Four years of work has led to his moment. When we started this, we knew it would be big. A battle of David versus Goliath as we took the Government to court. But we also knew that it was the right thing to do, to fight for the millions of Frankenchickens that were suffering because of the way that they had been bred. And on Friday 13th December, we got the result we had been nervously waiting for.
Represented by Advocates for Animals, four years ago we started the process to take the Government to court, arguing that fast-growing chicken breeds, known as Frankenchickens, are illegal under current animal welfare laws.
After a loss, and an appeal, in October 2024 we entered the courts once more. And the judgment is now in on one of the most important legal cases for animals in history.
The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred. This is a huge moment for animals in the UK.
A billion Frankenchickens are raised with suffering coded into their DNA each year. They are bred to grow too big, too fast, to make the most profit possible. In light of this ruling, we believe that farmers are breaking the law if they continue to keep these chickens.
However, Defra, the Government department responsible for farming, has been let off the hook on a technicality. Because Defra has been silent on fast-growing breeds of chicken, the judges found they had no concrete policy that they could rule against. This means that our case has been dismissed and the judges have not ordered Defra to act.
It is clear: by not addressing this major animal welfare crisis, Defra has failed billions of animals - and the farming community. This must change.
While this ruling has failed to force the Government to act, it has confirmed our view that farmers are acting criminally by using fast-growing breeds. We will now explore bringing private prosecutions against mega-farms that use Frankenchickens.
The cruel use of Frankenchickens is possibly the biggest animal welfare crisis of our time. With your continued support, we will use this new ruling to do everything we can to bring it to an end.
[Disclaimers: This is more shallow and conclusory than I'd like due to non-EA stuff that has been going on in my life. Although I am a lawyer, I lack professional experience with UK law specifically, although it is a common-law jurisdiction like the US . Still, I thought there was value in me saying something before this got too stale.]
1. The opinion of the Court of Appeals, Civil Division ("CACD") seems to be a mixed bag, and THL UK's post seems overall too rosy. On the other hand, I find VettedCauses' analysis in the comments to be too pessimistic.
2. CACD's interpretation of paragraph 29 seems somewhere in the middle of plausible interpretations of the relevant text. It is certainly more favorable to animal advocacy than the position taken by the lower-court judge below.
3. Paragraph 29 needs to be understood in the context of the broader regulatory scheme, as described in the following excerpt from the judgment (emphasis mine):
I would therefore accept the Secretary of State’s case that Paragraph 29 is a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals whose genotype and phenotype mean that, regardless of the conditions in which they are kept, they cannot be kept without detriment to their health or welfare. However, this needs some further explanation. There is a difference between detrimental characteristics which are inherent in the nature of the breed and which cannot be mitigated by changing the environmental conditions in which the animal is kept, and those which can be so mitigated.
For example, an animal which, because of the way in which it has been bred, is susceptible to cold will not suffer any detrimental effect on its health or welfare if it is kept indoors with appropriate heating during periods of cold weather. It can reasonably be expected, therefore, that such an animal can be kept without any detrimental effect on its health or welfare. The keeping of such an animal is not prohibited by Paragraph 29, although it may be that other provisions of the legislation would be engaged if the animal was kept outside in the winter, or if adequate heating was not provided. That might constitute a failure to take reasonable steps in all the circumstances to ensure that the needs of the animal were met, contrary to section 9 of the 2006 Act.
(This continues with the language quoted by JBentham in another comment.)
In other words, Paragraph 29 covers cases in which no adequate mitigations are available, while advocates need to look to other legislative provisions to cover cases in which adequate mitigations were available but not employed. I assume that these theories could be charged in the alternative in a prosecution (i.e., the advocates would not have to commit to one theory in advance).
4. THL UK did not succeed in compelling the UK authorities to do anything, and seems to have at least de-emphasized this part of its case on appeal. From a US law perspective, it is hard to compel a regulator to regulate when it doesn't want to -- so I am not surprised by the loss or the court's reasoning. The status quo was that Defra wasn't acting, and there wasn't to my knowledge a viable alternative pathway to compel Defra's action. So this is a loss but does not sound like a worsening of the status quo.
