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This is: Strategic considerations for upcoming EU farmed animal legislation, published by Neil_Dullaghan on the effective altruism forum.
Preamble
The European Commission is planning to revise and expand the scope of European Union (EU) animal protection policies with new legislative proposals in late 2023, likely followed by another ~12-24 months of negotiations before being passed into law. The effective animal advocacy movement should attempt to have the most impact during the policy formation stage and to prioritise which countries need to be targeted to ensure proposals are not significantly weakened before passing into law. I’ve recently written two reports to contribute to strategic discussions, here and here. The two reports total more than 57,000 words. Below is an overview of the project, the main recommendations, and a summary of the main arguments (or see PDF version here). For readers unfamiliar with the EU it will help to have first read the introductory post in Rethink Priorities’ EU animal policy series, read Lewis Bollard’s Open Philanthropy newsletters on EU topics (2021,2020, 2017) or watched these time stamped videos on decision-making structures in the EU (CNBC 2019, Kurzgesagt 2019).
Who is this for & what might they gain from reading this research?
Farmed animal funders: Information on what countries one would want to see progress in to have the best chance of successful EU legislation.
European animal advocacy organisations: Ideas on how your work can fit into a larger EU strategy, legislative texts to model your political asks on, and suggestions on why joining associations, like Eurogroup for Animals or the Open Wing Alliance, could improve your EU impact.
What did I do?
I collected and synthesised historical case studies of six animal welfare issues (battery cages, tail docking, tethers, veal crates, sow stalls and broiler stocking density) addressed by seven EU species-specific directives[1] and progress so far towards fish welfare standards. I also offer a brief overview of animal welfare issues not yet legislated on.
I summarised evidence from the wider political science literature on the main factors in EU decision-making, especially those highlighted by the case studies. This was to counter some of the problems of having only deeply researched cases of successful farmed animal reform. I also outline some strategic considerations for EU legislation on cage-free hens on fish welfare.
I compiled information in Google Sheets on previous legislation, country-level statistics such as the percentage of cage-free hens, a list of animal welfare reports from the agency of the EU that provides independent scientific advice, a timeline of when countries will hold the Rotating Council Presidency, and some data from Votewatch.eu on how countries have voted on key policy areas. I hope this information can feed into an EU strategy.
I created probability distributions of what share of egg laying hens will be cage-free by 2025, and partnered with an EU academic to generate simulations of countries voting on a hypothetical EU cage-free policy for egg-laying hens. I also posted a number of questions on the forecasting platform Metaculus as an example of one tool animal advocates can use for multi-year planning.
Why is this a worthwhile area to pursue?
Government/policy/lobbying experience is seen as a talent bottleneck in effective animal advocacy (Harris 2021) and legislative/policy change has been less of a focus within the space relative to public opinion and industry change (Animal Charity Evaluators 2018). Relative to corporate commitments, legislative changes are likely to be much more difficult to reverse and may have higher levels of implementation due to enforcement mechanisms (though see my report on enforcement for caveats).
As noted above, the European...
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