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Corporate Outreach – 2014

Please note that this report is archived, as it was written in November, 2014 and is not up to our current standards.

What is Corporate Outreach?

We use the term corporate outreach to refer to any campaign where an activist or animal advocacy organization seeks to directly influence the behavior of a corporation. Some organizations that do outreach seek to establish professional relationships with corporations in the food industry and use those relationships to help them implement policies that improve animal welfare.1 Some organizations that do corporate outreach use petitions, media exposure, and other forms of public pressure to influence corporations to implement policies that improve animal welfare.2 Not all corporate outreach is focused on welfare goals; some campaigns address abolitionist goals by using relationships or public pressure to induce companies to remove animal products from their recipes for certain products or to increase the number of plant-based foods they produce.3,4

Corporate outreach is related to other institutional campaigns like efforts to implement Meatless Mondays or cage-free egg policies in schools and hospitals, because in all institutional campaigns a small number of decision makers implement policies that affect relatively large numbers of animals.5 It is different from these campaigns because corporations are structured differently from school districts and other institutions, so different tactics are available to activists.6

What are its strengths?

In the best case scenario, corporate outreach can be an extremely efficient way of securing short-term or even long-term welfare gains for a large number of farmed animals.7 Most campaigns focused on ending particular confinement practices (most often battery cages for laying hens and gestation crates for breeding sows) are eventually successful,8,9 and we believe most of these campaigns are significantly more efficient than attempting to convince individual consumers to purchase only cage-free eggs or gestation-crate-free pork.10

Successful campaigns involving particularly large corporations also affect the norms of how animals are treated in industrial agriculture.11 When a particular practice has been condemned by many large corporations who are not known for their concern for animal welfare, that affects how legislators, other corporate decision makers, and the public view that practice.12 It makes it easier for activists to get laws passed banning the practice as an unusually cruel one.13 It may also influence the extent to which people perceive farmed animals’ suffering as worthy of concern.14

What are its weaknesses?

Corporate outreach campaigns are somewhat limited in terms of the changes they can promote with a reasonable probability of success; campaigns on confinement issues seem to have more success than campaigns to introduce vegan options at chain restaurants.15 Food industry corporations, whether directly involved in animal agriculture or only in producing foods for consumers, are not likely to be receptive to requests that they drastically modify their practices unless those requests are accompanied by compelling economic interests, including those resulting from high levels of public concern.16 While it is possible to make a compelling economic case that a company should avoid the use of intense confinement practices, especially if those practices are not used by its competitors, this relies on the public’s disapproval of those practices.17 While at the present time a large proportion of the public finds specific practices used in large scale animal agriculture upsetting and unethical, only a much smaller proportion finds the exploitation of animals for food unethical in general, and most people accept that animal products require some suffering on the part of the animals producing them.18 Advocates’ ability to convince most companies to make a given change relies on a perception that the public would also demand such a change if it were paying attention.19 Beyond the cases of battery cages and gestation crates, it’s not clear to what extent the public would support changes proposed by animal advocates, and we would expect it to be difficult to persuade companies to make changes the public does not care about or would not support.20 Unless other efforts change the public’s views of animal agriculture, corporate outreach efforts may not be able to create large-scale change except regarding a limited set of practices the public already views as cruel.21

What about long term effects?

Possible Positive Effects

It is possible that by promoting discussion of conditions for farmed animals, and embodying that discussion in policies of institutions like corporations, corporate outreach encourages a norm of caring whether these animals suffer.22 It is also possible that increased costs of raising animals in more humane conditions could ultimately lead to fewer animals being raised for food at all and form part of a transition away from raising animals for food.23 Finally, campaigns that explicitly seek to increase the availability of plant-based foods do not seem to have any of the potential drawbacks of campaigns focused on welfare improvements, though so far they have in general been less successful.24

Possible Negative Effects

Corporate outreach may help strengthen animal agriculture in the long term by relieving some of the most extreme contradictions between the way the general public would like animals to be treated and the way that they are actually treated in industrial agriculture.25 This could prevent activists from gaining sufficient support to make more drastic overhauls to the way animals are treated,26 or it could simply support demand for animal products at a higher level than would otherwise exist.27 We have no evidence of the former function, and would not expect any, as such large-scale historical forces are extremely difficult to recognize or measure until their effects are already pronounced.28 There is some indirect evidence that improved animal welfare standards would increase demand for animal products; media coverage of undercover investigations of animal agriculture has been linked to reduced demand for animal products,29 so it is logical to conclude that by raising welfare standards, producers can raise demand for their products or at least hope to avoid publicity that would lower demand for them.30

Conclusions

Overall, we do not think most organizations engaging in corporate outreach view it as part of a coherent strategy to provide benefits to animals in the far future.31 Its long-term effects are not well-understood and could be either positive or negative. As with most interventions performed by animal advocates, we think the long-term effects are more likely to be positive than negative, because promoting concern for animals’ interests is so important that in the absence of strong reasons to believe the effects are negative, we expect the effects to be positive on balance.32 We don’t think the long-term effects of any animal advocacy intervention are extremely well understood, though some seem clearer than the long-term effects of corporate outreach, and so we put limited weight on this consideration in our overall understanding of how effective or ineffective any intervention is.33

Do we recommend it? Why or why not?

