Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy and writes the organization’s farm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people’s stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerate animals’ mass suffering in factory farms. Bollard explains the massive amount of work it will take to reduce or eliminate factory farming, and the setbacks including the challenges plant-based meats have had. He also shows, however, that there have been striking successes that should make the issue feel less hopeless and insurmountable, and actually major improvements to animal welfare are within reach. He explains why the issue is a priority, why it’s so challenging to mobilize people around, what has been accomplished so far, and what could be accomplished with more activism and political pressure. 

Nathan J. Robinson 

You work at Open Philanthropy, an organization that aims to address the most pressing crises and more serious problems in the world. I know that they think a lot at Open Philanthropy about what the worst things in the world are, and what we most urgently need to work on, and you yourself have dedicated your career to working on animal welfare. So, you clearly have concluded that animal welfare falls into the category of one of the most morally urgent issues in the world. I think for plenty of people, it seems like a secondary issue and gets neglected. Could you tell us why you believe this is such an urgent moral priority?

Lewis Bollard 

I believe that factory farming and our treatment of animals is a moral atrocity that future generations will look back on with disgust. I think most of us believe that, too, when we really think through what we already believe and its ethical implications. So, most of us already believe that it’s wrong to torture an individual animal and cause an animal to suffer needlessly. I think most of us believe that animals can suffer, or that pigs, chickens, or fish can all suffer. And when most of us see the conditions on factory farms, we would have little doubt that these animals do suffer. In fact, in opinion polls, when they are asked about each of the individual practices on factory farms, people routinely say each of them should be illegal. So, people already agree that these practices are abhorrent. What we have is a system that practices these horrid methods of treatment on tens of billions of sentient animals every year. When you just think through the sheer scale of that and the sheer amount of suffering involved, I think it becomes apparent why this is a moral atrocity.

Robinson 

The numbers really are staggering. Obviously, for many people, a billion is just a big number. How do you help us understand what kinds of numbers of animals are being tortured at any given time? 

Bollard 

One way to think about this is in terms of how many farmed animals are suffering for each person on the globe. For every human being on the globe, there’s almost one farmed mammal—a pig, cow, or sheep—who is suffering. There’s typically one egg-laying hen who’s confined in a battery cage, three chickens being raised for their meat in atrocious conditions, and then potentially tens of fish—and potentially hundreds of wild caught fish—that are being caught as well, for each one individual. If you’re someone who consumes eggs, there’s probably a hen out there in a battery cage who could have your name on it. That is the direct contribution to the suffering of individual animals.

Robinson 

You have a very interesting post on the Farm Animal Welfare Substack that you and Open Philanthropy run on this issue called, “We love animals, why do we torture them?” So you’ve laid out the basic facts here, which is the quantity of suffering that we are talking about. Why do we allow this to happen? You point out that there are these common explanations that we reach for: we have close relationships with dogs, and we have less of a relationship in our lives with chickens; we like animals that have these qualities that we call cuteness—snakes and certain rats are cute, but others aren’t. But you say that the common explanations aren’t quite satisfactory. Explain why we do this, and what you think is a better explanation.

Bollard 

I think that the example of rabbits is an interesting rebuttal to a lot of the theories of why we torture animals. People often say, we care for the ones who are pets, who are cute, who are mammals, and who are smarter than other animals. And yet for rabbits, not only do we keep them for pets—they’re very cute and smart—we also torture them in vast numbers for the meat industry, fur industry, and animal testing industry. Just in terms of the variety of ways we abuse them, they are one of the more abused animals on the planet. And I think in reality, the line is not between any kind of structured basis; it’s not really that we care about animals that have a certain moral standing or a certain intelligence or something like that. I think we fundamentally care about animals who are easy and convenient for us to care about, and we don’t care about animals that are inconvenient for us to care about. That’s partly a matter of apathy, of not caring enough. I think it’s partly a matter of ignorance, of people not understanding how bad these conditions are and how we’re treating animals on factory farms. It’s partly the classic problem of how the status quo just prevails, of inertia, where people just keep on doing something because we’ve been doing it for a while. It just keeps on happening, and there’s not enough pressure and power to change it.

Robinson 

One aspect of this is that with the sheer numbers that you’ve described, it can really induce a sense of hopelessness. When you think of what we’re talking about, it’s so vast and so embedded into our lifestyles. I live here in beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana, and when I go to a restaurant, nearly everything has meat in it. It is not a vegetarian friendly city. I will look down a menu and think, my god, everything is made of some different animal. It almost makes it difficult to imagine a world in which this went away. It would require a massive transformation to get rid of this.

