| Status | Exploratory |
| Primary Work Area | General Animal Advocacy Legal and Legislative |
| Website | Verein Gegen Tierfabriken |
| Review Published | December, 2016 |
Verein Gegen Tierfabriken (VGT), or the Association Against Animal Factories, is an animal charity based in Vienna with ten local chapters throughout Austria. They conduct public outreach in order to change attitudes and promote animal-friendly lifestyles, and they work to improve legal protections for animals through political lobbying. They also host national and international conferences to promote veganism and the animal liberation movement. VGT aims to end all abuse of animals, including in factory farms, labs, hunting, and the fur industry. They argue that pushing for incremental welfare reforms will eventually lead to more systematic change, a view that we generally agree with, as described in our discussion of the long-term effects of corporate outreach.
Verein Gegen Tierfabriken (VGT), or the Association Against Animal Factories, is an animal charity based in Vienna with ten local chapters throughout Austria. They conduct public outreach in order to change attitudes and promote animal-friendly lifestyles, and they work to improve legal protections for animals through political lobbying. They also host national and international conferences to promote veganism and the animal liberation movement. VGT aims to end all abuse of animals, including in factory farms, labs, hunting, and the fur industry. They argue that pushing for incremental welfare reforms will eventually lead to more systematic change, a view that we generally agree with, as described in our discussion of the long-term effects of corporate outreach.
Impact Evaluation:
History of Improving Legal Protections for Animals in Austria
VGT was founded in 1992 and began doing legal work in 1997. Since then, they have worked with other animal rights groups to achieve a number of legal victories for animals in Austria. For example, In 2004, the Austrian parliament unanimously supported a motion to include the protection of the “life and wellbeing of animals” in the constitution (and as of 2013, now contains even stronger wording). In 2005, Austria banned fur farming; it is now illegal to raise an animal for the use of her fur.
VGT, along with other animal rights groups in Austria, also achieved a ban on the use of battery cages for laying hens. This campaign and others by VGT are particularly interesting in their use of confrontational direct action to achieve relatively moderate goals, such as activists chaining themselves to furniture in a government building with dead hens to demand a meeting with the local governor. We have not thoroughly evaluated confrontational tactics, but note that VGT has achieved substantial success with them. We look forward to conducting more research into these strategies in the future.
Varied Potential Impact of Campaigns
Some of VGT’s campaigns have the potential to directly affect larger populations of animals than others, such as their campaign to ban battery cages. The number of caged hens in Austria dropped from 2,506,392 to 239,322 between 2005 and 2009. By comparison, VGT’s campaigns to abolish hunting have the potential to directly affect a relatively small population of animals. In the 2014/2015 hunting season, about 771,000 animals were killed by hunting in Austria.
The impact of VGT’s campaigns may extend further than the local animal populations in Austria. For example, VGT argues that the Austrian ban on fur farming inspired similar bans in other countries. Still, it seems unlikely that VGT’s work on behalf of smaller populations will have sufficiently greater indirect impact than their work for larger populations. In many other countries as well as in Austria, the number of animals in factory farms far exceeds the number of animals in other industries.1
Disagreement on wild animal suffering
Martin Balluch, Chairman of VGT, has stated his opposition to intervention in the wild to help animals. While this view currently doesn’t seem to seriously impact the strategic choices of VGT, we view the suffering of wild animals as a serious moral issue that deserves more research and consideration, and we disagree with some of Balluch’s views on the subject.
For example, Balluch seems to view his own choice to “travel deliberately to a wilderness” as suggesting that suffering in the wild, such as an attack by a bear, wouldn’t be a violation of his autonomy. We agree with this, but think it has little applicability to wild animal suffering because wild animals have not made a similar deliberate decision to take these significant risks. We think that enduring starvation, for example, is most likely an extreme violation of autonomy. The desperate measures animals are willing to take for food when starving indicate a strong preference for avoiding that experience.
For instance, compare the number of animals slaughtered in factory farms by European country to the number of animals killed in the fur industry by country.