Hot take: the fact that we kill more animals per year than the total number of humans who’ve ever lived, and ~99% of them are factory farmed, I think animal agriculture is a moral atrocity that dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history).
That 12 people agreed with such a clearly false statement concerns me on what is usually a pretty rational forum. If we include sea fishing plus (maybe) all the insects we kill through spraying, not even close to 99 percent of animals we kill are factory farmed. It might even be under half.
Also this line… “Dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history)”might be true, but it’s extremely uncertain and a great way to turn people off the cause and make people less likely to donate.
over 99 percent of the world doesn’t work on factory farming, and this at least appears to make it sound like you think their work is unimportant.
I think the animal welfare movement still has a big a motivation/messaging problem which doesn’t help on the donation front. I think there’s a lot to learn from examples like the masterful Lewis Bollard TED talk here which still claims factory farming is the biggest moral problem of our time, while not alienating and showing a lot of empathy for regular people.
Good point, the way I worded that is wrong since we kill more animals than we farm and looking into it more now it looks like the 99% figure applies to the US, but according to our world in data (link later in this comment), the global estimate including farmed fish is more likely 94%. It’s also not more animals per year than all humans, apparently it’s likely about on par
According to our world in data and sentience institute, we factory farm 111 billion per year, but “this has wide uncertainty, ranging from 39 to 216 billion” (https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed) (i.e. on the low end my point is it happens every three years and it still dwarfs human issues but not by as much, and on the high end it happens almost twice per year and is an even worse problem.)
Once you factor in wild fishing, then it’s even more clear. And the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.
I agree that my perspective is likely to turn away people, I don’t lead with it in conversations with the general public, but I do still think it’s true. The problem is multiplied by every year we let it continue, it’s not just a one-time <torture as many animals as all humans ever> event. Effective messaging to the public is super important, but it’s not what I was trying to do with my comment. I was trying to highlight a reality so that people who really care about reality can use it to help orient and decide what to focus resources on.
“Once you factor in wild fishing, then it’s even more clear. And the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.”
First seacaught fish are not farmed. The simple fact that some fish are farmed illustrates the difference. Estimates I can find are between 1 and 2 trillion fish killed while fishing, about 10x the number of total farmed animals. This means excluding invertebrates using your farmed animal numbers maybe 10% of the animals we kill are factory farmed (excluding wild animal stuff), which is quite different from 99%
I also disagree that “the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.” Yes the death might be bad or worse, but most suffering at a factory farm comes from a badly lived life, not a bad death. Many might disagree and I’m very uncertain, but its very possible that many fish that we kill after catching (yes with a bad death) have net positive lives. I find it hard to believe their suffering is on the same scale as a factory farmed chicken or pig.
I’ll have to think about a better way to phrase my point, since I still think that the sheer amount of suffering and death far outweighs human issues. Almost all animals we kill at the very least have a bad death, and ~94% of the ones we farm (~10% of the ones we kill) also have a bad life. We factory farm about as many animals per year as the total number of humans who have ever lived, maybe about a third as many, maybe almost twice as many. Multiply that out by the number of years we’ve been doing those things and I still don’t think any human problem even comes close to as bad.
but its very possible that many fish that we kill after catching (yes with a bad death) have net positive lives.
Doesn’t this imply that even a theoretical painless death of a fish is really really bad because your taking away all the good moments trillions of fish could have experienced? You could argue that the utility experienced by those who consume the fish is higher, but it probably doesn’t compare to the utility those unimaginably large amount of creatures could have experienced had they continued their natural lives.
(I agree with the more important point that non-adversarial messaging matters and these sorts of comparisons are practically useless.)
You may be interested in my estimates for the total welfare of animal populations which I calculated assuming individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year is proportional to “number of neurons”^”exponent”. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, which I believe are reasonable best guesses, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of cattle, hens, broilers, and farmed black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and mealworms, finfishes, and shrimps ranging from 7.65*10^-4 to 2.48 times the total welfare of humans. So I believe the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than that of farmed animals.
Nitpick. I think you meant “kill more farmed animals”, not just “kill more animals”. Abraham Rowe estimated agricultural pesticides kill “100 trillion to 10 quadrillion” insects per year, around 1 quadrillion (10^15). Hannah McKay and Sagar Shah estimated humans kill 1.12 trillion (= (76.2 + 134 + 440 + 472)*10^9) farmed broilers, finfishes, shrimps, BSF larvae, and silkworms per year, only 0.112 % (= 1.12*10^12/10^15) of the insects killed by agricultural pesticides.
