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Why Factory Farming Won't Simply Be Engineered Away: Lewis Bollard on Technology, Money, and Political Power

Dwarkesh Patel · ▶ 1:08:04 · 37 min read
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Overview

Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, which the host describes as the largest funder in the space. The conversation opens with a question many technologists would ask: if artificial general intelligence is coming, is animal welfare work just a way to make things slightly more bearable until AI solves the problem? Bollard rejects that framing. In their view, the end of factory farming is "far from inevitable." Global factory farming is growing by about 2% more animals every year, and a system that has survived a century of technological change could survive this one too. The rest of the discussion covers why the system is so efficient, which technologies have actually spared animals, why so little money goes to the most effective interventions, and how the meat industry keeps such a firm hold on legislatures.

37 min read

Two Possible Trajectories, Even With AGI

Bollard describes two paths. On the first, which the world has followed for the last century, technology makes factory farming more efficient, so more animals are raised in more intensive ways. On the second, the number of animals on factory farms falls and each animal suffers less. Bollard says they are "really optimistic" that AGI will speed up technological progress, bringing better alternative proteins and better humane technology. They argue, however, that technology alone will not decide which path wins, because the main obstacles are cultural and political.

On the cultural side, Bollard says most people want real meat. They claim plant-based meat already tastes about as good as the real thing, though the host disputes this and Bollard concedes it is "a debate." Their larger point is that many people say they simply are not interested in an alternative and want "the real thing."

On the political side, Bollard gives a thought experiment. Suppose AGI solves cultivated meat. It is already illegal in seven US states and might soon be banned across the European Union. By the time AGI arrives, would there be anywhere left to sell it? Bollard's conclusion is that advocates should welcome what technology can do but prepare for "the significant possibility that AGI does not end factory farming."

Why Factory-Farmed Chicken Is So Hard to Beat

Asked what makes the system so efficient, Bollard starts with biology. Over a very long evolutionary history, the chicken became an animal that turns a small amount of grain into protein people like to eat. Its feed conversion ratio, the grain put in per unit of meat out, is about 2:1. Grain is very cheap. The industry has also stripped out nearly everything else that costs money, including treating animals well and giving them any comfort. Any competing product, Bollard says, is trying to beat "the price of grain times two, plus a few extra costs," and that is a very hard target.

The host offers a comparison. Humanity is spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to replicate intelligence, which evolution has been optimizing for somewhere between tens and hundreds of millions of years. Evolution has been optimizing the conversion of calories into living tissue, including immune systems, growth factors, nutrient delivery, and texture, for billions of years. Seen that way, it is not surprising that artificial meat is so difficult.

How Far Away Is Cultivated Meat?

Bollard says the answer depends on what happens next and on what counts as cultivated meat. Some companies already sell it in very small volumes at very high prices, which Bollard calls incredible. The hard part is scaling up and lowering the price enough to compete with factory-farmed chicken. Given current venture capital and the startups that exist today, Bollard does not think the world is on a path to cultivated meat that is cheaper than factory-farmed chicken, although it could get on one.

When the host asks whether that will ever happen, Bollard says it depends partly on AGI and what AGI does. They would not rule it out but do not think it is the default or most likely outcome. The host suggests that nanotechnology and robotics will eventually make raising chickens obsolete. Bollard's reply is that unless the costs of those technologies fall close to zero, chickens will remain extremely cheap. They grant that AGI-era technologies might produce remarkable new proteins but warn against relying on that, both because the cost problem may not be solved and because the cultural and political barriers would still be there.

The Funding Gap Between Moonshots and Humane Technology

The host points out that when people think about using technology to help animals, they usually picture far-off moonshots such as lab-grown meat, not ways to make existing farms less cruel. Bollard's estimates show how uneven the funding is. They put venture capital for "humane technology" at probably less than $10 million a year, while alternative proteins have attracted billions over the last few years.

