Transcript

Hi podcast listeners. Today’s episode sets a new length record but it’s also very comprehensive. I had time to ask Lewis all the questions I had about how to effectively help animals, and he had a lot to say. If you want to spend a few hours learning everything you need to know about ending cruelty to animals in agriculture, I don’t know of any better single resources.

I’ve added a link to a comprehensive overview of the conversation so you can skip to whatever sections you want to listen to. As always we also have a full transcript and links to the job opportunities and research pieces we discuss. The link is in the show notes.

You can get the episode on your phone so you can listen to it whenever you like over a few sessions, by searching for 80,000 Hours in your podcasting app.

If what we’ve talk about today piques your interest in working on farm animal welfare, you should apply for free, one-on-one career coaching. We’ve now helped hundreds of people formulate their plan and compare between their options, introduced them to mentors, collaborators and funders, and got them into high impact jobs. It takes a few minutes to apply for a 45 minute Skype call, and the application process itself is designed to help you structure your own thinking, and give you a list of actionable next steps.

The link is in the podcast description or the blog post where you found this episode.

Our guide to improving institutional decision making which I talked about in the podcast with Julia Galef is now out and I’ll link to it from this episode as well.

And now I bring you Lewis Bollard.

Robert Wiblin: Today, I am speaking with Lewis Bollard. Lewis leads the Open Philanthropy Project strategy for Farm Animal Welfare. Full disclosure, the Open Philanthropy Project is one of 80,000 Hours’ [00:01:23] biggest donors. Prior to joining the Open Philanthropy Project, he worked as policy advisor in international liaison to the CEO at the Humane Society of the U.S. also called HSUS. And prior to that, he was a litigation fellow at HSUS, a law student, and an associate consultant at Bain & Company. He has a B.A. from Harvard University in Social Studies and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Lewis.

Lewis Bollard: Great to be here.

Robert Wiblin: We plan to talk about Lewis’s work, making grants, how we can most effectively help animals, and how listeners can best use their careers to improve animal welfare. But first off, Lewis, what originally drew you to dedicate your career to helping animals and why did Open Phil end up focusing on it, among other things?

Lewis Bollard: Sure. So, when I was a teenager, I became aware of global poverty, first. And like I imagine many of you listeners, it was an issue that really struck me as incredibly important and incredibly neglected. And then I later became aware of factory farming. And it struck me as also important, but even more neglected and with really clearer solutions. And so, really since I’ve been a teenager, this is an issue I’ve been really passionate about — wanted to work on. As far as Open Philanthropy Project went, they have these three criteria — importance, tractability, and neglectedness — for selecting cause areas. And farm animal welfare lined up on all three of those criteria. And so, I think the primary consideration was ultimately just that it was a major issue. It’s been neglected by the donors and has the real potential to gain some traction here.

Robert Wiblin: Do you want to give us some numbers to help give an idea of the scale and tractability and neglectedness of the problem?

Lewis Bollard: Sure. So starting with numbers for the scale of the problem. If you look at the number of animals being farmed at any point in time, globally, there are about 23 billion chickens, at any point in time, alive in farms. Overwhelmingly, in intensive factory farming systems, globally. Now, about 15 billion of them are broiler meat chickens. And the other 8 billion, roughly, are layer hens. There are another, roughly, 6 billion land mammals that are being farmed. That’s pigs, cows, rabbits. And then there’s somewhere between 35 billion and 140 billion farmed fish, at any point in time. And those numbers are incredibly imprecise because no one is keeping track of precise numbers. So the Food & Agriculture Association keeps pretty good track of the numbers of land animals but not the numbers of farm animals. And if you’re also concerned about wild caught fish, the numbers could be in the trillions.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Lewis Bollard: So, certainly they’re on the importance of the issue. If you look on the neglectedness side, the numbers are also pretty stark. Before we came into the space, I’d say that there was probably about 20 million dollars a year being devoted to this problem, it’s entirety. That’s now probably increased to maybe 50 million a year.

Robert Wiblin: So, 20 million in the U.S. or globally?

Lewis Bollard: Globally.

Robert Wiblin: Wow. That’s really very little. So there were almost no farm animal advocacy organisations, only a handful.

Lewis Bollard: There were only a handful of animal organisations and when I say that number, I’m only counting certain things. I’m not counting, for instance, farm sanctuaries where it’s providing direct care for farm animals. But, if you really just look at advocacy for farm animals, It was extremely limited. A couple of groups like Mercy for Animals, Compassion in World Farming can be around for several years, but at very small budgets.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you have any concrete way of assessing the severity of animal suffering? Any kind of quantitative measure that you can use, I mean ideally I guess to compare it to human suffering. But short of that, just you know, how bad is it, in a general sense?

Lewis Bollard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it would certainly be great to have a more rigorous quantitative measure to compare to human suffering. I think for now, that all we can really do is compare with in-species. Because our ability to understand the relative experiences of different species still so limited. But within species, you can look at a couple of different things. You can first look with acute pain experiences. How long do they last? So we know, for instance, with castration and piglets. This is standard practice for virtually all male piglets, globally. We know that that is a process that causes minutes of intense pain as measured by stress responses and that they’re still feeling some degree of pain … days, weeks later. When it comes to chronic suffering, you can look at the conditions, and you can use aversion studies. So you can say, “We’ve put these hens into a cage or we can put these hens into a cage-free environment.” And we can see how much effort they will exert to get out of that cage environment and how much effort they’ll exert to get things they’re not receiving currently. Like access to a nesting box, access to a perch.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, some people will advocate for vegetarianism or try to scale back animal agriculture on the basis of environmental and health benefits, as well as animal welfare benefits. Do you think those gains are large compared to those that we might hope to get from Animal Welfare Improvement?

Lewis Bollard: I think the environmental gains are real. I think that if you look at the best global estimates right now, the Food & Agriculture Organization estimates that about 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions come from animal agriculture. If you look at land use or water use, the percentages are significantly higher, in terms of the amount of water used globally and the amount of land. So from an environmental perspective, I think there’s a very clear case. Particularly for moving toward pulses, whole grains, other relatively low carbon footprint foods.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What grants have you made at Open Phil, and how long has the programme been running?

Lewis Bollard: So we started this programme in October of 2015. And since then, we’ve made about 30 million dollars of grants within Farm Animal Welfare. Those grants were initially directed largely toward corporate campaigns, to eliminate some of the worst practices within animal agriculture. So we began with grants to support corporate campaigns to phase out battery cages in the United States. Then extended those campaigns globally to work in Latin America and in Europe. We’ve also sought to reach neglected regions and neglected issues. So we’ve made a set of grounds in China, a set of grounds in India, a set of grounds related to fish welfare, and then we’ll also remain open to exceptional opportunities that fall outside of these core areas [00:08:07]. So one example would be The Good Food Institute which is working on alternatives to animal proteins. Another example would be Animal Charity Evaluators which is looking to build the field and evaluate animal charities.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). How did you go about deciding which groups to fund and which ones not to fund?

Lewis Bollard: So the number one thing we look for is whether the group is operating in an area of high impact. So, a group working on fish has the potential to do so much more than a group that’s working, for instance, solely on cows. Just because there are so many more fish out there. A group working in China has the potential to a great more impact than a group working in New Zealand. The second thing we look for is a track record. So, to what degree has this group chalked up tangible victories in the past. And this was something that was very appealing about corporate charity campaigns, which we can track very tangible outcomes from these campaigns in the past. And then the third thing is a good team or good leadership. So we look for people who seem to be highly competent, seem to have a clear sense of success, seem to be flexible and willing to adjust their tactics and strategies based on past experience.

Robert Wiblin: So, most animal advocates seem focused on animals that are easier to sympathise with, perhaps like pigs and cows. But you’re kind of going in the opposite direction, thinking of chickens and fish and I guess potentially even insects? Or other more unusual cases like that.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so the case we’re focusing on chickens and fish is very similar to the case focusing on Farm Animal Welfare as a cause. In terms of importance, there are more than 10 times as many chickens as there are, for instance, pigs. And there are more than 100 times potentially as many farm fish as there are for pigs. So, the numbers are really there. Then in terms of neglectedness, it’s also the case. So certainly, we need more funding for work on pigs and cows and other more charismatic mammals, but there’s been real dearth of funding around fish, chickens, and other animals that people don’t think about or relate to as easily.

Robert Wiblin: But, while there’s ten times or so as many chickens, their brains are also about one hundredth the size of the brain of a pig, right? And a similar number to the brain of a cow. So I guess it’s not completely obvious that there’s more suffering in chickens than pigs in the world, right?

Lewis Bollard: Certainly not completely obvious. I mean I think there’s a really interesting question about how to compare the well being of different species. I do think it’s very unlikely that the sheer size or weight of a brain is likely to be closely correlated with ability to suffer. I think if that were true we should possibly be focused on sperm whales, or on elephants, or other large creatures with huge brains. But I think what we see even within humans, is that brain size can differ and it doesn’t necessarily affect relative capacity to suffer.

Robert Wiblin: OK well maybe let’s come back to that in a minute. Another interesting study is that about half of the world’s fish, and a quarter of the world’s land farmed animals are in China. So why is Open Phil not focused on China and perhaps India as well?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so we are as much as we can be. We see China and India as absolutely top priorities, particularly China. As you note, a huge portion of the world’s farm animals are based there and contrary to some perceptions it’s not for export, it’s primarily for domestic consumption that these animals are being raised in China.