Bollard 

That’s a great point. It is deeply ingrained in our everyday life. It is a massive industry. But one thing that gives me a bit of hope is looking at what humanity is doing on climate change. Animal agriculture, I think, is about 1 percent to 2 percent of global GDP, and the global energy industry is about 8 percent of global GDP, so it’s significantly larger. In the name of slowing, and ultimately preventing, climate change, much of the world has finally recognized the need to totally overhaul the energy industry and change how we produce energy. I’m hopeful that as people become more concerned about factory farming, we can start to build that same ability to totally transform the industry around animal agriculture.

Robinson 

You mentioned before that you attribute our lack of willingness more to ignorance and apathy than you do to conventional explanations about implicit moral hierarchy. You cite this incredible research in this post on why we torture animals, where researchers actually made an effort to quantify or organize the moral hierarchy of animals by asking people questions. There’s an amazing chart of the moral standing of various kinds of animals, and it’s not really what you think. And at the bottom, below all the non-human animals, are murderers, terrorists, and child molesters. Then it goes to things like worms, ants, mice. And then, they also asked about inanimate things, like the highest mountain in the world. When you actually try and organize a human moral hierarchy, it’s really, really weird.

Bollard 

That’s right. I think our implicit and, as it turns out, explicit moral hierarchies are just very confusing and strange. I won’t begin to try to understand what’s going on there. I think most people probably just aren’t thinking about their moral hierarchy at all. And so, it’s the kind of thing where they just throw stuff out there. But it is, as you say, very bewildering. I guess the slight cause for optimism there is that a lot of animals didn’t do as badly as I’d expect on that. The fact is that some animals did better than some humans.

Robinson 

Heads of state don’t do well!

Bollard 

That’s right, politicians in general. I think it is slightly heartening that animals are doing better than they are.

Robinson 

From highest to lowest, we have: cat, chimpanzee, whale, horse, coral reef, lion, old growth forest, head of state, owl, member of opposing political party, cow.

Bollard 

That’s right.

Robinson 

Extraordinary. And you point out that when people are asked if they believe in the welfare of animals—if they think animal torture is okay—across countries, most people, as a pure matter of principle, say they care about what happens to animals. Now, if you move to the second question of how much of a sacrifice you’re willing to make to carry out your ideals, that might be a different matter.

Bollard 

It doesn’t really matter where you ask—surveys have now asked all around the globe, in Europe, America, China, Brazil, and Sudan. No matter where they go, everyone agrees with the basic principle that you shouldn’t torture animals and that animals are entitled to some basic protections. The weird thing is that almost nowhere in the world do animals actually enjoy these protections. There’s this huge disconnect between what we say we believe and what happens in practice.

Robinson 

It’s not just that they believe in animal welfare in a kind of vague way. You also cite a survey that went through specific practices that occur in industrial agriculture today, really horrible things that actually are widespread, and every time you describe that and ask if that’s okay, the numbers against it are just overwhelming.

Bollard 

Yes, that’s right. You not only see this in surveys but also whenever a ballot measure comes up on farm animal welfare. The ballot measures always win. When it’s actually put to a popular vote, people always vote for them. I think the problem is that politicians don’t vote for them. And so, it only works when you’re able to do a ballot measure.

Robinson 

Do you attribute that mostly to the effect of industry or lobbying?

Bollard 

I think it’s mostly about industry. I don’t think it’s just about money, though. Part of it is industry, where there’s a lot of money. Industry has this weird hold on the political class, where farmers are first seen as salt of the earth, heart of America characters. I think there’s an aspect where they tend to be pretty rich, and so they tend to be among the better-off people in their community and have the political influence like that of a doctor. They’re also very good at mobilizing. Right now in Europe, cities are being paralyzed by hordes of tractors because farmers are annoyed about new environmental regulations. They’ve managed to get the European Union to repeal its recent pesticide regulation. So, farmers are very good at mobilizing, and they’ve really worked out how to put a lot of pressure on politicians. For now, that seems to have worked. 

Robinson 

But, when you discuss some of the most egregious practices and the things they cited here, like the castration of newborn calves, cutting piglets tails, keeping chickens in a cage the size of a sheet of paper, or killing newborn chicks with carbon dioxide—you describe this stuff to people and ask what they think of this, it goes up to 75 percent, usually, or up to 86 percent. Some things, like keeping pigs in tight cages, people are 96 percent against.