Bollard says both are needed. They understand why investors prefer alternative proteins, which may offer higher margins and resemble electric vehicles or solar power, a new product that replaces the old one. Bollard thinks alternative proteins could take some share of the market but does not expect the whole market to switch soon. As they put it, alternative proteins are needed to meet growing global demand for protein so that factory farming does not keep expanding, and humane technology is needed to reduce suffering inside the factory farms that remain.

"A Mistake as a Movement": Moving Away From Personal Diet

The host, who grew up Hindu and has never eaten meat, says that preparing for the interview made them doubt how much individual vegetarianism matters, especially when charity evaluators say a dollar donated can "offset" a certain amount of meat-eating. Asked whether vegetarianism is overrated, Bollard says: "I think we made a mistake as a movement making this about personal diet." Personal choices to eat less meat or buy more humane meat are welcome, they say, but large-scale social change does not happen through individuals. It requires government reform and corporate reform, and anyone can support those as an advocate or funder whatever they eat.

The host asks why the public still pictures animal advocacy as PETA-style protests urging people to give up meat, while groups working on corporate and policy change get so little attention. Bollard's explanation is that early advocates were few and felt unable to achieve larger change, so they understandably focused on their own behavior. That focus became self-reinforcing and eventually an end in itself, about "personal purity" as much as impact. It is much easier to measure your own purity than your contribution to reforming factory farming. Bollard says this has changed a great deal over the past decade, and the movement is now much more focused on impact.

Three Levers That Have Worked at Scale

The host brings up global health: the Against Malaria Foundation estimates it has saved around 180,000 lives, but China's economic liberalization lifted about a billion people out of poverty. What is the equivalent in animal welfare? Bollard names three large-scale drivers of progress so far.

The first is government policy. Advocates got the European Union to set basic animal welfare standards, which Bollard says affects billions of animals every year. The second is corporate reform. McDonald's has just fulfilled its pledge to go cage-free in the US, which by Bollard's figure takes seven million hens a year out of cages in that supply chain alone. The third is technology, with in-ovo sexing as the example. Bollard says it has already spared about 200 million male chicks from being killed at birth. Their view is that these levers are only beginning to be used and could help tens of billions of animals.

In-Ovo Sexing: A Case Where Technology Reduced Harm

Bollard traces the problem back to an earlier technological change. The egg and meat chicken industries split once producers realized they could breed meat chickens for weight gain and laying hens for egg production. Male chicks of laying breeds became useless, since they cannot lay eggs and do not grow fast enough to be sold as meat. The standard practice, Bollard says, is that about 8 billion chicks a year worldwide are thrown into a giant grinder or suffocated in bags on the day they hatch.

In-ovo sexing applies existing technologies to scan eggs and determine the chick's sex, so male eggs can be removed early in incubation. According to Bollard, ten years ago it was only a vague idea. Today it covers about a third of the European egg industry, it has just arrived in the United States, and the first such eggs are now on US shelves. They are optimistic it can eventually end chick culling globally.

On whether policy or technological maturity drove adoption, Bollard says it was both. Advocates had drawn attention to chick culling, which gave governments and philanthropists a reason to support the technology. Bollard estimates that about $10 million of public and philanthropic money, "a very little amount," was enough to bring the technology to the point where startups could deploy it.

Low-Hanging Fruit for Technologists

The host notes that in-ovo sexing uses existing tools such as MRI and PCR, and asks whether technologists looking for startup ideas should simply spend a few days on a large poultry or pig farm. Bollard thinks there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. The industry is mainly a commodity business that has only invested in lowering prices or raising output, not in welfare, so many of its practices "just seem archaic."

Their example is piglet castration, which is typically done with a blunt knife and no pain relief. Immunocastration, an injection with the same effect, was developed without much difficulty. Bollard believes there are many similar practices where someone with basic technical skill and a real focus on welfare could introduce changes that help billions of animals.

