EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy

I would like to express my support for Bruce Friedrich’s post. And he has strong effective altruist support: Peter Singer and Jeff Sebo have raised the same concern about how effective animal advocacy evaluates different approaches to change (Sebo & Singer, 2018).

1. Difficulty measuring the benefits of activism should not lead us to discount it.

Sebo and Singer explicitly identify the risk of measurability bias. Their concern is that the methods we use to evaluate activism may favor interventions whose benefits are easier to count. An approach may have important benefits even when those benefits are difficult to measure. As they explain:

"It is rather an argument that, if one aspires to reduce animal suffering as much as possible and to use evidence and reason in the course of doing so, then one should take care not to focus disproportionately on the direct, individual impacts of particular interventions since doing so will lead to an incomplete, and probably incorrect, analysis of what animal activists should be doing individually and collectively."

This matters for dietary advocacy because changing social norms may help people adopt dietary changes even if the immediate effects of individual interventions are small.

Expressed another way, there is a fair amount of peer-reviewed research that has found that social stigma is a reason people do not change their diets and, if they do change their diets, change them back (Markowski & Roxburgh, 2019; Hodson & Earle, 2018; MacInnis & Hodson, 2017; Minson & Monin, 2012; Cole & Morgan, 2011).

Many people simply want to be “normal,” and whatever normal is, they will do. This suggests that resistance to dietary change may reflect more than a personal commitment to eating meat. People may know that animals are suffering, and care, and still not go vegetarian or vegan because they are afraid of social isolation. Making vegetarianism and veganism seem normal and decreasing stigma could help more people make and keep the change.

We do not need to wait for a global tipping point to begin this work. Norms can change within particular communities. For example, we see many African Americans embracing plant-based eating as it becomes a norm within parts of the African American community, often framed around health and food justice rather than animals (Harper, 2010; Botchway et al., 2022). I experienced this firsthand in Atlanta, Georgia. What stood out to me was that many of the restaurants that were “plant-based” did not mention animals at all; however, they did mention how African Americans had been given the worst food and how plant-based eating was now a way to reclaim their health. I knew several people who took their dates to completely vegan restaurants, even though they were not vegan themselves, because they viewed these as high-status restaurants that would impress their dates.

An analogy might be smoking: One could imagine effective altruists in the 1950s trying a host of strategies to decrease smoking, including, say, flyers and protests, finding few immediate results, and concluding that these approaches were not worth pursuing. They might then focus only on making cigarettes less harmful, perhaps by decreasing the amount of tar. But substantial change in the rate of American smokers was possible. It required norm-setting behavior.

Or take civil rights, which I raise to compare how movements create change, not to equate the experiences involved. One could imagine effective altruists studying individual efforts to decrease anti-Blackness in the South, finding limited utility in, say, distributing flyers, and concluding that all that could be done to help African Americans was to convince white Americans to treat African Americans better. However, more substantial change was possible. Here, too, it required norm-setting behavior.

Sebo and Singer make this point explicitly:

"For example, historical studies of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, and more allow one to see how conciliatory and confrontational approaches to activism can interact in ways that make the whole different from and greater than the sum of its parts."

Their argument is that we need to assess how approaches work together, as well as what each achieves individually. This is difficult research, but, as they put it, “It might be difficult to do this work well, but it is not impossible to do so.”

We can see an attempt at norm-setting, or shocking the conscience, in the open rescue movement. Perhaps it will work, perhaps it won’t, but we should not assume it is impossible. Its potential effects include changing how people understand animals and animal exploitation, alongside the direct effects of individual rescues.

2. We do have evidence that we can create long-lasting dietary change.

It is incorrect to say that there is no evidence we can produce long-lasting dietary change. We do have evidence. The problem is that we just don’t know how to scale it. The technique with the strongest support so far for producing dietary change is what we refer to as “moral shocks,” in essence, watching Earthlings or Dominion.

For example, Kramer and Landry (2026) randomly assigned 1,149 University of Toronto undergraduates to watch either a 16-minute clip from Dominion showing industrial pork production or a control video about mushrooms. Instead of asking only about intentions, they had participants choose real meals, and about half of those choices were actually served. What is so strong about this study is that the changes lasted. Right after the video, participants chose 27 percent fewer meals with meat. A week later, they were still choosing 13.5 percent fewer meals with meat, 30 percent less pork, and 122 percent more plant-based meals. The effect did shrink over the week, and the participants were college students, so we need more research on how long these changes last and who they work for. But the changes did not disappear. I learned about this study from Seth Ariel Green, who described it as “a great study.” There are other studies that have found similar results.

