The importance of public criticism

In the previous blog post, I mentioned an animal welfare corporation’s claim that 2.5% of the people receiving their literature will switch to a plant-based diet. They have been making this claim for years despite the actual data showing this estimate to be at least one (and possibly two) orders of magnitude too large. Today, less than two weeks after the blog was posted, the claim has been removed from the corporation’s web site. The change was made sometime during this past week, and given the timing, it’s obvious to me the claim was removed as a reaction to the publication of the numbers on this site.

Although that post was not specifically about that corporation and therefore didn’t mention them by name, their reaction to the blog post shows how important it is to make criticism public. Back in 2006, when I first asked them privately about the discrepancy between the numbers, I was offered a non-answer. Now, under public scrutiny, they made no such attempt to defend the numbers and instead quietly removed the misleading claim within two weeks.

I have been advised in the past to bring up my criticisms privately to the animal welfare corporations; yet these experiences are one clear example of how that advice primarily serves to bury criticism rather than support positive change.

As I mentioned in the last post, when faced with criticism, the leadership of the animal welfare corporations often reacts reflexively by covering up the obvious symptoms of the problem being criticized while leaving unexamined and unaddressed the deeper issues involved. Leaving the underlying causes in place offers, at best, a brief reprieve until the next symptom appears. I believe it’s better to directly and honestly face what ails us, own our mistakes, work to fix them, and move on, wiser for the experience.