At EAG London 2019, we encouraged the attendees of the farmed animal welfare meetup event to pick a smaller sub-group to join for the majority of the session. I hosted a sub-group discussing “movement-wide bottlenecks.” The 9 participants (including myself) included individuals working at 3 ACE-recommended “top charities,” 4 EAA researchers, and the 2 co-founders of a new animal advocacy organisation. I asked them the following question:
“To what extent is each of the following a bottleneck for the farmed animal movement? (1 is that this is never a practical limiting factor. 3 is that this is one of the most important limiting factors for the majority project ideas or plans. 5 is that this is not only preventing the movement from growing, but is causing it to down-size or reduce its most impactful activities.)”
The average scores awarded were:
- A lack of leaders, co-founders, and engaged advocates in countries outside of North America and western Europe: 3.4
- A lack of management experience and leadership “talent”: 3.2
- A lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion: 2.8
- A lack of awareness and engagement with existing EAA research among animal advocacy organisations: 2.6
- A lack of funding: 2.4
- A lack of coordination between those working on similar problems: 2.4
You can see the structure of the event here, and see the responses by participant here, including free form responses to a question inviting participants to write down their “favourite 1 to 3 suggestions” to “deal with these bottlenecks” (after paired discussion).
Two participants suggested other bottlenecks that could have been included in the list of options:
- “Overabundance of generalists, lack of experts.”
- “Insufficient resources for evaluating first-order charities.”
- “Systematic + thorough research into how best to improve animal welfare.”