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In his talk, farm animal welfare champion Louis Bollard reveals how it is possible to make lasting, sustainable changes in the meat industry.
He shares how a blend of big data, inventive tech and grassroots pressure is actually driving major corporate and legislative reforms, showing us that we can tackle massive moral and environmental problems if we decide to act.
Today I want to talk with you about one of the most important moral issues we never talk about, and that's factory farming.
But first, I want to share with you the story of how I came to be here.
I grew up in New Zealand, and yes, we had a sheep farm.
It was small, 100 acres of rolling hills, and the sheep would graze the hillsides by day and then retreat to the hilltops to circle up and fall asleep at night.
The sheep ultimately went to slaughter.
But I always felt like at least they'd lived good lives and had quick deaths.
Frankly, if I'm ever reincarnated as a sheep which, as a New Zealander, is not unlikely I'd like to live their life.
When I was a teenager, we traveled to Vietnam.
And in the back streets of Hanoi, I stumbled into a live animal market.
I still remember seeing the site, stacks upon stacks of cages crammed full of animals of every species, trembling in fear, staring out at me in distress.
I was shaken.
But when I returned to New Zealand, I figured things were different.
I mean, you can see the cows and the sheep in the fields.
Still, I started to wonder how we treated the animals that you couldn't see.
How in particular did we treat the pigs and the chickens?
So I did what you did back then.
I picked up a phone book, and I looked up some pig and chicken farms.
And one by one, I called, and I naively asked if I could just come visit.
And one by one, they told me no.
They don't let anyone just visit.
Finally, I got hold of a major slaughterhouse and connected with a farm boy.
Let's call him Liam.
Now, this slaughterhouse didn't do visitors either, but Liam and I bonded over sheep, and he agreed to get me in.
Honestly, the slaughterhouse wasn't as bad as I'd expected.
It was the state of the animals arriving there that shook me.
I remember seeing pigs coming down off a transport truck, some shaking, some squealing, some limping in pain.
Liam, I said, why are those pigs limping?
Not my problem, he replied.
So I looked into it.
Before I tell you what I learned, let me say I'm not here to tell you what to eat.
In fact, I don't think this should be on you as an individual consumer at all.
You never chose factory farming.
When the factory farms came in and replaced the old family farms, they didn't tell you they were doing it.
They didn't relabel the meat as now for miserable animals.
They labeled it as all natural and farm fresh.
In fact, the industry has created an entire system to stop you from seeing how your meat is produced.
They've even passed ag-gag laws in US states to make it a crime to record conditions in factory farms, which makes it all the more important that we see what they're trying to hide from us.
I want to share with you three common factory farming practices.
I deliberately didn't choose the most gruesome or out-there practices I could find.
These are everyday realities involved in the production of most pork and eggs globally.
Here we go, the gestation crate.
This is why the pigs at the slaughterhouse were limping.
They were female breeding pigs who had been confined to crates, unable to walk or even turn around for their entire pregnancies.
Once they gave birth, they were moved to slightly larger birthing crates and then back into these crates to get pregnant again and again and again for years on end.
A friend of mine who worked undercover at a pig factory farm told me the worst thing he has ever done was to force these pigs back into their crates after they gave birth.
They fought so hard not to go back in. battery cage on an egg factory farm.
Most of the world's eight billion egg-laying hens roughly one for every person alive on Earth today are confined right now in cages like these, unable to so much as flap their wings.
And this is a trash can full of live baby chicks.
I honestly didn't believe this one when I first heard about it.
It just sounded like comic book villain stuff.
But it's real.
The egg industry has no need for the seven billion male chicks born annually.
So it kills them on their first day alive in this world, typically by throwing them in the trash or into a giant meat grinder.
I could go on, but don't worry, I won't.
We're all done with the images.
I'm guessing you're not a fan of what you just saw. and you're not alone.
Eighty-eight percent of Americans told a recent survey that they think gestation crates and battery cages are unacceptable.
Try finding any other issue that 88 percent of Americans can agree on today.
It's not surprising, though.
We as a society have already decided that animal cruelty is wrong.
If you treated your dog the way that a factory farm treats their pigs, you'd be committing felony animal cruelty in most US states.
And this isn't just about the animals.
Factory farms which densely crowd together hundreds of thousands, even millions, of near-genetically identical, immune-compromised individuals, are the perfect breeding grounds for disease.
They control these diseases with antibiotics.
Tons of them.
In fact, even as we face an antibiotic resistance crisis in humans, we are feeding far more antibiotics to farm animals than we use in all human medicine.
But antibiotics can't stop viruses, which is why we have a bird flu pandemic sweeping through America's factory farms right now.
After I learned all this, I dedicated my life to ending the worst abuses on factory farms.
And the good news is, I've seen more progress in the last decade than in all prior decades combined.
On these three practices, we are close to a tipping point.
Thank you.
Take the gestation crates.
Advocates have won bans on them in 11 US states, from California to Florida.
The Brazilian pork industry, led by giants like JBS, is moving away from the crates entirely.
Take the battery cages.
Advocates have won promises from the world's largest supermarket and fast-food chains to stop sourcing eggs from caged hens.
McDonald's is now 100 percent cage-free in its US and Canadian egg supply, and Costco is nearly there too.
44 percent of US hens are now out of cages, up from less than 10 percent a decade ago.
Or take the chick killing.
Innovators have developed de novo sexing technology that allows the egg industry to only hatch the female chicks.
Thanks to that, Germany recently banned the killing of day-old chicks entirely, and France and Italy are largely doing so too.
Other innovators are developing alternative proteins made from plants algae, even animal cells, to meet the world's growing demand for animal protein without more factory farming.
And yet, for all this progress, the problem overall is still growing worse.
More animals are suffering at human hands today than at any prior point in our history.
We raise and kill 210 billion animals globally every year.
210 billion.
That's more than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.
We are the only species to have ever inflicted so much suffering on so many other animals.
But we are also the only species to have ever acted to protect other animals from cruelty.
We are a species of animal lovers.
It is core to our humanity.
One day, humanity will end the worst abuses on factory farms.
And when we do, our descendants will look back and ask what we did to help end them.
So what can you do to help?
You can advocate, donate, even devote your career to this cause.
But if you do just one thing, I ask this.
Talk about factory farming.
Tell the corporations you buy from the politicians you vote for that you expect them to adopt at least basic animal welfare standards.
Tell your friends and family what you've learned about factory farming.
Factory farming thrives in the dark, shielded by a cone of silence, ignored by our politicians, our media and society at large.
Its victims are voiceless.
They need your voice.
I was thinking about this when I was back in New Zealand a few months ago with our three-year-old son Willie, visiting my childhood farm.
Willie's started asking what I do at work all day.
He just doesn't understand strategic philanthropy to reform factory farming, no matter how many times I repeat it.
So I told him, I'm trying to make the world a little bit more like that farm.
We can have that world.
Humanity has already amassed unprecedented wealth and power.
Soon, advances in AI will make us more powerful still.
And we will face a choice, a test of our humanity.
Will we use that power to factory farm ever more animals, or will we use it to end this cruelty?
Humans are animals too.
What separates us from the pigs and the chickens is our ability to make moral progress.
We should use it.
Thank you.
That was Louis Bollard speaking at TED 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
Ready to elevate your skincare?
Introducing Medicaid, a clinically proven, dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.
You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, And that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.
This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Mini Protein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible transformative results.
Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after 8 weeks of use.
The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.
Visit Medicaid.us.
That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.
Use code podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.
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