Vegetarians/vegans should consider promoting eating only beef/dairy as the only animal products they consume as a potential strategy to have people cause less suffering to livestock with a high retention rate. I suspect that the average person would be much more willing to give up most animal products while still consuming beef and dairy, compared to giving up meat entirely. Since cows are big, fewer animals are needed to produce a single unit of meat, compared to meat coming from smaller animals. Vitalik Buterin has argued that eating big animals as an animal welfare strategy could be 99% as good as veganism. Brian Tomasik also compiled this list of different animal products ranked by the amount of suffering they cause per kilogram, and beef and milk are at the bottom.
An objection people might make to this is that eating more beef could contribute to climate change, but I’m skeptical that the amount of additional suffering caused by climate change will exceed the amount of suffering reduced by having less factory farming. It could also be argued that habitat loss may reduce wild animal populations, which may reduce wild animal suffering by preventing wild animals by being born.
As a side note, there needs to be some sort of name for the philosophy of eating big animals to reduce livestock suffering described above. Sizeatarianism? Beefatarianism? Big-animal-atarianism? Sufferingatarianism?
While I’m sympathetic to the idea that of supporting people becoming not entirely vegan—I think it pays off, impact wise—I find it hard to believe that telling them which specific animals to eat is going to be worth the effort.
How sure are we of any choice of numbers in that calculation? Maybe a cow is morally worth 1 chicken, maybe 10,000.
Different people like different foods. I suspect their choice for “the one product that if I keep eating, will allow me to be otherwise vegan” would be much more broadly distributed.
So this seems both like it takes extra effort and might miss a lot of people, and on the other hand the marginal gain from it is not that big.
How sure are we of any choice of numbers in that calculation? Maybe a cow is morally worth 1 chicken, maybe 10,000.
Question Mark’s ideas (backed up by Buterin and Tomasik, who aren’t slouches prone to noise) doesn’t come from some “philosophical” or speculative ranking of animals that only exists “online”, but reflect the extreme practices that exist in factory farming.
In totality, these practices focus suffering on a fraction of the animal food system. Over 90% of suffering is probably concentrated onto a single animal species.
There is a good reason EA animal welfare orgs who work in land animals, focus on chickens and pigs, and even for pigs, the focus is mainly on a single practice (gestation crates).
Even EAs, and even some EAs with interest in animal welfare, don’t really understand these practices or how they affect welfare.
This is astonishing because the information fits into a few paragraphs and could be conveyed with a few pictures.
The issue has always been that farm animal welfare is self censoring, caught between:
the yelling of ineffective advocacy — it’s sort of crazy how “vegan” is a slur and how little credibility advocates can have
non-EA political ideological activism (which doesn’t even qualify as infighting) there are people who wholesale and aggressively co-opt animal welfare to focus on human political issues
actual infighting where EA Farm animal welfare is attacked by non-EA animal welfare (e.g.“welfarist” vs “abolitionist”) . As you can see in the reply below, it is hard to justify dismissal of ‘welfarist’ ideas
Finally, the last gate is the horror of the reality. I haven’t seen any content on the forum that explains why certain animals have it worse (unfortunately it’s not just because being in a cage is confining) and I’m reluctant to start with this comment.
Instead, another approach is to point out that cows not just have it much better, but it’s possible the life of many cows such as beef cows, could actually be net positive.
These rankings match the opinions even of EAs who focus on dairy cows, opinions of outside EA animal welfare scientists, as well as “common sense” understanding of cattle and dairy farming and the economics and husbandry of the animals.
Different people like different foods. I suspect their choice for “the one product that if I keep eating, will allow me to be otherwise vegan” would be much more broadly distributed.
So this seems both like it takes extra effort and might miss a lot of people, and on the other hand the marginal gain from it is not that big.
Extremely unfortunately, the idea that people’s choices of animals is static, or that consumption within meat or eggs is fixed, is very much not true.
Below is a chart showing the stats for US animal consumption between chicken, pork, and beef.
