Overview

These are my notes of the "State of the Movement for Farmed Animals" from EAGxBerkeley, given by Monica Chen, Executive Director of the New Roots Institute.

While I did my best to capture highlights, these notes are not exhaustive - Monica's talk was full of interesting information indeed.

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Talk Notes

“Animals need EA”

• Marketing of farmed animal products shows green hills and happy animals. That’s not the case.
• Q: How many animals are killed for meat, dairy, eggs in the US every year? 
  • A: 10 billion
• Q: How many of those are raised on factory farms? 
  • A: 99%
• Animals in the industry are treated very inhumanely

The farmed animal advocacy movement is very varied. You have farmer advocates, people concerned about health, etc. 

"How Do We End Factory Farming?” - Types of Interventions

• Learn from past, successful movements?
• People have different timelines for that. That results in different interventions.

Supply and Demand Strategies

• Impacting Supply
  • Idea: if we change the supply, that will change the demand.
    • Example: impossible burger at Burger King
  • Alternative proteins
  • Disadvantages to these strategies:
    • You need to make sure there’s “price, taste and convenience” parity, which is hard to do
• Impacting Demand
  • Via raising awareness
    • Via movies/shows. Ex: game changers
      • Problem: very hard to get into mainstream media channels
    • Leafleting
      • Problem: hard to know if it even works
      • Advantage: it’s a low-barrier entry, an easy way to get people involved in the community.

Corporate Outreach

• Advantages:
  • High leverage. Few decision makers that have tons of impact. 
• Disadvantages:
  • Easy for corps to say they’ll do something and not follow through. Then they get the positive press for the promise but don’t pay the price on flaking.

Law and Policy

• Using those to get lots of press
• A lot of change where we have key allies

Sanctuaries

• Disadvantages: very expensive with very little impact (low ROI).
• Advantages: 
  • An easy way for people to get their start in the movement
  • Education for general population (schools etc.)
    • (bigger educational impact for the ones closer to urban areas)

"Building the Movement" Organizations

• E.g. Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit (AVA), ADP
• (Organizations that focus on helping others in the space)

New Roots Institute Strategy

• Educating
• Recruiting
• Training
• Positioning (i.e. having animal advocates in mission-adjacent organizations.)
  • “Biggest message: each of us is uniquely positioned to create change”