We recommend corporate outreach conditionally, as an intervention which has extremely high potential to increase animal welfare in the short to medium term when conducted thoughtfully.34 Only some kinds of corporate outreach interventions appear to reach this potential, most notably those that are part of a larger strategy targeting an entire industry.35,36,37 Furthermore, we believe that a sustainable approach to animal advocacy must also consist of elements that attempt to influence public opinion more directly, both to provide further impetus for institutional change38 and because changes in norms and public opinion have clearer long-term effects than changes in corporate policy or the law alone.39

What are characteristics of a strong corporate outreach campaign?

  • The campaign forms part of a strategic plan to change broader industry norms and practices.40 A campaign that fits into a larger strategy is more likely to have a fully thought-out plan for how activists will convince the target corporation to change.41 Furthermore, campaigns that ask multiple corporations within an industry to make the same policy changes can reinforce each other by their success more effectively than can campaigns with disparate targets and goals.42,43,44
  • The campaign is conducted by an organization or individual who is committed to pursuing it over a period of weeks to years.45,46 Advocates we spoke to emphasized the crucial role of persistence in creating successful campaigns.47,48 Campaign staff should be prepared for companies to be unresponsive to initial contacts and should be ready to pursue the campaign using alternative means if a particular approach is unsuccessful.49
  • The campaign is conducted by an organization with prior experience with corporate and institutional campaigns, or the leaders of the campaign have discussed possible strategies with an experienced organization.50 There are many organizations with strong records in corporate outreach, and advocates should use their experience to inform future campaigns.51 Some organizations that have had success with corporate outreach are Compassion in World Farming, Humane Society of the US (Farm Animal Protection Campaign), Mercy For Animals, and The Humane League. Each of these groups uses somewhat different tactics.52

How strong is the evidence about the efficiency of corporate outreach?

In some respects, the evidence about corporate outreach is extremely strong, because it is a type of intervention whose effects are particularly easy to understand. The desired outcome is usually a policy change, and it is easy to tell whether a corporation has drafted and implemented a new policy, particularly if they have an open relationship with an advocacy organization.53 Most corporate outreach is done by organizations who conduct many campaigns per year, or even many campaigns at a time, so they have plenty of opportunities to observe which tactics work and which do not and to estimate their overall success rates and the characteristics of an average campaign.54 Because corporate policy changes (especially in corporations closer to the agriculture side of the food industry) have a fairly direct effect on animal welfare, it is also relatively clear how the outcome of a campaign ultimately affects animals.55 Corporations who supply animal products can make direct changes in animal welfare by changing the requirements for farms they work with and helping farmers implement the new system.56 Corporations who purchase animal products from suppliers and sell them to consumers are sometimes large enough that a shift in their buying requirements will precipitate a shift from their suppliers.57

However, there are significant gaps in our understanding of the medium to long term effects of corporate outreach, where data is not as naturally available to advocates as a byproduct of conducting the campaigns. The first gap is in understanding the implementation of corporate policies. While corporations make public updates to their policies that improve animal welfare standards, these policies are often designed to be implemented over a period of years.58 They may not continue to offer updates on whether they are meeting the timelines laid out by their original policy changes, and if they do, it may not be easy for animal advocates to independently verify their claims.59 Concerns about implementation and follow-up are warranted because issues have arisen in the past.60 It is also generally unclear what the counterfactual impact of corporate outreach is; some companies adopt policies to improve farm conditions without being contacted by animal advocates, so we must consider that some who adopt such policies after being contacted by advocates would have done so on their own after some longer time interval.61 On the other hand, some companies who adopt such policies apparently on their own may be doing so in response to changes in the industry attributable in part to corporate outreach efforts.62 We think that animal advocates working in corporate outreach generally cause policies to be implemented 1-10 years before they would have been implemented by corporations anyway, but acknowledge that this is an estimate not based on direct evidence.63 Alternatively, for practices that would not have been otherwise adopted and which companies may abandon in the future, we think a 1-10 year period of improved practices is likely; corporate policies are not decided or changed on a whim, so very short time periods are less likely than somewhat longer ones.64 However, it is important to note that for policies calling for gradual implementation, the 1-10 years they are in effect may consist of time in which the company explores options for implementing the change, or implements it for some but not all animals which should eventually be affected.65

Finally, there is extremely limited evidence available to suggest how corporate outreach may shift conditions for farmed animals over the very long term. We aren’t aware of anyone who has attempted to study this subject explicitly, and there are few clear parallels to past situations in other movements.66 In the absence of strong evidence, multiple contradictory theories are possible for how corporate outreach could affect the situation for animals in the far future, as we discussed above.