So we have made a set of about four million dollars worth of grants to groups in China. And the primary constraint on making more grants than that, is a lack of opportunities in China. So we’ve already supported most of the groups that were excited about doing work there, and that have a legal ability to work there, and that’s another constraint in terms of operating in China.

Robert Wiblin: Is there just a lack of any people who take an interest in animal welfare in China? Is it just a kinda not a cultural issue there?

Lewis Bollard: I’m not sure what the origins are. I think that it is true that there is less civil society across many sectors in China.

I think it’s something we naturally see more of in more developed countries. There are more people focused on social activism than there are in still developing or emerging economies. And my hope is that as China develops further we’ll see more this, and I think we already are. I mean one of the most heartening things to me in China is seeing the recent protests around the dog meat trade within China. Which, to be clear, the dog meat trade is really no worse than the trade in pigs or in chickens, in China or elsewhere. But the fact that this is an issue that’s really mobilised a lot of Chinese, gotten a lot of people out involved protesting, stopping trucks, suggests to me something very heartening about the future of animal advocacy in China.

Robert Wiblin: That at least there’s many people who in principle think that animals can matter in particular cases?

Lewis Bollard: Exactly, and the fact that they’re willing to devote their time, and really to undergo some serious risks to be engaged in this kind of activism.

Robert Wiblin: Why have you focused so much on corporate reform campaigns? It sounds like that’s the main thrust of your work at the moment.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah it’s certainly not the only thrust but I would say about a third of our portfolio has gone to support directly corporate campaigns. And the reason really is that the track record recently has been very impressive. So, when we started supported corporate campaigns in late 2015, groups in the US had already secured some critical victories on cage-free. They had gotten Costco, one of the largest retailers to go cage-free. They had gotten Aramark and Compass Group, the largest food service companies, and they had just gotten McDonald’s, within the fast food sector.

And in the year and a half since then, they’ve basically gotten the remainder of the entire US food industry to make commitments to move away from battery cages. And there are certainly questions about how much better is that transition from battery cages to cage free. But iI feel very confident that that transition only happened because of the advocacy of these campaigning groups.

Robert Wiblin: Do you have a sense of how many animals you’re helping per thousand dollars that you spend in these grants to corporate welfare campaigns.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah so our rough cost-effectiveness estimate is that these cage-free campaigns are at least 150 animals per dollar spent. And what we mean by that is 150 hens moved from a cage to a cage-free environment for a year per dollar spent. And one of the assumptions there is that these campaigns only brought forward progress by five years. I think that’s a pretty conservative assumption. I think it’s quite likely they brought forward progress by much more than five years. So we’re only counting five years of benefits. But yeah 150 … And I would say there’s a wide potential spectrum, maybe a 100 to 250 per dollar there.

Robert Wiblin: What is your research work like day to day? How do you spend your time?

Lewis Bollard: So I spend my time between a combination of online research, trying to read the latest reports both from animal advocacy groups, from animal charity evaluators, but also from the industry. So reading industry publications to see what changes are happening, what’s influencing them. And I spend a lot of time on the phone with animal advocates. So I spend a lot of time finding out what are the things people are thinking about, what are they doing. And I try and spend a decent amount of time on the phone with independent experts. So talking for instance to fish welfare scientists, or talking to people who are experts on the non-profit situation in China.

And then combining those two things, I think that the third task is kind of compiling that. And this is something … I’ve a monthly newsletter where I kind of synthesise some of those findings together, and really see what is there that we can learn from disparate sources that could be useful for our philanthropy.

Robert Wiblin: Do you do a lot of follow-up with the groups that you make grants to, to see how they’re going?

Lewis Bollard: We do, yeah, and we’re looking to increase that follow-up too, over time. So our current set-up is that we look to talk to each of our grantees at least once every six months, to understand what wins they’ve had, what losses they’ve had, what they’ve learned, what they’ve changed about their plans. In the case of larger grantees I’m talking to them more often than that, perhaps every few weeks. We want to be very careful not to be in the role of micromanaging them. Or to be dictating their tactics or telling them what to do. But we absolutely do want to understand how they’re doing and what they’re up to. Both in terms in renewing the grants but also so we can share those lessons with other philanthropists.

Robert Wiblin: I guess a lot of the grants are pretty recent but do you have a sense of how well the money is being spent? Are you getting the bang for buck that you were hoping for?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I’m very excited about how the grants have gone so far. So as I mentioned one of the biggest categories is the corporate campaign grants and those have significantly exceeded our expectations. We did not expect that that the US corporate campaigns would have already produced cage-free pledges across basically the entire food industry. And they’ve similarly exceeded expectations internationally. So large UK, German, French retailers making similar commitments based on these campaigns.

The other things we funded, I think it’s generally too soon to tell. So for instance with our China grants, with our India grants, a lot of what we’re looking to do is to build up a movement and to build up capacity over the longer term. And I think unfortunately we’ll only really be able to evaluate the effectiveness of those grants over a five, ten or longer year time-frame.

Robert Wiblin: So coming back to your day-to-day work, is Open Phil a place that you would recommend that people work? Is it a fun place to work, or at least an exciting place to work?

Lewis Bollard: Yes, I’d definitely recommend it. And not just because my boss is probably listening to this podcast.

Robert Wiblin: I’m sure he knows it all already. He’s probably just skipped through it.

Lewis Bollard: I mean I think it really is kinda of a dream job in the sense of if you care most about having an impact within one of the cause areas that Open Phil works on, and in my case what I care most about is having an impact on farm animal welfare. Then there are not only the resources there, the financial resources to do that, but also a huge amount of autonomy to really pursue what appear to be the most promising opportunities. And to spend a lot of time researching them. And to really make grant recommendations based on your best judgment.

Robert Wiblin: What are the biggest frustrations of the work?

Lewis Bollard: I think one of the real frustrations is a lack of good data. So I’ve mentioned some the data we do have on total animal numbers for instance, from the food and agriculture organisation. But we don’t have good data on the experiences of these animals. So we don’t have great data even on what percentage of animals in different countries or in different types of production systems, are undergoing different kinds of physical mutilations or particular kinds of slaughter. We also don’t have robust data on what those experiences are like. And so robust data of the sort you were asking for earlier, of how would we compare the experiences of different animals, with still really going off very limited evidence. And it would be great to see more data in that. So that can be very frustrating when we’re trying to compare grants, and that could be the most important thing to distinguish based on … We just, we don’t have it.

Robert Wiblin: Thinking about working at Open Phil specifically, are there any downsides of the work there that people might not consider? I mean it sounds extremely appealing, you have potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in the long term to give away. Are there any things that make that difficult or unpleasant?

Lewis Bollard: Well I think the flip side of great autonomy is that you don’t have as much of the benefits of being part of a team. I mean there certainly is a team that [00:20:00] at Open Philanthropy, but we’re each working on very distinct issues, and so within my work on animal welfare it can be a little lonely at time. I mean, there aren’t a lot of other, there’s no one else there working solely on this issue, and so there are people I’ll talk to about it, there’s people who’ll give me guidance, but it’s not something if you’re looking for a real team environment. The programme officer role, at least, doesn’t really fit that bill.

Robert Wiblin: Why haven’t you hired a research assistant, or something like that?

Lewis Bollard: So, we’re actually looking into the possibility now, and for interested listeners, my hope is we will be looking to recruit that in the next few months, and you can look out for that opportunity. So, yeah, it’s on the horizon.

Robert Wiblin: What kind of personal traits will you be looking for, above others?

Lewis Bollard: So, I think the most important trait for me, is someone who’s analytical and good at dealing with data and independent research. Obviously, we want people who care about the issue, both care about farm animal welfare and, ideally, care about effective altruism and having the greatest impact. But generally, I’m trying to keep a pretty open mind otherwise about what that person would look like in terms of their worldview, their ideology, their background.

I think the most important thing is just that analytical ability and the intelligence to really be able to engage in debates. And to be able to criticise me and to prove me wrong on things, because I think one of the dangers of only having one person, and one of the real benefits of having another person, is that you can get a little more diversification of views on things.

Robert Wiblin: We’ll put up a link to that job vacancy when it goes up. Are there any other jobs, or job vacancies, that Open Phil has at the moment?

Lewis Bollard: I think we’ve had, we have some vacancies in the logistics team. I think we’ve been looking for possibly a couple of people in the logistics team. And I’m pretty sure those are up on the website.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, we’ll link to those as well. Are there any organisations you’ve investigated that you ultimately decided not to fund, and I guess without naming any names, what were the reasons for that?

Lewis Bollard: Sure, yeah, we’ve had a number of investigations that we opened, and ultimately decided not to fund. And there have been a variety of reasons for that. I’d say the most common reason is that we weren’t excited about the particular proposals presented to us for what this group would do with additional funding. So, even where a group seemingly has a good track record, or has a good leadership team, we still want to see really tangible plans for how they need and would use more funding.

So, I’d say that’s the most common one. Otherwise, we’ve also just found other red flags. We’ve heard, during the evaluation process of a group, negative things or disputes about their track record. Or we’ve come to see perhaps that particular strategy, when we look at the cost-effectiveness estimate, the numbers really aren’t as good as we expected them to be.

