The goal isn’t 'end factory farming', but reduce as much suffering as possible

I thought this was a well-written, thoughtful and highly intelligent piece, about a really important topic, where getting as close as possible to the truth is super-important and high-stakes. Kudos! I gave it a strong upvote. :) 

I am starting from the point of being fairly attached to the “let’s try to end factory farming!” framing, but this post has given me a lot to think about. 

I wanted to share a bunch of thoughts that sprung to my mind as I read the post:

One potential advantage of the “let’s try to end factory farming!” framing is that it encourages us to think long-term and systematically, rather than short-term and narrowly. I take long-termism to be true: future suffering matters as much as present-day suffering. I worry that a framing of “let’s accept that factory farming will endure; how can we reduce the most suffering” quickly becomes “how can we reduce the most suffering *right now*, in a readily countable and observable way”. This might make us miss opportunities and theories of change which will take longer to work up a head of steam, but which over the long term, may lead to more suffering reduction. It may also push us towards interventions which are easily countable, numerically, at the expense of interventions which may actually, over time, lead to more suffering-reduction, but in more uncertain, unpredictable, indirect and harder-to-measure ways. It may push us towards very technocratic and limited types of intervention, missing things like politics, institutions, ideas, etc. It may discourage creativity and innovation. (To be clear: this is not meant to be a “woo-woo” point; I’m suggesting that these tendencies may fail in their own terms to maximize expected suffering reduction over time). 

Aiming to end factory farming encourages us to aim high. Imagine we have a choice between two options, as a movement: try to eradicate 100pc of the suffering caused by factory farming, by abolishing it (perhaps via bold, risky, ambitious theories-of-change). Or, try to eradicate 1pc of the suffering caused by factory farming, through present-day welfare improvements. The high potential payoff of eradicating factory farming seems to look good here, even if we think there’s only (say) a 10pc chance of it working. I.e, perhaps the best way to maximise expected suffering reduction is, in fact, to ‘gamble’ a bit and take a shot at eradicating factory farming. 

• A potentially important counterpoint here, I think, is if it turns out that some welfare reforms deliver huge suffering reduction. I think that the Welfare Footprint folks claim somewhere that moving laying hens (?) out of the worst cage systems basically immediately *halves* their suffering (?) If true, this is huge, and is a point in favour of prioritising such welfare measures. 

If we give up on even trying to end factory farming, doesn’t this become a self-fulfilling prophecy? If we do this, we guarantee that we end up in a world where factory framing endures. Given uncertainty, shouldn’t (at least some of) the movement try to aim high and eradicate it? 

I’m not sure that the analogy with malaria/poverty/health/development is perfect:

• Actually, we do seek to end some diseases, not just control them. E.g. we eradicated smallpox, and are nearly there for polio. Some people are also trying to eradicate malaria (I think). (Though eradicating a disease is in many ways easier than eradicating factory farming, so this analogy maybe doesn’t work so well.)
• Arguably, the focus within EA global health discourse on immediate, countable, tangible interventions (like distributing bednets) has distracted us from more systemic, messy - but also deep and important - questions, such as: Why are some countries rich and others poor? What actually drives development, and how can we help boost it? How can we boost growth? Why do some countries have such bad health systems and outcomes? How can we build strong health systems in developing countries, rather than focus ‘vertically’ on specific diseases? *Arguably*, making progress on these questions could, over the long term, actually deliver more suffering-reduction than jumping straight to technocratic, direct ‘interventions’.
• Some of global development discourse *is* framed in terms of *ending* poverty, at least sometimes. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals say we should seek to ‘end poverty’, end hunger’, etc. 

I’m very unsure about this, but I *guess* that a framing of “factory faming is a gigantic moral evil, let’s eradicate it” is, on balance, more motivating/attracting than a framing of “factory farming is a gigantic moral evil, we’ll never defeat it, but we can help a tonne of animals, let’s do it” (?) 

*If* we knew the future for sure, and knew it would be impossible ever to eradicate factory farming, then I do agree that we should face facts and adjust our strategy accordingly, rather than live in hope. My gut instinct though is that we can’t be sure of this, and there are arguments in favor of aiming for big, bold, systemic changes and wins for animals. 