How Optimization Creates New Cruelty, and the Question of Brainless Animals

The host raises a pattern Bollard has written about: pushing hard for efficiency in one area creates new problems that are then "solved" with more cruelty. Bollard uses pigs as the example. Once pigs were moved indoors and bred to grow faster, which also made them more aggressive, they got bored and started biting each other's tails. Farmers cut off the tails. When that did not work, they began clipping the pigs' teeth. When that was still not enough for sows, they confined them in crates to keep them away from other animals. Then came antibiotics and other drugs. Bollard's point is that each step fails to address the underlying problem and sometimes makes it worse.

The host then asks a deliberately provocative question: could pigs or chickens be bred without brains? If suffering is what matters and the animals are already bioreactors for turning grain into meat, removing the capacity to suffer would be the ultimate optimization, and suffering such as pecking or getting caught on wires is inefficient anyway. Bollard agrees that suffering is uneconomical for each individual animal, since the breeds and conditions the industry has chosen cause more deaths and more welfare problems. The problem is that the system is collectively more efficient. "If you can cram twice as many animals into a barn, it doesn't matter if 10% more of them die." Welfare is neglected because improving it costs a little and the efficiency gains from ignoring it are much larger.

Bollard says they are personally more optimistic about incremental reform than about brainless animals. The host notes that the public is not excited about cultivated meat either, and Bollard answers that this is why many approaches are needed, since no single solution will satisfy everyone.

Higher-Welfare Chicken Breeds

In genetics, what Bollard sees as achievable in the near term is removing the physical defects that have been bred into animals. Modern broiler chickens, they say, have been bred into "mutants that collapse under their own weight." Breeds with much better welfare that remain commercially viable already exist. Some companies, and entire countries such as Denmark, have moved fully to them.

The difference, according to Bollard, is balance. Mainstream breeding has selected almost only for fast breast-meat growth and efficient feed conversion. Higher-welfare birds are bred for robustness: sturdier legs that do not collapse and healthier cardiovascular systems that avoid common heart problems. Bollard sums up the approach as breeding many birds and keeping the ones that die less. These birds are slightly less economical because they have not been pushed as hard on those two traits, so their adoption depends on advocacy. Bollard cites major campaigns in France, Germany, and Denmark, and says that the previous month the LDC Group, France's largest chicken producer, committed to moving its two main brands to higher-welfare genetics.

The host objects that a century of industry economics has consistently turned gains into more crowding and more extreme optimization, so why wouldn't welfare gains be eroded too? Bollard agrees this has happened before. They describe a study from the 1990s in which broiler chickens learned to choose feed laced with painkillers, and all of them did, which suggested chronic pain. The industry promised to strengthen the birds' legs and did so for a while, then used the stronger legs to support more weight and made the birds bigger, largely erasing the improvement. Bollard says mortality in the industry has recently been rising again, which suggests producers have pushed too far once more.

This is why Bollard thinks government and corporate standards are essential, setting a welfare floor the industry cannot go below. They note that the Danish government is strongly encouraging higher-welfare breeds and aims to ban the lowest-welfare ones, and that French retailers are dropping low-welfare breeds. "The industry left on its own will always find a race to the bottom," Bollard says.

Bigger Animals: More Meat per Brain, or More Suffering?

The host raises a related idea. Beef is already preferable to chicken in welfare terms because a cow provides far more meat per brain. So would it help to engineer even bigger animals, for example by altering myostatin-related genes? Bollard thinks it would probably mean more suffering overall. They point to the history of broilers: growth rates have risen fourfold since the 1950s, prices have fallen by half, and consumption has tripled. Because both consumption and suffering per bird rose so sharply, they outweighed the benefit of larger birds.

The host pushes back that consumption might have risen anyway, and that if consumption is held constant, a modern chicken would need to suffer four times as much as a 1950s chicken for bigger birds to be a net loss. Bollard does not answer that calculation directly. Instead they describe a middle path: the higher-welfare breeds advocates are promoting do not return to 1950s growth rates. They grow at roughly 2025 rates, "scaled back slightly," which allows much larger welfare improvements. Very slow-growing heritage chickens will have a niche market, but Bollard thinks the realistic option at scale is birds that still grow fast and large without having their bodies wrecked.

