Realism or optimism: what helps animals more?

Last weekend I attended and spoke at the Vegan and Animal Rights Conference (VARC) in Manchester, alongside four hundred like-minded people. We did the usual networking, strategizing, learning, and karaoke singing, and like many others I left inspired, connected, and energized (thank you, VARC team!) Some volunteers were walking around collecting data from attendees, which would hopefully show funders that the conference is an effective use of their money. I’m all for measurement, but with some things the value seems so obvious that it may not require overanalysis.

There were many great talks and speakers, but I want to focus here on two sessions, which described the same movement in very different moods. They made me consider, once again, what we can realistically achieve.

In his talk A journey of a thousand steps, Connor Jackson from Anima UK spoke from the trenches of corporate welfare campaigning. Connor has spent over a decade leading Anima’s UK work, combining undercover investigations with corporate pressure and activist mobilization, and building a track record of pushing major food businesses to improve chicken welfare standards.

Connor is vegan and wants to see an end to animal exploitation, but he has his reasons for campaigning for better living conditions for layer hens and slower-growing broilers. After decades of activism, he said, the number of farmed animals continues to increase. And chickens, of course, represent the vast majority of farmed animals. Connor believes the movement is “overwhelmingly failing” these creatures and needs to change its approach.

He thinks cage-free campaigns may be the most successful campaigns in animal rights history, giving hundreds of millions of birds a better, though far from ideal, life. Activists who can’t see a difference between caged and cage-free, or between fast- and slower-growing breeds of chickens, are not taking animal suffering seriously enough. Being able to spread your wings, escaping the pain of walking on metal grates for over a year, access to sunlight, the ability to escape aggressive flockmates… are all very meaningful for the birds.

Connor knows that cage-free systems are not the end point, but the strategy is to progress in steps: from battery cages, to cage-free, then to free range, to organic and beyond. With such incremental reforms, we can progressively undo the focus on efficiency that harms animals, raise their political status, and shift what society deems acceptable.

This will take time. Although he calls himself an optimist, Connor believes many activists’ dreams and goals - such as ending animal exploitation within the next few decades - are misguided, and that we’ll be stuck with intensive animal agriculture for many decades to come.

In his talk The sleeping giant: unleashing the power of the animal movement, Harley Brewer, an activist with Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, and Animal Rising, offered a different story.** While many media outlets are keen to report that veganism is collapsing, Harley argues that the data do not match that narrative, and that the number of vegans has grown dramatically over the past decades. He believes that, as a movement, we think we are smaller than we are: in the UK, there are not just 3% vegans, 6% vegetarians, and 5% pescatarians, but also 25% flexitarians. Together, Harley says, that’s 39% of the public taking part in an economic boycott by actively reducing meat consumption. All these people are taking active steps to help put an end to factory farming.

If any other movement had 40% of the public taking part, Harley argued, it would not see itself as failing. We can absolutely win this and there is no reason we couldn’t end factory farming in our lifetime. Harley pointed to several recent victories: universities going partially or even fully plant-based, Proveg UK swapping nearly 60 million meals in UK schools to plant-based ones, and the Communities Against Factory Farming delaying or stopping every single factory farm application.*

Winning will require thinking politically (the government is the ultimate decision-maker), building coalitions across ideologies, and transforming the people who participate. Veganism should not be a prerequisite for joining the movement - the only requirements are a willingness to work on the issue and an ability to collaborate. Most of all, according to Harley, we need to believe that we can win.

I’m not sure who I agree with more: Connor Jackson or Harley Brewer. It’s not obvious, in part because they’re using focusing on different things and using different metrics.

I do believe Connor is right that making a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of chickens is significant. And I also think Harley is right that, despite the horrible and loud voices wishing vegans and the animal rights movement to hell, we have more support than we think we have.

But aside from asking which of these narratives is most factual - a question we’re not going to resolve here - we can also ask which one is most helpful.

Some will say that what’s most helpful is what’s most factual. That’s a reasonable view. If you believe you can do less than you actually can, you might aim lower than you should. Conversely, if you believe you have superpowers, you might set unrealistic goals and end up disappointed and frustrated. It seems, therefore, quite important to have a clear sense of what we can realistically achieve.

And yet at the same time, I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies: believing you can do more than you think may energize you to actually do it. In that sense, as Karl Popper said, optimism is a moral duty.

I’m not sure whether realism or optimism will get us the furthest. We probably need a combination: optimistic realism or realistic optimism. And what’s most useful may often vary individually, on the person and where they are, psychologicially. If you feel burned out or dejected, a dose of Harley would do you good. If you’re overly optimistic, believing everything will sort itself out quickly, take a dose of Connor.

Because one thing seems clear: we will have to keep working as hard as we can. Lewis Bollard of Coefficient Giving put it aptly: the end of factory farming is neither inevitable nor impossible.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

We should dream big and appreciate small steps, put in the work and think creatively, do our research and find out the best interventions and tactics, and collaborate with everyone who thinks factory farming is a disaster (no matter what they eat).

*note that not everyone thinks stopping new factory farms is a good idea, from an animal welfare perspective

**I'm aware that also Wayne Hsiung offered a very inspiring and optimistic side, but I was unable to attend it.