Robert Wiblin: If you have an existing group that’s doing good work, but they can’t yet show you a plan for how they’ll scale up and what they’ll do with more money, mightn’t you just expect that if they have a good track record they’ll be able to find a way to use the money effectively?

Lewis Bollard: I think that’s certainly possible. I think that it depends a lot on the kind of group we’re talking about. Particularly in many of the cases we’re considering, pretty well-established groups where one or two of their programmes have good track records, and other programmes don’t. And so in those cases, we want to be very careful that we’re only funding truly additional work and we’re not just providing money in the general pot that could go to ineffective work. And so in those cases, the room for more funding question becomes very important.

With the smaller groups, certainly, I think we’re more open to the philosophy of just backing them to do something, and the more that a group just has one programme, or does one thing, the easier that case is. So long as the argument they’re making to us is just, “We’ll do more of this thing we’re already doing well,” that’s a compelling case.

Robert Wiblin: You just mentioned doing the math, the cost-effectiveness analysis of the different kinds of interventions that groups have. In your view, what are the most effective interventions for helping animals, and how confidently do we have answers to that?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so, right now there’s a variety of confidence levels, so I’d say the intervention that I am most confident in right now, are corporate campaigns, because we can track so clearly the role of each advocacy group, the number of companies, the number of animals affected by each pledge, and then the subsequent implementation of those pledges.

When it comes to other strategies, I think there’s a lot of potential, particularly where strategies focus on important areas, and neglected areas. But it’s going to be a lot harder to have confidence in the cost-effectiveness estimates we come up with. So, for instance, I feel very optimistic about focusing on China, because of the number of animals there and because of the neglectedness. But, I feel very low confidence in the cost-effectiveness estimates we’ve come up with, just because we don’t have a good sense for the tractability of those interventions, yet.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any interventions that you think are especially overrated?

Lewis Bollard: I do think that, traditionally, there was too much faith placed in online ads. So, in individual dietary change in general, trying to get people to go vegan. And that’s not to say that individual dietary change cannot be an effective tactic. I think that it’s totally possible that, if done well, it can be and there’s a need for more research there.

But I think there were a few studies early on that gave misplaced confidence to advocates, that online ads in particular, and leaflets, too, were having an outsized impact on dietary change. And I think more rigorous studies since then have really suggested that that was not the case, and that we don’t have a strong sense for the effectiveness of these interventions.

Robert Wiblin: Why do you think those studies produce positive results, perhaps excessively positive results?

Lewis Bollard: So, the early studies were all done by advocacy groups in the area [00:25:46], who had a very clear incentive. They also just weren’t particularly well-designed studies. We didn’t … Some of the studies didn’t have control groups. Some of the studies relied on the same volunteers who handed out the leaflets, going back and asking the people that handed leaflets to, what effect it had on them. And in a lot of cases, the sample size was really small. So, there were just the kind of classic problems we have with a study that doesn’t have the kind of methodological safeguards that studies should have.

Robert Wiblin: Someone who had a lot of experience in social science research reading those papers would have realised that they weren’t good at the time, it sounds like.

Lewis Bollard: Absolutely, and I think people did. I think that this has been a debate since these studies first came out, and that’s a big part of the reason why better studies were put into the field, and why those better studies have now provided more caution. I think that some people got overly optimistic, probably because they wanted to be. I mean, there’s an aspect of motivated reasoning, here, where it makes sense that you want this to be an effective intervention, because it’s relatively easy to do. And ultimately one of the most important things is, can we get people to change their diets?

Robert Wiblin: Are there any really high quality studies coming out on this topic in the future that will really allow us to settle that debate?

Lewis Bollard: I don’t think there’s something that will allow us to settle this debate, yet, though maybe further down the line. The study that I’m most excited about recently, was a study by a group called the Animal Welfare Action Lab. So, this was a study done by Krystal Caldwell and Greg Boese and Bobbie MacDonald.

And what they did was they had a group of [00:27:21] respondents read articles about a general transition to veganism, about a general transition to reducetarianism, and a control article, I think, about global poverty. And they measured the effect of those articles simply on self-reported meat consumption, and self-reported perceptions about animals, reducetarianism, and veganism. And they found quite a robust, surprisingly robust, impact, not only right afterwards, but also a month later.

The reason I like the study is because it really observed lots of good practices. So, they pre-registered the study, they put all the data online, they had an adequately powered sample. There was no P-fishing involved. It was just everything you’d want to see in a study.

So, we recently funded them to replicate, or attempt to replicate, the study on a larger scale using YouGov data, rather than MTurk [00:28:18]. And to me it will be really interesting to see whether that study replicates, or whether it doesn’t. But that’s what I’d love to see more of, is that kind of study where it’s a strong study. It doesn’t matter so much about the specifics of what it’s measuring are, but that it really has some external validity.

Robert Wiblin: That sounds like a really exciting study. I’ll see if we can put up a link to that in the show notes [00:28:39].

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Wiblin: Are there any things you’ve personally supported in the past, either financially or otherwise, that you’ve come to regret?

Lewis Bollard: I don’t know if there are things that I’ve come to regret. I mean, I think that we’ve certainly had some grants that look likely to be failures, but I think that that’s part of taking higher risk bits. And so in some ways it would be concerning if we didn’t have any failures. So, I’m less inclined to regret those.

I mean, I also think it’s the case that in the past, for myself, I’ve given funding to groups that I no longer think are effective. But again, I think it’s probably normally more constructive to see that as a positive learning path, that you reach a point of realising these were ineffective and finding better ways to do things.

Robert Wiblin: So, there’s nothing you’ve personally done that you think it was stupid even at the time?

Lewis Bollard: Not that immediately comes to mind, but I’m sure there’s something out there.

Robert Wiblin: What are some of the most popular things that people do today, in general, to try to improve animal welfare?

Lewis Bollard: Well, I think if you look beyond the EA movement, the most popular thing is to help local groups helping cats and dogs. And while that obviously has positive, direct benefits, I think in the greater scheme it doesn’t have the same effectiveness as: (a) focusing on farm animals; and (b) focusing on advocacy, as as opposed to direct care. I think even within the farm animal side, you see a lot of people focusing on caring for farm animals. For instance, within sanctuaries. Though those can certainly be a useful advocacy or education tool, I think that has to be the focus and oftentimes, the focus instead becomes caring for farm animals, which again, is very much a positive, but is not going to reach anything like the cost effectiveness of advocacy interventions [00:30:29].

Robert Wiblin: Looking at farm animal welfare groups in particular, how does your portfolio of interventions that you fund differ from what people are doing in general? What are the things that you’ve decided not to fund that you might have?

Lewis Bollard: I think the biggest thing we’ve decided not to fund that is widely done otherwise is individual dietary advocacy. Leafleting, online ads, other forms of vegan outreach remain very common within the movement and for us, we just don’t feel like the evidence is there yet. It’s not that we think it could never be there and it’s not that we think people are necessarily wrong to be supporting those initiatives, but we just don’t feel there’s robust evidence there that would make us feel confident enough to support that kind of advocacy.

Robert Wiblin: Let’s talk a bit for a moment about you personally. What in your background put you in a good position to take the role that you have now?

Lewis Bollard: I think the programme officer role is in many ways a generalist role, where it’s really useful to have a broad background in research, in writing, in communication. In some ways, I think of the extra curricular activities that I took. For instance, I was very involved in debating through high school and through college. I think that was a very useful activity for honing some of the analytical skills and communication skills that I now use. I think a general liberal arts degree in the US is also pretty useful in terms of reading a wide variety of material, researching, and putting together papers. I ultimately went to law school and I think that was useful in the sense that it also further honed my thinking process. I don’t think it was necessary though. I would say for people who are listening that if they want to perform a similar role, I’m not sure that law school is necessarily the right way to go about it.

Robert Wiblin: What’s your accent? You sound Australian to me.

Lewis Bollard: Almost. I’m from New Zealand.

Robert Wiblin: Okay, right. There’s a lot of Australians and New Zealanders seemingly involved in effective activism.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, there are. It’s a funny phenomenon.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, like Canadians. We’re everywhere, we’re walking among you. Do you think those traits that you’re looking for are kind of natural dispositional characteristics that don’t change very much or are they primarily trainable? Are they things that people listening could develop on their own?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I’m going to go for the compound answer that it’s both. But, I do think that there are definitely things that people can do to train for this. I think that just doing more rigorous research involving numbers, using data, understanding data, researching online to find essential facts, pulling them out, preparing reports. I think that that is some of the best kind of training for what we do. I think too, obviously evaluating charities. If you also make your own personal donations, thinking hard about those and thinking about what numbers and what data should inform that, but also where you could gain more information and how that information would update your thinking and influence your decision.

Robert Wiblin: It looks like in terms of animal advocacy, you’ve only worked for the Humane Society of the US, is that right?

Lewis Bollard: That’s right.

Robert Wiblin: Do you wish that you’d worked at a wider range of places to have a better sense of the whole space?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I do. I mean, I think if nothing else, the optics would look better if I’d worked at more than one animal group and I’m certainly conscious to not want to have favorites within the movement. I think that one of the nice things about farm animal welfare is that, it’s still a pretty small movement and a very closely connected one. I’ve really had the opportunity to get to know people across all of the groups and to get some sense at least of what they do. But, I do think that there is a lot of value to people getting experience in multiple related jobs or domains and certainly within animal welfare, I think there’d be a lot of value to people working for multiple groups.

