My mom wants to start eating some amount of meat again but wants to only do it if she can offset the suffering.
Any specific recommendations on charities that would be effective for this/how we'd calculate how much to donate?
My mom wants to start eating some amount of meat again but wants to only do it if she can offset the suffering.
Any specific recommendations on charities that would be effective for this/how we'd calculate how much to donate?
Much of the value of veg*nism may come from influencing cultural norms and those around you, rather than directly reducing demand. Social effects are hard to measure, so I doubt you'll find reliable offsetting metrics.
For donation recommendations, I'd recommend checking out Animal Charity Evaluators' top charities! But I'd encourage your mother to donate and stay vegetarian (and go vegan!).
Beef consumption directly costs less suffering/kg because of the amount of meat provided per cow. It also plausibly reduces wild-animal suffering by taking up land.
Unfortunately, climate concerns and animal welfare concerns conflict when debating which animal products are least harmful: https://foodimpacts.org/
This avoids the question but I suspect meat-eating offsets are morally dubious from a standpoint that takes moral uncertainty seriously.
Emitting carbon then donating to offset it is in some sense ex-ante Pareto improvement. It's rather easier to say "nobody was made worse-off".(though it gets much more complicated when you consider the impact on people that are not born yet)
It might be the case that eating meat wrongs the animal being eaten, and that animal is not helped by the donation. So the case for offsetting is weaker here.
The harm that you're doing is by adding demand and thus spurring more meat production and likely animal abuse/killing. This is why purchasing poultry from a store would be harmful whereas eating fried chicken from a dumpster would not be harmful (to chickens).
Funding farmed animal welfare charities could have an offsetting effect or exceed the effect that you have on the demand.
It seems to me very sad where animal advocates discourage offsetting where omnivores are asking about it.
This isn't an answer to your question, but wouldn't a better alternative be to only eat meat that has been verified to be suffering free? It accomplishes the same goal (offsetting suffering).
I personally do this myself; i've found and toured a local farm and verified that the animals are raised and slaughtered with as little suffering as possible.
Replies discourage future meat consumption offsetting, but I'd like an answer to offset past decades of meat consumption
A practice of effective donations to animal welfare charities probably influence cultural norms too; hard to say which one has a larger second-order effect though naively I'd guess it's donations.