First I’d like to comment on “this may be hypocritical or otherwise dubious.” To me hypocrisy doesn’t seem morally relevant in itself. In outreach of course others are going to use this factor as a quick-and-dirty heuristic for assessing the feasibility of your proposed way of life, but if you donate to Animal Equality to turn others into vegetarians, they never get to know you.
I’ve recommended to people who didn’t want to become vegetarians that they compensate the harm by donating to a top ACE charity. ACE estimates that a vegetarian saves about 35–144 animals from lives as farmed animals per year, so around 90 maybe, for the sake of simplicity. It also estimates that the top charities save somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 animals from such life-long torture for $1,000, so $.1 to $1 per animal. Since ACE’s estimates are very rough, as ACE details itself, the interventions will usually become more expensive they are successful, and I’m not sure if suffering as a result of egg consumption is already included, I have advised donations in the area of $100 per year to one of the top charities. My trust in such cost-effectiveness estimates is such that I would rather err even higher.
Counterfactually speaking, there is also the harm in not influencing some of your peers to consume less meat, which you have to offset, so significantly more than a $100 donation is probably called for.
Hypocrisy aside (again), I find it intuitive that when a product is very cheap/cost-effective, like animal welfare, we should buy as much as possible of it instead of producing it ourselves. In fact the low price makes it an extremely attractive buy at the moment, which might soon change as more people become vegetarian. (This seems to be related to moral trade and our spiffy new impact certificates.)
On the other hand, this trade-off doesn’t apply to me—and probably not to many others either—as I’ve found vegetarianism to be just about zero effort and probably negative cost from the start. I’ve recently started supplementing creatine, but it’s €11 for €500 g, so at 5 g per day, it’s 11 cents per day. I would guess that this is still offset by my savings due to my not buying expensive meat.
Moreover there is something like the paradox of voting at work here where a tremendous advantage for everyone (democracy or animal welfare) is only achievable when a majority of people do something that to each of them in isolation would not seem cost-effective. Animal welfare may have a greater elasticity than democracy, but seeing how many people in my culture find it inappropriate to eat dogs or even consenting humans, there is probably some critical mass that only needs to be reached in order to establish vegetarianism as the norm. The cost-effectiveness of this factor is probably hard to estimate, like with scientific research.
I’m eliding a number more very convincing arguments for vegetarianism because they were already explained in other comments.
First I’d like to comment on “this may be hypocritical or otherwise dubious.” To me hypocrisy doesn’t seem morally relevant in itself. In outreach of course others are going to use this factor as a quick-and-dirty heuristic for assessing the feasibility of your proposed way of life, but if you donate to Animal Equality to turn others into vegetarians, they never get to know you.
I’ve recommended to people who didn’t want to become vegetarians that they compensate the harm by donating to a top ACE charity. ACE estimates that a vegetarian saves about 35–144 animals from lives as farmed animals per year, so around 90 maybe, for the sake of simplicity. It also estimates that the top charities save somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 animals from such life-long torture for $1,000, so $.1 to $1 per animal. Since ACE’s estimates are very rough, as ACE details itself, the interventions will usually become more expensive they are successful, and I’m not sure if suffering as a result of egg consumption is already included, I have advised donations in the area of $100 per year to one of the top charities. My trust in such cost-effectiveness estimates is such that I would rather err even higher.
Counterfactually speaking, there is also the harm in not influencing some of your peers to consume less meat, which you have to offset, so significantly more than a $100 donation is probably called for.
Hypocrisy aside (again), I find it intuitive that when a product is very cheap/cost-effective, like animal welfare, we should buy as much as possible of it instead of producing it ourselves. In fact the low price makes it an extremely attractive buy at the moment, which might soon change as more people become vegetarian. (This seems to be related to moral trade and our spiffy new impact certificates.)
On the other hand, this trade-off doesn’t apply to me—and probably not to many others either—as I’ve found vegetarianism to be just about zero effort and probably negative cost from the start. I’ve recently started supplementing creatine, but it’s €11 for €500 g, so at 5 g per day, it’s 11 cents per day. I would guess that this is still offset by my savings due to my not buying expensive meat.
Moreover there is something like the paradox of voting at work here where a tremendous advantage for everyone (democracy or animal welfare) is only achievable when a majority of people do something that to each of them in isolation would not seem cost-effective. Animal welfare may have a greater elasticity than democracy, but seeing how many people in my culture find it inappropriate to eat dogs or even consenting humans, there is probably some critical mass that only needs to be reached in order to establish vegetarianism as the norm. The cost-effectiveness of this factor is probably hard to estimate, like with scientific research.
I’m eliding a number more very convincing arguments for vegetarianism because they were already explained in other comments.