Welfare standards on farms like larger cage sizes, stunning before killing, etc don’t have obvious benefits for humans. Arguably there are downstream benefits by making meat more expensive and thereby causing less of whatever indirect effects meat consumption creates.
I haven’t thought too much whether all animal rights interventions also improve global health, but I think even if I believed that were true, it wouldn’t tell me whether they improved global health a comparable amount to working on global health directly, so it doesn’t feel like the right question for deciding what the highest priority project is, IMO.
(In fact I agree with your conclusion for other reasons, just wanted to flag why this argument didn’t feel convincing to me.)
Welfare standards on farms like larger cage sizes, stunning before killing, etc don’t have obvious benefits for humans. Arguably there are downstream benefits by making meat more expensive and thereby causing less of whatever indirect effects meat consumption creates.
I haven’t thought too much whether all animal rights interventions also improve global health, but I think even if I believed that were true, it wouldn’t tell me whether they improved global health a comparable amount to working on global health directly, so it doesn’t feel like the right question for deciding what the highest priority project is, IMO.
(In fact I agree with your conclusion for other reasons, just wanted to flag why this argument didn’t feel convincing to me.)
Reducing animal agriculture for the benefits to humans by reducing habitat destruction is a really roundabout and ineffective way to help humans.
If you want to help humans, you should do whatever most helps humans.
If you want to protect someone from climate change, you should do whatever most effectively mitigates the effects of climate change.
If you want to help animals for the sake of helping animals, you should do that.
But you shouldn’t decide that helping animals is better than helping humans on the grounds that helping animals also indirectly helps humans.