Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last long. This low salience is self-reinforcing: even people who care deeply about it seldom bring it up. Yuval Noah Harari thinks “the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history” — and almost never talks about it.
2. Our main opponent isn't the meat industry; it's inertia. If battery cages and gestation crates had always been illegal, the industry could never have gotten them legalized. Defending the status quo is just far easier than changing it.
3. The meat industry isn't the omnipotent Bond villain some activists imagine, forever scheming to win the grand battle over the future of meat. It's a bunch of middle managers in Tyson fleeces in a business park in Springdale, Arkansas, trying to hit their Q3 targets.
4. Factory farming is like tax havens, multi-level marketing schemes, and FIFA. Most people oppose it — but they care far less than the small minority who profit enormously from it.
5. None of us can truly internalize the vastness of the suffering factory farming causes. That’s a good thing. If we did, we’d go mad.
The future of farming
6. Every major technological revolution so far has hurt animals. The Agricultural Revolution confined them. The Scientific Revolution incubated animal testing. The Industrial Revolution put animals to work in mills and mines. Together, all three enabled factory farming. Will the AI Revolution be different?
7. Some assume cultivated meat will win once it's more efficient than farming animals. But when humanity was poor, it ate the most efficient foods: grains, roots, berries, scavenged meat. When it got richer, it could afford the luxury of inefficient foods it preferred — like meat. If it keeps getting richer, efficiency may matter even less.
8. Technology has no moral direction of its own. For the last century it mostly made animals' lives worse: denser cages, crueler genetics, and drugs to keep them alive in squalor. But it could just as easily make them better, through alternative proteins and humane farming tech. Which way it goes is partly up to us.
9. A post-factory-farming future will likely involve both alternative proteins and pasture-based meat. This prospect sometimes seems to distress the evangelists of each solution more than factory farming itself does.
10. We don’t lack the land to replace factory farming with pasture-based farms. We could pasture-raise every broiler chicken, egg-laying hen, and pig in America on an area about half the size of West Virginia. (Growing their feed would take another 35M acres — roughly the cropland we devote to corn for ethanol.)
11. The main problem with pasture-raised meat is that it costs more. But much of that premium is labor costs, which is to say jobs for farmers. If AGI brings both widespread wealth and mass unemployment, the price may stop mattering, and creating farm jobs may become popular enough to attract government subsidies.
12. We’ve already curtailed many bad practices, at least in the US and Europe: tethering sows, face branding cows, forced molting (starving) of hens, veal crates, docking cows’ tails, slaughtering mammals without effective stunning, and live-plucking birds. In every case, the industry insisted the practice was essential right up until it was stopped — then adapted within a few years at trivial cost.
13. Companies adopt animal welfare reforms when reform becomes the path of least resistance. We can make it that path in two ways: by raising the resistance to continuing cruel practices (the purpose of corporate campaigns) and by lowering the resistance to more humane alternatives (the purpose of humane tech innovation).
14. “Abolitionist vs. welfarist” was always a silly framing. Some abolitionist goals, like banning foie gras, mostly shift people to eating other animals with better welfare. And some welfarist goals, like replacing chick culling with in-ovo sexing, abolish entire parts of the system.
15. Horseshoe theory applies to the most anti-welfare animal activists and factory farm lobbyists. Both dismiss cage-free as a marketing gimmick. Both insist factory farming is the only way to produce meat at scale. Both spend more time attacking welfare advocates than each other.
Unsolicited dietary advice
16. Michael Pollan’s dietary advice is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” My equally catchy version is “Eat plants. If you also eat animals, eat large ruminants like cows, not chickens or fish. Choose the lowest-value cuts, like organs. And ask an LLM to find the highest-welfare certifications and brands in your country.”
17. Meat color tracks suffering. Whiter meat means more animals per meal (chicken versus beef), worse conditions (pasture-raised animals have darker meat), and more valuable cuts for industry (chicken breast versus thigh). Farmed salmon is suffering-dense and would be white too; it's only pink because farmers add colorant to the feed.
18. The health and climate cases against meat are really cases against red meat. And chicken is so much worse for animals than beef that if even one in ten people responds by swapping steak for chicken, those arguments cause more suffering than they prevent. Since "eat less red meat" became popular health advice five decades ago, Americans eat about 30% less beef — and 150% more chicken.
Vegan advocacy
19. One reason “go vegan” became the dominant ask is that it matches the gravity of the situation. Saying “factory farming is evil, don’t buy from it on Mondays” just feels off. But it’s a wildly ambitious opening ask. Imagine if the opening ask on climate change were “stop driving,” or on homelessness “give up your home.” Now imagine some people thought this should be the only ask.
20. The idea of the personal carbon footprint was popularized in the mid-2000s by BP, as part of an ad campaign to shift responsibility from producers to consumers (h/t Tobias Leenaert). The meat industry never needed an ad campaign to frame avoiding factory-farmed meat as a personal choice. We did it for them.
21. Vegan advocacy may have so far failed at its stated goal: to turn society vegan. But it succeeded in recruiting most of our movement’s top leaders and advocates globally. That’s an impressive track record for a few thousand leafleteers.
