This comment section felt a bit brigaded here, which I don't love.

I'm sympathetic to debating strategic disagreements in the animal welfare movement, and appreciate you bringing these ideas up and pushing for what you believe is the right approach.

There were 2 things that stood out to me:

We need to go beyond Peter Singer’s utilitarian approach, which has had a limiting impact on campaigns giving preference to concerns about animal suffering and welfare reforms. What is needed are a deontological philosophy and a holistic, ecological systems approach.

I don't think utilitarianism gives a preference to welfare reforms — it's that welfare reforms have a strong track record of being effective, while these other approaches don't. Peter Singer himself wholeheartedly embraces animal liberation, literally! If the utilitarians thought that things beyond welfare reforms would work, and were cost-effective, they'd do them. It isn't because of their principled commitment to utilitarianism that they disagree.

Secondly, I think that many of the donors and EAs would stop being EA donors or EAs at all if deontology became the norm. At least speaking for myself, I am not aligned with EA because it is EA, but I'm aligned with EA because it is more aligned with my values (which are very utilitarian). I suspect this is true for many EA-motivated people. If EA changes, it doesn't mean the donors will change their values.

The campaign was inspired by: (1) the “AI Windfall” entering the animal movement

I think an important question for people who aren't excited about new funding entering the space going to welfare reforms is "why are these new donors are interested in funding animal welfare work at all?" 

I think the answer is because cage-free campaigns, etc. demonstrated that helping animals at scale was possible, and because welfare-motivated advocates demonstrated that something could be done to help animals effectively. 

No animal welfare advocate controls where these donors give — if the movement today decided to pivot to plant-based advocacy and stop doing welfare stuff, it's plausible significantly less money would be donated to helping animals. There isn't a pot of unlimited money controlled by animal advocates — there are donors who have specific values and priorities, and organizations who will make the case to those donors that their work should be funded. The pitch should be to the donors (who actually will decide these things), not to EA as a whole, and has to overcome the fact that you're pitching against the thing that might have gotten many of them excited about animal advocacy in the first place.

This is a comment critical of your approach in this article. I am sympathetic to the broader claim you are making, that the EA movement should be more systems-change focused. However, I don't think your target audience will hear that message for the issues stated below. Please hear this from the perspective of an ally recommending a tactical shift.

This article does not meaningfully engage with any of the actual reasons why most people in the EA movement take a different approach to helping animals than what you recommend. You make a great case for the importance of shifting our food system, but the vast majority of EAs who work on animal welfare already believe this.

The real challenge is tractability: what can we do that will actually work? This is left unaddressed.

Your calls to action are also unlikely to be effective.

On your first point, if you tell anyone with a strong moral commitment, "I know what you should do, but you'll have to fundamentally change your moral theory to believe it's a good idea," they're going to drop your suggestion, not the moral theory. For example, I feel confident that no one on this forum could entice you to become a utilitarian using the merit of shrimp welfare campaigns.

The thing is, you don't need to convince anyone to stop being a utilitarian. If you have good reason to believe that changing the food system will be what's best for animals and people (you do, your article is about this), then that means utilitarians should change the food system. IF there's a tractable way to do it.

The other two calls to action are generic and don't suggest any real change. They imply that the reason why we have failed to change the food system already is that we haven't formed coalitions or made plans to do so. Clearly, we have done these things. The movement is still losing, badly. Animal consumption is rising and veg*nism is flat. We all want to change these trends, and we need more than a call to come together to fix them.

Thanks for this, Anita. The UK egg study alongside the PETA white paper makes a strong case that welfare reforms within animal agriculture can carry environmental trade-offs that plant-based change avoids. The point about measuring impact by the total number of animals bred into the food system, rather than animals spared from cages, is a useful shift in framing for funders.

Thanks for posting. I think the welfare evidence is more mixed than the PETA paper suggests. Welfare Footprint's analysis (https://welfarefootprint.org/laying-hens/) agrees that keel bone fractures are the main problem in cage-free aviaries, but still estimates substantially less time in pain per hen than in cages. I'd be interested in how you weigh that.

Have you read this paper? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11957195/ It might be informative for your “Action Plan for a Plant-Based Future” and what is actually tractable. 
 

This is brilliant. In the Global South, we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change through increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and disruptions to food systems. At the same time, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and puts substantial pressure on land, water, and biodiversity.

We urgently need to move beyond fragmented approaches and toward a holistic food-systems approach that addresses climate, biodiversity, food security, public health, and animal suffering together. If our goal is genuinely to help animals, we should also be working to reduce the number of animals bred into systems that exploit them in the first place. Plant-based food-system transformation offers an important pathway to address these interconnected challenges.

Thank you, Anita, for your insightful article. As an animal rights activist living in Türkiye, I witness the effects of climate change becoming more severe every year. Floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate-related disasters are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives. The first victims are often animals—especially those kept on farms and in barns, whether they are confined in cages or not. When disasters strike, these animals have little or no possibility of escaping. Protecting animals from the impacts of climate change is therefore essential to protecting their rights.

