I have been very involved promoting animal protection since 1975 (the year I graduated with a DPhil in biochemistry). I started work for a small London charity (FRAME) promoting alternatives to animal research and have been amazed at the progress made since 1975. Back then, our annual budget was 8,000 GBP and our “big” victories involved having a letter published in one of the major newspapers (preferably The Telegraph—our founder was a Conservative).
Today, laboratory animal use in many major industrial countries (not Canada) has fallen by 50-75%, and the UK, the Netherlands, the USA and Australia have all produced government reports calling for major investment in NAMS (either New Approach Methods or Non-Animal Methods, depending on where you sit). Biomedical research became fixated on genetically modified mouse research models in the mid-1990s, but that fad has now given way to a new technology—“Organs-on-a-chip” often involving human cell cultures derived from stem cell culture.
Lab animal use peaked at around the same time for the USA, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in the mid-1970s. Animal use began to fall as fast as it had risen post-WWII. The GMO mouse fad halted the decline in animal use but the decline is now again visible since 2015.
One sees similar very rapid change in the companion animal space. There are around 1 billion dogs in the world today—nearly all closely associated with humans (either as pets or as community street dogs). Dog neutering took off in the US in the mid-1970s and the euthanasia of dogs in US shelters (because they were surplus) has fallen from around 7 million a year to around 500,000 a year even though the US dog population has more than doubled since 1973. Globally, dog neutering is having similar beneficial impacts for both dog and human well-being.
I agree with Tucker that the farmed animal space could see very similar improvements in the next decade, especially given the EA interest in farmed animal well-being.
This is a notoriously hard problem to measure overall (there’s lots of variation in actual consumption vs reported diets, social desirability bias etc.), but there are several easier sub-sections of the problem that we can more easily measure and they tend to show exponential growth.
As un-scientific as it is, I also think the anecdotal evidence from long-term vegans is worth considering, Most people who have been vegan 10+ years (myself included) will acknowledge that the rate of growth over the last 5 years has been significantly faster than the 5 years before that across virtually every metric, from the number of vegans you meet in everyday life to the number of restaurants and products available to the overall attitude that the public has towards veganism etc.
I’ve been vegan for 11 years, and to me the growth felt faster in the first 5 years than it did in the second. This could easily just be due to my changing life circumstances (first 5 years as a student and living with other vegans), but that’s my personal anecdotal evidence. Recently it also seems like all the vegan restaurants have been closing in my city (Manchester, UK) although hopefully(?) that is more to do with the economic situation than with a decline in veganism.
The link you’ve shared on the proportion of the population identifying as vegan is encouraging, but I’m finding it hard to figure out the data source for their graph. I’m sure I saw some data shared by someone on the EA forum recently that suggested the growth of veganism had been stagnating recently, but not sure how to find that now!
This seems like a really important question though and I’d love to read an in-depth analysis of what the answer is likely to be.
Executive summary: Ending factory farming within our lifetime is an achievable goal due to the exponential growth of animal advocacy, technological innovation, and strategic application of AI and systems-level thinking.
Key points:
The animal advocacy movement is entering an exponential growth phase, with rapidly increasing public awareness and availability of plant-based options.
AI can revolutionize animal advocacy by personalizing outreach, identifying key influencers, accelerating research, and generating persuasive content.
Focusing efforts on 20 key global hub cities can create cascading effects that transform perceptions and practices on a larger scale.
Local activism remains crucial for building foundations, creating culturally resonant messaging, and strengthening the global movement.
Open Paws is developing AI systems to amplify advocacy impact, with opportunities for individuals and organizations to contribute to AI training.
The convergence of technological growth and movement momentum presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate progress toward ending factory farming.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
I think this post is unreasonably optimistic. A repeated theme in your post is that exponential growth in technology and the animal advocacy community could result in drastic pro-animal change, but it ignores the fact that there could also be exponential growth in the animal agriculture industry and anti-animal attitudes. There has been a rise in veganism, but there has also been a rise in meat-eating. AI could be used to convince people to become vegan, but it could also convince people that eating meat is okay and they shouldn’t worry about it. AI could be used to come up with welfare-improving interventions in animal agriculture, but it could also be used to come up with profit-maximizing interventions, and I suspect the latter tools are far more likely to be applied. I don’t see a persuasive reason why the animal welfare movement will gain an advantage over competing interest groups.
