Why “animal welfare” is a thing?
EDIT / UPDATE: −10 votes so far 🤷♀️I still do not get why “animal welfare”… Why focusing on playing Bach or Mozart, why not stop the entire thing?
I do not understand why does it matter to focus on animal welfare? 🤷♀️
Meat is cheap.
Poor people eat meat because it is cheap.
From Freakonomics:
McDonald’s McDouble, at 390 Calories, 23g (half a daily serving) of protein, 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and iron, etc., is the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.
Another example from an online supermarket:
1kg of beef: £5 and 2500 calories
1kg of broccoli: £5 and 340 calories
If you are poor, you are more likely to eat calorie-rich food and keep your expenses down.
Animal welfare means—now we play them Bach or Mozart in a slaughterhouse?
I believe that allowing free market to decide is a fair option, currently there is no free market.
Free market economy?
Farmers do not pay for CO2 emissions.
Farmers do not pay for water use (depending on the country)
Farmers have special rates for fuel (depending on the country)
Common Agricultural Policy in the EU
It has been criticised on the grounds of its cost, and its environmental and humanitarian impacts.
Free market economy!
The market price for CO2, water, all the externalities.
Now the farmers can use their fields and machinery to grow crops that absorb CO2 and generate carbon credits. With less supply of beef, those who produce it can charger higher prices.
The unified and standardized market for CO2 is a completely separate topic, see my blog post about it.
The religious aspect of killing
“You shall not kill”
Maybe religious leaders can help animals?
AID—Artificial Insemination Directive
If you cannot prevent killing, you can make it more difficult to come alive.
There are various laws against animal cruelty.
Being artificially inseminated can be seen as cruel.
I genuinely think that as long as meat is cheap, the demand will continue.
To meet that demand, the animals will suffer.
In order to reduce the demand, the artificial subsidies have to be removed and those who produce beef
Check my book about system change too: http://genesis.re/book
Firstly, I think this may be helpful in understanding the downvotes: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/about—to me, your post isn’t very clear, and it seems you’re using a somewhat superficial excuse of a question in order to make a bunch of semi-related points (if this is not the case and you’re sincerely just looking for an answer, then sorry for the assumption).
Linking to your book doesn’t really add to the post and comes off as unnecessary self promotion independent of whatever the actual concrete point of this post may be.
“Playing Bach or Mozart” to animals is probably just an intended minor provocation and you’re not seriously thinking that this is what EA is going for when it comes to animal welfare. Still, to attempt to answer your question:
“animal welfare” is a cause area in the sense that it’s a big global problem (billions of animals experiencing pain and suffering) that is neglected (comparably few resources going into improving the situation) and potentially solvable
playing music to animals on the other hand would be one possible intervention (so an answer to the question of how we could approach that big problem), and certainly not the most effective one, and I don’t think anybody here has claimed that. But correct me if I’m wrong.
if you disagree with how animal welfare is handled in EA currently, there are at least two possible constructive ways of attack:
you argue that animal welfare is not an important cause area, because either it is not as big a problem, because it is not neglected, or because it is not solvable; all of these things are pretty well established however, so unless you know of some very crucial consideration, even strong evidence in any of these areas would probably only lead to comparably small adjustments in how this cause area is prioritized in comparison to others
you argue that there are interventions to tackle that problem that are more effective than those currently favored by EA; this seems closer to what you’re trying to do here. So your question should not be “Why is animal welfare a thing”, but “Why do you assume intervention X is more effective than intervention Y” (e.g. X being research into clean meat, and Y being carbon tax), and then doing some research on the effectiveness of both things; or alternatively if you’re relatively sure of that, writing a post in favor of intervention Y being underrated and why people should look more into it as it’s a very effective animal welfare intervention.
Building on the last point: when arguing against a position, you’ll get more support and fewer downvotes if you follow a) the good faith principle (basically assuming the position you’re arguing against originates from well meaning people with a genuine interest in doing good) and b) try steelmanning the opposite view (i.e. trying to find the best possible available argument, as opposed to strawmanning, which “playing Bach or Mozart” basically is).
To get closer to the actual object level here, I’d be interested in what you think about these statements and to what extent you agree or disagree with them:
1. Animal suffering is a problem worth solving
2. We should prioritize approaches of solving the problem that do the most good per dollar/time (i.e. alleviate the most suffering or yield the most happiness, or following a similar metric depending on your values)
3. Which approach is the most effective one is an open question that should be answered primarily by gathering evidence
Thank you for the generous comment.
I was coming from “fake news” background where click-bait titles and controversy gets you clicks and comments, but here only downvotes...
My style is often controversial and I’m definitely not sorry.
Just like environmentalist are talking about Polar Bear 🐻 losing natural habitat… For someone living on $1 per day, who don’t have passport, don’t have bank account, don’t have electricity—does it matter? I’m worried about catastrophic climate change.Animal industrial agriculture—waste of land, waste of water, CO2, agricultural subsidies—it’s TERRIBLE DISASTER. I’d love the market to decide:
market price for water
market price for CO2
no subsidies
There is market for premium meat! My personal view—I’m OK to have chickens and eat eggs in my own homestead. I’ll treat them well.
