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.
Edit 2: Thanks to the many commenters I think my position is focused more at 'ending factory farming in our lifetimes or next few decades', rather than ending factory farming altogether.
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'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”?