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All right. Welcome, everyone, to the Great Charities podcast. And today, we are, as always, here for a treat, but this treat this a bit tastier than normally, especially for me. And I will explain why in a second. I’m here with Mahi close to Hafen. He works for the Albert.

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You’re gonna gonna my. Can you help me? sidechain Foundation. Albert Schweitzer Foundation. I’ll put spices on it.

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You probably never heard that. It’s a tricky name to pronounce before, right?

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The West Germans. It’s super easy for anybody.

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My gotcha. And of course, a tricky name translates to a very efficient organization. The Albert SlideShare Foundation have received a 1.6 million dollar grant from the Open Philanthropy Project for their work to prevent damage done to broiler chickens.

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And they’re also being ranked as the number one organization that is helping animals two years in a row from animal charity evaluators. These are if you’re not new to this field. Two huge accomplishments in my world. And I quickly want to share what I’m personally. I’m so excited to speak with you guys today. And that is because my heart question in the field of charity is animal welfare. And that is where I personally make my donations to. And since you guys are the top ranked course, you are out of all organizations in the world. You guys are who I will choose to make my show. Did the nations do so?

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I can’t make man jump in just one second. Yes, of course.

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So just to clarify, we are one of four top recommendations. So there are three other great groups and actually many other great groups around the world that nations can’t quite do quite a bit to keep.

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And that is the kind of humbleness that can only be spoken from someone that is ranked number one, not a man. I’m super excited to have you here. And the purpose of this podcast is to explain what great organizations do in a way that is easy to understand. So could you explain what your foundation is doing?

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Yes, it’s possible. Sure. So. Well, at first glance, we are an animal charity group. So we do help animals. And actually starting out, we were helping all sorts of that animals. We even joined protests to ban wild animals from sex, etc.. And we soon realized that we have to focus in order to get things done. And when we saw that, we quickly decided to focus on factory farming because IFR. When you look at all the areas where humans caused damage, her death to animals, factory farming is by far the number one cause in terms of numbers of animals involved. And I think also you could argue the suffering is very intense in factory farms. So that’s where we decided to focus. And even the vet in that area of factory farming, we decided to focus very much in order to really have an impact. And we started out with working on ending battery cages in Germany because of the sounds of cages and better cages, sort of very small cages that got it absolutely barren. Nothing in there, just cages and nothing else. And like a feeding, feeding goes in and come out and the animals don’t matter at all. They’re just producing machines. So we were able to since this is a very brief introduction, we were able to end battery cages, basically gravity. And we now are focusing on other species such as part of chickens, as you mentioned, but also fish fishes, which are kind of not on the radar when it comes to animal welfare. Wow.

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How many chickens, lives of chickens do you think have been improved because of this action?

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So in Germany, we usually have around 40 million chickens living at any given point of time. And when I started working for a foundation back then, it was 2008 or 2009. Ninety percent of these were in cages. Our founder had already achieved a big victory in front of the German Constitutional Court, which ruled that we as unconstitutional. However, all the big buyers, like all the supermarket chains and all the catering operations that was still able to import paychecks from neighboring countries, France. So this witness, important as it was, wasn’t to. They had to stop this practice. So when I joined in, my first mission was to convince the German supermarket chains to stop selling these fakes, which kind of worked right away. And so it’s kind of safe to say that now north of 30 million chickens per year are affected by the work that we as a foundation have done. But I have to add often in cooperation with other groups. So it’s not like I get this personally are the foundation that this by itself. So, you know, it’s have to keep that in mind.

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So what is the process done to initiate those changes? Is it political work? Is it activism? Is it handing out flyers, raising awareness?

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Yeah, great question. So is also a question we asked ourself very, very often and we tried all kinds of things. The German animal protection movement before tried to the foundation really got going was very much focused on convincing consumers to stop buying battery cage X so they would have like leaflets and flyers and maybe online ads or whatever saying please choose cage free X. So X that come from production systems that are not as bad as cages, but that only had a tiny impact. So we figured out that legal work can be extremely helpful to convincing the courts to ban certain practices. And also a corporate outreach is hugely impactful because when you convince a supermarket chain to stop selling certain products, you don’t have to convince the consumers anymore because they don’t have a choice. John Ballymore And usually they won’t go to a different country just to find certain facts. So we take these choices that way by consumers. We just convince the big buyers to change their behaviour. And then the worst animal products available at.

