Lewis Bollard

So first, there was some policy upfront, which was because advocates had drawn attention to this practice of killing male chicks, there was real impetus by governments and philanthropists to support kickstarting this technology.

And my estimate is it was about $10 million, very little amount of public and philanthropic money that kickstarted this technology, got it to a point where startups could start to implement the technology.

Yeah, I think there's huge potential for technologists here.

I mean, there is a lot of low hanging fruit because this is primarily a commodity business that has only done things that reduce the price or increase production levels.

It has not invested in animal welfare.

And as a result, you find these things it's doing that just seem archaic.

Like the way that it is castrating piglets is with a blunt knife and like no pain relief.

And so in that case, there was a new technology of immunocastration, an injection that achieved the same effects.

And it was very easy to develop.

And so I think there are a whole lot of other practices like that out there.

There are a whole lot of these archaic practices being done where someone could come in and with a little bit of smart work around this and an actual focus on animal welfare, bring in solutions that could potentially help billions of animals.

I mean, think of what we've done to pigs.

So when we took pigs inside from outdoors and we selected them to grow faster and to have this inadvertent greater aggression,

The first thing they started doing was getting bored and biting each other's tails.

And that was a problem.

So then we said, we'll cut the tails off.

Well, that didn't work.

So then we had to start clipping the teeth and cutting part of their teeth off.

And then that still wasn't enough when it came to the sows.

So then we had to put them in crates to protect them from any other animal.