Tobias Leenaert is the author of How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach, a highly regarded book offering practical strategies for vegan advocacy. He is also the co-founder of ProVeg International. Tobias is known for his thoughtful, pragmatic, and solutions-oriented approach to building a more sustainable and compassionate food system.
In this article, Tobias discusses the key takeaways from the Defund Meat Conference in Heidelberg, Germany, where leading academics presented research and strategies for reducing meat consumption through legal, economic, and political interventions.
Can We Stop Paying the Polluters?
By Tobias Leenaert of ProVeg International
On Jan. 16-17, 2025, I attended the Defund Meat Conference at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. The one hundred or so attendants were mostly new faces to me, as they came from outside my usual animal protection/alternative protein-circles. This write-up may interest readers who, like myself, are less familiar with research concerning animal agriculture and welfare in the fields of law, political science, or economics. It may also benefit academics who are interested in meat governance and animal law.
The conference featured speakers from top universities and was organized by Anne Peters (the Institute’s director) and Saskia Stucki (Zurich University of Applied Sciences). Stucki opened the conference by emphasizing that the meat problem has long ceased to be a private matter and has become a significant public concern warranting political intervention through behavioral, fiscal, and regulatory instruments. She noted that “defunding meat” – the conference title was questioned by some – is not as radical as it may sound. Rather, Stucki said, it’s simply a call to put our money where our mouth is, and stop paying the polluters.
André Nollkaemper (international law, University of Amsterdam) spoke about how International Law reinforces the current unsustainable and animal-unfriendly status quo, but identified emerging signs of change. One promising development is that international institutions like the World Bank, WHO, FAO, WTO, and UNEP have begun incorporating sustainability principles, while the World Organization for Animal Health is the only of these international organizations to have adopted animal welfare standards. Another positive shift is the UN’s One Health approach, which recognizes the interconnection between environmental, human, and animal health. However, Nollkaemper noted that the current global climate of authoritarianism and populism creates significant obstacles for reforming international law. He believes meaningful change must emerge from bottom-up efforts and systemic pressure.
Jennifer Jacquet (environmental science, University of Miami) examined the meat industry’s manufacturing of doubt. Specifically, Jacquet looked at how long the industry has known about its significant contribution to climate change (and denied it). A pivotal year was 1989, which saw the publication of an article on methane emissions from livestock. This prompted a New York Times journalist to write that methane might be the easiest greenhouse gas to control—yet little progress has been made since then. Jacquet revealed that meat companies spend proportionally more on lobbying relative to their annual turnover than the fossil fuel industry does. She also noted an interesting contrast: unlike the fossil fuel industry, the meat industry is deeply concerned about individual lifestyle and dietary changes.
Nicolas Treich, an economist at the University of Toulouse, presented his work on an animal welfare tax on animal products. While environmental and health taxes have established frameworks, no conceptual foundation exists for an animal welfare tax—a gap that Treich and his colleagues aimed to fill. Their proposed non-anthropocentric tax would discourage the consumption of products from animals whose lives are deemed “not worth living” (though this concept itself needs better defining). The talk was a challenging and fascinating combination of economic formulas and philosophy. I wonder if simpler frameworks might be available which could for instance avoid the thorny problems of population ethics (Treich suggested that animal products coming from animal lives worth living could be subsidized).
Laura Burgers (University of Amsterdam) provided a useful overview of strategic litigation possibilities. These include private law cases (such as Urgenda’s suit against the Dutch government and the case of the Dutch Milieudefensie against Shell), administrative law actions (like Wakker Dier’s lawsuit to enforce regulations against lifting chickens by their legs), and criminal law proceedings (such as Sherpa’s case against BNP Paribas for alleged money-laundering and complicity in illegal Amazon deforestation). With my humanities degrees I don’t know the first thing about law, but litigation seems like an avenue the animal protection movement should explore further.
Einat Albin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) explored how the logic of labor law might be applied to animal welfare. The law currently recognizes only humans and commodities, with animals falling into the latter category alongside objects like pens and staplers. However, in some countries, certain animals have already gained limited rights derived from labor law—combat and police animals receive pension rights, while zoo animals are granted rest periods. When we begin discussing animals in terms of labor (similar to how we’ve reframed the work of prisoners or women’s invisible household labor), this can transform perceptions and values. This shift in perspective could lead to economic changes, as employers would need to account for new costs. An example of an initiative exploring these ideas is the Dutch Animal Labour Union.
Cesare Romano discussed the “right to science” and its potential implications for cultivated meat bans. Kristen Stilt from Harvard Law School delivered a passionate talk on meat and zoonotic diseases, highlighting critical concerns about factory farm biosecurity. Cleo Verkuijl from the Stockholm Environmental Institute explored lessons from anti-fossil fuel campaigns. Lukas Fesenfeld (ETH Zurich) presented research showing how distributing meat substitutes to Swiss citizens influenced their support for meat reduction policies.
Odile Ammann (University of Lausanne) examined lobbying practices, while Kirsi-Maria Halonen (University of Lapland) focused on public procurement law. Marco Springmann (University of Oxford) shared his team’s findings on the environmental and health impacts of various diets. Elisabeth Burgi Bonanomi (University of Bern) analyzed subsidies in trade regulation. A panel on “transformative meat governance” featured Charles Godfray, Stefan Mann, José Martinez, and Friederike Schmitz. World-renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein closed the conference remotely with a talk on behavioral nudges. The full conference agenda can be found here.
It had been a while since I had attended an academic conference. Obviously, the professors and researchers weren’t the usual suspects one encounters at animal rights events, but with most of them, it was clear how deeply they cared about animal welfare and/or our planet. There’s something quite moving about a Harvard professor sitting on the floor, tapping away on a laptop covered in “plant trees” and chicken-stickers. The work of these academics should, where relevant, inform the animal and environmental movements’ strategies and tactics, and sufficient attention needs to go to bridging the academic and activist spheres.
This article was originally published at Tobias’ platform, The Vegan Strategist, and is republished here with the author’s permission. For more insights from Tobias Leenaert, subscribe to his newsletter, where he shares thoughtful analysis and strategies for creating a more compassionate and sustainable food system, animal issues, challenges of being an activist, and other topics.
