The STS Label Compass: Why «animal welfare» is the wrong term here

The «Label Compass» of the Swiss animal welfare organisation is meant to provide guidance at the meat counter.

Yet while the organisation compares labels, the number of animals killed in Switzerland rises year on year. An analysis of the question of where animal welfare ends and where it begins to stabilise the very system it ought to be criticising.

A compass pointing in the wrong direction

The Swiss animal welfare organisation (STS) has launched a new «Label Compass». It rates meat, egg and dairy labels according to four categories: very good, good, adequate, unsatisfactory. Its stated aim: «Less, but better animal protein, sustainably produced, with respect for farm animals.»

Sounds reasonable. But it isn't, once you look at the figures behind this «respect».

86 million dead, and rising

In 2025, over 86 million «farm animals» were slaughtered in Switzerland. That is 236’621 per day, 9’859 per hour, 164 per minute. In total, around 40’636 more animals were killed in 2025 than the year before. Already in 2024, Switzerland had set a sad record with over 85 million animals killed, the vast majority of them chickens, at around 82 million. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of slaughtered animals rose from 68 to over 85 million, mainly due to the shift towards poultry.

This development is taking place not despite, but alongside a growing landscape of labels which, during exactly this period, was co-shaped and co-sponsored by the STS. If the number of deaths rises while the label debate becomes ever more differentiated, one has to ask what the labels actually achieve.

What the STS itself admits

On the occasion of the label compass, STS spokesman Manuel Iseli openly told Nau.ch that the production of animal-based food is a «societal reality» whose conditions one wants to improve. The killing itself is not up for debate. It is managed, not prevented.

It is precisely here that other organisations in the animal welfare scene disagree. Céline Schlegel of Animal Rights Switzerland sums it up in the same article: «A great deal of animal suffering is also permitted in label production.» Even top-rated labels would ignore central forms of suffering, such as the panic of pigs during CO2 stunning or the painful sternum fractures in laying hens. Swissveg also warns of a «moral licensing» effect: those who buy a good label feel morally relieved and cheerfully continue consuming, instead of fundamentally questioning their consumption.

Speciesism with a seal of approval

The accusation contained in these 86 million goes deeper than mere label criticism. It concerns the question of which non-human animals are considered worthy of protection at all. The term for this is speciesism: the unequal treatment of living beings solely on the basis of their species membership, a concept coined by the psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970 and popularised by Peter Singer with his book «Animal Liberation». Telling in this regard is that the killing and consumption of pigs and cattle is largely accepted in the Western world, while the killing of dogs and cats is socially condemned and legally prohibited, even though these animals possess comparable capacities for pain perception and social bonding.

It is precisely this pattern that underlies the criticism formulated at the outset: if 86 million dogs or cats were killed in Switzerland each year, there would be a nationwide outcry, special broadcasts, political initiatives, and probably also harsh reactions from the STS itself. In the case of chickens, pigs and cattle, it remains a label rating with four categories. This is not a neutral differentiation by animal species, but a moral hierarchisation that reproduces precisely the structure underlying racism and sexism: membership of a group decides the value of a life, not the actual capacity to suffer.

If one applies the standard of human protection

The term “animal welfare” suggests that a protected interest stands at its centre: the life and physical integrity of the animal. Apply the same standard that society applies to the protection of humans, and this suggestion immediately falls apart. No understanding of the protection of humans would permit an organisation to assess the “conditions” under which humans may be killed and then call that “protection”. An institution that develops standards for how a killing should proceed so that it counts as “good” rather than “unsatisfactory” would, in the case of humans, not be part of the protection. It would be part of the crime.

What the STS practises is therefore more aptly described not as animal welfare but as a social-services sector for animals: an administration of husbandry and killing conditions within a system whose basic premise, that one may kill a sentient being without any interest of its own in doing so, remains untouched. The term “protection” obscures this basic premise. It lends an administrative practice a moral legitimacy to which it is not entitled, and thereby makes it harder to challenge, precisely because it presents itself as progress for the animals.

The mountain of meat also harms people, the environment and the climate

The 86 million are not an isolated animal-suffering problem. The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency (IARC) classifies processed meat as carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans, a verdict based on the evaluation of more than 800 studies and demonstrating the link above all with bowel cancer. With every additional 50-gram portion of processed meat per day, the risk of bowel cancer rises measurably.

The high consumption of animal-based foods is also a major cause of harm to the environment and the climate. Agriculture and animal husbandry emit more greenhouse gases than the entire transport sector, with a large share attributable to feed cultivation and land-use changes. The EAT-Lancet Commission calculates that a global shift to a predominantly plant-based diet could more than halve the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system and prevent up to 15 million premature deaths each year. Add to this the pollution of watercourses through nutrient inputs and the loss of biodiversity due to the enormous land requirements of animal husbandry.

A label cannot change anything about these orders of magnitude. It improves individual husbandry conditions in specific respects, but leaves the quantity itself untouched, and it is precisely the quantity that is the problem for the climate, health and the number of animals killed alike.

Complicity instead of protection

The STS does not act neutrally in this. With its Label Compass, the organisation actively helps to shape how consumers perceive and legitimise the existing killing industry. Whoever buys a label rated «very good» is buying a clear conscience, not the absence of suffering and death. The animal dies regardless, usually young, usually in large-scale facilities, usually without the public ever looking on.

In this way, the STS does not become an opponent of this reality, but one of its stabilisers. The organisation manages the status quo rather than challenging it. This is the decisive difference between a social sphere for animals that seeks to improve husbandry conditions within the framework of use, and an animal rights position that identifies the use itself as the core of the problem.

Labels do not free a single animal from the system

A label can gradually improve a form of husbandry. It cannot save the life of any of the 86 million animals, because that is precisely not its purpose. Whoever, under the banner of so-called «animal welfare», accepts that killing is fundamentally acceptable as long as the conditions beforehand are right, is shifting the ethical question rather than posing it. And whoever does this with a compass that promises orientation, risks that this orientation points precisely in the direction where the most killing takes place, at the expense of animals, humans, the environment and the climate alike.