Farmed animals are currently the majority of mammal + bird biomass, and so ending the (factory) farming of animals is concomitant with reducing the total mammal + bird population[3] by >50%, and this is not something that I see talked about as potentially negative.
Presumably counterfactual reductions in animal agriculture result in counterfactual reductions in land use for agriculture, and so counterfactual increases in wild habitat, allowing more wild animals to be born and live. Animal agriculture is responsible for a disproportionate share of land use.
As someone suffering-focused, I see this as reason to not work on diet change and reducing animal agriculture, because increasing wild animal populations seems bad. I mostly support welfare reforms and reducing the use of very small animals in particular.
I was assuming that a reduction in agriculture would result in an overall reduction in the biomass (and “neuron count”[1]) of birds and mammals, because:
Currently the biomass of farmed birds + mammals is about 10x that of farmed birds + mammals (source, not sure how marine mammals are counted but only the ballpark is needed), and this is only using 45% of the habitable land as you say
Logically it makes sense that farming aims to efficiently convert land area into animal biomass, and has more of a top down ability to achieve this than nature does. The animals that are most widely farmed are partly chosen for having food chains of only one step, and not needing to run around a lot expending energy.
A point against this is that animals are slaughtered earlier than their natural lifespan, which would result in fewer days experienced per unit of feed input. But given the numbers above I don’t think this is an offsetting factor
Of course by number of individuals it would go the other way, which is presumably why you are concerned about reducing farming from a suffering-focused perspective. So I think this comes back to the issue of moral weights for small animals (as usual 😌).
...
I’m now trying to inhabit a position that I don’t exactly believe, but is interesting and that I do find somewhat persuasive.
From a bigger picture perspective, you can imagine someone trying to derive the optimal arrangement of civilisation according to hedonic utilitarianism, where they accept something closer to my end of the suffering-focused and logarithmic-intensity axes[2]. Suppose they have a good model of evolutionary theory and economics but lack the details of how life on earth currently looks.
They might think something like the following: “In order to expect any kind of top down control over the outcome you need an intelligent species + culture that can coordinate over the use of large areas (geographical, or in whatever relevant space). This species will probably be high maintenance, because they will need to have had very complex and demanding needs and wants in order for them to develop the necessary culture in the first place.
The ideal scenario would be for a relatively small population of this high maintenance species to act as stewards for a much larger population of creatures that are very low maintenance, in order to achieve a high total utility with the resources available. These low maintenance creatures should be chosen to not require a lot of energy, be easily satisfied with simple and cheap pleasures, and have simple social structures such that you can scale the number of individuals without too many side effects.
Of course, this is just a pipe dream, because this would require the advanced species to have some kind of intrinsic preference for stewarding this larger population. Among the set of all goals it seems unlikely they would have this specific one”.
If you look at the actual world it is quite striking how close it is to this vision. Humanity does maintain large populations of low maintenance animals, using a large proportion of the resources that are available to do so, at minimum economic cost. The difference is that we currently torture them.
If you were to accept the vision above, it looks like an easier move from “maintaining large population and torturing them” to “maintaining large population and trying to give them happy lives”, than it is from “large population + torturing them” to “90% smaller population of domesticated animals” to “later maybe we make the population large again for morally motivated reasons”.
...
Anyway, sorry for getting on a tangent from directly replying to your comment, but this long term picture is the thing that makes me actually uneasy about going hard on interventions to end factory farming. That is, on the margin currently I’m pretty happy with a best guess of it being positive expected value to reduce the amount of animal farming, but would be more hesitant about ending farming overnight because of the potential for irreversible effects.
I would expect that if non-animal protein sources become clearly superior than animal sources, then this would result in a very rapid collapse in the number of farmed animals, and that once this has happened it could be a lot harder to move towards the “high population, high welfare” world (because we would start using all the land for something else, and the idea of using a large fraction of the land on earth for managed populations of animals would become seen as weird).
I think it’s not widely conceptualised that potentially “PTC-dominant alternative protein ⇒ >50%[3] collapse in the welfare-range-weighted population of creatures within 10 years”.
