It’s one of those truths of the world that most people know but don’t really want i know: Billions of animals live out their lives in horrible and oppressive conditions on factory farms so that our eggs and meat are a little cheaper. practically No one really approves of itBut almost everyone participates in it.
If you want to change it, what should you do about it?
When I was in college, there was some passionate disagreement among animal activists about which approach to take. Many of them favored leafleting – handing out flyers with grotesque pictures of the horrific conditions of factory farms, with the idea of shocking people into change. Others advocate for protests at restaurants and grocery stores, or the daring rescue of dead animals from captivity. Some people hoped we could avoid meat entirely with plant-based or lab-grown alternatives, while others wanted to gradually work toward legislative change.
This is part of the story How Factory Farming Ends
Read more from this special package analyzing the long fight against factory farming here. The series is supported by animal charity Assessors, which received a grant from the Builders Initiative.
a section Between people who call themselves animal rights activists — working toward a world where we don’t treat nonhuman animals as property, but recognize them as persons — and those who call themselves animal welfare activists, and who favor interventions to make processes that We raised and killed animals for more humane food.
EA vs. Activists
increasing Effective-altruism-inspired donation to animal support The spectrum tends to come down to the animal welfare side.
Consider lobbying to make a factory farm more humane, even though it still subjects animals to terrible conditions. Many animal rights activists feel that this amounts to complicity in abuses that even supposedly more humane farms can perpetuate.
In contrast, effective philanthropists tend to jump at such opportunities — after all, 10 percent better conditions for animals, while hardly perfect, is still good. There were many sanctuaries for rescued farm animals bitter about the reluctance of effective animal advocates to fund them; As a result, effective animal advocates will seriously observe that there simply aren’t that many animals in sanctuaries compared to the number in factory farms. It was a matter of numbers.
There was also a difference in ethics. Faced with an atrocity, some people are drawn to splattering themselves with blood and taking to the streets, trying to make passers-by realize the horror they are involved in. Other people are interested in whipping out some spreadsheets These two groups are often suspicious of each other, each eager for allies who refuse to do what they want.
One could write an entire book on the clash of cultures as effective altruism-based donations enter the animal advocacy space. Functional philanthropy was also making a splash in other areas like global health and development or biosecurity or AI, but those are all areas where a lot of money is already being spent from many sources. In contrast, farmed animals were not supported.
Effective animal advocates quickly become a A huge source of expenditure in spaceAnd their philosophy of how to do well became prominent. This understandably leads people to become frustrated with other theories of how to do better, theories they often work on for decades with very little funding.
But in the end almost everyone involved should agree that effective animal advocacy movements should be judged not by how they make people feel, but by how their work affects animals.
Stronger together
Over a decade, the philosophy of incremental and numbers-based welfare work has accomplished much.
one Recent blog posts Published by the Open Philanthropy Project, which has funded effective animal advocacy work, describes how they did it. D Open Wing AllianceA coalition of animal advocacy organizations zeroed in on corporations as a good target for pressure to improve conditions. Since these corporations tend to sell eggs to consumers, they care about their reputation.
The Open Wing Alliance will effectively offer them a deal: commit to going cage-free, Otherwise: “Protesters will unite online and in the field; They will show up in skimpy clothing at corporate headquarters and franchise locations. Public advertising and social media shaming campaigns will further drive negative press. OWA will do its best to … [the target’s] Their refusal to make necessary welfare improvements is a brand synonymous with animal cruelty.”
In an important way, it represents a synthesis of two threads of the animal advocacy movement that I encountered when I was a college student: suit-wearing lobbying types meeting with corporations and crafting carefully selected claims based on rigorous analysis. Of which animals are said to do most of the work. But the reason to go with the corporation is that if they refuse, they will face protesters willing to put their bodies on the line for animals.
This proved to be a very powerful strategy. Hundreds of pledges have been made, and by and large, they have been kept. Millions of chickens live lives that are still pretty horrible, but still significantly better than they would have been – otherwise A hypothetical conclusion That compared to a chicken raised in a cage, each cage-free chicken will spend 275 fewer hours in “disabling pain” and thousands of hours less in low-level pain.
No one is declaring victory, but it seems the negotiation-and-threat-of-protest strategy is a very cost-effective way to improve animal conditions.
road ahead
Of course, it is impossible to imagine completely solving the horrors of factory farming with this approach – or with any single approach. Corporations will change their policies if it is relatively cheap to do so, but it is hard to imagine them adopting the more expensive changes required to give better lives to animals intensively raised in factory farms. And even if you don’t pull that off, animal advocates will be plenty happy; They want us to stop killing and raising billions of animals in captivity to eat, not just to be nice about it.
And the most unpleasant feature of factory farming is that, unlike almost all of the world’s problems, it has so far gotten worse as the world has gotten richer. As more people enter the global middle class and can buy cheap meat, it creates incentives for more companies to mistreat animals terribly. For all the advances I’ve discussed, far more animals are now farmed in factories in the United States than when I was in college.
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On a big problem like this, you can achieve a ton and still have an unimaginable distance to go.
But when I look at the state of animal support in 2024, I am optimistic. Since a decade ago, the field has undergone a serious maturation. It integrated different perspectives on what advocates were trying to achieve, and grew somewhat out of the friction of very different people trying to work together toward a common goal. And people have accomplished real and worthwhile things and learned a lot about what works.
The stakes remain high and the situation stomach-churningly dire, but many of the arguments I remember being in college are that the movement is now well past the point. Disruptive protest or polished advocacy? Why not produce another as a strategy, like how labor unions do it? Does it justify incremental change? It seems, yes, it certainly is. Despite all mutual mistrust, do people from different subcultures and different perspectives really care about animals? It seems, yes, they do!
At the same time, I’ve seen many other advocacy groups operate on such distinctions. It’s worth taking a step back sometimes to marvel at the achievements of animal advocates — and, if you work with any other high-stakes depressingly sick in our world, to learn from them.
