Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

I agree with you that we should be honest about what we believe, pursue a variety of strategies, and try to expand the moral circle. I also think you're right that animal liberation played an important role in recruiting many of the movement's current leaders. And I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who do courageous work to help animals. None of the following is intended as a criticism of their work. That said, I disagree with you on a number of other points:

1. EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
2. We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea..." But we've tested many versions of the idea! EAs have tested -- and funded the testing of -- leafletting, online ads, documentaries, institutional meat reduction, pledges, and just about every dietary change idea produced. Other funders have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into diet change with limited effects. We should keep testing new approaches to diet change. But, until we find one that works, I don't think we should invest dramatically more in an approach that has repeatedly failed.
3. It's not clear to me why AI and more resources will change the relative cost-effectiveness of dietary change vs. other strategies. You write, "Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources." This is true. It's also true of all other interventions. What matters is not whether AI or vastly more resources could increase animal liberation / diet change's impact -- I'm sure they could -- but whether they will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward. Again, the post doesn't explain why they would.
4. I'm skeptical that animal liberation activism made farm animal welfare improvements possible. You suggest that "It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare." But you don't point to evidence for that claim, so consider some evidence to the contrary. All federal US farm animal welfare improvements (the 28 Hour Law, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act) preceded any liberation activism, as did critical UK, Swiss, Scandinavian, German, and EU reforms. All the recent corporate animal welfare wins came after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach (2015 onward) and toward focusing on welfare wins. Animal liberation activists largely opposed these campaigns. It's not clear to me how liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil encouraged corporations to go cage-free.
5. The justice movement analogy points to the challenge with dietary change. You ask "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" To which I reply: "Are there other justice movements that succeeded through individual behavioral change as dietary change seeks to?" I can't think of any. (Also, as Elliot notes in the comments, there are lots of social movements that have succeeded without the liberation / justice frame.)
6. I think the talent section presents a false choice. You write, "If we don’t tell the world why animals matter ... will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?" But EAs are constantly telling the world why animals matter, and constantly attracting people who are passionate and focused on maximum impact. I think EA in general is a rebuttal to the idea that you can only attract passionate and impactful people to doing good by framing things as a liberation struggle. AI safety doesn't, global health doesn't, and it's not clear why animals should be the exception.
7. This is a good case for some funding of animal liberation / diet change, but not a good case for spending more at the current margin. If you include PETA's $80M annual budget, and the ~$50M annually spent on diet change globally, animal liberation and diet change currently account for over a third of the animal movement's funding. So the question is not "should animal liberation and diet change get any funding," but rather "at the margin, will increasing animal liberation / diet change advocacy from ~$130M to $X do more to help animals than the alternatives?" I think we should keep assessing that on the merits of each opportunity.

Thanks again for this thoughtful post, which I think makes an important point. 

Thanks for the clear post Bruce. To add to your points, it also seems that campaigning and advocacy also created the conditions by which lots of passionate young advocates built up experience and became many of the leaders of the movement today, and that this is happening less today.

One point of disagreement I do have with this framing is that if you focus specifically on the justice movements that succeeded and then ask "Did any of them succeed by only focusing on welfare improvements?" You've made an artifically constrained reference class to compare it with, being reforms we remember as justice movements that famously won as justice movements. 

I think the better reference class is all attempts to radically improve the wellbeing of others. Using this reference class there are many successes including that focused on technological solutions to problems that could be framed as liberation or justice issues: child mortality reduction via global health innovations, famine reduction via green revolution, extreme poverty alleviation via economic development, women's empowerment and family planning via oral contraceptives, etc.

There's also many liberation/justice movements that failed or stalled despite decades of  intense effort and focus. 

FWIW I think you do outline some of the reasons why this particular effort is promising. I think that's the most important part to flesh out. Not all liberation efforts are equal. Each needs to be argued on their merits.

Out of personal curiosity, this appears to be a big shift from your previous position on diet change advocacy. I've listened to you talk in the past and recall you were quite negative on the value of diet change. What has led to the shift? Or let me know if I'm misunderstanding. 