Bollard 

Yes, that’s right. There are even crazier survey findings. A few years back, Sentience Institute surveyed the American public several years running, asking, do you support a ban on factory farms? And about half of Americans supported the ban on factory farming. Even crazier, something like 30 or 40 percent said they supported a ban on slaughterhouses. Now, I think that was more a case of people not understanding what that would mean. In the same survey, people said they overwhelmingly thought eating meat was a personal choice and that people should be able to eat meat. But I think the support for banning factory farming could actually be pretty real. I think it is just a case where people don’t understand that this system has completely taken over and don’t understand that something that they think is morally abhorrent is actually what’s producing the food they eat.

Robinson 

The good news there is that some of the moral work that could be very difficult has already been done.

Bollard 

This is something that gives me a lot of hope, the fact that people already agree with us and are already supporting these kinds of reforms. And so, the challenge is then, how do we get politicians and corporations to do something about it? How do we get what people already believe to become the actual practice?

Robinson 

Let’s dive into a little more into what you think the priorities are. Obviously, as someone who is horrified by the killing of animals generally, I would like to live in a world where people don’t eat meat, where we have moved to a meatless society and a society in which animals are free to live long and happy lives.

Bollard 

Yes.

Robinson 

That’s a few generations away, probably. And so, we have to prioritize and think, we might not get there, but we could get them slightly bigger cages first…. At Open Philanthropy, how are you thinking about what we can do now?

Bollard 

It’s a great question. And one distinction I would make is between what you can do personally and what makes sense on a broader movement level. At an individual level, just eating fewer animals is probably the best thing you can do, and eating no animals at all if that’s something you can do. That’s probably your best personal option. I think at a movement level, we’ve seen that that has not been a strategy that has been highly effective. There have been decades of vegan advocacy, and the percentage of vegans hasn’t increased significantly. And instead, where we see more potential is first advancing better product alternatives. So, advancing alternative proteins, better plant-based meats, that can entice more consumers away from factory farm products, and second, by trying to address the worst abuses in the system. And so, trying to get companies to commit to getting rid of the worst abuses in their supply chain, getting laws passed to institute some basic standards, and getting rid of things like battery cages—the worst abuses of chickens raised for meat—as a start. Then we definitely need to go further and raise those standards higher.

Robinson 

At the end of last year, you had a post called, “A year of wins for farm animals,” where you went through a lot of news that I think probably didn’t make the front pages in many places. You pointed out that in many places in Europe, as well as the United States and as far as Japan, countries have taken measures that have materially improved the lives of some. And because we’re talking about very large numbers of animals, some is a lot of animals. 

Bollard 

That’s right. The macro picture overall is still very bad—there’s still a ton of animal suffering, and factory farming keeps getting bigger globally. So, I don’t want to pretend that’s not the case. But I think it’s important that we focus in on the glimmers of hope, the positive things that are going on globally, and I think we’ve seen a bunch of them. So, one thing I pointed out is that we have more countries investing in alternative proteins. We’ve seen a number of countries, most recently Germany, put significant money behind alternative protein research. We saw the Danish government issue a state plan for the promotion of plant-based foods. We’ve also continued to see companies getting rid of some of the worst practices. This wasn’t in the newsletter, but within just the last two weeks, McDonald’s in the U.S. announced that it has completely gotten rid of its reliance on battery cages for their hens. That doesn’t sound like that much, but that’s about seven million hens alive at any point in time who are out of cages due to that one corporate action. And we’ve seen many other corporate actions. Activists have been able to push companies across the board to get rid of some of the worst practices, and I think we continue to see really exciting progress on that. 

Robinson 

I think many people who share this common moral understanding that what is going on is horrible and wrong may also share that sense of futility. It’s such a large problem, and they may be heartened to hear about new measures that make a real difference. But then there’s a missing piece of the picture, which is, how did those come about? What kinds of activism get the goods? When we see an announcement by a company that has given in to activist pressure, how do activists produce that pressure? How do these success stories come about?

Bollard 

I think it’s from very determined and focused activism. These things do not just happen on their own. It is very much the case that, for instance, with these corporate campaigns, it requires sustained pressure on those companies. Now, that pressure only works because what they’re doing is wrong and also perceived by their customers as wrong if they actually know anything about it. So companies are sitting on this kind of crazy liability, where they really hope their customers don’t find out how their animals are treated because they’ll be revolted if they do. And so, their entire strategy is ignorance. I think when you’re in that situation, activists can basically come forward and say, we’re going to tell your customers how these animals are treated, we’ll release an undercover investigation that goes on one of your farms, or we’ll do campaigns where we show on social media on how these animals were treated. Alongside that, there’s sustained engagement directly with the executives of the company, saying, here’s what we’re doing, and we have a reasonable request of you. And most of the time, advocates can get those companies to agree to those reasonable requests. 

