Hi! I run Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC).
alene
Karma: 1,566
The good news is that life on Earth has been going better and better for humans over the millennia. For instance, we have technology that make it easy to grow tons and tons of food so lots of people can eat as much as they want. We have cures for lots of previously deadly diseases so lots of us humans can live a very long time. And lots of people live in countries that recognize their rights. We also have a robust international economy that makes it really easy for a large number of people to buy the goods and services they want—and for lots of other people to get paid producing those goods and services!
The bad news is that none of this has translated to things going well for animals. :-( In fact, it has translated to the opposite. Things have been going worse and worse for animals over the millennia. For instance, factory farming, which causes a HUGE amount of suffering for animals, developed very recently in human history, and it developed as a byproduct of humans getting the things they want most (like a great economy, and the ability to produce food cheaply). So we have seen that humans getting more and more of what we want doesn’t translate to animals getting what they need. Of course, humans do also want animals to be treated well, on some level! But humans’ main goals are human-oriented goals. And so when we get more and more ability to achieve our goals, we put those human-oriented goals first, resulting in negative externalities for animals. If AI goes well for humans, it’ll go well for humans. It’ll be aligned with what humans want. And that will mean it’s aligned with prioritizing human interests over all others. Sure, it’ll care about animals a little, the way humans care about animals a little. But it will continue to put human interests first. And that will continue to result in externalities for animals.
The same way people harm animals now (e.g. for food, entertainment, fashion, science, etc.) may continue. And new ways to harm animals may develop that we never could have imagined before AI. For instance, people love having pet dogs. When their pet dogs die, people are sad. People may want to be able to upload their pet dog’s brain to the cloud to hang out with the pet dog when their dog dies. But trying to develop this technology may be a lot of work. AI may do the work by uploading 100,000 dog brains, or 100,000 copies of the same dog brain, to the cloud, and running various tests to see what works best. Perhaps a lot of these dogs will suffer immensely due to some mistake AI made in an early draft or some feature AI failed to include. And perhaps the suffering will be made worse because the dogs don’t have bodies and cannot even able to express their suffering without vocal cords or paws. Eventually, AI may work out the kinks before AI roles out the final keep-your-dead-pet-alive-as-an-app-on-your-phone product. But there’s all that behind-the-scenes suffering in the meantime. Humans care about animals a little. But humans love to turn a blind eye to behind-the-scenes suffering, so humans won’t be too upset about this situation. Then maybe AI realizes humans would like an upgrade to their pet-on-your-phone product. And that means AI needs 100,000 more copies of dog brains to do more experiments. AI that is fully aligned with human interests would realize humans would like the upgrade more than humans would be bothered by the suffering inherent in creating the upgrade. So AI will create the upgrade. This is just an example to illustrate my point. But I think there are lots of ways animals can be caused to suffer that we can’t even imagine right now.
What animals need is for AI to be aligned with animal interests, too—not just human interests.
Thank you so much for explaining this, Evelyn! It is really interesting to hear your perspective as an advocate for democracy who cares deeply about animal welfare! And thank you for your important work.
As an American animal advocate myself, I definitely agree that I value my free speech because I use it for animals! And I love the way the U.S. Constitution helps me advocate for animals.
But that still doesn’t lead me to conclude that overall, the best way to help animals is through democracy promotion.
(First, as a probably irrelevant aside, Americans like me actually got our freedom of speech through a couple wars and the creation of a new Constitution with a bill of rights, not through democracy. I see through your profile that you’re German so I don’t know how free speech works in Germany or if it’s something voters decided on. In the United States, though, freedom of speech is actually one of the things that makes our country less than a complete democracy. The US Constitution says that the people can’t pass a law to abridge of the freedom of speech—even if a majority of people vote that they would like to pass the law. That is why undercover investigations of factory farms are currently allowed in every state in the United States. Various democratically elected state governments keep passing ag-gag laws to ban these investigations, and the undemocratic court system keeps striking them down because of first amendment. But I think this is just a technicality because I assume the pro-democracy movement is actually a pro-good-governance movement that also includes stuff like free speech as a limitation on democracy?)
More importantly:
My assumption would be that there is way more farmed animal suffering in the United States, where I live and where we have excellent free speech, than in Uganda. I know that the Uganda human population is lower than the United States human population, but my assumption would be that even per capita, there is way more farmed animal suffering in the United States than in Uganda. For instance, I get the impression that the meat industry uses much fewer animals per capita in Uganda than in the United States.
