Sorry this wasnât clear! I wasnât thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)
Sorry this wasnât clear! I wasnât thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)