Robert Wiblin: You worked at Bain & Company for a while. Was that your first job out of university?

Lewis Bollard: That was, yeah.

Robert Wiblin: Working in consulting for a couple of years is one of the parts that we’ve recommended, although because so many people have done it, we’ve started to back away from that lately because we’re worried that we’re getting saturated. At least soon, we’ll be saturated by [00:34:47] ex-management consultants. Is that something that you would recommend? Do you think that that added a lot of skills?

Lewis Bollard: For myself I don’t think it did. I can certainly see it making a lot of sense to someone, particularly, obviously if you are looking to give, it can be a useful launching plan for a lucrative careers. I think that if you are looking to work in management with a non-profit, then there is some really useful skills. Analytical skills certainly that are brought to bare. For myself, my feeling is that, I mainly did this as a sort of a cop out because I wasn’t yet ready to go and work full time on animal advocacy, and because I came into the job market during the depression and so it was kind of exciting just to have a job in New York. I generally think … I ended up working there for a year. I don’t really believe that in that time, that I gained a lot of useful skills. I think I mainly gained a lot of information about very particular business sectors, which would be useful if I wanted to go and work in those business sectors. Otherwise, I’m not sure it is completely generalisable.

Robert Wiblin: It sounded like you were also doing law school or potentially now you’ve ended up developing some skills that are somewhat stranded given the way you’ve gone with your career. Why did you go to law school at the time?

Lewis Bollard: Yes. I’m not sure I regret law school, but I would say that I don’t necessarily recommend it to others. At the time, I think that law school appeared to be the obvious route towards effective advocacy. I think that for a lot of people in America in particular focused on social change, it’s natural to look to the courts because this was the success route of civil rights, this was the success route of gay rights. Unfortunately, I think it’s very unlikely to be the success route for animal welfare, or for that matter, for other EA courses. When I went to law school, I think I had this inclination that generally lawyers are in good position to bring about social change, and it was only once I started working as a lawyer at the Humane Society on factory farming, that I realised the legal options are very limited on this issue.

Again, I think not necessarily mistaken that I gained useful skills. The credentials were probably helpful in getting this current job, but I do think that for people who are thinking about how they can have the greatest impact, it’s often people who look far too quickly at law school on social change issues, rather than at looking at where their competitive advantage lies.

Robert Wiblin: I want to spend the next half an hour to perhaps 45 minutes working through a bunch of specific different approaches that people might take to help animals. Given that you were talking just about legal advocacy, maybe let’s dive into that a little bit more. Why is it that legal advocacy isn’t such a promising avenue for helping animals?

Lewis Bollard: The biggest constraint on legal advocacy, is the lack of laws to be used or enforced. Within the United States, there are only two federal laws that apply to farm animals, and both of them are only enforceable by the department of agriculture or prosecutors, so there is no private citizens suit. No way that individuals can help enforce them, and they are both very minimal legal protections. Similarly, at the state levels, the very minimal protections that do exist, first normally except farm animals from their protections or agricultural practices from the protection. Secondly, they don’t provide any means of civil enforcement. What you are really looking at, is a system that’s set up to only be used by district attorneys or US attorneys.

Unfortunately, most of the district attorneys in the areas where factory farming is, tend to be tight with those communities who are often elected positions. Your ability as an independent litigator to make an impact, is extremely limited, and to further constraint, is the constraint of standing, which is that in US courts, to be a litigator on this, you need to show a concrete harm to yourself. It’s not sufficient to show a concrete harm to an animal, or to show an animal cruelty harm that might affect you. That makes it very hard to get into court in the first place, even when there is law you can use and a clear legal violation you can challenge.

Robert Wiblin: Who would have standing? Would it be other firms that are trying to compete with that firm and are following the regulations?

Lewis Bollard: Sometimes, yes. It depends a lot on the law being used. The problem is that, often no one has standing, which is why a lot of these laws go completely unenforced.

Robert Wiblin: Seems like an oversight on the part of the legislators.

Lewis Bollard: You can see it’s an oversight, or you can see it as intentional. I tend to think that a lot of these cases … animal agriculture has been very careful that they don’t want to see laws on the books enforced. The few occasions where these laws have started to be enforced, they’ve often come in and amended the laws to prevent the enforcement. I think that standing doctrine … and this has been across multiple areas. Certainly across environmentalism, and other areas where it’s not directly individuals who are affected, this being consented if it by industry, to increase the requirements for standing doctrine, to make it harder for people to get into courts in the first place.

Robert Wiblin: I guess this allows them to say, “Oh, look at these very strict regulations that are on the books that we have to follow.” Or at least, there are some regulations, but then of course, they are not enforced at all. So they can basically do whatever they want.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right. A lot of US factory farming companies like to say that they are compliant with all US laws and regulations. There are virtually no US laws and regulations, and it’s not at all clear that they are compliant with them. But they’re correct in stating that no one is prosecuting them for violating them because of the total lack of enforcement of those laws.

Robert Wiblin: What about in the EU or the U.K. or possibly New Zealand? Are there more promising avenues for a legal advocacy there?

Lewis Bollard: I think there might be. I haven’t looked as deeply into legal opportunities in those countries. Certainly, in the U.K. and in the European Union there are stronger laws protecting farm animals. At the European Union level, there are a number of quite powerful directives. I don’t think that there is an ability for a citizen suit to enforce any of those laws but it does seem like there’s a more functional political system in which lobbying and working with regulators is more likely to have an impact. I know that there has also been attempts at litigation in Australia and New Zealand around animal welfare. I’m not sure how successful it’s been to date but it does seem that there are fewer barriers than there are in the United States.

Robert Wiblin: There’s also groups like the Non-Human Rights Project and I think groups that have advocated on behalf of killer whales in farms, or, I guess, the Great Ape Rights Project … I don’t know exactly what it’s called but they get a lot of attention I suppose though. I’ve seen them regularly on the front page of The New York Times, so they might be seen just as a legal approach to getting a lot of publicity and engaging in advocacy that people read about. What do you think about those?

Lewis Bollard: I think they’ve been very effective in getting publicity and I hope that that publicity has started to make people reflect more on the legal lines we draw around humans and keeping our animals. My concern is, firstly, that I think it is very hard for those groups to succeed in the current legal system. I think they would acknowledge that that the standing doctrines and just the lack of laws to be enforced mean that they are forced to really ask the judges to go out on a plain for them.

The other issue that I always think about is how likely is this to help farm animals down the line? To me, it’s quite conceivable that society will expand our moral circle, or our legal circle, to include chimpanzees, to include orcas, to include elephants and other cognitively sophisticated mammals, but will still feel completely capable of excluding chickens or fish, or other animals that don’t have the same claim to legal personhood based on cognitive ability or something similar.

Robert Wiblin: A related approach a number of people who we both know are working on is in a radical vegan advocacy, where you really get in people’s faces and you have a really strong message. Your goal is to shock people into a paradigm shift where they realise that cruelty towards animals or just in a speciesism is a really important issue. You get a dramatic shift in attitudes in society in the way that we’ve perhaps seen with feminism or with civil rights in the past. What do you think about those approaches?

Lewis Bollard: My general inclination is that it’s too early for society to be receptive to such radical advocacy. I think when you look at past social movements it normally came at a point where far more society was onboard. For instance, with the Civil Rights Movement you had a far larger portion of U.S. population actively supporting the movement. Then it was the use of more radical tactics to really get the salience on the issue and to get people riled up.

I do think that this is something that is very open for research. So I think that this would be a great thing for people to test for studies, whether confrontation is effective or not. The one thing I would say is that I think that confrontational tactics often become confrontational against other activists and it seems very likely to me that it’s counterproductive to spend some portion, or in many cases most, of and activist’s time fighting other activists, or convincing other activists that they’re wrong.

Robert Wiblin: Animal advocacy seems really quite distinctive in just how much infighting there is and how much you have groups set up almost seemingly for the purpose of attacking other groups within the same very niche cause. What’s going on there?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, it’s confusing. I think that it is natural given that it is a source of such strong feelings. I can understand, being so angry and upset myself when I found out about factory farming. I mean I think there’s a realisation when you find out about the scale and the degree of mistreatment of animals by humans. There’s a real desire to be angry about that and to be annoyed at the world. I think that oftentimes activists first express that anger or frustration toward general society. Then when they find that general society won’t listen they will direct it towards those who will listen, which is to say other activists or companies that are trying to do higher welfare policies.

I think that it makes sense, that given we have such strong emotions as activists on this issue. It makes sense that even relatively small tactical disagreements can quickly become moral disagreements, or become moral judgments on one another. So I think it’s natural and I do think that there are parallels in past movements. If you look at, for instance, the U.S. Anti Slavery Movement, there were similarly virulent disagreements within the movement. That said, I think it’s definitely counterproductive, and I’m hopeful … It does seem that the divisions within the movement are slowly dissipating over time and so I’m hopeful that that trend will continue.

Robert Wiblin: It seems to me like you should try to implement a really strong norm within that group of just, basically, not aggressively criticising other activists at all just because the history has been that it’s been so destructive. People are just fairly rarely persuaded by using those means, it seems to me.

