A direct welfare intervention targeting Scottish farmed salmon could be more cost-effective in 2025 than 2000 as the population has increased even as global aquaculture has diversified.
I agree there’s some important sense in which species diversification constrains how many species we can help with fixed resources (if species diversified and total population remained still, then intervention cost-effectiveness would decrease). I think “portfolio problem” gestures at how this phenomenon is hard to notice if we analyse the cost-effectiveness only at the level of direct welfare interventions, and don’t take a step back to look at how we distribute resources across welfare interventions or consider approaches that target the diversification problem itself (like the post’s recommendations).
Thanks for your continued engagement, Andrew! I think we’re getting closer to agreement on the scale question :)
We agree that further research is needed to take your animal-equivalent numbers and figure out the actual reduction in animal farming if demand for meat-based companion animal food declined. I had Perplexity take a first pass, looking at a 13% drop in meat-based dog food consumption in North America and Europe, and it suggested 60 million to 130 million animals would be saved.[1] To be clear, that’s a first pass, and it’s still a lot of animals! I would be interested to see somebody look into this; I know @Billy Nicholles is thinking about it.
I don’t know if you can call that a prima facie outcome; the counter-argument isn’t unlikely or complex, but a fairly basic claim about economics. But in any case, the burden of providing reasoning and data about how many animals would be saved lies with the researcher making claims about the “number of ‘food animals’ spared from slaughter” and trying to argue that vegan pet food is “a leading EA cause area”.
(I do think that tractability is a more interesting and important crux, but Andrew has not replied to my comments so there’s nothing further to discuss. I found some of Billy and Seth’s points in the other thread constructive, though!)
I wanted to look at a 13% drop to reflect Andrew’s tractability section, at dog food because vegan cat food is less reputable for health, and at North America and Europe because I’m suspicious that the breakdown about premium meat -vs- byproducts applies far outside the West. But to be clear, the drop from 7 billion is more due to economics than my assumptions; I also asked it to consider Andrew’s assumptions (complete drop in dog and cat food demand globally) and it suggested 260 to 670 million animals would be saved.