Opinion: Beware the shift in lobbying tactics by activists
Animal Rebellion activist Josephone Robinson © MAG/Philip Case Recent protests by animal rights protestors outside McDonald’s distribution centres marked an interesting change in tactics, insofar as the arguments they were putting forward to justify their actions were almost exclusively around the environmental effects of meat production rather than the more traditional fare of systemic animal cruelty.
This is perhaps indicative of a tacit acceptance that the wider public increasingly understands that standards of animal care on British farms are generally as good as exist anywhere in the world.
As such, consumers are less likely to be sympathetic to a placard-wielding rent-a-mob denying them a sausage-and-egg McMuffin on welfare grounds.
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See also: Video – Animal activists blockade McDonald’s depots
But we should not for a moment believe the tide has turned. The focus of welfare campaigning is shifting more towards legislators than consumers, with potentially more damaging and irreversible consequences for livestock farming if allowed to go unchallenged.
Welfare standards that seek to go above and beyond delivering objectively measurable outcomes that consumers are prepared to pay for invariably end up compromising competitiveness while contributing little to the wider welfare of farmed animals.
Few would argue that the phasing out of dry-sow stalls across the EU was a bad thing. But for UK pig producers, forced to implement the ban fully 10 years before their European contemporaries, the result was a 40% reduction in the national herd inside of five years.
Meanwhile, pigmeat produced to supposedly unacceptable standards flowed freely into this country from the EU to satisfy real consumer demand for competitively priced bacon.
For those producers who managed to survive that most unlevel of playing fields, the legacy is still felt today. Cross-subsidisation from other enterprises may have kept them in business, but chronic underinvestment in infrastructure continues to weigh heavily on both productivity and, ironically, welfare provision.
Yet despite this, we find ourselves standing on the threshold of history repeating itself as the government pursues incoherent and irreconcilable strategies of trade liberalisation while pledging to unilaterally drive already world-leading domestic welfare standards ever higher, regardless of the cost.
It’s a potentially toxic mix that could have profoundly negative long-term consequences for both the livestock sector and the broader welfare of animals.
But simply arguing against the need to raise welfare standards, however reasoned and rational, is like trying to answer the question “are you still beating your wife?”.
Answer “yes” and you are clearly out of order, answer “no” and you are implying that you used to… which is why I have real concerns about the potential long-term implications of the proposed Animal Sentience bill announced in last month’s Queen’s Speech.Â
On the surface, it appears innocuous enough, merely seeking legal recognition of what is already undisputed… that animals are capable of feeling pain and distress.
What is more concerning is that, once the principle is established in law, the potential for widening the scope of what animal sentience encompasses, if unchallenged, is virtually limitless.
It risks rendering livestock farming unsustainable, based on nothing more than subjective judgement… and lobbying power.
This bill is an unnecessary and potentially damaging Trojan horse. While its passage through parliament is unlikely to be halted, we should at the very least be taking every step to ensure its future boundaries are clearly defined.