I agree that it would be better for animals if Ugandan animal rights activist had the right to advocate for them.
But sadly, in the United States, where we all have the right to advocate for farmed animals, only a tiny portion of the population does so. And a much larger portion of the population uses their rights and power to do things that are bad for animals like operating live-hang poultry slaughterhouses.
That said, considering that you are in Germany puts your opinion in a new light for me. My understanding is that Germany is an extremely democratic country where people have lots of rights. And I also understand that it is a country that it’s done more than perhaps any other country to pass laws in the last 10 years to improve farmed animal welfare! 🇩🇪 I know you have banned battery cages and chick culling for example! 🐥 So Germany is a really good illustration of your point about how people who are free may use their freedom to stand up for animals.
I just wish that is what all free people would do everywhere. And in my experience, it sadly isn’t. Maybe the issue is that animal suffering is usually an externality of things people want, rather than people focusing on the animals directly in making their decisions.
In any case, thank you for your important work to promote democracy, Evelyn. I obviously agree democracy is a very good thing even as I think people should continue doing animal welfare work.
Thank you for your comments, Matrice and @Tobias Häberli!
Matrice, what you’re saying about poverty and existential risk makes so much sense to me. You’re making a really good point for both of them. The vast majority of humans who are in poverty probably would do just about anything to get out of poverty. And most humans probably would do a bunch of stuff to keep humanity around. So the more rights and power humans have, the more we will achieve our strongly held goals of escaping poverty and preserving our species. For instance, if a person has the ability to move freely to a new city, maybe she will move to a new city where she can get a job. If a person has the ability to vote, maybe she will vote for economic policies that let her afford a line of credit to start a business. So I totally agree with you that democracy promotion seems like a great way to fight poverty and existential risk.
I am extremely concerned about farmed animal welfare, though. That extreme concern makes me somewhat unique among humans, although somewhat normal among EAs. :-) EAs rock. True, studies show that vast majority of humans would rather farmed animals to have better welfare. But the vast majority of humans would presumably rate farmed animal welfare as a very a low priority compared to all their personal interests that affect them directly, like the economy. EAs are really special and unique in caring so much about farmed animal welfare that EAs would consider donating a significant amount of their time or money to farmed animal welfare work.
So, sadly, I don’t think your logic applies as well to farmed animal welfare. If people have more political rights, they won’t necessarily use those rights to improve farmed animal welfare. In fact, as humans in our society have been gaining more and more rights, farmed animal welfare has been getting worse and worse. Factory farming didn’t even exist two hundred years ago, when life was much worse for humans and we had fewer rights. So, sadly, history has shown that improvement in human rights and wellbeing and rights doesn’t result in improvement in farmed animal wellbeing and rights.
A way to look at it is that humans are the dominant group. Giving more power to the dominant group won’t necessarily help the subordinate group. Some members of the dominant group (especially EAs!) care a lot about the oppressed group and will use their additional rights and power to help the oppressed group. But that’s not the main thing that members of the dominant group will do with their additional rights and power. In fact, a lot of things that people do with our rights and power hurts animals. For instance, people use our political power to vote for an economy that will allow us to set up foie gras companies. Then we build factory farms, force-feed birds for foie gras, and slaughter them. People use our political power to vote for an economic system that will make it very easy to sell food products, including foie gras. And then we sell the foie gras using the cold supply chain made possible by the roads we voted for the government to build. Since, as a species, we mostly care about our own wellbeing, the more rights and power we have as a species, the more we’ll tend to increase our own wellbeing. There’s no particular reason to think that our increased rights and power will result in a different species being better off, and history has shown the opposite.
To be clear, as a human, I do, selfishly, want us humans to have lots of power, freedom, and democracy! I love Democracy. 🇺🇸 (That’s an American flag because I’m American, and I love America and the U.S. Constitution so much. And I want our Constitution to survive.) But I just don’t think that protecting Democracy will help animals.