You still seem confused. You say your views are controversial, as if this community doesn’t allow for and value controversial opinions, and think that it’s the claims you made. That is not the case. Hopefully this comment is clear enough to explain.
1. This was a low-effort post. It was full of half-formed ideas, contained neither a title or a introduction that related to the remainder of the post, nor a clear conclusion. The sentences were not complete, and there was clearly no grammar check.
2. Look at successful posts on the forum. They contain full sentences, have a clear topic and thoughts about a topic that are explained clearly, and engage with past discussion. It’s important to notice the standards in a given forum before participating. In this case, you didn’t bother looking at other posts or understanding the community norms.
3. You have not engaged with other posts, and may not have even read them. Your first attempt to post or comment reflects that lack of broader engagement. You have no post history to make people think you have given this any thought whatsoever.
4. Your unrelated comments link to your other irrelevant work, which seems crass.
marsxr, thank you for putting this blogpost up. While I appreciate that your contribution to the forum, I disagree with the solutions and the objections you raised, and also the strategy you used in writing this blogpost.
First, I am a believer to get the best argument from oneself, one needs to steel-man the arguments/positions held by the party you are arguing against, instead of straw-manning them. The way you put the animal welfare movement’s work as playing music to animals is not only unrepresentative of EA+non EA farmed animal welfare groups’s work, it is downright inaccurate. No farmed animal advocacy group I know of prmote the use of music, instead, they advocate for welfare reforms such as moving away from cages or using regulated stunning during slaughter, to legal reforms, to the promotion of plant based options.
Second, I suggest to stick to less points that are more crucial, especially ones that you haven’t developed or explained in details. For example I am confused by the point on the religious aspects of killing. I am probably equally confused by your point on using anti cruelty laws to our advantage. This is actually a pillar of many farmed animal groups. It seems to me that you are unaware of both existing work on this area, and the difficulty to use general anti animal cruelty laws to the advantage of farmed animals.
So let’s discuss about your core arguments, and let me attempt to steel man your arguments. You seem to be suggesting these key points:
1. That meat’s demand is driven by the low price-essential nutrient level, which I very much agree.
2. That meat’s current low price in the consumer market is caused by two main factors, the non-consideration of meat’s external costs, and the subsidies given on top of that. I agree on this.
3. You seem to implicitly deduce that if we succeed in forcing those externalities back to the farmers, we will have much less meat demanded. If this is what you meant I am not very sure about it validity (or mine). This might be true for commonly eaten meats in the west such as lamb and beef. But the externalities are much lower for animal products like eggs, poultry, fish and crustaceans, and even more so when in the future insect farming becomes popular. It is unclear to me that even requiring the farmers of the mentioned animal products to pay for all the externalities would make all animal products demanded by so much less that welfare reform becomes meaningless.
4. You didn’t explcitly conclude it this way, but it seems like your conclusion is therefore that we should not focus on animal welfare improvement, but instead work on retifying the government policies that support the production of meat (animal products).
I actually cannot agree with this conclusion, if I presented it correctly. My objections are fourfold, one argument is in point 3 above, the others are:
A. Unless welfare reform will slow down the elimination of factory farming or even make it impossible. It seems to me that even if there will be a day factory farming will be totally eliminated, improving welfare before reaching that day is important. And I don’t see how welfare reforms can impair the ultimate goal.
B. Some government policies are hard to change, and this is quite true for those that involve agricultural products. And I think we should consider the possibility that factory farming will still be supported by governments for a long time. As you had pointed out, a lot of poor people rely on these “cheap proteins”, why would the governments risk destroying their lives? Also, the fact that a lot of externalities of producing meat actually are burndened upon countries that do not produce that piece of meat. I don’t quite see how governments will suddenly become so morally enlightened that they dare to charge for externalities that are external to their countries.
C. If anything would eliminate factory farming, it seems to me to be the emergence of meat alternatives that are superior to real animal products in all meaningful ways such as economics, environment, aesthetics, tastes and nutrition. It could either be plant based mock animal products, or cultivated animal products. I actually see this as the way more likely reason why factory farming might go obsolete. But I don’t think, and I haven’t heard anyone working to promote alternatives, that we should stop promoting better welfare (or elimination of the worst welfare practices). To the contrary, they are actually generally very supportive of welfare reforms.
To conclude my own, I think welfare reforms has a lot of benefits, both in the short run and mid-to-long run, that it is worth pursuing.
Looking forward to feedbacks to my take!
Valuable resource: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/welfarists-or-abolitionists-division-hurts-animal-advocacy/
Twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/1282612362185445376
•••••
Someone was able to share this link: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/welfarists-or-abolitionists-division-hurts-animal-advocacy/
I believe that radical approach is much better.
1️⃣ Remove agricultural subsidies
2️⃣ Charge for externalities such as CO2eq emissions (methane)
3️⃣ Ban it outright