Animal Lovers Should Partner With Big Business In India
Corporate campaigns are among the most effective ways to create an impact for animals by showing businesses that consumers desire better conditions and more plant-based products. In the U.S. alone, the cage-free campaigns will save a hundred million hens this year. In addition to this direct impact of giving animals more space on industrial farms, welfare campaigns also reduce total consumer demand for animal products. As reforms are given attention by the media, consumers are reminded that most animals do not live the humane and carefree lives suggested by advertisements and labels.
By comparison, advocacy efforts that target individual consumers are often less effective because the efforts do not change corporate practices or the underlying shortage of animal-friendly food options at stores and restaurants. It is incredibly taxing and difficult to convince people to go vegetarian or vegan, and there are many statistical hurdles in measuring how effectively we do it due to social desirability biases, self-reporting errors and small sample sizes.
Corporate campaigns, however, have groundbreaking and measurable effects. In the past year itself, Kraft Heinz agreed to improve chicken welfare by providing more space per chicken, better lighting, environment and supplier verifications by 2024. Nestle USA committed to going completely cage-free by 2020 due to pressure from the Open Wing Alliance, a consortium of animal groups. The international hotel chain Marriott declared it would go cage-free by 2025, due to pressure following a horrific undercover investigation. General Mills committed to boycotting pork producers that use gestation crates, dairy producers that dehorn and cut off the tails of cows and go cage-free.
Corporate reforms of similar magnitude are desperately needed in India, where the urban middle class is eating more meat, dairy and eggs than ever before, and the demand for these products is set to rise. This has led to widespread national concerns relating to human health, environmental impact, and animal cruelty.
While key corporate successes for farmed animals in India have come from legal advocacy efforts, there is merit in taking the Western approach to work with industry forces to hasten reform. India recently set an extremely positive precedent in the formulation of the India Institutional Outreach Coalition (IOC) for farm animal protection, which includes key Indian and Western organisations working within the farmed animal space.
The coalition’s aims are to streamline strategies for the Indian animal protection movement while sharing resources, expertise, and networks. It also aims to create a united face for the animal protection movement, showing corporations that Indians believe animals deserve better. Together, the animal protection movement should rally its supporters to contact businesses about animal welfare, to accelerate their commitments, and to hold them accountable to their advertising.
Indian meat, dairy and egg corporations lack the tremendous political and cultural power of their counterparts in the U.S, which presents a strong opportunity to hold them accountable to society’s values.
Indian advocates are exempted from many of the problems U.S. activists’ face, like lawsuits for exposing cruelty and corporate lobbying to punish vegan companies. This gives our nation the chance to end the encroachment of Western practices and become a world leader in humane industry standards, a tremendous historical feat.
There are ample opportunities to get started. Consumers should make demands of leading Indian poultry producers such as Venkateshwara Hatcheries and Suguna Foods, dairy producers such as Amul, Mother Dairy and Kwality Limited, as well as the Indian counterparts of cooperative international food companies such as McDonald’s, Nestle and Starbucks.
One way to do this is the classic good cop-bad cop approach: formally engaging with an institution to discuss meat or dairy reduction possibilities, and running PR campaigns and undercover exposes if companies fail to meet their promises. If coordinated correctly, companies are likely to change in clusters, because chains like Domino’s are more likely to serve plant-based cheese options if we convince Pizza Hut to as well.
Long-term strategies for corporate reform in India should be the top priority of its animal advocates. Large animal advocacy groups should continue their efforts to teach grassroots advocates how they can carry out corporate campaigns that tap into widely-shared consumer sentiment. This critical opportunity to create a better world for animals should not be taken for granted.
