Research
Matthew Hayek, “Quantifying Global Yield Gaps in Orphan Protein Crops for Lower-Meat Future”
Plant-based alternatives to animal food products are a rapidly growing market in the US and show emerging potential abroad. There exist hundreds of varieties of leguminous crops, but their research investment and productivity is relatively low, and, thus, they do not benefit from the economies of scale characterizing soybeans. In this project Matthew will quantify global yield gaps for these varieties.
Dale Jamieson, Yifei Li, and Haley Sadoff “Meat and Dairy Production and Consumption in China: Bending the Curve”
The increased production and consumption of animal protein People’s Republic of China (PRC) has raised serious challenges to human health, global economic and environmental stability, and to animal welfare. This project is the pilot phase of an ambitious project intended to contribute to bending the curve downward of China’s meat and dairy consumption.
Jennifer Jacquet, Sonali McDermid, and Oliver Lazarus, “Big Beef and Dairy Influence on Climate Metrics and Policy”
Recent research by IATP and GRAIN (2018) analyzed emissions from the top 35 corporate meat and dairy companies globally. This project expands recent work around corporate responsibility for beef and dairy’s role in anthropogenic climate change.
Casey Riordan and Becca Franks, “Alligator Wrestling and its Impact on Captive American Alligators in Florida”
Alligators in the United States are almost universally treated as nuisance animals with few resources allocated to humanely managing them. Recently, a new end-use for alligators in Florida is becoming more common and has been further popularized by the Animal Planet reality series, Gator Boys. Rather than harvesting alligators, some trappers relocate them to a “sanctuary” or nature park. Unfortunately, many of these facilities force individual captive alligators to perform daily “wrestling shows” to entertain tourists. This project identifies the major businesses offering alligator wrestling shows to the public and, drawing on a sample of publicly available videos of alligator wrestling matches in Florida, identifies the welfare implications of alligator wrestling.
Chris Schlottmann, “Centering Animals in Agriculture
This project will focus on environmental assessments of agriculture, such as XYZ, including the basic argument for emphasizing animals in environmental assessments of agriculture, how assessments differ, and why methane and nitrous oxide matter in such assessments. It will also explore psychologically resonant frameworks for understanding environmental, animal, and human impacts and ethics, including analyses of purity, localism, and non-industrial frameworks.
Jeff Sebo, Wild Animals, Climate Change, and a Duty to Assist
This project begins by surveying the impacts that human-caused climate change is likely to have on wild animal populations, and will argue that we have a moral duty to assist wild animals in adapting to human-caused environmental change. This work will contribute to Jeff’s monograph, Why Animals Matter for Climate Change, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.