Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and you are listening to The Vegan Report.
Today I offer you hope.
What if I told you that some smart people came up with a viable strategy to end factory
farming for good?
A way to channel all our activism in the most impactful way.
A roadmap telling you where this animal rights struggle ends.
This master plan comes in the form of a legal article titled A New Age of Animal Law written
by three animal rights lawyers.
Jereb Klekel, a staff attorney for Animal Outlook, Grace Brasovsky, a public defender
and Cheryl Lihi, director of Animal Outlook.
I welcomed on the show one of the co-authors, Jereb, and we discussed the good and bad of
animal welfare before getting to the core of his paper.
Then I challenged him on some of the points and assumptions he makes.
If you want to read A New Age of Animal Law, you will find a link in the description for
a longer and shorter version of the article.
I also left a link to Animal Outlook's website.
Think about supporting a non-profit powered by such talented and passionate attorneys.
Hi, Jereb.
Thank you so much for having accepted my invitation and welcome to the show.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm very excited to be here, talk to you.
My first question for you is, what's the point of your article?
Why did you decide to publish it and talk about it publicly?
This article, A New Age of Animal Law, I think comes from, for better or worse, just being
a people pleaser and wanting to try to take a lot of really smart perspectives in the
animal law movement and to combine them and to put them together and to create a synergy
that I think can and should exist in the movement.
We're a small movement of animal lawyers.
By that, I mean lawyers who are litigating on behalf of animals.
But historically, there's been a surprisingly sharp divide in the movement between abolitionists
on the one hand and welfarists on the other.
I think there is opportunity for that to change and to evolve and to grow and for really smart
minds on both sides to work together as opposed to against each other as historically it's
maybe seemed necessary to do.
That's the basis of this paper is how can we create this unified system, this unified
thought for advancing animal law so that everybody is working together to achieve the same goals.
That's exactly what I got from the paper.
It feels like something unifying and it feels like it's like a strategy for the movement
and it gave me clarity in what are the next steps and how to be consistent in what we're
doing as activists in the activism space.
It also gave me a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel.
Here is the plan, here's the strategy, and here's how we could get to the kind of world
we wish was a reality.
Was this also an aim and intention you had while writing the paper?
Absolutely.
In a lot of ways, I see it almost as more of a starting point because there's a lot
of smart people in this movement and I'm sure that as people read the article, they will
see things, parts of the strategy that they can tweak for themselves or add to or subtract
from.
I think having this outline in my head, this framework gives me some kind of purpose going
forward and some structure as you said and hopefully can be a bit of an educational tool
for young lawyers who are coming up in the movement, at least in terms of seeing the
different perspectives and how they want their role to fit in.
And hopefully also for non-lawyers because we can talk about this a little more later
if it's interesting to you, but I think that people who aren't lawyers and people who are
activists also play a very big role in the legal side of the movement as well.
And so I hope the paper kind of fits all of that together.
So let's get into understanding some of the words that are used in the article, some of
the concepts starting with animal welfare.
Now I have to say before starting this podcast, before really starting this activism journey,
I did not give lots of thoughts about this divide between abolitionism and welfareism.
For me, animal welfare was just part of the animal rights movement in the sense of I would
see some of my favorite pro-vegan organizations like Mercy for Animals pushing animal welfare
policies, laws, supporting them, being active around that, launching campaigns, animal welfare
campaigns.
And I would think, yeah, it's just consistent.
As a vegan, I would support animal welfare as much as animal rights.
I feel like I did not truly realize the difference between this divide and what it meant really.
So for the other ignorant people in my audience, what would you have to say?
Well I started very much in the same boat, not even realizing when I first became vegan
and got into the movement that there was this divide.
But the divide, historically, it makes sense.
I don't think it just comes from an unnatural tension.
So I'll take a step back and start with the definitions that you asked for.
And when we talk about welfareism, of course I'm painting in broad brushstrokes here, but
welfareism is the idea of improving welfare for animals, improving their living conditions.
Now for a pig at a factory farm, that might mean a slightly bigger cage size or eliminating
a certain practice that's especially painful.
All of those would be considered welfare measures.
On the flip side, you have what I call the abolitionist perspective.
And that comes from a place of animals have inherent rights and at least the right to
a continued life and to be free from harm and free from exploitation and to not be treated
as property.
And so the idea is that you shouldn't be exploiting them for food or for other purposes.
And you might think they do go hand in hand and in a lot of ways they do.
Improving conditions for animals is trying to improve the lives for animals the same
way you would be improving their lives by no longer exploiting them altogether.
But when you look a little closer at those positions, you see a pretty big dichotomy.
You can talk a little bit about why that dichotomy has evolved, but Professor Gary Francione
is really, I think, the first or at least one of the main people to point out why that
dichotomy is important and why it exists.
And he's now more of a dissenting viewpoint, I would say, in the movement, but very much
one of my idols and role models in the movement because he asks the hard questions, right?
