Corporate animal welfare campaigns

What the evidence says

Each link in the chain has different evidence.

Commitments. Campaigns have won many. More than 2,750 companies have made cage-free egg commitments, according to The Humane League, an animal advocacy group.

Follow-through. A progress report from the Open Wing Alliance, published by The Humane League, says 92 percent of cage-free commitments with deadlines of 2024 or earlier had been fulfilled as of July 2025, up from 89 percent a year before. That figure counts commitments, not hens, and comes from advocates’ own reporting. In the United States, USDA data show the cage-free share of the egg-laying flock rising from 36 percent in January to 38 percent in June 2023. USDA credits both state laws banning hen confinement and corporate pledges, so the campaigns’ share of the change can’t be read from the trend.

Welfare. In 2023 the European Food Safety Authority’s scientists recommended avoiding cages for laying hens and broiler chickens. A common worry is that cage-free flocks die at higher rates. A meta-analysis of 6,040 commercial flocks, about 176 million hens in 16 countries, found mortality fell as producers gained experience with cage-free systems and found no difference between caged and cage-free systems in recent years.

Cost-effectiveness. Rethink Priorities estimated in 2019 that the corporate chicken welfare commitments won from 2005 to 2018 will affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent. That is a subjective range for past spending, not a forecast for a new dollar, and it rests on assumptions about follow-through and about how many hens would have gone cage-free anyway. Because the figure is not a cost per outcome in the sense the Impact Calculator uses, this entry has none.

The grade is weak because Charitology found no rigorous test of the central causal claim, that campaigns put more hens in better housing than would otherwise have happened. The claim rests on tracking data, trends with several causes and modeling.

Where it sits on the depth scale

These campaigns are structure (depth 3). They change the purchasing rules of large companies, and through them the standards of a whole supply chain, so the harm stops being produced for the animals affected. Whether the change lasts depends on enforcement, which is why follow-through tracking is part of the work.

Open questions

• How should the welfare of a hen be weighed against other outcomes? See how much animals count and the exchange rate problem.
• How much of the shift to cage-free would have happened through state laws and market trends alone?
• Do companies that miss deadlines eventually comply, quietly drop their pledges, or neither?