TED Talks Daily - How to end factory farming | Lewis Bollard

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Factory farming is the greatest moral crisis we ignore, says farm animal welfare champion Lewis Bollard. He exposes the truth behind the "all natural" labels on your groceries and shows how technology and public pressure can uncover the unseen struggle of animals, drive the industry to reform and harness our collective capacity for moral progress. (Note: This talk contains graphic images.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe.

With WISE, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos and Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by Airbnb. A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work and I remember sneaking in a little time to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corners of Canada with Airbnb, because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m. That's one of the things I love about Airbnb. You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms, and still stay up with my partner

after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep. You're getting experiences that feel authentically yours. Whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula where you can literally roll out of bed and into a canoe or a cozy spot in Cape Breton where you can make your morning coffee and watch the sunrise without anyone rushing you to check out. This summer, when you're planning those trips that matter, the ones where you want to actually connect with your loved ones, check out some of the most loved homes across Canada on Airbnb. Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Meat is an integral part of billions of people's diets around the world, and yet it's

hard to balance this reality with the unimaginable horrors that exist in factory farms today. In his talk, farm animal welfare champion Louis Bolard 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 that lived good lives and had quick deaths. Frankly, if I'm ever reincarnated as a 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 and fair, 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 and 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 from 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-thair 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 8 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 7 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.

88% of Americans told a recent survey that they think gestation crates and battery cages are unacceptable. Try finding any other issue that 88% 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 U.S. 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 then we use in all human medicine.

But antibiotics can't stop viruses, which is why we have a bird flu pandemic sweeping for 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 U.S. 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 cage tens. McDonald's is now 100%. 100% cage-free in its U.S. and Canadian egg supply, and Costco is nearly there, too. 44% of U.S. hens are now out of cages, up from less than 10% a decade ago.

Or take the chick killing. Innovators have developed a 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, 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.

It's 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. Willys 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 or animals too? What separates us from the pigs and the chickens

is our ability to make moral progress. We should use it. Thank you. 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 Tonica, Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

This episode is sponsored by Airbnb. A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work, and I remember sneaking in a little time to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corners of Canada with Airbnb. Because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m. That's one of the things I love about Airbnb.

You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms, and still stay up with my partner after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting experiences that feel authentically yours, whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula

where you can literally roll out of bed and into a canoe or a cozy spot in Cape Breton where you can make your morning coffee and watch the sunrise without any, anyone rushing you to check out. This summer, when you're planning those trips that matter, the ones where you want to actually connect with your loved ones, check out some of the most loved homes across Canada on Airbnb.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe.

With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos and Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Terms and conditions apply.