Wild animal welfare
22. Nature did not optimize for animal welfare. Darwin wrote that he couldn't believe a beneficent God had created the Ichneumonidae — parasitoid wasps whose larvae eat caterpillars alive from the inside, saving the vital organs for last to keep the meal fresh.
23. Intervening to help at least some wild animals shouldn’t be controversial. Wildlife rehabilitation centers take in injured animals regardless of whether a human or another wild animal hurt them. No one accuses them of playing God.
Effective altruism
24. My favorite thing about EA is that it takes doing good as seriously as investors take making money. It hunts for the moral equivalent of mispriced assets: hugely important problems ignored by others. And because the market for doing good is far less efficient than financial markets, it's far easier to beat. A great hedge fund might double the market's return for a few years; GiveWell's top charities can save 100 times as many lives per dollar as US charities.
25. I know this is also many people's least favorite part of EA: that it talks in spreadsheets rather than empathy. But the spreadsheets are an act of empathy. I want to help 100 times more humans, or a million times more animals, because I care about each one enough to want to help more of them.
26. My least favorite part of EA is something it also shares with top investors: hubris. EA was meant to be an endless search for the best ways to do good. Too many EAs act as if the search is over because they found the answer.
27. My favorite critique of EA begins "That isn't actually effective, because..." Once the argument is about what works — not what feels good, fits an ideology, or impresses donors — EA has already done its job.
Inside baseball
28. Our movement has an incredible set of driven, smart, relentless founders. They’ve built wildly effective groups. But many are poorly suited to running big organizations. They should hire a chief of staff or managing director so they can focus on what they’re best at — or step down and found something new.
29. Our movement also has an incredible set of strategic, creative, persistent campaigners. The best ones often get promoted into jobs where they spend more time in meetings than campaigning. They should get a raise instead, and be sent back to campaigning full-time.
30. Our movement needs stronger boards. That’s a great opportunity for talented supporters, especially those with board or executive experience, who can’t work in the movement full-time but want to get more involved.
31. If you're frustrated at how slowly society expands its moral circle, consider how slowly our own movement has expanded ours. It took us a century and a half to get from dogs and horses to farm animals, despite their vastly greater numbers. It took us a few more decades to get to chickens and fish, the most numerous farmed vertebrates. We've still barely reached shrimp and insects.
On strategy
32. Some advocates notice that successful social movements, like civil rights and suffrage, used tactics like marching and civil disobedience, and conclude those tactics must work for us too. They forget that plenty of failed movements — anarchism, temperance, pacifism — used the same tactics.
33. Factory farming is the rare issue where the populist right and the progressive left agree. That’s why I’m skeptical that bundling it with left-coded issues like climate change and environmental justice will broaden our coalition. For every progressive we pick up, we lose a conservative.
34. There’s no silver bullet to ending factory farming — not cultivated meat, not veganism, not welfare reforms, not brain-dead chickens. It makes sense for individual advocates to focus on their one solution. But as a movement we want as many shots on goal as possible — and all the better if they’re uncorrelated.
35. The best advocates are realists about means and optimists about ends. They know most efforts will fail and all change is incremental. They also know how much good incremental change can do.
Causes for optimism
36. In most countries, animal agriculture’s share of the economy is shrinking while funding for farm animal advocacy is growing. I expect AGI to accelerate both trends. That bodes well for the future political balance of power.
37. Most people want cheap meat and don’t want to know how it’s produced. That’s no cause for despair. Most people once wanted cheap sugar and didn’t want to know if it was grown by slaves.
38. Almost no one without a financial stake in factory farming will defend how it treats animals. Historically, few practices have survived long once almost everyone agreed they were wrong. That makes factory farming more fragile than it looks: it survives only because society hasn't yet acted on what it already believes.
39. When I was born in 1986, no US state and just one nation (Switzerland) had banned a standard factory farming practice, no major food company had an animal welfare policy, and veggie burgers tasted like the box they came in. Today 14 US states and about 40 countries have banned at least one such practice, most major food companies have animal welfare policies, and the Impossible Burger can confuse meat eaters.
40. Factory farming is both a moral tragedy and a moral opportunity. I wish we'd never invented it. But since we did, I'm grateful that philanthropy lets me — and so many of you — spend our working lives helping more animals than anyone in history ever could.
This was partly inspired by Cate Hall’s 50 things I know, which I recommend. Most of these could be a newsletter of their own. Tell me which you'd actually read.
Happy birthday! As a present, here are a few thoughts I’d love your take on:
7. Efficiency still matters to producers even as societies get richer. If cultivated meat can deliver the same product more cheaply, lower prices and/or higher margins are still powerful competitive advantages over slaughter meat.
23. Yes - and I wonder whether directly funding things like wildlife rehabilitation could outperform some current WAW research, which seems several steps removed from actually helping animals. Is there a funding level or time horizon at which you’d want to see the field shift more heavily from research/field-building toward interventions?
34. Shouldn’t we focus disproportionately on the shots most likely to score? Presumably the portfolio shouldn’t be evenly spread if some approaches look more promising than others.