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Humane Society CEO: Customers prefer restaurants that show compassion to animals

The CEO of the Humane Society of the United States discusses why he believes that restaurant brands embracing animal exploitation will lose cusomers.

June 15, 2016 by Joseph Grove, Contributing Writer — Founder, Orchard Content

Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, believes that customers are forcing restaurants and other food sellers to change their practices and has recently written a book, "The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals,” describing the progress.

He recently spoke with me about how the restaurant industry is changing.

Joseph Grove: Wayne, you start your book very boldly. In the fourth paragraph of your introduction, you say, “If you are part of the old, inhumane economic order, get a new business plan or get out of the way. You’re already in danger of being too late.” Should restaurateurs be intimidated by that statement or excited by it?

Wayne Pacelle: Well, I’m not sure about that. I think that statement is really a bit of a gentle warning that if animal exploitation is part of your business model, you’re going to face a range of risks. You can remedy that situation by embracing animal protection and seizing an opportunity to connect with customers.

JG: Do you consider most restaurants, Wayne, to be part of the inhumane economy now?

WP: That’s a good question. I think MOST of them are sort of unwitting partners in the business of factory farming. Factory farming has become the dominant production method for animal products. And I don’t think that there is malice or calculation in trying to cause harm to animals. I think that it’s a very commercially connected enterprise to these harsh agricultural systems. And consumers are now increasingly alert to those problems. They’re asking players on the supply side and the sales side to make adjustments to account for the needs of animals. And that means that any company, including a company that’s selling food, really must think about what’s happening in its supply chain.

JG: I know I was a long time Qdoba customer, and when Chipotle stopped serving all pork because they weren’t happy with the conditions in which some of the pork they were serving was raised, even though I’m not an animal eater, I switched brands because of that. Is that one reason why the operator should embrace rather than resist the humane economy?

WP: When it comes to food, it’s one of life’s most basic necessities and we need food to survive, so there’s no question that food is a part of every hour of every day for us. If we’re not eating, we’re thinking about it or thinking about obtaining it some ways. But that basic necessity also connects to our value systems in society, and food—the question of food—radiates out into discussion of animal welfare, environmental protection, public health, personal health and resource allocation. It is such a basic question. We should not confront the question of food from one really narrow metric, which is let’s get taste and let’s meet our caloric needs. There’s so much more to it than that. And I think that people on all sides of the equation need to look at that broad set of values that connects to food.

JG: HSUS has made so much progress in such a short amount of time. I would look at that and ask you two questions. One: Where will the restaurant industry be relative to these issues in 10 years? And two: Do you run the risk at some point of compassion fatigue? I mean how far can you really go with these victories?

WP: Well, let me say about number one, 10 years from now, restaurants and other food sellers won’t be connected at all to intensive confinement of animals on farms because that will have ended. We will have also dealt with mutilation practices like tail-docking and a number of other harsh and severe procedures that became routine within animal agriculture. I think that we will see a dramatic increase in information and labeling for consumers to make informed judgments about the food they’re eating. So that will relate to nutritional issues like calories, fat and nutrients, but it will also relate to conditions for the animals, any inputs of the animals in terms of drugs or other outside agents. And I think that we’ll see a tremendous increase in the number of plant-based offerings, many of which have high protein content and are better for us than meat.

The second question is about our compassion fatigue. You know, I think that’s a risk, but I also believe that any business and any person who is a thoughtful one is about continuous improvement, and I don’t see companies or people becoming fatigued. I think that agriculture is always changing the way it operates to do better, and it starts mainly around questions of efficiency. I think we can do so around questions of animal welfare also. I think that the pressures are going to come from so many angles that farmers are going to have an incentive to have continuous improvement in animal agriculture.

[Look at] the labeling system now called the Global Animal Partnership, which is a five-step-plus rating program, where consumers have information about the conditions for the animals. There are six tiers. That is a much stronger information framework than a binary system where you know it’s humane or it’s not humane. This is a gradation where there’s continuous improvement among consumers. There’s continuous improvement among farmers. I think that’s the sort of circumstance that we’re going to find ourselves living with, which is much greater choice, a push to reach higher standards of animal welfare.

