Thank you! I'm not aware of any US certifiers using CCTV, though I know several use unannounced audits to follow up on farms with bad prior audits or allegations of abuse. My sense is that most European certifiers are similar, though I may be wrong.

Sadly both audits and CCTV footage are almost always kept private. My sense is that there's not yet a big enough carrot (i.e. price premium on certified products) or stick (i.e. reputational harm from refusing public CCTV) to push certified farms to agree to this. My guess is it would require a retailer to say "we'll only sell your products if you install CCTV and share the footage." I hope they'll eventually get there. 

Thanks Neil. Good catch, and sorry I'm only replying now -- I hadn't checked the Forum over the break. I assumed that the original article was referring to all cage-free production because:

• The 15% cage-free immediately follows a claim referring to all Brazilian production: “This type of production did not exist in Brazil until 2017. Mantiqueira was the first one. Seven years later, [cage-free] production represents almost 15% of the total."
• The next sentence reads: "We were a driving force." This implies they were a driving force in an industry-wide change, and doesn't really make sense if it refers to their production, i.e. "We were a driving force in getting ourselves to go 15% cage-free." 

But I think this could be a translation issue. And I don't have any other sources, while the sources you found seem more likely to be accurate. So I suspect you're right that sadly Brazil has made less progress thatn we thought.

Thanks for flagging that Hugh. I wavered on whether to include that grant given its inclusion of insect-based protein, which I agree is concerning.

Thankfully most alternative protein grants don't include insects. (And, as CB points out, GFI doesn't include insects in their definition.) But the term is increasingly contested, as insect producers -- with the backing of the pet food and aquaculture industries that are their primary customers -- are pushing for alt protein funds to cover them.

Thanks Fai! Yes I'm trying to express more often the deep appreciation that I feel for the incredible donors and advocates in our space. I'm glad to hear you find it encouraging :)

Hey Lucas, thanks for engaging with the newsletter. A few quick replies:

1. Rethink's 8-20% support in a national poll seems consistent with the 36% result in Denver because (1) Denver is very liberal and very urban, which I expect are the two strongest predictors of support for a ban, (2) as Jason notes below, there are a lot of reasons why people might not want a slaughterhouse in their city, but would oppose banning them nationally, e.g. NIMBYism, (3) a lot of the campaign focused on things unique to this one slaughterhouse, e.g. its uniquely bad animal welfare and environmental record, and (4) this was a lamb slaughterhouse and lamb is both a niche meat and comes from an animal with more public sympathy (vs., e.g., banning a chicken slaughterhouse).
2. We're not sitting on the biggest pile of animal-advocacy cash on the planet. One of the funders of the Denver slaughterhouse ban is. But you're right that, presumably like them, we didn't think this was the best use of marginal funds to help animals.
3. I'm sorry I missed the Berkeley initiative. Had I seen it I would have included it. I'm skeptical though that we can take a lot from a symbolic vote on whether to allow factory farms in a dense urban area that has no factory farms.
4. I agree that history is full of radical shifts. My personal read of history is that they involved lots of smaller wins and progress before advocates reached the point where they could achieve women's suffrage or abolition. But I appreciate that I'm unlikely to persuade you there, and I agree this is a good debate for our movement to continue to have on strategy.

Great piece, thanks Tyler! I didn't see this before sending out my take on the election results yesterday and, if I had, my take would have been better for it. I agree with most of your analysis, with the exception of this headline conclusion:

I fear the policy landscape for farmed animal protection work is looking more and more bleak.

I think that's true of the EATS Act, which could really hurt state ballot initiative work. But I'm not sure it's true more broadly:

1. I don't think the abolitionist ballot measures did any worse than they would have if brought in prior years. "Banning meat" has always been incredibly unpopular. For the same reason, it's not clear to me that politicians opposing banning meat indicates a change of opinion, vs. just an increase in salience of the debate, which may or may not be a good thing.
2. We've always had opponents on the left and the right in politics. As James Ozden points out, we now also have more public supporters on the right than ever before. I'm not sure if they'll be able to affect policy, but we may have a better shot than in any prior administration.
3. The state cultivated meat bans are bad signals, though they're almost certainly preempted by federal law. I agree there's a risk that a Trump FDA could ban cultivated meat nationally. But I think it's more likely they'll deregulate FDA policy in a way that helps cultivated meat.

Of course, there's huge uncertainty on all this. And none of the above makes me think we should prioritize US policy work for farmed animals. Instead, I continue to think that our best opportunities lie elsewhere.

Thanks for the feedback and interesting info! I agree I overstated the importance of 2004-12 R&D. I chose that time period because it felt most comparable to where alt proteins are at, but I should have clarified that earlier R&D was more important.

I based my assessment of the importance of govt R&D policies to reducing solar prices on this IEA analysis -- mostly the graphs showing their assessment that govt R&D policies (both publicly-funding and market-stimulating policies) drove ~two thirds of solar cost-reductions from 1980-2012.

But you clearly know more about the broader literature here than I do. And the IEA's analysis may be consistent with yours if their "R&D: market-stimulating policies" category includes deployment subsidies. Either way, thanks for the thoughtful reply!

Thanks Nick! I agree that "keep it positive" isn't always the right call. In fact, it was very negative footage that first got me to care about factory farming.

My advice was intended for navigating social media algorithms and media editors, who both seem to favor the positive. But I agree the history of social movements suggests you also need to explain the gravity of the issue and elicit outrage.

Thanks Nathan! I like your idea of mapping the key arguments that stop people from helping farm animals. My sense is there are different blocking arguments depending on the ask. For high-welfare meat, I suspect the blockers are:

• "I already buy humane meat" (easy to believe this when most meat is labeled with 'all natural' and other meaningless labels)
• "High welfare meat is too expensive" (true of truly high-welfare, but not necessarily of med-welfare)
• "I have no way of knowing which meat is high welfare" (it's really hard because in most countries the meat industry is free to mislabel their products with fake certifications and lots of meaningless claims)

You're absolutely right that a major challenge is that portions of the animal movement don't negotiate. Some high welfare meat is easily 50% better, but if you claimed that on Twitter you'd get drowned out by abolitionists claiming it's all equally bad. 

I'm pessimistic about changing individual diets in general, whether to higher welfare meat or plant-based, simply because of the scale of people you need to reach. So I'm more excited about mobilizing people to support corporate and political change. I suspect there the biggest blockers are a mix of "my action won't make any difference" and "I'm too busy with other stuff."

I'd welcome any additional thoughts you have!

Things I believe. Though I'm really torn on the Huel vs. Soylent one