Resources

Conversation with Josh Balk
Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014)

  1. “The vast majority of the victories HSUS has gotten in corporate outreach have been the results of friendly negotiation with executives, shareholder resolutions, and working with investors.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  2. “THL uses some tactics that other groups doing corporate advocacy wouldn’t use. Once they have chosen a target for a campaign, they contact the company and say that the company is behind on an issue and using practices the public does not support, but that their preference is to resolve the situation quietly by the company making a commitment to boycotting battery cages (or the relevant practice). If that doesn’t work, THL will set up petition pages with Change.org… They will also set up a website, often with a video associating the company with the issue, and send this out to leadership and staff members to show that the public is responding. Once the petition gets enough signatures, they reach out to media and retailers (for food manufacturers) and point out how many consumers have gotten involved. In general, at this point they reach out to stakeholders like other businesses and investors to increase the pressure on a company. THL also does some grassroots action, like leafleting outside locations to inform customers or potential customers about the issue[.]” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  3. “Once HSUS has a relationship with a company, it is easier to bring up other issues; for instance Compass Group now has policies about cage-free eggs, gestation crates, and encouraging meat reduction.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  4. Compassion over Killing has conducted campaigns to get companies making vegetarian meat substitutes to remove eggs from their product line or provide vegan options and to encourage chain restaurants to provide more vegan menu items. 

  5. “The first step [on Meatless Mondays] is similar [to corporate campaigns and cage-free egg policies at schools]; THL meets with the dining team and tries to sell it to them citing other schools doing it, reasons why it is a good idea, and good press coverage other districts have gotten. If that doesn’t work, they’re usually worried that the community or parents will be upset. THL goes to classrooms, via humane ed or otherwise, and goes door-to-door in residential neighborhoods, to get signatures from students and parents in support of the idea.” Ultimately, they use public pressure (if needed) to convince the dining team to make a change. – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  6. “The big difference between working with corporations and working with school districts is that HSUS has purchased stock in virtually every major publicly traded food company. This allows them to continue trying to work with companies even if the companies are not interested. With school districts (unless there’s a grassroots campaign), if the Director of dining doesn’t want to engage in dialogue, it’s hard to continue pursuing change in that district. However, there are so many schools out there that even if 98% don’t respond to HSUS’s calls or emails, there are enough districts who engage to create massive change.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  7. Based on estimates of corporate outreach campaign costs and effects provided by The Humane League and the Humane Society of the United States, we estimate that a corporate outreach campaign relieves an equivalent of approximately 5 years of factory farm suffering per dollar spent. However, our error bounds were very wide, between .002 and 8,821 years of suffering averted per dollar. Our uncertainty came from two sources:

    1. Most significantly, uncertainty about the average amount of suffering averted by a corporate policy change. While it is possible to assess how many animals are affected per year by policies implemented after a campaign is completed, we don’t feel we have a good understanding of how many years of policy change can be attributed to a campaign (because companies could go back on their commitments and also because companies could change their policies based on evolving industry norms without being contacted directly by animal advocates). We also don’t have a good sense of how much of the total suffering of life on a factory farm is averted by the kinds of policies typically implemented as a result of corporate outreach.

    2. Variance in costs and outcomes between campaigns. Campaigns that use public pressure or require the purchase of corporate stock to influence can be much more expensive than campaigns that in which animal advocates have an easier time gaining access to corporate decision makers. Also, campaigns involving very large corporations can have significantly larger outcomes than campaigns involving smaller companies; an organization’s effectiveness at corporate outreach could vary significantly based on the types of companies they were able to target and influence. See our Corporate Outreach Intervention Calculation Sheet. 

  8. “THL has not failed to get a commitment from any company they have targeted with a public campaign.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  9. “HSUS’s team is actively engaged in communication with around 100 major food companies at a time. It can take several weeks to several years for these discussions to result in policy changes…The vast majority of the victories HSUS has gotten in corporate outreach have been the results of friendly negotiation with executives, shareholder resolutions, and working with investors. Josh states there were only 4 larger campaigns in the past 10 years.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  10. We do not know of any specific attempts to measure the effectiveness of campaigns aiming to persuade individual consumers to purchase cage-free eggs or other higher welfare products. Because of confusing and poorly regulated welfare labeling, we think such efforts face very difficult conditions, at least in the United States. USDA definitions of common terms such as “cage-free”, “natural”, and “free-range” often do not conform to consumer expectations, so advocates must not only convince consumers that it is necessary for their food to be produced humanely, but also teach them to recognize whether it has been. – USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. (2012). National Organic Program. 

  11. HSUS has recently led a major push to eliminate gestation crates from the pork industry, largely through corporate campaigns. “Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well. So in any sector, they need a leader to make the first policy. For gestation crates, that was McDonald’s on the restaurant side, Compass Group on the foodservice side, ConAgra on food manufacturing, and Safeway in groceries. Once they have these leaders, they can point out these successes to competitors to demonstrate that the change will fit in their business model. The gestation crate campaign has been very successful with these tactics; virtually every major player in the food industry has created a policy against it…HSUS is close now to having so many victories on the gestation crate issue that the practice will die out.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  12. “The hardest victory in an area is the first one. Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well.” – Conversation with Josh Balk.

