We should, as a community, encourage veganism but direct some attention to effective charities as well as an extremely conservative basis for meat-eaters to offset their negative impact on animal welfare. I think it would be worth developing a fund managed by people who study animal welfare and can best assess what organizations are, in expectation, going to have the best impact on the victims of factory farming. Then compute a conservative amount (which would probably depend a lot on how many chicken products one consumes) and encourage meat eaters (or vegans for that matter) to contribute some multiple of that to the fund.
If offsetting is easy, it could probably be sold to even many outside the EA community.
I agree. Commenting on the animal welfare side:
We should, as a community, encourage veganism but direct some attention to effective charities as well as an extremely conservative basis for meat-eaters to offset their negative impact on animal welfare. I think it would be worth developing a fund managed by people who study animal welfare and can best assess what organizations are, in expectation, going to have the best impact on the victims of factory farming. Then compute a conservative amount (which would probably depend a lot on how many chicken products one consumes) and encourage meat eaters (or vegans for that matter) to contribute some multiple of that to the fund.
If offsetting is easy, it could probably be sold to even many outside the EA community.