These are just some thoughts that sprang to mind, I don't think that in and of themselves they fully repudiate the case you thoughtfully made. I think more discussion and thought on this topic is important; kudos for kicking this off with your post! 

(For those interested, the Sentience Institute have done some fascinating work on the analogies and dis-analogies of factory farming vs other moral crimes such as slavery - eg here and here.)  

I like the thought process and the sentiment, but I think big goals are a critical guiding light for the future. "Reducing suffering as much as possible" is neither inspirational enough nor concrete enough to rally behind.

"End factory farming" is a clearer a inspiring rallying point, the same way we in global development do talk about ending poverty, and yes eradicating Malaria. The millennium and sustainable development goals use those kind of terms and I believe help light the way.

Call me naive, but I think distant hope is more likely to keep people going than lead to burnout, as long as we are realistic about our short term goals. I don't think ending factory farming is unrealistic long term.

(I didn't read all the comments so someone else might have said this already)

I think this post is admirable for trying to persuasively correct a mistake you see people making — but I end up disagreeing because of equivocation between end factory farming and end factory farming within our lifetimes.

I think the goal is to end factory farming, & my sense is most of the harms you're worried about only accrue when people have an unrealistic sense of how likely that is overall (not guaranteed) & how soon that might happen (maybe not for a very long time, or perhaps ever).

See some (limited) discussion of this in 80k's new factory farming article which I was reading earlier today by coincidence.

This is such a good post, and I agree very much. You said so many things that I have been thinking and wishing I knew how to say. Thank you so, so much for writing this, @ElliotTep!

I agree we should focus on reducing suffering. And I have other reasons, too, in addition to the points you brought up.

Other reasons:

1. The problem with factory farming is the suffering it causes. So, we should focus on the real problem—the suffering. When we talk about fighting factory farming, we are actually only talking about a proxy for our real goal. (The real goal is to decrease suffering.) I think it's better to focus on the real goal. Because focusing on a proxy can always have unintentional consequences. For instance, if we focus only on ending factory farming, we may decide to do something like tax methane emissions. That tax may cost the meat industry money. It may decrease the number of factory farms that get built. It may raise the price of beef and thus decrease the amount of meat that gets sold. But if it causes beef prices to go up, people will eat more chicken. And then the methane-tax intervention will result in more suffering. This is just one of many examples.

2. I have recently been learning first hand that a lot of people in the meat, egg, and dairy industries have serious concerns about the treatment of animals. There are slaughterhouse workers, contract growers, corporate meat-industry employees, and ag executives who really want to improve animal welfare! But, naturally, almost none of these people want to end animal farming. Because, as @Hazo points out, that would mean ending their livelihood. We are more likely to succeed at improving animal welfare if we can work collaboratively with these concerned people in the meat and egg industries. These are the people who deal with farmed animals on a day-to-day basis, and who have the biggest impact on farmed animals' lives. I think selecting a goal that we can work towards together with people within the industry is highly worthwhile.

3. Factory farming isn't the only thing that's bad. All suffering is bad. Animal testing causes severe suffering that's likely worse per individual than the suffering caused by factory farming. My understanding is that the scale of animal testing on mice and rats isn't actually known, and most numbers we see leave them out. Wild animals also suffer. Rodents suffer when they're bred in pet stores to sell to snake owners. Fish presumably suffer in large numbers in the pet trade. I'm not sure if people count insect farming as factory farming, but it's a concerning new trend that could theoretically cause even more suffering than at least what most people think of as factory farming. New forms of mass suffering could be invented in the future. If AI is sentient, people (or AI) could cause AI to suffer on massive scales. Digital minds could be created and replicated and made to suffer in huge numbers. If we fight factory farming, that doesn't help move the needle on other forms of suffering. If we focus on the suffering itself, maybe we can move the needle generally. For instance, if we work to create an anti-suffering ethic, that would be a more helpful ethic to create in the long run than a pro-vegan or anti-factory-farming ethic. Because the anti-suffering ethic would move us to help factory farmed animals while also staying vigilant about other forms of suffering. 

