What Anima International did in 2024 to reduce animal suffering

Sometimes in Anima International, we give ourselves a theme for a certain period of time to help us focus on what’s the most important. The year 2024 falls within the era of what we call ‘no fucking around’. This is a tongue-in-cheek way to ensure we were totally focused on getting big wins for animals, especially considering the impending opportunities and challenges that loom on the horizon. 

While it sounds cliché, I genuinely think the stakes for animals have never been higher.

More chickens are being farmed for their meat than ever before, and the farming practices the industry uses have never been more abhorrent. Today, in a typical chicken farm, the animals are packed tightly together to save space, have been bred to grow so big so quickly that they can hardly stand up, and their bodies are frequently burned by their own waste left on the ground. Yet, the production of chickens farmed for their meat continues to grow. The egg industry, too, continues to exploit billions of caged hens despite the historic shift we have seen away from the use of cages globally. 

In addition to these challenges, powerful artificial intelligence is emerging which may have a significant impact, for good or ill, on animals and how intense factory farming practices can become. Finally, potential legal changes concerning animals in the European Union may result in the ‘Brussels effect’, causing changes to reverberate across the world.

In addition to the challenges, the scale of what we are trying to change can also be difficult to grasp. I think a fair argument can be made that, as Yuval Noah Harari says in the introduction of Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation’— 

“Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”

The reason Anima International exists is to put an end to this crime.

While the stakes have never been higher, we have the unprecedented opportunity (and duty) to change things for these animals, but it’s not going to be easy. Huge industries and companies around the world with immense political power are actively pushing for us to fail. But we know, as well as you, that failure is not an option. 

Below is a condensed rundown of just some—though far from all—of the work that, thanks to your deeply appreciated support, we’ve accomplished during our ‘no fucking around era’. I’ll let you be the judge of whether we stayed true to our mantra or not.

Anima International highlights of 2024:

• Getting hens out of cages—we worked tirelessly to expose the cruelty of cage egg farming, successfully changing the markets to move further away from it.
• Fighting the suffering of chickens raised for meat—we secured press coverage about the horrific practices of chicken farming and met with companies to negotiate significant progress for animals.
• Using political power to cement wins for animals—we pushed for a ban on fur farming in Poland and male chick culling in Denmark, as well as progress towards the first legislation for farmed animals in Bulgaria.
• Exploring opportunities to influence transformative artificial intelligence—we worked to ensure animals’ interests are included as part of policymaking in the EU.
• Building a strong movement of animal advocates—we organized the CARE conference and laid grassroots foundations in Central Asia.
• Rethinking our strategies and closing programs—we closed our Ukraine branch and switched focus in France.

Getting hens out of cages

In Poland—an agricultural powerhouse farming 53 million hens per year—we have seen a drop in cage production by 20% since we started our work for hens. But we cannot stop there.

The push to get hens out of cages has been one of the most impactful focus areas ever in the animal advocacy movement. Millions of hens around the world now no longer live in cramped, barren, metal cages too small for them to move around in.

Although we have already seen historic progress, the work is far from done. The scale of the ongoing transformation means we must stay vigilant and take action to ensure these vital changes reach every last corner of the market.

Exposing the reality of egg farming

The practice of farming hens for their eggs takes place behind closed doors, or rather, behind huge industrial, windowless hangars. In order to give these hens a better quality of life, we must first show consumers and companies what farming hens in cages actually looks like. To give you an example, just a few days before we published this blog, Anima International released new footage taken on an egg farm belonging to one of the biggest producers in the European Union. An Anima International volunteer secured a job working on the farm and, using hidden cameras, filmed the terrible conditions they saw. They documented the shocking and yet legal way that hens are bred on farms using cages where they are treated as egg-laying machines, forced to produce at a level that would be impossible for them to achieve in less extreme conditions.

The importance of monitoring the market

Hundreds of companies across Europe, and thousands around the world, agreed in recent years to phase out the sale of eggs from hens kept in cages. The next step, and one that is just as important as getting companies to make the original pledge, is to ensure the companies do what they said they would on time. 

For our team in Poland, this is why 2024 has been almost entirely focused on working with companies, both behind the scenes and in public campaigns, to ensure they implement their existing cage-free policies. We also secured several new cage-free commitments this year, bringing the total number of companies in Poland that have committed to no longer use eggs from caged hens to 218.

One of the methods we use to ensure companies follow through on their promises is to publicly compare them with one another. For example, this year we contacted all companies in Poland that had previously committed to go cage-free and asked them about their progress. Consumers rightly care about whether companies are being honest and transparent, but more importantly, they care about whether companies are moving away from barbaric farming practices. By compiling the results into a report, we highlighted those that had removed cages from their supply chain early and exposed those that didn’t reply at all, or were falling behind on their promises.