Robinson 

Progress isn’t linear. Obviously, things can go forward, and then they can go backward. A couple of years ago, there was a great deal of excitement about plant-based meat alternatives. And, unfortunately, you wrote a post last year called, “What happened to plant-based meat?” where there was kind of a boom and a lot of money flowed into this sector. And of course, it’s really promising. If you can produce something that is essentially meat but without the animal suffering, people who don’t like animal suffering are going to want that. It’s not that the sector has gone bust, as I understand it, but it is true that it hasn’t had the kind of growth that we would love to see. I remember a feeling of excitement. There’s this great book called The End of Animal Farming that gets you excited about the possibility that we could end animal farming altogether. And so, perhaps you could give us the answer to your own question, which is, what happened to plant-based meat?

Bollard 

It’s been really unfortunate to watch. It seemed like things were going so well. But sales have been falling for plant-based meat in most companies for the last couple of years. There are a couple of things going on. A couple of them have nothing to do with the product. One of them is that we’re in a high-inflation environment where people are feeling more squeezed in terms of expenditures. Plant-based meat is very expensive. We’ve also seen expensive animal proteins suffer during that time—expensive steaks and fish, all kinds of things like that, have been selling worse. And I think there is a fundamental problem for plant-based meat, which is that people don’t think it tastes good enough yet. 

Robinson 

I think it tastes great. I disagree with that. 

Bollard 

We do see this phenomenon that plenty of people tried plant-based meat and didn’t come back for repeat purchases. And so, I do think that speaks to people feeling like it doesn’t taste good enough. I also think we’ve probably seen that we need more advocacy alongside better products. I think part of the problem for many people is they don’t feel a need to replace meat because they think meat is great and just aren’t aware of all the horrible problems associated with factory farmed meat production.

One example of this is in Germany, where there has been a lot more engagement on that. In surveys, people who eat plant-based meat are more likely to say that they’re doing it for climate or animal welfare reasons, and plant-based meat sales have continued to rise. That’s maybe a sign that where there’s a deeper ethical commitment, and not just curiosity or perceived health benefit, those sales can be more robust. 

Robinson 

Every time I go to the U.K., I’m impressed with the expansion of vegan options. You can now get vegan sausage rolls on the High Street, and I like this very much. I feel like it’s not that it doesn’t taste good, it’s that it doesn’t taste as good. And so, you have to have some reason other than health—some of it is pretty fatty, so there’s not really an obvious health advantage, and it does cost more. But if you could tweak those numbers to where it tasted a little better than conventional animal-based meats, or it was a little cheaper. My God, if it was even just a little bit cheaper, you’d solve almost the whole problem!

Bollard 

That’s right. This is where AI could help. It could also help the factory farming industry in many ways, but on the plant-based meat side in particular, I think there’s some really fertile ground there. There are specific problems with reaching those final little bits of making it taste exactly the same as meat, or better than meat, and similarly on cost. And I think I’m hoping that this is something that better technology could help solve.

Robinson 

Yes. I really do feel like if you had something that actually tasted better and was cheaper, you would really see a massive change overnight. There are some people who have this aversion and think, I will only eat something that I know was produced by the suffering of an animal, which is very strange. I do think that’s a minority view. 

Bollard 

Yes, I think so. One of the things that we have seen is that the meat industry has been waging a very successful PR campaign to brand plant-based meats or any imitations as fake, highly processed products. I do think that there are surveys showing this is going on, that people now have this impression of plant-based meats as being bad imitations—they must be bad for you because they’re ultra-processed foods. And so, I do think there’s that risk. Again, I think that’s the reason we need advocacy alongside the technology. It’s not enough to just present people with a product if the other side is willing to spend a lot of money to tar that product.

Robinson 

Yes. But, if you want to look under the hood of how your food is made—if that’s where we’re going with this conversation, I can assure you, if you want to go into a factory and look at how this thing came into existence—

Bollard 

This to me is the crazy thing about this. The industry is saying, you can’t try this plant-based meat because of how it was made. Who’s the pot calling the kettle black? It is just kind of crazy. And I think that one of the problems is that when you look at a label, chicken is allowed to just be called a single item—chicken is just listed as one ingredient—and plant-based chicken has to list 22 ingredients. Whereas in reality, chicken is a mixture of feed additives, all kinds of different feeds, and possibly the remains of some other dead chickens that were fed back to the live chickens. But none of that has to go on the label. So, it’s partly that the labels are set up to really favor the industry. 

