it is for 'more ethical' meat. The now-outgoing CEO of the RSPCA said that consumers can feel comfortable buying assured products, and the RSPCA website even used to have recipes for the assured products. Yes, they may have encouraged reducing meat eating, but 'reducing' is a very wriggly concept that can be interpreted by some to mean switching from beef to fish, which would actually be worse!
I totally agree with you that the animals on RSPCA Assured farms have better lives than those on non-assured farms, but the cost of this is the RSPCA supporting the cultural and legal systems which treat farmed animals as objects for exploitation. Yes, the impact of this is harder to measure than the impact of a cage-free hen house, but I believe that this is ultimately doing more harm in the long run.
Re point #1, you seem to be suggesting that these schemes are _increasing_ animal product consumption. Or in other words, the presence of higher-priced "humane" products on the market causes people to consume animal products who would otherwise avoid consumption because the products are not "humane".
While that's not impossible, it seems _extremely_ unlikely to me. It seems far more likely that these products are capturing a share of an existing market of animal product consumers. That share is made of people with enough income to afford spending more on the same products they would have consumed regardless, because they feel better about buying these "humane" products.
If I'm correct, then this products are strictly a good thing for animals, since the animal product consumption rate would be the same with or without these products. I would be willing to bet a very large amount of money that the vast majority of "humane" product purchases come from people who would otherwise buy regular products, not people who would stop eating animal products entirely if these "humane" products did not exist.
Thank you both for engaging with this! I agree with Dave on #1. Given how supply and demand normally works, I think the onus should be on anti-certification campaigners to show evidence that animals on assured farms are *not* replacing animals that would be on non-assured farms.
But I'm more sympathetic on point #2. I don't think anyone should say that you can feel comfortable buying assured products. I think the meat recipes were on the RSPCA Assured site -- not the RSPCA site -- which feels more defensible to me. But if they were on the RSPCA site, I agree they shouldn't be.
And yeah the crux of our disagreement may be whether the harms of the "RSPCA supporting the cultural and legal systems which treat farmed animals as objects for exploitation" outweigh the benefits to the welfare of certified animals. I suspect they don't, but I agree it's hard to measure and thus very reasonable to have different views here.
I don't think the scheme is causing an increase in meat eating, but I'm skeptical, because of the trend towards increased meat consumption, that they're replacing animals who would otherwise be on non-assured farms. I think you're right that these products are mainly being bought by a particular consumer group, but this is also the group that is probably most sympathetic to veganism and they are being told by the RSPCA that they're actually helping when they buy these products (alongside being misled by images from Assured Scheme advertising). I don't think factory farming ends by everyone deciding to become vegan, but it does end by some people becoming vegan activists and advocating for either 100% plant-based catering in institutions or law changes which capture all animals products, not just a small fraction of the market. The RSPCA is actively hindering this process by telling its supporters it's okay to eat animals from certain farms.
Re: law changes, when these are proposed, one of industry's strongest arguments against new regulations is "this is a crazy untested rule authored by activist bureaucrats with no understanding of our business, and it will force us to raise prices far more than they claim".
Establishing a prototype system of real-world farms following a certain set of rules proves that wrong. So I think it helps more than hinders legal progress.
Thank you Lewis for laying this out so clearly. I listened to Ben Newman's episode on this topic yesterday, on How I Learned to Love Shrimp and, intuitively, it feels like attacking RSPCAs and alikes won't lead to the most animal lives saved. But I'm mostly trying to learn the pros and cons atm, and your article really helped with that.
Love this post. I think there are many people who care about buying humane meat, but are led astray by these labels.
When I was a kid, my parents would always buy the chicken labeled free range, and our whole family assumed it meant the chickens were running around outside leading happy lives.
If more abusive companies lost their certifications, I believe people like my parents (ie liberal folks with disposable income) would change their buying habits. imo, even moving from a bad welfare farm to a less-bad-welfare farm makes a difference.
Plus, as someone who actually buys meat from a small, family farm where the animals are running around outside (https://www.familyfriendlyfarms.com/) it frustrates me that some of the worst factory farms are pretending to be all these things, driving people away from actual high welfare farming. Some of those US labels are a travesty.
(I'm allergic to soy and sensitive to processed foods, which makes it really hard for me to go vegan. As someone who is a meat eater and will continue to eat meat for the foreseeable future, the existence of actual high welfare farms, where chicken and pigs are pastured raised and not high growth breeds, is really important to me.)
You are right on, Lewis. Incremental steps are crucial for making tangible progress, while at the same time we shouldn't ignore the significant, vital role that radicals play in driving change. History shows that (lasting) change often unfolds in stages -- but that radicals are the ones to spark awareness and garner the energy of change (while small reforms can solidify our gains on the way there.) Take the civil rights movement or environmental protections—some bold voices in those quarters set the stage for gradual but lasting reforms.
And as a counterpoint, there are the communist revolutions (which I know too well), which illustrate the cluster-fuck complexity (think of all the unintended-consequences feedback loops) of implementing radical change. Add to this example the French Revolution: it was a drastic, disruptive attempt to dismantle the entrenched aristocracy and establish equality. Initially, it succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy and feudalism from one day to the next. But the aftermath was anything but straightforward. The radical upheaval led to years of instability and violence, eventually paving the way for Napoleon crowning himself Emperor-- an opposite effect of the original revolutionary ideals of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
So really the revolution turned France into an empire focused on military expansion and centralized control that started a series of wars across Europe. Conquest 'trumped' the original principles of democracy and equality. And ultimately, the Congress of Vienna restored the monarchy in full and brought the Bourbon dynasty back to power for practically the rest of the century. The point is that radical changes can sometimes result in outcomes that diverge sharply from their original intentions. These revolutions rapidly overhauled entire systems, driven by strong ideological commitments, but in the end had outcomes that led to destinations entirely off the map.
So I agree with you -- it’s about strategically and methodically chipping away at issues, while at the same time keeping the fire of radical change alive. A dual approach can and should work synergistically. If all of us can recognize all of our efforts' worth at the strategy table, we can, and we will, stay united for the cause.
Thank you for your nuanced insight. We shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater! Every group's effort, even if flawed, helps the global move towards what's right.
Dear Lewis
Thank you for this article. While I drafted a critical comment, it grew so long that I made an own article of it, citing yours:
https://substack.com/history/post/155709526
Great article, Lewis. Thank you. I learned a lot from reading it.