Rowan, D'Silva, Duncan, and Palmer (2021) on Animal Sentience

Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva, Ian J. H. Duncan, and Nicholas Palmer, “Animal Sentience: History, Science, and Politics.” Animal Sentience 31(1), 2021

• “…the lot of animals has worsened considerably since Bentham penned his famous phrase.”

• Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012, pdf): humans are not special when it comes to consciousness! Birds, for instance, demonstrate consciousness.

• The best evidence is that all mammals, all birds, and many other species (like octopuses) possess the neural/physical capacity for consciousness, and they also demonstrate intentional behavior.

• Milestones include Ruth Harrison and her book, Animal Machines (1964); the Brambell Report (1965, pdf) (a report on farmed animal welfare prepared for the British government); and the formation of the British advocacy group Compassion in World Farming (1967).

• In assessing animal welfare, one of the difficulties involves measuring feelings and their intensity -- though clearly subjective feelings are central to wellbeing.

• One way to discern animal welfare is to offer animals two (or more) options, and see which one they choose -- a revealed preference approach. The next step is to gauge the strength of the preference, perhaps by altering the "price" (in effort, say) that animals are willing to pay to take their preferred option. 

• The “Five Freedoms” are well-known and widely adopted guidelines for animal welfare, growing out of the Brambell Report, where the focus was on livestock. 

• "Of all the stimuli or states of suffering in animal agriculture, pain is probably responsible for a bigger reduction in welfare than any other... [p. 6]." Bad flooring generates a lot of pain in farm animals.

• Other sources of pain include difficult social interactions in crowded settings, surgeries conducted without anesthesia, and fast-growth-related problems. Boredom also can harm animal welfare.

• Traditionally, examinations of animal welfare have focused on suffering, but pleasure also is important. 

• Animal sentience is now explicitly recognized in legal documents in many parts of the world, including in the EU, Colombia, and the post-Brexit UK.

• The Animal Protection Index (available at https://api.worldanimalprotection.org/) encapsulates country-level information on the legislative protections for animals.

Still Earlier Singer: A Book Review, 1973

Peter Singer's Animal Liberation grew out of book review he wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1973, a full fifty years ago. Here is a bullet-point summentary of that review; I am using the reprinted version of the review, pages 11-30 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020. The book reviewed was Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris.

• “…a demand that we cease to regard the exploitation of other animals as natural and inevitable, and that, instead, we see it as a continuing moral outrage [pp. 11-12].”

• Bentham gets a look in (which now (2023) is more-or-less obligatory)!: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?’

• Do animals suffer? (People seem to want to believe that the answer is no.) But animal physiology and behavior seems to suggest the capacity for suffering -- which also is pretty much all that we have to go on when we consider whether other human beings are capable of suffering. (The capacity of our commonly farmed animals to suffer is not now contested, really. Controversy continues with respect to bivalves and insects.)

• Singer is frequently associated with the word “speciesism” (a parallel, for example, to sexism and racism). But he is always careful to indicate, as he does in this book review, that the term originates with Richard Ryder, not with Singer himself.

• The paradox of animal experimentation: the animals we experiment upon need to be like us (so that we can learn something about ourselves from the experiments) but also not like us (so we can justify the cruel experiments that we would not allow upon humans).

• “Man may always have killed other species for food, but he has never exploited them so ruthlessly as he does today [p. 27].”

• Some of the worst abuses of farm animals: veal, battery cages, maiming and removing body parts without anesthesia

• Will people change their behavior? (Fifty years later, the answer is still no, for the most part.)

Early Peter Singer: Preface to Animal Liberation (1975)

We now have almost 50 years later Peter Singer, in the form of Animal Liberation Now. But maybe there is something to be said for a short glance at the original. The version I am using is a reprint of the original preface, pages 1-10 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020.

• “This book is about the tyranny of human over non-human animals [p. 1].”

• “The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over in recent years [p. 1].”

• The moral issue at stake has nothing to do with being an animal lover; the argument concerns “reason, not emotion [p. 5].” Portraying activists as “animal lovers” is a method of excluding animal welfare from serious moral or political consideration.

• The crux of the matter: the rational and moral imperative to provide “equal consideration of interests [p. 3]” to animals and to humans...

• ...and that means all animals: “When the United States Defense Department finds that its use of beagles to test lethal gases has evoked a howl of protest and offers to use rats instead, I am not appeased [p. 4].”

• “I ask you to recognize that your attitudes to members of other species are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person’s race or sex [pp. 6-7].”

