If you’re not eating meat, you have to replace the protein and calories. At baseline, flour is 4,464 calories/dollar and 134g protein/dollar.
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Perhaps the most important number is the cost to prevent an animal from being farmed. Initial estimates were as low as $0.10/life, but later came under scrutiny. One estimate puts the cost at $5.70 to save a chicken life, with pigs being around $150. Since that implies costs scales about linearly with meat-produced, I’m assuming $636 to save a cow’s life, but these numbers are all speculative. Note also that these are estimates for one particular intervention.
i’m a bit confused here. what does saving a life entail? does it mean, say, getting the proteins you would’ve gotten from a chicken from plant-based sources instead? if so, the numbers seem to suggest that plant-based diets are more expensive than meat-based diets, which seems pretty unlikely to me? legumes, nuts, peas and soy-based product are all pretty affordable.
edit: also, the average american’s calorie intake is significantly higher than the recommended amount. so one could argue that the same amount of calories don’t always need to be replaced. but of course reducing calorie intake is not feasible for everybody.
Another thing that wasn’t immediately clear to me: are you comparing chicken lives to cow lives (by numerically distinct individuals), or chicken-years to cow-years? I think this is a significant difference since iirc the standard length of the life of a factory farmed chicken is on the order of 0.1 years, while I would guess that it’s higher for cows (but don’t recall a number off the top of my head).
Yes good question! Cow lives are longer, and cows are probably more “conscious” (I’m using that term loosely), but their treatment is generally better than that of chickens.
For this particular calculation, the “offset” isn’t just an abstract moral good, it’s attempting to decrease cow/chicken production respectively. E.g. you eat one chicken, donate to a fund that reduces the numbers of chickens produced by one, the net ethical impact is 0 regardless of farming conditions.
That convenience is part of the reason I chose to start with this analysis, but it’s certainly something I’ll have to consider for future work.
nice, thanks for doing this!
i’m a bit confused here. what does saving a life entail? does it mean, say, getting the proteins you would’ve gotten from a chicken from plant-based sources instead? if so, the numbers seem to suggest that plant-based diets are more expensive than meat-based diets, which seems pretty unlikely to me? legumes, nuts, peas and soy-based product are all pretty affordable.
edit: also, the average american’s calorie intake is significantly higher than the recommended amount. so one could argue that the same amount of calories don’t always need to be replaced. but of course reducing calorie intake is not feasible for everybody.
Sorry yes, “saving a life” means some kind of intervention that leads to fewer animals going through factory farming. The estimate I’m using is from: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9ShnvD6Zprhj77zD8/animal-equality-showed-that-advocating-for-diet-change-works
And yes, it is definitely better to just be vegan and not eat meat at all. This analysis is purely aimed at answer the chicken vs cow question.
Another thing that wasn’t immediately clear to me: are you comparing chicken lives to cow lives (by numerically distinct individuals), or chicken-years to cow-years? I think this is a significant difference since iirc the standard length of the life of a factory farmed chicken is on the order of 0.1 years, while I would guess that it’s higher for cows (but don’t recall a number off the top of my head).
Yes good question! Cow lives are longer, and cows are probably more “conscious” (I’m using that term loosely), but their treatment is generally better than that of chickens.
For this particular calculation, the “offset” isn’t just an abstract moral good, it’s attempting to decrease cow/chicken production respectively. E.g. you eat one chicken, donate to a fund that reduces the numbers of chickens produced by one, the net ethical impact is 0 regardless of farming conditions.
That convenience is part of the reason I chose to start with this analysis, but it’s certainly something I’ll have to consider for future work.