    Corporate policies are also cited as examples in public discourse about animal welfare. For instance, policies from McDonald’s, Burger King, and Smithfield are cited in a recent New York Times op ed explaining why New Jersey should ban gestation crates. – Maher, B. (October 17 2014). Free Pigs from the Abusive Crates. New York Times. 

  13. “Legislators want to know what corporations are doing, and corporations want to know what legislators are doing, so both types of effort help each other. Corporate and legal bans feed off each other in a positive way.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  14. Individual moral judgements are affected by perceptions of others’ moral beliefs. Because food corporations are mostly not known for their concern for animal welfare, when they take visible steps to prevent animal suffering, their implied belief that animals suffer and reducing their suffering is the right thing to do is likely to be perceived as reflecting a larger moral consensus. Individuals who do not agree with this perceived consensus will tend to shift their views toward what they perceive as the norm, usually without conscious effort.

    This view of moral reasoning as a social and intuitive process is derived from that articulated by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind. 

  15. Campaign success also varies due to other factors than the campaign goal, including the type of outreach used and the attitudes of executives at particular companies. But campaigns on confinement issues seem dramatically quicker to result in success than similar campaigns to reduce use of animals products or to provide plant-based alternatives. For example, The Humane League and Compassion Over Killing both use public pressure to encourage corporate change.

    The Humane League has focused on confinement issues, and their “campaigns each last at most a few months before the corporation makes some type of commitment to a policy. THL has not conducted any active campaigns that didn’t result in policy change within this timeframe.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014).

    Compassion Over Killing has led several corporate outreach campaigns focused on reducing animal product consumption and providing vegan options. We think their campaign regarding Dunkin’ Donuts has been typical of campaigns which engage chain restaurants in this area. Compassion Over Killing began convincing individual locations to offer soymilk in 2008. But their public calls for the chain to offer dairy-free milk and vegan donuts at all locations date to at least 2010 and did not result in company-wide change until 2014, when Dunkin’ Donuts announced they would begin carrying almond milk in all locations. – Compassion Over Killing. We Love Dunkin. 

  16. “Every company is different, but even the most difficult will make changes if THL can convince them that it is in their rational economic interest to do so; they can’t just continue in their practices whatever the cost. Some companies see themselves as trying to be humane to animals, and others have their identity tied up in their relationships with animal farmers, but ultimately all of them react to their economic interests.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  17. This is particularly true when confinement practices are cheaper to use than the alternative. One reason why anti-gestation-crate campaigns have been so successful is that gestation crates do not make a large difference to the cost of producing pork, so advocates need not produce as large a reputational threat as when discussing other practices, such as the use of battery cages, which affect costs more substantially.

    “Corporate executives are usually very busy with other things and often not aware of the details of farming practices until HSUS brings them to their attention. This makes confinement practices a good first issue to discuss, because they are easy to grasp in a limited amount of time. It’s not too difficult to convince companies that moving away from those practices is the right thing to do, but figuring out how to do it can be harder. On the gestation crate front, this hasn’t been as hard, but with cage-free eggs there are cost issues that need motivation and creativity to surmount.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  18. A telephone survey developed by academic Researchers found that most Americans expressed concern over farm animal welfare, with a majority of respondents saying that housing chickens in cages and pigs in crates was inhumane. However, fewer than 3% of respondents were vegetarian, and respondents rated farm animal welfare overall as a less important concern than food prices, food safety, or the financial well-being of US farmers. – Lusk, J.L. et. al. Consumer Preferences for Farm Animal Welfare. 

  19. Advocates also sometimes draw public attention to an issue, to demonstrate what the public reaction actually is and apply further pressure to companies. “If [directly requesting that executives make policy changes] doesn’t work, THL will set up petition pages with Change.org, which helps get the message out and also contacts the target of the campaign each time someone signs a petition. They will also set up a website, often with a video associating the company with the issue, and send this out to leadership and staff members to show that the public is responding. Once the petition gets enough signatures, they reach out to media and retailers (for food manufacturers) and point out how many consumers have gotten involved. In general, at this point they reach out to stakeholders like other businesses and investors to increase the pressure on a company. THL also does some grassroots action, like leafleting outside locations to inform customers or potential customers about the issue, which doesn’t necessarily have a big direct impact, but is upsetting and annoying and increases the pressure to reach a resolution.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  20. Such changes include increases in the proportion of vegan or vegetarian items on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves. While consumers are unlikely to actively oppose such a change, most likely would not feel strongly positive about it either. The Vegetarian Resource Group has commissioned two nationally representative polls to determine how often Americans order vegetarian meals when dining out, and each found that around 6 percent of the population always chooses a vegetarian dish, while around 40 percent of the population never orders a vegetarian meal. The rest of the population sometimes orders vegetarian food; while these people might appreciate additional vegetarian options, it’s likely that most would not feel strongly one way or the other. – Stahler, C. (2008). How Many People Order Vegetarian Meals When Eating Out? Vegetarian Journal. 