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So is there something you think the average European or American citizen don’t know about your cause as a whole that you would like for them to know?

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Yes. So the average person in the US, I often heard is not very aware of factory farming.

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So at least several years ago, it used to be the case when I last checked in that many people just had the impression that farm animals are treated in a nice way and they live in small farms and they can jump around the backyard, etc. which is unfortunately not the case. Like the average animal products you buy, the meat or eggs or any dairy products comes from these factory farms. These huge operations where many, many animals are crammed into very crowded spaces where they don’t have really many enrichment, sometimes no enrichment at all. And so they can’t really do anything. And like any other animal, like a dog or a cat, they they want to keep busy. They want to actually enjoy life. But there’s no way for them to do that. In fact, if in fact, these rates are very high and these farms, a lot of antibiotic use to keep the animals alive so they won’t die before they reach that purpose, which is being slaughtered or laying many eggs, some giving maybe. So this is unfortunately the situation we are

facing all across the world. Some countries like Switzerland. People tend to think that’s factory farming has been abandoned. Which is some future. Unfortunately not the case, though. Ninety nine percent of animal production is unfortunately really horrible. So bad actually that you don’t want to watch the videos property that somehow this is 99 percent. That’s pretty much the ratio.

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Yeah, me, myself. It hurts when I see those images. I can barely make my. I just know how bad it is, but it creates so much suffering for me to watch the images. So I guess that’s a challenge you guys are facing when reaching out to people. I mean, just looking at myself, when I was a teenager, I wanted to help animals in some ways. I gave some small donations to causes. I was helping elephants, for example, because I felt resonance with that animal. And at the same time, I think probably not that many people relate to chickens. So how can you make people care about chickens?

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It’s difficult. It really is.

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I mean, Germans have in polls always said that they won’t buy eggs from better caged hens. Unfortunately, the market data showed that these statements were kind of false. Unfortunately. But we had lied through these undercover investigations and through the media picking up on these kind of airing the stories and showing people that if we can get a shift in kind of acceptance and what is seen as acceptable by most people on the street, basically. And so fortunately, this does include chickens. So people did say that they were not happy with the way hens were treated in these battery cages. And also when when undercover investigations about broiler chickens, so the chickens that get slaughtered for their meat. When these investigations come out, there’s also an outrage. So people do seem to care on some level, but I think it’s not really possible to make them empathize as much as they would with a dog or a cat unless they actually get to meet some animals, which you can from sanctuaries.

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Gotcha. So you’re saying now you’re working more towards broiler chickens and could explain the difference between them and kitchens.

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Yes. So it’s very interesting when you look at hen or.

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Oh, sorry. I got to give you my phone.

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When when you look at the way chickens are used, they used to be used as both purposes.

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Dual purpose, so to speak. So they were used for their eggs. And then after sometimes they were spotted. And then kind of when factory farming came into play, the farmers and the breeders. They were always looking for ways to make things more efficient. So they figured out that they can breed an animal, especially for laying hens, laying eggs and laying hens. They lay around 100 per year, sometimes even more so almost one per day, which is completely unnatural for them to do it in nature. They would lay maybe, I don’t know, 6 X and then kind of race, race the chicks that come out of this interactive farming and then the breeding techniques that were used all the time, they now lay almost one day. But these chickens, they don’t grow fat very fast. Actually, they are not made to grow fat very fast so they can lift a little bit longer so they can be used to lay eggs for a year. On the other hand, you have the broiler chickens which are used for their meat and they are bred to grow extremely fast and extremely fat, extremely fast. So it takes them about a month to reach that sort of weight, at least in Germany. So kind of you could if you make the comparison to human being, which I know is a difficult thing to make, but you could basically say that a baby becomes kind of a sumo wrestler within just a couple of years so fast, like really extreme. And so we have two completely different breeds that still both called chickens, but they had a function in a very different way for the industry.

