Terrible news affecting billions of animals was received last week.
Two years after EU policymakers declared the most ambitious plan ever by any government to phase out some of the cruelest practices in factory farming, this legislation, along with a suite of other reforms that would reduce the suffering of potentially billions of farmed animals, have been dropped.

A leak from earlier this year outlined the EU Commission’s plans for the world’s most comprehensive farm animal welfare reforms to date. In addition to legislation to phase out cages for farmed animals across the EU’s 27 member states, the Commission planned to put a ban on the routine mutilation of hundreds of millions of animals every year such as piglet castration, to stop some of the currently common and legal murder methods of about a billion farmed fishes, shortening the transport of live animals, to stop the practice of slaughtering day-old chicks, to stop the sale and production of fur, to reduce the crowdedness in the chicken industry, and stopping chickens from growing at such rates that essentially they can’t stand up because their legs can’t support their own weight.

Such a reform in EU would have possibly induced and bolstered momentum for similar changes in other countries as well. That is especially so considering that both animal advocates and farmers have been pushing for the new standards to also apply to food imported from outside the EU, which could reduce the suffering of hundreds of billions of animals all over the world.

Regardless of your personal views on welfare reforms, considering our general views and what we think animal activists should do with their precious time, the crucial point we want to make here is more about the reasons such legislation has failed, and about the lesson we think should be learned from the fact that a unique process has initiated this act and yet it failed.

Commission officials admitted that the legislation had been dropped due to pressure from the powerful European meat lobby, and concerns over rising food costs due to inflation, extreme weather, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Again it is made so clear how a handful of powerful key players in the human political game can so tremendously affect the lives of billions of sentient nonhuman animals.
As always, the fate of billions of sentient beings is determined by economic and political interests, not ethics.

And this story also has a depressing aspect from supposedly democratic sense.
This legislation proposal came about as a result of what’s called a European Citizens’ Initiative, in which EU citizens can propose a policy directly to the Commission so long as they collect at least 1 million signatures in support of it. The Commission doesn’t have to adopt the proposal, but it at least has to formally respond to it. A coalition of animal groups has managed to gather more than the required million signatures, and so the Commission agreed to craft the legislation.

Olga Kikou, Head of Compassion in World Farming EU and substitute representative of the ‘End the Cage Age’ European Citizens’ Initiative said that “After years of strong citizen engagement and clear-cut commitments, the Commission is now betraying EU citizens who believed in what was promised in 2020,” and added that “The farm animal revolution that everyone was expecting would have diminished the suffering of hundreds of millions of animals every year. It has fallen victim to political games and those who espouse business as usual.”

Obviously this is far from being our main concern here, however this should function as an important reminder of how the world really works.
Even when something that may turn at least some parts of the lives of at least some animals into at least a little bit less horrifying, it is being trampled by factors and motives that has nothing to do with the victims themselves, who as always, are treated as pawns in a cruel game where their lives are being absolutely controlled by others.

Activists must not confuse accepting reality for what it is and acknowledging reality for what it is. This is our world and us activists are the last who should paint a prettier picture. We are also the last who should accept it. We can choose to keep fighting to marginally scrape the edges of this exploitative world, only to see how one political move after another revokes all the little gains we have made, or we can choose to fight all the maladies at once by looking for ways to destroy it.