So the question is not whether any intervention can change diets. We have evidence that some can. The problem is the difficulty of scaling up, of getting large numbers of people to watch Earthlings. However, it might be possible to significantly increase the number of people who have an Earthlings-like experience. For example, a number of street outreach programs are thinking through ways to have people agree to watch segments of Earthlings.

Relatedly, lectures in college classrooms seem to work. Tracking more than 100,000 meal selections, Jalil, Tasoff, and Bustamante (2023) found that students randomly assigned to a single 50-minute talk on the health and climate effects of eating meat reduced their meat consumption by 5.6 percentage points, with no signs of reversal over three years. The authors calculate a high return on investment even under conservative assumptions, about US$14 per metric ton of CO2-equivalent.

This matches my own experience. Virtually every year, I get to teach a class in which students read every word of Animal Liberation and watch every second of Earthlings. I know they do because I test them on it. Perhaps more importantly, as a professor, I can set a norm in which veganism is clearly not stigmatized: the professor is doing it. And this happens at a key stage in students’ lives, when they are often first deciding who they will be as adults, separate from their families. Unsurprisingly, the changes I see are substantial, with 10–20 percent of students becoming vegetarian or vegan, and this works in a completely different way from, say, a flyer. I know many other vegan professors. We could support them in teaching more classes about animals.

In any case, this evidence suggests that some interventions can produce lasting dietary change. So, no, not flyers per se, but yes, it is a possible area where more research could be helpful.

3. Seth’s meta-analysis is narrower than it may appear.

The meta-analysis identifies limitations in the existing research and excludes many studies that do not meet its inclusion criteria. Only after applying those criteria does it find a small average effect across the remaining studies. That finding does not establish that dietary change is impossible or that other interventions cannot produce larger effects. The authors explicitly call for rigorous evaluation of promising interventions, which supports further research, including more and better-designed studies (Green et al., 2026).

I am aware of a few studies that have found that individual approaches may not be effective, for example, distributing pamphlets or providing information about health and the environment (Haile et al., 2021; Bianchi et al., 2018). Yet a classroom lecture on health and environmental topics did produce lasting change (Jalil et al., 2023). Finding that a particular approach did not produce dietary change does not prove that dietary change itself cannot work.

It is worth noting that one of Seth’s co-authors, Maya Mathur, had earlier published a well-done meta-analysis that found that appeals to animal welfare reduced meat consumption, at least in the short term (Mathur et al., 2021). When I asked her how to think about the two, she told me she now considers Seth’s meta-analysis the better one: the field’s methods improved much faster than she expected, and the newer analysis rests on a much stronger evidence base. Her update also means that much of the rigorous research on this question is recent, and the newest rigorous studies are not uniformly discouraging, as the Dominion and classroom studies above show. Rigorous measurement does not show that dietary change is impossible. It shows that most interventions tested so far have produced small effects, and that some stronger ones may work. And, as Sebo and Singer caution, even the best-designed studies of individual interventions cannot capture how advocacy shifts social norms over time.

4. There are a lot of people who have already changed their diets in the U.S.

The proportion of vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. is probably 9 percent. I have extensive analysis on this point in two different posts (Stănescu, 2019, 2025). I realize this may be a significantly higher number than you have heard before, so please take a look at the research I have compiled.

Ironically, the strongest numbers are from the meat industry itself. They have monthly polls on this exact question, so we have lots and lots of data, every month. Since these studies are funded in part by the beef and pork checkoff programs, any industry bias is presumably in the opposite direction, which is part of why I prefer their data to, say, a poll by Vegetarian Times. Consistently, what they find is a fairly high number of vegetarians, vegans, and semi-vegetarians. For example, the August 2026 Meat Demand Monitor, released September 1, reports 4 percent vegan, 4 percent vegetarian, and 10 percent flexitarian/semi-vegetarian (Tonsor, 2026, p. 3). These are much higher numbers than most people assume. According to this industry-funded survey, 18 percent of respondents identify with these diets, including 4 percent who identify as vegan.

5. I agree with you that we need to be more effective.

A representative from PETA asked me to provide recommendations for their advocacy and communication strategies. Here are five areas I suggested to them where I think more research and support could be helpful:

1. Focus on the industry. Test whether exposing the industry’s practices and influence can persuade people to change their diets.
2. Focus on positive portrayals of vegans. Test whether showing vegans in a positive light can reduce the stigma that makes people reluctant to become vegan.
3. Support college professors teaching classes on animals. Help more professors offer these classes and study their effects on students’ dietary choices over time.
4. Focus on retention. Help people who have already become vegetarian or vegan maintain those changes, and study what support makes a difference.
5. Focus on subgroup identity. Work within particular communities to make vegetarianism and veganism part of what feels normal within those communities.