• The animals themselves cannot organize, cannot voice a protest.

• Many people (including meat eaters) are beneficiaries of the current system, so they are hard to persuade.

• Another prejudice is the unexamined view that concerns with animal suffering are trivial in a world where many humans suffer.

• The unfortunate near necessity of using the term animal to refer to only refer to non-human animals, which seems to support a notion of difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. (Singer was writing before the coining of the useful word "anymal!")

• The wastefulness of animal agriculture, feeding billions of farm animals who then we eat, instead of cutting out the middle anymal. (This resource-intensive approach to feeding humans is one of the main reasons that plant-based meat (and dairy and egg) alternatives will eventually out-compete the morally-unacceptable industrial farms.) 

Cornish et al. (2020) on Animal Welfare Labels

Amelia Rose Cornish, Donnel Briley, Bethany Jessica Wilson, David Raubenheimer, David Schlosberg, Paul Damien McGreevy, “The Price of Good Welfare: Does Informing Consumers About What On-Package Labels Mean for Animal Welfare Influence Their Purchase Intentions?” Appetite 148: 104577, 2020. 

•  Most people care about the welfare of the animals that we eat  

• It's even possible that people think that more “humane” products taste better 

• The “Heuristic-Systematic Model,” a version of System 1 and System 2 (Thinking, Fast and Slow); System 1 decision making might mean you just buy what you always have bought 

• Food labels can be confusing; there's “…a proliferation of new and unfamiliar on-package labels [p. 2]” Are industry-provided labels reliable? 

• Online survey with some 1600 Australian respondents, almost ¾ female 

• The respondents are asked about their purchase intentions for meat and eggs, given different labels and prices; some of the labels provide more detailed information about animal welfare than the others

• The purchase intention questions are followed up by an “animal attitude” survey 

• Young people and females are more sympathetic to animals 

• Older people (and males) think the current level of farm animal welfare is better than what other age groups think -- and interest in buying higher welfare products wanes as views of current welfare improve 

• Lower income people are less likely to buy (more expensive) higher welfare meat 

• People who grew up in the city, and highly educated people, are more likely to buy the higher welfare versions 

• The main result: more detailed label info leads to an increased intention to purchase higher welfare products 

Lades and Nova (2022) on the Ethics of Nudging Folks Away from Meat

Leonhard Lades and Federica Nova, “Ethical Considerations when Using Behavioural Insights to Reduce People’s Meat Consumption.” University College Dublin, Geary WP2022/09, October 25, 2022 (pdf). 

• Food choices depend on the choice architecture, so nudge-style, demand-side policies like instituting plant-based meals as defaults can reduce meat consumption

• Examples of food nudges include: vegan or vegetarian defaults; positioning of plant-based items at compelling locations; providing “sustainability” labels; and conveying information about growing low-meat social norms 

• Nudges sometimes present ethical questions; the authors recommend using the FORGOOD method to systematically consider potential ethical issues 

• FORGOOD: Fairness (distributional impacts); Openness (avoiding manipulation, with graphic warning labels or very persuasive defaults as examples of nudge-style policies that could  be ethically problematic); Respect (for autonomy, freedom of choice, non-stigmatization…); Goals (overcoming internalities? externalities?); Opinions (public acceptability, before or after the nudge?); Options (policy alternatives to nudges); and, Delegation (can choice architects use their power wisely?)

• "In short, the paper suggests that choice architects should apply behavioural interventions to reduce meat consumption only when these interventions are FORGOOD [p. 14]."

Richter et al. (2023) on Swiss Views on Meat Reduction Policies

Sebastian Richter, Adrian Muller, Mathias Stolze, Isabelle Schneider, and Christian Schader, “Acceptance of Meat Reduction Policies in Switzerland.” iScience 26: 106129, March 17, 2023. 

• Stakeholders in the current food system in Switzerland (as well as elsewhere) might find some reforms aimed at reducing meat consumption to be more acceptable than other reforms. 

• From interviews with 25 stakeholders (political parties, food business associations, relevant government agencies – but not consumers), the authors compiled a list of 37 measures that could reduce meat consumption. 

• 23 stakeholders (including 13 from the original interviewee pool) then indicated their degree of acceptability for each of the 37 measures. For each policy reform, stakeholders indicated either approval; conditional approval (with explanation); rejection; or indifference. 

• The authors group the reforms into seven “types”, such as “voluntary measures” or “information measures”; various versions of incentives; regulations; and others. 