Which is if we are just taking these incremental steps to improve the lives of animals by making
their cages bigger, are we actually reaching a more abolitionist angle like we want to
in the long run?
Or are we actually fighting against ourselves in one way or another?
So I can go into a little bit more detail if you want about how those emerge, but that's
broad strokes the overview of the welfarists who want to incrementally improve the lives
of animals and then you have the abolitionists who want to end the exploitation altogether.
Sometimes how this is presented is, welfarism is a more realistic approach and abolitionism
is more of an idealistic one.
Would you agree with that?
I think that that's definitely how it's presented.
I agree that that's how it's presented.
So I think welfarists will say, listen, we live in a world where people eat animals.
That's just the reality.
We're not going to overnight wake up and see that all animals are freed and we no longer
eat them.
So we might as well do what we can for the animals, right?
And they will critique an abolitionist by saying, listen, you're wasting a lot of your
time and resources when you could be taking these tangible steps to help animals.
And I think that's maybe a position that more people intuitively are drawn to.
But from the abolitionist side, what someone like Professor Francione would say is you're
actually fighting against yourself because if you take these incremental steps and you
start celebrating that, say, now cages are bigger for animals.
Look, we won this huge victory.
They have more space to move around.
Then you're just reinforcing the idea that there is an ethical way to consume and to
exploit animals.
And you have consumers who will then look at supermarket shelves and see cage free and
be like, oh, look, the animals are happy.
I'm going to keep eating eggs.
And it prevents them in a way from confronting the bigger picture question of should we be
doing this in the first place?
And so that's a lot of the pushback you get on either side.
And that's kind of where the divide starts and how it's framed.
In preparation for this interview, I watched one of your lectures online and there was
those three animal welfare laws, policies that you identified and that were applied
in the US, namely the 28 hour law and then the Humane Metals of Slaughter Act and the
Animal Welfare Act.
And I guess those three are considered like big victories by animal welfareists.
Could you maybe expand on what they are?
And I think that will give us a better idea of concretely what is animal welfare.
So I apologize to you before the podcast and we'll again here now that we're reporting
about my limited knowledge of American law.
So this focuses on US law, but there's really only three federal statutes.
And by federal statutes, I mean the laws that apply to the entire country as a whole.
There's three federal laws that Congress enacted to protect farmed animals.
I'm sorry, two statutes they've enacted to protect farmed animals.
And I start pretty much every lecture or every topic you'll see me give to law students or
anywhere else this way, right?
There's the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the 28 hour law.
And you can tell by the names exactly what they do.
The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act regulates in some ways how animals are slaughtered and
it tries to eliminate some of the cruelest slaughter practices.
And then the 28 hour law is a transport law.
And this law I think is probably most shocking when I explain it to people because it means
you can't transport animals for over 28 hours in the back of a transport truck.
And when you think about that as the baseline, that's pretty crazy because it means that
under that law, you can have an animal in the back of the truck and create for 27 and
a half hours and that's compliance, right?
So that's the level of baseline that we're dealing with.
And that's why protecting farmed animals through the law can be very difficult, right?
That's the baseline.
So if you think about those two statutes and what they protect, right?
Slaughter and then hopefully less than the 28 hours leading up to the slaughter during
the transport.
And I usually stop there and I say, okay, so who can tell me what's missing from those
protections?
And people have various answers.
And then when they realize, oh, it's the rest of their lives, it's everything that they
experience up until that point of transport to slaughter, they go, oh, wow, these baselines
are really, really well at the federal level.
And so that's kind of where we're starting.
And some of those laws, they do protect animal welfare to a degree, but you see how low the
federal baseline is.
Now you asked me about the Animal Welfare Act and you may have noticed that I didn't
mention it in saying that Congress enacted laws to protect farmed animals.
And that's because also as a surprise to many people, the Animal Welfare Act does not protect
animals, or it's radical culture.
It doesn't apply to farmed animals.
So your biggest federal animal welfare statute in the country doesn't apply to farmed animals
at all.
That's the baseline we're dealing with.
And something that you raise in the article is that it's one thing to have those laws.
It's something else to enforce them.
And there's no such thing as animal police.
And I have witnessed some acts of animal cruelty.
And I have witnessed how the police has its limitations in addressing those behaviors
and the social acceptability.
I will edit this out, but how socially it is acceptable for those acts to occur.
So people don't even have the instinct of calling the police when they witness.
So yeah, there's this dog, for instance, who is outside all the time, even in winter.
It goes against animal welfare laws, protecting companion animals.
You call the police, they're powerless.
What are they going to do?
You call different agencies, shelters, or whatever.
They are overwhelmed.
So basically you have this law that was adopted.
You had activists behind it who worked hard to craft that law.
But then it's not enforced.
And so my question is, how many of those laws are enforced in the world of factory farming?