  21. There will always be some variation in what corporate outreach can achieve based on the leadership of individual corporations, including some companies making changes ahead of public opinion because they see themselves as particularly caring towards animals. “Some companies see themselves as trying to be humane to animals, and others have their identity tied up in their relationships with animal farmers, but ultimately all of them react to their economic interests.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  22. Individual moral judgements are affected by perceptions of others’ moral beliefs. Because food corporations are mostly not known for their concern for animal welfare, when they take visible steps to prevent animal suffering, their implied belief that animals suffer and reducing their suffering is the right thing to do is likely to be perceived as reflecting a larger moral consensus. Individuals who do not agree with this perceived consensus will tend to shift their views toward what they perceive as the norm, usually without conscious effort.

    This view of moral reasoning as a social and intuitive process is derived from that articulated by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind. 

  23. Not all changes that advocates view as improving animal welfare impose similar increases in production costs of animal products. In particular, corporations have been slower to eliminate battery cages for chickens than gestation crates for sows in part because the cost difference in larger for cage-free eggs than for gestation-crate-free pork. “On the gestation crate front, [convincing companies to change] hasn’t been as hard, but with cage-free eggs there are cost issues that need motivation and creativity to surmount.” – Conversation with Josh Balk.

    Some changes, such as eliminating the use of fast-growing poultry, would likely be more expensive than eliminating battery cages. 

  24. Here we consider success on the most basic terms: a campaign is successful if it achieves its stated goal, and more successful the more quickly the goal is reached. Whether campaigns that seek to reduce the use of animal products are more or less successful than campaigns for welfare improvements in terms of their effects on animal lives is a difficult question both empirically (because suffering is hard to measure objectively) and philosophically (because there are concerns such as animal freedom from human use, which are not equally addressed by the two types of campaigns). We think that campaigns to increase the availability of plant-based foods have had little enough success in the first sense that they are also less successful in the second sense, but from some points of view, welfare-based campaigns might not even be capable of success in the second sense.

    We do not have a complete accounting of all corporate outreach campaigns, and campaign success also varies due to other factors than the campaign goal, including the type of outreach used and the attitudes of executives at particular companies. But campaigns on confinement issues seem dramatically quicker to result in success than similar campaigns to reduce use of animals products or to provide plant-based alternatives. For example, The Humane League and Compassion Over Killing both use public pressure to encourage corporate change.

    The Humane League has focused on confinement issues, and their “campaigns each last at most a few months before the corporation makes some type of commitment to a policy. THL has not conducted any active campaigns that didn’t result in policy change within this timeframe.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014).

    Compassion Over Killing has led several corporate outreach campaigns focused on reducing animal product consumption and providing vegan options. We think their campaign regarding Dunkin’ Donuts has been typical of campaigns which engage chain restaurants in this area. Compassion Over Killing began convincing individual locations to offer soymilk in 2008. But their public calls for the chain to offer dairy-free milk and vegan donuts at all locations date to at least 2010 and did not result in company-wide change until 2014, when Dunkin’ Donuts announced they would begin carrying almond milk in all locations. – Compassion Over Killing. We Love Dunkin. 

  25. A wide variety of surveys have found that consumers care how farmed animals are treated, at least in some respects, and that they commonly misinterpret food labels to mean that animals have been treated more humanely than they actually have been. This tension is a potential source of support for farm animal advocates. – Animal Welfare Institute. Consumer Perceptions of Farm Animal Welfare. 

  26. Some countries have banned production of foie gras, a product which plays a small role in typical diets but which also is produced under particularly cruel conditions. If the cruel conditions are a crucial part of activists’ ability to get bans on production of specific animal products, specific industries within animal agriculture which modify their practices to be less obviously cruel will be harder for animal activists to fight in fundamental ways. 

  27. That is, some people may be willing to purchase animal products but only if they are produced under circumstances they consider humane. If these circumstances are not actually good for animals, then it might be better not to provide this option. In fact many consumers claim that their purchasing decisions are at least in part guided by animal welfare, but it is likely that this is influenced by social desirability bias. – Lusk, J.L. et. al. Consumer Preferences for Farm Animal Welfare. 

  28. We think this is true in virtually all cases. For example, immediately after World War I, popular opinion held that the war had been so terrible that no one would risk another such conflict with modern weaponry, and leaders tried to establish international structures that would prevent another such conflict. But historians now believe that the terms of the peace settlement contributed to the rise of the Nazi party and the outbreak of World War II. It is often difficult to determine the impacts of specific policy decisions or action groups even in retrospect. MIRI has conducted some research on whether reliably good long-range predictions are achievable. 

  29. “The key findings of this study can be summarised as media coverage of animal well-being and welfare has (i) reduced US pork and poultry demand and (ii) largely reallocated expenditure to non-meat food rather than across competing meats.” – Tonsor, G. T., & Olynk, N. J. (2011). Impacts of Animal Well‐Being and Welfare Media on Meat Demand. Journal of Agricultural Economics. 