Perhaps some of these approaches will work, and perhaps some won’t. But that is a reason to study them. If you are interested, I can share more data and thoughts on each of these points.

Overall, I do not think it is fair to describe dietary advocacy as an approach that has repeatedly failed. We do have evidence that some forms of it can work. How much more funding it should receive is still a question worth studying. But, as Sebo and Singer argue, we also need to consider how activism changes social norms over time. If we discount those changes simply because they are harder to measure, we may underestimate the value of funding this work.

Therefore, we should continue to fund research on the effectiveness of dietary advocacy and, until that research is finished, advocacy in that direction.

Again, I would like to express my appreciation to Bruce for his post. He and I have disagreed in other areas, but on this issue, I strongly support his points. I also appreciate each of you working in veganism, vegetarianism, or animal rights. You are doing the most important work there is, and I am grateful to each of you for your work.

References

Bianchi, F., Dorsel, C., Garnett, E., Aveyard, P., & Jebb, S. A. (2018). Interventions targeting conscious determinants of human behaviour to reduce the demand for meat: A systematic review with qualitative comparative analysis. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 15, 102. Article.

Botchway, M., Turner-McGrievy, G. M., Crimarco, A., Wilson, M. J., Davey, M., Wilcox, S., & Frongillo, E. A. (2022). “They eat what they eat, I eat what I eat”: Examining the perspectives and experiences of African Americans who adopt plant-based diets. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 16(3), 363–373. Article.

Cole, M., & Morgan, K. (2011). Vegaphobia: Derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(1), 134–153. Article.

Green, S. A., Smith, B., & Mathur, M. B. (2026). Meaningfully reducing consumption of meat and animal products is an unsolved problem: A meta-analysis. Appetite, 216, 108233. Article.

Haile, M., Jalil, A., Tasoff, J., & Vargas Bustamante, A. (2021). Changing hearts and plates: The effect of animal-advocacy pamphlets on meat consumption. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 668674. Article.

Harper, A. B. (Ed.). (2010). Sistah vegan: Black female vegans speak on food, identity, health, and society. Lantern Books.

Hodson, G., & Earle, M. (2018). Conservatism predicts lapses from vegetarian/vegan diets to meat consumption (through lower social justice concerns and social support). Appetite, 120, 75–81. Article.

Jalil, A. J., Tasoff, J., & Bustamante, A. V. (2023). Low-cost climate-change informational intervention reduces meat consumption among students for 3 years. Nature Food, 4(3), 218–222. Article.

Kramer, L. A., & Landry, P. (2026). How the sausage is made: Testing the effectiveness of an informative video in promoting sustainable food consumption. Scientific Reports, 16, 18492. Article.

MacInnis, C. C., & Hodson, G. (2017). It ain’t easy eating greens: Evidence of bias toward vegetarians and vegans from both source and target. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(6), 721–744. Article.

Markowski, K. L., & Roxburgh, S. (2019). “If I became a vegan, my family and friends would hate me:” Anticipating vegan stigma as a barrier to plant-based diets. Appetite, 135, 1–9. Article.

Mathur, M. B., Peacock, J., Reichling, D. B., Nadler, J., Bain, P. A., Gardner, C. D., & Robinson, T. N. (2021). Interventions to reduce meat consumption by appealing to animal welfare: Meta-analysis and evidence-based recommendations. Appetite, 164, 105277. Article.

Minson, J. A., & Monin, B. (2012). Do-gooder derogation: Disparaging morally motivated minorities to defuse anticipated reproach. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(2), 200–207. Article.

Sebo, J., & Singer, P. (2018). Activism. In L. Gruen (Ed.), Critical terms for animal studies (pp. 33–46). University of Chicago Press.

Stănescu, V. (2019, July 1). Guest post: Response to the claim that only 2% (or less) of people in the United States are vegetarian. Critical Animal. Post.

Stănescu, V. (2025, July 20). You are not alone: The real numbers on vegetarians and vegans in America. Win for Animals. Post.

Tonsor, G. (2026, September 1). Meat Demand Monitor: August 2026 (Vol. 7, Issue 8, p. 3). Kansas State University, Department of Agricultural Economics. Report.