And then is it worth pursuing, creating those laws and establishing them if they will not
be enforced?
There's a lot of pieces to that question, I'm going to try to hit all of them.
And I will start by saying, I agree with you entirely that enforcement is a very big issue,
or lack of enforcement rather.
Now when we were just talking, I talked about federal laws.
Part of the reason the legal system in the United States is a little weird and different
and complicated is because of the federalist structure.
So there's federal laws that apply to the whole country, but then there's state laws
and states act as their own separate sovereigns and can establish their own laws.
And it's really states that have a lot of the stronger laws that are out there for protecting
animals.
And those are the ones that can be enforced a lot more and that are often under enforced.
And states also have a lot of flexibility to pass some of the stronger laws for protecting
animals.
So California's Proposition 12, which we can talk about a little later too if you want,
is one of the biggest examples that people think of, right?
This gestation crate ban or the ban on the sale of meat that comes derived from pigs
that were kept in gestation crates, right?
And so there are these state laws that can actually do more, at least for animal welfare,
right?
And the problem that we see a lot is the lack of enforcement.
So this comes back to your question and to exactly what you're asking.
But sometimes it's because there aren't laws on the books and sometimes it's just because
of practice where people don't think about enforcing the law that way, even though they
very clearly should based on the text of the law itself.
So I'll give you an example.
We have a case in Maine right now, the state of Maine, where we're litigating against Maine's
Department of Agriculture.
And our big issue with the department is that they are not protecting animals kept in the
state's aquaculture facilities.
And the aquaculture facilities, the aquaculture industry is blowing up, it's expanding exponentially
and it's like the Wild West because there's no animal welfare measures at all in that
industry.
Now, Animal Outlook, where I'm an attorney, did one of the first investigations into the
aquaculture industry in the US and it was in Maine and we saw just horrible cruelty,
everything that you would expect and more.
Because anything that people will do to animals, they'll do tenfold to fish because it's just
like, oh, they're just fish, right?
And we go to the Department of Agriculture, which has the state's animal welfare program
and we say, hey, you have to protect the animals in this industry.
And before we even got to this point where we are in litigation, the first thing the
agency said is, oh, that's not our job.
And that blew our minds.
It just blew us out of the water and you wouldn't think that it would because we see stuff like
this all the time, but the agency has the animal welfare program and animal is defined
to include every living sentient creature that's not a human being.
So we say, so your job is to protect these fish, right?
And they say, no.
We say, well, your job is to protect animals.
Yes.
And animals is defined.
Yes.
Every living sentient creature that's not a human being.
Yes.
Fish or animals.
Yes.
And fish are sentient.
Yes.
And fish are living.
Yes.
And fish are creatures.
Yes.
So you have to protect the fish, right?
No.
And you're like, where's the disconnect here?
What has happened?
Right.
Because there's some animals that are just, you know, the government is not doing its
job to enforce the law and protect these animals, even though it very clearly can under the
letter of the law, right?
Whenever Animal Outlook does investigations, a lot of investigations, we see law enforcement,
we see prosecutions.
And typically we want to prosecute either the corporation or like the owner manager
of the facility rather than just, you know, individual workers.
And that's for a few different reasons.
But one for the animal purposes is you start going after individual workers.
You're kind of sending this message that, oh, it's just a few bad apples who are hurting
animals in these unusual circumstances.
When really it's systemic, it's companies themselves that have these conditions and
practices that are inherently cruel to animals.
And in a lot of states, the cruelty laws should be applied to those facilities by prosecutors,
by law enforcement, the same way they would be applied to a cat and dog.
But when you tell a prosecutor that, they go, what do you mean?
Like, no, that's not what we do.
We don't prosecute, you know, agriculture industries.
And so part of Animal Outlook's work, part of my work as an attorney there is trying
to actually work with prosecutors to get them to enforce these laws against the corporations,
because there are sometimes these laws on the books that are just being under enforced,
like you said.
And we've been very successful in that in the last couple of years and getting these
prosecutions against owners and managers of facilities.
And I think the more the law actually starts to be enforced the way it should be, the more
you'll actually see this kind of systemic change in the industry.
And the more the public will recognize, oh, this is these practices, the way these companies
are operating is just inherently unawful.
It's just cruel.
Let's talk about what I find the strongest argument for animal welfare laws.
And that is the driving up prices of exploiting animals.
In many ways, I find that veganism is about driving change in the market.
So it's more or less something that has to do with influencing the economy.
And I learned about this driving up prices animal welfare argument from your article.
I was completely ignorant about it.
So could you please explain what the argument is about and how much is it realistic?
Is it a goal that has been fulfilled in the past?
Do we have historical data to back up this claim of animal welfarists?
Yeah.
So historically, the argument from welfarists have been if you add regulation to an industry,
then the costs go up to the industry and it costs them more money to operate and they
can't make as big a profit.