  30. Raising welfare standards to the point that the most common methods of raising animals for food did not appear cruel to the typical consumer would reduce the salience of undercover investigations and animal advocacy protests to the mainstream media, potentially reducing coverage by the media of animal welfare issues, especially coverage sympathetic to animal advocates. 

  31. This may be because the far future is difficult to think about strategically at all. We do think many organizations engaging in corporate outreach view it as part of a coherent short or medium term strategy. For instance, “The first consideration in planning a campaign at HSUS is the type of change that they want for animals. Much of Josh’s focus at both HSUS and COK has been on the suffering of chickens in the egg industry, and specifically in battery cages. They devised a strategy to ultimately try to abolish battery cages; part of that strategy was to work with corporations, especially major egg buyers, to start switching them to cage-free eggs.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  32. Animal advocates and corporations typically promote the results of corporate outreach in terms of the benefit to animals, thus at minimum helping to normalize the belief that farm animal welfare is worth deliberately protecting. These messages transfer to media reporting. Here are some examples of coverage:

    Barclay, E. (August 22 2014). Nestle Nudges its Suppliers to Improve Animal Welfare. NPR.

    Gee, K. (January 9 2014). Tyson Urges Hog Farmers to Improve Animal Welfare. Wall Street Journal.

    Martin, A. (March 28 2007). Burger King Shifts Policy on Animals. New York Times. 

  33. We don’t have a formal method for weighing multiple considerations against one another. Since it seems likely that the vast majority of animals we can affect will live in the far future, however, if we were certain about the long-term effects of many interventions, this would probably be our primary consideration in deciding what to promote. It is not, because although it is very important, we don’t have enough confidence in our predictions to base all our decisions on what we believe about the far future. 

  34. Based on estimates of corporate outreach campaign costs and effects provided by The Humane League and the Humane Society of the United States, we estimate that a corporate outreach campaign relieves an equivalent of approximately 5 years of factory farm suffering per dollar spent. However, our error bounds were very wide, between .002 and 8,821 years of suffering averted per dollar. Our uncertainty came from two sources:

    1. Most significantly, uncertainty about the average amount of suffering averted by a corporate policy change. While it is possible to assess how many animals are affected per year by policies implemented after a campaign is completed, we don’t feel we have a good understanding of how many years of policy change can be attributed to a campaign (because companies could go back on their commitments and also because companies could change their policies based on evolving industry norms without being contacted directly by animal advocates). We also don’t have a good sense of how much of the total suffering of life on a factory farm is averted by the kinds of policies typically implemented as a result of corporate outreach.

    2. Variance in costs and outcomes between campaigns. Campaigns that use public pressure or require the purchase of corporate stock to influence can be much more expensive than campaigns that in which animal advocates have an easier time gaining access to corporate decision makers. Also, campaigns involving very large corporations can have significantly larger outcomes than campaigns involving smaller companies; an organization’s effectiveness at corporate outreach could vary significantly based on the types of companies they were able to target and influence. See our Corporate Outreach Intervention Calculation Sheet. 

  35. “Corporate outreach campaigns depend on the momentum of previous similar campaigns, and getting the first corporation to make a change might be very hard. But once there is momentum for a type of change, that is available to everyone….There might not be room for infinite growth in this area, but right now it’s really good how much attention corporate outreach is getting. The momentum is building and David thinks it is opening the possibility for changes that may not have been possible several years ago. ” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  36. “The hardest victory in an area is the first one. Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well. So in any sector, they need a leader to make the first policy.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  37. Compassion Over Killing ran a series of successful corporate campaigns to remove eggs from vegetarian products, then ran some less-successful campaigns, whose struggles they attribute partly to the lack of an overall strategy. “COK would need a new strategy to start approaching more companies in the future. They have found success by having specific company targets, getting one to change, and then moving on the to the next one (which is in turn pressured by the change of the previous company).” – Conversation with Erica Meier. 

  38. Some groups choose campaign topics based on expected public support, because it is easier to persuade companies to change their policies if they perceive that the public cares about an issue. “The confinement issues are also very visceral and cause a lot of suffering, and this makes it easier to appeal to the public when campaigns are organized around these issues. HSUS and other groups want to utilize the public support on these issues to abolish practices like using battery cages and gestation crates.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  39. Changes in law and corporate policy tend to address only the worst abuses of industrial agriculture, so there is a risk that with those issues addressed, policymakers will not continue to take steps to improve animal welfare or end the use of animals. Groups that attempt to change norms and public opinion often seek to provide a clear moral message that human use of animals is wrong or animal suffering matters, which seems likely to have more robustly positive long-term effects if the message is successfully disseminated. 