For example this talk you gave at EAG in 2018:

Then I went to work at PETA in 1996 and I thought everybody loves animals. All we really have to do - we don't have to win an argument with a meat eater - all we have to do is show people what's happening and obviously people will want to align their values and their actions. Everybody's going to go vegan. We just need to tell them, and again, it didn't happen.

What I've come to understand is that the vast majority of people are not going to radically change their diet on the basis of really anything other than price, taste and convenience. Maybe health. There appears to be something in human nature. I don't know if it's emotion or physiology or biology or psychology. I don't know what it is, but the vast majority of people just aren't that interested in changing their diet, and they're not interested in hearing from me about why they should change their diet.

I love this "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" and would perhaps even take it further to...

"Are there other justice movements that won without being justice movements."

The moral underbelly, and even the passion in that underbelly which keeps me going personally is indeed a thirst for justice and liberation (in my case for humans in poverty not animals suffering but same diff). EA helps me enact this chance through finding cost-effective ways to fix the problem. Even among more "intellectual" EAs, I think a decent number of us are still (emotionally at least) motivated towards those ends rather than a utilitarian suffering minimisation mindset.

Such a well-rounded, and thought-provoking article, Bruce. If other social justice movements have taught us anything, it’s that lasting change requires time, patience, and a diversity of tactics. Thank you for showing how these pieces puzzle together, and for reminding us never to lose sight of our movement's DNA

 

At the end of the day the ceiling for how much you can change without touching the core, the ethics, is limited. I don't think that ceiling is that high, because interests collide and the interests of animals and humans are not just going to magically align due to new technology. 

The big thing I think we are missing, well, one of them, is getting people to act for farmed animals, (not only for welfare reforms but also more "radical" activism), into a community, regardless of what they eat. What you said, Bruce, "I don't care what you eat", that is a good thing to say from an alternative protein promotion perspective, but also for (some, not all) animal rights advocacy perspective. "I want you (the meat eater) with us in this ethical fight" - sending a letter to the mayor or senator, protesting, voting, aligning careers to animal's interests, and much more. EAs are well positioned to do this work, and this is where the animal right movement has failed. I think we never made non-vegans feel welcome, at home, in our activities.  

There is another important argument i think we should all acknowledge and put into the conversation: the modern animal rights movement is now 50 years old, but diet change and factory farming has been its highest global priority for only about 15 of those years - an extremely short time period.
This movement has been mostly focused on fighting animal research, the fur industry, hunting and animals in circuses for so long. Of course there has always been advocacy on veganism and factory farming, and some vegan organisations, but all the focus on farm animal investigations and campaigns is quite recent.

If our goal is animal liberation, our movement has the toughest one ever in human history for many reasons we all know so well. And one of them is that the list of animal abuse issues is very long. But, most important of all, i think if we look at the effectiveness of our movement through these lenses, we can see it has actually been extremely effective, with often little resources and as a young and inexperienced movement: fur farming was huge in the past, but now it has been banned in almost all European countries and the global production has now dropped 90% in the last ten years; about 50 countries banned the use of animals in circuses; foie gras production has been banned in almost all UE, India, Australia and more; cosmetic testing banned in Europe and then slowly in major parts of the world; and the list of small or big wins goes on. 
As EA teaches us, these are not the areas where most animals are used and with the highest level of suffering. But can you imagine a plant-based society with no factory farms where people still wear fur or enjoy watching chained elephants in circuses? Changing the perception of animal abuse, and shaping the idea that animals are capable of suffering, is a vital part of our movement’s work, and all these other campaigns helped not only in that but also in the growth and expansion of the movement itself, generating amazing activists.

This is a huge topic to discuss, but what I wanted to point out here is that professional and dedicated campaigning to stop factory farming and promote diet change are relatively new. It is true that there is a wall we are hitting and we are not able to climb yet, but we just started hitting it recently. I think there are still a lot of tests to be done, and there is definitely room for improvement and some success, but only if we still believe that animal liberation is our northern star.