Robinson 

Could you tell us other ways in which it seems to be a sector where bullshit euphemisms are carefully devised? There are a lot of cartons of milk that have pictures of happy looking cows on them, and there’s a lot of terminology that is specifically designed to make people conjure an image of a bucolic 1930s farm overflowing with tomatoes and turnips, with the farmer in his hat in his overalls with his pitchfork.

Bollard 

One of the craziest ones to me is that I think most factory farmed chicken in America is now sold with an “all natural” label on it. That’s because the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is essentially in bed with these industries, has decided that all you have to do to qualify for that label is to not add a bunch of weird additives after the chicken is dead and packaged. But the words “all natural” mean nothing about how it was raised. Surveys show most people think it means the bird can go outside. It doesn’t mean anything of the sort. And so the industry relies on these crazy labels. And then, to make it even worse, they go and push for state laws to try and stop plant-based meat from even calling itself plant-based meat or using any meat related words under the guise of consumer protection.

Robinson 

It’s the same with milk, correct?

Bollard 

That’s right. They’re preventing plant-based milks from having milk on it, so you’ll have to say almond beverage or soy beverage.

Robinson 

The good news is I feel like the soy milk and oat milk people may have won the branding battle. I feel like the industry came to this one too late because now we all call it oat milk.

Bollard 

I think that’s right. I think it’s become so ingrained. The fact is that plant-based milks are routinely sold next to dairy milks in the dairy aisle and in the same kind of cartons. The industry is far too late to push back against that.

Robinson 

When I was reading your piece about new regulations that are put in place, we know it’s a pretty vicious industry that’s going to want to have standards that make it look like they’re doing good without actually doing good. Do you have an example of a loophole we should be careful off, or how we can make sure that we’re putting in place things that are really going to make a difference to the lives of animals?

Bollard 

I think this is a constant challenge. The European Union has had these farm animal welfare laws that their own Ombudsman has found had been routinely clouded by industry. Industry will often undermine their own commitments when they can. So, what advocates have really pushed for is, first, when it comes to laws, having a clear enforcement regime in place, and ideally having that enforcement not be done by a department of agriculture because those tend to be very bought by industry. And then second, when it comes to the corporate commitments, normally a requirement there is that there’d be third-party auditing of those practices. That’s not a failsafe, but I think particularly when you’re talking about production systems, it’s relatively hard for a producer to lie about being cage free when they have cages, and particularly when you have these companies telling their investors they’re cage free, that would actually be a form of investor fraud. So, I think that there are some protections against this, but it’s definitely something we need to be constantly vigilant about. 

Robinson 

They could be cage free yet abused in all sorts of other ways. 

Bollard 

Oh, sure. Cage free is no Nirvana. Our view is that it is significantly less bad than then cage systems, and I think there’s a lot of evidence around that. There are still many problems, and it’s far from an ideal life for hens. 

Robinson 

To conclude here, our listeners and readers may hear or read our conversation and agree. What do you think is the most important thing that needs to happen right now? How can people plug themselves into this movement in a way that is useful?

Bollard 

I think on an individual level, I’d encourage people to check out groups like the Humane League and Mercy for Animals. They have volunteer networks that you can get involved with. You can also check out more local animal rights groups. I’d encourage people to tell their politicians and their elected representatives that this is something they care about. I think one reason this gets ignored politically is that politicians don’t hear much about it. And so, I think constantly showing up at the congressperson’s district office hours and having a conversation with them about it is actually very helpful. Same for companies. Any company that you buy products from that uses animal products, I would tell them, why don’t you have a better animal welfare policy? I’m disappointed on this. So, I think that really just speaking up, particularly speaking up to actors who can do something about this, is a really valuable act.

Robinson 

Act as if you live in a democracy, and you might be surprised what happens. As you pointed out, there have been changes. And I really do think this is so important because it’s so easy to feel a sense of futility and hopelessness, especially in the face of the biggest problems. There’s a kind of irony that the problems that are the most important are the ones that we can most feel inclined to look away from because they feel so completely insurmountable, and we want to work on things where we think that a difference can be made. This is an issue where a difference can be made. 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.