  40. “The hardest victory in an area is the first one. Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well. So in any sector, they need a leader to make the first policy.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  41. “Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well. So in any sector, they need a leader to make the first policy. … Once they have these leaders, they can point out these successes to competitors to demonstrate that the change will fit in their business model. The gestation crate campaign has been very successful with these tactics; virtually every major player in the food industry has created a policy against it. For cage-free eggs, they have used similar tactics, but those policies are harder to get corporations to implement because they are more expensive.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  42. “Corporate outreach campaigns depend on the momentum of previous similar campaigns, and getting the first corporation to make a change might be very hard. But once there is momentum for a type of change, that is available to everyone.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  43. “The hardest victory in an area is the first one. Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well. So in any sector, they need a leader to make the first policy.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  44. Compassion Over Killing ran a series of successful corporate campaigns to remove eggs from vegetarian products, then ran some less-successful campaigns, whose struggles they attribute partly to the lack of an overall strategy. “COK would need a new strategy to start approaching more companies in the future. They have found success by having specific company targets, getting one to change, and then moving on the to the next one (which is in turn pressured by the change of the previous company).” – Conversation with Erica Meier. 

  45. “THL is actively working on about 2 campaigns at a time, with another 2-3 in a less active stage, not counting companies they have contacted but do not plan to target with a larger campaign. These campaigns each last at most a few months before the corporation makes some type of commitment to a policy.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  46. “HSUS’s team is actively engaged in communication with around 100 major food companies at a time. It can take several weeks to several years for these discussions to result in policy changes.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  47. “The two most important skills for someone working on corporate outreach are persistence and good social skills. Companies don’t come to activists; activists have to go to them, and often have to send reminders and reach out persistently.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  48. “To work with the companies, it takes professionalism, the ability to set realistic goals, and tenacity. Tenacity is probably the most important characteristic.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  49. “If the company is hesitant or does not want to meet, HSUS raises the level of attention on the issue by actions like filing shareholder resolutions, meeting with shareholders, and having friends of executives reach out to ask them to work on the issue.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  50. Of course, this is stronger as a predictor of success when an organizations has had more success with similar campaigns. But we also think organizations which have done considerable work on a variety of corporate outreach campaigns are well-placed to identify promising new approaches. They may also have corporate contacts that make it easier for them to achieve success in campaigns others would not find tractable. For example, consider the relationship between HSUS and Compass Group:”Once HSUS has a relationship with a company, it is easier to bring up other issues; for instance Compass Group now has policies about cage-free eggs, gestation crates, and encouraging meat reduction.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  51. “David suggests that individuals who want to get involved start with local Meatless Mondays or cage-free egg campaigns; he recommends reaching out to THL or HSUS for help getting started, as these groups have materials already assembled that will make conducting such a campaign easier.”–Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  52. Compassion in World Farming engages positively with producers, running an awards program that incentivizes businesses to meet specific standards in order to claim the award.The Humane Society of the US usually engages positively with producers, encouraging them to adopt policies in return for good public relations opportunities, but occasionally uses undercover investigations or stockholder pressure when other tactics don’t work. (See Conversation with Josh Balk.)Mercy For Animals runs undercover investigations with a major goal of exposing typical farming practices to consumers, but also leverages those investigations into corporate outreach when possible, as with recent investigations into Tyson Foods. (See Conversation with Nick Cooney (March 20, 2014).)The Humane League often runs campaigns drawing public attention the farming practices of particular companies, after having approached the company about the policy in question but without having conducted investigations of specific farms. (See Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014).)  

  53. Even if a company does not have a strong relationship with an advocacy organization, they are likely to publish when they have drafted an improved policy because doing so can generate good public relations. We think it isn’t likely that companies would announce such policy changes if they had no intention of honoring them, though, because the risk of being caught in an overt lie would be worse than the potential downsides to openly engaging in practices that are (or have recently been) industry standard.

    However, there is some danger that companies would write a policy intending to adhere to it but for some reason not follow through. We know that in some cases (See Animal Welfare Group Takes Back Food Retailers Award. (March 7 2014). The Poultry Site.), companies have announced these changes, but they may not always do so. Advocates may be able to avoid this risk by structuring policies so that changes must be made with board or shareholder input and by actively following the practices of companies they have worked with.
     

  54. In preparing this report we spoke with representatives from the Humane Society of the US, who told us that they are engaged with about 100 companies at any given time (See Conversation with Josh Balk.) and from The Humane League, who told us that they are engaged with 2-5 companies at any given time (See Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014).). We are aware of organizations which take on occasional corporate campaigns very different from the rest of the work that they do (as with Farm Forward’s campaign relating to Hellman mayonnaise), but there seem to be few enough such campaigns that most are conducted by organizations for which this is a regular part of their activities. 

  55. To be precise, corporate outreach has a direct effect on animals relative to outreach directed at changing consumer behavior. There are still intermediate steps, particularly for retail stores and restaurants which buy food from suppliers who buy animal products from meat, dairy, or egg companies, which buy them from farms. But the intermediate steps between a corporate policy change and an effect on animals are clearer than the intermediate steps between a student watching a video and an effect on animals. 

