Event recording: Rethinking animals in agriculture

Jenny Splitter (Moderator) is an award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief of Sentient, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet covering the impacts of factory farming on climate change, food systems, animals, health, policy and more. Her work has been published in leading publications including The Guardian, Popular Mechanics, Undark and New York Magazine. 

Dr Harriet Bartlett (Panelist) is an interdisciplinary scientist working on figuring out and incentivising the best ways to farm for people, the planet and the animals we farm. Her background is in preclinical veterinary medicine, which she studied at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD (also at the University of Cambridge) focused on comparing the carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, antimicrobial use and animal welfare of a broad range of UK and Brazilian pig production systems - from intensive through to organic systems. She conducted by far the largest study of its kind – personally visiting and collecting data from more than 150 farms. She found tradeoffs were not inevitable and identified the types of farms that best limit negative externalities. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, BBC Farming today and she presented it at New Scientist Live. She is now a Research Fellow in Biology and Geography at the University of Oxford and leads the HESTIA farm trials, which aim to find ways to reduce the impacts of farms - at a rate fast enough and scale large enough to meet planetary goals. She is running the first robust large-scale trials testing of the effects of giving real farmers information on their impacts - currently focused on European pigs, dairy, and crops, Brazilian beef, Kenyan maize, and Vietnamese shrimp.

Josh Milburn (Panelist) is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University in the UK. His research asks what it means to take animals seriously in moral, legal, and political thought. Josh is the author of 2022's Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (from McGill-Queen's University Press) and 2023's Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (from Oxford University Press); he's currently working on Animals, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick's Animal Ethics, under contract with Oxford University Press. Josh is also the host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.

Hibba Mazhary (Panelist) is currently finishing up her part-time PhD at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, focusing on the geographies of slaughter and consumption in the British halal meat industry, including consumer motivations, ethics, certification, and the relationship between meat consumption and exposure to animal death. She teaches undergraduate human geography at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She has worked as a research assistant on several projects, including on meat normalisation narratives in the media, laboratory animal welfare, and parenting and the gut microbiome.

Nikki Yoxall (Panelist) Head of Research at Pasture for Life, and a first-generation farmer based in NE Scotland, where she co-runs Grampian Graziers – working with local landowners to graze cattle for ecological and biodiversity benefit, whilst selling 100% pasture and tree-fed beef to the local community. Nikki is currently undertaking a PhD in Agroecological Transitions and has interests in Holistic Management, agroforestry, and connecting folk with their food.

Cleo Verkuijl (Panelist)’s research focuses on legal and political dimensions of UN sustainable development and climate policy, just and healthy dietary transitions, and animal health and welfare. Cleo has led several multidisciplinary research projects on One Health and just transition approaches to food systems transformation. She was a coordinating lead author of UNEP’s “What’s Cooking” Frontiers report, on the potential of novel meat and dairy alternatives. In 2023-24 she was a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School. Cleo has also served as coordinating lead author of the first two Production Gap Reports. Produced by leading research organizations and the UN, this is the first assessment of the gap between the targets of the Paris Agreement and countries’ planned production of coal, oil, and gas. A Team Leader and Writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin since 2015, Cleo has reported on UN processes on climate, ozone, and the Sustainable Development Goals, among others. She has taught environmental law and policy as an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, and as a tutor for the University of Edinburgh. Cleo has previously worked for the UN Environment Programme in Brussels and was a policy officer with the NGO network Climate Action Network International during the Paris climate negotiations. She holds an LL.M. in Global Environment and Climate Law from the University of Edinburgh.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of resources mentioned during the event and referenced by the panelists during pre-event planning:

• Journal article: Trade-offs in the externalities of pig production are not inevitable (Dr Harriet Bartlett)
• Visualisation: Pathways to animal futures: values, strategies and perspectives (TABLE)
• Blog: On flesh and the spirit: understanding British Muslim’s meat consumption (Hibba Mazhary / TABLE)
• Explainer: What is environmental efficiency? And is it sustainable? (TABLE)
• Journal article: Climate change, public health, and animal welfare: towards a One Health approach to reducing animal agriculture’s climate footprint (Cleo Verkuijl)
• Journal article: A 12% switch from monogastric to ruminant livestock production can reduce emissions and boost crop production for 525 million people (Event attendee)
• Journal article: FAO’s 1.5 °C roadmap for food systems falls short (Cleo Verkuijl)
• Journal article: Understanding the relative risks of zoonosis emergence under contrasting approaches to meeting livestock product demand (Dr Harriet Bartlett)
• Report: Culture Clash? What cultured meat could mean for UK farming (Event attendee)
• Report: A just transition in the meat sector: why, who, and how? (Cleo Verkuijl)
• Organisation: Insect Welfare Research Society (Event attendee)
• Journal article: Plant sentience and the case for ethical veganism (Josh Milburn)
• Journal article: Can insects feel pain? A review of the neural and behavioural evidence (Event attendee)
• Journal article: Protein quality as a complementary functional unit in life cycle assessment (LCA) (Nikki Yoxall)

Imagine a distant future. 

In it, our relationship with the animals we eat has changed for the better. What do you see? A world where regenerative farming allows animals to live natural lives? A world that's meat-free, where humans are brought together by a new consensus against captivity and killing? A world guided by the welfare scientists, whose precise understanding has allowed us to eliminate animal suffering? The global population is growing–in this future, are we eating more meat, or less?

Many critical conversations about animals in the food system are taking place in parallel. Animal activists and vegan charities, animal welfare scientists and ethologists, animal ethicists, conservation scientists–all critique current systems of animal agriculture, but each focus on different specifics and different strategies for change. Each field is diverse, with various voices pushing in different directions. To what extent are they trying to shape common–or at least compatible–futures? Where do stakeholders from different fields agree on ideal outcomes but disagree on near-term tactics (incrementalism vs. transformation)? Where do they fundamentally disagree on what utopia might look like, even if they agree on the current direction of travel?

In this session, we bring together experts in animal welfare science, One Health, animal ethics and moral philosophy to discuss different approaches to our relationships with the animals we eat. Through their conversation, we aim to illuminate not only the different futures towards which different disciplines (more or less implicitly) work, but also the values and priorities that underlie them.

This event will also mark the publication of TABLE’s newest explainer, "Animal ethics and animal welfare in food systems" and the interactive visualisation "Pathways to animal futures: values, strategies and perspectives". In this work we explore the histories and presents of animal welfare science and philosophical approaches to animal ethics, and their roles in the debates around the future of food.