Lewis Bollard: Yes, I completely agree with you. I think the challenge is that, as a funder, we certainly will only fund groups that don’t spend their time or funds attacking other groups, but that that leaves us in a position with really no leverage over those activists and groups who are doing that.

Robert Wiblin: Well, I guess you might hope that, as a result, they would shrink as a fraction of the movement.

Lewis Bollard: I think that’s happening. I think that that is one of the things that is already happening. I certainly think I’ve been happy to see that a number of funders feel the same way that they will only fund groups that don’t spend time attacking other groups. I think that there is still the potential for a relatively small number of people in a small portion of the movement to do a lot of harm to other groups, but I completely agree that whatever we can, to establish a norm that does not include attacking other groups that includes, wherever possible, cooperating with them and supporting them. That would be very positive.

Robert Wiblin: I guess we wouldn’t want to preclude the option of explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing and saying I think other people should, in some case, stop using interventions that don’t work and switch over to these other approaches in a way that’s polite and evidence-based. Because, of course, that’s the kind of thing that you and I would be doing and trying to accomplish.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s right and I think that’s absolutely the case. I think, for instance, when we made our original cage-free grants Direct Action Everywhere, published a post criticising them, and I’m glad they did. I think that that is exactly the kind of respectful disagreement and debate you want to see. We do need to have that kind of lively debate within the movement. We do need to have some settled positions criticised, conventional wisdom questioned. So I think it’s absolutely great to have that kind of debate and I think that the object should be seeing the norm in such a way that that kind of debate is possible, but actively sabotaging other groups’ campaigns and work is not.

Robert Wiblin: Can you tell us more about your work of funding groups overseas? I see you’ve funded China, and what were the other countries again?

Lewis Bollard: We funded now in China, in India, in Brazil, in a number of European countries, the U.K. and Germany, and we have indirectly funded advocacy across a number of other countries via regranting.

Robert Wiblin: How do you go about finding these groups? I imagine you only speak English, or you can speak English and perhaps Spanish.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, unfortunately, I only speak English. The most useful thing I have found has been networking through people who I already know. So talked to U.S. based activists and asking their recommendations for people in other countries, or talking with people I already know in other countries and asking their recommendations for activists. But even just online research has turned out to be surprisingly useful. For instance, with our China grants we ended up supporting 10 groups. I’d say of those groups I was already connected with about three of them and through those connections was put in touch with another three. But the remaining four were all just things that I found online by exhaustively searching for reports and for everything I could find on the work being done in China and just reaching out to those groups cold.

So that’s often the way. In the case of our grants in India, I actually traveled to India and met with about 25 different activists representing different groups, and certainly found that to be a very useful tool. So I think it’s quite likely we’re hopefully going to recommend a set of grants in Europe. For that set of grants, I also recently went over to Europe and met with a number of groups. I think that is an increasingly useful tools to actually meet with groups, but where that’s not possible, certainly, I’m always trying to talk over Skype, have phone conversation-

Lewis Bollard: Where that’s not possible, so I’m always trying to talk over Skype, have phone conversations and as much as possible vetting one group via multiple different independent sources. So really asking everyone about everyone else, to give a kind of as independent sense as possible for what’s going on.

Robert Wiblin: Have you had to reduce your standards for quality of evidence in order to find granting opportunities overseas?

Lewis Bollard: Yes, definitely. I would say for instance, that in China our standard for quality of evidence is significantly lower than it is in the United States.

Robert Wiblin: But it’s compensated for by the fact that the problem is so neglected over there that perhaps even a worse project, or a more risky project, is still worth going for.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that’s the thinking and I think it could fall into either bucket, right? It could be that projects are worse and I’m certainly open to us supporting worse projects in a country where I think it’s really important to get things going. But I think it’s also as you say, just riskier, because in a lot of these cases it’s projects without track records. So we’re talking about a project where we can’t find clear evidence on what it’s done in the past, whether it’s been effective. But we know that it’s operating in an important area. We know that it’s neglected, and that can really start to make the case.

Robert Wiblin: What’s the nature of animal advocacy in India? Is it often religiously motivated?

Lewis Bollard: So there’s certainly a religious sub-current. I was quite happy in traveling to India, to see that there is a very clear distinction between the animal advocacy movement and the Hindu fundamentalist movement. And so a lot of the headlines you’ll see about cow protection laws and preventing the slaughter of cows, most Indian animal advocates want nothing to do with that. They understand, first of all, that it’s really just a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry. But that secondly, it’s probably bad for animal welfare, I mean what happens when these slaughter bans get passed at the same time as the Indian dairy industry is rapidly growing, is huge numbers of surplus cows that can’t be legally slaughtered, so they’re either smuggled long distances to be slaughtered or they’re dumped in these sanctuaries where they will slowly die or won’t receive medical treatment. So, I think that there is a real understanding amongst Indian animal advocates of that.

It’s certainly true that the Hindu nationalists right now have a lot more political power than the animal advocates do. But, there is also a really strong cultural and historical current of animal protection in India. So, it goes back to the promotion of vegetarianism by Ashoka and others early on in Indian history.

Robert Wiblin: Does Jainism as well?-

Lewis Bollard: Jainism as well, certainly. Jainism has a very strong current on this. Really, all of India’s religions do. That something, which is remarkable to me, is that India’s constitution includes animal welfare protections. And right after independence India passed a very strong animal cruelty law. Now there is still major problems with enforcement of that law. But, the fact that it has on the books laws that are far stronger than what the U.S. has, and really stronger even than many European countries suggest to me that there’s a lot of potential there, once those laws are enforced to actually see really high standards in India.

Robert Wiblin: Is it fair to say that India morally is just ahead of Europe and the U.S. in this respect, like culturally, are those values widespread?

Lewis Bollard: You know I can’t really speak to how widespread those values are. I haven’t seen any good public opinions surveys on the issue and so I think certainly within the Indian elite, these values seem a lot stronger than they seem amongst the elites in other countries. I think the other thing is there’s far less of a countervailing lobby there just doesn’t seem to be the same kind of organised lobby in favor of factory farming or other abuses of animals so that seems pretty important. I do certainly see really, really promising trends in terms of even amongst the Indian population there seems to be some broad degree of concern about animal welfare.

Robert Wiblin: What about countries that are majority Buddhist? I mean, Buddhism, I’m not an expert on this, but my understanding is it regards vegetarianism as a noble thing to do, though in most countries it’s not regarded as obligatory, but in some strains of Buddhism, particularly in China it is generally regarded as obligatory or something that most Buddhists would be doing, but varies country to country. Does that provide potentially a foundation for spreading humane values much more broadly?

Lewis Bollard: I think it might, this is certainly something we’ve been looking into about, I mean it’s certainly the case that the majority of Japanese are Buddhist, large portion of the Chinese population are Buddhist, and as you say this is a religion whose precepts involve doing no active harm to other sentient beings so I think there is a strong ideal of non-harm in that religion. And what you’ll often see is even within subsets of the religion or within regions where not everyone is vegetarian, the monks or the nuns normally still are vegetarian and so there’s definitely a sense that this is what you should strive toward.

I think it’s also a very tough thing to get involved with religious advocacy and often a very sensitive thing, so I mean for instance in China, we don’t want to be in the business of being seen as sort of religious advocates saying it’s even more sensitive than being seen as civil advocates. But, my hope is that there are things we can do to bolster those voices already within the Buddhist movement, within the Buddhist religion, that are promoting vegetarianism or that are promoting a stronger degree of respect for other sentient beings to really encourage their voices and to give them the resources to elevate their voices too.

Robert Wiblin: It occurs to me that that could potentially even be a cost effective thing to do even setting aside animals, that Buddhism seems to have values I think that are closer to mine than most religions, and inasmuch as there’s a huge population there that could be motivated to think in a more effective altruist way and might be quite receptive cause it’s quite compatible with some of the underlying ideas of the religion, maybe there’s just some good opportunities there?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question. I would certainly defer more to experts on the theology and on the-

Robert Wiblin: I probably should as well. (laughter) I’ve read the Wikipedia page to be fair.

Lewis Bollard: I do think there is an aspect of a lot of religions have some really good things on paper. I mean not just about animals but about, for instance, charitable giving and the obligation to care for the poor and to care for the sick. And it’s really a question about whether people actually implement those in practice. But I do think that there’s a lot of room for effective altruism to connect more with religious communities in general and to really connect more too with those teachings that are very deep in some religions that really do try to promote altruism and doing good for others.

Robert Wiblin: I might be judging Buddhism by a different standard because it’s further away from what I’m used to. You judge things that are near to you by what they actually are and things that are far away by what they describe themselves as being.

Earlier you mentioned Brazil and South America, I’ve been to Central America and it doesn’t seem like animal advocacy is a huge thing there, people really love their meat. What’s the story with animal advocacy there?

Lewis Bollard: Latin America has been a real bright spot and a real pleasant surprise, some of this came out of initially just talking to Mercy for Animals, which had been placing online ads in multiple countries around the world. And just seeing what the click-through rate was like, how much they had to pay to get a click, and then what that click led to, how much time a person spent on the website, whether they requested a vegetarian starter guide and so on. And the metrics were just hugely better in Latin America than anywhere else, so for instance, compared to the U.S. they were getting click-through rates that were five, six times higher, they were getting people spending much more time on the website.