Animal Liberation and Diet Change are 2 different concepts. We can achieve Animal Liberation similarly to how the Civil Rights Movement, Gay Rights, and Women’s Rights movements have achieved success. We are already achieving legislative successes such as California banning the sale of fur and San Francisco requiring a minimum amount of food purchased with city funds to be vegan (50% minimum for jails). Also we passed legislation that would require a horse racing track to close, and it closed as we were working on the legislation. This has nothing to do with persuading people one by one to change what they eat, but this is incremental work towards Animal Liberation.

Thanks so much, Lewis — I appreciate you responding in such depth; I know you're busy and don't take that for granted. 

Prefatory comment: 
My post captured some of what I've been wondering about in recent weeks, based on the Substacks from Nan, Itsi, and you. 

And then the thing that prompted me to move those thoughts from my brain to the Forum was Aidan’s dismissal of even trying to come up with something new, b/c it’s all been tried (quoted in my piece). It seems to me that we won’t come up with something new if we’re not trying to come up with something new… 

While I’m delighted to offer some thoughts, I’m sure there are many EAs who would have better ideas than I do, and I’d really love to see lots of smart EAs who care about animals challenging one another to come up with new ideas (or twists on old ideas) that are focused on animal liberation and diet change. 

If our messaging is laser focused on mitigating the myriad ways animals suffer, that’s what people will spend time on. I wonder if we might see some creative and high-impact proposals focused on diet change and animal liberation, if we actively challenged the community to come up with some. 

Okay, from there: 

My first four points were asking whether there might be reasons other than direct behavior change that we should be considering, and then my final point asks whether a changed reality for our movement (e.g., AI and more resources as the two obvious examples) might warrant a rethink about what's possible. 

With regard to AI: Just like everyone else on the planet is trying to figure out how to use AI to come up with new and better ways to do things and to solve previously unsolvable problems, that’s what I’m wondering about here. 

I don’t claim to have answers; this feels like the kind of challenge that warrants lots more people thinking about it (inspired by Itsi’s line, “the projects that step up to the plate will happen.”) 

That said, here are some thoughts.

Could AI: 

1) help us hone animal liberation and diet change strategies for greater impact? What have we been missing? Why have our strategies so far failed? What might we do to make them more successful?

2) help us analyze what worked with you, me, and everyone else who did change our diets and sign onto Animal Liberation philosophy and then why that workeed and what it might look like to scale up based on that information?

3) help us figure out how to do much, much more with less, via agents for example, opening up impact opportunities that were constrained by bandwidth previously? 

4) help us target the people most likely to be open to changing their diets or adopting animal liberation philosophy for the kind of repeat interactions that might work? 

5) come up with ideas that no one else has thought of yet?

Those are a few ideas/questions; I would love to see what others might come up with, if prompted to do so. 

*** 

On Resources: 

I agree with you (of course) that “what matters is … whether [animal liberation and diet change advocacy] will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward.” 

It seems like we’ve written off the idea that interventions focused on animal liberation and diet change should even be considered. I’d like to see them in the mix, with creative people really thinking about what might work. 

FWIW, I could imagine a big difference in impact between two similar interventions based on the concept of going deep v going broad. Maybe not, but it feels like it might be worth exploring. 

Also FWIW, I don’t think the animal liberation movement and diet change advocacy have tried the ideas laid out in The End of Roe — are there lessons there for animal liberation and diet change advocacy, not just for farm animal welfare advocacy? I don’t know, but it seems to me like it would be worth thinking about. 

Re: the diet change section on the EA Forum: I was referring to where we’re putting money and what we’re encouraging people to think about right now w/a potential huge influx of resources; everything I’ve seen that speculates on uses of a potential significant influx of funds has focused on animal welfare and alt proteins, both of which I am (of course) incredibly enthusiastic about! 

I’d be interested in seeing more people also thinking about diet change and changing the ethics zeitgeist. 

***

Very good points w/r/t whether animal liberation activism made welfare improvements possible. Ugh. That said, I still wonder whether a complementary focus on animal liberation and diet advocacy might, directed effectively, prove helpful to welfare campaigns. Could there be a symbiosis there? I don’t know, but it feels to me like it might be worthy of exploration. 

I appreciate your comments w/r/t the liberation struggle question. I agree with Elliot’s points and yours. Just one thing: Things like AI safety and global health have humans at the center, so it feels like maybe the liberation concept (these beings matter) is a given?

*** 

Conclusion: 

My post is a call to bring the creativity and analytical minds of the EA community to questions around animal liberation and diet change. EA is constantly asking “How do we do this better? How do we make this work? What’s most effective?” 

