Interesting perspective, although of course there are more reasons to want to end large scale intensive animal farming than just the welfare of animals (I’m thinking of anthropocentric reasons such as improving biosecurity, mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, improving food security, etc).
Also I guess the main point of the post (you can think of yourself as part of a broad strategic movement as opposed to just a person working in an organisation) can be applied to any movement, e.g. AI safety, biosecurity, existential risk, etc, not just animal welfare / ending factory farming.
Hi Aïda. That makes sense. However, I think the reasons you mentioned sometimes play against increasing animal welfare. Poorer welfare standards tend to have a lower carbon and land footprint.
Yes true. But I guess many people are happy to tolerate that negative externality as a medium-term price to pay for progress towards the longer term goal of no / very little animal consumption which would be better both for animal welfare and anthropocentric reasons such as mitigating climate change/biorisk etc...
Iam very uncertain about whether decreasing the number of farmed animals increases or decreases animal welfare (in expectation) due to potentially dominant effects on soil invertebrates. In addition, I worry decreasing the number of farmed animals may prevent some from having positive lives.
Interesting perspective, although of course there are more reasons to want to end large scale intensive animal farming than just the welfare of animals (I’m thinking of anthropocentric reasons such as improving biosecurity, mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, improving food security, etc).
Also I guess the main point of the post (you can think of yourself as part of a broad strategic movement as opposed to just a person working in an organisation) can be applied to any movement, e.g. AI safety, biosecurity, existential risk, etc, not just animal welfare / ending factory farming.
Hi Aïda. That makes sense. However, I think the reasons you mentioned sometimes play against increasing animal welfare. Poorer welfare standards tend to have a lower carbon and land footprint.
Yes true. But I guess many people are happy to tolerate that negative externality as a medium-term price to pay for progress towards the longer term goal of no / very little animal consumption which would be better both for animal welfare and anthropocentric reasons such as mitigating climate change/biorisk etc...
Good objection though! 🙂
I am very uncertain about whether decreasing the number of farmed animals increases or decreases animal welfare (in expectation) due to potentially dominant effects on soil invertebrates. In addition, I worry decreasing the number of farmed animals may prevent some from having positive lives.