Mark Steele spent three years on the RSPCA NSW board and another stint as a non-executive director of RSPCA Australia. He left at the end of September and posted his reasons on LinkedIn, which is not the act of someone quietly moving on. His core charge is precise: the RSPCA Certified logo functions as a credibility loan the underlying standard cannot repay. The standard he's contesting covers 97% of Australia's meat chicken — almost all of the 800 million birds slaughtered annually. Those birds are almost exclusively fast-growing breeds that reach slaughter weight in four to six weeks. Animal welfare experts are not ambiguous about what that pace of growth does to a body: cardiovascular strain, skeletal problems, dermatological issues. The biology, as Jed Goodfellow of the Australian Alliance for Animals puts it, is being pushed to its limits. Steele's argument is not that the RSPCA does nothing. He concedes it does 'much fine work.' His argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: a shopper who sees the RSPCA logo on a chicken package will reasonably infer that the bird lived and died well. He believes that inference is false, and that the logo actively forecloses the question before the shopper thinks to ask it. The RSPCA recently updated its standards, effective January 2031. The changes include lower stocking densities, variable lighting, and an end to electrical water bath stunning. These are real changes. What they do not include is a mandatory phase-out of fast-growing breeds. Instead, the organisation created a new 'enhanced' voluntary category to encourage the switch to slower-growing breeds — a category that has no consumer-facing label yet and no binding timeline. Steele called it 'a small step forward,' which in context reads as something between a compliment and an indictment. The RSPCA's own senior scientific officer told the Guardian the organisation would ultimately like to see slower-growing breeds replace fast-growing ones, and encouraged consumers to spend accordingly. That is a position and a pass-off simultaneously: we agree the current state is not the end state, but the mechanism for getting there is consumer pressure, not standard enforcement. The certification scheme, under this logic, continues to mark the transitional state as acceptable. Europe is the comparison that keeps appearing in this debate, and it matters. Slower-growing breeds are increasingly standard there. The cost premium exists but is not prohibitive — European consumers have absorbed it. Australia has 55kg of per-person annual chicken consumption, roughly double what it was thirty years ago. The commercial inertia here is significant, which is exactly why the certification question is load-bearing. If the label says 'higher welfare' and the welfare gap closes only through voluntary adoption at producer discretion, the label is doing marketing work. Steele is a senior counsel — he knows how to construct a liability argument. His public exit is structured like one: here is the claim the logo makes, here is the reality, here is the gap. The RSPCA has until 2031 to close some of that gap through its updated standards, and indefinitely to close the rest through voluntary encouragement. That timeline and that mechanism are, implicitly, what he found untenable.