JG: Regarding the egg industry in particular, you’ve got the continuum of what some would call abuses along the way, and certainly cage-free environments remedies the center part of that hen’s life. But you do have the issue with the male chicks at the beginning, the maceration, and, of course, you have the spent-hen slaughter houses at the other end. Do you see the industry moving eventually in the United States to address those as well?

WP: Definitely. And I think we’ll have a technological solution that is implemented very soon on the killing of the male chicks. There are German researchers that have already identified a sex- selection method for the developing eggs. The issue of the disposal of spent hens is a more complex one. With the suffocation and the maceration of the chicks, you can get ahead of that problem by disposing of the egg before a creature forms in any meaningful way. But at the end of the life of the hen, there’s not a lot of talk about retirement homes for them to allow them to live out their natural lives, so this will remain, I think, a fundamental moral problem for folks concerned about the full life of the animal.

JG: Many of our readers are pizzeria operators. Your book doesn’t go into a great detail on dairy, but certainly many people who are vegans see that industry as a source of great harm. Will there come a day when I can go to Papa John’s and order a pizza with vegan cheese?

WP: Oh, yes. Definitely. You’re seeing vegan cheeses improving in terms of their quality and taste and functionality, and that process will continue and we’ll have great tasting vegan cheeses that are good for you. So, yes, I think that will just become one of the offerings in the marketplace. Part of it is even if you’re with a group of five or six people and one person is vegan, a restaurant is not going to want to give that one person veto power over the restaurant selection. So the restaurant should be offering something for people with that dietary preference, and I think that’s just going to be a good business move for companies.

When it comes to the broader issue of dairy production, and also egg production, these are natural reproductive processes and there’s nothing inherently problematic with either of those processes. The difficulty comes with selective breeding to accentuate those reproductive capacities to the point where the animal’s system is severely stressed by overproduction. So laying-hens are producing 265 eggs a year and that is stressing their system because that’s not a normal ovulation cycle. The industrial dairy cow produces 27,000 pounds of milk a year, and that is many times the output of a cow who lived some decades ago. This is why dairy cows are spent at 3, 4 and 5 years of age while they can live into their teens if they’re given a normal sort of output triggered from their genetic makeup.

I think this is the problem, that we have manipulated the animals genetically to produce, and they have chronic pain or they have other systems failures at a premature age. I think that one of the big issues that we will look to in the years ahead is the underlying genetic health of these animals and to unwind some of the genetic and hereditary problems that these animals have as a consequence of a breeding program designed to maximize output.

JG: You know we talk about the kinds of changes that you’re talking about right now and it seems to me as I follow through with it economically that we’ll end up having fewer available animal-based products, albeit humanely prepared and raised, and that may increase costs. Is there a danger of ethical eating becoming a luxury for the well-off and something that escapes the poor?

WP: I think that right now what happens in our society is that we do not have a proper accounting of the meat and other animal products that we consume, that government intervention has distorted the market and the absence of proper regulations has allowed cost to be passed on to consumers and local communities and to the healthcare system and to other parts of our society.

So the issue of factory farming is chock full of externalities where all sorts of costs—billions and billions of dollars in cost—are passed on to folks as a consequence of this kind of production and consumption system and we’re just not paying for it at the checkout counter at the supermarket. We’re paying for it with our healthcare costs, and we’re paying for it with our environmental remediation actions. We’re paying for it with increased medical costs as a consequence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and salmonella poisoning. I think then that we have a false sense of the cost right now.

I also think that there a lot of folks who are economically disadvantaged, yet we still have very high rates of obesity and heart disease among people who do have economic challenges, and I think that proper valuing of plant-based foods is going to be cheaper and more cost effective. Unless an animal is raised on grass, that animal is going to require enormous inputs of cultivated crops in order to produce animal products. It was 40 years ago-plus that Frances Moore Lappé said that animals are protein factories in reverse. They take a lot of plant matter and the animals convert that plant matter into a small amount of animal protein. And the reason that I mention that is if you look at the fundamentals of food production, if you grow plants directly for people rather than grow them indirectly to feed to animals, it’s inherently a much more efficient a system. You have much less land cultivation. You have a smaller volume of food, which means less in the way of seeds and any other inputs and water—all of these resources that go into production cost money— and when you are growing less of it is should be a lower cost but we have an upside system because of subsidies and deregulation. With a proper accounting marketplace, which is what I call for in “The Humane Economy,” we’ll get back on track with a more rational cost structure for food products.