The host observes that the industry is not just caging wild animals but manufacturing creatures essentially optimized to suffer. Bollard agrees and adds the example of breeder birds. Meat chickens are bred to survive only about seven or eight weeks, and many are already going lame or collapsing by then, before reaching puberty. The birds kept past puberty to produce the next generation would collapse under their own genetics if fed normally, so they are given about 30% of what they would eat on their own. In Bollard's words, they are being starved by 70%.

What a Factory Farm Is Actually Like

The host describes accounts of pigs in gestation crates: swollen joints, broken bones, damage from chewing iron bars, ulcers from bruising, tumors, and pus. These are expected outcomes across the population, not rare emergencies. Bollard says they have visited factory farms and that they are "every bit as bad as it looks on the videos." What the videos do not convey is the constant distress noises and the terrible smell.

Bollard describes one egg farm they visited, which they call relatively well run. They still found many hens stuck in the wire, left to starve slowly, and many dead birds in cages with live ones. The cause, they argue, is scale: one farmer might be responsible for 200,000 hens and can do little more than check feed and water lines and remove some of the dead. Removing dead animals is, Bollard says, much of what a factory farmer's job consists of. The industry's picture of individual care for animals is incompatible with that scale.

The host emphasizes scope. A single farm in India with 100,000 hens in pain for weeks would be a moral emergency, and with roughly 10 billion chickens alive at any time, the global problem is about 100,000 times larger. Bollard compares this with how the law treats other cruelty. Dog fighting affects thousands of animals, and Congress has passed several laws against it while every state makes it a felony. Cockfighting, which also involves chickens and similarly numbers in the thousands, has been banned too. Yet when factory farms do worse to far more chickens, "we call that commerce."

A Very Small Pool of Money

According to Bollard, less than $300 million a year goes to all work worldwide on every approach to ending factory farming, and less than $200 million of that is what they would call "smart money" directed to evidence-based interventions. For comparison, they say philanthropic climate advocacy alone is 50 times larger, US cat and dog shelters and rescues are 25 times larger, and some individual conservation and poverty charities are 5 to 10 times larger.

Asked what the next dollars would buy, Bollard says more funding would be "transformative" because proven playbooks already exist. Their first priority would be holding companies to animal welfare commitments they have already made. Many companies pledged to stop using battery cages and are now trying to back out or quietly ignoring the pledges. Bollard argues that more campaign funding could hold them to their word and improve conditions for millions of animals right away.

How Cage-Free Campaigns Worked, and "$1 for 10 Years"

Bollard describes battery cages as roughly the size of a microwave oven, with as many hens crammed in as possible and kept there for years. Consumers do not accept this, but the industry does not disclose it; egg cartons do not say "from caged hens." Advocates went to the largest retailers and fast-food chains and argued that customers already expected better and clearly did not accept the practice. They won pledges from almost all the largest food companies in the US and globally. Bollard's figures are that the transition now spares more than 200 million hens a year from battery cages, the US has gone from under 10% cage-free to 47%, and the EU is at 62%. The key, they say, was exploiting the gap between what consumers assumed was happening and what was actually happening.

On cost-effectiveness, Bollard says cumulative impact is already "well north of 500 million hens," plus billions of broiler chickens affected by reforms. If these changes were not going to happen soon anyway, and campaigns sped them up by years or decades or made them happen at all, the cumulative effect reaches billions or tens of billions of animal-years. Bollard puts spending on these corporate campaigns at less than $100 million a year over a few years, and on that basis estimates the cost at far less than $1 per ten years of improved animal life. The host restates this as $1 buying more than ten years of better life and calls it astonishing, noting that global health already has tens of billions of dollars from sources like the Gates Foundation. Bollard attributes the opportunity to systematic neglect: most philanthropists choose popular causes like education, health, and climate, and if billions flowed into this area, opportunities like these would not exist.

When the host asks which organizations do this work, Bollard recommends supporting a diversified set of groups and names The Humane League and Sinergia Animal as two that run these campaigns.