Finally, it’s simply true that eating animals entails paying for abuse so extreme that almost everyone is repulsed by it. 

But as far as I'm aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these arguments most effectively

👋 I and many others are working on this! See, eg, Meaningfully reducing  meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis. We write such papers with the goal of figuring out what strategy works best for talking to people about factory farming.

P.s. Welcome to the forum Bruce, hope it’s a good experience. 

Couldn’t agree more.
First, the amount and diversity of suffering produced by animal agriculture is inconceivable. Cage size is only the tip of the iceberg. Welfare campaigns usually target one problem at a time, but farmed animals face countless harms: extreme selective breeding, separation from parents, overcrowding, behavioral deprivation, painful procedures, transport, slaughter, and probably many forms of physical and psychological suffering we do not even understand.

There is also a basic economic constraint behind it. Keeping a companion cat or dog in good welfare conditions over their lifetime cost around $10K–$100K. A chicken raised for food has to cost only a few dollars. Animal agriculture cannot provide anything close to the conditions we would normally consider humane. In contrast, reducing the number of farmed animals addresses all of these harms simultaneously.

It's true that a moderate campaign attract more audience. But welfare reform lacks a clear trajectory. Suppose we move from conventional eggs to cage-free eggs. It is still just as difficult for the consumer to move from cage-free eggs to plant-based food. Compare this with Meatless Monday. It is also moderate, but it also changes behavior: people learn what to order, what to cook, which plant-based foods they enjoy, and how to eat without meat. Each reduction can make the next one easier.

The underlying problem is that people have an interest in eating animal products. This is why we should focus heavily on PTC (price, taste, and convenience) of plant-based alternatives. A common response is that PTC is not enough because meat consumption is deeply cultural and therefore difficult to change. Of course it is cultural. But where does culture come from?
We sometimes reverse the causal story around "culture". Meat culture didn't emerge out of no where. It stems from the fact Meat is a good product. Because it's a good product, it affect individual incentives and shapes behavior. Repeated behavior then helps generate social norms, identities, and eventually culture. Culture also feeds back into behavior, but it is not independent of the material environment.

This matters because most people who try vegetarian or vegan diets eventually give them up. The common experience is expensive, inconvenient, socially difficult, or less enjoyable, so quitting is unsurprising, and the failed attempt may strengthen the belief that veganism is unrealistic.

The theory of change I find most plausible is make avoiding animal products increasingly easy, cheap, tasty, convenient.
Interests and norms reinforce each other. If eating animals remains overwhelmingly convenient and attractive, people have a strong psychological incentive to rationalize it. If alternatives become better and easier, the cost of accepting the animal-liberation argument falls dramatically.

We should invest far more in interventions that make animal agriculture easier to leave: better and cheaper AP (alternative proteins), plant-based defaults and nudges, institutional meat reduction, and repeated exposure to good plant-based food.

If we broaden this to "value change" and maintain it as a future aspiration rather than a current priority, then I'm for it.

Some limited form of value change seems necessary for progress on wild animals and digital minds, so I don't think the topic can be avoided indefinitely. 

My two cents is that the movement has yet to achieve widespread value change even in highly-educated, academic circles. I think it would be highly effective on the margin to focus on think tank staffers, elite law school students, graduate students in ecology subfields, and so on. There should be a consensus understanding on these issues - for instance, that animal suffering is a negative externality of meat eating.

Just as there came to be with the claim that climate change is occuring, and is anthropogenic.

Failure of a TOC, strategy, campaign or tactic can happen in 3 ways:

1. The resources used are not deemed worthwhile - inefficient. This could be down to either the concept or its implementation;
2. The execution was weak and didn’t deliver - failed efficacy; or

3. The wrong thing was done - ineffectiveness. 
    
   Industry disentangles these. As a movement we seem to leap to (3), whereas to my mind the explanatory cause is often (2). 
   
   Whether EA or non EA we often risk dismissing good concepts because as you say someone tried once and failed. 
   
