Animal-welfare-labelled meat is not a stepping stone to animal-free diets: empirical evidence from a survey

ABSTRACT

A survey is used to test a stepping stone model for meat reduction and farm animal suffering elimination. People’s preferences to eat conventional meat, animal-welfare-certified meat and plant-based meat substitutes are measured in hypothetical situations where everyone else eats certified meat or plant-based meat substitutes. These preferences reflect social norms about food. When everyone else follows a harmful social norm, such as eating conventional meat, violating this norm by following a different diet becomes costly due to social sanctions. Either the survey method has a low sensitivity to detect real stepping stones, or the survey evidence suggests that animal-welfare-labelled meat is not a stepping stone towards the reduction and elimination of animal-based meat. If people transition to eating welfare-labelled meat, they may become less likely to eliminate meat from their diet. Everyone eating welfare-labelled meat is an absorbing state, which prevents a further transition to animal-free meat substitutes. The survey shows very weak and mixed evidence that the introduction of an animal welfare label could be counterproductive for animal welfare. In the long run it could result in a locked-in equilibrium with a less harmful social norm, i.e. a suboptimal state of animal farming that still contains animal suffering.

KEYWORDS:

• Stepping stone
• animal welfare
• meat consumption
• social norms
• abolitionism

JEL:

• D11
• D12
• D70
• Q18

Acknowledgments

The author wants to thank Milan Vervoort for helping with the pilot survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘incrementalist’ is misleading. A welfarist can ask for an immediate, radical reform of the meat production sector, and an abolitionist can ask for the incremental reduction of meat consumption. Hence, reducetarians can be abolitionists if they aim for reductions all the way to zero consumption.

2 The stepping stone model of Gulesci et al. 2021 assumes a finite population of size $N$, in which case the net-cost is defined as $c_{\mathrm{ij}}\equiv s_{\mathrm{ij}}-{\displaystyle \frac{N}{N-1}{b}_{\mathrm{ij}}={\displaystyle \frac{(N-1)s_{\mathrm{ij}}-N{b}_{\mathrm{ij}}}{N-1}}}$. The factor $N-1$ appears with the social sanction $s_{\mathrm{ij}}$ because a person does not sanction herself when switching to another state. Here we assume that $1/N$ is much smaller than the standard deviations, such that we can take the limit $1/N\to 0$ (and hence ${\displaystyle \frac{N}{N-1}\to 1}$) in all hypothesis tests.

3 This is in contrast with the pilot surveys, in which average $u_{\mathrm{HH}}$ was higher than average $u_{\mathrm{LL}}$ and one third to one half of respondents were abolitionists. However, those surveys were not representative for the Belgian population, as they contained relatively more women and university students. In those pilot surveys, only 5% of respondents were reluctant abolitionists, and no-one was a reluctant abolitionist stepping stoner. Sample sizes of the two pilot surveys were N = 188 and 115.

4 One third of them are people who consider themselves as eating mostly plant-based. Those people state that they are already on the abolitionist stone H. For these people, $u_{\mathrm{LH}}$ is 60, which is lower than their utility $u_{\mathrm{LM}}$=64 (although this difference is not statistically significant: t-test p-value 0.6).