China and the Developing World

Because rising incomes are increasing meat consumption worldwide, the host asks what can be done outside the West. Bollard sees two openings. First, countries where protein demand is growing fast but no entrenched animal agriculture industry exists yet can take a different route, including supporting alternative proteins without political backlash. Bollard says China is investing heavily in cultivated meat research and that most cultivated meat patents worldwide now come from Chinese public universities. In this field, they argue, the US is falling behind because of an entrenched industry that lobbies aggressively.

Second, welfare standards can spread through multinationals. Bollard notes that Unilever, Nestlé, and even Burger King say they should not have cages anywhere in their global supply chains. The host points out that factory farming spread because it was cheaper, not because other countries copied laws. Bollard agrees and expects that once in-ovo sexing is proven and scaled in Europe and the US, it will become cheaper and spread globally for economic reasons. They also believe moral progress can spread. At a trade show, a manufacturer of gestation crates told Bollard it had already stopped selling them in Europe and the US and did not expect to sell them in Asia forever, because as Asian countries grow richer and see images on social media, "they're not going to be cool with this either."

The host asks whether there is a Kuznets curve, where suffering first rises with wealth and later falls. Bollard's answer is mixed. So far, wealth has correlated strongly with more suffering worldwide, because richer people eat much more meat and more of it comes from factory farms. In a few European countries, though, Bollard thinks Germany in particular has probably passed the peak and is now seeing total animal suffering decline. They stress that this did not happen automatically. Skilled German advocates channeled public concern into retailer commitments and government policy, and Bollard does not believe wealth alone will produce the same result elsewhere without advocacy.

Imports, State Laws, and the Farm Bill

A persistent weakness of welfare laws is that banned practices can simply move elsewhere and the products can be imported. Bollard describes how advocates passed ballot measures banning gestation crates in Florida and Arizona, and the pork industry then brought in crated pork from other states. Advocates responded in California and Massachusetts with ballot measures that applied the standard to all pork sold in the state. Bollard says the EU is now considering applying its welfare standards to imports as well. They argue this approach both prevents laws from being undercut and changes the politics: local farmers will oppose any law that leaves them undercut by outside competitors, and sales standards let them support reform without being at a disadvantage.

The pork industry, Bollard says, knows this is the only way it can realistically be regulated, since it has "an absolute hold" on the legislatures of Iowa and North Carolina, the main pork-producing states. It first argued before the Supreme Court that state sales standards were unconstitutional and lost. It then turned to Congress. Bollard says the upcoming farm bill contains language that would bar states from setting animal welfare sales standards, and that the default expectation is that it will pass within the next few months.

The host asks why popular state-level measures cannot be defended nationally. Bollard's first answer is structural. States used ballot measures precisely to bypass entrenched lobbies, but in Congress everything starts in the House and Senate agriculture committees, which are dominated by agricultural interests. Bollard says a majority of House members signed a letter opposing the provision in the previous Congress, but most of them do not sit on the agriculture committee, which decides the bill's contents. The House agriculture committee recently held a hearing on the issue and invited only industry lobbyists, with no opposing witnesses. The industry also regularly flies in large industrial pork producers who present themselves as speaking for the whole industry.

The host asks why higher-welfare farmers who benefit from these laws are not flown in too. Bollard says many family farmers do support the laws because they create a market for their higher-welfare products, but they are much less wealthy and organized. They also cannot leave their farms to spend a week in Washington. Some groups do fund trips for them, but Bollard thinks a much larger effort is possible and that their voice is badly neglected.

Why would the bill pass if most House members oppose it? Bollard explains that the provision could not pass as a standalone bill and would lose on the floor. That is why it has been placed in the farm bill, a must-pass package covering farm subsidies and food assistance, where most members care about much bigger issues. The industry is betting that no one will sink the whole bill over one unpopular provision.