As you rightly note, a bit more than 10 years ago, we looked at the evidence w/r/t diet change and liberation advocacy, saw that nothing was working, and largely moved on. That may have made sense then, and it’s certainly paid dividends in the form of decreased suffering for an unfathomable number of animals (and the prospects for even more, of course). 

My point is: In the light of where were are now (e.g., with advanced AI and the potential for a lot more resources, and perhaps there are other new variables), might an overt focus on animal liberation and diet change advocacy lead to some new and transformative interventions that could work? 

Maybe not, of course, but I also think maybe so. It definitely feels to me like it would be worth putting the challenge out there. 

Thank you again for engaging—and, of course, for your world-transforming work. 

I'd like just to pick up a couple of points in this reply, numbers 4 and 7. I appreciate that Lewis was addressing specific points that Bruce made rather than making a comprehensive argument but it's what's in front of us. 

Firstly, characterising animal liberation activity as "liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil" is too narrow a definition at best, and unfair and inaccurate at worst. I entirely agree that that form of activism has shown almost no sign of creating lasting change and may well have been harmful, (although I accept that it may have contributed positively in some ways). Liberationist campaigning, however, encompasses a wide variety of different techniques and approaches. For every liberationist chanting "evil" there is another putting on a tie and talking to their adversaries (me, for instance, or indeed Bruce). If you define "activism" as "shouting at people that what they do is evil", then the case against it is watertight - but it's not a useful definition. Characterising activity intended to promote animal liberation in this way, with respect, is not helpful to an informed, evidence-based and open debate.

Similarly, all the "recent corporate animal welfare wins" came "after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach" is winning an argument by defining the terms so you can't lose. Well, there were corporate wins before that pivot, and legislative wins that arguably had deeper (if not wider) effects before it too. Defining success by "recent corporate wins" begs its own questions and doesn't help the wider analysis. (I'm also curious about the evidence that the only significant legislative wins for animals in the UK took place before liberation activism.) 

In regard to Point 7, I don't think it is helpful to include PETA's budget in the ledger of animal liberationist/diet change activity. When I worked at PETA, none of my work was liberationist or focussed on diet change. PETA does a proud job in both those areas but a very large amount of its work does not fall into those categories. And if $80m out of the $130m "budget" is accounted for by a single organisation (however good or effective), that hardly represents the diverse, innovative and dynamic movement ecosystem that is needed for success, or even needed to make a proper evaluation of the effectiveness of liberationist/diet change activity. 

The best argument for food system (“dietary”) change activism would be studying and leveraging actual real-world case studies, specifically the playbook and track record of the tobacco and meat industry and their proven ability to increase market share through successful marketing campaigns. The documentary, The Real Mad Men of Chicago, shows us exactly how this was done over the last several decades.

The important lesson here is that food industry powerholders hold the key to a major shift in the direction of a plant-based food system. Without a people-powered movement to influence their decisions, we don’t stand a chance to make meaningful change, and consumers will just continue to consume the animal-heavy diet that is marketed to them, despite all the consumer-facing outreach we have done and continue to do in the vegan movement (by default?). It sounds like EA testing has found this singular focus on consumer dietary change to be ineffective. If so, on that point, I would agree, it could never be enough on its own. But surely we were strategic enough to realize that much earlier on right?

To further build a mass movement, we would also need to better leverage potential trigger events that reflect the pains and anxieties of everyday working people such as bird flu, food price inflation and extreme weather events and effectively use messaging to tie this into a plant-based foods solution.

Lastly, I think we need to listen carefully to what the powerholders of the food system are telling us. For example, earlier this year, the leading spokesperson for the turkey industry John Zimmerman told Congress at a public hearing that if “we” don’t solve the bird flu problem, there will be no future for the chicken and egg industries. The industry is telling us what their greatest vulnerabilities are and we need to be leveraging them to our advantage. I don’t see that happening “at scale” or even on a micro level, yet.

Obviously there is much more to say, but I prefer real conversation over texting. It’s more effective to communicate face to face whenever possible.

This is an important argument, thanks, but I don't agree that the better reference class is attempting to improve the wellbeing of others. The examples you provide certainly could be framed as justice issues, as you say, but are also problems that were/are pretty universally recognised, which require practical solutions that are/were politically and economically acceptable to those with the power to implement them. The need to end the consumption of animals doesn't fall into that category. Most people, politicians and cultures don't think it's OK for women to die in childbirth but do think it's OK for animals to be slaughtered for consumption. 

That's a really good point w/r/t my second point/question, Elliot. 