Methods like this, showing everyday supermarket shoppers which retailers are failing to adhere to their promises often lead to real results for hens. After publishing a comparison of different supermarkets earlier this year, mid-size retailers like Intermarché and Stokrotka, both well-known in Poland, increased the number of hens covered by their cage-free policy. We successfully used the same method of ‘ranking’ companies with bakery chains, which pushed companies to state openly how close to their goal of being cage-free they were.

Fighting the suffering of chickens raised for meat

For many years, Anima International has been fighting for chickens in most of the countries in which we operate. While public opinion is now on our side, tangible change for animals has proven harder to achieve in some countries, with northern countries making the most progress.

Following the huge impact of work to end keeping hens in cages for their eggs, many animal advocates began to focus on ways in which we could improve the lives of chickens raised for meat. According to Our World in Data, “Every year, almost ten chickens are slaughtered for every person on Earth. We raise and kill around 74 billion every year.” With these numbers in mind, pushing companies to adopt a package of changes known as the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC)¹ which creates a significant improvement in the lives of these animals.

Securing press coverage to inform the public and pressure businesses

Anima International made its first-ever appearance on national television in the UK, being interviewed on BBC’s Countryfile program, which gets around 4–10 million viewers per episode. Later in the year, the BBC once again broadcast footage from one of our investigations, in which our volunteer, Tomasz, filmed undercover for five months in the broiler chicken industry. Show presenters described the issue of ‘Frankenchickens’, a name created to describe chickens that have been selectively bred to grow as quickly as possible at the expense of their welfare.

We also secured 160 media hits about chickens raised for meat in Poland, including national television coverage in cooperation with the biggest investigative television show, of an investigation into two broiler farms. 

In Norway, our main campaigning focus has been retailer Coop, a membership-based cooperative. After conducting a YouGov survey of Coop members, which found that 7 out of 10 want the company to phase out fast-growing broiler chickens, we then hung posters at 200 Coop stores all across the country informing Coop members that the company was disregarding the wishes of its members, and calling for the company to commit to better welfare. The resulting press coverage called for the chickens to be taken off store shelves.

In Denmark, hundreds of adshells and a huge outdoor banner were set up around Copenhagen demanding that the same retailer, Coop, improves its chicken welfare policy. Along with Coop, we have been pushing McDonald’s hard on their continued sale of chickens from fast-growing breeds, achieving press coverage in the process.

Working behind the scenes

This year, we’ve been working behind the scenes in the UK to establish relationships with chicken producers. We have particularly tried to get to know producers who either already farm chickens meeting the BCC criteria or would be willing to switch part of their production towards this in order to meet the higher welfare requirements. Our mid-term goal is to link them with companies that want to stop selling chickens farmed using the most egregious (and yet widely used) practices. Closing these kinds of logistical gaps can immediately reduce the amount of suffering these chickens face on a daily basis, thereby making enormous gains in improving their welfare.

Progress in the United Kingdom

Thanks to our work alongside many other groups working tirelessly in the UK, 2024 definitely proved to be a year of progress towards getting retailers to move in the direction of the Better Chicken Commitment. UK supermarkets Morrisons, Tesco, Lidl, and Aldi all committed to give chickens in their supply chain more space—a move which is in line with the requirements of the BCC. Tesco’s decision came soon after Lidl and Morrisons’, showing that the market is shifting. It’s possible (although we don’t know for certain) that Tesco and Lidl were influenced by Anima International’s report on hock burn which received significant coverage in the BBC.

These changes mean that there is essentially only one major supermarket left in the UK to make the move to a lower stocking density—Asda. Many groups in the UK have worked for years to achieve this progress and we, along with them, will continue to push the retailers to adopt the remaining requirements of the ECC.

Using political power to cement wins for animals

Throughout our existence, we have met with hundreds of politicians from across the political spectrum. In 2024, we continued to draft bills and lay the necessary foundations for policy change. 

Pushing for a fur farming ban

Poland is one of the biggest producers of fur in the world (second place after China, to be exact, although it’s definitely not something to be proud of), breeding and then killing around three million animals annually. It’s important to remember that animals packed into small cages by this industry are wild (i.e. are not domesticated) and also predatory and solitary in nature, which adds to their unimaginable suffering. Just this year alone, we met with over 30 members of parliament from different political parties to discuss a ban on fur farming in the country.