It's a very simple kind of economics argument.
If you tell an aquaculture industry, it can treat fish however it wants and they can have
free reign, then they're not going to implement measures to take care of the fish.
And if you start implementing them and all of a sudden they need bigger tanks and cleaner
water and all of these other measures, their costs are going to go up.
That's the historic argument.
From the abolitionist side, there's really been two counters to that and I will take
them in turn.
So the first, and this is really where I think I would disagree most with Professor Francione's
approach is that these welfare measures inherently make the industry more profitable all the
time no matter what.
That by increasing animal welfare, you're actually making the animals live longer and
do better and the industry will ultimately make more money because there will be, I don't
know, fill in the blanks, less need for antibiotics, less recalls, et cetera.
It'll just make the industry operate more efficiently.
And I think that just has to be wrong.
And without kind of weighing in on the back and forth debate about which measures is that
true about, which measures is it not, I think you can just look at a couple of basic hypotheticals
and see that it can't be true across the board.
If cages for chickens are three feet and you implement a measure that means the industry
has to then go and make them four feet and then has to go and make them five feet and
six feet and 10 feet and 12 feet, the industry has to keep spending more money to build bigger
cages and to expand them.
And then it takes up more space and they need more land and they can have fewer animals.
So you can very easily see how a welfare measure can increase costs.
So I start from that premise that regardless of what you may think of welfare measures
that currently exist and whether they're driving up costs, there certainly are welfare measures
that will drive up costs.
And I think to say that there's not, it's just too much of a blanket statement.
And I think that's one of the responsibilities of animal organizations if they're bringing
litigation or proposing legislation is to make sure, yeah, this is the kind of measure
that will actually drive up costs to the industry.
But I'm going to set that aside now and assume that there are measures that can actually
increase costs for the industry.
And this is where you get to the second counter argument, which I think historically has been
the more persuasive at least to me, which is that animal products like meat, I'm just
going to take as the example, are inelastic.
If you look at basic economics and you look at supply and demand, if you have a necessity,
a product that's a necessity, if you cause the industry to increase its costs, it doesn't
really matter because it's going to pass that cost on to consumers.
An example I always give is if you're wandering through the desert and you haven't had water
for two days and you come across somebody in the desert who's selling a bottle of water,
you will pay whatever they ask for that bottle of water.
Maybe a bottle of water costs $2 in the real world, but you will pay 10 or 20 or 100 because
otherwise you will die.
So if it's a necessity good, then you will pay more for it.
And historically, the agriculture industry for animals has done a great job of persuading
the public that animal products are necessities.
You grow up with them in the food pyramid.
And I think abolitionists, that's one of their big roles is putting a dent in that and saying,
these products aren't necessities.
Actually you can live a vegan lifestyle and be perfectly healthy.
And if you do it right, you can be even healthier.
And meat can actually be unhealthy.
And you kind of change that narrative in a way that aligns with the science.
But historically, it's been viewed as a necessity.
So if we pass a welfare measure, costs go up for the industry, they just pass those
costs on to the consumers and they say, all right, well, now your stake is $12 instead
of 10 and people just pay it.
And that's kind of the end of the story because they say, well, we have to eat meat.
It's just part of life.
So that's the necessity piece.
And I think abolitionists really in charge of tacking that piece.
Then you have the substitutability prong.
So when products have substitutes, they're more elastic.
And so I give you an example there to make that a little more concrete.
Just say you have a type of chewing gum you really like, like a fig gum.
I don't even think I don't know why I said fig gum.
I don't know if that exists.
My antler has been growing figs.
So I have figs on my mind.
But say you have fig chewing gum, right?
And you're like, there's nowhere else I can get this.
It's not a necessity.
So I'm not going to spend $8 on gum too often.
But when I want to treat myself, spend $8 on gum.
It's great.
OK, so you pay it because there's no substitutes for it.
But then if other companies start coming out with it and it's $6 and $5 and $4, now you
have options.
So if you think about the fig gum company that's charging $8 a pack, somebody sues them
and they have to up their cost to $9 and there's no other products.
It's probably not going to change the demand that much because people who want the gum
will pay $9 if they would pay $8.
But now if there's other products, there's another product that comes out and they charge
$8.50.
And that company has to go up to $9.
Now people have an option.
They can switch.
And that's, I think, what we're seeing for the first time in history with these really
realistic plant-based products that really replicate the taste and the texture of animal
products.
And hopefully, at some point, relatively soon at a cost-effective level, cell-based products,
fermentation-derived products, you see all of a sudden there are substitutes in the market.
And so I think what that means is for the first time now in history, as welfare measures
start to drive up prices for the industry, it's no longer going to just be like, oh,
we'll pass this on to consumers.
The industry will then have two options.
They either take the hit and it cuts into their profit margin or they pass those costs
on to consumers and it gives consumers more pause in thinking about the substitutes that
are out there.
