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Aim
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The aim of this scoping exercise was to look at existing animal protection laws and see how they could be extended to adjacent areas, as this might be more tractable than proposing completely new laws. The idea was to investigate relevant laws and geographic regions, find potential ideas in this context, and then prioritise those ideas in terms of their promisingness. After this scoping, the best idea would be analysed further in a deep dive report.
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Process
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1. I tried to find the most relevant animal laws that I could in this short period of time. In my search, I prioritised the United States (U.S.), the European Union (EU), a few major European countries, and some major LMICs (China, Brazil, India, Indonesia), since those should be the countries where legislative changes would have the biggest impact (i.e. countries with the most animals killed) and/or are most tractable. I came up with a list of 38 laws, most of them from the U.S. and the EU.
2. I brainstormed potential ideas for extending these laws to adjacent areas, for instance by strengthening the regulations (e.g. space requirements or transport times), applying them to further animal groups or geographic regions, or covering other parts of the supply chain or market (e.g. also applying rules to imports, or extending production bans to sales). I directly excluded 15 laws that did not seem promising in this respect, as I did not see any ideas for extending those laws that would be highly promising. This left me with 23 laws to investigate further.
3. I listed all of the specific ideas that resulted from my brainstorming for these remaining laws, a set of 39 ideas (usually 1-2 ideas per law, in rare cases more). I scored these ideas on the dimensions of scale, tractability, and neglectedness, and converted this into an overall score. I only spent roughly 5-10 minutes per idea on this scoring, using some evidence, but generally only doing very quick intuitive reviews.
4. I reviewed the list and scores in full, to make sure that my ratings were consistent and reasonable, and tried different ways of computing the final score in order to perform sensitivity checks. For the top nine ideas (scores of 30 or larger), I then consulted with my advisor and we listed crucial considerations in order to get a more holistic perspective on each intervention.
5. Based on the scores and crucial considerations, we decided which ideas to move forward with for a deeper analysis. We agreed that it would be most helpful to group ideas by laws, geographic regions, animal groups, or any other categories that ideas had in common and that would benefit from synergy effects. We also decided that a medium dive was more warranted than a deep dive for these topics, due to some crucial uncertainties that we still wanted to resolve.
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Further notes on the geographic regions in scope
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I did not go into detail on various U.S. state laws, as that would have left me with not much time for other geographic regions. I did however go into detail on the various cage-free laws of the different states, as detailed here. I decided to include Prop 12 and Question 3 in California and Massachussetts respectively, as those are very high-profile cases. I also decided to include Ohio's laws on cage-free hens, as this is 1 of 3 states that already has a caged egg production ban that could be extended to sales and it is the biggest state among those 3.
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EU legislation (directives and regulations) can be seen as roughly equivalent to federal legislation in the U.S., affecting all member states. As member states can enact stricter rules themselves, a country like Germany can be seen as somewhat equivalent to a state like California. I thus did not check EU member states' legislation in detail, same as for U.S. states (except for the bans of cages, which I checked in detail for the U.S. states). I only chose Germany as one EU country to check in detail, as I am familiar with it and it is one of the major animal farming countries in the EU. I also looked at the UK separately, due to it not being covered by the EU anymore and being a major European country.
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Some resource that I did not check in detail but that seemed very interesting/relevant
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Animal Welfare Institute on Legal Protections for Animals on Farms in the U.S. (including info on state laws)
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A detailed history and backgroud on animal legislation in the EU
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A detailed overview/database of animal legislation at the EU level
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Other notes
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Banning low-welfare imports is an adjacent area to this. Animal Policy International is already focusing on welfare standards in international trade. My research was more focused on specific laws, but I did also cover how some of these laws could be extended to cover imports as well. Such extensions did not make it into the list of most promising ideas though.
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