Towards this end, we published an analysis demonstrating that the fur industry in Poland is based largely on wealthy foreign businessmen, and not on the quaint idea of the traditional ‘Polish farmer’, which the fur industry tries to spread into society to defend itself. The report shows that Danish and Dutch investors, along with one Polish family, are responsible for around three-quarters of fur production in the country.

The biggest moment of the year came in June when a bill to ban fur farming was submitted to the Polish parliament. This time, the bill was co-written by Anima International to minimize the chances of it not proceeding to the following stages of the process, which has happened on multiple occasions in the past. The bill was signed by over 120 members of parliament which is an unusually high amount of support for a bill so early in the process. It will soon be reviewed and processed by lawmakers.

Ending male chick culling

In Denmark, around 4.5 million newly hatched male chicks are killed by the egg industry each year because they are unable to lay eggs, and so are considered useless. By reaching out to politicians, and sharing our knowledge about the issue of chick culling with influential decision-makers, we are pushing for the government to adopt new technology which would in turn prevent millions of unwanted male chicks from being hatched—and then immediately killed—every year. 

The new technology, known as in-ovo sexing, determines the sex of the chick before they are hatched, meaning that it’s possible for the egg industry to determine which eggs should be hatched or not. Our work this year paid off, with the new animal welfare agreement setting out the aim to investigate alternatives to this insanely cruel practice, and to phase it out completely. While not a law, it is a formal agreement between the government and six political parties.

Working to secure the first legal protections for farmed animals in Bulgaria

Our single goal in Bulgaria this year has been to ban the use of cages for calves in the dairy industry. This would be groundbreaking, as it would constitute the first legal progress for farmed animals in the country. For those of us living in more Western societies, it’s hard to imagine that there are countries out there, even within the European Union, that have never formalized any political protection for farmed animals beyond the bare minimum. We intend to cross Bulgaria off this list. 

To achieve it, we launched a petition against the use of cages for calves in the dairy industry, which has already gained 70,000 signatures. As a result of dozens of meetings, multiple MEP candidates and over a hundred MP candidates across 6 of the 8 parties in Parliament declared themselves in favor of better protection for farmed animals. We then commissioned the Institute of Agrarian Economics to conduct an economic analysis researching the potential impact removing cages for calves would have on the dairy industry.

While you may not have seen it yourself (unless you’re really into the Bulgarian influencer scene, of course), our video featuring Bulgarian celebrities gained its first million views within only 48 hours of its release. This means we may have reached 1 out of every 5 Bulgarians with our message. The resulting media frenzy saw the issue of animal welfare being talked about across television and radio, with activists and celebrities highlighting the specific case of calves kept in cages. Incredibly, this was the most media ever gained for animals across Bulgaria.

Transforming the food system through politics

In Poland, as part of our food system transformation work, we have been focusing on food in politics, building relationships with the Ministry of Agriculture in Poland, along with other key stakeholders in the food industry, including farmers themselves. 

We conducted research asking a sample of 1,000 farmers in Poland about their opinions on the future of the food system. The coolest finding, in my opinion, was that 54% of farmers would support the introduction of subsidies to encourage the transition from raising livestock to growing crops.

Out of all the meetings, publications, and our general advocacy work, the most significant was a roundtable event we organized which included participation from the Ministry of Agriculture and representatives from multiple political parties, including the one currently in power and parties in the opposition. The event covered the potential ways to develop the plant-based food sector in Poland, with all attendees agreeing that the sector was important and should be a valuable part of Poland’s economy.

Exploring opportunities to influence transformative artificial intelligence 

We participated in the public consultation on the use of artificial intelligence organized by the European Union and began exploring other ways we can ensure animals are considered by future AI.

It’s possible that in the future, artificial intelligence will become autonomous and capable of making important decisions without human input or even against human input. It also seems possible that those decisions may be based on the knowledge of human values that are currently in use in society. Put another way, current human biases or scientific ignorance about animals may become ‘locked in’ to future artificial general intelligence, which could be extremely bad for animals in the future.

In Anima International, we’ve started to explore whether there is anything we can do to prevent such misalignment, especially because what happens in places like factory farms doesn’t represent the public’s opinion on how humans should treat animals. We want to do all we can to prevent a world where artificial intelligence is used, such as with precision livestock farming, to increase the intensity with which animals can be farmed. 

With this in mind, we recently took part in a new European-level public consultation on artificial intelligence regulation named the EU Artificial Intelligence Code of Practice. In the years to come, we’ll be exploring other ways we can ensure animals’ wellbeing is taken into account. 

Building a strong movement of animal advocates

One of the core tenets of Anima International is collaborativeness and sharing. In 2024, our movement-building work had its most successful year to date.

