Should the RSPCA campaign for veganism and abandon Freedom Food?

This was put to me as a serious question and I think it deserves a serious answer (as always, please remember that these are my personal views and no-one else is responsible).

Firstly, I believe there's a substantial moral issue about the desirability of trying to bring about a future in which no animals would live in association with humans. This would mean substantial disruption even for some wild species which have adapted to live in a landscape which has been modified by human activities (such as keeping grazing animals). Some domestic animals would become extinct; in some cases this might be better for them than continuing to be kept inhumanely but this wouldn't always be the case. Some would possibly survive as feral populations, bringing further questions about the justifiability or otherwise of human control of their numbers. Unless we reintroduced large carnivores, it's likely that populations of some wild animals such as deer would still need to be limited by human action. Members of some species would have significantly more uncomfortable lives if they had to live in a feral state.

Secondly, there's the practical question of whether an RSPCA campaign in favour of veganism might overall do more harm than good. My answer to this is that it might do good provided it remained one element of a range of activities that were generally acceptable to the broad mass of the animal-loving public. If anyone is doubtful about the possibility of doing harm, they should look at the reaction to Lord Stern's advocacy of vegetarianism as a means of reducing climate change.

On the whole ordinary animal lovers are quite sympathetic to other people who don't eat meat because they care about animals and they would probably be happy, or at least unconcerned by, a campaign to increase the number of vegans. In any case, reducing the total consumption of meat is almost certainly the only realistic way to make high-welfare systems viable; otherwise the pressure to for intensive farming will be irresistible.

Once campaigns get more radical than that, suspicion begins that the campaigners don't really care about animals but are "political". At worst, a substantial campaign in favour of veganism might be used to justify claims that RSPCA investigations of cruelty to animals are part of a plot to destroy animal farming.

There has already been a petition on the number ten website asking for a government enquiry into the policies of the RSPCA apparently with the intention of removing an alleged bias in favour of animal rights. In fact the government petitions site demonstrates exactly how oddly the RSPCA is viewed (by both friends and enemies) as no other charity attracts remotely similar numbers of demands for the government to do something about it. Topics include one asking the Prime Minister to tell the RSPCA to abandon the Freedom Food scheme (rejected on the grounds that this was nothing to do with the government.)

Thirdly, of course, there are legal limitations on the way the RSPCA can campaign. With the introduction of a more rigorous public benefit test for charities it is likely that more campaigns may be challenged in the future, particularly if they appear to have political aspects.

The main objections made to the Freedom Food initiative appear to be:

• That it may make agriculture more acceptable to people who otherwise might demand that animal farming is ended altogether.
• That it operates on the assumption that farmers basically want to do the right thing and need technical advice about the best ways to improve welfare instead of assuming that people will be cruel to animals unless they are carefully watched.
• That it does no good because the only people willing to spend more on high-welfare products are those who would become vegans if they were only pushed hard enough.
• That the RSPCA could stop all use of animals if it wanted to.
• The objector in fact dislikes something else that the RSPCA does (e.g. campaigning for a ban on hare-coursing) and Freedom Food is just a convenient weapon.

But if it is assumed that most people can't be trusted to treat animals humanely it becomes difficult to explain how closing Freedom Food could be expected to produce a net increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans. In contrast, there is at least some evidence that people who are not prepared to become vegetarians are willing to pay more for higher welfare.

Freedom Food is by no means perfect, but anyone who believes it should be abolished needs to prove it would be preferable for welfare certification schemes to be controlled entirely by commercial interests. My own view is that it is better to have an imperfect scheme which is continually under pressure to improve.

Freedom Food Egg Saga continues

Alice Clark, senior farm animal scientist with the RSPCA, said she was working with the egg industry to gather the evidence necessary for the RSPCA to be able to support the change. She said the RSPCA had asked scientists at Bristol University to look into the issue, but Tom Vesey said, "We don’t have that much time. The suspicion is that the RSPCA is prevaricating. I get the feeling the RSPCA finds it best to say nothing. It says it is looking for evidence, but that is like proving a negative. This could drag on for 12 months or more and there could well be a shortage of eggs. The shortage could be filled with imports, many of them of questionable welfare standard. That would do nothing for animal welfare."

Alice Clark told the Ranger that she was just as keen as the egg industry to press on with an evaluation of the potential impact on welfare. "It’s not something that we have closed the door on; we are keen to look at it," said Alice. She said the evidence about the potential effect on animal welfare did not exist at the moment, but she had been holding meetings on possible trials.

She said the RSPCA was asking scientists at Bristol University to look into the issue as part of an existing study under way at the university. The study was set up to look into range enhancement. Scientists are one year into a three-year project. "Bristol are very keen to do that, so that should be under way."

Read it all...

Freedom Food

More on Freedom Food stocking density negotiations in Farmers Weekly Interactive.

Currently, Freedom Food egg flocks have a maximum external stocking density of 1000/ha. However, last month, Lion eggs announced that it was doubling its external stocking limit to 2000 birds/ha from 1 January 2009 and called on Freedom Food to follow suit. This is still below the 2500 birds/ha upper limit allowed under the EU marketing regulations.

It's worth reading it all to get a feel for the way Freedom Food standards are developed. 