4. Elliot's point about how ending factory farming is an unrealistic goal also worries me for another reason: The effect of the slogan on longtermist EAs who hear animal-focused EAs say it all the time. Animal people keep saying "Factory farming is going to end. Factory farming is unsustainable." To me, an AR person, I know to translate that slogan to "I'm trying to get myself hyped up! I'm trying to inspire others to join me on a crusade!" Because I know, sadly, what an uphill battle it would be to end factory farming. And I think most AR people know that. But to someone who doesn't spend their whole life focused on animal welfare, it's not obvious that this statement is just an inspirational quote. It sounds like the speaker is literally predicting that factory farming is going to end. And I worry that longtermist EAs, who may spend slightly less time paying attention to the trends in animal agriculture, may just hear the slogan and take it at face value. Here's why I worry about that: It seems that many longtermist EAs are working hard to try to preserve humanity, or at least consciousness, for as long as possible. And many longtermist EAs seem to assume that life in the future will be net positive. This assumption seems to involve assuming that factory farming will end, and that it won't be replaced by anything even worse (see point #3). I worry that longtermist EAs may be outsourcing their thinking a little to animal EAs. And animal EAs are falling down on the job by just giving an inspirational slogan when we should give the truth. If it's true that we have no realistic expectation of suffering decreasing in the future, and no reason to believe factory farming will end before humanity ends, we should make sure longtermists know that. That way, longtermist EAs can plan accordingly.

I'm also leaning towards thinking of the movement's objectives in terms of “reducing as much animal suffering as possible” rather than “ending factory farming”. That said, I'm more hesitant about what you draw from this distinction, concerning the more or less reasonable levels of ambition we might want to aim for.

When I hear animal sanctuary managers criticize effective altruism and justify their appeals for donations by explaining that “each one counts”, I'm hardly convinced: sure, every animal saved is a victory, but is it really the best we can do with these donations? It seems doubtful, given the derisory impact compared to the scale of the problem.

I find myself raising a similar objection here to the question of how ambitious we should be. Definitely, “If only 30% of the companies fail to meet their cage-free goals because of our work, instead of 60%, that is a win to celebrate.”, but is that really the best we can do with the money we spend? Maybe it is, yes. But the low impact relative to the scale of the problem still makes me wonder if we can't do better than that, by looking for other ideas for even more cost-effective interventions, including those directed towards a longer-term impact, which seek to take us towards a society where we've reduced suffering so much that there's no more factory farming (or even no more farming at all, or where we actively seek to take animals' preferences into account beyond the simple avoidance of suffering). And it seems to me that this questioning stems from the very principles of EA: to seek an ambitious impact, without stopping at what we've already tried so far, even if it didn't seem so bad.

The harsh reality for funders and project leaders is that it's excruciatingly difficult to predict what might have the greatest impact in reducing suffering, even if only on the scale of a few decades. Could redirecting all the money devoted to corporate campaigns towards a patient effort of cultural influence through elite education and lobbying to spread antispeciesist values reduce suffering much more dramatically on the scale of a few decades, with greater cost-effectiveness? The uncertainty is so large that I have the impression that we're tipping over into a debate of confronting more or less optimistic intuitions, in which it's really difficult to reach firm conclusions.

Therefore, I find it hard to be convinced by the passage where you emphasize your doubts about interventions aimed at long-term abolition ("The hope of ending factory farming is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which I think are often a poor use of resources compared to other interventions."). It seems to me that one could say something quite similar based on the same uncertainties: the hope of reducing suffering in the short term is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which may be a poor use of resources compared to other interventions (which aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but over a longer period of time).

Since in the end, we still have to choose which interventions to fund or engage in, I believe it's best to recognize that these choices are based on intuitions, and to make them explicit (while trying to assess their relevance): do I have the intuition to be risk-averse and focus on interventions whose impact can be measured in the short term? Or am I prepared to risk allocating fewer resources to avoiding hours of intense suffering for today's hens, in order to fund projects that aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but on a century-long scale, and with an expected value that becomes absurd to calculate, as it can both hit the ceiling or turn out to be negative? Do I have a hunch that we should choose our battles using RP's moral weights, or am I having trouble with the postulates on which their calculations are based? Etc.

