Lewis Bollard: belief

Transcript context

…This is why I really wanted to do this episode. I think people will be aware that there's a general problem here, but the actual politics, the actual economics, the actual state of the technology landscape here… there might be interventions which are stupendously effective, which we overlook just because people are not aware of what's actually happening in this space. On that point, to use an analogy from global health and poverty. The Against Malaria Foundation estimates that it saved on the order of 180,000 lives, which is a lot. But then you compare it to China liberalizing, which brought a billion people out of poverty. That's just a many, many orders of magnitude bigger impact. In animal welfare, do you have some big take about what the “China-liberalizing” equivalent in this space is? There have been three large-scale drivers of progress so far. The first has been government policy. Advocates got the European Union to set basic animal welfare standards. That is billions of animals every year, billions every year. Then there’s corporate reforms. We see the same thing. There's this incredible scale across these corporate supply chains. McDonald's just implemented its pledge to go cage-free in the US. That alone is seven million hens every year out of cages, just in the McDonald's supply chain. The third lever is technology. One example would be in-ovo sexing as a new technology that can get rid of the need to kill male chicks. In the egg industry, the unwanted chicks are killed at birth. In-ovo sexing has already spared about 200 million chicks from that fate. So there are these giant drivers. The good news is we're just getting started with them. There is the potential, I think, to help tens of billions of animals through these drivers. I want to go into in-ovo sexing. Just the fact that you can have a new technology and you can have basically Pareto improvements where things aren't getting more expensive… Maybe in the future they'll actually get cheaper because of this technology. At the same time, you're having improvements in animal welfare. The problem, of course, with this industry has been that in the past, increases in efficiency have been coupled with increases in cruelty. I want to understand whenever the trend goes in the opposite direction, what causes that to be the case? What is the history of this technology? How does it work? Why did it take so long for it to come into common practice?…

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