Money, Organization, and the Political Economy of Meat

The host notes that meat processing is a commodity business and asks how it can afford so much lobbying. Bollard says it is also an oligopoly: a handful of companies process most pigs and appear to earn outsized profits, and price-fixing and antitrust scandals recur because coordination among so few firms is easy. The egg industry claims it cannot afford to go cage-free, yet Bollard says it has made "insane profits" during recent high egg prices. They note that the stock price of Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer, has doubled over the past few years, and attribute this to very inelastic demand for eggs, which lets producers raise prices sharply after even small supply cuts. Many egg producers are fairly small, while companies like Tyson operate on the scale of billions. Bollard's conclusion is that the industry has the money for reform and lacks the will.

When the host jokingly asks how to "corrupt the political process in the opposite direction," Bollard says there is no need for corruption because public opinion is strongly on the advocates' side. It is the industry that has to persuade politicians to act against their voters' wishes. What is needed is to mobilize animal welfare supporters and farmers who benefit from higher standards, give them the same footing the industry gives its small group of factory farmers, fly them to D.C., have them meet their representatives locally, and also put money on the table. Bollard's understanding is that industry executives donate the maximum to politicians and then get meetings. They say they wish the system worked differently, but given that it does not, they suggest people team up with a few friends, max out their contributions, and tell the politician, "I really care about this and I'm watching what you do on this issue." People who already give significantly to politicians, they add, could change the dynamic just by raising the issue.

The host cites Bollard's blog post estimating that the meat lobby spends about $45 million per election cycle, and notes that the tech industry, despite comparable resources, has far less influence on its priorities. Bollard calls this a real puzzle: an industry employing less than 1% of Americans, defending very unpopular practices, and not spending an extraordinary amount, still has a firm grip on legislation. Their explanation has several parts. The meat industry fights alongside all of agriculture and allied sectors such as insurance and pharmaceuticals. It draws on the "mythos of the American farmer" as a hardworking, salt-of-the-earth figure, and people do not realize these are factory farmers. And it is very well organized in Washington and state capitals. Bollard also cites a "children's book rule" of politics: never take on characters from children's books, such as police, doctors, and farmers. The host jokes that tech workers have not yet made it into children's books.

Contract Farmers: The Coalition's Hidden Fracture

The host notes that the farmers in debt to companies like Perdue and Tyson often have adversarial relationships with them, and asks why they end up in a political coalition together. Bollard explains that companies such as Tyson and Smithfield mostly do not own farms. They rely on contract farmers whom Bollard describes as "essentially indentured laborers" with large loans hanging over them. Bollard says these farmers often do not support the industry's positions; the trade associations only claim to represent them. Their boards are drawn from large agribusinesses and the biggest industrial farms, not small contract growers. Bollard calls it "a bit of a bait and switch."

Why take such contracts at all? For some, Bollard says, it is the least bad option, especially for someone with a small plot of land they want to keep and few other skills. They describe a conversation with Craig Watts, a former contract chicken farmer for Perdue. Watts said he was promised he would earn more than $100,000 within a few years if he took out a loan. Once he was in, payments were gradually cut until he was earning less and less, and by then the loan kept him from leaving. Bollard adds that there is usually only one processor with a slaughterhouse in a given area, so there is no real competition, and farmers are often tied up in long-term contracts.

Bollard thinks pasture-based farming would be a good use of that land, since a pasture-raised chicken farm does not need much. The obstacle is finding a processor: the big players want commodity production only, so pasture-raised producers often have to build their own slaughterhouses and supply chains, which raises costs sharply.

Mislabeling and Supermarket Markups

The host asks why the market does not build supply chains for consumers who would pay more. Bollard points to efforts such as Niman Ranch with independent pork farmers and Cooks Venture with pasture-raised chicken, which recently went out of business. Bollard blames widespread mislabeling. Much factory-farmed chicken is labeled "all-natural," which surveys show consumers take to mean the birds were outdoors, though it means nothing. A pasture-raised product costing $2 more next to an "all-natural" product that consumers think is equivalent will struggle.

The host compares this to organic bananas, which command a real premium despite questionable health benefits, and asks whether the problem is that consumers cannot tell products apart. Bollard agrees and points to eggs as evidence. In the US egg market, labels such as "cage-free" and "pasture-raised" have real meaning, and pasture-raised eggs are growing fast. Even so, supermarkets use them to segment customers, knowing that wealthier shoppers are less price-sensitive, and mark them up well beyond the actual cost difference.