I agree that these technologies are also being used by the animal agriculture industry and that represents a very serious threat to the animal protection movement. A large part of my theory of change involves taking actions to slow the adoption of these technologies in animal agriculture whilst increasing them in animal protection, but I thought that was outside of the scope of this post given how long it already was.
I spoke about this fairly extensively at the International Animal Rights Conference though and if you’re interested in learning more about how we can address that threat, here is a link to the recording of the talk.
Thanks for the great post! I was aware of the power of exponential growth in other movements/spaces but never thought to apply it to the pro-animal movement, so that was an ‘aha’ moment for me.
I’m curious though—in what way do you think the concept of exponential growth might not apply to the pro animal movement? The examples you’ve given in the post make it tempting to call the rate of growth exponential, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on scenarios where this might not be true.
Funding is another major obstacle, we clearly don’t have the resources to compete with animal agriculture on computing power. That’s why I think our best bet is open sourcing models and data (which animal agriculture won’t do because they give them a competitive advantage) and leveraging the power of a passionate community to improve our models, rather than “throwing money at the problem”.
Whilst it’s not really an issue of exponential growth not applying to animal advocates, one other major concern is that exponential growth can also apply to the animal agriculture industry, as @GoodHorse413🔸 pointed out. I think that’s a threat we should take very seriously as a movement and something we should aim to disrupt through a combination of lobbying for legislative changes and engaging in corporate campaigns to restrict or ban various uses of AI in factory farms and slaughterhouses.
I have been very involved promoting animal protection since 1975 (the year I graduated with a DPhil in biochemistry). I started work for a small London charity (FRAME) promoting alternatives to animal research and have been amazed at the progress made since 1975. Back then, our annual budget was 8,000 GBP and our “big” victories involved having a letter published in one of the major newspapers (preferably The Telegraph—our founder was a Conservative).
Today, laboratory animal use in many major industrial countries (not Canada) has fallen by 50-75%, and the UK, the Netherlands, the USA and Australia have all produced government reports calling for major investment in NAMS (either New Approach Methods or Non-Animal Methods, depending on where you sit). Biomedical research became fixated on genetically modified mouse research models in the mid-1990s, but that fad has now given way to a new technology—“Organs-on-a-chip” often involving human cell cultures derived from stem cell culture.
Lab animal use peaked at around the same time for the USA, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in the mid-1970s. Animal use began to fall as fast as it had risen post-WWII. The GMO mouse fad halted the decline in animal use but the decline is now again visible since 2015.
One sees similar very rapid change in the companion animal space. There are around 1 billion dogs in the world today—nearly all closely associated with humans (either as pets or as community street dogs). Dog neutering took off in the US in the mid-1970s and the euthanasia of dogs in US shelters (because they were surplus) has fallen from around 7 million a year to around 500,000 a year even though the US dog population has more than doubled since 1973. Globally, dog neutering is having similar beneficial impacts for both dog and human well-being.
I agree with Tucker that the farmed animal space could see very similar improvements in the next decade, especially given the EA interest in farmed animal well-being.
Andrew Rowan
I hope you are right, but is there evidence that veganism is growing exponentially?
This is a notoriously hard problem to measure overall (there’s lots of variation in actual consumption vs reported diets, social desirability bias etc.), but there are several easier sub-sections of the problem that we can more easily measure and they tend to show exponential growth.
We see this exponential pattern in the growth of vegan restaurants in Europe, the percentage of the UK population identifying as vegan and the number of products labelled as vegan worldwide, just as a few examples.
As un-scientific as it is, I also think the anecdotal evidence from long-term vegans is worth considering, Most people who have been vegan 10+ years (myself included) will acknowledge that the rate of growth over the last 5 years has been significantly faster than the 5 years before that across virtually every metric, from the number of vegans you meet in everyday life to the number of restaurants and products available to the overall attitude that the public has towards veganism etc.
