Critiquing the Dublin Declaration based on underpowered analysis and inadequate methods undermines trust in the sciences – A response to Krattenmacher et al. 2024

In 2022, the Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock was initiated following the “International Summit on the Societal Role of Meat – What the Science Says” in Dublin (www.dublin-declaration.org). While calling for improving sustainability, the Declaration underlines the primordial role of animals in food systems of the past, present, and future (Leroy and Ederer, 2023). At the start of 2025, it has been signed by 1223 scientists. An elaborate verification process based on exclusion criteria strictly limits this list of signatories to qualified scientists from universities or research institutes. As a result, many willing signers were turned down because they are conducting their research in industry settings.
Despite these efforts to maintain independence from commercial interests, a range of scientists and media outlets, interwoven in their unsympathetic positions towards livestock farming and advocacy for vegan lifestyles, have repeatedly attempted to stick the label of industry lobbyism on the Dublin Declaration (Leroy et al., 2023). It is, of course, any scientist’s right and obligation to question other researchers' findings, assumptions and motivations. We need, however, to object to attempts that lack methodological rigor and are based on unsatisfactory scientific standards, as was recently the case for an article by Krattenmacher et al. (2024) in this journal, henceforth here named KESTR. The article’s overreaching conclusion that the Dublin Declaration is merely a gain for the global meat industry and especially its unacceptable defamatory attitude towards a collective of more than a thousand scientific colleagues, implicitly accused of industry bias, is not based on a balanced scientific assessment. More specifically, we will address KESTR’s contention that the Declaration is a “loss for society” and a “gain for the meat industry” based on their flawed “discursive frame” and “eco-system” analyses (which have been presented in Section 1 and 2 of their article, respectively). Due to format constraints we cannot address all details of these accusations in this article, but for a more elaborate response to criticism of the Dublin Declaration we refer the reader to https://www.dublin-declaration.org/rebuttals.