Freedom Food

Gave a short talk on the work of the local branch to Anglia Ruskin Student Animal Welfare Society and the validity of the Freedom Food scheme came up in the Q&A session afterwards. Looking back on this, I don't think I got across the significance of FF as a source of advice on best practice for farmers who genuinely want to improve animal welfare on their farms. The students mainly seemed to view it as a mechanism for checking up on farmers and catching them out (and universally wanted to press for more frequent inspections).

The audit aspect of any welfare acreditation scheme obviously is important (otherwise no-one knows whether farmers are complying with the standards and deserve premium prices), but I don't think the average person stops to consider the importance of the science and knowledge that goes into the development of standards in the first instance.

One of the most valuable (and comparatively little-known) features of Freedom Food is the iterative process by which standards are devised; studied in actual commercial use and then revised on the basis of the findings from those studies.

There's some information about this on the Bristol University Veterinary science website, and also the EU Welfare Quality site. The Guardian has an article relating just to the Freedom food standards for broiler chickens which illustrates why annual inspections might not be sufficient to catch individual acts of cruelty or indiference by workers, but would verify the farm's systems and processes.

Further thoughts

I suppose what I'm getting at partly is that some things (e.g. employee behaviour) do need spot checks, but a lot of the things that go towards improved welfare on farms aren't really likely to be whisked away once the assessor's back is turned. Buildings, for example don't need more than annual checks; and some aspects of good practice can be assessed by requiring record-keeping. Records might be forged, but if health records include veterinary visits, vaccination etc. deviation from the required standards would require collusion from an assortment of professional people with a reputation to lose.

More thoughts

Freedom Food is the only welfare-specific assurance/quality label scheme in Europe, and it was started before the similar schemes in the US. 

Bristol University has some example assessor recording forms and flow charts which illustrate what is being checked; it's not simply a matter of an inspector turning up and looking for examples of cruelty.

I think there are important parallels with Nathan Winograd's thoughts on how attitudes to humans can make animal advocates less effective at helping animals. If we assume that most other people are nasty, uncaring individuals who can never be trusted we end up alienating potential allies, wasting resources and ultimately failing to achieve progress. If we assume that other people are basically trustworthy and want to avoid cruelty, we may sometimes be deceived, but overall we'll make better gains even if we sometimes have to accept that not everyone shares our views about what constitutes good animal welfare.

Back to the Future

The Federation of Woodland Egg Producers seem to be replicating something very similar to the conditions on the early 20th Century Chivers farms. 

• Planted with trees which cover at least 20% of the range
  
• The trees are a mixture of fast growing and slower native trees which are indigenous to the local area
  
• The trees are planted close to the house to encourage the hens outside to range
  
• All farms are audited and approved by the RSPCA and conform to the RSPCA Freedom Food standard
  

Maybe this is the way to go to maintain standards in a time of financial hardship. Planting trees in areas which would otherwise be either grass or bare ground is a potential way of soaking up CO2 and eventually producing wood for fuel or construction, and the dual use of land answers the objection to free range that there is not enough available land to produce all the eggs needed to supply the consumer.

Freedom Food Eggs

This article in the FarmingUK online magazine about changes to the Lion code for the "free range" label is both interesting and depressing — and demonstrates the part Freedom Food plays in keeping the developing welfare-audited food market honest. 

"Freedom Food, however, says it is waiting to see evidence that there will be no detrimental effect on animal welfare. If that cannot be produced, it will continue with its stocking density limit of 1,000 birds per hectare."

"Leigh Grant, chief executive of Freedom Food, said the RSPCA was waiting to see the evidence that there would be no effect on animal welfare.

"The RSPCA has had very positive dialogue with the industry and it is asking the industry to provide evidence that this would not prove detrimental to animal welfare," he said. "The industry has agreed to run trials and the RSPCA is awaiting the result.

"My own personal position is that if the industry, working with the RSPCA, is able to arrive at a point where it can show that the change is not detrimental then I would be happy. However, I would not want the RSPCA to be influenced by commercial considerations."

He said that when a product carried the Freedom Food logo that product carried an RSPCA endorsement, so it was inevitable that the RSPCA should be very sensitive about welfare considerations. The RSPCA had worked very hard with the industry over the years to help put free range where it was today and he hoped that co-operation would continue. He pointed out that a huge number of retailers - the majority of them - were with Freedom Food. If the industry was not able to provide evidence that a change in stocking density would not affect animal welfare then the Freedom Food standard would not be changed. Then there would have to be two separate standards and the retailers and their customers would have to make a choice."

So, we could potentially be seeing a situation where "Free Range" labelled eggs could be from hens stocked at twice the density of hens producing eggs under the "Freedom Food" label. (In fact, my reading of the article is that this may already be the case, but the higher-density wouldn't be eligible for the "Lion" quality label.

I can see that there must be pressure to maximise production of food per acre of land. Arguably the ultimate way to do this would be to grow plants for direct human consumption, but people are likely to want to consume eggs for the foreseeable future. Maybe the answer is a return to the older system of poultry flocks in orchards (scroll down to see Chivers' then cutting-edge pedigree flock, just down the road from Cambridge). 

In fact Chivers must have been an absolutely wonderful example of integrated farming for maximum productivity per acre as they seem to have had bees as well as poultry so that their orchards were producing honey, eggs and fruit from a single piece of land. So far as it's possible to tell from the photos, their hens had at least as much space as the best modern free-range farms, and probably better welfare since chickens are naturally woodland birds.