I’ve been vegan for 11 years, and to me the growth felt faster in the first 5 years than it did in the second. This could easily just be due to my changing life circumstances (first 5 years as a student and living with other vegans), but that’s my personal anecdotal evidence. Recently it also seems like all the vegan restaurants have been closing in my city (Manchester, UK) although hopefully(?) that is more to do with the economic situation than with a decline in veganism.
The link you’ve shared on the proportion of the population identifying as vegan is encouraging, but I’m finding it hard to figure out the data source for their graph. I’m sure I saw some data shared by someone on the EA forum recently that suggested the growth of veganism had been stagnating recently, but not sure how to find that now!
This seems like a really important question though and I’d love to read an in-depth analysis of what the answer is likely to be.
Executive summary: Ending factory farming within our lifetime is an achievable goal due to the exponential growth of animal advocacy, technological innovation, and strategic application of AI and systems-level thinking.
Key points:
The animal advocacy movement is entering an exponential growth phase, with rapidly increasing public awareness and availability of plant-based options.
AI can revolutionize animal advocacy by personalizing outreach, identifying key influencers, accelerating research, and generating persuasive content.
Focusing efforts on 20 key global hub cities can create cascading effects that transform perceptions and practices on a larger scale.
Local activism remains crucial for building foundations, creating culturally resonant messaging, and strengthening the global movement.
Open Paws is developing AI systems to amplify advocacy impact, with opportunities for individuals and organizations to contribute to AI training.
The convergence of technological growth and movement momentum presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate progress toward ending factory farming.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I think this post is unreasonably optimistic. A repeated theme in your post is that exponential growth in technology and the animal advocacy community could result in drastic pro-animal change, but it ignores the fact that there could also be exponential growth in the animal agriculture industry and anti-animal attitudes. There has been a rise in veganism, but there has also been a rise in meat-eating. AI could be used to convince people to become vegan, but it could also convince people that eating meat is okay and they shouldn’t worry about it. AI could be used to come up with welfare-improving interventions in animal agriculture, but it could also be used to come up with profit-maximizing interventions, and I suspect the latter tools are far more likely to be applied. I don’t see a persuasive reason why the animal welfare movement will gain an advantage over competing interest groups.
I agree that these technologies are also being used by the animal agriculture industry and that represents a very serious threat to the animal protection movement. A large part of my theory of change involves taking actions to slow the adoption of these technologies in animal agriculture whilst increasing them in animal protection, but I thought that was outside of the scope of this post given how long it already was.
I spoke about this fairly extensively at the International Animal Rights Conference though and if you’re interested in learning more about how we can address that threat, here is a link to the recording of the talk.
Thanks for the great post! I was aware of the power of exponential growth in other movements/spaces but never thought to apply it to the pro-animal movement, so that was an ‘aha’ moment for me.
I’m curious though—in what way do you think the concept of exponential growth might not apply to the pro animal movement? The examples you’ve given in the post make it tempting to call the rate of growth exponential, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on scenarios where this might not be true.
One major obstacle I see is the slow rate of adoption of AI by animal advocates. Currently, about 50% of animal advocates rarely or never use AI in their work: https://www.openpaws.ai/research-and-reports/report-on-the-use-of-ai-in-animal-advocacy
Funding is another major obstacle, we clearly don’t have the resources to compete with animal agriculture on computing power. That’s why I think our best bet is open sourcing models and data (which animal agriculture won’t do because they give them a competitive advantage) and leveraging the power of a passionate community to improve our models, rather than “throwing money at the problem”.
Whilst it’s not really an issue of exponential growth not applying to animal advocates, one other major concern is that exponential growth can also apply to the animal agriculture industry, as @GoodHorse413🔸 pointed out. I think that’s a threat we should take very seriously as a movement and something we should aim to disrupt through a combination of lobbying for legislative changes and engaging in corporate campaigns to restrict or ban various uses of AI in factory farms and slaughterhouses.