Our first half year at Farmed Animal Protection Hungary - wins, fails and lessons learned

By Tamás Drexler @ 2024-12-19T15:23 (+20)

Introduction

Founding a new organization is challenging, and so is animal advocacy work. After spending a half year working at Farmállatvédelem (Farmed Animal Protection Hungary) animal advocacy organization I co-founded myself, if I could list only 2 things that I’ve learned from this experience, these would be: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and always ask for feedback. So I am writing this article for these two purposes:

1. To share my extracted learnings, so other potential founders don’t have to learn them in the hard way
2. To get some feedback from those who are more experienced than me about our future plans and what we can possibly improve

Context:

Why Hungary?

Institutional animal welfare reform efforts are neglected in Hungary, but due to its favorable conditions given its EU membership and medium level GDP per capita, there is room for improvements. Raising awareness regarding animal welfare issues is also important because as a member state, our country has a vote in EU animal welfare policy decisions.

From a personal perspective, by the time of founding the organization, I didn’t considered myself skilled and experienced enough to work for a more established organization, which is capable of influencing EU-wide or even global policies, so I identified animal advocacy work in Hungary as the most impactful pathway at the given moment, taking into account that I speak the mother tongue of the country and familiar with its culture.

Why cage-free and fish welfare?

In Hungary, more than 80% of laying hens live in caged systems which means about 7.5 million chickens at the given moment. Less then 10% of the eggs are exported from the country, so Hungarian companies committing to cage-free or aligning with their commitments can have a high impact on national producers. A significant proportion of the market (about 10-15%) belongs to relatively few companies: the 6 large multinational retailers that have cage-free commitments due by 2025. There is a lack of transparency about their progress, so ensuring the fulfillment of these commitments seems to be a promising intervention. It is also important to mention that no national commitments have been made so far.

In the case of aquaculture farms, around 18.000 tons of fish are produced yearly, with which Hungary is ranked 66th worldwide (out of 207 countries), but no other organization has been focusing on their welfare before, while official reports by the Ministry of Agriculture of Hungary state that farm infrastructure is outdated.

Both cage-free and fish welfare institutional outreach have been proven to be cost-effective in terms of reduction of animal suffering and the former intervention already has a longer track-record, with a lot of experience and know-how available within the movement. In contrast, fish welfare is a relatively new area, where our experience can possibly help other organizations in their future work.

Fish welfare project

Farm level survey

As we had no information about the current state of fish welfare in the country, we launched a survey on the farm level, in which we aimed to investigate the following:

• General information about the farm (production volumes, farmed species, etc.)
• Water quality measurements
• Feeding practices
• Transport (including where farmers sell to)
• Slaughter
• Presence or absence of ASC and GlobalG.A.P. certifications
• Their plans to improve animal welfare and its barriers

The survey was sent out multiple times in direct emails and the Hungarian Aquaculture and Fisheries Inter-Branch Organization (MA-HAL) also agreed to send it out via their mailing list. THey have around 100 members, including the farms with the highest production volumes.

As we had no prior knowledge of the Hungarian Industry, we contacted fish researchers of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences (MATE) for interviews and for feedback on the survey. I also visited one of Hungary’s largest fish farms, which is operating in a semi-intensive pond system.

However, after the initial data collection phase, only 3 fish farms have filled out the survey (including the farm where the personal visit took place). Therefore, we started phone outreach in November, focusing on the high priority farms that make up 1/3 of the total production area in Hungary. This resulted in 2 additional answers. The production volumes of farms responded cover 11,45% of the total fish production in Hungary.

We suggest that the main reason for lack of responses is that even though we followed a farmer-friendly communication and approach, farmers still did not trust us as animal advocates. This is based on what we have heard from them during the phone calls and after an interview with a freelance aquaculture consultant.

Next steps

As of today, the analysis of the survey responses is just about to begin. In the meantime, we have been informed by Animal Ask that they are planning to conduct a Europe-wide research to assess the state of the current production systems and to identify the most promising interventions in each country, which is fully aligned with our initial plan. We suggest that further research and institutional outreach for fish welfare in Hungary is not topical until this research project is finished.

Currently, we are in the stage of generating ideas about how we should proceed with fish welfare outreach, using the learnings extracted from our survey. According to our current knowledge, it seems to be the most cost-effective to deepen our relationship to fish farms we already established connection with and advocate for adapting an international certificate, as no Hungarian fish farms are certified with neither ASC, nor GlobalG.A.P. I also suggest that publishing a public report about the survey and our general knowledge of fish welfare, showing us as professionals, rather than activists, as they may currently perceive us, could help us to build trust with fish farmers and therefore a stronger ground for future outreach.

