Hugh P's Quick takes

There are two UK government consultations closing March 9th, for: (1) banning cages for 7 million hens, and (2) reducing the pain that castration and tail docking practices for lambs cause, such as requiring pain relief. In the UK are 7 million hens (21%) still in cages, and roughly 17 million lambs that go through these painful procedures every year. 

You can use these guides to make your response, to make these changes more likely to happen: 
Hens: https://tinyurl.com/cage-consultation 
Lambs: https://tinyurl.com/lamb-consultation 

If you prefer, you can sign up for this online event on Sunday 5pm-6pm UTC, where we'll be writing and submitting our responses together. 

Potential opportunity to influence the World Bank away from financing factory farms: The UK Parliament is currently holding an open consultation on the future of UK aid and development assistance, closing on November 14, 2025. It includes the question, "Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?". This would include the World Bank, which finances factory farms,^[1][2] so could this consultation be a way to push it away from doing that, via the UK government? 

Are any organisations planning on submitting responses? If so, should there be an effort to co-ordinate more responses on this?

1. ^{^}

    "Why the World Bank Must Stop Funding Factory Farms", 30 Apr 2024 https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/why-the-world-bank-must-stop-funding-factory-farms/ 

2. ^{^}

   "The World Bank has a factory-farm climate problem", 20 Nov 2024 https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/world-bank-development-banks-factory-farm-climate-industrial-agriculture/ 

I think the term "welfare footprint" (analogous to the term "carbon footprint") is extremely useful, and we should make stronger attempts to popularise it among the public as a quick way to encapsulate the idea that different animal products have vastly different welfare harms, e.g. milk vs eggs.