If you believe and/or work in animal rights advocacy, you've probably heard this recently. You may even be someone who has said it.
"We've been fighting this for decades, and factory farming is bigger than ever.”
“The chicken industry has gotten worse, not better. Corporate cage-free commitments are theater.”
“Lab-grown meat is perpetually five years away.”
Individual diet change is a rounding error. Nudges and defaults don’t work.”
“Where's the return on investment?"
The effective altruism community has been particularly brutal with this accounting. After decades of animal advocacy spending, they run the math and ask the uncomfortable question: what have we actually purchased with all of this time and manpower? The ROI is nearly impossible to measure, the metrics are soft, and movement infighting is as voracious as ever. We have leaders who hold up time-served and burnout as virtuous indicators of dedication to the cause. The market share of plant-based alternatives, while growing, remains a small fraction of food consumption, and the economic viability of these products has followed the opposite trajectory as we all expected and hoped. Moral concern for animals exists in polls but doesn't move behavior.
Public Opposition to Factory Farming:
Actual Behavior:
So activists get demoralized. Donors redirect to global health. We get bogged down in trying measure “suffering adjusted days.” The movement's best minds drift toward other causes where progress is more legible, more measurable, more associated with understandable return on investment: malaria nets, shrimp stunning, etc. While I am a firm believer in the phrase “perfect is the enemy of good,” I think metrics born from ROI desperation are the enemy of progress. Do we think young people who love animals are going to be excited about stunning shrimp? Do we think young people, with access to YouTube, Claude and social media will be excited to beg corporations for token crumbs of cage free progress?
The first point I want to make is that they're asking the right questions; They're just looking at the wrong timeline, and chasing the wrong metrics.
There’s precedent here.
While I do not work in the animal rights space as a profession, I have cared deeply for it for most of my life. (Fun fact: there are a lot of people who feel the same way about animals who do not live in the Bay Area). My background is in nonprofit social service work, particularly in behavioral health and addiction treatment over the past decade.
Let me tell you a bit about addiction treatment in America. Specifically, I want to tell you about how long it took.
*Note: comparing the history of addiction to animal rights is nowhere close to being a 1:1 comparison. But because of my work history, I’m looking to take the lessons learned the former and apply them to the latter. I think there’s plenty of overlap.
In 1784, American physician Benjamin Rush published An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind. He argued—based on observation and reason—that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral failing. This was genuinely radical for the time – hell, this was radical at anytime before about 2020. For someone addicted to alcohol, the socially acceptable explanation was spiritual corruption or character weakness. Abusing distilled spirits was a choice. Rush put forward an idea that was truly revolutionary: no, some people cannot choose to simply not drink - something is wrong with their brains.
A few hundred years later, medical and social science proved he was right.
He was also completely ignored.
For nearly 200 years, addiction remained a moral category. Drunkenness was sin, and drug use was depravity. Addicts deserved punishment, not treatment. Mothers and fathers who fell short of being good parents and fell into poverty and helplessness from addiction were not people afflicted with a disease, but people making decisions to abandon their responsibilities.
This wasn't just philosophy—it shaped policy, and policy reinforced social stigma. Criminalization, not intervention. Punishment over medicine. Prisons, not hospitals.
The 20th century brought incremental, painful shifts. Alcoholics Anonymous (1935) reframed addiction as disease—but one you had to accept and surrender to. There was spiritual language mixed with medical metaphor. It was weird and imperfect, but it worked for millions. Why? Because it met people where they were. It didn't require them to be fixed before they deserved help. It said: you're okay, you're sick, now what? This filtered into communities through 12 Step Groups, and offshoots like Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon, and others. It gave people with similar issues a small community to rely on and speak safely.
In mid-century, the disease model gained institutional traction. Insurance companies started covering treatment. Hospitals opened addiction medicine units. Professionals got credentialed. But here's what's important: this didn't happen because public opinion shifted first. It happened because institutions decided to legitimize the framework.
Then came the breakthrough in neuroscience. MRI technology. PET scans. Neurochemistry research. By the 1990s, we could actually see what addiction did to the brain. Dopamine dysregulation. Prefrontal cortex damage. Physical, measurable changes. This wasn't philosophical anymore. It was undeniable.
But—and this is crucial—that science alone didn't win the day. Science was fuel for institutional change that was already in motion.
By the early 2000s, addiction treatment had moved from fringe to mainstream. Insurance covered it. Medical schools taught it. Hospitals competed for addiction patients. The stigma didn't vanish, but it shifted. Addiction became a health problem, not a moral problem. It afflicted communities and families, who agreed new approaches were necessary after seeing how the systems of the past treated their loved ones.