5. So what's the theory of impact here? THL UK's post points to planned private prosecutions as the current plan. The English legal system is unusually friendly to private prosecutions -- but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) can take over a privately-conducted prosecution at any time, including with the specific intent of discontinuing the prosecution. This includes cases in which it deems the public-interest test for prosecution is not met. Although I have no knowledge of CPS decisionmaking in these circumstances, I would guess that CPS would weigh the view of the responsible governmental agency quite strongly in making this determination.
6. If Defra has pointedly declined to endorse anything remotely near THL UK's view of the facts and the law, then I speculate that THL UK needed a somewhat favorable judicial interpretation of Paragraph 29 to avoid CPS taking over any potential prosecution and discontinuing it. Litigation was and is always a risk, but THL UK may have reasonably concluded that Paragraph 29 wasn't of much use without either Defra support or judicial support.
7. Likewise, I think most Magistrates' Courts would be very unlikely to convict without some official/authoritative source putting farmers on notice with sufficient specificity that they could be violating the criminal law. That makes sense, because this is a criminal statute and Paragraph 29 is written at a very high level of generality. A report written by an advocacy organization is not, in my view, an official/authoritative source. So again, I think it was reasonable to think that THL UK -- having failed to get buy-in from Defra -- needed something from a precedential judicial authority before initiating criminal prosecutions.
8. Defendants convicted before the magistrates can get a rehearing from the Crown Court (the upper-level criminal court). After that, they can seek leave to appeal to . . . the Court of Appeal. So in all likelihood, any successful path to prosecution would be going through the Court of Appeal one way or another (although it would be the Criminal Division).
9. THL UK isn't made of money. I assume it would be much more cost-effective to figure out what the law is, and then build your trial around that legal standard . . . rather than running all the expenses of trial against very well-heeled defendants and then risking everything getting thrown out because the Criminal Division didn't agree with the lower courts on the law.
10. All in all, the choice of litigation strategy seems reasonable to me, and I suspect there is still a potentially viable way forward for THL UK -- even if it isn't the way forward THL UK might have hoped for.
Whilst I salute the effort and progress here, this post does seem rather full of spin, given that from what I can tell the court ruling was against the animal advocates. I'd rather see posts that present the facts more clearly.
Wow, yeah, I was quite misled by the lead. Can anyone give a more independent assessment of what this actually means legally?
The Humane League (THL) filed a lawsuit against the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (the Defra Secretary) alleging that the Defra Secretary’s policy of permitting farmers to farm fast-growing chickens unlawfully violated paragraph 29 of Schedule 1 to the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007.
Paragraph 29 of Schedule 1 to the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007 states the following:
THL’s case was dismissed.
THL appealed the dismissal, and again THL’s case was dismissed (this most recent dismissal is what THL’s post is about).
In this most recent dismissal, the Court clarified the meaning of Paragraph 29 as follows:
Essentially, the Court ruled that Paragraph 29 is only violated if an animal is bred such that it cannot avoid genetically caused health/welfare problems even under perfect environmental conditions (i.e. giving the animal the best possible food/diet, a perfect living environment, and world class medical treatment). This allows farmers to continue to farm animals so long as their genetic issues can theoretically be mitigated by improving conditions, even if those conditions are unlikely to be implemented in practice.
For example, let’s say there is a genetically selected breed of chicken that under normal factory farming conditions grows so fast that their legs snap under their weight by the time they are a month old. Under the Court’s ruling, this would not violate Paragraph 29, so long as this problem (and other genetically caused problems) could theoretically be mitigated with better environmental conditions (i.e. giving the chicken the best possible food/diet, a perfect living environment, and world class medical treatment).
Since the Court offered this interpretation of Paragraph 29, all trial courts in the UK (except for those in Northern Ireland and Scotland) are now required to use this interpretation of Paragraph 29 when making rulings.
