Have you read Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy ?

I feel like your message implies that the central claim of Forget Veganuary (that focusing on veganism is unhelpful, and that donations are more promising) was not sincerely held by FarmKind / animal advocates. I strongly disagree. 

The view that diet change is not promising has been defended in animal advocacy since the early 90s, by a diversity of leading figures of the movement (Wayne Hsiung, Peter Singer, Yves Bonnardel, Nick Cooney).^[1] It simply had never been made into a public campaign. So I don't resonate with the framing of the campaign as bait: on the contrary, it stated out loud a view that many advocates had. (Not saying that getting attention was not part of the campaign - though it's part of most campaigns).

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   To varying degrees, with caveats, etc. 

I like this article (maybe mostly because I like Tomasik), though I find it a bit dated, and the twelve years that have passed since then indicate that the thesis is somewhat off (to be fair, I think Tomasik would agree that his evidence is very anecdotal). While the popularity of wilderness preservation in the mainstream has grown since then, it seems that large fractions of the animal rights / welfare movement has been pretty distant from it. Anti-wilderness-preservation views have been endorsed by some of the main animal rights influencers: James Aspey, Die Militante Veganerin, Gary Yourofsky (to varying extents: I think Gary Yourofsky finds nature bloody and somewhat horrific, but I'm not sure that he's explicitly anti-wilderness preservation, but the first two are clearer on it).

Meanwhile, in animal welfare (at least the EA-leaning side of it), consideration for wild animal welfare is quite common. But that slice of animal welfare is a small world.

One anecdotal observation is that among more "normal" ethical vegans, habitat destruction is commonly seen as much less important than factory farming.

However, I think there is truth in the article: vegans are probably more likely to have concerns about "the environment", and there are pro-habitat-preservation memes that end up being tied with animal rights. So I'm not saying that animal advocacy systematically make people less favourable to wilderness preservation.

Thanks for flagging this concern! I'd share it if insect farming had existed as a substitute for the factory farming of other animals. However, in practice, insect farming tries (and mostly fails) to substitute for:

• Soybean meal (which causes some suffering through crop clearing, pesticides, etc - but insects in farms are also fed crops)
• Fishmeal (the impact on animal suffering of fishing is unclear)
• Pet food (among the lowest expected-suffering-footprint animal product, since it mostly comes from byproducts of large animals)

Though I understand that we don't have the same views on insect suffering, I think that none of the three sources of food above cause much higher expected suffering than factory farm conditions for insects (again, I'd be much more uncertain if insect farming substituted for broiler chicken farming). 

My current view on insects is that in the face of some indications of nociception / sentience-adjacent traits, these animals suffering significantly doesn't seem astronomically less likely than dogs or birds suffering. So to me, the pain of a trillion insects doesn't seem less in expectation that that of ten billion chickens or 500 million cows, though I have no confidence in more precise comparisons (so I'm not saying "obviously insect farming is worse than chicken farming").

Mieux Donner, France's new effective giving initiative, has now received over 1 million euros (1.172 million dollars) in donations, since its inception in 2024.

Thanks for the info! I'm surprised that I'm only learning about it here.

The world’s largest insect farming company has officially gone bankrupt !

I keep coming back to the "Case study" section here, I find it to be a very useful illustration of the central thesis of the sequence.

Thank you so much for pushing back on my simplistic comment! I agree that my framing was misleading (I commented without even re-reading had said). Thanks for highlighting crucial considerations on counterintuitive conclusions in NU and CU. 

Your comment makes me realize that an objection based on utopian situations makes sense (and I've found it reasonable in the past as a crux against NU). I guess my frustration with the use of the World Destruction Argument against NU, in the ways EAs often bring it up, is that it criticizes the fact that NU recommends extinction in our world (which contains suffering), even though CU has a decent chance of recommending extinction in our world (as soon as we determine whether wild invertebrates are living net-negative lives or not!).^[1] 

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   Though again, if there are higher chances of astronomically good than astronomically bad futures, animal suffering is easily outweighed in CU, but not in NU (but CUs could change their mind on the empirical aspect and recommend extinction). But my impression is that this isn't what people (among non-philosophers, which includes me) are objecting to? They mostly seem to find deliberate extinction repugnant (which is something I think many views can agree upon).

Nice comment! I answered one of your requests as a top-level comment.