Used as a stand-in for some more accurate proxy for sentience, but which scales predominantly with brain size/complexity rather than number of individuals
Using “>50%” as a stand-in for “a quite surprising amount of the total fraction” and welfare-range-weighted as a stand-in for “weighted by the delta in welfare that humans could reasonably expect to achieve with some degree of confidence (e.g. without it being in animals that are so different from humans that their sentience is highly questionable)”
Presumably counterfactual reductions in animal agriculture result in counterfactual reductions in land use for agriculture, and so counterfactual increases in wild habitat, allowing more wild animals to be born and live. Animal agriculture is responsible for a disproportionate share of land use.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
As someone suffering-focused, I see this as reason to not work on diet change and reducing animal agriculture, because increasing wild animal populations seems bad. I mostly support welfare reforms and reducing the use of very small animals in particular.
I was assuming that a reduction in agriculture would result in an overall reduction in the biomass (and “neuron count”[1]) of birds and mammals, because:
Currently the biomass of farmed birds + mammals is about 10x that of farmed birds + mammals (source, not sure how marine mammals are counted but only the ballpark is needed), and this is only using 45% of the habitable land as you say
Logically it makes sense that farming aims to efficiently convert land area into animal biomass, and has more of a top down ability to achieve this than nature does. The animals that are most widely farmed are partly chosen for having food chains of only one step, and not needing to run around a lot expending energy.
A point against this is that animals are slaughtered earlier than their natural lifespan, which would result in fewer days experienced per unit of feed input. But given the numbers above I don’t think this is an offsetting factor
Of course by number of individuals it would go the other way, which is presumably why you are concerned about reducing farming from a suffering-focused perspective. So I think this comes back to the issue of moral weights for small animals (as usual 😌).
...
I’m now trying to inhabit a position that I don’t exactly believe, but is interesting and that I do find somewhat persuasive.
From a bigger picture perspective, you can imagine someone trying to derive the optimal arrangement of civilisation according to hedonic utilitarianism, where they accept something closer to my end of the suffering-focused and logarithmic-intensity axes[2]. Suppose they have a good model of evolutionary theory and economics but lack the details of how life on earth currently looks.
They might think something like the following: “In order to expect any kind of top down control over the outcome you need an intelligent species + culture that can coordinate over the use of large areas (geographical, or in whatever relevant space). This species will probably be high maintenance, because they will need to have had very complex and demanding needs and wants in order for them to develop the necessary culture in the first place.
The ideal scenario would be for a relatively small population of this high maintenance species to act as stewards for a much larger population of creatures that are very low maintenance, in order to achieve a high total utility with the resources available. These low maintenance creatures should be chosen to not require a lot of energy, be easily satisfied with simple and cheap pleasures, and have simple social structures such that you can scale the number of individuals without too many side effects.
Of course, this is just a pipe dream, because this would require the advanced species to have some kind of intrinsic preference for stewarding this larger population. Among the set of all goals it seems unlikely they would have this specific one”.
If you look at the actual world it is quite striking how close it is to this vision. Humanity does maintain large populations of low maintenance animals, using a large proportion of the resources that are available to do so, at minimum economic cost. The difference is that we currently torture them.
If you were to accept the vision above, it looks like an easier move from “maintaining large population and torturing them” to “maintaining large population and trying to give them happy lives”, than it is from “large population + torturing them” to “90% smaller population of domesticated animals” to “later maybe we make the population large again for morally motivated reasons”.
...
Anyway, sorry for getting on a tangent from directly replying to your comment, but this long term picture is the thing that makes me actually uneasy about going hard on interventions to end factory farming. That is, on the margin currently I’m pretty happy with a best guess of it being positive expected value to reduce the amount of animal farming, but would be more hesitant about ending farming overnight because of the potential for irreversible effects.
I would expect that if non-animal protein sources become clearly superior than animal sources, then this would result in a very rapid collapse in the number of farmed animals, and that once this has happened it could be a lot harder to move towards the “high population, high welfare” world (because we would start using all the land for something else, and the idea of using a large fraction of the land on earth for managed populations of animals would become seen as weird).
I think it’s not widely conceptualised that potentially “PTC-dominant alternative protein ⇒ >50%[3] collapse in the welfare-range-weighted population of creatures within 10 years”.
Used as a stand-in for some more accurate proxy for sentience, but which scales predominantly with brain size/complexity rather than number of individuals
I.e. they think extremely bad experiences are not orders of magnitude worse than simply quite bad experiences
Using “>50%” as a stand-in for “a quite surprising amount of the total fraction” and welfare-range-weighted as a stand-in for “weighted by the delta in welfare that humans could reasonably expect to achieve with some degree of confidence (e.g. without it being in animals that are so different from humans that their sentience is highly questionable)”