Lewis Bollard: prediction

Transcript context

…Why not think that they will just be eaten up in terms of their welfare impact? To the extent that the economics in the industry for a century have been to cram more things in, to figure out how to optimize along axes which just make the animal incredibly unhealthy and immiserated for longer and in more extreme ways? Okay, we'll come up with in-ovo sexing, but then there will be another thing which is the equivalent of gestation crates. Why think that even technologically the thing that is favored is the suffering-free optimizations? I think you’re right. This is the story of a lot of the industry's efforts to improve welfare. There was a study back in the 90s where they taught chickens how to select pain relief-laced feed. They found the broiler chickens were all selecting the pain relief-laced feed, suggesting they were all in chronic pain. The industry said, "Don't worry, we'll address it. We'll strengthen their legs." So they went away and they strengthened their legs for a bit. Then they were like, "Wow, it's great. The chickens have stronger legs now. They can go and eat more stuff and we can put more weight on those legs." So then they made them bigger and essentially undid those gains. In recent years we've seen the mortality rate in the industry rising again and getting worse. So presumably they've just pushed so far again in that direction. So that's a major risk. This is why you need the government or corporations involved. This is why you need the government setting out a baseline standard saying, “You can't go below this welfare floor.” For instance in Denmark, the government is strongly encouraging the move toward these higher welfare breeds and looking to ban low welfare outcome breeds entirely. You need to maintain those higher welfare outcomes. This is what you need in corporate supply chains too. This is also what you see with the French retailers moving away from these low welfare breeds. You need them to maintain those standards. Because you're right, the industry left on its own will always find a race to the bottom. Potentially, we could find ways to make animals even bigger with the future forms of biological progress that some of my guests talk about. It's already the case that it's better to eat beef than chicken, because cows just have so much more meat per brain. What if we just got rid of the myostatin inhibitor genes or whatever, and then now there's even more meat per cow? Is that better because you have more meat per cow, or is it worse because it's potentially going to lead to the same dynamic of these overgrown, more suffering animals? Which way does that tilt?…

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