Another way to look at it is: Imagine we were having this conversation back during the Middle Ages. We might dream of a brighter future where there’s a Democracy so that we can vote and own land. We might see a person slaughtering his chicken with an insufficiently sharp blade and think that in that future, when humans like us have more rights, animals will also be treated better. But we would be extremely wrong. 2026 is that brighter future for humans. There is way more Democracy in the world than there was in the Middle Ages. And farmed animal suffering is way worse now than in the Middle Ages. The typical way chickens are slaughtered in the U.S. today is now via a long, dangerous trip to slaughter (which many don’t survive), followed by a shackle-and-hoist live-hang system that is even crueler than someone using an insufficiently sharp blade. And it happens to an unprecedented number of birds (several tens of billions per year worldwide, and 9.5 billion per year in the US alone—way more than the number of birds killed per year in the Middle Ages). So more Democracy, or preserving the current level of Democracy, won’t protect animals.
I think the only way to protect animals is by affirmatively working to protect animals.
Dear Kes,
This is a super helpful and illuminating reply! Thank you! I love the idea of EA helping all cause areas to more effectively accomplish their goals.
There are lots of things I care about that fall outside of EA. And, for those things I care about, I often think most of the work being done to achieve that thing seems inefficient. So I love the idea of EAs helping make goals get accomplished. That’s super smart.
It just scares me when I hear people encourage EAs to donate to democracy promotion above other, more traditionally EA, causes.
Thank you for your time and explanation!
Sincerely,
Alene
This is a cool post!
That is exciting re: COPW v. NNPC (2019) 5 NWLR (PT. 1666) 518.
And I LOVE this: “Provision for public interest litigation in new laws to grant proper standing to animal advocates/organizations and interested persons to institute actions in court where government agencies fail to act in the interest of animals.”
Humanely hatched eggs from in-ovo sexed hens launched in the United States!!!! https://www.wattagnet.com/egg/news/15749986/eggs-from-inovo-sexed-hens-are-now-available-in-the-us
In 2025, a California court recognized Legal Impact for Chickens’s power to sue an agriculture company for cruelty.
2025 saw developments in nonprofits’ ability to use civil litigation to stop illegal animal cruelty in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and California.
Most notably, in 2025, California courts clarified the power of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCAs) to enforce laws relating to animals. This should have a major effect on compliance with the state’s cruelty laws.
One of the relevant lawsuits, LIC v. Alexandre, was brought by the EA-aligned nonprofit I run, Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC). So, naturally, that’s the case I want to highlight:
Legal Impact for Chickens v. Alexandre Family Farm, LLC, No. CV2401841, 2025 WL 1928044 (Cal.Super. May 30, 2025)
In LIC v. Alexandre, a California judge allowed a farmed-animal cruelty lawsuit to proceed in civil court. LIC, an SPCA, sued a dairy company for alleged cruelty (pouring salt in cows’ eyes, dragging downed cows, and starvation). The defendants asked the court to dismiss the case. The defendants argued that LIC has no power to enforce the cruelty law. Happily, California’s Humboldt County Superior Court rejected the defendants’ argument and allowed the case to proceed! The court held that LIC stated valid causes of action for injunctive and declaratory relief under California Corporations Code sections 10404 and 14502. Importantly, the court ruling means that an SPCA like LIC can directly sue agricultural companies for cruelty, with no special standing barriers.
The defendant dairy company sought appellate review via a petition for writ of mandate. The appellate court denied this writ, allowing the lower-court ruling to stand and case to proceed. ❤️
Cages for laying hens are now illegal in Germany!
This is thanks to the good work of Mahi Klosterhalfen and Albert Schweitzer Stiftung für unsere Mitwelt over many years!
Before reading this, I would have believed it was the job of the top executive officer (e.g. an ED, CEO, president, etc.) to set the org’s agenda. It sounds like that’s what you’re currently doing at your org. That would seem right to me. And I THINK I still believe that? Although you’re making me question it.
You say, “I, as the founder, have a lot of control—but not a clean mandate, not an explicit delegation.” To me, you having a lot of control sounds right. But you lacking a clean mandate would seem like a problem to me. I’d think you should ask the board to give you “a clean mandate” and “explicit delegation” to make these kinds of strategy and goal decisions. E.g. write up some kind of document for the board to sign officially delegating that power to you.
THAT SAID, your post is pointing out that all nonprofits are different and so we shouldn’t assume the same thing is best for all of them. So now, I guess, I don’t know! Maybe at your organization, it is somehow right for the top executive officer NOT to have a clean mandate and explicit delegation?
I’m just thinking, in my limited life experience, things seem to go best if there is ONE person who cares a lot, is very focused, and works hard to make things happen according to a single plan. A top executive officer (e.g. you, or someone you hire to fill that role if you don’t want to) seems best poised to be that person. But I don’t know if my life experience gives me an accurate sense of how the world works. And I take your point that maybe what is best for one organization to achieve its goals is different than what’s best for another organization to achieve its goals.