And maybe they switch over to plant-based products because of that change in price parity.
Fascinating.
Now we're getting at the strategy, the core of your article, which is, you know, the way
I see it is like a fight on many fronts.
First of all, you need to drive up prices of animal products, bypassing animal welfare
laws.
Then you have to advocate and make alternatives.
So the Impossible Burgers and the lab-grown meat out there make them viable options, accepted
by the public, embraced, and to see them now as great alternatives for those animal products
that are becoming more and more unaffordable.
Yeah.
So I think it's a few fold.
And obviously I have a little bias as an attorney, but I think the law will start to play an
even bigger role in the movement now that there's more options.
And if you're the kind of person who doesn't want to read a thousand page law review article,
you can go right to page 52 and it gives you that roadmap.
And I can walk right through that.
I also might, my co-author Cheryl Lay, he's the executive director of Animal Outlook.
And I published a kind of summary piece on the Brooks Animal Law Digest that walks through
this.
So that's a bit of a shorter summary as well.
But the idea is, right, we've talked about kind of this phase one, so to speak, right?
These alternatives come closer to replicating counterparts.
Consumers start to consider them as substitutes.
They go, oh, maybe the demand curve starts to become more elastic.
Right.
And I've said, it's up to abolitionist activists and lawyers to make the public and not just
a portion of the public, but the entire public, accept alternatives as viable substitutes.
And I think there's a couple of ways to do that.
Right.
One is, as I mentioned before, showing that animal products are not necessities.
Right.
And there's a lot of different ways you can do that as both an activist and a lawyer.
To give you one example of the case that we have right now at Animal Outlook, it's a lawsuit
against the American Heart Association.
The American Heart Association puts its heart check stamp of approval on certain beef products.
Right.
And we're suing them by saying, hey, you're actually, that's a paid endorsement.
You're getting paid by the beef industry to put that heart check on those products.
And it goes counter to the science and even science that American Heart Association journals
publish.
And, you know, and by bringing these efforts in courts, which I think have an inherent
legitimacy to them as, you know, like a serious legal system, you show through the court system
that, oh, these animal products aren't necessities.
They're not even, they're not even necessarily healthy.
They might actually be damaging to us.
Right.
Well, let me just maybe present the, you know, devil advocate, be the devil advocate and
present maybe the opposite side argument, which is, you know, the beyond meat and the
impossible burgers of this world are processed food.
It is hard in the minds of people to present the case that this is healthier than meat.
And you know, just from my personal experience, I use an app called Yuka and it allows you,
you know, to scan the labels of products and cosmetics and it gives you a list of the different
additives.
And also it tells you, oh, those additives are forbidden, you know, in Europe, European
countries or Australia and they link all sorts of study studies around that.
And I won't name the company, but it's a big meat alternative company.
And I tried scanning their products.
I used to be a customer of them.
And then I discovered how bad they were ranking and how many additives were in their products.
And I thought, ooh, this is not good when you try to sell the idea that those alternatives
are healthier than the animal products.
Yeah.
So I think there's a couple of ways to think about that issue.
One is that not all alternative products are going to be made equal.
And I think it would be naive and I hope that vegans don't fall into this trap too often
of just saying, oh, all plant-based products are inherently super healthy for you, right?
Oreos are plant-based products.
They're not healthy for you.
I treat them like they are, but they're not.
And that's going to be the case with alternatives as well.
There's going to be some that are healthier than others, right?
And it's going to depend too on the nutritional criteria that you're looking at, right?
Some products may be healthier because they have lower cholesterol.
And that may be especially important to someone who's trying to cut down on their cholesterol
that like an alternative burger has way less cholesterol than a meat product, right?
But maybe there is a disadvantage in some ways because some of the processed chemicals
in that product aren't great, right?
And I think as consumers, you kind of have to weigh your options and see which of these
products are healthy in the ways that you want it to be and the way that you need it
to be.
But it doesn't change the bottom line that meat products are unhealthy, right?
When it comes to carcinogens, high saturated fat, and so on and so forth, right?
And so it's the job I think of.
And again, here we're not even talking about the substitutability problem.
We're just talking about the necessity problem, right?
If you go after and you show that meat products are not a necessity when it comes to health,
that they are actually detrimental to health, at least if consumed in large amounts, right?
Then you're showing the product, sorry, you're showing consumers that these are not necessity
products, right?
And that's really the first step in making sure that these products no longer have this
inelasticity value, showing consumers that they don't even need to buy them, right?
When it comes to substitutability, you can look at other factors.
And I think that's where the second piece, the ethical piece really comes to play, right?
Because I think it's also up to abolitionist lawyers to show people that these other products
have to be adequate substitutes, even if you don't think they're perfect, because animal
products can never be an ethical option, right?
And as an abolitionist, you have to show why that can be the case.
Yes, I do agree that some people will see animal products and we make the case that
they're unethical.