JG: So if we look at the case against animal farming in the overall picture, it seems to me we have three arguments against it. First, compassion for the animal; second, personal physical health and well-being; and three, it’s better for the planet if we don’t have so much animal agriculture. Which of those three arguments do you believe ultimately will do the most good for animals?

WP: Well, they’re all so intertwined. And I would also add a fourth. I think there’s a big public health component, which may be independent of the environmental issues and relates to pathogens and anything that’s led to avian influenza or antibiotic-resisting bacteria or mad cow disease. [I’m referring to ] those sorts of public health issues and the potential for pandemics that are spawned on factory farms. Obviously, that poses the most severe potential threat, even if it’s less likely or certain than some of these other elements.

I ultimately believe that the case that’s going to be the stickiest with people—stickiest in terms that people will hold onto it—is the moral argument for animal protection. When we get connected to animals and see them as creatures that deserve a good life, and whether you choose to be a vegan or vegetarian or when you are alert to the suffering of animals or you choose to support actions that shame farmers—like the head of our agricultural council in Nebraska said, his goal is to make sure his animals only have one bad day in their lives—that ultimately is going to lead to the biggest changes. Obviously, our self-interest from a health perspective is very powerful. And when we have products offered to us and available in the marketplace that have all of the protein content that animal products have and all of the nutritional benefits, with none of the adverse elements of meat, whether the hormones or high fat or cholesterol, and then you have very similar texture and taste, its going to be very easy to sample those plant-based proteins and to integrate them into our diet. We’ll be able to satisfy our custom and craving for meat by substituting something that doesn’t really require any sort of sacrifice by us and actually gives us an opportunity to have something very familiar in terms of taste and texture and nutrition and far superior in terms of moral outcomes.

JG: After reading your book, I went to the grocer and bought a package of the Gardein Burgers you wrote about. One of the best burgers I’ve had in my life. They’re incredible.

WP: It is incredible, and it’s going to be like computers in that it is going to keep getting better. I talk to folks in the industry and I hear their enthusiasm. “Wayne, we just developed this new burger and it’s so much better than what we had before,” they’ll tell me. And I say I like what they had before. And they’ll say, “This is so much better!” I think with that sort of entrepreneurial spirit, tested by consumers who are going to give it thumbs up or thumbs down, is going to allow us to create functional and superior equivalents for some of these animal products that have been a fixture in our lives and in our lifestyles

JG: One verification. You say in your book that people eat on average 29 animals a year. How did you calculate that number? That seems low to me when I look at what my apostate children eat during the course of a month or so. Is it the aggregate?

WP: It’s a little misleading because it excludes fish, which are a different size and it skews perceptions a little bit. And also many of them are wild-caught as compared to raised in the formal sort of way like agriculture. I used the number basically as a terrestrial animal number and it’s a simple arithmetic equation. There are 320 million of us and we raise about 9 billion animals a year. We do export some of them, but we do have some imports as well, so it’s roughly about 30 animals a person.

JG: Final thoughts?

WP: I know that food is very personal for people and it makes confronting these issues a little more difficult because the discussion is leavened with moral judgment and that makes it a tougher issue. But I do think now it’s our duty as citizens in our society to think about our effects on others, as this issue of the humane treatment of animals is a big moral question of our time.

We inevitably must look at the largest category of animal use, which is the use of animals for food, and grapple with these really important questions that have enormous implications for us as individuals, for the health of the planet and certainly for animals. I really hope for a rational, science-based discussion of these issues. And I don’t mean just science-based. I think our ethical framework has scientific inputs built into it when it comes to the science of animal well-being, and I think we need to factor those in. But we need to do a little bit of a reset in terms of how we view our relationship to animals. It’s the right question for everyone involved at every stage of the commercial enterprise of food and agriculture to think about. Whether you’re a consumer or a seller or a supplier. We all have duties in this area. We’re not putting it just on the restaurant sector. Everybody’s got responsibilities here.

About Joseph Grove, Contributing Writer

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