   There has been a limit on progress so I have sympathies with anyone wanting to try something different. And I do believe different is needed. But similarly I’m also cautious to dismiss past and present attempts within the liberatory frame.

    

Great article, Bruce!

To your point: "... as far as I'm aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these [ethical] arguments most effectively..."

In my experience, many EAs are vegan or care about animals because of Peter Singer (that's also how it started for me). However, his book Animal Liberation came out over half a century ago (with an updated version in 2023) and its surprising how relatively little the movement has done to activel push Singers books/articles out there and/or to package his arguments (and those of Melanie Joy and other thought-leaders) in more modern and more easy to digest  formats.

I only stumbled across Peter Singer as student by accident. Afaik, there was and still is no well-funded concerted effort to influence top universities across the world with ethical argument about speciecisim, carnism and/or animal liberation. 

(I just misspelled speciesism on purpose because apparentl  even in 2026 android smartphones don't know nor autocorrect the term, further supporting Bruce's point that so much more could be done to advance ethical arguments).

So to support Bruce's call for action and to end on a constructive note: 

I'm happy to offer $10,000 to whoever ensure that smartphones around the world know, autocomplete and autocorrect the terms Speciesism and Carnism. 

Thank you Bruce! As someone working on the culture-change side, a take like this is rare & welcome. Building on Mark's point, failure of execution ≠ a failed idea/tactic/entire genre of advocacy, and without funding for the work...good luck to those of us trying to find out which was which.

I appreciate your post's arguments and share your sentiment about wanting to be honest about pursuit of justice and the fact that factory farming is arguably the most profound injustice perpetrated by humans today. My reticence about your conclusions has just been driven by the repeated personal experience that it is not productive to give people my honest opinion about how bad it really is to, say, eat a chicken sandwich. In contrast, making less "blame-valenced" claims like "farmed animal conditions are really bad and we should improve them" has been far more likely to lead to constructive dialogue. Does this say something awful about most of humanity? Absolutely, but I'd rather be pragmatic and actually help animals than feel good about myself and not actually help. I can't speak for everyone, but my impression is that most animal-aligned EAs are similarly on board with animal liberation but are just trying to be pragmatic.

If you've found success with a conversational formula with members of the general population around justice, animal liberation, and being honest about what you really think about meat consumption, I'd love to hear it so I can use it in my own life.

Separately, what do you make of the arguments that diet change advocacy might not be the best for animals when considering wild animal effects?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This could be the most important post for animals ever put on this forum. Someone engaged with and respected by the EA community respectfully challenging the orthodoxy. 

My longstanding concern about EA’s influence on animal advocacy is that it so dramatically skews priorities in the direction of welfare and has led to a situation in which the animal liberation movement is unwilling to articulate its values and beliefs and is scared to say its own name. 

Exactly as Bruce says here, we cannot succeed by hiding what we are. Of course not everyone supporting EA action does support animal rights and those who don’t should keep putting their money where it aligns with their values. (Though the rest of us shouldn’t stop trying to bring them round.) But donors who do support animal rights should put their money into it and help develop the diverse movement that is essential to success.

Thank you, Bruce.

Thank you for writing this. It’s a topic I’ve been discussing a lot. So frustrating to hear EAs argue for things like tabooizing mention of veganism and serving animal products at EA events, as if upholding the basic ethic of our movement (that animals are valuable moral patients) is worth sacrificing in order to avoid alienating people who have such low tolerance for it that they won’t participate if they’re reminded of it too often.

I think this post was a good contribution to this topic and I'm excited to respond to different parts of it more in future posts.

>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.

I strongly disagree with this. I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.

On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us.

If we had the money, I'd like to see every print media surface in and around major universities saturated with effective messaging a la the Slingshot campaign in the UK.

Ironically, Animal Liberation Now, the update to the classic Animal Liberation, leans heavy on criticizing factory farming as opposed to criticizing animal exploitation in general. I fear that this could result in people concluding that free-range, organic, regenerative meat production solves all the ethical issues.