From our understanding, this is not a favorable interpretation of Paragraph 29, as it makes it extremely difficult to prove that a violation of Paragraph 29 has occurred. Under this ruling, the only way to prove that a Paragraph 29 violation has occurred is by proving the health/welfare problems encountered by an animal are completely unavoidable, even with absolutely perfect environmental conditions/treatment.
Because of this ruling, anyone who ever tries to claim a Paragraph 29 violation has occurred will have to meet this extremely high standard of evidence that the Court has laid out.
Huh, yeah, seems like a loss to me.
Correspondingly, while the OP does not engage in "literally lying" I think sentences like "In light of this ruling, we believe that farmers are breaking the law if they continue to keep these chickens." and "The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred." strike me as highly misleading, or at least willfully ignorant, based on your explanation here.
Agreed, this post seems like it goes way against standard forum norms if this is correct
I don’t think THL UK’s view of the case is as unreasonable as implied. (See my reply below.) And it’s reasonable for them to provide their view of what it implies for farmers. But the statement about the judges’ ruling does seem somewhat misleading because it suggests that the law is concerned with whether animals will suffer in practice, whereas it seems to be concerned with whether they will suffer in theory. In other words, something like “the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will invariably suffer because of how they have been bred” may be more accurate. But again, I don’t think this is as hard to prove as it might seem at first glance. (Again, see my reply below for a fuller analysis.)
THL claimed "we believe that last week's ruling on Franken chickens marks 'the beginning of the end of this type of this type of outdated farming'"[1] and has a collaborative post on their Instagram page that states that this ruling marked "a significant victory for animal welfare."[2][3]
The Court dismissed THL's case, and provided an unfavorable interpretation of the animal welfare law in question.[4] All trial courts in the UK (except for those in Northern Ireland and Scotland) are now required to use this unfavorable interpretation of the animal welfare law in question.
Is this a significant victory for animal welfare?
https://x.com/humaneleagueuk/status/1868675467932295355
Note: THL also states in their post "we got the result we had been nervously waiting for" and "This is a huge moment for animals in the UK". Further, on THL's website, they state "The judgment is in on one of the most important legal cases for animals in history."
https://www.instagram.com/p/DDko43NtAeF/?hl=en&img_index=1
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Humane-League-UK-v-Secretary-of-State-for-Environment-Food-and-Rural-Affairs-Press-Summary.pdf
Thanks for getting back to me. I think there is a spectrum of interpretations of Paragraph 29, some more favourable and some less favourable to animals.
The least favourable interpretation is that the law does not provide farms with a "conditional permission" - that is, the law does not establish a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals subject to a "proviso". This was the position taken by a High Court judge in May 2023, and would have ruled out private prosecutions of farms.
The "victory" in the Court of Appeal came in the Court's ruling that:
As Essex Court Chambers put it:
It is true that the most favourable interpretation for animals - that the law establishes a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals in the conditions that they are likely to be kept - was not upheld by the Court.
But I maintain that while this means that the bar is high, I don't think it's as high as it seems at first glance. You rightly point out that the Court said that "Paragraph 29 is a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals whose genotype and phenotype mean that, regardless of the conditions in which they are kept, they cannot be kept without detriment to their health or welfare".
But they go on to say:
Similarly, Welfare Footprint write: "Although the adoption of better management practices – including lower stocking density, longer resting times and the provision of enrichment – is beneficial and desirable for improving broiler welfare, their impact is limited if the negative welfare effects inherently associated with the genetics for fast growth are not addressed."
One question I do have is why THL UK took DEFRA to Court, instead of bringing a private prosecution of a factory farm. One reason might be that this was an attempt to affect the whole industry, whereas any positive Judgment in the case of a particular farm might still only apply to that farm, even if it establishes a precedent that can be used to bring successful prosecutions against other farms. In other words, taking DEFRA to Court may have been considered a quicker and more efficient route.
This might be of interest to: @Ozzie Gooen @MHR @MichaelStJules @bruce @Rasool.