• Research funding, voluntary measures, and information measures all meet with high acceptance. Greater antibiotic control also generated little disapproval. 

•  “The measures most frequently rejected are the regulatory measures ‘mandatory limit on the share of meat products in the overall retail assortments’, ‘regulation of nudging for meat alternatives’ by the state as well as the financial incentives ‘VAT exemption for vegetable foods’, ‘increase VAT for meat products to >7.7%’ [p. 8].” 

• Coercive negative incentive measures (taxes, basically) meet with substantial rejection. 

• Nonprofits, research institutes, and state bodies are generally more accepting of meat-reducing measures; the food industry and political parties are among the most unenthusiastic. 

• Factors affecting acceptance include lead times and grace periods; clarity and transparency; and coherence among multiple policies. 

• Promotion of meat alternatives does not fare particularly well in terms of acceptance. 

• Coherent policy packages (including taxes with earmarked distributions of revenue) might be more acceptable than policies viewed in isolation (which is the approach to approval attitudes taken in this article).

Sullivan (2013) on Animal Welfare Labels

Sean P. Sullivan, “Empowering Market Regulation of Agricultural Animal Welfare Through Product Labeling.” Animal Law Review 19(2), 2013. 

• The welfare of (so-called) agricultural animals receives little legal protection in the US.

• Two sources of federal animal protection, the Humane Slaughter Act and the Twenty-Eight Hour law, exclude poultry -- and the Slaughter Act excludes fish, too. Even these federal rules are underenforced.

• State-level laws specifying better animal welfare standards (than what federal law calls for) might be ruled unconstitutional as a violation of the Dormant Commerce Clause. [In April 2023, we are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that will (presumably) directly address this issue.]

• The US relies significantly on “market regulation” (consumers voting with their wallets) to provide animal welfare. Under this approach, some firms will cater to consumers who are not very interested in animal welfare, while other firms will provide higher animal welfare (meat and other products) aimed at consumers who are willing to pay for enhanced animal welfare. [Of course, it is asking a lot for market regulation to produce "socially optimal" levels of animal welfare, even if you accept the nearly-always-unspoken-but-there premise that it is only human preferences that count for social welfare.]

• In practice, there seems to be very little consumer willingness-to-pay for higher animal welfare products (at least when this article was published in 2013 – has this situation changed?) People say they are interested in providing better welfare to farm animals, but food purchases provide little evidence of such an interest.

• One “resolution” of the paradox is that consumers do not have an easy means to actually purchase enhanced animal welfare products.  The problem is that the information of how animals are treated is hard (or impossible) to judge when making purchasing decisions – so producers lack an incentive to devote resources to higher animal welfare.

• A credence good or characteristic is one where consumers are not sure of the “quality” of that characteristic even after they have purchased and consumed the product (as opposed to search or experience goods). If you consumed a food item earlier today with a dairy or egg ingredient, do you know the welfare provision for the animal who supplied that product? [My students admit that they don't.]

• Part of the problem is that labels on consumer animal products often lack credibility and clarity.  Current rules forbidding false or misleading labels are rendered pretty toothless when the actual animal welfare conditions are not monitored. Widespread absence of third-party auditing implies that animal welfare claims lack credibility. 

• The voluntary provision of credible labels can be crowded out by a plethora of not credible labels (muddying the waters or signal jamming) – even labels are a credence characteristic! For instance, “free range” does mean something about the living conditions of poultry (though not other animals, and not even egg laying hens) – but it doesn’t mean, for instance, that most chickens ever spend any time outdoors. "Pasture-raised," "grass-fed," "natural" – these terms (and others) lack standardized definitions.

• If animal welfare is a credence attribute, producers will only provide the minimum level of welfare that is consistent with profit seeking. 

• Credible labels could convert animal welfare into a search good, as opposed to a credence good.

• Making labels credible will require some level of harmonization, standards to earn a label like "high-animal-welfare-certified." But what level of animal welfare should be required to earn such a designation?

• And credible labels require that the conditions they certify are subject to verification. Is the USDA the right entity to engage in such verification, given its dual role in both regulating agriculture and promoting it? 

• A fairly coarse label like "high-animal-welfare-certified," could be integrated with less coarse supplements (like "enhanced and diverse outdoor environments").

• So, moving towards a credible system of labelling could help market regulation result in something closer to the levels of animal welfare people really desire. But we still are only talking about consumer preferences, not the preferences of the animals themselves.