And we’ve really seen more of that as we’ve started to support more advocacy in these countries, particularly in Brazil and Mexico, just because they’re the largest countries in Latin America. We’ve seen a lot of receptiveness, a lot of people getting engaged in Facebook campaigns, companies often surprisingly receptive to going cage-free or making animal welfare reforms. And politicians now starting to really discuss this as an issue so I don’t know what the story is there behind that, but I think that part of it is that there really were a lot of activists and a lot of sympathy beneath the surface but there just previously hadn’t been the resources to mobilise that and so it started at a head start compared to other countries.

Robert Wiblin: It’s quite surprising because I think you’d face significant headwinds there, one, animal welfare seems to be a bigger deal in say northern Europe than southern Europe, and Latin America seems to have more of a, like Italian and kind of Spanish style culture and historical pedigree. And then you’ve got the Catholicism, which isn’t inconsistent, but also doesn’t seem to push animal welfare that hard. Plus like maybe a more macho culture than you’d think in like northern Europe. And yet, it’s more effective there than in the U.S. I suppose one thing is the ads might be cheaper per impression because the people aren’t as wealthy.

Lewis Bollard: Right. So the ads are cheaper but quite separately from that the click-through rates are better and the time spent and so on is better. I don’t want to overstate how rosy the picture is, there certainly still widespread factory farming, it is the case too that some companies have proven very resistant to change and some of them, because there aren’t the kind of free speech protections that there are in the U.S. some of them have sued activists for campaigning and tried to really squelch their campaigning.

Robert Wiblin: Well that’s happened in the U.S. as well.

Lewis Bollard: That has happened in the U.S. as well, yeah. I think it’s a mixed picture in Latin America, I guess, to me it’s mainly optimistic relative to my base-line assumption. Less optimistic just kind of objectively.

Robert Wiblin: It’s really good that it was tried out cause I guess you have these-

Lewis Bollard: Objectively.

Robert Wiblin: It is really good that it was tried out because you have these stereotypes about countries that are based on not all that much experience just like the people’s very broad impressions and sounds don’t always match the actual experience.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah I think that is a great point, I mean I think that particularly when it comes to pretty new issue, like animal welfare, that isn’t very well correlated with, for instance, political left and right or other kind of standard things we know more about. It makes a lot of sense to this test it, to see, to test the message, to test in different countries, in different places and see what works. I think we’re constantly kind of surprised by what that is.

Robert Wiblin: One possibility is that people in the US are already familiar with the fact that people care about animal welfare and advocate vegetarianism. They’ve least heard of it even if they haven’t heard all the details. So possibly they’re just sick of it and they know what the ad is going to be about they don’t want to read it again. But in South America it just might be a more noble thing so people are curious to find out.

Lewis Bollard: That’s definitely one plausible explanation and I think another set of results consistent with that set I heard recently was that of a group in Australia was testing online ads with different demographics. Traditionally we thought of young people as being the most receptive demographic but what they found was that old people clicked on their ads far more often, spend far more time on their website, and, based on a very kind of lose subjective interpretation of comments, left far more favorable comments. And again that may just have a lot more to do with the fact that they hadn’t [01:01:27] been exposed this message previously. So you both have a set of low hanging fruit that hasn’t already been grabbed but you also have people who really just have more of an interest factor, there’s more for a new, unique factor here.

Robert Wiblin: Maybe they’re just less easily distracted than the kids, y’know interrupting their reading about animal welfare to check Snapchat I bet.

Lewis Bollard: That, too. That, too.

Robert Wiblin: Alright, as as we continue on march through each of the different intervention areas, let’s talk a bunch about corporate campaigns. Can you describe in detail the approach that these campaigns are taking or try to influence corporate behavior?

Lewis Bollard: Sure, so the basic premise of this campaigns is that the manner in which farm animals are treated is really oblivious to the customers of grocery stores or fast food chains or other companies that are using these animal products. In those cases when consumers find out how those animals are treated, they are not very happy about it. It’s not consistent with their expectations and their faith in the company. So, what these campaigns do is really seek to capitalise on that dissonance. They seek to make customers of companies aware how the animals in the chain are treated. And to thus really create a PR incentive or brand incentive for the companies to do something about it, to deal with that dissonance, to avoid the consumer backlash. Then to really avoid the significant negative publicity from just simply exposure of how they’re treating the animals in their supply chain.

Robert Wiblin: Mm-hmm, and so they describe the conditions of animals to the general public and try to get it in the media and then say “Stop doing this and we’ll stop complaining if you change what you stock or how you produce eggs”?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so I mean a lot of it is more fine in particular leverage points. So it’s for instance finding, first making sure that the company’s senior management and their investors are aware of how the animals are being treated. And oftentimes that is enough. They aren’t even aware and when they see it they feel terrible about it or they recognise a major brand liability waiting to happen. If that fails, then yes, launching campaigns certainly generating media publicity, generating a lot of online feedback and so making sure that consumers are really communicating with this company how annoyed they are about this. Communicating through Facebook, through Twitter, through phone calls to the company and then doing things like targeted protests to really make the company’s consumers aware, in particular a lot of calls to make it a hassle for the company and to make them really deal and interact with the issue.

Robert Wiblin: Most of these campaigns have been about cage versus barn-laid or free-range eggs, right?

Lewis Bollard: Yes, so first round of campaigns which are just now winding up in the US have focused on eliminating use of battery cages for layer hens. That’s now the primary focus of campaigns in Latin America and in Southern Europe. In the US and in Northern Europe where those campaigns have largely been won in the sense of securing pledges from across the industry, activists have now moved on to the treatment of broiler chickens, the meat chickens, which are raised separately from layer hens and are particularly focused on reforming the genetics, the amount of space they have, so the crowding, and slaughter methods and other living conditions.

Robert Wiblin: So what do you mean, changing the genetics?

Lewis Bollard: So one of the biggest problems that modern broiler chickens face is the genetics that they’re born with. Those genetics have been optimised for two things only: for as rapid growth as possible and for lower feed conversion ratio as possible. In the process, animal welfare has been really neglected. What we have now is birds that grow five, six times faster than they did in 1950, but the bird’s systems are not designed to keep up with that. So their legs aren’t five to six times stronger, their lungs and heart aren’t six times bigger. So what you end up with is a lot of birds lame later in the growing period, you end up with major respiratory problems or heart problems. So a lot of sources of chronic suffering that are created simply by the genetics these birds are born with.

Robert Wiblin: It sounds perverse but could that even have been positive for animal welfare? Their lives are worse but you need fewer of them to produce the same amount of meat. On the other hand, of course, the meat becomes cheaper, then, and so people consume more of it. I guess that it’s not obvious that it’s obvious overall

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so this is certainly a debate that’s been had around the current requests for higher welfare genetics which may mean slower genetics. To me I think the most important thing is that when we’re talking about higher welfare genetics, the focus is on those welfare outcomes. So I think if you look at the current outcomes for broiler chickens, it seems very likely that they live net negative lives as opposed to in 1950 where I think it’s totally conceivable that they had net positive lives. If you’re talking about net-positive versus net-negative then extending a net-positive life isn’t such a bad thing whereas extending a net negative life is a very bad thing.

But I think when we look at these welfare outcomes whether it’s lameness, whether its respiratory problems, it’s not the case that we need to reverse all the genetic changes made since 1950. So we don’t need to make birds grow five to six times slower. Just reducing the growth rate by something like 25 percent could make a major difference and the biggest reason for that is not the actual growth rate itself but it’s that at every stage in breeding chicken the genetics companies only have so much genetic variation to play with. What they’ve been doing with these high performing bird ranges is selecting solely based on these two characteristics of growth and feed-conversion. When you free up some that genetic potential and then able to select based on animal welfare factors, you end up with a significantly higher welfare bird without doing a lot to sacrifice that growth rate.

Robert Wiblin: Could we take that even further and ultimately make animals that have just amazing lives that are just constantly ecstatic like they’re on heroin or some other drug that makes people feel very good all the time whenever they are in the farm and they say, “Well, the problem has basically been solved because the animals are living great lives”?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting ethical question for people about whether that would, in people’s minds, solve the problem. I think from a pure utilitarian perspective it would. A lot of people would fine that kind of perverse having, for instance, particularly I think if you’re talking about animals that might psychologically feel good even in terrible conditions. I think the reason why it’s probably going to remain a thought experiment, though, is that it ultimately relies on the chicken genetics companies and the chicken producers to be on board. And not only have they shown very low interest in improving chicken welfare and improving chicken well-being, it’s a fight just to get them to agree on the most basic reforms, but they also seem far more concerned about being able to say to their consumer that a chicken isn’t technically genetically modified which sort of changes you’re [01:08:45] envisaging would probably involves some sort of genetic modification. So it’s funny given that they’ve done so much to genetically manipulate these birds and to do far more than GMO technologies could have done in one swoop.

Robert Wiblin: Quite ghastly things.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, exactly. But they still maintain this real – they want the consumer still to feel the kind of naturalistic fallacy about these birds.

Robert Wiblin: I was thinking you could just use the same breeding techniques to select the birds that seem to be happiest. I guess you would have a problem there between seeming happy and being happy. You could end up breaking that link.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think that certainly when you’re talking about higher welfare outcomes, one of them is to look at the perceived subjective well-being of birds. It’s quite hard to measure. Birds don’t smile in the same way as we do and we don’t have the same kind of insights into their minds and when they’re happy or not. But I think the bigger issue here is that for birds to truly be happy in the kind of environment they’re being kept in would require far more than you can naturally select for.