Thank you for clarifying this. We agree that our comment above implied a greater degree of unreasonableness on behalf of THL than was warranted.
That being said, we still believe the law is likely in a worse place for animals compared to before the filing of the initial case. The interpretation offered by the Court appears to be quite strict, and we suspect it will be difficult for subsequent litigants to meet the evidentiary standard established by this case. Hopefully we are wrong about this.
We also still believe that THL’s communication surrounding this case was quite poor, and misleading. Notably, THL did not even disclose the name of the court case in this post, or in the post on their website.
I disagree that this makes it “extremely” difficult to prove that a violation of Paragraph 29 has occurred. A judge might find it hard to imagine environmental conditions that even in theory could mitigate the suffering caused by their genetics. You could feed them less, but farmers already do this with breeder birds (to prevent them from becoming overweight) and this is itself a welfare concern because it can result in starvation.
As Welfare Footprint puts it: "Although the adoption of better management practices – including lower stocking density, longer resting times and the provision of enrichment – is beneficial and desirable for improving broiler welfare, their impact is limited if the negative welfare effects inherently associated with the genetics for fast growth are not addressed."
It is a higher bar than implied by the post, though. (See my post below for a fuller analysis of the case.)
Does someone have a rough fermi on the tradeoffs here? On priors it seems like chickens bred to be bigger would overall cause less suffering because they replace more than one chicken that isn't bread to be as big, but I would expect those chickens to suffer more. I can imagine it going either way, but I guess my prior is that it was broadly good for each individual chicken to weigh more.
I am a bit worried the advocacy here is based more on a purity/environmentalist perspective where genetically modifying animals is bad, but I don't give that perspective much weight. But it could also be great from a more cost-effectiveness/suffering-minimization oriented perspective, and would be curious in people's takes.
(Molly was asked this question in a previous post two months ago, but as far as I can tell responded mostly with orthogonal claims that don't really engage with the core ethical question, so am curious in other people's takes)
Welfare Footprint Project has analysis here, which they summarize:
The reduction in suffering per chicken is probably >24% if this analysis is correct, and it accounts for longer lives. My guess is >50%, giving substantial weight to disabling pain relative to milder pain. Accounting for more chickens necessary for the same amount of meat (EDIT: although WFP assumes they grow to the same weight) wouldn't flip things. (And there would be a reduction in demand to partially offset this, due to higher costs per kg of meat.)
Lameness-related pain primarily due to their breed seems to be the largest source of their suffering and responsible for a lot of suffering, so it makes sense to me that slower growing breeds would be better off.
Thank you! This is the kind of analysis I was looking for.
I think it's worth noting here that (if I'm understanding it right) the alternative breeds recommended by the better chicken commitment are slower-growing but don't have a lower max weight. And the welfare footprint project numbers on pain durations already account for the longer time to reach full weight.
I'm not sure, but the optimal weight at slaughter could be lower, which I think Lusk et al. (blog post) found for the US. Even if they could reach the same maximum weight, it may be more profitable to slaughter them at lower weights.
Ya, I intended to imply that, but could have worded things better. I've edited my comment.
Gotcha, that makes sense! Even if producers slaughter at a lower weight, I think the number of chicken-days of life per kg of meat shouldn't change much relative to what goes into the WFP analysis. So I don't think that producers slaughtering earlier changes the quantity of time spent suffering very significantly, just whether it's distributed among fewer longer-lived chickens or more shorter-lived chickens.
Ah, ya:
(Obvious flag that I know very little about this specific industry)
Agreed that this seems like an important issue. Some quick takes:
Less immediately- obvious pluses/minuses to this sort of campaign:
- Plus #1: I assume that anything the animal industry doesn't like would increase costs for raising chickens. I'd correspondingly assume that we should want costs to be high (though it would be much better if it could be the government getting these funds, rather than just decreases in efficiency).
- Plus #2: It seems possible that companies have been selecting for growth instead of for well-being. Maybe, if they just can't select for growth, then selecting more for not-feeling-pain would be cheaper.