Similar to your reference point expansion (all very good examples), the farm animal welfare endeavor is not striving for animal liberation or diet change, so it doesn't make sense for me to hold it to animal liberation or diet change as its end goal (i.e., what success looks like).

Better welfare for farm animals stands on its own as an unequivocal good, a point I've made many times in response to the IMO wrongheaded argument that welfare reform delays liberation. 

I am struggling with this concept though, since I would like to see us keeping animal liberation as our north star... But that need not be the case for the welfare reforms, and fair enough.

Absolutely, Anita! A holistic, systems-based approach grounded in a philosophy of duty and animal rights gives us a stronger foundation for meaningful, long-term change. Plant-based diet change and institutional food system transformation must go hand in hand if we are to address the interconnected polycrisis facing animals, climate, biodiversity, and much more. A full movement-wide pivot is both necessary and achievable.

PS: I went vegan and joined the animal advocacy movement after attending the vigil. It transformed my life and my perspective towards animals.

Thank you Anita ! Animal Welfare campaigns keep normalizing the specisist ag system, not only the industries. Working together on refocusing funding on campaigns based on diet change and animal liberation is definitely a win-win for everyone: for us, for animals and for climate ! Thank you Anita and Bruce for being part of the open dialogue and for speaking up. 

Well said. 

Thanks for your note, Elliot. 

What Prompted This Post — 

This post was precipitated by thinking about the potential influx of a significant amount of money for farm animals and wondering whether AI and a lot more money might change the nature of what’s possible w/r/t animal liberation and diet advocacy. 

Put another way, it seems to me that what’s possible in one reality (until now) might be be quite different from what’s possible in another reality (AI + a lot more philanthropic support). 

I don’t know, of course, but I think it’s probably worth thinking about that explicitly. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recent posts from Nan Ransohoff (The third wave of American philanthropy), Lewis Bollard (The AI Windfall), and Itsi Weinstock (The San Francisco Strategy for Animal Welfare). .

• Nan: “AI is about to generate hundreds of billions in new philanthropic funding. We have a huge amount of work to do to make the most of it.”
• Lewis: “New AI money could bring a step-change for factory-farmed animals — if we spend it well.”
• Itsi: “the projects that step up to the plate will happen.”

And then also thinking about the fact that Coefficient Giving, the Navigation Fund, the EA Animal Welfare Fund, ACE, and most others in the EA animal welfare community are not doing much to promote diet change or the philosophy of animal liberation. 

That makes sense in a world of restricted resources: The farm animal welfare work is paying dividends beyond anything I would have expected, and if we have limited funds, we should focus there. Fair enough. 

But in a new world of AI and significantly more resources, would it make sense for us to think a bit more expansively? It seems to me that it probably would. 

I really loved Dave Coman-Hidy’s reflection on the book The Fall of Roe and lessons we might take from it. The anti-abortion movement:

• built a complex, interlocking ecosystem
• was obsessively single-issue
• used incrementalism as the path to total victory
• prioritized community, which was essential to the movement's success

A few things I have been thinking about since reading his review and then reading the book:

• If we followed that playbook, could we actually win some victories for animal liberation and diet change? I don’t know, but I do think that AI and a massive influx of money… that might warrant changing how we think about what’s possible. 
• Although the anti-abortion movement worked incrementally, no one was unclear on the righteousness of the cause or the end goal, and they didn’t hide it, I don’t believe. They were on message, sure. And they were incremental. But you knew where they stood, fundamentally. I think this would fit into my second point/question. 

So: Might there be ideas for animal liberation and diet change that are new and innovative and powerful, building on the lessons we've learned over the past decade of wild success for farm animal welfare, as well as the lessons from The Fall of Roe, etc.? 

Not if we don’t try… 

***

Have I updated my thinking w/r/t diet change advocacy? 

I suppose the most obvious thing to say is that I have changed so many of my views since June 2018; that was a long time ago; GFI was just turning two years old. :-)

For one thing, I stopped talking about “convenience” many years ago (I thought even before June 2018, though apparently not). 

That said, my point in that talk was that I no longer believed that diet change advocacy could change meat’s steady global upward trajectory. It was not that I thought/think diet change advocacy was worthless.

Diet change and animal liberation advocacy do some very good things: 

First, many people will change their diets, and fewer people eating animals is a very good thing! 

Second, I’m here because of diet change and animal liberation advocacy. So are most of the leaders in alt proteins and farm animal welfare advocacy, as well many (perhaps most) of the people who started the plant-based and cultivated meat companies. 

