Comparing animal advo interventions

It does not make sense to ask whether one intervention in animal advocacy is more effective than another, because they all work together. The only thing we can really do is talk about effectiveness in context. Everything balances against one another, so it is not about which intervention is more effective than which. Effectiveness measures are always based on the movement at the time.

It might be the case that if something is found to be not effective, that is because the rest of the movement and society are not in a place where it can be effective. Whereas if something is found to be more effective than something else, that might justify rebalancing the movement’s resources towards those things. It does not necessarily justify throwing all of our resources behind them.

For example, finding that cage-free campaigns are effective indicates that now might be the time to allocate more resources to them. But we would expect that as we allocate more resources to them and away from other projects, we might see them start to be less effective. If we see that cage-free campaigns are effective, we should investigate why and try to get to the bottom of it. We may find that it is about the conditions under which they are effective.

It might be that they are particularly effective because of a current cultural context of companies responding to consumers, facilitated by platforms like Twitter or conscious consumerism. Once you find out why a strategy is effective, you can ask what other strategies feed into that. Similarly, if something is not effective, we should look at the system and why it is not effective.