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A Systems Thinking Perspective on Farm Animal Activism
6 min readFeb 2
In this post, I will offer a systems thinking perspective on how farm animal activists can reduce farm animal suffering long-term by analyzing the different types of change that farm animals activists create and stating some key takeaways from this analysis. At the end, I will list some limitations to this analysis.
In this section, I will analyze the four types of change that farm animal activists create, namely social change, legal change, corporate change, and technological change.
Social change is when society changes its beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors as they relate to farm animals or animal products.
The two primary forms of social change that farm animal activists create are changes in how society views factory farming and changes in society’s dietary preferences.
In this section, I will argue that social change is the most important form of change because:
First, social change is usually necessary for legal change because legal change mostly occurs via democratic means. For instance, in the case of legislation, legal change can only occur if legislators, who represent the will of the people, support it.[1] Similarly, in the case of ballot initiatives, legal change can only occur if the people directly support it. If most people oppose a form of legislation in democracies, it is unlikely it will pass.
Second, social change is usually necessary for corporate change because corporate change almost always occurs as the result of either legal change or corporate campaigns. Legal change requires social change to have already occurred as stated previously, and corporate campaigns also require social change to have already occurred. This is because corporate campaigns require that consumers will be willing to boycott a company’s products if it is unwilling to change how it treats its farm animals.
Third, social change can often drive technological change because companies have a strong incentive to research and develop new technologies if they believe that the public will have a sufficiently high demand for them. This may be especially true in the case of alternative proteins, which would receive more funding from the private sector if there was a higher demand for them from the general public.
Lastly, social change can drive support for farm animal activism. When more of the public cares about how farm animals are treated, they are more likely to increase funding, labor, and social support for farm animal activists.
Legal change is when a governing body changes its policies for how farm animals are treated, what animal products are available, and how resources related to farm animals are distributed.
Legal changes are important because they are usually highly persistent, create incremental change, and can set a precedent for other governing bodies considering similar policies.
As stated previously, legal change almost always requires public support because it mostly occurs via democratic means.
Notably, legal changes are particularly impactful because, in contrast to corporate campaigns which can only target a few companies at a time, legal changes directly control the policies of every single company in the governing body’s region. This means that if a legal change occurs at the federal level, its value is similar to that of doing a corporate campaign to every single company in the nation.
Some legal changes which I consider particularly important are ones that control how farm animals can be treated, what animal welfare labels go on which animal products, and how much funding can be provided for alternative proteins.
Corporate change is when a corporation changes its policies related to how farm animals are treated.
Corporate changes almost always occur as the result of legal changes or corporate campaigns.
In the previous section, I explained how legal change causes corporate change so, in this section, I will focus on corporate campaigns instead.
Corporate campaigns are when farm animal activists pressure companies, such as meat companies, retailers, and fast food companies, to change their policies for how farm animals are treated. If a company doesn’t give into the activists’ demands, they will create negative press for the company by doing media campaigns opposing how the company treats farm animals. If enough consumers care about how the company treats its farm animals, they’ll boycott its products, which could reduce the company’s profitability or even cause it to go out of business. This means that corporate campaigns usually succeed, but it also means that their success is contingent on consumer’s willingness to do boycotts.
Some claim that corporate campaigns are valuable because they can lead to further legal change down the line, but I suspect that this effect has significantly diminishing returns. If a few companies do an animal welfare reform at scale, it will demonstrate that the meat industry can do this reform and still remain profitable, which will increase the likelihood of governing bodies also supporting this reform. At the same time, it seems like each additional reform after this won’t significantly increase the likelihood of this occurring since the viability of the reform has already been demonstrated.
Overall, I think that farm animal activists are unlikely to achieve their long-term goals via corporate campaigns because they require social change in order to occur, don’t cause social change, and will have diminishing returns without social change.
First, as stated previously, corporate campaigns require social change to have already occurred because they rely on consumers being willing to boycott a company’s products if it fails to give into farm animal activists’ demands.
Second, corporate campaigns don’t cause social change because companies usually give into activists’ demands so corporate campaigners rarely raise attention toward companies’ actual practices.
Lastly, corporate campaigns are, in my view, likely to have diminishing returns without significant social change. Currently, Americans are (presumably) willing to boycott a company if it fails to follow the Better Chicken Commitment. While this is wonderful, I doubt that, without significant social change, Americans will be willing to boycott a company if it doesn’t, for instance, have pasture-raised chickens.
This means that corporate campaigns create positive change, but we shouldn’t expect that, by themselves, they will continue to do so.
Technological change is change that improves the welfare of farm animals either via direct interventions such as gene-editing or via indirect interventions such as the development of alternative proteins.
As far as I know, there are currently no forms of technological change that are regarded as guaranteed ways to eventually bring an end to farm animal suffering. As such, these sorts of promising and likely worth supporting but by no means guaranteed ways to significantly reduce farm animals suffering.
In this section, I will describe some key takeaways from this analysis.
First, according to this analysis, EEAs should primarily focus on social change since it is either necessary for or directly contributes to all of the forms of change we really care about. Social change is not only necessary for corporate or legal change, it also drives technological change and support for farm animal activism.
Second, according to this analysis, legal change is important because it locks in change for farm animals at the highest possible level. At the same time, legal change should mostly be seen as occurring in tandem with social change rather than as an alternative way to create positive change for farm animals.
Lastly, according to this analysis, corporate campaigns should be considered a reasonably ineffective tactic because not only do they not contribute to other forms of change, they are unlikely to pave a path to the long-term outcomes that farm animal activists really want.
In this section, I will describe some limitations to this analysis.
First, I am not an expert on farm animal activism so my understanding of farm animal activism is certainly limited.
Second, this analysis is highly critical of corporate campaigns, but they are widely supported by EAA organizations so we have good reason to think that I may be understating their benefits.
Third, when doing this analysis, I was primarily thinking about terrestrial farm animals in Western countries so this analysis may not apply as much, for instance, to shrimp in the Global South.
Lastly, since this post is from a systems thinking perspective, it is necessarily impossible for me to describe all the ways in which farm animal activists create change and all of the ways in which they interrelate. In this post, for instance, I primarily focused on positive ways that activists can create change, but it’s important to note that activists can also accidentally create negative change. I think this may be one of the primary reasons the movement has been less successful than it could have been. Similarly, in this post, I also left out changes to the movement itself, such as changing strategy, increasing coordination, or reducing in-fighting, which are also very important.
Some activists are skeptical of how much legislators represent the will of the people in the case of farm animal suffering because the meat industry wields a significant amount of political power via lobbying and campaign contributions. Although this is a serious concern, it’s worth pointing out that enough support from the public could easily overcome the meat industry’s political influence. If the public began to overwhelmingly support laws regulating how farm animals are treated, they could simply vote out legislators who refuse to pass farm animal welfare reforms. After all, in most countries, farm animal welfare laws significantly correlate with the public’s support for them.
