Read the full post at https://samuelbacahenry.substack.com/p/vegan-factory-farmers-and-engineers
I’ve seen several articles & posts aghast at news that the Effective Altruism movement is funding, developing, and steering movement focus & finances away from veganism/animal rights and into innovations for the factory farming industry (including vegan-operated factory farms and labs and AI-enabled bio-engineering).
This includes: funding an organization (Spring Innovation Fund) to invest in, create, test, improve, market, & sell new factory farming technologies (and eventually sell the companies developing them).
Innovate Animal Ag is also launching an “Accelerator Farm” to similarly research new factory farming technologies on behalf of industry:
Innovate Animal Ag CEO Robert Yaman describing the animal welfare nonprofit’s factory farm during an interview with Niko McCarty on The New Biology.
There is also a proposal by Aidan Kankyoku (Anima International/Sentient Futures/Phauna Foundation/Direct Action Everywhere/Simple Heart/Save the Dogs/Pro-Animal Future/Pax Fauna) for vegans to give up the fights for animal liberation, veganism, & animal rights and instead join the factory farming industry to use artificial intelligence in bioengineering brainless chickens incapable of suffering.
I haven’t seen any in-depth discussion of who exactly is leading, funding, and promoting these initiatives (and relationships with some of its prominent vocal critics).
When I first heard that former vegan/animal rights/animal welfare activists were starting their own factory farm/slaughterhouse and developing factory farm tech on behalf of the animal ag industry, I assumed it was just some fringe relatively unknown newcomers.
In researching this article, I found a deeply entangled network of funders, fundees, and leaders involved with these current and growing initiatives. And the entangled relationships show a who’s who of animal rights/vegan/animal welfare advocacy leadership and funding from the past few decades.
The leaders, funders, and promoters of these initiatives and their financial and leadership entanglements include some of the most prominent public relations, lobbying, funding, and advocacy organizations in the animal welfare/veganism/animal rights movements.
When I looked closely, I was shocked to see the credentials of Spring Innovation Fund’s leaders & their deep connections into the big vegan/animal rights/animal welfare funders, organizations, and conferences (e.g. founders of Mercy For Animals and Animal Charity Evaluators; JUST, Beyond Meat, Mission Barns, Good Food Institute, Coefficient Giving/Dustin Moskovitz, Effective Ventures, Peter Singer, Manifold For Charity, etc).
It’s the same with Innovate Animal Ag (Mission Barns, Animal Charity Evaluators, Mercy For Animals, Effective Ventures, Dustin Moskovitz).
And Aidan Kankyoku (Phauna Foundation, DxE/Simple Heart/SaveTheDogs, Pro-Animal Future, Pax Fauna, Sentient Futures, Anima International, Manifund).
There are ultra-wealthy funders backing these initiatives…with premonitions of even greater windfalls to come with the OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) AI IPO’s predicted for 2027.
However, there is also opposition from many prominent funders, leaders, media, and organizations.
The purpose of this article is to plainly lay out these connections and a call to durable, sustained, institutional and individual collective resistance to these initiatives.
I don’t hold out hope that these initiatives will be permanently shelved. But, in resistance, we can retain and reinforce parts of the movement that still put animal liberation, veganism, and animal rights ahead of animal welfare alone, industry relationships, prominence, and financial investments (organizational and individual).
Note: This article is based on publicly available sources from organizations’ own websites, social media, legally required financial filings, and other public journalism.
We do not yet have some organizations’ financial filings for 2024 to 2026.
See Bibliography for links to sources.
Read the full post at https://samuelbacahenry.substack.com/p/vegan-factory-farmers-and-engineers