In this respect, I find it interesting to move forward in this debate by asking:

- How each of us goes about approximating the probability of finding interventions that would be so effective in reducing suffering as to bring about the end of factory farming in, say, 50 years' time?

- How does one go about assessing what does or does not constitute a “poor use of resources”?

I thought about this question over the last few months while drafting our strategy and vision. A few thoughts and observations:

Some other EA organizations also seem to have adopted directional visions instead of static visions describing an ideal world. 80k had this in their 2014 business model:
"Our aim is to have the biggest possible social impact."

and they currently have this more detailed blog post about the meaning of social impact.

2022 CEA:
"CEA's overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow."

What I primarily need from a vision statement is to succinctly and clearly communicate my goal to my team, supporters, and the general public. The problem with static vision statements is that they are unable to properly communicate what we are trying to do.

Making the ideal world come sooner or making it more likely to come is only one part of doing good. Another important part of doing good is affecting non-ideal worlds by making them less bad or making the worst futures less likely. It becomes more difficult to explain my focus on harm-mitigation with a static vision statement, because in many cases harm-mitigation doesn't obviously make the ideal world come sooner. I think harm mitigation is worthwhile even if it has zero impact on when the ideal world comes.

On the other hand, one main distinction that both the general public and animal advocates are primarily interested in is whether the organization is against all animal farming or not. Directional vision statements make your position on this unclear. When you say "I'm trying to do the most good for the animals", people(both mainstream public and animal advocates) keep asking you "I don't get it, are you a vegan organisation or not?".

Pretty much all animal advocacy organizations I know of have static vision statements describing an ideal world. I'm still confused about what is the best way to proceed here.

I understand the appeal of focusing on immediate, measurable reductions in animal suffering and the disillusionment many animal advocates feel regarding our ability to achieve our ultimate goal as a movement. But I believe that limiting our ambition to merely "reducing suffering" in the short term undersells the potential of this movement, risks complacency, and most importantly, fails to capitalize on the momentum we are currently experiencing.

To elaborate further on why maintaining the goal of ending factory farming is crucial, and how it is indeed an achievable goal, I've written a separate post outlining the key factors contributing to our potential success. These factors include:

• The Achievability of Ending Factory Farming in Our Lifetime: This is possible due to the exponential growth of the animal advocacy movement, coupled with technological advancements (especially in AI), and the adoption of systems-level thinking.
• Exponential Growth is Key: Social change often follows an S-curve, and the movement to end factory farming is entering a phase of rapid acceleration. We must harness this momentum.
• AI Can Revolutionize Advocacy: AI has the potential to personalize messages, identify key influencers, accelerate research, and generate persuasive content, dramatically increasing our effectiveness.
• Systems-Level Thinking Maximizes Impact: By focusing on influencing key institutions and decision-makers, we can create ripple effects throughout society, leading to widespread change.
• Strategic Hubs Amplify Change: Concentrating our efforts on just 20 influential cities can transform global perceptions and practices related to factory farming.

While acknowledging the importance of immediate suffering reduction, we must not lose sight of our ultimate goal: ending factory farming. By embracing technological advancements, strategic thinking, and the power of exponential growth, we achieving this ambitious goal within our lifetime is entirely possible.

I found your article very useful.
Similar thoughts to the ones you express here led me to write this post: Fighting animal suffering: beyond the number of animals killed

I think you're spot on, and I appreciate you writing this post. However, I think you've maybe missed the most important reason that you're correct, which is that the focus on ending factory farming makes the movement significantly less accessible to the broader public than it otherwise could be.

Most people are broadly on board with welfare changes that animal activists push for (e.g. moving away from battery cages or gestation crates), but less on board with "ending factory farming." And they're even less on board if it's made explicit that what most activists mean by ending factory farming is achieving a world with no or significantly less meat than there is now. 

A lot of the paths to greater impact for the movement go through harnessing broad public support, or building broad coalitions. This is significantly harder to do when the center of gravity of the movement is around something so radical in relation to public opinion. More so when the focus on ending farming pushes the movement towards theories of change that are also unpopular, such as veganism and cultivated meat.