- Minus #1: Focusing on the term "Frankenchicken" could discourage other selective breeding or similar, which could be otherwise useful for very globally beneficial attributes, like pain mitigation.
- Ambiguous #1: This could help stop further development here. I assume that it's possible to later use selective breeding and similar to continue making larger / faster growing chickens.
I think I naively feel like the pluses outweigh the negatives. Maybe I'd give this a 80% chance, without doing much investigation. That said, I'd also imagine there might well be more effective measures with a much clearer trade-off. The question of "is this a net-positive thing" is arguably not nearly as important as "are there fairly-clearly better things to do."
Lastly, for all of that, I do want to just thanks those helping animals like this. It's easy for me to argue things one way or the other, but I generally have serious respect for those working to change things, even if I'm not sure if their methods are optimal. I think it's easy to seem combative on this, but we're all on a similar team here.
In terms of a "rough fermi analysis", as I work in the field, I think the numeric part of this is less important at this stage than just laying out a bunch of the key considerations and statistics. What I first want is a careful list of costs and benefits - that seems mature, fairly creative, and unbiased.
I think this feels like a very aggressive zero-sum mindset. I agree that sometimes you want to have an attitude like this, but I at least at the present think that acting with the attitude of "let's just make animal industry as costly as possible" would understandable cause backlash, make it harder to come to agreements, and I think a reasonable justice system would punish people who do such things (even if they think they are morally in the right).
I feel like that's pretty unfair.
You asked for a "rough fermi estimate of the trade-offs", I gave you a list of potential trade-offs.
If we're willing to make decisions with logic like, "while genetically modifying unnaturally fast-growing chickens in factory farms would increase the pain of each one, perhaps the math works out so that there's less pain overall", I feel like adding considerations like, "this intervention will also make meat more expensive, which will reduce use" is a pretty vanilla consideration.
No, those are two totally separate types of considerations? In one you are directly aiming to work against the goals of someone else in a zero-sum fashion, the other one is just a normal prediction about what will actually happen?
You really should have very different norms about how you are dealing with adversarial considerations and how you are dealing with normal causal/environmental considerations. I don't care about calling them "vanilla" or not, I think we should generally have a high prior against arguments of the form "X is bad, Y is hurting X, therefore Y is good".
The chickens don't end up weighing more at the point that they go to slaughter - the faster growth rate is so that they get to the same slaughter weight in a shorter space of time, which uses less feed. Chickens with faster growth rates therefore aren't replacing more than one slower-growing chicken.
The slower-growing breeds live for longer, which would be bad if it was extending the same pain intensity over a longer period of time, but this seems like it isn't what happens: https://welfarefootprint.org/broilers/
Sure, I don't think it makes a difference whether the chicken grows to a bigger size in total, or grows to a bigger size more quickly, both would establish a prior that you need fewer years of chicken-suffering for the same amount of meat, and as such that this would be good (barring other considerations).
FWIW, Molly's comment you linked to quoted and cited Welfare Footprint Project and basically addressed something like "grows to a bigger size more quickly":
You are right! I had mostly paid attention to the bullet points, which didn't extract the parts of the linked report that addressed my concerns, but you are right that it totally links to the same report that totally does!
So pleased to see this! Please update us on the next steps when you know about them. (Though I understand that sometimes it is better not to share details about legal cases).
Specifically, I'm wondering: does the judge agreeing with the key argument open up other potential legal cases, for example? If DEFRA's labelling scheme became a reality, would that mean they'd have to make statements about the wellbeing of Frankenchickens?
From the rest of the comments, it looks as if I misunderstood this line: "The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred. This is a huge moment for animals in the UK." I.e., it looks as if it should be rephrased to "solely because of how they have been bred", still a good thing, but not the home run I was hoping for.
I really appreciated clarification from @JBentham (this is particularly helpful), and the pushback on the content of the post from @Habryka, @VettedCauses and others!
Great victory from THL UK -- well done!