Existential Welfarism

An argument for running a campaign that cannot succeed

The animal rights movement has been struggling with the welfare/abolition debate for as long as I can remember and, though the acrimony has died down a bit, and welfare campaigns seem to have won the day (or at least most, though certainly not all, of the funding), the struggle certainly continues. ¹

For myself, I’ve never really believed, as some do, that welfare campaigns trick people into not feeling guilty about what’s happening to animals when they are still living in horrific, even if slightly better, conditions (“a higher circle of hell” is how I ike to put it). The main reason I feel that way is that no one seems to actually feel bad about it in the first place, so there is no guilt to be assuaged. Which is to say, I thi

nk it’s hard to argue that welfare campaigns set us back, since we weren’t getting much of anywhere with most people anyway.

But, on the other hand, I’ve never really understood the long-term theory of change underlying many welfare campaigns. Of course, if the end game is just getting, say, laying hens out of battery cages and into cage-free, albeit often extremely unpleasant, housing, then they make sense. And I’m not saying that’s an unworthy goal or easy to pull off. A higher circle of hell is a higher circle of hell, if that’s all we can actually manage.

But if the end game is, dare we say it, ending the egg industry, or even limiting it to legitimately highish welfare eggs (whatever that means), it’s hard for me to figure out what the next step is after the battle is won and the industry has spent all the money and switched over to its abysmal, but better-than-cages, cage-free housing. Unless that’s your final goal, it just feels a bit like a dead end after you have accomplished something, but not nearly enough. (Feel free to explain why this is wrong. I really want to know.)

However, the problem with the other strategy for change — for people who think welfare campaigns are, at best, a waste of time and money, and, at worst, window dressing designed to hide abuse — which is generally known as “abolitionism” (though that seems more like a goal than a strategy), is that the main tactic is to get people to go vegan. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that turns out to be much harder than one originally believed when one first thought, “Oh my god, I have to tell everyone what’s really happening to animals!! They’ll stop eating them, for sure!!!” Of course, this strategy has been dramatically aided by the growth of vegan foods and lots of vegan progress due to the hard work of many advocates, but, let’s face it, we’re not exactly approaching abolition.

This is the conundrum (or one of them) that continues to dog animal rights campaigners.

One possible approach is to try to combine a welfare campaign with an abolitionist goal. Many welfare campaigns, such as cage-free campaigns, seek to achieve the feasible, i.e., something that it might be possible for an animal-abusing industry to do without going out of business. That seems reasonable. They are hardly going to agree to do something that ruins them. But it turns out that anything that’s feasible is, to put it mildly, inadequate. Thus, cage-free housing for laying hens.

Basically, I like the idea of finding a thing that is done to animals (and there are loads of them) that the general public has never realized happens all the time (again, loads), and would completely agree is horrific and absolutely must not happen, but that would cost enough to change to make it impossible for the industry to stop doing it without raising the cost of production so high that they would not be able to stay in business (without huge government subsidies). In short, something that is existential for the industry, or, more accurately, one segment of it. This is exactly the opposite of the normal requirement and selling point for welfare reforms, which are extolled as being cost-effective. Examples might include 24/7 indoor housing for pigs or chickens, separating dairy calves from their mothers at birth, and castration (always a crowd pleaser).

Once one has settled on a dreadful and existential practice, you stage a boycott of that particular product until farmers agree to the reform, or there is legislation prohibiting that practice.

Why would farmers agree with this reform? Well, they wouldn’t. That’s the point — the practices that would be targeted by this approach are done by the industry because they are financially necessary for the industry to be able to sell its product at a low enough price that people can afford to buy it. These practices are not just cost-reducers. They are the business plan. So the industry would carry on about feeding the world, and crazy activists who hate farmers, and milk does a body good, and America runs on beef, and whatever. But the industry would never agree to give animals this particular break, because it simply can’t.

Of course, I guess I could be wrong, or we could choose a reform that’s easier than we think, and it could turn out they can indeed pull it off for far less money than we think. So, that would be good, right? But it’s far, far more likely that that would not happen, and the industry wouldn’t agree. Because they can’t.

Alternatively, rather than appeal to farmers, we could ask the government to impose this reform on farmers against their will. And, you ask, why would government agree to legislate such a reform? Well, obviously, it almost certainly wouldn’t. Governments are not in the business of putting farmers, even factory farmers, especially factory farmers, out of business. But if you have enough support, it’s not actually impossible. And it perhaps would make legislators uncomfortable to refuse to vote for a reform so directly focused on ending a particular type of hideous cruelty. But, yeah, highly, highly unlikely.

Why would we do such a stupid boycott campaign that A. is only targeted at one aspect of the industry and B. has close to zero chance of anyone capitulating? As to the first, that appears to be a huge plus. As Rutger Bregman points out here (in a different context), boycotts generally work much better if they are only targeted at a relatively small segment of the true target. It has to feel doable. We’re not saying you have to go VEGAN, just quit this particular food. For a while. Until they fix it.

As to the second problem, i.e, the complete futility of such a campaign having total success in its stated goal of having the industry abandon this particular practice, admittedly, yeah, that’s not an attractive feature for campaigners, or funders, who would understandably like to support something that maybe they can “win.”

But, for one thing, as noted, even though we may think the industry can’t reform itself and stay in business, maybe they will do at least something to address the particular harm.

For another thing, even if we are right and the practice can’t be abandoned, it could be an incremental way to get the public to notice what animal agriculture really is like, that it is incapable of reform, and to persuade at least some people to choose to continue to boycott the single product involved even if they come to recognize that their boycott is not going to ever end with a “win.”

So it’s basically an incremental way to get people to look at animal agriculture and see what it is doing and to take a small but potentially effective action to address it without having to challenge them with the apparently insurmountable, identity-shifting obstacle of “going vegan.” Of course, it only gets them to see a tiny slice of the cruelty, but it might get at least some of them thinking about the rest of it. If they need more proof that the whole damn thing has to go, it then requires finding something equally heinous involving another animal-based product and starting all over again with a new campaign. At least we know there is a never-ending supply of cruelty.

For a historical example and a nascent idea of the kind of campaign I’m talking about, see here.

AI generated, obviously

1. As Marina Bolotnikova recently eloquently described the debate: “For basically its entire existence, the animal rights movement has been like a great dialectic between two poles — radical tactics vs. moderate ones, saving the lives of a small number of animals vs. somewhat improving the lives of millions more living on factory farms (we are remarkably fractious and intellectually diverse for a tiny movement that no one likes). “