More innovations followed – for-profits popped up that expanded the use of medications to combat addiction. The public student loan forgiveness program encourages people to go to school for social services, which absolutely benefits the addiction treatment sector. Specialized licenses and credentials have come about for physicians and nurses. Certified Peer Supporters became a movement (advocates with lived experience who can charge Medicaid for their advocacy).
How long did this take? From Rush's insight in 1784 to genuine institutional legitimacy? About 220 years.
From the first pharmaceutical interventions (naltrexone, 1984) to widespread adoption? About 30 years, and we're still fighting battles on opioid medications.
Here's what I need you to notice: none of this happened through moral persuasion alone. We didn't shame America into accepting addiction as disease. We built institutions. We professionalized the field. We got insurance companies involved. We accumulated irrefutable data. We led with empathy instead of judgement.
And here’s where my comparison starts: when looking at each piece of this movement, you could easily make the case that the ROI is terrible. Despite every medical and social advance, addiction remains and incredibly difficult thing to fight. From alcoholism (which has never gone away), to cocaine in the 70’s, the crack epidemic of the 80’s, methamphetamines and heroin in the 90’s to pharmaceutical opioids in the present day, one could look at all of the collective money and time as wasted. People are still dying. Services are still expanding. We may have better ways of treating certain addictions, but people keep finding new drugs to use, which require new interventions.
Many people utilize detox units and sobering centers 10,15 or more times before they manage to find recovery…and then the chances of relapse are incredibly high.
Q: How much is one human life worth?
A: Whatever it costs to save.
Animal rights has been a serious political and philosophical movement for maybe 50 years. Factory farming abolition? Maybe 40 years as a stated goal. Effective animal advocacy as a discipline? 30 years. And I’m being generous here.
I won’t rehash the massive financial discrepancies between the movement and Big Ag here – we all know them. We’re David, they’re Goliath, and unlike in the Bible, we’re flinging stones off his forehead to little effect.
And because of this feeling of endless rock flinging, many in EA space are ready to give up on a lot of what has been tried in the past because it “doesn’t work.”
Did AA work? Did Suboxone work? Did EMDR or cognitive behavioral therapy work? Have we beaten addiction?
No! We have an incredibly long way to. But EVERY thing we have tried in the past has led us here, and I don’t think anyone can argue that addiction treatment is worse off now than 100 years ago.
Animal rights believers are not behind. We're exactly where addiction was in the mid-1980s.
Let me show you some parallels:
The difference? Addiction had something we can build: a clear health crisis hitting humans that demanded institutional response. Though the opioid crisis of the 2010’s blew the Overton window wide open and finally got the upper classes of society to understand what other classes of people suffering from addiction had been facing for decades, the work had been done to mobilize solutions.
There are major differences between addiction and animal consumption, but lets focus on alcohol for now: the consumption of booze is both socially accepted, reinforced, glamorized, and part of everyday life for millions of Americans. When you drink a beer, you’re probably not thinking of how many people are wasting away in prison because of marijuana offenses while alcohol commercials play on TV, you’re just enjoying a football game. When someone eats a hot dog, they’re not thinking of the horrific conditions animals live in and the capitalist evil that makes it cheap, they’re just enjoying a baseball game.
What I’m saying is this:
While some animal liberation and diet change attempts have not worked, to call them failures is defeatist, and I would argue inaccurate. All of the work from animal lovers over the decades has gotten us here; and while the world is every bit as bad for animals as it ever has been, I doubt anyone would argue that it isn’t better and easier to be a vegan now than it was 100 years ago.
However: just as we look back on our government’s “war on drugs” as a regrettable folly that actually did more harm than good for people suffering from addiction, we may soon come to realize that many of the techniques used to advocate for animals, while well-intentioned, have stigmatized the movement. It’s hard to have an empathetic dialogue with someone when they already assume what you think.
Here's something animal advocacy has that addiction didn't: institutions that already claim to value animals.
*Note: Many animals rights advocates despise the existence of zos and aquariums, but I need you to stick with me here. Regardless of your feelings about animal-based edutainment, my argument is not in defense of zoos and the like, it is simply to say that these are institutions with social capital and trust from much of the non-animal rights population.
The addiction movement benefited because the addicted person is who needs acceptance and treatment. There's built-in empathy for the human in crisis.
Animal rights asks people to accept culpability—to see their own choices (eating, entertainment, research participation) as harmful. That's psychologically much heavier than accepting addiction as disease, and it requires a very sensitive touch when instigating this dialogue.
So how do we start getting people to think differently? Shaming them? Yelling at them? Begging corporations to pretend they care until no one is looking anymore?
A zoo theoretically exists to conserve species and educate the public. A hospital exists to promote health. An animal rescue/adoption center exists to protect animals and find loving homes for them. A school exists to educate the next generation. And Unitarian churches exists to serve liberal moral values and social justice.