Organizing the annual Conference on Animal Rights in Europe

The Conference on Animal Rights in Europe (CARE) was started by Anima International almost 10 years ago. 200 people attended the first CARE in 2016. The annual event was started as a way of bringing together groups and individuals from more neglected regions, like Eastern Europe, and as a way to focus on pragmatic ways to create change for animals. At the time, many of the groups that came together shared the burden of operating in less affluent countries outside the anglosphere, and so CARE was a great way for them to share frustrations, advice, and resources as to how to deal with these region-specific challenges.

This year’s CARE welcomed even more guests from all around the world, with over 500 attendees both in person and online from 41 countries across the globe. At the same time, it remained a place where activists could get together to discuss our movement’s most pressing issues, whether that be solving interpersonal conflicts and strengthening relationships, discussing the current state of the movement’s broiler chicken campaign with key campaigners from around the world, or refilling our tanks with new motivation and inspiration.

Building the movement in post-Soviet regions

Over the past few years, Anima International has been helping to build the animal advocacy movement in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Our operating model is to provide funding and a project coordinator to organize movement-oriented events, as a tool to strengthen and expand the animal advocacy movement within these countries. By working with people on the ground, we are able to form deep relationships and transfer lots of grassroots organizing knowledge. 

In 2024 alone, we worked in the following countries:

• Kazakhstan—Anima International helped set up Central Asia’s first-ever animal welfare conference, a vegan festival, and a new plant-based lifestyle project in Kazakhstan. We are now setting our sights higher, aiming to organize the first large-scale Central Asian Animal Welfare Conference next year.
• Uzbekistan—we helped to organize Uzbekistan’s first vegan festival.
• Armenia—we successfully hosted our first major festival with local activists, attracting around 800 people.
• Kyrgyzstan—and finally, we helped organize Kyrgyzstan’s first-ever festival with the themes of plant-based food and animal welfare.

As far as we are aware, before Anima International began work in this region, there were no organizations in these countries dedicated to promoting a plant-based diet or protecting farmed animals, even on a volunteer basis. There were only a few independent vegan activists, bloggers, and one organization in Georgia. Taking this into account, the progress and enthusiasm we’ve seen in this region just over the last year has been incredible.

Rethinking our strategies and closing programs

To increase our impact for animals, we closed down our plant-based program in France to focus on helping hens. Furthermore, after years of helping to build the foundations of Ukraine’s animal advocacy, the war pushed us to end our work there.

Closing our established campaign in France to launch a more impactful one

We decided to close our institutional plant-based campaign this year so that we could focus on another subject that we felt would have more impact for animals. The whole team in France has now pivoted to work entirely on helping hens.

We will be publishing a blog all about this decision next year, so I won’t go into more details right now.

Closing our Ukrainian branch

Anima International has worked in Ukraine since 2017. During these seven years, we helped to build the nascent movement in the country, conducting Ukraine’s first-ever work on cage-free commitments and pushing for the very beginnings of transforming the food system. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we continued to operate for two more years, but an open war made any efforts highly uncertain, and of course the country had different priorities other than transforming its economy to be more considerate towards animals. This year we regrettably closed down our work, although we plan to use our expertise about the region in future political discussions that happen between the European Union and Ukraine. 

It marked the end of an important part of our work, but we wanted to match tears with laughter. During the gathering of Anima International’s members this year, we presented the Ukrainian team with a lifetime achievement award to recognize their tenacity and dedication to helping animals, even during times of war.

Looking ahead

When I stepped down as Executive Director earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of questioning whether we’re doing our best work. Sometimes when I’m sitting at my desk writing an email, having a call with a colleague, or even—dare I say—writing a blog post, I ask myself whether I am indeed helping animals. Their suffering seems extremely far away from my comfortable apartment, daily to-do lists, and Zoom calls. But when I take the time to reflect on the progress that we helped achieve for animals in 2024 alone, I feel more hopeful. 

In 2025, Anima International will continue to concentrate on the most impactful work only. We will treat cage-free campaigns as our priority by pushing big companies in France to follow through on what they promised and transform the market in Poland. We will also advocate for animals in EU policymaking, explore the ways in which we can ensure animals aren’t left behind by artificial intelligence and run the greatest CARE conference to date.

As always, if you want to support our work you can make a donation. But to be honest, if you are reading this, then I’m going to guess that you are already an animal advocate and doing all you can to help us change the world. So, I’d much rather just thank you for the work you are already doing and ask you to never stop. 

See you in 2025 to continue our fight and our era of no fucking around.

Acknowledgements:

Anna Bearne, Cyril Ernst, Connor Jackson, Jakub Stencel, Ania Kozłowska, Ilona Rabizo