  56. For instance Smithfield Foods has over 50% of pregnant sows on its own farms in systems that do not use gestation crates, compared to about 10% nationally. They have also notified farmers who work with them on contract that those contracts will be more likely to be renewed if farmers stop using gestation crates. – Doering, C. (January 7 2014). Smithfield Urges Farmers to Stop Using Gestation Crates. USA Today. 

  57. If their requirements do not cause suppliers to change their policies, transferring their business to other suppliers can also make a difference. This is particularly visible when many corporate campaigns target the same policy change.

    “HSUS is close now to having so many victories on the gestation crate issue that the practice will die out. Josh is in contact with pork companies, and the companies that still use gestation crates have yet to tell him where they will sell their products as anti-gestation-crate policies go into effect. … Some companies have accepted the new reality and announced plans to make changes, and others will either have to shift or have their competitors take their business.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  58. We see typical implementation times for policies not implemented immediately in the 5-10 year range, during which time companies gradually switch their entire supply to conform to the new policy. Some policies do not even have a clear timeline attached, as with Hellman’s recent announcement that they would try to implement sexing of chicks in ovo to reduce cruelty in the breeding of laying hens. The Humane Society of the US has a listing of policy updates showing a variety of timelines for policy implementation. – Timeline of Major Farm Animal Protection Advancements. (September 8 2014). HUmane Society of the United States. 

  59. Certification agencies do check individual farms enrolled in their programs over time to ensure that they maintain adequate standards of animal welfare. However, animal advocacy groups which encourage companies to adopt less restrictive policies typically do not have the resources to exhaustively check supply chains. 

  60. For instance, a European supermarket chain which implemented policies to increase the welfare of broiler chickens in cooperation with Compassion in World Farming recently changed their policy to allow chickens to be kept in more crowded conditions, causing CIWF to revoke the award they had issued to the company. – Animal Welfare Group Takes Back Food Retailers Award. (March 7 2014). The Poultry Site. 

  61. “For instance, on the battery cage issue, they might contact a number of retailers, restaurants chains, and so forth. They say they’re working on the issue, mention some competitors that have adopted the desired policy and that the target company is lagging behind, and ask what their plans are. … Some companies say they actually are doing something, or even have already adopted a policy but didn’t put out a press release.” – Conversation with David Coman-Hidy (July 2, 2014). 

  62. Advocates typically find that convincing companies to change their policies is easier when competitors have already announced changes. Presumably a similar mechanism also leads to an increase in the number of companies who make a particular policy change without direct requests from animal advocates. “The hardest victory in an area is the first one. Once HSUS starts getting a whole line of companies creating policies, it’s difficult for their competitors not to go along with it as well.” – Conversation with Josh Balk. 

  63. The proliferation of corporate welfare policies in response to specific issue campaigns from animal advocates appears too great to be coincidental, especially in the case of gestation crates, which were acknowledged as an issue by industry about ten years before HSUS drastically increased their efforts against gestation crates in 2012, resulting in much faster change. (See Patton, L. (February 13 2012). McDonald’s to Phase Out Pig Crates 11 Years After Chipotle. Bloomberg.) So it seems likely that companies who appear to be adopting a policy because of corporate outreach efforts in general would not have adopted the same policy at the same time without those efforts.

    However, corporate outreach works when it makes reasonable demands of companies. This means the decisions companies make are usually decisions they might have eventually made on their own because of trends in the industry or public opinion, or been forced into by default because of changes in the law, as with gestation crate bans in some states. We’ve chosen 10 years as a rather unfavorable-towards-corporate-outreach upper bound for how long it would take companies to arrive at these changes on their own, assuming that animal advocates would continue or increase their use of other tactics such as public education, undercover investigations, and legal initiatives. Of course, because companies affect each others’ behavior, there is very little possibility of truly isolating the effects of corporate outreach on company policy. 

  64. It would be falsely optimistic to assume that gains from corporate outreach will endure forever. Even if the relevant corporations retain their market share, farming has become less humane in many ways in the recent past and, despite the efforts of animal advocates, may do so again. 

  65. For instance, Smithfield Foods pledged in 2007 to eliminate gestation crates from their facilities by 2017, but dropped the target date in 2009, before converting all their facilities to other housing for pregnant sows. After pressure from HSUS and other groups, they reinstated the deadline in 2011. Had they instead returned to their previous position on gestation crates, at no time would their policy change have affected all the pregnant sows in their farms. – Walzer, P. (December 9 2011). Smithfield to End Use of Gestation Crates by 2017. The Virginian-Pilot. 

  66. One parallel that does exist is to the antislavery movement and boycotts of slave-produced goods (with related support for competing industries) and the similar recent “Fair Trade” movement, which also seeks to promote products made by companies who treat human workers fairly. While boycotts of slave-produced goods in the late 1700s and early 1800s did not end slavery as an institution, we don’t see much evidence that they hampered the more radical movements which led to the end of chattel slavery in British territories and in the US. The ultimate effects of the Fair Trade movement are far less clear, since it is ongoing at the present time. 

Corporate Outreach – 2014