Thank you so much for your support, Jason!
Thank you Joey!
Thank you Akber!!!!
Thank you Kathleen!!!!
Got it. Thank you so much for explaining so patiently!
Got it. I think I understand what you’re saying. I’m not as good with math so I’m not sure if I followed the calculations. But to try to put what you’re saying in less mathy terms, I think you’re basically saying:
1) There are WAY WAY WAY more nematodes than farmed animals.
2) Nematodes are significantly less likely to be sentient than farmed animals.
3) But the fact that there are WAY WAY WAY more nematodes than farmed animals still means that, from an expected value perspective, one would still expect the effect of farming on nematodes to be much bigger than the effect of farming on farmed animals.
Is that right?
Like, if you could enter a deal where a person is guaranteed to pay you $1 up front, but in exchange you accept a 6% chance that the person will later take $4,810,000 from you, it’d be a bad deal to make, even though the most likely outcome is you simply gain a dollar and don’t pay anything. Is that a good analogy?
Thank you for this interesting, weird, surprising, and important post. It is a mind f*ck.
--
Question: You say, “In particular, it is crucial to know whether [soil nematodes, mites, and springtails] have positive or negative lives.”
Is another crucial question to find out whether soil nematodes, mites, and springtails are sentient at all?
To me, reading this, the main emotional / System 1 reaction I had was, “But those animals are SO small and SO different from me. I can’t even see them! It’s hard for me to believe they’re sentient.” I looked briefly on the EA Forum and found this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jYdmcrgAj5odTunCT/demodex-mites-large-and-neglected-group-of-wild-animals (“Strictly speaking, it’s unclear whether Demodex mites are sentient. But this is mostly because nobody has researched this question—for many groups of invertebrates where people have looked (e.g. insect groups), the science does support these groups being sentient. To me, it seems plausible enough that Demodex mites are sentient that we should be giving serious consideration to their interests.”).
What is your opinion on how likely these small animals are to be sentient? E.g. do you think it’s more like 10% likelihood or more like 90% likelihood?
To me “whether they have positive or negative lives” seems to imply that you think they likely do have lives with a valence one way or the other, as opposed to just unvalenced lives like we imagine plants and bacteria have. But maybe that’s not what you meant.
I realize that there are SO many animals that even a small chance of them being conscious is a big important moral thing for us to consider. So to be clear I’m not trying to push back on caring about them even if the likelihood of them being conscious is only like 10%. I’m just curious what you think.
--
Update: After posting this, I just googled to see what soil mites look like up close. And the pictures I found of them are SO CUTE. They just look like little bugs, with cute little legs and stuff. So that makes me change my System 1 reaction to a new System 1 reaction of “Oh, of course these little cuties are sentient.” :-)
This is SUCH a great post. Very needed. Thank you Aaron!
Woah! This is really interesting and surprising to me. Thank you so much for letting people know!
This is a REALLY good point. Thank you for posting this. I come from the animal rights movement. We have a similar problem in that movement. People in the AR movement tend to feel isolated, because they care so much about animals and perhaps they feel that the rest of the world, their family, and their society doesn’t get it. So they are so eager to meet and befriend another AR person. It’s really fun to make friends so easily! I love how quick other AR people are to trust me when they find out I’m an animal advocate. But there’s also a downside to the trust in AR, similar to what you’re describing. People can be too trusting when they’re part of an ethical movement like AR or EA. And it can let others take advantage of them. I even imagine that people who want to take advantage of others might intentionally be motivated to join ethical communities like EA, AR, charity work, religious work, political activism, etc., so they can be accepted more easily with fewer questions. (Not sure—Just a hypothethis.) Thank you for writing this!
This is a really interesting, thoughtful, and empathetic post.
But I had kinda the opposite objection to offsets lol. :-)
I very much applaud people who eat meat and donate to fight farmed animal cruelty. Such people have done, and can do, so much good for animals.
