For what it’s worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so it’s plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we won’t know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I don’t think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until we’ve solved wild animal welfare science. There’s tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesn’t include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely there’s a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if we’re uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.
For what it’s worth, this is somewhat similar to how I think about whether to donate to farmed animal welfare vs. wild animal welfare.
There are vastly more wild animals than farmed and any land-use change affects wild animals, so it’s plausible that the impact of reducing factory farming is mostly a question of how it affects wild animals. I think the evidence supports something close to cluelessness about the net value of the average wild animal life, so until we do wayyy more research on wild animal welfare, we won’t know whether the second-order effects of reducing factory farming are good or bad.
But I don’t think that means we should pause the farmed animal advocacy movement until we’ve solved wild animal welfare science. There’s tremendous value to pushing society toward giving animals their due moral consideration, and the ideal world almost certainly doesn’t include factory farming. (Even if it does turn out to be the case that factory farming is actually good for the world on net because of its land use impacts, then surely there’s a way to achieve those effects without also torturing hundreds of billions of animals in the process.)
So I think we should be investing a lot in reducing our uncertainty (i.e., funding wild animal welfare research) while simultaneously building pro-animal power (i.e., funding farmed animal advocacy) even if we’re uncertain about the value of the interventions the animal movement is currently organizing around.