And nearly all of them serve animal products.
Ask any animal rights true believer what truly infuriates them, and I bet most of them would include the general public’s daily cognitive dissonance: we spend thousands of dollars on our dogs and cats whom we love while grilling steaks and chicken at night. We cry when we hear Sarah McLachlan singing while dogs are shown in cages during a commercial, but when footage is leaked from factory farms people choose to block it out and continue their behaviors.
Every zoo I have ever been to serves meat in the cafeteria. A cursory google search of “plant-based zoos” brings up nothing. This is cognitive dissonance baked into institutional practice, and reinforces each and every single day the idea that some animals are more important than others.
The mistake animal advocacy has made is fighting individual morality. The EAs are right to be frustrated by this. You can't scale moral persuasion, and guilt doesn't change markets. Shame creates backlash, and being judgmental ends a conversation about animal treatment before it begins.
The decades have shown that we can not scale shame, and we can not scale veganism.
But you can scale institutional alignment. And you can track return on investment.
When addiction treatment stopped being "you're a bad person, you should stop drinking" and became "you have a medical condition; here's what can be done about that," everything changed.
Animal advocacy needs the same shift. Not instead of moral argument—alongside it. One focus of our moral center of gravity needs to move from "convince individuals" to "align institutions."
Here's what this looks like: you meet with an animal rescue’s leadership and point out that they're serving chicken and steak at an upcoming dinner. Not as an accusation. As a the start of what may be a very long conversation.
You walk into a hospital and say: "You treat heart disease. Plant-forward diets prevent heart disease. You're not walking your talk. How do we fix this?"
You walk into a zoo and say: "Your conservation message says we need to protect species…you have a map on the wall showing deforestation’s effects on the environment…yet you're funding habitat destruction through concession contracts. This is incoherent. Let's make it coherent."
Each institution that changes doesn't require moral conversion. It requires consistency. It requires walking toward their own stated values.
And here's the magic: once an institution changes, it becomes normal. It becomes precedent. It becomes the baseline for the next institution. Do we think people will stop going to zoos and aquariums because they can’t order a crappy hot dog? They can’t eat a dried our chicken sandwich?
What if just one single zoo quietly phased out meat? They don’t even need to make it a big deal – just quietly stop serving it. And over time, people have to tell their kids “no, they don’t have chicken nuggets here, it’s a zoo. They protect animals here.” What does that spur in a child’s understanding of animals?
The hospital switches to plant-forward cafeterias? Then other hospitals possibly look bad for not doing it. The zoo stops serving animal products? Then it's harder for the aquarium to justify serving them. The animal rescue goes vegan? Then donors expect it. Then it becomes the professional standard. Then it becomes unremarkable.
This is how change actually happens. Not through mass enlightenment. Through institutional creep, and public acceptance.
It will not be fast or easy. It will need people working in these institutions who understand it, who are willing to at least test it, and who are true animal lovers.
Perhaps it will take funding to offset the losses from removing animal products from menus until things stabilize.
Here's where we reassess the "failure" narrative.
In the 1980s, the animal movement seemed to accomplish nothing. Factory farming grew. Industrial agriculture scaled. Consumption increased. But what was actually happening?
Academic legitimacy. Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983) made animal ethics a serious philosophical field. Universities created animal ethics courses. Philosophers who'd never cared about animals had to engage with the arguments. It didn't matter if they agreed. They had to think about it.
Institutional cracks. Cage-free requirements seemed like theater when they passed. They were theater a lot of times. But they were also precedent. Companies didn't volunteer these commitments because consumers demanded them—they demanded them because advocates had created enough pressure that it was easier to concede than resist. And once they conceded on one thing, the question became: why not another thing?
Corporate meat reduction. Tyson Foods has actual plant-based research divisions now. Impossible Foods is valued in the billions. Cargill is investing in cultivated meat. The industry is hedging its bets because they can see the pressure building. This isn't failure. This is the industry adapting in real time to perceived future constraints. It’s not nearly as fast as anyone would like, and success is not guaranteed – but I believe grassroots advocacy might need to look a lot less like yelling through a megaphone and a lot more like having deep conversations with leaders at animal-centric organizations.
Market growth. Beyond Meat, Oatly, Impossible—these companies didn't exist 15 years ago. They're not dominant, but they're legitimate. They have shelf space. They have brand recognition. They have institutional investors. They have supply chains. The infrastructure for an alternative food system is being built, piece by piece, not because of moral awakening but because there's money to be made.
Generational shift. Younger Americans are less attached to meat consumption than older generations. This isn't universal, but it's real. It's the definition of progress you can't measure annually but you can see over decades. We need to reinforce this.