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I didn’t know it was that different. Well, I think few people are aware of that. Now it’s my guess. Yeah. So you received the 1.6 million dollar grant from the French project, and that is to help broiler chickens. What is a really good thing you think that could happen realistically in the next years?

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Yes. First, to clarify, some open philanthropy kind of decided after a while of funding certain parts of World War I like cage-free work or broiler work or fish work. They kind of decided to give us an upgrade in terms of giving us an unrestricted grant. So they are basically now saying he has money to do what you think is best for the animals. And after working together with Open Philanthropy Project for a couple of years, and when they’re happy with the progress they see, sometimes they we decide to give you like these unrestricted funds. So now we can kind of decide what exactly the money. And one thing we do with the money is working on braless, as you mentioned. And what happened is that several animal protection groups all across Europe sat together and decided, what do we want to ask the industry to do? And there was an extremely important step for laying hens. It’s relatively easy to ask companies to stop using X that come from these terrible cages and with braless. That is not really kind of a different way to differentiate between standards because you have like standard factory farming and then you usually have organic, which is twice as expensive or three times less expensive and which is not really a way to go if you want to convince businesses to change the ways of operating. So what happened? These groups came together and we thought about what are the most terrible things that happen to the chickens. One of them we already talked about, it’s photobook reading. They just grow way too fast. And that leads to them actually not really being able to walk.

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But when it comes close to their slaughtering day, so they actually because the so heavy, so fast, the legs can’t even carry the bodies anymore. And that leads to some of them actually dying because they can’t move to where the water or where the foetus anymore. So that’s only a small percentage. Most of them obviously survive. Reasons and all this is made sure about the industry. But we want to make sure this overbreeding is at least slowed down. So it’s not as terrible anymore. And the second part is the space they’re giving, given. So we want to improve the space. Right now, they are cramped next to each other and it’s basically around twenty five birds per square meter. So you can’t see much when you look from the top and you look on all these birds, you can’t really see the floor because it’s just birds. And we decided to ask in that reduction of study of birds and meter, which is very important. And then we. So I’m asking for a couple of enrichments, such as they get some material that can play or engage with just the animals, we want higher quality and more light, which is important to make them move more. If they just kept them dark all the time. They don’t really move a lot and they can convert even more feet into meat because they didn’t use the calories for moving around. So it’s really terrible. The industry comes up with what we ask for one night and some other small improvements, and that is now what we’re asking companies to commit to changing that chicken supply to higher standards.

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All right. So instead of trying to make industries and people switch to organic chicken, you are trying to make the conditions better for the broiler chickens.

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So the suffering is at least a little bit less. That’s right. And just to note, organic, like people, when they hear organic, they think it’s a paradise for animals.

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Unfortunately, when you go for undercover investigations that Beneke Fox, you see not the case. So organic is unfortunately not the solution for people who want to have happy animals, friends, happy meat.

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Got it. That leads me nicely to the last question, because we’re coming up towards the end there. And that is if someone feels called towards being involved in making the lives of factory farm animals better, but is something they can do to be involved and engaged.

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And so when it comes to personal choices now several things. One is obviously giving money, giving donations to charities that help, ending the worst practices. And if you’re totally new to this, you might want to check out an animal charity evaluators for its recommendations. And then obviously, there are personal choices. Everybody can make it for me personally. Fifteen years ago, I’ve decided not only to stop eating meat, stop eating all animal products and based diet for fifteen years, that working very well for me. And if some listeners say, well, it is this that is way too big for me, I just encourage everybody just to take this step by step and to look for online resources on how this can be done. There are a lot of guides on how to switch to a more plant based diet or even go all the way. That’s really the speed and the extent to which you want to do that depends on where you are in your life. Basically.

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My it was a lot of fun speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview.

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It’s been a pleasure, Amy. Thank you very much. Good luck with your work. Thanks.