We show the footage and they understand that this is not the ethical option.
I hosted the debate recently between different vegan activists and they were all in agreement
that people are selfish and that going about trying to appeal to their morality was not
that efficient.
So how do you address that weakness?
So unfortunately, I am not going to be the person who comes on the show and argues that
people are not inherently selfish because I tend to agree with every one of your other
panelists.
Unfortunately in saying that, or I should say fortunately in saying that, I think that's
the advantage to kind of the roadmap that I've tried to lay out here is that people
are selfish to a point, but they're also self-conscious beings, right?
And so maybe if you think of meat as a necessity, right?
And you say, okay, this is a necessity product.
People are like, well, of course I'm going to eat this, it's a necessity.
Maybe they should, right?
Maybe it's natural and healthy and evolutionary to be selfish to that point.
But then as you start to chip away at that necessity approach, right?
And you start to see the prices go up and you start to see substitutes that are more
on parity price-wise, right?
Maybe somebody is selfish enough to say, I'm not going to eat a plant-based burger.
I'm not going to eat a veggie burger for $11 if I can eat a cheeseburger for four, right?
But are you selfish enough to say, I'm not going to eat a veggie burger for six, I'm
going to eat a cheeseburger for 450?
What about five and 550?
And then if you're really ingrained in your ways, you know, and we've talked a lot about
plant-based meat, right?
What happens when cell-based meat, if cell-based meat hits the market and is the exact same
food product as meat from a slaughtered animal, you know, maybe people will say at first,
oh, this is gross.
I wouldn't eat this.
It comes from a lab, even though everything they consume comes from a lab.
And then they will turn and they will say, oh, well, now the cell-based product is $3
and this hamburger is $7.
Maybe I should give it a try, you know, until eventually I think it just starts to become
the norm.
And so I agree with you that people are selfish, but I think there is a tipping point in there
somewhere where people are like, am I this selfish?
And I think selfishness can be a spectrum, right?
Like most things.
And so I think that's where these strategies come together.
And that's why these substitutes, I think, become so valuable because historically, right,
it's made abolitionist jobs easier, right?
We used to have to say, oh, you should stop doing this for ethical reasons.
And it sounded like a sacrifice.
I still don't think it was, but you could think of it that way, right?
You're giving something up, right?
Now you're just saying you have to have a good enough substitute and here's why.
And it makes the argument a lot easier.
And so I think you have to play off the degrees of selfishness that people have.
If you can always cut this out, if it bores you, but don't me for a second.
This is kind of my big picture theory to animal rights.
It's a simple minded theory and that's why I like it.
Is that killing and torturing and hurting animals is just always wrong.
And I don't think it takes a really deep philosopher to figure that out.
I think you can take an animal like a rat that a lot of people don't like to say, I
don't like rats.
And you say, all right, well, do you think it's okay to just pull that rat's toes off
one by one or pull its feet off or light his tail on fire?
And then they'll stop.
Like, why are you saying these things?
Why are you doing that?
Right.
That's horrible.
Right.
So you don't really have to convince somebody that it's wrong to torture an animal.
It's a harm an animal.
And then you think about these whole grass fed free roaming myths and you think, all
right, well, if you have this lovable dog and she grows up in your house and she cuddles
and she gets everything a dog could want with the walks and the running and the playing
and food.
And then one day you just shoot her in the face.
Well, that's not right.
Right.
So everybody knows like you can't just, just because an animal had a good life doesn't
mean it's ethical to kill them.
Right.
This is all intuitive stuff for us.
You know, people think of veganism as extremism in some ways, but when you think about it,
it's really a simple principle, right?
Don't torture and don't kill an animal that has a life and feels pain and the sentience.
It's pretty basic.
I think most people will agree with those premises if you're actually confronted with
it head on.
And then the question becomes, is it justifiable?
Right.
And there's a concept in the walk, the justification defense where, you know, the idea is not that
something is ever right, but can it be justifiable nonetheless?
Right.
So a robber is always going to be unethical.
It's never ethical to rob a store.
Nobody would be like, oh yeah, it's great.
Go rob a gas station.
That's a great thing to do on a Saturday night.
It's just not okay.
Right.
But it's worse if Bill Gates does it than if, you know, there's a homeless pregnant
mother who needs to feed her family of three.
Right.
It's not that it becomes ethical for her to rob the store, but it's justifiable.
And I think that's how I view the animal rights issue and consuming animals and animal agriculture
is, you know, if Ben Gunn is a vegan, right, Ben Gunn being a artist stranded and marooned
in Treasure Island, right, and he needs to catch and kill an animal to survive.
Like, okay, right.
But he doesn't have to put the animal's life above his own.
He can still survive and I think he'd still consider him to be an ethical vegan if he
leaves it as a vegan.
But then it becomes, you know, what justifies it?