The host cites Bollard's figure that cage-free eggs cost only 19 cents more per dozen to produce, while chains often charge around $1.70 more. Bollard calls this the non-commodity part of the industry. Almost every major US retailer pledged to stop selling eggs from caged hens, many by this year, and Walmart and Kroger have not followed through, arguing that customers find cage-free eggs too expensive. Bollard says they are expensive, by one to two dollars a dozen, but only because retailers take a large markup from less price-sensitive shoppers, which undermines their own commitments. Costco, by contrast, went 100% cage-free and now sells cage-free eggs at the same price Walmart charges for caged eggs. Similarly, in states that banned caged-egg sales, cage-free eggs cost the same as caged eggs do across the border. Once cage-free becomes the baseline, Bollard says, it becomes the commodity and the extra margin disappears.

Why Companies Don't Advertise Their Reforms

If welfare is so popular, why don't McDonald's and others publicize their commitments? Bollard notes that the best companies, such as Vital Farms and NestFresh, do market their animal welfare credentials because their pasture-raised operations look good. Large companies have mostly just made things "less bad." Going from caged to cage-free is valuable, but customers already assumed they were not using caged eggs, so announcing the change prompts the question of what they were doing before. Many people also still find the new reality short of what they expect, since the hens do not go outside. And for pledges phased in over years, such as McDonald's committing to eliminate caged eggs within ten years, advertising the pledge would tell customers they will keep eating caged eggs for the next decade. The gap between public expectations and actual practice is so large that removing the worst practices does not make a good advertising claim.

Why Corporate Campaigns Outperform Legislation

The host suggests corporate campaigns have been even more effective than policy. Bollard agrees that they have been "phenomenally successful" with consumer-facing companies. Advocates have secured more than 3,000 corporate animal welfare pledges globally, including from all the largest retailers and fast-food chains, affecting hundreds of millions of animals. They give two reasons. First, the structure is different. Any welfare bill in Congress or a state legislature goes to an agriculture committee controlled by big agriculture and dies there. A corporate decision-maker is usually not being lobbied by the industry, or is much less swayed by it. Second, Bollard thinks companies have proven more responsive to customers than politicians are to voters. Politicians focus on their voters' top ten issues, maybe fewer, and on low-salience issues like this they follow donors or take the easy path. Companies find they have to act when customers are angry. The host adds that for a retailer, the quality of what it sells is central in a way taxation policy is not.

The Strange Merger of Animal Welfare and Climate

Bollard says surveys show animal welfare is what people care about most within sustainability. Yet companies from McDonald's to Tyson focus their public messaging on climate. The host finds it odd that animal charities' websites also lead with sustainability and emissions, when the issue for them is the torture of tens of billions of animals.

Bollard describes a "weird conflating" and says producers have exploited climate concerns cynically. Tyson Foods, for example, argues it cannot switch to higher-welfare breeds because they eat slightly more and so have a larger carbon footprint, and that letting animals move around burns more calories, which also increases emissions. Bollard calls this absurd. They recount a conversation with the SVP of sustainability at one of the largest meat companies, who acknowledged that internal surveys show animal welfare matters more to consumers, but said the company responds far more to fast-food customers and investors, who are focused on climate. When the host asks whether this is ESG, Bollard says those companies have all set climate targets that now take priority over their animal welfare targets.

On why animal charities do the same, Bollard says many people care about several issues, and sometimes they align: alternative proteins are both better for animals and have a smaller environmental footprint. But not always. Bollard finds it "wild" that people are urged to switch from beef to chicken for climate reasons, since that switch means about 23 more animals consumed per year and several years of factory-farm suffering, for a fairly small climate benefit. They see a tendency to give climate automatic priority over any amount of animal suffering, but believe this is more of an elite narrative than what ordinary people think. In Bollard's view, most people are "pretty horrified by animal suffering" and do prioritize it.

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