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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
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[note: my donation is currently paused for financial reasons, but reflects what is written below]
Put simply, if living with a huge amount of suffering animals is maybe wrong, then living with a raising amount of suffering animals is certainly morally careless.
It's due to general trends -humans globally seem to do better and better at helping one another, with fewer and fewer children deaths overall, people seemingly concerned by the suffering of other human beings, GDP rising, etc. I expect the ball to keep rolling.
Animals, on the opposite, suffer in greater and greater amount, and we don't seem to have found a real solution to revert this trend. Animal rights advocacy might end up being a "phase" in retrospect, and this is a worrying prospect. My hope is that my donations help build up momentum to eventually reach a tipping point.
Thanks for sharing, Camille! Relatedly, people may like James Özden's post The default trajectory for animal welfare means vastly more suffering. For somewhat opposite evidence, there is my post Farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades?, and Robert Yaman's How to Be a Techno-Optimist for Animals.