Cage-free outreach

Initial research and starting of accountability work

At the first stage of our cage-free project, we contacted more than 5 organizations that work on the same intervention as ours in Europe, focusing on the Eastern region to learn from their experiences and joined the Open Wing Alliance in August.

After extracting what we have learned about corporate outreach and relations, we developed our strategy in which we decided to focus on accountability in 2024 and 2025. This is due to that the majority of the big retailers, that also use the most eggs, have cage-free commitments due by 2025 but we had no knowledge of any steps made to fulfill these commitments. As we currently see, we can achieve the highest impact by making sure that these companies are making steps, rather than focusing on securing new national commitments.

We also decided to focus on positive communication to establish long-perm connections to corporations, therefore we don’t consider pressure campaign activities at the moment. Aligned with this, we started to reach out to the 16 committed corporations by simply asking about their current percentage of cage-free eggs used. We suggested that they are more likely to respond to this neutral inquiry, rather than to a message which is calling them out and trying to convince them to increase their cage-free availability right away.

As of today, we have got responses from one hotel, that has already fulfilled their commitment, one retailer and one wholesaler that are open for communication with us and meetings have been organized with their representatives for January, 2025. With the other, yet not responsive companies we have started phone outreach and will continue to do so next year.

Next steps

In 2025, our aim is to ensure that 40% of companies we reach out to either meet their commitments by the 2025 deadline or establish a realistic timeline for transition if that deadline isn't feasible. In addition to that, if possible, we want to achieve one new commitment from prioritized national companies.

To achieve this, we will continue experimenting with different outreach methods to reach these companies (emails, phone calls, contact on LinkedIn, physical mail via post) and publish a narrative report shortly before Easter about the outcome of our outreach. We expect that non-responsive companies will rejoin the conversation after we give publicity to their non-compliance. Depending on the results until that point, i.e. we see that some companies will go cage-free even without our contribution, or they are not responsive at all, we will decide on shifting the strategy to include advocating for new national commitments.

We also want to start a public awareness campaign to use consumer demand as a stronger leverage point during negotiations.

Other activities

As highlighted in the previous sections, we found it important to get connected to a group of international organizations that have more expertise in cage-free outreach or fish welfare and put focus on learning in other areas as well. For this reason, we attended the CARE conference in Warsaw and planning to maintain our connections within the movements as we see that there is a high value in them.

By the end of 2024, we contacted all the stakeholders relevant to our course area with the aim that they are at least informed about our work. Being a new organization without a broad volunteer network and follower base, we see it as highly important to think outside the box and reached out to the 2 most well-known sustainability focused NGO-s within the country to lay the base for possible cooperation and joint projects for the future.

One of our biggest challenges is getting more well-known in Hungary and raise public awareness, to have stronger arguments about public opinion and consumer pressure when talking to companies. We reached out to general and sustainability focused online media channels, but responses are currently lacking. Most of the people we can currently reach don’t belong to our target audience, being vegans already, and many of them even reject welfare reforms or simply not interested in becoming more active for animal advocacy. We are utilizing personal connections and social media to get followers but seeking some wider support about marketing strategy.

We have successfully recruited and finished the onboarding of 2 generalist volunteers, working in 4 hours per week and we will continue to search for a skilled social media volunteer as well to strengthen our online presence.

A new outreach idea

It has been proved that cage-free outreach is more cost-effective than broiler welfare reforms. However, according to our current knowledge, it has never been investigated if a greater amount of suffering could be spared by decreasing the number of chickens raised for meet than by facilitating the transition to cage-free. It seems to be logical as hens in alternative farming systems still endure some pain, but we don’t have a clear theory of change for such an intervention that asks people to avoid chicken meat. We would be keen to hear some feedback about this idea from the EA community for further development. 

Conclusion

• Getting connected to the aquaculture industry was harder than previously anticipated, future efforts should focus on building more trust. We need to decide on the necessity of further fish welfare advocacy, or rather to wait until the Animal Ask research project is finished
• A positive attitude towards companies in the cage-free outreach seems to be promising until now, we will continue our activities with this approach next year.
• We are looking for feedback on our idea to advocate for avoiding chicken meat consumption

Also, please feel free to share feedback about everything described here, including mistakes we made, mistakes you made working on similar interventions or further questions – these can really help us seeing things that we might look over from inside this organization!

For those who celebrate Holidays in this period of the year, I wish you Happy Holidays and a happy 2025 for you all!