Yep, I think farmed animal advocates sometimes miss that even if you only care about human-impacted animals (and not naturogenic suffering), the vast majority are wild animals, not farmed animals. The classic ACE graph could be replicated again with wild animals as the large boxes, and farmed animals as the small ones, and that’s putting aside climate change (which impacts way more wild animals).
That makes sense, Abraham. Here are some graphs I made illustrating that wild animals are neglected compared with farmed animals.
On the other hand, I think people advocating for a greater focus on helping wild animals, including myself in the past, often overestimate the robustness of their best guess that the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals is much larger than that of humans. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “number of neurons”^”exponent”, and exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of:
Wild birds, mammals, and finfishes ranging from 0.0412 to 376 times the total welfare of humans.
Yep, I agree that the case is complicated by total welfare potentially being dominated by invertebrates. That being said, I think many people in the community who might not be motivated by helping insects or nematodes or mites might still care about shrimp, and humans still kill 25 trillion wild shrimp (!) annually.
I agree the absolute value of the total welfare of wild invertebrates may well be much larger than that of wild vertebrates. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I get an absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes ranging from 0.459 (= 0.0189/0.0412) to 2.60 k (= 977*10^3/376) times that of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes. However, my point was that the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals including vertebrates and invertebrates.
I think the focus should be on cost-effectiveness, and the absolute value of the total welfare. These will be lower than suggested by animals killed because a higher number of these tends to be associated with animals with fewer neurons and welfare proxies. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, and only accounting for effects on target beneficiaries, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has been 0.0114 (= 2.06*10^-5/0.00180) to 29.4 (= 20.6/0.701) times that of cage-free corporate campaigns (the graph below has my results for more interventions and exponents). So I do not know whether the interventions which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of wild shrimps are more or less cost-effective than the ones which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of chickens
Accounting for effects on soil animals and microorganisms, I have very little idea about whether any intervention, including SWP’s HSI which gets more farmed shrimps to be electrically stunned, increases or decreases welfare (in expectation).
Nice idea. We do have one WAW version of the classic graph, which I like in its simplicity, but it lacks the funding angle and if you do not see it next to the FAW classic, it’s not as meaningful. I’ll add this idea to our wish list of comms graphs.
Hot take: the fact that we kill more animals per year than the total number of humans who’ve ever lived, and ~99% of them are factory farmed, I think animal agriculture is a moral atrocity that dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history).
That 12 people agreed with such a clearly false statement concerns me on what is usually a pretty rational forum. If we include sea fishing plus (maybe) all the insects we kill through spraying, not even close to 99 percent of animals we kill are factory farmed. It might even be under half.
Also this line… “Dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history)” might be true, but it’s extremely uncertain and a great way to turn people off the cause and make people less likely to donate.
over 99 percent of the world doesn’t work on factory farming, and this at least appears to make it sound like you think their work is unimportant.
I think the animal welfare movement still has a big a motivation/messaging problem which doesn’t help on the donation front. I think there’s a lot to learn from examples like the masterful Lewis Bollard TED talk here which still claims factory farming is the biggest moral problem of our time, while not alienating and showing a lot of empathy for regular people.
https://youtu.be/dvLnIecUNL8?si=VyvYqWjIp701j_MB
Good point, the way I worded that is wrong since we kill more animals than we farm and looking into it more now it looks like the 99% figure applies to the US, but according to our world in data (link later in this comment), the global estimate including farmed fish is more likely 94%. It’s also not more animals per year than all humans, apparently it’s likely about on par
According to https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/, “About 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth”.
According to our world in data and sentience institute, we factory farm 111 billion per year, but “this has wide uncertainty, ranging from 39 to 216 billion” (https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed) (i.e. on the low end my point is it happens every three years and it still dwarfs human issues but not by as much, and on the high end it happens almost twice per year and is an even worse problem.)
Once you factor in wild fishing, then it’s even more clear. And the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.
I agree that my perspective is likely to turn away people, I don’t lead with it in conversations with the general public, but I do still think it’s true. The problem is multiplied by every year we let it continue, it’s not just a one-time <torture as many animals as all humans ever> event. Effective messaging to the public is super important, but it’s not what I was trying to do with my comment. I was trying to highlight a reality so that people who really care about reality can use it to help orient and decide what to focus resources on.
This comment doesn’t make much sense to me.
“Once you factor in wild fishing, then it’s even more clear. And the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.”