One might counter this by saying that social movements need a radical flank, and I think there's merit to this argument. However, the current animal groups pretty much all use messaging around ending factory farming, even the ones perceived to be more "moderate." I would argue that the movement right now lacks a moderate flank.

Another reason the framing is bad that you don't mention is that it makes the industry significantly more skeptical of activists. All businesses look skeptically on external activists to an extent, but I think this is especially so in animal agriculture. Producers know that when activists advocate for e.g. cage-free reforms, their actual goals are to get people to eat fewer eggs, and eventually to get people to stop eating (factory-farmed) eggs all together. Some activists say this explicitly in public. For producers, this makes the activism a battle over the future existence of their industry, not a debate over current practices on the margin, making progress significantly more challenging. 

I see the potential for this argument. I particularly like the emphasis on celebrating counterfactual wins, that some people may not immediately see as wins. 

However I'd like to see more elaboration on how it actually results in different tactics and framing.

So I like the definition of "helping as much animals as posible" but when exactly does this lead to different tactics to ending factory farming? 

Given that most people define factory farming as a system that uses practices that are known to cause suffering (stocking densities way too high, lack of natural light and ability to express natural behaviours, frankenchicken genetics), I think both your framings lead to more or less the same policies.

For example, I'd argue that many animal advocates consider cage free campaigns to be a goal on the way to eliminating factory farming, because confining animals is a key feature of factory farms. In fact, in the US factory farms are formally called "confined animal feeding operations" (emphasis mine)

It's also not clear to me why "ending factory farming" is less defined than "preventing animal suffering".

Thanks, Elliot.

• Many animal advocates frame the goal of the movement as "ending factory farming".
  • I see why it’s a tempting message, both to hold onto internally, and when pitching to people new to the movement.
  • Yet, I think the reality is that we might never get there.
• I think the framing therefore leads to the following problems:
  • Unrealistic hope leads to disillusionment and burnout.
  • You should count counterfactual wins, not the absolute numbers.
  • A lack of strategic clarity when developing a theory of change.
  • Leads to a poor allocation of resources.

There is another point which makes me especially in favour of focussing on reducing suffering, and also increasing happiness. Ending factory-farming only increases animal welfare if factory-farmed animals continue to have negative lives forever, whereas I would say they may become positive in the next few decades at least in some animal-friendly countries.

Can you elaborate on why you think we will never eradicate factory farming? You point to near-term trends that suggest it will get worse over the coming decades. What about on a century long time scale or longer? Factory farming has only been around for a few generations, and food habits have changed tremendously over that time.

I think it's important to consider how some strategies may make future work difficult. For example, Martha Nussbaum highlights how much of the legal theory in the animal rights movement has relied on showing similarities between human and animal intelligence. Such a "like us" comparison limits consideration to a small subset of vertebrates. They are impotent at helping animals like chickens, were much legal work is happening now. Other legal theories are much more robust to expansion and consideration of other animals as the science improves to understand their needs and behavior.

Using your line of argument applied to the analogy you provided would suggest that efforts like developing a malaria vaccine are misguided, because malaria will always be with us, and we should just focus on reducing infection rates and treatment.

It's been clarified in the comments that with the statement "I think the reality is that we might never get there" what was meant was that we might not end factory farming within our lifetime. Well, if your focus is on reducing suffering, why does it matter less if that suffering is reduced in the next generation, or the one after that?

Animals will continue to suffer terribly as long as factory farming exists. Changing the size of cages, or the exact type of feed given, only changes that suffering by degrees. But others have pointed out that we are making progress towards the long-term goal of ending factory farming altogether. Doing so will reduce animal suffering much more dramatically, and that seems like a long-term goal worth pursuing to me.

I find that ending "factory farming" in the western world is possible in less than 40 years. The real problem here is veganism: people need animal proteins, and by pushing veganism, the animal welfare activist look like crazy bolsheviks. 