Robert Wiblin: Or it would take thousands of generations, or a huge amount of evolution for that to work.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, and it might still not be possible. There are some basic evolutionary reason why you would find really harsh unforgiving environment make you unhappy. There are reasons why there should be aversive [01:10:03] for an animal evolutionarily.

Robert Wiblin: Although … Well, I’m not so sure about that. I studied genetics, and I’m just thinking, in fact, these environments aren’t bad for them in the modern world, in a sense, because they get food and they reproduce. In a way, there’s a disconnect between what they’ve been evolved to want in the past and in fact what actually perpetuates their genes today. So it would certainly require a radical reprogramming of what kinds of environments chickens enjoy, but there’s other species that like cramped, damp conditions. I don’t know, I mean insects obviously, but like burrowing animals.

Lewis Bollard: Right. Yeah, so I mean I think you’re certainly right that the biggest problem here is the imbalance between these animals needs as they were naturally and have been developed through breeding, and the environments they’re in. And despite the best efforts of farmers to breed the original animal out of them, they have not gotten to a point where birds, for instance, don’t feel the desire to extend their wings or to perch or to dust-bathe, or do other things that are severely constrained in these environments.

I’ll defer to you on whether you could ever breed a bird like that, but I do think that the simpler solution is likely to be to just improve the conditions sufficiently, that the bird is able to exhibit those kind of important behaviors.

Robert Wiblin: Another reason that this approach might be redundant is that I expect it would be more difficult and take longer than producing meat, cultured meat or other meat substitutes that don’t require animals.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. I mean, I think when people start to talk about completely re-engineering the minds of chickens so that they’re essentially brain-dead and don’t realise the environment they’re in, it just seems like a better option to only grow the meat part of the bird and not grow the mind at all.

Robert Wiblin: I expect that is probably coming in the next 30 to 50 years, possibly even sooner than that, and it’s clear that there’s a commercial path to doing that in a way that probably just doesn’t exist without these radical changes in bird genetics.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, people always talk about hurdles to consumer acceptance of grown meat or clean meat, but obviously those hurdles would be far greater for brain-dead meat or otherwise significantly altered chickens, so I do think that as you say, it’s most likely we’ll see this through people just growing the meat cells themselves, and that also seems more efficient than growing the entire bird.

Robert Wiblin: It’s strange that that would have hurdles to consumer acceptance, with birds so large that their legs break and then they starve and rot on the floor of the farm not so much.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, it’s a real irony. It really is kind of crazy how so many of the, when there are surveys done, questions about “Would people eat grown meat,” and people say they wouldn’t because it’s not natural, when you look at the current system, if natural is even a good thing that you care about, there is just no way you would assign natural as the descriptor of the current system. I think that has a lot to do with willful ignorance of current conditions and my hope is certainly that as the animal movement does a better job of raising awareness of actual conditions with people, that will make them more receptive to alternatives like grown meat, which they’ll come to see are really both cleaner in terms of how they’re produced but also just obviously so much better for animals.

Robert Wiblin: We just had a lengthy diversion into genetics, but we were talking about corporate campaigns and their approach. I wanted to discuss for a minute the economics of the cage-free campaigns. So they’ve put pressure on these companies and they inform them, some moral persuasion, and some just profit-based persuasion, and many of them have folded quite quickly. Is that because it’s not that much more expensive to get rid of the cages? Or is it that consumers kind of wanted it anyway? Or perhaps if everyone’s doing it at once, you don’t get much of a commercial disadvantage?

Lewis Bollard: I think it’s a variety of those factors, but I actually think more than that, that these campaigns have just been very effectively run. I mean, I think the most important factor behind these campaigns is that they have never given up a campaign until they’ve won.

So if you think about the proposition as a company when one of these campaigning groups comes to you and says, “Hey, you’re doing this cruel practice. We’re planning to campaign against you.” As that company, you face a choice. If you know that they have never backed out of a campaign; they have ultimately won every campaign even if it’s taken them a year or longer, you face a choice of either we can do this right now and incur whatever cost there is down the line and possibly get a mild kind of positive halo for doing a good thing, or we can endure a brutal campaign where our brand gets trashed for weeks, months, or even a year, and then we can end up doing the same thing with the same costs associated to it. So when you see it in that way, it becomes pretty rational to make that decision.

And I think that one way they’ve been able to really build up their reputation has been going through industry subsector at a time. So starting out with food service companies, and really creating a place where after Aramark and Compass Group had made these commitments, for Sodexo, they were the only other major food service company that hadn’t, and they’d risked becoming the pariah within their industry. And similarly doing that within fast food, food fat manufacturers, grocers. So I think definitely building up the kind of momentum within each industry has been really important and there is a kind of herd mentality that occurs, but I also think there’s a basic kind of rational calculus for companies.

Robert Wiblin: Are the campaigners gonna make sure that they never drop a campaign, that they’re going to just … If they start something, they’re gonna finish it?

Lewis Bollard: That’s the plan and so far, they’ve held true to that. I mean, there are campaigns that have been going on for quite a while. Some that have been going on for more than six months. But almost invariably, other than the current few campaigns that are going on, they have ultimately won. And I think that normally over time, they either kind of wear down a company, or they experiment and ultimately find the pressure points that really get to the company and make them want to compromise. So yeah, that really has been their track record to date.

Robert Wiblin: What is the kind of first email or letter that they send to the company? Is it very friendly and informative? Is it all smiles and cheer?

Lewis Bollard: Some I’m not involved in the tactics. But my understanding is that yes, the initial communications are always as friendly and polite as possible. So there really is an effort to appeal to the better angels of the executives’ nature. And sometimes it works. I mean really, sometimes it is the case that what happens here is that executives of the companies simply didn’t realise, and it sounds crazy, but you think, if you’re running a large food manufacturing company and just a few of your products have eggs in them, It’s totally possible that you just don’t know how those eggs are produced. And so it’s sometimes the case that when the executives find out how they’re produced, they’re shocked and they want nothing to do with it. I think it’s also sometimes the case that executives even just receiving their polite emails see the potential brand damage for when consumers will do this, and so that’s sufficient. So yes, it starts out with a pretty polite, nice approach.

Robert Wiblin: And they kind of go in order from companies that seem either most culturally receptive or their brand is most likely to be damaged, because they have a brand that says, “We’re a nice, friendly, environmentally positive company.” Or do they go to companies where it’s not costly for them because the eggs, say, are only a small fraction of the product cost? What’s the calculus?

Lewis Bollard: So certainly, they’re looking for the low-hanging fruit first but ultimately, they know they need to get through the entire food industry. So you ultimately need to get pledges from even the toughest companies at some point. So, generally, I think that there’s been a tendency with each of these corporate campaigns first to focus on the food service sector. And the reason for that is that it’s a highly competitive sector where accounts, where the companies are constantly competing for accounts.

Robert Wiblin: What do you mean food service?

Lewis Bollard: So food service, Compass Group, Aramark, Sodexo, these are the companies that serve all the food served at universities, in hospitals, in office cafeterias, and each of those universities or office cafeterias is viewed as an account. So what happens is, when a campaign starts, and when the Humane League for instance, they would have mobilised students at campuses across the country. They’re not just protesting against Aramark. They’re petitioning their university to drop Aramark as their food service provider because of its mistreatment of animals and given this is a high-margin, highly competitive business for companies like Aramark, they’re very sensitive to that, so they want to fulfill what those customers are demanding. They want to avoid that kind of negative publicity. So that’s one example of how they start.

Robert Wiblin: So, a lot of companies are switching from cage eggs to non-cage eggs, but what are the conditions once they get out of the cages?

Lewis Bollard: So they’re certainly far from perfect. Typically, what the difference looks like is this, is that in a cage operation, the average bird in the United States is in a cage with between four and six other birds. In that cage, they have about 67 square inches. So that’s about the size of an iPad, and that’s where they spend their whole life and there’s really no behavioral enrichments, which is to say that there’s no way for them to express their need to perch, to nest, to dust-bathe, to do other things that preference studies and aversion studies suggest are very important to hens. In a cage-free environment, there are similar in a total numbers of hens as there would be in a facility, so we’re still talking about hundreds of thousands of hens in a single farm. Perhaps 50,000 in one barn. But within that environment, they’re free to roam around, so it’s typically entirely indoors and there is both horizontal and vertical space. On the horizontal space, the minimum required by the industry standards are 144 square inches, so more than what’s required for a bird in a cage, more important obviously, given they can move around, they can functionally make use of far more space. I think, critically about these cage free environments, industry standards require that there be access to perching space, to dust bathing, and to nesting boxes, and again, we know these are really important things for hens.

So, clearly there are still things lacking from the set up. They don’t have access to the outdoors. These are still high density operations. There are still real management concerns. That mortality, for instance can be very variable depending on the management of the operation. They are harder to manage than battery cage operations are. So, there remain major animal welfare concerns but I also feel pretty confident that it’s a significant improvement.

Robert Wiblin: What about free range chickens? Are they better off again?

Lewis Bollard: I think in most ways they are. So I think that, I know less about those because I haven’t read up as much on the stays as free range. Free range still remains a tiny fraction of the US market, and is simply not financially viable for these companies right now.