This is the stepping stone narrative that animal advocates miss. Every "failure" was actually a load-bearing piece of something larger. The moral argument that seems ineffective? It's softening institutional resistance. The corporate concessions that seem insufficient? They're creating precedent and infrastructure. The market growth that seems small? It's building alternatives.
Addiction treatment teaches us something uncomfortable: real systemic change takes a century or longer. It takes that long even when the problem is literally killing the people in power.
Addiction wasn't solved because society suddenly agreed it was bad. It was solved because institutions—hospitals, insurance companies, governments—found it was more efficient to treat addiction as a medical problem than to criminalize it. Those institutions didn't change because they suddenly got morality. They changed because the alternative was too expensive, too ineffective, or too politically untenable.
Animal agriculture is still immensely profitable. It's still politically powerful. It's still culturally normalized. The incentive structure hasn't flipped yet.
But it will. Not because everyone becomes vegan. But because:
This is the timeline we're actually on. It's not the timeline of moral victory. It's the timeline of institutional and economic incentive shifting. It's slower and more grinding than moral urgency would like. It's also more reliable.
If you're an effective altruist frustrated by animal advocacy ROI, here's my reframe: you're measuring the wrong output.
The output isn't "did everyone become vegan?" The output is "did institutional practice shift?" Did a major food company reduce animal products in their supply chain? That's output. Did a hospital change its cafeteria? That's output. Did a zoo stop serving animal products? That's output. Did academic legitimacy increase? That's output.
These things don't sound as romantic as "we freed the animals" or "we saved billions of lives." But they're the actual lever. They're the precedent-setters. They're the normalizers. And as an animal lover, I would sure as hell rather spend time convincing a zoo to ban the sale of animals to align with their stated goals than try to convince someone why they should be excited about stunning shrimp.
If you're an animal advocate exhausted by years of work with limited consumer behavior change, here's my reframe: you're not actually failing. You're in the long game, and the long game has always been this slow.
The question isn't "how do we convince everyone to be vegan?" It's "how do we make institutions walk their talk?" That's a different problem, and it's a problem you can actually solve. It requires strategy, flexibility, and patience, but not sermons. It requires identifying institutional dissonance and pointing it out, not shouting moral truth into a void to the detriment of the movement.
Here's what this could look like starting tomorrow:
Animal rescues and shelters stop serving animal products at fundraisers and events. This is the most obvious place to start. The cognitive dissonance is too blatant. An organization that exists to save animals serving dead animals is indefensible. This one institutional standard could ripple.
Zoos and aquariums align their concession practices with their conservation missions. They have incredible educational platforms. They have institutional legitimacy. They also have a message problem: "We protect species" + "We serve species" is incoherent. You can’t preach about conservation while serving products that prop up the practices that destroy the environment.
Hospitals move toward plant-forward default cafeterias. Health care institutions have enormous institutional leverage. Doctors prescribe diet as medicine. Hospitals can't logically promote health while serving food that increases disease risk.
Schools implement regular plant-based meals. Generational shift is already happening here. You're not waiting for culture change; you're enabling it.
Progressive religious institutions align their practices with their values. Many faith communities have environmental and compassion commitments that logically extend to animal consumption.
Each of these is not revolutionary. Each is institutional alignment. Each is boring. Each is also precedent-setting.
Like many people, I, too, am frustrated by animal advocacy's pace. Genuinely. Billions of animals suffer in evil industrial systems. We know how to reduce that suffering. We have alternatives. The fact that we're not moving faster is maddening, and it depresses me.
But we've watched other movements grind through slow institutional change. We've seen it take decades to shift policy on health issues. We’ve seen it take generations to normalize once-radical ideas.
Movements are not linear, but punctuated by fits and starts. There are long stretches of nothing, and then suddenly an opportunity for forward momentum appears.
This is where animal advocacy should look; Not because everyone's waking up with a new morality, but because institutions should choose consistency over contradiction. The next generation will find this cognitive dissonance as obviously wrong as we find segregation or slavery.
Obviously, nothing is guaranteed, but the work being done now—all of it, even the things that feel like failures—is load-bearing infrastructure for that shift.
We need to keep working, and I am not advocating for ending any work currently being done. Corporate campaigns are important, political lobbying and legal work are important. However, I believe we need to make a renewed and collective aim at institutional change, not individual change. Point out dissonance, don't accuse sin. Build infrastructure, don't just demand behavior. Think in decades, not quarters. Professionalize the movement by recruiting armies of scientists, doctors, educators, and animal advocates (like in rescues) that are traditionally left out of larger animal rights work.
Nothing as evil as our culture’s treatment of animals can survive forever. The timeline for massive change is long. But it's proven. And we're already on it.
In the coming weeks I plan to roll out a vision for how this institutional persuasion campaign can be operationalized, along with some next steps to get it in motion.