What is the animal welfare equivalent of socialdemocracy? In my view, expanding the rumninants husbandry (becuase the true horror is farmed hens and pork), killing fishes by electrical stunning instead of suffocation, and above all, join with western farmers for total protectionism, because farmers are for efficiency (and cruelty) mostly for fear of foreing competition.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L6wdRBCh3izCD244t/farmers-in-the-animalist-coalition

At the end, electrical utilities are the main lobby for climate change mitigation. Western farmers can be the same for animal welfare.  

Thanks for writing this Elliot!

I really enjoyed reading this, and I really appreciate you pointing out that each animal helped matters, because I think that’s a very important point that people often forget. I also agree it’s important to be honest about what is feasible in the foreseeable future.

I am, however, more optimistic than you about ending factory farming. I think society has gradually been becoming more conscious of animal welfare issues and most people support ending factory farming. It might take 50 years, 100 years, but I think eventually this will translate into people caring enough to fight against powerful systemic forces. I’d be interested to hear what you think are the big differences to past social movements (the fact that animals can’t speak for themselves is obviously one!)

I think we also need to be careful about celebrating small wins too much. My understanding is that cage-free or something similar is like going from -100 to -90 on a welfare scale. That’s still good, but the bigger difference is between -90 and 0. That’s one reason I think our goal should still be to end factory farming, at least in regions where there is growing support for animal welfare.

In practice, I’m not sure whether that would change which actions we take, but maybe it should push us more towards building the democratic institutions that allow people to raise their voice about animal welfare (eg. Australian Alliance for Animals reforms), over say corporate campaigns. I’d also be keen to hear what other interventions you’re less pessimistic about (the "many more" from your post).

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

Thanks for writing this!

I’ve really struggled with this when writing AAC’s mission and vision statements. Historically our vision and mission statements have been much more pragmatic and realistic like speeding up the end of animal suffering through increasing talent density etc etc. and I agree with Emres point on the difficulty of communicating what we are doing to a broader audience. These kind of static vision statements whilst being pragmatic seem to be less inspirational to external stakeholders, staff and smaller donors.

So I’m leaning towards changing AAC to have a more broad directional vision statement because I think this is more likely to inspire actions and isn’t that the point of visions? So I guess my question is, do you think that organisations are really genuinely aiming for this goal with the thought that we should strive to achieve it in our lifetime and in their plans or do you think we are just trying to inspire action and that really our theories of change are more in line with the things we do have power over. If AAC was able to increase talent density in the movement and fix the talent bottlenecks I’d be pretty happy with us an organisation and think we’ve done “our bit” but I don’t think that would inspire my staff.

Thank you for this very insightful line of thought.

Could you develop this part please? The "why this problem is much harder and disanalogous" part.

A lack of strategic clarity when developing a theory of change. For advocates who buy that we will end factory farming, this might mean that they are more likely to pursue interventions and theories of change that will do just that: end factory farming. This leads to conversations about how do we mimic previous social movements that have ‘won’ like the emancipation and gay marriage movements. While I think this work can be valuable, I often see it discussed in ways I think are insufficiently clear-eyed about why this problem is much harder and disanalogous. 

I've recently been coming across content that on some level discuss how some aspect 'X' is / shoud be different in the pro-animal movement. 

One example is the disproportionate amount of focus that goes into consumer activism over institutional change. I'm not an expert in social movements, nor have I spent much active time studying them, but the sense I get is that other social movements like ending slavery, and feminism have involved focusing on institutional and scalable changes. In this example, X = type of change we should focus on. 

In this post, I would say X = the goal of the pro-animal movement. 

In both instances, X is different for the pro-animal movement than in other forms of social movements. 

I wholeheartedly acknowledge that nonhuman animal oppression is a beast that none other parallels so there ought to be some differences in the way we approach bringing about change in this area. But I inevitably also wonder if there is some level of embedded speciesism involved when we differentiate nonhuman animal oppression from human-specific oppressions. 

How about both lens? I could see the 'end factory farming' framing and dreaming big be really good for some folks, particularly young people with lofty ambitions who are not yet in the movement. I think it was particularly helpful for me to have this framing when joining the movement!

We could also advocate for near-term suffering reduction as a lofty goal within itself, given the right context (i.e. within EA)!