You can see the yellow line here, which represents a single animal (these trends probably matches many western countries).
Vegetarians/vegans should consider promoting eating only beef/dairy as the only animal products they consume as a potential strategy to have people cause less suffering to livestock with a high retention rate. I suspect that the average person would be much more willing to give up most animal products while still consuming beef and dairy, compared to giving up meat entirely. Since cows are big, fewer animals are needed to produce a single unit of meat, compared to meat coming from smaller animals. Vitalik Buterin has argued that eating big animals as an animal welfare strategy could be 99% as good as veganism. Brian Tomasik also compiled this list of different animal products ranked by the amount of suffering they cause per kilogram, and beef and milk are at the bottom.
An objection people might make to this is that eating more beef could contribute to climate change, but I’m skeptical that the amount of additional suffering caused by climate change will exceed the amount of suffering reduced by having less factory farming. It could also be argued that habitat loss may reduce wild animal populations, which may reduce wild animal suffering by preventing wild animals by being born.
As a side note, there needs to be some sort of name for the philosophy of eating big animals to reduce livestock suffering described above. Sizeatarianism? Beefatarianism? Big-animal-atarianism? Sufferingatarianism?
While I’m sympathetic to the idea that of supporting people becoming not entirely vegan—I think it pays off, impact wise—I find it hard to believe that telling them which specific animals to eat is going to be worth the effort.
How sure are we of any choice of numbers in that calculation? Maybe a cow is morally worth 1 chicken, maybe 10,000.
Different people like different foods. I suspect their choice for “the one product that if I keep eating, will allow me to be otherwise vegan” would be much more broadly distributed.
So this seems both like it takes extra effort and might miss a lot of people, and on the other hand the marginal gain from it is not that big.
Question Mark’s ideas (backed up by Buterin and Tomasik, who aren’t slouches prone to noise) doesn’t come from some “philosophical” or speculative ranking of animals that only exists “online”, but reflect the extreme practices that exist in factory farming.
In totality, these practices focus suffering on a fraction of the animal food system. Over 90% of suffering is probably concentrated onto a single animal species.
There is a good reason EA animal welfare orgs who work in land animals, focus on chickens and pigs, and even for pigs, the focus is mainly on a single practice (gestation crates).
Even EAs, and even some EAs with interest in animal welfare, don’t really understand these practices or how they affect welfare.
This is astonishing because the information fits into a few paragraphs and could be conveyed with a few pictures.
The issue has always been that farm animal welfare is self censoring, caught between:
the yelling of ineffective advocacy — it’s sort of crazy how “vegan” is a slur and how little credibility advocates can have
non-EA political ideological activism (which doesn’t even qualify as infighting) there are people who wholesale and aggressively co-opt animal welfare to focus on human political issues
actual infighting where EA Farm animal welfare is attacked by non-EA animal welfare (e.g.“welfarist” vs “abolitionist”) . As you can see in the reply below, it is hard to justify dismissal of ‘welfarist’ ideas
Finally, the last gate is the horror of the reality. I haven’t seen any content on the forum that explains why certain animals have it worse (unfortunately it’s not just because being in a cage is confining) and I’m reluctant to start with this comment.
Instead, another approach is to point out that cows not just have it much better, but it’s possible the life of many cows such as beef cows, could actually be net positive.
These rankings match the opinions even of EAs who focus on dairy cows, opinions of outside EA animal welfare scientists, as well as “common sense” understanding of cattle and dairy farming and the economics and husbandry of the animals.
Extremely unfortunately, the idea that people’s choices of animals is static, or that consumption within meat or eggs is fixed, is very much not true.
Below is a chart showing the stats for US animal consumption between chicken, pork, and beef.
You can see the yellow line here, which represents a single animal (these trends probably matches many western countries).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58312
By the way, the average diet, has gotten worse, in terms of meat consumption (this probably includes the number of vegetarians or vegans).
Note that this comes from the USDA, which is definitely not EA or animal welfare aligned.