At the same time, scientific research increasingly documents the enormous impact of animal agriculture on the climate and the wider planetary crisis. This makes it clear that we cannot address the climate crisis by focusing only on fossil fuels. Even if we could halt fossil fuel use overnight, we would still need to transform the food system and reduce the environmental pressures created by industrial animal agriculture.

That is why a holistic approach matters. We need solutions that address the challenges together rather than treating them as separate problems.

This is also why it is so important to support activists and organizations already working on the ground. We need to be able to continue this work rather than constantly having to look for other jobs to sustain ourselves. In Türkiye, we have been working for years to promote a transition towards a plant-based food system. We are seeing changes, and awareness is growing, but the transformation is still not happening as quickly as we need.

At the heart of this conversation is a simple question: If we do not need eggs to thrive, why do we need cages at all?

For 3 years I've been actively participating in events linked to Effective Altruism, always with enormous enthusiasm, commitment and from a deeply professional perspective. Therefore, after reading the PETA report and reflecting on the arguments raised in this letter, I must say that it has generated a deep surprise and, above all, sadness.

It's difficult for me to understand that such important spaces within Effective Altruism can provide promotion and even economic support to initiatives focused on "cage-free" systems, when there is evidence that indicates that these alternatives aren't necessarily positive for hens or chickens and that, in certain aspects, even aggravate their situation. To this, of course, are added the environmental and health impacts that we cannot ignore either.

Precisely because Effective Altruism invites us to think in terms of impact, evidence and real consequences, I think we've the responsibility to review our priorities when new information shows us that certain strategies may not be producing the results we expect.

It is not simply a question of making an activity more "humanitarian" whose foundation's still the exploitation of animals. It's about asking ourselves, with honesty and coherence, what changes can really understand the most defenseless of this system.

With the information we've available today, we must act consistently. It isn't enough to "improve" the conditions of the farms if we continue to support a system that needs to breed and exploit billions of animals.

The challenge should be much deeper: reduce - to eradicate - our dependence on livestock and actively accompany the transition to a food system that's ethical, healthy, sustainable.

We're human people who have the ability to change and I think that should be, precisely, the essence of evidence-based thinking: having the humility to review our strategies, recognizing when something does not work as we expected and directing our resources towards what can generate the greatest possible positive impact.

If we really have the tools to build a better future, we also have the responsibility to use them!

Thank you, Anita, for this brilliant article and for speaking up for holistic change of our systems.

The UK egg study you mentioned is a good example of the necessity of systemic changes as it shows that welfare reforms like cage-free don't just fall short for hens, they can also increase emissions, land use and even the number of animals bred. 

Funders and organizations need to explore together how resources could shift toward systemic changes. It's crucial for tomorrow.

This is why the Beyond Cage-Free Open Letter is necessary. I'm proud to be a signatory, and I encourage everyone to read it and sign it: https://beyondcagefree.org/ 

My personal story: As a lifelong animal lover, it was obvious that I wouldn't pay for cage eggs, so cage free / organic and free range production came very conveniant. I was so deep in carnism, that even the knowledge about maseration of male chicks didn't stop me. 

But when found out that chicks are suffocated with CO2 (like pigs are), that was too much for my conscience to bare - so I switched purchasing eggs from small (< 80 birds altogether) henhouse. They killed roosters with an ax. After a while that didn't feel okay either. 

So, against my will I became vegan. Now it seems so silly how stubborn I was. If EA follows logic in reducing suffering, it would encourage veganism, by normalizing it as a default instead of "extremism". Words matter.  Change is made by actions. Funding is a real drive for change. 

this article opened my mind for fighting to change the food system, not only one component (cages) of it

Thank you to Anita, Robert Grillo (founder of Free from Harm), and many others for their wonderful work on this letter and new coalition.

The mission and vision must be to remove animals from the food system, not to pour the majority of funding into better ways to exploit and kill them. The real animal liberation movement dares to advocate boldly for the rejection of all animal farming, slaughterhouses and exploitation; for all earthlings and our planet. 

This Open Letter is a necessary and urgent step towards inspiring more advocates and funders to do that. I urge everyone to read it, sign, and speak up.

Change to plant based food system is the most effective for our planet!

Nice article with much to agree. I do think the association with heterodox "edgy" theories like consequentialism and utilitarianism does alienate the regular folks audience a bit, and framing these issues in more traditional moral language seems to be the most effective way to reach out to a broader audience. I've been thinking on why shock strategies like PETA's backfire so often and I've come to the conclusion that people need small contexts with small wins to create rapport with a cause; just flooding them with the inhumane cruelty of our food systems can make one feel disgusted but powerless, given the overwhelming quality of the challenge. Even small actions can have differential outcomes to welfare and those are most easily achievable in the short and medium term, as well as promising ones to turn a dial on awareness in the long run