What diet change advocacy is unlikely to do: Change the massive upward trajectory of meat production and consumption. 

But neither will farm animal welfare advocacy, of course.

But maybe AI and a transformational amount of funding could flip the script. I don’t know. 

But it won’t if we’re not trying…

*** 

One final point: A lot of my post represents new and not fully formed thinking — so much so that I say explicitly at the top that I’m tossing these ideas out for consideration and look forward to hearing from others. 

I tried to present these five observations/questions with appropriate circumspection; apologies if I failed at that! 

I’m excited to hear more from you and others. 

Thanks for engaging!

I think your analysis here is great but, with respect, doesn't account for one thing. People need a reason to leave meat and animal agriculture. Of course there are strong arguments that have nothing to do with animal liberation, but environmental arguments haven't made them abandon their cars and we all know that it's perfectly possible to eat a nutritious, healthy diet which includes some animal products. Like you say, by a whole load of criteria, meat is a good product. In addition to making it easier for people to leave, we need to make it attractive for them to leave.

That's why we need to invest in the advocacy which changes hearts and minds. Once you "get" animal rights, then abandoning animal products is a matter of when, not if. Making it easier to leave it certainly makes when come sooner.

Is anyone aware of any work intended to convert plant-based consumers to veganism, ie to test how open to animal rights arguments people are when they no longer eat animal products? I agree with you, Tom, that reducing the cognitive dissonance should work, so I'd really like to see any evidence about whether it does and how best to do it.

Thanks Seth - that's great to see! I'm sorry I didn't realize that. Are any of the major EA funders supporting your work? 

Aside: I've been here off and on for almost ten years! :-) 

Joined Nov 6, 2016

I remember talking with Lewis Bollard and Richard Parr once upon a time about the idea of giving every incoming student at the US's top universities a copy of Animal Liberation. 

I still really love that idea, as step 1 of turning all of those universities into immersive environments for animal liberation and diet change advocacy. 

Hey Mark! We should catch up.

I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well.

But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3.

Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.

Yes. If we date the movement back to Singer or to the founding of key organisations like Animal Aid (UK) and PETA, a nascent movement trying to promote one of the most radical ideas in human history tried and made almost no progress for a few decades, working it out as it went along and making lots of mistakes. Well, duh. Of course the  most effective approach wasn't going to be taken and of course progress was minimal. That doesn't show us the wrong thing was being done - in my view what it shows us is that the right thing was being done in the wrong way. And where it was done right, it takes more than 30 or 40 years to undo tens of thousands of years of culture.

With proper investment from those with money, we can do it better and we can give it time. 

I think that most people know that animals suffer, but they don’t care enough to make any changes. Most people are just selfish and largely apathetic towards most others. I thought that maybe meditation will help people to become kinder, but some people who meditate a lot for many years still eat meat. They go on multi-month silent retreats and still order meat when they go to a restaurant. However, I noticed that around 4% - 15% of people who attend multi-day meditation retreats at Spirit Rock are vegan, based on the number of vegans posted in the dining hall. So maybe meditation will help people to become kinder. Anecdotally, some people say meditation helped them to care about animals more and to become vegan. 

Thanks for your note, Ariel. 

I hope others will jump in here, too, but here are some thoughts from me: 

I think there are two distinct forms of communication here: 1) campaigns; and 2) interpersonal (i.e., your question about “a conversational formula with members of the general population.”)

I think the former can be done quite easily without getting people too upset. 

My hypothesis is that part of the failure of animal rights to make a bigger impact is that all the animal liberation campaigning is hit-and-split. People see the messaging once and only once, and then it leaves their consciousness as they go about their lives, where 99.9% of messaging reinforces the normalcy of eating animals, etc. 

One of the things I love about college campuses is that there is a possibility of ensuring that every single person on campus sees animal rights messaging on a fairly nonstop basis.

Some years back, Whole Foods founder John Mackey and I went to a bunch of campuses and debated meat-eating against student debate teams (e.g., Stanford and Emory); we didn’t pull punches: If you would not eat a dog or cat, you can’t justify eating a chicken or pig. 

For things like debates, you get an audience of 50-1,000+ (the big numbers come when the school puts the event on their calendar and requires that students go to a certain number of official events/year). Also, we usually had campus paper coverage, so that amplified the reach. 

We came and went, so I suspect that the impact was not that great, though I do occasionally hear from someone who attended one of the debates that it turned them vegetarian or vegan, etc. 

With sufficient funding, we could sustain animal rights messaging on campuses. Look at what the Federalist Society accomplished, e.g., without overwhelming resources. 

