(In general, the salaries which I will work for in EA go up with funding uncertainty, not down, because indeed it means future funding is more likely to dry up, and I have to pay the high costs of a career transition, or self-fund for many years)

You are right! I had mostly paid attention to the bullet points, which didn't extract the parts of the linked report that addressed my concerns, but you are right that it totally links to the same report that totally does!

Sure, I don't think it makes a difference whether the chicken grows to a bigger size in total, or grows to a bigger size more quickly, both would establish a prior that you need fewer years of chicken-suffering for the same amount of meat, and as such that this would be good (barring other considerations).

No, those are two totally separate types of considerations? In one you are directly aiming to work against the goals of someone else in a zero-sum fashion, the other one is just a normal prediction about what will actually happen?

You really should have very different norms about how you are dealing with adversarial considerations and how you are dealing with normal causal/environmental considerations. I don't care about calling them "vanilla" or not, I think we should generally have a high prior against arguments of the form "X is bad, Y is hurting X, therefore Y is good".

Thank you! This is the kind of analysis I was looking for.

Huh, yeah, seems like a loss to me. 

Correspondingly, while the OP does not engage in "literally lying" I think sentences like "In light of this ruling, we believe that farmers are breaking the law if they continue to keep these chickens." and "The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred." strike me as highly misleading, or at least willfully ignorant, based on your explanation here.

- Plus #1: I assume that anything the animal industry doesn't like would increase costs for raising chickens. I'd correspondingly assume that we should want costs to be high (though it would be much better if it could be the government getting these funds, rather than just decreases in efficiency).

I think this feels like a very aggressive zero-sum mindset. I agree that sometimes you want to have an attitude like this, but I at least at the present think that acting with the attitude of "let's just make animal industry as costly as possible" would understandable cause backlash, make it harder to come to agreements, and I think a reasonable justice system would punish people who do such things (even if they think they are morally in the right).