First seacaught fish are not farmed. The simple fact that some fish are farmed illustrates the difference. Estimates I can find are between 1 and 2 trillion fish killed while fishing, about 10x the number of total farmed animals. This means excluding invertebrates using your farmed animal numbers maybe 10% of the animals we kill are factory farmed (excluding wild animal stuff), which is quite different from 99%
I also disagree that “the method of slaughter for sea fish (suffocating or crushed to death in a pile) does not seem meaningfully better to me than a factory farm slaughterhouse, so the connotation still applies imo.” Yes the death might be bad or worse, but most suffering at a factory farm comes from a badly lived life, not a bad death. Many might disagree and I’m very uncertain, but its very possible that many fish that we kill after catching (yes with a bad death) have net positive lives. I find it hard to believe their suffering is on the same scale as a factory farmed chicken or pig.
I’ll have to think about a better way to phrase my point, since I still think that the sheer amount of suffering and death far outweighs human issues. Almost all animals we kill at the very least have a bad death, and ~94% of the ones we farm (~10% of the ones we kill) also have a bad life. We factory farm about as many animals per year as the total number of humans who have ever lived, maybe about a third as many, maybe almost twice as many. Multiply that out by the number of years we’ve been doing those things and I still don’t think any human problem even comes close to as bad.
Doesn’t this imply that even a theoretical painless death of a fish is really really bad because your taking away all the good moments trillions of fish could have experienced? You could argue that the utility experienced by those who consume the fish is higher, but it probably doesn’t compare to the utility those unimaginably large amount of creatures could have experienced had they continued their natural lives.
(I agree with the more important point that non-adversarial messaging matters and these sorts of comparisons are practically useless.)
Thanks for the bold take.
You may be interested in my estimates for the total welfare of animal populations which I calculated assuming individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year is proportional to “number of neurons”^”exponent”. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, which I believe are reasonable best guesses, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of cattle, hens, broilers, and farmed black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and mealworms, finfishes, and shrimps ranging from 7.65*10^-4 to 2.48 times the total welfare of humans. So I believe the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than that of farmed animals.
Nitpick. I think you meant “kill more farmed animals”, not just “kill more animals”. Abraham Rowe estimated agricultural pesticides kill “100 trillion to 10 quadrillion” insects per year, around 1 quadrillion (10^15). Hannah McKay and Sagar Shah estimated humans kill 1.12 trillion (= (76.2 + 134 + 440 + 472)*10^9) farmed broilers, finfishes, shrimps, BSF larvae, and silkworms per year, only 0.112 % (= 1.12*10^12/10^15) of the insects killed by agricultural pesticides.
Yep, I think farmed animal advocates sometimes miss that even if you only care about human-impacted animals (and not naturogenic suffering), the vast majority are wild animals, not farmed animals. The classic ACE graph could be replicated again with wild animals as the large boxes, and farmed animals as the small ones, and that’s putting aside climate change (which impacts way more wild animals).
That makes sense, Abraham. Here are some graphs I made illustrating that wild animals are neglected compared with farmed animals.
On the other hand, I think people advocating for a greater focus on helping wild animals, including myself in the past, often overestimate the robustness of their best guess that the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals is much larger than that of humans. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “number of neurons”^”exponent”, and exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of:
Wild birds, mammals, and finfishes ranging from 0.0412 to 376 times the total welfare of humans.
Soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes ranging from 0.0189 to 977 k times the total welfare of humans.
For an exponent of 1.5, the absolute value of the total welfare of each of the above 2 groups of wild animals is much smaller than that of humans.
Yep, I agree that the case is complicated by total welfare potentially being dominated by invertebrates. That being said, I think many people in the community who might not be motivated by helping insects or nematodes or mites might still care about shrimp, and humans still kill 25 trillion wild shrimp (!) annually.
I agree the absolute value of the total welfare of wild invertebrates may well be much larger than that of wild vertebrates. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I get an absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes ranging from 0.459 (= 0.0189/0.0412) to 2.60 k (= 977*10^3/376) times that of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes. However, my point was that the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals including vertebrates and invertebrates.
I think the focus should be on cost-effectiveness, and the absolute value of the total welfare. These will be lower than suggested by animals killed because a higher number of these tends to be associated with animals with fewer neurons and welfare proxies. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, and only accounting for effects on target beneficiaries, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has been 0.0114 (= 2.06*10^-5/0.00180) to 29.4 (= 20.6/0.701) times that of cage-free corporate campaigns (the graph below has my results for more interventions and exponents). So I do not know whether the interventions which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of wild shrimps are more or less cost-effective than the ones which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of chickens
Accounting for effects on soil animals and microorganisms, I have very little idea about whether any intervention, including SWP’s HSI which gets more farmed shrimps to be electrically stunned, increases or decreases welfare (in expectation).
Nice idea. We do have one WAW version of the classic graph, which I like in its simplicity, but it lacks the funding angle and if you do not see it next to the FAW classic, it’s not as meaningful. I’ll add this idea to our wish list of comms graphs.
Why Wild Animals? - Animal Charity Evaluators