I just worry offsets may focus people on feeling guilty for eating meat. I don’t think people need to feel guilty for eating meat. Animal cruelty isn’t the fault of the consumer. Consumers want the animals they eat to be treated humanely. Indeed, consumers consistently pay extra for labels that suggest the animal was treated humanely. Animal cruelty is the fault of companies and executives that abuse animals. These companies often intentionally mislead consumers with humanewashing. Consumers should have the right to buy meat and assume the animal was treated humanely. Indeed, the general public has voted for laws against animal abuse! For example, cruelty is a crime in every single US state and, as Charles mentions, the public in many states has even explicitly banned things like battery cages via direct democracy. So whose fault is it when companies commit animal cruelty despite the law? In my mind, it’s squarely the company’s or its executive’s fault—not the fault of the public that voted to outlaw cruelty and then attempted to buy products that the public thought were humane.
And I think that people feeling guilty for eating meat is, ironically, bad for animals. I have heard there is some research to suggest that when people feel guilty toward a group, it actually makes people less empathetic toward that group! It makes sense. If we think, “the other political party is hurting X group of people,” we feel bad for X group and want to help them. If we think “my political party is hurting X group of people,” our defense mechanisms kick in and we immediately start coming up with reasons why what we’re doing to X people really isn’t that bad, or is necessary, or is deserved, in order to protect our self image. Then we just try to think about something else, instead of intervening to help X group. It’s usually easier to grapple with someone else’s misdeeds than our own. So why encourage the public to think of Big Ag’s misdeeds as their own?
I suspect that part of the reason the public does so little to improve the plight of animals in factory farms may be because many members of the public wrongly feel like they have no moral standing to complain about the treatment of animals because they already eat meat. This is just what animal abusers want the public to think.
I want to fight back against the idea that anyone who eats meat is part of the problem. I want everyone to feel like we are benevolent heroes who absolutely have moral standing to complain about Big Ag’s treatment of animals. I think that’s the best way to encourage people to fight back.
To be clear: I agree it is GREAT to help animals through donations!
And I think people should donate joyously and feel good about donating—not just feel like they’re doing it to compensate or atone for something.
I also suspect that people who donate joyously may end up giving more than people who are donating to compensate or atone. Because if you enjoy something, you’re inspired to do the maximum amount of it! If I feel great whenever I donate money, why would I stop at my “offset” amount? I’d keep giving until it no longer made me feel great (perhaps because it caused a noticeable decrease in my quality of life), which might end up being ten times the offset amount. What I’ve learned from fundraising is that most people who give a lot of money to charity seem to really enjoy giving money to charity! More broadly, I’ve noticed people tend to do more of any behavior that they enjoy. So I think we should frame donating as joyful and heroic, not some kind of duty or apology.
Plus, if someone sees their friend happily donating to a pro-animal charity, they may want to mimic their friend and join in on the donating. But if someone sees their friend sadly and shamefully donating out of guilt, I doubt they’ll be inspired to mimic their friend and join in.
Lastly, blaming consumers deflects blame from meat companies for the companies’ treatment of animals. Consumer-blame rhetoric lets meat companies claim they’re only giving in to consumer demand. That’s bad for animals. In reality, a single company has way more control over animal welfare than any consumer. A meat company can affect hundreds of millions or billions of animal lives by a decision the company makes on a random day. We should make sure activists, the public, lawmakers, and judges keep our focus on meat companies and work to change the behavior of meat companies, rather than getting distracted by thinking about consumers.
I got this idea from my friend and former colleague who is an environmental activist. She explained to me that the environmental movement used to focus on blaming consumers for buying products and encouraging consumers to recycle. She explained that it wasn’t very effective and deflected blame from companies that actually have way more control over the environment than consumers. She said that the more modern trend in the environmental movement is to focus on holding companies accountable for their decisions, and encouraging the public to become activists. That has struck with me for a long time. If the animal movement is going to ask the public to do something, I want us to encourage the public to vote for pro-animal politicians, donate to pro-animal causes, and pressure companies to treat animals better. And I think the best way to get the public to do that is to focus the public on companies’ behavior.
So I guess, I would push back on both this very thoughtful and kind post (because I don’t think people need to go vegan if they care about animals) and also the very thoughtful and kind idea of offsets (because I don’t blame the public for farmed animal cruelty).
To be clear, I applaud anyone who does anything to help animals—people who go vegan to help animals, people who donate to offset their meat eating to help animals, people who set up offsetting campaigns to help animals, and people who make EA Forum posts encouraging others to go vegan to help animals. I just predict that the best outcome for animals will come on focusing more on how much good we can do and less on how much we can blame ourselves.
Interested in others’ thoughts on my perspective!