Robert Wiblin: That’s different than in the UK and Australia right?

Lewis Bollard: That’s right.

Robert Wiblin: In Australia that seemed like most of the eggs are always free range.

Lewis Bollard: That’s right, so in the UK and Australia it’s now a significant portion. I don’t know if it’s a majority yet, but it’s certainly a significant portion of egg sales. I think part of that is lower total scale. I think also that certainly British climates are better suited to free range operations. One of the problems that US free range operations have is the birds often end up indoors for half the year anyway. The biggest problem in free range operations is predation and keeping predation under control. I think we’re free range operation managed to do that. They can be very high welfare.

Robert Wiblin: Some even positive perhaps.

Lewis Bollard: I think that’s quite likely. I mean I think that there are still other problems associated with the egg industry. Say, for instance, even free range operations rely on chicks from commercial hatcheries where the male chicks are normally ground up alive because there’s no need for them. So there are still certainly other problems with the industry. But I think if you will look just at the experience of a free range hen in a place where predation is being controlled. I think they probably are getting to express most if not all of the things that a hen really cares about and wants to express.

Robert Wiblin: Do they still cut off the half of their beaks to prevent them from pecking?

Lewis Bollard: This, it varies. But in most free range operations, my understanding is they don’t. So debeaking is done in cage operations, it’s done in most cage free operations. In an environment with low enough density and with enough other distractions, so I think, in particular this is something with free range hens where they have access to soil, and they can peck at soil, that creates enough of other distractions that they’re not going to peck at other hens.

Robert Wiblin: So I’ve got three broad categories: cage eggs, I guess, larger cage eggs, and then free range. Do you have a sense of the relative cost of the eggs from each of these different modes of production?

Lewis Bollard: So, right now, US egg prices are at historic lows due to a variety of factors. My understanding is that in the last month, and this is in August, the average cage egg price for a dozen has been hovering around $1.30 or so nationally.

Robert Wiblin: That’s incredibly low.

Lewis Bollard: Incredibly low, yeah. For a cage free dozen we’re looking more at like $2.20 or so for a dozen and for free range, I think for a lot of free range labels you’re looking more at like $4.00 or $5.00.

Robert Wiblin: Okay.

Lewis Bollard: So …

Robert Wiblin: So, it’s several multiples …

Lewis Bollard: Several multiples, I think in the case of … often times, both cage free and free range is used as a price differentiation tool as well, so …

Robert Wiblin: … the part where there’s picking up consumers that are willing to pay more even if it doesn’t cost that much.

Lewis Bollard: Exactly, exactly. I think that, my hope is, that will change over time, as this becomes the new standard. So as it moves away from being the sole specialty product, it makes sense for companies to not price it in that way.

Robert Wiblin: I recall in Australia that the difference in cage eggs and free range eggs, was maybe that they were double, maybe double and a half, from memory. So maybe a guess that might cost in production, that’s maybe where we’re ballparking at.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, that sounds right. I think certainly some of the studies coming out of Europe, in terms of cage free production, suggest costs about 25% higher than cage production. They don’t suggest costs that are twice the price.

Robert Wiblin: And, so, because the cost of production isn’t that much greater, has that made this a more promising campaign to go with first because just companies are more willing to do it, and maybe also eggs aren’t as expensive as meat in the first place, so it’s just less of an overall increase in cost?

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, I think those are all things that have made this more tractable. I think the fact too, that for a lot of companies eggs are not integral to their menu. So even, for a lot of fast food companies, eggs are something that they are, maybe have a couple of breakfast dishes including, but otherwise aren’t using. So I think that, all those things together, certainly made this a more tractable first goal and will make subsequent campaigns harder.

Robert Wiblin: Have you ever met someone in the agricultural industry or animal agricultural industry, who you’ve explained the conditions animals are in and why this is immoral and have just been overcome with shame and decided to leave or change their ways?

Lewis Bollard: (nervous laugh) … um …

Robert Wiblin: Have you ever heard of a story like this? …

Lewis Bollard: Well …

Robert Wiblin: … thinks you know, maybe I’m one of the baddies, and you know, I’m going to hell, or whatever their non-religious equivalent would be ..

Lewis Bollard: Sure, sure, so I did have a friend I went to university … I went to University at Auckland for six months before I came over to the United States for university. And I had a friend from a dairy farming family, and both of his, two of his brothers went into dairy farming and I ultimately persuaded him to go vegan and he, has since then, been vegan and been very concerned about factory farming. And when I say I did, it was mainly that we debated and liked on to read animal liberation and that had the effect.

You know, what I found a lot more often with people in industry, is either that they are understandably very defensive because they have a lot at stake in the current system, or that they’re just not particularly happy about aspects of the system. That they feel like they have already made some costs and they’re already sort of bored into it. That they either don’t have the power to change it, or that someone else will do it if they don’t. So I think this is a kind of common refrain is that it’s just, it’s the market dictating this, they don’t have a ton of autonomy about setting these conditions or changing how animals are treated.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I did know some people at university who, especially came from dairy farming, or have free ranging livestock. And I’ve got to say, in those cases it is somewhat harder to persuade people of the fact that conditions for dairy cows are probably among the least that and also free ranging livestock that they say, based on my experience, they seem to have positive lives. And it’s understandable that they’re not ignorant about what’s going on. But in more thinking, people who raise broiler chickens or caged chickens, it does require an astonishing lack of empathy, I think, to just not think, that is a moral issue.

Lewis Bollard: Yeah, think that’s right. But I think that there’s also an aspect of focusing on particular rationalisations. So I have a really interesting example, recently of, I was talking with a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Agriculture, which is sort of a blue ribbon panel put out a number of years ago, and he’s a quite senior professor at Johns Hopkins. He said the most the shocking experience for him as a scientist, was visiting a major pig factory farm at the University of Iowa, that was part of the … I think maybe it was Iowa State, rather, it was part of the university, it was kind of an agricultural demonstration facility, and they were using gestation crates. He walked in and he asked …

Robert Wiblin: Do you want to just describe gestation crates for us by chance?

Lewis Bollard: Sure, gestation crates are essentially coffin sized crates that are used for pigs during their pregnancy. Pigs typically spend their sixteen week pregnancy in gestation crate before being moved to a farrowing crate for about four weeks, while they give birth to their litter. Then they’re re inseminated and moved back into a gestation crate. So they spend a majority of their three to four year lifespan in these crates where they are completely immobilised. They can’t turn around, they can just lie down but that’s about it.

Robert Wiblin: Really, it’s just astonishingly evil.

Lewis Bollard: It really is, I think that it’s probably one of the most obviously evil practices used in factory farming. It just has so little justification and is so obviously cruel to these smart and complex creatures. You know, in this particular case this scientist was telling me that he asked these students at Iowa State, who were studying animal science, or studying veterinary sciences. He asked them, what did they think about this?

They all said they thought it was great, and they pointed out that these pigs didn’t have to worry about climatic variation, didn’t have to worry for a shortage of food, didn’t have to worry about lack of water. They really focused on those few aspects of the system, that were providing for the pigs needs. He even said he asked one of the scientists there, he said, “How do you justify this not providing for these pigs needs?”

And she said, “Well, we are providing for the pigs needs, they can drink as much as they want, and they can eat as much as they want, and they can go to the bathroom whenever they want.”

Robert Wiblin: I would be interested to offer this personal lifestyle that is nourishing to them, but at the same time typically extended …

Lewis Bollard: Indeed.

Robert Wiblin: Well, that leads us fairly naturally to the next approach that I’d like to discuss, which is undercover investigations of conditions in farms. I guess, in the more extreme case, rescues that sometimes take place after there’s undercover investigations. Do you want to describe what those approaches involve?

Lewis Bollard: Sure. So, for several decades now, activists have gone undercover on factory farms to expose the conditions. And this is really a necessity, because these farms deliberately shut themselves off from the world and try to avoid consumers seeing how animals are treated. And so the most common method for these investigations involves investigators securing a job at a facility, and then once they’re on the job, using secret cameras to simply film what’s going on. And they then typically will turn that film over to the authorities, and at the same time publish it, so that the public can become aware.

And the one recent major threat to these undercover investigations has been a set of ag-gag laws passed in various states, which sought to criminalise undercover investigations to make is basically a felony to engage in these kind of employment-based undercover investigations. And a promising development on that front, about five or six states passed these ag-gag laws in recent years. Most recently, though, two different federal courts have struck down ag-gag laws in Utah and in Idaho under the First Amendment.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. My understanding of First Amendment is that you might still be prosecuted for stealing the information, because it might be a breach of contract, a breach of perhaps your labour agreement as an employee. But that having gotten the video, you can’t stop anyone from publishing it, because that would be a violation of their freedom of expression. Do I understand that correctly?

Lewis Bollard: So these rulings have gone a little beyond this, and certainly I think it’s very clearly established under the First Amendment that you have a right to publish anything. So if you already have the video, you absolutely have the right to publish that. I think the area that was a little murkier until these recent rulings was the gathering of that information with the explicit purpose of publishing it, and in both of these cases, the court’s found that that was a First Amendment protected activity, that essentially that gathering of information was part of that same act of speech, and that same act of publicising conditions, and in particular these laws were so obviously targeted, it’s oppressing speech. They were so obviously targeted at stopping the publication of these videos, and that the