And I think the more substitutes we start to see, more people start to see that these
aren't necessities, the more people will start to realize like, oh, this is unethical
and it is also unjustifiable.
And I think that's where the movement needs to push people is this is not justifiable.
I also wanted to address the fact that, you know, we talk about those products, those
meat, you know, lab grown meat and the impossible burgers of the world and the just eggs as
alternatives.
But why should they be the alternative?
Why people would not have the instinct of purchasing both, you know, animal products
and those alternatives, so to speak?
Yeah.
I mean, I think you identify a real problem.
I think that we're seeing that in the market now in large part.
And that's something the article talks about is where people don't look at it as an alternative,
but they look at it as in addition to.
Right.
I think that's only true with some products and some industries.
And maybe that talks for product quality and price and where things are.
Right.
I mean, products like oat milk put a huge dent into the market for dairy milk.
And so I do think there is the opportunity to get there.
But you're right when it comes to products like just egg or beyond burgers, impossible
burgers.
Right.
You're seeing more of an in addition to rather than an alternative kind of approach.
And that's where I think a couple of things have to happen.
Right.
You have the economic side where you have to keep pushing for that price parity, because
right now plant based products are largely more expensive still across the board.
And as the companies work to bring down those prices and on the other hand, as lawyers are
working to kind of litigate up costs for the animal industries, whether that's through
litigation or attacking subsidies from the government, you'll start to get that price
parity.
And that's when I think you'll see more of a substitute than an addition to.
And on the other side, to the extent you can give people that ethical argument, even if
you can't convince everybody ethically, I think the more it becomes out there and the
more people start to think about it, the more they'll be like, all right, these other products
aren't that bad.
I can switch over.
So I think it's both.
I think it's a twofold response.
And I think right now we're not seeing it yet, but hopefully we will get to the point
where we are seeing that if you can reach that price parity there.
And what are the indicators of this strategy working?
Well, I mean, I think you kind of have your stereotypical statistical indicators, right?
Which are, is the quantity of animal product sales going down and the product of plant
based sales going up, right, and you can try to kind of quantify everything.
And then I think there's indicators that just aren't really quantifiable, right?
You can kind of start to see shifts in society and judges that are hard to quantify at first
and aren't really obvious until they take hold, right?
The non-human rights project had a case on behalf of Happy the Elephant in New York,
right?
A habeas case about saying that the rights of Happy the Elephant were being infringed
by being kept in the Bronx Zoo and ultimately lost in the highest state court in New York.
But there were seven judges, I believe, on that panel and two of them wrote very strong
opinions, disagreeing with the opinion as cultural dissent.
And they wrote two very strong dissenting opinions, which maybe shows you like, oh,
these kind of off the wall ideas, as we would call them, are now becoming a lot more on
the wall, right?
So you get these kind of subtle indications along the way that the thought is starting
to change.
You now have these very kind of prestigious judges sitting on the bench who agree with
this as a theory, who believe that animals should have legal personhood.
And 20 years ago, you know, you barely had lawyers who would agree with that, let alone
judges.
So you get indicators like that that show there's progress.
You have your quantitative indicators, you know, and then you kind of have your indicators
of your own, which is difficult because n equals one is always bad statistically.
But you can go and you have conversations with people and you see how people are thinking
about things and have they heard of veganism?
You know, a lot of you know, just a few years ago, you hear people going like, oh, are you
a vegan?
Or are you a, you know, and they wouldn't even know the word.
Now I think most people know the word and maybe that's an indicator of progress.
I wish there was something like a doomsday clock of veganism, something that could, you
know, measure, have this overview measure of the progress of the cause and just, you
know, instruct the movement to, you know, hey, you should be critical about what you're
doing right now because in the past three years we had a 5% increase in our universal
vegan cause indicator.
And this year we had like 3%.
What happened?
Something like that, some kind of universal way of, oh, we're making progress towards
our end goal.
Yeah, I listen, I would love that.
And I think everybody in the movement would because you love to see some indication that
what you're doing matters and makes a difference.
And I'm guilty of the same thing, right?
Like when Animal Outlook, when we put out our New York Times article about the Holden
Farms investigation, you know, you can get the media imprint numbers and see like this
story has reached so many hundreds of millions of people, right?
And it's quantifiable and it makes you feel good.
You think, okay, this is getting out there.
But I think we also have to be pretty cautious and circumspect about relying too much on
that short-term positive reinforcement.
You know, like we live in a world of social media where it's a lot of times about likes
and clicks and, you know, how many people have seen your posts and things along those
lines.
And it can obfuscate, I think, the long-term goal sometimes.
It certainly has an intrinsic value to it, you know, but I think, you know, if we look
back historically, it's like when people were fighting for whatever cause they were fighting
for, they were doing it just because it was the right thing to do.
They had no idea if it was going to make an impact.
They just knew, this is what I know.
This is a black and white issue.
