Yesterday, Sinergia responded to our review of them. In this post, we will address what Sinergia said in response to the first point from our review. This post includes only a small snippet of Sinergia’s response; if you’d like to read their full response, you can find it here. 

The first point in our Sinergia review was:

Sinergia claims that "JBS published in 2023 the commitment to banning ear notching by 2023." As evidence for this claim, Sinergia provided a link to one of JBS's animal welfare pages. However, the link does not state JBS committed to this. We also checked every archived version of the link and could not find this commitment. Further, in 2024, JBS stated that they still use ear notching due to "Difficulty in finding alternatives that ensure process traceability."

At one point, JBS had a tentative plan to stop ear notching by 2027, but it was later abandoned (currently, we are unsure if it has been reinstated). This plan was the closest thing we could find to the commitment Sinergia alleges.

Although this commitment does not exist, Sinergia estimates that this commitment has helped 8,700,000 piglets per year since 2023, and claims 70% of the credit for helping these piglets.

Note: Sinergia's claim "JBS published in 2023 the commitment to banning ear notching by 2023" was in Cell W10 of Sinergia's original spreadsheet. Sinergia/ACE (meaning Sinergia or ACE) deleted Cell W10 from the spreadsheet right before Sinergia issued their response.^[1]

Sinergia responded by saying:

Vetted Causes made an error in their analysis. JBS’ commitment to abolish ear cropping does exist. JBS clearly states in Brazilian Portuguese on its website: “100% da mossa abolida até 2027,” which translates to “100% of ear cropping will be abolished by 2027.” The term "mossa" refers to ear cropping in Brazilian Portuguese, and further explanations can be found on industry websites (1, 2). This commitment was also published in JBS’ 2022 Animal Welfare Report, published in October 2023 (page 33).

Sinergia’s Brazilian team, which is native in Portuguese but not English, made a minor mistake in the spreadsheet shared with ACE. It stated “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023,” when it should have said “Committed to banning ear notching in 2023.” Sinergia acknowledges that this mistake shifts the meaning of the sentence and it has since been corrected.

Although Sinergia downplays this as a “minor mistake,” it results in Sinergia receiving credit for helping millions of JBS's pigs who were not impacted (i.e. JBS pigs who have their ears notched from 2023 to 2026).^[2] This is not a “minor mistake.” Further, Sinergia claims that this mistake has been corrected, but all that was fixed was changing the phrase “by 2023” to “in 2023” in Cell K10.^[3] The impact calculations were not fixed, and still incorrectly credit Sinergia for helping millions of JBS's pigs who were not impacted.^[2]

Additionally, we’ve previously stated concerns about the possibility of charities deleting important evidence related to a negative review. We’re worried that Sinergia/ACE has done that here. In Sinergia’s commitments spreadsheet, Sinergia/ACE deleted a column that had information related to our review.

As explained above, Sinergia claims that when they said “by 2023,” they meant to say “in 2023.” Further, Sinergia indicates  that this "mistake" occurred because their Brazilian employees are not native English speakers. However, Sinergia’s original commitments spreadsheet contains a Cell that suggests otherwise. Cell W10 of Sinergia's original spreadsheet said “JBS published in 2023 the commitment to banning ear notching by 2023.”^[4] If this was a translation issue, why did Sinergia know how to use “by” and “in” in Cell W10, but not in the Cell with the alleged "mistake"?

Unfortunately, Sinergia/ACE deleted all of Column W right before Sinergia posted their response, and did not add any note stating that this column was deleted. ^[1] This column contained Cell W10, where Sinergia stated that “JBS published in 2023 the commitment to banning ear notching by 2023.”^[4] For context, Sinergia/ACE added notes for every other edit that was made to  Sinergia's spreadsheet after February 20th, 2025, and this was by far the biggest edit (Column W contained more text than any other column in the spreadsheet, and was completely deleted). 

Note: Cell R5 of Sinergia's spreadsheet further suggests this was not a mistake/translation issue, as Sinergia states that the “Transition deadline” for JBS to stop ear notching is 2023. 

We are extremely disappointed that Sinergia downplayed this as a “minor error,” and that Sinergia/ACE deleted information that is relevant to our review without adding a note. We plan to address Sinergia’s complete response in the future, but wanted to post this now.