Q&A: How do we harness the moral majority for animals?
For decades, Americans have said they oppose cruelty to farm animals—and they've proved it at the ballot box. Still, factory farming remains our dominant model of food production. Why does such widespread moral agreement translate into so little political change? Shannon Campion, executive director of Senterra Funders, believes this contradiction also points toward a solution: If we can turn the public’s moral instincts into political power, we can begin to dismantle factory farming and build a food system that works for animals, people, and the planet alike.
Q: You argue that factory farming so violates Americans' basic moral principles that there is hope for building political consensus around ending it. First, what do you mean by that?
Shannon Campion: Americans have long stood against farm animal cruelty. For years, polls have shown that the majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents support laws that give farm animals more space, ban the cruelest cages and crates, and guarantee basic humane treatment. And we’ve seen actions align; every state-level farm animal welfare ballot measure has passed, including California’s Proposition 12 in 2018 and Florida’s gestation crate ban in 2002. These measures won support from voters in both urban and rural areas.
When given the chance to weigh in with their vote, Americans are clear and united. In fact, they’re arguably more united on this than many other social issues that don’t enjoy such a high success rate at the ballot box.
Q: If that's true, why do so many Americans still eat meat and why has animal welfare been such a difficult issue to gain political traction on?
Campion: What we eat is social, cultural, personal, and largely shaped by forces we don’t consider. Meat is still at the center of the plate for many because political interests have lobbied for decades to make and keep factory farmed meat, dairy, and eggs cheap, abundant, and well-marketed.
The political headwinds are largely about entrenched interests. The National Pork Producers Council, National Chicken Council, and other agribusiness lobbies strategically dominate the policymaking and electoral processes to keep elected officials and regulators in their pocket. Meat industry interests spend roughly $45 million per year on lobbying, which gives them incredible influence, especially on state and federal agriculture committees (where farm animal-related bills typically originate). They also spend billions on marketing campaigns, reinforcing the false image of today’s industrial agribusiness as the "humble family farmer" and the "storybook red barn."
At the same time, these powerful corporations and their trade groups have aggressively attacked plant-based and cultivated alternatives. They’ve lobbied for restrictive labeling (or outright bans) and against financial incentives to help the sector grow, and they’ve spread the deceptive “ultra-processed food” narrative.
A main reason these corporations spend so much to preserve their power is because they are up against the will of the people. If elected officials were beholden to voters instead of Big Ag, the political landscape would look vastly different for animals. We see this in countries like Germany, where legal protections for farm animals better reflect the average citizen’s concern for them. And again, the success of ballot measures here in the United States illustrates what happens when people do have a say.
Q: What is the most hopeful path forward toward ending factory farming? What victories have we seen so far and what do you hope to see in the near future?
Campion: We need a number of things to happen concurrently.
1. We need to build much greater political power and leverage the unity that organically exists across party lines, along with the broad public support we enjoy, to overcome the entrenched interests of Big Ag.
It’s important to remember how small these interests actually are in terms of the overall share of the population. Agribusiness executives and owners of large factory farms are, by and large, the only ones who benefit from this highly industrialized, consolidated system, and they represent far less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. (Not to mention the meat industry is an oligopoly, and some of the largest corporations, like JBS and Smithfield, are foreign-owned.) The rest of us—consumers, rural communities, small- and mid-size farmers, people who care about animals or the environment—have everything to gain by joining forces against Big Ag and pushing for a better food system.
2. Factory farming will likely be around for a while in some form, so ending the worst practices of confinement and abuse are critical to reducing the chronic suffering of billions of animals.
So far, corporate pressure campaigns and policy advocacy have driven most of the successes for animals on this front. The level of talent among campaigners in this global movement is truly awe-inspiring. Thanks in large part to their advocacy, the U.S. egg laying hen flock is now 46 percent cage free, up from 12 percent ten years ago. The European Union and United Kingdom are now 60 and 82 percent cage free respectively. With three to four times more funding, we could relegate cages and crates to history—and accelerate the next set of animal welfare advances, such as reducing the health issues caused by selective breeding and improving living conditions for chickens raised for meat.
3. We also need to build up the options. If we want a world free from factory (for the animals, humans, and the planet) we need to make plant-based proteins cheaper, more accessible, tastier, and more culturally accepted.
Protein diversification is a food security and economic development issue, which is why you see countries like China, Singapore, and Germany investing heavily in R&D. In the past five years, we’ve seen global government funding for R&D and other support for plant-rich proteins grow from less than $100 million total to over $500 million a year. In the United States and many other parts of the world, however, we are still years, or decades, away from seeing these products widely accessible and affordable, largely due to the fact that they’re competing in a warped market in which heavy subsidies have made conventional meat artificially cheap.
Still, the fact that cultivated meat—slaughter-free meat grown from animal cells—is now available and tastes so similar to conventional meat is tremendous, especially given how challenging its development has been. AI will likely accelerate this progress, and I’m optimistic that more money in this sector (through philanthropy and impact investments) will lead to incredible improvements, both in the product itself as well as a favorable regulatory environment in key regions of the world.
4. Finally, this area needs more funding.
Donations to reform and replace factory farming now total around roughly $260 million a year, which represents just 0.04 percent of global philanthropy and over 100 times less than causes like global development (around $70 billion) or climate change (around $60 billion). It’s remarkable what committed activists, campaigners, and organizers have accomplished for animals with such limited resources, but they need more to stand up against entrenched interests, especially (unfortunately) in politics.
In my role leading a funder collective, I see new donors join this effort every month, and that gives me hope. I think these donors realize there is an unparalleled opportunity to support hardcore, effective campaigns and leaders to change the world for animals. Fortunately, our movement is finally at a place where it could effectively absorb double or triple the amount of funding it currently receives, which was not true five years ago.