I, you know, I would like to make some impact in my life and whether I win this fight or
lose this fight, I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do.
And I think that mindset is sometimes difficult to keep in a world where you want to quantify
things.
And again, I don't say this standing on like my high horse over here, you know, like I
think we're all guilty of it, myself included, of wanting to see these tangible short-term
results.
And I love statistics.
My most influential legal paper was not a legal paper.
It was a scientific statistical paper.
And I think it has a ton of value.
But I also think there's something to be said for just saying, this is a black and white
issue, exploiting animals is wrong.
I'm going to just fight this out till I, you know, and that's, that's what I'm here to
do.
And I think that'll move the movement forward as well.
Yeah.
Let me just say something a bit shocking.
You know, I think maybe if those past successful social justice movements were using maybe
more indicators or more data and more, you know, you know, measures of impact, maybe
they would have had more success and, you know, at a quicker rate than they had.
And also, I do believe that the animal protection movement is its own thing.
I think, yeah, it is helpful to compare to other social justice movement up to a certain
point.
This is, this is in every way you look at it, a different ballgame, you know, in terms
of how big it is, you know, what we're going against this industry, but not just that,
the ideology behind it and how much it is has been established for thousands of years
and how it is universally adopted by every culture and how it's not a divide between,
you know, gender or race, but different between species, you know, divide between species.
It's crazy.
I agree with you completely.
I think, you know, on the one hand, if you ignore history and don't learn lessons from
history, then you're, you know, you're being naive and not learning lessons that you can
learn.
And, you know, like one of my favorite books I remember reading is What Can Animal Law
Learn from Environmental Law?
And I'm blocking on the author's name right now, which is mortifying.
But you know, you get these kind of analyses that compare it up to their movements and
how they've evolved and they're very helpful.
But also, you don't want to stick to a rubric because everything does work in its own way.
And this is, like you said, you know, no pun intended, a different animal.
And so, you know, you know, it's we're humans, we're inherently imperfect, and we're winging
it a little bit as we go.
But it's, you know, maybe I've just been a lawyer too long where I keep giving wishy
washy answers.
But I think when you don't know the answer, you have to be open to all strategies and
you have to be open to pulling from the past.
And you also have to be open to, you know, to taking risks of your own.
Think can actually move things forward and make a difference.
And they're not inherently contradictory.
No, it's a good answer.
And you're at the forefront of this fight, which I'm not.
So no, you definitely are.
And I think, you know, we all it's I don't know, I guess maybe we all struggle with this
of, you know, wanting to you want to know you're making a difference, but also have
the humility to know that you're one small piece of a wheel.
And yeah, I mean, I think that we what you're doing is incredibly valuable.
I mean, when I was in law school, we didn't have an animal law class.
I learned animal law by listening to the Animal Law Podcast, right?
I'm Mary Ann Sullivan's podcast.
That's how I taught myself animal law.
So people like you who are getting ideas like this out there that wouldn't otherwise be
out there, I think is as valuable as anything that can be done.
And if nothing else, it's certainly nice to hear intelligent people like yourself asking
intelligent questions and making people think and, you know, making the movement reflect
and think.
I certainly can't say that I have all of the right answers or good answers or certainly
not the best answers.
But you know, when we start having these conversations and thinking it through deeply and taking
the issue seriously, I think that's in a lot of ways the most we can ask of ourselves.
And so I am very grateful for you for doing this and for inviting me on for challenging
me.
And yeah, I think it's I think it's very valuable.
Thank you, Sherb.
And did I miss something?
Is there a question I should have asked and I missed?
No, I mean, I don't think so.
I'm happy to answer anything else you have.
I mean, some of the questions I get a lot are like, oh, what should, you know, law students
do if they're looking to become animal, you know, things like that, which I think are
probably a little bit more off the mark for your podcast.
I'm a legal nerd.
If there's like nuances, I'm happy to go into them.
But I think we've hit a lot of, you know, the big points.
Well, let me now thank you, Sherb, for for this wonderful article.
And you know, not just you, but also the other two co-authors.
It's wonderful to have this not mindset, but to be able to conceptualize what we're doing
and to have this clear view of, you know, here's the plan.
Yeah, I loved that article.
And thank you so much for having written the article and for your activism work.
Well, thank you.
And thank you to you as well for all the reasons that I said and for having me on to talk about
it.
And, you know, like I said at the beginning, I hope it gives a good roadmap.
And I also think it's a starting point.
And if people see ways to improve it or to tweak it, I think, you know, that's always
a very positive thing.
It helps to move us forward.
And I hope that, you know, putting it out there serves some sort of a unifying force.
But I also hope that it encourages people to critique me and to put ideas out there
that are even better and stronger.
And, you know, I obviously would not have been able to write it without my co-authors,
without Brace and Cheryl.
Brace is my best friend from law school who got me into Adam along in the first place.
So I was very happy to be able to write the article with her.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.