TBC, I’m absolutely not the expert here; I’ve done vanishingly little animal advocacy for more than 10 years now. 

My point with the post is that I think we’re writing animal liberation and diet advocacy off too quickly, especially as I’m reading blogs that are basically begging for people to found new groups to attack every possible welfare reform. 

I'll bet that if we applied the same kind of creativity to diet and animal liberation advocacy that we're applying to animal welfare, we would come up with some strong ideas that are worth trying. 

Personal advocacy: 

My main recommendation is to make it a conversation, rather than a lecture. Ask A LOT of questions (i.e., the Socratic method), and really listen to the answers, and then share your perspective as gently as possible. Satya Magazine ran something that I wrote about this in 2005. 

Matt Ball and I talk a lot about this in the Animal Activist’s Handbook, which was assigned reading at both Mercy for Animals and The Humane League for a bunch of years (when they did a lot of vegan advocacy). It looks like you can get a used copy on Amazon for just under $6.50. 

I see that MFA still has an essay I wrote many years back on its website: Effective Advocacy: Stealing from the Corporate Playbook. See the four Carnegie principles and “eating with meat eaters” for some tactics that have worked for me. 

Here I am talking about some of these principles at Farm Sanctuary in 2015. 

Clearly, some of the precise interventions I discuss have not worked yet, but I do hear from people who picked up a leaflet and went vegan. It’s rare but not impossible. I believe this is what netted us Milo Runkle, who founded MFA, and also the actor Maggie Q. 

Thanks for engaging, 

Bruce

I'm sure all of us who've tried and failed to bring individuals we know to our point of view have experienced what you describe here, Ariel. It's disheartening. But as Bruce says in his excellent reply, personal experience isn't the best guide to what's going to change society. We already have quite a bit of evidence about what might work, but we need more, and what we do know hasn't been implemented at scale.  That's where those funders come in and where members of the EA community with a belief in animal liberation can have a transformative effect.

Hi Robert, I don't think there's anyone in EA-world who has a vested interest in perpetuating the use of animals for food. I think they don't support diet advocacy and animal liberation b/c they don't think it will do much good, resources are limited, and animal welfare advocacy makes real and positive changes for animals. i.e., basic cost-benefit analysis. I would like to see that thinking updated on the basis of new information and a new reality, but I also think it's totally genuine. And I don't see any mixed incentives. 

Actually, animal rights advocates such as PETA have a very good track record for engaging legislators etc, over decades before and after the EA movement emerged. I've done political lobbying for many years in many AR organisations and am currently a lobbyist in the UK for The Vegan Society. We engage productively with legislators and policymakers who are not vegan, veggie or interested in animal rights. If you come to them with a proposition that makes sense and aligns with some other goals or values they have, they still work with you. Animal rights campaigners and lobbyists have been central to legislative changes that have benefited animals hugely for a very long time.

You write: "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."

Thanks! I've been thinking about these things since reading the Substacks from Nan, Lewis, and Itsi, but it was your recent Sandcastles piece that moved me from thinking to writing. So thanks for that, too. 

You write that you "strongly disagree with" my line about largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals, noting: "I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering if it's what you meant."

Reply: Perhaps that's too strong -- I'm not sure. My point is that EA is not funding animal liberation work or much in the way of moral persuasion work around diet change, etc. To me, saying that EA has walked away from the moral foundations of our work feels right, but it's 100% possible that I'm quite wrong. I'll look forward to your (or others') response/s.

I'm also very curious to hear more about this: "On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us." 

I'm not sure what you're saying here; do you think the arguments are so bad that I can't possibly be serious? That's what I think I'm getting from the article you link to. I assure you that I'm serious... I could, of course, be incredibly wrong, and it's very possible that you'll explain and I'll agree. I don't know what I don't know. 

Or perhaps you're saying that the post aligns to my self-interest (the more common connotation of "bad faith"); since the post advocates that EA should fund things I don't work on professionally (and as I note in the post, haven't done much with over the past 10+ years), I'm not sure how my argument would align to that more common understanding of bad faith, either. 

Curious what you think of the author's view from that article about bad faith: 

"Arguments can be evaluated on their merits, without addressing what the speaker's angle is in saying it (even if you think there's probably an angle). This delivers most of the benefits of 'assume good faith' norms; the main difference I'm proposing is that speakers' intentions be regarded as off-topic rather than presumed to be honest." 

I've generally thought that suggesting bad faith falls into the "Look over there, a distraction!" category of argumentation described in the article. 😊