I’ve written this in my personal capacity and all views are my own. I didn’t even integrate Claude’s suggested improvements. Thanks to Zoe Sigle for the feedback on an earlier draft of this post.
Edit: I see a couple of people disagreeing. If you think the overall thrust, or specific claims are wrong, please do feel free to add it in the comments.
Summary
- 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.
- I think a better approach is to focus on reducing suffering for as many individual animals as possible.
- Helping millions and billions of farmed animals as an amazing achievement. Focusing on the win as a % of all farmed animals is the wrong frame.
- We celebrate charities that fight against malaria for saving lives,, not "failing" to end malaria or preventable diseases.
What’s the problem?
I see a lot of animal advocates confidently assert that the goal of our movement as ‘ending factory farming’. Strategic discussions ask how will we end factory farming? And when?
I don’t think there are any guarantees we’ll ever reach this goal. We might, but we definitely might not. Cultivated meat is unlikely to be cost-competitive for a long time or maybe even ever, plant-based adoption has stalled in recent years, small welfare improvements around the world are slow and hard won, and lower-income countries are poised to eat far more meat as they become wealthier in the coming decades. If you disagree…this post might not make much sense.
So I get why advocates frame the issue this way. It gives us something to hold on to, a desperately yearned for light at the end of the unfathomable tunnel that is our modern food system. It’s hard to get new people involved by pitching a problem with no solution. It’s depressing. It’s (seemingly) more compelling to pitch someone on joining the inevitable tidal wave that will solve the biggest moral catastrophe of our time.
And yet, I think this approach is a mistake. Instead, we should emphasise ‘reduce as much animal suffering as possible’ (or something similar).
But first…
Why is the current framing bad?
- Unrealistic hope leads to disillusionment and burnout. If your motivation as an advocate is built on the promise that factory farming will end in our lifetime, what happens to that motivation if you wisen up? What happens when plant-based consumption decreases, or meat consumption rises? For some advocates, this probably (speculatively?) leads to disillusionment, leaving the movement, and contributes to burnout.
- You should count counterfactual wins, not the absolute numbers. I think it’s simply the wrong way to measure our success. Our job is to do as much good as we can. You can’t control headwinds or tailwinds. And a $300m a year movement is up against a trillion-dollar industry! If reality throws us a formidable meat lobby, our biggest success might be hindering them, and that is a huge win. If global meat consumption grows due to economic development, improving welfare conditions on those farms might be the best we can do. And if we succeed, we should celebrate the billions of lives counterfactually helped.
- 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.
- Leads to a poor allocation of resources. 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. My tentative hot takes on some of those interventions are cultivated meat (still worth pursuing but often oversold), the idea that many animal farmers will transition to farming crops, that due to climate change meat will be too expensive and so investors should wisely stop investing, and many more.
So what’s the solution?
I would frame things this way, and I think you should too: Factory farming of animals is not a single issue that we count in terms of percentage won. It is the 70 billion terrestrial and trillions of aquatic individuals that suffer immensely each year, and our goal is to help as many of them as possible. Each of them is worth helping. Each individual helped, or spared from being brought into existence, is worth celebrating. Because the totality of factory farming is such a large problem, and so neglected, we have an extraordinary opportunity to reduce an immense amount of suffering for millions and billions of individuals.
Getting McDonalds to go cage-free spares ~7 million hens from cages each year. 7 million individuals who feel happiness and pain and whose lives are meaningfully improved. I hope the funders and advocates who helped achieve this feel like heroes for this win alone. Now of course we could say these advocates only helped 0.1% of the egg-laying hens in our food system, and barely made a dent. This is true. It’s also the wrong framing.
The Against Malaria Foundation estimates they’ve saved 185,000 lives in the 19 years they’ve existed. We rightly say that this is exceptional and laudable work. I’ve never heard anyone say that that’s barely a dent, only 1% of deaths from malaria prevented. In global health and development, there isn’t a framing that we’ll ‘end poverty and preventable health issues’. We should do the same for animals and the wins in our movement.
As I said earlier, even if things get worse for animals, there are still wins to be counted. If we manage to ensure only 5 states ban cultivated meat, instead of 8, that is a win to celebrate. 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. If I personally somehow manage to reduce the growth of the number of animals by 0.02% then that is 20 billion individuals a year who feel and yearn and suffer.
And each one counts.
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.
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:
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 work as as public waiting for
"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 out short term goals. I don't think ending factory farming is unrealistic long term.
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.
Thanks, Elliot.
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.
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
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.
Could you develop this part please? The "why this problem is much harder and disanalogous" part.
Good question, I wasn't sure how much to err on the side of brevity vs thoroughness.
To phrase it differently I think sometimes advocates start their strategy with the final line 'and then we end factory farming', and then try to develop a strategy about how do we get there. I don't think it is reasonable to assume this is going to happen, and I think this leads to overly optimistic theories of change. From time to time I see a claim about how meat consumption will be drastically reduced in the next few decades based on a theory that is far too optimistic and/or speculative.
For example, I've seen work claim that when plant-based meat reaches taste and price parity, people will choose plant-based over conventional meat, so if we raise the price of meat via regulation, and lower the cost of plant-based, there will be high adoption of plant-based, and meat reduction will be 30% lower by 2040 (those numbers are made up, but ball-park correct). I think these claims just aren't super well founded and some research showed that when a university cafeteria offered impossible and regular burgers, adoption was still quite low (anyone know the citation?).