One animal welfare strategy EAs should consider promoting in the short term is getting meat eaters to eat meat from larger animals instead of smaller ones, i.e. beef instead of chicken and fish. With larger animals, it takes fewer animals to produce a unit of meat compared to smaller animals. Vitalik Buterin has argued that doing this may be 99% as good as veganism. Brian Tomasik compiled this chart of the amount of direct suffering that is caused by consuming various animal products, and beef and dairy are at the bottom. For lacto-ovo vegetarians, they should also be encouraged to consume more dairy and fewer eggs, since battery-cage eggs involve significant suffering.
Some may argue that convincing people to substitute other animal products for beef will contribute to climate change, but I’m skeptical that the additional suffering caused by the marginal increase in climate change will outweigh the suffering prevented by the drastic decrease in the number of animals subjected to factory farming. In the long term, cultured meat and/or genetically engineering farm animals to not have nociceptors are better solutions.
I actually told some people to do this kind of diet. Even though I feel very uncertain about it.
I was always baffled by the fact that in Asia, when a lot of people speak of “cutting meat consumption”, they start by cutting the meat of cows When I tried to convince them that they should do the reverse, they look extremely surprised. It’s kind of a cultural thing here that cutting cow’s meat first is seen as standard, everyone kind of “knows it has to be the case”.
I think that’s normal in Canada and probably many other Western countries. People think mammals matter more individually (or like them or identify more with them), are less healthy to eat and worse for the environment to farm. It’s plausible to me that the average chicken matters more than the average farmed mammal because of how much worse chicken lives seem to be.
I started my transition to veganism by cutting out meat from mammals, too, although I think I was only starting to get into EA at the time.
One animal welfare strategy EAs should consider promoting in the short term is getting meat eaters to eat meat from larger animals instead of smaller ones, i.e. beef instead of chicken and fish. With larger animals, it takes fewer animals to produce a unit of meat compared to smaller animals. Vitalik Buterin has argued that doing this may be 99% as good as veganism. Brian Tomasik compiled this chart of the amount of direct suffering that is caused by consuming various animal products, and beef and dairy are at the bottom. For lacto-ovo vegetarians, they should also be encouraged to consume more dairy and fewer eggs, since battery-cage eggs involve significant suffering.
Some may argue that convincing people to substitute other animal products for beef will contribute to climate change, but I’m skeptical that the additional suffering caused by the marginal increase in climate change will outweigh the suffering prevented by the drastic decrease in the number of animals subjected to factory farming. In the long term, cultured meat and/or genetically engineering farm animals to not have nociceptors are better solutions.
I actually told some people to do this kind of diet. Even though I feel very uncertain about it.
I was always baffled by the fact that in Asia, when a lot of people speak of “cutting meat consumption”, they start by cutting the meat of cows When I tried to convince them that they should do the reverse, they look extremely surprised. It’s kind of a cultural thing here that cutting cow’s meat first is seen as standard, everyone kind of “knows it has to be the case”.
I think that’s normal in Canada and probably many other Western countries. People think mammals matter more individually (or like them or identify more with them), are less healthy to eat and worse for the environment to farm. It’s plausible to me that the average chicken matters more than the average farmed mammal because of how much worse chicken lives seem to be.
I started my transition to veganism by cutting out meat from mammals, too, although I think I was only starting to get into EA at the time.